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.

As has been widely reported since Thursday, the Prime Minister’s chief advisor, one Dominic Mckenzie Cummings, has left Downing Street for the last time, according to reports (at the time of writing).  Along with Michael Gove, Cummings has functioned as the ideological driving force behind the Brexit strategy.  He masterminded Boris Johnson’s December 2019 General Election campaign, and has since been instrumental in the lockdown and test-and-trace strategies.  He also initiated the war on civil service culture and on the BBC’s liberal-left bias.  He is an inveterate upsetter of apple carts and an anti-Establishmentarian par excellence.  But it is his dedication to the small band of Vote Leave activists who followed him into government which has angered Tory MPs as much as his abrasive personality and helter-skelter methods.

The capture of the leadership by Johnson and the excision of the europhile old guard did not signify a sea-change in the rest of the parliamentary party - not least because Central Office controls candidate selection, and the 29% of Tories who are new are not all ideological ERGers and closet Farageists giving voice to the people and challenging the power of the Establishment.  They are what Tories have been for almost two centuries: accommodationists and corporate servants.  As such, the second lockdown has brought unrest in the parliamentary party over covid strategy and the epic failure of test-and-trace to a head.  Rather than attack the Prime Minister whose electoral feat gave them their place in the Westminster sun they have allied with the group within and without the Downing Street machine who are “friends of Carrie Symonds” and gone after the head of communications Lee Cain, to whom Johnson had offered the job of Downing Street’s Chief of Staff.

Aside from being a Vote Leaver, Cain’s crimes included a clash with Symonds over his handling of her row with Johnson at their south London home in June last year, which led to vin rouge all over the sofa and a call to 999.  He also earned the antipathy of another Downing Street insider, Allegra Stratten who, despite arriving in post only a month ago, took an instant dislike to Cain and wouldn’t speak to him.  The witches coven was completed by another wonk Munira Murza, who directs the No.10 Policy Unit, and Home Secretary Priti Patel; albeit in their case most likely because Cain had boycotted the BBC and upset the press lobby by opening access to the new media.  We should not run away with the idea that Cain is entirely a victim here.  The Daily Telegraph has reported that he and the Vote Leavers have taken to calling Symonds “Princess Nut Nuts” behind her back; their reasons, apparently, being that she acts the princess, is of questionable sanity, and bears some facial resemblance to a squirrel.  Naturally, Downing Street firmly denies any such suggestion.  But imagine, while this blokish humour might have been safe from consequences in the last millennium, it probably wouldn’t work so well in this one.  It may also not be terribly clever, given that Symonds is Johnson’s fiancee and the mother of his child.

In any event, Cain has been forced out, and now the whole Vote Leave house of cards is falling.  Cummings was meant to move on by Christmas to create an organisation to parallel the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency in the USA.  This is his real ambition, not being holed up in Downing Street fighting political fires all day.  Johnson, meanwhile, is already adjusting to his new situation and signalling to the press that Symonds’ green, badger-friendly agenda will now influence his vision for a “global Britain” with his own foundationally liberal values.  The culture war against the civil service and the BBC will end.  It is rumoured that for Northern Ireland an extension to the transition period might be agreed with Brussels.

Most interestingly, Johnson will be “less dogmatic” than past Tory administrations in his approach to Scottish independence, replacing the denialist policy of Cameron and May with a policy of positive argument for Union.  Fat chance that has.  Anyway, denialism isn’t exactly dead.  It’s just that, to quote Johnson, “We’ve got to make it more than just about saying no to another referendum.”  Alister Jack, the Scottish Secretary, still says no; re-confirming that for this government any second Scottish independence referendum is some twenty years away.  Nobody really believes that.  On 6th May next year, and in the months after, that theory will be put to the sternest of tests. 

The immediate signs are a bit more hopeful for the London government.  SNP support has been declining steadily among Scottish voters since its peak in August of this year.  But it is doing so for clear reasons, among which only a general exhaustion with the SNP, after so many years of power at Holyrood, is helpful to London.  Public dissatisfaction with the Scottish government’s handling of the covid crisis will be resolved, politically at least, by the availability of a vaccine by the year’s end.  The Starmer honeymoon will come to an end.  What will really make or break the issue is the reality of the Brexit settlement and its reception north of the border.  If ... and it is a fairly sure if ... the settlement respects the British government insistence on our sovereign nationhood, and if in consequence all suggestion of legal oversight by Brussels and its institutions is forever banished, then the Scots will have to get used to a future in which only London dwells.  That probability is already driving support for independence higher.  One poll last month put it at 58%.  Nicola Sturgeon stated in 2015 that she would not seek a second referendum until support is above 60% for a period of a whole year.  It is reasonable to expect that if (a) the SNP achieves a majority representation at Holyrood in May and (b) IndyRef 2 support hits 60% just once, the press will be on. 

Both are within easy reach, which means that the meaning of Boris Johnson’s new policy of engagement can easily be turned against him.  What, after all, is the point of keeping the Scots in the Union if that is truly not the wish of the people of Scotland?  What is the point of talking up the Union if polling support for independence just continues as it is?  Th only advantage of denialism for London is if support falls as the Scots become more accepting of their junior status in the Union; and they won’t.  Denialism will only generate its opposite.  There is no happy, shared future to be had, only discontent, recrimination, protest.  London will not be able to hold the line for even two years, never mind twenty.

Now, I will explain why this is all so important for us, as nationalists.  Dealing first with the Scottish Independence question ...

The Union, the London government and its dismissal of the West Lothian Question, the great emphasis that both the Union and the London government place on the civic over the ethnic ... these all weigh against the freedom of the English, in particular, to develop a politics of self-expression and representation.  We labour under a heavy political yoke in which our identity is unrecognised and our natural right on the soil, our natural interests as a people are not just neglected but actively demonised.  It is made a hundred times easier for the British Establishment when we elect only a British government, and are fed only the politics of that government, with its totalistic global-corporate, neoliberal and neo-Marxist bias.  But what happens to Westminster if the Holyrood government secures and wins a second referendum?

If and when Scottish independence becomes a reality the Union will still be a Union of Crowns but it will comprise only England, Wales, and Northern Ireland.  The Northern Irish Unionists are ethnically Scottish, not English, and may one day lose the numbers or the will to maintain their union with us.  But for the purposes of this paper it is not the future of Northern Ireland which interests us but the future of England after Scottish independence.  The West Lothian question would be no more.  The Barnett Formula would be a thing of the past.  With 533 of the remaining 591 seats and, a further seven (at present) Sinn Feiners who do no sit, Westminster would become effectively an English parliament.

Conventionally speaking, the English electorate is predominantly right-of-centre but not economistic and not socially liberal.  The immigrant peoples, obviously, are left-of-centre. A political realignment with different and perhaps interesting points of tension beckons.  The tendency prevalent among the English to consider themselves British, which has been in decline since devolution, would collapse, and with a rising sense of Englishness should come some detachment from the foreign populations (who cannot claim our ethnicity, and who cannot switch overnight from being “black British, “Asian British” and so forth to English, though some may try).

The ground on which we fight, therefore, will be massively more favourable towards us.  Every one of us, if he or she is at all clear-minded, ought really to be a firm supporter of Scottish independence.  It would take us forward further than Brexit ever could.

In conclusion, let us quickly look at the other two post-Cummings signs and portents that Boris Johnson is communicating through the media.  Pulling back from the culture war which Cummings started will certainly benefit Laurence Fox’s new party, Reclaim.  As the race madness and the tranny madness and all the rest of the coercive, abusive neo-Marxist agenda will inevitable pursue its dizzy path to an absolute standard of social pathology, so the voices of commonsensical protest will be raised; first this one man Fox, then a handful of others, then an armful.  Whether the armfuls burgeon into a political movement is perhaps doubtful.  But a counter-weight has been placed on the wildly out-of-true cultural scale, and that is a start.  It behoves us not to be too churlish about it merely because Fox, like Farage, will not stand beside our people.  All work to level the political ground will benefit us too.

Thirdly, Johnson’s greener, more liberal global “vision”, with its infamous “Build Back Better” slogan, has more than an echo of Klaus Schwab’s plans for a totally toxic globalist hell of the commons beneath his paradise of the rich.  One looks at the outlines of the one and then of the other, and wonders.  But surely not?  It’s inconceivable, no?  Until one remembers Johnson’s liberal ideas about immigration and his coming destruction of the planning laws to sate the construction industry that helps to finance his party.  As usual with Tories it is hard to know where the corporate whoring stops and the ideology of The Globality begins.  No degree of corruption surprises the observer of British politics any more.  But, of course, if that is the journey on which Johnson and his party want to take us, even though we are out of Brussels’ grasp with its crystal clear pursuit of a globalised future and of the new-made globalised beings which will stand where once did Europe’s beautiful and creative peoples, then so be it.  Nationalists will have another clear target on the fat behind of the British Establishment.

The prevailing liberal system has grown stale in the extreme and, for our people, not just unproductive but destructive.  There are political signs all across the West of a yearning for an alternative.  The timing is ripe for ethnic nationalism.  But then as nationalists we come up against the stops of our marginalisation and downright persecution (which will get a lot worse if the Law Commissioners get in England what the SNP government has wanted for Scotland).

The one defence we possess is that the political, media, and liberal Establishments are marginalising and persecuting a political standpoint we, as ethnic nationalists, do not hold.  It is no more correct and appropriate to attack our politics than it is to attack the politics of the Board of Deputies of British Jews.  Advocacy for the existence, natural right, and natural interests of whole peoples cannot be illegitimate, and advocacy for the existence, natural right, and natural interests of the native British people cannot be separated out and treated differently simply because as the natives of this land our interests run counter to those of the non-native populations colonising it. Equality before the law must prevail.  Properly explicated and rid of false associations from the judge and jury which is liberal thinking, ethnic nationalism is morally unimpeachable whichever people it refers to.

Of course, that is a utilitarian argument for theorising the mechanics of ethnic nationalism.  It is a good argument but it is not the whole of the argument, the most serious part of which is the necessity to fashion a philosophy capable of changing history in an epochal sense.  I think we are moving closer to that.  But nothing is yet extant, and in the meantime the narrative of our politics is supplied by so-called “ground-breaking” academics of nationalism.  All working from within the liberal order, they have produced little that we would recognise as our politics.  For example:

Eric Gellner (1925-1995), a Czech-born Jew, theorised nationalism from the starting point of cultural plurality, treating nationalism as a product of modernity and an artificial and strictly political imposition upon the state.  He held that nationalism can only exist in industrial society, by which assertion he could divorce it from the principle of ethnicity (which he did actually hold to be enduring).  In turn, that divorce enabled him to assert that nationalist sentiment is actuated by “the feeling of anger” or “the feeling of satisfaction”, depending on whether “the political and national unit” is “congruent”.  Gellner’s academically influential notions about nationalism are narrow and near-sighted, quite lacking the sense that the fundamental interests of the people must be expressed in their government.

Benedict Anderson (1936-2015), an Anglo-Irishman born in China, also concluded that nationalism was modern, and a response to capitalism.  His famous work Imagined Communities made the classic sceptical plaint that peoplehood requires everyone to have been introduced over the dinner table to everyone else or the people must, to some extent, be a work of the imagination.

This assertion has become a staple of the Marxised left’s stabby little denials.  We could, I suppose, turn to the Mooreian Shift to dispense with it.  But, in fact, that natural acceptance of what is in another because that is also in oneself ... the quiet but utterly solid contentment conferred by being-in-kind, walking among kind ... that suffices.  Were it otherwise ... were a man unable to acknowledge his entire people because he hasn’t met all of them in person, then, in principle, knowledge of the immediate and singular is reified over knowledge of the expansive and plural.  So, for example, a plurality that is a crowd at a football game can only ever possess the meaning of individual football fans as witnessed by each one of them.  When those people leave the stadium they must, by Anderson’s scepticism, remain only and always football fans and not be husbands, fathers, brothers, lovers, workers, shoppers, travellers, holiday-makers, or all that is of the endless round of human experience; because that human fullness would be “imaginary” for everyone at the game.  But we do not hold that other people are incomplete human beings simply on the ground that we do not know them completely.  We know and experience them to be just as we are, even those we have not ourselves met.
 
Anderson, by the way, gave his memoir the title of A Life Beyond Boundaries, which figures.

Anthony D Smith (1936-2015), a Jewish sociologist, argued that ethnic nationalism, as a common ethnic address of power and agency, was a thing of the non-European world.  But in the European world such a nationalism is an invented imposition upon pre-existing ethnicities, histories, myths, and so forth, and properly functions only as an accident of geography and symbolism in the wake, again, of capitalism and modernity.  The organisational rule, meanwhile, is civically nationalist.  It does not even require that its adherents in any given place look alike.

Walker Connor (1926-2016), an American political scientist, was the best of the bunch born before WW2 in that he made no bones about the ethnic foundation of nationalism.  But he approached it through the lens of conflict in the world instead of through the expression of human being, making it too much a negative phenomenon.

Further, he held it to be non-rational and emotional in character while at the same time insisting that it was based on kinship.  Well, you can’t have it both ways.  Either it is of the human instinct for kin or it is non-rational.  The assumption that the first proves the second is wrong.  Ethnic nationalism, as the whole people’s freedom to pursue its interest in survival and continuity, is not at all problematic to explain intellectually, although such explanation is not a pre-requisite - which it cannot be, of course, because instinct precedes thought.  The idea that anything, actually, is entirely constructed of thought is itself a nonsense.

It is the same with Connor’s related belief that because nationalism belongs to the human instinct it is subconscious.  Do men and women have subconscious mutual attraction, or it is fully and gloriously conscious?  Well, just so with ethnic self-preference.  Connor commits the same error of sloppy thinking and terminological inexactitude that he spent his whole life correcting in fellow academics.  His career-long insistence upon exactitude gave us the clumsy appellation ethnonationalism.  We have no reason to avail ourselves of it.

With the exception of Frank Salter, the later generation of academics have largely devoted their energies to the political relationship of the ethnic group to the state, or to the political expression of ethnicity in citizenship.  The nativist aspects of ethnic nationalism have been treated positively only in respect to archaic Third World tribes.  The nativism of European peoples is consistently reduced to a negative manifestation towards immigrants and immigration, as if the rest of humanity has absolutely no opinion on the colonisation of its homeland and it own replacement by alien populations.

At present, a lot of noise is being made around the self-promoting Israeli religious scholar Yoram Hazony, whose rise to prominence really got going with his 2018 book The Virtue of Nationalism.  But, of course, while he is for “nationalism” and against globalism as a governing power over nation states (which he characterises as a form of imperialism) he is against “tribalism”, ie, he is for the multiracial nation state (after all, 20% of the population of Israel is Palestinian, and it’s not like the Israeli government is going to flood its Jewish population with Sub-Saharan Africans and North Africans, and the masses of the Turkic world, Arabia and south, central, and east Asia; so that’s alright, then).

The Chatham House “scholar” and globalist pet Matthew Goodwin is the resident go-too British “expert” on all things allegedly right-wing.  He has treated his mainstream political clientelle to studies of the “fascist” BNP, UKIP, populism, the radical right and, with his next tome due in 2021, the whole shabang of nation, identity and belonging.  Goodwin is not a philosopher, of course.  So the strong probablility is that, writing from the liberal mentality as he does, he will have no more comprehension of the real dynamics of ethnic nationalism - its ontology, its philosophical principles and interior workings - than any of the gentlemen above.  I strongly suspect that nationalism as a naturalistic and emergent organising structure or system for the whole life of Man is something neither he nor any of them can penetrate because that cannot be done from the non-emergent, indeed imposed and artificial organising system which is liberalism.  A clumsy new word for this a lá Walker Connor would seem to be needed.  Liberocentricity, perhaps.

At this point we should acknowledge that we, connected though we are to the whole world of nationalism, are little better at formally explicating our own system of thought.  We seem to be content to recline into the comfortable notion that it can’t matter too much because as ethnic nationalists (please let us not employ Connor’s semiotic) it’s all effortlessly instinctive.

Accordingly, we have brought forth vast reams of critical analysis of our deteriorating racial circumstance, such that even those of us who qualify as long-standing nationalists with developed critiques of our own rarely rise in our politics above reaction, be that born of our instincts or from our factual observations and judgements.  To put it bluntly, critique is an unsexed thing.  It can never seed the ideational future.  So it can never serve the historical obligation upon us to re-order the world for the life and good of our kind.  A politics which seeks that has to come out of an holistic and original nexus of thought about the life of Man.  From the moment that modernist thinking appeared as a revolutionary tool of the powerful, nothing less ever had historical agency.

Today, President Macron will lead a national tribute to the teacher Samuel Paty, decapitated in a Paris suburb last Friday by an 18 year old Chechen, born in Moscow.  This comes on top of the large spontaneous public gatherings in many French towns over the weekend, in the immediate aftermath of the killing.  Macron has already made a public statement to the effect, according to Charles Moore in the Telegraph, that:

Paty was teaching “the freedom to believe and not to believe”. Winning this battle is “existential” for France, because, as a secular republic, the principle is foundational.

This is cant.  The real and racist attitude of the French government towards freedom of expression was shown by the prosecution and conviction, in January, of the writer Renaud Camus, for the sin of making a very fine speech in Colombey-les-deux Eglises on 21st October 2017 to the National Council of the European Resistance, of which he is president.  The speech itself was generous to the Jewish community of France and to its holocaust narrative.  But Camus still found himself pursued by the disgusting quasi-governmental and notably Jewish organisations SOSRacisme and LICRA, and charged with “public incitement to hate or violence on the basis of origin, ethnicity, nationality, race or religion”.  He was sentenced to two months in prison - quite enough to be at danger from non-white inmates - commutable against a payment of 1800 euros to these two bodies.  He paid the blackmailers.  But how much will he have been silenced?  More or less than the French teachers who will not now do what Samuel Paty did, and show their pupils a couple of the cartoons which prompted the Charlie Hebdo massacre of 7 January 2015?

In his initial response to Friday’s killing Macron said the attack shouldn’t divide France because that’s what the extremists want. “We must stand all together as citizens,” he said.  In the spirit of standing together, then, below the line I reproduce the entire text of Renaud Camus’ speech.  It is worth the time taken to read it.  But be sure to say nothing like this yourself if you visit France, and do not under any circumstances refer to immigration, as Camus did, as an invasion.  You are not a famous French author.  You will doubtless get two years if SOSRacisme or LICRA gets to hear of you.

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As the conversation between James and myself on his post detailing the sociobiological history of Euroman has drifted towards some thoughts of my own on the doomed Levellers of the English civil war period, I thought I might post those thoughts here in the following form.

The history of how the ancient, socially vivifying quality of fair-dealing between English brothers in law-conforming pre-Norman society flowed not into the timeless, naturalistic ethnic politics which we espouse today but into the modernist politics of equality and class conflict … that history is interesting and instructive.  It centres on one event in the autumn of 1647 at the very dawn of the modern era itself.  It is a story about the coming time of an idea, and the ideological clamour and energy which impels it into the political consciousness and into history.  It is a story about the ease with which an ancient contention can be suborned and bear consequences quite opposite to it.  It is a story, for us, about what might have been, but also a reminder that we possess the prior right to speak from those vivifying moral virtues which both socialists and Establishment anti-racists so readily and promiscuously ascribe to themselves.

A year and a half before Charles Stuart’s beheading, officers and men of the New Model Army (which had just driven the forces of the king out of London, and set up headquarters at Putney) had gathered along with commoners at St Mary’s Church.  They were there to debate the rights of free Englishmen, the meaning of sovereignty and consent, and the future Constitution of England, all which they did over the course of fifteen days from 28th October to 11th November.  They were the very antithesis of a rabble and a wondrous demonstration of the creativity and high-minded principle which abide among the ordinary and unassuming like water in the rocks.

St Mary’s Putney, sketched by Thomas Rowlandson, though over a century after the Putney Debates

St Mary’s Putney still stands today, hard by the bridge over the river.  Emblazoned on a plaque above the transcept is a single sentence uttered by Colonel Thomas Rainsborough, a Leveller, member of Parliament, and the highest ranking officer present in those fifteen days.  It was the enduring sentiment, and it reads, “For really, I think that the poorest he that is in England hath a life to live, as the greatest he.”

The Putney Debates resonate strongly with liberals, and have an honoured place in their socio-political iconography as a watershed for the rights-based liberty of the individual against the over-bearing power of the state.  But Rainsborough’s truism, so plainly of its time in its usage, is also of its time in its relational certainties.  They are not the certainties of present-day liberals.  They do not relate to bloodless civic entities, each induced by the philosophical gods to unfetter his or her (or whatever’s) individual will while domiciled in the constitutional space otherwise known as England.  They relate to “the free people of England”, in the words of the Leveller Manifesto of 1649, actually titled An Agreement Of The Free People of England, signed by Lieutenant Colonel John Lilburne – “Freeborn John”, as he was known – and leading Levellers William Walwyn, Thomas Prince, and Richard Overton.  The text styled England as “this distressed nation” and, most interestingly, “this Common-wealth the land of our Nativity”.

Rainsborough’s England, then, was not at all the neutral administrative space of the liberal rationalist who would come a century after, nor neutral at all but the home we nationalists of today would recognise, where mutual belonging and fellow-feeling bestowed meaning and worth upon the life of every Englishman and woman.

The English Civil Wars are situated in the long (and, obviously, on-going) struggle of the Anglo-Saxon sons and daughters of the soil for deliverance from the Norman heel, and thence from all arbitrary power.  Lilburne – as near to an English nationalist as one could get in that religious age - actually wrote of common law as a Norman Yoke.  It is easy for us as nationalists today to understand the instinctive sense of English peoplehood which imbued and inspired Lilburne and all the other Levellers.  They were populists, and could command the stated support of a third of the populace of London.  But they were a minority in the New Model Army.  While all the parliamentarian forces made war on the degrading, subjugating power of absolute monarchy, the majority did not support the cause of a people’s participatory democracy, as conceived, for example, by Rainsborough who, after uttering his celebrated dictum at Putney, said:

“I think it clear, that every Man that is to live under a Government ought first by his own Consent to put himself under that Government; and I do think that the poorest man in England is not at all bound in a strict sense to that Government that he hath not had a voice to put Himself under.”

And therein is the outline of a second struggle of that time.  The greater part of the senior officers or Grandees, including Oliver Cromwell, the future Lord Protector, had fought not for a parliament with supreme authority over the law but for a constitutionally sovereign parliament above the people.  They fought not to give the people an equal vote but to restrict the vote to landowners like themselves.  They rejected the Levellers’ insistence that the people, not their elected representatives, are the final source of authority, and must be so because, in the words of the Leveller’s Manifesto:

… having by wofull experience found the prevalence of corrupt interests powerfully [incline] most men once entrusted with authority, to pervert the same to their own domination, and to the prejudice of our Peace and Liberties ...

Nothing is new.  Nothing really changes.  Nor would it change after the crushing of Leveller mutinies at Bishopsgate, Banbury, Andover and Burford by forces under Cromwell’s command, all in April and May 1649.  That proved to be the tipping point.  The great London funerals for the murders of Rainsborough in Pontefract in 1648 (in a bungled Royalist kidnap attempt), and Robert Lockyer, executed by Cromwell pour encourager les autres after the Bishopsgate mutiny, were forgotten.  The last full-throated Anglo-Saxon cry for all the people’s freedom and for fair-dealing died away.  It was not, after all, the time for a politics of the people.  It was the time for the modern, and the modernist understanding of the individual and his unfettering will and, thereby, a novel freedom abstracted from its ground in human presence and affirmation.

As the hiatus that was Cromwell’s authoritarian, puritan rule passed, the path was open for power elitism to slowly reinvent itself in the form of the elected representatives of the people and all those who enjoyed special access to them.  Ahead lay Lockean subjectivity, complete with the tabulu rasa, which would take hold in the next generation of elites looking for some promising ideology of human artifice to sink all trace of the populism and naturalism that, for a few short years, had lit the darkness, and which had ... indeed, could have … no place in their own scheme of things. 

Further ahead still lay revolution in France and radical ideas of a social progress which somehow left out the human in substance, and ideas of equality which left out the human in scale; bringing us to where we are today, beset by all manner of deadly and estranging harms but without that recourse to self and kind and nature which the generation of the England Civil Wars had through the voices of the Levellers.

As the urban industrial era solidified so Man became more and more a creature of caesura and of mere socio-economic import.  The Levellers’ cause, especially Rainsborough’s famous dictum, was not purloined exactly but re-interpreted in the only way it could be: as a somewhat picturesquely doomed but nevertheless noble struggle for the franchise and an interpretation of fairness in terms of social conflict and economic inequality.  The real principle ... the cohering principle of being and belonging that animates and explains the Rainsborough dictum (which liberal individualism does not)  may be formulated as:

However rich or poor in circumstance, each and every Englishman and woman has the life inherent to us all to live as he or she may, and none can be insensible to that English life in another of the English yet remain a whole and moral human being.

… and that’s what was lost to working-class solidarity and the nebulous ideal of social justice.  The capitalist stood in for Lilburne’s Norman.  The new political Grandees deftly drew a veil over their Cromwellian proclivities and jumped into the moral shoes of the Levellers.

Even so, it is not liberals or their socialist offspring but nationalists who are the Lilburnes and Rainsboroughs ... the passionate advocates for the people … the populists of our time.  For one thing we actually know who the people are (ie, not Africans or Pakistani Muslims or Roma, or whatever else 21st century Grandees like to claim).  For another, the decades of Establishment destructiveness towards the native British people are far more onerous than any transgressions of Charles 1st upon the religion and estates of his subjects, and it is nationalists who are reminding the Establishment of that.  It is nationalists reminding the English people that we all enjoy a negative right not to be subjected to government abuse and coercion.  Each of our folk has the right not to be cast down and oppressed for his or her love of our people and his or her desire for their freedom and good, and may bring opinions to that effect (or, indeed, to the effect that we do not love Africans or Pakistani Muslims or Roma or whatever) to the public space ... the St Mary’s of our time ... as freely as anyone else.  Fairness requires that those opinions are heard and, moreover, respected by our arrogant latter-day Grandees and, if they are the majority opinion of our people, acted upon.

The Levellers’ fight for fair-dealing, then, is ours now, and in its fundamentals it has not greatly changed.

So, the political is the ideational store of everything that has currency and, therefore, political potential.  As our people’s existential concerns may expressly not be talked about in party-politics, then they can have neither.  They are not political in this key and unavoidable sense.  They are, instead” “hate”, “racism”, “xenophobia, etc; and no amount of nationalist discourse and nationalist activism can make them otherwise.  For we nationalists do not control that process and neither, manifestly, do our people.  The groups who, by participation, do control that process are listed from (i) to (vi) above.

To become political our people’s existential concerns must be introduced to the political by people who are connected to those groups.  For them, the gates to the citadel are unguarded, and they may carry in any ideas they like.  At first they will be rebuffed by some, certainly.  But if the action is undertaken by others again and again, if shibboleths are challenged and injustices exposed, if fairness and justice and freedom are appealed to, if logic and commonsense is displayed, resistance will break down.

Well, it does not matter who carries our ideas into the chalk circle.  It only matters that political correctness and anti-racism are ignored and are seen to be ignored, that our people’s existential concerns gain political currency and, in time, become not just a commonplace of the public discourse but an unavoidable reality for it, that the political is electrified thereby as we would willingly electrify it ourselves, and the way is prepared for our people’s cause to be championed by nationalists electorally and in every other way.

The question for us today, then, becomes: How can we influence such an outcome?  What will it take to establish a group working covertly and daily on specified projects, each targeting the soft edges of the (at a rough estimate) fifteen to twenty thousand people in this country who alone possess anything like the power of free political speech?

... And at that point discretion must prevail.  The paper will be presented to its first recipient(s) this weekend.

To define the political against politics may seem only to be of interest to a few geeks and wonks who are unsatisfied with the usual utilitarian definitions.  “The stuff politicians do” ... that sort of thing.  But, actually, an understanding of how the political delimits politics, opening in any given time to the new, is key to its historical dynamic and also to people like us who wish to subvert and even replace that dynamic.

Perhaps the first thing to note is that, “great men” aside, politicians themselves are almost never the source of change.  As we saw with the long and disgraceful Remain rebellion, politicians of all mainstream parties are conservative in matters of their own position and persuasion.  They don’t welcome instability in their own political careers, or anything that might result in them being found out and forced out.

Because the class is self-selecting, its politicking from parliament to parliament, from generation of MPs to generation of MPs, tends always towards something vested and, in the longer term, alienating from the voters.  That self-selection occurs in no small measure on the basis of the possession of certain canonical values and beliefs which themselves refine and radicalise as other influences are brought to bear - for example, the agenda of those who actually fund political activity in this country, and all those who, at once or perhaps twice remove, participate in the process of developing (in our time, radicalising) “the stuff politicians do”.  Thus ...

i. Formal advisors have, of course, been a staple of government since the Pharoahs, and probably earlier.  The breed populating Westminster and Whitehall these days is the SpAd, dozens of whom provide ministerial teams with political strategy options and a very few ... Dominic Cummings being the notable case in Boris Johnson’s government ... with blue-sky thinking.  SpAds fill the party-pris space between ministers and their civil servants, whose terms of service include party-political neutrality.  They tend to come from, and eventually return to, the policy institutes and PR firms which have likewise thickly populated the political scene over the last few decades.  But while they are “in the thick if it” at their ministries or in Downing Street they are as much part of the political class as the honourable members and noble lords of Westminster.

ii. Immediately beyond the Westminster class is the oft-termed chattering class, the professional reporters, commentators and critics of the legacy media, all of whom have daily access to politicians, and whose relationship with them is symbiotic.

iii. Also very close to the politicians is the huge array of quangos, policy institutes, charities and organisations such as Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace, and pressure groups such as the British Board of Deputies, the Muslim Council of Britain, Stonewall, and Hope Not Hate.  Their contact to MPs is more formalised, since information really only flows one way and MPs don’t need many of them as such - excepting left-of-centre MPs, of course, who can find gainful albeit chrony employment among the forest of Blairite quangos, international panjandrum bodies, and what-have-you when the Westminster career is done.  Much like Blair himself.

iv. The most cordial of political relations are those between Conservative MPs and corporate and banking interests.  Of course, said interests have to become party donors to gain access to ministers and actual influence over policy.  But it’s always money well spent - and valued by the politicians much more highly than, say, the loyalty of voters.  Career-expired Conservative ministers who have proved useful can expect to rack up a fine collection of non-too-taxing, two-afternoons-a-month non-exec directorships and consultancy arrangements.  Keeps the wolf from the no longer ministerial door, doncha know.

v. Beyond the clamour from all these entities is the source of the most fundamental input to the political process, and that’s the professoriate: the political philosophers, the political scientists and theorists, the economists, the sociologists, the historians, the jurists, and so forth.  It is their historical function to shape the future.  There are some instances where the political connection is direct.  Freidrich Hayek, for example, shaped Thatcherism.  Anthony Giddens shaped Blairism.  Even archly pragmatic governments such as David Cameron’s have their intellectual gurus (in his case the rather more humble Steve Hilton, an original member of the Notting Hill Set).  As a rule, though, the most historically re-defining government is informed by the most philosophically re-defining intellectual.

vi. Way out in the distant margins are the radical street activist groups such as Black Lives Matter and Unite Against Fascism, publicly toxic because of their extremism, but not so toxic that politicians can’t slavishly follow every demand they chant.  And that’s without these groups having any formal contact with them.  In these cases, of course, it’s not always about political cowardice.  A significant fraction of MPs, and not all of them in the Labour Party, very likely agree ideologically.

So these are the six sources of “the new” which feed the political class.  They define the boundary of the political not via their broad output (books, papers, lectures), much of which may never attract MP’s attention or interest, but via their input to Westminster and Whitehall itself, however restrictive that might be, however that may come about.  The political is the totality of theory in metamorphosis and theory already metamorphosed into practise.  The political is all that can be talked about in party political circles. 

We should note at this point that this essentially technocratic arrangement came to real prominence not in Thatcher’s time but a decade later with the drive by Clinton, Blair and Shroeder to fix for all time the then regnancy of the progressive left all across the West.  In part that was to involve ideological radicalisation.  The formal institution of culture war, anti-racism, and political correctness moved wholesale from the American campus, where they incubated in the 1970s and 80s, into national party systems; and at the same time Third World immigration was massively ramped up.

So it was that in his famous and very candid article for the Evening Standard in October 2009 Andrew Neather, a previously unheard-of speechwriter for Blair, Straw and Blunkett, reported “coming away from some discussions with the clear sense that the policy was intended - even if this wasn’t its main purpose - to rub the Right’s nose in diversity and render their arguments out of date.”

The other weapon in the progressive toolkit was the system of appointments to Third Sector bodies at all levels.  John Major’s government had installed Tories in 57% of these appointments.  But Blair completely changed the ideological balance. By 1998, Labour supporters made up 75% of appointees and Conservatives only 13%, a trend which carried right through the years of Labour rule, Gramscian style, and onward to that of Theresa May.  They were the years of the networker in an ideologically progressive, state-funded managerial system allying not in their hundreds but in their thousands with like minds in government.

Blair’s intention - to render right-wing opinion politically inoperable and thereby dominate government in perpetuity - was never achieved.  But he did succeed in insulating party politics from the more inconvenient opinions of the people.  In place of the steering hand of the voting public MPs had all the expert advise and creative thinking they could possibly need.  Politics could function for four or five years at a stretch without once taking account of what the people thought.  And why not?  The votes still rolled in on election day.  Blair won three general elections.  Brexit notwithstanding, he made politics safe for politicians.

For nationalist parties trying to mount electoral challenges dependent on unbridling the will of the natives his dispensation presents a near-insuperable barrier.  How do you make a breakthrough when your own arguments are simply, cleanly excised from every area of the political, and all anyone ever hears of you is the usual mechanical abuse and condemnation?  How do you make a breakthrough when you don’t really understand why the political is so impossible to penetrate ... not just ideologically because the Establishment and the media are hostile to nationalist thought, but literally, because the political is filled to the brim with the unholy marriage of economically hyper-individualist policy and socially hyper-egalitarian policy.  There is no room for kinship when all is individualism.  There is no room for particularism when all is universalism. 

The question, then, becomes one about how to drive a nationalist wedge into the rockface - or, perhaps a better analogy, how to strew the political ground with nationalist seeds.  The good news is that it is possible.

This is dedicated to and inspired by a most-evocative and salient expression of the Joy of Sexual Creation:
In the strength of a champion, one could rejoice, one’s family could find safety.

Note the singular “champion” and the implicitly (hence plausibly deniable) invocation of the simple “nuclear” household headed and protected by a father.  The plausible deniability is key to the sexual mutilation of Euroman.  In this Brief History—provided without academic references or much elaboration—we’ll explore the deep history of this denial and why JudeoChristianity is, at its heart, the parasitic castration of Euroman’s uniquely powerful identity with deity.

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