The Australian Labor Party’s victory in Australia marks the end of almost a decade of Liberal Party rule. Indeed, the Liberal Party bears many similarities and its philosophy and ideology derived from the Conservative Party in their mother country. Having just scraped a majority in 2019, Scott Morrison has led the Liberal Party to its worst defeat since 1944. This claim however isn’t based on losing government but more critically losing its affluent seats like Goldstein, Higgins, North Sydney, Mackeller and former Prime Minister Tony Abbott’s seat of Warringah failing to be won by the Liberals again. But with the shock victory of independent Dr Monique Ryan in Kooyong suggests a worrying foreshadowing of what is yet to come in Britain.
Poor Leadership, Good Results
Firstly, the presumptive narrative that ‘Keir Starmer is an awful leader, so we’ll get back in’ is to be questioned due to the Australian election. Net satisfaction with Labor leader Anthony Albanese’s performance fell to a record low of minus 14 per cent – the worst for an opposition leader since Bill Shorten – just in mid-April. Starmer too shares an abysmal rating with 53 per cent of respondents to a YouGov poll in April judging him to be ‘doing badly’ as Labour leader in Britain. Nevertheless, with a shared cost of living crisis due to high inflation and rampant house price increases, both conservative parties have failed on their perceived core mission of safeguarding the economy.
The Wavering Middle-Classes
May’s local election results in the UK display signs of dissatisfaction with the current Tory government. The Liberal Democrats (not to be confused with the Australian Liberal Party) exploited the dissatisfaction among middle-class Tory voters in historically safe Tory areas. Australian Labor too exploited this dissatisfaction with middle-class Liberal voters. Being dubbed the ‘teal independents’, predominantly female, middle-class, wealthy, small-l liberal and climate-conscious candidates swept through solid Liberal seats. Teal itself being a mixture of green and blue (the Liberal Party’s colour) displays similarities with NIMBY-minded candidates in solid Tory wards during the UK May election. England’s results saw a net increase of 194 councillors for the Lib Dems and 63 for the Green Party with Labour seeing an increase of only 22 councillors at the expense of a loss of over 336 councillors for the Tories.
Forget the ‘Red Wall’ concept in Britain and in Australia, the Tory Party and the Liberal Party are seeing their core base desert them before their very eyes.
Repercussions for Australia and Dangers for Britain
Republicanism is strong in Australia and the return of the Labor Party with outspoken republican Albanese at the helm, coupled with the culture war heating up over trans rights during the election, this presents danger to the future of the monarchy in Australia once again. For Britain, the story is already well understood since Blair that a Labour government (no matter how appealing to traditional middle-class Conservative voters) will irrevocably vandalise the British constitution once more.
One key lesson learned from this election is that it is a massive challenge to hold onto the prosperous middle classes (which are a core rightist constituency) without compromising on conservative social values. Values of ambition and enterprise have been consistently championed by each Tory government since around the 1860s, yet this current Tory government is the first to not encourage – or even boldly talk – about these values. To fight the culture war without a sound handling of the economy risks losing both to left wing manipulation and thus conservatives are once again in opposition dominated by a left-wing hegemony in economy and culture.
The implication of defending traditional values by the Liberal Party and – supposedly – by the Tory Party without the confidence of the middle-classes on the economy is to pave the way for a leftist victory. Due to the shared Anglo traditions of parliamentary sovereignty, this leaves Australia’s institutions open to vandalism and destruction.
Conclusion
With the end of almost a decade of Liberal rule in Australia marks the beginning of a new era of Labor government. The recriminations inside the Liberal-National Coalition will begin as the moderates seek to flex their dwindling muscle to make the case that the 2022 electoral strategy of chasing ‘Red Wall’ voters cost them their heartlands. Right wing Liberals who protested Scott Morrison’s party by voting for the United Australia Party or Pauline Hanson’s One Nation may return home, but this election has marked the end of solid conservative dominance in Australia.
The Conservative Party in Britain should be worrying. The long-held belief that the Tories will stay in government due to Labour being unable to produce a competent-enough leader has been proven wrong. Ineptitude in optics over Partygate and 40-year high inflation (the highest among G7 countries, currently) is cutting away the Tory Party’s electoral backbone. Forget the insipid ping-pong of which party leaders held illegal gatherings during lockdown and focus on the disastrous state of the economy. If the awful May local election results weren’t a warning of what is yet to come for the Tories, this Australian election result should scare the Tories to death beyond the years of Brexit.
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The Betrayal of Lampedusa
“At midnight tonight her borders will be opened. Already, for the last few days, they’ve been practically unguarded. And I’m sitting here now, slowly repeating, over and over, these melancholy words of an old prince Bibesco, trying to drum them into my head: The fall of Constantinople is a personal misfortune that happened to all of us only last week.” – Jean Raspail, Camp of the Saints, Epilogue (1973).
Within the last 48 hours, the Mediterranean island of Lampedusa, once host to 6000 Italians, has been overrun by upwards of 18,000 African migrants, the vast majority of whom are military-age men. Some of them have been shipped to Germany, but they continue to vastly outnumber the native population.
Since their arrival, the migrants have taken to fighting amongst themselves, struggling over the island’s waning and already limited resources, with local officials struggling to maintain control. As every astute observer of politics and history will know, violence within the in-group is typically remedied by violence against an out-group, making the possibility of further and more severe chaos, far from a hamstrung hypothetical, a very real threat at this time.
In no uncertain terms, Lampedusa is experiencing an invasion, one which has been instigated without any formal declaration of war between nations yet will afflict the island in much the same way.
Given the nature of this event, I am reminded of Jean Raspail’s The Camp of The Saints, the final words of which provide the opening to this article. The author grimaces as the last outpost of European civilisation, Switzerland, is forced to capitulate to the ‘rules-based international order’, having been outcast as a rogue state for closing its borders amid a continent-wide migrant invasion.
Lampedusa is symbolic of the transformation which has occurred in towns and cities across all of Europe. From England to Italy, from Spain to Poland, from France to Germany, from Sweden to Greece, mass immigration from Africa and the Middle East, as well as Eastern Europe to a lesser and more regionalised extent, has radically transformed the essence of many European settlements, altering them in such a way not seen since Antiquity.
In England, in this year alone, we’ve become well-acquainted with the dire consequences of mass immigration. From rising tensions between the Blacks and South Asians in Peckham to ethnoreligious violence between Indians and Pakistanis in Leicester, divisions which the established order has tried to dilute by promoting anti-white rhetoric in the name of intersectional social justice.
Amid this litany of troubling events, it is easy to forget our European friends face many of the same problems, and that such problems are not an idiosyncratic quirk of the British state.
Unfortunately, similar to such cases, many will not feel sympathy for the people of Lampedusa. Some of native descent in Europe will remark on the inevitability of this ordeal, as if it was apolitical in nature or without a realistic alternative. Erstwhile, some of foreign descent will wryly remark that such an invasion is deserved; if not ‘deserved’, then a change for the better, and if not a change for the better, then negligible happenstance unworthy of press coverage.
Our leaders have known about Lampedusa’s troubles for no less than 20 years. However, instead of preventing such activity, they have spent decades trying to transform illegal migration to a standard bureaucratic procedure. If you can’t beat them, join them!
Since the early 2000s, Lampedusa has been a prime transit point for African and Middle Eastern migrants seeking to enter Europe. Migrants have been paying smugglers to ship them to the island, from which they are transported to the Italian mainland for processing.
Not that any of the processing matters of course. Those without the right to stay, even under Europe’s distinctly liberal asylum laws, continue to live on the mainland, as their deportation orders are barely enforced.
When the Italian government struck a deal with the Libyans in 2004, obliging the latter to accept African immigrants deported from Italian territories, the European Parliament condemned the agreement, and the ensuing repatriations, as unconscionable, unworkable, and quite possibly, illegal.
In 2009, roughly 2000 migrants overwhelmed the island’s asylum facilities. Only capable of accommodating 850 people, the migrants started to riot. How dare the people of Lampedusa be so unprepared for their completely unscheduled, unsustainable arrival!
Catching word of the riot, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) quickly issued a condemnation; not of the traffickers, not of the authorities, or the migrants, but of the Italian people.
In May 2011, roughly 35,000 migrants had landed on the island since the start of the year. By August, the number had increased to roughly 50,000, with most of the arrivals being men in their 20s and 30s. Compared to the recent arrivals, it is clear things have not changed in this respect either.
Following the 2013 Lampedusa Disaster, in which a boat carrying over 500 migrants, mostly from Eritrea and Somalia, sank off the coast, resulting in at least 300 deaths, Pope Francis prayed not for the natives, but those complicit in a criminal operation to illegally enter their home.
In 2015, from January to April, over 1500 migrants died on the route from Libya to Lampedusa, making it the deadliest migrant route in the world, and just as was the case two years prior, efforts went towards making the trafficking network more legal, more safe, and more efficient, rather than ending the practice altogether.
Consequently, boats needn’t travel far off the coast of Africa to be brought to the mainland by the EU or the UN. The prevailing political mentality is that migrant deaths in the Mediterranean are best averted when the EU, the UN, or some other official organisation does the traffickers’ dirty work for them, showing little-to-no consideration for the domestic consequences of their precious so-called ‘humanitarianism’.
In the case of Lampedusa, the idea that an island of one community should become an island of two, lacking a tangible sense of common belonging, situates both groups into a state of war, and such a war is unjust, both in the sense it is unnecessary, and in the course which it is likely to follow, assuming it is not dealt with in a fitting manner.
From the Pelagies to the Aegeans, every island in the Mediterranean is the first in a trail of dominoes, each of increasing size, intersecting at every European capital, with every tremor created from their fall being more forceful than the last.
I do not want what has happened in Lampedusa to happen tomorrow, the day after, next week, next month, next year, or ever after. It is the height of political and moral arrogance to plunge an entire community of people, overnight no less, into such existential uncertainty.
To subject anyone, native or foreigner, to such sordid and egregious indignity is to betray every metric of justice, and anything short of mass deportations, the immediate defunding of complicit NGOs, and the destruction of every treasonous convention and law, will amount to nothing but betrayal, a betrayal of Lampedusa and all the peoples of Europe.
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One simple way to fix the government | Daniel Evans
Sorry, not this government. The idea of proportional representation seems to be fluttering about, but you don’t even need to go that far. There’s a much simpler solution which doesn’t rely on changing the electoral system. Even better, all you have to do is lean into existing political expectations. And, well, it’s not so much one simple way to fix the government. First comes the political party, which then becomes the government.
Solution
Put party appointments, candidates, and occupants of elected positions under the direct and total command of the party leader. Yes. Run the party like a company, military unit, the mafia, etc. whatever comparison works for you. In other words, like any group organised to actually achieve a common purpose in the face of external pressures.
But what about party members?
Shouldn’t the members have a say? No. At least not the way they do now. It’s better that way. They’ll come around when their party wins.
Party members don’t really have much, if any, of a say in party matters as it is. Whether it’s council, parliamentary, or leadership candidates, there’s quite a lot of filtering which goes on before they are presented to members. At the lower level, staggeringly few party members vote on internal party association positions, or even council candidates, so there’s no real loss there. At the higher levels, in the Conservative Party, for example, Kemi Badenoch was the most popular choice for leadership this time around, among the members, before MPs filtered her out and narrowed the field to Truss and Sunak. Now it looks like the party isn’t even really getting Truss. (A lot of that is her fault to be fair).
As a party member, what exactly are you losing by not getting a say? Even after all that, you were almost certainly going to vote for the party anyway, so what are you even complaining about? Isn’t it more important to get behind those who reflect your principles, or back who you think is the best shot, etc. rather than “having a say” exactly?
The reason you want a say isn’t that you want power, exactly, it’s that you want to feel like you matter. Trying to get thousands of cooks to meddle in the broth isn’t the way to matter. When you identify the leader and plan that you want to back, fall in line, and follow their lead. As part of the masses, you have a very small amount of individual energy. If you want it to do anything, it needs to be focused like a laser. Let yourself be focused.
Success happens when there’s a plan and everyone sticks to it. It doesn’t happen when everyone starts fighting over their own ideas. Make the party leader ultimately responsible not just for their plan but for all the resources and people they will need to execute it. That means party members do not get a say. Party members must be rewarded in other ways, but that’s a topic for another piece.
Loyalty
There is one aspect of party candidate selection which is worth keeping: loyalty. The selection process today selects for loyalty above all else, to the party, and to nebulous groups of insiders within the party itself.
Loyalty is important. You need everyone to act as one, working to the same goal, with the same ethos, presenting a strong, united front. The leader at the top should have a plan and will need loyal people to get it done. Make it obvious where that loyalty is going to – to the leader – rather than vaguely to the party, which really means planless, disorganised, venal, behind-the-sceners.
Members don’t really have a say as it is. When it comes to it, most don’t seem to mind and vote for the party in elections anyway. Activists keep knocking on doors, delivering leaflets, donating, etc. Lean into that political reality, clear up the leadership structure, and, even better, make it much more honest by showing plainly where that loyalty really goes.
Just in that regard, putting everyone under the direct and total responsibility of the party leader would make everything better for the candidates, party activists, and the party as a whole.
For candidates, they don’t need to waste time with the chaos and pettiness of the local party and activists. They don’t need to waste untold hours doing pointless tasks to prove their loyalty. If they owe their position entirely to the party leader, that’s where you get the loyalty. Remove some big obstacles to getting the best candidates 1) the time they have to spend doing politics instead of whatever highly demanding civilian job they have, and 2) the risk of not getting selected even after all the loyalty-proving they have to go through.
Do you want better politicians? Make it easier for the better ones to put themselves forward.
For the party leader, the benefits are obvious. He squashes the potential for distraction and dissent, potential rivals from within his own camp, and gets to act much more pragmatically.
This all increases the chances of winning. You like winning, don’t you?
What If It All Goes Wrong?
If the leader turns out not to be a winner, at least it’s totally clear where the problem is – the leader. If the party can only go where the leader does, and the party fails, you know what to do. This makes it much easier to cut your losses, move on, and try again with someone else in a new party.
This criticism is more or less a criticism of the status quo anyway. When party leaders don’t work out, the leaders change. Often the party as a whole changes, merely the branding stays familiar. How many of you have asked whether the Conservative or Labour Parties are really Conservative or really Labour?
What’s the difference, practically, between junking an entire party with its leader and starting again fresh, and more honestly?
Better Government
If you were reading closely enough, you noticed that the solution included total responsibility over those in elected positions.
Let’s face it, people don’t really elect the individual MP. They vote by party or leader. Lean into that political expectation. Use it to clear up and prevent parliament becoming whatever it is now. Stuffed full of has-beens, inadequates, and failures, many occupying “safe seats”.
The party leader should be able to fire and hire as they see fit to the parliamentary seats they/their party has already won. Accepting this should be a condition of candidacy in the first place. It could even be the first law the party passes.
The ability to replace bad MPs might keep them good for longer and allow for a proper cycle of “tested and done” out for “promising and new”. For example; what is the point of Matt Hancock? He’s just blocking someone potentially useful, or at least someone who is not a net negative. Let’s be real, nobody voted for Matt Hancock. Come on. Why wait around? Fire him and get someone else.
Spent losers hanging on is one of the reasons the Conservative Party today is having so much trouble. It happened to the Labour Party too in the dying days of the Gordon Brown government too. Too many MPs hanging around long past their usefulness. It diminishes the pool of potential ministers.
Before you know it, we’re all pretending that Dehenna Davison is a minister who actually does any governing.
The Party Leader
Command over all party appointments, candidates, etc. would include the party leader himself.
No party leadership elections. Most people vote by party or for a party leader, presidential style. Lean into that. Spare everyone the mixed and mashed chaos of whatever normally goes on in the background of party politics. Spare everyone the same mixed and mashed chaos of what goes on in the foreground of party politics!
But isn’t it a problem if you can’t remove a leader from the party? No. Just back the leader you want in a new party. It doesn’t really matter if someone can’t be removed as leader in a party if everyone leaves to do something different. Just look at UKIP/Nigel Farage/the Brexit Party. And now Reform UK or whatever the Brexit Party rebranded as.
The solution for fixing the government
In summary: there’s a leader, a plan, their team, who they will hire and fire to get the job done, and do you want it or not? If yes, you have a structure which might actually be able to get something done. If not, don’t vote for it, and from your perspective, nothing is lost. Simple.
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Making Plans Without Nigel
Nigel Farage’s rise to prominence came in the wake of the utter implosion and failure of the BNP. After what seemed to be promising growth for this nationalist vehicle it effectively self-sabotaged to the point of complete unviability. Years of activism and goodwill pissed away. This is a subject deserving of attention in and of itself but will wait for another time. Enter UKIP, a party that although libertarian had the glimmer of nationalism in its eye with it’s main goal being leaving the EU. They had been rolling along in the background of British politics but were never really given any mainstream attention. The BNP was a eurosceptic party so the voter base could transfer over nicely to UKIP, although UKIP itself barred BNP members from joining for pragmatic optic reasons. Nigel essentially served as the frontman of the “fruitcakes and loonies” and his gift for public speaking and particularly his keeping alive of the immigration question attracted disenfranchised nationalists.
After this point, politics in the UK was overtaken by the Scottish independence debate as well as the question of Brexit. The latter obviously being achieved but poorly implemented. Glossing over this part of recent history to the meat of it; Nigel essentially forced the Tories to do something they were otherwise unwilling to do, leave the EU. Whether it was arrogance or fear that drove them to it we will never really know. What has transpired since then is a complete revelation to a great mass of people of the complete duplicitous nature of the Tory party. Nigel moved from UKIP to a new vehicle, the Brexit Party, in order to pressure the Tories into delivering a no-deal Brexit over accepting some Europe favouring deal. Post-Brexit the party has become Reform.
It was immediately clear that the Tories never wanted Brexit, indeed many of the things they publicly say they want or will do never come to fruition. It’s a party of saying one thing and doing the opposite. Nigel’s presence in British politics has been key in revealing this. When the last general election came up Reform made the decision to stand down in order to not split the vote and lose to Labour (who would have most certainly delivered a worse Brexit deal) ensuring another period of Conservative government. This is where the most recent criticism of Nigel begins in earnest.
Nigel is (dis)credited with “saving” the Tories. This is frankly preposterous. What has transpired over these last few years is a complete exposure of the true nature of this “conservative” institution. Reluctant Brexit deal, shambolic lockdown and further inability to reduce immigration. As we come toward the end of this 13+ year period of Tory rule what have they actually achieved for their voters? Nothing. Well not nothing, they’ve actually massively increased immigration.
If Reform had taken the decision to split the vote then potentially a Labour government would have been in charge of the exit deal and over lockdown. This would have given yet another excuse for Tory diehards, and the party itself, to say they would have behaved differently. Thankfully we don’t live in that reality, they’ve shown their true colours once again. Nigel has played the long game and come out of top. Are you really going to vote for a Conservative party that continue the same people that have been in power for 13 years?
As we are approaching what looks like a massive Labour win we have to remember what got us into this mess. Nigel has given the Tories enough rope to hang themselves with, the stool just needs a kick. Under a potential future Labour government we need to remember that, we can’t let the Conservatives sneak back in under the false bravado and empty talk the likes of which Suella Braverman has been deploying in recent weeks.
Rumours of Nigel as the next Conservative leader, after his appearance at the Tory conference, have been quashed by the man himself. He can’t envisage leading a party that stands for nothing and ultimately does nothing. I can only see his leadership happening if the party is completely gutted and that seems extremely unlikely at this point in time.
Nigel is not leading Reform at the moment, that task unfortunately falls on Richard Tice. A particularly boring man, a charisma vacuum, a damp rag to borrow a phrase from Nigel. If that party is to go anywhere it needs its old helmsman. I can’t think of a better place and time for Mr Farage to step back into a leadership position.
Where does that leave nationalists? Well firstly after being very kindly carried on Nigel’s back for over a decade it’s time for us to forge our own path. There is currently not a suitable vehicle for nationalism in the UK so it seems to be falling to independent candidates. I am currently only aware of one candidate that is stepping forward in the next election, Steve Laws, and would encourage every British nationalist to get behind him in this brave endeavour. The next decade is going to be critical for nationalism we simply have to get a party together, or commandeer one, and start winning seats locally and nationally. UKIP made an attempt to transform into a more nationalistic party, albeit in the vein of Tommy Robinson’s anti-Islam/counter Jihad. Although given what has happened recently, a staunchly Zionist party being the only vehicle for nationalism could have been a disaster. As I’ve said previously, we should exhibit caution when taking sides in the Israel-Hamas War. A fresh start waits on the horizon.
Mr Farage is not a gatekeeper, recently he said he believes a party will come along that makes him look quite tame. That’s us, we’re waiting in the wings but held back by our nature of being disparate and largely anonymous. Funding is also another great issue but there are plenty of content creators that surely, if they cared, could set aside some of their patron money towards the founding or funding of something tangible. Can funding be courted by actually engaging in active British politics? Potentially. The BNP had substantial membership and funds so there is certainly money out there to be had if only we could present ourselves more concretely to the British public. The Right in recent years has concerned itself with debate club topics of history and religion. These are naturally important but we can’t lose track of the ballot box if you genuinely feel that it is possible to gain ground electorally, which I do.
Nigel has expressed for years his desire to retire out of the political limelight, he was never masquerading as a saviour for our demographic woes, he just wanted Britain to leave the EU. That has been achieved, albeit imperfectly, so the future of Reform is uncertain but if it can pressure the Conservative party into genuine change then he will have done us another great service. The priority is stopping the endless tide of immigration into this country, finally carrying out the will of the British people after all these years.
As stated, the next decade will be incredibly important for nationalism in the UK, any advocacy for lowering, if not outright stopping immigration, should be pursued as our top priority. Find a vehicle that suits you and begin supporting it, either from the sidelines or involving yourself if you feel able to. The difficulty with our brand of nationalism, one that advocates for the native White British population, is that it will make you a persona non grata in many walks of life. That will change, but for now it is understandably a risk many cannot take. These issues will be hashed out in the coming years, as more speak out and as the imported problems of immigration can no longer be hidden or obfuscated the less taboo the subject will become. Indeed, given the current events in the middle east are reverberating back to our shores many are seeing the current & future demographic problem writ large.
Fundamentally, we are walking on a similar but distinct path from Nigel, we can no longer expect him to be something he isn’t. That is delusional for us and unfair, ultimately, on him. By doing that, we risk fostering resentment and poisoning what have ultimately been positive developments for nationalism when we otherwise would have been scattered and homeless. I doubt we’ll immediately separate fully from his political influence but now is our time to step into the limelight.
Nigel Farage’s significance to British nationalism today will not be forgotten, like Enoch Powell before him, it is foundational for many. Here’s to ARE Nige! Always and forever!
