The King's Shilling

Why I won’t be joining the 'Transition to War' in a nation that hates itself. Yet.

Ahoy, mateys.

Apologies for the radio silence, my friends. I have no excuse. Other than a general rumination and paralysis of thought.

I don’t wish my writing to be a list of complaints or rants. I don’t want to imply that I have any special abilities or insights. Only, perhaps, a unique perspective. For what that may be worth.

Photo by Michael Afonso on Unsplash

We’ve had Donald Trump as emperor of the Western World™ for about 14 months now. I think it’s fair to say that things have changed somewhat since November 2024.

I do not think that the context of those changes has been remotely borne in mind by our pundit class, either in Scotland or the US. Although let’s be frank, the likes of Alistair Campbell (no relation) and Rory Stewart are so preoccupied with telling us how “Disgusting” Trump is, that political commentary on the centre-left has degenerated into effective nothingness.

The fact that these two were ‘power-adjacent’ during the Blair and Brown years, and the recent 15-year conservative reign, brings me great comfort. It lets me feel like the Satanic Cabal that exists in the conspiracy-minded online right, really is just misguided egoists who’ve been captured by a spirit of vanity and comfort, rather than any nefarious, consciously malevolent competence.

The events of 2025 let me draw the following conclusions:

• In January, as Trump used the ‘Pen and the Phone’ precedent to attempt to dismantle the deep state that had undermined him during the prior 8 years, the Pacific Palisades burned. The lesson was that deep-rooted leftism has already done the damage to California that no directed energy weapon ever could. Inertia and corruption are now fully baked into the culture of governance of that once great frontier of the West. A symbol of wealth and expansion now reduced to ash and decline.

• Cleaning house in the US civil service, and Tariffs were a symbol of a return to early republican values. There is again an ‘inside, and an outside’ to the nation. Something the nation state of Israel uncomfortably reminded us of in the West these past couple of years. The global economy did not, in fact, collapse. Yet.

• The Ukraine war isn’t going away. The munitions of the mighty West™ have been spent, even if our rhetoric has not. Russia sees itself as the last racially, ethnically, and religiously White (™?) empire on earth, and they are not yet spent. They do not believe that European liberal democracies or US multiculturalism are viable alternatives to their more traditional semi-feudal society. (Presumably, this means that Covid isn’t going to come back).

• MAHA has taught us that conspiracy theories with logic and evidence behind them are often tragically true. The limited liability corporation in bed with federal regulators granting ‘exemption and indemnity’ is a recipe for corrupt regulatory capture that engages in literal human sacrifice for the sake of profit. It has also taught us that fraud and human sacrifice are legal, and that nobody will go to jail for any of this, because everyone is guilty. Mutually assured destruction rules.

• Pope Francis has passed, but the woke church remains.

• The push for cashless societies and CBDCs has been made, and digital ID is being rammed down our throats, in spite of legitimate concerns and widespread failures and unpopularity.

• While it is unfashionable now to be associated with the discredited WEF, the likes of Keir Starmer will never quit. The forces of mistrust, malevolence, ego and nihilism only regroup, rebrand, and ram the ‘democratically legitimised will’ of the collectivist hive mind down our throats no matter what.

• DOGE and the very public lovers’ spat between Trump and Musk reminded us that politics is the art of the possible, not the art of the deal. Welfarism is here to stay until the collapse. If they couldn’t fix it in the United States of Boomerland, nobody is going to touch it here. (Remember DOGE?).

• 2025 taught me that my Pakistani friends are unlikely, if ever, to see the parallel that their nation of origin was created by the British Empire, as a religious ethno-state, a mere 10 months before Israel, and with the same authority. The Pakistani diaspora has a strong ‘in-group preference,’. Now, I don’t think there is anything wrong with peaceful in-group preference, as such. It is simply my observation that our state media seems to be fully aware of this preference and will play into it for political favour. Meanwhile, it will loudly decry Jewish, British or American in-group preference as inherently evil.

• 2025 taught me that no matter how much my Iranian friends suffer, and have to send money to their starving or suffering families back home - so they can afford to eat or avoid the democides enacted by their regime - the BBC and the international Left, will never, ever, ever, recognise the legitimacy of an uprising of people who love and support and hope for the liberating whizzbang of missiles sent by ‘Uncle Trump’ and ‘Uncle SAM’s’ F35s.

• 2025 showed us that leadership matters. That illegal immigration can be stopped. That patriotism can hold its own against nationalism. And that DEI was a top-down project that cost money, prosperity, and mental health, at the expense of the many for the benefit of the few. All they have to do is stop it.

• The AI arms race has shown us that the financialization of everything in a central-bank fiat economy means we will persist in refusing to learn any lessons, ever. We are headed full steam into another collapse and bailout, and from there into oblivion. Then war. (Depopulation, fake viruses, and fake climate change didn’t work, so sadly, global conflict is all we’ve got left to justify the end of entitlements/benefits).

• Nick Fuentes, Tucker Carlson, and Candace Owens have not, in fact, demonstrated that Die Juden control US politics. Rather, they have accidentally highlighted that the 60 million American Evangelicals who believe that the nation state of Israel forms a key part of their eschatological rapture theology (Invented by John Darby and some Scottish milkmaids in the 1830s, I believe) remain a powerful force in US electoral demographics.

• 2025 taught me that hundreds of millions of Muslims, Communists and Socialists in the UK and US still believe that 6 million Jews in Israel, and 5 million Jews in the US, control everything that happens in the world, including all of the terror attacks funded by Iran and committed against other Muslim nations. Also that you cannot criticise Jews because they own the media, even though everyone has spent the past two years criticising Jews and Israel publicly in the media. (For context, there are 21 million Campbells in the world. We outnumber Jews by double, and I am only very rarely accused of usury and blackmail). Here’s a clue, gang, if Mossad keep blackmailing you for pederasty, maybe stop paying money to human traffickers and f*cking little kids?

• The Butler, Pennsylvania, assassination attempt on Trump reminded me that symbolism happens. The fact that his ear was injured (probably by minor shrapnel), and his shoe fell off, had a nice symbolism to it. Something like a ‘head-to-toe’ completeness. Like, the inversion of reality we’ve endured from the Left in recent decades would be coming to a complete end. That the right will not be listening to sanctimonious Leftist sh*t anymore.

• The golf course assassination attempt also reminded us that they will not quit. There was also an alleged foiled plot by an Iranian-backed assassin as revenge for Trump taking out terrorist Soleimani. You get enemies just by daring to exist.

• The murder of Ukrainian refugee Iryna Zarutska on public transport in Charlotte, NC, was an inflexion point that hardened the hearts of many of us. Aside from the fact that you knew she was new to the country, because there is no middle-class white girl native to North Carolina who would be naïve enough to go sit with her back to a giant African American guy on a bus, with her headphones in. There just isn’t. This incident highlighted that the left will take the wrong side on any issue, no matter what, because they are 100% committed to disorder, at any cost. Their compassion for perpetrators over victims is not confined to political movements like the terror group Hamas, but is generalised towards all criminality. That is the true difference between Leftism and liberalism. It also made public transport and 15-minute cities a whole lot less appealing to the champagne socialist elites who push them.

Photo courtesy of the Washington Examiner.

• The assassination of Charlie Kirk was shocking and also massively symbolic. First, Trump’s ear, and now this young man’s throat was shot out. If the leader of the Right would be deaf to Leftist caterwauling, the left would remove the voice of the Right in retaliation. I think many of us knew instantly in that moment that there would be no peaceful acceptance of the democratic will that is now being witnessed all across Western nations, which is calling for peaceful, but firm, patriotic order to be restored.

  

Photo by By Gage Skidmore from Surprise, AZ, United States of America - Charlie Kirk, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=178421555

No. There is going to be a long and bloody battle, whether we like it or not. I do not believe that the shot was unlikely or impossible from a technical point of view.

However, I was deeply suspicious of the choice of target. To my mind, what was so surprising was the almost ‘time traveller’ forward thinking of an assassin to select a non-politician for such a strike. For sure, Charlie Kirk was influential.

Was this the most influential person they could take off the board after Trump fired DEI Secret Service hires and beefed up his private praetorian guard? The forethought and insight to target Charlie Kirk still seems suspiciously high-level and unanswered to me. Although no. I do not find Candace Owens’ dream interpretations or Tucker Carlson’s Qatari-funded ramblings to provide a compelling counter-narrative.

More recently:

• Maduro’s capture was a strategic masterpiece. What our pundit class fail to realise, probably because they haven’t been in a fist fight since they last got b*ggered in public school changing rooms, was that this was Mad-Dog Trump at his finest. High-tech surgical intervention. Actual enforcement of law, done internationally. Makes the left and the isolationist right furiously argue the case for further intervention in other states, in the name of ‘consistency.’ Reminds the world that the US now has a department of WAR, not of milquetoast Defense (Telos restored, euphemism denied). And he disarms the Libtards entirely by taking unashamed public responsibility for the fact that we need oil, and drug dealers need to die. This is the return of monarchy for 4 years, and people on the right are fully in support of it. Not only that, but this is the only way to communicate the Iranians, the Chinese, or the Russians that the US dollar is not backed by the UN, or consensus, or any other nice little story. It is backed by the might of the US military. You don’t get better bang for your buck than that.

• The shooting of Renee Good is also symbolic. It shows us that the ‘Covid-proof’ mob rule witnessed under the fake BLM and George Floyd debacle has had its day. We are now deaf to that, and immune.

So, there we are. All caught up and nicely digested.

In terms of the UK, Donald Trump is more important to us than anyone cares to admit.

As the author of the book Designated Security Duties, and as a supplier of technical authorship services to several marine security training centres around the UK, I have attended various security-related briefings this year. These briefings came from a variety of maritime security experts, industry leaders in autonomous shipping and counter-drone warfare, very senior Royal Navy officers, members of Parliament, the House of Lords, the Department for Transport, and so on.

(The content of some of these briefings was discussed on a ‘Chatham House Rules’ basis, so I am not here to name names or discuss the content of those specific elements.)

I will say that I noted a few notable and important things when observing my governmental and military peers and colleagues this year:

• There was zero explicit mention of the events or language of Operation Midnight Hammer at any of these briefings, although it was euphemistically referred to. Even though the end of the Red Sea Crisis caused by Houthis backed, supplied, and funded by the Iranian Octopus was well understood to be of prime importance at all meetings. The sentiment at the time of the meetings I attended seemed to be, ‘Let’s wait and see’.

• There was absolutely zero hope that the UK would ever commit to the 5% of GDP spend on defence. Even the 3% pledged in the recent Strategic Defence Review penned by Lord Robertson, and whatshisface, is unlikely to fully materialise.

• There was almost zero mention of the US Navy’s role in securing the freedom of the seas, and Trump’s name was treated like Voldemort. Even though there was gratitude and relief for US military leadership in hushed tones and side room chats, despite the wildcard uncertainty that man represents.

• There is a kind of denial about the possible ending of the UN or NATO alliances that borders on mental illness. These monolithic towers of Babel have been such foundational parts of the worldview, and personal professional prestige and psychology, for so long that I have detected almost zero willingness to entertain the fact that they may soon be gone. And I think this very denial has the potential to be the seed of the final demise of the United Kingdom and much of Europe.

I won’t talk about drones, or subsea cables, or psyops, or the results of market analyses, or cyber attacks, or submarine activity, or the results of NATO wargames. Although all of that was super-interesting, I can only say one thing. Compared to my last attendance at these kinds of seminars and briefings 2 years prior, the tone has changed. There was now an urgency and sincerity that had been lacking on previous occasions. I’d say in a good way, from the ‘people at the coal face’ as it were. But definitely in manner that sent chills down my spine, in a way it never has, previously.

At one event in the spring, in Glasgow, I did have the chance to put questions directly to a senior member of the British government. He took several questions from me in public and was very generous with his time. I will say, he gave kind and thoughtful answers, but I think he really failed to grasp what I was asking with respect to the pseudo-military role of the Merchant Fleet in a time of war.

I did not publish anything in the blog at the time, because the SDR had not yet been published.

• He had no real answer to my observation that I was seeing vocal terror supporting Islamists serving on British Merchant Ships. (Although my observations were anecdotal, there was no acknowledgement that any systemic resistance to politically hostile people entering the British Merchant Navy was removed decades ago).

• He seemingly had no knowledge of what I was talking about when I asked if the Merchant Shipping Act or the promised ‘Defence Readiness Bill’ would address the longstanding failure of the Department for Transport to publicly define the meaning of a ‘British Ship’, or a ‘British Interest Vessel’. This matters to investors who may be looking to flag their ships as British (or not), and to officers serving at sea facing security threats.

• I was shocked that nobody seemed to bat an eyelid when he stated that Britain would never again act unilaterally in cases like the Falkland Islands invasion by Argentina. (Although that was shortly after the Chagos Islands were gifted to a foreign nation for no apparent reason, so perhaps this was obvious.)

It seems to be the consensus opinion among everyone I speak to that no unilateral action will ever again be taken by the UK. Our fleet is now designed based on this assumption. Nobody really seems to debate this, from what I can tell.

There is apparently horizontal acceptance of the fact that our public officials no longer even pretend that we could defend our sovereign British territory by ourselves.

This shocked me. But no one else, it seems.

I really felt a generational divide between myself and the people in our government at that first springtime maritime security seminar. It has really deflated my hopes in liberal democracy in this country, because I think the people in charge simply do not know the world the younger generations have grown up in.

Article 5 is ‘baked in’. I have been told this several times by diverse parties this past year. Meaning that our actual stated national policy is to be fully dependent on the United States for our defence, and yet badmouth them publicly at every turn.

I think this baffles me so much because, since the latest conflict in Ukraine began, there has been a building narrative that we should prepare ourselves for a generational event. That a World War 2-style conflict of nation-states will return to mainland Europe, and perhaps, soon.

Why any alliance, such as NATO, would ever view a totally dependent member as a member worth keeping was not a thought to be entertained.

I was left with some quite frightening feelings during the final few months of 2025:

1. Our governing class has no concept of (or desire for) unilateral sovereignty anymore. They are ideologically committed to the belief that collective defence is real, and that its air of international consensus legitimises the use of force. Indeed, that nothing else does. They believe in big government, treaties, bureaucracy and censorship because they still believe that consensus equals truth.

2. They do not recognise the requirement for partnerships and collectives to be made up of equals. Politicians literally make a living from printed money, donations, selling favours, smoke and mirrors. They have no concept of the virtues of being a primary producer, like a farmer or an oilman.

3. Britain has downsized its armed forces for decade after decade, while throwing aggressive rhetoric around the world stage. We’re no longer capable of punching above our weight for very long. Expect a reliance on Article 5, and more of a ‘flailing’ above our weight, until remedial defence spending is prioritised.

4. There is little understanding of how this island nation is entirely dependent on the Merchant Navy, and yet how perilously neglected and sold off it has become.

5. Yet, despite all that, the phrase ‘Transition to War’ was on many people’s lips.

The full implication that emanated from this year’s SDR was more like ‘Transition to more of a war footing’. But this was too euphemistic. We in the audience all heard it as ‘We’re going to war, boys. Get ready.’

I think the feeling I sensed was that we’ve got about 2 years before Russian aggression is ‘felt’ on home soil, or at least, in UK home waters. Largely due to technological advances reducing the protection traditionally afforded by distance. Although I’m not yet sure what this will entail.

Wherever I drive now, I imagine that anti-drone fishing nets will have to be installed above the road soon, and I look at the crumbling road surfaces and run-down sidewalks, and think, ‘Yeah. Right.’

Rory Stewart and Alistair Campbell have spoken about this on The Rest is Politics podcast, and Rory was quite keen to advocate the urgent mass conscription of the Youth. I got the feeling that both Conservatives and Labour Party members view this as a last-ditch effort to enforce social cohesion through collective suffering, after decades of unfettered social disintegration.

It won’t work.

Vague promises of defending ‘Liberal Democracy’ after Covid lockdowns are so hollow, it beggars belief that this can be spoken with a straight face. The cream of our youth can only dream of getting a 40-year mortgage, and you think they’re willing to ‘serve’ en masse? Do you actually have the gall to round people up with machine guns and reinstate the death penalty for desertion, when the Royal Navy can’t even stop a rubber dinghy to defend this country?

Give us a break, guys.

Even Churchill famously said something like, ‘Yes, conscription was the best thing that ever happened to this country. But it nearly destroyed the Army.’

Conscription is ineffective, and therefore detrimental, if we are actually hoping to defeat a real enemy. Especially in a high-tech full-spectrum AI war.

At the after-party drinks outside the club in London, I was directly asked, ‘If your license and medical are still active, why don’t you join us? We’re going to need about X of skippers like you for X, Y, Z quite soon. You’d be ideal. (Specific numbers and activities were mentioned, but may be sensitive, so I won’t repeat them).

‘No chance’, says I.

My excuses were as follows:

1. You can’t afford me now. You lot expect our sailors to pay full income tax as if they’re on shore. Even if you did pay my full day rate that I get now, you’d have to double it to be worth my time.

2. I have a wife and young kids. I have enough danger in my life. I board ships offshore, I climb pilot ladders, and fly in helicopters and all that, all year round. I go in tanks. I climb masts and turbines. I already float around in the Taiwan Straits from time to time. I don’t need people actively shooting at me as well, if I can help it.

I told them the truth that I could muster in the moment. They nodded grimly and acknowledged that ‘Your helicopters do tend to fall out of the sky a lot more frequently than ours do’.

If they want me, they’re going to have to force me to do it. But if I’m honest with myself, those reasons weren’t right.

I have enough money to make a decent living. I really loved the Navy, and at my rank and with my experience, it wouldn’t be any hardship at all to swallow the naval discipline and hierarchy. And to be honest, I quite like the danger. It’s cool and exciting. I love ships too, but I’d have no moral qualms in blowing some of them up.

No, the reasons of self-interest I gave were just a polite way to dismiss the topic. The truth is much sadder.

I do not believe that the British Government is even remotely interested in serving its people, defending the realm, or upholding the heritage of service to God and of moral endeavour that has characterised the struggle of our forebears since the time of Alfred the Great, to Winston Churchill.

What has our King done since he acceded to the throne?

In fact, I’m sure the current Labour administration has a serious nihilistic death wish that I want nothing to do with.

Instead, I’m going to keep my head down and serve British and American shipping in the best way I know how. Through my training, consulting and marine advisory business.

In a couple of years, when our nation is decimated by Russian hybrid 1^st through 5th Gen warfare, and the US’s Greenland fleet has to save our beloved (if confused and neglected) homeland, I just hope Emperor Trump remembers that there are no term limits in the UK. And, that the law of conquest remains an iron law of nature.

Just saying. 😉

I do just want to point out that the great Thomas Sowell and others would remind us that the defence sector is not immune from the principle of “concentrated benefits and dispersed costs”.

As with environmental problems, collectivists always like to say that ‘global problems require global solutions’. As if that were an argument in itself. But, as with environmentalism, we also suffer from the ‘tragedy of the commons’.

If collective defence under Article 5 is a resource that is free for all NATO members to consume, then logically, the one who consumes it all first gets the greatest benefit of the ‘common’. In this case, the common defence.

Obviously, the Ukrainians have beaten the UK to it.

It is true, that this is all ‘baked in’ to how things have been done since WW2. Concentrated benefits with dispersed costs are not seriously questioned by anyone, anymore. Not outside the online right.

I think it was Sowell who said ‘Only in government is any benefit, however small, considered to be worth any cost, however large.’ Although I’m unsure if it was him.

When it comes to war, we know exactly who is going to be paying the cost. We learned that from the ’08 bailouts, Covid lockdown parties, and botched attempts at depopulation.

But where is the benefit?

I’m naturally distrustful of our current modes of governance. Deep state, unaccountable civil servants, who love Systems, not people. DfT ministers with no more knowledge or experience of merchant shipping than catching the odd ferry to a stag do in Amsterdam. And endless attacks on liberty, property and human nature.

On ships, being top-heavy causes capsize. On ships, the divisional system ensures distributed autonomy. Much like how watertight subdivision ensures damaged stability. These give a metaphor that our anti-free speech, anti-property, anti-truth, anti-sovereignty, anti-Christian and anti-free market government would do well to ponder during their latest arms race.

A case for renewed civilisation is being made in the USA. I fail to see that case being made here. And no, Reform isn’t cutting it.

Anyway,

Happy New Year, y’all. I’m sure 2026 will be equally interesting 😊

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