The hand-to-hand fight for the right’s soul
DANIEL JUPP
QUIETLY, and unnoticed by most ordinary voters, an aspirant political party has died less than a year after its birth. Advance UK, the brainchild of Ben Habib, is no more. Deregistered as a political party, its members and college are faced with a choice between Nigel Farage’s Reform UK and Rupert Lowe’s breakaway Restore Britain. The reality of that choice is the topic of an interesting article by the right-wing commentator Pete North, The civil war for the soul of Restore Britain.
Despite having previously warned that Restore Britain contains genuinely unpleasant racists in its ranks, yet backing Restore’s candidate in Makerfield, Habib settled on a neutral stance: ‘The responsible thing to do now is for Advance UK to take a step back and allow the pressure that Restore Britain will undoubtedly bring on Reform and the Conservative Party to develop. Now is not the time for us to be standing in elections against Reform, against Restore . . . and just confusing the landscape.’
North is less circumspect. His article confronts head on the ‘nationalism’ issue facing Reform and Restore (an overtly nationalist party) – where they stand on what’s become the ‘civic’ versus the ‘ethno’-nationalism debate. Habib had positioned himself as both a civic nationalist, based on shared United Kingdom citizenship (not on race or ancestry) but also a cultural nationalist underpinned by traditional Christian values. I suspect Farage might similarly identify himself.
The ideological problem for this position, North says, ‘is that median civic nationalist ideology only works for as long as minorities are small minorities with compatible culture. The window for that to work has been and gone. It was in ruins before the Boriswave but it’s totally gone now.’ He argues that in these circumstances ‘ethno-nationalism is the only way to preserve Britain’. Without the British peoples, Britain is just an airport lounge where foreign tribes compete for access to the welfare dispensary. Maybe, but equally an ethno-nationalist policy is redolent of formal apartheid, genuine white supremacy as well as mass deportation.
North insists that ‘the problem isn’t the ism. It’s the ists’. He describes the online ethno-nationalist fraternity that have put their support behind Rupert Lowe’s Restore Britain as ‘toxic’. He worries that their ‘ethno-nationalism walks hand in hand with ethnic economic collectivism, which metastasises into National Socialism with a hefty dose of anti-Semitism . . . people [who] are completely politically illiterate’, whose ideas ‘would trigger most people’s gag reflex’. And utterly repellent to the ‘working-class southern English tribe, who mingle with the Windrushers as family and friends’, whose political totem is Tommy Robinson, not Nick Griffin. ‘Britain is not going to elect a far-right party,’ North asserts.
What he brilliantly articulates is the problem that faces ‘the right’ from too much ethno-nationalism on the one hand and too little of it on the other. A perceived schism that only helps the left. What should be self-evident, but that in the wake of mass immigration and enforced multiculturalism needs reasserting, is the irrefutable fact of our nation’s Anglo-Saxon heritage – our English descent, culture and language. Also that the coherent and unique civic values – not least freedom of speech – associated with this identity that by its nature includes patriotic and integrated ethnic minorities people or cultures of English descent and language, will only be protected by massive reduction of immigration and an end to the anti-white institutionalised racism of the State embedded across the country’s political institutions and social organisations.
The Henry Nowak case shows us precisely why, and of course Nowak was a victim of it by white skin colour even though he was a 2nd generation immigrant of Polish descent. When the authorities endorse critical race theory and its white-hating elements, both native white ethnicities and white immigrants suffer.
Nazism however is as literally foreign to the traditional English mindset as Islamism is. The white working class and the ethnic majority in Britain have not all suddenly and collectively decided to become extreme racists, as the lurid fantasies of a left-wing dominated media and political class assert. Opposing mass immigration, opposing insults and calumny directed at one’s ancestors and history, and wishing to maintain a unique nationhood to pass on to one’s descendants – none of that is ‘far right’ and none of it presupposes hatred of others, nor does wanting sensible and much more limited migration from culturally compatible (and safer) societies. Rather, the white majority who aren’t radical leftists have been ignored for decades, and have seen utterly insane and unprecedented levels of demographic change imposed on them with direct negative impacts on their safety and security. Of course they oppose this – who wouldn’t? But every time they have peacefully asked for a different policy, they been answered with contempt and seen immigration increase still further.
Those few who claim to be nationalists or patriots but actually just hate Jews or black people, confirm every dishonest smear the Left places on nationalism and serve the purposes of the government, providing excuses for legal, policing and propaganda disparities that unjustly target the (still) ethnic white majority, while alienating and losing the confidence of integrated and assimilated ethnic minorities.
The closure of Advance has brought to the surface a fundamental tension running through the post-Reform right, an uneasy struggle between decent (and fed up) anti-immigration conservatives who make up much of Restore’s support, and a hardline ethno-nationalist faction that has attached itself to Lowe’s project. The harder ethno-nationalists are very active on social media and on the ground, but likely to have the effect on most voters that North predicts.
These are people who think that Habib and civic nationalists of minority ethnicity (or mixed race) should not be allowed to join their party, like the self-declared racist and Restore Party member, Steve Laws. A view apparently not shared by Lowe himself who declared Habib and the Advance UK membership as ‘welcome in his (open to all) Restore Britain family’.
The need for acknowledgement of ‘English’ as an ethnic category, never necessary in the past, is the direct consequence of the imposition of immigration, multiculturalism and legally enforceable diversity policies on once white communities. This need is urgent, even if extreme elements attach unwanted other ideas to it.
The modern truth is that I, a white Englishman, am done a racial injustice by people who deny either my basic ethnic Englishness or treat me as a second-class citizen and teach my children to hate their ancestors. At the same time I may have far more in common with Thomas Sowell or indeed Trevor Phillips then I have with Owen Jones or the white leftists who support injustice towards me on racial grounds.
These new conditions argue for a degree of ethno-nationalism along with the civic nationalism that Habib argued for in a way that Reform hasn’t fully expressed, nor has Restore. Farage’s response to the Nowak case sought to get the balance right by honestly identifying anti-white bias but did not reach into the deeper issue of ethno-nationalist representation.
Some ethno-nationalism is, as Lowe’s deportation focus explicitly realises, and as North believes, the ‘only way to save Britain’ from current two-tier injustices, critical race theory, black supremacism and rampant immigration levels that will relatively soon see the effective extinction of the ethnic groups who have been the majority populace of the UK for thousands of years.
Such an acknowledgment forms the logic behind Eva Vlaardingerbroek’s first patriotic European Citizens’ Initiative. At the same time this preservation and defence of the majority cannot be allowed to be hijacked by those who are genuinely extremist and simply racist towards others.
Defending ourselves from replacement or injustice is morally an absolute right. Embracing Nazism is morally an absolute wrong.
Habib and Lowe were both ousted from Reform for different reasons that represent different fractures on the Right. Habib is mixed race, of English and Pakistani descent, and a leading civic nationalist. In Oxford Union debates Habib offered a stout defence of British history and identity, including during the era of the Empire. A former Brexit Party MEP, he is undoubtedly a decent and sincere patriot, whose most recent big speech focused on the reassertion of Christian and British culture, a clampdown on immigration, and deportation for asylum seekers, illegals and foreign-born criminals. He left Reform after Farage replaced him as chairman with Zia Yusuf without notice. Lowe left the party for what might be termed more ethno-nationalist reasons, for advocating large scale deportations of unintegrated migrants – a policy which Reform has come to adopt.
The route to accommodating both civic and ethno-nationalism is to reduce immigration very severely, to fiercely push back against woke and leftist narratives of contempt for the majority and their identity and history, but to also reject things like Jew hatred with equally uncompromising integrity. Distinguishing between migrants who integrate and those who don’t is vital to fair judgement on these issues, and expressions of hatred or contempt towards the white majority and their history seems, along with actual crimes being committed, like a fairly good way of discerning whom we want to accommodate and whom we should deport or deny entry to. The issue is which party can be trusted to do it.
There’s absolutely nothing wrong with wanting to remain a white majority nation because this means protecting your existing and native populations. Rupert Lowe will say that out loud. Farage won’t. He (like his unlikely bedfellows Tommy Robinson and Ben Habib) appears more sensitive to ethnic minorities who respect that and who came here for the cultural and civic values that complete demographic alteration would destroy. Those people deserve protection too, far more than any radical leftist, of any skin colour or ethnic background, does.
This article (The hand-to-hand fight for the right’s soul) was created and published by Conservative Woman and is republished here under “Fair Use” with attribution to the author Daniel Jupp
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