Majorityrights Central > Category: Conservatism

That headline is a pithy riposte from a Telegraph reader - one Harry Bloke - posted on the thread to a piece by some Tory loyalist.  Tory loyalists are, of course, in ferment after Thursday’s much truncated elections, and greatly divided on how to respond to the predicted yet astonishing break-through of Nigel Farage’s latest insurgent creation.  Reform UK is now a grievous threat to the two-party system and the Establishment which rides its back.  The hitherto insurmountable electoral barrier of First-Past-The-Post looks to have been torn down.  The outlook for the legacy parties looks settled.  There is little they can do to stem Reform’s progress:

Reform UK’s real-time membership tracker tonight.

... indeed, Starmer has committed to doubling-down on his unwanted and authoritarian programme of economic managerialism, climate delusion, and social engineering.  As ever, the far left of his party are itching for the chance to put the knife in his back and give their (presumed) captive voters “real socialism”.  Farage would rejoice.  Meanwhile, the lacklustre Kemi Badenoch has dismissed those among her MPs who want to ape Reform policy-wise.  She is at one with the Tory Establishment boys, the City boys, the europhiles, the closet liberal democrats … all the creatures who Reform voters deride for being egregiously self-serving and not remotely conservative.  The fourteen years of their puffed-up and obtuse sense of political and personal entitlement is the very reason that the party is dying on its expensively-shod feet.

No, the near miraculous stealing of, in Runcorn and Helsby, the Labour Party’s sixteenth safest Westminster seat, and the near wipe-out of Conservative county councillors in those shires where voting took place, speak of history unstoppably in the making.  At this still early point one has to agree with Farage that the next general election really could see a Reform government, with himself in Downing Street.  The notion that it might be Starmer seems very questionable.  The notion that it might be Badenoch seems plain eccentric.

Of course we would welcome Reform in government, not least for the freedom of thought and speech it would/should bring to us as to everyone, and the contest of ideas which could then follow.  Otherwise it is difficult to see how we might ever speak to our people.  However, with Reform in power and freedom of expression restored we could contrast our vision with those who, at bottom, want no more than that the liberal system is driven and directed neither by a Davosian cadre nor by hostile leftists.  Revolution is anathema to mere reformers, and then a revolution for life is incomprehensible to mere liberal individualists.

Still, let us recognise the extraordinary deeds of this man Farage, a uniquely gifted populist politician who has struck electoral gold in a moment of huge promise long in the making.  It is a shame that it could not be nationalists who have done that.  But our job is to bide our time and take our chances later.

Back in pre-Covid times, within a month of Boris Johnson’s great Brexit election victory of 12th December 2019, the globalist monster began to assert its will on the new United Kingdom government.  From that first moment of hope betrayed it’s been downhill all the way.  The present crisis afflicting Liz Truss’s government, if one can call it that without heavy irony, is the lowest point so far.  The country’s first African Chancellor of the Exchequer is out on his ear, guilty of cutting taxes without cutting expenditure.  No one believes that Truss herself can survive more than a month.  The candidate she soundly defeated for party leader, the Indian midget Rishi Sunak, is now widely expected to replace her in a coronation event, without a further vote among the party members in the country.

Isabel Oakeshott has set out the coup in all its audacity at The Spectator (paywalled):

The first step of their plan involves market turmoil on Monday morning. Sunak and his supporters hope that more financial panic will be enough to force Truss to quit – whether voluntarily; or via a threatened change in the party rule book that theoretically protects her for a year; or via some other mechanism they have yet to come up with.

Step two involves the coronation of King Rishi, the argument being that he is the only figure that can at least semi unite a furious and fractured parliamentary party. Jeremy Hunt may fancy his own chances, but is unacceptable to many MPs who backed Sunak. The idea is to keep him where he is – in No. 11 – while offering the other big Tory party leadership contest loser – Penny Mordaunt – another of the great offices of state (Foreign Secretary).

Step three involves convincing a mutinous parliamentary party that this new set up is better than the alternative: Truss/Hunt attempting to play political Siamese twins, when he has just publicly junked her entire economic agenda and she is Prino: prime minister in name only. Nobody really believes this macabre charade can last long.

Step four is something all sides can agree on: resolving to do whatever it takes to avoid a general election. Sunak’s outriders – already busily working the phones – will argue that their proposed solution restores some political stability, deferring the terrible day of reckoning that looms at the polls. Two years is an eternity in politics, they argue – perhaps in the interim, something will come up?

So, what is one to say when such schemers and deceivers are in the ascendency, disposing of the party rule-book and the voice of the membership in the country.  There is no respect, no fear, no dignity, no sense of right and wrong, or of fair play.  There is just ambition and opportunism, and much arrogance.  To an outsider, the overall impression is of something dead or dying, in a poisoned world of many dead and dying things; a sentiment rather accurately expressed by a commenter on the thread to Oakeshott’s article, Demosthenes by name:

Demosthenes • 6 hours ago
Pathetic, cowardly, cuckolded, snivelling empty husk of a once proud political party. When they’re turfed out at the next election they will have nothing to show for their decade and a half in power but bigger government, higher taxes, diminished personal freedoms and unrelenting, pitiless, unprecedented levels of mass immigration year after year after year.

Whitehall see themselves as the true masters of this country, and frankly I have to agree with them. While conservatives may frequently be in office, it is the liberals who are permanently in power. That’s just the politically-correct, morally-relativist soup they all swim in.

It’s said that dead things can go with the flow, but only alive things can go against it. There are many dead things floating along with the currents of modern Britain, not just the civil-servants. Indeed, virtually every public institution I can think of; the BBC, ITV, the Police, the NHS, universities, judges, lawyers, the charity sector, even the army… all our cultural elites in fact, are as dead as any other rotting carcass.

You are a fool if you believe the so-called Conservative party is any different. It took the biggest voter turnout in our nation’s history, and the prospect of electoral armageddon, for the Tories to be dragged kicking and screaming over the Brexit finish line, pathetically diluted and delayed though it was, and carving out a large portion of our country to live indefinitely under foreign laws… Celebrate that if you really want to, but on every other issue that truly matters; mass-immigration, climate apocalypticism, political Islam, anti-white racism, historical masochism, etc. etc., the Tory Party is just another dead thing going with the flow towards the fast-approaching waterfall.

If the plotters succeed in installing Sunak at No.10 it is inevitable that a terrible punishment awaits the Conservative Party at the next election, scheduled by December 2024.  One awaits the next word from Nigel Farage, perhaps in the ear of Oakeshott’s live-in boyfriend Richard Tice, who runs Farage’s former Brexit Party under the title Reform UK.

Today, a nice piece by the writer Frank Wright appeared on the state of affairs appeared at what we must now call TCW but was, until a few weeks ago, The Conservative Woman, virtually the last surviving British “right-wing” site at which a free man can sound off.  Frank is awake, to put it really rather mildly.  He seems to model that rare conservative estate which is one step away from nationalism, and which is too well rooted to be susceptible to the customary scarecrow tactics.  His piece, titled “The more normal you are, the more the Regime hates you”, and is well worth a read.

Very rarely, the writers of pieces above the line venture below and converse with the hoi polloi.  But Frank was kind enough, or crazy enough, to get himself into a conversation with me, which went something like this:

UKCitizen • 6 hours ago
Unfortunately they found it is difficult to generate widespread resentment among the normies so they needed to create as many divisions as possible to make being normal a minority. Can’t control and gain power from a content and happy populace.

guessedworker  UKCitizen • 6 hours ago
“They” were the gentlemen of the Institute of Social Research in Frankfurt University. Their creation was Critical Theory, and they and it have since proved to be a curse on our race.

Frank Wright  guessedworker • 4 hours ago
I’d argue for Bernays and Lippmann as the engineers of consent, perfecting a method of the attachment of emotions to symbols by means of the creation of false events.

guessedworker  Frank Wright • 4 hours ago
Perhaps they are both creatures of subversive persuasion rather than subversion as such. Convincing people to act in some way is fundamentally less dangerous than forming them from childhood for that action.

Frank Wright  guessedworker • 3 hours ago
I’d argue they created the modern personality.

guessedworker  Frank Wright • 3 hours ago
You can argue it, but I would question your theory of Mind.

Frank Wright  guessedworker • 2 hours ago
Go on then.

guessedworker  Frank Wright • 2 hours ago • edited
OK, well, first, I applaud your clear-thinking. You are right that the sum of the acquired is the nidus of our sorrows. I only wish more of our people understood that the way out, so to speak, is through our own immersion in the formative influences of the day. But there are many sources and levels of influence. We can never be pure nature. We always carry the mark of what does not actually belong to us but, subject to its difference from nature and its reliance on a state of psychological lightness and/or suggestibility, structures us. But not all influences in that regard are equal.
The question you are really asking me is: how do we measure the structure for its fundamentality. Half of my answer is that there is the Jesuitical sense, there is the propaganda sense, and there are degrees in between. The degree to which we are made the possession of what we are not varies accordingly. But there is another half, which is the solidity and internal connection of the subject. Human beings can, under negative familial circumstances, suffer from a lightness of being which opens them out to, as they say, “support the latest thing”. They have no personal richness, no source of internal self-validation. Three or four generations of that will produce societal insanity in every way, from elite decadence and corruption to general criminality and psychopathy.
Lippman and Bernays dealt in the shallow end of the pool, softly drowning the weakest of us on a daily basis. But Jesus, Paul, Thomas Aquinas, Descartes, Locke, Voltaire, Marx, Freud, Adorno, Hirschfeld, and a cast of Enlightened and Marxised thousands have worked weakness into our very bone, and it is that weakness which, ultimately, we have to find the philosophical means to address and restore to health.

Frank Wright  guessedworker • 2 hours ago
I think there is no means by which man can transcend himself, which is the very essence of the progressive idea. I do not think man has progressed morally at all, and think efforts made to demonstrate this an illusion.
What I am on about with the Bernays stuff is that we have become more machine like as this machine becomes more integrated into our lives. This is not an accident. In fact, I’d argue the self is to a greater degree dependent on or addicted to the updates in worldview, feeling, orientation and so on provided by mass media. We have fallen in love with our own reflection, but it is not cast in some impassive mirror - it is a vision granted by Satan’s window, that spellbinding instrument through which all our thoughts are delivered.

guessedworker  Frank Wright • an hour ago
Man’s essential self is not his received/constructed self. His fallenness from his essential self into his received self is the general form of “the problem”. The individualised and marxised/universalised received self of today is simply what must be transcended.
How this might come to pass is the substance of my own intellectual enquiry, which I write about, in so much as I am able, at my own website. Is transcendence possible? Yes, if we accept that there is always this struggle between presence-in-being and absence; and we all, individually and as a people, traverse the line between the two. We are not fixed. That is the human condition. What vivifies our kind ... what clarifies our will to increase ... that is what lights our way towards presence. We may, as individuals, traverse the distance in a manner in which we never can as a group (and certainly never can as “Man”, all men), but the general good of facing the right way is really the object of the common struggle. Our systemic philosophy, our politics, should lead us that way.
It is interesting to have a real conversation with someone, even though we are only lightly touching on the potentials and points of interest. Thanks for bearing with it and not reflexively shooting off into the emotional defence of prior certainty.

Frank Wright  • an hour ago
Well I never. I will try to give your arguments the response they deserve- on your own site - at another time. I’m on the phone, have a cold (it’s not AIDS honest) and can’t give you the reply your thinking merits right now.

Frank Wright  • an hour ago
I can’t find your website. Do give me a link. I’m interested to talk to you about these ideas.

guessedworker  Frank Wright • an hour ago
My site is majorityrightsDOT com. You will find the work of many others there, from all walks of the dissident right.

I don’t know if Frank will show up here.  But it would be good to explore his position in greater detail.

I checked the site mailbox yesterday - something I have done less frequently since it was moved by the ISP to webmail, which I find to be a problematic platform.  Anyway, I managed to access it and I’m glad I did because there were a couple of mails of real interest.  One of them was a source of sadness, and confirmed the death of a past friend of MR and a man whom many more than just myself held in high respect.

Wintermute - WM, for short - arrived at MR early in its history, at the same time as the also redoubtable ben tillman.  Indeed, they operated on occasion rather like a tag team, and woe betide anyone who incurred their disfavour.

WM’s mission was to convert the world to his version of the Single Jewish Cause.  For some reason he had ventured away from his usual stamping ground at The Phora and selected MR as a suitable case for treatment.  This was not actually what I needed at that time.  Of course there was no reason that WM should hold back.  He did not know that MR was an experiment on a highly unstable material, or that he was lighting a naked flame every time he came here.  He did not stop to examine the cast of actors in this tragi-comedy.  To him, conservatives and libertarians from Oz, paleos from the US, trad cons from the UK and Belgium and proto-nationalists from all over were all people equally in need of grasping the one thing guaranteed to blow the place sky-high.  I attempted to keep my experiment running.  He attempted to make it in his image.  I avoided confrontation.  He sought it.  That was the way of things.

Every barrier I threw up he dutifully dismantled - not always, it must be said, with the most insightful diagnosis of my ideological failings.  Here, for example, he puts my resistance down to “social conservative propriety”:

By raising the spectre of Nazism, you are trying to both inhibit discussion of the Jewish Question, and to minimize the harm done by ignoring it. Would you level the same charge at Belloc?

It is the refusal to discuss the question which results in the radicalism that you decry.

This refusal is very definitely part and parcel of the ‘social conservative’ sense of propriety, though there are also considerations that even more venal: Nixon and Graham are excellent examples.

This remains the only occasion on which anyone has informed me that social conservatism rather than, say, Weimar liberalism, could be a factor in the rise of National Socialism.  Obviously, I had expected WM to be a make-believe National Socialist, like so many German-American WNs I had encountered on the net.  But he wasn’t at all that way inclined.  Probably, he was just too well read. 

Looking back at his commentary I find a WM who, although he couldn’t be clearer about the Jewish impact on our life, was never very clear about his own political antecedents and principles.  MR was a place to which one came to contest those very goods.  It was wholly predicated on the hierarchy of values which has, at its peak, the survival and continuity of European peoples, and on the inevitability that contact with that would inform and renew all who thought otherwise.  But somehow WM floated above all that.

I came close to nailing him down once or twice.  I remember proffering the opinion one time that, had it survived Hitler’s wars of aggression, National Socialism would, over time, have de-radicalised and subsided into a conservative force in its own right.  He agreed, to my surprise, and explained why.  Shortly after, still trying to pigeon-hole the man, I offered the judgement that “You are, I believe, a white nationalist.”  But nope, he confounded me again:

I don’t think of myself in those terms. I think in terms of classical liberty, which more and more seems to me to be an epiphenomena of the populations that are called “White”. That I include considerations of race in my political thinking does not make me a Nazi, a skinhead, or a “white nationalist”. Maybe I’m just a no-modifier “conservative”, who does not share the same preferred set of blinders as his fellows. Had that possibility occurred to you?

Then one day he was gone.  In honour of him I wrote a piece about courage and the unity of men, and that was that.  Or nearly that, because we then began an exchange of private mails in which more of him emerged.  What I found was a man of the spirit, brave in the face of what seemed to be a debilitating illness that he would eventually be unable to beat.  But he was spiritual in that other sense, too.  He was, or had been, a Gurdjieffian; and his natural bent was not at all that of the angry, Jewphobic WN but of a man straining for some permanency and right, and doing it with culture and principle and, always, stylish prose.

I remember saying that if he ever wants to write about his real worldview, minus the Jewish stuff, I would gladly publish it.  But he didn’t want that.  He was a dedicated fighter, a man who had taken a personal decision, a vow perhaps and much against his want and nature, about how he would proceed and why, and nothing could or would change it.  Then he stopped replying, and there was no more contact.

A few months ago Ben came on one of our threads and I asked him if WM was still in touch.  He said he thought he was still down in Texas.  But that turned out not to be true.  The email I opened yesterday was from an old friend and accomplice of WM who, only just the other day, had read the exchange with Ben, and was very kindly writing to tell me that, in fact, WM passed away over two years ago.

One of the lesser harms done to us by the Judaic struggle is that its necessary opposition consumes good men and good minds - sometimes, as in the case of WM, our best.  What he might have achieved, had he not made the decision to plough such a narrow furrow, can never be known.  It is another loss in a great history of losses that is the story of our people’s struggle to live a life fitted to us in peace and in freedom, and perhaps what WM really meant by “classical liberty”.

Those who knew him will remember him well and with gratitude, as do I.

I have been waiting for some days for regular ConHome contributor Robert Halfon, a Jewish Conservative MP married to a Brazilian woman, and serving chairman of the Education Select Committee, to post a piece about his current report into the condition of white working-class children in the education system.  Halfon is a decent enough man as MP’s go, and his report does exhibit compassion and concern for this failing constituency.  It acknowledges, for example, that the system is guilty of neglect.  Halfon particularly deplores the current hard-left turn to Critical Race Theory.  He wants some rather obvious if also tepid action to assist the white child-victims of the education system.  But, of course, he can’t admit that the problem runs much deeper than that, and the condition of these children is more existential.

ConHome is edited by another Jew, the Catholicised Paul Goodman, who allows on the site any hard-left criticism of the Conservative government, and even milque toast, sub-Farage civic nationalist criticism of immigration.  But naming the native victims, now that’s one step too far and summary excommunication will follow.  Nevertheless, ConHome is the primary right-of-centre party-affiliated UK site which permits readers’ comments, so the war for freedom of expression has to be fought.  The circle of the say-able has to be widened.

Mr Goodman, or one of his gentile co-workers dedicated to the great Conservative cause of corporate whoring, will very shortly be rushing to narrow it again ...

Verry

It’s not simply neglect. It’s not even that the educational establishment and the teaching profession have sought to level to the ground what English children can know of their own history, culture, and peoplehood. It’s also that multiracialising the English homeland and life experience is a producer of the draining and destructive phenomenon of culture shock. Any native people made subject to colonisation, and then deserted and attacked by its own authorities wielding pure, malignant lies about equality and racism, will lose the golden thread of relation and meaning in its life. The resulting anomie, self-estrangement, powerlessness and hopelessness IS culture shock; and it will manifest in the education of the children and in their later lives, deepening with each generation.

You politicians have attempted murder.

This morning ConservativeHome, the only really salient website for politically-minded British conservatives, ran an interesting piece by Rebecca Lowe.  She is described as “the former director of FREER, and a former assistant editor of ConservativeHome. She is co-founder of Radical.”  The latter tells us that she is part of the feminist rearguard action against the trespasses of trannyism on womanhood, her judgement being that the broad offices of state have fallen to it, and it is now a radical act to speak of woman in her nature and whole being. 

The article is titled What consequentialism and Peter Singer have taught me about the gender debate.  In it she is much exercised by the Jewish radical Singer, and spends a fair part of the article sniping at his approval of parents murdering their disabled babies.  But her principal concern is “the gender debate”.  It’s a good and properly conservative article but, of course, it does not situate Singer in the wider historical paradigm, the failure to recognise which ensures that conservatives continue operating on the enemy’s ground and on the enemy’s terms.

One ConHome commenter (whose similarity to other such, long-banned commenters of a nationalist persuasion, offering an identical nationalist critique, we need not dwell upon) offered the following, minor observation in an attempt to open a few tight-shut conservative eyes:

FickleFate
Good to see a properly thoughtful article at ConHome raising issues of an importance greater by orders of magnitude than the customary political fayre.

Consequentialists are active nihilists: deniers of all that is content-ful in the human being. What resides in and belongs to us, what we receive from the past, what connects us, what is particular and of the essence of us, what is emergent from our nature, what we discriminate for and, most of all for nihilists, moralise about ... this can have no place in the utopian end time, where all otherness is the same as self, all boundaries and borders are gone, and all human cause, all struggle, all desire, all need, all conflict is forgotten.

That self-estranged and denatured , artificial human estate, sans nation, sans kin and kind, is the final equality. It is not at all at odds with our Abrahamic religious and post-Enlightenment secular philosophical paradigms; which is why conservatives, who stand, in theory at least, against it, can never slough it off. They stand and fight on ground which inclines towards it, and are for the most part captured by gravity, defending only the last slip downwards from the next, but always relenting anyway, always sliding again in the end.

We need a clear philosophical exposition of why it is only truly conservative to level the ground. Scruton strove throughout his life to speak of such.  There are some less exalted nationalists and anti-modernists, routinely and mechanically traduced by the crazed left, who speak of much the same.  But will you listen, or are you too complacent, too self-absorbed, too materialistic, too disinterested in the struggle for the human tomorrow?

Today the DT’s lead journalist on economics Ambrose Evans Pritchard posted a piece on the mounting nervousness of the world’s billionaires as they contemplate possible future neckties.  The article itself isn’t exactly incendiary.  It begins:

Davos Man is trembling. The cosmopolitan superclass is scrambling for ways to share a little of its income stream – as a prudent insurance policy – before the bottom half of western democracy takes matters into its own hands.

The new doctrine is enshrined in the Davos Manifesto, the digital billionaires’ answer to the Communist Manifesto of 1848. The cardinal code is ‘stakeholder capitalism’, otherwise known as looking after your workers, and agreeing not to trash society, or the local water system, or the planet.
There has been something grotesque about a lockdown crisis that has ravaged small firms and the manual self-employed even as the well-to-do accumulate trillions of excess savings. The Nasdaq 100 index is 40pc higher than before the pandemic. Listed global equities have risen in value by $24 trillion since March. The owners of wealth have made out like bandits.
.
“We’re on the brink of a terrible civil war. The US is at a tipping point in which it could go from manageable internal tension to revolution,” says Ray Dalio, founder of the world’s biggest hedge fund, Bridgewater Associates. Words no longer suffice. The pie will have to be divided.

Davos men and women know in their hearts that the economic dispensation of the last 20 years has been gamed by their caste, adorned in the ideological bunting of globalist virtue.

They know that staggering inequalities have festered, to the point where the average chief executive of an S&P 500 company earns 357 times as much as the average non-supervisory worker. The ratio was around 20 in the mid-1960s. It was still 28 at the end of Ronald Reagan’s term, which is an amazing thought.

Which is all fine and dandy.  But it doesn’t actually deal with the issue at hand, which is the keen desire among perfectly unexceptional British Tories to see “the bandits” brought low, as witnessed by the following not at all unusual comments from the subsequent thread:

READ MORE...

Our nationalist arguments alone, however germane, however well-made, however moral, will not bring the political class and the wider British Establishment to grant our people a hearing.  We are all too well insulated from the political, and that is how our rulers like it.  Nothing will change without a very great pressure from our direction.  But how is that to be generated?  How do we make the Establishment’s dismissal politically unsustainable?  Obviously, only the people themselves can force the issue to the right conclusion.  Politically active nationalists, therefore, have the duty to free and then harness our people’s will.  To free our people’s will we must speak not merely negatively of our crisis but positively of freedom.  They must then speak of their freedom to the Establishment.

How we get from here to there is the subject of this essay.  The good news is that something very like it has been done before.  Its (for any nationalist) sobering story tells how Nigel Farage and UKIP achieved their own historic moment of victory over the Establishment.  That is the general path for any micro-party seeking to change history in a truly significant way.

The campaign for an EU Referendum grew out of the heady ideological years of Margaret Thatcher’s first government and her burgeoning atlanticism.  In contrast to the spring of freedom and change which coursed through that period, the process of European Community integration, with its Heathite corporatist connotation, appeared stodgy and bureaucratic, centralising and undemocratic.  Opposition to it arose both from within and without government, in particular among the ideological free-market members of Margaret Thatcher’s cabinet, including Thatcher herself.  There was also a strong contingent of senior backbench Conservative MPs who were like-minded, and there was a powerful caucus of right-wing eurosceptics outside parliament, including the majority of association members and significant parts of the press.  Some senior Labour Party members in both Houses, including Tony Benn, Frank Field and the Lords Shore and Stoddart, also argued against EC integration on the basis of Brussels’ burgeoning power and emerging unaccountable structures.

The first expression of organised resistance to European integration only came later, though, and from within the Tory Establishment.  This was the formation of the Bruges Group in 1989, following Thatcher’s benchmark speech of the previous year to the College of Europe, a speech intended to set out a different vision of Europe’s future from the integrationist one advanced by Brussels.  The speech proved a watershed for ambitious men and ideological europhiles in her own cabinet.  When Thatcher was removed from office in the same year and a leadership election held, the choices being the ambitious John Major or the ideological europhiles Michael Heseltine and Douglas Herd.  Major won and quickly revealed himself to be a conventionalist on integration and just about everything else.  The Bruges Group found itself out in the cold and fighting integration alone at Westminster.

In 1991, during the struggle over the signing of the Maastricht Treaty which was due the following year, a Bruges Group founding-member, the academic Alan Sked, founded a second organisation which he named the Anti-Federalist League.  That act got him expelled from the Bruges Group, not least because the AFL intended to give voters a say by running AFL candidates at elections (which it did in the 1992 General Election and in two subsequent by-elections, failing ignonimously but providing clear confirmation, if any were needed, that to prosper in Westminster elections single-issue parties have to become full-spectrum parties).

With the signing of the Maastricht Treaty by John Major, and the European Community re-named the European Union, and with the Maastricht Rebels within the Conservative Party defeated, the struggle against integration was over.  AFL had lost its purpose.  Accordingly, Sked and most of his members committed to change tack and campaign for complete withdrawal from the EU under the banner of the United Kingdom Independence Party – only to find themselves eclipsed for a time by James Goldsmith’s Referendum Party, formed in 1994 (in the 1997 election campaign Goldsmith stood over 500 candidates and spent more money on press advertising than did the Tories or Labour, all for 2.6% of the vote and no seats.  It deregistered in 1997, following Goldsmith’s early death).

That same year, with much frustration among members at the lack of progress, Sked was toppled from the leadership by a group within UKIP led by Nigel Farage.  The cause of a Referendum had never looked weaker.  Yet what no one knew then was that in Farage it had a top-class media performer and a natural communicator.  Even so Farage was not initially the UKIP leader.  Under Michael Holmes the party fought the 1999 European Parliament elections and won 6.5% of the vote, gaining three seats.  Then, much professionalised under the leadership of the former Conservative MP Roger Knapman, it fought the 2004 Europeans and won 2.6million votes, 16.1% of total votes cast, and twelve seats.  That was the beginning of the UKIP breakthrough.

The strategy had always been to pressure the Conservative Party to return to euroscepticism or, failing that, to maneouvre it to see that its own self-interest lay in giving the people another Referendum on Europe (and, in fact, both objectives would be achieved, the latter first, immediately prior to David Cameron’s election triumph of 2015, the former second with Boris Johnson’s general election triumph four years later).

On coming to the leadership in 2006, Farage quickly cemented the policy, putting together a range of populist policies to attract the Tory voter.  It did not matter that the objective was not to win power at Westminster or even to replace the Conservative Party as the main party of opposition.  It was always about instilling fear and doubt at CCHQ.  To that end, Farage also broke conclusively with the de rigeur plastic-man image of Blair and David Cameron (elected Tory leader a year earlier), and of political spin, and the fashion for youth.  Farage gave forth in the saloon bar, pint in hand, speaking unscripted and much in the manner of any rather well-informed Tory of the shires.

It worked.  The party came second to the Conservatives in the 2009 Europeans, and in the 2013 local elections it won an average of 23% of the vote in wards where it put up a candidate, and in the 2104 locals it won 168 seats.  Finally, in the 2014 Europeans UKIP won a grand total of 4,376,635 votes, 26.6% of all votes cast, and twenty-four MEPs - more than of any British party.

By the time the 2015 General Election hove into view, with David Cameron in 10 Downing Street at the fag-end of coalition government with Nick Clegg’s LibDems, and with party polling showing a likely second hung parliament, Cameron’s party strategists, fearing the loss of another four million votes to UKIP and the return of a Labour government under Ed Miliband, opted to meet UKIP’s challenge head on and include a Referendum on EU membership in the party election manifesto.

When, on the morning of 8th May 2015, Cameron found himself the surprise victor he was saddled with a campaign promise on which he never expected to have to make good.  Ever the PR executive he committed himself to an entirely cosmetic re-negotiation of British terms of EU membership with the other 27 leaders of the member states.  In the campaign which followed, Cameron’s renegotiation package sank like a stone in the public consciousness.  Even the Remain side ignored it, offering a high-handed and unremittingly hectoring defence of our membership.  The two Leave organisations, with Farage and UKIP fighting under the aegis of Leave.EU and the Conservative eurospectic ministers overwhelmingly under that of Vote Leave, presented positive and hopeful messages of a sovereign and free national future.  Optimism, patriotism and the Anglo-Saxon love of freedom had defeated Establishment bullying and deceit and the power of the old media.

The Sunderland celebration on Referendum night - the first result to be called.

So, what are the immediate lessons to be drawn from this history?

First, the party began to take itself seriously.  It did not rely on change coming from some other quarter (say, from Bill Cash and his party-first clique).  It did not rely on “worse is better” in the form of more and better banana stories.  Rather it established a clear political strategy and held to it.  Throughout its period of electoral success it also really understood the presentational nature of its mission.  It knew it had to look like its prospective Tory voters.  When the charge was made in the media that the BNP was infiltrating the party, action was taken to publicly ban anyone with past or present BNP connections – Hope Not Hate was brought in to vet new applications for membership.  The tendency, common in minor parties, for non-mainstream politics to attract marginal people was ruthlessly addressed.  Even the senior MEP, Godfrey Bloom, who bopped the deceitful BBC journalist Michael Crick on the head with some rolled-up papers, had to walk the plank.  Members who told off-colour jokes on social media were expelled.  It paid off.  The press found it had much less of an easy job to paint the party as wierdly extremist and hopelessly amateur.

Second, the party had luck and timing on its side … luck that a skilled operator like Farage, mercurial though he could be, was on its side, and that the eurosceptic cause was shared with a number of senior and respected Tories in cabinet and on the back benches.  Likewise, the Tory press was largely eurosceptic, which at least prevented it from applying an extremist sticker to the party.  The Daily Express, when under the ownership of Richard Edmunds, went one stage further and actually campaigned for UKIP, becoming almost as much a house journal for the party as the Telegraph was for the Tories.

With regard to timing, obviously UKIP under Farage was favoured in a way that Sked’s and Goldsmith’s parties never were.  When Michael Howard retired as Tory leader and David Cameron succeeded to the role, supported by George Osborne as shadow chancellor, the last of the mainstream parties dallying with euroscepticism had gone and been replaced by another internationalist clone-party.  The Tories, New Labour, the LibDems, the SNP, Plaid, the Greens … they were all europhile.  There was just UKIP, the BNP, and George Galloway’s Respect Party arguing for an end to EU membership.  UKIP, therefore, had a ready-made constituency of the deserted.  It only had to prove itself worthy of their votes.

Cameron’s uncertain grip on power was also a gift of Time.  His advisors were telling him that he was dependent on the very constituencies where the burgeoning UKIP vote could cost him anything from twenty to fifty seats to Labour or the LibDem, and thus the election.  That concentrated minds wonderfully.  The final element was the cynicism of the Tory hierarchy, who seriously believed they could steal UKIP’s clothing then, after the coalition is returned to power, send Dave out to the lectern in Downing Street to tell the voters, “Sorry folks, but Nick won’t support a Referendum.  I’ve tried to convince him, I really have.  But his whole party is terribly pro-EU, you see.  So with the greatest regret we are going to have to pass on that one.  Hey-ho.”

Third, UKIP grasped fairly early that it had to become a professional political machine.  Grandstanding about the nature of power in this corrupted world was fine for hobbyists.  But it wasn’t going to deliver votes.  As soon as Roger Knapman took over at the helm in 2002 he began to professionalise the party.  A full-time political advisor was hired, centralisation and strategising took over, and amateurism was discouraged.  By 2005 serious levels of funding had begun to flow in.  By 2011 Stuart Wheeler, a former major donor to the Tories, was installed as party treasurer.  Arron Banks donated £1,000,000 for the 2014 European Parliament election.  In March of that year Ofcom duly awarded UKIP major party status.  It was an arrival!

Love or hate his politics, Farage’s relatability, high national profile and speaking ability (so evident in the YouTube videos of his often hilariously disrespectful speeches in the EU Parliament, viewed hundreds of thousands of times) brought massive media attention, and that brought a mass party membership which peaked at 46,000 in mid-2015, making it possible to fight on the ground throughout England and Wales.

The UKIP path, as such, went through three phases: from 1994 to 2002, when the party was full of naivety and had yet to fully understand the nature of the enterprise on which it had embarked; from 2002 to 2014 when the party professionalised and experienced success and growth; and 2014-2016, when the party matured to the limit of its potential and finally achieved its grand purpose.

It was done by seriousness, a respectable and popular cause also voiced by senior politicians in the other parties, a voter-base that was inherited and so did not have to be built from scratch, a skilled communicator as leader, strong mainstream media support, good timing and good fortune in its enemies, solid funding, a mass membership, professionalism in party management, intelligent policy-making and presentation … these were the elements that together generated the UKIP phenomenon of a minor party changing history in a major way.  These are what political nationalism, in its own “same but different” context, has to broadly match.  Carry on as we are and that will never be done.  Our people will never have an opportunity to bring this criminally errant Establishment under their will.