The response to the Iran-Hezbollah drone attack on Britain’s Royal Air Force Base in Cyprus earlier this month has been revealing. For the first time since 1980, Britain had no warships in the eastern Mediterranean or the Gulf. Air defences were effectively absent. The UK’s main carrier strike group was still en route to Greenland. Britain ended up having to rely on Greece and France to help secure its own military base. That is not evidence of foreign capture. It is evidence of institutional incompetence.
|
|||||
|
We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people. Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house] Authors
Arts, Tech & CultureCivil Liberties
Commentary
EconomicsPolitics |
Samizdata quote of the day – institutional incompetenceMarch 9th, 2026 |
 17 comments to Samizdata quote of the day – institutional incompetenceLeave a Reply |
Who Are We?The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling. We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe. CategoriesArchivesFeed This PageLink Icons   |
|||
All content on this website (including text, photographs, audio files, and any other original works), unless otherwise noted, is licensed under a Creative Commons License. |
|||||
Is it true that the RN has 63 ships and 100+ admirals?
We seem to have 134 Admirals and flag officers and 60 active ships (plus auxiliary vessels).
The Army is similarly top-heavy.
It’s evidence of all sorts of things: economic decline, historical guilt, wishful thinking, institutional escapism, expecting rewards without effort, communist indoctrination, luxury beliefs etc.
Now, Pakistan has despatched warships to the Straits of Hormuz. HMS Dragon is still in dock. I’d be careful around Central London because there could be a seismic event in the vicinity of St Paul’s Cathedral when the bones of Admiral Nelson achieve high angular momentum…
“Rule Britannia! Britannia can’t get out the dock!”. People ought to be keel (or Keir?) hauled and they might as well replace The First Sea Lord with Ensign Harry Kim.
Just look at this grinning twat?
It is a total national fucking disgrace.
Arguably handing out patronage like senior armed forces jobs, chairmanships of NGOs and Commissions and so on, are just ‘patronage’ doled out by the Powers That Be to ensure support.
Nothing to do with Real Life(tm) except to divert resources to funding patronage. And after a few decades you end up with too many Bosses and not enough Workers – and it is difficult to reverse the process without upsetting your dinner party guests.
Jacob Reynolds is correct – and thank you to Thomas Fairfax for posting this.
Discovered Joys – it is not so well planned as that, you underestimate the “crapness”, if I may use the word, of the modern British state.
Patrick Corzier and NickM – yes indeed.
Marius – C. Northcote Parkinson predicted the present situation – in his short book “Parkinson’s Law”.
All bureaucracies degenerate unless there is a constant effort to prevent it – and there is no person actually “in charge” in the British system.
Prime Ministers and Secretaries of State for Defense are NOT “in charge” – indeed if they even say the “wrong” thing (let alone do the “wrong thing”) they can be punished for “bullying”.
The orders of Jacob Rees-Mogg as a minister were ignored – even on such things as civil servants not wearing leftist political badges and lanyards, Deputy Prime Minister Raab was removed for “bullying” (he-did-nothing-wrong), Prime Minister Johnson was removed for eating a piece of cake with people he had been working with all day, Prime Minster Truss was removed for offending the officials of the Bank of England, and-so-on.
There is no elected person in the British system who has the power of an American State Governor – let alone the President.
“But Paul – all the politics textbooks say a British Prime Minister is much more powerful than an American President” – yes, and every politics textbook is nonsense, utter nonsense.
In reality elected people in the British system can be removed on the whims of the establishment (the officials and “independent experts”) – for trivial “offenses” or even for nothing-at-all.
Imagine you were the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom and you wanted to reform the Armed Forces – you would find you could not even hire and fire the military officers, you could (basically) do nothing-at-all.
Americans must roll back the power of officials and “independent bodies” – they have vastly too much power in the United States already, and the danger of the British situation, where officials and “independent bodies” have most of the power – reducing elected people to the position of almost puppets, is horribly real.
Fred:
63 ships? Only if you count the rowing boats perhaps.
The navy has two carriers, six destroyers and seven frigates (that might be six now). Six nuclear subs and four Trident boats. That’s about it. The last remnants of a once impressive amphibious capabilyt have gone, sold to Brazil for a song. The mine hunting force, once world class, has also withered. There are a few patrol boats armed with a 30mm cannon.
We went through a period of about 20 years when not a single frigate was ordered. The Type 23 frigates had a designed life of 18 years, and have now been pushed past 30, with the result that they are wearing out before replacements are built. That is what you get when decadent governments neglect proper defence planning.
Paul:
Boris was not really removed over the cake (which he did not even eat). He and Sunak both received a most unfair £50 penalty charge, which they paid. That did not stop Sunak becoming PM in due course.
Boris was assassinated by his own cabinet after the Pincher business. They resigned one by one until he could not continue. Pincher groping a man at the Carlton Club was hardly Boris’s fault, but that was the excuse they needed to get rid of him.
There is every chance he will be the last Conservative leader ever to win a general election.
John K – yes I forgot that Mr Johnson did not eat the cake (as he was on a diet).
Mr Johnson’s real “offence” was (as you know) nothing to with Mr Pincher, it was that he had privately expressed doubts over the demented Covid lockdowns.
Mr Johnson obeyed orders (the orders of the establishment) – but he grumbled about it, he was not eager and happy.
It is not enough to obey orders – one must be happy about it, be a “true believer” in the agenda of the international establishment, not grumble about it – not even in private.
And, yes indeed Sir, the condition of the Royal Navy is a disgrace.
Apparently HMS Dragon is underway! I assume they have drilled holes so they can get the slaves to row or something…
Paul:
The essay by the same title is most instructive and deserves to be taken seriously. Unfortunately, C. Northcote Parkinson did his best not to be taken seriously in the last page.
When i read it, I had been made aware of the dangers of the Administrative/Deep State, by Hayek (end of 5th chapter of Road to Serfdom) and by a short video on reason.com; but Parkinson gave me an insight on how the growth of the State is driven by incentives.
I note that Ibn Khaldun warned about this long before Parkinson, and Gaetano Mosca a few decades before Parkinson; but neither of them described the dynamics of incentives.
(No doubt there were others that i don’t know about.)
A person in charge might actually make it worse, as his/her interest might well be to concentrate more power in the hands of the executive!
PS:
As a matter of fact. i used to believe myself in that “politics textbook nonsense”.
But is it actually nonsense?
Let’s assume that a British PM has
1. a backbone;
2 and 3. balls;
4. a loyal majority in Parliament.
(NB: Thatcher lacked only the last item.)
Then (s)he should be able to abolish the Administrative State as it exists today.
Snorri Godhi – alas, such a person would be removed as Prime Minister.
That is one of the weaknesses of our system – an American President or even State Governor is directly elected, they are quite difficult to remove before the next election.
A British council leader or even Prime Minister is fairly easy for the establishment to remove.
“concentrate more power in the hands of the executive”
Almost all power is already concentrated in the executive – but it is not in elected hands, the people do not choose who has this power – and the people can not remove them.
Supposedly, in the British system, all officials (even the “independent experts”) are responsible to the Crown – the Monarch, but, in practice, the Monarch has little power – and given who the monarch now is, it would make no difference if the Monarch did have power, as the Monarch has “liberal”-establishment opinions – as was made brutally clear by the Gentleman’s Christmas broadcast of 2024 – some people still believed the Monarch was on the side of the British people, they were left in terrible despair by the statement of His Majesty.
By the way – I agree with Snorri Godhi about Parkinson undermining his own case.
NickM – so when I am arrested I will be a Galley Slave, well at least I will get some weight off before I die.
True… but i failed to express myself clearly.
What i meant is not concentrate more existing State power in the hands of the executive (to the detriment of the legislative & judiciary branches); but increase the power of the State, and specifically of the executive branch.
But i still do not see how the British Deep State could remove a PM who has the solid support of the Parliamentary party (and a backbone).
Snorri Godhi – you may be correct, perhaps a Prime Minister with the strong backing of a majority of the House of Commons would win.
Certainly Perry believes that – which is why he is backing a certain political party, in the hopes that it will gain a majority in the House of Commons and destroy the Deep State (or “Administrative State” to use the polite term).
Perhaps you are both correct – I do not know.