The populist challenge is so grave - and so full of potential for genuine nationalists to exploit, that I make no apology for setting it out in several separate Substack essays. I know that many readers have only a limited amount of time in their busy days to consider these things, so I’m breaking them up for your. Here is the latest bite!
I am sure that overseas readers will forgive me using the example of Reform, not least because they invariably will see close parallels with the situation in their own countries.
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Reform came out of UKIP, a party founded in the 1980s, but four decades of ups and downs, splits and rows with Nigel Farage mean that very few of those involved now have much of a political pedigree.
Among Reform’s older and more senior members, the UKIP old-hands are undoubtedly outnumbered by Tories who have recently jumped ship. When it comes to the grass-roots and to the rapidly growing number of young activists, however, they are more or less new to politics.
As such, they automatically lack any real ideological cohesion or direction. What is more, Farage can do little to put this right: The ability to be all things to all featherless bipeds is central to the appeal of 21st century populism - if they veer too openly towards free market economics (Farage’s natural position as a former stock broker) they risk losing the support of Red Wall Labour voters.
But move towards the old BNP position as “the Labour party your grandparents voted for” and they alienate ex-Conservatives in the shires and suburbs.
Nature, however, abhors a vacuum, and this applies to political movements without an ideology - particularly new ones attracting young people with political ambitions. Quite apart from the intrinsic appeal of having ideological guidelines by which to form and judge policies, ideological differences also both aid and cloak personal and factional ambition - particularly among the young.
I have first-hand experience of this, having been one of the founding group of young militants who, back in 1980 - in our late teens and early twenties - founded a monthly magazine, Nationalism Today, with the express though unstated intention to use it as the vehicle through which to ‘radicalise’ the National Front.
The NF was at the time in splintered ruins after its shattering defeat at the hands of Maggie Thatcher with her empty populist rhetoric about understanding “how the British people feel about being swamped”. It had gone from being poised to become England’s third political party to disillusioned chaos. Its old leadership were busy waging their own three-way civil war.
We were sure that we would be able to build a youthful majority for our distinctly ‘left-nationalism’ and in due course to wrest control of its governing body, but even we didn’t expect to do so in less than three years. Having done so, we spent another three years rebuilding the Front, experimenting with some remarkable initiatives, including community roots campaigns and the creation from scratch of the white music scene.
In the end, for various reasons, it all ended up as nothing more than experience which helped me in my BNP times, but it did also show just how much change a small group of determined young men can make - in the teeth of paranoid hostility from the Old Guard - with all well-thought through and radical nationalist agenda.
I am not suggesting that populist parties such as Reform can be ‘captured’ by a process of infiltration, either by nationalists or by nationalist ideas. They already have serious vetting procedures aimed precisely at preventing this. Farage, for example, has long used the Marxist ‘anti-fascist’ fund-raising business Hope Not Hate to vet the membership of UKIP and Reform for nationalists and politically incorrect social media posts. The number of people barred or expelled as a result runs into many thousands.
The leaders of most of these parties will, again like Farage and the BBC, have done deals with powerful establishment forces, exchanging kid glove treatment for the populists in return for their providing a safety valve for public anger and cutting the ground from under the feet of genuine nationalists.
I reiterate that I am proposing the infiltration of ideas, not of people; the ‘turning’ of individuals, not entire organisations; to use the populist parties as ready-made lakes in which to go fishing, rather than expecting to turn them into our own ponds.
This ideological infiltration will at times be aided by ‘clean skin’ nationalist activists joining bodies like Reform, keeping their real opinions private and working primarily as ‘spotters’ for individuals who they judge to be open to the ideas contained in specially produced ideological publications of various kinds, which will then be sent to them anonymously.
There is no need for this process to involve a large number of such spotters. The fact is that most up-and-coming populists, the young ones in particular will be potential targets. Reform at present have around 1,000 elected councillors, the majority with no previous serious political affiliation. Even some of those who might well previously have been civnats will be undergoing the same radicalisation and ‘tribalisation’ which is sweeping through the general population.
By the time the next UK general election is over, Reform look set to have had thousands more councillors elected, along with members of the devolved governments, and hundreds of MPs.
It will not take Sherlock Holmes to find physical and email addresses through which to reach these targets for our educational materials. The problem is not reaching them, it is only a matter of producing them and raising the money to put them into their hands.
Taking into account other populist and ‘counter-jihad’ targets in addition to elected Reformists, we could expect to have 5,000 individual targets before the end of this decade. Allowing £5 a head for the cost of printing (videos and e-books will have their roles, but there is still no substitute for hard copy when it comes to long term ideas) and delivering our publications, that gives us the challenge of raising £25,000.
This does mean that I will, in due course, be asking people like you to join, or at least donate to, an organisation with this project as a key part of its overall mission. This is not something which can be put into practice by ‘organisations’ built around a couple of self-proclaimed ‘leaders’ who do little except provide entertainment videos funded by Buy Me a Coffee.
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£25,000 is a drop in the ocean compared to what various nationalist parties have spent on elections in the past. Indeed, I would hazard a guess that various people who should know better will between them throw away more than this amount in lost deposits and the cost of leaflets in the next general election.
In any case, the NF and BNP over the years raised and spent literally million of pounds contesting and losing elections. To be fair, some of those efforts helped to build the organisations.
Before the advent of the Internet, the five-minute party political broadcasts which were secured by standing in at least 50 parliamentary seats or many hundreds of council ones, were actually quite an effective way of reaching new people. The free post delivery of election addresses by the Post Office was a similar benefit.
We are now in very different times and circumstances, so it makes far more sense to invest perhaps a twentieth of the cost of one of those old election contests on injecting nationalist ideas right into the heart of the populist movement.
True, some of what we send them will go unread. Some of them will read and reject it. But others will lap it up, while in many more our efforts will surely sow seeds which will germinate and grow in due course.
Such an operation will be new to most nationalists, but it has been undertaken before, with very considerable success. The target was the Labour party, and the ideological infiltration was carried out by the Communist party. the key time, the 1930s and forties. The story was related by the Communist-turned Catholic Douglas Hyde, one-time editor of the Daily Worker, in his excellent book I Believed.
Writing after his conversion, when he had become one of Britain’s most effective anti-Communists, Hyde recounted how, the morning after the massive Labour victory in 1945, sitting in his editorial office in the CP headquarters, he received call after call from men he knew as hardcore Communists, phoning to give him greetings as newly elected Labour MPs.
Of course, there is a serious risk of young nationalists who decide on careers in populiast parties going native, of being corrupted. But many of them are going be following this path anyway, because it’s potentially a good career move for educated young white men facing intense competition in their traditional professions from positive discrimination minorities and AI.
It’s going to be a numbers game - the more we reach, the more we will influence to ome extent or another. And the more we influence, the more will end up being expelled and thus be pushed towards the sort of constructive nationalist campaigns and community initiatives which I will outline later in this series.
This is actually the most important benefit to be had. Whatever the populists or their successors do - there no parliamentary or any other road back to the old ‘normality’, This is why we so urgently need to find and train a new generation of young nationalist cadres, the community leaders who will help inspire and shepherd our people through the dark but opportunity-filled times ahead.
Some, on the other hand, will manage to stay within the populist machines, where nationalist ideas wil not change things drastically, but will here and there nudge them a little further.
Sometimes this may buy us a bit more time, sometimes it may give us a bit of extra protection, sometimes it will simply be a good thing in its own right. Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth!
Further essays in this series will first complete this explanation of the mission to exploit the phenomenon of populism, then we will go on to set out What Is To Be Done in the field of direct nationalist activism. .Subscribe for free to read these. Better still, become a paid subscriber at the highest level you can afford, in order to help provide the resources needed to move all this from Beyond the Pale and turn it into winning reality. Thank you!
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