I’m sure you could strap a smart-watch to a dog, float a sausage over its head and hope it chases after the mystery meat for five kilometres. Otherwise, it’s not really worth cheating running apps to set new ‘personal bests’.

Unfortunately, you will have to get out there and do the work yourself. To quote a phrase, “who’s going to carry the boats?” (link). You are and the good news is that you’re going to get loads of likes on the internet for it.

That’s just part of the secret to Strava’s success, validation and vanity.

The San Francisco-based company, named after the Swedish phrase ‘to strive’, launched more than two decades ago amid the aftershock of the 2008 financial crisis.

But the app’s origin story actually dates back much further. Co-founders Michael Horvath and Mark Gainey met on Harvard University’s rowing team in the late 1980s.

Horvath later earned a PhD, going into academia, while Gainey joined the world of investment banking.

The pair kept in touch and the itch to recreate those competitive and collegiate days got back under their skin in the early 1990s. This led to the creation of their first venture, Cana Sports.

The idea was to use the nascent internet to bring your friends together to train via a virtual locker-room.

But the year was 1995. With no broadband, universal computer access and smartphones, Cana was too far ahead of its time.

Though this business didn’t take off, it did give Horvath and Gainey vital experience in the start-up world.

The duo would leverage this knowledge again in the late 2000s as the Web 2.0 ecosystem was establishing itself. Strava was launched.

Things started off slowly and the company was bootstrapped until 2011, when Horvath and Gainey secured a $3.5m Series A round.

The thesis was prophetic: GPS-enabled devices would become exponentially more popular amongst consumers, including actual and wannabe athletes (link).

Sigma Partners was the first VC to back the plan, with Sequoia Capital joining the party in 2014. Their cash, including several other funding rounds, accelerated Strava’s growth, putting it in a near perfect position for what was to come next.

When the Pandemic broke-out at the start of 2020 the app had just 40 million users. It was still a niche destination, but thanks to government-enforced lockdowns people took to exercise to break their boredom.

Strava was the go-to app to test yourself against your safely distanced friends and colleagues and by the end of 2023 the platform had more than 120 million users.

The Privacy Paradox

That is the business’ other secret to success: timing. Strava, as its founders envisioned, had caught on as the wearable craze took off.

Smartwatches are now ubiquitous with our digital lives and so is our paradoxical approach to privacy.

Though we say we want less snooping on our movements and tastes, we are happy to forgo full privacy in order to engage with and play a part in the user-generated economy.

This is especially true of Gen Z, who have been dropped into an online world of TikTok, multi-screening and super-fast broadband.

This generation, more than any other, has also snubbed alcohol. The lockdowns shut the pubs and fitness apps promoted teetotal behaviour by showing the negative impacts of booze on sleep and your heart-rate.

It’s hard to escape last night’s bad choices when they’re on your wrist for the next week.

These trends have super-charged the popularity of running, cycling and swimming.

The London and New York marathons saw applications jump by 31% and 22% respectively last year, for example, while Hyrox, a cardio-intensive workout sport, has seen its own boom (link).

The self-described ‘fitness competition for everybody’ now regularly attracts thousands of participants to its events, which are deliberately limited to drive-up demand and maintain the quality of the production.

Hyrox has subsequently become notorious amongst fitness fanatics for its waiting lists, with the most physically and financially willing amateur athletes – one event can set you back $180 just for the entry fee – to travel abroad.

Factor in flights, food and accommodation, and you are easily hitting the $500 to $600 mark to run around a warehouse on a weekend.

It’s worth it for the Gram though, with many participants choosing to be upsold on the professional photography package (link).

This is the ecosystem Strava and its freemium model is thriving in (the upgraded version is $80 per year) – more and more people want to workout and they’re willing to spend a significant slice of their disposable income on wellbeing.

And that’s the app’s final secret, positivity. You can call it vainglorious, you can call it egotistical, but you still have to commit to self-improvement while someone cheers you on, albeit online.

As we move further into the AI-generated internet, Strava’s user-generated model is offering a genuine alternative to the doom and gloom seen elsewhere.

The company reportedly wants to take that proposition to the public markets and recently hired the former CFO of Pelton, Barry McCarthy (link).

With a most recent private valuation of $2.2bn, Strava is looking to see what Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, and Morgan Stanley can bring to an IPO.

In the meantime, its user base continues to grow both organically and thanks to Strava’s acquisitions, including the recent purchase of Runna, an AI-supported coaching app (link).

As of January, Strava has 180 million users, a 350% increase on where it was in 2019. By comparison, Reddit has more than 120 million daily active users.

That virtual clubhouse idea doesn’t sound so niche anymore.

Subscribe now

Other things I’ve found interesting

• A young cinematographer couldn’t land a job so he went on a one-year birdwatching trip with his brother. They turned the adventure across America into a documentary (link)

• is a big fan of Anthropic’s language model, Claude (link)

• A16Z has closed a $15bn mega-round and infrastructure will be the focus of one of its new funds (link)

• The UK’s Raspberry Pi has warned of chip shortage thanks to the AI boom (link), while the UK government is looking for someone to lead its Sovereign AI Fund (link)

• A long-form interview of Demis Hassabis, co-founder and CEO of DeepMind (link)

• on Grok (link)

• There are lay-offs at Politico (link) as Semafor raises $30m (link) thanks to its thriving events business

Surgical strikes, minimal casualties, night-time raids. We’ve been here before. But this time we’re not watching cable news correspondents embedded inside the American War Machine at prime time.

With the smartphone’s usurpation of the TV, memeable content is instead being beamed straight into our pockets via the White House at all hours of the day.

Uncensored and unedited, this digital propaganda has successfully established the initial narrative around Trump’s invasion of Venezuela.

There’s been little talk of those killed by the assault, as if the conflict didn’t really happen, while Nicolás Maduro’s moustached and blindfolded face has spread across the internet.

‘Who is Nicolás Maduro?’, SEO-friendly articles asked as live blogs furiously charted the reaction to the raid. Elsewhere, hot takes on the dictator’s downfall spread across social media.

Whether they were for, against or indifferent to the invasion, posters have been inclined to use Maduro’s now infamous capture-shot as a thumbnail.

If somewhat sinister, it’s good for engagement with its low-res, we’ve just caught a bad guy, quality.

For their part, the President and his allies quickly branded the now ex-President of Venezuela as a narco-terrorist, warned the rest of the world ‘not to play games’ with the US and falunted Trump’s man-of-action credentials.

“If he says he’s serious about something, he means it,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio told a press conference, timed so America could wake-up to Trump’s hour-long reflections on the kidnapping.

No US personnel or equipment were harmed in the process, we learned, and the country’s “very large” oil companies would soon be deployed to Venezuela to re-establish the industry there.

“They sent everybody bad into the United States,” Trump, flanked by Rubio, War Secretary Pete Hegseth and Pete Hegseth’s brown shoes (oh so very brown), added for good measure.

We had to take his word for it, no mainstream media packaging needed. The President had served up Maduro and the memes. Soon emergency podcasts whirled up, one thousand and one reasons were given for the assault.

Was it China? Was it Russia? Was it energy prices? And what the hell is the Monroe Doctrine?

They only had the White House’s information to go on, but that didn’t stop the commentaries. Forget the fixers, the foreign correspondents too, there’s content to be made.

Trump knows this as he curated carefully worded missives to be fired-out over Truth Social. The fog of war means he can’t be fact-checked.

But it didn’t go all his way. Trump’s old TV producer brain must have been frustrated that he couldn’t release the footage of the Maduro operation, which would have been live-streamed into the President.

Creators, through their self-imposed sense of urgency, have used the hygienic White House account. There are no mangled bodies in this version of events, only victories – big and beautiful ones, to quote a phrase.

As for the military tactics deployed by the Americans as they raided Fort Tiuna, there is also no time for ignorance.

Media generalists must pose as experts, aggregating the slogans, images and narratives provided by Trump. It was those Special Forces/CIA chaps that done it, they parroted.

A representation of the invasion, abstracted from the real-world events they were created from, was quickly created.

The movie about the conflict played out in real-time and allowed all of us to participate in it thanks to social media.

It was like Chuck Norris’ The Delta Force, but we got to write the script and infinite versions of the production were allowed.

The only plot rule was that the main character had to cheat death and he had to be shown riding into town — the town being Caracas — to capture his rival.

Whether those characters are heroes or villains was up to you, so is the yet be written conclusion of the story.

You may want to write a sequel, a follow-up which focuses on other towns. Havana comes to mind.

Subscribe now

Recent TPM posts

• A Tyranny They Can’t Afford (link)

• Digital Ads Give The Campaigns Away (link)

• In Search of The Online Millennial Man (link)

For reasons no one else can understand or explain, the British government is very keen to spend a lot of money on what could be a very bad idea.

Like many of Keir Starmer’s freshest flagship policies, the universal and mandatory Digital ID idea was never actually endorsed by the electorate.

But regardless of the wishes of the pesky UK public, Number 10 is looking to plough ahead with the unpopular policy after its promotion by the increasingly influential Tony Blair Institute (link):

“Digital-ID systems improve governance, facilitate greater inclusion, fuel economic growth and help governments achieve their core goals. Far from enabling greater surveillance, digital IDs can actually make information more secure.

Beyond their public-sector benefits, they also allow citizens to interact more safely and smoothly with private-sector institutions. They are a critical component of a reimagined state fit for the 21st century.”

For his part, Blair has remerged in recent years as a Big Technology advocate, arguing that new software can fundamentally reshape how states deliver their services.

The former Prime Minister, like Starmer, is a globalist, who sees the Singaporean system, whereby collectivist discipline is promoted by a powerful centralised government in a highly multicultural society, as an ideal template to shape Western policies around (link).

It’s a technocratic expansion of New Labour’s supranationalism, one which in 1998 fully extended the remit of the European Court of Human Rights into British law.

A year after the introduction of the Human Rights Act and as a rising star in London’s legal world, Starmer published a 900-word book on European law. He has since gone on to promote an idealised international order (link), even as we move into a multi-polar world.

At his political core then the Prime Minister shares the same consequentialist views as Blair, including the belief that the state has a great amount of competence to deliver complex projects and a prima facie moral justification to limit individuals’ personal liberty in the right circumstances.

That’s a charitable view of the philosophy behind the Digital ID proposal anyway. A contrary view would come from advocates of the natural rights and resistance theories which shaped Anglo-American thought (Locke, Jefferson and Nozick et al).

They would reject such a stance, arguing that a government would considerably overreach its limited remit by interfering with a person’s individual liberty in such a heavy-handed manner.

On more practical matters, meanwhile, it appears that Starmer’s administration, with its high levels of debt and public spending, can’t actually afford it.

The UK government has subsequently entered into a gloriously bureaucratic row with The Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR), the financial watchdog Labour championed heading into the last election.

For its part, the OBR has said (link) the Digital ID bill could surpass £1.8bn of ‘unfunded costs’ – that’s Whitehall-ise for fudging the books, an accusation the government hasn’t taken too kindly to.

In a reply to a ministerial question tabled in the House of Commons, the government responded by saying that it didn’t recognise the OBR’s figures and that the scheme would be put to a public consultation (link).

Crucially, however, we’re still none the wiser as to how much Starmer thinks this policy will cost taxpayers or how exactly the system will stop people illegally entering the country.

Here’s what Starmer said in September:

“Digital ID is an enormous opportunity for the UK. It will make it tougher to work illegally in this country, making our borders more secure.

And it will also offer ordinary citizens countless benefits, like being able to prove your identity to access key services swiftly – rather than hunting around for an old utility bill.”

The proof to back up these big claims is still pending and may never come. But if the Digital ID plan is forced through the Commons, thanks to Labour’s massive majority, it will only build on Starmer’s short but impressive anti-democratic résumé.

That currently includes limiting jury trials, cancelling elections and, amongst other things, instructing government lawyers to oppose the wishes of directly elected local authorities (link).

Alas, consequentialists always frame themselves as preserving the greater good.

Subscribe now

10 Questions For Digital ID Advocates (link)

• Is the government happy to build new and centralised databases with a significant amount of personal data and, if so, at what cost?

• Given past hacks and cyber-attacks (link), would the government admit that the project would immediately go on the National Risk Register?

• How would enrolment and registration work?

• Would the whole project impact trust in the government (especially amongst minority groups)?

• Digital ID advocates claim, like a magical policy wand, it will help solve all manner of issues, including immigration. But why not make the existing systems work? As just one example, the past independent chief inspector of borders and immigration pointed out several flaws until the last government fired him (link).

• We already have ID cards (passports, driving licences and so on) so why create another level of government infrastructure and a stealth tax on citizens?

• Rural broadband (and the lack of it) is still an issue (link). Other adults don’t have smartphones. Will these people be excluded from society?

• How would digital ID enforcement work and who would carry it out, the police?

• What budget would a government give the NHS to help cope with the transition to digital ID?

• How, practically, would you unify the DVLA, Passport Office and National Insurance databases?

• How would the collected data be shared? How many functions/apps would the Digital ID have?

• Overall, how would a Digital ID project not become a large IT infrastructure that runs over time, runs over budget and undermines public trust?

“The broken promises are strewn across the country's memory.” — Tony Blair, writing in the 1997 New Labour general election manifesto (link).

The lag is real. Though the Covid-19 pandemic started around five years ago, its aftershocks will still be felt for years to come, impacting economics, politics and how we choose to live our lives.

You don’t have to look further than the 2008 financial crisis to see how these things play out.

Here in the UK it wasn’t until the middle of 2011 when the unemployment rate peaked at 8.4% (link), with youth joblessness (16 to 24-year-olds) rising to more than 22% as a generation of graduates questioned why they put themselves into debt.

Today, unemployment is back on the rise for our future workers. As it stands, the rate has climbed to 16%, up from 10.9% around the same period in 2022 (link).

Without substantial economic growth, another youth unemployment crisis surely awaits. This time there’s more debt, higher rents and a generative AI revolution to deal with.

Understandably, hundreds of thousands of Britons are voting with their feet and leaving the country, many for good (link).

For everyone else, those pandemic habits have institutionalised themselves into our daily lives. Less eating out, more frugalness and a pickier perspective when it comes to consumption.

Here’s what Ken Murphy, the boss of Tesco, the UK’s largest supermarket chain, is noticing (link):

Moving on to that, the customer sentiment and how they’re feeling. I think the best way to describe it is mixed.

I think that the shopping habits they’ve built in over the last three or four years following the initial cost of living crisis have stuck. And in some ways, some of them have been accentuated. So, you are seeing an increase in fresh food purchases.

Which I think is a good thing for the health of the nation. But also, an indication of a trend of more scratch cooking, more cooking from first principles.

We’re also seeing though a trend of more dining in, in weekend and evening occasions, as evidenced by the strong growth in Finest of over 16% which is now lapping three years of consecutive strong, double-digit growth.

The rich, meanwhile, who have benefited from an asset price surge (link), keep getting richer (link), in what has been dubbed a ‘K-Shaped economy’.

These trends aren’t going anywhere, at least for now, and they will decide who wields political power going forward.

Trump benefitted from the situation when he took on Joe Biden and Keir Starmer’s Labour Party was able to kick the Conservatives out of government last year because the economy was performing so badly (Rishi Sunak seemed relatively competent in Number 10, but he was cursed by his predecessors).

Heading into office, Starmer and his Chancellor Rachel Reeves promised not to raise taxes on workers and prioritise economic growth. On both counts the pair have failed, the media has turned on them (link) and there is endless speculation about the Prime Minister’s future.

Increasingly, D-Day looks like the 7th of May. That’s when elections will be held for the Welsh and Scottish Parliaments as well as local authorities across the rest of the UK.

Once again, the government has decided to delay some of the crucial votes (link), but a bad result at the ballot box could still trigger the beginning of the end for Starmer.

Left-wing rivals, including the Health Secretary Wes Streeting (link), are already setting their stalls out should the ‘ball come loose at the back of the scrum’, as Boris Johnson once quipped.

It’s all looking quite precarious as a general sense of economic doom and gloom permeates throughout the country (link) like a nasty case of mould.

But politics being politics, Labour’s rivals have been able to seize upon the dire situation.

Nigel Farage’s Reform Party has picked apart the government’s record on immigration and crime, while the Conservative Party, under the now semi-stable leadership of Kemi Badenoch, has put the economy at the heart of their campaigning.

Elsewhere, The Green Party and its new leader, Zack Polanski, a former hypnotherapist (link), has attacked Starmer over the Israel-Gaza conflict and his administration’s renewable credentials.

Labour has subsequently leaked votes left, right and centre, ending the year in joint third place:

• Reform: 30%

• Conservatives: 18%

• Labour: 16%

• Greens: 16%

• Liberal Democrats: 12%

Source: Politico’s Poll of Polls (link)

As for the Prime Minister himself, just one in six Britons (18%) have a favourable opinion of Starmer, according to YouGov.

You would expect another restart from Number 10 in the New Year. This would be Starmer’s second, having already attempted a post-election rejuvenation in the winter of last year (link).

But, as it stands, data across social media transparency portals reveal that Labour is heavily prioritising the campaign of Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar.

He’s pushing bread and butter Labour messages across Facebook, Instagram and YouTube against the SNP. Labour would cut energy bills and improve the NHS north of the border if the party was in charge, Sarwar has claimed across various video formats.

Meanwhile, Rosie Wrighting, the Labour MP for Kettering, is increasingly being promoted by the party on social media alongside a cost of living-focused message (link).

Fellow East Midlander, Natalie Fleet MP, is also featured heavily across Labour’s channels as well as anti-Farage videos, contrasting Starmer’s upbringing to the private school boy (link)

Reform, meanwhile, heads into 2026 pushing a ‘Broken Britain’ message (link) and backing what it calls ‘alarm clock Britain’, whilst urging its supporters to ‘never trust a Tory’. As for the Conservative Party, it has almost been purely focused on piling the pressure on Rachel Reeves, as outlined below.

For Polanski’s part, The Green Party has done very little on the paid-for social media front, but the leader has appeared on popular YouTube shows and has even launched his own podcast, Bold Politics. The move aligns with where voters are at — YouTube is universally popular in the UK (link).

Finally, the Liberal Democrat party seems to be running out of steam as we approach 2026. Even though Ed Davey’s stunts during the 2024 general election saw the party hit above its weight in the media, mostly because it was all a bit mad (link), the party has failed to capitalise on the attention.

It has most recently ran a series of attack ads, focusing on the Tory seats of East Hampshire, South Shropshire and Salisbury, all constituencies the Liberal Democrats will heavily contest at the next general election.

Returning to Number 10, its looks like the penny had dropped, via new(ish) comms chief Tim Allen, that social media is the present and the future.

For the Lobby, the assorted groups of political correspondents, that means they will get less briefings as content creators are asked to join press conferences.

The Spectator’s James Heale has dubbed it a ‘war on the Lobby’ (link), but the move could well spawn the next generation of political media stars, as we saw during the televised briefings during the pandemic.

There will also likely be a re-concentration on the media in Wales and Scotland, with nationalist parties Plaid Cymru and the SNP leading in the polls.

But, alas, the air-war can only get you so far in politics. You need a good ground game too, something which Labour has been adept at (so far).

Subscribe now

Latest from TPM

• In Search of The Online Millennial Man (link)

• A Subtle Form of Censorship? (link)

• Why The Big Short Bros Are Back (link)

Recommended reading

• on driverless cars (link)

• ’s political predictions (link)

• on Soviet weightlifting (link)

We’re deep into the Larger Trinity season here in the UK. The World Championship of Darts is being played out, in all of its dress-up, sing-along glory, at North London’s Alexandra Palace (link).

England have just been thrashed by the Aussies at the cricket (it’s been truly woeful), and all tiers of the association football pyramid – the Premiership, Championship and lower leagues – are cramming in game after game, leading up to a Boxing Day bonanza (link).

Millions will flock to the terraces and tune in over a plate of reheated leftovers on the 26th, and they might even multi-screen some horse racing while they’re at it.

Thanks to blokes live sports is in rude health both in Britain and the US, where households still watch the NFL, basketball and baseball together (link). But elsewhere the story of the online man isn’t a straightforward one.

Prompted by the now viral The Lost Generation essay from in Compact (link), which painfully lays bare Hollywood’s discriminatory practices under the banner of the optic-inducing Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion framework, I wanted to find out how men were consuming, embracing and rejecting content.

With live sports aside, it’s a fairly negative outlook for traditional media. Though trust in the news media is on the decline generally and across all demographics (link), men take an especially less favourable view of the journalism industry.

When I looked into the tables from a 2023 YouGov poll, for instance, for every major UK broadcaster men trusted them less than female viewers (link). This was even true for the BBC, which typically scores very high favourability ratings.

Asked ‘how trustworthy or untrustworthy do you rate the news reported by the following media organisations?’, male respondents gave a net rating of 20 versus 26 from women for the broadcaster.

When you add age to the equation, you might expect older men – insert the old man yells at cloud meme – to be particularly distrustful of the news media. According to a major Gallup poll of US voters (link), that isn’t the case.

It’s Millennials, as Jacob Savage alluded to, which no longer align their values with mass media, scoring a record low 23 on Gallup’s 100-point trust index.

Bearing in mind that these are the management classes, the ones with all of the disposal income, that’s quite an indictment for Hollywood and the journalism industry.

Gen Z and those over 50 both ranked at 28, while the boomers gave mass media a lot of trust with a score of 43.

So we know that the online man, especially of the Millennial variety, embraces live sports streaming, whilst strongly rejecting other forms of mass media. But where exactly are they on the internet?

Increasingly, it’s on the lad-laden technology stack of YouTube, Reddit and X. YouTube is universally used across all age, gender, race and geographical brackets, but men especially favour the Google-owned video platform.

Studies from YouGov (link) and PewResearch (link) not only show that YouTube is a favourite, but that podcasts are a preferred form of content. Naturally, creators such as Joe Rogan, Chris Williamson and Shawn Ryan come to mind since they all have blokey offerings.

But all of the most popular pods, including Goalhanger’s Rest is History, are moving onto the platform with visual content to accompany their audio output (check-out the Substack of independent podcast guru for more on this trend).

And though Reddit and X are not nearly as popular as YouTube, it’s men who disproportionately use the sites. There is a nine point gap (25 versus 16) between male and female usage of the platform formerly known as Twitter, according to Pew.

The research also shows that the older you get, the less likely it is that you will use short-form video sites like TikTok.

A related and worrying trend outlined in the data is that teenagers are constantly online (link). That means boys are getting their social cues and sensibilities from the the digital world.

The male role models of yesteryear, including the likes of David Beckham, James Bond and Arnold Schwarzenegger, seem one-dimensional compared to the highly interactive and engaging YouTube stars of modern day.

There are upsides, in that Gen Z males are able to get the information they need in real-time, with it being often explained both in video and audio format. There are also notable downsides.

The filter system of traditional mass media no longer curates or censors content for young men and boys, leaving them exposed to the wills of the algorithm and bad actors.

In a post-literate world where the idea of the image ranks highly, bodybuilding has mainstreamed from a niche, somewhat weird, sport, into a hobby for the masses.

‘Fitness influencers’ have flourished, while steroid use (link) and body dysmorphia has grown (link).

‘Fake natty’ and ‘enhanced’, a euphemism for drug use, have subsequently entered the lexicon.

If the online male isn’t watching the likes of Sam Sulek (link) or planning for an offline workout, they are likely holding a controller. The American Time Use survey saw the biggest jump for boys and men in the gaming category from 2019 onwards (link).

Fortnite, Minecraft and Roblox are popular titles amongst younger audiences, while Grand Theft Auto and Call of Duty, two games which have been around for decades, are Millennial favourites alongside action role-playing games like 2022’s Elden Ring, with the age cohort spending up to 22 hours per week on gaming (link).

Thirty-something males might not have been online-natives, but armed with full fibre broadband and burgeoning bank balances, they’re certainly trying to catch-up with their younger counterparts. And they’re increasingly not interested in what mainstream mass media has to say to them, unless it’s sports-related of course.

You won’t find the Millennial man at the library.

Subscribe now

Either through cock-up or conspiracy the British public have been denied contemporaneous information on one of the most sensitive political topics of our age for years.

Between 2016 and 2024, and perhaps even longer, important and independent reports on immigration have been routinely delayed in Whitehall.

I first started reporting on this phenomenon around the EU Referendum campaign. The government of the day and later Number 10 administrations would defer to a serious sounding group on immigration policy, The Migration Advisory Committee.

The MAC, as it’s known in Westminster, is typically made up of independent economists. Probably their most important role is to recommend which occupations need to go on the government’s shortlist of workers (link).

If the UK needs more nurses, doctors or plumbers, for instance, they would be added and restrictions would be lifted. The MAC also provides research on the impact of visas, seasonal work and other migration-related matters.

It’s all a bit dull and, somewhat understandably, other political journalists would simply report the MAC’s findings and move quickly on to another story. However, I decided to look into the organisation and, as I did, I started to discover some intriguing things about the MAC.

To begin with, though the MAC is independent, its reports are published by the Home Office. A fact I will come onto shortly. Secondly, the MAC doesn’t necessarily set the scope of its reports. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the organisation was effectively politicised in 2015.

Net migration had reached a new record high of more than 330,000 (link) and David Cameron, who had promised to cut net migration to “tens of thousands”, asked the MAC to advise on “what more can be done to reduce levels of work migration from outside the EU”.

For a small non-departmental public body, this was an awful lot of pressure to bear. That stress would rise to new levels in Whitehall in 2016 when David Cameron and George Osborne used the fully machinery of government, including £9 million of taxpayer cash on leaflets (link), to campaign against a split from the EU.

Cameron staked his political career on the referendum, thinking it would be an easy win. But as the June vote got closer and closer so did the polling between Leave and Remain.

In what still looks like a desperate move today, the Prime Minister claimed a potential split from the EU would to lead Europe descending into war (link).

That was the context in which I published the below in January 2017, seven months after the Brexit vote:

“…Isn’t it strange then that the last minutes of the so called MAC were published on 24 June, a day after the EU referendum?

“Well, that was before yesterday when I asked the Home Office, which provides clerical support to the group, what had happened.

“There was no explanation, just a promise: “The minutes will be on the website next week.”

“True to the spokesperson’s word, the minutes -- for July, October and November -- have been published on the MAC’s governance page.

“Having scanned through the documents, I can assure you there are no revelations or potential embarrassments for the government.

“So why has it taken so long for the minutes to be published?”

Why indeed? From a journalistic point of view, the situation was frustrating. It doesn’t make much of story if the information is eventually going to be published, but you had to give the Home Office a right to reply.

It’s good journalistic ethics, but it also gives the other side an opportunity, through a variety of tactics, to kill any article.

No longer a reporter, I watched the MAC and its minutes from afar. The same pattern of behaviour was still going on up until this year. To prove the point, here’s a schedule of updates relating to the MAC’s 2024 meetings:

As an isolated administrative issue relating to an organisation which nobody’s heard of there isn’t much of a story here. But here’s the kicker: the same thing was also happening with other independent bodies associated with the Home Office.

In September last year the interim Independent Chief Inspector of Borders and Immigration, David Bolt, used his annual report to urge the Home Office to publish his reports within eight weeks of receipt (link).

Like the MAC, the Immigration Inspector’s office has to go through the Home Office for publication.

Bolt’s predecessor, David Neal, was sacked (link) at the start of 2024 for going to the media about alleged security failings of the UK Border Force.

In short, Neal warned that general aviation aircraft weren’t being checked properly. That’s for firearms, human trafficking or contraband. All serious stuff.

The Home Secretary at the time was James Cleverly. who was first promoted into the Cabinet by Boris Johnson, whose premiership is now remembered for the ‘Boriswave’ of legal immigration.

Neal went public on the sacking in The Guardian (link), expanding on the curious culture of delays inside the Home Office:

“First, you should know that there are 15 outstanding unpublished reports for which that inspector has responsibility, on subjects as varied as deprivation of citizenship and unaccompanied asylum-seeking children housed in hotels. These reports stretch back as far as April 2023.

“You, the public, should have seen them. Delays in publishing will mean that the Home Office will claim that matters have moved on. While the reports will be published eventually, there will be no one to highlight key recommendations or provide a personal assessment to complement the evidence base of the reports.”

These reports didn’t just concern airports, but the government’s response to the small boats crisis, which by 2024 had become a top three issue in British politics. In particular, Neal criticised a lack of an exit strategy from asylum hotels (link):

“An initial target date for exit from hotels was set for May 2021. This was subsequently extended to March 2022. Both dates proved to be unrealistic. It was not until 29 September 2023, in a submission to ministers, that senior civil servants proposed an “initial hotel exit plan” to close the first 100 hotels “over a manageable period of time”.

An earlier report of his also revealed that asylum seekers were absconding from ‘safe hotels’ (link):

“The Home Office told our inspectors that 227 migrants had absconded from secure hotels between September 2021 and January 2022, and not all had been biometrically enrolled.

“Over a five-week period alone, 57 migrants had absconded – two-thirds of whom had not had their fingerprints and photographs taken. Put simply, if we don’t have a record of people coming into the country, then we do not know who is threatened or who is threatening.”

We’ve since learnt that asylum accommodation will cost taxpayers £15.3 billion, triple the amount the Home Office first claimed (link). To maintain its exit strategy from asylum hotels, the government has fought local authorities in the courts for trying to ban these premises, despite their growing unpopularity.

The costs are surmounting and could reach an additional £1.4 billion if the boats keep coming (link).

Meanwhile, the MAC used its annual report this week to estimate that family visas will cost the UK £5.6 billion and half of those entering on family visas were unemployed (link).

It make you think: Are there any other delays we should be aware of?

Subscribe now

Being early is the same as being wrong, is what they’re tell you on Wall Street. It’s a warning Dr has enthusiastically leaned into with his new blockbuster newsletter, Cassandra Unchained.

For the uninitiated, Cassandra was a figure in Greek mythology who was given the gift of prophesy by the gods. But in a cruel turn of events Cassandra was also cursed — nobody would believe her predictions.

Burry has cast himself as a modern-day Cassandra. As a contrarian hedge fund manager at the now defunct Scion Asset Management, he estimated that the US housing market would blow-up in 2007.

The rapid rise of the subprime adjustable-rate mortgage industry, catalysed by the trading of derivative financial instruments, meant that consumers with little or no creditworthiness could take out massive loans for residential properties.

As the borrowing rates soared, typically from the second or third years of these mortgage agreements, delinquency rates would climb.

Since 2003 Burry had been pulling the prospectuses of the financial instruments, known as mortgage-backed securities and the riskier collateralised debt obligations.

He noticed that these bundles of securities or tranches were increasingly being packed with riskier and riskier loans. In other words, their credit standards were deteriorating.

But despite these warning signs, a mixture of greed and leverage had taken hold at some of the world’s largest financial institutions, leaving them exposed to this increasingly dangerous paper as “crappier and crappier mortgages” were being sold and re-sold at an unforeseen scale.

To ‘short’, or bet against the market, Burry had to literally create a new form of insurance against mortgage-backed securities defaulting. Some major Wall Street banks agreed to sell Burry these derivative insurance products in the shape of credit default swaps.

This was in 2005, years before the Great Recession. Some of Scion’s investors became increasingly frustrated with Burry because he had to pay out premiums on the credit default swaps. In total, Scion was reportedly drawn down by $100 million.

After a flurry of redemptions from his fund, Burry would reduce his $8 billion exposure to credit default swaps to $2.3 billion in a bid to appease his investors.

He would have to wait until mid-2007, when the housing market started to crack and delinquency rates soared, for his hypothesis to be proven correct.

In the end Scion made more than $725 million on the trade, netting $100 million for Burry. Even on those returns, some of Scion’s investors were still pissed off.

Burry later became became a micro-celebrity thanks to Michael Lewis’ 2010 The Big Short, with the 2015 film of the same name and a portrayal from Christian Bale further boosting his fame.

Self-diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome, Burry thereafter kept a low profile publicly and rejected most media interviews. He did, however, build a cult following on Twitter (now X), where some of his pronouncements on the economy and equity markets went viral.

A cottage industry of following hedge fund managers and their bets was also created around him. With YouTube videos (link), forum posts and articles published on Scion’s quarterly 13F filings, the form hedge funds have to submit to the Securities and Exchange Commission to disclose their top positions.

But Burry called it quits as a hedge fund manager in November, announcing that he would close Scion down and create the Cassandra Unchained newsletter:

“After 25 years managing various Scion funds professionally, I’ve left the hedge fund business to focus on what I’ve always loved: writing and sharing investment ideas.

In the 1990s, I published Valuestocks.net, which Forbes twice named “Best of the Web,” and I wrote for Microsoft’s MSN Money as the Value Doc. For many years, my Scion Capital investor letters did all my marketing for me. Cassandra Unchained is a return to the public forum — and man am I excited.

Running money professionally came with regulatory and compliance restrictions that effectively muzzled my ability to communicate. These constraints meant I could only share cryptic fragments publicly, if at all. Without comment or clarity from me, news media has wildly misinterpreted many of my mandatory SEC filings — even causing havoc in markets as well as angry debates that I never intended.

That is all over. Cassandra, as Warren Buffett called me during his testimony to Congress about the GFC, is unchained…”

The outlet, with an annual subscription price of more than $380, has more than 155,000 total subscribers and has proven to be a coup for Substack, with Burry bringing his audience over from X and attracting new followers to the platform.

His new hypothesis is that technology stocks, especially those with a strong exposure to the generative AI boom, are overcooked. Burry has claimed that AI companies are allegedly inflating their earnings through accountancy tricks, namely by extending their depreciation schedules from three-to-five years up to six.

In short, this would mean AI rigs would last and be in demand for longer. Burry doesn’t buy it and has subsequently betted against leading chipmaker Nvidia, with the company pushing back (link).

The industry has argued that the demand is there, while others have pointed out that it’s too early to tell how long these bleeding edge processors will be financially viable for.

And though they are now being using for large-language-model scaling, their compute will be needed for AI app usage, known in the industry as ‘inference’. As such, moving the depreciation schedules out to six years is reasonable.

Either way, Burry’s intervention has fed into the wider ‘AI bubble’ narrative, with financial commentators noting the incredible rise of the ‘Magnificent Seven’ technology stocks over the past decade. Oracle’s latest earnings announcement (link) added fuel to the fire.

The company didn’t meet Wall Street’s estimations, with the Oracle’s debt pile rising to $108 million (link). A report from Bloomberg on Friday poured salt onto the wound (link), triggering another stock sell-off.

Reporter Brody Ford claimed that Oracle had pushed back the completion dates for some of the data centres it is developing for OpenAI to 2028 from 2027. Labour and material shortages were reportedly blamed.

Another Big Short alumni, Steve Eisman, is taking a more measured approach to the ‘AI bubble’ debate. Like Burry, Eisman betted against the US mortgage market as boss of FrontPoint Partners. But his short was put on later, in the autumn of 2006. A frequent contributor on CNBC, Eisman has admitted that he’s a holder of the some of the biggest technology stocks. He’s not selling (link), at least for now.

But Eisman has aired some contrary opinions through his new(ish) podcast, The Real Eisman Playbook (link). The show, which is across all of the main platforms, has already amassed more than 6.5 million views on YouTube. With a preference for interviewing independent financial analysts (he trusts them more), Eisman is able to breakdown some of the most complex business practices for the layman.

For retail investors, this type of information is gold. The institutions have to pay big bucks for this analysis, while Eisman gives this out to the world for free via his studio in New York.

A recent highlight was his sit down with Nigel Coe from Wolfe Research (link), an analyst focused on data centres. The industry is at the crossroads of the technology and industrial sectors, with these ‘bit barns’ providing the building blocks for the AI revolution.

Coe and Eisman went through some of the biggest players in the space, including CoreWeave, a former crypto mining business turned AI hyperscaler, and outlined the bull and bear cases for the stocks.

Eisman’s Socratic method of simply asking ‘why?’ or ‘how?’ throughout the course of a the conversation is deadly effective in an industry prone to jargon and suspectable to hype trends.

You can see why he called bullshit on the subprime mortgage market when most people though house prices could only go up.

As for Michael Lewis, his Against The Rules podcast has had a mini-revival thanks to a recent and rare interview of Burry (link). His last book project, 2023’s Going Infinite, raised eyebrows after Lewis got close (some critics say too close) to Sam Bankman-Fried, the now convicted fraudster.

Here’s how Emma Brockes in The Guardian (link) reviewed the book:

“Lewis tells the story of Bankman-Fried’s swashbuckling rise with predictable brio, but there is another, trickier side to the tale and here, Lewis struggles.

He tries to get around the huge question mark over his subject’s character by telling an opaque parable about a man called Bob – the moral of which is do we ever, really know our friends – but it doesn’t disguise the fact that Lewis can’t bear to think ill of his subject.”

It was a rare miss for the Californian-based Lewis, whose bibliography also includes Liar’s Poker, Moneyball and Flash Boys. But much talk of an ‘end cycle’ in the equity markets, something that could be similar to the Dot Com crash of the early 2000s, could re=popularise the author and give him much more material to write about.

Subscribe now

My other writings on the AI boom

Are LLMs the way forward? (link)

Inside Big Tech’s nuclear dream (link)

The UK’s AI strategy (link)

You couldn’t have picked a more mysterious street in England. For six weeks just off Fetter Lane, near where the Knights Templar once allegedly located their headquarter, a who’s who of cryptographers, coders and digital assets experts gave evidence in London’s High Court in 2024.

The primary question at hand wasn’t who Bitcoin’s original founder was, but who the pseudonymous ‘Satoshi Nakamoto’ wasn’t.

The case was brought by the Crypto Open Patent Alliance, a non-profit cryptocurrency group backed by Jack Dorsey, Coinbase and BTC Core with a stated aim to prevent patent hoarding and obstruction of innovation.

Though I will leave the case and its outcome for others to comment on, it did crucially unearth new and historically relevant materials relating to the early days of Bitcoin.

These artifacts have garnered very little interest elsewhere, despite their significance. Here I’ve attempted to outline their importance and explain why they will force a rewrite of Bitcoin’s early history.

First Contact

To begin with, we now have on record Satoshi’s email exchange with cryptographer Adam Back from 2008. The Bitcoin creator had reached out to Back in order to properly cite his Hashcash whitepaper (2002).

A frequent remailer user (an email service which provides anonymity), Back had created Hashcash in 1998 as an anti-spam tool. The algorithm worked by creating a digital signature every time an email would be sent.

Since it took time and computational power to generate this stamp, its proof-of-work, the micro-costs of Hashcash would deter spammers. Satoshi would integrate the proof-of-work protocol as Bitcoin’s mining function.

The system forces machines (initially envisioned as CPUs) to use their power to solve cryptographic puzzles. For Bitcoin’s use, it expands and verifies a distributed ledger (the blockchain). In doing so, the machine is rewarded with a coin (a Bitcoin) for its work.

We learn from the emails with Back that Satoshi had “nearly” finished the first release of Bitcoin in August 2008 and that they hadn’t heard of Wei Dai’s b-money cryptocurrency system (link).

A bit like Back, the coding came first and then the whitepaper came afterwards for Satoshi (link): “I actually did Bitcoin kind of backwards. I had to write all the code before I could convince myself that I could solve every problem, then I wrote the paper. I think I will be able to release the code sooner than I could write a detailed specification.”

The Marketing

But the most interesting and in-depth revelations from the new disclosures come from a Finnish computer scientist called Martti Malmi.

Otherwise known as ‘Sirius’, Malmi corresponded with Satoshi privately between 2009 and 2011. He helped develop Bitcoin and market the project to the wider world. That work include creating an FAQ, running the Bitcoin.org website and launching one of the first Bitcoin currency exchanges.

As part of the trial in London, Malmi published his email exchanges with Satoshi (link) for the first time. This was a rare and welcome move for Bitcoin researchers.

Given the nature of the project, other Satoshi collaborators have been less forthcoming. For better or worse, they have decided to value privacy over transparency.

Malmi’s contribution therefore substantially extended the Satoshi corpus, which had previously included email exchanges with the nearest thing Bitcoin had to a co-founder, Hal Finney (batch one link, batch two link), developer Mike Hearn (link), the aforementioned Gavin Andresen (link) and Satoshi’s public posts.

Those public communications were across forums (the original SourceForge one, on the P2P Foundation and across the later BitcoinTalk.org site), mailing lists (P2P Research, The Cryptography List and Bitcoin’s dedicated list which Satoshi created) and the Bitcoin Whitepaper itself.

As it stands, no early Bitcoin contributor, developer or supporter has claimed to have interacted with Satoshi other than via non-real-time text communication. Malmi’s disclosure partly reveals why.

A keen user of privacy technologies, including the Tor routing network, Satoshi would sometimes take a break from the early Bitcoin project, put the development of the digital payments technology to one side and then later download his emails [1].

This private admission from May 2010, including that he had “been busy with other things for the last month and a half”, aligns with a gap in his public postings between late March and mid-May 2010.

Satoshi went quiet in the Spring of 2009, with his last public email in March and the next one in October of that year. But the Malmi emails show that Satoshi was active behind-the-scenes, emailing the Finnish developer in May and then in June 2009. Notably, Satoshi also worked on Christmas Day 2009.

The Donors

The other revelation from the now public emails is the existence of early Bitcoin “donors” [2], with one donor offering to send Satoshi $2,000. Malmi would use some of the money to host Bitcoin’s website and help fund his Bitcoin exchange, which the pair had conceived of in a bid to make the cryptocurrency more popular [3].

The emails also give Satoshi assigning a time code (GMT) to their correspondence [4], something that isn’t seen across the rest of the early Bitcoin corpus, and we are given a sense of Satoshi’s wellbeing in mid-July 2010 [5].

They reference a “flood of work” following the exposure this early beta project had been given on Slashdot, something I’ve written about before in relation to Bitcoin (link).

As a popular aggregator in the 2000s tech scene, akin to HackerNews today, tens of thousands of people would have flocked to Bitcoin’s website and forums via Slashdot. That’s the context of Satoshi’s further statement: “I’m losing my mind [,] there are so many things that need to be done.”

They had been fixing bugs, a list of which Satoshi had made from chatter on the BitcoinTalk forum [6], and upgrading the project’s code since 2009, with the original build starting in 2007 well before the Bitcoin whitepaper was published.

To use some of the English Commonwealth dialect Satoshi is known for, the creator seemed knackered by the summer of 2010. Those same sentiments of being stressed out are shared in August 2010 on the Bitcoin forum, when Satoshi apologised for being “so busy lately” and failing to “keep up” (link) with bug fixing.

Earlier that month a hacker had exposed a major vulnerability in the Bitcoin system and created two lots of 92 billion Bitcoins, far beyond the 21 million Bitcoin cap. The ‘value overflow incident’, as it was later dubbed, could have cratered the project then and there.

To overcome the issue, the developers patched the Bitcoin software [7] and the technology’s community agreed to perform a ‘hard fork’, moving to a new system with new rules. Bitcoin survived. But, as it stands, this was the most serious bug in the technology’s history.

By the second half of 2010, a new Bitcoin exchange, MtGox, had launched, the project was getting noticed on Wikipedia, with a dispute erupting between the technology’s users and Wikipedia editors (link), and the first retail transaction had been recorded when developer Laszlo Hanyecz exchanged 10,000 Bitcoin for two pizzas.

Though Bitcoin’s price was just around $0.10, further interest in the project grew thanks to posts on Reddit (link) and community-driven sites literally giving away Bitcoins (link).

As the year came to a close, Satoshi was concentrating on fixing bugs, upgrading the software, overseeing the translation of the project into multiple other languages and delegating responsibilities to the other Bitcoin developers.

The Overflow Incident

But there was a touch of drama before the year was out. Amid speculation that WikiLeaks could start accepting donations via Bitcoin, Satoshi took to the forums in December 2010 to make a public appeal (link): “Bitcoin is a small beta community in its infancy. You would not stand to get more than pocket change, and the heat you would bring would likely destroy us at this stage.”

Remember, the value overflow incident had happened just four months earlier. One of Satoshi’s final public posts was to flag that he was planning to ‘venture into more complex ideas’ (link).

He also announced that the next patch of the Bitcoin software would concentrate on denial-of-service (DoS) resistance, no doubt this was in reaction to the new found fame the project had attracted on the internet.

The early Bitcoin developers had previously warned that the software was vulnerable to these types of rudimentary cyber assaults (link), where an attacker floods a machine(s) with a mass of superfluous requests making its services unavailable often for a finite period of time.

The DoS upgrade also followed Satoshi’s own warning on 11 December: “...WikiLeaks has kicked the hornet’s nest, and the swarm is headed towards us.” The remarks were in response to a PC World article on Bitcoin authored by Keir Thomas (link).

Headlined ‘Could the Wikileaks Scandal Lead to New Virtual Currency?’, the post drew some unwanted attention to the project and associated it with a political hot potato. It’s unclear whether this was the straw which broke the camel’s back for Satoshi, who subsequently stopped posting publicly.

But we do know that Satoshi was around 42 months into the project, having first started working on Bitcoin in mid-2007, and some of the most important aspects of the organisation had been delegated to a trusted core group of developers by mid-2010.

The Malmi emails are important because they show that Satoshi seemed aggravated by the workload associated with upgrading Bitcoin by the summer of 2010, even before the value overflow incident occurred.

They also corroborate testimony from other Bitcoin insiders that Satoshi did continue to communicate privately in early 2011, often using terse responses to Malmi and Andresen [8].

The Malmi archive stops in February 2011, but Andresen and Satoshi would continue their exchanges with the Bitcoin creator up to the end of April 2011 (link).

That’s when Andresen announced that he planned to travel to Virginia in June to give a 50-minute-long presentation on Bitcoin. He wanted to make the plan public to the Bitcoin community.

That’s because he wasn’t travelling to any old organisation, but to a subsidiary of the CIA (link). Andresen gave Satoshi a day’s heads-up before going public on the trip. He hasn’t heard from Satoshi since.

End Notes: Satoshi in Context

The wider historical context of Bitcoin’s creation is often overlooked and mischaracterised. Though it launched near the start of the 2008 Financial Crisis, with the Bitcoin network going live in January 2009, Satoshi, by their own account, actually started building the system in mid-2007.

At that time, mortgage defaults were hitting the headlines (link), but the Dow Jones Industrial Average still reached a record high in October 2007. In fact, the early 2000s might have served as a more impactful inspiration for Bitcoin.

The music industry had turned on peer-to-peer music sharing website Napster by 2000 (link), the UK was selling its gold reserves (link), Switzerland was one of the last countries to move off the gold standard in 2000, the Dot Com Bubble had burst by 2001 as BitTorrent launched (link), the War on Terror started in the same year and the Euro began circulating in 2002.

There are currently no accounts of Satoshi mentioning these events, but they provided the political and economic backdrop of the first half of that decade. The other major development was the 2001 Patriot Act.

Created after 9/11, the legislation saw the substantial expansion of the US state and its surveillance powers, raising concerns amongst privacy groups both inside the United States and outside of it. The concerned parties included the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a group which Satoshi was supportive of [9].

Another guessing game amongst digital asset scholars is what projects Satoshi was aware of before building Bitcoin. Adam Back’s pointer to Wei Dai’s b-money is interesting, as is the fact that Nick Szabo’s 1998 Bit Gold concept (link), of a decentralised digital currency, was not mentioned in the Bitcoin whitepaper. Equally, David Chaum’s DigiCash corporation (link), which launched in 1989, was not cited by Satoshi.

This is especially curious since Satoshi hints that they have been learning or developing on the C++ programming language since the 1990s (link), at the same time as the rise of the original cypherpunks (link).

But thanks to Malmi’s archive we do now know that Satoshi was familiar with some other currency projects, including Liberty Reserve (2004), e-Bullion (2001), Pecunix (2002) and Webmoney (1998) [10].

All of this information helps build on the already existing Satoshi profile. That is of a developer or group of coders with a strong knowledge of cryptography, economics, peer-to-peer networks and C++ programming.

On the technical side, we know they preferred the Windows operating system over Linux and used Tor and PGP privacy software systems, sometimes on a seven-year-old computer rig without an AMD or Intel Core i5 processing card.

Somewhat ironically, but as they intended, Satoshi’s hardware wasn’t good enough to keep up with some of the Bitcoin miners on the early network.

Subscribe now

References

[1] Satoshi email to Malmi on 16 May 2010. “…just now downloaded my e-mail since the beginning of April. I mostly have things sorted and should be back to Bitcoin shortly. Glad that you’ve been handling things in my absence. Congrats on your first transaction!”

[2] Satoshi email to Malmi on 21 July 2009. “There are donors I can tap if we come up with something that needs funding, but they want to be anonymous, which makes it hard to actually do anything with it.”

[3] Satoshi email to Malmi on 23 June 2010. “I got a donation offer for $2000 USD. I need to get your postal mailing address to have him send to. And yes, he wants to remain anonymous, so please keep the envelope’s origin private.”

[4] Satoshi email to Malmi on 12 November 2009. “Right now (04:50 GMT) my node is connecting to yours and getting zombie connections each time. The socket isn’t returning an error, just zombie without notice. If you’re running the linux build right now, it would be interesting to see what the log says on your side.”

[5] Satoshi email to Malmi on 18 July 2010. “Please promise me you won’t make a switch now. The last thing we need is switchover hassle on top of the slashdot flood of work we’ve got now. I’m losing my mind there are so many things that need to be done.”

[6] Satoshi BitcoinTalk post on 19 September 2010. “I keep a list of all unresolved bugs I’ve seen on the forum. In some cases, I’m still thinking about the best design for the fix. This isn’t the kind of software where we can leave so many unresolved bugs that we need a tracker for them.”

[7] Satoshi email to the Bitcoin developers list 15 August 2010. “*** WARNING *** We are investigating a problem. DO NOT TRUST ANY TRANSACTIONS THAT HAPPENED AFTER 15.08.2010 17:05 UTC (block 74638) until the issue is resolved.”

[8] Satoshi email to Gavin Andresen on 6 January 2011.

“Gavin Andresen wrote:

> I’d be happy to talk to Rainey;

Great

> Satoshi, I assume you don’t want to

> deal with press/PR/interviews ?

True

> We could decline to talk to the press-- Satoshi, I know you’ve

> expressed concern about bitcoin growing too big too fast, and being

> unable to keep up with traffic/attacks/feature requests/etc. But I

> don’t think ignoring the press will make them go away; they’ll just

> talk to somebody else. I think it is better to give a realistic

> impression of bitcoin (it is cutting-edge, beta software that is still

> being developed, it is not poised to replace PayPal or the Euro

> anytime soon, etc) rather than let somebody over-enthusiastic become

> “the unofficial bitcoin spokesperson.”

You’re the best person to do it.

EFF is really important. We want to have a good relationship with them.

We’re the type of project they like; they’ve helped the TOR project and done a lot to protect P2P file sharing.

[9] Satoshi email to Gavin Andresen on 6 January 2011. “EFF is really important. We want to have a good relationship with them. We’re the type of project they like; they’ve helped the TOR project and done a lot to protect P2P file sharing.”

[10] Satoshi email to Malmi on 4 February 2010. “You could always exchange for Liberty Reserve. It’s an online currency similar to e-Bullion, Pecunix or Webmoney that allows exchanges no questions asked and with privacy. LR and the others are hard to buy but easy to cash out. Hard to buy because exchangers are very cautious about getting ripped off by reversed payments, so they require more details and holding time. Cashing out is very easy. LR is non-reversible, so there are oodles of exchanges eager to turn LR into any kind of payment.”

US consumers are tapping out, Trump’s inflation and economic ratings are falling fast and the White House’s Federal Reserve Chair pick, expected in early 2026, adds uncertainty around interest rates.

The outlook is not looking good for the President and the end of the Russian-Ukraine war can’t come quick enough to potentially lower oil and natural gas prices.

At the same time, the US can’t build nuclear power plants quick enough to meet the new and massive compute demands from data centres.

I’ve outlined all of the relevant data below, including some notable reports out of Virginia, where two worlds of the Trump White House – immigration enforcement and generative AI hyperscalers – are colliding.

US inflation figures

Via The Bureau of Labor Statistics, October (link):

“The index for energy increased 1.5 percent in September, after rising 0.7 percent in August. The gasoline index increased 4.1 percent over the month. (Before seasonal adjustment, gasoline prices increased 1.1 percent in September.)

“The index for electricity decreased 0.5 percent over the month and the index for natural gas decreased 1.2 percent over the same period. The index for energy increased 2.8 percent over the past 12 months. The electricity index increased 5.1 percent over the 12 months ending in September and the natural gas index rose 11.7 percent. In contrast, the index for gasoline fell 0.5 percent over this 12-month span.”

Rising energy costs lift US producer prices in September

Via Reuters, November (link):

“Producer goods prices jumped 0.9%, the largest gain since February 2024, after climbing 0.2% in August. Energy goods, which accelerated 3.5%, accounted for two-thirds of the increase in goods prices.

“Wholesale services prices were unchanged after falling 0.3% in August, when trade margins were compressed. The decline in trade margins had suggested that wholesalers were absorbing some of President Donald Trump’s sweeping tariffs on imported goods. That has largely resulted in moderate consumer prices, though the cost of some goods at the supermarket, including beef, coffee and bananas, has surged.”

The data centre energy graph

Via The Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, December 2024 (link).

Trump poll ratings

-27 disapproval rating on inflation for Trump (link)

-18 disapproval rating on the economy for Trump (link)

Gallup Concerns Index (link)

US consumer delinquency rates

Via The Federal Reserve, November (link):

“After plummeting to all-time lows during the pandemic, delinquencies on credit cards and auto loan debt increased to levels not observed since the Great Financial Crisis (GFC), raising concerns about the health of household balance sheets.”

Home Depot warns of ‘consumer uncertainty’

Via Company’s Q3 2025 earnings (link):

“…And then you talked about the overall economy in housing. We did expect to start seeing some pickup in demand in the second half of the year. And this wasn’t just the calendar dynamic of, oh, things will be better in the second half.

“We were expecting interest rates and mortgage rates to come down, which they did, that would have been some assistance to housing. But we really just saw ongoing consumer uncertainty and pressure in housing that are disproportionately impacting home improvement demand.”

Record number of subprime borrowers miss car loan payments in October

Via Reuters, November (link):

“The share of subprime borrowers at least 60 days behind on their auto loans rose to 6.65% in October, the highest level on record, according to Fitch Ratings data going back to the early 1990s.”

Mortgage delinquency rates

Via WalletHub, November (link):

“The rate of mortgage delinquency varies significantly from city to city, ranging from around 3% to nearly 24%. The bad news is that while people in some cities are having much more difficulty paying their mortgages than others, the problem as a whole is also getting worse this year. In fact, the mortgage delinquency rate actually increased in all but 13 of the 100 cities in our study between Q1 2025 and Q2 2025.”

One in three student loan borrowers risk default as delinquency rates soar

Via The Guardian, June (link):

“About 5.8 million federal student loan borrowers were 90 days or more past due on their payments as of April 2025, according to a new analysis from TransUnion.

“That’s roughly 31% of borrowers with a payment due, up from 20.5% in February and nearly triple the 11.7% delinquency rate reported in February 2020, just before the pandemic began. The April figure represents the highest delinquency rate ever recorded.”

Trouble in Virginia

US utility plans to raise bills despite Donald Trump’s vow to slash energy costs

Via The FT, published in April (link).

“One of America’s biggest utilities has proposed raising consumer bills by 14 per cent next year to cover costs linked to soaring electricity demand and inflation, in a blow to Donald Trump’s pledge to slash energy prices.

“Dominion Energy, which provides power to 3.6mn customers in Virginia, North Carolina and South Carolina, said the rising cost of labour, materials and upgrades to the grid required it to increase prices for the first time in more than 30 years to ensure a reliable service.”

Via Axios, published in August (link):

“Between May 2024 and May 2025, the average cost of electricity for residential customers in Virginia rose about 3%, from 14.95 cents to 15.41 cents, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.”

Virginia Has Become a Hotbed for Immigration Arrests

Via The New York Times, published in July (link):

“Arrests in the state by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents are up more than 350 percent since 2024, one of the steepest increases in the country.

“This outpaces the growth in ICE arrests in Democratic-run states like California and New York and Republican-controlled states like Florida and Texas. Nearly 3,000 people were arrested by ICE in Virginia in the first five months of 2025, on par with numbers in a much larger state like New York.”

Subscribe now

But before that major announcement in the House of Commons, Rachel Reeves has already attempted to give us, and Mr Market, a sense of what is to come.

In a preview of her actual Budget speech, the top Labour minister has hinted at tax increases.

This would, of course, break her party’s General Election Manifesto.

But don’t worry, folks, there’s plenty to blame for this trust smashing exercise.

The Chancellor has pointed to the tough macro-economic conditions the British economy has faced, her fiscal inheritance from the Conservative Party and the weather.

Well, not quite the latter, but she might as well have.

All in all, it’s looking like more doom and gloom from the Treasury.

What better time then to talk to Joe Mayes, who is tasked by Bloomberg News to cover Rachel Reeves on a daily basis.

Joe has a new book out Can You Run The Economy? An interactive guide on how to fix the UK’s economic plumbing, which draws on deep research and interviews from a string of former Chancellors.

Joe talks about his career in journalism, his relationship with the Chancellor and he even gives some Budget predictions – the freezing of income tax thresholds sounds awfully prescient.

Autumn, 1954. Around 50 miles from Fleet Street and deep within the English countryside, an old Berliner was reflecting on the latest international embarrassment he had caused.

The man in question was Sefton Delmer, The Daily Express’ star foreign correspondent, who had based himself in a farmhouse on the Essex-Suffolk border. It was his home away from the day-job, which had seen him cause most mischief in Spain, France and Germany.

Born in Berlin to an Australian academic, Delmer was repatriated to England during the First World War, he went up to Lincoln College, Oxford, and then returned to Germany as a freelance reporter.

As the Great Depression killed off the Weimar Republic and triggered street battles between the fascists and communists, Delmer got close to Ernst Röhm, the co-founder of the SA, the Nazi Party’s first paramilitary wing.

This relationship bore fruit when Delmer was the first English-language journalist to interview Adolf Hitler. He later reported on another and more sinister encounter with Hitler and Hermann Göring.

The Nazi chiefs paraded around the fire-bombed Reichstag Parliament building in February 1933. Warning of the evils of Bolshevism, they would use the incident to extend their powers, crackdown on opposition parties and ultimately take control of Germany.

As for Delmer’s old contact, Ernst Röhm, he would be executed more than a year later as part of the Night of the Long Knives, the SS purge of the ‘Brownshirts’.

It may have been a very ugly business during an extremely turbulent time, but Delmer’s initial relationship with the Nazis was the type of world-beating access Lord Beaverbrook wanted.

By the early 1930s his Daily Express had reached a circulation of two million copies, with the paper and its proprietor wielding a growing influence over domestic and international politics.

More scoops were needed to satisfy his paper’s hungry readership and Delmer would be dispatched by legendary editor Arthur Christiansen to cover the Spanish Civil War.

From apparent relative safety, Delmer would try to extract stories from Royal Navy men by appearing half-drunk in the port towns (link). He would turn their tales into his own.

In Madrid, Delmer would get scooped by Geoffrey Cox, of The News Chronicle, who first reported on British volunteers flocking to The International Brigade – a writer called Eric Blair being one of them (link).

We don’t know if Delmer rubbed shoulders with Ernest Hemingway, but the pair were almost certainly in Spain at the same time.

That conflict, arguably the first foray into modern warfare, was the dress rehearsal for what came next. And what came next was when Nazi Germany attacked Poland in September 1939.

Delmer would cover the invasion and then the Wehrmacht’s march Westwards before returning to England in 1940.

After stints with the BBC broadcasting from London into Germany, the Secret Service-linked Political Warfare Executive would pick Delmer up. He would establish a black propaganda unit on the outskirts of Milton Keynes, part of a wider area dubbed ‘The Country’ which included Bletchley Park.

A frequent visitor to Delmer’s residence at Aspley Guise was James Bond author Ian Fleming, the right-hand-man of Rear Admiral John Godfrey, the Director of Naval Intelligence (The Royal Navy being Britain’s senior military arm).

Fleming, who was nearly blown up alongside Delmer (link), shared top secret information with the journalist-turned-propagandist. In turn, Delmer and his team carefully used this prized information in broadcasts, in print and as part of elaborate forgery schemes.

A favourite technique was to slip in two believable rumours per-day into German-language news broadcasts. The goal? To confuse, upset and destroy enemy morale.

Sometimes Delmer and his shadowy unit had too much fun. They found themselves under scrutiny after placing a story in the national press that the government was planning to import man-eating sharks from Australia in a bid to deter any invaders from across the English Channel (link).

Delmer’s propaganda escapades deserve a treatment of their own, something which the newsman provided in his Black Boomerang book. But for our purposes, focusing on the troubles of the 1950s, we should be most interested in who joined Delmer’s team and what impact they had on the world stage in years and decades to come.

The Trouble From Marburg

November, 1943. You could see the beginning of the end for the Axis Powers as 1943 came to a close. The Germans and Italians had been forced out of North Africa, there were substantial gains for the Soviets on the Eastern Front and the Allies had a foothold in Italy.

The ‘Three Big Powers’ subsequently held a meeting in Tehran to decide on several issues which could end the war, especially in the European theatre.

Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill agree to open-up a second front with the Germans, drawing manpower and munitions away from the East. The leaders also decide to demand an unconditional surrender from their enemies. This latter point was a blow for the German resistance.

Since at least 1942 the anti-Hitler movement, including trade unionists, left-wing politicians, Christian leaders and disaffected military men, had attempted to keep in contact with the Allies via their agents in Spain and Portugal.

The two Iberian nations were technically neutral during the conflict, but they definitely picked sides – the old alliance between Britain and Portugal remained, while Fascist Spain favoured the Nazis.

This meant that Spain and Portugal became important intelligence hubs, a situation which the Abwehr, the German military intelligence service, sought to exploit by trying to cut deals with the US and British intelligence services (link).

Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, who led the service, even made several trips to Spain of his own. It wasn’t until the 1960s when we started to find out why he and his successor, Colonel Georg Hansen, didn’t get as far as they wanted. In short, the German resistance was taken entirely seriously (link). But by who exactly?

Historian Hugh Trevor-Roper, who was part of MI6 during the war, laid the blame at the feet of Soviet double-agent Kim Philby (link), who was his boss at the time and, as the records at the National Archives show, dismissed the German resistance reports as “speculation” or “unreliable”.

As for his duplicity impacting the Iberian connection, Philby was also reportedly able to suppress a report from a Lufthansa lawyer that there was a serious plot afoot to assassinate Hitler in the summer of 1944.

This was the unsuccessful suitcase bomb attempt at the Wolf’s Lair on the 20th of July 1944. The attack, which came a month after the Allied invasion of Normandy, was masterminded by Claus von Stauffenberg and part of the wider Operation Valkyrie.

That lawyer was Otto John and he was an agent of both the Abwehr and MI6. He was codenamed ‘WHISKY’, owing to his penchant for hard liquor, a fact which we will return to later.

After the attempt on Hitler’s life failed and his co-conspirators, including his younger brother, Hans, began to be rounded up, John made a dash for Spain on the 24th of July. According to his own contested account, John used his Lufthansa credentials and signed onto a flight manifest as a mechanic.

The Gestapo were hot on his heels and John had to lay-low in Madrid and then Lisbon before Lord Templewood, the British Ambassador to Spain, made an intervention to make sure the Security Services scooped him up.

By November 1944 John had finally made it to England and after being interned briefly as a prisoner of war (PoW), one of his first requirements was to be interviewed by Delmer, who was looking for new recruits.

John, who had originally hailed from the Hessian city of Marburg, was taken on by the Political War Executive at a wage of just under £12 per week, with free board and lodging at ‘The Rookery’ in Aspley Guise.

The German worked on the infamous Soldatensender Calais or Soldiers’ Radio Calais station, which operated until April 1945 and targeted Wehrmacht soldiers in France as well as U-boat crews operating in the English Channel and North Sea.

After the war, Delmer said that the broadcasts made some U-boat crews surrender early. But there is currently no evidence to support this claim.

A Treacherous Game

May, 1945. Most historical accounts of the Second World War would have you believe that the defeated German forces, represented by General Alfred Jodl, Chief of Staff of the German Army, signed an unconditional surrender to the Allies during the early hours of Monday 7th of May.

That is true. But, contrary to the agreement at the Tehran Conference and popular belief, some more bespoke deals were also brokered by Axis officials in the months after Germany’s official surrender.

One which we are still understanding the full depth and scope of today is that of Abwehr General and Soviet expert Reinhard Gehlen and his staff. The Americans would call this Operation Rusty. But before we get into its details, there is some important context to cover.

From 1944 onwards there were shifting priorities both amongst the Axis and Allied powers. The German officer corps increasingly understood that defeat was inevitable, with Gehlen planning a leave-behind model of his own based on the Polish resistance (link).

Heinrich Himmler, deeming this to be too defeatist, dismissed the idea and rebuked Gehlen. The equally stubborn and delusional Hitler effectively fired Gehlen, who was warning of mounting Soviet attacks, in April 1945.

The most devout Nazis wanted the German people to lay down their lives before surrendering to the Allied powers, a grizzly factor which made the Battle of Berlin so bloody.

The US and the UK, meanwhile, were increasingly worried about the threat from the Soviet Union after the war.

With these considerations in mind, and facing torture and death from Stalin’s forces, Gehlen collected some of his most important intelligence files in Berlin and fled to the Bavarian mountains, where his men literally buried secrets and waited for the Americans.

Gehlen would use these files, which included important battle order information of the Soviet forces and a working knowledge of Bolshevik intelligence networks, as a bargaining chip after he surrendered to the US Army.

After understanding the true size of their catch, the Americans first sent Gehlen to the 12th Army Group Interrogation Centre in Wiesbaden in June 1945, and then on to Fort Hunt in Virginia in August. This was where some of the Ritchie Boys, German-speaking Jewish refugees, operated and where the US housed and interrogated high-value PoWs.

By all accounts, including oral histories of Fort Hunt released only in the past decade (link), Gehlen was given preferential treatment and he wielded his officer-status over his captors. Such was his comfort, Gehlen and his staff allegedly nicknamed the compound as ‘Truman’s Hotel’, the outside world only knew it as PO Box 1142.

Gehlen’s debriefs would help the Allies understand how the Abwehr was organised, especially on the Eastern Front, and the true threat from the Soviets.

Back in Germany, the country was continuing to be divided up between the Allied forces. Despite falling within the Soviet zone, Berlin was split into four areas controlled by the US, Britain, France and the Soviet Union.

Refugee camps had also sprang up across the country, with tens of thousands of destitute Germans and Eastern Europeans turning to black markets and selling their secrets to the highest bidder in order to make ends meet.

James Critchfield, who served as lead liaison officer between the CIA and Gehlen, described post-war Germany as an “intelligence jungle”. There were emigree networks, there were private intelligence operations and the Allied forces had their own, often competing, initiatives.

And though some agents were ideologically tied to the new battle between capitalism and communism, financial gains drove others. All in all, it was a knotty and dangerous landscape, one which the Americans somewhat reluctantly turned to Gehlen and his team to help navigate.

The Service

Summer, 1946. Initially sponsored by the US Army, Gehlen would return to Germany by July 1946 and start re-establishing himself. His team made an immediate impact, claiming that they had formed a network of more than 600 agents within the Soviet zone of Germany by October 1946.

The US was fixated on the Russian order of battle, with Pentagon planners wanting to avoid any nasty surprises from the East. The pressure was on Gehlen and his team to deliver more and more military intelligence, but the funding for this ballooning operation was quickly running out.

In his memoirs The Service, Gehlen moaned that he was forced to establish a black market operation to pay for his enterprise:

“I set up a special section for raising the funds we needed to continue. With the $125,000 that remained to us, we purchased as much cocoa as we could from American stocks, and sold it around Munich—particularly in the notorious Mohlstrasse black market area—at a profit so large that we more than tripled our original outlay.

“If our operatives were caught, their special American passes provided for their immediate release. The American authorities connived wholeheartedly in this, as they had no option.”

Widespread illicit behaviour like this and inflationary pressures on the Reichsmark forced the Allies to introduce the Deutsche Mark in the Western occupied zones of Germany in June 1948. The same month the Berlin Blockade began, mounting more pressure on Gehlen and his sponsors.

The Americans still didn’t know what to do with the General. He had clashed with US Army officers, Operation Rusty had become increasingly expensive, but, at the same time, the West had to face up to the realities of a new conflict, the start of the Cold War.

After many bureaucratic battles in Washington and Virginia, the US Army was able to slowly and suddenly offload the Gehlen Organisation to the nascent CIA, which was formed in September 1947 by absorbing elements of the US’ wartime intelligence apparatus, including the Office of Strategic Services, the Strategic Services Unit and the Central Intelligence Group.

The aforementioned James Critchfield, then a young combat veteran who had served in military intelligence and joined the CIA in 1948, was asked to survey Gehlen’s operation.

He produced an extensive report, ultimately concluding that the spy network should be continued to be used by the American authorities in some capacity:

“...RUSTY is a re-established GIS [German Intelligence Service] which has been sponsored by the present de facto national government of Germany, i.e. by the military occupational forces.

Because the 4,000 or more Germans who comprise RUSTY constitute a going concern in the intelligence field, it appears highly probable that RUSTY will emerge as a strong influence, if not the dominant one, in the new GIS.

Another important consideration is that RUSTY has closest ties with ex-German General Staff officers throughout Germany. If. in the future, Germany is to play any role in a Western European military alliance, this is an important factor.”

The Agency would assume control of the Gehlen Organisation in 1949.

At the same time, Otto John was making himself unpopular. Beyond his growing reputation for womanising and boozing, John had moved on from interrogating German generals in the Kensington cage and attempted to establish a legal practice in the UK only to face financial hardships.

He then turned to his old sponsors, the British, who put him on the staff of the prosecutors at the Nuremberg trials as part of the Allied War Crimes Commission.

Though the Nazi war machine is rightfully seen as evil today, questions of patriotism and treachery were still very much on the mind of most Germans after the war. This was a sore spot which John pressed on during the trial of General Erich von Manstein in Hamburg in 1949.

Though von Manstein was found guilty of war crimes and handed a sentence of 18 years imprisonment, the Field Marshal was a popular figure within German military circles and their consensus was that he was given a raw deal, partly because John apparently twisted the facts of von Manstein’s case towards the Allies’ favour.

John would then bounce between Germany and Britain, where he failed to secure citizenship. Pulling from his old socialist resistance contact book, John would tap up Jakob Kaiser, a trade union leader turned West German minister, for a job.

Though he would turn the role of a foreign minister down, John eventually found himself in the running to become the head of West Germany’s domestic intelligence service, the Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV).

The organisation was a cross between the US’ FBI and the UK’s Scotland Yard. It was part of a new network of federal institutions which emerged as Western Germany found its feet again and sought to re-establish itself in the international community.

But despite the apparent prestige of the role, nobody wanted to head-up the BfV. The French, Americans and British exhausted a list of candidates before alighting on John.

Beyond Kaiser’s endorsement, Sir Ivone Kirkpatrick, the British High Commissioner in West Germany, also apparently pushed for John’s appointment after an endorsement from John Wheeler-Bennett, who worked with John in the Political Warfare Executive and on the Allied War Crimes Commission.

In November 1950 and at the age of 41 John was installed as President of the BfV, overseeing the future security of West Germany. It didn’t go to plan.

Old Friends, New Tricks

October, 1951. The state of war between Germany and some of the Allied powers had officially come to an end near the end of 1951, but there were still existential issues to face up to for West Germany and its new allies.

Though the new nation’s economic fortunes were improving, the Federal Republic was facing a multitude of threats on many sides.

Those included its unruly neighbour to the East, the Soviet-backed German Democratic Republic, the ongoing war in Korean and the secret formation of post-Nazi networks (link), many of which relied on the support of German colonies in South America and operatives in Spain.

It wasn’t all bad news though, Winston Churchill, the original Cold War warrior, was back in Downing Street after the Labour Party blew its post-war popularity through economic incompetence and infighting.

The man who had prophesied an ‘Iron Curtain’ descending across the continent was in the driving seat once again to push for European unity in the face of an embolden Soviet Union.

Unlike Clement Attlee’s government, which opposed the rearmament of West Germany, Churchill showed some support for the idea, ultimately and initially backing the creation of a European Defence Community (EDC).

As Britain was still on rations and much of Western Europe was still trying to recover from the war (the Marshall Plan being enacted in 1948), this issue was a thorny one.

But the EDC plan gave European leaders wriggle room: West Germany would be rearmed but only as part of a European army. The new menace from the East could be countered, while the old menace would be muzzled.

Politically, it was the equivalent of threading the needle, but, as ever, Churchill was willing to put his reputation on the line for the scheme. Lord Beaverbrook and The Daily Express, meanwhile, remain unconvinced.

In protest against Britain joining a European Common Market, and by extension other European supra-national organisations, Beaverbrook shackled his English Crusader mascot in chains so that every front page of the Express would make the paper’s position clear.

For Beaverbrook, Churchill had wrongly given up on the British Empire. But Churchill knew that the US was now the world’s super-power, whether patriotic Brits liked it or not. And the Soviet threat should be taken seriously, something he had accused Attlee of failing to do when the pair clashed in the House of Commons (link):

“We have a great deal of information about the military expenditure of other countries, including the vast expenditure by Russia and the preparations that country is making behind their smokescreen of peace propaganda.

“I am not going to reveal to the world how much we know, except to say that we know a great deal. It is, however, certain that the defence expenditure of Russia alone is not less than 13 per cent. of her national income.

“She maintains an army of some 175 active divisions of which one-third are mechanised and tank divisions comprising about 25,000 tanks. Of these an appreciable number are at immediate readiness in the Soviet Zone of Germany. She has 2,800,000 men under arms and could double this number on mobilisation.

“This force is backed by about 19,000 military aircraft including jet aircraft of the latest design, both bombers and fighters. She has considerable naval forces, which include strong submarine fleets, many of them of modern design.”

But despite these comments before coming into power, Churchill’s enthusiasm for the EDC would wane. Ultimately, the idea had been captured by European federalists and the Prime Minister wanted to keep Britain allied to Europe but not married to its political projects.

Instead, Churchill and other Western leaders backed the idea of expanding NATO’s role, which was effectively dormant until the Korean War kicked-off.

One important action from NATO in 1951 was the formation of the Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe. This organisation brought European forces together and standardised military equipment, especially ammunition.

The Opportunists

It was an extremely sensitive and tense time, something which the Soviets sought to take advantage of. In Germany they would consistently call for a unification between the Western and the Eastern zones, whilst accusing the US, France and Britain of being motivated by imperialism.

By mid-1951 the MGB (later known as the KGB) started to exert its own power and influence over West Germany by blackmailing old Nazis, establishing intelligence networks and attempting to infiltrate the new nation’s intelligence services.

Targets included the BfV and the Gehlen Organisation, which wasn’t fully absorbed into the Federal Republic until 1956 as the Bundesnachrichtendienst or the BND.

The Reds, who had been in power since the early 1920s, were able to play the long game. Gehlen, in contrast, was establishing himself, while the CIA were very much the new boys on the block when it came to the foreign intelligence world.

The British had some pedigree, especially in disrupting and infiltrating Axis intelligence services, but that reputation was severely dented when Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean defected to the Soviet Union in 1951. Philby, who was the chief British intelligence liaison to Washington, was forced to resign in July of that year.

The Russian bear had started to sharpen its claws, but the West was able to fight back thanks to a codebreaking operation known as the VENONA intercepts. Amongst other traitors, it helped expose the atomic spy Klaus Fuchs (link).

It was in this atmosphere of suspicion that The Daily Express and Delmer decided to blow the cover of the Gehlen Organisation and its association with the US. In a March 1952 exclusive, the British newspaper warned that “Hitler’s general now spies for dollars”.

For the Western powers and especially the CIA, the exposé was less than helpful. Gehlen later complained that the report was “sensationalist”, and he reached out to several journalists in a bid to “set the record straight”.

“Out of these early talks emerged a regular policy of the organization (and later of the Federal Intelligence Service) of collaborating with selected representatives of the press and other media,” Gehlen revealed.

It must have been a big surprise for the General’s neighbours too. Until then, Gehlen was solely known as a successful businessman who lived by Lake Starnberg and drove to work in a Mercedes 220, rather than a spymaster operating on the outskirts of Munich.

Needless to say, Delmer’s scoop put him on the radar of a few interested parties. That scrutiny only compounded over the course of the early 1950s.

Reds Under The Bed

1953. The spy game between the East and the West again ramped-up. The British and Americans later learned that MI6 officer George Blake was turned by the Soviets in 1953. The Cambridge man exposed the existence of Operation Gold, the building of the Berlin Tunnel, alongside 400 subagents.

At the same time the Reds apparently used Wolfgang Gans zu Putlitz, an old colleague of Delmer’s and John’s, in a bid to get closer to the BfV boss. Gans zu Putlitz was an assistant at Soldatensender Calais during the war and eventually relocated to East Germany in 1952.

Though MI6 warned John that his old friend was now “in the other camp”, the pair still had lunch. For Delmer and The Express though, they were most interested in stories about the apparent return of the Third Reich.

It seems far-fetched now, but there was some evidence to support their ‘Nazi return’ claims. One of the biggest stories of 1953 was the exposure of The Naumann Circle.

Led by Werner Naumann, the last State Secretary of Propaganda for the Third Reich, this underground movement had formed around 1951 and planned to gain influence by infiltrating new political parties, most notably the Free Democratic Party.

According to the CIA’s own sources (link), the West German government did know of the neo-Nazi group’s existence, but decided not to break up the ring. The British authorities, however, took a different view and Sir Ivone Kirkpatrick ordered Naumann’s arrest (link).

Delmer and The Express turned the episode into a cause celebre. During the trial it was revealed that British fascist leader Oswald Mosley had helped finance the group (link).

But despite the newspapers’ stark warnings and prosecutors claiming that Naumann had intended to take control of the West German Republic, the Führerbunker survivor walked free once again. Naturally, The Express called foul on the West German judiciary.

By the end of 1953, Stalin was dead, a power struggle had been triggered amongst the Soviet leadership, two uprisings – the first in Czechoslovakia, the second in East Germany – had been put down and the Reds had tested their own hydrogen bomb in the Kazakh Republic.

Elsewhere, Fidel Castro’s first attempt at overthrowing Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista had failed, while Western intelligence services were able to restore Mohammad Reza Pahlavi to power as the Shah of Iran.

As 1954 loomed, Nikita Khrushchev slowly emerged as the new Soviet boss and Churchill wanted President Eisenhower to push for peace, whilst increasing cooperation between the US and the UK on nuclear energy (link).

In spite of his failing health due to a severe stroke earlier that year, the British Prime Minister met Eisenhower and the French Premier Premier Joseph Laniel in Bermuda in December 1953.

Ultimately, Churchill’s face-to-face approach failed, he couldn’t convince Eisenhower to meet with Khrushchev (link). The Cold War continued but there was a move towards détente at the start of the new year when the ‘Big Four’ powers, including the US, the UK, France and the Soviet Union, met at the Berlin Conference.

Though little progress was made at the summit, the countries did agree to hold future conferences in a bid to seek peace in Korea and Indochina, with the subsequent Geneva Conference achieving a temporary relaxation in that conflict.

As for the future of Germany, the Western countries called for free and fair elections in the East, while Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov claimed that war reparations should be cancelled across the country.

Regardless, West Germany’s slow and contested integration into the European community continued, as did The Express’ attacks on the integrity of the Republic’s institutions.

Delmer reheated the Gehlen and Naumann cases in March 1954 as a part of a series of articles on West Germany, with his claims of growing militarism meeting some scepticism in the Houses of Parliament (link).

But it was Delmer’s interview with Gans zu Putlitz, which was also published that month, which caused The Express man most trouble after catching the attention of the British authorities.

The aristocrat was a signed-up socialist by then and his association with Guy Burgess was most likely known within intelligence circles (link). As we have already noted, Gans zu Putlitz had met Otto John in the prior year and now he was going public with his anti-Western propaganda through Delmer.

It was now clear who The Express’ star source come fixer was in Western Germany. But the worse was yet to come for Delmer and his friends.

Twice Through The Lines

July, 1954: Following an official trip to the US where he was given a tour of the FBI and the CIA headquarters, John returned to Germany, flew to Berlin and disappeared. He was last seen at a ceremony to mark the 10th anniversary of the failed plot to kill Hitler on the 20th of July.

At the morning Joint Intelligence Committee meeting in Whitehall on the 22nd of July, British spymasters noted that John was spotted leaving the event in a taxi and they suggested the head of the BfV had defected to the Soviets.

“John was known to have had a number of meetings with a German who had himself had contacts with the Russians,” Roger Hollis, of MI5, noted.

That mystery was partly solved when John soon appeared in East Berlin, where he broadcast his dissatisfaction with the alleged rise of militarism and Nazism in West Germany. He also called for the reunification of his country.

It was a propaganda victory for the Soviets. A Western intelligence chief was now actively undermining the goals of the Atlantic alliance. The remarkable development was also fortuitous for Gehlen and his organisation. The pair had previously clashed, but now the BfV faced a crisis of confidence.

Reflecting on the incident in his memoirs, Gehlen stuck the knife in:

“John broadcast over the radio the favorite Communist lie that my organisation was carrying out espionage against France, and suggested that West Germany was on the threshold of a new Nazi revival.

He seems to have regarded me as his great rival for the role of Adenauer’s Canaris; unfortunately, Dr. John was inclined to see all his real friends as enemies and—far more dangerously—vice versa.”

But Gehlen stressed that his organisation had nothing to do with the defection. So who did?

When John later held a press conference in August 1954, one which Delmer was able to attend, he claimed that he had crossed willingly into East Germany.

John would attempt to radically change this version of events in just a year’s time, but until then his old friend Delmer would face his own troubles. From at least September 1954 British intelligence discovered that the Gehlen Organisation was keeping tabs on the newspaperman.

The Secret Service picked-up traffic which indicated that the West Germans knew that Delmer was seeking a farmhand at Lamarsh and such knowledge could allow them to plant their own spy into Delmer’s family home. Ex-Abwehr officer Hermann Giskes was at the centre of the plot.

Delmer had exposed Giskes’ post-war involvement in the Gehlen Organisation as part of his Express coverage. It is not clear what came from Giskes’ efforts, but the counter-intelligence expert is better known nowadays for his involvement in Operation North Pole, which resulted in the capture of more than 50 British SOE agents during the war. The radio hoax substantially undermined the Dutch resistance.

It wasn’t just the Germans who were interested in Delmer, Churchill also wanted the British Security Service to investigate him. Downing Street sent a minute to MI5 in October 1954 asking that they make delicate enquiries into Delmer’s alleged “communist sympathies”.

An answer came back to the Prime Minister in November. Delmer wasn’t considered a communist, but he was anti-American and very critical of the UK’s “fumbling” foreign policy, MI5 said.

Given that the source was “reliable and well-placed”, with a sub-source on The Daily Express, there is a very good chance that Chapman Pincher, the paper’s defence correspondent, may have vouched for Delmer. Pincher had a strong relationship with the intelligence services, a factor we will return to later.

The heat eventually died down for Delmer and he continued to report on the brave new world forming around him in the wake of the Second World War. By mid-1955 there was more certainty for West Germany as the nation joined NATO, started to rearm and was formerly recognised by the United States, France and the UK.

Gehlen was also no doubt delighted when it was announced in July that the West German government would takeover and fund his organisation. The agency had swelled to a staff of 3,000 personnel.

Gehlen was a long way from Virginia now, but he never forgot his friends in America. The CIA continued to have a close relationship with the organisation, which provided a stream of intelligence from Eastern Europe.

By the end of 1955, Otto John had returned to the scene. According to his own account, John had made a daring escape from the East by leaving his guards to overwatch a briefcase full of money.

With the Soviet heavies distracted, he then navigated through museum and university grounds and eventually jumped in the car of Danish journalist Henrik Bonde-Henriksen (link). The pair then drove to West Germany.

John was initially held for psychiatric examination and then placed into custody until his trial in November 1956. His old friend Delmer covered the case as John pleaded his innocence.

The former BfV chief claimed that Dr. Wolfgang Wohlgemuth, an old family friend who MI6 had warned him of (the German with Russian connections), had drugged his coffee and kidnapped him.

Once in East Berlin, the KGB then took John to Moscow to interrogate him and the Soviets coerced him into publicly repudiating the West.

Despite his protests, John was found guilty of treason in December 1956 (link), the presiding judge noting how quickly John cooperated with the Soviet forces.

He was sentenced to four years of imprisonment, but was released in July 1958, some 14 years after the 20th of July plot, and pardoned by West German President Theodor Heuss.

Just a year later Beaverbrook would sack Delmer from The Express, the old man was apparently bored of Delmer’s high expenses and increasingly low-quality stories.

Delmer would continue to write for other papers, including The Sunday Telegraph, but his dismissal also gave him an opportunity to semi-retire back to the countryside, where he wrote his two autobiographies, Trial Sinister (1961) and Black Boomerang (1962).

Pincher, meanwhile, was able to get John’s own memoirs cleared by the British authorities, but they wouldn’t be published in English until 1972. By then the scale of the KGB’s infiltration into Western intelligence services was partly exposed.

The Gehlen Organisation had been compromised early on. As just one example, Heinz Felfe was blackmailed into becoming a Soviet spy in 1949. Felfe did not want his past SS membership to become public.

The British had dropped him in 1950 for serious operational and personal security reasons, but Gehlen recruited Felfe in November 1951. He was arrested a decade later.

A meaty damage assessment report produced by the CIA outlined the impact of Felfe’s treachery (link):

“From June 1959 until his arrest on 6 November 1961 Heinz FELFE was the most knowledgeable of all BND officials on CIA operations against the Soviet targets in East and West Germany.

“With already some 8 years of experience as a KGB penetration of the BND, considerably more as a counter-intelligence officer, and a high degree of native intelligence and cunning, the KGB could only have evaluated his agent performance from that date as of the highest calibre.

“From the time of his entry on duty with the BND in November 1951, FELFE began to build with KGB assistance a reputation within the German Service as a Soviet operations expert.

“This reputation grew as he rose in BND ranks until he was able to so deeply ingratiate himself with the BND that he attained a position whereby he could initiate, direct, or halt any BND operations and later some of CIA’s to the ultimate advantage of the Soviets.”

Felfe’s role partly explained why the joint operations between the BND, CIA and MI6 went awry in Eastern Europe, most notably during the guerrilla war in the Baltic states, where the Soviets were able to get one step ahead of resistance movements and eventually snuff them out.

Though Western intelligence did suspect something was wrong by 1951, and later ingeniously proved it by requesting a sample of radioactive water from their commandos (the KGB overdid the dosage), they wrongly suspected that the Reds had just been able to infiltrate a group of ‘Forest Brothers’ in Latvia. In reality, the Soviets had near full coverage of these operations.

Ultimately, Delmer’s and John’s concerns that the Nazis would return were misplaced, but they were right in claiming that the Western powers were turning a blind eye to them.

For his part, Gehlen retired from the BND in 1968 and soon afterwards published his memoirs. He was able to celebrate his 70th birthday with his old friend James Critchfield in 1972.

For Otto John it wasn’t a happy ending, he continued to declare his innocence until his death in 1997.

Postscript

Bolivia, 1983. It was now a matter of time before the ‘Butcher of Lyon’ would be forced back to France. Nazi hunter and journalist Beate Klarsfeld had discovered Klaus Barbie living under an assumed name, Klaus Altmann, in Laz Paz in January 1972.

Though the former Gestapo officer was exposed, he had the backing of the Bolivian government. The South American nation had a long history of coups and military dictatorships, something which Nazi fugitives like Barbie took advantage of after the war.

But Bolivia took an important turn towards freedom in 1982 when the regime was ousted and the country’s Congress voted Hernán Siles Zuazo back into power (link). For torture-loving Barbie, who sent children to gas chambers and murdered many others, his time was nearly up.

Zuazo’s government arrested the unrepentant Nazi in February 1983 and handed him over to France. A trial and conviction would follow later, but Barbie’s capture also prompted some hand-wringing amongst the Western powers before a conviction of life imprisonment was handed down.

Rumours had long swirled that Barbie was able to escape to South America after the war because of an intervention from the CIA. In reality, the US Department of Justice discovered (link) that the Army’s Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC), effectively a forerunner to the CIA, had smuggled Barbie out of post-war Germany. This was after the Nazi served as an anti-communist informant for them.

The Americans knew the German and French authorities were closing in on Barbie so they paid a Vatican-linked priest, Father Krunoslav Krunoslav Draganović, to use his well-established rat-line.

A Croatian fascist (link), Draganović was extremely well connected, including with the Italian authorities, and he was subsequently able to procure an immigration visa for Bolivia and a travel permit from the International Committee of the Red Cross for Barbie’s family.

After being smuggled through Austria to the Italian port city of Genoa, Barbie sailed to a new life in South America in March 1951. He would later work for Gehlen and the BND.

It was this story and the wider Nazi hunts of the 1970s and 1980s which reinvigorated a public debate about the Allies conduct after the Second World War.

In 1987 left-wing writer Carl Oglesby unsuccessfully sued the CIA for information about the agency’s relationship with Gehlen, while James Critchfield went public in the 1990s to share his own story (link).

In October 1998 President Bill Clinton signed the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act into law. For the first time, the legislation mandated the declassification and release of US government records related to Nazi war crimes and criminals.

In the UK, MI6’s records remain shut. But MI5 documents, Secret Service memoirs and oral histories have given us a glimpse of what was really going on at the start of the Cold War.

Subscribe now

The Political Press Box

Find my latest long-form audio interviews of political communicators here. Please like, subscribe and listen.

📧 Contact

For high-praise, tips or gripes, please contact the editor at iansilvera@gmail.com or via BlueSky (link). Follow on LinkedIn here.

• 221 can be found here

• 220 can be found here

• 219 can be found here

• 218 can be found here

• 217 can be found here

• Is the government happy to build new and centralised databases with a significant amount of personal data and, if so, at what cost?

• Given past hacks and cyber-attacks (link), would the government admit that the project would immediately go on the National Risk Register?

• How would enrolment and registration work?

• Would the whole project impact trust in the government (especially amongst minority groups)?

• Digital ID advocates claim, like a magical policy wand, it will help solve all manner of issues, including immigration. But why not make the existing systems work? As just one example, the past independent chief inspector of borders and immigration pointed out several flaws until the last government fired him (link).

• We already have ID cards (passports, driving licences and so on) so why create another level of government infrastructure and a stealth tax on citizens?

• Rural broadband (and the lack of it) is still an issue (link). Other adults don’t have smartphones. Will these people be excluded from society?

• How would digital ID enforcement work and who would carry it out, the police?

• What budget would a government give the NHS to help cope with the transition to digital ID?

• How, practically, would you unify the DVLA, Passport Office and National Insurance databases?

• How would the collected data be shared? How many functions/apps would the Digital ID have?

• Overall, how would a Digital ID project not become a large IT infrastructure that runs over time, runs over budget and undermines public trust?

Further Reading:

Is The Surveillance State Just Lazy? (link)

Ross Anderson’s past evidence to the UK Parliament on Digital IDs (link)

A media report of the UK Prime Minister’s trailed speech (link)

UK Parliament: Cyber resilience of UK digital infrastructure (link)

A 2005 House of Commons Technology Select Committee report on Digital IDs (link)

Subscribe now

I’ve responded to ’s intriguing new essay on the impact of technology and media on our post-industrial society below. In doing so, I’ve adopted a slightly different format than usual, but, as ever, I do hope readers enjoy it and find some value in how I’ve approach the task at hand. You can read the original article here (link).

The Age of Print

James starts his essay in the 18th Century, outlining the impact of the ‘reading revolution’. As he rightfully notes, though there was a literate society in the West before the 1700s, it was not a mass population phenomenon.

The oral tradition of passing on information and knowledge by word-of-mouth was much more pronounced. Here, I thought it would be important to bring in some historical context.

Though printing presses had emerged in the 15th Century, the industry was heavily suppressed by censorial legislation and taxation. In England, for example, prospective texts would have to be submitted to the Stationers’ Company for publication.

It wasn’t until after the Glorious Revolution of 1688 when John Locke and the early Whigs were able to defeat the Licencing Act, stop pre-publication censorship and start to undermine the monopoly of Stationers’ Company.

Crucially, printing presses were also then able to expand beyond Cambridge, Oxford and London. This liberalisation would eventually spread across the British Empire and it would eventually help foster the American Revolution (link).

Scotland had a slightly different story, one which was intertwined with the Kingdom’s religious sensibilities. John Knox and the Presbyterian movement thought it was increasingly important that God’s people were closer to their creator.

As such, they were encouraged to read the bible in their native language, rather than Latin. Literacy therefore became a core tenant of the Scottish Reformation.

The First Book of Discipline (1560) outlined a plan to have a school in every parish across Scotland. Though this bold ambition was never met in the 16th Century, by the end of the 17th Century the Scottish lowlands had high literacy levels and it is estimated that more than a third of the national population knew how to read (link).

The role of religion in the ‘reading revolution’ is often skirted over in our secular age, but it was clearly important and perhaps even foundational, as was the case in Scotland and Sweden.

Moving away from the spiritual realms and towards the temporal, technology, advancements in printing and transport networks also had profound impacts on the literary society.

The Turnpike roads of England increasingly made it easier to transport early newspapers and books across the nation (more about their history here), while printing presses became more efficient and their operators became increasingly skilled.

The early 17th Century would also see the business model behind printing change, moving from political patronage towards a system where consumers would ultimately fund this insurgent industry. The early Industrial Revolution and increased urbanisation also helped the ‘literary society’ grow.

Here’s what James writes:

It was one of the most important revolutions in modern history — and yet no blood was spilled, no bombs were thrown and no monarch was beheaded.

Perhaps no great social transformation has ever been carried out so quietly. This one took place in armchairs, in libraries, in coffee houses and in clubs.

What happened was this: in the middle of the eighteenth century huge numbers of ordinary people began to read.

For the first couple of centuries after the invention of the printing press, reading remained largely an elite pursuit. But by the beginning of the 1700s, the expansion of education and an explosion of cheap books began to diffuse reading rapidly down through the middle classes and even into the lower ranks of society. People alive at the time understood that something momentous was going on. Suddenly it seemed that everyone was reading everywhere: men, women, children, the rich, the poor. Reading began to be described as a “fever”, an “epidemic”, a “craze”, a “madness”. As the historian Tim Blanning writes, “conservatives were appalled and progressives were delighted, that it was a habit that knew no social boundaries.”

This transformation is sometimes known as the “reading revolution”. It was an unprecedented democratisation of information; the greatest transfer of knowledge into the hands of ordinary men and women in history.

In Britain only 6,000 books were published in the first decade of the eighteenth century; in the last decade of the same century the number of new titles was in excess of 56,000. More than a million new publications appeared in German over the course of the 1700s. The historian Simon Schama has gone so far as to write that “literacy rates in eighteenth century France were much higher than in the late twentieth century United States”.

Where readers had once read “intensively”, spending their lives reading and re-reading two or three books, the reading revolution popularised a new kind of “extensive” reading. People read everything they could get their hands on: newspapers, journals, history, philosophy, science, theology and literature. Books, pamphlets and periodicals poured off the presses.

…

Even more importantly print changed how people thought.

The world of print is orderly, logical and rational. In books, knowledge is classified, comprehended, connected and put in its place. Books make arguments, propose theses, develop ideas. “To engage with the written word”, the media theorist Neil Postman wrote, “means to follow a line of thought, which requires considerable powers of classifying, inference-making and reasoning.”

As Postman pointed out, it is no accident, that the growth of print culture in the eighteenth century was associated with the growing prestige of reason, hostility to superstition, the birth of capitalism, and the rapid development of science. Other historians have linked the eighteenth century explosion of literacy to the Enlightenment, the birth of human rights, the arrival of democracy and even the beginnings of the industrial revolution.

The world as we know it was forged in the reading revolution.

The Counter Revolution

James then jumps ahead three hundred years to the present day, arguing that literacy is now in decline. He cites a series of reputable studies and paints the the chief villain in this story as the smartphone:

What happened was the smartphone, which was widely adopted in developed countries in the mid-2010s. Those years will be remembered as a watershed in human history. Never before has there been a technology like the smartphone.

Where previous entertainment technologies like cinema or television were intended to capture their audience’s attention for a period, the smartphone demands your entire life. Phones are designed to be hyper-addictive, hooking users on a diet of pointless notifications, inane short-form videos and social media rage bait.

Though I may agree with James’ overall sentiments, I think it’s worth pointing out that the rise of broadband internet and social media platforms, especially ones which adopted news-feed-style structures, have been just as impactful.

Of course, those apps would be transferred onto smartphones, with short-form video and picture platforms, including Snapchat, Instagram and TikTok, gaining great popularity at the end of the 2010s.

Here you can see an important distinction between the hardware and software, and this is somewhere I depart from James’ thinking.

Smartphones, in and on themselves, may be increasingly designed to be a one-stop-shop for information, communication and entertainment, but it’s the apps which have prioritised gamification algorithms in a bid to boost engagement.

That’s why certain ‘dumbphones’, which still have 5G, Bluetooth and Wifi connectivity, limit the number of apps a user can download. They are increasingly popular with parents (link).

James continues:

The average person now spends seven hours a day staring at a screen. For Gen Z the figure is nine hours. A recent article in The Times found that on average modern students are destined to spend 25 years of their waking lives scrolling on screens.

If the reading revolution represented the greatest transfer of knowledge to ordinary men and women in history, the screen revolution represents the greatest theft of knowledge from ordinary people in history.

Our universities are at the front line of this crisis. They are now teaching their first truly “post-literate” cohorts of students, who have grown up almost entirely in the world of short-form video, computer games, addictive algorithms (and, increasingly, AI).

Because ubiquitous mobile internet has destroyed these students’ attention spans and restricted the growth of their vocabularies, the rich and detailed knowledge stored in books is becoming inaccessible to many of them. A study of English literature students at American universities found that they were unable to understand the first paragraph of Charles Dickens’s novel Bleak House — a book that was once regularly read by children.

If we are talking about “ordinary men and women”, as James evokes above, I wouldn’t have it that “ordinary men and women” attend Oxbridge or are English literature students at elite America universities, and therein lies another contestable point of his wider argument.

Tastes simply change and that’s especially true of popular literature (personally, I prefer more utilitarian wordsmiths like Orwell, who James cites in his references, rather than a writer who overdoes the flowery language and impenetrable paragraphs).

And for the past 50 years, TV and cinema have supplanted literature as the primary form of entertainment, creating a cultural zeitgeist of its own — one in which the book industry is downstream of.

The Web 2.0 platforms have merely inherited TV and cinema’s mantle as the culture-setters. Why else would publishers print ‘As Seen on Netflix’ on sleeve covers or seek to engage with TikTok influencers who have built massive followings recommending books (link)?

I would redefine the problem for James. It’s not that Gen-Z students can’t literally read the course materials, it’s that they digest it in an entirely different way and the texts themselves may have no cultural relevance to them.

This may be a problem which stems from the student, but it’s also a major issue for the Academy. As the world moves quickly on, how relevant are English literature lectures and are they being taught in an effective and modern manner?

He goes on:

The tradition of learning is like a precious golden thread of knowledge running through human history linking reader to reader through time. It last snapped during the collapse of the Western Roman Empire as the barbarian tides beat against the frontier, cities shrank and libraries burned or decayed. As the world of Rome’s educated elite fell apart, many writers and works of literature passed out of human memory — either to be lost forever or to be rediscovered hundreds of years later in the Renaissance.

That golden thread is breaking for the second time.

These statements feel slightly overdone, especially since we’re literally still discovering what the ancients read (you can read more about these efforts in my article on the Oxyrhynchus Papyri here).

I would argue that the fabled “golden thread” is being defined, rather than being undermined, as has been the case for over 300 years.

I can tell you with great confidence that fisherman today no longer read Izaak Walton’s The Compleat Angler, a colourful guide first published in 1653.

An Intellectual Tragedy

James expands his argument that we’re in a cognitive freefall by brining in more reporting and more studies. John Burn-Murodch’s FT article (link) on declining global PISA scores, a well-recognised measurement of educational attainment, is cited heavily.

Most intriguing — and alarming — is the case of IQ, which rose consistently throughout the twentieth century (the so-called “Flynn effect”) but which now seems to have begun to fall. The result is not only the loss of information and intelligence, but a tragic impoverishing of the human experience.

There is no doubt that these metrics are worrying. However, there is little to no acknowledgement of another Murdoch. That is Rupert Murdoch and his burgeoning book business. Here’s what Bloomberg said of the News Corp division in May 2024 (link):

News Corp., Rupert Murdoch’s publishing company, is finding its footing as a separate business, with stronger profits from book publishing helping combat the downturn in the ad market.

Profit, excluding some items, was 11 cents a share in the fiscal third quarter, surpassing the 3 cents analysts estimated on average, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

The company reported $2.08 billion in revenue for the period, which ended March 31. Analysts projected $2.06 billion. Like many publishers, Chief Executive Officer Robert Thomson is working to transform the company’s print properties into a digital business as well as expand into markets around the globe.

This doesn’t sound like an industry which is in decline to me. More evidence comes from Bloomsbury, the publisher behind the Harry Potter franchise. The company’s share price has slipped since its all-time high in 2024, but it’s current performance of around £4.70 per share is still very high compared to most of its history as a publicly-listed business.

These facts seem to have alluded James. He goes on:

The epidemic of anxiety, depression and purposeless afflicting young people in the twenty-first century is often linked to the isolation and negative social comparison fostered by smartphones.

It is also a direct product of the pointlessness, fragmentation and triviality of the culture of the screen which is wholly unequipped to speak to the deep human needs for curiosity, narrative, deep attention and artistic fulfilment.

I like to think we’re turning a corner and the benefits, rather than just the downsides, of smartphone and Web 2.0 technology is often overlooked for dramatic effect. I’ve previously written about the positive impact of hiking apps on the offline world (link) and I also note that there are a range of language learning, mental health and wellbeing apps available today.

Having said that, I readily acknowledge that countries like Australia are banning social media platforms for teenagers and there is now a growing movement to police this technology more closely.

As a sports fan, avid weightlifter and former rugby player, I would be keen for policymakers to push for more offline interventions, including more physical education classes. Here’s what the Centre of Social Justice’s recent ‘Lost Boys’ report says on the matter (link):

Our qualitative research, especially in Alternative Provisions outside mainstream education, highlighted the importance of exercise and physical activity for young boys within the education system. A common theme from youth workers was about how Physical Education (P.E) or outdoor games was one a boy’s best experience of an otherwise negative time in school.

One conversation with some boys from a LA that ranks in the top ten IDACI scores in the country went as follows: We asked what the best thing about school was. The three immediate responses were ‘nothing’, ‘P.E’ and ‘substitute teachers’.

This not only exemplifies the great dissatisfaction of some of the boys and their potential antagonism with their regular teachers (one boy even cited how he felt that teachers at his previous schools seemed to constantly pick on him when he was struggling with English and Maths at primary school) but also how fundamental sport is to engaging young boys.

Healthy body, healthy mind; healthy mind, healthy body.

World Without Mind

James goes on to issue another warning. That the decline he’s outlined could undermine the roots of Western civilisation itself:

This draining away of culture, critical thinking and intelligence represents a tragic loss of human potential and human flourishing. It is also one of the major challenges facing modern societies. Our vast, interconnected, tolerant and technologically advanced civilisation is founded on the complex, rational kinds of thinking fostered by literacy.

As Walter Ong writes in his book Orality and Literacy, certain kinds of complex and logical thinking simply cannot be achieved without reading and writing. It is virtually impossible to develop a detailed and logical argument in spontaneous speech — you would get lost, lose your thread, contradict yourself, and confuse your audience trying to re-phrase ineptly expressed points.

I generally agree that true critical thinking and intellectual honesty is now a rarity. Book reading would certainty help, but it needn’t be limited to literature.

Many academic journals are now easily accessible online and the amount of fiction and non-fiction information on the web is vast. Equally, when James talks of philosophy, he should be aware that analytic philosophy has taken a narrow turn.

It is increasingly interested in meta arguments, rather than broad metaphysical surveys of the world and its inhabitants. That means analytic philosophy is simply not taking on the big questions.

Perhaps Nozick vs Rawls (in the 1970s) was one of the last meaningful debates in the Anglo-American tradition. If you’re interested in rights, justice and the role of the state, it is worth looking into.

The End of Creativity

Here, James successfully argues that future students will be increasingly reliant on their teachers and other figures of authority to supply them with information.

Because they won’t be able to interpret source texts themselves, students will have to build upon or manipulate aggregations or summaries. It’s a Jean Baudrillard-esque situation (link).

Or for those not familiar with the Frenchman’s philosophy, it would be like three-chord punk rockers ripping off each other — there might be some musical gems, but the overall output would be inherently limited:

Modern students who are unable to read are once more reliant on the authority of their teachers and are less capable of racing ahead, innovating and questioning orthodoxies. These students are just one symptom of the stagnant culture of the screen age which is characterised by simplicity, repetitiveness and shallowness. Its symptoms are observable all around us.

Harking back to our 16th Century historical context at the start of this critique, this is exactly what the aforementioned Knox and Co. were fighting against some 450 years ago.

The Death of Democracy

Much like our Reformation example, James outlines his own political consequences for the ‘illiterate society’, which, initially, look sound:

In Amusing Ourselves to Death Neil Postman argues that democracy and print are virtually inseparable. An effective democracy pre-supposes a reasonably informed and somewhat critical citizenry capable of understanding and debating the issues of the day in detail and at length.

Democracy draws immeasurable strength from print — the old dying world of books, newspapers and magazines — with its tendency to foster deep knowledge, logical argument, critical thought, objectivity and dispassionate engagement. In this environment, ordinary people have the tools to understand their rulers, to criticise them and, perhaps, to change them.

He adds:

Politics in the age of short-form video favours heightened emotion, ignorance and unevidenced assertions. Such circumstances are highly propitious for charismatic charlatans. Inevitably, parties and politicians hostile to democracy are flourishing in the post-literate world. TikTok usage correlates with increased vote share for populist parties and the far right.

To me, this is putting the egg before the chicken. TikTok has certainly had an impact on the social media ecosystem — YouTube had to respond by launching its own short-form video platform, as just one example — but Facebook, Instagram and YouTube are still the dominant players in the space. Here’s OfCom’s latest media consumption survey to prove that point (link).

Perhaps more ‘populist parties’, as James would potentially describe them, are also “flourishing” because voters feel unheard when it comes to their top issues (immigration, the economy and healthcare), inflation is still high across the Western world and taxes are increasing to meet high government debt and spending levels (link).

Though short-form video is helping insurgent parties get these messages across, you can’t escape this macro-economic and political reality.

The Moronic Inferno

And all of this leads to James’ conclusion:

The big tech companies like to see themselves as invested in spreading knowledge and curiosity. In fact in order to survive they must promote stupidity.

The tech oligarchs have just as much of a stake in the ignorance of the population as the most reactionary feudal autocrat. Dumb rage and partisan thinking keep us glued to our phones.

And where the old European monarchies had to (often ineptly) try to censor dangerously critical material, the big tech companies ensure our ignorance much more effectively by flooding our culture with rage, distraction and irrelevance.

These companies are actively working to destroy human enlightenment and usher in a new dark age.

The screen revolution will shape our politics as profoundly as the reading revolution of the eighteenth century.

Because of the Shareholder Value Movement of the 1980s which is still incredibly influential today (link), the listed Big Tech companies are most interested in pleasing their investors.

How do they do this? If they’re a social media company, Wall Street is fixated on one particular metric: average revenue per user or ARPU. If your company has a high ARPU compared to its rivals and peers, it should be doing very well, so long as that is also the case for the business’ revenue and profit lines.

Social media companies have been able to increase ARPU rates by making their platforms more engaging. This has worked in the short-term, but another way to generate a high ARPU score is to create a service which has deep value for users.

This would allow social media companies to charge a premium for access to such an offering. If the service is popular, the ARPU rate should increase.

Since you can only do so much with short-form video, this may be a route the social media companies pursue in the future. We are already seeing a reembrace of long-form, under-produced content on YouTube (link).

If this trend continues, the tech companies will have to embrace it to survive. This is why I’m much more optimistic about the future than James is. So, are we in a post-literate society? Not quite. Will we get there? You’ll have to ask AI.

Subscribe now

The Political Press Box

Find my latest long-form audio interviews of political communicators here. Please like, subscribe and listen.

📧 Contact

For high-praise, tips or gripes, please contact the editor at iansilvera@gmail.com or via BlueSky (link). Follow on LinkedIn here.

• 219 can be found here

• 218 can be found here

• 217 can be found here

• 216 can be found here

• 215 can be found here

• 214 can be found here

The boxing gods, they give and they take. Just hours after Terence Crawford ascended to legendary status on Netflix by overcoming Mexico’s Canelo Álvarez in a brutal 12-round bout, the death of Ricky Hatton was announced (link). It was a body blow for all boxing fans, but it was especially sore for us Brits.

A working-class lad from the outskirts of Manchester, Hatton rose to fame during the fallow years of modern British boxing, well before Anthony Joshua and Eddie Hearn’s Matchroom were in their pomp.

Back in the 2000s, before the rise of the heavyweights, the main stars were smaller, faster and arguably more entertaining. But the pay-per-view (PPV) numbers were lower.

It was evidently clear that the last golden era of British boxing, starring Frank Bruno, Lennox Lewis, Chris Eubank and Nigel Benn, had become history.

There were no ‘big fights’ anymore, the type of match-ups that packed the pubs up and down the nation. That was until Hatton’s star started to shine.

A fried food loving, beer guzzling, no-nonsense Mancunian, Hatton’s down-to-earth personality resonated with the public and so did his boxing style.

The light-welterweight would often sit in the pocket, absorb danger and then dispatch his opponents with crushing body blows (link). Hatton’s penchant for knockouts would earn him the ‘Hitman’ moniker.

The world titles, TV appearances and ‘best of’ DVDs would follow, but Hatton’s legend would really be formed after he secured a 43-0 record. He put his undefeated status on the line against Floyd Mayweather Jr. in the winter of 2007.

The clash made for fabulous theatre. Despite enduring a tough childhood in Michigan, Mayweather Jr. had built a reputation of a genius villain amongst fight fans. He was flamboyant, cocky and boxed out of the 'Philly shell', a defensive but highly negative technique (link).

Hatton was the exact opposite of ‘Pretty Boy’ Floyd, something HBO, Sky Sports and Oscar De La Hoya’s Golden Boy Promotions were keen to make the most of when the pair went on a pre-fight media tour to Los Angeles, New York and Manchester.

Floyd would literally flash the clash, come to press conferences blinged out and try, in vain, to wind-up his opponent (link). In contrast, Hatton thanked the fans, acknowledged the sacrifices of his family and turned out fully suited and booted.

It was all great fun, made even more entertaining by the United States vs. Great Britain undercurrents. When Mayweather travelled to a rain-sodden England, bravely wearing a United strip (Hatton supported Manchester City, their sworn rivals), he was greeted by the trumpets, drums and chants of the Hatton faithful.

The old football songbook was pulled out, with renditions of ‘Rule Britannia’, ‘God Save The Queen’, ‘Who Are Ya?’ and the now iconic ‘One Ricky Hatton’ to the tune of ‘Winter Wonderland’ (link).

The fanfare made it all the way into the MGM Grand in Vegas and outside of it on 8 December 2007. More than 30,000 travelled from Britain to support the Hitman, but only a fraction of fans secured a spot in the small 17,000-seat arena. The media dubbed it the ‘Hatton Invasion’ (link).

Though they were outnumbered, the Brits were near the end of their boxing pilgrimage and they decided to put on a show. Brad Pitt was booed, Tyrese Gibson, of The Fast & The Furious and Transformers fame, was mocked and his rendition of the ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ was drowned out (link).

In contrast, Tom Jones was cheered, the British national anthem was enthusiastically sung (at least ten times) and the Hatton chants rang out. That was until the middle of the 10th round when Mayweather knocked his rival down twice with a left hook (link), ending the fight.

Hatton had been outclassed and outboxed, losing for the first time in his professional career. For his part, Mayweather would retain the prestigious WBC and Ring Magazine welterweight titles and go on to beat the likes of Canelo Álvarez, Miguel Cotto and Manny Pacquiao.

Hatton, meanwhile, would end his career with an impressive 45–3 record, with a notable loss to Pacquiao in 2009. He would make various TV appearances, oversee his own promotion company and become a boxing trainer.

Contemporaries of Hatton’s, including Nottingham’s Carl Froch and Wales’ Joe Calzaghe, benefited from the eye-balls he drew to the sport (Mayweather vs. Hatton did 1.15m PPV buys in the UK alone — at 4am in the morning) and British boxing fans will be forever grateful for the memories he gave us.

Even when UFC star Conor McGregor took on Mayweather in 2017, there were deep similarities between the passionate Irish fandom and the Hatton faithful a decade before, such is the Hitman’s legacy.

But perhaps Hatton’s most important intervention was to stop his own son, Campbell, from boxing when he fell out of love with what has to be one of the world’s toughest jobs (link). He was by no means perfect, but he was our Ricky.

UK boxing PPV records:

• 2018: Joshua vs Parker, 1.83m

• 2017: Joshua vs Klitschko, 1.63m

• 2019: Ruiz vs Joshua 2, 1.57m

• 2017: Haye vs Bellew, 1.53m

• 2018: Joshua vs Povetkin, 1.25m

• 2011: Klitschko vs Haye, 1.17m

• 2007: Mayweather vs Hatton, 1.15m

• 2017: Mayweather vs McGregor, 1m

• 2015: Mayweather vs Pacquiao, 942k

• 2009: Pacquiao vs Hatton, 900k

Subscribe now

The Political Press Box

Find my latest long-form audio interviews of political communicators here. Please like, subscribe and listen.

📧 Contact

For high-praise, tips or gripes, please contact the editor at iansilvera@gmail.com or via BlueSky (link). Follow on LinkedIn here.

• 218 can be found here

• 217 can be found here

• 216 can be found here

• 215 can be found here

• 214 can be found here

• 213 can be found here

“Loads” was the answer I received from my Reform UK party source when I enquired about the expected press presence at the party’s annual conference over the weekend. He wasn’t wrong.

Despite complaints that the insurgent and combative Reform had mistreated East Midlands regional title Nottinghamshire Live (link), the national and international media was out in force at the National Exhibition Centre in Birmingham.

The party had undoubtedly benefited from the goodwill it had built up over the summer.

When Parliament was in recess, the Labour government and other opposition parties naturally slowed their communication efforts down. Not Reform.

The party ignored any unspoken media ceasefire, saw a gap in the media market and held telegenic briefings almost every Monday from July into September.

It was hard work, with staffers having to regularly sacrifice their weekends. And the party spent a significant amount of money on props, venues and refreshments. But, ultimately, the tactic paid off.

Leader Nigel Farage dominated the broadcast and print media, while Reform moved even closer to political and policy journalists and their editors.

Having spoken to more than 10 Lobby journalists at Reform’s conference, these sentiments — that Farage generates traffic and the party produces copy — really shone through.

Even the FT and Bloomberg sent teams of senior journalists to the conference, while Politico fielded a five-strong unit.

The left-wing opposition parties have cried foul over Reform’s favourable treatment, with the OfCom-regulated broadcasters, including the BBC, being in their crosshairs.

But the Greens and Liberal Democrats simply haven’t put in the same graft as Reform, with the latter party facing its own reputational issues amongst journalists despite having more than 140 representatives (MPs and Peers) in Parliament.

Frankly, many Lobby journalists currently see the Lib Dems as a bit lame and don’t know what they stand for beyond the party’s headline social care policy and Sir Ed Davey’s odd awareness stunt (link).

A recent example would be the Lib Dems’ decision to hang a ‘Trump Tower’ sign onto Millbank Tower. Reform is headquartered there, but so is an array of media outlets and journalists. The stunt received limited coverage in The Mirror and Huffington Post (link).

The good news is that the Lib Dems *should* be able to easily rectify this communications concern by concentrating more on voters’ top concerns (immigration, the economy and healthcare) and the party’s forthcoming conference provides a platform to do this.

But the political media environment is only going to get tougher as Britain moves away from the traditional Labour-Conservative divide, towards a multi-party system where more than five different organisations (Reform, Labour, Lib Dems, the Conservatives, the Greens and potentially Jeremy Corbyn’s Your Party) are vying for voter attention.

Alas, journalists’ livers can only handle so much booze.

Subscribe now

Reflections on Reform UK conference

I’ve put some further thoughts together on the event for the day job (link), with that analysis outlined below.

The British political class found itself in Roundhead country over the weekend. A new rebellion had sought to fortify itself in Warwickshire as Reform UK held its annual conference at the National Exhibition Centre on the outskirts of Birmingham.

For Nigel Farage’s party the issue at hand wasn’t that the King was divided from his country, as was the case with Charles I more than 380 years ago, but that Parliament itself no longer understood the chief concerns of the British electorate.

For Reform and its growing voter base (the party now consistently tops the opinion polls), Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour government increasingly looks economically inept and is merely copying the Conservatives’ miserable record on immigration.

But though the stakes are high and talk of political unrest is heavy, most Reform UK members SEC Newgate encountered at the conference were hopeful. They cared deeply about future generations and treated the assembled media with respect, something The Sunday Times’ Josh Glancy acknowledged during a panel session with our very own Allie Renison.

That mood of confidence and excitement from members was reflected by the party’s leadership. Farage used his headline speech to declare that he thought Reform was on track to win the next general election (and he could be right), with a call for members to be ready to fight an election as soon as 2027.

But for the short term, there will be a great focus on the 2026 elections, where Reform will seek to unseat Labour in Wales, take on the SNP and Scotland and make further gains throughout the local authorities of England.

To achieve this there is a small matter of convincing more voters to back them at the ballot box and that’s why Reform will be prioritising its Welsh and Scottish manifestos.

The party has accordingly launched a recruitment drive for four additional policy officials. Two will focus on the central government, the other two will concentrate on the devolved administrations.

It is also clear that an emerging think-tank ecosystem of new and established groups will play a growing role for Reform alongside formal party committees.

Having said all of that, Reform’s policy platform could be accused of starting with "vibes", not detail, while it is not easily pigeonholed into traditional left and right positions. Maybe new Head of Policy Zia Yusuf will rectify that?

The thread going through Reform’s conference, however, was clear. It was one of fairness, hard work and restoring a sense of pride and prosperity. It is essential for business to understand this mood ahead of any engagement on detailed policy issues.

As for whether Reform will stay the course, perhaps history has more lessons for us?

Though the Roundheads won the English Civil War, its Protectorate would eventually fail with the Restoration of the monarchy, followed by another usurpation in the shape of the Glorious Revolution.

The Whigs emerged as a political power, defeating the republican Commonwealth Men in the process, but they would ultimately be replaced by the most potent force in British party-political history: the Tories.

The Political Press Box

Find my latest long-form audio interviews of political communicators here. Please like, subscribe and listen.

📧 Contact

For high-praise, tips or gripes, please contact the editor at iansilvera@gmail.com or via BlueSky (link). Follow on LinkedIn here.

• 217 can be found here

• 216 can be found here

• 215 can be found here

• 214 can be found here

• 213 can be found here

We had one voice of TV truth (the 1950s to the late 1980s), many voices of cable news truth (the 1990s to the end of the 2000s) and then digital truths across a handful of platforms (2004 to the early 2010s).

Now the truth is spread across a plethora of platforms as well as personalities. That is the no-consensus world we live in, where families are divided by their algo-driven devices and trust in the media is at an all-time low (link).

It’s a familiar story and though it is worth exploring how we got here, it’s also worth considering what happens next. To do exactly that, I’ve decided to look at the ‘no consensus’ phenomenon from a European perspective.

Unlike the US, we typically have multi-party systems and hold a higher amount of trust in the established media and other institutions.

To zoom the analysis further in, I’ve focused on the UK, which, until recently, has been behind the rest of European when it comes to pluralistic political economies.

A big reason for that is that the UK and France are the only two major European powers which don’t use some form of proportional representation voting, where an electorate can make multiple choices at the ballot box by using a scored system.

But in spite of the UK’s first-past-the-post or winner takes all set-up, which has traditionally returned a clear government from one of the major two parties (Labour or the Conservatives from the 1920s onwards), my research shows that the ‘no consensus’ phenomenon will usher in an age of multi-party politics.

Not only that, lawmakers will win their seats on record low voting numbers, prompting questions about representation, get out the vote (GOTV) initiatives and the role technology and media can play as a kingmaker in future UK and European elections.

But before I get into the data, here’s a bit more history and context which I think is sometimes overlooked when we talk about where we’re at today and where we’re going next.

Namely, we should factor into our thinking the three major macro-economic and geo-political events of the early 21st Century. The Iraq War, the 2008 financial crisis and the pandemic.

In Europe, you should also add in the Euro area crisis and the migration crisis. For the UK, put the 2016 EU referendum vote in the mix as well. This event prompted David Cameron to quit Downing Street, with Theresa May succeeding him as Prime Minister.

She would hold a general election in 2017, which the Conservatives won but without a majority in the House of Commons. On average, 27,685 votes were needed to win a seat at that election.

Fast forward two years and the Tories had put Boris Johnson in charge. He held a general election in 2019 and secured a majority. However, the average number of votes needed to become an MP had dropped to 26,880 votes.

By 2024, Johnson had been forced from Downing Street and Rishi Sunak triggered another national vote. Labour secured a majority this time and the average number of votes needed to win a parliamentary constituency had fallen further, this time to 18,504. A 33% drop over the space of seven years.

According to Nuffield Politics Research Centre (link), 411 of 650 seats were decided on a vote share of less than 34% at the 2024 genera election.

Voters had increasingly become more fickle, breaking traditional party loyalties and trying new political choices at the ballot box. The alternative options — the Liberal Democrats, Reform UK and The Greens — all benefited from this behaviour.

The average vote share needed to become an MP

• 2017: 55.7%

• 2019: 54.3%

• 2024: 42.50%

It looks like the 30% share of vote marker will be the new standard for British politics. In fact, there’s evidence that we’re already there.

There were eight constituencies decided on a vote share of less than 30% at the 2024 general election, including South West Norfolk. This is where former Prime Minister Liz Truss lost to Labour thanks, in part, to a strong showing from Reform UK (link). Terry Jermy would only need 26.7% of the vote to win the seat.

It was a similar story in the Welsh seat of Brecon, Radnor and Cwm Tawe, where the Liberal Democrats’ David Chadwick won the constituency with just 29.5% of the vote in a three-way contest against Labour and the Conservatives.

Using a simulation of current polling (outlined below) and the 2024 election results, an average vote share of 32-34% might be needed to win a seat at the next national poll.

Current opinion polling in the UK

• Reform UK (RUK): 32%

• Labour (Lab): 23%

• Conservative (Con): 18%

• Liberal Democrats (LD): 13%

• Green: 8%

Given that each House of Commons constituency has an electorate of around 70,000, with a 65% average national turnout over the past three general elections (45,000 people actually voting), you would only need 14,000 to 15,000 votes to become an MP.

That’s the average. If we have more contests with 26.7% winners, as was the case in South West Norfolk, you will have more representatives with the backing of just 12,000 people or less.

And these estimates don’t even include Jeremy Corbyn’s new ‘YourParty’, which is expected to run candidates at the next election and creating more three-way contests in the process.

There are lots of first, second and third order consequences to this new system, some of which I’ve outlined below:

• The voting system itself will face scrutiny as MPs will have fewer and fewer constituents actually voting for them

• Tactical voting will be encouraged more and more, while public policy positions will have to bake-in another dynamic — voters of other parties

• It will make endorsements from the media and businesses harder (at the last election Labour was able to secure some lukewarm support from the British press)

• GOTV campaigns will have to rely on media more to target voters at the right time and place

• The fight for air-time across traditional and new media outlets will become intensified, with parties knowing ever vote will count

• Candidates will increasingly have to have a strong local appeal, rather than being parachuted into a contest

• Personal branding will also become a ‘thing’, with wannabe MPs having to create and manage their own YouTube, Instagram and TikTok channels

• Some unexpected coalitions may emerge as the politicians follow the voters and drop their traditional party loyalties

All in all, there is going to be considerable volatility and transformation within British politics ahead. For the 'no consensus' phenomenon, it could easily be catalysed by these conditions.

Subscribe now

The Political Press Box

Find my latest long-form audio interviews of political communicators here. Please like, subscribe and listen.

📧 Contact

For high-praise, tips or gripes, please contact the editor at iansilvera@gmail.com or via BlueSky (link). Follow on LinkedIn here.

• 216 can be found here

• 215 can be found here

• 214 can be found here

• 213 can be found here

• 212 can be found here

When VC royalty Andreessen Horowitz announced that its first international office would be in London, Rishi Sunak’s government had a real coup on its hands. For a long-time Paris had sought to woo frontier technology investors over.

The French hadn’t quit the EU, they were willing to throw a giga-load of grant money at foreign companies and President Macron was more than happy to roll-out the red carpet.

But a16z, the fund’s cooler name, was after something even more valuable – it wanted access to a burgeoning ecosystem of crypto companies and their founders (link). Unfortunately Paris didn’t have that, but London did.

The move from a16z was also politically opportunist. It came when the US’ Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), then under Gary Gensler, was cracking down on the blockchain sector.

If Joe Biden’s America didn’t like this very global industry, it would simply up sticks and re-base in Europe and the Middle East, so the theory went.

For Sunak, a graduate of Stanford and a self-styled technology enthusiast, a16z’s decision was music to his ears. As Boris Johnson’s Chancellor in 2022 he had promised to make the UK a “global hub for cryptoasset technology”.

This commitment built on the recommendations in the landmark Khalifa Review (link).

The 2021 report, which reviewed the country’s fintech ecosystem, warned that the UK had great potential in the digital assets sector, but it had to move quickly because of international competition:

“The UK already has a strong position that it should capitalise on, but other jurisdictions are developing their own propositions (such as the EU’s Markets in Crypto-Assets (MiCA) proposal) and the UK needs to act quickly to preserve its position.

“The UK should aim to be at least as broad in ambition as MiCA – but should also consider whether it can develop a bespoke regime that is more innovation-driven.”

The situation was looking even rosier when Coinbase, the world’s largest listed crypto exchange, got in on the act and urged the government to roll-out a clear regulatory framework so that more digital businesses could operate and be born in Britain.

The companies teamed with Westminster think-tanks to host discussions at the party conferences, publish whitepapers about how the UK could be a world leader in crypto and Coinbase attempted to drum-up grassroots support through its Stand With Crypto campaign (link).

For its part, A16z threw its big guns at the initiative, namely Brian Quintenz, then the VC’s global head of policy, who wore through a considerable amount of shoe leather in London meeting and greeting the great and the good of the SW1 scene. Quintenz would later be selected by Trump to become the chairman of the US’ Commodity Futures Trading Commission.

But for all the time, money and resources the industry devoted to getting the UK on the global stage, including CryptoUK, the trade body I’m associated with, Sunak’s crypto ambitions seemed to have burnt out by 2024.

By the first half of that year, the UK’s financial regulator, the FCA, had imposed money laundering regulations on cryptoasset exchange and custodian wallet providers, banned the sale of cryptoassets-backed Exchange Traded Notes (cETNs) to retail consumers (in a move which is now, in 2025, expected to be overturned) and extended financial promotion restrictions to cryptoassets.

But despite these interventions, the UK industry remained without a comprehensive regulatory framework to operate in.

The Prime Minister was more interested in another frontier technology, the rise of generative AI. Crucially, ChatGPT had been unveiled in March 2023 – a couple of months before a16z’s London announcement.

Enamoured by the potential of LLMs, Sunak went on to host the first international AI Safety Summit at the famous home of the World War Two codebreakers, Bletchley Park, where the Prime Minister was able to interview Elon Musk live on X.

Just two months later in January 2024, the SEC would approve the first spot Bitcoin ETF, while the EU’s comprehensive MiCA Act continued to roll on into its implementation phase. The British tech trade media began to ask the obvious question (link): was Sunak’s cryptoasset hub dream dead?

It was a moot point by the summer of 2024 as Sunak had triggered a surprise general election, ran a lacklustre campaign (link) and lost power to Sir Keir Starmer, who had secured a thumping majority of more than 170 seats in the House of Commons.

Labour had made no mention of crypto in its manifesto, though the party did promise to help turn the country around by boosting digital infrastructure. It was only at the start of 2025 when the Chancellor Rachel Reeves started to make positive soundings towards the industry.

In April, citing FCA figures that more than 12% of the UK adult population had some sort of exposure to crypto, she promised to make Britain the “best place in the world to innovate — and the safest place for consumers” (link).

The FCA’s 2024 consumer research

• 93% of UK adults have heard of cryptoassets

• 12% of UK adults own cryptoassets – extrapolated to around 7 million adults

Increasingly, consumers are:

• considering cryptoassets as part of ‘a wider investment portfolio’

• influenced by ‘friends and family’, with 20% of people stating this was the main reason for purchase

• buying cryptoassets either through their own long-term savings (19% in 2022, 26% in 2024) or through use of a credit card or overdraft (6% in 2022, 14% in 2024)

Under the new rules, crypto exchanges, dealers and agents would be brought into the regulatory perimeter.

The FCA had also published its own regulatory roadmap (link), giving some much-needed transparency and a timeline on what would be coming next.

Progress, at last. But groans amongst the crypto industry began to be voiced again when reports claimed that the Bank of England was souring on its stablecoin ambitions (link).

Regulatory purgatory and ‘innovation’ by government-backed committees could seal the industry’s fate in the UK, something Coinbase and George Osborne, the former Chancellor, have now sounded the alarm on (link).

If the Chancellor really wanted to take on these paternalistic tendencies, she should set the UK’s crypto framework into law. The US is already well ahead, the Middle East is catching up, Britain’s big crypto advantages are fading.

Subscribe now

The Political Press Box

Find my latest long-form audio interviews of political communicators here. Please like, subscribe and listen.

📧 Contact

For high-praise, tips or gripes, please contact the editor at iansilvera@gmail.com or via BlueSky (link). Follow on LinkedIn here.

• 215 can be found here

• 214 can be found here

• 213 can be found here

• 212 can be found here

• 211 can be found here

• 210 can be found here

Right, before we begin, we have to explain a bit of British slang to our American friends.

The term in question is ‘nonce’ and we’re talking about it because the UK government effectively just used this derogatory phrase to attack it’s perceived main political rival, the Reform party.

Why is it so inflammatory to call somebody a ‘nonce’? Well, because it basically means you’re a child sex offender.

In case you wanted some context, Nigel Farage voiced concerns about the Online Safety Act (OSA), which, amongst other things, forces consumers to hand over a form of ID to a website or platform if they want to watch ‘adult content’. The hope is that children are now shielded from porn.

Why did the Reform leader do this now? Because parts of the OSA have just come into force and millions of frustrated people (in more ways than one) have been hit by the age verification gating for the first time.

Farage and his team have pointed out that children can easily skirt around these digital bouncers by using VPNs — downloads of which have soared over the last 48 hours in the UK (link) — and the OSA is actually causing more harm than good.

Subscribe now

But in what has since emerged as a premeditated media attack (Number 10 signed it off), the Science and Technology Secretary Peter Kyle then alleged that Farage would have been on the side of Jimmy Savile, the notorious serial child rapist, if he were alive today because of his anti-OSA stance.

Cue the rightful outrage from Farage, who’s called for a public apology from Kyle. But instead of backing down, the Downing Street operation has doubled-down on the outlandish incident by publicly supporting the Secretary of State and launching a social media campaign against Farage.

It’s extraordinary stuff, but if you look closely there are at least three layers to the story. Firstly, the Prime Minister, his government and the Labour Party more generally is scoring badly in the public opinion polls.

The consensus is that Starmer’s first year in office has been a bad one, with Labour dropping more than 10% in the popularity rankings. Reform, meanwhile, has surged, landing the occasional double-digital lead over Labour.

This has allowed Farage and his party to build-up political momentum and secure disproportionately strong (the party only has a handful of MPs) media coverage.

The UK has also entered its summer months and the annual ‘silly season’ of low-quality news is well underway.

Spotting a politically unagile PM and a hungry pack of journalists, Reform has sought to take advantage of the situation by holding weekly press conferences where Farage announces a new policy or unveils a defection to his party.

It looks like Number 10 has got wise to these tactics and has deployed a dead cat strategy, implying that Farage is an accidental ally of child sex predators and undermining his media momentum at the same time.

This leads us to the second layer of the OSA debate — is it really a dead cat for voters? Though the OSA has been opposed by digital rights groups and others have pointed out its obvious practical flaws, the British public have supported aspects of the legislation.

When asked about the age verification barriers, 58% of voters said they strongly supported the move, according to YouGov (link). Not only that, but four in five adults want social media companies to be held legally responsible for the content shared on their platforms (link).

It seems that the voters are more aligned to Kyle’s position on the OSA than Farage, at least in selective framings of the legislation.

And, frankly, when people do go to the ballot boxes next May (link), they won’t be thinking about the legislation. The economy, immigration and the NHS will continue to be the main political issues.

With that in mind, Number 10 has just been able to trial an underhanded attack against Reform, luring the insurgent but operationally smaller party onto contentious ground and putting its attack and rebuttal approach under stress.

If Starmer’s advisers like what they saw, expect more of this in the future. This is the second layer. The third and final layer is a lot more cynical.

The hullabaloo around Kyle’s comments has totally overshadowed a serious debate the Labour government wants to avoid: If it really cares about protecting children and stopping heinous crimes like sexual violence, why doesn’t it increase the number of police?

In reality, the Home Office is one of the few major ministries to actually have a real-terms budget cut under Starmer and his Chancellor Rachel Reeves. The below is taken from the Office for Budget Responsibility’s latest forecast:

Reform has missed a trick by not asking this basic question about policing. And it’s one which comes up time and time again in relation Digital IDs.

Advocates claim such intrusive technologies will stop illegal immigration and crime, but they fail to produce any evidence for this, and then melt away when you raise the police or border point.

As I’ve quoted elsewhere, here’s what the late Ross Anderson said (link) when spy agencies wanted to hack into everyone’s WhatsApp messages:

“We do indeed need to spend more money on reducing violent crime, but it should be spent locally on hiring more police officers and social workers to deal with family violence directly. We also need welfare reform to reduce the number of families living in poverty.”

Unfortunately, the UK government has adopted what I’ve described as a ‘lazy surveillance state’ policy, where privacy is eroded in the name of safety but nothing really gets done — at least not in a preventative sense.

And all the while new databases chock-full of sensitive information are being assembled, creating fresh targets for hackers. Or, failing that threat, the state could just hand the data over to private companies, as was the case in 2022 (link):

The UK’s data watchdog has formally reprimanded the Department for Education for granting unlawful access to millions of children’s information that was then used for gambling age-verification checks.

The department has narrowly avoided a £10m fine after it wrongly gave an employment screening firm access to a database of 28 million pupils’ qualifications, in what the Information Commissioner’s Office called a “serious breach of the law”.

To put the above story in context, the aforementioned ICO, the UK’s data regulator, also estimated that there was a 8,000% increase in the number of people impacted by financial data breaches in central government between 2019 and 2023.

More databases or more police? I’ll take the latter.

The Political Press Box

Find my latest long-form audio interviews of political communicators here. Please like, subscribe and listen.

📧 Contact

For high-praise, tips or gripes, please contact the editor at iansilvera@gmail.com or via BlueSky (link). Follow on LinkedIn here.

• 214 can be found here

• 213 can be found here

• 212 can be found here

• 211 can be found here

• 210 can be found here

• 209 can be found here

Over the past month the UK has been awash with generative AI news. The copyright battle, which Elton John intervened in (link), the Prime Minister’s AI adviser stepping down and the unveiling of the government’s industrial strategy.

This major announcement followed a bigger one — the Spending Review, which gave the public, politicians and civil servants a good idea of how HM Treasury will give and take over the course of this Parliament.

The long and short of it? There ain’t that much money, and the government is borrowing more. Things are tight. And that’s the context we should review the country’s AI strategy in, which I’ve done below for the day-job (original link).

Before we get into it, you may want to read my original and early assessment of the UK’s AI strategy from 2024 (link). It was still very much a work in progress, but it seems the government has broadly been consistent (both on the bad stuff as well as the good stuff).

I also wrote about Whitehall’s claim that it can save £45bn by adopting generative AI tools. The figure now seems to appear in all sorts of tech-related government comms. However, its origins look suspicious (link).

Elsewhere, I’m currently in the process of writing a separate article on the winners and losers of our new AI age. Hopefully there should be some surprises in there — at least I was jolted out of the current consensus thinking.

Finally, and before we get into it, a recent Bond Capital paper (link) highlighted some interesting AI trends:

• AI/ChatGPT user growth (>800m weekly active users) has scaled faster than the internet

• The number of AI start-ups has 4x’d to 27,000 between 2021 and 2025, while the developer base has 2.4x’d to six million

• Searches for ‘ChatGPT’ hit 365bn in two years. The same milestone took Google 11 years to reach

If anything else, AI is massive right now.

The AI Strategy Analysis

There are three big assumptions at the heart of the UK government’s industrial strategy. Sir Keir Starmer’s administration thinks it can generate economic growth by making the public sector more productive, it hopes to stimulate construction and infrastructure builds, and it plans to achieve this over the course of this Parliament.

On the face of it, it sounds like straight-forward policy-marking. That is until you look at the country’s poor record on output per hour – the typical economic measurement for productivity – over the last five years (link). The UK looks increasingly unproductive, with more and more taxpayer cash having to be spent on the welfare state as people exit the workforce.

The rise of generative AI (from 2023 onwards) gives Whitehall an opportunity to break this cycle. But with tight fiscal rules and historic debt to GDP ratios, the government has a very limited budget to play with. It is within this framework that we should look at Starmer’s industrial strategy and its relationship to AI.

A popular intervention from the government has been its pro-data centre stance. The UK will need to beef-up its own processing capacity if it wants to compete on the global stage and attract top AI researchers, who will want access to the best supercomputers. Starmer’s administration has therefore promised to make “timely planning decisions”, with a 13-week target for decisions made by ministers on called-in applications.

This is part of Starmer’s wider commitment for the UK to be an “AI maker, not taker”. Though the government did pull £1.3bn of funding for a new supercomputer (link), the good news is the rather large tailwind from Silicon Valley, where the ‘Magnificent 7’ mega-cap technology stocks (Microsoft, NVIDIA et al) will spend twice as much on capital expenditure in 2025 compared with before the roll-out of ChatGPT.

The UK hopes to grab a slice of that substantial pie, estimated to be more than $300 billion. Microsoft, as just one example, has committed more than $3 billion to expand its data centres in the country (link).

Talking of top talent, the new industrial strategy has promised to attract leading academics to the UK. It has launched a ‘Global Talent Taskforce’ and a £54 million talent scheme. The initiative will cover relocation and research costs over five years and its budget will be distributed by the UK Research and Innovation department to leading universities and other research organisations.

On a related front, the government has also announced an AI skills drive, where it will work with top IT consultancies and AI providers to produce courses to help train up 7.5 million workers. The government has claimed that Whitehall is missing out on £45 billion per year of unrealised savings and productivity benefits, as 4-7% of public sector spend could be achieved through full potential digitisation of public sector services (link).

To help create these savings, ‘Humphrey’, the government’s own AI tool, has started to be rolled out amongst civil servants. “No one should be wasting time on something AI can do quicker and better, let alone wasting millions of taxpayer pounds on outsourcing such work to contractors,” Technology Secretary Peter Kyle has said.

But beyond the public sector, the government’s interventions towards the private sector have been relatively light. There are no direct grants available for the adoption of LLM technology, for example, though R&D tax credits are still available for businesses.

This could well be a missed opportunity. A recent Morgan Stanley paper (link) predicted that profits could grow by more than 16% thanks to the adoption of AI. But the jury is currently out as to whether the UK’s SMEs, which make up the backbone of the British economy, will quickly embrace the technology.

Another potential road bump has been the decision from Matt Clifford, the Prime Minister’s top AI adviser, to step-down from government. Clifford is well respected within technology and finance circles. It’s unclear who will fill his role.

Ultimately, if the AI industrial strategy is a success, the government’s finite bets will have to come in, while macro and micro-economic conditions outside of its control, including international investment, will have to fall in its favour.

Subscribe now

They just can’t help themselves. The media and the commentators, that is. As the Ukraine-Russia conflict drags on, talk of ‘disinformation campaigns’ continue.

Sure, there may be campaigns directed by the Kremlin which solely focus on discombobulating their adversaries, but that framing misses the point. Disinformation is baked into the creation, strategy and the existence of the Russian state.

To understand why this is so important, let’s revisit the death of Stalin. After the Soviet leader passed away in 1953, a power vacuum was formed and by mid-1957 Khrushchev and his allies had seized control of the party and the state apparatus.

A reorganisation of the Soviet government was ordered and Alexander Shelepin, an ally of Khrushchev outside of the existing state security apparatus, became chairman of the KGB in December 1958.

Drawing on the Soviets’ long history of defection and penetration operations dating back to the 1920s (Operation Trust, for example), Shelepin championed active measures and saw disinformation as a key strategic pillar for the Soviet Union.

A Directorate D or ‘Dezinformatsia’ was subsequently established within the First Chief Directorate of the KGB in 1959. Leninist political warfare principles would help reform the Soviet Union and the KGB — the sword, the shield and the disinformation.

Active measures remained at the heart of Soviet strategy throughout the 1960s, ‘70s and ‘80s, when, infamously, the KGB decided to spread a rumour that the US had invented the AIDs virus.

The plot was only a success because the KGB had been able to plant a fake story in an India newspaper. The Soviets were facing their own PR issues at the time after using chemical weapons in Afghanistan.

Yuri Andropov, KGB chief between 1967 and 1982, apparently once described the Soviet Union’s political war against the United States as “the final struggle for the minds and hearts of the people.”

That partly explains why the world was so surprised when the Soviet Union did eventually collapse in 1991 — economic and social metrics were well within the ‘Dezinformatsia’ playbook.

Likewise, one of the few things we do know about Putin’s KGB career is that he worked in the First Chief Directorate (foreign intelligence) and was stationed in Dresden, East Germany.

The ‘little green men’ popping up in Ukraine (link), the Salisbury novichok suspects appearing on state TV (link) and the denials around the downing of MH17 (link) — it all sounds a bit familiar.

Sow dissention, exploit ‘wedge issues’ and attempt to cloud what’s really going on. Disinformation is the strategy.

Subscribe now