What I see instead is the other side of Hanlon’s razor —incompetence— coupled with a political class riven with pockets of self-interest, and very few seemingly with an intellectual hypothesis to explain the UK’s current predicament, or to chart a path out of it.
No need to imagine it. Read the Wikileaks. Names are named. The class division is real, and it is fomented by those who seek to profit from the subterfuge - and they DO profit, at massive scale.
If you read any history about any daring military action during WW2, a lot of it was done by men thinking up of stuff in dark rooms while smoking cigars. Why is this so unbelievable now?
BTW, The UK ran the world's largest empire and until recently this was in living memory.
> What I see instead is the other side of Hanlon’s razor —incompetence— coupled with a political class riven with pockets of self-interest, and very few seemingly with an intellectual hypothesis to explain the UK’s current predicament, or to chart a path out of it.
Hanlon's razor IMO is nonsense. It is honestly believe it was invented so people could explain away their malice.
Anyone who is relatively intelligent will work at out some point, that if they don't want to do something they can passively aggressively work against the authority while working withing the rules. My father (who builds luxury yachts and is near retirement) was telling me how he maliciously complies with various companies rules to make his superior's life more difficult, this is a way to get back at them for their poor planning.
Even if you accept that Hanlon's razor is mostly true. It cannot be applied when you are dealing with political actors. Political actors, the media and anything related are literally trying to manipulate you. In fact it is a good rule that whatever they tell you that it is, assume the opposite and that is typically true.
No dark rooms, armchairs or cigars are needed. Did you guys even read Wikileaks?
e.g. corporate lobbying clearly exists and operates, and may be nefarious, but is broadly directed towards the corporate entity's gain, rather than dividing and conquering the masses.
Conspiracies are a very common part of business law, people just do not accept that it can happen in the political realm.
So sure, that's probably blackmail and subversion (via kompromat on prominent politicians or business people) in favour of that country's interests, but again that's insolated and self-interested (i.e. in the interests of the particlar country in question). But it's not centralised 'divide and conquer the proletariat' in favour of the (ultra-)bourgeois, which was my original point.
I'm not saying that such things don't exist; I'm just arguing they're not as centralised and targeted at creating divides and unrest amongst the people as the original post suggests, as usually that's not a tactic that results in a beneficial outcome for the group involved. Epstein's putative handlers weren't going "nah, forget infiltrating the mil-tech sector in your country; what we're really interested in is a few headlines about immigration in the UK".
I don't understand how you don't see this as textbook conspiracy or centralised?