Samizdata quote of the day – Dominic Cummings’ new nerd army

Thomas Fairfax (Yorkshire) · Slogans & Quotations · UK affairs

Asked for his own judgement on Britain’s prospects, Cummings claimed there is a “black pill” in the fact that few societies escape the dynamics of decline that the country now appears trapped in; the “white pill”, on the other hand, is that Britain’s system has proven surprisingly resilient and adaptable in the past. He then implored the Looking for Growth membership to put aside their start-ups and to help rejuvenate the establishment. Whether and how they respond to this call will be of some consequence to the country’s future.

– Wessie du Toit

October 25th, 2025 |

2 comments to Samizdata quote of the day – Dominic Cummings’ new nerd army

• Paul Marks

  October 25, 2025 at 3:22 pm

  Only two Prime Ministers in my lifetime have tried to roll back the state – Margaret Thatcher and Liz Truss, both were betrayed.

  As for Mr Dominic “Lockdown” Cummings – he must decide whether his objective is to “reform” the state, or to roll it back – to reduce its size and scope. If he is interested in “reform”, in making the state more “efficient” (yet more administrative reorganizations, bringing in “better managers” and so on) then I am not interested, but if he is interested in rolling back the state (reducing its size and scope) – they he may be worth listening to.

  On the matter of the British system being “resilient and adaptable in the past” – that it is an odd way to describe both the decline of liberty, the rise of the state even as a proportion of the economy, since the 1870s – some 150 years, and also Britain’s relative decline in relation to other powers for roughly the same period of time.

  Already by 1876 (when Grant was still President of the United States) America had an edge when it came to where one should invest for the long term – thanks the Disraeli’s Acts of 1875, one of which gave the unions power (cue – the long term relative, relative, decline of British industry compared to other nations – and the emergence of structual unemployment – made worse by the Trade Union Act of 1906), the other Act of 1875 demanding that every city and town government undertake about 40 different tasks – whether or not local taxpayers wanted councils to do these things or not, which made a mockery of accountable government.

  Although some parts of Britain, such as Kettering where I live, were still a bit freer than most of the United States up to the 1890s – as School Boards were not compulsory in England and Wales till 1891.

  Income tax was the main source of government revenue in Britain, the tariff the main source of Federal Government revenue in the United States – one can argue over their relative merits (or rather demerits) – but in the early 1890s the income tax became “Progressive” (graduated) in Britain – and that is an abomination.

• Paul Marks

  October 25, 2025 at 3:37 pm

  I have been totting up votes in recent council by elections in Britain – and I am rather disturbed by the results.

  In spite of the manifest failures of statism – the parties of the left (Labour, Liberal Democrat, Green and Scots and Welsh Nationalist, and others) still seem to have more votes than the parties of the right – and that includes the Conservatives as a party of the right (which some would dispute).

  How anyone in Britain, where the utter failure of the state, in everything (apart from in indoctrination – which is the main interest of the British state and establishment), is obvious, can continue to vote for even more statism, even more government spending, taxation and regulations, is baffling – it appears that the indoctrination of the education system and the “mainstream media” (including the entertainment media) is very strong here.

  I noticed this during Covid – even the most obvious lies were believed by a majority British people. It was frightening – deeply so.

  I did think that most people had finally come to understand that statism had failed utterly and that what is taught in the schools, universities and repeated in the media (including the entertainment media) is a tissue-of-lies, but voting behaviour casts doubt on my recent optimism.

  But then, to give an example I have given before, we live in a land where the crippling Poor Law (and other) taxation that destroyed the Irish economy in the late 1840s is described as “laissez faire”. The truth is inverted.

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