Badges of honour

In which Pete sets out his political philosophy and accepts the slings and arrows of outrageous manipulation by a self appointed coercive cancel squad and happily defenestrates himself from the overton window, to remain honest to his principles....

"... Today I've had my first mention in Hope Not Hate material. Ten years ago I'd have been mortified, but now it's almost a badge of honour. Hope Not Hate are cranks who think that even stating basic biological facts is far right extremism. The reason I'm on the HNH radar, though, is because I've joined the @Homeland_Party, which in their view is a fascist party.

But of course, outside of its proper historical context, the word fascist is meaningless. Now it just means anyone who far leftists don't like, and that's anyone even vaguely right wing. They probably think Suella Braverman is a fascist.

I've ended up on the far right because I'm entirely open about my views and I've stopped caring what anybody thinks. Back when I campaigned against RAF Linton on Ouse being used as a migrant dumping ground, I was subject to all the usual smears and I learned first hand how they weave bogus biographies of people they don't like. Not strictly libellous, but crammed with context-free innuendo. As such, if they say someone is a fascist, I simply don't believe them and I'll be my own judge.  

It's true that I've not been shy about my opinions about mass immigration. Even as a moderate I held the view for twenty years that multiculturalism does not work, and I've made my thoughts known about Pakistani culture having grown up in Bradford. Nothing gets the left clucking and reaching for the report button like telling the truth. I was aware of mass grooming before we even had a word for it. It was largely accepted as normal.

Ironically, because the left have had all my accounts on various platforms suspended, HNH don't have access to much of the really juicy material. When I see potted biographies written about me I really have to laugh. The sum total of my sins is writing blogs and appearing at a protest in the village when I spoke to Sam Melia, not having the first idea who he was, having never really heard of Patriotic Alternative.

It's only really since Brexit I've taken a harder line on immigration. In the run up to the referendum, I favoured staying in the EEA and keeping freedom of movement, not least because I had a suspicion that EU workers would be replaced by third worlders. It was actually a Ben Judah piece in the New Statesman that turned me against FoM, when he detailed his undercover experience of London's black market in low wage labour.

In fact, left wing Brexiters did more to persuade me that FoM had to end - because fundamentally, it is a neoliberal policy. It has nothing to do with individual freedoms and everything to do with free movement of capital. It allowed corporate parasites to bid for government contracts, then acquire cheaper EU workers so they could skim more profits.

It's only really in the last four or five years I've become an immigration hard liner. I was a Ukip supporting civic nationalist who believed integration was possible. But that, ultimately is an obsolete concept when there is nothing discernibly British in some cities for new arrivals to integrate into. Being that they arrive and immediately resume their own customs and culture makes them colonisers, not immigrants. I have come to regard integration as largely fictional. It only really happens in elite circles.

I should also point out that the complete lack of political will to stop the boats has also hardened my stance. We have been systematically lied to as elites pretend economic migrants are refugees. I object to being gaslit.

Still, though, I am more of less the same centre-right conservative I have always been. There just isn't a centre right party I can join. The Tory party is a liberal party and Reform is a substance free, vacuous populist party. I take the view that the unprecedented levels of immigration from culturally incompatible countries is an existential danger that threatens to undermine Britain as a high-trust liberal democracy. As such, we are within our rights to insist these latest waves of immigration are reversed. We were never asked and it was done in defiance of the electorate who repeatedly voted for less immigration.

I do not regard this as an extreme position, and it isn't fascist. The people who regard it as fascist ultimately do not believe in the concept of borders and nations, and do not recognise any real concept of citizenship. It's based on happy-clappy hippie claptrap infused with communism. The left is intellectually bankrupt.

As to being far right, I am far right relative to where the establishment parties are, but I have always been far right relative to where far left organisations like Hope Not Hate are - because virtually everyone is now if they favour even basic border controls.

That said, I haven't exactly taken any real care to avoid being called far right. I have employed some, shall we say, robust rhetoric. I describe low IQ, low skill sub-Saharan immigration as "garbage immigration", largely because it's an accurate, if not politically correct term. I make no effort to avoid being called racist because I do not care about the opinions of people who go around calling people racist - because it's always people who have no intention of debating the issues in good faith.

As to joining the Homeland Party, I had a reasonable idea of who I was dealing with. I've read the wikipedia/HNH biographies of the people involved, but those pages are written by the same sort of people who smear me, and there is always missing context. I decided to make my own mind up about these people by going to meet them at the Homeland Party conference.

I went out of curiosity, not least to discern whether this was a new entity or whether it was just another attempt to resuscitate the BNP, which I categorically would not have joined. I did note a whiff of the old blood and soil nationalism, but I got more of an impression that this was an entirely new organisation, speaking to a far younger demographic of well turned out chaps.

As is typical for fringe politics, there was a certain autistic eccentricity to it, but nothing especially malign. Only one of the executive team has any past link to the BNP, and there is no real association with Patriotic Alternative - which very much is linked to neo-Nazism, and nothing I would have anything to do with.

Having spent some time with the top team, I was reasonably convinced they are serious people. In many respects they're not nearly as right wing as me, but certainly more doctrinal in their approach to nationalism.

What turns a lot of people off is that the party defines itself explicitly as a nationalist party, and nationalism is something of a dirty word in British politics because of its past associations. Often nationalism is conflated with fascist imperialism, but Homeland is not an imperialist party. It is not supremacist in nature either. It simply does not qualify as a fascist party.

For me, the hop to nationalism was not a big leap. Just recently I set about writing a centre-right manifesto as a thoughy exercise, and settled on an adapted version of  American National Conservatism, which is centred on national sovereignty and pits itself against liberal internationalism. This is not very far from Ben Habib's politics which he recently described as "nation-ism". But then I got to asking myself why the disambiguation when we're essentially talking about the same thing?

As such, the real difference between Homeland and Reform is that Homeland has an explicit nationalist philosophy, whereas Reform is a party for nationalists, but in substance is a populist party. The key difference is in approach to immigration policy where Reform stops far short of anything radical because it still craves broadcast media respectability. Homeland doesn't see the point in putting on a pretense, and will openly advocate for remigration.

In this, Farage believes remigration is too radical, but he's behind the times. Donald Trump has pledged to deport millions while several EU member states are dipping their toes in remigration policy. It is an inevitability. I concluded we need a party that will nudge the Overton Window in that direction - and that Reform is far too cautious, not least because it still cares what the likes of Hope Not Hate say about them. I'm not willing to play the game by rules defined by our political enemies.

As such, it is likely that my name will appear regularly in HNH tract, but that goes with the territory. The function of it is to discourage others from putting their heads above the parapet. That might have worked were they more sparing about who they call far right, but they've jumped the shark with their antics. I simply regard it at free publicity now. Anyone who wants to know what I think about things, and how I arrived at my current politics, can easily find out for themselves. My old blogs are still online and my current essays can be found on my Substack. Good faith actors will find I am ever ready to debate them. If you take their word for it then you've suspended your critical faculties.

As a member of Homeland, I'm rubbing shoulders with people from different political backgrounds, some with views I profoundly disagree with, but we focus on areas where we do agree, and we are all agreed that mass immigration is an existential threat, and that remigration is urgently required for our national survival.

There is disagreement as to how far it needs to go, but we'll cross that bridge when we come to it. I'm not a puriticnical ethno-nationalist. Never was, never will be. But politics is always about alliances and coalitions, and I find no answers in mealy-mouthed civic nationalism as espoused by Farage/Robinson. It's an intellectual cop out.

"British values" are intrinsically linked to British culture, which is a product of the British people and British history. Should we become a minority in our own homeland, those values (which are not universal) are threatened along with everything that makes British society what it is. Being that the alternative to nationalism is civil disorder, Lebanonisation, and low grade civil war, I must put my reservations aside. If that means people call me names, I can live with it.