BritanniQ: The Cummings Revolution
The following opens the latest issue of BritanniQ, Bournbrook’s weekly newsletter in which A D M Collingwood curates essays, podcasts, books and quietly patriotic beauty, and sends the best directly to your inbox.
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The Cummings Revolution
Dominic Cummings and Peter Hitchens have more in common than might be apparent — or either man would care to admit. Both share a distain for the quality of our political class, lamenting in the strongest possible terms their preference for in-group signaling and cheap soundbites over hard policy thinking and legislating. Both men suggest that education is at the heart of this problem. Both have identified the potential for convening a supermajority in Britain based on a platform that is left of centre economically and right leaning socially. Both see the need, in different ways, for near revolutionary reform in the mechanisms of state. Both men even lived and worked in Russia. Somewhere, between Cummings’s whizz-bang schemes and Peter Hitchens’s deeply conservative commonsense, there is a programme for a British rebirth.
Thus, we start this week with two podcasts. First, Cummings appears on Steve Hsu’s excellent Manifold podcast for a longform interview reviewing much of Cummings’s life. The former prime ministerial adviser offers a number of fascinating insights, including how polling is misunderstood, the misplaced priorities of the political class, how the metropolitan liberals were so easily duped by a baseless conspiracy theory, and the general (and startling) hysteria in Westminster when Boris Johnson took over. Secondly, Peter Hitchens discusses his new book, A Revolution Betrayed, about the abolition of the grammar school system, with William Clouston, the leader of the SDP. To listen is to feel infuriated at the future Britain lost. As the acclaimed historian David Kynaston has written elsewhere:
“But what if [grammar schools] had not [been abolished]? If instead this rival elite had continued to grow and prosper? No chillaxing David Cameron, no languidly entitled Jacob Rees-Mogg, no cakeist Boris Johnson, but a focused, industrious, unsentimental generation of meritocrats, able to take and implement the long scientific and rational view in the overall national interest?”
