In fact, the report goes on to identify that only 9% of workers will achieve a comfortable pension, defined as £ 62,700 for a couple per year. Most pensioners will unfortunately face a “cliff-edge” drop in income in retirement unless they take remedial action.

One of the main reasons for this is the terrible returns that are generated from most collective pension schemes and savings products sold by UK “asset management” companies. Both of these organisations insist on adding in low, or negative return government bonds (called gilts when applied to UK government bonds) into savings. The addition of low (or negative) return government debt often happens by default and the weight of bonds in a saver’s portfolio increases with age. A recent survey by the UK Department for Work and Pensions2 found that the mean net investment return at retirement was only 2.5% (please note the decimal, that is two-point-five percent per annum over the past five years), in an environment where inflation has been running at around 8% in 2022. At retirement a full two thirds of a typical pension portfolio is invested in cash and bonds and therefore has no realistic prospect of making a reasonable return.

Even for the people who have managed to escape the millstone of government bonds, the plethora of fees charged by most mainstream asset managers will reduce equity returns by several percentage points. For most people this will add up to tens or even hundreds of thousands of pounds of savings forgone. These costs are almost never made up by superior savings performance and in many cases the money taken from savers is simply used to pay sales commissions and provide dividends to the owners of these “asset management” businesses. Costs which generate zero value for savers.

I’ll be writing about some of the dirty tricks some asset management companies use to hide these ugly facts. They range from the simple ruse of quoting returns on a cumulative basis without providing an annualised equivalent, through to slicing costs into different pieces making it almost impossible to understand how much a saver is being charged in total. I’ll also look at more sophisticated tricks like using misleading industry generated (Investment Association) soft benchmarks in order to misleadingly claim “outperformance”.

I have been warning for some long time that based on past performance government bonds can be expected to drag down savings returns (see the post about the Markowitz Hoax3). In addition, the recent steep fall in government bond prices has only made that situation worse. Last month I highlighted the way in which bond prices have fallen, primarily as a result of central bank bond sales and the UK government’s increasing debt burden (see the video below).

Please get in touch if you are worried about your pension returns and wish to avoid living at near subsistence levels in retirement.

Please email: Alex@berkshirewilliams.com or Joanna@berkshirewilliams.com

Any discussion is for informational and educational purposes only. It does not constitute investment advice, financial advice, or a recommendation to buy, sell, or hold any securities or investments. The information presented is based on publicly available data and the author’s own analysis as of the date of publication. All investments involve risk, including the potential loss of principal. Past performance is not indicative of future results. Readers should not rely on any information contained in this article/discussion as the basis for making any investment, financial, or other decisions. You should consult with a qualified financial advisor or conduct your own independent research before making any investment decisions. The author is not an investment adviser. The author and any affiliated parties expressly disclaim any liability for any loss or damage arising from the use of, or reliance on, the information in this article/discussion.

In the process of money printing the Bank of England has lost around £ 150 billion (about £ 5.4 thousand per household or 2.5x the entire defence budget). Pretty well all of that money has ended up with vested banking interests either as gigantic trading profits (The Bank of England bought high and sold low) or as massive interest income for high street banks. We the Taxpayer fund this bonanza for the banking industry. By a complete coincidence the “independent” board members of the Bank of England are drawn primarily from the banking industry. If you want to discuss the investment implications and especially understanding your exposure to government debt via collective pension schemes, please drop me e-mail alex@thinkingcoalition.org. [n.b. this is not investment advice].

Thanks

Alex

Did you think about burning piles of useless PPE equipment?

Few people, I suspect, would have pointed to the estimated £ 150 billion bill (OBR higher rate scenario1) that “We The People” have been left with for the privilege of having our money devalued through mass money creation.

Before I get into the nitty gritty of that figure, I will firstly explain how new money is created. Fear not, the truth is far simpler than you have been led to believe. In fact, not only is the truth buried under a mountain of obfuscatory jargon, but also the theory of banking is mistaught!

This bombshell observation was dropped by none other than the Bank of England (BoE) itself in a note which states that “the relationship between reserves and loans typically operates in the reverse way to that described in some economic textbooks2”. In fact this is an understatement and should read ALL economic textbooks. As an aside, we have to ask whether the authors of economic textbooks (particularly the classic Economics by Begg, Fischer and Dornbusch) were just plain dumb? Given that they were all highly respected economists we can answer with a firm “no.” In my view, the theory of banking was deliberately mistaught.

The fairytale version of banking that I and many others were taught outlines how Mr. Jones spends some of his salary and takes the remainder and deposits it in his account with the local bank. The bank then lends those funds on to Business Z. Business Z expands and also makes a profit and pays interest to the bank. The bank retains some of the interest and passes the balance to Mr. Jones in the form of deposit interest. Everyone lives happily ever after.

I never really liked that version because it implied that there would be some kind of link between wages (and corporate cash flows), savings (household and corporate) and loans, whereas no such link exists in reality. As I covered in a recent note, debt has ballooned relative to GDP and now stands at 250% of GDP in the US (household, corporate and government combined). The equivalent figure is 219% for the UK according to the Bank for International Settlements (BIS).

In fact, the BoE dropped a big clue in their paper confirming that deposit creation actually worked in the way I had long suspected where deposits are generally created from loans. For bookkeepers this is a simple debit and credit entry, when the bank signs a loan agreement it creates an asset with the simultaneous liability being the deposit account of the borrower into which the loan proceeds are credited. The BoE paper is very clear on this “fountain pen money, created at the stroke of bankers’ pens when they approve loans.” This reality helps to explain how it is possible that loans (and deposits) in an economy can increase by so much more that economic activity as measured by GDP.

“When a bank makes a loan to one of its customers it simply credits the customer’s account with a higher deposit balance. At that instant, new money is created3.”

Now if you or I tried to create a deposit by writing numbers on our statement, we’d be arrested for fraud, but a banker doing the same thing is engaged in “money creation” and will likely receive a bonus. In addition to the reversal of causality compared to our fairytale version of reality we also need to accept that a large amount of lending does not go to fund Business Z which creates a step-up in economic activity (GDP) by expanding. In fact, I estimate that over 80% of new loans go to activities that either don’t directly grow GDP or at best increase it only marginally. The bulk of lending is going to mortgages, which tend to push up prices of existing housing stock, commercial real estate and consumer loans which bring forward some demand, which subsequently reverses as loans are repaid.

There is one more step that we need to get in order to understand the central banks’ role in new money creation. The central bank is de facto the bank for commercial banks who have deposits with the central bank. These deposits are just deposits, althought they are confusingly called “Bank Reserves” by bankers.

I’ll go through the details of how the BoE created £ 900 billion to buy bonds in Part 2 of this article, but in the meantime it is enough to say that the process was exactly the same as the generic example described above, the Bank of England firstly made a very large loan to the Asset Purchase Fund Facility Limited (APFF) in order to create a deposit.

The BoE lent these billions to the newly set-up company APFF with £ 100 in capital and no trading history (company 06806063. And, yes, I did notice).

So at the moment of lending, the BoE de facto created a deposit which allowed the Asset Purchase Fund Facility (APPF) to pay for the purchase of government bonds (gilts) from dealers, pension funds and insurance companies. Of course, these arrangements don’t make commercial sense, but that is because they are part of a confidence trick (con) that is required to keep people believing in the value of fiat currency.

In exchange, the APFF then transferred funds to the sellers of those gilts (dealers, pension funds etc.) which meant that those pension funds then had larger deposits in their own bank accounts. Eventually it meant that commercial banks ended up with larger deposits (confusingly also called reserves) with the Bank of England (I’ll cover this in Part 2, but right now, it is not important. I have also included a diagram below for subscribers).

At the same time the Treasury (the ministry of finance) was borrowing huge amounts of money by issuing vast amounts of new bonds (gilts). As we discussed in the last note peak bond issuance reached £ 62.5 billion in the month of March 2020 alone. In order to avoid appearing to be a banana republic, APFF cannot buy newly issued bonds directly from the government. Since we are a civilised advanced economy, the Bank of England (via the APFF) can only buy bonds that have been in circulation for one week4. So de facto the money that the APFF was using to buy from the dealers and pensions, was immediately being used by those same organisations to buy newly issued bonds from the Treasury. We know that from the stock of holdings where we can see that the monthly increase in the APFF’s holding of government bonds (gilts) was approximately equal to the size of the new bonds being issued by the Treasury. These arrangements are a ruse to channel freshly printed money from the Bank of England to the Treasury by using the private sector as an intermediary (more on this in Part 2).

The key thing to understand for now is that the Bank of England’s balance sheet grows significantly when it is creating money. On the asset side, the multi-billion pound loan to APFF shows up and on the liability side is the deposits of commercial banks which grow as the APFF transfers its money to the sellers of gilts (as an aside the fact that Bank of England shows this operation as a loan to APFF is ridiculous because it is “lending” to its own 100% owned subsidiary).

To be fair to the authorities, they did provide a lot of data about what is happening, but the dishonest mainstream propaganda media is not informing the public about this this topic. In reality the topic of the erosion of the buying power of people’s money was (and is) absolutely mission critical and should be at the heart of any and all reports about finance. Below is a time series for APFF’s ownership of UK government debt, in nominal (as opposed to market price) terms directly from the ONS5.

You can see how quickly the bureaucrats have become addicted to money creation as a “policy tool” (in truth a confidence trick which enriches vested interest and represents another step towards the economic cliff edge). The “emergency” intervention in 2009, spearheaded by big state socialist Gordon Brown, went on to grow for the next seventeen years and counting.

To give you some idea about the scale of this this money creation, £ 800 billion (at nominal values) is equivalent to the entire UK defence budget for 13 years. It is equal to 40% of the entire balance of household deposits and is around 38% of GDP (note these are only APFF’s government bond holdings, it also has some corporate bond holdings). This level of money printing took the bank of England’s ownership of government debt to 36.5 %, in 2022 the highest level in recorded history since 1697.

So the public who lock up their households at night to keep themselves and their property safe, who look over their shoulder before withdrawing money from an ATM lest it be stolen find that, invisibly and mysteriously, their money decreases in value. The public who don’t own property and who work to earn a wage to pay rent and buy food find that their earnings are worth progressively less and that while their income is “sticky,” their outgoings are not.

This debasement of money is one of the biggest burdens we face in our society. An enormous problem that any government worthy of the name would seek to fix it. And that’s why it comes as a shock that the invisible process is actually the intended result of the government’s policy!

As I mentioned in my last note, according to Ray Dalio the plan is to eventually default on government debt by inflating it away and that requires a high degree of stealth which I suspect is why nobody explains this stuff.

Some people instinctively understand the dangers of money creation and have sensibly been buying gold (a good idea up to a certain price). In fact, Western currencies have started to devalue against all other assets. I created the chart below for the US Dollar because the US has the most accessible data, but this picture will be repeated for most Western currencies with US Dollar with nominal interest interest is still falling against goods and services (inflation), houses (Case Shiller) and gold (ounces purchased).

In fact, it is noticeable that pretty well all Western central banks started money creation (bond buying) at exactly the same time, they then increased this buying up to roughly comparable levels as a percentage of GDP and then reversed the process around the same time and at the same rate. You would have to be fairly naïve to imagine that this is all random and that “independent” countries all with “independent” central banks all separately decided to pursue exactly the same policy choices at exactly the same time. The fact is that there is a high degree of coordination in the actions of different Western central banks around the world.

(note that the above chart is total central banks assets, the APFF loan discussed above is around 75% of Bank of England assets which is why the Bank of England’s total assets peak at almost 50% of GDP in early 2022).

What does all of this mean for me?

Read more

The increase in the cost of borrowing manifests itself in higher yields on government debt, yields being the market rate for government borrowing and which are inversely related to the market price of government bonds. The higher the yield, the lower the market price of a bond (bear with me on this, it will make sense).

Today’s slightly alarming headline was “UK long-term borrowing costs reach 28-year high”, so what does that mean for you and me?1

As someone who has been warning people about the dangerous nature of “safe” government debt, I felt some very fleeting satisfaction in the news that the market value of 30-year (and 10-year) UK government bonds (gilts) are weak.

I started warning about the unsafe nature of government bonds owing to the fact that annual nominal returns on U.S. Treasury bonds and U.K. gilts have been very low for a long time and way below the higher returns available from equities.

The headline “UK long-term borrowing costs reach 28-year high” means that bonds have transitioned from not just offering a return that is lower than inflation, but actually negative returns (price drops) in nominal terms. Had you owned the largest iShares gilt ETF over the past 10 years (2016-2026) you would have lost money .

The headline has triggered the predictable political mud slinging: Team Blue (a.k.a. the Fake Conservatives) shouted “bloody Labour” and promising that only they will return fiscal sanity to the UK when re-elected. Yet a large part of the reason that we are in this mess is that Team Blue and Team Red (and Team Yellow for that matter) worked together to push the UK into this debt trap.

Shutting down the economy during “COVID” added hundreds of billions onto government debt for the sake of achieving essentially nothing in terms of disease control2.

The best way to see this is to look at the size of monthly UK government debt (gilt) issuance over the period 2019 to 2026. The chart shows gross issuance and some of this new debt will be used to retire existing debt, as a rough rule of thumb since June 2023 around ½ of the gross issuance has been used to cover maturing debt and the other half to cover government overspending (borrowing). In May 2020 alone the “Conservative” government issued a whopping £ 62.5 billion in gilts3, equivalent to around £ 2,200 for every single household in the UK.

Gross issuance has failed to fall back to pre-COVID levels around GBP 8.2 billion (red line) and remains above the line. It’s what happens when you increase the absolute level of debt because you then need to issue more debt to cover maturing debt. Higher debt levels imply higher yields (market determined interest rates) meaning that you also need to issue more debt to cover a higher interest expense. At some point that process gets out of control, but we are a long way from that point as yet. As a result of this huge debt issuance, debt to GDP has continued to motor upwards.

This time around though, the Bank of England is noticeable by its absence. In 2020, the Bank of England bought up pretty well all of the bonds being issued via its subsidiary, the Asset Purchase Facility Fund (APFF) Limited. The chart below shows the gross issuance of debt by month, but this time compared to monthly changes in APFF’s total assets (effectively the amount of gilts it buys in any one month). It is pretty clear that APFF was essentially buying all issuance in 2020 and 2021, but since around January 2022 has been effectively running down its balance sheet and not buying new issuance. This timing corresponds exactly with the period yields started to increase very significant from around 1% to over 5% now when the APFF stopped buying more gilts.

Why is it different this time around?

Ostensibly the Bank of England is justified in not stepping in to save the 30-year gilt at a time when inflation is above its 2% target, because they can keep monetary policy reasonably tight by allowing yields to increase. Commercial investors are now playing an increasingly important role in the bond market and they, quite reasonably, demand higher interest (yields) than the Bank of England.

Personally I have a slightly more cynical view about monetary policy and that is that quantitative easing is primarily about allowing the wealthy to maintain and expand their wealth. As I pointed out in an unloved post called “The Great Lockdown Swindle” the wealth of the top 0.1% in the United States expanded by USD 6.0 trillion between 31-March 2020 and 31^st March 2023 according to official data from the Federal Reserve4. The chart below shows just how powerfully quantitative easing (orange line – Federal Reserve assets) drove up the wealth of the top 0.1% (blue dotted line).

Nobody has ever really been able to convince me that making the uber-wealthy wealthier has any real “trickle-down” benefits. I am convinced though that mass money printing creates a huge penalty for ordinary folk who are faced with increased costs (inflation) and who for the most part do not own equity portfolios.

Whilst the various non-executives involved in the oversight of the Bank of England may be fine people, they are drawn from the “great and the good”. Achieving high levels of seniority in their chosen field (mainly banking and private equity) is important but it also means that many of them are likely to be very wealthy with extensive equity portfolios. Disclosure of their financial interests is somewhat limited but only one of the twenty four non-executives in the various committees has disclosed a financial interest in gilts (UK government debt). Almost all of the others have disclosed equity interests and/or funds under discretionary management, which will likely be heavily invested in equities.

Their interests will very likely diverge from those of the average person and I can hazard a guess that the value of financial assets (meaning equities) will be a lot more relevant to them than the price of a loaf of bread.

As I suggested in my last note, I believe that much investment “common wisdom” about the desirability of holding government debt (efficiency, safety, risk free rate etc.) has been propagated in order to justify stuffing collective pension schemes with low-return government debt. So bond losses, like the ones we are now seeing, will largely be imposed on the great unwashed.

Rather than getting bitter and twisted about this reality, I have chosen to “take things as I find them” and have been suggesting to clients that we look at their pension holdings and get out of government debt, as far as that is possible (unfortunately in many cases this is very hard to do). Having done that, the next task is to avoid expensive branded asset management products. In fact this advice is exactly the advice that Warren Buffet gave in the Berkshire Hathaway shareholder’s letter of 2013.

The times ahead are clearly going to be tumultuous and if you are seriously interested in avoiding large potential losses and even making gains then please contact me on alex@thinkingcoalition.org

Many thanks

Alex

(thanks again to for reviewing)

Caveat

Any discussion is for informational and educational purposes only. It does not constitute investment advice, financial advice, or a recommendation to buy, sell, or hold any securities or investments. The information presented is based on publicly available data and the author’s own analysis as of the date of publication. All investments involve risk, including the potential loss of principal. Past performance is not indicative of future results. Readers should not rely on any information contained in this article/discussion as the basis for making any investment, financial, or other decisions. You should consult with a qualified financial advisor or conduct your own independent research before making any investment decisions. The author and any affiliated parties expressly disclaim any liability for any loss or damage arising from the use of, or reliance on, the information in this article/discussion.

Alex Kriel is by training a physicist and was one of the first people to highlight the flawed nature of the Imperial COVID model. He spent his career in consultancy and fund management including a long stint in Russia. His last job was in one of the world’s largest pension funds where he handled corporate governance issues and shareholder voting over a portfolio of 2,300 equity investments. He is a founder of the Thinking Coalition which comprises a group of citizens who are concerned about government overreach and are developing practical solutions to protect inalienable individual liberties (www.thinkingcoalition.org)

Although people groan at the idea of thinking about investments and pensions, this is definitely an area where an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Spending a few hours now to avoid two common errors could translate into significantly (x2) better pension outcomes down the road. It’s no good spitting blood over the advisor that gave you bad advice, or the active manager whose costs killed your returns down the line, we help people stay ahead and identify and resolve these and other related problems.

One of the mysteries that has bothered me for a very long time is the constant debate over how much government debt to mix in with high return equity in order to generate an “efficient portfolio.”

I suspect that millions … actually, make that billions of manhours have been spent on debating departures from the “classic” 60:40 equity to debt portfolio or a “racier” 70:30 portfolio or a “safer” 50:50 portfolio. This suggests that increasing the amount of government debt in a portfolio make it less risky, yet that same debt yields low returns and can generate real (inflation adjusted) losses. In reality, everyone in the know understands that 100% high-return equity is, and always has been, the answer to the equity to debt question.

Actual returns achieved by Berkshire Hathaway (Warren Buffet CEO) essentially 100% equity 1964 to 2025, from 2025 annual report

How did we end up with these debates?

The first fact that we need to acknowledge is that equity returns over any period of several years or more are usually significantly higher than returns achieved on debt (Treasury bonds). This is the case in nominal or real (i.e. inflation adjusted) terms.

The chart below was included in his book “Stocks for the Long Run” by Professor Jeremy Siegel. It was reproduced in a recent article by WisdomTree Prime (part of the WisdomTree asset management business)1. I use it because even though the timescale is not perfect for our purposes, it is from a reputable third-party source. The key point is that over a long period of time (222 years) stocks have outperformed bonds by a factor of 1,500 times (2,171.0/1.5).

The question is then if you had USD 10 in 1802 where would you invest it?

Note also the use of a logarithmic scale, that ensures that the other assets such as bonds, bills and gold are visible in this chart – had a regular y-axis scale been used, those other assets would flatline as if glued to the horizontal x-axis.

If we zoom in to a period that is likely to be more directly useful to us, say 1990 to 2025, we again see the same staggering out-performance of equity over debt – this data was posted by Professor Damodaran of Stern Business School online2 (incidentally we also get to see the power of compounding in a buy-and-hold strategy).

Note that these returns are historic actual returns and not a theoretical model. Note also that although equity again beats debt by a huge margin, this period includes a period when inflation and interest rates were falling under easy monetary policy, conditions that were very favourable to US Government bonds. This favourable environment reversed in 2022 and bonds began to fall precipitously.

So the next question is: starting in 1990, what assets would you have invested in?

Poor but “efficient”

The somewhat preposterous idea that you should dilute equity returns with low-performing debt was hatched around 1952 by RAND operative Harry Markowitz, when he described an “efficient frontier”. His theory managed to convince people that they should sacrifice asset returns (which determine future pension pay-outs) for volatility (a mathematical measure of how much any particular asset jumps around year on year).

Whereas previously the question asked by those investing pension funds was “How can I maximise returns,” Markowitz reframed it to ask “How much return will I sacrifice in order to minimise standard deviation?” Maximising investment returns while minimising standard deviation was defined as “efficient”. “Efficient” sounds … well, efficient! So much so that seeking the “efficient frontier” became the goal of many investment advisers. In this process, some important things were forgotten: that returns drive actual cash outcomes, that standard deviation is a mathematical construct that can’t be used to fund medical assistance, trips to see overseas grandchildren, or go on a cruise.

I suspect that a private investor would rather have USD 38.80 from a stock index that bounces around rather than USD 5.40 from a bond investment that doesn’t.

Not only are the returns from equity higher, but it also turns out that the basic logic that underpins the “efficient portfolio” theory, namely that shares and bonds tend to move in opposite directions and that combined, they tend to reduce volatility (standard deviation) does not hold over time.

Academia has for the most part been complicit. It is only very recently that a group of academics broke cover and stated the obvious: that (guided by past performance) a portfolio of U.S. and international equity will always beat any portfolio with bonds in it. Specifically, that a portfolio strategy with “no material fixed income allocation” will “dominate[s] conventional stock-bond strategies in building wealth, preserving capital, and generating bequests.”3

As a Buffet-type value investor, you are taught that market prices (and volatility) are noise. Mr. Buffet equates the stock market to the eccentric farmer living next door who shouts out prices every day, largely depending on his mood. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred you ignore the eccentric farmer, but if he happens to shout out a high price you sell to him and if a low price, you buy from him. The rest of the time you ignore him.

The interests of the financial institution and the private saver are not the same

Volatility is important for financial institutions which mark their positions to market generally in real time and need to maintain various buffers to handle maximum probable losses, which are in turn calculated by formulae relying on volatility as an input. High volatility creates a headache for the financial institution because it means they have to carry larger buffers to absorb larger potential losses.

But things that are a problem for financial institutions are not a problem for a private saver who is aiming to maximise his or her savings in the medium to longer term.

Cui bono?

In addition to supressing the incomes of millions of pensioners, the “efficient frontier” theory (along with other similar theories) also creates a captive audience for low/negative real return government debt in the shape of 40% of every portfolio of every single person who subscribes to the 60:40 convention. Public pension funds in particular have large portfolios of low return government debt and regularly report negligible returns that drag down the weighted average return for the pension fund.

Accounts of large Dutch pension fund manager APG, the obvious conclusion would be to replace the low return fixed income “assets” (circled) with high return equity assets below.

This captive audience will swallow endless amounts of government debt issuance. In the event of debt devaluation through inflation this captive audience (generally the great unwashed) will absorb 100% of the losses. This chicanery is aided by another (related) “truth”, namely the idea that lending to the government (buying T-bonds or gilts) is “risk-free” as in the risk-free rate. In reality, bonds carry risk and they will perform very poorly in an environment of rising inflation. At one point in 2022, the volatility of the largest bond Exchange Traded Fund (“ETF”) was higher than for the largest equity ETF4.

How we can help

Whatever stage of your pension journey you are at, it is vital that you don’t load up your pension with under-performing “assets” like government debt and high fee/low performance funds. It is also important to have some view of what the world looks like going forward as developed market debt levels explode and government finances deteriorate in an environment of shifting geopolitical power. Sitting down with an advisor to tweak a portfolio from 60:40 to 70:30 isn’t going to cut the mustard and is likely to leave you in a significantly worse position in retirement. For an introductory discussion about these concepts please contact alex@thinkingcoalition.org or ashley@thinkingcoalition.org. Please be aware that we are not investment advisers and do not provide investment advice but can discuss historic statistics and recent academic papers and opinions that we believe are of interest without giving investment advice.

Caveat

Any discussion is for informational and educational purposes only. It does not constitute investment advice, financial advice, or a recommendation to buy, sell, or hold any securities or investments. The information presented is based on publicly available data and the author’s own analysis as of the date of publication. All investments involve risk, including the potential loss of principal. Past performance is not indicative of future results. Readers should not rely on any information contained in this article/discussion as the basis for making any investment, financial, or other decisions. You should consult with a qualified financial advisor or conduct your own independent research before making any investment decisions. The author and any affiliated parties expressly disclaim any liability for any loss or damage arising from the use of, or reliance on, the information in this article/discussion.

Alex Kriel is by training a physicist and was one of the first people to highlight the flawed nature of the Imperial COVID model. He spent his career in consultancy and fund management including a long stint in Russia. His last job was in one of the world’s largest pension funds (assets under management EUR 600 billion) where he handled corporate governance issues and shareholder voting over a portfolio of 2,300 equity investments. Prior to this he worked for and consulted two large hedge funds and has been involved in complex litigation over shareholder rights. He has also been a board member and audit committee chair of several large public companies. He graduated from the University of St. Andrews and has an MBA from City University Business School (London).

The chart from The Changing World Order illustrates how much gold one nominal unit of currency will buy over time – so if in 1900 that is 1.00 ounce, by 2020 that becomes 0.01 ounces (99% decline). To be fair, it is not surprising that inflation eats away at purchasing power over long periods – the key question is what assets will protect against and even outperform above inflation under different scenarios and to remain agile during the coming dislocation.

The best way to understand what’s coming next is to listen very carefully to the world’s most successful investors. In the last note, I covered the likely cycle that Ray Dalio could see with excess debts, excess deficits, money printing, increasing wealth inequalities and internal conflict. Looking at this wasn’t a theoretical exercise; it was designed to identify the likely scenario to prepare for by moving assets into categories that will survive and even thrive under that scenario. Sitting on the sidelines in cash will likely lead to very significant real (inflation adjusted) losses.

This note expands on the analysis from Dalio’s The Changing World Order and looks at the signal contained in Berkshire Hathaway’s huge cash pile of USD 369 billion. This is not an accounting investigation, but an attempt to gain real insights about how to position oneself for a dislocation.

These notes will provide some analysis with more specific insights reserved for paid subscribers. Finally for those who really want to prepare seriously, that can be done via 1:1 discussions on a fee paying basis (contact: info@thinkingcoalition.org). The classic 60:40 equity, debt portfolio is already broken and would perform horribly in an inflationary environment. Physical gold is an excellent hedge but forgoing possibly high returns post a correction is short sighted, Berkshire Hathaway cleaned up in 2008 by being the only bid.

Overview

As Warren Buffet handed over the reins of Berkshire Hathaway to new CEO Gregory Able, he dropped a pretty massive clue that Berkshire Hathaway expects parts of the U.S. market to do poorly from these price levels. At 31^st December 2025 Berkshire Hathaway had a pile of USD 369 billion in cash and T-bills. Berkshire Hathaway dramatically increased its cash pile at the end of 2024 (see chart below to Q1-2025) and as at 31^st December 2025 this had further increased.

Berkshire itself has grown tremendously since 2001 (it now has assets of USD 1.2 trillion) so it makes sense to look at cash and T-bills as a percentage of total assets. The current position - just over 30% of total assets is way, way above its long run level of around 11%. Their equity investments (including equity method investments in companies in which Berkshire owns more than 20%, Heinz and Occidental) have correspondingly shrunk from 35.5% at the end of 2022 to 26.4% at the end of 2025.

You can make some inferences from this unusually large cash holding:

i) Berkshire believes that the assets it is selling are fully valued and will not offer decent returns going forward.

ii) The decision to hold cash implies that there are no other acceptable assets currently available that will generate a decent return (i.e. a low enough entry price level).

iii) Holding rather than returning the cash to shareholders implies that they expect that prices will fall and investment opportunities will materialise.

Simple maths suggests that if your aim is out-perform the S&P 500, with 30% of your assets in cash you are expecting a large fall. In a market in which the S&P 500 was rising, it would become very difficult for 70% of the portfolio to compensate for the fact that 30% was “doing nothing”. On the other hand if the S&P 500 index was falling, the 30% in cash doing nothing would itself generate outperformance.

This cash holding is particularly significant given Berkshire Hathaway’s record of stellar performance investing in corporate America – achieving a cool 6,099,294 % (yes that’s six million, ninety-nine thousand and two hundred and four per cent) over the period from 1964 to 2025. This is equivalent to an annually compounded rate of 19.7% compared to 10.5%. for the S&P 500 with dividends included. The annual report correctly describes Warren Buffet as “arguably the greatest investor of all time.”

The site Hedgefollow.com provides an overview of the big sales which include Apple, Bank America Corp and Verisign, suggesting that going forward returns will be poor in these stocks. Apple with an acquisition cost of USD 27.30 per share was up almost ten times by the end of 2025. This is classic Buffet in that i) he had the foresight to buy and ii) the balls to buy in volume and iii) the patience to hold on 10 years and counting for the remaining holding.

Buffet’s Japan diversification

Another interesting feature of Buffet’s investments is his diversification into Japan. Given the phenomenal success that he has enjoyed in the U.S. (with a 19.7% annual compounded return) one imagines that Buffet feels that he can do just as well in Japan.

So far that decision has worked out like a charm. His Japan position across five conglomerates (USD 35.4 billion at market) is up 130% over cost. You can do some back-calculation to work out when he bought Mitsubishi (for example) – this works out at an average cost price equivalent to the level in April 2023. He has made 243% over cost over roughly 3 years, equivalent to a 51% rate of return compounded.

Suggestions for positioning in 2026

In the last article, I spent some time explaining how Ray Dalio views possible scenarios for the U.S. given the ways in which previous empires have expanded and contracted over history. The plausible base case scenario that we have is untenable debt levels, followed by zero rates and money printing and then high inflation to inflate those debts away. Of course multiple other scenarios are possible and have some probability associated with them, including a 1930s style deflationary bust or simple “business as usual” with a building debt pile and moderate inflation for years.

But how to position in the base case?

(continued for paid subscribers)

Read more

Ray Dalio, Chapter 1 “The Big Cycle in a Tiny Nutshell”

I spent some time looking at the investment situation in general and at gold prices in particular and thought that it would be useful to share some findings.

The alternative investment media features many who make panic-inducing claims with high levels of certainty. Oftentimes they are selling Wall Street Secret Sauce™. I prefer to listen to those who have survived and prospered in the investment business over decades of market turbulence, including Ray Dalio, Warren Buffet and others. Tellingly, their statements are much less definitive and focus on identifying big trends rather than daily noise.

I don’t have any Secret Sauce™ to sell and the best I can offer is a summary of analysis from those who really do have the knowledge and research capacity. In particular, Ray Dalio whose “Principles for Dealing with The Changing World Order” provides clues as to where we are in the mega-cycle, what conditions we may see in the U.S. and other developed economies, and what we should prepare for. I would recommend buying the book, Dalio has also generously posted the charts in the book for free and posted a number of articles on economicprinciples.org

Dalio’s book focuses on the economic life cycles of empires and analyses the transition from the Dutch to the British empire, from the British to the American empire and strongly hints at a transition to a Chinese empire. One of the most impressive parts of the book is that it draws on Dalio’s access to a very long time series (going back to the 1800s) across multiple countries.

He creates and interesting illustration of the lifecycle of the typical empire1. In terms of the chart below, the United States (and several other developed market economies) are somewhere around circle 14 at the “printing money” stage.

Interestingly, Dalio’s analysis aligns very closely with “The Fate of Empires”, Sir John Glubb’s brilliant 1976 essay that illustrates a 250-year lifecycle compared to Dalio’s “200 to 300 years”. While Glubb’s paper focuses on a completely different driver, primarily the loss of religious faith, he describes many of the same effects.

What’s coming next

You may remember that the 2008 Global Financial Crisis (GFC) was attributed primarily to excess borrowings (leverage) in the U.S. household sector, particularly in the sub-prime mortgage subsector. What is probably not well understood is that leverage in 2025, expressed both in terms of US dollars and as a percentage of GDP, is much much higher than it was in 2008.

Domestic nonfinancial leverage (Government, Households plus Business) at the end of 2025 (USD 80.7 trillion) was a whopping USD 47 trillion higher than at the end of 2007, of which USD 27.8 trillion was added by the Federal Government alone.

Whilst at least some media attention is focused on the level of Federal Government debt (107.8% of GDP), they rarely cover the consolidated level of debt across all sectors (256% of GDP). The level has come down fractionally from its 2020 COVID peak, but it is still almost double the debt level of 1980. The reduction in debt levels of the household sector expressed as a percentage of GDP post 2008 (green) have been more than offset by the Federal Government spending money like a drunken sailor (Dark blue).

Even this picture though is still not complete as the Federal Reserve Z1. data does not include enormous off the balance sheet liabilities the U.S. Government has to fund in the form of Social Security, Medicare and other entitlement programmes. The present value of those liabilities (the excess of programme expenditure over programme revenue) adds another cool USD 88.4 trillion on to U.S. Government liabilities, equivalent to around 287% of GDP.

In an ideal world debt levels don’t matter because they are channelled into productive activities and debt and GDP move roughly in tandem. In the real world, problems start when debt is used to fund paper assets or to fund consumption, neither of which creates any durable increase in productive activity (measured by GDP). It is pretty obvious that the U.S. (and other major economies) are quite deep into this position now (the short talk by Professor Werner helps explain the difference between productive debt and unproductive debt).

The chart below zooms out and looks at a long time period from 1900 to 2021 and illustrates the significant expansion of non-financial debt in the “Roaring 20s” in the U.S. and what this meant for subsequent interest rates and money printing.

The chart illustrates that in 2008 the level of private sector non-financial debt exceeded the level achieved in the “Roaring 20s” (it currently stands at 137% of GDP by my calculations). In both 1920s and in 2008, the government’s response was to drop interest rates to zero and start printing money (expressed as monetary base to GDP).

The top chart is lined up with the interest rate cycle (blue line) and money printing (red line) below – when debts reach an unsustainable level, interest rates are lowered to zero and soon after large amounts of money are printed to achieve a debt restructuring via inflation. The situation -post 2008 has many parallels with the Roaring 20s.

In Dalio’s analysis, the government’s policy responses are additive, so when the impact of zero interest rate policies produce diminishing returns, they then move to excessive money printing. In the final stage, this money printing is tied with massive government spending (think forever wars), which creates large deficits – anything to keep the party going!

Money printing creates winners and losers, the winners are the people who hold financial assets (the wealthy) and the losers are the people on fixed wages who see their real incomes fall as consumer prices increase. This is a subject that I covered in the post “Where did the money go?” which explained the Cantillon Effect.

Over time the nominal value of GDP grows due to high levels of inflation whilst the debt mountain stays fixed in nominal US Dollars (with the exception of Treasury Inflation Protected Securities) and the relationship between debt and GDP eventually recovers without the need to explicitly restructure excess debt.

An interesting Substack author drew the waterfall below which highlights that when new bank money is pumped into the economy, it benefits those closest to the money spigots (ie. the owners of financial assets) whilst penalising the general workforce.

(Please note I like the article and explanation included, but don’t necessarily agree with comments on Bitcoin).

Insiders understand that large amounts of leverage in the economy are untenable at some point in time and that money printing will lead to inflation, but by positioning themselves they can maintain and even expand their wealth no matter what the conditions are. Unfortunately, the average Joe is working for a nominal salary and has limited time and ability to stay ahead of the curve.

What comes next

In political terms, the increase in wealth inequalities from money printing create further internal friction within society. This manifests itself in extreme “left” and “right” populist positions, irreconcilable arguments, polarisation and even open conflict (circle number 18). These internal fights within a nation state tend to coincide with external conflicts as a geopolitical peer seeks to take the top spot in the global pecking order. This is the case with China’s gradual move towards top-dog status.

In financial terms, the currency eventually falls in value because of the increase in the amount of money in the economy. At the moment we have “inflation” of financial asset prices with lower inflation of the prices of goods and services, but this will likely move into high levels of inflation more generally. In high inflation environments (particularly those which involve violent political disputes), the population will be primed to accept the severe pain that is required to stop inflation. Typically, this means moving to a currency system that is somehow linked to something tangible, or otherwise to figure out a way to recover confidence in the currency by credibly limiting its supply.

Gold and shares

I bought a lot of paper gold in September 2020 and recently sold some down following a very strong rally. It was inevitable that there would be some profit-taking after the strongest gold rally since 1979.

If you look at gold as a store of value and as insurance against the devaluation of the dollar (through money printing), it is interesting to compare the price of gold per ounce to the amount of money circulating in the U.S. (as measured by M2 which is essentially cash and short term bank deposits). Of course, there are many factors underlying the gold price, however one main assumption is that the price of gold (largely fixed supply) should go up as fiat money is created. Looking at the chart below, it seemed reasonably obvious that the gold price got well ahead of where it should be based solely on M2 considerations – although I’m not complaining!

The gold price is taken from Damodaran Online, which uses nma.org average prices for the year (2025 = USD 4,339 per oz). Calculating a ratio of M2/Gold price showed that gold was becoming expensive on a historic basis.

Shares

Given Ray Dalio’s analysis that we are in the late stage of a big debt cycle (circle 14), it makes sense to be nervous about the US Dollar, however it doesn’t make sense to avoid investing altogether. The temptation to sit on the sidelines and avoid possible downward corrections carries enormous opportunity costs as I know from personal experience. The alternative is to “buy and hold”, remaining invested over the long term which will work provided you don’t buy into bubbles like 2000, 2007 and now.

I worry that extreme fear created by some in the dissident space pushing the Great Taking narrative will prevent people participating in any equity returns. If you choose to opt out of ways of trying to maintain the value of money in a high inflation environment you will likely end up broke.

In another note, I plan to look at the issue of what to invest in, how to position for a possible acceleration of inflation in an environment where some equities are at or above 2000 bubble valuation levels. In the meantime, I wanted to leave a very useful summary of geometrical average returns posted by Professor Aswath Damodaran from Stern Business School. You can download the entire data set and look at the returns and investigate links between stock, bonds, inflation, gold and real estate (I added in the inflation figures below)2.

These returns may not look particularly large, but when you start compounding at rates like 10%, you end up with very large numbers. Warren Buffet’s Berkshire Hathaway has excelled at buying and holding a core equity portfolio over decades, whilst selling high and buying low for more peripheral assets. Berkshire achieved a respectable return of over 6 million percent between 1964 and 2025, equivalent to 19.7% compounded annually. As explained above, these returns were generated when debt levels were lower and, in the current late stage of a large debt cycle returns going forward will likely be different to those in the past. Here Buffet describes corporate America’s ability to grow earnings and pay dividends:

“In aggregate, American business has done wonderfully over time and will continue to do so (though, most assuredly, in unpredictable fits and starts). … The goal of the non-professional should not be to pick winners … but should rather be to own a cross-section of businesses that in aggregate are bound to do well. A low-cost S&P 500 index fund will achieve this goal.”

2013 Berkshire Hathaway Shareholder Letter

Conclusion

The illustrative lifecycle model produced by Ray Dalio is based on analysis of the rise and fall of many countries over history. The empire lifecycle that he arrived at for “200 to 300 years” ties in exactly with the typical two hundred and fifty year lifecycle proposed by Sir John Glubb. Dalio suggests that excess leverage, zero interest rates, mass money printing and large deficits are baked into the system rather than being the product of nefarious conspiracies. Money printing is simply the path of least resistance in order to restructure debt by stealth by inflating up GDP whilst keeping nominal debt levels suppressed. This process creates winners (wealthy owners of financial assets) and losers (regular workers who see a fall in their real wages). If you want a “Great Taking” theory, then mass money printing fits the bill without the need for a new conspiracy (in fact insiders need the public to be in financial markets to act as an exit so the “Great Taking” narrative makes no sense to me). Dalio also confirms the “conspiracy theory” that politicians work hand-in-glove with wealthy elites in a “symbiotic relationship”.

Money printing finally breaks down under runaway inflation and, following a period of suffering, people are then willing to endure the hardship to re-establish sound money.

I’ll be looking more at ways to adjust my own investments and will be sharing those thoughts (for what they are worth) with paid subscribers in the near future. The single most important lesson that I learned from the post is that although equity markets are subject to sharp downward corrections, the overall positive trend in corporate earnings and valuations is unbeatable over a medium time horizon so long you avoid investing into bubble conditions like 2000, 2007 and now. Completely opting out of owning diversified equity indices will likely carry tremendous opportunity cost.

Please let me have your thoughts below and level of interest in expanding on the topic of fiat collapse, gold, equity investments and/or Bitcoin.

The question of social media addiction is particularly interesting at the moment as a young lady, referred to as Kaley, has taken YouTube and Meta to court in Los Angeles on the grounds that her adolescent struggles were (at least in part) owing to the addictive features of YouTube and Meta. It is possible that this case will be reported in the Establishment mainstream media as it will be used to justify governments’ proposed draconian banning of service access and the elimination of internet privacy. Nonetheless Kaley’s claim is not without merit.

In my mind, there is no question that social media is evil, using algorithms designed specifically to keep users hooked to the platform, the same kind of tricks used in gambling and gaming.

The programming used to keep people addicted to platform is largely based on 1930s experiments carried out by B.F. Skinner (Harvard) and C.B. Ferster on pigeons and rats. The short version is that Skinner and his fellow scientists placed pigeons (and occasionally rats) into a “Skinner Box” in which a reward was delivered in the form of food, usually in exchange for performing a task. The task was related to pecking a disk (in the case of a pigeon) or pushing a lever (in the case of a rat).

The process started quite simply: one peck delivered a unit of food. Then the scientists created increasingly complicated reward schedules (for instance: multiple taps delivered a unit of food), and they continued to monitor the pigeon’s behaviour. When they varied the relationship between the task and the food reward, they generated some dastardly insights: randomising the number of pecks needed to release food caused pigeons to compulsively peck at very high rates since it didn’t know when food was coming. They also found that pigeons continued to peck long after the reward system was disabled, again because it had no idea how many pecks were required. In addition, in a standard reward schedule there was usually a pause after delivery of food but in the randomised version there was no such pause and the pigeon’s behaviour was compulsive.

This variability in the number of pecks is closely related to a situation where you have variable rewards for a task, such as when you post your brilliant insights on X. You don’t know how many likes you will get (if any) and the system keeps you hooked by occasionally giving you a viral tweet.

The chart below shows the increase in the number of followers to my account on X; you can see that on one particular day I was rewarded with 262 followers, but on most days close to zero. Classic variable rewards for posting very similar content.

In the same way that randomising the pecks needed to create a reward, so too the variability built in X serves a similar purpose to people hooked on the platform.

Another hack programmed into the system is the dopamine hit of seeking new or rewarding posts. Dopamine is released in the expectation of finding something new or interesting and it drives the brain towards endless scrolling to keep the dopamine flowing. Of course, your timeline delivers the same old slop, so eventually the process leads to burn out and creates feelings of disappointment.

Another illusion created by social media is that you can directly access powerful individuals, even though (we understand) that in many cases these accounts are run by functionaries. Even in cases where the individual does run his or her account, there is little prospect of them engaging with your red hot reply. This is sometimes referred to as a parasocial relationship, where you imagine that you are interacting with a high-status individual on social media, but the “interaction” is entirely one-sided.

A good example is Nigel Farage who has not replied to anyone on Twitter for over two years. The grab below is a search of two years of replies with only one result where Farage is replying to himself as part of a thread.

You can extend the search back into 2023 and 2022 and you will get a handful (literally) of replies, a couple to Musk and similar individuals. So Farage has set up a classic one-sided parasocial interaction by not answering the hundreds of thousands of replies he receives.

Yet another negative feature of social media is that the platform owners realise that humans have evolved to be more attentive to bad news than good. It is likely an evolutionary hang-over from the days when missing the news about sabre-toothed tigers heading your way was potentially fatal. I suspect this evolutionary bias drives the old Fleet Street adage that “if it bleeds, it leads.” Many of X’s most popular tweets are scenes of war, random acts of violence, street fights and robberies pushed out by accounts with millions of followers.

All of these aspects, and a few others as well, combine to ensure that people remain on X for far longer than is good for them. Instead of a sore beak, they become agitated after they have been exposed to lots and lots of bad news. I am more than happy to own up to wasting inordinate amounts of time on X, and I suspect that other platforms employ similar tricks in order to keep people hooked, for instance, YouTube’s autoplay of follow-on videos.

It will be interesting to see how Kaley’s case develops. In general, the “safety features” that these platforms employ are minor when compared to the harms they generate via their exploitative algorithms – as laughable as the safety features of slot machine operators. I suspect these gimmicks might just be enough to sustain legal protection and avoid a claim for damages. But early disclosure looks quite damming for Big Tech with one document from either YouTube or Instagram stating that “The goal is not viewership, it’s viewer addiction.”

Having said that, I definitely do not support the already overbearing Nanny State imposing swingeing bans or age-verification requirements on platforms. These steps tend to deny a parent’s agency over their own children. Similarly, adults must be able to make their own decisions and take responsibility for their own actions, but this seems to be a point of view which is becoming increasingly rare.

Certainly, the time spent on social media appears to be extraordinarily high with a recent S&P Global survey estimating that American internet adults spent 2.5 hours per day on social media. The highest usage was in the Gen Z age group who spent a whopping fiver hours per day on social media. It is also worth remembering the dastardly plans laid out in Microsoft patent WO2020060606 which envisages that people will be hooked up to computers in order to generate cryptocurrency by performing various mindless tasks, including using social media.

If the government wanted to do something, then it would be helpful if the platforms were forced to disclose that their algorithms have indeed been designed to exploit cognitive flaws. There could be a cigarette packet type warning that using this platform is bad for your health.

Hats off to the people who have largely abandoned social media platforms, they have demonstrated that they are indeed smarter than a 1930’s pigeon!

Let me have your thoughts below.

If you appreciate the work that we are doing to expose the truth, as far as we can discern it, and dispel the endless lies and propaganda then it would be great if you could switch to a paid subscription, or at least a one-off donation via Buy-me-a-coffee. Substack seems to be squeezing dissidents, all of whom appear to have seen a significant decline in income from the end of October 2025 for no apparent reason. I want to be able to share research insights with readers whilst keeping my head above water. Funding options are available via Patreon (Patreon.com/ThinkingSlow) and Buy Me A Coffee (https://buymeacoffee.com/thinkingslow).

Many thanks

Alex

(thanks again to Mark Sutherland for reviewing and editing).

Alex Kriel is by training a physicist and was one of the first people to highlight the flawed nature of the Imperial COVID model. He spent his career in consultancy and fund management including a long stint in Russia. His last job was in one of the world’s largest pension funds where he handled corporate governance issues and shareholder voting over a portfolio of 2,300 equity investments. He is a founder of the Thinking Coalition which comprises a group of citizens who are concerned about government overreach and are developing practical solutions to protect inalienable individual liberties (www.thinkingcoalition.org)

vmfunc’s original disclosure is somewhat technical and a lot of the online reporting on this issue has been unnecessarily sensationalised. Unnecessarily, because the facts seem to be alarming without any embellishment. This is my attempt to summarise their findings.

Persona is primarily an age-verification platform with a reported USD 2 billion valuation and its shareholders include (inevitably!) Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund.

Persona acts as a third-party service provider to OpenAI (which runs Chat GPT) to screen new and existing users. Notably, Substack also uses the services of Persona. For most new users ChatGPT’s verification process is largely invisible. The new user signs up with their name, a date of birth and a verified e-mail address. Persona then performs checks to verify the user’s age and to see if he or she is included on the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) sanctions list.

In most cases the process ends there however, if red flags are triggered, additional checks take place. These additional checks are also required if a user wishes to access advanced ChatGPT features, for example, the creation of an interface between ChatGPT and another programme via API.

vmfunc’s key finding was that the “sanctions compliance” check is much more than the name suggests. In fact users are checked across hundreds of databases and, even more worryingly, there is a two-way process between OpenAI and the government, whereby OpenAI is able to file Suspicious Activity Reports on its user directly with the U.S. government.

Under-age users

Users who are assessed to be under-age are required to undergo age verification procedures before he or she can use ChatGPT. The user must submit a picture of a government-approved identification document (ID) and a picture of themselves. The verification programme reads the date of birth on the government-issued ID and matches the ID photo with the picture provided. The purpose of the user’s photo is used to confirm the identity of the person who submitted the ID and that the user is present and alive.

Sanctioned users

If red flags are raised in relation to sanctions compliance, Persona checks across much more than just the sanction lists maintained by the U.S. Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC). According to vmfunc, those users will undergo a whopping 269 checks, of which only 23 relate to confirming the identity of the person against the ID provided. The remaining checks use dozens of databases to check:

• for a politically exposed person (PEP),

• for certain crypto-wallet addresses,

• against various media reports.

vmfunc produced the flowchart below to illustrate this process:

As well as disclosing the enormous size of the net that these users are checked against, vmfunc discovered that OpenAI has the ability to file suspicious activity reports (SARs) on its users to U.S. and Canadian money laundering authorities (FinCEN and FINTRAC respectively). ChatGPT doesn’t handle financial transactions, so one assumes that these reports would be created and filed based on the type of questions the user is asking and the answers they received. Note that FinCEN will only investigate a small proportion of these and other SARs using AI and algorithms to rank them into risk categories. Remember when you are being interrogated by your bank, that despite the SAR reporting system 98.9% of the proceeds of crime according to a 2016 Europol estimate are not being confiscated. Although a paltry 2.2% of the proceeds of crime are being frozen, only around half of this amount (1.1%) is actually being confiscated.

vmfunc also revealed that a lot of the data collected by Persona as part of this process will be placed on a server that can be access by the government and retained for anything up to three years. The hackers also disclosed that, in line with most of Big Tech’s general contempt for the individual, OpenAI’s decision is spat out at the end of the process and, in the case of a refusal to provide access to their service, there is no explanation and no right of appeal.

I am sure that many people have horror stories of these “computer says no” situations. I had one hiring a car at a rental company in Heathrow where the computer decided that I didn’t have sufficient connection with the address on my driving license, despite the fact that I have lived there on and off for forty years. Although I had hired from this location in the past, the branch manager claimed that he was unable to override the decision generated by his computer, in spite of the fact that my documents proved my connection with the address. Perhaps I should consider myself lucky because it could have been worse compared to the Hertz customers who were arrested for grand theft auto!

The silver lining was that I stopped using this large chain and have since then hired cars from a long-established local firm which is run by some very nice chaps whom you can not only hire from, but also chat with.

Conclusion

It is clear that the digital drag net is being widened, even for access to something as harmless as ChatGPT. vmfunc have performed a great service by disclosing that Persona’s verification system has been designed to offer two-way communication with the state and has built-in an ability for ChatGPT to file suspicious activity reports. It represents the merger of state and big business that is envisaged under Italian fascism.

(this quote is not literal, see note at end)

Large tech corporates are willingly cooperating with the state to spy on citizens. Whilst this cooperation can partly be justified for banks, it is worrying that this monitoring is being created for OpenAI. We saw during COVID how these unhealthy links between social media platforms and the U.S. government were used to shut down the social media accounts of dissidents (see video here).

A screen shot of ThinkingSlow videos deleted by YouTube during COVID

With the likely roll-out of teenage-by-default policies, ALL users will be required to undergo age verification. It is clear that the Internet will become an increasingly hostile environment for those who value privacy or who want to express an opinion. Yet, as I discussed in my last note, X (Twitter) has already created a de facto social credit score through its Hidden_Reputation_Score (HRS) which is based solely on a person’s opinions. People expressing views of which X disapproves (such as non-establishment views) achieve low HRS scores. It doesn’t take much imagination to see how access to multiple applications could well be restricted due to a low HRS (or equivalent). In addition, it is easy to see that all applications may at some stage have backdoors where they can report their users’ activities directly to government authorities. If you can be guilty of WrongThink on ChatGPT, you can be guilty of WrongThink anywhere.

It is good to know that there are so-called “white hat hackers” out there who are able and willing to expose the nefarious means by which Big Tech works with governments to monitor their users. A number of people have made the decision to exit this platform and X. Probably more will follow as these forums seem to be increasingly hostile to anyone challenging the approved narrative.

If you appreciate the work that we are doing to expose the truth, as far as we can discern it, and dispel the endless lies and propaganda then it would be great if you could switch to a paid subscription, or at least a one-off donation via Buy-me-a-coffee. Substack seems to be squeezing dissidents, all of whom appear to have seen a significant decline in income from the end of October 2025 for no apparent reason. I want to be able to share research insights with readers whilst keeping my head above water. Funding options are available via Patreon (Patreon.com/ThinkingSlow) and Buy Me A Coffee (https://buymeacoffee.com/thinkingslow).

Many thanks

Alex

Thanks again to for suggestions and edits.

Alex Kriel is by training a physicist and was one of the first people to highlight the flawed nature of the Imperial COVID model. He spent his career in consultancy and fund management including a long stint in Russia. His last job was in one of the world’s largest pension funds where he handled corporate governance issues and shareholder voting over a portfolio of 2,300 equity investments. He is a founder of the Thinking Coalition which comprises a group of citizens who are concerned about government overreach and are developing practical solutions to protect inalienable individual liberties (www.thinkingcoalition.org)

Note on quote attributed to Mussolini

Like a lot of quotes available for izquote.com this one is not accurate and there is no record of Mussolini making this statement. He did express ideas similar to the ones in the quotation in his document The Political and Social Doctrine of Fascism (1934) “The Fascist State has drawn into itself even the economic activities of the nation…” There is no doubt that the state rules supreme in his doctrine where “The Fascist State …leaves a sufficient margin of liberty to an individual; the latter is deprived of all useless and possibly harmful freedom, but retains what is essential.” I suspect opinions will differ about what is meant by “essential”!

Some of the “old hands” on this column may remember that after we exposed most of the COVID and vaccine lies, we started looking at social media censorship and fake “bot” traffic on X.

A 2021 viral interview with Professor Bhakdi which led to YouTube channel shut down.

My conclusion then was that virtually everything that is presented via the “for you” timeline is fake; almost all of the apparently popular tweets and posts are amplified by fake “bot” accounts. By “bot” I mean accounts whose actions (likes and retweets) are programmed, the only human interaction involved is to set the rules to determine which commentators, or messages are to be liked or retweeted. I produced a very punchy estimate, based on various samples, that as much as 80% of X (Twitter) like and retweet traffic was fake with only around 20% of likes and retweets coming from genuine individuals operating a single account.

Of course the key thing about that fake traffic is that it is not evenly allocated to everyone but concentrated on selected accounts or messages. The selection is done either externally by activist groups, particularly by the Left who operate huge (30,000+) “bot farms” and/or internally by the X (Twitter) algorithms. Back in 2022 I made a video about it and it remains one of the Thinking Coalition’s most popular investigations (still worth watching on Rumble).

In the video, I explained that this system meant that censors could avoid “hard measures” such as account cancellations and restrictions in favour of “soft measures”, such as burying honest commentators under a pile of “bot” traffic to ensure that genuine accounts operate at a massive disadvantage.

The thoughts and ideas that are considered to be WrongThink have changed over time: in 2020 and 2021 Twitter brutally censored any criticism of COVID-19 mRNA gene therapies. While the definition of WrongThink has evolved, censorship remains a reality on “free speech” X.

Elon Musk explained the process in a classic Doublespeak statement: X gives you “freedom of speech, but not freedom of reach.” This play on words is a dishonest way to avoid stating that X is not in favour of freedom of speech and that it uses techniques to effectively censor opinions of which they do not approve.

In the last couple of weeks various screen grabs of X account metrics have been circulated on X as people worked out how to query GROK in order to get visibility into their own previously hidden account metrics. I have queried GROK a few times about this topic and although it regularly provides the disclaimer that it is only providing estimates as account metrics remain X’s propriety data I think GROK’s outputs appear accurate.

There are various phrases that enable me to ask GROK to show the extent to which my account is being amplified or throttled by X. One of these is “Algorithmic_Impact Summary for @ThinkCoalition” (and you can try this at home if you are so inclined) and GROK’s answer is shown below (please note it doesn’t always reply in this format):

The right hand side of the screen doesn’t fit in the grab, but key parameters are visible.

Don’t be put off the fact that GROK’s answer seems to be written in computer code since the phrases are self-explanatory! For instance, you will see that my “current-reach-suppression-severity” is “Moderate to High” (on this point, GROK’s answer gave me great relief because I was beginning to worry that the reason few people responded to my posts was that my content was boring!)

“Success” on Twitter (X) is driven by getting a large number of views, likes and retweets which depends upon getting your message out to as wide an audience as possible. The algorithm decides what to push into people’s “For You” timeline, an individual’s feed will generally be a combination of material from accounts they are following, accounts favoured by Twitter (X) algorithms and viral tweets. The extent to which an account is favoured by Twitter (X) is indicated in the for_you_push_level, in my case tweets are limited to core followers. So my posts will not be seen even by non-core followers and certainly not by the wider public. These arrangements then render my material largely invisible and preclude subscriber growth. The reason is that my posts contain WrongThink, which Twitter (X) defines as “Consistent anti-Great Reset, anti-globalist, vaccine scepticism, NATO/Ukraine policy criticism, digital control opposition.” So libertarian thinking and anti—war thought is severely censored.

Not only are my tweets (posts) not widely circulated through the “For You” feed but replies that I make to other people’s tweets (posts) are also largely hidden, this is reflected in the reply_deboot_severity metric which is “Moderate to High.” Replies on Twitter (X) are often not sorted logically by likes, retweets or times but are moved up and down the list of replies based on the algorithm. In extreme cases replies are hidden underneath click through menu options like “Show more replies.” Because of this, a regular user will never see my replies to someone else’s posts without clicking on the “show more replies” option (there a several levels of reply invisibility).

GROK has calculated a blended score called hidden_reputation_score which aggregates its assessment of an account’s visibility expressed as a percentage. Since I don’t get out much, I decided to have a look at a selection of other people’s accounts for their “hidden-reputation-score-estimated” (HRS). This returns a numeric value which is easy to compare across different accounts. The HRS scores are grouped into the following categories:

• an account with over +20% HRS is Elevated by the X algorithms so pushed into the “For You” feed and replies are given a high priority,

• -20% is Reduced and

• -60% or lower are Significantly Reduced.

You will see from GROK’s answer above that my estimated HRS range is between -65% and -85% putting me well and truly in the naughty corner, completely invisible to anyone outside of “core followers” and my replies are often hidden.

I might be disheartened were it not for Elon’s assurances that I still have freedom of speech on X.

A study of the distribution of scores across different accounts gives you a very good picture of what RightThink and Wrongthink looks like on X, with X amplifying the former and throttling the latter.

You should be able to recognise some of the names, but in case the print on the chart is too small I have put them as a list in the appendix. Here are some of my initial conclusions.

• If you are a Murdoch media outlet (@TimesRadio), which is constantly pushing for more proxy wars you will get a massive boost from the Twitter X (algorithm). Rember that Times Radio only platforms think-tank “experts” who are almost always paid by think-tanks funded by the military industrial complex. By contrast if you are in citizen/dissident media operation (@TWTNewsTalk) you will be throttled out of existence. Again, this represents an inversion of what social media was supposed to be all about.

• You can see the huge amplification for Nigel Farage (and more or less everyone associated with Reform UK e.g. @GBNews) compared to say David Kurten at the Heritage Party. As I have repeatedly stated since 2024, Reform UK is in my view a an Establishment charade as they will always toe the Establishment line (Epstein was a Russian agent).

• If you want to push the climate hoax as a green/Marxist politician you will get amplified (@zakpolanski) but if you are a climate sceptic (@JMCDelingpole) you will get crushed out of existence, even though climate scepticism has been expressed by some of the world’s leading physicists.

• If you are pro-Israel (@AIPAC) the X platform will significantly amplify your message. If you report the funding that @AIPAC provides to U.S. politicians (@TrackAIPAC) X will throttle your posts. To my mind, these positions should be reversed because citizens should be encouraged to find out about which entities are funding and influencing their elected representatives.

• If a PsyOp is being run, as is the case with Ian “Bosh” Skinner, then that account will get huge amplification. In my post on this subject, I demonstrated that his “successful businessman” schtick was largely fabricated and that his primary purpose was to drum up support for Reform UK from a particular demographic.

• You may have noticed that @DavidKurtnen has two entries: one for his 2020 position (@DavidKurtnen 20) and one for his 2026 position (@DavidKurtnen 26). This is something that he noticed that the more he became critical of the Neo-Con agenda, the more he was suppressed on Twitter (X). This observation is borne out by the significant deterioration in his hidden-reputation-score between 2020 and 2026.

• Finally David Icke and James Delingpole share the prize for being guilty of extreme WrongThink with an estimated average hidden-reputation-score of -77.5%. So James occupies a place in the naughty corner, closer to the corner than I am (at least I am in good company!)

You can get a fuller readout of account parameters from the query “Full Visibility/Throttling Check for @ThinkCoalition” that yields a lot more information, including information on potential infringements. None of the accounts that I looked at had any infringements, so really X is generating a pure WrongThink score based solely on a person’s opinions.

It would seem that WrongThink is defined as something that the advertisers and/or regulators may not like, or which X anticipates that advertisers and/or regulators might not like. In my case this is “Consistent anti-Great Reset, anti-globalist, vaccine scepticism, NATO/Ukraine policy criticism, digital control opposition.” Yes, guilty as charged! Those are indeed my views and I foolishly thought that I was free to express them on a level playing field.

In terms of the misinformation analysis on my account Grok stated “fact-referenced but strong contrarian interpretations on vaccines, geopolitics, [and] institutional narratives.” Again guilty as charged. I am careful not to make unsubstantiated claims, because I believe in credible research. While it is reasonable to think that “fact-referenced” is a strength, it counts for little in X’s WrongThink regime which happily pushes out tonnes of fake news, fabricated documents and AI generated images into my feed.

It doesn’t take much imagination to see how this WrongThink score could be combined with other data from other sources on traffic infringements, credit score, tax status and so on to create a blended Social Credit Score. X’s algorithms are already denying dissidents the ability to earn money (or, at best, earn money at very reduced rates) whilst providing financial incentives to push the Approved Agenda™ (Marxism, Climate alarmism, Great Reset, more proxy wars etc.) It is a useful exercise because it illustrates the way the system as a whole works, carrots for the people “on message” and sticks for the trouble makers! The X system doesn’t (yet) contain sticks, other than impaired earnings, but once you have a blended Social Credit Score then access to all areas of digital life can be turned on and off accordingly, very much as envisaged by the WEF in 2020.

Musk is not your friend

I hope that you are convinced that Elon Musk’s word games around freedom of speech, but not freedom of reach are a complete con. The fact is that limiting “freedom of reach” is straight up censorship. So the censorship parameters have changed since October 2022 and the methodology has changed (slightly) but de facto the net result has remained the same.

This alone convinces me that Elon Musk is a “wrong-un” despite his sensible comments about the demographic collapse of the West. If you are still not convinced by the censorship regime that he operates on X (Twitter) or by his position on mRNA (he described the first dose as a “no brainer”) or by his less-than-subtle running around in a Baphomet costume, you should be aware that his work on the brain-computer interface at Neuralink plays a key role in the digital gulag.

I will wite about this separately, but the digital gulag described in Microsoft patent number WO 2020/060606 A1 filed in March 2020, requires users to be monitored by wearables, or implants. De facto that means implants and therefore the brain-computer interface technology being developed by Neuralink is critical to the functioning of the “cryptocurrency system using body activity data” patent.

Pretty well all technology has dual-use capability, and the key question comes down to the governance of that technology. During COVID we saw terrible governance where public officials defended Big Pharma corporates whilst throwing their citizens under the bus. I doubt that governance of the intrusive Big Tech envisaged in patent WO 2020/060606 A1 will be any better.

Conclusion

My earlier research on the topic and my recent interactions with GROK again reinforce my conclusion that Twitter (X) functions as an inversion of its advertised purpose which was to allow independent operators to investigate and challenge mainstream narratives. In fact Establishment owned outlets and narratives receive massive algorithmic amplification whilst individuals questioning those narratives get throttled. Today’s RightThink is roughly more proxy war with Russia, Reform UK as an Establishment challenger party and unlimited support for Israel. The platform rewards RightThink through wide distribution allowing for significant subscriber growth, by contrast WrongThink results in heavy censorship making it impossible to grow the follower base.

Please let me have your thoughts below and let me know if there are different or additional interpretations to the reputation score chart. Also be aware that GROK doesn’t always provide the data in the form that I have screen grabbed and sometimes provides less insightful tables, but you should generally be able to replicate my findings.

The System clearly doesn’t want us and likeminded researchers asking questions or challenging the narrative, I hope you appreciate that this means that we can never earn a living by sharing analysis via social media platforms. This makes it all the more important for individuals to fund our research work in order to keep the lights on. It would be great if you could switch to a paid subscription here, or at least a one-off donation via Buy-me-a-coffee (https://buymeacoffee.com/thinkingslow) other funding options are available via Patreon (Patreon.com/ThinkingSlow).

Many thanks

Alex
(thanks again to for reviewing and editing).

Appendix – detail of accounts in order of appearance in the chart

Alex Kriel is by training a physicist and was one of the first people to highlight the flawed nature of the Imperial COVID model. He spent his career in consultancy and fund management including a long stint in Russia. His last job was in one of the world’s largest pension funds where he handled corporate governance issues and shareholder voting over a portfolio of 2,300 equity investments. He is a founder of the Thinking Coalition which comprises a group of citizens who are concerned about government overreach and are developing practical solutions to protect inalienable individual liberties (www.thinkingcoalition.org)

Whilst it is necessary to have hope, it is also necessary to retain some realism. We should by now be aware that politicians always give fantastic sales pitches and almost always betray their voters once in office. Since this is very much the rule and not the exception, why do we think that this time it’s different?

Rupert Lowe puts on a great show pushing the idea of country, family, individual liberty, limited government and Christian heritage … I mean, what’s not to like! However, even at this early stage in his parliamentary career there is already a huge mismatch between his stated beliefs and his actual voting record, and a big disconnect between his stated opposition to Net Zero and his investment activity.

Let’s start with some of the more amazing votes … sorry, make that non-votes.

One of the most amazing non-votes was his failure to show up to vote against Labour’s inheritance tax raid in December 2025. His whole schtick and promotional video is based around farmer Lowe, caring for the land, thinking in terms of seasons and passing the land on to future generations. Yet this intense level of commitment didn’t stretch to actually voting, so Lowe joined the ranks of Jeremy Corbyn, Dianne Abbott and others as a no show.

Another theme that Lowe plays in to is Britain’s Christian heritage. Again one would imagine that this commitment to Christianity and British values would get him to vote against the horrendous abortion to term legislation. I wrote about the highly dishonest amendment (New Clause 1, NC1) to the Crime and Policing Bill which enabled abortion to term. A process that was initiated by hard-left MP Tonia Antoniazzi and was voted upon on 17^th June 2025 where (again) Rupert Lowe and Nigel Farage both failed to show up.

You might remember that many Christian-inspired lobby groups (including March for Life and Right to Life) expended enormous effort to try and defeat this amendment whilst Lowe and Farage simply didn’t show (Farage was hosting his show on GB News at the time of the vote).

Even more bizarrely, Lowe dishonestly claimed that he did oppose abortion to term in an exchange on X! He was (in my view) relying on a general lack of understanding of complex parliamentary procedure in order to get away with this lie. Lowe’s vote against was on 18^th June 2025 where he opposed the third reading of the bill which covered all of the amendments at once. For all intents and purposes, the third reading is a formality and, in terms of stopping the bill, the vote here was irrelevant. His only chance to vote against NC1 took place on 17^th June 2025 and he simply didn’t turn up.

In the replies on X, many people actually thanked Lowe for his service without understanding that they had been deceived. With this in mind, I invited him to delete his completely misleading “I did” tweet via a social media post which he ignored, and others also correctly pointed out that he did not vote on 17^th June 2025.

Yet when Lowe does turn up to vote things fare little better. For instance, on 29^th November 2025 he voted for the assisted dying bill in its second reading (along with Richard Tice and Lee Anderson), even though this legislation is not aligned with Christian principles and was vehemently opposed by most Christian-minded lobby groups. Somewhat confusingly, he voted against this legislation at its third reading, but again by that stage it was too late.

Investments

Although Rupert Lowe has referred to net zero as nonsense, he has invested seemingly considerable amounts of money in delivering the Net Zero agenda. One investment was in Kona Energy which I covered in this substack. Kona seek to provide batteries to stabilise the supply of electricity from erratic wind turbines thereby “delivering the zero carbon future.”

In addition Lowe has invested personally in Alto Energy, a company involved in the installation of heat pumps, which for the most part rely on government grants to incentivise people to move to heat pumps in line with net zero plans.

Is Rupert Lowe anti-establishment?

Rupert Lowe is a “player” with significant wealth and business connections. As an ex-Morgan Grenfell banker he would have been trained to be disarmingly charming whilst having a killer focus on profits. As well as chairing Southampton Football club, one of his many business ventures included Digme Fitness Limited where he was a co-director with none other than Rishi Sunak’s wife, Akshata Narayan Murty.

Conclusions

People need to understand that politicians are highly skilled in emotional manipulation: they understand what people want, which for the most part is to be allowed to get on with life with minimal interference in a safe and healthy environment. The oligarch-owned and generally Leftist political class has done everything possible to frustrate those simple desires through net zero madness, open borders, COVID oppression, intrusive electronic surveillance, high taxes, pointless wars and so many other harmful “policies.” Anyone who comes along and credibly promises to fix that will garner a huge amount of support from conservatives.

In addition, politics is described as “showbiz for ugly people”. Reform conspicuously waved Union flags, poured pints and wore Barbours to emphasise their Britishness. At the same time Reform UK’s leadership put Britain’s core values of individual liberty and democracy in the shredder when they embraced compulsory vaccination for care home workers in 2021 (no I haven’t moved on). Although Rupert Lowe was less involved in that particular initiative, it is irritating to see him invoking Christian roots whilst failing to oppose abortion to term and supporting, albeit partially, assisted suicide. For politicians flags, pints, Barbours, sheep and so forth are props that support the creation of a patriotic image, but when push comes to shove they have demonstrated that they have little respect for British values.

Rupert Lowe’s voting is completely at odds with the small “c” conservative and Christian image he professes to cherish.

Restore’s proposals feature deportations of illegal migrants, but rarely cover the more immediate threats of the digital gulag and the financial distress created by Britain’s involvement in pointless forever wars. On these threats he is largely silent and, worryingly, has received endorsements from Elon Musk who is playing a key role in the creation of the digital gulag. In fact Elon Musk has already introduced a social credit score indicator on X which is called the hidden_reputation_score, but more on that later. Likewise, Lowe has announced his and his party’s unconditional support for a certain Middle Eastern country, which means he would likely support UK involvement in future pointless regime-change wars.

As I set out in previous notes, I am not optimistic about the chances of achieving a true conservative government in Westminster owing to the fact that political success is largely driven by brand awareness. In turn, brand awareness requires a lot of access to mainstream media and a lot of funding, which means that parties are dependent on oligarchs. In turn, dependency on oligarchs means that politicians will almost exclusively pursue the interests of their oligarch donors at the expense of the citizenry. There are though smaller parties like the DUP who do a fantastic job of fighting for conservative values well below the radar screen and with a limited number of MPs.

So, whilst I don’t get any particular satisfaction from being a Scrooge-like figure mumbling Bah-Humbug whilst everyone on the right runs around excitedly on Restore Day, my sense is still that Lowe is not a reliable representative. I’ll continue to support Heritage and single-issue grassroots organisations (UKMFA, HART Group and others) rather than drinking Restore’s Kool-Aid.

If you appreciate the work that we are doing to expose the truth, as far as we can discern it, and dispel the endless lies and propaganda then it would be great if you could switch to a paid subscription, or at least a one-off donation via Buy-me-a-coffee. Substack seems to be squeezing dissidents, all of whom appear to have seen a significant decline in income from the end of October 2025 for no apparent reason. I want to be able to share research insights with readers whilst keeping my head above water. Funding options are available via Patreon (Patreon.com/ThinkingSlow) and Buy Me A Coffee (https://buymeacoffee.com/thinkingslow).

Many thanks

Alex

(thanks again to for inputs and edits).

Alex Kriel is by training a physicist and was one of the first people to highlight the flawed nature of the Imperial COVID model. He spent his career in consultancy and fund management including a long stint in Russia. His last job was in one of the world’s largest pension funds where he handled corporate governance issues and shareholder voting over a portfolio of 2,300 equity investments. He is a founder of the Thinking Coalition which comprises a group of citizens who are concerned about government overreach and are developing practical solutions to protect inalienable individual liberties (www.thinkingcoalition.org)

Recently, billionaire Sir James Ratcliffe triggered outrage amongst the Westminster political class when he claimed that Britain is being “colonised”. Predictably, he was denounced as “racist”. Agents of the industrial censorship complex have examined ways to make him retract his statement. What has been surprising though, is that politicians, media outlets and talking heads of all stripes and flavours were so quick to denounce him.

Establishment figures have looked into ways to punish Sir James for his comments. The less imaginative, among them Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer (no surprise there!), demanded that Ratcliffe apologise for his remarks. The more imaginative linked Ratcliffe’s part-ownership of Manchester United Football Club to suggest that he has breached Rule E3.1 of the Football Association (FA) to not act in a “manner which is improper or brings the game into disrepute.”

It was imaginative because Rule 3.1 was introduced to prevent players abusing referees. On the other hand, in a street mugging the best weapon is the one that is within reach.

In the midst of all of this outrage, no one addressed whether his comment was accurate or justified. This is my take.

What is colonisation?

Dictionary definitions vary, but this colonisation definition from Merriam-Webster is a starting point:

Is it true to say that certain areas in the UK have been colonised?

Prospect magazine published ground-breaking population projections in 2010 that suggested the combination of low indigenous fertility and high immigration meant that the “White British” ethnic group were likely become a minority in Britain in 2065 or thereabouts.

Since that 2010 projection, the outcome was more pronounced because net migration has been higher than the assumptions in the Prospect model. A straight-line extrapolation of Census data from 1991 to 2021 shows that white British will be a minority shortly after 2060, with Asian being the next largest ethnic group with 17.4%.

In itself the ethnic group classification is somewhat meaningless since the real question is the extent to which any group assimilates “British values.” For the avoidance of doubt, I am definitely not an ethno-nationalist and I do not believe that a person has to have a particular ethnicity to subscribe to British values.

As such, this trend should be a concern only if the ethnic groups that are displacing the White-British category pursue their own cultures within the UK. Movements in population numbers by ethnic group over the ten years between the 2011 census and the 2021 census show a fall of around ¾ million in the White-British category and significant growth in White-other, African, Pakastani, Indian etc.

Large scale immigration also creates an increase in the share of certain religions including Islam and Hinduism. The ONS data shows the following change in religious groups from 2001 to 2021 and I have extrapolated the trend for illustrative purposes only. In other words, the chart below is not a prediction:

The chart reveals that by far the biggest change is the increase in the “No Religion” category (+8.0 million over ten years) with the contemporaneous fall in those identifying as Christian (-5.7 million over ten years). Immigration from Pakistan and Bangladesh is consistent with a 1.1 million increase in the numbers identifying as Muslim, and immigration from India is consistent with an increase in 0.2 million identifying as Hindu.

As one might expect, we have seen a corresponding increase in the number of places of worship from these religions. For instance, there now an estimated 2,000 Islamic places of worship in the UK. There has been a demand for Sharia law courts and there are an estimated 85 such courts operating in the UK. It is reasonable to expect that these numbers would increase.

Back in 2009, our fake-Conservative hero Boris Johnson, then Mayor of London, was asked about sharia courts and he replied “I think there may be cases where religious based arbitration services can be of use to people and to communities and they may not always be a bad thing.” He went on to mumble something about the importance of English justice, but the clear message was that he was prepared to tolerate the operation of sharia law in London.

Which country do you identify with?

Perhaps the most important indicator is a new category in the ONS survey which asks people about which countries they identify with. There are three main categories:

• British identity only

• Other identity and at least one UK identity

• Other identity only

Worryingly, 9.7% of respondents did not identify with the UK at all, equating to what the ONS optimistically defines as “only” 5.8 million respondents. The largest areas with people who do not identify with Britain are Birmingham, Newham, Manchester and Brent. Tower Hamlets is a good example of colonisation where the largest ethnic group is Asian (44.4%), the largest religious group is Muslim (40.0%) and a full 26.5% do not identify with the UK. The photo shows people praying on a road in Tower Hamlets in October 2025, this is a deliberate show of strength since Islamic guidance tells believers to worship inside Mosques wherever possible. This is certainly possible in Tower Hamlets and this event is therefore staged for the cameras.

The economic case

There are those who would push the colonisation issue aside and who would opine that mass immigration is an economic necessity. Unfortunately, the economic case for mass immigration also doesn’t hold water.

While limited and skilled immigration can bring economic benefits, the mass levels of legal and illegal immigration have created a drain on the public purse. It is simply a fact that, on aggregate, ethnic minorities receive more in government benefits than they pay in taxes. This is shown in the ONS chart below as a positive net position (benefits received minuses taxes paid).

Verdict

Sir James Ratcliffe’s statement is accurate. The demographic make-up of the U.K. is changing rapidly and significantly with a large reduction in the White-British ethnic group at the same time as there is an increase in White – Other (mainly East Europeans) and Asians. The current trends imply that White-British will become a minority sometime around 2060.

As the Asian population increases, so has the prevalence of Islam and Britain now has around 2,000 masjids and prayer rooms. Several Islamic NGOs have clearly stated that their objective is not to adjust to British customs, but rather to introduce Islamic values to Britain. Indeed the Karimia Institute (which bizarrely receives funding from the Home Office) spells this out explicitly: “we believe that British citizens can benefit from these [Islamic] values”

Our leaders are traitors

It is clear that the entire political class either bought into multiculturalism or did nothing to prevent it. It is reasonable to expect that they will do nothing to protect British values. This is not a Left-Right issue because while the Left proposed open borders (and view those who oppose open borders as “fascists”) the fake-Conservatives promised to oppose it and then actually accelerated immigration.

As I discussed in a previous note, in addition to government actions and inactions, there is a network of oligarch and taxpayer-funded NGOs that facilitate (mainly illegal) immigration and prevent deportations.

Sir John Glubb wrote that mass immigration indicated the end of empire (see “the age of decadence” in his Fate of Empires paper). The age of decadence was characterised by (amongst other things) an influx of foreigners, an increasing welfare state and a weakening of religion. The more conspiratorially minded would be inclined to believe that this cycle is completely engineered, but Glubb’s suggestion is that empires have an inherent cycle that lasts around 250 years from the age of pioneers to the age of decadence.

In terms of the current political class that is implementing these open borders policies, benign explanations would be:

• an altruistic desire to help others without considering the costs or disruption to the indigenous population

• a desire to maintain GDP growth, whilst ignoring the fact that per capita GDP is falling.

Less benign explanations could be that ethnic minorities have a much higher propensity to vote for Labour than the rest of the population which provides a positive incentive for Labour to increase immigration. This of course doesn’t explain why the fake-Conservatives also pursued this policy. Whatever the case, a society weakened by multiculturalism is easier to control, especially if horizontal conflicts can be engineered between ethnic groups so that slaves fight slaves instead of fighting the slave masters.

In such circumstances, one wonders if the political class loves or hates the British way of life.

If you appreciate the work that we are doing to expose the truth, as far as we can discern it, and dispel the endless lies and propaganda then it would be great if you could switch to a paid subscription, or at least a one-off donation via Buy-me-a-coffee. Substack seems to be squeezing dissidents, all of whom appear to have seen a significant decline in income from the end of October 2025 for no apparent reason. I want to be able to share research insights with readers whilst keeping my head above water. Funding options are available via Patreon (Patreon.com/ThinkingSlow) and Buy Me A Coffee (https://buymeacoffee.com/thinkingslow).

Many thanks

Alex

(thanks again to for reviewing and editing).

Alex Kriel is by training a physicist and was one of the first people to highlight the flawed nature of the Imperial COVID model. He spent his career in consultancy and fund management including a long stint in Russia. His last job was in one of the world’s largest pension funds where he handled corporate governance issues and shareholder voting over a portfolio of 2,300 equity investments. He is a founder of the Thinking Coalition which comprises a group of citizens who are concerned about government overreach and are developing practical solutions to protect inalienable individual liberties (www.thinkingcoalition.org). He does not support Manchester United.

I guess that the government’s grotesque response to the COVID “pandemic” accelerated many people’s journey to dissent. The UK’s medicines regulator (the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency, or MHRA) played a central role in that process by (1) accepting the woefully inadequate COVID mRNA trial results and (2) providing temporary authorisation for the largely untested “vaccines” in December 2020. Following that, the MHRA effectively ignored the growing mountain of yellow card reports that started to build immediately after the “vaccine” roll-out. When I last looked there were over half a million yellow card reports, yet the MHRA has done almost nothing to withdraw the “vaccines.”

The former head of the MHRA was Dr. Ian Hudson (immediate predecessor of the devious June Raine) who served as chief executive from 2013 to 2019. It turns out that Dr. Hudson was convicted in 2024 of two counts of attempting to engage in sexual communication with a child.

So why are we finding out about this now, years after the conviction? The ostensible reason is Hudson’s registration with the General Medical Council was suspended on 3^rd Feb 2026 on the grounds of his failure to disclose the 2024 conviction. More puzzling though is that our fearless mainstream media didn’t report the conviction, given that court reporters at the Chelmsford Magistrates Court must have known about it.

No further details of Hudson’s communication are known, but it was serious enough to warrant a six-month custodial sentence suspended for 18 months as well as the obligation to enrol in the sex offenders register for ten years.

Worryingly, Hudson practiced as a paediatrician from 1982 to 1989. He then worked in clinical research in Big Pharma before joining the MHRA’s predecessor body (the Medicines Control Agency) in 2001. As already stated, Hudson was chief executive of the MHRA from 2013 to 2019 a position with a £ 190,000 to £ 2000,000 compensation package. He then exited through the revolving door to enter the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF) as a senior advisor. He “retired” from the BMGF in 2024 and presumably his “retirement” was related to his conviction.

It has been known for a long time that the MHRA has massive shortcomings. Despite critical reports and strongly-worded letters, the agency’s oversight functions seem to be deteriorating rather than improving. The Fourth Report of the Health Committee’s Publication on Health in 2004-05 concluded that “The closeness that has developed between regulators and companies has deprived the industry of rigorous quality control and audit.” At this time, Dr. Hudson was head of licensing, the position he held prior to becoming the chief executive.

A later criticism of the activities of MHRA was made in 2023 when the All-Party Parliamentary Group on the pandemic response and recovery (APPG) gave the MHRA both barrels. In a damning letter they asked: “is this a regulator primarily concerned with patient safety, keeping watch over medicines and devices and taking the necessary action to protect the public promptly if there is a problem?” They concluded: “We feel compelled to conclude that the MHRA has indeed become an enabler for the pharmaceutical industry, with patient safety no longer being its primary concern.”

Their conclusion is cold comfort, given that their damning letter did not propose any actual remedial actions other than to call for “the Health and Social Care Select Committee to launch…. a long overdue investigation into the MHRA.” So almost ten years after the MHRA’s significant shortcomings were revealed in 2004-2005, the APPG’s “action” is to call for yet another investigation. This is buck-passing ad absurdum! No serious organisation could spend decades twiddling its thumbs as a response to serious problems. This kind of bureaucratic inertia is the reason why I am a diehard libertarian.

No matter though: the people most closely involved get gold-plated pensions and gongs all around, including Dr. Hudson who got his OBE in 2020.

There is an obvious conflict of interest between the MHRA receiving fees from the very industry that they are supposed to be independently regulating. An excellent BMJ article shows that 86% of the MHRA’s budget is derived from industry. This is a long-standing problem in Anglosphere countries with Australia’s TGA receiving a whopping 96% of its budget from industry. Further, there are questions over funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF). BMGF provided USD$ 7.1 million to the MHRA between 2011 and 2020 under various grants, during which time Dr. Hudson was chief executive. Dr. Hudson had meetings with the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation in 2018 and 2019, in fact in 2019 he travelled to Seatle to meet them. We know that Bill Gates has what in my view is an unhealthy fixation with mass vaccination, so the question arises as to whether BMGF’s funding influenced the MHRA?

Dr. Hudson was doubtless involved in establishing the system that facilitated the dangerous and rushed approval of the “vaccines” in 2020. Did he prioritise the welfare of the public, or was he thinking about pleasing his future employer?

On top of all of this, we now find out that Hudson was a sexual predator, a proclivity that probably developed before he was sentenced in 2024.

I don’t believe that it is an accident that such sleazy individuals work their way up to positions of power. After all, the last thing that vested interests want is their regulator to be is competent and ethical and focused on its mission. Much better to have incompetents and/or morally weak people who can be induced to look the other way when necessary.

I think similar reasoning was in play when Neil Ferguson was engaged to produce a hopeless model of the spread of Covid, likely on the basis of the hopeless model he produced to create the BSE crisis. Hopeless models allowed the vested interests to achieve their desired “decade of vaccines” and such terrible appointments are probably not accidental.

Speaking for myself, I don’t want to be “kept safe” by a predator. This sordid episode confirms that when it comes to medical treatments, the state’s position should at most be advisory and that an individual must have absolute authority to make a decision for himself (or herself) under all circumstances. Further, the government’s advice should be taken with a huge pinch of salt, given the corrupting influence of oligarchs and big business over government functionaries.

If you appreciate the work that we are doing to expose the truth, as far as we can discern it, and dispel the endless lies and propaganda then it would be great if you could switch to a paid subscription, or at least a one-off donation via Buy-me-a-coffee. Substack seems to be squeezing dissidents, all of whom appear to have seen a significant decline in income from the end of October 2025 for no apparent reason. I want to be able to share research insights with readers whilst keeping my head above water. Funding options are available via Patreon (Patreon.com/ThinkingSlow) and Buy Me A Coffee (https://buymeacoffee.com/thinkingslow).

Many thanks

Alex

(thanks again to for reviewing and editing).

Alex Kriel is by training a physicist and was one of the first people to highlight the flawed nature of the Imperial COVID model. He spent his career in consultancy and fund management including a long stint in Russia. His last job was in one of the world’s largest pension funds where he handled corporate governance issues and shareholder voting over a portfolio of 2,300 equity investments. He is a founder of the Thinking Coalition which comprises a group of citizens who are concerned about government overreach and are developing practical solutions to protect inalienable individual liberties (www.thinkingcoalition.org)

A part (probably the bulk) of Lubov Chernukhin’s enormous wealth is derived from her husband, Vladimir Chernukhin, who fled Russia in 2004 and who prior to that was a Russian government official. He fled shortly after one of his employees, Mr. Mikhailov, was arrested on suspicion of corruption.

The pinnacle of Valdimir Chernukhin’s government career was his appointment as Deputy Minister of Finance by Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov in 2000. Shortly after, he was appointed Chairman of the board of state-owned Vneshekonombank in 2002.

Unfortunately, the wheels of his career started to fall off in early 2004 when his mentor, Mikhail Kasyanov, was dismissed as prime minister. Kasyanov subsequently began campaigning against President Putin and attempted to run as a presidential candidate in 2008, but was disqualified.

Despite this setback, Mr. Chernukhin might have consoled himself with the £230 million fortune he managed to amass while serving as employee of the state. Fortunately for him, Nathan Rothschild was able to help him obtain a British passport. Mr. Rothschild (son of the late Lord Jacob Rothschild) created a £275,000 a year role for Mr. Chernukhin which allowed him to get a work visa. After spending five years in the UK, Mr. Chernukin was able to convert his work visa into permanent residency (the so-called “indefinite leave to remain”). After the “work” assignment, Mr. Chernukhin stated that he repaid the wages “loan” in 2009 which suggested that the £275,000 salaried position was a sham. Notably, Nathan Rothschild is no friend of Russia under President Putin, describing it as being as dangerous as Nazi Germany, despite the fact it doesn’t have any totalitarian political ideology and generally sits within its borders whilst NATO continued to roll eastwards.

The first thing that struck me about this arrangement was the fact that Nathan Rothschild’s father, the late Lord Jacob Rothschild, worked extensively with another of President Putin’s political enemies, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, back in 2002. As I discussed in my note Putin the White1, Lord Jacob Rothschild was a trustee (with Henry Kissinger) of Khodorkovsky’s “Open Russia Foundation” (subsequently renamed “The Future of Russia Foundation”). At that point, Khodorkovsky was clearly nailing his flag to the mast of the globalist Anglo-American empire. In that note, I showed that Khodorkovsky was arrested shortly after the formation of this board of trustees (below) and subsequently did not take part in the 2003 presidential election (which many believed that he would have won).

Extract from a company resolution signed by Lord Jacob Rothschild, Henry Kissinger and Mikhail Khodorkovsky.

(as an interesting postscript, this foundation still exists but has been again renamed the “New Generation Europe Foundation”. Directors include Establishment figure Baroness Helena Kennedy).

Tice and net zero

Lubov Chernukin is currently a director of Satellite Energy UK Limited. The company was incorporated by British Virgin Islands registered Kersill Overseas in January 2025 and its business plan is to present a “game-changing approach to clean power generation” relying on carbon capture technology. Lubov Cherknukin doesn’t seem to have any relevant background in this business area which requires gigantic capital investment. Her lastest UK venture was a ten-pin bowling and crazy golf venture in Hastings called Owens Entertainment which went out of business shortly after it opened, leaving many local businesses out of pocket.

While I was not privy to the discussions between Tice and Chernukin, it is reasonable to suppose that she might have promoted her newly-incorporated business to Tice.

The British “press” not only failed to report on Tice’s meeting with a Russian-born British national, but also the fact that she is promoting a carbon capture/net zero business whilst Reform UK has denounced net zero as being “net stupid”.

It is always about the money

I suspect that the real reason for the meeting was the fact that Lubov Chernukin is a huge funder of the fake-Conservative party. According to the Electoral Commission, Lubov Chernukhin has provided the fake-Conservatives with £ 2.6 million, the largest individual recipients being Priti Patel and Brandon Lewis (the former Chairman of the fake-Conservative Party). According to media reports, Chernukhin stumped up £160,000 in 2014 to play tennis with Boris Johnson (then London’s mayor) and David Cameron (then prime minister).

Welcoming my enemy’s enemy

To me, it seems pretty clear that the Anglo-American establishment is strongly opposed to the Putin government and therefore welcomes Putin’s political opponents with open arms. This is yet another reason why I don’t agree with the “they are all in it together” theorem because it implies that President Putin is in cahoots with other world leaders and that they in some way de facto work for the same oligarchs and/or other globalist forces. To believe that Putin is on the same team, you need to assume that the repeated calls for Russian regime change, the imposition of 20,000 sanctions, and the provision of EUR 200 billion in military funding to Ukraine are not genuine efforts to remove President Putin from power. To this list you can add the fact that the Anglo-American establishment gives sanctuary to President Putin’s political opponents.

There are various pieces of evidence that suggest that they are “all in it together” and some are more credible than others. The narratives that revolve around the dominant influence of Chabad Lubavitch in Russia are not overly credible and often rely on heavily edited video clips from a talk by Rabbi Eliezrie (the original version is hard to find but is available via the link) .

The evidence concerning Russia’s response to COVID is much more credible and Russia roughly fell in line with the global lockdown and mass “vaccination” policy response. Even in this area there were some important nuances which I wrote about here2 and which led to Russia having one of the lowest vaccine uptake rates in Europe.

Keep your enemies close

A more realistic picture of how Russia works assumes that the Anglo-American establishment really does want to remove President Putin. Their desire to change the Russian regime does not really come from an ideological perspective, but rather from the Anglo-American establishment’s desire to control Russia’s natural resources and the country’s economy more generally. This was likely the role that Mikhail Khodorkovsky was supposed to fulfil before he was arrested in 2003. I suspect President Putin opposed these moves as he was more interested in having an inner circle of Russian oligarchs owning Russian assets, than divvying up with Western financial and oligarch interests. It is correct to say that he didn’t have any particular ideological objections to integration with the West up until 2008 when the West made it clear that they intended to absorb Ukraine and Georgia into NATO and pursue the 1990s Brzezinski doctrine of American global hegemony.

Since that time, the social policies of the progressive West and conservative Russia have diverged. The Russian government places emphasis on the importance of the nation state, Christianity and increasing the birth rate (which is also falling precipitously in Russia). These differences should not be extrapolated to conclude that President Putin is seeking to build a libertarian paradise in Russia simply because he is pushing conservative social policies. Several authors have built up large followings by demonstrating that Russia is not a freedom-loving conservative paradise, and I never really believed that it would be.

It is clear that the ruling “elites” in all countries will use (or more accurately abuse) technology to increase control over the citizenry. All of the major world leaders seem to agree on this topic. At the moment no political leader anywhere will stop the roll-out of intrusive technology. It is a major challenge for the citizenry to see whether they are able to organise effective resistance before they are corralled into the digital gulag.

Russia is reasonably advanced on Digital ID and you already need an app (Gosuligi) which records various biometric information just to have a Russian mobile phone number. Foreigners are finger-printed and scanned when they pass through Russia’s main airports. So Russia is not a libertarian sanctuary, but it has at least rejected the woke agenda.

Conclusions

The British media’s failure to mention Richard Tice’s trip to France to meet Lubov Chernukhin shows that we don’t have a fourth estate, that media coverage is curative and that outrage is highly selective. The route to citizenship for Vladimir Chernukhin again shows the support that the Rothschild family are willing to provide to Putin’s political opponents. I believe that the “they all in together” claim doesn’t hold water and requires those who believe it to ignore the ongoing and serious challenges to Putin’s leadership.

This doesn’t mean that Russian and Western leaders don’t agree on anything at all and in fact they generally seem to be in agreement that rolling out technology is a good idea. They are also prepared to cooperate on an ad hoc basis – Russia and China’s abstention on Trump’s security resolution on Gaza in November 2025 being an obvious case in point.

When your MP next ignores your letter remember: it’s a big club and we ain’t in it!

If you appreciate the work that we are doing to expose the truth, as far as we can discern it, and dispel the endless lies and propaganda then it would be great if you could switch to a paid subscription, or at least a one-of donation via Buy-me-a-coffee. Substack seems to be squeezing dissidents, all of whom appear to have seen a significant decline in income from the end of October 2025 for no apparent reason. I want to be able to share research insights with readers whilst keeping my head above water. Funding options are available via Patreon (Patreon.com/ThinkingSlow) and Buy Me A Coffee (https://buymeacoffee.com/thinkingslow).

Many thanks

Alex

(thanks again to for reviewing and editing).

Alex Kriel is by training a physicist and was one of the first people to highlight the flawed nature of the Imperial COVID model. He spent his career in consultancy and fund management including a long stint in Russia. His last job was in one of the world’s largest pension funds where he handled corporate governance issues and shareholder voting over a portfolio of 2,300 equity investments. He is a founder of the Thinking Coalition which comprises a group of citizens who are concerned about government overreach and are developing practical solutions to protect inalienable individual liberties (www.thinkingcoalition.org)

The short e-mail message received today fails to mention the scale of the data breach and informs the recipient that data breach resulted in the “email address from your Substack account being shared.” Online reporting suggest that this breach relates to nearly 700,000 records, this can be compared with a total claimed user base of 20 million monthly active subscribers.

The e-mail also makes clear the data was accessed in October 2025 and it is not really clear why it took several months to inform people about the data breach. The e-mail doesn’t include links to resources produced by the Federal Trade Commission and others which advise consumers about actions that they could take after a data breach.

Imposition of age-verification requirements

Data breaches happen and according to the e-mail, sensitive information about credit card numbers and financial information were not accessed. In addition to the data breach headache, we’ve experienced a very poor response (no response actually) from our queries to Substack relating to the imposition age-verification requirements to access part of our content. These restrictions seem to apply both to notes and direct messages.

Some message threads just shrug this development off as Substack’s compliance with various legal requirements including the UK Online Safety Act. That however is not true since age-verification requirements only apply to harmful content, which is generally pornography and information on self-harm. In fact, the UK regulator (Ofcom) has explicitly stated that providers have no legal basis to impose age-verification requirements on non-harmful content.

I am pretty sure that restricting access to our notes qualifies as “unnecessary content restrictions.” A group of creators with over 60,000 subscribers in aggregate wrote to Substack about this and so far Substack has failed to respond to e-mails (tos@substackinc.com), direct messages and tags in Substack posts. Since first writing one month ago, our group has now expanded to include Kit Klatenberg and Robina Qureshi and now has over 80,000 subscribers in aggregate.

Signatories to the 7^th Jan 2026 letter

The inappropriate imposition of these age requirements is having a significant negative impact on our subscribers who, quite reasonably, don’t want to submit passport, driving license and/or other information to go through the age-verification process. Some creators are seeing a steady decline in paid subscribers and gross annualized revenue from October 2025 onwards. The chart below shows that the steady income reduction for Thinking Coalition from October 2025 onwards is completely at odds with the continued growth in subscribers (orange). Also, the fall from October 2025 is a significant reversal of a steady trend of fairly steady growth throughout 2025. These trends are illustrated within the dotted circle.

People may have been tightening their belts towards Christmas and everyone is facing cost of living challenges, but the revenue developments suggest a response to administrative forces rather than market factors. A number of dissident authors have seen these counter-intuitive trends.

Conclusions

The data privacy requirements imposed on corporates are generally pretty weak and rely on self-regulation and adherence to a Data Privacy Framework. Substack itself complies with the EU-US Data Privacy Framework. This mainly regulates the way in which companies handle, store and potentially sell data rather than imposing requirements on safekeeping. Class Action lawsuits seem to be the major remedy to seek compensation for data breaches. But even here awards are modest and relate primarily to requiring a company to monitor people’s credit ratings to prevent fraudsters taking out loans in their names. Even a very large data breach like Capital Health System’s loss of around ten million files including sensitive information on names, e-mail addresses, social security numbers and clinical information resulted in a damages award of USD 4.5 million.

Data breaches are part of today’s online reality and no one seems to be completely immune from this problem. Having said that our experience in interacting with Substack has not been positive, like many of today’s faceless organisations they seem to ignore reasonable requests for clarification. Being told that Substack has lost my data just adds to a list of poor interactions with this company which has so much promise.

If you are a creator or a subscriber who would like to co-sign the letter to Substack then please contact me on info@thinkingcoalition.org, the full text of the letter is available in various notes including via the link provided.

Many thanks

Alex

Alex Kriel is by training a physicist and was one of the first people to highlight the flawed nature of the Imperial COVID model. He spent his career in consultancy and fund management including a long stint in Russia. His last job was in one of the world’s largest pension funds where he handled corporate governance issues and shareholder voting over a portfolio of 2,300 equity investments. He is a founder of the Thinking Coalition which comprises a group of citizens who are concerned about government overreach and are developing practical solutions to protect inalienable individual liberties (www.thinkingcoalition.org)

That’s a thing right? I am hearing so many similar anecdotes as to be quite disconcerting. Medically speaking.

It is now, very common, indeed downright normal, run of the mill, “nothing to see here”, to speak with a mother, father, grandparent, on a daily basis, nay, several times a day, and to be told the patient is autistic, has learning difficulties, has ADHD, is depressed, has a cancer diagnosis, is having cancer treatment, is being referred for a possible cancer diagnosis, is “tired all the time”, has no energy etc. etc.

People are ill and people feel ill in larger numbers than ever before. Children especially are ill, earlier and more profoundly than ever before.

Why?

This my friends, is the perennial question. This is a question that you do not ask, you must not ask. The stock answer to your little question is clear, “we have better detection now”, “we are better at diagnosis”, “they were undiagnosed before”. Oh, so they didn’t previously exist? Is that what you are saying? Because you’ve slapped a bloody great diagnostic label triumphantly upon them, they are now visible? Do you know how utterly absurd that sounds?

This is what we have been brainwashed into believing and to a large extent, this is what is believed. I hear those conversations, I listen to the intricate justification and rationalisation that is needed to keep their own sanity on track, in order to believe that up is down and wrong is right. Maybe they need to believe it because it’s easier and more palatable than trying to digest the unvarnished truth. The bare, cold truth is that there has been a planned, deliberate, sustained and co-ordinated attack on the nation’s health and the tentacles of that attack are so entwined and entrenched under policy, diktats, procedure and directives, as to be hidden totally whilst being in plain sight. All the individuals play along like those in a Milgram experiment or those afflicted by Stockholm syndrome. If they can see it, or if they see the frayed edges of the lie, they hastily tuck it back under the bed, because the truth is too much to face.

It would undermine everything they took to be factual, and it is a very disconcerting and scary place to find yourself, believe me, I’ve been in that place. All that I “learned” or should I say, all that I was fed, to be digested and regurgitated throughout my nursing career was a fabrication, punctuated by tiny little truths, these tiny little truths are essential to hang the biggest lies on. There is always some little thread that can be used as a prop to stand it all back up again and make it all appear quite credible, or, credible enough to cast doubt on the doubters.

This is how it works.

Now, if you question injecting poison into babies, you are the crazy one.

If you question the media campaigns, pushing the worried, but otherwise healthy, to submit to breast/cervical/prostate screening, so they can be pushed onto the conveyor belt of worry and interventions so that they can no longer remember when they last felt “well”, this means that “you” must want them to miss out on treatments that could “save their lives”, what miserable scared little lives they have left.

So, I see what is going on. I hear it every day, I see and hear the despair of those who cannot understand why they feel like they feel, and I listen, all the time scanning their notes and counting up how many COVID jabs they have taken, how many flu and shingles and pneumococcal jabs they have had, how many prescription medicines they are taking, and wondering why they cannot see this themselves.

All of these injections and pills, to prevent them from getting sick and to make them better… and yet……

I truly cannot see how we extricate ourselves from this.

The brainwashing is from birth, and we have all been subject to it in whole or in part, some of us possess an ability to see through it, to see the lies as they stand before us, some are totally blind to it and will never ever see it. Many have too much invested and wilfully choose to ignore it as the system benefits them financially as well as affording them status and an elevated sense of their own importance, i.e. doctors and the like.

So be true to yourselves and change what you can to protect your health, share what you know with those whom you love and those you want to protect, do not be surprised if much of it is greeted with scorn and sometimes anger. Do try not to be too disheartened, one day, they may well revisit that conversation and reflect, understanding that you were coming only from a place of love. Then they may have the strength to pass that forward.

We can only hope.

Much love 💕

Word has it that diamond geezer Tom Skinner is a right grafter, an Essex lad who got into a bit of bother early on but then came good. He’s a patriot and gets up at the crack of dawn to graft all day in the bedding business to put food on the table.

On the other hand, if Mr Skinner’s accounting records are to be believed, almost none of that is true! In this article, I am not seeking to sling mud at Tom Skinner for its own sake, so much as to show that almost everything about Reform UK is fake and doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. The bigger questions are (1) who is investing all this time and effort in creating the fake narratives and characters in Reform UK and (2) what is their true agenda?

The first red flag comes with Tom Skinner’s enormous mainstream media coverage from 2019 onwards including on high profile shows like The Apprentice, Celebrity MasterChef and Strictly Come Dancing. If you believe (as I do) that access to mass media is quite tightly controlled, then this level of exposure is suspicious.

Skinner was apparently chosen for The Apprentice in 2019 in spite of a 2011 conviction for handling stolen goods and possessing 2,000 diazepam (Valium) tablets. Then again, everyone deserves a second chance. By 2019 though, a number of businesses that Skinner had been involved in had been struck-off for not filing any records.

In fact, the records at Companies House indicate that not one single business in which Skinner has been significantly involved has ever achieved any meaningful trading. There are a couple of businesses where Skinner’s involvement was minimal that still exist. In one of those businesses, Interwines Ltd, he became a director and shareholder on 6^th October 2022 and ceased to be a director and shareholder on the same day. A very bizarre situation.

It is hard to get an overview of Tom Skinner’s business performance because there are six different versions of the same Tom Skinner at different addresses (Grays, Leigh-On-Sea, Brentwood, Romford). This means it is not possible to easily identify all of the businesses that he has been involved in.

By the start of The Apprentice he had already been involved in Only Bentley Limited (voluntary strike-off) and Fast Way Furniture Limited and Essex Furniture Limited (both dissolved by compulsory strike-off for not filing any accounts).

Following his appearance on The Apprentice, Skinner’s more recent businesses have not fared any better. Bosh Beds Limited disappeared under a voluntary strike-off in 2023 again with no evidence of having carried out any actual business. The remaining company, The Fluffy Pillow Company Limited, carried out very limited business and its only major transaction was taking on a maximum £ 50,000 COVID “bounce-back” loan. As of the last accounts filed in 2022, there was no evidence that this loan was being repaid. One might speculate that the compulsory strike-off of The Fluffy Pillow Company Limited was stopped by the “bounce-back” loan provider.

The “bounce-back” situation is similar to that of Reform UK MP James McMurdoch, who took £70,000 in COVID “bounce- back” loans in relation to two companies without any sign that any effort has been made to pay either of the loans back. McMurdoch resigned the Reform UK whip when that story broke.

Tom Skinner is also heavily promoted through social media. A Grok analysis on his (@iamtomskinner) account’s key parameters indicates a “hidden reputation” score of between +75% to +85% indicating a high degree of promotion. This is reflected in the “visibility tier” score which indicates that posts from Skinner will be fed into people’s timelines. By comparison my own estimated hidden reputation score is -82% which means that visibility is “severely reduced”. No doubt this is my “reward” for correctly warning people that the COVID threat was hugely overstated and that vaccines were unsafe and ineffective. Such is life!

Other aspects of Tom Skinner’s life seem no less controversial, including the fact that he cheated on his wife shortly after they were married in May 2022. His mistress described him as “nothing but a liar and a cheat”.

Despite these shortcomings, we are led to believe that James Tristan Ward Orr (ex-Winchester and Oxford and associate professor of Philosophy of Religion at Cambridge) wanted to invite Tom Skinner to J.D. Vance’s Cotswolds barbeque. Orr apparently claimed that Tom Skinner was “England incarnate” after seeing some of Skinner’s boisterous patriotic social media videos. Well, it would be true if England incarnate was a self-promoting criminal with a string of failed businesses.

What’s the real agenda?

As I said in 2024, my guess is that Reform UK was set up as a containment vessel for fleeing Tories who had been duped once too often by the powers that be. Reform UK kept 2024 voter turnout just above levels which would otherwise have been embarrassingly low. At the same time Reform UK leadership has shown that it can be relied upon to deliver key Deep State agenda, for instance compulsory vaccination and more proxy war with Russia, whilst yelling “down with foreigners”.

Reform UK leadership is closely aligned with the Tech Bros. not least because of Nigel Farage’s relationship with Peter Thiel. I suspect the party will deliver on the next round of Deep State agenda items (to be covered in a forthcoming article), which include but are not limited to:

• Pushing the proxy war with Russia and keeping defence spending high to allow insiders to capitalise their defence-related investments (Anduril, QinetiQ, Cambridge Aerospace etc.);

• Allowing Palantir to take more data from the British state for the benefit of Peter Thiel and other insiders, and the facilitation of Digital ID.

• Legitimising billions accrued by crypto-speculators, by encouraging central bank and other taxpayer funded purchases.

• Supporting Israel/Likud’s regime change objectives in the Middle East.

I suspect that Tom Skinner’s role in this is to deliver better voting results in the younger age groups where, according to YouGov data, Reform UK did not perform well. At the other end of the demographic scale Danny Kruger would be tasked with getting Reform UK votes from the AB demographic where Reform UK performed poorly compared to the C2 socio-economic group.

I still find it astounding that so many people buy into the Union Flag waving imagery given the fact that Reform UK completely abandoned all key British values during COVID, especially by embracing compulsory vaccination.

My own conclusion is that Reform UK is a Deep State project led by devious opportunists who have no discernible principles. It seems that handlers like Zahawi, Jenrick, Orr are being brought in to make sure that Farage and friends continue to deliver on the Deep State’s agenda once in power in 2029, if not before.

The actual histories of many key characters in Reform UK clash with their public personas, so anti-immigration Matt Goodwin is a visiting fellow of Chatham House where he was previously involved in pushing for open borders. Likewise, Lucy Connolly’s social media history completely contradicts the kindly child minder public image. For those of my readers, who like odd hand gestures, you may enjoy this photo of Tom Skinner.

I try and avoid presenting problems without offering some solutions. The fact is that big-money politics will be beholden (almost by definition) to the oligarchs who are funding expensive propaganda campaigns. It is somewhat unrealistic to expect that a glitzy top-down party like Reform UK to be seriously working for the people, rather than pushing the vested interests of their funders. The reality of the UK and most Western political systems is that political funding (including think tanks) is dominated by the uber-wealthy and global corporations. For that reason, policies usually benefit those interests at the expense of the general population. This was on clear display during the “pandemic” where the uber-wealthy benefitted tremendously from money printing and the imposition of COVID restrictions that benefited their large, tech-enabled investments.

Workable solutions, or even effective resistance to technocracy, can only be developed at the grass-roots level. However, those initiatives not only almost never get media exposure, but they are often also penalised on social media. For this reason, when you hear someone say “but I’ve never heard of them” you should recognise this as an endorsement. I keep suggesting that people fund or volunteer for lesser-known initiatives like the Heritage Party, the Alliance for Democracy and Freedom, or support single issue groups like UK Medical Freedom Alliance, the HART Group and others. This makes a lot more sense than placing false hope in a high-profile Establishment charade like Reform UK.

Substack is currently censoring our work by placing age-verification requirement on parts of our content, which subscribers quite reasonably don’t want to comply with. To helps us to continue producing analysis and insights please convert to paid subscription here or fund us via Patreon (Patreon.com/ThinkingSlow) and/or Buy Me A Coffee (https://buymeacoffee.com/thinkingslow) instead.

Bosh!

Alex

Alex Kriel is by training a physicist and was one of the first people to highlight the flawed nature of the Imperial COVID model. He spent his career in consultancy and fund management including a long stint in Russia. His last job was in one of the world’s largest pension funds where he handled corporate governance issues and shareholder voting over a portfolio of 2,300 equity investments. He is a founder of the Thinking Coalition which comprises a group of citizens who are concerned about government overreach and are developing practical solutions to protect inalienable individual liberties (www.thinkingcoalition.org)

Having said that, it is surprising that Reform would take on someone so unpopular, and who shows absolutely no contrition for the vaccine programme he led being a spectacular disaster. In fact, Zahawi still seems to expect gratitude over the fact that he was able to roll-out the ineffective and unsafe gene therapy product at high speed.

I always believed that Reform UK was created as a containment vessel to capture disaffected Tories in the 2024 general election1. After years of betrayal by the Fake-Conservative leadership, the powers that be must have understood that they were going to see a mass exodus of voters from the Fake-Conservative Party. Absent a controlled opposition party, those disaffected voters could have caused real problems either by supporting genuine, grass-roots conservative movements (Heritage Party or Alliance for Democracy and Freedom, etc.) or stopped voting altogether.

In the 2024 general election the Fake-Conservatives lost a staggering 7.1 million votes falling from just under 14 million votes in 2019 to 6.8 million in 2024. The Labour wing of the Uniparty was also completely uninspiring and also received fewer votes in 2024 than 2019. I suspect there was a real danger that the voters fleeing the Fake-Conservative party could have stopped voting altogether. Reform UK was able to pick up over 4 million votes in 2024, but even then voter turnout was low at 59.7%. Without 4 million votes for Reform UK, turnout would have fallen to a catastrophically low and unprecedented level of 51%.

For those that were (and remain) more optimistic about Reform UK, the appointment of Zahawi would have felt like an ice-cold shower. People have different reasons for disliking this open borders, tax dodging, expenses milking vaccine pusher, for my money the showstopper is Zahawi’s total lack of contrition over his diabolical vaccine programme.

Both Zahawi and Farage have expressed pride in the mass vaccine roll-out despite the fact that it failed to prevent infection and caused stunning levels of harm in the UK population with around 500,000 yellow card reports. Government changed the reporting system which made it harder to get a consolidated view of the harms caused by COVID vaccines, so here is the yellow card data when I last looked in 2024:

I haven’t updated the entire table, but the current position is not significantly different to the numbers above.

Of course, the “vaccine” roll-out was a tremendous bonanza for Big Pharma, which received around USD 60 billion in revenue on a global basis, extracted from tax-payers without having any product liability.

In the UK, the cost of the vaccines was around £ 8.3 billion (including acquisition and administration costs). If a private citizen had spent huge amounts of money buying a vaccine that failed to prevent infection and caused tremendous harm, they would engage with the manufacturer or distributor to demand recompense and, if they weren’t properly compensated, they would probably take legal action. In the Kafkaesque world of government, those responsible for the vaccine catastrophe, including Zahawi, continue to boast about the “success” of mass vaccination and still demand gratitude from the long-suffering electorate.

As far as I can determine, it was Bill Gates’ obsession with vaccines that led to the vaccination of billions of people who did not need it. As early as 2010, Gates was openly calling for “a decade of vaccines.”

Enormous levels of applied psychology and downright coercion was imposed on citizens to ensure that they took a poorly tested and almost certainly dangerous gene therapy product. The approximate chain of events was that applied psychology, and particularly the use of fear, was recommended by the Communist-infiltrated Independent Scientific Pandemic Insights Group on Behaviours (SPI-B) in March 2020.

The resulting fear encouraged people to believe that abandoning the established pandemic response plans and resorting to panic-induced lockdowns was a good idea. Lockdowns themselves were lobbied for by hard-Left statists and those under the influence of Bill Gates and others, especially by Dominic Cummings in the UK.

Once the lockdowns were in place, those confined at home found that it was not for “two weeks to flatten the curve” when they were racketeered into taking vaccines in order to get out again. The Deep State also tried to get Digital ID over the line as part and parcel of the vaccine coercion – fortunately they narrowly failed to achieve that objective. I suspect that the failure to get the COVID Pass (Digital ID) implemented was due to low levels of compliance.

As the Fake-Conservative’s vaccines minister, Nadim Zahawi played a key role in implementing all of these policies. When challenged about vaccines at a recent Reform UK press conference, Zahawi put on a fake shark’s teeth smile and dismissed the reporter as being stupid. His demeanour shows that he has absolutely no contrition and will doubtless deliver for oligarchs and Big Pharma next time around (as will the rest of Reform’s high command).

As I said, people dislike Zahawi for different reasons, and in addition to his lack of contrition, there was the fact that he arranged for the long suffering tax-payer to pay his electricity costs. While I am keen to pay my taxes to “keep the lights on,” I thought that paying for Zahawi’s estate and stables was stretching the friendship.

What’s to be done?

As a rule, I try and avoid criticising something without putting forward some alternatives. No doubt, Refomites will fall back on the argument that Farage is less bad than Starmer.

Regardless of this extremely low benchmark, I think that we need to accept several facts about British so-called democracy. Firstly, we should accept that key policies are set by oligarch and business-funded NGOs. In this model, the job of the politician is to put on a good show and create the impression that there is some debate on key policies and that the final determination is made by the people’s representatives in Parliament. It is hard to know to what extent this was ever true, but my own research indicates that this is now fiction. The setting of policies via oligarch-funded NGOs is the reason why multiple countries adopt identical unpopular policies in lockstep.

Secondly, politicians and political parties are to a large extent sold like soap powder via mass advertising campaigns. Mass advertising is expensive which means that parties that raise large amounts of money tend to succeed. Of course, raising large amounts of money means that parties become dependent upon key oligarch donors. To nobody’s surprise, these donations come with strings attached in the expectation that the politicians will pursue an oligarch’s agenda once in office.

The only way out of this conundrum is to seek to support genuine grass-roots organisations and to see if integrity and pooled efforts can at least constrain the well-funded oligarch charades otherwise known as political parties. Campaigners like Dr. Teck Khong of the Alliance for Democracy and Freedom believes that grass-roots organisations can reclaim sovereignty in a number of areas which are delivered locally and have a significant impact on the quality of voters’ lives. Teck is focused on making improvements to local healthcare, which is more achievable than, for example, trying to alter foreign policy. John Philpot Curran gave us a stark warning all the way back in 1790 about what may happen to people in the event that we are unable to oppose “the active”:

Ticking a box with the word Reform UK on it in 2029 (or earlier) will not cut the mustard, nor will opting-out of political activity altogether, which is a guaranteed losing strategy. For practical steps and ideas please see my reports “Winning the Omniwar”2 and “Give us some solutions”3 and let’s jointly exercise eternal vigilance and avoid the fate of the indolent!

Substack is currently censoring our work by placing age-verification requirement on parts of our content, which subscribers quite reasonably don’t want to comply with. To helps us to continue producing analysis and insights please convert to paid subscription here or fund us via Patreon (Patreon.com/ThinkingSlow) and/or Buy Me A Coffee (https://buymeacoffee.com/thinkingslow) instead.

Many thanks

Alex

Alex Kriel is by training a physicist and was one of the first people to highlight the flawed nature of the Imperial COVID model. He pays his own electricity bills. He spent his career in consultancy and fund management including a long stint in Russia. His last job was in one of the world’s largest pension funds where he handled corporate governance issues and shareholder voting over a portfolio of 2,300 equity investments. He is a founder of the Thinking Coalition which comprises a group of citizens who are concerned about government overreach and are developing practical solutions to protect inalienable individual liberties (www.thinkingcoalition.org)

At the same time, rhetoric about taking over Greenland is also ramping up. When Trump was sworn in, I wrote a Jan 2025 Substack warning about the fascination of Trump’s backers, particularly Peter Thiel and Elon Musk, with Technocracy. That post is still very relevant and quite short and describes Technocracy as a totalitarian system that is built upon the distribution and expenditure of energy certificates. Technocracy was to operate in a Technate and I reproduced the map of the Technate in the Jan 2025 article.

What I hadn’t realised at the time was that as well as consolidating Greenland and Canada to the north, the Technate also extended to the south and into Columbia and Venezuela, it also seems to incorporate Guyana, Suriname and French Guiana.

The main author of this plan was the somewhat dodgy Howard Scott, the Director in Chief of Technocracy Inc. who stated In June 1940 that “..The United States alone is not sufficient in the Western Hemisphere. Our defence must comprehend the Continent from Alaska to Venezuela and from Greenland to Bermuda, including the Pacific Islands westward to the International Date Line”. A summary of the Technate plan from Cornell University indicates that Howard Scott stated that “The acquisition of these territories should be a mandatory part of the program of Continental defence for immediate achievement – either by purchase, negotiation, or the force of arms.” It seems to be more than a coincidence that President Trump is implementing the exact “plan” that Howard Scott produced considering that Trump’s backers Musk and Thiel are believers in Technocracy.

Of course, the Technate is not the only motivation driving Team Trump’s desire for regime change in Venezuela. Tulsi Gabbard made a powerful speech when she was running as a presidential candidate denouncing the fact that the U.S. Administration is effectively run by corporate interests who want access to Venezuelan resources that belong to the people of Venezuela.

This is a very good and accurate assessment of how Washington actually works, I assume that the speech is from 2019. It appears that the speech itself has been memory-holed and I was only able to identify this clip from the account of @mtracey.

The last element of the regime change operation is Maduro’s outspoken position on Israel’s actions in Gaza and his trading links with Iran.

That has put him in the cross-hairs of the Israel lobbying machine, which has been agitating for regime change in Venezuela from years. See for example the 2019 report from neo-con NGO the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.

In conclusion, Nicolas Maduro has faced an unfortunate confluence of forces that seem to drive many foreign policy decisions in Washington namely corporate imperialism, the Tech Bros fascination with 1930s Technocracy and Israeli lobbying. In addition, as I mentioned in the Jan 2025 note, Peter Thiel and others are heavily invested in defence (Anduril) and defence related (Palantir) businesses. In order to capitalise those investments to make even more money, they need bigger and bigger defence budgets, which in turn require forever wars.

Some of the Trump faithful have bravely accepted that they have again been duped by a politician who carries out policies that are the exact opposite of the policies he campaigned on. Generally there is no shame in being duped since, for the most part, politicians are professional con artists.

There is another part of the Trump faithful that is tying itself up in ridiculous intellectual knots trying to pretend that more forever wars, coupled with eye-watering increases in defence spending are all part of Trump’s 5-D chess plan. America will decline under the weight of ever-increasing defence budgets coupled with foreigner creditors unwillingness to use the U.S. Dollar as a reserve currency. Trump is of course accelerating those trends whilst enriching the inner circle. Rather than “clearing out the war mongers” Trump has become one of them.

Substack is currently censoring our work by placing age-verification requirement on parts of our content, which subscribers quite reasonably don’t want to comply with. To helps us to continue producing analysis and insights please convert to paid subscription here or fund us via Patreon (Patreon.com/ThinkingSlow) and/or Buy Me A Coffee (https://buymeacoffee.com/thinkingslow) instead.

Many thanks

Alex

Alex Kriel is by training a physicist and was one of the first people to highlight the flawed nature of the Imperial COVID model. He spent his career in consultancy and fund management including a long stint in Russia. His last job was in one of the world’s largest pension funds where he handled corporate governance issues and shareholder voting over a portfolio of 2,300 equity investments. He is a founder of the Thinking Coalition which comprises a group of citizens who are concerned about government overreach and are developing practical solutions to protect inalienable individual liberties (www.thinkingcoalition.org)

After living and working abroad, mainly in Indonesia, since 2019, in 2025 I spent some months in the country of my birth, namely England, and found it subtly and not so subtly altered.

The most obvious change on an infrastructure level are the many volume house builder estates completed or being built close to dual carriageways on the edges of towns in Southern England, many with supermarkets located close by. Meanwhile the centre of most English towns - the ‘high street’ - is increasingly hollowed out with chain cafes, charity shops, and nail bars.

Another obvious change is the cameras and 5G towers everywhere. If you want to live life on camera England is a good choice as it has more CCTV than any other Western democracy. Much of the surveillance infrastructure is privately run. I visited with friends a classic Cotswold village, and having found a parking spot behind a pub that turned out to have no availability, we found another that did. But a few days later a parking and surveillance company - ‘Parking Eye’ - charged me £60 for 4 hours of parking behind the first pub where we hadn’t managed to obtain food or drink. Winnie the Pooh was conceived in Ashdown Forest where A A Milne spent much of his childhood. But if you go there for a walk now you will find empty parking areas festooned with QR codes and cameras enforcing substantial hourly sums for the privilege of walking where Pooh and Tigger were first imagined.

Rural as well as urban England has essentially been adulterated. There are remnants of English culture still to be found - churches and pubs most visibly. The landscape of counties like Dorset and Somerset remains stunningly beautiful. But the heavy regulation, the eye-watering prices for a gallon of petrol or a pint of beer, and the cameras mar even these more rural counties. ‘Old England’ is more in the mind now than in the real experience of being IN England. England has been adulterated by creeping totalitarian control freakery pushed by local authorities across the whole country, and by the thousands of government ‘agencies’, and private licensees, set up or contracted by civil servants with zero business acumen to ‘manage’ everything from car parks and forests to motorways, sewers and trains.

What all of these control freak agencies have in common is the proliferation of rules about what citizens may do or not do, and the proliferation of charges and fines for intended, and even unintended, usage of what was once infrastructure that belonged to the people. A camera spots a tyre of a vehicle that merely touches the white line of a bus lane on a public road and somewhere a local authority server spits out an automated £100 fine for bus lane infringement, sent with the help of the Digital-ID promoting Drivers and Vehicle Licensing Agency, to the address of the ‘vehicle keeper’.

To add insult to injury, all this public/private, high fee charging, and higher fine charging, infrastructure is in a country in which the majority of citizens’ incomes is already claimed by the State in taxes. Income is taxed at a minimum of 30% and most goods and services attract a further 20% in sales taxes. Along with all the fees and fines for going about daily life, and the highest energy prices in the world to pay for government ‘net zero’ targets, this means governments, local and national, in England are creaming off at least 60% of the income of its citizens. When the State becomes the majority procurer of goods and services, it is communist in all but name. Neoliberal China is a lower tax regime than England and a less heavily regulated place to do business. It is forbidden in China to get involved in politics except via the Communist Party. But even here England is rapidly out-doing China with hundreds of thousands of police investigations of social media posts, and the incarceration annually of over 2000 non-violent citizens whose ‘crimes’ are merely to say things that criticise government policies or cause offence.

Another parallel of contemporary England and communist regimes - such as those of Eastern Europe until 1989 - is that while the surveillance of citizens and destruction of private property via taxes and regulations are rampant, the infrastructure is in terminal decline. In England pot holes and uneven pavements remain un-repaired. In many places the roads are so bad it is impossible to drive even close to the speed limit. Yet local authorities spend huge sums on further slowing traffic with artificial chicanes, speed bumps, new sets of traffic lights, and ‘Low Traffic Zones’ which trap urban residents in streets they can no longer easily drive out of, and which destroy small neighbourhood businesses. If one tires of petrol prices, potholes and parking apps, English train tickets are the highest priced per mile in the world although the dozens of private companies leasing trains and track from government agencies are all heavily subsidised by the tax payer.

Even farmers, perhaps especially farmers, are not immune from the death pall of regulatory, rent and tax overload that is killing so many small and medium sized enterprises in the towns. I am writing this while staying at a friary which runs an estate of forest, rivers, ponds, and grazing land. It derives energy for wood chip boilers from the forest, and meat for its freezers from the grazing land. But when I asked why there are no chickens and ducks - which are the cheapest and easiest way for farmers and smallholders to generate protein from their land - I was told they aren’t allowed to keep them because of ‘bird flu’ regulations.

The keeping of chickens in England was subjected to government license during the alleged ‘COVID’ pandemic. But the licensing has not been lifted, This forces more and more people - and even farmers and smallholders - to buy eggs and chicken from mass-producing factory farms in supermarkets where infection control and welfare standards are far lower than on small and traditional mixed farms. Reducing access to home grown protein also reduces the resilience of the populace to supply-chain shocks of the kind that occurred in the COVID years.

The proliferation of licensing and regulation of food growers has been accompanied by an increasingly liberal approach to food sellers. Packaged foods in England are now widely adulterated with undeclared ingredients. Food regulations allow the purveyors of margarine in plastic tubs to label it ‘butter’ if it is made of vegetable oils with cows milk; the purveyors of ‘honey’ sell products that are mostly sugar which they are not required to declare on the label; and the purveyors of ‘beer’ - including long established companies such as Guinness which trade on their brewing heritage - sell beer that is made with high fructose corn syrup, and artificial flavourings. Among the most toxic ingredients in English food are the pesticides and herbicides - and especially gut and nerve corroding glyphosate - that are liberally sprayed on fresh produce, and also found in flour and processed foods, and which supermarkets are not required to declare.

Adulteration was a term widely used in Victorian England with reference to food and drink. Many food and drink items in markets and shops were adulterated with toxic ingredients which increased the quantity of what was being sold for lower cost than the genuine article. Britain’s population exploded from 9 million in 1801 to 37 million by 1901 during the industrial revolution, and given the poverty wages received by most industrial workers, demand for cheap provisions outstripped supply, fostering a marketplace rife with fraud. Bakers laced bread with alum and bone meal to stretch flour; brewers dosed beer with arsenic for froth; milkmen diluted cow’s milk with water, chalk, or even formaldehyde to mask spoilage. These practices exacted a huge public health toll, contributing to infant mortality rates as high as 150 per 1,000 live births in industrial cities like Manchester in the nineteenth century.

A crusade against food adulteration began in the early nineteenth century, fuelled by Enlightenment-era faith in science, and moral outrage over ‘invisible poisons’. The leading critic was German chemist Friedrich Accum, whose Treatise on Adulterations of Food, and Culinary Poisons sold thousands of copies (1820). Accum exposed the grotesque ingenuity of adulterers: red lead in cayenne pepper for colour, copper sulphate in pickles for vivid green, even ground glass in spices to add bulk. His methods—simple chemical tests—democratised detection, empowering consumers to test their own larders.

Accum’s work was revolutionary not just for its revelations but for framing adulteration as a moral failing of the mercantile class, analogous to usury or slavery. His work stirred public campaigns and parliamentary probes. But it also attracted fierce resistance from food producers. Accum was often reviled, and even accused of stealing books from the Royal Institution in London where he had compiled his index of adulterated foods. The view that prevailed was laissez-faire ideology championed by economists like Jeremy Bentham which prioritised ‘free trade’ over government regulation. Adulteration was seen as a market failure which consumer choice in the marketplace would eventually correct.

Food adulteration also featured in imperial ‘free trade’ after the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846. This led to a flood of imported adulterated foods from China and India. The most widespread imported toxin was lead chromate in tea, which sickened consumers on a large scale and undermined the alleged benefits to England of the mass poverty and slavery to which England subjected colonial territories.

The most ubiquitous contaminant was not imperial but domestic, in the form of arsenic added to many household items as well as foodstuffs. Use of arsenic in the dying of wallpapers, and in sweets and candies, led to a huge increase in infant mortality which culminated in what became known as the ‘Arsenic Green’ crisis of 1850.

In 1852 Arthur Hill Hassall was appointed chief medical officer to the General Board of Health. In that capacity Hassall published, in The Lancet, the results of microscopic examinations of thousands of samples of English foods in which he found that 60% of milk was watered, 40% of coffee chicoried, mustard bulked with lead, and gin adulterated with blindness-causing industrial alcohol. Hassall’s work, summarised in his Food and Its Adulterations (1955) led to Parliamentary action in the form of the Adulteration of Food and Drugs Act 1860 which criminalised selling adulterated goods ‘not of the nature, substance, and quality demanded’.

Efforts to eradicate food adulteration still faced fierce opposition from grocers’ guilds, who decried them as ‘trade interference.’ Enforcement of the adulteration of food and drugs act was therefore weak with only 1,000 convictions by 1870. Furthermore the Act only focused on town markets and shops which allowed rural purveyors to evade scrutiny.

The subsequent Sale of Food and Drugs Act 1875, provided a more comprehensive approach and harsher penalties, and Whorton describes it as the ‘Magna Carta of food law’ in his The Arsenic Century (2010). Under this new regime, prosecutions rose to over 5,000 annually by 1890 with margarine sold as butter being a prominent target. But meat and milk adulteration endured. In 1900 U.S. imports of beef were halted since it was found to be widely contaminated with formaldehyde. Milk adulteration remained extensive until the Milk and Dairy Act 1915 mandated random unannounced on-farm inspections.

In 1939 the government set up a Ministry of Food in Whitehall. Its staff analysed 1.5 million food samples annually by 1943, curbing enduring adulteration such as sawdust-laced flour. Postwar, the Food and Drugs Act 1955 extended the reach of adulteration regulation to include synthetic chemical preservatives as well as colourants. By the 1960s, routine inspections by local authority officers were around 200,000 annually. In the 1970s these inspections were extended to include pesticides in vegetables, antibiotics in meat, and lead in canned goods.

In the 1980s, the neoliberal government of Margaret Thatcher reoriented food production toward industry self-regulation. This led to the 1996 Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy crisis. Thatcher’s government deregulated the production of cattle feed which resulted in the mass poisoning of cattle with prions from sheep brains in cattle feed cooked at too low a temperature. But despite the role of deregulation in the BSE crisis, the government set up a new food regulation regime in 1997 under the aegis of a new Food Standards Agency. The FSA was mainly staffed by food industry insiders, and it shifted the food quality regime from regulatory enforcement through food inspections to industry ‘self-regulation’. Local authority food inspections declined from 100,000 in 2000 to under 20,000 by 2020 (FSA Annual Reports, 1998-2020).

Lang and Heasman (Food Wars, 2004) argue the new light-touch approach allowed the revival of ‘adulteration by stealth’. Pesticide and herbicide levels in fresh foods have risen since inspectors stopped regular tests for these. At the same time ‘traditional’ foods are now laced with industrially producer fats and fillers, with enforcement reliant on consumer complaints rather than proactive raids. The prime example, which led me to investigate this issue, is the large array of plastic tubs labelled ‘butter’ in all British supermarkets that are actually margarine mixed with cow milk fat to allow the fraudulent ‘butter’ label. 70 years after it was stopped by the Edwardians as food adulteration, margarine is once again being sold as butter in every English supermarket.

Margarine was invented in Napoleonic France as a substitute for butter since butter turned rancid on long military campaigns. Margarine today is composed primarily of industrially produced seed oils. Seed oils are industrial compounds extracted from seeds with heat and toxic solvents. These industrial fats are novel to the evolved human body and cause mitochondrial damage. They are the most significant factor in the large rises in obesity, diabetes, heart disease, and neurological conditions in industrial countries since the 1970s, as comprehensively documented by N. Teicholz in The Big Fat Surprise (2014). Seed oils are also oestrogenic, and overload the body with Omega 6 which crowds out the important Omega 3, and this can lead to neurological disease. Human bodies cannot also not easily process industrial fats and so they tend to get deposited on the human physique. Photographs of North Americans, or English, on beaches in the sixties show almost universally that people were of normal body size and shape. What changed in the 1970s was the widespread introduction of seed oils into human foods, often marketed as ‘healthy fats’ by the food industry.

The neoliberal food adulteration regime has led to a public health crisis in England with more than 64% of the English estimated by the National Health Service to be overweight in 2023, and an estimated 29% of that percentage obese. Given the zeal English parliamentarians, and civil servants, exhibited in response to a coronavirus in 2020-21 which was no more fatal than normal influenza outbreaks (the Infection Fatality Rate of COVID19 was 0.015% and the average age of English ‘COVID’ attributed deaths was 82, which is the average age of death) it is mystifying that England is now so lax on the adulteration of food and drink, and neglects their impacts on the health of its citizens.

The neoliberal argument that food quality regulation is a restriction on trade wears thin given the huge range of government regulation on every kind of economic activity in England. Tens of thousands of small and medium sized enterprises were closed down, never to reopen, as a result of the totalitarian restrictions of the COVID years. And now COVID is over, there is no shortage of local authority inspectors when it comes to innocuous activities such as parking a car, building an extension, or walking in a forest. Similarly there is no shortage of police for investigations into the newly invented crimes of ‘hate speech’ or ‘unlicensed broadcasting’ on social media of views that disagree with the involvement of the English State in the Ukraine War or genocide in Gaza.

Mass poisoning via the systematic adulteration of food and drink by supermarkets and industrial food processors is apparently no longer a Public Health priority in England. Instead the government and NHS devote most Public Health campaigns to promoting mass vaccinations. Historically vaccines hardly figure in the systematic decline in serious illness and death from infectious diseases. These declined to near zero in the 1950s, before mass childhood vaccinations began. This is because of the wiser Public Health interventions of the State in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries on food adulteration, and subsequently on water quality, and air quality (Illich, Medical Nemesis, 1975).

In the COVID years the people most at risk of mortality from the coronavirus, other than the very elderly, were those whom the food industry had majorly contributed to making obese. It is predicted that the English NHS will eventually be overwhelmed by treating the huge toll of chronic diseases which sadly plague the overweight and are the consequence of large scale food adulteration by industrial food processors. And yet food inspections in supermarkets continue their downward decline, even as cameras in supermarket car parks are all primed to fine supermarket customers who overstay their permitted two hours of free parking.

England, whose nobles penned Magna Carta after the defeat of the Crown at the Battle of Lewes (1264), was once proud to be the birthplace of ‘freedom’ - of private property rights free from the capricious edicts, and thefts, of barons and monarchs. But a few centuries later, the majority of the English lost their property rights in Enclosures enabled by Parliament. Propertyless wage labourers were subjected to death-dealing poverty and adulterated food throughout the Industrial Revolution. Victorian Reformers sought to address this at the origins of what is now called Public Health. But in England today freedom from capricious government assaults on private property, and proper regulation of food adulteration, are both gone. Adulterated foods line the shelves of supermarkets that dot the new housing areas spreading over the urban outlands, as well as inner urban areas. Far from protecting citizens from criminality on this scale, the English government protects corporations - many of them foreign-owned - from the ideals of fair play and mutual trust that were once beloved of the English. The English are now a harried, poisoned and submissive race; over-taxed and over-surveilled; reduced to endless form-filling and phone apps in order to avoid fines and penalties for attempting to start a business, keep chickens, heat a new house, or park a car. Freedom is gone, and food adulteration is fashionable once again.

Michael Northcott is Professor Emeritus of Ethics and Theology at The University of Edinburgh and Adjunct Professor at the Indonesian Consortium of Religious Studies, Gadjah Mada University, Yogyakarta, Indonesia. He is the author of many books and articles on environmental ethics and religion, the most recent of which is God and Gaia: Science, Religion and Ethics on a Living Planet (Routledge 2023). You can find him on