Though I have not written much about it, I do not dissent from my closer colleagues at the Libertarian Alliance on the Iran War. Together with Messrs Bickley, Godwyn, Pozeram and Wang—not forgetting Mrs Halcombe—I wanted America to lose. I wanted America to suffer a memorable and irremediable humiliation. Now that it has lost and is humiliated, I am pleased. It might be hard to be as pleased as Reginald Godwyn is. When I joined him yesterday afternoon in an office that reeked of tobacco and flatulence, he got up from his desk and danced about me to cries of “Suez is avenged, young man! Suez is avenged!” I thought he might have a seizure, and was relieved when he eventually sat down and recovered himself with a drink of some foul-smelling spirit.

This being said, I share the generality of his sentiment. The Americans waddled into an unprovoked attack on Iran, all waving their stupid flag and their Scofield Bibles. Whenever they waddled not fast enough, their leaders were shoved from behind by the thuggish Netanyahu Government—a government that seems to have a full set of images of them having sex with children, and perhaps murdering and eating them afterwards. The result was a comprehensively bloody nose. They had no strategy beyond hoping that political assassination, followed by the mass-murder of civilians, would bring on an Iranian collapse. Instead, their own weapons failed to work properly, then ran out. Their bases across the Middle East were destroyed. Their allies in Europe looked the other way. Their local allies have begun to desert them. Everyone is walking away from the dollar, and this will now head even faster into toilet paper territory. The resulting vacuum is being filled by an Iran that controls the Straits of Hormuz, and therefore the price of oil across the world. The Chinese and Russians are laughing up their sleeves and quietly redrawing their borders. It is another Suez, and I feel no disinclination to gloat.

But I am not writing to join in the more theatrical gloating. My purpose is to explain why, beyond simple distaste for the country, we wanted America to lose, and why we are so pleased that it has lost. I will begin by clearing away a possible misunderstanding. We are not leftists. We do not believe that Western civilisation is some blot on the history of the human race that needs somehow to be erased. We do not look on every Western defeat as a sacrament of anti-colonial justice. We do not believe that the peoples of Europe are uniquely wicked, or uniquely obliged to abase themselves before those who, whenever they have had the chance, have behaved no better and often much worse than we did and still often do. We are opposed to the mass murder of women and children. We agree that perpetrators should be brought to some kind of justice. But the suffering of people outside our own group is not at the top of our priorities. This may shock those who have mistaken humanitarian slogans for political thought. It should not shock anyone else. Our own priority is Britain, or perhaps just England, followed by Europe as a whole. With this in mind, we see the humbling of America as both a great danger and a great opportunity.

It is a danger because we believe that a world in which Europeans—whether collectively or through one great power—are not strong and self-sufficient will not be a friendly place for Europeans. We are resented both for having given birth to the modern world and for the crimes we committed when we still monopolised the fruits of that birth. The Chinese resent their “century of humiliation.” The Indians burn with outrage that it was foreigners who conquered them with a few thousand soldiers and then lifted them, with varying mixtures of brutality and reform, out of their long stagnation. The Africans have been persuaded to blame our past conduct for all their present failings. So long as they were in no position to act against us, we could smile at their various complaints and carry on about our own business. Once they are in a position to act against us, they will act against us. They will act because it is the nature of the strong to dominate the weak, and because the weak, once strong, almost never become philosophers. They become self-righteous avengers of past slights. Just as the Romans justified their conquest of Greece as revenge for the alleged expulsion of their ancestors from Troy, the rising powers will tell themselves that we deserved whatever is done to us. They will not say, “The Europeans made mistakes, but also gave the world much that was excellent.” They will say, “The Europeans once ruled. Now let them be ruled.” The rhetoric will be moral. The reality will be power. No sensible man can welcome this. No European should suppose that the retreat of American power will produce a world of smiling conferences and mutually respectful trade. It will produce a scramble. It will produce spheres of influence. It will produce tribute in one form or another. It will produce new hypocrisies to replace the old. Those now lecturing us about justice will soon discover that justice without punishment is only half the fun. This is the danger.

However, let us suppose a world in which the greatest power is China, and China is balanced by Iran, and India and Brazil. This will, by definition, be a world in which European supremacy has passed away. At the same time, a world in which America has been humbled will present opportunities which, intelligently managed, allow us to check, and even to cast off, the forces that brought about the passing of that supremacy.

Though it is not my purpose to write on this at any length, I will, to emphasise the scale of what has been lost by Britain alone, compare the present not with some imagined golden age, but with a real point in the past: 1926. In that year, Britain was still a serious country. It was the core of a global empire. It had a manufacturing base that supported tens of millions. Its universities produced knowledge. Its scientists led the world. Its writers and artists were men of genius, not recipients of funding for sub-mediocrity. Its people were peaceful and hard-working, and astonishingly free. They walked the streets of their cities knowing where they were. They could look back on centuries of progress. They could believe, with some reason, that the future would be better than the past.

I do not believe the British Empire could have lasted forever. It was the product of a unique head start in industrial development. That lead was not sustainable. Once others caught up, Britain’s supremacy was bound to decline. Empires rise when they can: they fall when they must. The British Empire was no exception. But the condition of Britain in 2026 cannot be explained as historical fading. It was not a sunset. It was arson. It is what happens when a ruling class decides that destruction is more in its interest than defence, and that compliance is more profitable than excellence.

Staying with Britain, which is the country that I know best, and for which I care most, we have, since at least 1979, and probably for some time before that, lived under the hegemony of a monied interest located in the City of London, though tied closely to a similar interest in America. This interest does not regard this country as a nation in any meaningful sense. It regards it as a base for its activities throughout the world—activities that are often disreputable and almost always parasitic. Its members may like the trappings of the old order that they replaced. They may pay for tasteful restorations. They may stand solemnly at Remembrance services, with faces composed into expressions learned from portraiture. But these are ornaments. They are not loyalties. The country, for them, is a platform. It is nothing more than that. They want a trading platform with fast Internet and a government that provides political stability and minimal oversight for their own activities.

The governing class is a wholly-owned subsidiary of this monied interest, though not in the crude sense of taking daily instructions. There are no morning telegrams from bankers telling ministers which betrayal to perform before lunch. Power does not usually work like that. It works through shared assumptions, career incentives, financing, social access, institutional habit and the punishment of those who step outside the permitted range. How the governing class governs from day to day is not dictated in detail. Its actions and their justification are left to whatever it finds congenial, or can sell to the governed. But these actions must accord, in the last resort, with the interests of the monied interest.

To keep Britain quiet and stable as a base, the monied interest has required the destruction of all independent power within it. The Empire was its the first target. Empires need imperialists—soldiers, administrators, engineers. These are men who know what they want for the imperial motherland, and who know how to get it. The Empire had to go. Next was manufacturing industry. A country with a broad manufacturing base is not easily controlled. It produces wealth outside the financial system. It sustains a working population that cannot be reduced to dependency without resistance. It supports local elites with interests distinct from those of the City. It produces men who understand cause and effect because they deal every day with machines, materials, time, risk and failure. Such men may not read Locke. They may not care for economic theory. But they are much harder to frighten with words like “inclusion,” “sustainability” and “stakeholder engagement.” Therefore, industry had to be destroyed.

This destruction was achieved, in the first instance, by a set of trade and monetary policies presented as free trade, but arranged in such a way as to produce steady deindustrialisation. The combination of high interest rates and continued heavy state borrowing in the early 1980s made it impossible for many otherwise viable enterprises to survive. Those that did survive faced an environment increasingly hostile to production and increasingly favourable to speculation. After that, much production was deliberately offshored. This was called efficiency. It was often merely liquidation. The result was not an efficient non-financial economy, but an economy crippled by design. More recently, globalisation has been joined by environmental policies designed to make energy unaffordable and therefore manufacturing uneconomic. A country that cannot afford heat cannot run furnaces. This, of course, is no difficulty for those lucky enough not to worry about the corresponding size of utility bills.

A corollary of deindustrialisation was the destruction of an autonomous working class. This was achieved by making workers economically redundant and then by atomising them through mass immigration. The more unassimilable and objectionable the immigrants, the better, since the point was never enrichment but fragmentation. A stable working class has memory. It has institutions. It has standards. It can bargain. It can resist. A fragmented population of service workers, benefit claimants, imported labourers and credentialled clerks can be managed through subsidies, slogans, police warnings and television.

Our economy is therefore no longer structured to produce wealth. It is a network of scams, designed to extract value rather than create it. A small elite harvests rents from speculation and leverage. The average worker lives off scraps, taxed at every level to feed a machine that hates him. He is, and he knows he is, as disposable as a used vape. The people who make things are punished. The people who manipulate and speculate are rewarded. If a man opens a workshop, he is visited by inspectors, planners, equality consultants and tax officials. If another man arranges paper claims on assets through six jurisdictions and calls the result innovation, he is invited to advise the Treasury.

Our political system has adapted to this arrangement. It is no longer a contest of ideas. It is a cartel. The parties differ in language and branding. They do not differ in direction. Whoever you vote for, you will receive mass immigration, gender ideology, climate hysteria, speech controls, public debt, administrative growth, and a government that cannot define the word “woman” without glancing nervously at its legal department. None of the ruling parties believes what it says. They do not even ask you to believe it. They demand only repetition, or silence. Politics has become less a method of choice than a ritual of submission.

The population itself has degenerated. People are fat. They are lazy. They are increasingly stupid. They live through screens and gorge on ultra-processed filth. They have no memory of anything before the iPhone. They parrot BBC headlines as if they were scripture. They do not miss liberty because they no longer know what liberty is. They do not recognise the cage. Indeed, many of them resent anyone who notices the bars. Give them pornography, takeaway food, streaming services, moral slogans and the illusion of participation, and they will call themselves free while living as managed livestock.

The arts and sciences are dead, and they are dead on purpose. The artists are empty. The scientists are civil servants. The universities are diploma mills for civil service fodder. Research is no longer about truth. It is about securing funding from committees of ideologues. The entire cultural sector is a closed feedback loop in which the talentless praise one another for the production of nothing. Greatness is no longer expected. It is not even desired. Genius is disruptive. Mediocrity is administratively convenient.

The process and its results have been justified through ideologies of equity and diversity. But these ideologies are not accidental insanities. They serve practical purposes. They dissolve common identity. They justify mass immigration. They turn complaint against elite rule into suspicion among the ruled. They allow authoritarian control to be presented as compassion. They create a leftism without redistribution, a radicalism that leaves property untouched while criminalising jokes. If you want to understand why public discussion in this country is filled with soft-voice calls for a total state, only ask who is really in charge and whose interests are served by a total state.

For a long time, the system worked in the sense of being an effective means to its end. Britain and America hollowed out their own societies while continuing to dominate the world. The monied interest expected to use China as a giant sweatshop for making goods from which financial elites would extract profits. But China did not remain an obedient sweatshop. Instead, it leveraged Western investment and technology transfers and access to markets to engineer the fastest economic rise in history. It now matches America in economic scale and increasingly outmatches it in industrial competence. Worse for the monied interest, China is plainly looking to free itself from dollar hegemony and build its own financial ecosystem.

This is the central fact of our age. China is not a problem because it is communist. The people who rule us have never objected to tyranny when tyranny pays its invoices. China is a problem because it is capable. It produces. It plans. It builds. It controls supply chains. It educates engineers rather than diversity officers. It manufactures the material world on which finance ultimately depends. A globalised financial system requires producers who need access to Western capital and Western markets. China increasingly needs neither in the old way. It is therefore not merely a rival. It is a possible replacement.

Russia complements China. It provides resources and strategic depth. It offers military capability. Together, they form the core of an alternative system that does not depend on the West. This is why the attempt was made to break Russia. The Ukraine war was meant to be a trap, drawing Russia into a prolonged conflict that would collapse its economy and open China to encirclement. If Russia could be weakened and dismembered, or turned into a dependent client, China would be left exposed. The Eurasian landmass could be brought back under effective control.

This effort failed. The Ukraine War was brought about after 2014 to break Russia. Since 2022, it has instead broken Europe. Western sanctions have backfired, revealing economic weaknesses in the sanctioning countries. NATO’s military technology has proved at least unimpressive when tested against a serious opponent. Russian determination has been greater than expected. Western arsenals have been depleted. Western populations have shown little enthusiasm for the sacrifices demanded of them. Proposals for British conscription are met with outrage and the sort of laughter that terrifies serious men more than anger. The ruling class has discovered that native Britons, after decades of demoralisation, may be useless as enforcement tools. The same is true of most Americans. They will submit to lectures. They will fill in forms. They will not necessarily die for the system that despises them.

For at least a decade, there has been a debate within the ruling class over whether the “woke” agenda is an asset or a liability. On the one side, there are the crazies, who will not stop until every European male has become a self-hating transsexual. On the other, there are the realists, who fear increasingly that the dissolution has gone too far. While the West had no serious competitor, the crazies had the whole advantage. Woke ideology was useful. It fragmented populations, disciplined speech, destroyed common standards, and turned every institution into a machine for moral supervision. But the external situation has altered. After about 2008, Russia began to recover, and China became too large to treat as an economic colony. A system that had weakened its own base could no longer function effectively in a world of great power competition.

This is the reason behind the recent calls for a change of strategy. There could be no easy destruction of China. Therefore, Britain and America, and the West in general, needed to be rebuilt as effective long-term enforcers of the globalised financial system. This implied a partial reversal of previous policies. The destruction of industry had gone too far. The atomisation of the population had gone too far. The suppression of energy production had gone too far. There needed to be some degree of reconstruction. This would mean a retreat from multiculturalism and environmentalism. It would mean reindustrialisation, cheaper energy, tighter immigration, and some partial restoration of social cohesion.

The election of a second Trump administration, and the rapid dissolution of the Labour Government headed by Keir Starmer, should be seen as reflecting changes of the correlation of forces within the Anglo-American ruling class. These were not revolutions. They were adjustments, signals that a change of direction had been decided far above, and perhaps without the full understanding of those employed to front it. Mr Trump was not the cause. He was the instrument. These facts indicated an optimistic outcome, though not optimistic in the childish sense. It did not mean that Britain would be restored to its old greatness, or that those who destroyed it would confess and retire to atone with charitable works. It meant that the settled course of engineered decline might be interrupted. There might be some reindustrialisation. There might be some lessening of the police state. There might be a partial restoration of national capacity. Given a loosening of control, we could hope to take advantage of the resulting Glasnost to press for greater changes that would be wholly to our advantage. As Tocqueville observed, the most dangerous time for a bad government is usually when it begins to reform.

Though it began because of their sudden weakening, the Iran War has not in itself been a defeat for the realists. What seems to have happened is that the Israelis and what is called “the Epstein Syndicate” sided with the crazies last year and helped them back into control. The resulting war with Iran was a gamble. It was a last attempt to regain hegemony without the need for unwelcome compromises at home. Iran is part of a wider system linking Russia and China. It supplies energy. It sits across one of the key routes between Asia and Europe. To control Iran would be to strike indirectly at China, to limit its access to resources, disrupt its trade and weaken the emerging Eurasian alternative. If this had succeeded, the need for reconstruction in the West might have been postponed. The old game could have continued. The financial empire could have tightened its grip abroad and avoided loosening its grip at home. Why interrupt the Potemkin love feast when rivals can be beaten down with a few political assassinations and a few hundred murdered schoolchildren?

Now the gamble has failed. It has failed spectacularly. The weapons made by the Iranians have proved superior to those made by the Americans in all the ways that mattered. This has been as great a shock, in its way, as the appearance of heavily armoured Persian cavalry in the wars with Rome in the third century. It has changed the balance of power against the West. The days of effortless military victory against non-European peoples are at an end. The spell has been broken. The idols still stand, but no one is now sacrificing to them.

This is why we welcome the American defeat. It is a defeat for the crazies and victory by default for the realists. We should not romanticise the latter. What they want is not our good, but their own. They want to rebuild nations of competent enforcers. If they want factories, borders and cheaper energy, they want these things for their own benefit. They want a restored England and America only so the same hands can tug on the leash. But that is an improvement on the future planned by the former.

And we welcome the American defeat, because it also suggests a defeat for the realists. They seem to have assumed that a minimal reconstruction would have put the West back into fighting order. The scale and completeness of the American defeat has shown the full extent of what has been lost here and gained elsewhere. This is not a relative weakening to be put right by a few tax cuts and a warmed-over Thatcherism. If even part of the world is to be retained as a place from which rents can be extracted, the reconstruction will need to be far more extensive than was believed. I and my friends welcome the decline of Western power because, like some powerful drug in a diseased body, it may harm the disease more than it does the patient. We welcome this defeat because it forces the disease to join the work of weakening itself. You will not see this at the moment in Britain, where it is business as usual for the perfection of our total state. But, as there is no longer any viable alternative, it soon will be in evidence.

However, before passing to the nature of the reconstruction, and how we may take over its direction, I will raise the large and unstated assumption of the whole ruling class, both crazies and realists. This is that any reconstruction is still possible. The realists hope that one is possible. The crazies fear that one is possible. But, when I look at the obese, shambling trolls who block the corridors in my school, I do not see an imperial race. Since the rot was made to set in after about 1960, we have had three generations of dysgenic selection. Since 1980, the Chinese have been moving in entirely the opposite direction—a ruthlessly meritocratic system of education and administration, supported by a eugenics drive of increasing sophistication. There is also the fact of network effects—that the Chinese have spent half a century developing integrated chains of greater and lesser manufacturing which enable high intelligence to have measurable effects on output; while we have been outsourcing and offshoring our own capacity to the point of non-existence.

But whether with hope or fear, the ruling class appears to believe that the supremacy of the European peoples is a fact of nature—that, freed of the specific causes that brought them low, they will almost immediately recover. If not with whole conviction, I agree with this. My reasons for agreement are probably best not elaborated in a country where the police increasingly behave like inquisitors for the official creed. I will also remain silent on what needs to be done with the dysgenic trash bred when degeneration was the whole agenda. I will say only that the present weakness of the West probably does not reflect the disappearance of the qualities that once made it dominant. It reflects only their suppression.

So I pass to what needs to be done. As said, this needs to be more than cutting a few taxes and rebranding the present order of things as other than it is. I also repeat that, whenever this may be tried in earnest, we shall have an opportunity to take over the reconstruction rather as the Bolsheviks did when the failure of the Provisional Government had cleared their path. How we take over is not something I care to discuss—as ever, I am aware that we live in a police state. But I am a keen student of the Russian and Iranian Revolutions, and I have little respect for what people call democratic norms. But let us assume that I and my friends, or some other group of similar nature, were to take power in this country—what should we do both to make this country ours again and to acquire the means to make stable and mutually-advantageous deals with the new great powers outside the West?

If you want me to start with electoral systems and divisions of power, you are reading the wrong essay. I will say that no specific institution inherited from the past should be sacred. If it has been so co-opted by the actual ruling class that it cannot be made to serve our interests again, let it by cast aside. But I will say no more than this. In my view, the highest imperative is to destroy the monied interest. Everything else is secondary—even, I suggest, all that comes under the heading of immigration. Fail to do this, and any revolution will fail. Do this, and any other mistakes of execution can be put right later. So the first and unavoidable task of any serious attempt at national recovery must be the destruction of the monied interest. By that I do not mean the destruction of genuinely private enterprise. I mean the class that owns without building, extracts without risk, and hides behind accountants and publicists. This is not capitalism. It is not even finance. It is a parasitic class that exists to speculate and then insulate itself from the fallout. It owes nothing to Britain. It has no loyalty. It uses this country as a platform for offshore extraction and regulatory arbitrage. Its money flows through tax havens. Its power is dispersed through layers of shell companies. It lives behind a firewall of jargon and complexity. That firewall must be torn down.

The first tool should be taxation. A large portion of the state’s revenue must be drawn from land. This is not because land taxes are fair, but because they hit the right targets. The monied class stores much of its wealth in real estate. A hard, immovable tax on land is difficult to evade, and will be effective in driving out the non-productive class. The same applies to a wealth tax. The purpose of this should not be redistribution, though it can be sold as this, but strategic attrition. The goal is not to balance the budget. The goal is to destroy the monied interest, or to chase it away.

Next, the financial system must be reconstructed around gold. Every deposit-taking institution—bank, shadow bank, pension fund, crypto exchange—must be legally required to redeem in specie. That means gold, not digital promises or IOUs backed by hope. There are strong economic arguments for hard money, but these are not the main point. The sudden return or gold convertibility would collapse most of the current financial system within a month, and this is the point. The opacity that defines modern finance—off-balance-sheet derivatives, collateralised debt, synthetic instruments, abstract futures—exists for one reason: to manufacture risk and sell it to the public. Any bank or institution unable to redeem its obligations in gold should be declared insolvent and liquidated. If you create money from nothing and lend it out at interest, you should be seen as a thief. If your business model relies on inflation, you should be seen as a criminal. We do not want your innovation. We want your exit.

Alongside this, we must ban most forms of limited liability. In the nineteenth century, limited liability was introduced allegedly to encourage enterprise. In the twenty-first century, it exists to conceal guilt. It allows corporate executives to loot their own firms, destroy suppliers, sack workers, defraud customers, and then walk away with bonuses intact. The corporation folds: the executives buy yachts. If full abolition is not immediately possible, then limited liability must be treated as a privilege, not a right. Directors who want this protection should be required to prove its necessity. The burden must be on them. And where protection is not demonstrably essential, it should be denied.

Beyond that, corporate governance must be naturalised and nationalised. That means stripping artificial persons of voting rights. No company, trust, or charity should be allowed to vote in shareholder meetings. Only natural persons resident in the United Kingdom should have that power. Foreign and non-resident shareholders may be allowed to collect dividends, but they should have no say in matters of policy or appointments. Insolvency law must also change. The default assumption in any corporate failure must be that those with significant control are personally liable. Let them prove otherwise. If you ran the company, signed the contracts, and drew the salary, you pay the debts. There must be no more hiding behind layers of legal abstraction.

These reforms would achieve two immediate results. First, they would break the web of concealment that currently shields the powerful. At present, it is almost impossible to trace ownership or liability in large firms. That is not an accident. It is the structure. And the structure must go. Any firm with a corporate ownership chain that crosses three jurisdictions should be deemed suspect. That alone should be cause for revocation of licence and liquidation of assets. Second, these reforms would force corporations to shrink. Once it becomes impossible to hide behind fourteen layers of holding company, people will think twice before gambling with other people’s futures. Directors will act like adults or they will stop doing business in Britain.

These amount to the politics of cleansing. We should not try to make capitalism fairer. We should try to make it honest. If that drives the parasites away, good. If it drives some of the honest out with them, unfortunate but acceptable. If they stay and adapt, better. But if they resist, they should be treated not as competitors, but as enemies.

The second major reform—just as important as attacking the financial class—must be the deliberate reindustrialisation of Britain. This is not for nostalgia, but because a country that does not make things cannot govern itself. It certainly cannot protect itself, or look potential enemies calmly in the face. A country that depends on imports for its energy and its military hardware is not a country. It is a client. It exists at the whim of its suppliers. We see this at the moment. If glad that the Americans are losing control of the Middle East, I do not see Iranian control as in itself an improvement. The goal must be to recreate an industrial working class—rooted and skilled. What I have in mind is not the economic underclass we have now, subsidised to consume and trained to obey, but a real class of men who know how to operate machinery and maintain systems. This class once existed. It had strength. It had leverage. And that is why it was destroyed. And that is why it must be recreated.

Where private capital is willing to invest, the state should get out of the way. That means repealing most regulations, gutting planning law, and eliminating environmental vetoes designed to serve activist careers, not public health. Investors should not be punished for doing something useful. They should be assisted—quietly and without red tape. But where private capital refuses to act—because the risks are too great or the returns too slow—the state must act directly. That may mean building infrastructure. It may mean partial ownership. It may mean subsidy. And, to complete the economic heresy, I have nothing against tariffs if they are needed. This is not a violation of economics. It is the correction of its blind spots. Tariffs do not need to be about protecting inefficiency, but about protecting development—about giving domestic industries the space to grow and stabilise before they can compete.

As for the trade unions, these must be handled strategically. If they support reindustrialisation, they should be welcomed. If they obstruct it, they should be crushed. Any union that chooses sabotage over partnership must be treated as an adversary.

Alongside these reforms, there must be massive and immediate spending cuts. The British state is not merely bloated, but malevolent. It exists not to protect, but to spy and propagandise, and to punish whenever the obvious is noticed. Outright embezzlement aside, the taxes it collects go in three main directions. There are hidden grants to the ruling class and its favoured clients—things like green subsidies. Those must go at once. There are various kinds of welfare payment. We need to be selective here—but my rule would be nothing for obvious scroungers: let them work or beg or starve. There are the costs of the managerial state. Here, we should slash and burn. Every department, agency, regulator, board, institute, and “charity” that survives by extracting money from taxpayers must be shut down. This includes the universities, which are not centres of learning, but ideological training camps. It includes the BBC, which is not a broadcaster, but a cathedral of regime values. The NGOs, regulators, public-private partnerships, local authorities, and advisory boards exist to give jobs to people who serve the interests of a ruling class that has come dangerously close to destroying us. End those bodies and publish their records. Sack the staff without severance. Cancel their pensions. Let them stack supermarket shelves or push trolleys in carparks. They have done enough damage. The purpose here is not to save money for the taxpayers—though it will—but to destroy the legitimisation and enforcement class of a managerial state. Revolutionary reconstructions are as much about personnel as ideas.

I could say more, but you get the idea. The end of American hegemony accelerates the loss of Western or European supremacy in the world at large. But this hegemony has been made the enforcement agency of an internal threat to our survival. Its loss exposes us to external dangers, but also gives us the chance to cast off the internal threat without which the external dangers would not exist, or would be manageable.

So now to the essential question: who will take the necessary steps to cast off this internal threat? The political right will not. It talks. It signals. It promises. It does not act. The Conservatives have had office and done nothing with it except lie to us while helping to enslave us. It is not a failed alternative. It is part of the problem. Nigel Farage and his Reform Party are simply the rebranded Conservatives. Any reconstruction that relies on people like him and his friends is a waste of time. My preference is for a dictator—preferably a dictatorship of me and my friends. I look rather good in black, and I do plan to be around a very long time. If that is not possible, then action will come from elsewhere.

The hard left, for all its stupidity, at least understands that the system exists and that it serves particular interests. Men like George Galloway are not constrained by the same need to appear acceptable to the system they criticise. He, in particular, is willing to say what is not permitted. That makes him both more interesting and dangerous than Nigel Farage and all the mediocre parasites around him. Some of his recent statements and alliances show an interesting flexibility of principle. Even otherwise, if the right is incapable of power, then the left may need to be used to break the system that the right has shown itself incapable of touching. Once broken, others can step in to make sure there is bread in the shops.

In closing, I once read this by H.G. Wells:

Since the passing of Victoria the Great there had been an accumulating uneasiness in the national life. It was as if some compact and dignified paper-weight had been lifted from people’s ideas, and as if at once they had begun to blow about anyhow.

We can hope that the suicide of American hegemony that Donald Trump has produced will have the same effect.