To John,
06.01.2026
I have no inclination to write on Farage and Trump in a formal way, in something like an essay, at this time. The time is not right for me to do so. I have rarely commented at length on them, ever. It sometimes seems beneath me to make comments about living people. Only after mature consideration does it seem right to make any judgement. But I can explain a couple of things, as a series of short notes.
I hope that thereby, I can also explain, with an attempt at theoretical depth and principle, why what you might call ‘the Right’, so much admires Farage and Trump. The Right are the people of our nation, or any other nation, who look after the survival of the strongest, who ensure the continuity of the tribe. That’s not an instinct of all humanity, of course; by and large, the continuity of the nation as a long term project is not of much interest to perhaps half of any nation. That’s why, rather humorously, airlines have to repeatedly tell passengers, that you must put on your own oxygen mask, before you can successfully attend to the mask of other people. For, in the chaos of life, and especially at times of ease and peace, priorities get forgotten, and the basic rules of life are treated with indifference.
The instincts of the Right should always take priority over those of the Left, at the most basic level. For, it does not really matter much, what or who is elected, and what their good intentions and visions might be, if a foreign enemy can abduct or put military pressure on the government. This is a basic principle which was well known after the war, and yet, in every succeeding decade, the effects of Right wing thinking have been reduced and educated out of the British people at the ruling elite level. A rough but reliable indication of this should be seen in share of GDP devoted to our military force; but there are other indications of a more worrying kind, such as the share of the population taken up by foreigners, particularly young ones. A Left wing nation usually undoes the knots and braces which gave rise to politics in the first place; and this is why there must always be a Right wing party, too; either in opposition, or in government.
But the concept of the Right and Left, as distinct parts of a body politic, is the first problem. I had almost begun to write out, that you, John, are self-confessedly of The Left, and that I am confessedly of The Right. But before that, this distinction needs some clarification. I have been both sides in my life, and it now looks to me, if we’re going to be using these terms, proper to explain how it comes about, that there is a such a division.
It seems to me that neither the Left nor the Right ought to rule in perpetuity. They are the same stock, the same body politic, but opposites. And the English system is, that through opposition of government parties, the government of the country arrives at synthesis. The parties are so opposed, the distinction so rigid, that people do not change sides. People belong to either one or the other, even though it goes against their personal interest so to do. If self-interest alone were important to individual politicians, then while the Left party was in Opposition and not in government, then individuals would temporarily change sides and join the Right, to join the governing party for a time, leaving their habitual one, for the period that their former enemies were in office.
But people do not do this. People in England truly are either of the Left or the Right, and they will undergo years of unpaid and humiliating, impotent opposition, so long as they can remain faithful to their respective Socialist or Conservative interests. Their loyalty is as deep as that; like a faith. I think this can be explained in simple terms as a necessity of our race or our culture. Just as some people are habitually late to get out of bed, and enjoy the night; and just as an equal number of people are early to bed and early to rise, ‘by nature’. And just as some people are born female, and some male, in roughly equal proportion. So, some are born conservative and are prone to what the government and the law has rather shamefully taken to calling ‘hate’, while others are born socialist, or in modern terms, ‘progressive’.
There is therefore, objectively, as little need for true enmity between Left and Right, as there is between men and women. The two are essential halves of the collective nation. The early risers and the late risers are both required in a tribe, since humans, for most of their prehistory, would have needed large numbers of people who could work the night hours, if only for guard duties, or to keep the fire going during the night, or to scare away the predators, and so on.
By nature I am conservative, and I admire Donald Trump, and I have some sympathy with the followers of Nigel Farage. I see that you have said about Farage, that he has an uncanny ability to appear in the unregulated field of electronic media, and that he has a certain unbearable plausibility in most of what he says, to a large number of people (roughly 50% of the population). With this, I can’t disagree. It is true. The other things, which you have attempted to say about him, don’t ring true to me. For instance, I think he’s only as demonic as any other politician, though you say that he has a special quality of being spectral like that.
Also, I don’t agree that there was once a rational world which is now being broken up by technology. The implication in your statement is, that there is a rational progressive movement toward perfection, and that the Fascists of Italy, or the Reform Party in England, broke or are breaking and fracturing that progressive movement. But because I don’t believe in any progress, therefore I don’t see Farage as breaking it up, or appearing in its fissures and fault lines.
But I do think Farage is uncanny; for two reasons: his ability to get on the media; and his ability to say the right thing to the right people, at the right time. That is, to the ‘Right wingers’, the ones who like the night, as it were, he is uncannily attractive. And note that I don’t find this offensive. Some like the dark and the quiet, and the night; it is taken for granted that those people (roughly 50%) deserve representation; and that they are absolutely indispensable to our society, working through the night on guard, or keeping the fire going. The tribe needs both types, or it will be destroyed by fate or by its enemies.
Let’s state the obvious: for more and more people, it seems as if the Left have been in power for a long time; but certainly since Tony Blair. There has been no conservative representation since Blair, probably a long time before him. Peter Hitchens has pointed out that the Tory Party and David Cameron did not represent conservatism, and I tend to agree. So, when the Right comes back, it comes back with redoubled force. That’s just natural, and if it looks ugly, then we can only blame the people, who failed to let them in and to take their turn decades ago. Ted Heath was quoted as saying, in the 1970s, that conservatives are ‘shits’, all of them, and these are the words of the official or supposed conservative leader. He hated conservatism, and except perhaps for a bit of Thatcherism, even Margaret Thatcher was not conservative, in the way that the Tory party had existed before the War. So, if contemporary conservative instincts appear to be abnormally muscular and aggressive these days, it is because they have been training largely in secret, and have grown monstrous after years in the wilderness.
The occasion for the conservatives coming out of the shadows, as if fleeing something horrible out there, or rushing to danger and battle with some monstrous threat, is two-fold, and the crisis is real: large scale globalist-mandated, legal and illegal immigration, firstly; and secondly, the emergence of openly globalist leaders, speaking and acting in ever more threatening and aggressive forms, aggressive toward their respective unique nations and their external enemies, at a time when they are being shown to be defenceless. By this I mean, that the globalist leadership, the Leftist, globally minded permanent leadership caste of the Western countries, including those of Britain, that caste is leading the nations to humiliation and the disappearance of those same countries, in many different and various ways, so that the prospect of disaster has simply grown intolerable and inevitable, so far as the Right can judge the case.
When Nigel Farage speaks to his followers, he often speaks about globalists; but he is careful not to point out that our nation has lost the struggle with Russia, and has failed in its objectives. But this is what he and his followers sense, I think; we can’t talk about it, because the situation of wanting a new leadership now, too often must express itself, by a call for our official enemies to help us. The Oppositional nature of British constitutional government has now grown so frail, that our enemies are somehow the only helpful alternative.
But this is only a second order reason for the rise of Farage and Reform, when we say that the globalist project is running out of steam, and in doing so, is going to leave us, the people, stranded and defeated as a nation, so that even some help from our enemies would be a blessing. You could say, we dimly feel that our globalist Heathite, Blairite, leaders have reached the end of the road, and it is now the time of the Right. This is a secondary matter. For, the primary problem is the one of immigration; the Balkanisation of our country. That’s why the Right have come out of the shadows. Perhaps the Left don’t see any problem with immigration; but then, that is why they are of the Left: it is the nature of progressive people to disregard such dangerous things. Now is the time for the Right to assume power for these reasons.
On the subject of the trickster, I don’t deny that Farage has this quality, the quality of an essential fluidity, a fault in his integrity, an inclination to deception; and so does Trump in his peculiar way. But the trickster is not something negative in itself. Rudyard Kipling is, to my mind, an example of the man who expresses himself in the way of an outsider or a trickster, somebody taking a liminal position; and yet he had the ability to see deeply into the nature of things.
This is in fact, what distinguishes the Right from the Left. The socialists have a vision for how things might be; when I say ‘socialists’, I include the post-Thatcher Tory party. The Right sees things as they probably will be, and as they are. Kipling, as TS Eliot remarks, was capable of a strange and devastating prophetic utterance. There is something alien about him:
“At times Kipling is not merely possessed of penetration, but almost ‘possessed’ of a kind of second sight. It is a trifling curiosity in itself that he was reproved for having placed in defence of the Wall a Roman Legion which historians declared had never been near it, and that later discoveries proved to have been stationed there: that is the sort of thing one comes to expect of Kipling. [… He] knew something of the things which are underneath, and of the things which are beyond the frontier.”
His poetry of between the wars, warns his contemporaries over and over, about the fruitless emphasis on the rules of markets and trade; his soul told him that the war would return, and that the interwar years were merely a calm before the storm. And as Orwell remarks, he certainly did lay down eternal rules of human life, though they are expressed in a vulgar way. I suppose that Kipling was a true Tory, and also alien to us. This combination of speaking the deeper truth, while being alien and appearing to be possessed by something beyond the frontier, is the Right wing or Tory form of expression, something which is quite rare.
Orwell claims that Kipling, who I suppose you could class as an outsider, and trickster (Kim, is an instance of his belonging not to the tribe, but to its further reaches), gave rise to a form of verse and a wisdom which expresses profound commentary on political situations, but is expressed in a vulgar but permanent way. “It does not matter, from this point of view, that thinking and decent people generally find themselves on the other side of the fence from him”.
The trickster has licence to be honest, where other people tell lies, or grow stupid in their inactivity. That’s what Shakespeare showed us in Lear’s fool. And I do think that Farage is a bit of a fool. Lear’s fool pretends to be mad, just until the unfortunate pair arrive at the moor or the heath; and at that point, the fool becomes sane, and starts to protect his master. That is to say, he had always told the truth; but he was not a real man, and never had been; and only at the very worst moment, did he reveal himself, and by then it was too late. Nevertheless, the Fool tells the truth, and speaks truth to power. Farage, to my mind, speaks truth to power, and, my intuition is, that like the fool, he will simply disappear at the moment when he is elected, when he needs to be a real man. So, we agree: Farage is a man almost possessed by some profound vision, and also maybe, the fool.
Trump is another matter. Trump is the truth telling fool, and yet he has embraced power. I do not know how to characterise their difference other than by pointing it out, that Trump goes on to the end, but Farage doesn’t. It is more profitable to point out how different these two men are, than how similar. David Lynch, the director, for whom I have considerable admiration, said of Trump in 2016, that he could be the greatest of the US Presidents. This was widely quoted in that year. Lynch had added, that it could be so, if Trump acted in the interests of the US people. It is my opinion that Trump does so. He believes in the idea of the nation state; if I were a global socialist, I would despise Trump, and I would not understand him. But I feel that he is a great US President, because he does work for the US people, in this way: by making resort to principles which never change, and recognising the necessity of strength overseas, and order in a nation. What makes him foolish in a democratic age is, that he also does not hesitate to say this in public, like the fool.
That Trump has what you might call a Biblical attitude toward the conditions of human life, that is, an old one, one which does not need careful education or sophisticated reasoning, might also mean, that he is unable to think in an original way, or that he is relying on old wisdom and doing so in a vulgar way. But his Tory instincts are sound; it is as Orwell said of Kipling: we know in our heart he is right by his nation, but we don’t appreciate his vulgarity.
Trump has this spectacular advantage over any European or British politician: he does not need the money, and he does not care in the least what anyone thinks about him. This is why it is inappropriate to say, that he is acting out classic ‘fascist’ gestures, in order to curry favour. Trump is already famous and wealthy enough, so why would he revive old conservative gestures, for any other reason, than that they are necessary? He acts in total confidence in the belief that what he does is right for his country and the people. His only principle is to do good by the US, with which he seems in some childish way to sympathise, as an extension of himself. Trump is also a fool, but in a different way: it is as if he has tried to become the ideal of the king, the dying god, the embodiment of his country. Just as a child has only a dim sense of himself and a vague self-awareness; and as he sees his parents as extensions of his own body and mind; so Trump vis a vis his country. He is fulfilling the established role of a king, or a Caesar. His reforms in the US, and his foreign policy, are like those which happened in Rome under Julius and Augustus. He behaves like an absolute ruler, and Suetonius and Tacitus have nothing bad to say about those two first emperors, because once they had attained power over their enemies, they turned to work beneficial to their country as a whole. They particularly revived the old traditions, and built up the nation according to its traditional strengths, its old constitution, in an era of decline and over-extension.
But what is most surprising to me about the era of Trump is not the man himself, but rather the response made to him by the Left. I don’t have much interest in Brett Easton Ellis, the author of ‘American Psycho’. But Easton Ellis wrote a remarkable book around 2019, I think, called ‘White’. It is an extended meditation on elite US society in the era of Trump. Easton Ellis, a New York elite figure himself, a man at the centre of US culture and power, had made up his mind to support Trump, and his book is about how he never met anyone else with influence and wealth, privilege and power, who supported the President. The comedy of his long discussion of the Trump era is, that people he had known to be clever and honest for years, were almost delirious with hatred for their President, and generally forbade any positive comments about him, at their dinner parties, their art exhibitions, their charity funder-raisers, or whatever it is they got up to. Their hatred for Trump was irrational, and had no easily discernible cause, as far as Easton Ellis could see. But it doesn’t end there, of course. They had other shibboleths and signs of group membership: anti-white racism; transgenderism; anti-American views and polices in general. These strange views were de rigeur among the elite in the US cities at the time.
The same applies in England, of course. The educated and powerful of our country detest Trump, and they generally detest Farage of course, which is where these two figures cross paths to some extent. They are significantly the same, in that the Establishment see in them something Satanic, something unspeakable, something they can’t explain. I think back to the same years, when I used to meet my sisters, three of them. They are representative of the educated class of people who work as doctors, PhDs at global charities, lawyers. They spoke of Trump with a hatred out of all proportion to the conscious cause of their hatred. If they were asked, what is it you don’t like? They would say that he had been recorded talking about enjoying touching women; ‘Women love me’. The intensity of their loathing for him is not justified by this well-known incident. Their resistance to him is something that, by and large, people don’t themselves understand.
I think I understand their hatred of Trump or Farage, however. The attitude of people who malign Farage (because of childhood episodes, etc.), opposing him without any obvious cause, no cause sufficient to justify their hatred, can be explained, to be based on quite common and familiar human impulses and motives. People who want to expel Farage, do so even though our system requires Opposition. Even though our political settlement only works because there is an organised Opposition, they still treat him and his movement as a foreign body which must be expelled, destroyed, made to seem illegal. They want to suppress and annihilate the Right. Indeed, it has become both legally and socially correct, to claim that what the Right stand for is, ‘hate’, which is to say, a political opinion that is entirely improper and barely legal. That there is a time for hatred, is not something the Left understand. In addition to the deformity of our souls, as it were, when ‘to hate’ becomes something impossible for us, we also see that this kind of irrational resistance toward the political opponent, is dangerous to our political settlement, and our country as a whole. As I have said, we need an Opposition, and the Left and Right need to alternate, each in its proper season.
The other place, where I have seen such unanimity, and such disgust for alternative opinions, was in a regular Army unit. In every British army battalion, and I image this is a characteristic of all military formations which are efficient, there is a certain style of being a man, which is shared by all members of the unit. Soldiers in a barracks are not a selection of various human beings. Rather, soldiers by and large, have chosen or fallen into the habit of being exactly like one another; and they do this by tending to use the same phrases, have the same reactions, to have the same tastes, to think and act in the same specific predictable way. To dispute, or not to have the taste, the style for it, is dangerous to a man in a barracks, since the group or the battalion can throw him out, if he steps out of line; and this affects his physical and mental composure, and his career prospects. This peculiar militarised existential manner of being, which they all must embrace, is naturally unspoken and not theorised; but it is immediately visible to any outsider; it is blindingly obvious. Yet, the soldier himself, in the individual instance, is mostly unconscious of it, if he is not actively cultivating it. And this is what the Left has done to itself, and they want to annihilate Trump by whatever means, because he is not one of this massive and exclusive elite caste.
But not only ‘the Left’; it is only because the characteristics of the permanent governing class is usually paid and supported by the State, and that their power and allegiance is to the State, that we can classify them as Left, rather than inherently Right or Tory. There was an essay about a year ago by an anonymous journalist who called himself Julien Sorrel (after the character in Stendhal’s ‘Le rouge et le noir’, I think). Sorrel wrote at the time when Paulla Vennells was head of the Post Office, or when she was revealed to have heartlessly and almost in a fit of absence of mind, persecuted and imprisoned thousands of innocent British postmasters. He examined her career: she had been head of this government department, master of this agency, CEO of a publicly listed corporation, candidate for Church of England bishopric. He pointed out, that there are a limited but large number of people who are exactly like her, in a similarly untouchable, unaccountable, yet powerful position, and that this type of person, lacking in expertise or experience, but blessed by a weird good fortune, is at the top of every profession. When looking at her career, it was possible to see a new sort of person, with no loyalties to the nation, but with a knack for being in charge and being chosen, a successful caste of people, who run everything in Britain. They are paid by the state, and they run the apparatus of the state, and they all think the same thing; they all wear the lanyards, the titles, the awards, the epaulettes and the braids of their rank; they have the medals awarded by their party.
They rule Britain; they have no Opposition; they are a caste; they have a taste and style which marks them out as belonging to the unit; they are a sort of internationalist party, which disdains any local or racial loyalty. They slide effortlessly and without any consequences, from one top job to another, without expertise or accountability, but with the connections, and with the membership. And, to be brief, not liking Trump or Farage, is one of the markers, that a person reliably belongs to the ruling caste, in Britain and in the US respectively.
It now goes without saying, that Trump has spoiled their party. Trump is not one of them. It is fairly tragic, I think, that this Left caste, this permanent ruling elite, an elite which you enter not by talent but by obedience and selflessness, cannot really be removed, and that it has no proper Opposition. It has made opposition into a crime, or at least, into something immoral; and it is probably largely unaware of its own military efficiency, its coherence.
Perhaps the most accurate reason why this caste of people, which includes politicians and prime ministers, as well as Christian religious leaders, chief civil servants, and the elite cultural figures, is in charge, is the largely forgotten point, that a Tory is not a democrat. So, the Left, and the progressive managerial class which runs Britain, can safely claim to be the only democratic party, in a democratic state. This would truly make it impossible for any conservative party to ever form a government, if all these premises were true. But, Britain’s constitution does not describe a democracy. Governments are formed into a Cabinet and from a Party. All the same, the progressive class of managerial experts are able to claim, that they work for the people, and serve the people and are democratic, and that the Right is not. And it is for this reason, perhaps, that David Cameron’s Tory party, and that of his successors, did not rule as conservatives might: they had joined in the democratic spirit, and ruled as socialists do.
But, if the spirit of the Tory and the Right is not democratic, but rather conservative and paternalistic respecting the people, then how did it ever attain power, in a constitution which demands that people vote for them? That is, why would people vote for a party which will not aim to give them what they want, once in office? I think the simple answer is, that almost half of the population of any country, know that what they want is not what they really need. For instance, a democratic party is not suited to forming an armed forces, and winning a war; which is why Sir Winston Churchill, a Tory if there ever was one, was prime minister during a war of national survival. This can be extended to the arrival of Mrs Thatcher, who told the people, that what you can’t afford, you can’t have; in a democracy pure and simple, it has become almost impossible to say this. And so, at periods, a Tory or Right wing party accedes to power, almost by magic. The Right in government do not serve the wishes of the people, they serve the immutable and fundamental laws, and aim only to make the nation survive against its enemies, and gather property so as to make the nation wealthy. These are not democratic objectives; and for more than half a century, the Right has been out of office as a result.
I have troubled myself to find out, a couple of times, exactly where Sir Keir Starmer came from, how he rose to power in the party; how he received the backing of the right people, so as to become Prime Minister. He clearly is not an actual prime minister; he is some kind of pawn; he is a cypher; he has been lodged in the job by other people. When people have spoken to him on camera, he has shown only a rudimentary level of personality or self; he is experienced only in law, and law of the easy kind, where the British state bureaucracy is making prosecutions, in its lazy and these days unprincipled two-tier way. How does a man of this low calibre become Prime Minister of Britain? Obviously, like Vennells, Starmer has the right markers, the right medals and signs of obedience to his class, which allow entry to the top job, where, like his peers, he is unaccountable, and largely indifferent to the chaos or the good he does there.
But, I have previously answered in a cynical way, that MI6 put him in the job. And I still think that this explanation is worth consideration, since I don’t imagine anyone gets those jobs without the secret services having approved the application to some degree. Starmer’s Czech secret police file recorded him, as a member of the British security state, when he visited in the 1980s. But, the answer is also, additionally, quite simple: Stamer is like Mrs Vennells; he’s a high ranking bureaucrat; he’s a trusted member of the elite. I have also previously pointed out, elsewhere, that neither Starmer nor even the House of Commons, is truly in charge of the United Kingdom as it is, and have described the power of the international or London based financial establishment. That is another matter, since we are dealing here with those who actually hold office, and not with their power to act. And I would also quickly add, that the managerial, British Soviet class of commissars and chairmen of committees who run Britain today, the permanent Left government, are in no sense ever at odds with the City. In his emptiness of mind, and his having been chosen by forces outside of anyone’s command, and in his pretence of serving ‘the people’, as a democrat, he is the British equivalent of Karmala Harris, or Joe Biden.
What does this mean? Do we need to remind ourselves of the previous US President, and what he was like? Perhaps, since, unaccountable and over-mighty as the ruling class is, it still needs to stop talking about its failures, and make an effort to forget. Biden was a literally empty vessel. A mere interchangeable member of a caste; a man who needed so little humanity and ability, that he was in office for a full term, before anyone would admit that he had lost his marbles, that there was no one at home, and that he was incapable of doing anything sensible at all. So little ability and humanity is expected of the Left ruling caste.
To equate Biden with Starmer is about as right, as to equate Farage and Trump. These are the true Right and Left, I suppose. And it is the duty of the English to now give the Right, who have been out of office for perhaps half a century, a crack of the whip.
If we now turn to who Farage is, I have my doubts about his suitability as both a leader, and as the leader of the Right faction; and although I will vote for him, because he is the only non-elite, Right wing option available, I do not have any confidence in him. The Reform Party will be a fiasco in office, but I don’t have any other option. The Right don’t have any other option. Peter Hitchens, a man who shares my Christian principles, and my reasoned conservatism, and who is alive in our day – a rare combination of factors – has said that we must not vote for what we want, but we must vote against what we do not want. But this leaves us with no option at all, since we don’t want the Labour Party, or the Tory Party in its managerial democratic form, and there is no way of voting against them, other than Reform. So it has to be Reform, or a spoiled ballot.
Farage speaks the correct words to inspire the Right, the proper words for our time. That there is too much immigration, that there is too much expenditure, that there is not nearly enough instinct for national survival, that the ruling caste are unnatural and anti-human. And yet, I have already said why Farage will let us down. Principally, I think that he will back away from the job at the last minute, and wander off, as Lear’s fool did, at the height of the drama on the heath. If his party were elected to office by a majority of MPs in the next election, it is my opinion that Farage would abdicate; he would hand over power to someone else. As things stand, that would be, to his second in command; which is Zia Yousuf. To my mind, if that were to happen, then it would be the final end of British politics as a method of governing and reaching consensus in the nation. So, instead of Yousuf, I think there would be simple chaos.
Following the Brexit vote of 2016, Farage left his party, and went to do something else; the next time I saw Farage, he was on YouTube, doing sales stunts for a new investment firm he had set up. One of those miserable videos which refuse to tell the viewer what is on sale until he has paid, or until he has heard so much, and spent so much time watching without reward, that he is reluctant to switch off and admit he has wasted his time; he consents to pay and sign up, because he is unwilling to accept, that he has been fooled; that was what Mr Farage had got involved in, a few months after the Brexit vote. The man who for decades had strategized Brexit, and then finally won the most important and difficult political battle in in our life time, could be found hawking his financial advice on a dodgy internet site, as if it never happened, as if he had suffered a head injury and forgotten who he was.
Also notice about Farage, that his uncanny ability to get on TV is probably not all that inexplicable. There is no Satanic manipulation of the metaphysical substrate of existence taking place, when Farage appears on BBC, ITV and everywhere else, all the time. He has one or two MPs; the Liberals have sixty; so, how does Farage get to be the one whose opinions are heard everywhere? The answer is, either that he is a manipulative Svengali with magical powers; or, more plausibly, that he is the controlled Opposition, and his opposition is encouraged because it is controlled. I think the second is more likely, and more natural.
In a situation where a solid corps of perhaps one million state-employed, elite British people rule, without any opposition, and pose as the only democratic option available to democratic people, by making up the ranks of both main parties, it is not too much to believe, that this caste have more or less manufactured Farage, and encourage him to speak and to campaign. His vanity and neediness doesn’t encourage him to respond positively. And so, the Tory and Right wing half of the British people may be harmlessly entertained, and so they might have something to hope for. Farage, whether he knows it or not, is the means by which the 80 or 90% of British people who have no representation, are given a sniff of one. The rape gang victims, the people made to leave London by the Muslim invasion, the Post Office victims, and the people whose streets have been sold to foreigners, and whose stock exchange has no British firms on it, whose children are told it’s not their country anymore at school, those people can still believe in Britain while Farage can appear on TV. I think that this is the wheeze Farage is part of. There’s no magic, just a strategic bone being thrown to the apprehensive and unhappy masses, which mollifies those who want to vote for a truly Right wing party.
There are three possible futures for Britain, if Farage is a fake, or if he fails to rule as the Prime Minister he claims he can become. One is to go along the trajectory of the past 80 years: to rejoin Europe, and to forget about Britain. The second is to have a revolution of some kind, a serious Right wing party is elected, sufficient to displace the international socialist elite, and to simplify Britain. And the third, is to descend slowly into bankruptcy and ruin in every way, as a country, but as a hopelessly mismanaged and socialist one, into a low level dirty war, or a civil war without end.
I have begun to talk about distant things, and to disclose, foolishly perhaps, what I see as the inner truth and necessity of our country and our age. But bear with me. If one were to allow option one, and gradual erosion of the British nation so as to make entry into the EU with full confidence, then this would be the path of least resistance. It would be the easiest and most peaceful pathway. The EU is anti-democratic, and prefers monopoly capitalism; it does not respect the individual rights of any person, and imposes rather than solicits governments, it is not a democracy but the same kind of unopposed and unaccountable government as the one which currently dominates Britain. It has never allowed the Right, or conservative instincts, to have any influence on policy. It is managerial, and largely governed by the imperatives and demands of large financial organisations, such as the banks of the City of London, or large monopolies.
If it were the only political bloc on the planet, it would efficiently manage 400 million people, and keep them in order. Independent schools, businesses, children, families, would gradually disappear in favour of EU state monitored organisations, which are easier to control, where people serve the bureaucratic elite, unimpeded. Christianity would disappear from the continent, and abuses such as euthanasia, and microchipping of the race, would become normal. Human life in an uncontested EU state would lack dignity, or any transcendence. It would be a pure technocracy, and the kind of nightmare which Heidegger warned against. It is against this managerial oligarchic, undemocratic, and anti-conservative soulless organisation, to which Britain might most likely gravitate, and where it will simply and gladly die.
I’m not in favour of the EU; I don’t think it will prosper in this world; but it is a failed continental organisation for additional reasons of its own. A state requires a military, and a police and a justice system. These are fundamental. The EU has none of these, and to create them will be extremely difficult; Europe is not the only bloc, and it faces pressure both to mobilise its military, justice, and continental repression, at a time when China, Russia, Islam, and the US are each more organised and powerful than it. So the EU is not something which will survive, or develop in a natural way, even were Britain to rejoin it. The effort to force the various populations of the European states to consent to continental and obviously managerial rule, despite their best interests, and to force them unwillingly to serve its institutions and particularly its military, will make of the EU a kind of continent-size concentration camp. The Left have no other way of raising a military defence force, than by inhuman coercion, since they cannot call on patriotism, history, or the drive to survival deep inside individual men, which is the usual and only sure recourse. I mean, most men would sooner die than let their nation get swallowed up entirely by the EU; and that is the future which, by and large, awaits them.
That is why the British nation should or must survive in another way, because there is a proven second route, the alternative to the EU. To return to Kipling, and his prophecies. What Kipling understood, along with every Right wing person on earth, is that there are rules of human life which cannot be broken without death; or breaking which results in a slow extinction, if the transgression is enjoyed for too long. And that survival can only be ensured, when there is a Rightist or truly Tory government in office for some time.
The Right must have their time in office, to act freely on their principles, because if the Left are allowed to continue to decide an independent Britain’s future, then the third and worst future comes about. There is an essay in today’s Spectator about the Republic of Venice, with which Britain has been compared many times, over many centuries: ruled by an aristocracy, a global sea power, it was once a fantastically wealthy trading network, dominating its neighbours by sea and land. In the late eighteenth century it was ruled by a complacent, unaccountable ruling caste, a perpetual elite, unable to foresee or prepare for the enormous danger heading its way. Madelaine Grant points out what happened to it when Napoleon arrived; in a couple of days he removed the Doge and the council of ten, and started filling in the canals, so as to make them like the boulevards of Paris. And the Venetian history ended just like that: with the aristocracy’s illusions and complacency thrown out, along with their freedom and their existence. So this is the other option, if Britain remains outside the EU: to aim to survive, and to survive the coming of a Napoleon, or whatever the current danger is. That’s what I want, and that is why I advise at all times, a return to the primitive and ineluctable laws of human nature. This is what conservatism means, what Toryism means.
The Right must have its time in office, with an appropriate leadership. Ideally, and this is our best chance of a happy future, a Right wing government will be elected, and will do what it has to do. It would set out to expel the majority of non-European or non-Christian immigrants from the country, and increase the size of the armed forces, and it would attempt to break the control of the country which the Left has over it. It would do other undemocratic things, such as restrict taxation and welfare disbursements, but those will happen regardless eventually.
Civil War, the third future pathway, is both the worst, and the most likely, future for the country; for two reasons, in my view. On account of the immigration problem, and their solution to it, the Right will never be allowed to hold government office, in the way I described above, just now. This is because such a party would take it, as its first duty, to expel several million foreign people currently resident in this country. This the reason that they seek office after all. The Left knows this already, and therefore, the Left, the permanent managerial democracy which rules Britain now, will prevent them from ever attaining office. As I have said, I think Nigel Farage, who is not a brave man, would flee from his job, if he were elected with a manifesto of this kind. Neither the Left elite, nor the phantasmatic Reform Party, will allow the Right their time in office. And hence, civil war is inevitable. The civil war will be the non-political means of resolving the dual problem, that the immigrants are in Britain, and that the Left will not relinquish power. So, the war will have three participants: the Right, the immigrants (Islam), and the Leftist elite. The disagreement of opinion about what to do, and how to repair the faults of the past, or not, is now so difficult, that the Left and Right are hardly sharing the same space anymore in Britain; they are now factions, hostile to each other, and beyond all rational debate. The price for ignoring Enoch Powell is going to be very high.
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I am of the Right by nature; to explain or justify my prejudices is all I can do. For they are prejudices. They are an acceptance of natural law, Biblical law. Happily, perhaps the larger part of people in my country agree with me in my natural and instinctual judgements; if I differ at all from the people who will vote Reform, it is because I can explain in words why my prejudices are palatable, and how they are beneficial, and I take it as my responsibility to explain why we need not be ashamed of them. Because I want Britain to survive; I want my people to survive, and my memory and my ancestors, and our way of life. I do not want to see or allows the humiliation and defeat of my people. I appreciate that foreigners think differently, that’s their right. And the Left think differently, which is in the nature of the Left.
I would like to say something about the place of Christianity in these political calculations, but I agree with TS Eliot, that we need a government, or a set of statesmen, who can see to our national survival, and that so long as they are able to protect us from our enemies, and, to recognise our enemies, then the state has done enough. And it is possible to consider our faith a separate matter. Christ said “I am not of this world”, and this distinction between our faith and our politics is fundamental and immovable.
I mentioned the mad king on the heath while discussing the tricksters, Farage and Kipling; I mentioned also Lear’s fool; how the fool at last turned sane, and tended to the care of his broken royal master; and how he then simply disappeared. It now comes to my mind, that there was another trickster on the heath at that time, who took over from the fool, who called himself Poor Tom ‘o Bedlam. Poor Tom was of course Edgar, the disinherited son of the Duke of Gloucester, and he ends up being one of the very few men still alive at the end of the drama, which concludes with a stage piled up with the dead – because of Lear’s generosity and his lack of respect for convention. On the heath, the duke’s son, this disguised and disinherited Edgar, sings a strange song about some lost English mythical figure, which Robert Browning was captivated by, and Louis McNeice.
EDGAR:
Child Rowland to the dark tower came.
His word was still “Fie, foh, and fum,
I smell the blood of a British man.”
(King Lear, Act 3, Sc. 4, 195-7)
In 1946, Louis MacNeice took up the same theme which Poor Tom had sung on the heath, while pretending to be mad; MacNeice showed us who ‘Childe Roland’ is. Roland’s is the story of a boy raised to do his duty for his country, and to become a brave man, raised probably to die while doing his duty, just as they all died in the line of duty who came before him, who disappeared obscurely, while serving their race and their home. Roland’s task at the dark tower, the same one undertaken by his dead brothers, once he arrives there after a lengthy and difficult journey, is simply to blow the trumpet, something none of his ancestors and brothers have survived. As he finally reaches the Dark Tower, while some kind of Dragon is lurking about, and it rises before him, huge and mute, he pulls the trumpet from his satchel, while the ghosts of his parents, the encouragement of dead brothers, and the voices of tutors and masters, are heard reassuring and encouraging him:
ROLAND (restrained in the sudden silence).
Wrist be steady
As I raise the trumpet so – now fill my lungs –
(The Challenge Call rings out […])
(The Dark Tower, MacNeice)
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With respect to what happens to Britain, once it has regained its independence, and harrowed hell, as it were, or drained the swamp, and flushed the stables; I propose that the successful British model is exported aggressively to continental Europe. The Left is correct, in thinking that Europe needs a military, and a pair of ‘nads’, and that it needs a means of defending itself against hostile foreign nations and power blocs, such as Russia and China, or Islam, or the USA. I recognise this, too. If Britain can sort itself out in time, perhaps with the help of the United States or the Russian Federation; I would propose the invasion of Normandy, and the dissolution of the EU; I would propose that Western Europe should be liberated, by an army gathered together under the Union Jack, and then ruled as a constitutional federation, with its capital in London. That would work, and answer to the wishes of both Left and Right.
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