MattGPT

Right, where Ben Sixsmith writes:

Here is an exceptionally easy argument to make:

1. Mass migration is ensuring that the historical majority in Britain is becoming a minority.
2. This is the result of policies that have been pursued regardless of popular opinion.
3. This has had many kinds of destructive consequences.

The first claim is so obviously true that one might as well deny the greenness of the grass. The second is proven by decades of broken promises (see Anthony Bowles’s article “Immigration and Consent” for more). The third requires argumentation, but I think that it is clear if one considers hideous incidences of terrorism, grooming gangs and violent censoriousness, as well as broader trends of economic dependency and electoral sectarianism.

Again, this is not a difficult argument to make. So why is it made so badly?

Matt Goodwin’s Suicide of a Nation is a very bad book. It reads like the book of a political operator extending his CV. The left-wing commentator Andy Twelves caused a stir on social media by pointing out various factual mistakes and what appear to be non-existent quotes. Twelves speculates that these “quotes” are the result of AI hallucinations, which is plausible, if not proven, in the light of the fact that two of Mr Goodwin’s sparse footnotes contain source information from ChatGPT.

Inasmuch as Suicide of a Nation makes a form of the argument sketched out the beginning of this article, there is truth to it. But it contains a fundamental problem — it assumes that this argument is so true that there is no requirement to make it well.

“Slop” is an overused term but it feels painfully appropriate for a book that is spoon fed to its audience. Goodwin, who had a long academic career before becoming a successful commentator, is not a man who lacks intelligence. But he writes as if he thinks his audience lacks it. “I did not write this book for the ruling class,” writes Goodwin, “I wrote it for the forgotten majority.” Alas, he seems to think that the average member of the “forgotten majority” has the reading level of a dimwitted 12-year-old. As well as being stylistically simple, the book is full of annoying paternal asides. “In the pages ahead I shall walk you through what is happening to the country …” “In the next chapter we will begin our journey …” Thank you, Mr Goodwin. Can we stop for ice cream?

The book is terribly derivative, with a title that reflects Pat Buchanan’s Suicide of a Superpower and a subtitle — “Immigration, Islam, Identity” — that all but repeats that of Douglas Murray’s The Strange Death of Europe — “Immigration, Identity, Islam”. It is written in the humourless and colourless rhetorical style of AI. I’m not saying it was AI-generated. (Indeed, a brief assessment using AI checkers suggests that it was not.) I’m just saying that it might as well have been.

There is a lot of highly dubious sourcing. Mr Twelves did not exhaust the number of questionable quotes in the book. “A nation that cannot defend its borders,” Goodwin claims the Roman historian Livy wrote, “Will soon cease to be a nation.” I can find no record of this quote. “Language is the tie that connects past with future, and binds together the citizens of the same nation,” Goodwin claims the lexicographer Noah Webster wrote. Again, I can find no record of this quote. To be fair, perhaps Goodwin has one — but he should have included more footnotes. He’s an academic! How did this not occur to him?

The writing is lazy. Goodwin, for example, twice refers to “the Canadian psychologist Gad Saad” within forty pages. (Thank God — I would have thought it was a different Gad Saad.) But the arguments are also lazy. “Would countries such as China, Saudi Arabia or Japan tolerate this?” Goodwin asks, after listing a series of crimes committed by asylum seekers, “No. Only Britain’s elites are this deranged.” Germany’s? Sweden’s?

What makes all this so strange is that it is so unnecessary. This should not have been a book that was difficult to write thoroughly and effectively. Again, I can only assume that Goodwin does not feel as if he has to make the argument well. His apparently abundant sales suggest that in cold economic terms this might be true.

Why? One explanation that occurs to me is that the right is unusually post-literate. Its success, in marketing terms, has been more prominent in the realms of social media and, especially, podcasts. The right has developed a formidable podcasting ecosphere, in which Goodwin is a major player, where the failure to systematically articulate one’s perspective is less obvious. A book, with this in mind, could almost be an afterthought — an excuse for generating more podcasts.

Secondly, the spectre of political correctness provides a built-in excuse for poor argumentation. “The elites will attack me because I wrote this for you,” writes Goodwin, “They will call me every name under the sun because I dare to tell you the truth.” On Twitter, Goodwin is already claiming that the left is “having a meltdown” — “cherry-picking” and “misrepresenting”. “Ignore the losers on the Left,” writes Goodwin, “Read it for yourself.” We should read books for ourselves. But we should also read critiques for alternative assessments. That we should ignore censoriousness does not excuse ignoring criticism.

Finally, and most generously, perhaps people have a sense that urgent truths should be communicated plainly and directly. Of course, there is something to this. Arguments, in many cases, should be clear and accessible. But this should never come at the expense of accuracy (what is Goodwin claiming to provide if not the truth?). Nor should it entail dumbing down complex issues (and what should be done about the state of Britain is complex, as Goodwin surely realises since he has spent much of the past months arguing with members of the nationalist party “Restore”).

Besides, call it idealistic but I just don’t think a book that claims to defend British culture should be so short on eloquence, wit, scholarship, poetry et cetera. British culture is pretty meaningless if it has the literary standards of ChatGPT and the argumentative standards of a telemarketer. Goodwin is talking about major issues here — tremendous demographic and cultural change, democratic dysfunction, and societal pathologies — but to do it so carelessly diminishes their status rather than inspiring or persuading people. The narrative around Suicide of a Nation has nothing to do with immigration, Islam and identity but with its stylistic and argumentative deficiencies — and the sad truth is that the author can hardly complain when there are so many of them. The lesson for his colleagues in Reform is not to let short-term popularity make them complacent when it comes to political and intellectual seriousness. 

Left, where Sophia Sheera writes:

Defeated Reform parliamentary candidate Matt Goodwin has been accused of using ChatGPT to research his latest book.

Goodwin, the GB News presenter who contested the Gorton and Denton byelection last month, published Suicide of a Nation: Immigration, Islam, Identity on 16 March. 

Early readers of the book say that it includes fake quotes, cites non-existent articles and relies on “AI hallucinations” to make statistical claims.

“I’m only 5 chapters in and have found a huge amount of what appears to be false quotes and basic misinterpretations of data that appear to be AI hallucinations,” wrote Andy Twelves, a New Statesman contributor, in a long thread on X.

Twelves accused Goodwin of “statistical illiteracy” regarding the claim that most primary schoolchildren in Leicester, Luton and Slough do not speak English as a “main language”. Children who grow up speaking an additional language at home are more than capable of speaking English fluently or as a “main language” at school, Twelves pointed out.

Goodwin’s book also includes quotations from Roman statesman Cicero, economist Friedrich Hayek and political theorist James Burnham – but Twelves claims that none of the quotes exist in the public domain.

John Merrick, deputy editor of The Break-Down, pointed out that several of the book’s footnotes include ChatGPT in the URL – meaning the source of information was not found by Goodwin, but generated by the AI chatbot.

“If the research of Goodwin’s book was conducted mainly by AI, then he’s done a terrible job of hiding it,” Merrick wrote on X.

He added that there are only 12 footnotes in the book, with five referring to Goodwin’s own Substack and two generated by ChatGPT.

Multiple X users who have criticised Goodwin’s methods claim that he has since blocked them.

Goodwin responded: “Everything in this book is based on official UK census data and the very same projections that are used by the Office for National Statistics and expert demographers.”

He added: “The Left don’t want you to read it, they don’t want you to know what is in this book, because they do not want you to know what is happening around you.”

Goodwin was a professor of politics at the University of Kent for nine years until 2024. In February he ran for MP against Green candidate and plumber Hannah Spencer, who won the vote by a margin of over 4,000.

And centre, where Mic Wright writes:

When the journalist Andy Twelves took a look through Matt Goodwin’s latest book – Suicide of a Nation – he uncovered a litany of false quotes, misinterpreted data, and a heavy reliance on the deceptive output of ChatGPT in the first five chapters alone. There are 12 references in the book; five are to Goodwin’s own Substack; three indicate they were sourced via ChatGPT; plus one Telegraph article, which quotes… Matt Goodwin.

At first, Goodwin’s response was to crow on X that the Left were “driving the algorithm” and simply contributing to the sales of the book. After 24 hours of consistent pressure, he returned with a long attempt at rebutting the objections, titled with his characteristic pompousness, ‘A response to my critics’. But while he dismisses criticism of his use of AI – claiming he simply used it to “[obtain] datasets… [which were] cross-checked with the original source” – defends his use of statistics and argues that the book’s paucity of references is not a problem, he does not address the issue of fabricated quotes.

In Twelve’s original thread of X, he identified quotes that Goodwin attributes to Cicero, Hayek and James Burnham that do not exist in the published works of the three men. I’ve also been through Suicide of a Nation and found other examples of what appear to be fabricated quotations. A particularly bad example can be found early in Chapter one when Goodwin claims that the American lexicographer Noah Webster wrote: “Language is the tie that connects past with future, and binds together the citizens of the same nation.”

Webster, whose central project was the evolution of a distinctly American English, did not compose that quote. Instead, he wrote: “A national language is a band of national union.” Goodwin attempts to bolster his false claim that “millions no longer speak the national tongue” with a quote that appears to be fabricated and is spun off from an entirely different argument made in a totally different context.

I don’t use ChatGPT or any other generative AI tools in my work, but it’s clear from the book references and his subsequent statements that Goodwin does, so I asked ChatGPT about Webster and the line “language is the tie that connects past with future…” At first, it claimed that the quote was taken directly from Webster’s work, but when I asked for the source, it said it is attributed to him but “not found verbatim in his major writings”.

It then went on to caution that “if you need to cite it academically, avoid using the quote as a direct citation”. That suggests that ChatGPT has a more stringent approach to referencing than the former professor, Matt ‘MattGPT’ Goodwin.

Let’s look at another of the seemingly fabricated quotes. Also in Chapter one, Goodwin writes: “As the American writer Christopher Lasch once warned: ‘A country without collective memory, shared identity, and emotional loyalty cannot withstand the centrifugal forces of individualism and group difference’.” Again, the quote doesn’t seem to appear in any of Lasch’s publicly available published work or interviews, and that clunky triad at the beginning has all the hallmarks of AI writing.

Where Goodwin cites statistics or research in the book, they’re almost always presented in the same way as they appeared in a newspaper article, usually from the Daily Telegraph, but occasionally from the Daily Mail or The Times. For example, Goodwin writes:

“In 2025, the NHS spent £64m million solely on translation services, enough to cover the annual salaries of nearly 2,000 nurses.”

In a Daily Telegraph report published on 13 September 2025, the line reads: “The data show that the total spending on translation and interpretation over the five financial years was £243m – equivalent to the cost of employing nearly 2,000 NHS nurses.”

Notice that Goodwin’s removes any reference to interpretation. As NHS consultant, David Oliver wrote for Byline Times back in 2024, in reference to similar stories published by the Daily Express, “£100 million on translation might sound like a big number, but it is a tiny fraction of expenditure and would make little dent in nurse staffing across all NHS organisations.”

Goodwin doesn’t just regurgitate lines from the newspapers. He’s also very keen on a partial quote and a tossing aside of context. One example of that is when he writes: “Andrew Neather, speechwriter to Tony Blair and his immigration minister Barbara Roche, admitted in 2009, [that] mass immigration had been a deliberate policy. The aim, he said, was to ‘rub the Right’s nose in diversity’.” Now, Nether did write those words, but in an Evening Standard column headlined Don’t listen to the whingers – London needs immigrants and in a paragraph that read in full:

“I remember coming away from some discussions with the clear sense that the policy was intended – even if this wasn’t its main purpose – to rub the Right’s nose in diversity and render their arguments out of date. That seemed to me to be a manoeuvre too far.”

With that context, the line becomes a lot less punchy than the six words dropped into the heart of Goodwin’s anti-immigration invective.

Putting aside the intellectual dishonesty that runs through Goodwin’s work, like the message in a peculiarly poisonous stick of Blackpool rock, there’s a wider danger from this kind of book. Those fabricated quotes will enter the information stream and, when generative AI gobbles them up, will end up being treated as real. Goodwin tells his readers, “The elites will attack me because I wrote this for you. They will call me every name under the sun because I dare to tell you the truth.” These are the words of a man making a preemptive strike, of someone who knows full well that his book is a carnival barker’s act that he’s trying to pass off as a statesman-like argument.

This is about more than a bad book by Reform’s notorious bad loser. Goodwin is explicit that he aims to further shift the Overton Window of acceptable political discourse. He assumes that he can wave his book around and use it to justify his position as a commentator and thinker, safe in the knowledge that most people – even those who buy it – won’t read it.

Not only is it a badly written, self-satisfied, and smug book, but it’s also filled with falsehoods and inventions. If they go unchallenged, they pile up over time and ossify into received wisdom, raised as proof purely because someone stuck them between covers. MattGPT is as bad for the intellectual ecosystem as ChatGPT is for the environment.

Beyond The Blue Fringe

The man who demanded that the Premier League lift its cap on foreign players has finally registered Restore Britain as the political party of remigration. Among those who have signed up is my former colleague, and the owner of a name straight out of The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, Milo Yiannopoulos. All eyes are now on the superstar of Telegraph Blogs, James Delingpole, who says that nuclear weapons do not exist, and who could not go back to the Telegraph, since, unlike back in the day, he could not now swear allegiance the State of Israel.

Bonnie Blue sounds like a place name, so let Nigel Farage name a new town after her. And put her on a banknote? The mind boggles. Nick Timothy was a key player in the proven hoax that gave rise to the Prevent to which he will be very lucky to avoid being referred. While I feel for Matt Goodwin as a fellow failed parliamentary candidate who has also been known to self-publish, my sympathy is nevertheless limited, since I have never published anything that had been written by Artificial Intelligence, and if I did, then I certainly would not list ChatGPT as a source in my footnotes. And much more fun besides.

But there is also serious work to be done. Everyone who campaigned against abortion up to birth also campaigned against assisted suicide, yet it was the less popular measure that succeeded. Assisted suicide was opposed by all of the Independent Alliance, by most of the Socialist Campaign Group, and by most of its allies. Now we need to apply to infanticide, among very many other things, the arguments that have in principle become the consensus on the Left. What other hope is there? People who think that nuclear weapons do not exist?

If This Is The Vanguard

Tom Cotterill writes:

More than 170 Royal Navy sailors serving in the elite nuclear submarine force have been caught using drugs over the past seven years. The submariners tested positive for a variety of banned or illegal substances including cocaine, cannabis, ecstasy and steroids. Other banned narcotics found during random, unannounced tests included benzodiazepine, a drug for treating anxiety and insomnia. According to the latest figures from the Ministry of Defence (MoD), 175 submariners tested positive for drugs over seven years, from 2018 to 2024. In 52 of the cases, the submariners were serving on a submarine at the time they were caught taking narcotics, with 12 of the cases occurring in 2024.

Almost all of those caught have been fired, with the MoD saying it had a zero tolerance policy towards drug abuse. Sources added that a small number of personnel might have been spared punishment for taking substances that they were unaware were banned, or if they had mitigating circumstances. The MoD said no drugs had been found in any search of a submarine in the past seven years. However, the positive tests are sure to raise security concerns. It is believed some of those who failed drugs tests were working on Britain’s fleet of four Vanguard-class submarines, each worth around £6bn. The boats carry the UK’s ultimate weapons, the Trident 2 nuclear missiles, with one always at sea at any one time.

Philip Ingram, a former colonel in British military intelligence, said: “There is no place for drugs in our Armed Forces, and especially in sensitive areas such as the submarine service where there is an increased security risk of drug-takers being blackmailed for classified and sensitive insights. The numbers unfortunately reflect the prevalence of drugs in society and that service personnel, often under huge pressure, succumb to temptation like their civilian counterparts. However, there should never be an excuse, and zero tolerance is the only right way forward.”

The submarine service is facing increased pressure, with sailors serving on the Vanguard vessels facing longer stints at sea. Last year, one boat returned to HMNB Clyde, in Scotland, after a record-breaking 204 days underwater. At the same time, efforts to deploy the Navy’s six Astute-class hunter-killer submarines have become increasingly challenging, with much of the fleet stuck in port and unable to go to sea. Former Navy commanders fear some sailors are turning to drugs to cope with the demands they are facing. Cdr Tom Sharpe, a retired frigate captain, said the Navy was tackling drug-taking, adding: “Taking drugs on a submarine is unacceptable, and they will be sent to jail. If you do something that imperils your ship deliberately, you’re in deep water.”

Cdr Ryan Ramsey, a former submarine captain, said the potential sacking of sailors caught taking drugs could have a dramatic “knock-on effect” on the service. “I’m not shocked by the number, really, but it is disappointing,” he said. “It’s probably symptomatic of a change in society towards drugs and boredom at not being at sea on operations. The Royal Navy detection system clearly works and they deal with those who are caught, but this doesn’t reach the root cause of why the individuals do this. The impact of losing people that you have spent money and time on specialist submarine training is significant. It means it increases the burden on other individuals on board if people suddenly leave.”

The MoD said it had robust measures in place to crack down on drug use by Armed Forces personnel. A Navy spokesman said: “We operate a strict zero-tolerance policy towards drug misuse. Any individual found to have breached this policy can expect to face serious consequences, including immediate discharge from the service. Such behaviour is entirely incompatible with the high standards of professionalism, discipline and integrity expected. All personnel are required to undertake mandatory alcohol and substance misuse training on a biennial basis, ensuring they remain fully aware of their responsibilities and the consequences of non-compliance.”

Rituals of Survival in Tehran

Najmeh Bozorgmehr brings us a true gem:

The sweetest things arrive at the most brutal moments. In Tehran, under bombardment, the craving comes almost instantly — after the blast, after the tremor, when someone reaches for something sugary. Jam appears. A piece of pastry is broken in half and shared.

It sounds surreal to speak of desserts in a city under sustained air strikes. But the body insists. There are quiet rituals of survival, ways of telling yourself you have endured another explosion, and you are still here.

Since February 28, when the US-Israeli war on Iran began, these small rituals have been holding a fragile line against panic.

There is nothing abstract about fear. In the heaviest strikes, every cell in your body shakes. The sound does not feel external; it travels through you, as if your bones themselves are echoing. In those moments, the mind has questions: is this the one? And, worse still, what if I survive, but someone I love does not? What if we all survive, only to step outside and find that the home that held our lives together is gone?

This cycle repeats itself several times a day and almost every night. Sleep becomes fragile. You lie down knowing you may be pulled awake by the roar of fighter jets or a violent blast. Even in silence, your mind rehearses what it fears most.

And yet, in the midst of this, life insists on continuing. What shall we have for lunch tomorrow? And the day after? The questions are not asked because tomorrow feels certain, but because it does not. Planning a meal becomes an act of defiance, a refusal to surrender entirely to fear. “How about dinner?” someone asks, as if the world has not just shaken.

A friend who sells organic food says she sold more raspberry jam in the first two weeks of war than in the entire previous year. Bakeries remain open, their ovens working through the bombardment, filling streets and homes with the smell of fresh flatbread. These are signals that the city is still alive.

The first need after every explosion is confirmation: we are all alive — so far. Phones light up with text messages. Calls from friends and relatives overlap. Voices tremble with relief. “We’re OK.”

Supermarket shelves remain stocked and people reassure each other: there is food, there is bread, there is enough. But immediately another thought follows: for whom? You eat and wonder who cannot. You sit at a table and think of families struggling to put even a simple meal in front of their children. In a stagnant economy, those who live on daily wages are pushed further to the edge.

There are moments that reveal a kind of dignity that feels almost unbearable to witness. The roads are dangerous, the bombs unpredictable, but people are still insisting on coming to work. It is both humbling and devastating to see how hard people fight for the most basic needs, how much harder life becomes for those already carrying its heaviest burdens.

What makes this war harder to comprehend is not only its violence but its immediacy. This is a modern city, in the present day. War feels like something that should have been left behind, a brutal inheritance of another century.

There are no sirens to prepare you. The first notice is the explosion itself and then the most humiliating feeling one can experience.

The psychological toll extends into the glow of television screens, into competing narratives. Channels are flipped rapidly: state broadcasts declaring resilience and victory, opposition voices predicting the imminent collapse of the regime. Underneath it all, people absorb not only the shockwaves of bombs but the distortions of information, unsure where the truth resides.

Beyond the borders, the world is watching. So is the Iranian diaspora. Some even celebrate. There are images of expatriates dancing, convinced that this war will bring transformation, that destruction will clear the way for something better. It is a distant optimism that feels incomprehensible from within the blast radius. Support for war becomes something else entirely when the missiles land close enough to rattle your windows.

Responsibility dissolves in the noise. Every side deflects blame. Meanwhile, ordinary people stand in the middle, absorbing the consequences. For now, life is measured in small intervals: between explosions, between cups of tea, between messages confirming that another loved one has made it through another night.

Sea View

Chris Haslam writes:

Another week and yet another horror story from the nation’s privately owned water companies as a Times investigation reveals that raw sewage was illegally dumped into our rivers and seas on more than 15,000 occasions last year.

The top five offenders were Wessex Water, with 1,474 offences; Anglian Water with 1,479; Severn Trent with 1,610; debt-ridden Thames Water with 1,983; and South West Water, which illegally dumped sewage in seas around Devon and Cornwall a staggering 4,345 times in 2025.

But such revelations, while horrifying, are now routine and the responses from the water companies so predictable that we could write them ourselves: “We’re investing billions in building a super-duper infrastructure to keep you, your kids and your dogs safe at the seaside #yay.”

They’re taking the piss. And then dumping it in our seas. Last May, on the first day of my 17th circumnavigation of the British coast to research The Times and Sunday Times 50 best beaches for 2025, I fell sick with violent diarrhoea and vomiting within hours of a swim at Holme next the Sea in Norfolk.

On day five my Jack Russell, Dave T Dog, fell into a pit of raw sewage on a track below the Maer Lane sewage works at Exmouth in Devon. He was sick for four days. I was unaware, as you might have been, that sewage had been leaking from there for months and that East Devon District Council had warned locals four months earlier to keep pets out of the area.

In seven weeks I’ll set off for the 18th year to inspect the coastlines of England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. The most notable change I’ve registered in nearly two decades is that in our attitude to our beaches. What once were playgrounds have become minefields where washed-up wet wipes are wrapped around the bladderwrack, earbuds lurk in razor shells and a dip in the sea could ruin your week — or worse.

Did the Thatcher government know that a trip to the seaside would require a risk assessment when it sold off the water companies in 1989? Or was this another unseen consequence of the prioritisation of profit over public safety?

Either way, 37 years of platitudes, action plans, investment strategies and fob-offs from government, water companies and the feeble Environment Agency have brought us to what the Undertones singer and water campaigner Feargal Sharkey has described as “one of the greatest acts of criminality and lawbreaking that we’ve witnessed in the modern world in this country”.

Let’s be clear: dumping a toxic cocktail of untreated sewage a few hundred feet out to sea when you’ve spent billions paying dividends to foreign investors rather than upgrading infrastructure is little different from fly-tipping.

Get caught dumping an old mattress down a quiet lane and you face a £400 fixed penalty. Get caught dumping sewage for 46,191 hours — as South West Water did in 2025 — and, in theory, you face up to two years in prison according to legislation introduced in 2025 aimed at circumventing corporate personhood, which protects the guilty by making the company they work for liable for their crimes.

But will judges have the courage to put the chief executive of a water company on a six-figure salary — plus bonus — behind bars?

Last week South West Water pleaded guilty at Plymouth Magistrates Court to 18 illegal pollution incidents between 2015 and 2021 in Bodmin, Harlyn Bay, Truro, Polperro and Plymouth. Sentencing is scheduled for June, but if magistrates think a fine will make the West Country’s beaches safer for families they should check the records. In 2023, the same court fined South West Water £2.15 million for almost identical offences.

The Times investigation of illegal spills in 2025 offers, in South West Water’s case, 4,345 reasons to suspect that the penalty has not worked as a deterrent. A custodial sentence, however, may serve to remind water company executives of their duties to the public.

And then renationalise water. Just do it.

Prize Draw?

Fraser Nelson writes:

The general election may be years away but Nigel Farage is already acting like a winner — and one flush with cash. His political campaigns are starting to look like gameshow giveaways, with huge cash prizes for all. We have seen a Reform UK petrol station selling cut-price fuel. This week Farage announced a prize draw where Reform will pay not just for your electricity but that of your whole street. In the current local election campaigns, Reform seems to be outspending every other party, and by a country mile.

On a personal level, Farage also seems to have never had it so good. Last week he announced he is personally investing £215,000 in a Bitcoin company chaired by none other than Kwasi Kwarteng. Not a name that normally inspires much financial confidence, but with crypto it’s all about hype. As Farage would have expected, the share price of the tiny Stack BTC jumped so far that at one point it quadrupled. On paper, at least, he made more in a day than many of his Clacton constituents make in a decade.

The struggle takes many forms and Reform is certainly a revolutionary party. Farage’s allies say he has always had outside business interests. But this new one could be his most lucrative, with a bonus potentially worth millions being triggered if Stack’s market valuation hits £100 million. It’s a ludicrously ambitious for a company that produces nothing. But crypto does not operate on conventional metrics. Its calculations move on narrative, momentum and perceived political tailwinds.

If investors come to believe that Nigel Farage is within reach of No 10 — and that a Reform government would actively promote his crypto backers — the upside becomes self-fulfilling. The investment is not just a bet on Bitcoin but on political power itself. It was only a matter of time before the worlds of crypto and populist-right politics found each other. They arguably both originate from the 2008 financial crash. Banks were bailed out by the taxpayer and a precedent was set: when governments are in a jam (a crash, lockdowns) they start printing money. The experts will tell you that it’s safe, that it won’t lead to rampant inflation. Few foresaw either the asset price inflation after the crash (which sent prices of shares and property surging) or the two lost decades for pay growth.

Kwasi Kwarteng gets his spelling wrong

The result? The richest became a lot richer and the workers were marooned. This led to a feeling that the system is rigged, and demand for radical change. During the crash, a paper was published under the name of “Satoshi Nakamoto” asking a simple question: why, in the digital age, could money not be taken out of the hands of governments and banks entirely? Why could there not be a digitally created currency that no central bank could print or inflate, no government could manipulate, no financial crisis could corrupt? The answer was Bitcoin

 Its anonymous creator hard-coded a fixed supply of 21 million coins into its design and set it loose on the internet. Early adopters saw it less as an investment than an act of political defiance, a way of opting out of a corrupt financial system. For years, Bitcoin remained a niche obsession of cyberpunks, libertarians and monetary cranks on the fringes of tech and finance. And then, mysteriously, it started to be worth something.

Bubbles burst. Bitcoin revives. From near-zero it rose to $1, then to $1,000, collapsed, recovered and then surged again to $20,000 in 2017. Each time it was declared finished, each time it returned larger. What changed was not just the price, but perception. It was at first dismissed as a curiosity or a scam but after multiple cycles it began to look like something else: an asset whose volatility was the point rather than a flaw. Boom and bust were not signs of failure but features of a system driven by belief. With each recovery, the pool of believers widened — and with it the scale of the next surge. Even sceptics started to ask whether they were witnessing not a bubble but a new kind of market altogether.

One of those sceptics-turned-believers was a British businessman based in Thailand. Christopher Harborne had made his first fortune in aviation fuel, supplying military aircraft across Asia. He was an early investor in ethereum, the second-biggest cryptocurrency, and holds a major stake Tether, the stablecoin that has become the closest thing to the dollar of the crypto world. With a staff of about 200, Tether generates profits to rival those of Goldman Sachs.

Last year, Harborne made the biggest donation in the history of British politics by giving £9 million to Reform, the latest in a long run of his support. This reclusive crypto king, who goes by the name of Chakrit Sakunkrit in Thailand, has provided two-thirds of all money given to Reform. It’s all perfectly legal: proposals to ban foreign residents from influencing UK politics were never enacted. But the crypto factor marks a conflict of interest that has never been formally acknowledged, let alone managed. And it raises obvious concerns, given what’s been happening on the other side of the Atlantic.

Donald Trump was a late convert to crypto and was calling Bitcoin a “scam” as late as 2021. “I don’t like it,” he said then, “It’s another currency competing against the dollar.” But he then discovered the crypto world was anti-government, anti-establishment, anti-regulation and served as a massive source of political funding. During the 2024 election campaign, crypto money didn’t just flow into American politics; it was a flood, and ended up accounting for nearly half of all company donations. No other sector — Big Pharma, oil, Wall Street — came close. “The crypto army is striking,” declared Tyler Winklevoss, co-founder of the crypto exchange Gemini, as the various crypto-backed candidates started to win. Or take down their enemies: they spent $40 million to oust Sherrod Brown, a US senator who ran an investigation into links between Bitcoin and terrorism.

When Donald Trump arrived in the White House, he was as good as his word and set about making America the “crypto capital of the world”. The US crypto investigations unit, set up to root out fraud and money laundering in the industry, was disbanded. The US government was to hoard Bitcoin as a national asset the way other countries hold gold. Bitcoin surged. The Trump family lost no time getting in on the action. A digital token called $TRUMP was launched, which had no underlying value, no product, no business — nothing except the name. It was soon worth $10 billion. At one stage, the First Lady launched her Melania coin.

Melania Coin

These ventures crashed, as is the nature of such things. But the more lasting venture was a crypto operation called World Liberty Financial with Eric Trump, Donald Trump Jr and 19-year-old Barron Trump (listed as the project’s “DeFi visionary”). It’s worth about $2 billion.

Now the “crypto army” is marching on London, the currency exchange capital of the world. America has shown the model: enlist the leader, promise to make him rich (or even richer) and then wait for him to throw open the financial gates for you. “When it comes to your industry, then I am your champion,” Farage told a crypto conference last year. “What we’re going to need is a ‘Big Bang 2’.” He wants a Bitcoin reserve at the Bank of England and tax on crypto deals cut from 24 per cent to 10 per cent. He’d set up a sovereign wealth fund comprised of crypto assets.

Brave new Bitcoin world in Britain

If this brave new Bitcoin world ever comes to pass in the UK, it will be good business for Stack BTC. It is what’s known as a “Bitcoin treasury company”: one that exists simply to buy and hold crypto. It has a peculiar business model. If investors value your shares above the Bitcoin you own, you can issue new stock, use the proceeds to buy more Bitcoin and thereby justify a higher valuation. The cycle feeds on itself. To its enthusiasts, it is an “infinite money glitch” and one that has attracted tens of billions of dollars worldwide.

Metaplanet, a lossmaking Tokyo hotel group, adopted the strategy and saw its stock rise 15-fold in under a year. A Florida toymaker followed. So did nail salons and electric-bike firms. The common ingredient is not the underlying business but the story being told. The biggest shareholder in Stack BTC is not Kwasi Kwarteng but Paul Withers, co-founder of the precious metals trader Direct Bullion — which has previously paid Farage some £400,000 to advertise gold coin investments to his supporters. The gold salesman, it seems, has gone digital.

Just two years ago, Kwarteng was dismissing Bitcoin as “a total crapshoot”. Now he’s the face of its future. In his Stack BTC video address, his first since delivering Liz Truss’s calamitous mini-Budget, he spoke of his company’s “institutional credibility”. As he said the c-word, it was slapped on the screen — its impact only slightly reduced by the misspelling (“credability”). But the numbers tell the real tale: shares at 1½p a month ago, Farage buying at 5p, a spike to 20p, now offered at 10p. The company is valued at roughly £9 million. Farage’s bonus depends on that valuation reaching £100 million. In a conventional business, that would require heroic growth of profits or output. Here, it requires belief: that he might reach No 10, and that policy will follow.

Farage would be pro-crypto even without Thai donors. It’s a natural fit for his kind of politics and Britain has been undeniably slow to adjust to the new realities. Millions of Brits (and a quarter of under-35s) own crypto. BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, holds more Bitcoin than it does gold. A new system is on the way: investor protection rules, anti-money laundering oversight and the other basics. But the Farage vision (and that of Trump) go further: an explicitly pro-crypto government, offering special privileges and a lower tax rate. This is not just playing fields. It’s using government power to pick winners.

The theme emerging here isn’t Thatcherism or socialism but something else: state capitalism. Where a political party overtly aligns itself with certain companies or sectors and acts in their interests. Farage proposes, for example, to stop the Bank of England paying interest on certain deposits placed by normal banks, saying it would save £40 billion. “Some of the banks won’t like it,” he said in Davos. “Well, I don’t like the banks very much because they debanked me, didn’t they?”

The closure of his personal account by Coutts was, at the time, a scandal. But what’s new is his follow-up logic: banks annoy him, so he will legislate against the banks. Crypto pleases him, so he will legislate to benefit crypto. This isn’t petulance but a careful model of political power from the playbook of what Viktor Orban calls “illiberal Conservatism”. It defines itself against the Reagan/Thatcher model, revels in its bad-boy status and frames politics as a battle of culture. So what may be seen as an egregious conflict of interest (politicians and crypto) is reframed as a power alliance against the reviled establishment.

It’s not new. Silvio Berlusconi prided himself on mixing his own business interests with being prime minister of Italy. Orban’s best friend from childhood, a former plumber, is now the richest man in Hungary. The crony capitalist model may appal some voters. But others see — and admire — strength. A leader who can call companies to heel, who can get things done: and if he makes a bit of money for himself on the side, what’s the problem? This model has been the scourge of post-communist states in eastern Europe fighting corruption. The odd thing is that the “illiberal Conservative” model is coming to the West.

Picking winners, punishing rebels

Trump is also picking winners and punishing those who resist. When Anthropic refused to allow the Pentagon unrestricted use of its Claude AI — objecting to automated weapons and mass surveillance of Americans — Trump didn’t simply cancel the contract. Anthropic was officially designated an “unacceptable risk” to national security, a status previously reserved for Chinese and Russian state-linked firms. The contract was given to OpenAI, whose president and chief executive had donated $26 million to Trump’s political operation. The message to corporate America: obedience is rewarded; independence is punished.

Farage presents Reform UK as a vehicle to bypass elites, back new technology and return power to “the people”. But the direction of travel points elsewhere. When politicians hold stakes in the sectors they promote, promise regulatory favours to friends and openly threaten disfavoured companies, the boundary between public policy and private gain begins to dissolve. What emerges is not a freer market but a managed one where advantage flows through proximity to power. The risk is that it starts to look less like a revolution and more like a racket.

This month Lord Chadlington, a Tory peer, resigned from the House of Lords after an investigation found he used parliamentary access to assist a company in which he held a financial interest. He argued that he acted in good faith during the Covid emergency, but accepted that even the appearance of a conflict of interest warranted stepping down rather than contesting a lengthy suspension.

That reflects an older expectation: that public office requires distance from private gain; that crossing the line carries consequences. Chadlington, 83, acted on an old code. Farage is building a new one. Britain has seen versions of this before in milder form and has long prided itself on resisting it. The danger now is not a sudden break but a gradual normalisation: incentives aligning, rules bending, expectations shifting.

By the time it is obvious, it is already embedded. The question is not whether a new, populist model can generate excitement or wide public support: it quite clearly can. The question is whether a political elite that rigs the system to suit its friends can really be trusted to serve anyone else.

BlackRock holds more Bitcoin than it does gold? This BlackRock? But a crypto launched by a Kwasi is funny in itself. Other than Nigel Farage, who could possibly think that anything involving Kwasi Kwarteng were an investment opportunity? Why would you want anyone of that mind as First Lord of the Treasury? And when Farage and Kwarteng launched their product, then would it make some sort of reference to Winston Churchill, or would that invite retaliation from those insurance people with the dog?

Having taken £12 million from Christopher Harborne, Reform UK’s ties to cryptocurrencies are very much current and very far from cryptic. There is being right-wing, and then there is having two kings. But do you have to take a Thai name to be naturalised in Thailand? If not, then why does Harborne have “Christopher Harborne” on his British passport, but “Chakrit Sakunkrit” on his Thai one? Harbone’s generosity has made Nigel Farage the political spokesman for cryptocurrencies, and specifically for Harbone’s Tether.

Yet the speculative value of cryptocurrencies is hurtling towards their intrinsic value of zero. A suspicious number of those who decry us sceptics of the cashless society also claim that we are under constant threat of cyberattacks, and a surprising number of those who are forthright against the cashless society are enthusiasts for cryptocurrencies, about which the clue is in the name. In the cashless economy, every penny that we spent would be tracked. Cryptocurrencies are beyond democratic political control. The combination of the two would be, and increasingly is, that level of tracking by those who were thus unaccountable.

Unaccountable not least because Tony Blair and Gordon Brown surrendered democratic political control over monetary policy, a surrender for which they had no electoral mandate but which they had plotted in Opposition, just as Keir Starmer and his cronies plotted fiscal drag, assisted suicide, puberty blockers, digital ID, facial recognition, the abolition of trial by jury, the taxation of family farms to the point that they would have to sell up to giant American agribusinesses, and much more to which we have yet to be made privy. At least Brown did keep us out of the euro. Much to the chagrin of Peter Mandelson, who used to enjoy the hospitality of George Osborne. Osborne has recently said that he would never have paid off Mandelson, but he would say that now, wouldn’t he? Whitney Webb and Mark Goodwin have vital information, with a book due out this year, about the Epstein network’s connections to cryptocurrencies. Osborne has written in the venerable pages of the Financial Times that Britain risked being “left behind” by stablecoins.

All that, and digital ID and facial recognition, too? Starmer has said that to access our own money, we would need the digital ID that the Tony Blair Institute would have linked to facial recognition. Expect it to be illegal to fail to produce whichever form of it a state functionary demanded, and impossible to make or receive payment without it. There is a word for the merger of state and corporate power to the point of the physical violence on which that merger depended. Not that it would be anything new in this country. If the spycops inquiry received anything like the coverage that it deserved, then digital ID would have public approval below 10 per cent. Facial recognition probably already does. Reform wants to hold the line against them. But it already has 12 million reasons why it cannot.

The Reign In Spain No More?

Jack Davey writes:

After years of near-unquestioned loyalty, the Spanish Right is turning against its King. Felipe VI’s recent acknowledgment “many abuses” and “ethical controversies” committed by the Spanish Empire has sparked outrage among the nation’s reactionaries. As Spanish politics polarises, the monarchy is emerging as the next front in the country’s political realignment.

Speaking at the opening of the exhibition Half the World: The Woman in Indigenous Mexico, Felipe VI drew attention to Spain’s own history. In a conversation with the Mexican ambassador about the empire, he admitted there was “a lot… a lot of abuse” and said Spain “needs to learn lessons, as there were fights as well as moral and ethical controversies.”

That criticism proved too much for the country’s Right. Alberto Núñez Feijóo, leader of the moderate conservative Partido Popular (PP), reaffirmed his “pride” in Spain’s legacy in the Americas, adding that “making a judgement in the 21st century of things that happened in the 15th is nonsense.”

The hard Right Vox, meanwhile, went further. The party’s spokesperson, Pepa Millán, hailed the Spanish enterprise in the Americas as “the greatest evangelising and civilising mission in world history.” Vox’s official stance denies the catastrophic impact on indigenous peoples, describing the conquistadors’ actions as the opposite of “the greatest genocide” in the New World.

Spain’s empire remains a particularly sensitive topic for conservatives. Critiques are seen not just through the lens of Left-wing identity-politics revanchism but also the Anglo-Saxon Black Legend — a Protestant-era narrative that Spaniards still view as a tool to single out their history as uniquely brutal compared with other European empires. Responding to the King, the PP’s spokesperson emphasised that “in Hispano-America there is a legacy of brotherhood between peoples; there are no ghettos like in the British Empire.”

This isn’t the first time Felipe VI has faced criticism for appearing too close to the PSOE government. Vox European Parliamentarian Hermann Tertsch posted on X that “many of us don’t understand your formal and almost habitual support for the arguments of those who only want to damage Spain’s history.”

In September, the King drew further ire from conservatives by calling for an “end to the killing” in Gaza. While the statement received international praise, Vox dismissed it, claiming that “in New York the King has read a socialist, globalist, totalitarian pamphlet.” A more measured critique suggested that Pedro Sánchez had “tricked” the King into “defending the indefensible,” but the episode remains a point of contention.

Since the 1978 democratic transition, the Crown has been a central pillar of Right-wing identification with the Spanish state. The monarchy still commands overwhelming favourability among Right-wing voters. But there is now a strand on the Right that is more openly criticising the King, marking a significant shift in the country’s political landscape.

The backlash against Felipe VI forms a part of a broader nationalist disenchantment with the constitutional order. Repeated elections have returned socialist governments despite a majority of self-identified Spanish national voters backing parties of the Right. For many Vox supporters, the King is no longer a counterweight within the establishment but an integral part of a system they believe works against them.

If Spain’s Right finally breaks with the Crown, it will mark the end of one of the defining bargains of the post-Franco order. The monarchy was meant to embody unity above politics; instead, it is being dragged into the very conflicts it was designed to contain. Once that line is crossed, it is not easily redrawn.

Like here, then. I have been expecting pretty much this sort of right-wing republicanism in Britain for decades, and it is now on the rise. Meanwhile, the Carlist line never reigned, but it runs deep in Spanish monarchism that the present dynasty is not quite pukka. Spain was at its most right-wing when the monarchy did not in practice exist, still well within living memory, and the Restoration was supposed to make the monarchy a bulwark against the forces that had become both sides of the Civil War, so that the successors of either have no more reason than those of the other to love it or even to tolerate it. Again, that is not without parallels in the United Kingdom.