There is no shortage of journalistic analysts claiming in alarmed tones that populism is gaining power across Europe and beyond. We witnessed the Brexit vote, the rise of Italy’s Giorgia Meloni, the success of Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, the 2017-21 Trump presidency in the U.S., and now a host of new so-called ‘populist parties’ have appeared on the scene. It is common to hear populism described as a ‘threat to democracy,’ and this is somewhat ironic for at least two reasons:
First, so-called ‘populist movements’ grow precisely by responding to the sentiments and yearnings of the demos, that is, the common people of the nation who want an existing oligarchic hold on political power to weaken for the sake of democracy’s future.
Second, politicians who recurrently claim that democracy is threatened by populist movements are typically those who have themselves undermined democracy either by repeatedly lying, rigging elections, or by simply getting into positions of power through no democratic process at all, like the Brussels bureaucrats who proceed to punish democratically elected governments whom they dislike, with the justification that such governments are ‘populist’ and therefore somehow ‘undemocratic.’
In truth, populism is merely the rise of political movements that appeal to ordinary people who, for complex reasons, feel that their concerns and perhaps their very lives are disregarded by elite power holders. Populism is in fact a symptom of how late and decaying democracies operate. (Like most symptoms, they manifest to help heal the foundering organism from the underlying sickness that is plaguing its body.) Populism is an obvious and predictable consequence of the errors that underpin our shift into the so-called ‘democratic age,’ for democracies possess no inherent mechanism to prevent their governments from passing whatever legislation and enacting whichever laws they like, so long as they possess the endorsement of the people to do so. There may be constitutional limitations, but even those can be overthrown by procedural constitutional amendments, which cannot be other than weakly resisted if every power holder comes from the same globalist, managerial, bureaucratic model.
Once parties of late democracies are in power, the governments they form no longer need popular endorsement for their actions, and often proceed to govern in a way that contradicts what they promised during their election campaigns. Late modern democratic governments often, then, ascend to power through lies or deceptions, and the populaces they govern are quite untroubled by this, as it typifies a form of political ascent to which the people have grown accustomed. For this reason, democratically governed peoples routinely come to see elections cynically, that is, as opportunities not to place the best statesmen in power but the least deceitful or corrupt of the toerags proposed by the given parties—and they vote with the expectation that nothing will actually change. Consequently, with each passing year, the number of voters decreases while the population rises. Democracy, which relies on the participation of those who possess suffrage, is thus everywhere in crisis.
When governments within decaying democracies realise that they do not have the support of the demos, and hence may come up against popular resistance whilst in power, they declare—as the German political philosopher and legal theorist Carl Schmitt famously put it—“states of exception.” In late democracies, then, the art of government becomes a delicate matter of balancing ongoing dishonesties with the fomenting of fear, the latter justifying new expansions of power by the governing party. Hence, they declare a new black death over a non-lethal virus whilst hiding the actual damage done by their vaccine remedy. They fling the country into international conflicts and threaten the population with nuclear disaster whilst overlooking the fact that the national home itself is fast becoming a third world state with a failing healthcare system and a wallowing economy. They seek to spread ‘awareness’ of the haunting spectres of ‘homophobia’ and ‘transphobia’ whilst remaining silent about the demographic disaster into which the nation has run. They proclaim that the citizenry must overcome their systemic and even unconscious racism whilst flooding the country with new arrivals from distant lands who neither love nor know the national culture, nor want to. And they announce an impending ‘climate apocalypse’ whilst ignoring the very real problem that 40% of the adult population do not have their own homes.
In each of the above cases, were the real problem—rather than the phoney but widely propagated problem—to be acknowledged but left unaddressed, there would be such social rage that the government would scarcely survive. So, the chosen method is that of feigning ignorance of the real problem until the next election campaign, during which politicians will suddenly both recognise and promise to address these real issues, only to leave them unaddressed on returning to power.
With each fear-mongering narrative, governments are better able to do something extra-democratic, namely carry out power-grabs without the endorsement of the people for the purported greater good of the people. The people, though, are becoming increasingly conscious that their governments now form post-democratic, self-serving, oligarchical regimes, and distrust is growing at a pace which may lead to irreversible action. Perhaps surprisingly—given that it is home to the ‘Mother of all Parliaments’—the appetite for a populist shake-up of the United Kingdom’s decadent parliamentarian regime, whose status quo all three major parties are equally committed to, seems to be growing.
Recently, I needed some work done on our garden, and two workmen came to do it. These men were strong, unassuming, wholesome types—salt of the earth working-class Englishmen—who did the work well and for a reasonable price. They had clearly picked up on certain indicators that they were working at a right-leaning household. The cross on the wall above the dinner table, the hunting trophies dotted about, the copies of The European Conservative by the sofa … it was clear to them that they could say whatever they wanted, and so they did.
One of the two workmen told me that his teenage son had just been suspended from his school. The lad’s class had been given a school project. The class was divided up into groups, with each group having to form a school club and recruit members to it. The club with the most members by the end of term would be awarded a prize. The groups were encouraged to form a ‘Gay and Lesbian Club,’ a ‘Black and Ethnic Minority Club,’ a ‘Trans and Trans-inclusionary Ally Club,’ and so forth. None of these club ideas appealed to the workman’s son and his group. So, together they founded a club which they felt their school needed; they founded a ‘Straight Men’s Club,’ which they promoted around the school as an “inclusive safe space for males who like beer, cars, and girls.” On account of founding this school club, the workman’s son along with the rest of his group were suspended from the school on grounds of homophobia.
“I just can’t take much more of this,” said the workman as he concluded the story of his son’s ordeal, “no one seems to be able to say what they think anymore, or even have a bit of a laugh.” I nodded sympathetically.
The other workman then told me that he and his wife had recently been taken aside by some of the staff at his little boy’s Church of England primary school. Their boy, aged six, had been wearing a small silver cross around his neck, worn under his shirt, which had been spotted by a teacher during PE. The staff explained that whilst the wearing of a small cross did not contradict the school’s uniform policy, it could make other pupils feel uncomfortable who did not share his and his family’s religious views. Meanwhile, the child’s father explained to me, there was another boy in the class who was being raised by his parents as a girl, coming to school in a dress, with pigtails and earrings. That was acceptable, apparently; but the small, concealed silver cross was not acceptable.
I have found myself having these sorts of conversations more and more. They happen in hushed tones. It’s like normal people are living under something comparable to the Soviet regime, whispering in badly lit street corners in the hope that a neighbour won’t report them to the authorities. But those whispers are now getting louder, and the whisperers more confident, as they are beginning to realise that they’re not so alone. There is a silent majority that is extremely fed up and wants change.
The UK Conservative Party has been in power now for 13 years. They could have passed any number of legislative acts to address the sexualisation of children, the demographic challenge that’s leading to the nation’s replacement by foreign peoples with foreign cultures, the woke takeover of the schools and universities, and all the many other problems about which ordinary Brits are increasingly troubled. The Tory government has done nothing except concede more moral territory to the cultural revolution that is wrecking the country.
Brits watch helplessly as their common home is transformed into something nobody wants, including the new arrivals from around the world. The national Church of England has become a peculiar club for retired progressives who have suddenly opted for ordination in a pitiful attempt to recapture meaning in the eve of their lives, preaching to congregations of five or six pensioners on why trans rights are human rights and love is love. The House of Lords, once a stable political organ of landed families and bishops, has become an activist clique of ageing Liberal Democrats. The once loved custodian called The National Trust has turned into a woke juggernaut. It condemns those long dead benefactors who left the Trust properties and lands—without whom the charity would not exist—for their possible possession of moneys from the slave trade, or instead ‘outs’ them in weird, revisionist frenzies which have nothing to do with the charity’s role as a conserver of architecture and landscapes. Throughout the country, Pride Day became Pride Month, which has become Pride Year, which is now every year, leaving us exasperated and jaded. And seeing our annoyance at the new regime of imposed infinite moral ‘progress,’ UK Police have morphed into thought-crime agents, there to hunt down bigoted dissenters whilst leaving 94.3% of real crimes unsolved. Brits no longer recognise their country, and they cannot endure this situation anymore.
The UK Conservative Party has, essentially, abandoned the old tory voters who kept the party going for so long. The old tory voter only ever wanted a patriotic party that would preserve—chiefly through the fostering of local government—the settled way of life which the nation had developed down the centuries. He wanted a party that kept the townscapes beautiful, allowed rural people to manage their own countryside, kept taxes low, didn’t disrupt established communities, didn’t tamper with the country’s ancient institutions, protected the liberties and autonomy of the family whilst actively ensuring its health, made at least the first rung of the property ladder easy enough to climb onto, and didn’t perform heavy-handed, top-down, imprudent, dangerous governmental actions like those we saw throughout much of 2020 and 2021.
Whilst the old tory voter has been abandoned by his party, the old British Labour socialist has been abandoned by his. The Labour Party is now essentially a cabal of globalist mischief-makers, with loyalties to anyone but the English working-class families that used to form its most devoted supporter base. Tony Blair’s hunting bill lost the Labour Party its share in the rural vote, and his crooked war-waging—seemingly justified by more deceit—lost it the confidence of everyone else.
Blair remains a key villain in the minds of those who distrust today’s oligarchical politics. Over the years, he told us that due to his intervention, Iraq would be the democratic model of good government in the Middle East; that Britain’s inescapable and inevitable future would be that of ongoing European integration; and that COVID vaccines were ‘safe and effective’ and those who opted out were “idiots.” Blair is not only the Platonic form of the self-serving globalist oligarch, but everything he says turns out to be entirely wrong. Yet, he has the conceit to jet-set around the world on behalf of his humbly named “Tony Blair Institute for Global Change,” reshaping governments according to his dream of a technocratically engineered global utopia, for which every individual will become a locus of pure data to be harvested and used. And as we live and breathe, Blair is preparing to play puppet-master over a new Starmer-led Labour government, beginning next year. Inexplicably, that swindler Tony Blair continues to be seen as both oracle and guru not only in the higher echelons of the Labour Party but among senior Tories as well.
That, in fact, is what is at the heart of how the UK’s oligarchical politics works, namely Parliament as theatre. Labour and the Tories have the same gurus and the same goals. After Prime Minister’s Questions, members of both parties giggle and wink and share their common objectives in the bar overlooking the Thames. The House is now an oligarchy’s circle which presents the theatrics of opposing powers to the masses while operating as one complot, with the only internal tension being over who holds the most concentrated power within the structure. Reflecting on his father’s devotion to the Labour Party, Roger Scruton put it perfectly in his England: An Elegy:
Only through the Labour Party, he thought, could we safeguard an England which belonged to the people, who in turn belonged to it. The spectacle of a Labour Party committed to ‘globalisation,’ indifferent to the fate of rural England, and managed by smooth ‘consultants’ who might next year be working for the other side, which is in fact only the same side under another description, would have appalled him.
Whilst the country desperately needs to be rescued from the Tories, the looming threat of a Labour government marks a harrowing prospect. The parties are two sides of the same coin, of course, but there are expectations among their supporters for the Tories to be more subsidiary in their governing. A Labour government may mean immeasurable misery for me personally. For beyond my work as an editor and writer, my life revolves around three things: our parish, our children’s home-education, and hunting; all three of these will likely be interfered with and ‘regulated’ by a new Labour government.
The rights and liberties of the worker, the need for deep community, local attachment, a share in the goods and inheritance of the nation, and all the many attitudes and pieties that formed the old English socialist mindset are today detested by the Labour Party, which is fixated on intensifying a woke agenda that will only frustrate the lives of ordinary Brits. (Perhaps, though, it was ever thus; as George Orwell put it in The Road to Wigan Pier: “The mere words ‘Socialism’ and ‘Communism’ draw towards them with magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, ‘Nature Cure’ quack, pacifist, and feminist in England.”)
The frustration in England is bubbling up to the surface. Generally, the English want to be once again free Englishmen in a free England. Liberation from Brussels was only ever—in the minds of the English who voted for it, and more broadly for many Brexiteers throughout the British Isles—a first step towards freedom from globalist mischief-makers. But the hoped-for effects of the Brexit vote have been thwarted by Westminster; our common law remains corrupted by imported statute law, our borders remain all but wide open, we continue to be under the jurisdiction of Strasbourg’s activist European Court of Human Rights, and any return to some patriotic confidence continues to be undermined by woke encouragement of self-hatred and oikophobia, especially in schools and universities.
A month or so ago, I went to see a stage performance in a local church hall, put on by children from the nearby town, among whom were my two elder children. I stood at the back with my dog on his lead, and a man of about my age pointed to a chair and said, “You can take that seat if you like.” “No thanks,” I replied, “I don’t think I’m allowed in here with the dog, so I want to be near the door in case I’m asked to leave.” He smiled and said, “Just say the dog identifies as a woman, then what will they do? If they try to chuck him out, they might have a complicated discrimination case on their hands.” I laughed and told him that he was a brave man to make such a joke. “I don’t care anymore; I can’t spend my life being told that what’s white I must call black and what’s black I must call white; from now on,” he continued, “I’m going to say what I like, as long as I think it’s true.”
This sort of exasperation is now encountered everywhere. The old British socialist and the old British Tory both feel alienated. These two types of Briton have always been far closer than anyone has wanted to admit, united by their love of the history and customs found throughout these isles, for which the bourgeois liberals who have come to dominate all three major parties—the Lib Dems being the worst in this regard—feel little if any warmth. Both the old British socialist and the old British tory—wedded by their common patriotic affection—are facing together the forces of repudiation, the “labour of the negative” as Hegel would have put it, and consequently have found themselves with no one to vote for.
England is changing beyond recognition, and the English, nearly all of whom deeply love their homeland despite the many years of oikophobic reprogramming to which they’ve been subjected, do not like what they see. Anyone who has visited Birmingham, Luton, Bradford, or any of the old English towns and cities that have been transformed into third world retreats for warring tribes, will know how grave the country’s situation is. Those who watched footage of last year’s riots in Leicester will know what I mean. Hysterical militias of the Hindu and Muslim inhabitants turned the largest city in the East Midlands into a battle ground, while the English residents—who still constitute around 35% of the city’s population—stood by in amazement, having to accept that their shared abode was no longer a home.
Immigration cannot be considered purely in abstract terms. Addressing the question of immigration has always meant contending with further questions of numbers, location, culture, and quality. The English—who have proven to be an incredibly welcoming people when it comes to immigration—generally know that the issue is a complex one, and thus they have long wanted a sensible conversation about it. Only in the last decade has it become possible even to raise the issue without immediately suffering the charge of ‘racism.’ Nonetheless, the growing acceptability of the conversation seems to have had little to no effect at the level of public policy and legislation regarding border control, citizenship, and access to tax-funded benefits.
Both Labour and the Conservatives routinely promise action on the issue of immigration when they think it will win them more votes, but they do not act when they can. The Conservatives remain effectively paralysed on the issue, and while there isn’t much to indicate that Labour will be any better, counterintuitively they may prove preferable on the issue of immigration. Not having been in favour of Brexit, Starmer is less likely than Sunak to agree to global trade deals which may involve concessions on visas. In other words, not being on the hunt for a Brexit dividend could make Labour more restrictionist, though of course that would not be as a matter of principle. Moreover, again due to being more explicitly pro-EU, Starmer is more likely to preside over a boost in immigration from more culturally proximate countries like those of the European continent, rather than from Africa and Asia. The actual numbers might not differ much, but the cultural stresses could potentially be less challenging following a Labour government. Immigration, however, is just one of a number of unaddressed issues that have made the UK ripe for a populist movement, which if done properly and cleverly could be enormously disruptive to the existing oligarchical politics under which we currently live in the UK.
It seems that the Reform UK Party is failing to build the populist momentum that is needed. Its leader, Richard Tice, doesn’t appear to be very inspiring. Its quadripartite approach to policy, namely that of reforming the economy, the public sector, the country’s energy strategy, and the national institutions, does not represent that creative combination of patriotism and impatience which underpins any successful populist movement. Laurence Fox and his Reclaim Party don’t seem to be able to get off the ground either. Fox may entertain us with unfashionable outbursts on television, but the common Brit isn’t stupid and well knows that Fox couldn’t engage in serious politics for five minutes.
Nigel Farage has always been able to present to the country a believable persona of the Barbour-wearing, ale-drinking, labrador-walking ‘chap’ with whom you could have a good booze-up on a Saturday evening. Brits love that about him. And yet he can still answer a difficult political question with precision and clarity. But Farage, for reasons known only to him, simply won’t put himself in the hot seat.
Who, then, will come to the fore? The appetite is certainly here. Brits are fed up with the globalist engineers who now run the Westminster machine, with no allegiance to anyone beyond their own little clique of power-seekers—an allegiance that can become surprisingly malleable at any moment if some detectable advantage to backstabbing occurs.
Like eastern peasants muttering in the streets under the Soviet terror, “No meat today—again,” the grumbling of Brits is getting louder. We are a patriotic and freedom-loving people, and we cannot endure any more of this. The race-conflicts, the re-education programmes in the workplace, the gaying of children in schools, the celebration of every culture but the cultures of this kingdom, the rainbow flags everywhere, the activist clergy, the cancel culture, the corruption of the curriculum … it has all become unbearable, and now the country feels like a faulty pressure cooker that’s about to explode.
A populist movement in the UK would have to call for the following reforms, for which there is rising public desire. It would call for pro-family policies; for parents never to be prevented from knowing the content of their children’s school curriculum; for all resources deemed to contain trans-activist or sexualising material to be withdrawn from schools; and for a formal recognition that without direct legal intervention, parents remain the exclusive legal guardians of their own children. It would also call for a citizenship programme to be established within educational institutions, offering elementary instruction in the British constitution and the common law (in England), as well as the religion of the country—for which we still have a sacral monarchy, Lords Spirituals, and an established Church. It would call for governmental reform, promising to decentralise government, giving more executive power to local, accountable councils; for the rescinding of policy that has prevented rural communities from managing their own countryside; for abandoning policy based on the country’s commitment to ‘net-zero;’ for a formal parliamentary declaration that the freezing of bank accounts will not be authorised for anyone other than those found to be money-laundering—and for such a mechanism never to be used as a means of punishment, coercion, or social control of citizens; for a commitment to cash circulation and the abandonment of policy ordered towards the formation of central bank digital currencies. It would call for immediate loss of office of politicians calling for extra-legal punishment of any member of the citizenry (that is, without due process); for the establishment of an independent enquiry—not by a parliamentary select committee—into what was known and the amount of misinformation that was deliberately promulgated during the 2020-21 COVID episode; and finally for the formal revoking of the country’s membership of the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, which is incompatible with the British concept of a ‘law of the land.’
Moreover, such populism would focus on law enforcement reform, beginning with a thorough investigation into the prevalence of woke ideology in the training of UK police officers, conjoined with the retraining of police in the skill of traditional policing; the formal abolition of all ‘non-crime hate incident’ recording and other thought-crime style policing; the endorsing of extremely severe punishments for real crimes that adversely affect the lives of ordinary law-abiding citizens, principally robbery, knife-crime, and child sex offences. And finally, it would call for practical policy for effective border-control, the deportation of illegal immigrants, and active policies of assimilation and integration over multiculturalism and ‘diversity.’
Those are the points on which a successful populist movement in the UK would have to concentrate. And if a thoughtful, prudent, but also patriotic and charismatic voice were to be heard championing such reform and policy, it would be met with cheers from every corner of these isles. The united media would come after such a movement, of course. At first, its leader’s bank accounts would be frozen, his emails would be hacked and made public, and he would be accused of all sorts of historical wrongdoings and misbehaviours. Every word he spoke would be taken out of context or deliberately misconstrued. He would be called ‘fascist’ and ‘homophobe,’ and children would be told by their schoolteachers that the rise of this populist movement was a danger to their futures and that they ought to be very, very frightened.
Were such a populist leader to appear on the scene, every possible means would be deployed to destroy this individual and the movement that he’d begun. He would have to be courageous beyond measure, like a classical hero of old. Very likely, as the establishment machine implemented everything in its armoury to destroy him and his following, the populist surge would fail. But if it succeeded, then it could start the return to the United Kingdom of that spirit that once animated it, from its exile during the long oligarchical occupation that has been tormenting its peoples.
