Starting a Sinofuturism thread so as to put into context the paucity of Western ambition. Will start with this: the greening of a Denmark-sized mass of desert.

> There was no legal obligation to give the islands away > They never belonged to Mauritius > Mauritius is already planning to violate the terms > The PM's claim that China opposed the deal has been clearly exposed as false > We are even less able to afford the deal than we were when it was signed > The small group that made this deal happen are continuing to bend over backwards to appease China There is still time for Labour MPs to do the West a massive favour and kill this deal

Well that's me told

Cannot wait to spend the rest of my life hearing every few months that Mauritius has sold another island to China for some extraordinary sum, that Mauritius has got rid of another tax, that every Mauritian child is awarded a Bugatti on their 18th birthday, that India has trawled every inch of the sea floor, that Mauritius is unilaterally upping our rent, that China definitely isn't snooping on Diego Garcia, and that you and I are paying for this crap forever

Just been fired from my job at the MoD. My job was to send long lists of asylum applicants to everyone except the Taliban. Managed it every day except one. Onwards and upwards

imagine having that as a surname

Unslopping Dedeclining Deyookayification Whatever this is, we should do more of it

Poundbury, 2030 - You wake up - Lab-grown full English for breakfast, served by robot butler - Walk your children (which you can afford, because the housing crisis has been solved) to school - HS22 takes you direct to Spaceport Cornwall, which can sustain heavy-lift launches - No need to take off your shoes or belt at security - You arrive at an oaken space station where your employer rents lab space - Here you use the zero-G to make pharmaceuticals that couldn’t be made on Earth - While you’re there, you check out the view of the lunar colony New Poundbury. The Georgian townhouses are really coming along - As you descend back to Earth following the conclusion of your working day, you admire the Wales-sized artificial island that is nearing completion on Dogger Bank - Pick up children, who have spent most of their day outdoors - Trip to the gym with your friends, who all live within 15 minutes thanks to (gentle) urban density and superlative public transport - Lab-grown toad-in-the-hole for dinner - Walk among the town’s fruit trees at dusk (a bonus of global heating) - Plenty of quality time with your family owing to the high national productivity that resulted from King Charles’s crushing of the Nimbys - Don your nightcap and look forward to another glorious day of Anglofuturism

Artificial island, perhaps in happier times to be twinned with Avalon aka Dogger Bank

Bureaucratic gravity will drag the New Towns toward looking like Milton Keynes, but the planners should be ruthless in pursuing the kind of charm in the pic below. No street furniture, minimal signage, lots of greenery. Imagine the 20th century never happened

I know we had the Captain Tom drone display, but:

This is an unbelievable turnaround on nuclear power plants.

This proposed new surface for Oxford Street is tacky. Why must it compete for attention? Just pave the thing

Globalism is dead. Long live Anglobalism

Britain: cancels HS2 after 40 years of prevarication. China:

I don't know the context of this 10-second clip, but the more I think about it, the bleaker it gets. - 'But it would take 10 years' being enough to dismiss a project - Patronising body language - Lack of visible interest in getting to the root of the problem - Deputy PM sat at a mid-range monitor - Cheap modern furniture bringing down the Victorian panelling A generation of British politicians squatting in the inheritance of their forebears

The High Court judge in question

The Tory party’s worst sin is that it has destroyed and betrayed itself for nothing

This is probably the Chinese equivalent of Norwich.

China recently returned a lunar sample to Earth and is planning a lunar research station with Russia:

I hear what you're saying, and I am in total agreement that there should be a massive nuclear power plant there instead

Even their annoying attention-seeking modernism is 10x better than ours and can sometimes resemble a Bladerunner background. Trads will be pleased to know that Xi has put a stop to this carry-on.

Yes, humanoid robots are overrated. Be that as it may, this looks v cool.

Hope Not Hate versus the Anglofuturism podcast

Britons built the 19th century Britons will build the 22nd

Average Anglofuturism podcast enjoyer

Hyper-sonic air travel.

If you know anything about drilling you will know that this thing reaches insane depths and will unlock a hell of a lot of heat/fuel

Now that Hope Not Hate have shot their shot, we can reveal some of the most unwoke fan art the Anglofuturism podcast has yet received

I'm reluctant to write about the British Antarctica Territory, lest the government notice we haven't given it away yet. But... The incoming Trump administration is going to great lengths to court Greenland, which spans 2.2 million km². The British Antarctic Territory (BAT) spans 1.7 million km², an area about eight times that of Great Britain. Where Greenland will have to be prised from Copenhagen, the BAT is already ours. And we are sitting on a goldmine. This is a continent that is home to volcano that spews gold dust [1]. Antarctica is poorly prospected, but we can infer from its size and its geology that it holds huge mineral deposits [2]. Most of these deposits will be buried deep under ice, but the BAT includes the Antarctic Peninsula and its endless tracts of exposed rock. It is likely that we would find gold there – as well as many other valuable minerals. Volcanoes are a sure sign of mineral wealth, and the BAT has several of them. [3] And then there is fuel. It is believed that the BAT harbours oil and gas reserves 10 times larger than our entire North Sea output over the past half-century [4]. Environmentalists will bridle at the idea of new oil fields opening, but they must accept the following contention: if resource extraction is to be done anywhere, it should be done on a continent that is almost entirely devoid of life. In ecological terms, Antarctica might well be the best place in the world for industrial activity. A treaty currently forbids resource extraction from Antarctica, but the world has changed since that treaty was signed. As such, other countries, such as China, Russia, India, and Turkey, are building Antarctic bases. Even Iran has said it wants one [5]. It is time for a renegotiation. Britain is nowhere near energy independence, and it does next to no mining. The BAT is a cheat code for both. It is an Anglofuturist's dream; it is also the last great gift from our more adventurous forebears. If we don't open that gift, someone else will.

Rolling police robot that can catch criminals.

In a parallel universe, one in which the British birth rate didn’t crater, we are richer, more populous, more entrepreneurial, more restless. Mass immigration never happened; instead, hundreds of thousands of Brits are seeking their fortune abroad. Worldwide, culture becomes more British. At home, the triple lock doesn’t exist. There are more fights. There are more scientific breakthroughs. There are more unicorns. There are more protests and more contagious social movements. NIMBYs, for better or worse, are outgunned. Things get demolished. Things get built. Taxes are at a postwar low. The nation’s finances have rarely been better. The Army is oversubscribed. New schools are opening. Police are on the streets. Pubs, most absurdly of all, stay open after 11pm.

Just one more juicing of demand bro. I promise just one more juicing of demand and we’ll fix the housing crisis bro

1/5 I'm in the new issue of the Spectator to make the case for the British super spaceport. The argument: the space economy is expanding rapidly. We currently have a chance to host up to 1/3 of launches. (Might as well mock it up in Scottish Baronial style while we're at it)

The Yookay state busily throwing furniture into the fire, as per

China can choose its own weather

🎆 New Anglofuturism episode: Britain's shadow empire 🎆 These circled bits of land are our overseas territories: underrecognised assets with existing functions relating to finance, science and defence. What if we could use them more imaginatively? 🔽

"Being a millennial socialist in 2025 must feel like being a hippy in 1974: the Beatles have split up; Hendrix and Joplin are dead; Nixon is in the White House; and another, more aggressive youth subculture — punk — is emerging to replace your fading utopian idealism."

Duplicitious rubbish. Russia helped Mauritius exert diplomatic pressure on us. China will be thrilled that we've handed our nuclear bomber runway to one of their partners. They & all our adversaries will be chortling at the exorbitant cost and our self-hating spiritual weakness

I'm delighted to disclose that I'll be starting at @unherd as senior editor on Monday. As such, I'll be commissioning essays on society, culture, technology etc. I'm especially keen to commission people from outside the usual commentariat. You? Someone you know? Get in touch.

China has armed its robot dogs with missiles

Hyperscale Henrys, made in Somerset, will clear Lower Earth Orbit of space debris

The Anglofuturist Social Contract is made simple by the immense wealth we will extract from Antarctica

Average British high street if we go the way we’re going v. Average British high street under Anglofuturism

If you are a Labour MP in search of a Chagos Islands off-ramp, this new Russia-Mauritius deal easily qualifies. The situation has changed, you can no longer back the deal. Vote it down, spend the money on welfare

January: appears on the Anglofuturism podcast March: enters Number 10 Downing Street

Third runway at Heathrow? Boring. New in CapX, some Anglofuturist ideas for growth. - Robotics agency - Exascale computer project - Give @boys_nicholas dictatorial powers over dozens of new towns - Fix indefinite leave to remain so that we can actually afford this stuff - Kneecap JR, pass the LFG bill - Massive spaceport - Do what @UKDayOne says about nuclear power - Build geothermal field labs à la FORGE Utah - Baby boom (cut childcare costs, copy French method of giving clout to prolific mothers) - Prepare to exploit the British Antarctic Territory And many more ⬇️ capx.co/anglofuturism-is-the…

An uber-woke charity has done a rather contrived hit piece on Anglofuturism that tries to drag our podcast in. I should be annoyed, but it’s pretty funny that some guy must have spent hour upon hour trawling through industrial policy chat in order to find anything remotely spicy

One of these days you, me and @JoannaLumleyUK will get together and chuckle about this over a cool jug of BRITA-filtered water

1/ How to keep, and profit from, British Antarctica It's eight times the size of Great Britain and is rich in resources – oil and gas, plus (judging by the geology) plenty of rare earths. The jewel is the peninsula: comparatively mineable, but already contested. A proposal🧵

Anglofuturism is the subject of a column in The Times today

Pingu is a cypher for English settlement of Antarctica

Anglofuturist lawyers, your country needs you

It was fascinating to learn about why different kinds of housing looks the way it does (and how things might chance in the future). With apologies to anyone who lives in a newbuild: telegraph.co.uk/family/life/…

Back-of-the-envelope plan for using British Antarctica to make Britain rich again: 1/ Massively intensify our scoping out of the continent's natural resources: precious metals, oil and gas, uranium, rare earths. This is compatible with the existing treaty system. We are already the world leaders at mapping Antarctica's geology. 2/ Use the IP as a bargaining chip. Tell the US that we have fully characterised the large chunk of Antarctica that remains unclaimed – and that they can have the IP if they back up our existing claim to the peninsula (which is easier to mine than the mainland) and inland. 3/ Incentivise startups to develop robots that can undertake extraction of REEs etc. This will make Britain best in the world at doing this in hostile environments – with much of the technology therefore applicable to mining of asteroids, the Moon and Mars. We won't be first to reach these places, but we will be invaluable to any serious attempt at using offworld resources. So where do we stand today? The main treaty prohibiting exploitation of Antarctica is up for re-evaluation in 2048. The crucial first step, the gathering of IP, is compatible with the treaty. So is the development and testing of robots. If other countries break the treaty between now and then – note the proliferation of bases being built by countries with no claim – then Britain should immediately start using the massive reserves of gas in the Weddell Sea. It might feel strange to be casting rapacious glances at a largely untouched continent, but its lifelessness makes it, in ecological terms, perhaps the best place in the world to industrialise. Someone, perhaps China – they have built the first intercontinental airport there, and can thus fly in gear from Beijing – is going to do it; we should at least ensure our portion isn't taken from us. Chile and Argentina have overlapping claims. Russia has been scoping out those very Weddell Sea reserves. So far, I've made a case that is loosely economic, but I think there's also a more intangible value to the opening of a frontier. There is a shortage of adventure in modern professional lives. Why not give people a chance to do something historic?

Season 2, episode 2 of Anglofuturism: Britain's manifest Hyperborean destiny, aka the British Antarctic Territory. Calum and I discuss Britain's early exploration of the last unknown continent; the mineral wealth of Britain's vast slice; the prospects of the Antarctic Treaty, which can be re-evaluated in 2048; and what a highly agentic Britain should be doing right now to ensure we get the most out of this extraordinary endowment. Links below 🔽

It's hard not to read The Case for Keto without getting angry about the wrong-headedness of nutritional advice from the '50s onward. High-carb diets are, for millions of people, slow-acting poison. My interview with the book's author, @garytaubes telegraph.co.uk/health-fitne…

TFW Hugo Rifkind tries to bring Paddington Bear into it

Anglofuturism is now a top-40 tech podcast in Britain

*cradling the LFG podcast* No babe you’re definitely edgy enough to be in Hope Not Hate

🚨 Some professional news! 🚨 Today, after seven years, is my last day at the Telegraph. To everyone who's contributed to, edited or read my work: thank you. I'll end my time at the paper in a way befitting my career here: roistering on company time.

1/ I spent several weeks last year looking into FORGE, the US government's attempt to crash-test geothermal methodology & gear in the Utah wilderness. Geothermal is 24/7 and, in theory, available worldwide – so we need to commercialise it fast. That's the aim of FORGE. 🧵

One day there will be a city on the British Antarctic Territory

This 'dainty little pixie boy' is... @louistheroux! Interview in which we discuss what his younger self would make of his life (and whether he would wear an ironic Louis Theroux T-shirt if he wasn't himself Louis Theroux) telegraph.co.uk/family/life/…

The New Statesman website is led today by a chin-stroking meditation on Anglofuturism, complete with ostentatious references to Turkish novelists, a Russian cultural theorist, Baudrillard etc

A gooder bunch of boyes and girls I never did see

Great to see @AFitzgerald1992 open his factory last night. High-precision manufacturing in Zone 3. Godspeed!

Note the developing Jenrickian motif of "greater still". "Great again" is for parvenus

Just today I saw a guy break off a bus' wing mirror simply because the driver wouldn't let him board. Even if you somehow think London is getting better, it should *still* be an urgent priority to eliminate this kind of corrosive thuggery. We should aim for public spaces to feel like Zurich or Tokyo, not New York. Every bit of policing legislation, every handing down of a sentence, should reflect that aim.

The closest I've got to weeping while conducting an interview. A conversation with @raymond_blanc about his late mother and the orchard she loved telegraph.co.uk/food-and-dri…

Britain has a new plan for the capture of the benefits of AI, and it's a good one. My only amendment would be the use of the British Antarctic Territory as a site for data centres. Bravo @matthewclifford and co

Just before he left, I spoke to a UK-based Ukranian expat who's now driving home to take up arms. He didn't want the West's sympathy; he wanted weaponry. "Our people will die. But give us guns. That’s it." The courage of normal Ukrainians is astonishing. telegraph.co.uk/news/2022/02…

🗞️Some meta-news🗞️ I'm moving... but not very far. On Monday I begin a job in the Telegraph's news department. I'll be writing news features: colour and longform. It's an exciting brief. Hurrah!

If people could see a side-by-side comparison of Britain today vs Britain if we hadn’t lost 15 years of growth, they would be appalled

Some thoughts on the past few days. If Anglofuturism is becoming more prominent, it is because of shifting political and cultural tides. Exactly where they are taking us is harder to say. unherd.com/newsroom/why-angl…

No cabinet minister should suffer the ignominy of a subpar rig

The vibes are shifting faster than I think almost anyone imagined

My book is out tomorrow. Some readers have already suffered the indignity of having it signed by a man with a collar gap. It remains possible to order the book without making the same mistake. Link in bio

Slop industrial complex. Happens across media. God forbid someone feels reverent while consuming something rather than titillated. We need better cultural antibodies for this crap

I can't define it in abstract terms. But I think I can recognise it when I see it. And I'm looking at it now.

Will add more as I spot them. Please feel free to add your own!

No two ways about it: the value of human labour relative to capital is going to tumble.

Anglofuturism season 2, episode 1: Lawrence Newport First he came for the XL bully. Now he is coming for Nimbys and criminals. Scourge to violent dogs... darling to British progress nerds... a pest to HMG. And now interviewed by me and @CalumDrysdale as we return. Link below!

"I am what you might call a Lactofuturist"

Just wait till he finds out about British Antarctica

This is absurd and infuriating. Labour and Powell (the lead negotiator) are living in a fantasy world where hard power doesn’t matter and where Britain must pay *£90m a year* to lease back one of its own possessions. To repeat: Mauritius’ only claim to the BIOT is that they used to be jointly administered by a foreign government. That is not nationhood. These islands were uninhabited before they were discovered by the Portuguese in the 17th century. The world is becoming a more dangerous place. In response, the US is trying – for the first time in decades – to expand its borders. Meanwhile, Britain is *paying to give away* a strategically crucial archipelago. The fantasy must end. The only solution I can see is for MPs to rebel, passing a law that prevents governments from giving away British territory unless they have parliamentary or electoral approval.

Exclusive: JD Vance interview in @unherd today. The VP addresses: ➡️How a stronger Europe might have prevented the Iraq war ➡️ Britain being in the right re. Suez ➡️ Trade deal prospects ➡️ Europe's blindness to the effects of immigration Link below🔽

Yes also true and important

The chance of the war in Ukraine prompting nuclear conflict remains small. Paul Ingram, of Cambridge's Centre for the Study of Existential Risk, puts it at 1 in 80. But, he told me, the gov't should now be making contingency plans. A key concern: food. 🧵

New Anglofuturism episode:! @Dominic2306 once said that @MarcWarner10 was "one of the smartest and most ethical people I have ever met in my life". Without him, "thousands would be dead." Today we present an episode that Calum and I are very excited about: our interview with Marc. We discuss: - Hard political reality changing the tech world - Marc's period in No 10 over the pandemic - Britain's last shot at sovereign AI capability - What AGI would do for the average Brit And much more. Marc is the founder and CEO of Faculty, which helps the gov't (among other clients) with services relating to AI. Links to the episode below. Enjoy!

Miss British Antarctic Territory 2026

Elite oikophobia doesn’t always have to win. In fact, its victories can still be reversed.

The Anglofuturism podcast features in this month’s issue of GQ

A dark day for the Nimbys. Joe, @pursuitofprog and James have drafted a (fantastic) bill, won the support of MPs, and are now trying, guerrilla-style, to get it passed. More info below (and in an imminent podcast episode).

Missed it at the time, but Anglofuturism seems to have made it this week, however briefly, into the the top 10 tech podcasts by Apple Podcast listeners in the Yookay. Dwarkesh who?? Watch out @pmarca

We need an inverted Philippe Sands – a barrister who will make it their life's work to defend Britain's claim to the Antarctic

I'm in today's Telegraph writing about Britain's manifest Antarctic destiny. Cementing our claim to would allow us to claim a bonanza of resources, enough to reverse our economic trajectory. It would also be glorious.