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The Worst Case Scenario
It may actually be possible for the right to be sleepwalked back into the arms of the regime. This might strike you as an impossibility, but I am increasingly unconfident in the rigidity of our opposition to the regime and the system it imposes on us. I still believe it to be highly unlikely that this occurs, but its absolute incredibility as a vision of the future has ceased. But how exactly are they working towards this aim, unknowingly or not, and what exactly am I referring to? I will try and articulate myself as clearly as possible, lest we continue to mope around in the gloomy shadows of doomed projects, forever dissatisfied with our lack of meaningful progress. As someone who continues to self-assuredly profess the inevitability of revolution in Britain, what I fear most are attempts to delay this eventuality – and more importantly attempts to prevent it. A nominally right-wing, authoritarian government could quietly emerge, restore popular comfort with the idea of Britain being a diverse, liberalised country and resolidify the British people’s pessimistic, defeated attitude towards politics, race, and the fundamental structure of the economy. More importantly, it could cause the right to accept the improvements as “enough”, maybe even claim them as the final victory (the battle that has been “won”), and see us de-escalate our efforts. We are entering stage three, the bargaining stage, and many wish to go, cap-in-hand, with offers to negotiate. This is the regime’s perestroika moment, and it absolutely must not succeed.
When you have a non-democratic and ideological regime, as we do in Britain – as most White countries also do, there are many things that it will do before compromising on its ideological tenets. To undo the core pillars that define the regime would be to invalidate the legitimacy of the regime itself, so – despite the societal breakdown and rapid deterioration in living standards – things continue on as they always have, irrespective of popular sentiment. Public services rot at the bone, the police stop functioning beyond their utility as apparatchik tools, etc. So long as the Pravda and Stasi remain competent and efficient the rest can wither and die and those in power won’t care. The Chinese Communist Party was able to transition their country into a quasi-nationalistic yet fundamentally capitalist country whilst preserving the iconography of Karl Marx and the hero worship of Chairman Mao. For many reasons, I doubt that our regimes in the west could have this kind of fluidity of form to persevere – but they may be able to work within the restrictions of their own resolute determination to maintain mass-immigration and the liberal, capitalist status quo.
Since 2016, the western establishment has become more totalitarian in its governance of the countries it occupies. The Leave vote in Britain’s EU referendum and Donald Trump’s election in the USA made our establishment paranoid and defensive (a defensiveness Rory Stewart alluded to in his own deluded way). Those in power will continue to try their best to maintain the status quo to the letter, down to every last miserable and humiliating detail. For that purpose, the Brezhnevian conservative Keir Starmer has been appointed as our Prime Minister to do absolutely nothing but maintain progress at its present pace, no faster no slower and without a single railroad switch change in site. But there will be those that work in the shady halls of power more fidgety than the rest who are especially concerned about the future of their project (the project being a global, totalitarian, technocratic panopticon where a small corporate elite rules over a coffee-coloured serf class – forever). They will be playing wargames where we win and they lose and considering how to defang the right before we are capable of animating the British away from their agenda and towards a fundamentally different trajectory (which ultimately is what Brexit actually represented but, thanks to Dominic Cummings and the December 2019 General Election, that rebellious movement in the zeitgeist was snuffed out and forgotten to history). What is hypothetically possible is a small concession to dissident right positions on race and inequality to refine the status quo, just as communist regimes historically used fascist methods and policies to keep their countries afloat in times of, usually self-inflicted, crisis. This would mean a form of multiracialism that is genuinely “fair”, or at least as fair as it sells itself, that is more palatable both to the general population as well as the right. A truly colour-blind and meritocratic system that punishes criminals adequately, rewards hard work and enacts planning reform to end many of the negative externalities mass immigration is causing – does this sound familiar? It is the outcome ‘ProgNats’ and the like are agitating for – a more effective and efficient Presidium-operated country that will have accomplished making it even harder for people to articulate a legitimate case for an authentic nationalist position.
There is reason to believe that the average person will go along with this soft transformation of society from an overtly egalitarian and explicitly anti-White one to a society that has quietly resigned itself to accepting some degree of hereditarianism (but a society that has only done so to preserve the globalist project). In fact, this transformation is already happening in real time, without any input from above causing it. I had the misfortune of being at a McDonald’s in Leeds just off a motorway and was shown a small microcosm that represented this trajectory. It was a grimy, dirty, noisy square with bright white lights and three interactive telescreens for ordering from. I decided to go forward into the open space between these telescreens and the counter to talk to one of the cramped Maccy’s girls and asked if I could order from her directly with physical cash (a request which she granted me). What I soon realised; stood in my Argosian slumber awaiting the proclamation of my order number, was that there were actually two queues. One had a huddle of immigrant slaves with their corporate rucksacks ready for retrieval (rucksacks which I feel are brightly coloured either to be demeaning or to mask the repulsiveness of the services they are having to render) and the other had a larger group of dishevelled, unkempt White Britons, awaiting their own personal orders. I stood in disbelief, wondering to myself “Are people okay with this? Are liberals okay with this?” and then went on with the rest of my day. Those immigrant wage slaves will work those jobs, and jobs like it, for the rest of their lives – their children will be born into slavery arranged by a Darwinian free-market. They have denied themselves the dignity of working in their own homeland as part of their own strata and been granted their monkey’s paw wish of better wages and better living for themselves – serving in heaven.
There may be the odd moment where someone finds the old liberal, egalitarian conditioning bubbling up again from their subconscious – a White woman might be stood at a bus stop and witness a panting, emaciated Somali riding a bike with one of the aforementioned rucksacks at 6AM and think twice about what is happening to our country (that is a real anecdote) – but ultimately “the bulk of people conform to the energies and pressures that they now feel themselves living under”, and our people will either accept the newly-imported caste of service sector slaves but not collaborate or they will actively, decadently indulge this newfound luxury. The point of bringing these things up is to say that if the right-wing can be made to feel comfortable with, and accepting of, a multi-ethnic society that is allowed to be freely arranged along racial lines, they will have done so with the same impulse as the lumpenaristocrat normies who subconsciously enjoy ordering slaves to their door. It might not even solely be contentment either, given that the right is increasingly unprincipled and no more moral in personal actions than the average person, they too may enjoy the illusion of prosperity that this new feudalism grants them just as much as anyone else. The only possible difference is that the act of a right-winger ordering a Caribbean Wecasa maid to their home may also come with it a post-service “ironic” gigachad tweet boasting of how cool and racist they just were.
As is increasingly pointed out, the liberal consensus is becoming one of ambivalence to the natural order. Likewise, there is no considerable pushback against any of this from those on the left who enjoy the costume of performative socialism. This is because of the very obvious fact that the left’s primary cause at the present is anti-Whiteness; it participates in an inter-ethnic conflict which is ongoing, rather than a class struggle that has been lost. Any criticism of these trends might be construed (rightly) as a critique of mass-immigration itself, might nudge open the heavy eyelids of the sleepy Saxon. We can’t have that, can we? Even if it means pretending the squalor that third-world immigrants create for themselves and the barbarism they make our own people suffer under is an acceptable arrangement for everyone. Because of this fevered fear of the “far-right”, we have a left-wing in Britain and elsewhere that is religiously dedicated to defending everything the liberal status quo does – doing so to quell their own anxiety about a legitimately anti-establishment force from the right which would unravel the regime’s fundamental underpinnings.
Brought to its inevitable conclusion, you end up with a strange consensus that everyone is generally happy with. The left-wing gets their “post-colonial” dissolution of whiteness, the liberals get their Pret a Manger serfs, and the right-wing gets their… [pending peace treaty]. We are hurtling into a rerun of 20th century liberalism where Whites and non-Whites of all political walks all enjoy the zany sheninigans of KSI and Kai Cenat but for very different reasons. This is different to what has been the norm currently, what I am describing is a society where hierarchy is more apparent, in which group differences are more apparent and part of an unconscious acknowledgement of what makes the status quo acceptable to everyone; a hierarchy sustained by a shared sense of relief among those who sit above lowest-of-the-low in the new economic caste system. Maybe liberals are the real slave owners, or maybe we are the real liberals for seeing anything wrong with this so-called progress. This Brave New, Bell Curve-ambivalent, World… a Libtartheid state.
Let us go into the dreams of the compromisemaxxers, those who wish to retain our present texture of life, our liberal, capitalist economic structure and even Britain’s current affliction. Ponder a future in which there is, with the gracious consent of some Bill Ackman-like figure, an end to the Diversity, Equality, and Inclusion that the 2010 Equality Act, 1970 Equal Pay Act and 1965 Race Relations Act have brought – but also the continued assurance that Britain would continue on with its current course of Brazilification. This timeline, though delusional and unlikely – is more likely than mass-immigration slowing or being halted without a meaningful revolution. This alternative world where a government comes to power and makes our national demographic transformation as acceptable as possible is a recipe for turning revolutionary fervour into consigned resignation that the future is impenetrable and our fate sealed – save only for the hope that a White Bumiputera system could be implemented someday. “Okay, a homogenous, White British Britain might be over, but maybe we can have a Rhodesian style government” is essentially a sentiment being passed around now in once-nationalist circles, as the new generation works to dilute opposition to the demographic problem. “Okay, well maybe the American Empire will allow us to be like the United Arab Emirates, Singapore, Japan or Israel even! We’ll still bow down and maintain occupation policy on the economy and migration, but the immigrants will be guest workers without rights” – as appealing as a British Gastarbeiter might conceptually be to our friends in middle-class management jobs who work adjacent to power in the centre of London, this silver bullet is in fact a poison pill. This immigration policy might have failed West Germany and lead to Germany having a large and expanding Turkish minority, but I am sure we could make it work here with our own immigrant population. I can see it now, Prime Minister ProgNat declares all immigrants as now being non-citizens, but residents in perpetuity – no push to return Britain to the state it was in when our grandparents were born, but instead the beginning of a giddy rock throwing competition with hornets’ nests as targets. This would transition us to the most tolerable post-majority arrangement but would further breed resentment in the immigrant population – assuring our doom as a people further down the line. Do we want done to us here in Britain our very own Zanzibar revolution? Having delayed the radicalisation of the masses by several decades, it would degenerate inevitably back to the present status quo but with much worse demographics to contend with. We would be scattered specs of diasporic blood across the global windscreen of progress, without any hope of homogeneity ever returning, the final nail in the coffin which holds within it our distinction from every other nation in the world, especially what defines us – our root-nation homeland in Europe. This is not the kind of country I want to live in, or the kind of country I want my descendants to live in. Whole areas lived in exclusively by immigrants – guest workers or not. Bus systems, roads, infrastructure all constructed and maintained to facilitate a large immigrant population – guest workers or not. The status is not the issue, their rights and position as citizen-equals is not the issue, the issue is these enclaves being here at all. Again, compromises are dreamt up in the hope of mitigating the problem, of dampening its consequences and the issues that come with it. But if the problem continues to exist it will endure, and if it endures it will win. Reform will not lead us to victory.
It is as if all revolutionary thought and visions of a brighter future are incomprehensible now to most, to such an extent that even within the realm of a hypothetical fantasy of taking over our country, we still affirm even within our own minds the promontory confines of what can and cannot be done – as rigidly set by the establishment. For the last four years or so we have seen the emergence of a Menshevik/Bolshevik split on the right, a split between those who wish to reform the current system and those that wish to see it all swept away – driven by (I would argue) a widening class divide. This class divide is a new one, caused by the excesses of 21st century capitalism, the continued fallout from the 2007-2008 financial crisis and Covid-19 Lockdown policies – all of which led to the consolidation of plutocratic power over Britain. To further pursue liberalisation of the economy (as if everything that came before now “Wasn’t Real Growth”) would only sharpen the worsening quality of life and living standards of the White British working class. The necessity is greater now than at any other point in our nation’s history for a radical, class-collaborationist economic system that puts the interests of the nation as a whole first – perhaps a form of Corporatism or a modern rendition of Syndicalism. The details are less important than the essence, which is that nationalism is no longer compatible with capitalism (if it ever had been). We need an economic system that doesn’t just benefit the middle class in the South of England (a section of our population that continues to successfully avoid radicalisation due to being economically shielded from most of the repercussions of capitalism).
What might often seem like ankle biting on the Twitter timeline is at its core a division over the basic fundamentals of how our nation should be organised. I am trying to make the case that a middle class-dominated right is currently leading us down into dead ends, pitfalls and off ramps to deradicalisation. There is now within the right a reframing of the issues that places Whites (in the pan-European, London-centric demographic sense) as an exclusively middle-class demographic (comparatively), pitted against a disproportionately black and brown underclass beneath them – a top-down class war with total disregard for the White working class caught in the market forces crossfire. From this line of reasoning, Thatcherite arguments have intruded themselves into our circles – with a broad racialism as their justification. Many on the right now seem to be willing to throw poorer, less-intelligent Whites into a third-world underclass wilderness to compete and struggle against the new slave caste (imported here to undercut them as workers and replace them as people). An example of what I describe occurred not too long ago, when a redpill on the racially-disproportionate occupancy rates of social housing in London was contorted into a dilution of the anti-immigration agenda and support for “selling off of social housing”. Not to state the obvious, but selling off social housing would only accomplish a geographic integration of the immigrant population, in line with explicitly stated regime aims, softening the urban BAMElaw which acts as an eternal reminder of the glaring incongruence between the Britain that was and the Britain that now is. This factitious right-wing continues to be fuelled by centre-right establishment journalists such as Sam Ashworth-Hayes and propped up with power-adjacent backhand deals granting them access to – maybe not the halls of power – but the cloister outside of them.
Our future depends upon reconnecting with the severed ends of our endangered White British working class. The remnants of them that are still out there have been deprived of everything but their blood – their nation is all they have left. Their country, their communities, their jobs, their trade unions, their dignity – all stripped from them as if they were no longer needed. So they wander the post-industrial wastelands, as they have for over thirty years, Ahasverus’ of Albion – longing for the homeland they knew when they grew up, constantly being told that it is not only dead but that it was evil and that it never really existed anyway. What is the liberal right’s answer to these people? What of the generation of White British people born into this post-industrial wasteland? Many have now become Gridlockian, Macra-like shadows of their former glory – anti-social, loutish; addicted to drugs, alcohol, and readily-available techSoma. It follows that the liberal right identifies more with their class than their nation. This is one sign among many that capitalism is ultimately a left-wing force, as is liberalism – perpetuating a materialist worldview that breaks down national bonds and turns individuals with homelands into consumers with shopping malls. This goes back to my earlier point about the desire to make the displacement process “fair” rather than to abolish it entirely; the result is a people that identify more with their class in a revitalised capitalist hierarchy. The new right-wing rejection of any and all criticisms of capitalism as a system comes from an animosity towards the White British working class for still being able to perceive things through a communitarian lens, which is itself a holdover from the trade union movement – which had kept the White British working class economically collectivist in their outlook (with that same tribalism now increasingly taking a populist orientation). Poorer, less-intelligent Whites could only have deportations, an end to immigration in principle and the abolition of capitalism as its survival/victory condition – this solution can never become conscious if the issues are allowed to be oriented around a middle-class class-consciousness purely driven by personal, material self-interest. An atomised, materialist right without a communal and spiritual element, regardless of form or flavour, continues to be stillborn because it lacks the ability to evoke a higher calling or bond that calls the people upwards. A higher calling that would offer higher values beyond their personal, material self-interest is something the White British working class is more open to now due to having had their class-consciousness broken by liberal capitalism. By giving up national economic decision making to shareholder capitalists and market forces, we have cut off our legs to spite our body, the national body, and the liberal right retroactively justifies the real economic contractions and trauma of deindustrialisation as a necessary (even positive) act of policy.
Britain, by every real metric, has ceased to have a meaningful, sovereign national government. We are now an economic zone with the apparition of a state attached – a state which on paper has the absolute authority to do anything in the country through parliament, but which in practice has no such authority. Government bankruptcy is irrelevant to a system that will always want an ever-expanding pool of labour to increase the number of consumers, keep the value of labour down and chill workers’ rights. We once had a mercantilist economic system, with the Navigation Acts and Corn Laws – great guarantors of our national wealth, until the Manchester vision of our country took hold and facilitated the creation of an international business elite that would eventually become greater in power and influence than the nation states themselves. This is the essence of capitalism – a materialist, internationalist system that values only money, productivity and growth – could this really be preferable to communism? It sounds identical to communism, actually. Mass immigration being, in part, not only a symptom of the finance capital growth model but a policy which this system depends upon (especially as it breaks down and self-cannibalises) is proof enough that we must strive for a fundamental alternative. The liberal right can write this off in little quips as much as they like but their solutions are evidently not workable for meeting the current moment. We are capable of organising a new system beyond the EconGrad consensus. We can step over the noxious vision of a nominally right-wing Britain that would be using a vaguely racialised comparative advantage theory of labour to justify the necessity of third-world slaves, second-world professionals and first-world transnational elites.
We are up against self-professed liberals who are incapable of answering their own version of the breakfast question – “What if liberal capitalism and nationalism were mutually exclusive?” – even though it is plainly obvious by now that they are. But maybe the globalists will grant them a scrap from the table down to their comfortable tier on the ivory tower, above the sea of sludge they are generally free from interacting with – like the limousine driving through the favela. Is this not what Milei and Wilders represent? These are surely establishment plots to sell artificial right-wing figures that are still controlled by the interests of capital so that liberalism can be maintained but with an authoritarian update that cleans up the bugs and issues. This only works if the right allows itself to become part of the regime apparatus of control, by the co-opting of dissident online right-wing culture and its domestication into a harmless playpen on the fringes – a playpen where naive, grumbling, headline-quote-tweeting toy soldiers cooperate unwittingly with the status quo. It seems to me the right-wing has found itself desiring only to be pandered to again, wishing for superficial wins to brag about online: like videogames having sexy female characters again or the adverts being trad. The shattered, retreating sentiment of “Maybe we never really wanted a meaningful change to the social, cultural and economic status quo, maybe the texture of our lives in modernity is fine, maybe multiracialism is okay – for they have stopped humiliating my people and our beliefs daily and have begun nominally cooperating with us” completing the total political convergence of left and right on a reformed regime that a depoliticised population can receive some newfound benefits from. That is what I mean when I warn of the perestroika of our time. We must hope and pray this stalls, failing at the hands of conservative figures such as Keir Starmer or prevented by reactionary figures such as J.K. Rowling.
It is time to acknowledge a paradox of 21st century politics, one which only figures like Matthew Goodwin and Glenn Greenwald have alluded to – we are the heirs to the socialist cause despite not believing in equality or a materialist worldview. There has been a “collapse of the far left in the last 20 to 30 years”. Communism as a conscious, ideological force no longer exists. It fell as if it were a cursed ring, melting into the Soviet Union’s now-extinct volcano. The mantle which we take up now is the conservative tribalism which the trade union movement represented in Britain – which once organised workers and communities to struggle against the shifting sands of progress imposed by capital. Just as such tribalism must return to our people through a deeper pulse that reaches beyond the defeat at Hastings to our Anglo-Saxon primordials, the right must also return to the radical anti-capitalism aspired to in previous right-wing movements before its compromises whilst in power. We must now move away from the eternally sliced pie where oligarchs expect their tithe and piece of the nation to run amok with. To meet this moment, it is crucial for us not to lose the thread of working towards an authoritarian, centralised state power – a state that would be mounted firm across the whole of the British Isles, shielding the British people and their liberty from the volleyed shots of moneyed interests. The plunder will end.
Our people can do better than this. We do not have to settle for anything. We do not have to make the most of a bad situation. We certainly should not delight in occupation delicacies. By present trends, our people might earnestly snatch at any offer for improvement without undoing the principles that are baked into our being which caused the problems in the first place. That for me is The Worst Case Scenario – where not only the apolitical masses, but the left, the liberals and even the right reach a pitiful mindbreak akin to the conclusion of Winston’s journey in ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’. The quiet deflowering of our stagnant present into something far more dangerous – a system that can survive long into the future – is something we must reject with all of our energy no matter how spent we may feel currently. A genuine alternative is possible, it always has been, that is what they fear the most – our recognition of this fact – and why there is any talk at all of the possibility of, or desire for, reform within the establishment. The revolution can and will happen irrespective of potential economic and social turbulence. We can triple the wages and double the pensions of policemen and soldiers; we can do what is demanded of our country even if it will likely hurt our country in the medium-term. A fox gnaws at its leg when it is caught in a trap. The civil strife which is coming is inevitable, but luckily the establishment won’t succeed in its hypothetical reforms – our society might transmogrify into one which is more ambivalent to ethnicity as every group recedes into their own private spaces away from each other – but our western governments are far too dug in to ever consider a change to the present course, even if it could mean the perpetuation of their power (even in spite of suspicious actors on the right trying to make this a reality). Given the foreign policy ongoing in the Middle-East and Eastern Europe, it seems to me that those presently in power would rather see total nuclear oblivion to human civilisation than see their ideological and political grip on the world slackened in any way.
Let us go forth with wind in our sails, with our own form of ambivalence – ambivalence to the radical solutions which we take to be self-evidently necessary. Imagine the spectacular and triumphant scene of a fresh-faced vanguard declaring victory at the signing of a British Lausanne Convention; imagine the sensation of crossing the threshold into a restored nation and rebalanced world, one free of the impending burden of serfdom in a foreign land. We must stamp out the cockroach-like pessimism of skirted-edge 20+ year projects. Embrace the greater you that exists beyond your consciousness and reach within for the fated Anglo-Shintoism that will lead us home to sweeter pastures. The Samurai turned to Ceorl, the Wakizashi turned to Seax – meet your greater form with outstretched arms and welcome yourself back into the fold as a true Englishman, ready to step over this purgatorial dichotomy and the squabbles of then and now and forge something entirely new and yet also distinctly old and true to ourselves. Reject this world in its current form and not only break free of each and every one of its tentacles but severe them like the second labour of Hercules so that our progeny may be freer, safer and more prosperous than we ever will be. Survival depends on the sheer will of men willing to dedicate themselves to the cause, men who we know not the names of now but who will emerge in the eleventh hour and forge the new England, the new Britannia, summoned up as reincarnated spirits of forgotten heroes. All was once over in the 9th century too when all was to be lost and yet was then formed anew. No man is willing to suffer or die for planning reform and means-tested pensions; much less the privatisation of social housing or the lowering of corporate taxes for Tesco and Amazon. Reject the pending peace treaty; reject those that wish to negotiate with power to help it kick our can further down the road. This is our struggle, not our children’s or children’s children’s. Our time is now, and everything is on us. Believe in yourselves and believe in Britain.
Against assisted dying
It is unsurprising the government is rushing through ‘assisted dying’. Having decimated what little political capital it possessed after a hollow election victory, Labour is clearly desperate to shore up as many achievements as quickly as possible; successes which can be fashioned into something resembling a coherent and tangible legacy at a later date, showing little-to-no regard for the common good.
What is surprising is how limp-wristed and tepid the opposition to this policy has been, especially from Britain’s commentariat. In no uncertain terms, the assisted dying bill is one of the most radical proposals for social liberalisation in decades, yet our opinion-having class has alarmingly little to say, at least when compared to other matters. Those eager to broadcast their intelligence on other issues – which they’re similarly unqualified to write about (that’s not a bad thing, by the way; far from it!) – are inexplicably scared to take a crack at this offputtingly complex but highly important matter which affects us all.
What little discussion has occurred in the commentariat (never mind Parliament) has revolved around the foreseeable practical issues of such a policy, typically pointing to the results of Canada’s assisted dying policy (MAID; Medical Assistance in Dying), the initial proponents of which say is being abused. As such, opponents of assisted dying in Britain essentially oppose it on the basis of negative and unintended consequences, specifically the gradual loosening of safeguards overtime, killing people who should’ve received non-lethal forms of care.
None of this is wrong per se, although it’s hard to treat this angle as anything other than unsatisfying. It does not bode well for a civilisation that its only barricade against its destruction is the ineptitude of the barbarians.
More than a total lack of faith in anything improving at all, it suggests that we are caught between our reluctance to end life yet struggle to justify such an instinct; we retain the form of a society which professes something like the sanctity of life, but lack any of the substantial belief, frightened to unlearn that which can’t so easily be relearnt once lost to history as another primitive superstition.
It’s difficult to be truly hard-line on something like assisted dying because it elicits so much sympathy. No right-minded person wants people to suffer, never mind be made to feel that they are forcing people to suffer. After all, humans are motivated by aversion to pain more than most things. However, advocates of assisted dying use this fact to strongarm more hesitant individuals into agreeing with assisted dying in principle, disagreeing solely on the technicalities of implementation.
More often than not, support for assisted dying is couched in the idea that if you’re in ‘unbearable’ pain, you might as well be given the choice to end your life, especially if you’re going to die in six months anyway. Putting aside the remarkable precision of such a prediction, it never occurs to advocates that if you’re going to die in six months anyway, you might as well tough it out, if not for the sake of yourself or your loved ones, then for the sake of ensuring that society-at-large doesn’t suffer the wrath of short-sighted policy.
Of course, this is assuming unbearable pain is the main reason for assisted dying, contrary to plenty of evidence to suggest otherwise.
According to data from places where it’s already legal, the main reasons for assisted dying are the inability to fulfil day-to-day tasks and engage in ‘meaningful activities’. Even abstract notions like autonomy and dignity are cited as more important than pain. Even fear about being a burden on one’s family is reportedly just as common.
A real shame, that’s for sure. There are few greater exertions of autonomy than refusing to die for someone else’s benefit, and there is nothing more ‘undignified’ than having so little sense of self-worth that you sacrifice yourself for others in your most intimate and personal moment. If we can’t reserve ourselves for our own death, it’s no surprise that things like sex and marriage continue to lose any sense of exclusivity.
Concepts like ‘anarcho-tyranny‘ and ‘two-tier policing’ are typically used in discussions surrounding criminal justice, but the underlying logic surely applies to a system which releases unrepentant, serially violent criminals as it provides the sick and vulnerable – many of whom needlessly swell with guilt over their condition – with the option to end their own life. This sense of guilt will only become stronger when someone in a position of medical authority – in a culture which reveres expertise, even when it fails us – tells them they can make it go away. That which is legally a ‘right to die’ will feel like the duty to die, and by extension, those expected to sign-off on the procedure will feel as though they have a duty to kill.
Far from acting as a safeguard, medical professionals will act as affirmers to something which they’ve been told is not theirs to dictate in the first place. When the option is available, like the patient, the fact something can be done will weigh down upon them, and whilst they may be motivated by a desire to alleviate or prevent suffering, those once hesitant are now incentivised to act with urgency.
Indeed, the same can be said of the patient’s family, the consultation of which is notably absent from the bill’s supposedly stringent requirements, although they’ll certainly weigh on the patient’s conscience. If patients don’t feel burdensome to their loved ones, they’ll absolutely feel burdensome to the NHS, an institution our country continues to revere with mindless zealotry.
Courtesy of the selfish (but outwardly generous) nature of our present culture, the patient’s expectation of good care risks being outweighed by the ’empathy’ we demand them to have for others in a different position. Assisted dying is not yet legal and yet many already feel (perhaps not without reason) that the elderly are spitefully overstaying their welcome on this mortal coil.
Advocates of assisted dying (similar to advocates of abortion) like to believe that leaving something up to choice absolves the decisions made of any and all comparable virtue. Far from removing an ideological imposition on society, this notion that we have no choice but to leave everything up to choice, that all options must be on the table, is one of the most duplicitous and tyrannical value systems afflicting contemporary society; so much that life itself is ceasing to be the default, becoming just another option for which one is cruelly judged behind a veil of strained, artificial tolerance.
Extending the comparison, liberalising assisted dying doesn’t just implicate those who’ll be inevitably and unjustifiably killed in the name of healthcare, it devalues death outside of the circumstances in which assisted dying would be viewed as an option. When abortionists downplay (or functionally deny) the value of the child, they’re implicating any baby which (for whatever reason) doesn’t make it. A procedure once permitted for the sake of saving the mother’s life, balanced against the life of the child, is now a simple matter of preference, exalted as a form of empowerment.
Followed to its conclusion, an involuntary miscarriage, rightfully treated as a tragic incident deserving sympathy, can only be regarded, in all sincerity, as ‘tragic’ as receiving a bad hand in a game of Blackjack. Of course, insincerity is the essence of civility, and therefore integral to any tactful interaction, but this is not the same as having a genuine moral compass. The tragedy lies in the fact we know something deeply valuable has been lost. We say “I’m sorry for your loss” not “better luck next time” for a reason. As such, unless you intend to engage in mental gymnastics to suggest “terminating” highly viable babies past the legal limit is worlds apart to killing newborns, the recent movements for decriminalisation should be concerning, even if wholly in-step with our opponents’ revealed attitude towards the unborn.
In a similar vein, if assisted dying should be liberalised to alleviate suffering on the basis that our life is ours to use as we see fit, then suicide becomes just another expression of individual choice which needs to be destigmatised. After all, why should we need to suffer? Why would such a precondition exist if life didn’t have an inherent value, and if life has an inherent value, how could we justify a policy like assisted dying in the first place? Because the suffering outweighs that inherent value? How would you know when suffering outweighs this value? After all, suffering is extremely subjective. You can make this assessment for your own quality of life, but not for another person’s. Confronted with the potential suicide of another person, there’s not a lot you could do. You needn’t assist the act or condone it, but you’d be a hypocrite for showing or feeling anything more than defeated indifference. After all, who are you to judge? Again, it’s not your life. In order to override them, you’d need to believe life has a value beyond quantification, which it certainly does.
If one’s suffering is one’s business, then it becomes one’s business to deal with it, using their preferred option of the many made available. Although plausibly convenient, it makes life less rich, for what good are the virtues of mercy, assurance, and even heroism itself? More than rendered obsolete by consent-based ethics, they are contorted into acts of undue, arbitrary interference.
Life is worth suffering, not merely because of what can be done between our birth and death but due to its facticity; it is given, not chosen. Nobody derives meaning from the things they consciously choose; at least, not for long. There will always be the sense that relying on such things feels constructed, inviting us to seek something more essential. We don’t choose our nationality, our sexuality, our name, our family, and so forth, and so the importance of these things is heightened in an era with an abundance of choice.
The present political landscape serves as testament to this fact, not solely in the form of progressive-left identity politics. Regardless of how his economic prospects ebbed and flowed, the Englishman could rely on having won the lottery of life. He was born into a community with just cause and proficient capability to take his welfare seriously, as well as provide him with a sense of rootedness in an otherwise changing world. He had a cultural heritage which suggested he was part of something greater than himself; any belief in his abilities was well-founded and any shortcoming would surely be redeemed by the successes of his kin. Confronted with large scale demographic change from immigration, he feels himself in revolt against a class which has not yet taken everything from him, but is in the process of trying to destroy his few but cherished saving graces.
Even things which aren’t pleasurable, such as personal tragedies, supply us with a greater and much needed confrontation with the involuntary nature of our existence than even the most high-brow, profound, and enriching pastimes.
It is often said that the value of life lies in its depth, not its length; in other terms, life is about having a good time, not a long time, and whilst there’s certainly truth in this idea, it detracts from the distressing fact that we have time at all; a fact we tend to avoid truly thinking about until we’re out of it. Indeed, I suspect many have thought about how they’d spend their last day on Earth before resuming their lives as if their mortality was part of the hypothetical. The fact death takes us without our prior consent frightens us; it goes against what we regard as the basis for permissibility, so we’re inclined to ignore it.
The simple fact of the matter is that assisted dying is never abused; it merely comes to better embody the spirit in which it was introduced. The process misconstrued as the ‘slippery slope’ is nothing more than a superficially innocent argument being carried to its garish but logical conclusion. The ever-ambiguous safeguards aren’t meant to shield against improper uses of the system, merely to shield against uses which haven’t achieved mainstream acceptance, and could be used as a justification to prevent (or outright reverse) its full implementation. Things called insane right-wing conspiracy theories today will be referred to as inevitable and necessary progress tomorrow.
So, let’s cut to the chase. Instead of obsessing over regulations which will be altered or subverted, let’s be very frank about our fundamental and irreconcilable differences, and eagerly embrace the intellectually demanding and morally sensitive nature of this matter.
Those in support can make their case for life’s essential hollowness, and that our time on Earth is nothing more than taking the path of least resistance to the grave, filling our time with surrogate activities until it becomes too much, at which point we hop-off the existential ride. As for those opposed, we must more staunchly make the case for death as it comes for us, as it does. Just as we can gain value from being born here rather than there, from being this rather than that, the same must be said of our death. We do not view life as an empty vacuum to be filled with things that matter. The fact we do what we do, in the knowledge that our time is finite, makes what we do meaningful. Life gives meaning to our activities, not the other way around.
The advocates of assisted dying are right about one thing. We don’t get to choose what we do with our life, but it is because of this fact that our death remains our own. Therefore, the only way to ensure our death remains truly ours, something indivisibly belonging to us as individuals, free of aggregated social pressures and bouts of false consciousness, immune to last-minute bargaining and uncontaminated by ambiguity over cause-and-effect – altogether free from the risk of coercion – is to prevent it from being turned into a choice in the first place.
Is Keir Starmer really the PM?
Are you sure? Are you absolutely sure that Keir Starmer is definitely the Prime Minister?
It wouldn’t be unusual if he isn’t. Does anyone even remember who Joe Biden is? And he’s supposed to be way more important.
It doesn’t really feel like Keir Starmer is the Prime Minister, does it? Maybe Esther Rantzen (who?) is the Prime Minister? Better do what she says. Promises were made, after all. Is Keir Starmer even sure he’s the Prime Minister? July, September, October. What a silly hostage.
OK. Enough of that.
Does he even really want to be the Prime Minister?
Whether it’s the debacle of sending Labour staff to campaign in the US, or the free gear, or obviously nepotistic appointments, there’s only one excuse he ever gives. Don’t blame me, it may look really corrupt, but it’s still just about within the rules. The rules run things, not ol’ Keir Starmer. Not responsible. The rules are. Got it. Maybe they’re the PM?
The failure to treat governing seriously is just another sign that these people are student politicians. They like the idea of governing, of being in office but not necessarily in power. They like the trappings, the pomp, the mincing about, and the throbbery but are they actually interested in the real substance of governing?
You will continue to get shallow “leaders” until the consequences match the severity of their civilisational level failures.
And they are at a civilisational level.
Another way of wriggling out of being Prime Minister is to give away all the land over which you’re supposed to govern. Bye bye, British Indian Ocean Territory. Yes, yes, overseas territory, short term lease, etc. cut the midwittery. The grug-brain/genius unity here is the unambiguous surrender of territory, which is bad.
Giving away the country is surely a sure sign that he doesn’t want to govern it?
Reparations? Don’t believe him when he says it’s not happening. Why sign to the commitment to discuss it at all, as if it’s even remotely reasonable, at the Commonwealth leaders meet up? Giving away land, giving away money. Is this what all the imminent tax increases in the budget are going toward? What is he going to entertain giving away next?
An aside, why is our government about to increase taxes to give it away to foreigners, while the likely next President in the US is promising to tax foreigners and abolish their income tax? Why can’t we have that?
Never mind Keir Starmer. And speaking of the Caribbean, does the cabinet want to want to govern this country either? Or are they more interested foreign interests as far and wide as the Caribbean, Africa, Eastern Europe, and the Middle East? What is in Britain’s interests? If you want to be a minister in a British government, shouldn’t you be totally beyond reproach? Why are otherwise obvious questions around conflicts of interest, such as dual nationality, not at all concerning? If free gear is enough to cast suspicion, why isn’t the protection, kinship, and privileges of a whole other country not even more suspicious? There are levels of security clearance you’re not allowed to hold if you have dual nationality, but you can still govern? Whose side are you on?
If they really wanted to govern, why didn’t they prepare for it?
Why do virtually no politicians spend any time honing the skills needed for executive decision making, administration, structuring, oversight, team-building, etc. etc. etc.? In what other professional walk of life would you expect to get to the top by merely being old enough, without criminal record (for at least 5 years), filing some paperwork, being gobby on TV, and winning a popularity contest among people who are also not qualified?
Does this look like a government? This post is slightly out of date, but close enough.
Really, it’s worse than this. As this is being written, the budget is coming up in a couple of days. The Chancellor of the Exchequer is in fact not even close to being a junior banking analyst. She is not an economist (anyone can call themselves an economist – the dismal science indeed), she lied about being any sort of chess champion, and it looks like the book she wrote was plagiarised.
Is it any wonder this sort of person is focussed on small and petty things like the gender of people in portraits? There’s no intelligence or imagination or frame of reference there for great acts of statesmanship.
There is only itty-bitty titties and a bob.
If you don’t want to be talked down to, Rachel, don’t lower yourself so. Or become genuinely great.
In the meantime, readers, you are governed by inadequates, by middle managers.
If they wanted to govern, they would have spent the time and effort to become capable of governing.
Let that be a warning to you too, readers, you cannot just be gobby on GB News or assorted podcasts. I see you. Sure, Kemi Badenoch is a flop, but Robert Jenrick? What are you doing? Have some self-respect!
Do you even want to govern?
Anyway, with all that, just look at the state of Labour.
Is Keir Starmer even going to last until 2029?
“Silence is violence” is control
Across England and Northern Ireland, riots broke out following the killing of three young girls in Southport. The accusations of two-tier policing that followed were expressions of a frustration that the police choose to be harder on anti-immigrant protestors than on pro-Palestine protestors or any protests initiated by similar causes.
By and large, accusations of two-tier policing are anecdotal, but that of course does not erase their existence or their validity. Putting aside the reality that ‘selective policing’ is a Marxist sociological-theoretical concept, the fact that academics have pointed to the existence of two-tier policing as a consequence of profiling (racial or otherwise), and that long-standing objections to stop-and-search focus on the discriminatory and (by extension) two-tier nature of the policing, the government and policing forces have denied two-tier policing.
Yet the most flagrant examples of an uneven application of the law seems to have come out of Belfast, where a judge “has warned that anybody present at a riot will be remanded in custody, even if they were only a ‘curious observer’.” It is not entirely clear why the judge feels that merely observing disobedience amounts to participation, but the consequences of this for journalists are yet to be fully explored. It would suggest that, unless a journalist observing a riot was to vehemently disown the riot, then they are unable to report on it taking place.
Where has this come from? How on earth could a judge have arrived at such a conclusion?
Two phrases have come to determine the Left’s attitudes towards the expression of “hateful comments”: first, “silence is violence”; and second, “it is not enough to not be racist, you must be anti-racist”, with “racist” of course being interchangeable with any sin you may think of or derive from consulting the Equality Act (2010).
The latter of these came most to the fore in the fever-dream era of Covid from 2020 to 2022, when many publications, writers and politicians condemned those who did not support, implicitly or otherwise, the riots conducted by Black Lives Matter:
To effectively defeat systemic racism — racism embedded as normal practice in institutions like education and law enforcement — you’ve got to be continually working towards equality for all races, striving to undo racism in your mind, your personal environment and the wider world.
In other words, you’ve got to be anti-racist.
Whilst many people agreed with or were at least sympathetic to the causes behind the riots, fashionable voices urged all who opposed those who disagreed with BLM’s principles (or actions, for that matter) to take action. It is not enough to not participate in racist behaviour, you must participate in anti-racist behaviour.
It was, without being subtle or pretending to be neutral, a call to action.
The former, meanwhile, has two similar impulses behind it, that make something seemingly nonsensical into a comprehensible idea. After all, how can silence be violent? The rational human understanding of violence is something active, something like hitting someone. I’m not of the opinion personally that speech is violence, but many are – yet even if we acquiesce to that premise, it does not address the point. How can silence be “violence”?
The answer, whilst it may seem unintelligent (and certainly unintelligible) actually derives from a paper written by Wilden in 1985, ‘In the penal colony’. In this paper, Wilden argues that violence expresses itself not just actively – being offensive or causing legally recognised forms of harm such as actual or grievous bodily harm – but passively as well.
Wilden’s paper rests on the intellectually-acrobatic argument that to not actively address circumstances and structures that do not allow for or facilitate an individual’s’ achievement of their highest form of potential is to be violent towards that person or persons.
Say, for example, a person benefits from the privilege of is class, but does not speak out in recognition of or opposition to that privilege, then he is not supporting the plight of those who such privilege works against. Silence is seen as a tacit support for the system that prevents some people from achieving their full potential and is therefore violent towards those people.
Silence, in this instance, is violence.
Now, the problems with this theory aside – least of all the epistemic difficulty of knowing what the ultimate achievement of someone’s ‘potential’ looks like – it seems to have been adopted by the Left wholesale, and even crept into popular vernacular. After all, mates don’t let mates perpetuate misogynistic attitudes, or so I’m told.
The most iconic image of these twin beliefs on the internet is of an unfortunate young man at a protest, holding a sign that recite the mantra of “silence is violence”. Yet, he is also wearing a shirt that says, “Why be racist, sexist, homophobic or transphobic when you could just be quiet?”
Typical responses to this picture fall into one of two camps. Either people look at it and mock him, asking how someone can be such an idiot as to say two contradictory statements in the same breath; or, they point out the hypocrisy, as if that the “typical Leftist” thing to do, to be inconsistent.
What these two responses miss is the very point: this is not about hypocrisy, or logic, but power and control.
The logical mind reacts in only one way. If one command is that you cannot say things you may believe (and some people certainly do believe things this man would call racist etc.), then you would prefer to say nothing. But if a countermanding command, then tells you that saying nothing is undesirable, you are left with one choice: to say what you are expected or demanded to say.
There is only one (acceptable) route out of this conundrum: the only way to not be violent is, apparently, to be positively affirming of whatever the oppressed do.
This logic lurks wherever the aggrieved assert themselves. For example, in the trans debate (and coincidentally the reason Professor Jordan Peterson shot to stardom), the expectation of the controlling logic above is that, even if you do not agree that a man can become a woman, you cannot say so, but you certainly cannot be silent about it, so to avoid being violent, you must affirm the identity of the person in question.
We may ask, why has this judge made this ruling now, if this belief has been so prevalent on the Left for so long? And surely judges are independent arbiters of the law? The only answer I can give is, it is never the fact of a Labour parliamentary victory that conservatives should be wary of, but the forces such a victory emboldens.
The judge’s ruling coming out of Belfast will have deep and far-reaching consequences for the policing of protests in this country – if only for the forces it will embolden.
The Campaign for Scottish Independence is back to Square One
‘Within the next five years, in one form or another, break-up is likely to come about’. These are not the reflections of an unhappily married man, but a pronouncement on the fate of Great Britain, as prophesied by none other than Tom Nairn, widely considered the intellectual flagbearer for Scottish nationalism up until his death last year. Most notable for his book The Break-up of Britain, which foretells the dissolution of the United Kingdom as a consequence of imperial decline, Nairn, delivering one of his final interviews, felt confident enough to declare that the hour was finally at hand, despite being ‘usually cautious about predicting timelines’.
Nairn wasn’t alone in his prediction. According to a Survation poll, when asked ‘How likely or unlikely do you think it is that there will be another referendum on Scottish independence in the next five years?’, 65% of Scots were of the opinion that it was either ‘Very likely’ ‘or ‘Quite likely’. Only 25% answered ‘Quite unlikely’ or ‘Very unlikely’. The 65% may indeed be correct; but if any such referendum is to take place within the given timeframe, Scottish nationalists will have to pray for a miracle to happen within the next week or so, seeing as the survey in question was conducted all the way back in October 2019. Nairn’s five-year prediction was made in 2020, which affords it slightly more leeway. Yet the odds that the Scottish National Party, which only months ago suffered a crushing defeat at the ballot box, is able to persuade the British government to grant them a second vote by next year are slim to none. The truth is that the nationalist cause hasn’t looked more hopeless since the result of the original Scottish Independence referendum in 2014.
Even that episode, in which the UK faced its first truly existential threat since England and Scotland were united in 1707, ended on a modestly optimistic note for separatists. While the result of the vote was 55-45 in favour of Scotland remaining in the UK, the fact that Alex Salmond, the leader of the Scottish National Party, had been able to secure a referendum from the British government in the first place – and that the ‘Yes’ side, as the pro-Independence side became known, had come so close to winning – was taken by many as a sure sign that the Union was on its last legs. Worse still for the ‘No’ side, the fact that Independence was more popular among younger voters seemed to suggest that the end of the UK was not only inevitable but imminent. Led by liberal activists whose passionate appeals invoked the rhetoric of earlier Independence movements in former British colonies, the nationalists’ quest for freedom from the English yoke became an end goal for progressives; it was merely a matter of time before the pendulum swung left, thereby slicing in half the nation-state that birthed the modern world.
Any doubts anyone may have harboured about the impending demise of the UK were surely dispelled by the political turbulence that followed the referendum – the general election a year later, the other referendum the year after that, if not the snap election that took place the year after that – which to onlookers home and abroad resembled the death throes of a spent entity. In particular, amidst the chaos that occurred in the wake of the UK’s vote to leave the European Union in 2016, the only thing anyone seemed to be able to predict with any certainty was that Scotland – which had voted 62-38 to remain in the EU – would jump ship at the soonest opportunity. (Around a third of Scottish voters even believed that there would be another referendum before the UK completed the Brexit proceedings.)
Indeed, for many unionists, the ostensible advantages of remaining within the European Union proved a deciding factor in their ‘No’ vote: a stronger economy, representation at the European Parliament, and facilitated travel to the continent. As part of the UK, Scotland was by extension part of the EU, and a newly independent Scotland would surely struggle to gain re-entry to a bloc which mandates a 3% deficit ratio for all member states, given that the nation’s deficit hovered around 10%. But the UK’s vote to leave the EU put a knot in that theoretical chain of consequences. Remaining in the UK became a guarantee that Scotland would be cut off from the EU, while Independence under the stewardship of the passionately pro-Europe Scottish National Party at least allowed for the possibility, however scant, of being ‘welcomed back into the EU with open arms as an independent country’, in the words of one MP.
Against this backdrop, even the most optimistic unionist would not have expected the status quo to hold. And yet, 10 years on from the 2014 referendum, Independence polls produce, on average, the same 55-45 split. So what happened?
As it turned out, while Britain’s decision to leave the EU predictably shored up support for the SNP, it also complicated the logistics of Independence. The smallest matryoshka in the set, Scotland would find itself not only isolated but vulnerable, separated by a hard border with its only contiguous neighbour. The country would have to decide between a customs union with England, Wales and Northern Ireland (which collectively constitute the greater part of Scotland’s trade) or with the much larger, but more distant, EU.
And while a number of sometime unionists found themselves suddenly on the ‘Yes’ side of the debate – including a contingent of high-profile figures, from the actors Ewan McGregor and John Hannah to the writers Andrew O’Hagan and John Burnside – a number of those who had voted ‘No’ in 2014 suddenly found themselves siding with the so-called ‘Little Englander’s. These Eurosceptic defectors were broadly comprised of what the commentator David Goodhart would go on to classify as ‘somewheres’: patriotic Scots, typically older and poorer, and defined by a profound attachment to the place they call home, as opposed to the cosmopolitan aloofness of ‘anywheres’. An understudied but significant section of society, Scottish ‘somewheres’ have been instrumental in preventing separatism gaining a majority in the almost weekly polls, considering how many elderly, unionist voters have passed away in the last ten years, and how many Gen-Z, overwhelmingly pro-Indpendence voters have aged into the electorate.
Then there was COVID. As with every other political matter, the arrival of the coronavirus pandemic in 2019 dramatically changed the nature of the Independence debate. Since pandemic response was a devolved matter, the four home nations took a competitive approach to dealing with the virus. While Prime Minister Boris Johnson was initially reluctant to impose lockdowns, Sturgeon lost no time in employing comparatively draconian measures, such as mask mandates and severe quarantine regulations. As a result, Scotland was able to boast a considerably lower death rate than England. Between January 2020 and June 2021, excess deaths in Scotland were only around 3% higher than average, compared with England, where they were 6 % higher. This measurable discrepancy had the effect of suggesting to many minds that not only was Scotland capable of handling its own affairs, but that government under the SNP was safer and more effective than direct rule from Westminster. For the first time, Independence polls consistently suggested that the ‘Yes’ side would win a hypothetical referendum..
But the momentum didn’t last. As the months passed, and particularly as Johnson was coerced into a stricter COVID policy, adopting many of the SNP’s own strategies, the gap in hospitalisation and death rates between each of the home nations narrowed to a pinpoint. Moreover, the UK had developed its own vaccine, and thanks to opting out of the EU’s vaccine rollout was able to conduct its vaccination campaign far more rapidly than any other European country.
From there it was all downhill for the SNP. In the summer of 2021, it transpired that the party had been misallocating donations and routinely lying about membership figures. Nicola Sturgeon, who had replaced Salmond as First Minister after the 2014 referendum, resigned in February 2023, citing gridlock around the Independence question. A month later Peter Murrell, Sturgeon’s husband and chief executive of the SNP, was arrested as part of a police investigation into the party’s finances, prompting the SNP’s auditors to resign as well.
Sturgeon was replaced as party leader by Humza Yousaf. But while the former First Minister had been able to command respect even from her adversaries, Yousaf, who lacked Sturgeon’s charisma and the prestige that comes with an established reputation, proved a far more divisive leader at a time when the party was crying out for unity. The fact that Yousaf only narrowly won the leadership contest, after his openly Presbyterian opponent had been slandered by members of her own coalition for espousing ‘extreme religious views’, did little to endear him to the Christian wing of his party. Perhaps most controversially, his decision to carry forward the Gender Reform Bill – which made it possible to change one’s legal gender on a whim by removing the requirement of a medical diagnosis – provoked derision from a public which still falls, for the most part, on the socially conservative side of the fence. Nor were progressives much impressed by his decision to end the SNP’s power-sharing agreement with the Scottish Greens.
Yousaf resigned after thirteen months in office and was replaced by John Swinney, one of the more moderate senior members of the party, but the damage to the SNP’s credibility had already been done. With less than two months to go until the UK-wide general election, Swinney had his work cut out for him when it came to convincing Scots to continue to put their trust in the scandal-ridden SNP. Independence polling returned to pre-COVID levels. However, for nationalists, such polls were less germane to the pursuit of a second referendum than the election polls, given that keeping a pro-Independence party at the helm in Holyrood was a necessary prerequisite to secession. As long as the SNP commanded a majority of seats, there was a democratic case to be made for holding another referendum. This had been Sturgeon’s argument during the 2021 Scottish parliament election campaign, which was, in her eyes, a ‘de facto referendum’. If the SNP were to end up with a majority of seats, she claimed, the party would have the permission of the Scottish people to begin Independence proceedings. (As it happened, they went on to win sixty-four seats – one short of a majority.)
The SNP had fewer seats in the House of Commons, but the nature of Britain’s first-past-the-post electoral system meant they still enjoyed considerable overrepresentation. Still, if possessing forty-eight seats at parliament was not enough to secure a referendum from the British government, then plummeting to a meagre nine seats in the 2024 general election killed the prospect stone dead. As the Labour party made sweeping gains in Scotland and the UK more widely, the SNP suffered the worst defeat in its 90-year history. In a speech following the election, a dour-faced Swinney acknowledged the need ‘to accept that we failed to convince people of the urgency of independence in this election campaign.’ The party ‘need[ed] to be healed and it need[ed] to heal its relationship with the people of Scotland’.
It is difficult to take note of something that isn’t there, which is perhaps why, as Ian MacWhirter noted in a piece for Unherd, ‘It doesn’t seem to have fully dawned on the UK political establishment that the break-up of Britain, which seemed a real possibility only a few years ago, has evaporated’. The topic of Independence now rarely features in the news, and some of the biggest names associated with Scottish nationalism – not only Nairn and Burnside, but also Alasdair Gray, Sean Connery and Winifred Ewing – have passed away in the decade since the referendum. Meanwhile, younger Scots are turning away from nationalism in general, an unforeseen phenomenon which MacWhirter puts down to the fallout from Brexit, the Covid-19 pandemic and the war in Ukraine, a sequence of geopolitical shocks that has many Scots wondering whether the campaign to sacrifice the nation’s economy and security on the altar of identity might well be recklessly indulgent. ‘The Union is probably safer now than at any time since the Jacobites waved their claymores 300 years ago.’
If the SNP hope to bring the dream of Independence back to life, it will not be enough to rely on generational shift and the goodwill of the British government. An uphill struggle awaits the Independence movement. It will entail extensive repairs to the party’s image, providing clarity on issues such as currency, retention of the monarchy and the route to EU membership, and – perhaps hardest of all – presenting a clear case as to why Scotland would be better off as an independent nation. Until then, the Union looks set to enjoy a new lease of life.
Kino
Britain’s Fifth Column
A fifth column is “a group within a country at war who are sympathetic to or working for its enemies.”
We have a problem that is acknowledged but gets little to no serious attention in the official political or media spheres; the growing Islamic base that has been imported into this country. Given the above definition, it might seem absurd to imply that these people are a fifth column, seeing as we don’t appear to be directly at war, but we are. I would not call this a cold war as there are many thousands of victims of its adherents living among us in Britain currently. To do so would be to diminish their experience, something our traitorous state has done more than enough of.
Islam is its own self-contained religion and civilisational structure. By allowing this population to grow, we are fostering an ideology that will only seek to grow and supplant our society because that is what their god demands. Islam has been allowed to run parallel to our society by our cowardly state permitting Sharia courts, turning a blind eye to polygamous marriages, and generally leaving these guests to their own devices as they overtake British cities. While deplorable and deeply distressing, this has so far been contained, not so much any more. The Islamic community is breaking out, it’s establishing a significant voting bloc and this heralds a dark omen for things to come. In a great twist of irony, it seems Labour will be the first to fall foul of this new political development.
Contrary to their minority position, the Islamic community in Britain has a relatively tight grasp on small businesses in corner shops, barbers, hot food takeaways, off-licences, and petrol stations. They’ve also got an increasingly large share in drug dealing, likely facilitated by these interconnect, all hours, businesses, where cash is king and electronic fraud is missed. HMRC doesn’t have the resources to deal with such matters effectively, often fearing accusations of bigotry and being threatened with violence whenever they try to conduct their investigations. This is where Mohammed Hijab’s (a real name I’m told) bizarre TV comments about blasphemy against Islam not being tolerated by “Muslim gangsters” likely come from. We’ve seen this before, from the murder of Kris Donald to the grooming gangs. The community sheltering the vile perpetrators, in my mind, damns them. The religious extremists and the cultural criminals go hand in hand.
The more odious elements of Islam in Britain claim they have conquered Britain – that is, being imported by our traitorous elite and living off welfare. Make no mistake, this is not Mohammed taking Mecca from the pagans, these people are arrogant welfare queens that the state protects and cajoles at every opportunity. Where is this arrogance coming from? Is it their status beyond criticism? The enshrining of Islamophobia as an ultimate crime against “Modern British Values” is certainly a problem. We have Muslim MPs almost brought to tears in Parliament for mean words while White children up and down the country are groomed and raped by adherents of their ideology and culture, fanatic or otherwise; crocodile tears from a vile community that not-so-secretly laughs about the modern woes of the native British.
Muslim gaslighting doesn’t end in Parliament. Pakistani actor Riz Ahmed put out a bizarre video a few years ago in which National Front types went door to door ethnically cleansing Muslims from England. I thought this to be a particularly bizarre thing to do when you consider the terrorism rate, per capita, of the Islamic vs British community. To me this was a tell in his thinking, it acknowledges that fundamentally they are at war with us. Riz also starred in the film Four Lions, which follows a hapless Jihadi’s attempt to carry out a terror attack in the UK. The film, while amusing, does paint these men (other than the grossly unsympathetic White convert) as sympathetic in their idiocy, with Ahmed’s character leading his less bright friends astray. Outside the context of the film, I find this portrayal to be unrealistic. The average second-gen or third-gen Muslim youth sincerely hates Britain, its history, and its people. They’ll prioritise and take the side of foreign conflicts over any domestic issue concerning the British nation. The most they’ll interact with British culture is through the superficiality of sport.
Moreover, there is a bizarre Africanisation of British Muslim culture, Ali G was a send-up of this, but Cohen seemed to back away from this obvious interpretation for whatever reason. Drug culture, speaking in a pseudo-Jamaican patois (to steal from Starkey) mixed with Muslim conventions, producing a particularly unpleasant and idiotic-sounding dialect. A glorification of crime, violence, and importantly terrorism pervades this culture. We’ve seen this play out across the pro-Palestine demonstrations happening over recent months. To quickly touch on drug culture, cannabis is a major drug among this group. People like Peter Hitchens get the relationship twisted. They assume that cannabis is the cause of terror, not that these people engage in drug culture because they are themselves a criminal and subversive element in society. Do drugs exacerbate their hatred? I wouldn’t doubt it, but the hatred is before the imbibing of wicked poisons.
This is all an incredibly dangerous mix that the state and security services seem to barely be able to keep a lid on. Despite their protestations that right-wing terrorism is the biggest threat, this is clearly nonsense. Islamic terror threats outstrip right-wing ones by miles, even with the vast population difference. This can also be seen in the police’s reluctance to police the entrenched Muslim community. What are they so afraid of? My guess is terroristic violence. To cow in the face of such a threat is basically to guarantee you will hand the country to Islamists.
What is to be done about this? Ideas have been floated about banning certain aspects of the religion to encourage them to self-deport but again, this relies on enforcement by the state which it is both unwilling and incapable of doing. I would propose a ban on the production, import, and sale of ritualistically slaughtered meat as that would be the easiest to enforce without confrontation. Businesses would be shuttered, products would be impounded at customs, and we would stand firmly on the side of animal rights. It’s reprehensible to me that Britain should take a step backward in this regard to placate alien desert religions. Naturally, this ban would affect the Jewish community, but that’s a sacrifice we will need to make for the future of Britain. The Jewish community is particularly robust and progressive when it comes to issues of wrestling with God, and I’m sure they’d find a way around our new law.
Less practical solutions have been offered; recently I’ve seen people saying that public prayer should be banned in response to mass Islamic worship in London. This is a nonsense approach that would only affect our beleaguered Christian community and would likely not be enforced fairly. Some have suggested banning cousin marriages. Whilst well-intentioned, the main thrust of my objection to such a policy is that we haven’t had to ban it for it to no longer be practised in this country (outside the Muslim community and presumable other outliers). Simply put, we’d be creating a nationwide law for an imported subset of the population. It’s not the thin end of the wedge of tyranny, but it does point to the ridiculous codification of a multiracial society.
Groups are so vastly different in outlook and disposition that you need to make the detrimental illegal for it to appear to function. Perhaps we should take it as a sign that people who willingly marry their cousins and as such have the largest disabled community in Britain shouldn’t be living among us. Britain does not exist to serve as a eugenic uplift scheme for foreign people who cleave to a religion that orders them to supplant us. On an entirely different and less targeted front, the deportation of economic net negatives would substantially reduce the Islamic population of Britain, but the problem of Islam would remain, albeit at perpetual minority levels.
Approaching last Christmas, we saw the usual warning of terror attacks rolled out for many festive markets and events that are happening across the country. If you attend any of these markets, you will likely notice the ethnic make-up of the security and the broken English with which they communicate. It’s not lost on me that many of these men are of African, non-Muslim, extraction however many are of Muslim origin and I find it entirely insane that threats from Islamic terrorism would be policed by fresh off-the-boat Muslims. We have a growing force of non-white imported security, increasingly used by businesses because they are cheap and a state which seeks to enforce anti-white laws, which is worrying. Their conduct is poor, and their obvious biases and unfamiliarity with Britain can’t be ignored.
In a recent clip, a piano player is aggressively harassed by foreign security. Is the proliferation of such people across the UK security sector related to the housing of fighting aged illegals now being overseen by two of the biggest private security companies Serco and G4S? It’s certainly a question worth asking. It is not without reason that it could be expected for such people to end up in the official police forces of Britain eventually. Standards in policing have been dropping for decades, if things are not reversed, I imagine we will start seeing these people transition into the force within the decade.
To me, this is all part of the plan, the expansion of the police state. Contrary to Telegraph hacks, the police state is already here. This great panopticon of Modern Britain, with its pervasive speech laws coupled with the new ‘diverse’ religiosity, forms a tyranny of leftists and racial mafias over the native population. As with everything in Modern Britain, the “elite” have made a vast miscalculation. Creating such a system will be subverted and controlled by the most vocal, violent, and united community. Without a doubt, that community is the Islamic one. While they are still a minority, they will increasingly wield disproportionate, anti-democratic, power over us all. It’s a horrific reverse colonialism where we, the native British, have been entangled in a web of increasingly complex and restrictive laws that all but guarantee our disempowerment. The Tories are utter traitors and completely politically spent for not seeing this and not doing anything about it for their fourteen years in power. Hopefully, they’ll be destroyed at the next election and a new, vigorous, and unapologetically nationalist force can rise to lift us out of this predicament decades of political incompetence and deliberate malice have brought us to.
I do not believe Islam will take over Britain is guaranteed, I do not believe that things are too far gone. Britain is broken and while Islam is germinating in this environment it’s entirely imported. For the most part, the White British converts we see are the most broken of outsiders, with fringe academics constituting a bizarre exception. Most people in Britain look at the Islamic community with rightful derision. They may not express it openly but in their hearts, they see it as a thuggish religion of petty criminals and child rapists. This is the version of Islam that the immigrants have brought to our shores, the blame is squarely on themselves and they alone shame their Ummah. Indeed, Arab Muslims in states like the UAE or Saudi often wonder why we have let such people settle in our lands, a favour they do not permit to their “brothers and sisters.”
In order to prevent this growing Islamic problem in Britain, we must acknowledge the interconnected nature of this religion, from how drug dealers and home office employees are all working together to advance their faith and racial groups within that overarching religion. We are constantly told to take people on an individual basis, but time and time again in Modern Britain this has shown to be dangerously faulty reasoning. It’s outdated and only conceivably worked when the country was homogenous and dwelt under a Christian understanding. Those days are gone. In an irreligious and deracinated Britain, we are at the mercy of monolithic minorities who use the law to cudgel each other and especially the native population.
I had said in a previous piece that I was unsure of the civilisational war proposed by the counter-jihad movement, and I still hold that belief. I do not believe in siding with foreign interests outside of Europe that seek to interfere in the Islamic world instead of focusing on problems at home. The priority is removing Islam from Britain and more broadly Europe, not fighting Israel’s wars or throwing our lot in with Zionists. The European and Islamic civilisations should be separate and distinct.
For My Ex-Libertarians
The United Kingdom, and especially the Isle of Great Britain, has a very particular legal quirk that sets it apart from Western Civilisation, and possibly most of the uncivilised world as well. There is no legal right to self-defence. Everyone knows that to some extent, “guns are banned” in the UK, and we’re nothing like those silly Americans who can carry so-called assault weapons in Wall-Mart. Yet most Britons will be surprised to learn that non-lethal options such as pepper spray are only available to law enforcement personnel, and that possessing any product “made or adapted to cause a person injury” (aka the most effective way to reasonably defend yourself or those around you) in a public or private space is against the law. Instead the ladies and gentlemen of the UK may purchase a rape whistle, as politely suggested by the West Yorkshire Police on their “Ask The Police” webpage. The UK is so averse to the concept of self-defence that in 2012, American Self Defence instructor, Tim Larkin was barred from entering the country by Theresa May during her stint as Home Secretary.
This is a stark contrast to the continent, where countries like Austria, Germany, and Hungary have strong, codified legal definitions of self-defence with “stand your ground” laws, as well as the option to carry things such as bear spray, and with an easily obtainable permit you can even carry pistols capable of firing rubber bullets or CS gas pellets. In France, similar laws apply, pepper spray, gas pistols capable of firing CN or CS Gas are available to any law-abiding citizen above the age of 18. Whilst carrying them in public for self-defence is not a valid reason, French law stipulates you may use them lawfully to defend your house and person. Of course, there are still problems here. Stéphane Charbonnier, the director of the famous Charlie Hebdo magazine and sports shooting enthusiast applied for a permit to carry a firearm for self-defence, this permit was denied, and he was told he could rely upon his police protection. We all know what happened next.
Following the various terror attacks across France in 2015, the French government permitted all police officers to carry their service firearms whilst off duty. Compare this to the UK, where outside of Northern Ireland, only specialist police are allowed to even think about firearms and have very little support from the government or the courts when they do shoot, despite their enshrined right to kill in service of the state and his Majesty. Imagine if Westminster had decided to arm all British city police services after the Murder of Lee Rigby, or in 2017 after multiple violent terrorist attacks across Britain. Imagine a Britain that allowed off duty police or even current or ex-servicemen the ability to carry a firearm in public for the purposes of self-defence. I digress, the arming of the British Police is another debate for another time.
This all seems rather reasonable and modern, two European democracies with modern, democratic attitudes towards personal self-defence, but that’s not all. Countries like Italy and Spain allow high risk individuals and business owners such as jewellers or cash transit guards to carry firearms on their person, or to be kept in a secure location at their place of work. There are similar laws like this across the less developed nations of Europe, particularly in Eastern Europe and the Balkans. But what’s extremely interesting, is that right in the heartland of Europe, there are two countries that stand alone when it comes to modern European firearms and self-defence law, Austria, and Czechia (formally known as the Czech Republic). Both of these countries permit civilians to own firearms for the express purpose of self-defence, and even allow civilians to carry them (Czechia) or very conditionally (Austria). The majority of all firearms held in Czechia are held for protection, and more than half of all Czech firearm owning citizens have a permit to carry a firearm for self-defence. Austria has some more specific use cases, but the general legal position is that if you own any sort of firearm, or any other kind of legal weapon for that matter, it can be used to lawfully defend yourself or your property. Austrian business owners or employees of said businesses (with express legal permission from the owner of the premises) can carry their firearms within their private premises but carrying prohibited weapons in public is illegal without a lawful reason. I don’t need to attack your brain with graphs, stats, and differential equations to prove to you that modern European nations with clear self-defence laws that empower victims with the ability to neutralise threats quickly and effectively to their person, their personal liberty, and their property are better places to live in than any major British city.
If you cannot effectively defend yourself or your property, how can you be expected to defend your country? In 2013, after Lee Rigby was brutally executed on a busy street in broad daylight, there was a lot of discussion about how people in the background are just carrying on with their own lives, walking past the two-blood-soaked Islamic militants as if public beheadings were just a normal part of life in the Royal Borough of Greenwich. A similar discussion has opened up regarding the recent rape case on the tube, about how other passengers just sat there and let it happen. The general public is aghast and shocked at such cruel indifference. But all official documentation from government and law enforcement officials in the UK recommend non-intervention, that your best choice of action is to merely alert the authorities and wait. And even then, there’s a possibility that even a police officer acting in the course of their duty to protect the general public, can be charged with murder. The current UK legal system requires all violent action towards others to be “proportional force” to be considered lawful self-defence, but how do you calculate what is proportional to a man raping an unconscious woman right in front of you? Surely in this instance you apply the most efficient and effective method you have at hand, regardless of how much damage is done to the assailant?
With the official legal advice of the government and all Law Enforcement in the UK advocating a form of learned helplessness, it’s no wonder that when confronted with difficult and violent situations, many can only watch in horror as they wait for the equally ineffective authorities to arrive and diffuse the situation. Now what happens if you are a young woman, and after calling for assistance you are greeted by Metropolitan Police constable Wayne Couzens? After that incident, the complete indifference to the “Near-Eastern Ceasefire of the week” public disturbances, and the overall lack of an effective police presence across any British Urban centres, what’s the point in calling the police? They won’t arrive on time, and it’s more than likely they’ll have you sleeping in a cell when they finally get there.
My own personal experience of the ineffectiveness and apathy from the British Police Services, was last year, when my mother’s car was stolen from her drive in the early hours of the morning. Already prepared for the Brazilification of the UK, the car was equipped with a tracking device. Being model citizens who know better than to engage in vigilantism, we scoped out the location on google maps and informed our police service that the car had been stolen, but we could also provide the police with the approximate location, aiding with the investigation and bringing about swift justice to car thieves! After all this isn’t South Africa, where you have to bring your own pen to the police station to report a crime. Amidst the excitement, our local police service informed us that since the car was now located in Outer London, the case would have to go through a lengthy transfer process to the Metropolitan Police Service before anything could happen. This process could take hours or days depending on how busy things were, and things are always busy for the Met. This immediately put a damper on the celebrations. Who knew how long it would be before the tracker was found, and the car relocated to a secure location beyond the reach of google street-view…
The deskbound officer heard our dismay and informed us that car theft in the UK currently follows a rather specific modus operandi. Cars are stolen to order by professionals, who then take the cars to out of the way locations, blocking the car from view with vans or other large vehicles, then they leave the cars alone until multiple stolen cars can be transported in bulk to the coast and then shipped off into the unknown. Then the officer told us that we could, as private citizens, retrieve our own property, as long as we believed that it was safe to do so. Yes, you read that correctly, the policeman who took our call, told us to go get our car back by ourselves, and to bring proof of ownership and identification because we would most likely be stopped by the police on our way home as we would be in the possession of an “un-stolen vehicle”. When I heard this I actually belly laughed, it was like being back in South Africa again. Nevertheless, we decided to sally forth.
As South Africans, our natural instinct was to reach for the 9mm for some insurance. Sorry, this is a civilised western nation, you can’t have that anymore. And even if we could, British laws would criminalise us for bringing anything with us for self-defence, and we would potentially receive greater punishment than any of the car thieves if we had anything on us which could be used to harm another person. To cut a long story short, despite assurances from police that someone would be dispatched to make sure we weren’t bleeding out on a dodgy council estate, we retrieved the vehicle with zero assistance from the police. It was located on an estate covered in bits and pieces of various luxury SUVs and Saloons, with masked youths cutting up cars on driveways in broad daylight. If anyone came at us with a knife or blunt instrument, my only effective means of self-defence would’ve been to hit them with my car, certainly a gross violation of “proportional force”.
This is what made me realise that the British Police and the legal system have completely failed the ordinary person. We were explicitly told by the police that if we ever wanted to see the car again, our best course of action would’ve been to retrieve it ourselves, providing that “it was safe to do so.” How is retrieving a stolen vehicle from a council estate safe in any capacity? Is “safe vigilantism” the future of law and order in Britain? The British police outsourcing law and order to the general public is not a recent phenomenon, and there have been many other cases where the police have been dependent upon law-bending civilians to enforce the peace.
Now if we were Sikhs, rather than dreaded White South Africans, we would be well within our rights to carry a blade during this endeavour because the legal system makes an exception for a weapon that has to be carried at all times “for religious purposes”. That religious purpose is explicitly self-defence mind you. Despite the fact that carrying any kind of blade explicitly for self-defence is a gross violation of UK law. Quite famously during the 2011 riots, Sikhs took to the streets with swords, bats, and all manner of weapons to defend their communities, and instead of the police disarming the sword-wielding paramilitary forces and dispersing, the Sikhs were praised by the Prime Minister! If I took even a rounders bat with me to rescue my mother’s stolen car I would’ve gone to jail.
The interesting thing about this Sikh tangent, is that the Seax, the famous historical general-purpose knife of the Anglo-Saxons, was considered to be a status symbol of a freeman, and that anyone without one was possibly a serf or a slave. Could an Anglo-Saxon freeman lawfully carry a culturally and religiously significant object like the Seax in modern Britain?
The 2011 August Riots revealed a long-held apathy within the police and the law enforcement caste of the United Kingdom. Across the country, militias appeared outside of Turkish barber shops and kebab bars. This mass mobilisation was welcomed across the political landscape, with no minister brave enough to question why these businesses and community centres had a surplus of edged weapons and baseball bats conveniently ready for an occasion like this. The EDL came out in force in Enfield and North London, and were reprimanded by the police and political establishment merely for being present. None of them were armed with more than an England football shirt, yet received none of the praise the middle eastern baseball enthusiasts got from the then Prime Minister, David Cameron.
I was going to conclude the article there, but since writing began, three more events have come to attention. On the 30th of December, 2023, roughly 50 men from the London Eritrean community gathered in Camberwell, armed with bats and wooden planks, injuring four officers and disturbing the public good. Apparently only eight individuals were arrested during this act, when you can clearly see countless men violating every British weapon law, as well as assaulting police officers and vehicles with weapons whilst the police seem only capable of timidly backing away. 50 or more Eritreans with cudgels fighting a pitched battle with the police, barely any news coverage, less than a quarter of the perpetrators arrested… Why? What’s the point in even showing up? Let the Eritreans bash up their own embassy if you’re not going to arrest them, it’s probably better they harass their own government rather than vent their frustrations on ordinary Londoners.
The second event was the reveal that Lawrence Morgan, the Jamaican Gangster whose deportation flight was prevented by a jumped-up Cambridge grad who now resides in Norway, was scheduled to be physically removed after a string of violent firearm related incidents. In 2016 Lawrence Morgan was imprisoned for only five years and ten months after being charged with the unlawful possession of a firearm, ammunition, and controlled substances. Another two-year sentence in 2017 for drugs charges, and then in 2020 he is caught on CCTV footage participating in a lethal Birmingham gang shootout whilst riding a small bicycle. No murder or attempted murder charges, despite the battle causing the violent execution of his associate, and Morgan himself caught on CCTV firing a pistol with intent. Jailed again in 2021 for only five years. The authorities attempted to deport Lawrence Morgan in 2023, if they fail to do so again (Border authorities have reportedly hired a hanger to stage deportations since they have become completely incapable of doing their job) Lawrence Morgan will most likely be back on the streets of England in a few years’ time. Ideally Lawrence Morgan would’ve been deported after his first firearms offence, but the only reason the authorities have attempted to deport him now was because in October last year, UK prison governors announced that British prisons were rapidly approaching full capacity. How many failed deportations do they let you have before they grant you citizenship?
And thirdly, a horrific chemical attack was carried out by an Afghan Asylum seeker, one let into the country despite a history of violent and sexual offences. The police now seem incapable of finding him and have publicly lamented that it’s “sooo difficult” to find someone who doesn’t use their bank card or a mobile phone. The forces of the state have no issue when it comes to keeping track of every football fan who has ever gotten a little rowdy at an away match, but a violent sexual predator can disappear into thin air as long as they stay away from their smartphone. As an ordinary citizen, no rape whistle or panic button can defeat a lunatic armed with even a small quantity of a corrosive substance. What can you possibly do when threatened with life changing injuries and or death? The legal precedent of proportional force would suggest that ordinary civilians should disfigure or maim an acid attacker, instead of putting the threat down with a human and instantaneous response.
Idris Elba and other lionised television gangsters such as the Labour party have begun a call for the complete ban of items such as machetes and “zombie knives” aka any large single bladed knife or sword, like the various kebab knives and industrial cutting tools that many people use for work, daily life, and the odd riot prevention. Nevermind the fact you’re more likely to be stabbed to death by a supermarket steak knife or B&Q screwdriver than meet your end facing an authentic katana or antique sabre wielding urban youth. There has been nothing from these public figures about controlling the usage of drain cleaner or any other household substances that can permanently disfigure or kill someone, but tools and items used by ordinary citizens, historians, law abiding collectors, and specialist craftsmen must be taken away because their mere existence corrupts the urban children and encourages them to embrace gang culture. As usual, our politicians would rather punish law abiding citizens instead of actually attempting to tackle why the urban populations of Britain prefer smoking weed and carving each other up instead of going to youth clubs and boxing gyms.
I expect Lawrence Morgan and other violent Jamaican gangsters will be back on our streets on “good behaviour”, in no time, and other local roadmen will be offered shorter and shorter sentences. Violent schizophrenic, with a history of incidents, Valdo Calocane, who stabbed three people to Death in Nottingham is not being charged with murder, but manslaughter. Following this trend, after a few years of medication and observation in a secure hospital he will undoubtedly be released back into the general public, to make room for more aggressive mentally unwell individuals.
We can no longer rely upon nautical building accessories like Narwhal Tusks, and have a sensible European approach to the legal right to defend one’s self, one’s property, those around you, and that which you hold dear. If you look at prior days of infamy, such as the Siege of Sidney Street or the Tottenham Outrage, when doing battle with violent aliens, the forces of law and order were joined by armed civilians giving chase themselves, or equipped and supported by civilians. Conveniently enough, the fact that the police during the Siege of Sidney Street were armed with firearms provided by a local gunsmith is left out by almost all official sources such as the BBC and London Police museum exhibitions.
With the appropriate equipment, perhaps it would be possible to galvanise the British public and restore even a semblance of law and order to Urban Britain. If at least one person had ready access to an incapacitating weapon like pepper spray or even a concealable firearm on London Bridge that day, five people would not have been stabbed. Across all of England’s terror attacks and similarly violent incidents, there are multiple references to bystanders resorting to desperate and weird items to defend themselves with like skateboards, tusks, or ornamental spears from historical displays. Granted pepper spray won’t do very much against a Christmas terror-lorry barrelling towards you but merely knowing in a violent situation you would be capable of doing more than cowering in fear and waiting for the royally appointed death squads might encourage the British population to have more of a spine.
Why we need a Hitchens-Navalny strategy for GE 2024
A few days before the 2010 general election, Peter Hitchens wrote an article in the Daily Mail titled ‘This is the most important article I’ve ever written – and loyal Conservative voters will hate me for it’.
In it he argued that, despite being counterintuitive, voters must eschew the Tories if there was to be any chance of implementing a genuine, conservative agenda for Britain.
Much of its analysis of Britain’s woes are completely applicable today. He ends it by writing: ‘Five years’ from now we could throw the liberal elite into the sea, if we tried. But the first stage in that rebellion must be the failure of David Cameron to rescue the wretched anti-British Blair project and wrap it in a blue dress’.
Fourteen years later, not only is the anti-British Blair project wrapped in a blue dress still ruling the country, but David Cameron is again one of its leading figures, rubbing more shoulders at Davos and advocating military actions more brutal and destabilising than even Blair could dream of.
In 2019, Brexit allowed the Conservatives to completely refresh their image and successfully brand themselves as a populist national-conservative party. I myself, for the first (and last) time, voted for them in that election. For this I am ashamed.
What has transpired since is that, what we once identified as Blairism, is in fact part of a wider and even more sinister agenda. If what Hitchens realistically desired was an internal struggle within the Conservatives after a 2010 loss, what we can achieve today is that party’s shattering into a million tiny pieces.
‘But Labour will be even worse’, you will undoubtedly hear the Tory Boys cry. If this was convincing and arguable back in 2010, today it is wrong on its face.
If grassroots supporters and ordinary voters could hear how Tory journalists, politicians and advisors speak amongst themselves, they would be taken aback over how deeply their views are reviled and how deep the liberal rot is.
It is a party run almost entirely by childless, rootless metropolitans, whose view of conservatism is a Randian wet dream of identikit glass skyscrapers and GDPmaxxing.
When it comes to social values, foreign policy, education, health and every other significant policy area, there is no difference between them and the people who run Labour.
In fact, I would go as far to say that Labour is actually run by more ‘normal’ people. So why is it so important to destroy the Tories? Because of what comes after.
Starmer’s Labour is at this stage a well-oiled machine raring to go. Unlike the Tories, it does not pretend to be something it is not. It is an out-and-proud party of the Davos agenda.
Its current popularity is based on it not being the party to preside over the last decade and a half of chaos and decline.
If we are going to have a globalist government, let’s have the exhibitionists instead of those in the closet, as this will help the public correctly identify their enemies.
Right now, there is no appetite on the left to disrupt Labour from its course, but once they are in power it will not take long for the Corbynista wing to start making movements.
This could remove from Labour the contingent that actually can make some common cause with the dissident right (Euroscepticism, averseness to dangerous foreign entanglements, distrust of corporate and financial elites, and a belief in the nationalisation of strategic industries come to mind).
More important is what happens to the Conservatives. Hitchens correctly identifies the Westminster consensus as being ‘only propped up by state funding and dodgy millionaires’.
The funding is allocated based on the number of seats a party holds, and the donations on its prospects of power. A Tory wipe-out would kill both birds with one stone.
If the rump of it is allowed to remain as a significantly large party, it is likely to limp on and even capitalise on its new ability to talk the talk from the opposition benches without having to walk at all.
A vacuum, which we know nature abhors, must be created in its place.
Current polling shows that support for Reform UK could cost the Tories many seats in favour of Labour, despite Reform not winning any themselves.
Reform platform is a damn sight better than anything else out there, but Richard Tice’s neocon Tory-lite outfit will not bring about the reform we actually need. It could, however, be the catalyst for it.
Destroying the Conservative Party once and for all would be a noble and worthwhile aim, and would open the door for major, long-needed shakeup of our politics.
This is a strong argument that Tice would be well advised to use, but predictably he will say that the Brexit Party stood aside for the Tories in 2019 and they failed on Brexit and immigration, so this time they won’t stand aside.
He will, equally predictably, be countered with the argument that he will still let Labour in without winning seats himself.
Openly declaring war on the Tories as a necessary first-step in building a viable and genuine conservative political movement is something that is hard to argue against. Such a battle cry could also attract non-Tory voters.
The only Reform UK politician I have heard express this intent openly is its Co-Deputy Leader, Ben Habib. So it is not an impossibility that they take this line.
Habib is the real deal, but would need someone with the profile of Farage to meaningfully spread this message.
If the straightjacket of the two-party system can be broken, a genuine political realignment can take place, making the ‘Red Wall’ shift pale in comparison.
You might now be wondering where Alexei Navalny comes into all of this.
We have all heard of ‘tactical voting’, but have you ever heard of ‘smart voting’?
Umnoye golosovaniye was a website set up by Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation that had a single goal: letting people know who to vote for to have the best chance of ousting incumbent United Russia politicians.
Unlike British tactical voting, this was an integrated, mathematical system that had no limits or any other goals, and would advise you to vote for communist, ultranationalist and liberal candidates alike; whoever had the best chance.
Many in the ‘non-systemic opposition’ said it would be impossible to vote out the ruling regime in any case, and that engaging with it by participating in elections would only legitimise it. Yet Navalny argued convincingly that shouting from the side lines alone ultimately changes nothing.
For obvious reasons, success of smart voting was limited in the Russian system, but it is a strategy much better suited to our own system of illusory free elections, which are based on brainwashing and narrative control, as opposed to the more primitive techniques used by the Kremlin.
There, the process of voting itself has to be manipulated to maintain the status quo, with there being a limit to the amount achieved by propaganda alone.
Here in the UK, propaganda is the overriding method of keeping out the non-systemic opposition.
What this means is that our actual electoral system is, compared to the American one at least, largely free from rigging and ballot manipulation.
This provides opportunity to collapse, or at least fracture, what is an all-encompassing regime by using its own structures against it.
The Conservative Party is the weak link in the chain – and it can be broken.
The success of a British smart voting system would depend on how convincingly the argument is made.
If it is made well enough, we could indeed throw the liberal elite into the sea five years from now.
Featured
Nigel Farage is Britain’s unofficial ambassador to the United States
On Saturday, late British time, former President Trump and presumptive nominee to be the Republican candidate for November, survived assassination by mere millimetres. A bullet, fired from an AR-15, aimed at Donald Trump’s head grazed his ear instead, thanks to an unbelievably lucky turn of the head as Trump looked at the graph on immigration statistics behind him.
A shooter on the roof of a nearby building, missed through a toxic combination of incompetence and lack of coordination between security forces, shot at the former President several times before being taken down by the security forces. The forces who, it has come to light, had the shooter in their sites for several minutes before he began shooting. Arguments have erupted over whether the threat should have been neutralised sooner, or by who, but in reality he should never have gotten that close. The entire security service should hang its head in shame.
While the world rushed to condemn – or, in the particularly nasty and degenerate corners of the internet, celebrate – the 20-year old shooter, the leader of the Reform party and newly-sworn in MP for Clacton, Nigel Farage, announced that he would imminently be travelling to the US to visit his friend and fellow traveller on the populist right, to lend his support.
The necessity of this move can be debated. Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer has already rung Trump and offered his wishes, and the 78 year old Republican is already out and about, back on the campaign trail and preparing for the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee this week. This is without even mentioning the fact that, after being shot, Trump got back to his feet, raised his fist in defiance and chanted “fight!”
Some rushed to decry Farage’s decision, pointing to his responsibility as an MP, and no doubt using this as an example of his unprofessionalism and self-aggrandisement. Others said that there is no real need, and Farage should focus on issues closer to home, especially as the King’s Speech is on Wednesday – though Farage did say he would not go before the speech.
Such reactions ignore the humanity of this situation. A man nearly lost his life, and while Farage’s medical credentials are certainly questionable in this instance, the value of having a friend speak to you and visit you after such a shocking moment can be invaluable. And while there is a world of difference between the projectiles, Farage is almost certainly fearful that one day a milkshake might be something closer to what Trump faced. Never forget that Andy Ngo once had to attend the ER in America after a milkshake thrown over him was found to have concrete mixed in.
Moreover, Farage was more than likely going to attend the RNC in Milwaukee this week anyway; this simply makes his visit more personal.
Yet, whether you agree with his politics or not, Farage’s very close relationship with the once-and-probably-future President of the most powerful nation in the world should not be sniffed at. Farage, like him or not, is going to be an asset should Trump return to the White House in January 2025 – a prospect that, more than ever, seems likely.
Rather than criticising Farage for making a decision which, it must be remembered, is entirely his prerogative – senior Conservatives visited America during the election campaign, and Lisa Nandy was in Germany for the Euros final this weekend, and rightly so – the British government should recognise Farage’s value in the special relationship.
This is not even to mention the fact that many populist parties in Europe look to the architect of Brexit with great admiration, Nigel Farage’s international profile is greater than some members of the cabinet, and is certainly more amenable to some foreign political parties.
Nigel Farage’s role in the coming parliament is likely to be one of unofficial ambassador – to the United States, certainly, and more than likely many other nations. It would be a mistake to undervalue and underestimate that.
The Path of Reconstruction
As every British conservative writer, pundit, and academic will tell you, Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli once said:
“The Conservative Party is a national party, or it is nothing.”
How right he was! Having ceased to be a national party in both respects, dispensing with any meaningful concept of the nation and placing all its chips on a concentrated slither of the Grey Vote – a demographic which it’s managed to alienate after a completely avoidable PR disaster – the party is on track to be reduced to nothing come this year’s general election.
Based on recent polling, the Tories are competing for a distant second with the Liberal Democrats, leading many to suggest 2024 is going to be Britain’s equivalent of Canada’s 1993 federal election, in which a centre-left lawyer secures a majority after the unpopular centre-right government, headed by an unlikeable first-of-their-kind Prime Minister, was decimated by a vote-splitting right-wing populist upstart called Reform.
Given this, it is worth considering the possibility of a Canada ’93-style erosion of the Conservative Party over the next five years and what this will mean for the British right, assuming it’s going to be represented by Reform UK or a different party arising from a merger between the two. After all, by his own admission, Farage isn’t trying to win the general election, stating it won’t determine which party enters government (rest assured, it will be Labour) but will determine which party leads the opposition.
The collapse of the Progressive Conservative Party – Canada’s main centre-right party – coincided with the rise of the Reform Party of Canada (RPC); a right-wing populist party founded in the 1980s and led by Preston Manning. The RPC originated as a pressure movement for advancing the interests of Western Canada, whose inhabitants felt increasingly alienated by the central government, especially as constitutional issues increased in salience. The RPC was particularly suspicious of attempts to grant “distinct society” status to Quebec, believing Canada was a federation of similar and equal provinces united by a set of rights and obligations, rather than an essentially multicultural and bilingual state.
As the RPC sought to become a national party, it was required to expand its appeal and therefore its political platform. The party dispensed with its Western-centric agenda and outright rejected calls within its rank-and-file for Western Canadian independence. In its place, the RPC formulated a platform dedicated to shrinking the size of the central government, lowering taxes, making considerable cuts to government spending, pursuing free trade agreements, supporting Christian social values, promoting direct democracy, and advancing political reform.
After its electoral breakthrough in 1993, the RPC continued to broaden its appeal, softening its positions to attract more moderate-minded voters in Canada’s Eastern provinces. Whilst the 1993 manifesto provided an extensive 56 reasons to vote for the party – over half of which dealt with the party’s core concerns, treating areas outside their remit with scarce detail – the party’s 1997 manifesto condensed its list of policies, softened its position on tax-and-spend, made national unity a top priority, and generally provided more thorough proposals. The party also openly disassociated with views which invited accusations of bigotry, intolerance, extremism but retained a focus on family-oriented social conservatism.
In the 1997 federal election, the RPC would increase its vote share and total number of seats, becoming the largest party in opposition and solidifying itself as the main conservative party in Canada. The party held onto its Western support base and managed to strengthen its influence in the Prairies, but still struggled to find support among moderate Atlantic Canadians, many of whom continued to support the PCP, despite its greatly diminished political influence. For the most part, the RPC was still viewed (and still functioned in many ways) as a regional party, seen by many as the Western equivalent of the Bloc Québécois – a party dedicated to the interests of Quebec and another major winner in the 1993 federal election.
To complicate matters further, the Liberal government of Jean Chrétien pursued greater financial discipline in order to reduce the national deficit. This occurred during a period of “constitutional fatigue” which tail-ended a turbulent period of controversial proposals for reform. As fiscal conservatism and political reform were the RPC’s core concerns, the party often struggled to oppose government policy despite being the largest party in opposition, simultaneously trying to integrate its newfound responsibilities (and privileges) with its populist background.
Concluding it needed to broaden its appeal even more, the RPC merged with several provincial wings of the PCP into a new right-wing party: The Canadian Alliance.
Similar to the RPC, the party continued to adapt its image, refine its positions, and broaden its platform. However, unlike the RPC’s 1997 manifesto, which largely homed-in on the party’s approach to its core issues, the CA’s 2000 manifesto paid greater attention to issues beyond the RPC’s traditional remit, such as international affairs, environmental conservation, and technological change, all whilst carrying over RPC policy on tax-and-spend, decentralization, and family values.
Alas, despite these efforts, the Canadian Alliance (CA) was short-lived, existing for less than half-a-decade, and was widely viewed as the RPC under a different name. The party would place second in the 2000 federal election, increasing its share of the vote and its number of seats as the RPC had done in 1997, but not before playing host to a major change in the Canadian political landscape: the end of Preston Manning’s leadership. For most members, a new party required new management, so the bookish Manning was ousted in favour of the clean-cut (but also gaffe-prone) Stockwell Day, whose outspoken evangelical views often contrasted his own party’s efforts at moderation.
The Canadian right would remain out of power until 2006, in which the newly founded Conservative Party of Canada (CPC), led by Stephen Harper, a former policy advisor to Preston Manning, defeated the incumbent Liberal Party and formed a minority government. Founded in 2003, the CPC was created from a full and official merger of the CA and the PCP. Combining policies and aspects of their intellectual traditions, the merger reinvigorated the centrality of fiscal conservatism in the Canadian centre-right, and united Canada’s once-divided right-leaning voters under one national banner.
Although courting the Christian right, Harper displaced the last remnants of the RPC’s populistic social conservatism to the party’s periphery, entrenching economic liberalism as the backbone of the CPC’s electoral coalition whilst formulating stances on a variety of issues, from immigration to arts and culture, from constitutional reform to public transit, from foreign policy to affordable housing, from international trade to social justice.
As it took roughly five years and two election cycles for the RPC to destroy and absorb the PCP, it’s possible that Farage is banking on achieving something similar. However, what this implies is that Farage intends to oversee the destruction of the Conservative Party, but not the reconstruction of Reform UK – at least, not in a frontline capacity. Once the Conservative Party has been sufficiently diminished, a relatively younger and less controversial candidate will take the reins and transform it into a political force which can continue to fight national elections and possibly form a government; someone to move the party away from ‘negativistic’ anti-establishment populism – primarily acting as a vessel for discontent at the insufficient (if not outright treacherous) nature of recent Conservative Party policy – and fully towards ‘positivistic’ solution-oriented policymaking and coalition-building.
Assuming this is Reform UK’s plan, seeking to replace the Tories after beating them into the ground over the course of a five-year period, Reformers must internalise a major precondition for success; besides, of course, overcoming the perennial task of finding someone who can actually replace Farage when he stands aside.
In admittedly generic terms, just as the RPC/CA had to find support outside of Albertan farmers, Reform UK (or the hypothetical post-merger party) will need to find support outside of its core base of Leave-voting pensioners in East Anglia.
At some point, Britain’s populist right must become accustomed to acknowledging and grappling with issues it instinctively prefers to shy away from and keep light on the details; issues which remain important to much of the electorate and remain relevant to governing: the environment, technological change, the minutiae of economic policy, tangible health and welfare reform, foreign policy and international trade, food and energy security, the prospects of young people, broader concerns regarding economic inequality and social injustice, so on and so forth.
If this sounds similar to the criticism directed at the liberal-left’s aversion to immigration, demographics, traditional culture, and crime in a way that befits public concern and the national interest, that’s because it is.
There are many issues one could use to convey this point, but the environment is undoubtedly the best example. According to regularly updated polling from YouGov, the environment is a priority for roughly 20% of the electorate; only the economy, immigration, and healthcare are classed as more important by the general public, and housing, crime, and national security are considered just as important. Young voters emphasise the environment more than older voters. From the get-go, it’s clear that an environmental policy will be an unavoidable component of any national party and certainly one with a future.
Compare this to Reform UK’s recently released ‘Contract with the People’, which does not possess a subsection dedicated to the environment. Rather, it has a section dedicated to Net Zero and its abolition. On the whole, the subject is dealt with in a negativist manner, merely undoing existing measures, replacing them with nothing, all without reframing the issue at hand. At best, one can find some commitments to tree-planting and cutting down on single-use plastics. As most should have surmised by now, parties can’t afford to be meagre with environmental propositions – go big or go home!
Of course, none of this is surprising. After all, according to Richard Tice, Chairman of Reform UK, concerns about climate change are misguided because the climate has always been changing; it’s a process which can’t be stopped, but it’s OK because carbon dioxide is “plant food” anyway. It’s not happening, and that’s why it’s a good thing.
Indeed, leftists look stupid when they insinuate a similarity between a depoliticised process of post-war mass immigration to the Norman Conquest, so what does the British right have to gain by comparing manmade carbon emissions to the K-Pg extinction event? If not out of strong environmentalist convictions, any force eager to replace the Tories as the primary right-leaning party in Britain must be realise such issues cannot be left untouched – even those issues one might say the Tories have embraced too much or in ways which aren’t in the national interest.
As we look to other right-wing populist upstarts across the Western world, it’s clear that such a realisation is not optional, but a precondition for transforming fringe organisations into national parties.
Consider this in relation to Marine Le Pen’s National Rally, perhaps the most successful party to make such a transition, evidenced by the party’s unprecedented success in the recent EU elections and their gradual but near-total displacement of the Republicans, France’s official centre-right party.
Similar to the RPC, the National Rally’s evolution has involved more than a name change and moderating its less-than-palatable elements. Instead, it has retained its central issues whilst diversifying its platform.
Although Le Pen has undoubtedly been a key driving force behind readjustments to the party’s priorities and image, distancing itself from its origins and so on, much of this process stems from the influence of Jordan Bardella: the party’s young president and the current favourite to become the next Prime Minister of France.
Contrary to suggestions made by Britain’s vibes-oriented commentariat, who attribute Bardella’s relative popularity with young voters and the broader French electorate to the mere act of using TikTok, Bardella has gone to considerable effort in his capacity as president to identify and address issues which are important to voters, not just issues which are important to the National Rally, and incorporate them into the party’s platform; issues other than immigration which similarly influence much of the public, such as the environment, which Bardella views it as one of the three main challenges facing the younger generation (the others being demographic and technological change). Indeed, a far-throw from the perpetual handwringing over young, know-nothing eco-zealots which homogenises right-leaning boiler room commentary in Britain.
“France, no matter what they say, is the cleanest country in the world. But it is up to us to do even better.”
– Jordan Bardella (@jordanbardella on TikTok)
Going beyond criticism of existing policies, which is often connected to the party’s support for French farmers and poorer voters in provincial areas, Bardella encourages the party to take up the environmentalist mantle and formulate solutions in step with its own intellectual history:
“Our political family would be making a big mistake if it behaved as blindly on the environmental issue as the left has done on immigration for the past 30 years. We can no longer afford to deny it.”
– Jordan Bardella, Interview with Valeurs Actuelles (24/11/22)
Along with this readjusted approach, Bardella has also made very specific appointments in his capacity as president, such as promoting ideas put forward by Hervé Juvin, MEP and former ecological advisor, and appointing Pierre-Romain Thionnet as director of the National Rally’s youth movement, briefly described in Le Monde as:
“…a reader of the late Catholic integral environmental journal Limite and quotes the English philosopher Sir Roger Scruton…”
The National Rally typically views climate change through its longstanding endeavour of protectionism, noting free trade results in offshoring the sources of pollution, rather than getting rid of them altogether. As such, not only does France relinquish its industrial capabilities, it pushes pollution beyond its political control; offshoring depoliticises pollution, a process which is worsened by the logistical chains required to ship products made on the other side of the world, nevermind in other localities of the same country or continent.
To his credit, Farage has hinted on some occasions at something similar in the form of reshoring emissions, and whilst this is a step in the right direction, it remains an underdeveloped afterthought in Britain’s right-wing, which (in the words of Dominic Cummings) remains mired in the “SW1 pro/anti Net Zero spectrum.”
At the same time, the National Rally engages in more universally recognised forms of environmentalism which aren’t predicated on immigration restriction, euroscepticism, or protectionism, especially at the level of local government; from tree-planting campaigns to ‘eco-grazing’ to installing LED lightbulbs.
“People feel that we have to get out of the fact that there’s only the issue of immigration.”
Hervé Juvin, as quoted in The New York Times
As a result, the National Rally maintains a monopoly on its bread-and-butter issues and claims ownership of issues which are not traditionally associated with the French right. Consequently, the French centre and left struggle to maintain control of the narrative surrounding their own key issues and remain stubbornly averse to the concerns of voters living outside the Parisian bubble.
Returning to the British political landscape, Reform UK can most likely afford to hammer its wedge issue of immigration into the Tories’ base at this election, possibly felling the party’s influence once and for all. However, as 2024 fades into the rear-view mirror, it will need to grow something in its place. The gains which once felt exhilarating will begin to flatline and seem anaemic if the party doesn’t aggressively pursue diversification (not the tokenistic kind, mind you). As the reality of living in a Labour-dominated one-party state sets in, many will begin to resent Reform UK unless it makes a concerted effort to adapt; the initial collapse of the right’s remit into the concentrated set issues it sought to politicise must be expanded as the issues which gave birth to its populist phase are moved from the periphery to the centre, and from thereon out, integrated alongside others to ensure their long-term electoral viability.
If it succeeds, it or it’s successor may very well replace the Tories as the main party of the centre-right. If it does not, the election and its aftermath is unlikely to follow the course of Canada 1993 or anything resembling it; the Tory Party may very well make a resurgence comparable to Labour’s post-2019 comeback. Nobody can afford to botch a murder, least of all in politics. Reform UK can’t stop at knocking the Tories down and it can’t be content with knocking the Tories out; it needs to smother the party to death with its own handkerchief and raid its carcass, pocketing both its right-wing and centre-right voters, even those who don’t have immigration as their number one priority and then-some.
At the same time, it needs to stay true to the promise of a nationalist approach to immigration, law-making, culture, and identity; at least, if it wants to avoid the same fate as the Conservative Party.
As various groups eye-up the collapse of the Conservative Party, looking for a chance to muscle-in and establish themselves as the dominant tendency of the right, it’s imperative that nation-first conservatism comes out on top. This will be particularly important as (unlike Manning, who wrote an entire book explaining his ideology) the specifics of Farage’s politics remain more ambigious than many would suspect; it’s entirely reasonable to suspect factions will claim him as their forebearer and themselves as his pure and true successors.
In my view, the right-wing cannot encumber itself with regurgitations of its past, whether it’s a form of neo-Thatcherism, which subordinates and uses socionational issues to reinforce a revealed priority for technical refinement and economic liberalisation, a misguided rehash of Cameronite centrism, which scarcely thinks about such matters in a conservative manner at all, or citizenist post-liberal projects, the artificial soldarities of which are unravelling in real-time. The right has already squandered one revolution, best not to squander another.
Of course, all of this is easier said than done, but it’s OK… Nothing Happens!
Relatability and Envy
At the Sky News Q&A, both Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer were asked to reveal something about themselves that would show the real them. Starmer was also accused of being a robot by a voter. Sunak waffled on about his love of sugary food. Starmer basically went on autopilot.
Did it work? No. Both just looked stupid.
It was an unfortunate question really. The problem is that politicians have become obsessed with being relatable. They’ll shed their political image like a snake in order to win a few votes. It can be talking about TV shows, playing sports or just mentioning something from popular culture. They have to look like they’re one of us.
It also ties in with a politics of envy. A number of politicians who are wealthy or come from good families play down their backgrounds or hide from it. The idea that someone from a privileged background can reach the level that they do without envy or scorn is somehow unrealistic in today’s society.
It’s All About the PR
For decades, politics has been a PR game. Who would you have a drink with? Who seems nicest? Who has the best family values? Who is funniest? Policies are put aside in favour of a good photo op and a one-liner that does the rounds on social media.
We’ve seen that in this election, particularly from Sir Ed Davey. He’s had fun going paddle boarding and riding roller coasters. There is no substancing in his messaging, despite the fact that he could make gains from the two major parties collapsing. Whilst the Lib Dems do have a manifesto and probably actual policies, it’s overshadowed by Davey’s antics.
It’s not new either. Even Margaret Thatcher was not immune to it. Aides had her hold a calf for photographers, the poor thing died not long later. David Cameron hugged huskies in snow. Neil Kinnock walked down the beach with his wife. Tony Blair met with Noel Gallagher. Everyone has a gimmick.
The problem is that it is clearly not authentic. Margaret Thatcher wasn’t an animal cuddler. David Cameron isn’t a fan of huskies. Neil Kinnock probably doesn’t do long walks on the beach. Tony Blair doesn’t listen to Oasis. Voters don’t want to see their politicians being hip and cool. They want to see them tackling the issues that we elect them to do.
We all know that the Prime Minister has a job to do. They oversee wars, economic crises, terrorist attacks and natural disasters among other things. The real test of a PM is their response to said issues. Nobody cares about what their favourite book or TV show is when such issues arise. Interviewers often like to throw in a soft question, just like a backbench Member of Parliament mentions a new animal sanctuary in their constituency. It just doesn’t fit.
It also assumes that every politician is one of us. Who cares if they don’t watch much TV? Who cares if they speak Latin or Greek? Boris Johnson, a man with a great love of the classics, would often recite Ancient Greek, but he also showed an affability and relaxed nature that hid this. Meanwhile, David Cameron struggled to look authentic when he wanted to ‘hug a hoodie.’ One lasted six years in office, the other three.
Rich or Poor?
This brings me nicely to my next point. Our nation, or at least the media, seems to not particularly like politicians being open about their privilege. If a politician came from a wealthy family or went to a private school, they are expected to flex their working class credentials.
Take Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer. Sunak is the son-in-law of a billionaire and wears very expensive items, and is thus wealthy. When asked about this, he points to the fact that his father was a GP and his mother a pharmacist, two respectable middle class professions. Starmer waxes lyrical about the fact that his father was a toolmaker (cue laughter) and his mother a nurse. What he fails to mention is that his father apparently owned the factory and he attended a private school, though through a bursary.
David Cameron suffered from a similar image problem, as did Boris Johnson in some quarters. Meanwhile, Margaret Thatcher was proud of being a grocer’s daughter and John Major left school at sixteen. Clement Attlee came from a comfortable background, attending a private school and Oxford. James Callaghan came from a working class family and did not attend university. Each of them have varied reputations as politicians.
Contrast this with that of America. Whilst Americans love the idea of the American Dream and pulling yourself up by the bootstraps, they also don’t care as much about class, whether upper or lower. Donald Trump has not once hid that he’s from a rich family, and yet he does not see shame from voters over this.
I frankly do not care if a politician came from a northern council estate like Angela Rayner or was the grandson of a duke like Winston Churchill. I don’t care if they went to a comprehensive or Eton, just as I don’t begrudge a parent for wanting to send their child to a grammar or private school. If they can afford private healthcare, then good for them.
If a politician from a comfortable background is asked about this, they should not downplay it. Instead, they should simply say that their parents worked hard and that they want all people to have the same opportunity.
That is not to say that I think the country would be a perfect place if every MP went to Eton and Oxford. I don’t think it would be perfect if every MP went to a normal school and didn’t go to university. We’ve had good politicians from all backgrounds, and we’ve had bad politicians from all backgrounds.
It does not serve us well to be envious of the rich, or assume that all working class people are good ol’ folk. We should not be desperate for a politician to be a big fan of Game of Thrones or like the same sweets as we do. Politicians should not pretend to be something they are not. I’m not voting for a person’s school or their favourite beverage. I’m voting for who I think has the best ideas.
Which, to be frank, seems to be none of them. Hey, at least I know that Rishi Sunak loves Haribo.
The Impossible as Motivation
“I’m a pessimist because of intelligence, but an optimist because of will.”
– Antonio Gramsci
Like all disaffected individuals who supported the Conservatives in 2019, I too find solace in the work of a certain Italian Marxist philosopher and his insights. The simplicity of that quote often speaks to a dormant impulse in the human condition, the belief that things really can change; that, when everything is said and done, we will win. We must, as President Trump once said: “…treat the word ‘impossible’ as motivation.”
In the history of Great Britain, this nation has faced many challenges and many dark days. Those dark days still lay ahead, for that can be assured. Those obstacles within our national politics seem numerous: civil servants, fifth columnists, various media establishments and even entire political parties which claim to represent the interests of the country. Out of this election, it is plain as day. Labour will win, through sheer dullness and the fact that Sunak has clearly given up and not even attempted to try during this race for his own premiership. The reason why people do not like Sunak is because, at his core, he represents ultimately why people do not like Conservatives or politicians in general. They are mostly losers who want to be liked and be seen as important by others; they want to be winner but have never fought truly for anything in their lives. It is for this reason, they are not worthy of any votes or seats. It is not because they have fought and failed, it is that they have never even tried or put up a fight.
From this, the only cure that needs to be given is that of Zero Votes and Zero Seats. Vote Reform now, Cummings later. This can be summarised as voting Reform now to give the Conservatives zero seats, thus ending them (at least, as much as possible) as a political force within Great Britain. Out of this, we should unite around a different right-wing party, one that genuinely seeks to change the direction of the country and prepared to ask and answer the questions that matter. Why are we having these problems? Why are people struggling to buy a house? Why is this country declining?
Following on from this, it is clear that Farage is here to stay and can become a massive nuisance for the administrative state, the state that is allergic to change and remains prestige-orientated. As such, Farage is not the man who will do these things; he is a media personality, not someone who is interested in the nitty gritty of continuing (starting with Brexit) a decade-long (if not century-long) process of fixing the foundational issues of this country. Farage is an Einstein in an Oppenheimer world, it would seem.
Farage understands the need for generating a new excitement around a political issue, he understands that nothing is impossible, even that the mere usage of the word should be taken as motivation. Indeed, his lifelong struggle to get Britain to leave the EU is one such endeavour which, even at the best of times, felt like an ultimately impossible task until it wasn’t. This is not dissimilar to Trump, a figure who isn’t sensitive to the nuance of details, but fundamentally understands the broad picture, why things needs to change, and how to go about doing it.
As such, one hopes that if Reform becomes akin to UKIP, they can become a political force that asks the big questions that the majority of the population want asked. Additionally, Reform should be able to shift the Overton window on a series of issues, bringing them to the forefront of politics from outside of the mainstream political parties. These should range from immigration, the economy, the housing crisis, and the need to dismantle the administrative state.
This being said, like UKIP and the Brexit Party before, when Reform has kicked through the door, it should again vanish. By the end of the decade, Reform should be as important as UKIP is in 2024. Reform should not be here to stay in the long term. Now that it seems possible that Reform will replace the Conservatives, just as the Labour replaced the Liberals throughout the 1920s, allowing them to fully turn their guns on Labour, exposing them as being no better. Of course, Labour is not up to the task of governing and will almost certainly do damage to Britain. Given that Starmer is a wet lettuce of a man, unlikely to last long in post, they’ll have plenty of material to work with.
From this, Reform can generate space for something to be built for the 21st Century, something with real long term vision and purpose. Insert “assorted weirdos” reference here. Indeed, it is rather fitting that the two individuals that are attempting to offer real alternatives to the current issues facing this country are the same two which brought Brexit home (twice if you count the 2019 general election). Now we could realistically see this occur again. Farage’s media personality pushing the core issues into the forefront of British political life, while Cummings dominates the nitty gritty of how to get from ‘A’ to ‘B’ and securing the real victories. Additionally, both men want the complete destruction of the gate keeping Conservatives and are radically anti-establishment and Westminster, something the vast majority of the electorate share.
Although Cummings has modelled his work on Singapore’s People’s Action Party (I would encourage all to read ‘From Third World to First: The Singapore Story: 1965-2000’), and its stewardship under Lee Kuan Yew, it is another Southeast Asian leader that he should also look at too. Ho Chi Minh (hear me out), and his leadership of North Vietnam, can be summarised as that of revolutionary self-belief and determination. The clinical and principled nature of Singapore, combined with the zealous optimism of Vietnam, would propel the country back into a forward-thinking, functioning 21st Century nation state. It should be hoped that, when Cumming’s Party is ready and the door has been blown open by Farage’s Reform, it too should move into place. A tech-focused, big tent, anti-establishment party that seeks to radically fix the core issues within the country. Radically reduce immigration, tackle the wealth disparity and tax avoidance, and dismantle the permanent administrative state.
In conclusion, Politics is Never Over. Things have returned to being interesting – we could witness another realignment in our national discourse. This should be motivating for people like Farage and Cummings. We can smell blood right now on both Starmer and Sunak, so we must take this chance to end the declinist duopoly once and for all, and scramble to build something in its place thereafter. As Farage stated in a mere four words: “We’re just getting started.”
The Century of Steel
Imagine a world in which there is no central structure, imagine a world where both the United States and China have fallen from a state of global hegemony to struggling to maintain any internal resemblance of order. This could occur independently of the other nation’s collapse or in tandem with it. What would the world look like? Would another world order emerge or would complete anarchy befall the world writ large? If there isn’t the time or conditions for another unipolar nation to fill this void, in part or in full, we must look for a more divided and unstable world structure. This core concept can be understood as non-polarity, where states cannot order themselves according to any traditional structure. Out of this concept, we could be entering a world of widespread turmoil and interstate violence. This can be understood as the Century of Steel (CoS), a term to help describe and articulate what we could be going through.
In order to understand the CoS, we first must look at Italian politics in the postwar years. The Years of Lead refers to a period of widespread social and political instability and violence in Italy. This period saw terrorism and assassinations become normalised from the 1960s to 1980s, the outcome of which saw government forces triumph and various far-right and far-left organisations disbanded. Notable and symbolic examples of this period include the Bologna Bombing in 1980 and the assassination of former Italian prime minister Aldo Moro. A lengthy explanation of this period can be found here.
Now, imagine a globalised version of the Italian Years of Lead taking place through a deglobalising world. Widespread interstate turmoil across nearly all regions of the world could occur. Following this, in the wake of the Coronavirus pandemic, we have seen the rise of old tensions occur once more from across the Eurasian Steppe and the Middle East. From the ‘Special Military Operation’ in Ukraine to the thinning of the Palestinian herd by Israel. The outcomes of this will look like Russia beating Ukraine, with them annexing half the country, followed by Israel becoming a pariah within the Middle East again, ending decades of peace efforts. With the collapse of the current ‘rules-based’ world order and the potential joint collapse of both major superpowers in the not-so-distant future, another avenue of what could happen needs to be explored.
One of the most underrated academics currently working is that of Yi Fuxian, who has contributed considerably to the topic of demography, especially within the context of the Asia-Pacific. In a recent Diplomat article, Yi argued that any conflict will only exacerbate the ongoing demographic issues between the aforementioned warring nations. As noted with the ongoing Russo-Ukrainian War, both nations have seen their respective fertility rates drop substantially. Likewise, if war were to break out between China and Taiwan (both nations are in considerably worse demographic situations), this would have disastrous consequences for both nations, regardless of the outcome of the conflict.
“If a Taiwan war breaks out, it will hasten these trends, leading to global instability and even the collapse of the U.S.-led world order… Time is not on the side of China or Taiwan, nor on the side of the United States. The three parties need to show sufficient wisdom and courage to achieve permanent peace across the Taiwan Strait – and avoid dropping off a demographic cliff.”
-Yi Fuxian, The Demographic Costs of a War Over Taiwan, The Diplomat (10/04/2024)
With most of the world now residing in a ‘post-fertile’ world, being below replacement level, there are fewer ‘new’ people entering into this increasingly conflictual world. What a lot of nations have now in terms of manpower is all they will have for many years to come, and when it goes, it goes. If you choose to spend it on conflict, you must accept the fact you will most likely not have anyone to replace them, creating various problems down the line. Moreover, the potential conflicts will only further perpetuate the conditions that caused states to fall into such a demographic rut in the first place.
If we are indeed becoming truly deglobalised, we could see the emergence of a new epoch. Just as the Cold War defined much of the 20th Century, the CoS may define much of the 21st. A ‘century’ of no centralised control being exerted within the world, incapable of regulating and mediating beyond a very narrow and constricted sphere of influence. This will only compound the ongoing issues being faced across the planet. We are entering very dangerous and complex times ahead for every single individual in the world and more conflicts will most likely arise in the following years as a result.
A Brief History of US Student Politics
‘Hey, hey LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?’
These chants outside of the White House haunted Lyndon B. Johnson throughout his presidency. He would sit in the Oval Office with his head in his hands as the chants wafted through the walls. When his son-in-law Charles Robb sent in a tape from Vietnam, Johnson buckled against the table and looked as though he was in tears. For the loud Southern Jackson, who took great pleasure in towering over and intimidating others, this seemed like quite a big deal.
This is not about Johnson, however. This is about the students who protested him and the Vietnam War. This is about the students who protest now and any time.
An American Education
Harvard University was founded in 1636 and is classed by many as the oldest institute of higher education in the United States. Throughout history, the Ivy League colleges (Harvard, Yale, University of Pennsylvania, Princeton, Columbia, Brown, Dartmouth and Cornell) have been considered the most elite, though others have made quite the showing. Between them, the Ivy League colleges have educated fifteen US presidents. They’ve also educated many Supreme Court Justices, Governors and members of Congress.
Throughout early American history, the Ivy League and other elite colleges were almost exclusively for white, wealthy men. Colleges for women did exist, such as the female equivalent of the Ivies, the Seven Sisters, though they came far later. Colleges for African-Americans also came later, such as Howard and Tuskegee.
Cornell began to accept women in 1870, but it took until 1983 for all of them to admit women, with Columbia being the last.
Minority men were able to attend earlier and more frequently, with Yale being the last to accept black students in 1964.
Despite more diversity in terms of the student body, Ivy League colleges see students of the wealthy 1% overrepresented. One in six Ivy students have parents from the top 1%, and they are 34% more likely to be accepted than students with the same scores but from less wealthy backgrounds. The children of these parents are also more than twice as likely to attend elite universities- the Ivies, Stanford, MIT, Duke and Chicago.
The Times They Are A-Changin’
Whilst protests and activism were not unknown prior, the 1960s saw an explosion in it.
The decade was one of great social change, perhaps the greatest since the 1860s. Firstly, there was more of a focus on youth. TV, radio and movies began to cater to teenagers. Bands like the wholesome Beach Boys and sassy Beatles saw teenage screaming along. As incomes expanded, college enrollment doubled between 1945 and 1960, doubling once again by 1970.
There was also less social and cultural hegemony than before, something that Richard Nixon and his Silent Majority sought to exploit. The Civil Rights movement was at an apex as students sat at segregated café counters and took integrated buses to register African-American voters in the Deep South. Second-wave feminism saw women demand access to birth control, abortion and equality in the workplace. As students moved away from their generally conservative homes, many became embroiled in a more progressive political atmosphere.
Perhaps most impactful in terms of lives was the Vietnam War. Action in the Asian nation had significantly escalated, particularly after the Gulf of Tonkin incident in 1964.
Students in particular were opposed to the draft. College students could receive deferments, but they were in the target conscription demographic of being young and healthy and unmarried, though the marriage deferment ended in summer 1965. One of the most notable forms of protests saw students burning their draft cards.
They were also active in the protest movement as a whole. College campuses became hotbeds of political activity. Students also joined protests and demonstrations.
There were varied reasons as to why students in particular were opposed to the war. Some echoed the popular sentiment of many that it was war thousands of miles away that did not have anything to do with America. Others believed that American soldiers were killing innocent civilians. Some thought that the money would be better spent elsewhere or that war in general was wrong.
One college that became a centre of counterculture politics was UC Berkeley. The California university became a hub of activism and protests regarding Civil Rights, free speech and Vietnam.
Most of the decade saw passionate but peaceful protests in the area, but this changed. In April 1969, students at Berkeley set up an informal encampment in People’s Park, scuppering a plan to turn it into a public space. On the 15th May 1969, police arrived to turf the squatters out. This, combined with a nearby college protest, saw around 6,000 people turn out at the park. The police eventually opened fire, killing San Jose resident James Rector as he watched from the roof. Many others were injured; one man was blinded. California Governor Ronald Reagan called in the California National Guard.
There had been a notable protest at New York’s Columbia University a year before. Black student protestors had asked white protestors to protest separately, which they did, segregating it on racial lines. Some of the students occupied the administrative Hamilton Hall, holding Acting Dean Henry S. Coleman hostage.
In another protest that year, students at Morehouse in Atlanta held the board of trustees. One of those students was a young Samuel L. Jackson.
Sixties Assassinations
Adding to the students’ cynicism were the assassinations of four famous men, all of whom were generally admired by students.
The first was John F. Kennedy in November 1963. Kennedy had been a proponent of college education and had been a point of fascination for young people, mainly due to his relative youth compared to other politicians.
The second was Malcolm X, the firebrand minister for the Nation of Islam and advocate of civil rights. He was slain in February 1965.
The third was Martin Luther King Jr, the well-known minister who advocated for civil rights via peaceful means. He was killed in April 1968.
The fourth and final one was Robert Kennedy in June 1968. He had entered the Democratic race for president as an anti-war and liberal alternative to unpopular incumbent Lyndon B. Johnson.
Death At Kent State
One of the most tragic events of the student protest movement came in May 1970.
The Sixties was over and new president Richard Nixon had promised law and order. Meanwhile, America was expanding military operations in Vietnam by entering neighbouring Cambodia. This caused immediate controversy in the anti-war movement. Several hundred students at Kent State in Ohio were protesting this. Residents and police officers had been concerned about potential repercussions in the community, and the Ohio National Guard was called.
The National Guard attempted to disperse the crowd through tear gas and other means, but this failed. Protestors began to throw rocks and other projectiles at them before being herded away. Near a hill, some of the officers started to open fire. Four students- two men and two women- were killed. Nine others were wounded, one of whom was permanently paralysed.
Images of the event, including the famous picture of a horrified teenager standing over one of the bodies, caused even more riots and protests across the nation. 100,000 people marched on Washington a few days later, leading to Richard Nixon famously talking to protestors in the middle of the night at the Lincoln Memorial.
Post-Sixties
Whilst the chaos of the 1960s gave way to a relatively more peaceful 20th century, activism and protests still remained. College Democrats and College Republicans have both been popular hubs for the partisan-minded students. Politicians regularly attend speeches and rallies, especially when they’re supported by the students.
As a rule, colleges tend to be on the left of the spectrum, in both faculty and students. Exceptions to this tend to be religious institutions like Bob Jones and Liberty University.
Issues that have arisen include the Iraq War, climate change, school shootings, race, gender, sexual assault and rape and military engagement in general.
The Current Protests
On the 7th October 2023, Israel was surprised by an attack by Hamas. People were murdered, missiles were fired and civilians taken hostage. In response, Israel had gone all out on Hamas. As a result, there have been numerous deaths and injuries in Palestine. Many people have been made homeless or have needed to evacuate from their homes. Some have flooded into neighbouring Egypt. Neither Palestine or Israel are safe.
Sympathy for the deaths of innocents have been widespread, but there is a huge difference in opinion regarding Israel. Protests have happened in major cities across the world, with the pro-Palestine side occupying most of that space. London for example has seen weekly protests since October.
The issue has become a massive one in America. Historically, the American government has been a strong supporter of Israel. Joe Biden has given assistance to Israel, but seems to want incumbent Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu out. Internally, there is debate amongst the legislative branch. Pro-Palestine and anti-interventionist politicians have come together to stop aid to Israel. Others wish to help it more.
It’s also been dynamite for college campuses. Coast to coast, north to south, university students have been protesting non-stop since October. The Ivy League colleges have been the centre of the protests, but other elite and notable colleges such as Stanford, Berkeley, Northeastern, NYU, Ohio State, and Emerson have seen student activism.
Students have been calling for an immediate ceasefire in the area. Regarding their own colleges, they ask for the institutions to break all ties to Israel, especially regarding financial gifts.
The protests themselves have been controversial. The shouting of ‘from the river to the sea’ is seen as a call to action against Jews, as well as the calling of a global intifada. Flickers of anti-semitism have allegedly been seen in these protests, despite the bulk of participants proclaiming they oppose Zionism, not Jews. Some Jewish students have participated in the protests, whilst others feel unsafe. Classes have been called off and students have been forced to study online.
Encampments have been put up on several campuses. Some have been cleared by police whilst others remain. These encampments are made up of tents, donated food and other communal activities, all of which are subject to rules. Whilst the protests remain mainly about Israel and Palestine, they tend to bend towards anti-capitalism and progressive ideology.
New York’s Columbia University has been the establishment most in the news. On the 17th April, a number of Columbia students started an encampment. Whilst the encampment was torn down by police the next day, it was rebuilt and protests continue. Students report difficulty getting to class. Arrests and suspensions have also been made.
Student Kyhmani James became the subject of media attention following comments regarding the murder of Zionists. He filmed a video of himself talking to the administration in an attempt to get his views across. Unfortunately for Mr. James, he has been kicked out of Columbia.
The Response
America’s 1st Amendment is very strict on the freedom of speech and assembly. That being said, law enforcement and university officials are more than a little tired of it. Students have been arrested, suspended and even expelled. Three college presidents have sat before Congress- Mary Magill of UPenn, Sally Kornbluth of MIT and Claudia Gay of Harvard. Magill resigned in December 2023, and Gay followed in January 2024 after a plagiarism scandal.
Some presidents have been tough. The University of Florida sent out a very clear letter to protestors telling them which behaviour was appropriate and what would get them kicked out. Florida State turned on the sprinklers. Northeastern University got the police to clear the encampment, saying that the use of ‘Kill the Jews’ crossed the line. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis promised to expel any protestors who joined mobs. Even Columbia, the home of the most infamous protests, allowed the police in to tear down the encampment.
It doesn’t look like this is going to go away anytime soon. What some call a win for free speech is what others call going ‘too far’. As parents look away from the Ivy League to less elite but still reputable universities, one wonders if it’s a case of rich kids with too much time on their hands and no problems of their own. Is it that or a genuine example of solidarity with Palestine? Whatever the case, America’s campuses remain on metaphorical fire.
Can Britain do business with Taliban-led Afghanistan?
I can’t say I’ve ever hosted the Taliban, although if presented with the opportunity, the Worshipful Company of Brewers wouldn’t have been my initial choice of venue.
This irony wasn’t lost on Daniel Evans, frontier markets and technology investor, co-founder of the Gibraltar Stock Exchange Group, and Chairman of the newly-founded Afghanistan Advisory Council (AAC).
Evans joked the venue would allow him to lay claim to successfully organising a piss-up in a brewery, although it must be said the event wasn’t a piss-up at all – partially because the drinks were appropriately alcohol free, but mainly because the foundation of the AAC marks the first actual step at rapprochement with Afghanistan since the Taliban’s return to power in August 2021.
All-in-all, a pretty serious affair. Serious enough to receive a written endorsement from Nooruddin Azizi, Afghanistan’s Minister of Industry and Commerce:
The launch was attended by businessmen from a variety of interested parties; railway construction, petrochemicals, international finance, and so on. Michael Mainelli, current President of the London Chamber of Commerce and Industry and former Lord Mayor of the City of London was among those present, as well as Miles ‘Lord Miles’ Routledge, adventurer-turned-YouTuber-turned-junior member of the AAC.
Among other ambitions for a hospital, a hotel, a logistics centre, and a railway terminus, the AAC’s flagship proposal of a Special Economic Zone (SEZ), set to be attached to Kabul airport, has won the backing of Mohammad and Zahid Asif, Owner and Managing Director of Walid Titan Ltd respectively, who are providing the land for the zone.
The precise details of the SEZ have yet to be fleshed out, although it’s clear that the AAC is looking to Dubai’s International Finance Centre (IFC) as a model; a demarcated zone where the norms and customs of international commerce prevail, and regulations are to be drawn up on the advice of the AAC.
The SEZ is one of several projects set to be funded by a new National Growth Fund, which will provide resources to develop a diverse range of industries and projects, such as a far-reaching hospital construction programme. One of the hospital centres will be located in the SEZ. The AAC has been given the mandate to advise the creation of the fund.
One might ask why the Taliban would allow any of this. If one reads between the lines, the SEZ would allow what are essentially Western standards of conduct to take root in an otherwise Islamic theocratic state. Sure, it’s not exactly going to be Amsterdam but it’s hard to square such a proposal with the totalising ‘Islamofascist’ caliphate prophesised by thought leaders of the dilapidated pantheon of liberal-humanitarian interventionism.
The simple but surprising reality of the matter is the Afghans seriously want to get down to business. In fact, it’s becoming clear the Taliban are more eager to do business with the British than vice versa, and not without valid reason. They’re highly suspicious of the Americans, their opinion of the Russians isn’t much better, relations with Pakistan have massively deteriorated within the past year alone, and China and Iran look more like regional threats than potential allies.
As bizarre as it sounds, the Taliban’s view of the British continues to be informed by the Empire, which they regard in a similar manner to how many of us Moderns regard the Roman Empire; that is, as a milestone in human achievement. The British are viewed less as hated enemies and more as honourable and accomplished adversaries. If that’s not soft power, I don’t know what is!
As one would expect, the Afghans have zero appetite to be controlled by a foreign power, but they’re not completely isolationist; they’re quite happy to enlist the help of foreigners with the know-how required to stabilise their war-battered economy, having endured invasions from the USSR and the US-led coalition, ongoing skirmishes with groups like ISIS-K, and incoming Pashtun refugees from neighbouring Pakistan.
It’s a matter of political ideology whether it’s preferable to live in a less-developed but comparatively liberal country over a more-developed but comparatively illiberal one, but – as a general rule of thumb – it’s better to have functioning railways, roads, and hospitals than to not have them at all. Some things aren’t exactly ideological touchstones. Is it really so polarising to believe that Afghanistan should have a reliable supply of currency, rather than making do with sheets of borderline dust held together with glue and tape?
Beneath debates on the political and religious destiny of Afghanistan lies an economy which needs to be run regardless, and the AAC hasn’t so much muscled into this gap, but waltzed into it; partially because the organisation seems to be ahead of the curve on this issue, but also because its founding members felt they had nothing better to do.
On his release from jail in October 2023, having been arrested for not having his papers in order, Routledge – who described the experience as “the best networking opportunity I’ve ever had” – received an email from Evans with the subject line “Bored/gold mine lol” – a proposal which snowballed into setting up a full-on, nation-wide development fund with the blessing of the Afghan government.
Overall, the AAC is filling the vacuum left by a regime that doesn’t know what to do with Afghanistan. One suspects it’s pretty hard to see a path forward with that much egg on your face!
For the past two decades, Britain’s political system has stuck to the same playbook; a hodgepodge strategy of attempting to nag and bomb Afghanistan into becoming a liberal democracy with little-to-no regard for local idiosyncrasies and so forth.
Indeed, no country is a blank slate and Afghanistan is no exception, but more than an investment opportunity – that itself is laden with several obvious benefits; Afghanistan is rich with natural minerals – but a real chance to rehearse discombobulated statesmen and commentators in the virtues and practices which factor into good nation-building; which I cannot help but feel is the spiritual mission of the AAC, even if not said so outright.
Keir Starmer, take notes!
Photo Credit.