I’ve recently been invited to join the Libertarian Alliance team, and I’m minded to accept. It’s a thoughtful gesture, and one that reflects well on the organization’s seriousness and intellectual independence. At the same time, I can’t help but feel a lingering hesitation—how much legitimacy can I really claim, as an American who has never once set foot in England, when it comes to analyzing the internal mechanics of British political life? The UK is not my country, nor my battlefield. And yet, more and more, the dividing line between the Anglo-American systems seems conceptual rather than practical. What happens in Westminster isn’t isolated from what happens in Washington—or Kiev, or Davos. If we’re all subjects of the same transnational oligarchy, then perhaps it’s entirely fair to study its local operations wherever they manifest.

So let me start with a review of Alan Bickley’s recent essay, The Fire Under Keir Starmer. What I like about this is it stands out in a sea of empty commentary for its intelligence and—for the few still capable of such recognition—its ruthless honesty. As is typical of Bickley, the article avoids the platitudes of political journalism and instead sketches a view of Britain’s ruling structure that is both realistic and unsparing. Where the mainstream parrots trivia about polling shifts and half-scripted leadership debates, Bickley drills down to the essential mechanisms of managed decline and elite recalibration. His argument is brutal and almost certainly correct: Labour will win the next election, not because anyone much wants it, but because it is the only remaining tool through which the ruling class can govern.

And yet for all its strengths, Bickley’s essay stops short of the more radical—and necessary—conclusions. He sees the puppet show for what it is, but refuses to speculate too loudly on the hands behind the curtain. He names the system, but does not trace its lineage. The diagnosis is damning; the prognosis fatal. But the question of who precisely has poisoned the patient remains unanswered. I will attempt here to both praise and extend Bickley’s analysis.

1. The Strong Points: Political Realism Without Illusion

Bickley’s opening move is characteristically deflationary. He notes the absurd media chatter around the attempted arson at Keir Starmer’s house, then immediately dismisses it—not because he doubts its significance, but because he lives in a police state where the wrong kind of speculation is dangerous. And indeed, that is one of the unspoken premises of the entire article: Britain is no longer a free country. The media is censored. The political class is managed. The range of acceptable thought is narrowing, and fast.

From this foundation, Bickley proceeds to dismantle the idea that the next election is a contest in any meaningful sense. Elections, he argues, are not moments of democratic agency but elite personnel rotations. The parties compete not for the public’s trust, but for their utility to the ruling class. The real rulers—City financiers, global capital, state bureaucrats, and their ideological outriders—do not need to win votes. They need instruments. And Labour is the instrument best suited to the next phase of regime management.

In this regard, Bickley’s structural model of British power is near perfect. At the top: a monied interest with no loyalty to nation or tradition, operating out of London, Zurich, Dubai. Below them: a caste of mid-level managers, PR hacks, NGO commissars, and media eunuchs whose job is to translate oligarchic will into law and narrative. Beneath that: the ideological foot soldiers—academics, activists, charity rackets—who generate the appearance of legitimacy and manufacture crises on demand. None of these layers functions independently. They are linked by money, status, and the shared knowledge that they are part of something too big to be named.

This layered structure, Bickley rightly observes, has been remarkably stable since at least the 1980s. Its purpose has never been national strength or even competent administration. It exists to extract rents. Its goal is to make Britain a safe base of operations for speculative capital, even at the price of destroying its native population.

Bickley excels in sketching the results of this system: a credentialled class of halfwits in charge of everything; a native working population atomised by immigration; the deliberate destruction of manufacturing and heavy industry in favor of Uber jobs and “compliance roles”; and a political elite that acts not to lead but to obey signals from above. No other mainstream commentator, certainly none in Britain that I’ve seen, is willing to say these things so plainly.

1. The Strategic Turn: Managed Decline Meets Tactical Reform

Where the essay becomes even more interesting is in its diagnosis of a strategic shift within the ruling class. Bickley notes that the old game of managing decline through demoralisation—diversity, deindustrialisation, debt—has hit a wall. China did not remain a sweatshop. Russia did not collapse under sanctions. NATO has been exposed as technologically backward. The green policies promoted to hollow out Western infrastructure have backfired. And crucially, the populations of the West are no longer functional enough to serve as soldiers, workers, or even profitable consumers.

This has led, as Bickley notes, to a “falling-out” within the elite. A new, more realistic faction has emerged—one that wants to preserve Western strength not for the benefit of its citizens, but to maintain the capacity to project force globally. These are not populists. They are not nationalists. They are strategic rentiers who understand that a dying host cannot sustain parasites. They have no intention of relinquishing control—only of recalibrating the system so that it does not implode.

In America, this recalibration has been symbolised by the rebranding of Trumpism—not as a genuine populist movement, but as a tactical course correction. In Britain, Bickley suggests, it will take the form of a reshaped Labour Party. The Conservatives are finished, their name synonymous with failure and betrayal. The Farage-led Reform Party is a joke—an empty Twitter brand with no organisation and no policies. Thus, Labour becomes the default governing vessel. If Starmer and his clique fail to adapt to the new directive—cutting immigration, ending net zero, allowing limited free speech—they will be replaced, but the party will remain.

This is perhaps Bickley’s most important point: the regime will be preserved, but the faces will change. The ruling class is not above shedding skins. It is already preparing to sacrifice the more useless parts of its apparatus in order to retain power.

III. The Weaknesses: Avoiding the Full Implications

For all its strengths, Bickley’s piece is ultimately too careful. He gets close to the essential truth—that the entire political structure is a simulation—but he refuses to ask who built it, or how its deeper mechanisms function. He avoids, for example, naming the intelligence services as political actors. He never mentions that the Blairite restoration of Labour was coordinated through the security state, using “anti-Semitism” as the pretext to destroy the last independent political movement in Britain (Corbynism). He never speculates about how media narratives, activist surges, and judicial decisions are synchronised. He speaks vaguely of oligarchy but leaves the machinery of enforcement unexamined.

Even more glaring is the absence of any real discussion of COVID-19 and its legacy. Bickley mentions the “biosecurity dictatorship” in passing, but does not develop the point. This is a major oversight. The COVID regime—lockdowns, vaccine coercion, censorship, digital surveillance—was the full manifestation of the system Bickley describes. It showed, with stunning clarity, that the population has no rights and no meaningful representatives. The entire political class, including Starmer’s Labour, acted as enforcers for a global biomedical cartel. That Bickley does not highlight this moment as the irreversible turning point that it was is strange—and leaves his argument curiously incomplete.

Nor does he draw the obvious conclusion from the Farage episode. Farage is not just incompetent. He is permitted opposition. He exists to channel discontent into dead ends. His entire political career has been one of “almosts.” Almost breaking the system. Almost leading a revolt. Almost creating a new party. In every case, the pressure is released before it can lead anywhere. Reform UK is a psyop for atomised pensioners. Bickley hints at this, but stops short of saying it.

Lastly, while the final line—suggesting that the Ukrainian “male models” who attempted to burn down Starmer’s house may have had help—is delivered with his usual irony, it gestures at a much darker possibility. Bickley knows that political violence is not random. He knows that fire, in elite politics, is often used to send a message. But he won’t go further. And perhaps he can’t.

1. Conclusion: Labour as the Last Tool

Bickley’s conclusion is unavoidable: Labour will win because the system needs it. The public is irrelevant. The alternatives are fake. The ruling class requires a new skin, and Labour will wear it. Whether Starmer survives is secondary. The party is modular. It can swap out parts without changing its function.

But what this ultimately means is that Britain is not a democracy, but an administrative province of an international oligarchy. Its elections are procedural theatre. Its laws are rubber stamps. Its media are organs of propaganda. And yet, Bickley does not seem angry about this. He observes it all with the detached fatalism of a man who knows that the correlation of forces is too lop-sided for the moment.

Still, his essay is a rare thing: unsentimental and contemptuous of all the right people. It sketches the world as it is, not as we are told it must be. And that, in 2025, is more valuable than any manifesto.

In short: Labour will win, the regime will continue, and the rest is noise.