Blog

<h2>So what is WOTE up to? Why the flurry of activity at wote.uk/blog?&nbsp;</h2>Several reasons... mostly the concentration of mind that arises from a glimpse of the noose dangling on the scaffold as July 4th approaches, and the fear that the ghastly misfit wannabe MPs - now endlessly tormenting and disappointing us on TV and social media - will get into government without being properly under the ongoing control of the Will Of The Electorate.<h3>It's up to us (and the heroically prolific political savant and spokesman for responsible moderate conservatives everywhere, Pete North) to keep on banging out the messages and themes that will come together in a manifesto for the Silenced Majority, soon enough.&nbsp;</h3>The principle of WOTE enables us to be ever so slightly demob-happy as we abdicate large tranches of granular responsibility for the mechanics of government to our fabulously well-trained and resourced civil and public servants. A lot of those details can now be tracked and reported using AI techniques. Leaving WOTE Federation MPs to make certain that the Whitehall warriors all earn their fabulous salaries and gongs and pensions - and have &nbsp;a rewarding time doing it whilst achieving the support and approbation of all for doing a good job that is continually monitored and confirmed by our rolling referenda sampling. Counter intuitively (for some), handing off the irrelevance, minutiae and distraction of Westminster and Quangoland means we can properly micromanage manage the parts of government that really need to be kept under the microscope - delivering the Will of the Electorate - and keeping it on the rails, and the potholes repaired at last.&nbsp;

Concentrated minds

<h3> Douglas Murray says, "But the fact that a party like Reform – with almost no household names on its list – could be so close to the Conservative party in the polls is itself a sign. If you add together the Reform and Conservative parties’ share of the vote, you have a force that would at least have a chance of power."</h3><figure id="figure-z0y34azn3llwth0ckd" class=""><a data-mce-href="https://x.com/DouglasKMurray/status/1796078363284836436" href="https://x.com/DouglasKMurray/status/1796078363284836436" target="_blank" rel="noopener"><img id="z0y34azn3llwth0ckd" src="https://cdn.durable.co/blocks/2cgYVpMI8HNsdYwPpefnUZfBBDMU50VpyXO6taT2mySmrAOpVdakpa1sQ3uQCtap.jpg" alt="Photograph: Valery Tenevoy / https://plagness.com/makhnitskiy-2021 / Данил Павлович Махницкий, избирается в Государственную Думу 8-го созыва как кандидат от партии «Новые люди» в 202 одномандатном округе (Новомосковский избирательный округ): Внуковское, Воскресенское, Десёновское, Кокошкино, Марушкинское, Московский, Мосрентген, Рязановское, Сосенское, Филимонковское и Щербинка." title="Photograph: Valery Tenevoy / https://plagness.com/makhnitskiy-2021 / Данил Павлович Махницкий, избирается в Государственную Думу 8-го созыва как кандидат от партии «Новые люди» в 202 одномандатном округе (Новомосковский избирательный округ): Внуковское, Воскресенское, Десёновское, Кокошкино, Марушкинское, Московский, Мосрентген, Рязановское, Сосенское, Филимонковское и Щербинка." class="object-cover bg-gray-100" style="aspect-ratio: 16/9; object-position: center center;" data-corners="default" data-aspect="16:9" data-caption="" data-positionx="undefined" data-positiony="undefined" data-fullwidth="false" data-mce-src="https://cdn.durable.co/blocks/2cgYVpMI8HNsdYwPpefnUZfBBDMU50VpyXO6taT2mySmrAOpVdakpa1sQ3uQCtap.jpg" data-mce-style="aspect-ratio: 16/9; object-position: center center;"></a></figure>This just isn't correct. Reform will underperform and score zero MPs, while Labour's lead will shrink closer to the election because that's just what happens. The best case scenario for this Tory party is a hung parliament.&nbsp;He goes on to say "But the Conservative party never seems to want those people; indeed it is one of the few political parties I know whose leader seems to rather dislike its own voters".It's more fundamental than that. It dislikes conservatism. Conservatism is popular so they mistake it for populism, and something to be socially distanced from, because they believe (for reasons that escape me) that the party has swung too far to the right.He concludes by saying: "After the catastrophe, I suggest a rethink. The Conservative party always says it is a broad church but it isn’t. [...] Perhaps after the election, when we become the only country in the world to vote in a left-wing government, the Conservatives might wonder whether they shouldn’t have made more friends on their own side. The left does – which is just one reason why it is going to win."Except that the Tory party very much is a broad church. It will take literally anyone but conservatives. We have radical free marketeer libertarians, liberal internationalists, Tory socialists and a smattering of full-blown wokesters. I can count on one hand the number of actual conservatives, because the meaning of the word conservative has become so badly corrupted, that very few people know what it actually means. Thus, the right does not have a unity problem. It has a definition problem.The answer, then, is not to bury its differences. That's how it came to be in the mess to begin with. It last came to power with a massive majority, but no unity of purpose and no plan, because the party doesn't stand for anything, and immediately breaks out into infighting the moment it tries to do anything.&nbsp;The task at hand, is to properly define what the right stands for, what it seeks to achieve, and build a movement around that, which naturally excludes the one nation wets, fanatical free marketeers, and the liberal internationalist dinosaurs.&nbsp;<h3>The right keeps showing us that if it finds the right "leadership" it can win referendums and elections, but without having a clue what to do with power when it wins, it accomplishes nothing and disintegrates almost immediately, and only after the fact do they realise that maybe they should have had a plan. i.e Reversing Blair's constitutional vandalism, delivering cheap energy and fixing immigration.&nbsp;</h3>Until the right fixes its fundamental definition problem, it won't actually matter if we do win elections, because nothing will be accomplished by it. There is no unity without purpose, just a temporary, tactical ceasefire for short term aims. And look where that got us. (The background phot features the late and great Felix Dennis - maverick publisher (The Week and many others) and hedonist tree-fancier. A forthright capitalist and terrible loss to the eclectic rich population of the UK, with no time for smug elites; we just know he would have been up for helping WOTE to make its mark and stick it to the Establishment.)

Stranger things.

<h2>I think a lot of the debate about integration is wrong.&nbsp; </h2>Dr Rakib Ehsan (@rakibehsan) is close to the mark, pointing out that Muslims have no desire to integrate with metropolitan social liberalism (any more that the rest of the silenced majority do!), and their political power is born from their community solidarity, which is ultimately rooted in family - which makes them closer to British conservatism than anything that wears conservatism as a skinsuit in British politics. As such, if we had a functioning doctrinal centre-right conservative party, it would be the natural home for British Muslims.&nbsp;There are those who say Muslims don't integrate. And I've certainly been one of them, and there's a lot of justifiable criticism that can be levelled at Pakistani Muslims in particular. But the case in point is Bradford.&nbsp;Bradford has a reputation of being one of Britain's top contenders to be the location where the Great British Enema hose is to be inserted.&nbsp; It is, but not for the reasons you might think. The poor city planning choices of Bradford council did more damage to Bradford than the Blitz on the east end of London. In the inner city suburbs, though, Muslims have gradually transformed Bradford. &nbsp;If Britain is a "nation of shopkeepers", then they've integrated just fine (to a point, at least).&nbsp;In fact, they've done more to regenerate places like Bradford than any central government funded schemes, largely through their own enterprising nature. All we hear from pundits is about &nbsp;"death of the high street" - but that's just not true of Muslim areas, which now have thriving proto-high streets, with modern anglicised shopfronts. Rows of shops that were derelict when I was a kid.&nbsp;The point <a data-mce-href="https://x.com/rakibehsan" href="https://x.com/rakibehsan" target="_blank" rel="noopener">@rakibehsan</a>&nbsp;makes is that there's not much about British culture they would actually want to integrate with. Certainly that's true when white lower working class culture has a dangerously unhealthy relationship with alcohol. But actually, I think the problem is that it's the white working class who are no longer integrated into anything.<h3>Community, faith and nation have been gutted by post-nation liberals, and much of the resentment towards Muslims is rooted in the fact that they seem to have the community and political coherence that we used to have, but can no longer aspire to.&nbsp;</h3>The question, therefore, is how we rebuild it. I think only National Conservatism can do that, because it's the only ideology willing to attack the causes of our social disintegration. Namely, the welfare state, which substitutes family bonds for the managerial state. It's our cradle to grave dependence on the state that robs us of our political powers. It's also our lack of aspiration, content with being employees rather than business owners. We need a new spirit of entrepreneurialism and a tax regime that lets small businesses keep what they make.&nbsp;That is not to say there isn't a problem with integration among Muslims, but as I keep saying, the problem is white middle class liberals whose multiculturalist dogma has created, encouraged and exacerbated political separatism, and abandonment of borders has basically chucked petrol on the bonfire.I keep thinking about that Rayner clip in which she grovels at the feet of Muslims. We hear a lot of talk about "British Muslims" (and there are plenty of them who are soundly integrated) but what we're dealing with here isn't British Muslims at all. Rayner is pandering to foreign squatters. They are foreigners with foreign accents who shouldn't even be here - who not only contribute nothing to British life, they contribute nothing to the Muslim communities they nest in.As such, policy must address itself to the specific problems. We have a lot of "appropriate outplacement" to do, and we have to set boundaries on what we will tolerate from incomers, but we also need a conservative social programme of "levelling up" for the white working class, because ultimately, social mobility starts in the family. On that basis, there is something we could learn from Muslims. I think a lot of the debate about integration is wrong.Last word to Dr Rakib Ehsan:: "<a data-mce-href="https://x.com/rakibehsan/status/1796189849457659970" href="https://x.com/rakibehsan/status/1796189849457659970" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Labour is being hoisted by its own identitarian petard.</a> If you fail to challenge views which claim that Britain suffers from rampant institutional racism and minorities are routinely victimised, don't be surprised when your own institution gets dragged into those accusations."

Bend over...

Elsewhere in this site we mention that we are experimenting with AI tools; and we invoked the MS design tool using this Magic Spell: "man wearing traditional Yorkshire ecky thump costume grasping stinging nettles." Early days, I fear... but at least it's free for now."... ... In which Pete North describes his recent journey as an online political observer and commentator, and the task ahead for the new breed of soothsayers and influencers that are steadily driving traditional media to face the possibility that they are no longer relevant. Today, the Evening Standard announced it is to stop printing a daily newspaper, blaming working from home and increased Wi-Fi on the London Underground. Twitter especially has been made robust and globally accessible at Elon Musk's insistence, and GB News is using for broadcast delivery and interaction. The "spaces" debating environment supports an unlimited potential audience and up to 12 speakers<h3>"...I've been on quite a few Spaces over the last few weeks and I can't remember exactly who said what, but a thought that wormed its way into my head, is that a degree of self-delusion is essential for any participant in politics. You have to believe in the impossible. Me especially.&nbsp;</h3>If I followed all my arguments through to their logical conclusion, I would have to admit that Britain is a defeated, colonised country and that it's too late to take it back. If I conceded on that, I would simply give up. Instead, I cling on to the idea that nothing is irreversible. That may be a delusion, but it's my delusion, and the one that sustains me.&nbsp;Here I have to remind myself that leaving the EU was once a delusion. Twenty years ago the possibility was so remote, but we all kept our eyes on the prize. We kept buggering on with our delusions. Which is what we must do now. We are still the majority. All it takes is determination and patience.If we are going to win, though, we're going to have to engage like never before. Voting alone won't fix this. It requires each of us to do more - to step outside our comfort zones and be leaders - even if that's just standing up to speak your mind when nobody else will. Join a party or organisation, even if you think it's futile. It doesn't matter which. Just get out and promote the idea that we *can* win. Later for all that politics bullshit.&nbsp;<h3>Looking at the political landscape right now, the British people have been frozen out their politics. Politics is now occupied by post-nation squatters. The Tory wets are consolidating their control over what's left of the Tory party, and the Labour party is poised to twist the knife. But they're surviving on borrowed time. &nbsp;Their age is over. They just don't know it yet.&nbsp;</h3>The political class are dinosaurs. They are relics of the old world order. They're clinging on by their fingernails. They may be fortified in an impenetrable Westminster bunker, with the media as their Imperial Guard, but soon they'll discover that they're going one way, and the people are going the other. <h3>Hell, even reality is going in the opposite direction to them. So just have faith in the law of political gravity. We can win. We will win. Faith turns delusion into the possible.</h3>

Grasping nettles

Nigel Farage has said Reform UK is becoming a "brand new Conservative movement". Sadly, it isn’t. It might be getting somewhere if it was. But ultimately, your party is what your website says it is. And if you didn't think it was important enough to update, you aren't to be taken seriously. We're now in an election period and Reform only has a working draft "policy" paper on its website - and it's lightweight drivel. I would vote for a new conservative movement, but I'm not voting for incompetent, lazy populists.This is because we’ve seen what happens when you come to power on the back of flim-flam and bluster. We got Boris Johnson, a woefully squandered majority, and Net Zero (because the policy cupboard was bare). Without thinking about what you’re going to do with power, there’s no real point in acquiring it.&nbsp;By now, most people on the right should understand what needs to be done.&nbsp; In interview after interview, Liz Truss outlines how she was sabotaged by the blob, noting that ministers no longer have any real power over their areas of competence. Blair’s constitutional mischief - a stealth revolution - must be reversed.This sounds like the sort of thing the Tories could and should have done with an eighty seat majority, but now we have to rebuild from the ground up and wait at least another five to ten years. Whether we succeed or not is entirely dependent on whether we have an "oven ready" intellectual product, with all the disagreements ironed out in advance. The last thing we want is opposition from our own side when we get hold of power.Then, as I keep saying, it’s not enough to simply roll back to last known working configuration. A restoration of parliamentary sovereignty overlooks that parliament did all this to us to begin with.&nbsp; Repealing Blairism is all well and good, but we still need some thought as to what replaces it.&nbsp;In a lengthy post, I spelled this out for Reform, but even if they understood it, they wouldn’t know what to do with it. I don’t think there’s any likelihood Reform will go away and do the thinking. They’re relying almost entirely on tub-thumping Farage speeches made up on the fly. The problem with that is that he's selling Farage rather than Reform, which means that the party, in policy terms, is getting relatively little exposure.&nbsp;Everything I'm reading about what Labour will do suggests Labour will finish the work of dismantling what's left of British democracy: the disastrous legacy of&nbsp;the last seven prime ministers. It's all reversible, of course, but it's going to require a National Conservative movement with a fully mapped out Restoration Act, and a plan to get busy on day one. But that’s just not how populists roll.If there is a way out of this mess, it will take a robustly conservative party that knows why it exists, what it wants to achieve, and how to do it. I’ve already <a data-mce-href="https://wote.uk/blog/distilling-the-essence" href="https://wote.uk/blog/distilling-the-essence" target="_blank" rel="noopener">set out the foundational principles of what a National Conservative party should look like,</a> and what a subsequent immigration policy should look like, but we must also think about governmental and democratic reforms. The most populists ever have to say on the matter is a forlorn plea for proportional representation.But the chief reason to choose principle over populism is that populism isn’t all that popular. Reform thinks it’s offering what the people want, but it’s not riding high in the polls, and conservative voters are more likely to stay at home (if the local election results are anything to go by). Even those who like Farage know he’s an unserious figure, and the electorate knows what he’s about. Reform may speak the same language as the politically homeless, but few believe they present as a credible alternative that’s ready for power.Without building a movement based on a coherent foundation, it could only ever be a protest vote dustbin, and sadly, it’s not even good at that. Farage hinted yesterday that he could be willing to make an election pact with the Tories, but with the Gaza effect eating away at Labour, Farage does not hold the same leverage that Ukip once did, and the Tory party doesn’t mind if Reform threatens MPs on the right of the party. Protest party politics doesn’t work if the target party has a death-wish.&nbsp;This is not to say Reform doesn’t have its uses. I won’t vote for the local candidate but will recommend Reform to people in my constituency with a view to degrading the safe seat majority of the Tory wet incumbent. That makes him easier to deselect next time around. Given the dismal conditions of this election, it’s probably never been more important to think locally, and about the longer term future.&nbsp;After the election, though, Reform doesn’t have much of a future. It may limp on as a protest vessel to keep the Tories out of power, but the real work is in popularising National Conservatism and beating the Tory party into shape.To that end, I have today joined New Culture Forum with a view to getting involved. Though I think entryism is the only game in town after the election, we also have to make the case for a robust nationalist centre right. Ultimately, the populist parties exist because there is no conservative party to speak of, so if we want real power, we have to go about building one. It’s difficult, but not impossible.&nbsp;This may sound deluded to some, but a thought that wormed its way into my head recently is that a degree of self-delusion is essential for any participation in politics. You have to believe in the impossible. Me especially.&nbsp;If I followed all my arguments through to their logical conclusion, I would have to admit that conservatism is vanquished and that Britain is a defeated, colonised country, and it's too late to take it back. If I conceded on that, though, I would simply give up. Instead, I cling on to the idea that nothing is irreversible. That may be a delusion, but it's my delusion, and the one that sustains me.&nbsp;Here I have to remind myself that leaving the EU was once a delusion. Twenty years ago the possibility was so remote, but we all kept our eyes on the prize. We kept buggering on with our delusions. Which is what we must do now. We are still the majority. All it takes is determination and patience.If we are going to win, though, we're going to have to engage like never before. Voting alone won't fix this. It requires each of us to do more - to step outside of our comfort zones and be leaders - even if that's just standing up to speak your mind when nobody else will. Join a party or organisation even if you think it's futile. It doesn't matter which. Just get out and promote the idea that we *can* win. Later for all that politics bullshit.&nbsp;<h3>Looking at the political landscape right now, the British people have been frozen out their politics. Politics is now occupied by post-nation squatters. The Tory wets are consolidating their control over what's left of the Tory party, and the Labour party is poised to twist the knife. But they're surviving on borrowed time. Their age is over. They just don't know it yet.&nbsp;</h3>The political class are dinosaurs. They are relics of the old world order. They're clinging on by their fingernails. They may be fortified in an impenetrable Westminster bunker, with the media as their Imperial Guard, but soon they'll discover that they're going one way, and the people are going the other. Hell, even reality is going in the opposite direction to them. So just have faith in the law of political gravity. We can win. We will win. Faith turns delusion into the possible. Follow Pete on substack at&nbsp; <a data-mce-href="https://www.northernvariant.co.uk/p/why-the-right-must-reject-populism" href="https://www.northernvariant.co.uk/p/why-the-right-must-reject-populism" target="_blank" rel="noopener">https://www.northernvariant.co.uk/p/why-the-right-must-reject-populism</a>

Why the right must reject populism

My writing of late has been exploring what the essence of conservatism is. This is a necessary exercise because genuine British conservatism can win where rootless populism cannot. And it has to be pitched firmly in the centre right. But what does "centre right" even mean when you have the likes of David Gauke, Rory Stewart and Amber Rudd laying claim to it? If those people are centre right then words no longer mean anything.&nbsp;In a post-Brexit referendum context, there is nothing centre-right about remainerism. Because real conservatism is about pragmatism.&nbsp;It was actually the president of the European Commission from 1977 to 1981 who said it best. In 1999, Roy Jenkins said “There are only two coherent British attitudes to Europe. One is to participate fully and to endeavour to exercise as much influence and gain as much benefit as possible from the inside. The other is to recognise that Britain’s history, national psychology and political culture may be such that we can never be other than a foot-dragging and constantly complaining member; and that it would be better, and certainly would produce less friction, to accept this and to move towards an orderly, and if possible, reasonably amicable withdrawal.”We did the latter. We're letting them get on with it the way they want to get on with it. With a sharply divided British electorate, there simply wasn't a mandate to go all in on the European project. This was always known, and our departure was always inevitable. The campaign to leave the EU began in 1975, before the EU was the EU.And there's something else that's fundamentally conservative. And it's not even "centre right". It's respecting the outcome of referendums. And as pragmatists, it is not for conservatives to try and drag us back to where we were never destined to be. We move forward. We believe, as a country, in national independence. We believe in internationalism, not supranationalism. Furthermore, we believe in national government and national democracy. That's your starting point.&nbsp;But then just this week, we have the supposedly "centre right" complaining about modifications to study visas. There simply isn't a conservative case (centre or otherwise) for allowing universities to expand beyond sustainable limits, selling visas to foreign students who won't complete courses, debasing the value of British qualifications in the process. It's grasping and short-sighted.&nbsp;<h3>The more one examines the ideas and attitudes of those who lay claim to the centre right, the more I'm convinced that these people are dissembling squatters.</h3>Far from being centrists or moderates, they advocate for the most radical changes to the makeup of British culture imaginable. These so-called "one nation" Tories are no-nation Tories. Or perhaps more accurately, post-nation Tories. Their misplaced sense of "pragmatism" is merely surrendering to the forces of globalisation without fighting back. This isn't pragmatism, it's supine indifference.If conservatism is to find its feet again, it must leave these dinosaurs far behind. The era of globalisation and "liberal internationalism" quietly died while we were all in lockdown.&nbsp;When we emerged from our collective incarceration, we stepped into a multipolar world, in which the post-war institutions are in a state of terminal decay, captured by a radical activist class. A world in which America is no longer the guarantor of European security. A world in which the EU no longer believes in free speech and free exchange of ideas. A world in which economic nationalism and national identity is roaring back to life. A world in which the young feel no obligation to maintain archaic international structures that were cemented in place many decades ago. A world in which electorates will no longer tolerate the stranglehold of duopoly and the false choice of consensus politics.The new conservatism must speak to this new world. It cannot be yesterday's men trying to put Humpty back together again. It must be prepared to build a New Britain, and a new settlement for the age of uncertainty. An age when the people demand more of a say in how they are ruled, and demand their politicians only act with consent.&nbsp;<h3>The centre is rooted in the nation state. The centre right is rooted in the time-honoured traditions that have withstood throughout. Nation, community, family, free enterprise and free association; the authentic centre of conservatism. If the Conservative Party can find its way back to these core concepts, it will rule for a generation and create a nation its people can be proud of.</h3>

WOTE.uk

Blog: the Revolution starts here...

Concentrated minds

Stranger things.

Bend over...

Grasping nettles

Why the right must reject populism

Distilling the essence