Nationalist politics in this country went into crisis from the moment in autumn 2009 when Nick Griffin was humiliated on Question Time, and the revolt by senior BNP activists began. By the time that Griffin stood down as leader - all of five years later - the party was vitiated. Membership had collapsed and nationalism had lost all political momentum. Online activists took up the slack, growing their audience as the social media platforms grew and adding a degree of thoughtful analysis to the general diet of polemic. But this year, again, we have seen a setback in the form of the programmatic, “wokist” purge by those same platforms of even the mildest non-liberal opinion, all conducted under the specious, self-defining rubric of “hate”. In the longer term it is entirely possible that the new free speech platforms will render the “mainstream” social media a boring irrelevance. But we are a long way from that today.

This has been happening, of course, while politicians, public sector managers, journalists and the police have been patronising Black Lives Matter, and thereby facilitating a paradigm shift in wider Establishment attitudes. The race dicta has moved within a hair’s breadth of the general judgement that “white” equals “racist”. It certainly equals “unconsciously biased” - a novel pathological condition that can, apparently, be “trained out”. For now this is the Establishment position. But the possibility of “training” alone holds back the judgement that white lives don’t matter. This is where we now stand, even as we are being replaced in our towns and cities by populations which have been taught to hate us.  Something truly terrifying is being prepared, and the forces driving this do not have a moral stopping point.

There is, let it be said, some cause for renewed hope in the appearance of Patriotic Alternative under Mark Collett and Laura Towler, whose refreshingly novel activism has caught the imagination of many. There is, in consequence, a renewed momentum in political nationalism (which explains the all-too-typical hit-piece published in The Times some days ago). As and when PA wins party political accreditation from the Electoral Commission it will be a safe bet that the other micro-parties who lay claim to an ethno-nationalist philosophy will be hard-pressed to justify their existence - Britain First has already been forced to add repatriation to its policy list. Further, PA claims to be pulling support away from the non-racialised parties of dissent. Its website traffic already exceeds that of the For Britain and UKIP sites. There is, in addition, a reasonable possibility that by the end of the year, or perhaps early in 2021, PA will pivot in a new and original direction which could have far-reaching implications for political nationalism in this country.

We must also note that there is some positive action, too, in the political mainstream. This government, under the influence of Dominic Cummings, is doing something at last to fight the culture war - the first time any Conservative government has even acknowledged its existence. There is push-back against the deep-seated, liberal patrician or mandarin culture of the civil service. The BBC’s equally ingrained urban liberal values are also finally coming under attack. It is reasonable to expect that, in time, other quite weighty blows will be landed by Cummings on the progressive edifice that is maintained at the tax-payers’ expense. Education, arts and culture, and the quangocracy are likely targets.

But elsewhere there is only deterioration. The race dicta in government very much reflects the standard globalist conjunction of neo-liberal economic policy and neo-Marxist social policy, the latter perfectly open to colonisation by BLM’s marxistic and anti-native politics. The corporate demand for basement-level labour costs and non-unionisation, high immigration and an ever-expanding population, all of it got by campaign donations to the Conservative Party and the promise to ministers of lucrative non-executive directorships when the Westminster career is done, always supercedes election-time promises to the party faithful. As a result, Boris Johnson’s government is driving immigration blindly onward, threatening to import half of Hong Kong, seeking to advertise jobs in vast swathes of the British economy anywhere that potential migrants with “points” might be found. Further, an historic liberalisation of the planning system, sweeping away the local power of decision and so attacking the principle of consent and the democratic process itself, is being engineered with the obvious (if not aim then certainly) by-product of colouring the rural Home Counties and the south.  We English - many, in this case, who have already fled from urban “diversity” - are having the last vestiges of our control over who we live with stripped from us.

Add to this the Brexit marathon, add the Covid epidemic with its effect on social and work practise, its impact on liberty, its debt economics, and a picture emerges of a nation in a time of flux and struggle, a nation being pushed towards the unfamiliar and to the extremes in every direction, with nothing remaining in its place and no realistic or immediate prospect of stability.  But that’s not to say that it’s a one-way journey to hell.  The political parvenu and ex-actor Laurence Fox’s embryonic but nevertheless reactionary, culture-warring party Reclaim, with £5 million to spend but no politics as such, is clear proof that anything is possible in this historical moment. As moments go, it is at once the worst of times if you are one of our people, but by no means the worst of times if you are a mainstream political activist. Yet it is also as good a time as any for us to act, and act we can.