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Two books. One argument.
Published simultaneously because the moment has arrived. These books were not written in response to this week's events. They were written because this week's events were foreseeable — because a state without accountability eventually exhausts its leaders, and because the question of what comes next required an answer that was ready when it was needed.
The new Prime Minister has no published plan. That is not a criticism of the individual. It is a description of the system: a state that cannot plan beyond the electoral cycle, led by a government that inherited a crisis it did not cause and has not yet diagnosed.
The diagnosis is in the first book. The plan — costed, phased, and anchored to a fixed date — is in the second.
THE STENCH OF THE STATE is the diagnosis. How the doctrine of ministerial responsibility was quietly replaced over three decades. How the process state was built, one individually defensible decision at a time. Why every actor can follow the rules and the outcome can still be indefensible.
FINALLY WORTHY is the prescription. A costed sixteen-year national renewal programme anchored to the centenary of VE Day 2045. Built on a single doctrine that is the exact inverse of the process state. Every significant task placed with a named person, given real authority and honest constraints, held to the result.
Both books are non-partisan. The argument is structural, not tribal. It indicts a system and its incentives, not a party. Figures are sourced to the OBR, ONS, NATO and Cabinet Office. Claims are revised down, not up, where the evidence demands it.
Arthur King is a pseudonym. The author's background is military and governmental. He has chosen to publish under this name so the ideas can be judged on their merits alone.
THE STENCH OF THE STATE → amzn.to/44wCpxy (affiliate link)
FINALLY WORTHY → amzn.to/4voAiI1 (affiliate link)
Published simultaneously because the moment has arrived. These books were not written in response to this week's events. They were written because this week's events were foreseeable — because a state without accountability eventually exhausts its leaders, and because the question of what comes next required an answer that was ready when it was needed.
The new Prime Minister has no published plan. That is not a criticism of the individual. It is a description of the system: a state that cannot plan beyond the electoral cycle, led by a government that inherited a crisis it did not cause and has not yet diagnosed.
The diagnosis is in the first book. The plan — costed, phased, and anchored to a fixed date — is in the second.
THE STENCH OF THE STATE is the diagnosis. How the doctrine of ministerial responsibility was quietly replaced over three decades. How the process state was built, one individually defensible decision at a time. Why every actor can follow the rules and the outcome can still be indefensible.
FINALLY WORTHY is the prescription. A costed sixteen-year national renewal programme anchored to the centenary of VE Day 2045. Built on a single doctrine that is the exact inverse of the process state. Every significant task placed with a named person, given real authority and honest constraints, held to the result.
Both books are non-partisan. The argument is structural, not tribal. It indicts a system and its incentives, not a party. Figures are sourced to the OBR, ONS, NATO and Cabinet Office. Claims are revised down, not up, where the evidence demands it.
Arthur King is a pseudonym. The author's background is military and governmental. He has chosen to publish under this name so the ideas can be judged on their merits alone.
THE STENCH OF THE STATE → amzn.to/44wCpxy (affiliate link)
FINALLY WORTHY → amzn.to/4voAiI1 (affiliate link)
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Arthur King | Writer & Commentator retweeted
🚨 BREAKING: The Government has announced a £100 on-the-spot fine for anyone caught saying "Can I get..." at a bar.
Officials state the phrase is "linguistically offensive" and a "threat to traditional British pub culture.”
Officials state the phrase is "linguistically offensive" and a "threat to traditional British pub culture.”
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Invaluable learning about what a drone experienced adversary can do on land.
But all the Hybrid Navy proponents in 🇬🇧 - take note of this para.
You can’t have a dispersed, multi-hull, always on network of low latency sensor to shooter comms without making a lot of . If you try to quieten it down…nothing works.
But all the Hybrid Navy proponents in 🇬🇧 - take note of this para.
You can’t have a dispersed, multi-hull, always on network of low latency sensor to shooter comms without making a lot of . If you try to quieten it down…nothing works.
In a U.S. Army war game in Germany, Ukrainian drone pilots playing the enemy caused about 70% of an American tank brigade’s losses in the first three days. Three days later, that figure was under 30%.
defence-blog.com/ukrainian-dron…
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This post and its replies sum up not only the state of 🇬🇧 shipbuilding, wider defence and industrial capacity, but also highlights that this is ALL down to political choice.
If politicians made different choices our decline could be halted and reversed and our country could be renewed.
Yet they bicker amongst themselves and fiddle around the edges without acting on substantial issues.
Government spending needs to be reduced - not one word even without touching the difficult stuff.
Illegal immigration can be halted with a realistic deterrent - there are numerous options - but, nothing.
The appalling position of a million NEET young people and the ‘low level’ youth mental heath crisis could be addressed determinedly at the national level…but, nothing.
I don’t know what or who we are waiting for but he or she does not seem to be on the horizon yet.
If politicians made different choices our decline could be halted and reversed and our country could be renewed.
Yet they bicker amongst themselves and fiddle around the edges without acting on substantial issues.
Government spending needs to be reduced - not one word even without touching the difficult stuff.
Illegal immigration can be halted with a realistic deterrent - there are numerous options - but, nothing.
The appalling position of a million NEET young people and the ‘low level’ youth mental heath crisis could be addressed determinedly at the national level…but, nothing.
I don’t know what or who we are waiting for but he or she does not seem to be on the horizon yet.
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Worth noting what this is and is not. Von der Leyen is offering Canada an "Alliance for the Future" built on CETA, deep cooperation on defence, critical minerals, AI and energy. It is not accession. No free movement, no common external tariff, no ever-closer union, no Court of Justice writ running through Ottawa.
Which raises the obvious question for anyone who followed the British argument of the last decade. We were told the choice was binary: full membership with all its political machinery, or the outside. Here is the Commission itself designing a third thing, sectoral partnership without political union, and offering it to a country it wants to keep close.
The UK is already named for the proposed European Security Council alongside Canada, Norway and Ukraine. So the template is being written in real time, and Britain is half inside one part of it already.
The question is no longer whether such a relationship is possible. It plainly is. It is whether anyone here has the wit to ask for the version that fits us.
bbc.co.uk/news/articles/…
Which raises the obvious question for anyone who followed the British argument of the last decade. We were told the choice was binary: full membership with all its political machinery, or the outside. Here is the Commission itself designing a third thing, sectoral partnership without political union, and offering it to a country it wants to keep close.
The UK is already named for the proposed European Security Council alongside Canada, Norway and Ukraine. So the template is being written in real time, and Britain is half inside one part of it already.
The question is no longer whether such a relationship is possible. It plainly is. It is whether anyone here has the wit to ask for the version that fits us.
bbc.co.uk/news/articles/…
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Today is Battle of Britain day, if anyone left cares.
86 years ago the battle peaked as the Luftwaffe tried to break the RAF.
Everything we have now is because they didn’t succeed.
We really need to do better at not fucking up what’s left.
I was privileged to have lunch, 16 he guy on the left who looks like he is wearing a white flying suit.
He thought the country was in a disastrous state then God only knows what he’d think now.
86 years ago the battle peaked as the Luftwaffe tried to break the RAF.
Everything we have now is because they didn’t succeed.
We really need to do better at not fucking up what’s left.
I was privileged to have lunch, 16 he guy on the left who looks like he is wearing a white flying suit.
He thought the country was in a disastrous state then God only knows what he’d think now.
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I went to the Battle of Britain Memorial some years ago and found it very moving. That it should be falling apart is yet another national disgrace. I have taken a regular donation out - please repost so that anyone who is willing and able can do their bit…
battleofbritainmemorial.org/support-us/don…
battleofbritainmemorial.org/support-us/don…
The official Battle of Britain memorial is at risk of closure, leaving the pilots who fought in the conflict in danger of being “forgotten”, veterans have said.
🔗: telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/09/1…
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In June 2025 two activists walked onto RAF Brize Norton past a fence you'd put round a garden and painted the engines of two of our tankers. The instinct afterwards was to find the station commander and blame her.
Wrong target. She inherited that fence and the forty years of assuming nobody would ever come over it. That assumption is the actual failure, and it runs across the whole estate.
The drones have ended the idea that home is a sanctuary. Brize, Leipzig, the Russian airfields hit last summer: same lesson each time. High-value kit in the open, within reach of ground nobody's watching.
Most of what we need to do first is cheap and we could start this year. The reason we won't is a mindset, not a budget.
Wrong target. She inherited that fence and the forty years of assuming nobody would ever come over it. That assumption is the actual failure, and it runs across the whole estate.
The drones have ended the idea that home is a sanctuary. Brize, Leipzig, the Russian airfields hit last summer: same lesson each time. High-value kit in the open, within reach of ground nobody's watching.
Most of what we need to do first is cheap and we could start this year. The reason we won't is a mindset, not a budget.
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The full essay, on why our bases are built for a war we stopped expecting, and the cheap things we could do about it now: declineandrenewal.substack.com/p/our-home-is-…
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Precisely. The critical vulnerability is trained staff not spaces he is a plan to sort it out.
x.com/arthurkingbook…
x.com/arthurkingbook…
@JuliaHB1 Politicians line to bash each other and rarely generate detailed operations solutions to immediate problems. Here’s mine: Britain’s prison crisis looks like a shortage of cells.
It isn’t. It is a shortage of certified, staffed, usable capacity — and that changes the solution.
By April 2026 there were about 85,700 prisoners, against certified normal accommodation of roughly 70,000. The pressure valve is early release: 3,100 prisoners were released in one tranche in autumn 2024 simply to keep the system moving.
The conventional answer is to build more prisons.
We should — but it cannot solve the immediate crisis.
The programme announced in 2021 eventually promised 20,000 additional places. Only 6,518 had been delivered by September 2024 and completion now runs towards 2031. Between 2010 and 2024 the net increase across the whole estate was just 1,005 places.
So start with what makes a prison place usable: a serviceable cell, legal certification and enough warranted officers to operate it.
The immediate plan:
1. Recover what we have.
Some 4,151 cells have been indefinitely closed through dilapidation since 2010. Rank them by cost and speed of recovery and put those capable of rapid restoration ahead of slower new builds.
2. Create a capacity cascade.
Put rapidly constructed modular accommodation onto existing Category C and D sites.
Move suitable lower-risk prisoners into it. That releases conventional accommodation further up the estate, which can be upgraded or repurposed to relieve pressure on Category B and local prisons.
This does not mean putting dangerous prisoners into lower-security accommodation.
It means the opposite:
Build quickly at C and D, move suitable prisoners down, and preserve the strongest accommodation for the most dangerous offenders.
Creating one place lower down can release a more secure place above it.
3. Fix the real bottleneck: officers.
In March 2026 there were 21,984 FTE Band 3–5 prison officers — 732 fewer than a year earlier, a fall of 3.2%.
Yet retention is improving: the HMPPS leaving rate fell to 9.1%. That points towards recruitment and intake, not simply retention, as the immediate weakness.
A cell without an officer isn’t capacity.
Recruit aggressively while moving appropriate support functions — perimeter security, gates, escorts and transport — away from warranted officers where possible.
4. Attack the inflow.
The remand population was 17,023 at the end of 2024 — around one prisoner in five and the highest level in half a century.
With a Crown Court backlog above 73,000, thousands of prison places are occupied by people waiting for their cases to be decided.
Build capacity without addressing that flow and we simply fill it again.
5. Keep building permanent prisons.
New prisons remain the best long-term solution. They cannot be the main answer to a crisis now when the current programme runs towards 2031.
Finally, put one person in charge.
Not one official for construction, another for maintenance, another for certification and another for recruitment.
One named person responsible for certified, staffed, usable capacity, with the authority and resources to deliver it.
Publish four numbers monthly: usable places, officer strength, early releases and remand population. Hold that person accountable.
We have spent years treating this as a construction problem.
It isn’t.
Recover the existing estate. Build rapidly at C and D to shuffle capacity upwards and keep the worst offenders in the secure accommodation designed for them. Rebuild officer numbers. Reduce remand. Keep building permanent prisons for the future.
Stop measuring how many cells we promise to build.
Measure how many prisoners we can actually hold safely and lawfully — and make someone responsible for delivering that number.
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£3Trillion in debt. Three times what it was in 2010 despite austerity.
What a total farce.
We can do something about. This is a start - the rest follows.
What a total farce.
We can do something about. This is a start - the rest follows.
UK doesn’t need more tax.
Here’s £50+bn a year within five years, without ⬆️taxes or ⬇️core entitlements.
🇬🇧 Government spent £1,360bn last year: 44.3% of national income. On the OECD’s comparable measure, public spending here is 46.0% of GDP, against a European average of 49.2%. Below Germany, Sweden and Italy.
The size of the state is not the immediate problem.
The case for higher taxes deserves a hearing. Britain borrowed £132bn last year while paying £130bn in debt interest. Defence is committed to ⬆️ to 3.5% of GDP by 2035. An ageing population will require ⬆️health and social care.
But before asking taxpayers for more, take the uncontested money first.
For now, leave;
State pension £155bn. Universal Credit £84bn. Disability benefits £66bn. Social care £56bn. NHS clinical services. School budgets. Defence. Debt interest.
Together, around three-quarters of government spending either reflects a legal entitlement or discharges an unavoidable public obligation.
Those debates may be worth having later.
That leaves roughly £250bn where government has genuine discretion. Within that more than £50bn can be found using the bottom of published estimates.
Transport £10bn, from a £49bn budget where the railway alone receives £26.5bn.
Discretionary grants £8bn, from a £34bn pool that entitles nobody to anything.
Overhead savings across arm’s-length bodies £4bn.
Civil service reform £6bn, around 100,000 posts over time.
NHS management, administration, procurement and support functions £8bn.
Business subsidies £5bn. Block grants £3bn. Digital transformation £3bn. Local government administration £2.5bn. Consultants £1bn.
None of this cuts a pension, closes a school, reduces frontline NHS care or weakens the Armed Forces.
Then there is the money that never appears in the spending debate.
Britain has 341 tax reliefs costing £218bn in 2024–25.
Only 25 have been formally evaluated in the past decade.
The annual evaluation budget is around £600,000.
That’s roughly £1 of scrutiny for every £360,000 of tax relief.
No department owns them.
No statute requires them to be reviewed whereas spending programmes must be defended.
Tax reliefs simply continue because nobody decides to stop them.
When government did evaluate one—Entrepreneurs’ Relief—it concluded the scheme was expensive, ineffective and poorly targeted. Reform reduced its annual cost from £2.3bn to around £600m.
Exclude pensions and the family home, review the remainder properly, and £8bn a year is a conservative estimate.
That produces recurring savings of roughly £58bn.
This would take around five years, beginning at perhaps £12bn annually, with openly budgeted transition costs. These are gross savings, and reducing civil service numbers means real people lose jobs. Those consequences should be acknowledged honestly.
So why hasn’t it happened?
Because Britain’s institutions reward preserving programmes, not proving they still deserve to exist.
No minister is criticised for leaving a programme alone.
Many are criticised for abolishing one.
Canada changed that in 1994.
Every programme had to pass six tests: public interest, proper role for government, correct level of government, alternative providers, efficiency and affordability.
The deficit disappeared within three years.
Canada still publishes annual reviews of its tax expenditures.
New Zealand completed the picture in 1988, making departmental leaders personally accountable for agreed results through fixed-term performance contracts.
Both sides of the ledger. Every programme. Every tax relief.
A named owner. A statutory review date. A sunset clause unless somebody justifies it.
Last year, 🇬🇧 departmental administration spending rose 11.7% to £13.8bn.
Nobody justified that increase.
Nobody will justify it next year.
That is why around £58bn remains readily available.
No programme and no tax relief has to prove to a named person that it still deserves to continue.
They just do.
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Arthur King | Writer & Commentator retweeted
Prisoner early release is an unneccesary act. Yet we are told there is no other solution.
Rubbish.
The prison estate has run at or near useable operational capacity since autumn 2022. The ceiling was 89,334 last November against a population of roughly 85,700 in April. Certified normal accommodation, the standard it was designed for, is about 70,000.
I put the problem through the Operational Estimate, which is what the Armed Forces use to plan under pressure with constrained resources. You are not allowed to reach for a solution until you have found the essential task and the point where the whole thing breaks.
The break is not cells.
There were 21,984 band 3 to 5 prison officers in post in March, down 3.2% on the year, and retention is improving, so the loss is intake. Fifteen years of building produced a net 1,005 places because closures and dilapidation ate almost everything constructed.
New Substack up - link in bio.
Rubbish.
The prison estate has run at or near useable operational capacity since autumn 2022. The ceiling was 89,334 last November against a population of roughly 85,700 in April. Certified normal accommodation, the standard it was designed for, is about 70,000.
I put the problem through the Operational Estimate, which is what the Armed Forces use to plan under pressure with constrained resources. You are not allowed to reach for a solution until you have found the essential task and the point where the whole thing breaks.
The break is not cells.
There were 21,984 band 3 to 5 prison officers in post in March, down 3.2% on the year, and retention is improving, so the loss is intake. Fifteen years of building produced a net 1,005 places because closures and dilapidation ate almost everything constructed.
New Substack up - link in bio.
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Prisoner early release is an unneccesary act. Yet we are told there is no other solution.
Rubbish.
The prison estate has run at or near useable operational capacity since autumn 2022. The ceiling was 89,334 last November against a population of roughly 85,700 in April. Certified normal accommodation, the standard it was designed for, is about 70,000.
I put the problem through the Operational Estimate, which is what the Armed Forces use to plan under pressure with constrained resources. You are not allowed to reach for a solution until you have found the essential task and the point where the whole thing breaks.
The break is not cells.
There were 21,984 band 3 to 5 prison officers in post in March, down 3.2% on the year, and retention is improving, so the loss is intake. Fifteen years of building produced a net 1,005 places because closures and dilapidation ate almost everything constructed.
New Substack up - link in bio.
Rubbish.
The prison estate has run at or near useable operational capacity since autumn 2022. The ceiling was 89,334 last November against a population of roughly 85,700 in April. Certified normal accommodation, the standard it was designed for, is about 70,000.
I put the problem through the Operational Estimate, which is what the Armed Forces use to plan under pressure with constrained resources. You are not allowed to reach for a solution until you have found the essential task and the point where the whole thing breaks.
The break is not cells.
There were 21,984 band 3 to 5 prison officers in post in March, down 3.2% on the year, and retention is improving, so the loss is intake. Fifteen years of building produced a net 1,005 places because closures and dilapidation ate almost everything constructed.
New Substack up - link in bio.
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We need to talk about the children.
There is too much politics in education and not enough attention to what children actually need, or to the country they will inherit.
This is a proposal for a serious, permanent national institution to give every child in Britain the things employers, universities and adult life all ask for and almost nothing in the system deliberately produces.
Organisation. Communication. Resilience. The habit of leading and of being led.
It will be difficult to build, hard to run and expensive. We used not to shy away from things like that when they mattered.
This matters. More than pretty much everything else.
🧵1/19
There is too much politics in education and not enough attention to what children actually need, or to the country they will inherit.
This is a proposal for a serious, permanent national institution to give every child in Britain the things employers, universities and adult life all ask for and almost nothing in the system deliberately produces.
Organisation. Communication. Resilience. The habit of leading and of being led.
It will be difficult to build, hard to run and expensive. We used not to shy away from things like that when they mattered.
This matters. More than pretty much everything else.
🧵1/19
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None of this belongs to either side of politics.
The employer data, the NEET figures and the childcare figures are all collected by government and disputed by nobody.
We have spent decades asking whether children passed their examinations.
It is time we also asked whether they are ready for life. 18/19
The employer data, the NEET figures and the childcare figures are all collected by government and disputed by nobody.
We have spent decades asking whether children passed their examinations.
It is time we also asked whether they are ready for life. 18/19
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In my book, Finally Worthy, the twelve-month National Citizen Service at eighteen builds the nation on top of the school years, taking 300,000 young people a year through structured service across infrastructure, agriculture, care, emergency service and defence, deployed outside their home region and housed together across every social boundary.
Work-for-benefits applies the same principle to adults. Nothing for nothing, and something real in return for something real. Those who cannot work will always be looked after, properly and without suspicion. The obligation falls on those who can but will no longer have the choice to do nothing.
And the fourth is what the first three leave behind: a national resilience bank. A population with training and standing that can be called on when the floods come, when the grid fails, when infrastructure is attacked.
Capability, then confidence, then the fairness that comes from every child having had the same chance at both.
A country that can look after itself is built one fifteen-year-old at a time, running a session on a Tuesday afternoon in a school hall that used to be empty. 19/19
Work-for-benefits applies the same principle to adults. Nothing for nothing, and something real in return for something real. Those who cannot work will always be looked after, properly and without suspicion. The obligation falls on those who can but will no longer have the choice to do nothing.
And the fourth is what the first three leave behind: a national resilience bank. A population with training and standing that can be called on when the floods come, when the grid fails, when infrastructure is attacked.
Capability, then confidence, then the fairness that comes from every child having had the same chance at both.
A country that can look after itself is built one fifteen-year-old at a time, running a session on a Tuesday afternoon in a school hall that used to be empty. 19/19
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