A series of rabbit-holes followed, and so this note is going to be a compilation of everything I ended up reading. In theory, there should be some sort of flow to it and it should form the basis of the wider report I end up writing. In practice… well it’s probably a bit rough round the edges. Thoughts/comments/throwaways always welcome. 

So what prompted me to spend my Saturday evening reading and writing about CNI? Well, we had a CNI incident this week - the power went out for 90-seconds at a National Rail operations centre in Manchester on Thursday. That knocked out or reset loads of signalling systems, and caused some physical damage that people needed to go out and actually repair, and so even though the actual outage was only 90-seconds (and National Rail are insisting it was less), getting things up and running again took a while. The disruption also meant that when things were working again, the trains and the crews were all in the wrong place, which piled onto the disruption. 

There’ll be an investigation I’m sure and they’ll commit to making the systems more resilient, but that doesn’t take away from the reality that when these systems go down, there’s serious knock-ons that disrupt people’s lives and so making these systems as resilient as possible is critical, hence critical national infrastructure. 

Despite that, Network Rail decided to move from a system of lots and lots of signal boxes (many of which, admittedly, had been around since the railways were laid) across the country into 12 critical nodes that each control a much larger area. Now that works really well if you’re trying to improve efficiency and trying to run a bigger system with the same budget whilst everything else is getting expensive. But it also means that when one of these nodes goes down, it affects a much larger area too, and so the critical-ness of each individual nodes rises. I’d argue that equals less resilient.

And it’s not just signalling that this affects. London-based readers might remember the landslip at Hook a few years ago, where intense rainfall caused the land under aging Victorian infrastructure to slip, leaving one of the main lines into London out of action for over a month. As costs continue to rise and budgets stay the same, it’s harder for the organisations responsible for maintaining our CNI to replace aging infrastructure, and so the likelihood of seeing major outages increases.  

Now thankfully, there are whole branches of government committed to making sure that doesn’t happen, most prominently the National Protective Security Authority, which is responsible for “target hardening the UK’s economy, infrastructure, industries and crowded places.” The Government also released a Resilience Action Plan last year, which included a commitment to improving the resilience of our Critical National Infrastructure. 

Another incident that got a special mention in the report was the fire at the North Hyde substation last year, which caused a major power outage at Heathrow Airport. Now that happened because some controls that should’ve been put in place by the National Grid in 2018, weren’t, which ultimately led to a fire seven years later, in 2025. Now when Heathrow built out their own electric network, they knew that if this substation went down, they would lose power across some critical systems that would mean they’d have to shut down the airport. But, they assumed that the energy network would be resilient enough that they didn’t need to worry about it. 

At the same time, the National Grid had no idea that this substation was so critical to keeping Heathrow operating. This incident highlighted how energy network operators had no idea which bits of their system were linked to CNI and CNI operators weren’t compelled to make sure they had backups. The Resilience Action Plan tries to fix both of these. 

So what, the Government’s on it and everything’s fine right? Well firstly, a big part of the Plan is that everyone across society has to come together to help protect the nation against disruptive events, and there’s an ongoing effort to bring different parts of society together to do just that. But the second point I wanted to make is just how quickly the threat landscape is evolving. 

Now a key assumption to really draw that out is that every single thing is hackable. If it’s on a computer and someone is determined enough, they can get into it and cause chaos.

That’s because all computers and all programmes have millions and millions of lines of code, and it’s practically impossible for there to be nothing in there that can be manipulated to do something that you didn’t intend for it to do. And almost all computers are run by humans, who fuck up tremendously frequently. Those two premises have led to an explosion in the development of cyber weapons in the last 15 years or so (if you want to hear more about that, you should read This Is How They Tell Me The World Ends, by Nicole Perlroth), mostly because nation-states started paying big money for it. 

Famously, the Russians stole loads of tools from the NSA in 2015 (via the Moscow-based Kaspersky anti-virus software, in case you’re still using it) and dumped them onto the internet. One of those was called EternalBlue, which was a flaw in Windows that the NSA had discovered in 2012, but kept to themselves because, well, it was useful to them. Bad actors then used those tools to build other attacks (you may remember hearing about NotPetya and WannaCry) to cause billions of pounds of damage. 

NotPetya always stands out for me - the Russians used it in Ukraine to effectively turn off most of the screens in the country. That meant ATMs stopped working, your card machine wouldn’t work and the radiation sensors at Chernobyl stopped working (which meant people had to don hazmat suits and go out with handheld radiation monitors). 

It then leaked out of Ukraine and went on a world tour, turning off screens worldwide. There was no undo button - these screens never turned on again. At Maersk, where it basically shut down the entire business, they had to throw out and replace 4,000 servers, 45,000 computers and reinstall 2,500 apps in ten days. 

So, you can hack pretty much anything and cause chaos. 

Now if you’re a bad state actor (for our purposes, read Russia, China, Iran), and you want to use your ability to hack pretty much anything and cause chaos in nations you see as a threat, well what would you do? 

Well, why speculate when we can see for ourselves? 

Ukraine’s energy infrastructure is under constant assault by Russian hackers, regularly trying to knock out their power as another lever in the war. The Russians have form here - another example that always stands out for me was in 2015, where Russian hackers used malware to cause a blackout 2 days before Christmas (which, in Ukraine, means it’s freezing). At the tail-end of last year, we also saw Russian hackers target energy infrastructure in Poland (NATO member, might I add), which came very close to leaving half a million Poles without power in the middle of winter. 

Looking across to the US, it’s been known for a few years now that a Chinese state-sponsored hacking group called Volt Typhoon keeps breaking into US energy infrastructure and just sitting there, which you could speculate is pre-positioning to be able to do something in the future. There’ve been similar incidents with the US water system, including right now, where Iran-backed (allegedly, because it hasn’t actually been proven yet and Trump is  using it to attack Tim Walz, who’s Governor there) hackers have caused equipment failures that could lead to contaminated water supplies. In this case, it’s been caught and water companies seem to have resorted to manual checks again to make sure the system continues to function, and asking people to boil their water before drinking in other instances. 

Here in Britain, we’re seeing a constant wave of attacks, with 200 attacks against UK CNI in the last 12 months, 75% of which have been linked to state actors according to the National Cyber Security Centre. Our National Security Risk Assessment added cyberattacks against water infrastructure and police systems this year, alongside existing entries of cyber risks against health, energy, fuel, transport and telecommunications systems. 

So, the countries that want to do us harm are going to keep trying to use their ability to hack pretty much anything to hack our CNI systems and cause chaos in our lives. 

But wait, I’ve been talking about things like this happening time and time again over the last decade and so why am I going on about it now? Because AI makes it infinitely easier to do these things. 

Case in point - in January (pre-Mythos and the latest wave of frontier models, a technological lifetime ago in our current world), someone attacked the water supply system in Monterrey in Mexico. They did so using Claude to map out the water system and it then helpfully identified a weakness, built an attack for it and tried to execute it. It didn’t work, but it’s a meaningful step change from humans taking months and years to do this research and build the tools to execute an attack like this. 

Anthropic themselves issued a report last September where they found Chinese state-sponsored hackers using Claude Code to attack tech, finance and chemical companies as well as government agencies without much human oversight. In some cases, it was successful. 

This means we now live in a world where the countries that want to do us harm can leverage AI to cut the time to map out vulnerabilities in our critical systems (which we know exist, because you can hack pretty much anything) and increase the chances of a successful attack. 

As AI improves, it’s only going to get easier and so it’s imperative that we’re using the most cutting edge systems to defend ourselves. 

How? 

Well, that’s for the next part of the report. Watch this space. 

RH

Europe is burning, and we all started the fire. 

Well, someone else will have *actually* started the fire (most wildfires are started by people, but not necessarily always on purpose). But climate change is something we’ve all got a hand in, and if this hadn’t been such a hot summer, the ground wouldn’t have been as dry and the fires wouldn’t have spread as far and wide as it has. 

To be fair, it’s not the only factor - changes in agriculture (i.e., fewer people farming) means that land that would previously have been plowed is now full of dry vegetation that is ripe for catching fire and there is a particularly dense bit of monoculture forest in Southwest France that causes the fire to spread quickly (this France 24 clip explains it well). But without climate change, it wouldn’t have been so dry and it wouldn’t have been so bad.

By current estimates, these are the largest wildfires France has ever seen, and on track to be so in Spain too. They have objectively been huge. 

Courtesy of the New York Times

90,000 people were displaced by the fire outside Madrid. It was so large that it would span the entirety of London. And the hottest month of the year is yet to come - August is going to be even more devastating for so many of these communities. 

And to top it all off, the fire in France has been burning so hot that it has been making it’s own fire clouds to create a literal fire storm that NASA once called a “fire-breathing dragon of clouds”.

And we mustn’t be so crass as to dismiss this as European problem. Brexit aside, we are still very much neighbours and our position on the continental seaboard remains firmly the same. 

More than half of England is in drought. Now I’ve always heard that and thought “oh yeah, hasn’t rained in a while” but never really thought about what that actually meant. The Environment Agency (who declare droughts in the UK) put this in their announcement which I thought explained it quite well. 

Arthur’s Seat in Edinburgh was on fire last week and moorland around Manchester has been burning for nearly a fortnight. The Cairngorms (in the Highlands!! See the map below for emphasis on just how North this is) also burned for nearly two weeks earlier this month. This is happening here too, and it’s only going to get worse as the world gets hotter. 

And of course another side effect of a hotter world is rising sea levels, but have looked at this map to check when the area you live in is predicted to start regularly flooding? 

And none of this operates in a bubble. It has a direct impact on our food supplies, national security (see UK Government paper and below), and the basics that we rely on to survive.  

(As an aside, this probability yardstick is brilliant and I think everyone should use it)

And to wrap this note up, it’s all about to manifest again as the Rhine, yet another critical global waterway, dries up and traffic slows (which is a story I suspect we’ll be hearing more of in coming weeks). 

This feels like an opportune time to point out that three of the other busiest waterways in the world are also currently closed i.e., the Strait of Hormuz (Iran/US conflict), the Bab al-Mandeb Strait (Houthi rebels - although ships returning) and the Black Sea ports (Russia/Ukraine war). 

The Rhine is the jugular vein of Western European industrial production, with a whole host of industrial infrastructure propped up along it, as below: 

Courtesy of the International Commission for the Protection of the Rhine

The Rhine feeds all of these industries and is one of the busiest waterways in the world. 

But it needs rain! And since there’s not been loads of that, it’s becoming shallower, which makes it harder for vessels to transit through. The key chokepoint is by the town of Kaub, where vessels needs a “navigable depth” of 1.5m to pass through fully loaded. It’s currently at 30cm and there’s no rain expected until the end of next week. This could be a problem that develops. 

I’d keep an eye on it.

RH

Hello!! 

I have been forcing myself to have a rest weekend this week, which is really bloody hard for me to do as a bloke who can’t sit still. But, I’ve had a slightly sore leg and figured some rest was sensible ahead of a few days in the country later this week.

That means I’ve sat myself down and refreshed the website for the first time in a while (some of those thumbnails were looking a bit samey…). I’ve dropped the Reviews section for now, because a year in I’ve still not done one, and rejigged the Pictures page so it shows the six most recent pictures from @diningstones. It would cost me something to have more than six, but I think six is plenty. Plus, for anyone really interested, they can click through to the actual Instagram page. I’m quite happy with how it looks. You can see it here: https://www.rahimhussain.co.uk/landing_pages/gallery

I also used Claude to do most of it. It’s still so impressive. These are tasks that would’ve taken me an entire weekend, even when I first made it using ChatGPT Chat as an assistant. Now, I can just tell Fable what I want it to do and 5 minutes later, it comes back, done. It’s very impressive, and it’s not like these were particularly exciting updates - they probably would’ve just been so boring that I wouldn’t have bothered unless I was really bored. So, net positive. 

I’ve also committed to writing a paper on the risks of AI on UK critical national infrastructure and done absolutely nothing towards that yet. That’ll change, so watch this space for updates (and bug me if you don’t hear anything!!). 

Sitting at home all weekend also means that I’ve read about 300 pages of A Covenant of Water (brilliant book so far, if not a bit recurrently devastating) - but because it’s like 700 odd pages long, I’m barely halfway through it. It follows two groups in South India and I’ve just got to the point where those two worlds become one. There’s also some brilliant bits of literature, which I may or may not share once I’m done. All in all, I’m really enjoying it and looking forward to ticking a book closer to my Goodreads target of 30 books this year. I’m currently on 10, so that feels a bit optimistic, but then also they’ve generally been quite long books and so I do wonder if a page target might be more sensible. Let’s see where we are at the end of the year.

The other book that I want to read after this is The Odyssey, which apparently is actually a poem! I’ve been on a bit of a learning experience with poems recently, which it turns out can basically be as long as the poet wants. This was sparked when I read V by Tony Harrison, which I’d heard good things about and is Andy Burnham’s favourite poem. I thought it was be a page, if that. I then started reading it and it kept going and going and going. I didn’t mind, because it’s a great poem about the conflicting feelings Northerners have between moving away from home for a better life and not wanting to leave everything that made them behind. I’m sure there’s endless literary analysis of it out there, but it’s a great poem and I’d recommend reading it (I read it here: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v07/n01/tony-harrison/v). Even if it is really, really, really bloody long. 

As, it turns out, is The Odyssey. It’s actually a book of 24 books (I’m not entirely sure how that works, but I think it’s just like parts in books?). Apparently it counts as a poem because it’s written in rhythm (or “meter”). I may have more insightful things to say once I’ve read it, which I’m committing to doing before I watch the film. And that’s not too painful to commit to, because I also really want to watch the film on proper IMAX, for which there are no tickets until September.

That’s because I’m being a bit of a film snob. You can go and watch it this week in a IMAX cinema somewhere in London. But not all IMAX cinemas are made equal. 

The crème de la crème is what I’m going to call True IMAX, where the films are shown on a 1.4:1 aspect ratio. This is what the IMAX cameras film on, and so you get to see the full image as intended. Any other cinema showing an IMAX film has a more rectangular aspect ratio, which crops out some of the image at the top and bottom of the screen.  Now, that’s not the end of the world. After all, there’s only 41 True IMAX cinemas in the entire world, and so when producing IMAX films, directors are cognisant that most people won’t be seeing the full picture and make sure that it doesn’t take away from the story, even if you lose some artistic expression.  

True IMAX screens also often show the film on, well, film. Like a physical strip of film copied from what the strip of film that came out of the camera (with some physical chopping and colour grading in between to make it make sense). Now in practise, that probably doesn’t change your experience very much, but it is a commitment to the craft that I think is brilliant and should be appreciated wherever possible. 

So where should you go watch The Odyssey? Well, if you’re not that fussed about seeing the full artistic expression (which is very fair), you can see it anywhere and it’ll be a perfectly pleasant experience. 

If you want a bit better than that, but don’t want to go to the pains of seeing in True IMAX (because it truly is a pain, as I’ll come to next), then go to any cinema near you that says IMAX (you can see the full list here: https://www.imax.com/en/gb/theatre/finder). Chances are, those will be the more rectangular IMAX experiences. Still bigger than a normal cinema, but not exactly what the camera captured. A reasonable middle ground, and one you can get tickets to in the next week or so, fairly easily. 

But if you really want to go for the full, True IMAX experience, go to either the BFI IMAX, the IMAX at the Science Museum or at Printworks in Manchester. Those are the only screens in the country that can show it in the 1.4:1 aspect ratio that the cameras capture, and is absolutely worth it. But there are basically no tickets at these until September. 

I saw Oppenheimer at the BFI when it came out and it was fantastic. It’s even more impressive for The Odyssey because it’s the first film ever to have been shot entirely in IMAX. That’s because these cameras can only shoot for up to 3 minutes at a time, are really bloody noisy and really bloody heavy. Christopher Nolan didn’t want to compromise this time though, and so we get the world’s first full IMAX film. If you’re willing to wait, I think it’s worth going to watch it on the big (big) screen. 

Whilst we’re on the BFI, they also do £4 tickets for under 25s, and have a great selection of old films on most of the time. I went to watch As Young As You Feel, one of Marilyn Monroe’s earlier films, during the week and it was a brilliant experience. 

Let me know if you end up going, and if you hear someone asking what the deal is with IMAX, forward this onto them!

RH

Settle in for a story. Old-timers will remember these letters started as a travel series from my misadventures in Marrakesh last autumn, and today we return to that tradition with this tale on the travails of moving flat in London. I hope I can channel some of that Mediterranean story-telling as I write this from a Mediterraneanly hot London this Saturday morning. 

So tldr, I had to move flat. I always knew that my housemates would be moving out around now, with one moving in with a long-term partner and the other going back to Bath after his placement year (which in of itself feels very full circle). Now my plan had always been to replace them with new people, maybe friends, maybe not, and be done with it. It was a nice enough flat, and even if it was geographically miles away from everything, it was, like everything in London, well connected enough to be about half an hour away from pretty much everything. 

Perhaps that was naive, but as I was to learn, the London flatmate market is absolute chaos. It’s wild out there. 

Getting people round to view actually wasn’t a problem, I had a fair few come to have a look (and a fair few agree a time and then never show up…) and I met a real spectrum of characters along the way. 

The most memorable was one guy who showed up about half an hour later than he’d said he would. But it’s far away, so okay fine, perhaps he underestimated the journey. These things happen, you say sorry and you get on with it. He didn’t say sorry, but that’s okay, there’s a lot going on here - that ends up being a minor point. 

He had a quick look round and seemed pleasant enough. I didn’t think we’d be best mates, but I figured I could live with him and it wouldn’t be terrible. He left, said he was interested and then we asked him for a standard set of documents that our landlord asks for (copy of your passport, employment contract etc). We had to chase him a couple of times, and to be honest, at this point, alarm bells really should have been ringing. 

Eventually, I get an email giving me access to his work SharePoint, where he’s uploaded some of the files we needed and set it so that I could neither download the files or share the link with anyone else. That wasn’t really going to work, as the landlord needed to see them, not me. I said as much, and got a flurry of voice notes (I hadn’t sent him any voice notes, to be clear) telling me about his rights under GDPR and how I was being terribly unreasonable by expecting him to share such personal information. 

Safe to say, we dropped him out of the process at that point. 

Anyway, after a few weeks of this, I found a couple of people, all sorted, sounds great. The landlord had put the rent up a bit, but we could make it work, so we sent out papers off to the landlord, who… just didn’t reply for a week. Now, in fairness to him, he is in the Royal Navy and so sometimes is on a ship in the middle of the ocean and can’t get onto his emails. I was fine with that, I knew he’d get round to it eventually. And he did, a week later, he said he was happy and asked that we send across a holding deposit and everything was soundo. 

It was, of course, at that point that one of the people that had agreed to sign with us (a friend of a friend, no less) decided it might be useful for us to know that he’d actually signed somewhere else in the intervening week, and so wasn’t going to be living with us. Cue facepalm and a mad scramble to find a replacement before another group made an offer, which they of course did and was then accepted. Sitrep: no flat. 

Excellent. Now at this point, I had five weeks before I had to be out of the flat. How fucking fabulous. 

And so began a series of viewings across the capital. There were some real disasters, with an honourable mention to the live-in landlady, who said I was such a stereotype (I think she meant City worker, but tbc), that no one could ever come to visit and that I couldn’t use the living room in the flat I’d have been paying well over £1,000 a month for. The living room was reserved for her dog to get a good sleep, and I couldn’t possibly risk disturbing it. 

I also went to one flat where they were just wrapping up the previous viewing, a seemingly lovely chap who wrapped up his conversation with them by saying he really liked it but would have to really think deep and hard about the fire risk from the Card Factory three doors down. Now I get it, paper catches fire, but is that really that much of a risk? I don’t know. 

And then once you find one you actually like, the chaos continues with trying to actually get it signed. I’d seen one flat in Hampstead that was really nice, and got on quite well with the lady. We’d had a nice chat and she’d said she’d send across a contract the next morning. I sent her the documentation she’d asked for and then… nada. I messaged a couple more times and my calls were forwarded to voicemail, so I figured she’d changed her mind. Which is fine, but then how difficult is it to just say as much? Strange.  

There was one brilliant flat that I’d viewed in Islington at about the same time as the flat I ended up in. It was very lovely, except when I got there for the viewing, there were four other people also there for the viewing. At the same time. So he took us on a little group tour of the flat, which was certainly a first for all of us. In the end, he decided to give it to someone who offered double the rent. Now technically you can’t do that anymore, but how do you enforce that? Excuse me, you can’t do that, I insist you take less money and live with me. Bonkers. For what it’s worth, he did message me a week later (once I’d already signed somewhere else) to say the person had dropped out and whether I was still interested. L. 

Now just before I ended up with this flat, I went on a series of viewings in a building in Old Street. At this point, I had two weeks left to move, and I was starting to feel the pressure. Accordingly, my standards had really fallen off a cliff… 

The guy showing me round was Canadian, and really, really enthusiastic about the building. He took me to see their “state of the art” gym, which was a cellar with a bench, some dumbbells and a sign on the wall telling whoever kept weeing into plastic bottles and leaving them lying around to stop… bad start. The rooms, somehow, were even worse, with barely any space for anything aside from the bed and every single room that wasn’t a bedroom having no window and basically being pitch black. Bad flat. He then really wanted to show me three others that were exactly the same. That felt like rock bottom. 

But alas, all’s well that ends well. I ended up with a very lovely flat that I’m very grateful for in Elephant and Castle. 

Moving is (and was) such a faff, and I didn’t do much to make it easier. I ended up being out until 0430 the night before I was moving, but then had to be up at 0900 to get breakfast with my friend, who was staying after having been to see Harry Styles. Saturday morning debrief over, I then sealed all my boxes because a man with a van was coming at 1100. He was a cool Lithuanian guy who had moved to Northern Ireland in the 90s and then London after that. My new flat is on the third floor, which made carrying everything up a real pain, but alas we got it all in, he left me £120 lighter, and I then spent the rest of that day unpacking. 

The next morning, I was back on the Piccadilly line to the old flat to give it a good old clean. That took most of the day (not because we were filthy, but because the landlord wanted very specific things done like the skirting boards wiped) and then I went home and finished off most of my unpacking. 

The one thing left was my books and I really needed a bookcase to put them on and so, the next morning I got myself up to Ikea! The bookcase was 2m long, but that’s not thaaat long I figured. Besides, Ikea delivery would effectively have doubled the cost of the bookcase so I thought no no, I’ll just go and get it myself. 

Jeez this thing was heavy. I had to stop every few hundred feet, which is a real pain when you’re going from Hammersmith to Elephant and Castle. The tube wasn’t too busy (given it was around midday on a Monday), and whilst I got some strange looks, I got a knowing smile from one older gentleman which really got me through that journey. I eventually learnt that balancing it on my shoulder was most effective, although I did have to switch shoulders every so often - but less often than I’d have to pause carrying it. 

My shoulders and arms hurt for the rest of the week. But now I have a bookcase!! I spent Thursday evening putting up pictures and now that I think we’re there, it’s very satisfying. I’m glad to be done and I’m glad to be here. 

And with any luck, that’s it for house moves for a good while. 

Anyway, have a lovely weekend - I’m off to the Serpentine Gallery to see the David Hockney exhibition. 

Cheerio, 

RH

I know I never promised that this would be a particularly regular note, but I always feel a bit bad when it’s been a few weeks between pieces - not least because my weekend reminder below gets unceremoniously dismissed.

Three notes in the last two months probably is about as infrequent as they’ve been, but in all honesty it’s been a bit of a bonkers two months (and not necessarily the good bonkers!) I’ll hopefully talk about one of the reasons for the bonkersness in a bit more detail next week, and hopefully see a return to regular(ish) scheduled programming soon. 

But I wanted to write something this morning because some good things have been happening in the world and in as messy a world as we live in now, where it feels like we’re constantly bouncing from one crisis and once-in-a-generation event to another, it’s nice to be able to stop and take stock of the bright spots in the world. 

Numero uno - there’s kind of a ceasefire in Iran, ish? Well, at least both sides have come to an agreement to stop the fighting, which has to be seen as a good thing, right? It hasn’t really changed anything fundamentally about the threat from Iran, but it has stopped the bombing and reopened the Strait of Hormuz (I’m choosing to ignore the fact that the Strait is now again closed after some continued fighting in Lebanon - we’re looking for the silver linings this morning). Cue further deaths avoided and the start of a long return to normality in global trade. This is good for the world, and perhaps enough of a lesson to dissuade any similar expeditions for a little bit. We can but hope. 

Numero dos - Andy won in Makerfield! I always hesitate before commenting on politics in these notes, but I have a sweeping exception for matters related to Reform or Restore or their ilk, because frankly the prospect of their governing of Britain is a bit of an existential threat to me. It does also have a huge impact on all of our lives, and so I think it’s worth discussing. One of my rules for healthy political conversations is that I’m only ever trying to explain my point of view and understand others. It’s not my job to try and convince you why mine is better - you’re entitled to disagree.

Politics is always messy but I do like politicians who manage to get stuff done amongst that, and even more so when it’s stuff that actually matters to people. There’s a reason people in Greater Manchester love Andy Burnham so much - he does things that touch people’s lives and that they can point to and say “yeah he’s a good one that Andy, we’ve got X now because of him”. And as messy as politics is, if you can get as many people in the country saying stuff like that, you win elections and make the country better. 

In writing this note, I read (on Wikipedia, so pinch of salt) that Andy Burnham was responsible for launching the first phase of a National Care Service at the tail-end of the Brown government. It was exactly what it sounds like - a service that gave elderly and disabled people social care that was free at the point of use and funded through taxation. The coalition government scrapped it. I wonder how different our country would have been today if that had been kept on. The current Labour government is trying to bring it back and are currently trying to work out how it would work in practise - they really ought to communicate this stuff better. 

The by-election itself is a tricky one to analyse - yes there was a massive swing back to Labour from the local elections, but people regularly use the locals as a bit of a protest vote. People also didn’t really see Starmer’s Labour and Andy as the same thing here - it was a vote for Andy, not a vote for Labour (and the campaign materials said as much!). My main reflection on this, especially after the local elections, is that it’s really restored my faith in an age-old belief that when push comes to shove, when it really matters, the Great British Public will stand up for what’s right. That makes me happy. 

And for anyone who wants to read what I think about this with respect to the impending Labour leadership dilemma, I’ve included a note I wrote to someone else in the postscript. Full disclosure - I am a Labour Party member, hence the all the “we”. 

And finally, numero tres - the World Cup is on! Now I’m not the biggest football fan in the world, but I can appreciate a good match and the brilliant energy that comes with the World Cup. Admittedly, the build up hasn’t felt as exciting to me this year, but after England’s first game this week, it feels like everyone is talking about it and it’s brought a lot of joy into the world. 

And I’m sure there will be more, but my favourite social aspect of the cup so far has been the brilliance of the Scottish fans descending on Boston and other US cities. I’ve seen some great bits on social media about bagpipes, the legalisation of haggis and Scottish fans adopting American fans - it’s a great bit of craic and to me, the perfect encapsulation of everything good the World Cup brings to the world. It also does bring me a lot of joy to see Panini (the people who make the football cards) sponsor Coca-Cola for the tournament. I have no idea why, it just really does. 

Anyway that’s all for today folks! Have a great weekend, get yourselves out in the sun (with suncream!) and enjoy the scorching 35 degree heat that this week is meant to see. 

RH

PS - Makerfield in the wider context

You asked for thoughts on Andy winning in Makerfield. I have many and so here they are. Some on the wider situation first, then specifically on Makerfield. 

Fundamentally, I do think Andy triggering this by-election with the intention of replacing the Prime Minister was unnecessary and not in the spirit of long-term leadership that the country needs. I would have preferred a natural return to normality after the local elections. 

But at the same time, the local elections were a sign of discontentment with the normality, and if you're going to majorly change tack, you should accept the mistakes and do it sooner rather than later. 

This Labour government needs to be a success, because the alternatives (Reform, harder right Tory, minority govt) would not be good for the country. In an increasingly unstable world, we need a strong Labour Party to govern and guide the nation through increasingly turbulent times. 

The pulse of the nation seems to suggest that Keir is not the man to do that and that his premiership will not result in reelection, and so, in that instance, perhaps short-term political noise of replacing the leader is worth the long-term benefits. 

And I do think there's a serious benefit to having a fresh brand come in and effectively give us a new government bounce. It would provide a useful separation from the unpopular parts of this government (winter fuel, poor communications etc) whilst giving us a nice way to shout about the wins, which we don't do often or well enough. 

But we have to get it right. We can't afford to do this again before the next election, and I think the cleanest way of doing that is if Andy becomes leader and Prime Minister. 

I think that's a great opportunity to fix the things that haven't been working and really bring our drive and ambition to the country. People want things to happen and we can make them happen and tell them they're happening. I honestly think it's that simple - the bar is so low that if we get that right, we win reelection. 

The competition is poor and I honestly think we should start using Unite the Kingdom as one of our own slogans - yes, we're going to Unite the Kingdom, and we mean the whole Kingdom and everyone in it. We should take that back and I think there's something powerful there (I can write more on this if of interest).

As for the rest, I don't think Wes should be or would be a very good Prime Minister (this may be unfair, but my impression is that he's not covered himself in glory here and I blame him more for instigating all of this than I do Andy). He could come back as Health Sec. I think Angela would do better as part of a Burnham cabinet. Give Keir the Foreign Office or some other grand office to keep the house in order. 

On a wider point re Makerfield, it's really restored my own age old belief that the great British public will stand up for what's right when push really comes to shove. We don't like politicians like Nigel Farage or their brand of hatred in this country and we don't want them governing us. The great people of Makerfield showed the world that on Thursday. 

We mustn't get complacent though. This was a real existential battle. The next one might not be, but we still need to make sure we win it. People that voted for us today might not next time if there's a non-Farage option and we need to use the time between now and then to prove to them that they made the right choice choosing Andy this week. 

Keen to hear your thoughts/what others say. 

That bar has now been hit for AI safety. 

Don’t get me wrong - I still think AI is a fundamentally brilliant technology on par with the invention of the steam engine and the internet. It’s going to change our world in ways we can’t possibly imagine yet, and we’re going to see phenomenal advancements in science, technology, and achieve great things. 

But as with all technology, it has the potential to be used for immense good in the world, but it also has the potential to cause absolutely devastating destruction to our world and our society. 

Jack Clark, one of the co-founders of Anthropic, gave a great analogy in an interview with The Rest is Politics this week (worth listening to), where he said these new models are like developing new nuclear power plants, where every so often they inadvertently pop out a nuclear bomb alongside it. 

As we build increasingly advanced models, the prospect that the technology could be used for devastating harm gets larger and larger. There’s an asymmetric risk trade-off where those trying to use the technology for harm only need to get through once to cause significant harm, whereas those defending need to get it right all the time. 

With those odds, I don’t think it’ll be long before we see an AI-enabled catastrophe. And I fear that it’s going to take a catastrophe before anyone takes the impetus to introduce safety measures to stop things like this happening. 

Cyberattacks through frontier models like Mythos (which Anthropic say is coming to the public in the coming weeks…) are one example we’ve heard a lot about in recent months, but the generality of the technology means it could be applied across a range of vectors - it could be used to build bioweapons or threaten national security or be used by militaries on the battlefield (as we’ve already seen in Venezuela and Iran). 

These problems are only going to get bigger as we further develop more frontier models. So what do you do about it? 

Well, I don’t know. If I did, I’d be spending all day trying to make it happen, but here are some rough thoughts I’ve had recently (possibly and probably somewhat incoherently):

You can’t stop the development of frontier models. The proverbial genie is out of the hat. This would be like stopping industrialists using the steam engine during the Industrial Revolution, and we all know what happened to the Luddites. And besides, even if you wanted to, you’d need global agreement that nobody would do it, lest someone gets an unfair advantage. I don’t have faith that our current state of diplomacy is going to make that happen - not least when we’re struggling to do so with nuclear proliferation. 

You can’t bring the frontier model companies under state control or really regulate them. If you stop an OpenAI or Anthropic from doing it, someone else will spring up, possibly in a different country, doing the same thing eventually. If OpenAI and Anthropic and Google all agree not to release “dangerous” models, what happens six months down the line when an open-source model reaches the same point of development? Anthropic changed their policy earlier this year from saying they’d stop development of models that crossed danger thresholds until safeguards were in place, to saying they would now only pause if the Board (or their Long Term Benefit Trust) thinks it’s necessary. 

You can’t really rely on the companies to self-regulate either. Historically, you could get some comfort (rightly or wrongly) by listening to these companies tell you how virtuous they were and how they’d set up all these governance structures and complicated mechanisms to ensure that the good of the world remained at the forefront of everything they did. But then when push came to shove at OpenAI and Sam Altman was removed because the board thought the company was getting too focussed on fast development at the cost of safety, the board got replaced and Sam was reinstated pretty quickly. 

As more and more of these companies go public (notably Anthropic, OpenAI and I guess technically SpaceX this year), the pressure between choosing option A that makes more money but is perhaps a bit morally questionable and a greater risk to safety and option B that is the better moral choice and better for safety but doesn’t maximise shareholder value becomes pretty deafening. It becomes very difficult for these companies to commit to prioritising AI safety over the profit motive and that’s scary. 

And this is all hugely amplified by the rate of change of the technology. We’re getting closer and closer to AI that can perform tasks at the level of human competence and agentic tools that can go off and do things by themselves. That brings it easier and easier for something to go wrong, and I’m worried about the day that it does. 

Now I don’t have the answers to any of these questions (or even really know what all the questions are just now) but I’ve been doing some learning through bluedot.org who have some great resources. I’ve done their Future of AI course and would really recommend - it takes two hours and you can sign up for the more detailed ones after if you enjoy it. 

This is one of the biggest problems in the world right now. The more people are aware of it and the more brain power that’s spent on it, the closer we get to helping mitigate some of the risks. 

RH

I promised a few weeks ago to write on recent events in Mali. As ever, I’m going to start by giving you the context, and then talking about what happened recently. I’ll refrain from making commentary on what might happen next, for reasons that will become clear. 

THE CONTEXT

Mali is huge. Much of the population live in the South of the country (particularly in the green parts of the map below) and along the River Niger which you can also just about make out on our map. The bulk of the landmass covers the Sahara Desert, which historically gave Mali an advantageous position from which to control trans-Saharan trade and gave rise to a series of powerful and wealthy empires (c.1300), including that of Mansa Musa, one of the richest people in history. 

During the Scramble for Africa in the 1800s, the French colonised Mali and made it part of French Sudan. The Republic of Mali then gained independence in 1960. The imposition of these borders were problematic for certain ethnic groups, including the Tuareg people whose historic territory spread across Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, Algeria and Libya. And so, since independence, the Tuareg and the Malian government have regularly been in armed conflict as the Tuareg rebel. 

The current conflict has been ongoing since 2012 (yes, 14 years - it’s not a typo). That conflict started after the President was ousted in a military coup, and a Tuareg rebel group, in cahoots with al-Qaeda, took control of Azawad, a region of northern Mali, which includes Timbuktu. They declared independence (which, of course, no one accepted), but then the two groups fell out and began fighting each other. The rebels lost, and al-Qaeda took control of most of the Azawad region, with the Malian government inviting the French military to help win back control. That military operation eventually morphed into Operation Barkhane, a wide-reaching multi-national counter-insurgency operation across the Sahel.

Various peace deals were signed in the decade that followed, none long-lasting. There were allegations of election fraud in 2020, which led to another military coup and the deposition of Malian President Keita in 2020. The military junta then took control of the country in 2021 and invited the Wagner Group (now Russia’s Africa Corps) to begin operations in Mali and support the fight against the Tuareg rebels. This led to the end of Operation Barkhane, and reports of random beatings, killings and the torture of civilians by Africa Corps mercenaries. 

WHAT HAPPENED RECENTLY

On the 25th of April, the Tuareg rebels joined forces with al-Qaeda militants and launched a large-scale offensive across Mali, taking control of two cities, Kidal in the north and Mopti in the centre. At the same time, car bombs went off and sustained gunfire was heard in the capital and across the country. Kidal is an interesting battleground in this conflict, with the Africa Corps only taking control off the rebels in 2023. Now, it seems that they reached an embarrassing deal with the rebels that allowed them to leave, and the rebels have since offered to “build a balanced and effective future relationship” with the Africa Corps if they withdraw from Mali. 

This was the largest, most coordinated attack by the rebels in years, and is a scary indicator on the resurgence of terrorism across the Sahel, where 51% of global terrorism related deaths occurred in 2024. It followed a months-long fuel blockage in Central Mali, and it seems the rebels are trying to trigger a coup similar to that seen in Syria when Ahmed al-Sharaa’s rebels overthrew the Asaad regime. (And as an aside, NPR did a great piece on how the persecuted Uyghurs were a key part of the Syria rebels offensive - https://www.npr.org/2026/05/17/g-s1-113270/uyghurs-china-syria-war-fighters-rebels-bashar-al-assad). 

WHY IT’S SO DIFFICULT TO SAY WHAT MIGHT HAPPEN NEXT

There’s a huge gap in reporting on the situation in Mali. Some publications do try, but it’s hard to find reliable fine details as budget cuts hit foreign correspondents desks around the world. And so, it’s really hard to understand the live situation, and whether the junta and the rebels will move closer to negotiation or escalation. 

Sadly, what is clear is that the Sahel remains the global hotspot for terrorism. That has a two-fold effect as the death and devastation across the Sahel spills across to other countries in the region. That fuels mass displacement within these countries and pushes migrants north into the Maghreb and Southern Europe. Anecdotally, in Carlo Masala’s “If Russia Wins: A Scenario”, migrants from Mali were forced into Europe to fuel far-right sentiment and drive division within our communities. 

All in all though, it’s a pretty dreadful situation that isn’t getting the international attention it deserves, and so I hope if nothing else, it spurs you to read beyond the headline the next time you get a BBC News notification on Mali. 

RH

But rather than rant about my misgivings with the whole organisation (which I may very well do another time), I want to focus on an article by Colin Brazier about the 2001 Bradford Race Riots, which you can read here: https://www.gbnews.com/opinion/bradford-race-riots-ethnicity-muslim. 

2026 marks 25 years since the streets of Bradford were lit up by the flames and destruction of race riots. Much of the discourse and media coverage in the years following has carefully towed the line between rightly saying how Asian youths unleashed untold mayhem upon the city they called home that weekend, but with the nuance that this didn’t happen in a vacuum and how a complex mix of social deprivation, police failings, and far-right provocation were significant contributing factors [Note 1].

Mr. Brazier doesn’t agree. His view is that this reporting has been far too sympathetic to the Muslim community that were, it’s true, responsible for much of the damage. He calls it an “expression of territorial dominance” and particularly blames the large Kashmiri diaspora, who make up the bulk of the Muslim community in Bradford as well as much of the Pakistani community in Britain. Now I’m a British Muslim who grew up in Bradford whose family first came to this country from that Kashmir region of Pakistan, and so I feel oddly qualified to make comment on this. 

That does give me a natural bias, but what I want to do is tell you a story. I’m not going to assign blame, I just want to tell a story that I think does a pretty good job of explaining what happened. And then I’ll leave you to make your own conclusions. 

So to start off, let’s set the scene. 

These far-right news organisations like GB News make a big thing about immigrants taking over these great Northern cities, and how places like Bradford have been taken over by Pakistanis (or that much-loved five-letter abbreviation…). As per the 2021 Census, 61% of people in Bradford are White - so most people in these cities are not immigrants, are not Pakistanis, and are not foreigners. 

In 2001, when the riots happened, that number was even higher, with 78% of the people in Bradford being White. Yes, that number has gone down 17% in 20 years, but most of the people in Bradford are still White people - the Pakistanis haven’t taken over. It’s a well-documented phenomenon around the Western world that White communities will typically leave denser, inner-city areas once immigrants move in for work, in favour of “nicer”, whiter areas further away. 

That leads me to the nuance of this data, in that people aren’t spread evenly through the city, and so you get smaller sub-pockets where there are more Asian people than White people and vice versa. When you’re a minority in a place, there’s a natural safety in numbers that prompts people to stay near their own kind. That’s exacerbated when someone does leave “the group” and gets beaten up or their windows put in, and over time that has led to some areas of Bradford that are predominantly Asian, some areas that are predominantly White, and some that are fairly mixed. To get a proper idea of what I mean, watch this great Stephen Graham scene from This Is England before you read on (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SxL-FoE6mzw).

With that context, let’s roll back to July 2001 - remember this is all pre-9/11. The National Front (NF), a fascist, Neo-Nazi, far-right political party, was on a tour of Northern England. They’d already had hits in Oldham and Burnley in May and June of that year, which had culminated in riots in both cities. They’d chosen Bradford as the next spot on their tour, but the Home Secretary had banned them from organising a march in Bradford to maintain public order.  

Nick Griffin, the leader of the British National Party (BNP), an associated fascist, Neo-Nazi, far-right political party, held a rally the night before the date of the planned march instead. In response to the prospect of fascists [Note 2] returning to the streets of Britain, the Anti-Nazi League arranged a counter-protest in the city centre, which was allowed to go ahead and attended by groups of both Asian people and White people. There was a large police presence because of rumours that the NF were planning on showing up anyway and on the day, a number of NF members were recognised in the city - skinheads naturally stand out in a crowd. 

For those who haven’t been, Bradford City Centre isn’t a very big place, and the police didn’t do a great job of keeping the two groups apart. Pockets of fighting broke out, including near a pub where NF members were said to be congregating, ultimately culminating in an Asian man getting stabbed. Police reinforcements in full riot gear were then met with anger for failing to protect the local community.

What followed was an eruption of violent disorder as a riot broke out. Bricks, petrol bombs, and burning cars were hurled at the police, and millions of pounds of damage was caused as the Manningham area of the city was set ablaze, largely by Asian youths.  

This is the part that Mr. Brazier claims is an “expression of territorial dominance”. What he fails to mention is that the next few days also saw damage by White youths in the Holmewood and Ravenscliffe areas of Bradford. Was that also an expression of territorial dominance? Nor does he mention how the Asian community that he so willingly denigrates came together in the days following to bring those responsible for the damage to justice, with over 1,000 people calling in after the police circulated pictures of rioters to every mosque in the city. 

His lazy reporting extends into factual inaccuracies next, with his claim that the 1989 Satanic Verses burning was in response to Ayatollah Khomeini’s 1989 fatwa to have the author, Salman Rushdie, killed. If GB News had editorial standards, they would’ve spotted that the book burnings were in January 1989, whereas the fatwa was issued in February 1989. 

And to complete the triad, he manages to link the book burning to the Nazis, but conveniently leaves out the responsibility of the National Front and the British National Party in instigating the riots. Perhaps those political parallels don’t count? 

At best, this is shoddy work. At worst, it’s a dangerous, demonising dog-whistle in a publication that claims to maintain a veneer of responsibility. 

Mr. Brazier claims the riots were just a prelude to problems that Britain will face in years to come. I fear reporting like his is a prelude to a continuing resurgence of the far-right in Britain, and the violence that comes with it.

This brand of divisive "journalism" does our Great British society no good. 

RH

[Note 1] This was helpfully informed by the publication of the Ouseley Report on race relations in Bradford, which had been commissioned before the riots. You can read the full report here: https://web.archive.org/web/20110812044953/http://resources.cohesioninstitute.org.uk/Publications/Documents/Document/DownloadDocumentsFile.aspx?recordId=98&file=PDFversion

[Note 2] This is a big word to use, and it is thrown around a lot these days. These guys only let White people be members and believe that non-White people should be stripped of citizenship and deported - violently if necessary. I think that justifies my use of fascist. 

Below, you’ll find a short version I’ve written for November 2026. 

To be clear, this isn’t intended to be a prediction. Instead, it’s a story of a series of extreme outcomes coming to fruition at the same time. 

It’s not meant to scare you, but to give you notice of one possible outcome of the escalatory steps we’re seeing in the world around us. 

November 2026 - A Scenario

It’s November 4th, 2026. The mid-terms were meant to happen yesterday. Maybe they would’ve done in the old world. 

2026 started off, as you’ll remember, with the US special military operation to capture Venezuelan President Maduro. A bonkers start to the year by any account, and headline-dominating in any year-end flashbacks for most normal years. But 2026 was by no means a normal year. 

Two months later, we saw another special military operation in Iran, the US administration buoyed on by the success and relative ease with which they’d deposed Maduro and intimidated the Venezuelan leadership into acceding to their demands. Iran however, was not Venezuela, and the joint Israel-US attacks on Iran failed to replace the regime. 

Instead, the Iranian republic hunkered down and unleashed strategic chaos across the Middle East, not least by closing the Strait of Hormuz. That brought the global economy to a standstill. It wasn’t instant - March was largely spent watching a delusional market convince itself everything was going to TACO itself back to reality. 

It’s when the tankers stopped arriving in April that things really started tanking. Things seemed salvageable going into the Easter weekend. After all, Trump had given the Iranians until the day after Easter Monday to come to an agreement or he was going to bomb the shit out of them, so surely they were going to sort it out, right?

WRONG, DUMMY! The Iranians don’t negotiate. They don’t mind a long war; it’s very much in their interests. They fought Iraq for EIGHT YEARS before agreeing a deal. The only other time they’ve agreed to a deal was President Obama’s 2015 nuclear deal that Trump then ripped up. They only agree deals when the economic position is becoming existential and when doing so doesn’t destroy their revolutionary identity. Their economy was weak in April 2026, but the rising oil prices meant it wasn’t existential. There was no way it wasn’t going to look like ideological submission either, and so they were never going to sign a deal then. 

And so, we saw Trump rain down hell, destroying much of the civilian infrastructure across the country. Bridges collapsed and power plants burned as leaders around the world gave Trump a stern talking to - because that’ll really show him. European leaders were particularly angry, and a joint E3 statement from the leaders of the UK, France, and Germany rebuked the President in stronger language than ever before. In response, Trump announced that the US would be withdrawing from NATO and that their defence infrastructure was no longer available for European use “unless they wanna PAY US for it.”

Of course, the Iranian response was even more drone attacks, destroying Gulf critical infrastructure such as desalination plants, and causing millions to die. They continued to apply pressure on the Strait, which triggered Trump to send in ground troops to seize critical islands like Kharg that control oil supply in the Strait. The US military took the sites, but were met by a barrage of missile attacks from the Iranian mainland, causing the loss of hundreds of American lives. The public outrage in the US was extraordinary and there were large-scale protests across major cities to demonstrate against the war. The aerial bombardment continued nonetheless, and became even harder to resist once the expensive, anti-missile defences began to run out. The destruction of more critical oil infrastructure on these islands triggered another oil price rally, taking it to $200/barrel. 

The market crash of late April 2026 was even more brutal than the April 2025 market crash. Financial markets were in freefall across the world, finally pricing in what this meant for the global economy. Oil wasn’t going to start flowing through the Strait anytime soon, everything was going to get even more expensive once again, and the little growth we had been promised for 2026 was to be stifled away. 

The pressure built up in liquid financial markets erupted into private markets, with the private credit bubble finally spilling over. The tide had well and truly gone out, and more than one Wall Street bank was found with its pants down. Later in the summer, we saw the collapse of two prominent global investment banks who’d over-leveraged in the private credit boom, with an aggregate market impact twice as bad as Lehman. Central banks pushed interest rates to record highs to stem the bleeding, and reintroduced quantitative easing to support the market. 

They continued to crescendo downwards, nonetheless. 

The 12th of June saw Russians come together across the Federation to celebrate Russia Day. The celebrations in Ivangorod that day were particularly memorable, with more fireworks than usual and an extraordinary display of Russian military might for a minor town way beyond the periphery of Moscow. Its importance became clear the morning after, however, as little green men crossed over the river and into the Estonian town of Narva in the early hours. There was a small resistance, that was quickly quelled by these men who were definitely, most certainly, not the Russian military. The Estonian locals, thinking the sound of shooting was simply more fireworks from the Russia Day celebrations, were largely caught by surprise, and by midday the Russian Federation had claimed Narva as Russian territory, and lay claim to the rest of the country. 

The permanently stationed NATO Battlegroup in Estonia had been severely weakened since the US left the alliance. The UK-led Rapid Response Force raced over to Narva, but the Russians had already established a stronghold by the time they arrived. Estonia triggered Article 5, and an emergency meeting of the North Atlantic Council was held to agree a consensus. The main blocker to a unified NATO response was Hungarian President Viktor Orban, who’d won a supermajority in April’s widely disputed election amid claims of Russian interference. He’d made a point of attending the meeting himself and refused to allow a unified decision to be reached. Individual countries, like the UK, France, and Germany, agreed to help, but without NATO support, were limited in what they could do. 

The Estonian military led the assault on Narva, with support from the few NATO countries that remained. The battle ground to a halt just outside the city, as Allied troops met the hastily dug trenches of the Ukraine-hardened Russian army. This was to become the frontline for yet another grinding war of attrition. 

Back in the United States, protests continued to worsen over the rest of the summer, and so President Trump mobilised the National Guard. This largely fuelled the violence, as protestors fought back against what they saw as an unreasonably aggressive response and the administration’s disproportionate use of force. In Minneapolis, troops had opened fire on protesters, and violent firefights between protesters and the National Guard became frequent occurrences. 

Come August, the US needed a good news story, and President Trump decided that Cuba would be that story, harking back to Operation Absolute Resolve that had seen him into the year. He’d already pushed Cuba to the brink of financial ruin at this point, with most of the country at a standstill following the US’s oil blockade. The people were desperate, and so it didn’t take long for another US special military operation (Operational Critical Lightening) to topple the Diaz-Canel communist government. But this wasn’t to be the long-awaited arrival of liberal democracy to Cuban shores, but the installation of yet another authoritarian regime, this time led by US Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, with the support of a US “peacekeeping” force. And for a few weeks, it seemed to be working - oil was flowing, and ordinary Cuban life was beginning to get moving again. 

Unfortunately for them, communist militias were also using the time to mobilise. Backed by the Castro family and with widespread support in what remained of the Cuban government establishment, this short-lived revival was quickly put to a stop as critical infrastructure was destroyed and the US “peacekeeping” force was under constant attack. The militia didn’t have particularly advanced technology or weaponry, but they’d learnt from the lessons of Vietnam and were putting guerrilla warfare to effective use in the streets of Cuba. Much of the “peacekeeping” force was wiped out, and President Trump committed to a ground invasion to seek vengeance for the US lives lost. The militias have continued their assaults in spite of this, leading to the loss of countless American lives, and the Cuban War is quickly developing into another deeply unpopular foreign policy decision for the administration. 

Back on the US mainland, protesters were increasingly organising and getting a hold of heavy weaponry to counter the National Guard. Allegedly, Russian intelligence operatives have been helping provide these supplies, and there are widespread claims that Russian and Iranian state interference is actively working to widen social division across the country through social media. In response, Trump has instead blamed pockets of the immigrant Cuban community in the United States, saying that they’ve been mobilised by the Cuban militia, with the support of communist China, to wreak havoc and orchestrate the protests fuelling violence and chaos on the streets of America. 

That, he claimed, put the US in an active state of war on the homeland, and meant they had to mobilise to defend the country against this illegal alien invasion. In the process of doing so, he’d been forced to invoke the historical precedents from the UK during WW2 and Ukraine during their current conflict and suspend the mid-terms. After all, it was impossible to guarantee that they’d be free and fair elections, and so it was crucial that they were suspended rather than allowing the Chinese-Cuban alliance another opportunity to undermine US democracy. 

That was two weeks ago. 

Democrats and Republicans erupted alike, and figures like Gavin Newsom and AOC are now leading many of the protests across the US. They say that if the President won’t let them go to the polls, they’re left with no choice but to remove him forcefully. The violence on the streets is like nothing we’ve seen before. 

The US is engulfed in domestic chaos that many commentators are likening to a Second Civil War. 

The Middle East is still on fire, with the missile attacks continuing and more people dying every single day.

Europe is fighting a war of attrition on two fronts, in both Estonia and Ukraine. Countries across the continent are deeply divided. 

And over in the Pacific, rumours are swirling that China is mobilising naval assets and troops for what could be an accelerated invasion of Taiwan, given that the US is distracted. 

They’ll make some great films about this year someday. I just wonder if it’ll still be Hollywood that makes them.

RH

Happy Sunday Funday,

A return to regularly scheduled programming today, with what I’m sure is a welcome break from the horrors of war you might otherwise get from this series of letters. 

I wish I could say the same about my trains back down to London this weekend. My original train, on the newly refreshed direct line from Bradford’s second station down into King’s Cross, was unceremoniously cancelled after - get this - railway signalling cables were stolen down by Stevenage. It’s the scrap value of the copper inside these cables that make them worth stealing, but it was really bloody inconvenient. 

That was meant to be an LNER train, but instead I had to get a Grand Central service from Bradford’s primary station, which thankfully was also direct. There’s something to be said for Bradford having two railway stations (hopefully soon to be three when Northern Powerhouse Rail, or whatever they’re calling it these days, finally gets up and running), both with direct links down to the capital, stemming back from it’s Victorian heyday when it was the wool capital of the world. 

As an aside, I went for a walk through the old Victorian industrial quarter whilst I was up this weekend, and you can see my pictures from that walk @diningstones on Instagram, if you’re interested.  

Now LNER is my preferred train line in Britain. I like the colour scheme, the trains are comfortable and it’s very rare that issues are fatal to your journey (unlike today). I’m such a fan that I actually book all of my train tickets through LNER, given how great their interface is, and since you don’t pay any booking fees vs if you were to book through a Trainline for example. 

Grand Central generally feels a little bit more dated (the announcer has just told us that you can find safety information in the saloon, what’s a saloon!?). Their route is also slightly longer (which, let’s be honest, is the main reason I don’t get it) and they have two sets of railway stock. The first is ancient and you can really tell - it’s not a very comfy journey. But, the second is still dated but harks back from a time when trains were made to be comfortable. That’s what I’ve got today, and there’s heaps of leg room, massive windows and intelligently placed power sockets (i.e., next to me by the window!). It is also a more scenic route, and I don’t envy you if you’ve never had the privilege of taking a train through Halifax. 

But this train is also delayed! Somehow, it got stuck between the depot and Bradford, which now means it’s running about 20 minutes behind schedule. They also don’t have a designated unreserved carriage (typically carriage C on an LNER train, super if it’s packed and you get on early!). You also can’t reserve a seat on Grand Central after booking the ticket unless you ring them. Now don’t get me wrong, I’m typically not averse to ringing someone, but this feels a bit stuck in the nineties like calling your stock broker. They also won’t deliver your food to your seat, which is inconvenient. 

But, I’ll be back in London only 30 minutes after I was meant to, which in the grand scheme of things is a pretty good outcome I think. Then I get to battle this weekend’s Piccadilly line closure as well, how fun!

To continue the positivity of this note, I read a pretty interesting SubStack recently. Unfortunately, I don’t quite know how SubStack works and there doesn’t seem to be a way of looking at what you’ve read. Since I didn’t like it, I can’t dig it out and share here, but I’ll try to convey the general gist of what they said. I tried to get ChatGPT to find it for me, but it turns out every bugger has written something about this. 

The main point that I wanted to share was that yes, the world is on fire (both literally and figuratively), and it does feel like things have really turned on a fulcrum since 2020 (happy covid lockdown day for those reading on Monday btw!). But, that is a fact of life that, even with the best will in the world, there’s very little that you can do about it. 

Instead, when things are falling apart on a big world level, it’s quite nice and helpful to instead look and focus on the smaller worlds around you. Taking the time to enjoy the quiet moments before and after ordering your coffee on a Sunday morning. 

Actually, you know what - sometimes I start writing something, realise I sound like a muppet teaching people to suck eggs and realise that I should probably cut it. This is one of those moments, and you all know that enjoying the small things in life will make you slightly happier without me telling you like it’s a secret formula. 

So… I suppose those last four paragraphs have added absolutely nothing to anyone’s life, but hey not everything has to be an exercise in productivity. Instead, hopefully that’s an interesting (bizarre?) insight into my fairly unfiltered mind and I hope the rest of your Sunday is scary-free. 

Have a great week ahead! 

RH 

P.s., I also seem to survived my lack of seat booking without getting moved on on this train, which is another small win for the weekend!

Good evening amigos and amigas,

Today’s letter is a bit of a smorgasbord (which I didn’t realise meant sandwich-table, but it makes me love the word even more) of things. 

I wanted to start with ChatGPT and finish  with a small Iranian SITREP. 

I’m also working on a piece about the Bradford Race Riots and GB News prompted by this article (https://www.gbnews.com/opinion/bradford-race-riots-ethnicity-muslim) that I was originally going to include here. But there’s a possibility that one gets a lot of scrutiny, so I want to take the time to make sure it’s watertight. I’ve also pitched it to the Guardian, but they might not want it, in which case you’ll get it first!

CHATGPT

So as regular readers will remember, I paid for the upgraded version of ChatGPT a few months ago, to get access to the latest, cutting-edge models, and I thought it would be interesting to share my thoughts and reflections here. 

The first point is just how much deeper I find this one to be, with a near night and day difference - now a lot of that is that as you use each new model, it’s exponentially better than the last so the jumps between each new model feel like they just get bigger and bigger. 

My usage has stayed at a pretty similar frequency to before, but what I have found is that when I get into a rabbit hole and want to keep going, I don’t run out of credits which means I can carry the thought all the way through to completion. This is super useful when researching things and trying to get a basic understanding of things to direct my learning on various topics. 

You can also upload files to this version, which is also very useful - one example is when I uploaded my rental contract and asked it to find a clause that I knew was in there but just couldn’t find after looking through two or three times. It did it in seconds, which was such a game changer. 

I also keep a spreadsheet to track my finances, and have built up a few years of data there. I shared that too, and asked it talk me through a few things, and we had a really informative, engaging conversation that I then used to reorganise my banking set up. Not financial advice, but a really helpful way to reimagine something stale that I hadn’t really updated since setting up for the first time. 

Now all of these are cool, but probably not worth the £20/month. But the Codex app that comes with it singlehandedly makes up the difference. It took a bit of getting used to, but I’ve now got it linked in with Github and Visual Studio Code (which between them are the backbone of the website) and it is an absolute game changer. 

I used it to build a tool that can now take these letters, format them into a PDF, watermark them and send them out to a mailing list automatically. The whole process took about an hour, most of which was me deciding how I wanted them to look, and now it just works. 

I’ve also got a tool that I built before this subscription, that takes each of these letters from my outbox, extracts the text, transforms it into a HTML webpage and pushes it out onto the website at the push of a button. Now that broke a few weeks ago, and I tasked Codex with working out what was going on and fixing it this afternoon. It did so within 10 minutes and now it works as expected again. Troubleshooting that before this would’ve taken me an entire weekend and so the £20/month is absolutely worth that time saving, even if it’s not every single day. 

IRAN SITREP 006

Markets have woken up to the idea that this war isn’t going away now. Trump continues to be publicly irrational, and I have seen little evidence that makes me think there’s any form of serious strategy behind what we’re seeing. 

Allegedly there’s now peace talks. I say allegedly because Trump says they’re happening and Iran says they’re not. It’s a bit confusing. 

Pakistan has emerged as a potential power-broker, but don’t forget their vested interests here - they’ve got a defence pact with the Saudis that I’m sure they’re really hoping doesn’t have to be used and are also almost entirely dependent on the Gulf states for energy. They continue to walk a political tightrope with the US administration, which the Pakistani government has become increasingly close to despite its unpopularity amongst Pakistani people because of its support for Israel and the ongoing genocide in Gaza.

Instead of focussing on rhetoric, I’m finding it useful to look at military preparation and troop movements, which have served Iran-watchers well so far in this war. Hark back to just over a month ago, when there were talks happening in Geneva whilst the US assembled the largest military buildup in the Middle East since the Iraq war. 

They clearly didn’t have a plan then. I don’t think they have a plan to completion now either. But I think they’re starting to formulate a ground invasion plan for the next steps, and that Doublespeak is in effect i.e., any peace talks are a ploy. 

50,000 US troops are currently in the Middle East, roughly 10,000 more than usual. Most of these are sailors, but there are 2,500 Marines which have been repositioned from Japan (much to the dismay of China hawks). There’s also an additional 2,000 soldiers from the 82nd Airborne Division (paratroopers) en-route. 

That’s not enough to launch a wholescale ground invasion of Iran. Iran’s huge. For context, it took 250,000 to invade Iraq. There are Kurds in the region that could be used (and have been in the past), who would love a US-backed opportunity to topple the Iranian regime. The CIA has already been arming them with small arms. But then the US went very quiet on the Kurdish front earlier this month and I haven’t quite been able to work out why. 

Regardless though, US troops alone might be enough to take something smaller. Maybe something like Kharg Island. But then you have to hold it, and that puts you on the back foot in a not very pleasant way. The Iranian military is a much fiercer foe than both the Iraq and Afghan forces fought in the 2000s, and even those are widely seen as failures. I’m not saying it’s impossible, but it is certainly unwise. 

But then I don’t know what other options they still have. Aerial bombardment clearly hasn’t toppled the regime and there’s no reason I’ve seen for why that might change as time goes on. The Strait of Hormuz is blocked and there’s no clear way of changing that (although Pakistan has managed to get a few tankers through, which suggests that some talking is happening somewhere). 

Do you put 50,000 troops next to a war zone, or do you put them into the war zone? I’m not looking forward to finding out. 

The other notable event is that the USS Gerald Ford is, by all accounts, well and truly in a state of SNAFU (for the uninitiated: Situation Normal, All Fucked Up). It’s been out for nearly ten months now, which is on the upper end of deployments - don’t forget this is also the one that was in Venezuela at the start of the year. It’s since left the Middle East and moored in Croatia over the weekend for repairs after a fire that took 30 hours to put out. 

The Pentagon claims the fire started in the laundry room, and a Greek newspaper apparently got a source saying that there was an investigation underway to explore the possibility that US crewmembers had started the fire to terminate their extended mission. I’ve also seen a video of President Trump saying it was attacked from 17 directions by Iran, leaving the crew “running for their lives,” but that’s actually from the Venezuela operation with misleading headlines overlaid. The information war is another dimension to this that we’ve not seen lots of yet. Keep an eye out.

To end on a slightly lighter note, you might find it funny that the reason this $13 billion, state-of-the-art aircraft carrier was delayed on its way to the Middle East was because the toilet system they installed is far too small and keeps breaking, and so it keeps flooding with shit. If ever there was a sign of the war effort…

Short week ahead, I hope you find time for a moment of joy despite the chaos. 

RH

I’ve never really followed the Oscar’s, but then again, I’ve never really watched many films either. 

This year, clearly I’ve seen many a film, but hadn’t actually made my way through many of those that’d been nominated for Best Picture. And so, I decided to change that. 

So, ahead of the Award’s this evening, here’s the ten nominations for Best Picture:

With everything going on in the world, it feels like it’s been an age since I sat down to write one of these that wasn’t about something terrible happening in the world. 

For newer joiners, it’s not always this bleak and regularly scheduled programming is in fact usually much less intense. 

So today, a few films I’ve seen recently, a few things I’ve cooked recently and some reflections on Ramadan. 

Some Films

I’ve been to the pictures quite a few times this year and seen some incredible films and some less so. Both Sentimental Value and Hamnet were both fantastic, and it looks like that’s being reflected in the Oscar nominations for this year. Sentimental Value just edges it for me, but I think that’s probably because it’s more relatable to being in your twenties - if you’ve got kids, Hamnet really does pull on your heartstrings and will probably leave you a little bit shellshocked; take a tissue. 

I also saw Marty Supreme, and it was… alright. I didn’t mind it too much, but Timothée Chalamet’s character really wound me up. Now I know that’s the point and it shows that he’s a great actor because I’m still wound up by how annoying he was, but it made the film less enjoyable for me. It was brilliantly shot though and is an aesthetically pleasing film, if you can get over how much of a shit the main character is. 

Giant, which is a biopic of former heavyweight champion Prince Naseem Hamed, was fine. It’s an interesting story and an entertaining enough boxing film, but it’s not Rocky. Jason Statham’s new film Shelter is basically just like any other Jason Statham film, with lots of fight sequences and people getting shot, but this time with a 12 year old kid in tow. It was good enough. 

Wuthering Heights was just weird, I know they’re all basically meant to be shitty people but I found myself wondering when I could leave about an hour in. Strange film, very odd. 

And then last night, I went to watch Crime 101. I had fairly low expectations but it was quite good in the end. It’s not world-bindingly unique, but it’s different enough that it kept me engaged along the way and I was quite satisfied by the ending, which I think is always a win. 

If you’re going to go out to watch one of these, make it Sentimental Value. It’s a brilliant, European-made film, the story is told wonderfully and every shot is magnificent. Definitely worth the trip. It’s also apparently the BAFTAs tonight, so I wonder how it’ll come out in that.

Some Food

I’m long overdue a @diningstones post, but I’ve really been enjoying taking the time to cook recently, not least because of Ramadan. 

This Friday night, I made some cookies based on a friend’s recipe. Now the last (and only) time I tried cookies I left them in the oven for too long because they just didn’t look done. Little did I know that you’re meant to take them out as soon as the edges look done and then the rest of the cookie sets as they cool, and so instead I was left with some fairly crispy sugar discs. 

Not this time though, I had done my research properly and thanks to a brilliant recipe, ended up making some pretty incredible cookies, if I do say so myself. The brown butter and miso makes such a difference and I think even gives them the edge over the M&S ones. I’ve put the recipe in the postscript - you have to try it, and send me pictures if you do!

Now also this week, I made some keema, which was incredible but I had far, far too much of it, and so come the weekend, I figured I’d make some mash and turn it into a Shepherd’s Pie. Now this is one of the first things I learnt to cook with my mum when I was younger so it holds a special place in my heart, but I did add a whole host of herbs (coriander, dill, and oregano) when whisking the mash - yes I prefer it silky smooth - and it was fabulous. The whole thing topped off with some parmesan made it incredible, and I was a big fan. 

I’ve also spent today making a hummus, which included nearly an hour of peeling the skin off the chickpeas, which apparently helps get it really smooth. It does look pretty smooth but I’ve not tasted it yet and suspect it could do with some flavour refining post-sunset, so I’ll report back with pictures of that another time. 

Ramadan

And finally, Ramadan started this week, which for the uninitiated means no food or drink whilst the sun is up, and therefore waking up before sunrise (c.4/5am at the minute) to get some food in. Now I’ve been doing this since I was a child (I’m sure my parents will have some stories to share) so the actual not eating bit isn’t too challenging, as I think is the case for most Muslims fasting for Ramadan. 

In fact, these fasts are actually the shortest I’ve ever experienced, as the month of Ramadan starts roughly 10 days earlier each year. That’s because the Islamic calendar is based on a lunar cycle which is roughly 10 days shorter than the Gregorian calendar, which is based on a solar cycle. 

And so when we were younger, Ramadan was in the height of summer, which meant much longer days, with some fasts spanning from c.2am to c.10pm in around 2016. 

The bit that does become a bit of a challenge is the disrupted sleep. Now this year, I’m managing to get up, eat, brush my teeth and get back into bed in about 20 minutes. I’m also trying to time my sleep in multiples of 90 minutes (which is roughly the length of a sleep cycle) so that I don’t feel as jarred when I wake up irregularly, but waking up in the night always leaves you a little bit more tired and disrupted than you would otherwise be. 

It is, on the whole though, quite a pleasant experience. 

It really forces you to slow down and focus, which is welcome when your mind is always racing otherwise. This really dominates your life for the month because you’re always conscious that you’re a little hungry and feeling a bit drained, so you slow down and I personally find it makes me a lot more considered about what I do. It also does bring you closer to God and is quite a nice way to reaffirm your faith each year. 

Removing one of your senses also really attenuates all of the other senses, which means you really appreciate the small things in life. I spent five minutes in awe at how great tortilla wraps could smell yesterday (as an aside, I got sixteen twelve inch wraps from the Mexican grocers yesterday and a litre of Valentina, which is my favourite hot sauce and the most popular one in Mexico). 

Above all, as a side effect of being forced to slow down and being a bit more considered, it’s really quite peaceful. I really enjoy the space to think about one thing at a time, and feeling a little fatigued in a way that means you’re doing one thing and one thing only, is really quite nice. 

And with that, the sun is starting to set and I can open my fast at 1731 today, so I should go and prepare my dinner. It’s the last of the Shepherd’s Pie and some samosas this evening. 

I hope you all have a wonderful week ahead of you. 

RH

P.S., here’s the recipe for the cookies

Ingredients:

• 110g Unsalted Butter
• 1.5tbsp White Miso Paste
• 200g White Sugar
• 1tsp Vanilla Extract
• 1 Egg
• 165g Plain Flour
• 0.5tsp Baking Powder
• 0.25tsp Baking Soda
• 0.25tsp Table Salt
• 150g Milk Chocolate Chips
• 45g Dark Chocolate

Instructions:

1. Brown butter
2. Whisk in miso paste
3. Mix in sugar
4. Wait for mixture to cool
5. Mix in remaining dry ingredients  
6. Place balls of 75g on baking tray, well spaced out to allow spreading - you will probably need to cook in batches
7. Cook at 180° until edges darken slightly, then immediately remove from oven
8. Allow to cool completely before devouring 

The Context

Iranian protests reached a record peak in mid-January, in response to a weakening economic position that has left many Iranians struggling to afford basic necessities. You can read the full backstory in my 359 Briefing here: https://www.rahimhussain.co.uk/blog/2026-01-12-rahims-letter-024-359-briefing-on-iran, but one of the key takeaways there was the prospect of foreign intervention making this a significantly more dangerous situation for the regime than we’ve seen before. 

The Iranian government then imposed a curfew enforced by security forces, which put a stop to the mass protests we were seeing in the streets, where at least 27,000 protestors were arrested (some reports suggesting higher) and over 3,000 killed. There have been limited protests since, with the most notable event instead being a hack of the Iranian State Broadcaster, which briefly played footage of the exiled Crown Prince and encouraged security forces to turn their guns away from the people. Whilst an X account linked to Anonymous claimed responsibility for it (see below), it remains unclear who was actually behind it. 

At the same time, the US has also been negotiating with Iran to try and reach a nuclear deal. For context, Trump withdrew the US from the Obama-orchestrated deal in 2018, and Iran subsequently withdrew in 2025. The US is reportedly now asking Iran to hand over 400kg of enriched uranium, stop developing nuclear weapons, limit its ballistic missile programme, and end support for its proxy groups such as the Houthis, as part of any deal. There has been a lot of back and forth - the Iranians initially said that “good progress” was being made, but then JD Vance accused them of not accepting Trump’s “red lines” and a deal looks no closer than before. 

This sets the context militarily too, as US military assets have been building “an armada” around Iran for weeks, which I’ll focus on in more detail below. It’s also worth noting that Trump has been particularly critical of the UK in relation to the Chagos Islands deal, where we’re giving the Islands back to Mauritius but then effectively leasing back the largest island, Diego Garcia, which is home to a joint US-UK airbase. 

Where We Are Today

So today - the Middle East is currently seeing the biggest build-up of military assets since the Iraq War, as shown in the graphic below. 

As you can see, there’s a significant amount of naval and aerial capability in the region. The aerial assets in particular have seen a massive airbridge this week, with FlightRadar data showing over 50 fighter jets (think the F-35, F-22, and F-16) being moved, as well as what seems like a constant stream of C-5 Galaxy and C-17 Globemaster cargo planes bringing military equipment into the region. Some of this seems to have included Reaper drones and both Patriot and THAAD air defence systems, which could help protect US assets in the event of short/medium-range missile attacks by Iran. A host of 16 air-to-air refuelling tankers are also in the region, as well as B2 bombers and six E3 Sentry aircraft. 

These last three are particularly important.

• Air-to-air refuelling tankers let you go on for much longer, and open up the possibility of using bases and aircraft carriers further away from Iran for any potential action. 
• B2 bombers are the aircraft used to drop the Massive Ordnance Penetrator (aka MOP) bombs used on Iran’s nuclear facilities last year, and are the only aircraft (that we know of) capable of doing so. 
• And finally, the E3 Sentries are effectively flying headquarters that allow military leaders to see what’s going on below them and control the battlefield. One of these can run a war, so six is an exceptional amount of power to have on hand. 

Some have suggested that this is purely leverage for the nuclear deal with Iran. I think that’s bullshit. You don’t move this much stuff around the world, at immense expense, whilst strategically weakening yourself on other fronts, just to make a point. 

Earlier today, Trump said that they might make a deal in the next 10-15 days, or “very bad things will happen.” 

By comparison, last year, on Thursday, June 19th, he said he’d make a decision on whether to strike Iran within the next two weeks. Overnight Saturday, June 21st/Sunday, June 22nd, Operation Midnight Hammer took place. 

This feels very similar.

As an addendum, it’s also worth noting that the UK is reportedly now blocking US use of UK military bases for any Iran operation that may take place, which feels pretty remarkable and, speculatively, may be an indication that the UK is uncomfortable with the legal position of what they’re hearing the US may be planning. This relates particularly to Diego Garcia and RAF Fairford in Gloucestershire, which have supported US strikes in the Middle East in the past.   

Where I Can See This Heading

These numbers below aren’t scientific at all. They’re mostly finger in the air and could be complete bollocks, but in a world where no one really knows what’s going to happen, it forces me to weigh up my views on the various possibilities. I would also caveat that I have an action bias, and so am likely to overweight big things happening sooner. I have tried to correct for this somewhat, but it definitely still feeds through. 

60% Likelihood: US Strike on Iran between US market close evening of Fri 20th and Futures market open evening of Sun 22nd

I find it very difficult to see the US backing down from all this preparation without any kind of fight. The airbridge this week suggests to me it’s imminent, as you wouldn’t want to leave all that kit just lying there. Trump has been talking about this for nearly a month, and made a very similar warning to today’s last year. Whilst it’s somewhat military context dependent (they may not want to start in a thunderstorm), I would say it’s most likely to be after market close on Friday, and before the futures markets open on Sunday. The prospect of this being a prolonged military exercise remains, but I do expect they’ll claim some form of victory before futures markets open. It’s true that the USS Ford aircraft carrier will only get to south of Cyprus by Monday, but that’s if it’s travelling at normal speeds. I can see a world where a) it moves faster than normal and b) significant air-to-air refuelling capabilities mean it can be effective from further away.

30% Likelihood: US Strike on Iran between 22nd Feb and 5th Mar

If it’s not this weekend, I think it’s pretty much locked on to be in the next 15 days - Trump doesn’t really have an easy off-ramp to deescalation from here and he’s publicly announced those timelines (for now). 

5% Likelihood: US Strike on Iran after 5th Mar 

As above, I still find it difficult to see how Trump off-ramps from here - they could find a deal, but I don’t think his red lines are going to be acceptable to the Iranians. He also has a desire for regime change in Iran (saying late last week that “it would be the best thing that could happen”), despite limited day-after planning for what happens after that. 

<5% Likelihood: No US Strike on Iran. Diplomacy prevails

This would be a wonderful outcome, but sadly, I can’t see it happening. 

Now, an actual strike could take infinite forms. I’ve seen some frankly absurd suggestions that the US is going to drop a tactical nuclear weapon on Iran. Technically, yes, that is possible, and I’d posture that Moscow and Beijing probably wouldn’t fire retaliatory strikes in response for an obliterated Iran - but it sets a dreadful precedent, and I don’t think anyone is really on the verge of pressing the big red button, despite the US-Russia nuclear non-proliferation treaty expiring the other week. That’s almost definitely not what’s going to happen here. 

More sensibly, it could be a small initial strike on strategic targets to force Iran into agreeing to Trump’s nuclear deal. If they still refused to agree, a broader campaign (likely alongside Israel, where the media has been claiming an attack is imminent since early January) to topple the Iranian regime would begin. For what it’s worth, I don’t expect that the Iranian government will submit after an attack. 

Pushing them into a corner is dangerous because if they feel like they’ve got no way out, there’s no telling what they could do. Their military retains a significant arsenal of ballistic missiles that could hit targets across the Middle East and bordering countries, including Turkey, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. Any regime change without clear succession also opens up the risk of widespread chaos in the region, which would provide a fertile feeding ground for even more nefarious actors. 

If the US strikes, this might just be the start. 

RH

I’m going to focus on where we are, right now.

Now I have to caveat this by saying that technology moves incredibly quickly. 

For the uninitiated, there’s a principle called Moore's Law (named after Intel co-founder Gordon Moore), which says that the number of transistors (a piece of kit that sits on microchips/semiconductors and switches between 0s and 1s, ultimately powering computers) doubles roughly every two years. Every time we seem to be approaching the limit, someone innovates and they manage to squeeze more on there - Chris Miller’s Chip War is a great book on the history of how that dynamic has evolved - and it’s been a key dynamic behind a lot of the technological innovation we’ve seen in the last fifty years. 

AI seems to be moving at a multiple of that, with the computational ability of AI models doubling roughly every four to seven months, depending on which measure you use. My preferred measure is looking at how good AI is at completing long tasks, as measured by the great people at METR and shown on a linear scale on the chart below. I’d encourage you to click through to the source and explore how it looks with different success rates and on a linear scale.  

Source: METR - https://metr.org/blog/2025-03-19-measuring-ai-ability-to-complete-long-tasks/

Now this is important because the longer the task an AI model can reliably complete, the more you can get AI to do things you would otherwise have got humans to do. Right now, the latest models can do an hour’s worth of work pretty reliably and seven hours’ worth of work most of the time. If it continues to accelerate at this speed (and there’s no reason to suggest it won’t), these models will be able to do tasks that took humans days or weeks, pretty bloody quickly. 

It sounds bonkers, but a world where AI models do work that we’ve historically done ourselves suddenly doesn’t seem too far away. You may have seen this article by Matt Shumer (who is by no means impartial) making a similar argument, which has been making a bit of a storm in online circles: https://shumer.dev/something-big-is-happening.

Markets are feeling it, as we’ve seen with the sell-offs in software and wealth management firms over the last couple of weeks. As AI models continue to develop on an exponential level, they’ll be increasingly capable of doing more complex tasks, which makes the outlook for how we humans spend our time suddenly look very different - more different in fact than arguably any time since the First Agricultural Revolution. 

Now once again, I have to stop myself and point out that that is a pretty bonkers thing to say. But this is how the people building these AI models are thinking about it and so it’s worth listening to at the very least. 

Sam Altman famously thinks that AI is a tool that’s going to replace human labour and that that’s going to lead to a world where traditional money is a lot less central to our lives. Sir Demis Hassabis, one of the co-founders at DeepMind (who have been part of Google since 2014), wants to solve intelligence, and then use that to solve everything else. These people think big in a way that even blows their Silicon Valley counterparts out of the water, and I think it would be a mistake to ignore the impact this could have on our lives. 

So what can you do? I think the answer, right now, is to use it as much as you can and become one of the people who’s an expert in getting these models to do things. Do it now, before you have to, and be curious. I’ve only used the free models so far, but I think this is a good time to pay for the premium tiers given it’s the only way you get access to the most recent models. 

Now I know there are a lot of models out there right now, so here’s a quick summary of the big players in the market:

OpenAI: These are the people behind ChatGPT and on the whole, seem to be leading the pack in terms of the practical ability of their models. I’ve used ChatGPT more than any other model, mostly because I seem to get the best results from it. Their latest model, GPT 5.3 Codex, was released on 6 Feb and is designed to iterate - so where before you would give it one prompt and it would give you one answer, you can now give it a task and it’ll go away and do multiple things in one go. That’s a pretty major game changer, and it’s this idea that’s really hit markets this week. Currently, you have to pay to use that version, but the previous models are freely available. I’ve not splashed out the £20/month for the Plus model yet, but I will soon and report back. 

Anthropic: These are the people behind Claude, and their latest model Opus 4.6 was conveniently released on 6 Feb too and has similar iterative abilities (which you also have to pay for, but I don’t plan on doing so - a free tier with an older model is also available). This is the model that’s been referred to most in the press around this week’s sell-off. I’ve only recently started using Claude, but the outputs do generally compare pretty well with those of ChatGPT. I just seem to experience a higher failure rate where nothing happens for reasons I’m yet to get to the bottom of. Interestingly, it was founded by former OpenAI employees who wanted more of a focus on AI safety, which they felt was naturally compromised when you were so close to the commercialising interests of Big Tech, as OpenAI is to Microsoft. Interestingly though, they have themselves taken funding from both Amazon and Google more recently. 

Google DeepMind: They did a lot of the scientific and academic research to lay the foundations for where we are today. The T in GPT stands for Transformer, which DeepMind invented, but Google’s maniacal focus on search slowed down how much that turned into a real product and they’ve been playing catch-up. Their current model is Gemini, which I do like, but it feels a lot more like a super Google search than anything else to me, and that feels like a bit of a waste. They don’t, as far as I know, have a publicly available model capable of iteration just yet. 

Some of the Others: Facebook (or Meta, technically) has a model called Llama, which I’ve not been able to work out how to use. The “Meta AI” feature that has shown up across my Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp accounts has caused me more nuisance than anything else. There’s another open-source model called Mistral that I also haven’t used, nor DeepSeek. I try to avoid X, and consequently have no real thoughts on Grok either, apart from how terrible a job they’re doing at stopping their model being used for bad. I know a lot of people who use and enjoy Perplexity, which is slightly different to all these, in that it’s sort of an interface that gives you access to lots of different models (i.e., GPT, Claude or Gemini), but doesn’t actually have one itself. I’ve generally found it to be quite underwhelming compared to the “real thing”. 

And finally, it would be remiss of me to write a piece on AI without mentioning the terrifying and potentially catastrophic side-effects it could have. We’re already seeing negative environmental impacts from the water needed to cool the data centres that power these models as one example. There’s also major ethical and safety risks - Anthropic’s own evaluations have shown that their more advanced models can tell when they’re being tested and can alter their behaviour in response. I’m sure I wasn’t the only person who felt a little uncomfortable at the social media site where only AI bots can participate and humans can only observe (www.moltbook.com if you haven’t already seen) and the AI talk of creating hidden channels and languages to avoid human supervision, let alone the horrors of Grok being used to generate naked images of people. 

These are all important problems that we need to be cognisant of as these models continue to evolve and take action to defend against them. 

Technological revolutions have the power to enhance both the very best and the very worst of human society. Which one we’ll end up with comes down to the humans using it. 

That treaty expires tonight (midnight between 4th and 5th Feb), and there’s no sign of a new one in sight. 

Naturally, that’s a big deal that I don’t think people are talking enough about. 

So let’s talk about it. 

What Was The New START Treaty?

Well, before we get to the New START, we should probably talk about the first START, which was signed between the US and Russia at the tail end of the Soviet Union in 1991. 

This was two years after the Berlin Wall collapsed, and a time when the threat of nuclear warfare between the US and Russia was a major existential threat to most of the world. 

START I limited both countries to having a maximum of 6,000 nuclear warheads (which are the bits that sit at the top of the missile and make it nuclear) and 1,600 intercontinental ballistic missiles and bombers (which is how a nuke gets from the US to Russia, or vice versa). 

This was a world of over-armament, and both Gorbachev and Bush the Senior wanted to reduce their nuclear weapons by 30% over the next seven years. By 2001, it had reduced about 80% of all nuclear weapons in existence. 

That treaty expired towards the end of 2009, but both sides agreed to continue observing the terms of the treaty whilst negotiations went on, and the New START was signed four months later in April 2010. 

New START continued along much of the same lines, aiming to reduce nuclear warheads and delivery vehicles further, effective for ten years from 5th February 2011 onwards, with an optional five-year extension taking the expiration date to 5th February 2026. 

Putin then announced in 2023 that Russia was suspending its participation in the treaty, although both sides seem to have broadly stuck to the terms of the treaty since then.

So The Russians Have Been Out For 3 Years Anyway? Non-Story??

Well, not really. 

It’s true that the Russians suspended their participation in 2023, and despite that seem to have continued to stick to the terms of the treaty. Nor did the treaty cover other nuclear powers, such as Britain, France, and China - although Russia and the US do have c.80% of the world’s supply, which is plenty enough to destroy the world multiple times over. 

It’s also true that the treaty didn’t put any limits on operationally inactive nuclear warheads, which covers those in storage (and often with some time-decaying components removed), and so there remains a non-zero stockpile that could, slowly, be reactivated and made operationally ready. 

But this now puts us in a world where, for the first time since 1991, the world’s largest nuclear powers aren’t treaty-bound to reduce their nuclear stockpiles. This comes just as both countries have been developing new and more sophisticated weapons, such as long-range hypersonic missiles, which are more manoeuvrable than ICBMs and therefore harder to shoot down. The Pentagon was also ordered to restart nuclear testing on par with Russia and China last year. 

That then puts us at the precipice of a 21st-century arms race. In an increasingly unstable world, that’s a scary trajectory. 

RH

For those of you I don’t work with, we had our annual investment conference yesterday - it was a brilliant day and I really enjoyed it. It’s very satisfying seeing the best of the business on display. 

I won’t bore you with the finance stuff, but I did want to share some reflections on the world I had afterwards, including the keynote talk, which was on global development by Professor Ian Goldin. 

So let’s start with demographics - the Western world is aging. Our populations are getting older, and we’re having fewer children - less than replacement rate across most of Europe and North America which means we’re going to move to a world with an older population. 

This means more retired people being supported by fewer and fewer young, working people, which puts more strain on our systems because less tax is going towards welfare systems, less people are there to work and physically keep these things going at the very time that we need them more than ever because our population is older and more vulnerable than ever. 

Now we’ve seen this in other parts of the world - Japan and South Korea are much further along these journeys and are doing lots to (unsuccessfully) revitalise their younger populations, but there are definitely lessons we can learn, especially around the use of technology.

Now Professor Goldin wasn’t hugely bullish on AI - what it needs to deliver to justify current market valuations is pretty bonkers, something like $2 trillion dollars of revenue by 2030, at a time when the US defence budget (the largest discretionary spend of the world’s largest economy) is only $1 trillion.  

But that’s not to say it’s not having a real impact in some parts of the economy such as science and research, where it’s helping make major strides in finding answers to some of the world’s biggest questions, such as cures for cancer (it’s difficult to find one ultimate cure for cancer, because by its nature it evolves). 

This links back to the demographics point because when we stop having enough young people to do all the jobs we need, we’ll try to find as many jobs that can be done by robots and technology as we can, not necessarily to save money, but because it’ll be the only way to make these things happen. This is why South Korea and Japan excel at automated machinery and manufacturing - they had to do it to survive.

Another solution to this problem is immigration - bringing more young people into the country is a time-tested way to do this, and a core part of the strongest economies in history. Politically, the country hasn’t been taken to that place yet, and whilst I can see a world where that changes as we slowly realise how much we actually need immigration, it’s going to be a very volatile journey I’m sure. 

If you’ll forgive a couple of political paragraphs, I don’t think we’ll be having it this decade at the very least, although it does increasingly look like the 2029 election is going to be dominated by politics around driving down immigration, as Nigel Garage Farage continues to set the political agenda for Britain. (A very opinionated aside, but why is it always “breaking” news when it comes out that he did something racist? I don’t disagree that it should be reported, but I’d argue that “Nigel Garage Farage is a racist” stopped being breaking news about the time he was in Year 11.)

A possible exception to this is if a charismatic, third-way, Macron esque candidate comes through between now and 2029, who can take a compelling and differentiated political vision to the country. It sounds mad, especially in our first-past-the-post system (which I generally support over proportional systems), but 2029 is a very long time away, so never say never. Don’t forget that we went from the 2015 election to the 2016 Brexit referendum in 13 months.

Anyway, the reason I bring in the politics of this is because the longer we push out this conversation on immigration, the harder it gets. As we get into the 30s and the 40s, the real effects of climate change will be hitting the world, with places we now know and love being under underwater. If sea levels rise just 3m, St. James’s Park will be a mythical story you tell your kids about. It will be increasingly difficult to grow crops, and so food and water security will be taking up more and more of the public discourse. 

And telling the nation that you need more immigrants to prop up the country when there’s a food shortage… well I’ll let you picture how the front page of the Sun might communicate that (it took a lot of self-restraint not to use the popular Scouse nickname for that newspaper).

I don’t have a call to action for you or a bullet pointed three key takeaways, but these are important conversations to have. Think about immigration and technology, not as threats to our way of life, but as catalysts for enhancing it. 

Things are always going to be different - we may as well try to make them better. 

And with that, I’m off to see my family for my brother’s birthday! I sat on the train for few minutes after it got here to finish this and now I’m locked in… 

Have a great weekend - I have a train back tomorrow evening, and so you may get something then as well, if I ever get out (maybe on these mysterious incidents we keep seeing around airlines - I’m not convinced they’re all accidents).

Cheerio!

RH