2025: The year of remigration

This was the year when the word remigration was placed firmly on the political map. I played a small part in that. We now see the word in common usage in the mainstream press and even form the US government. It stands every chance of becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy.

But that all depends on what is meant by the word. For some it means removing all illegal immigrants while others will settle for nothing less than deporting all brown people. There is no real agreement on what the word means in terms of definition or execution.

The chances of it happening in Britain, though (even the gentlest version of it) seem slight. Earlier this year we had Zia Yusuf setting out Reform’s position that all illegal immigrants will be removed. He even went as far as putting a number on it. Reform is seeking to remove 600k in their first term.

But then as anyone familiar with the issues knows, this isn’t even scratching the surface. Official estimates suggest there are well over a million illegals, but it could be as many as three million. And let’s cut to the chase here. Even removing 600k people who do not want to leave is no easy feat. It would require political mastery we’ve not seen in a generation or so.

As I’ve oft detailed, I don’t think the ICE van approach will yield the results we want to see. As an approach it may be successful in the first few weeks, but after that it’s a law of diminishing returns as illegals go deeper into the woodwork. At that point you’re having to deepen investigations and utilise local inspection and enforcement that no longer exists.

The preferred approach to remigration is to create the conditions where as many as possible will leave voluntarily - even if that means offering financial assistance and incentives. Quite obviously, there is merit in terminating all benefits for foreigners, but as noted previously, for many migrants, benefits are just additional income to their highly lucrative illicit activities dealing drugs and counterfeit goods.

In order to address that we will have to seriously beef up the National Crime Agency, perhaps even turning it into our own version of the FBI. We have to remove all the means by which staying in Britain is profitable. Even then, we’re still going to have to go into the woodwork to find them.

This is the thinking that is largely absent form the remigration debate. We’ve seen some acknowledgment in Restore Britain’s derivative report on mass deportations, but no detailed picture of what enforcement capabilities need to be rebuilt. In my view it’s going to take unprecedented spending on local authority enforcement, and a national supervising agency working on the presumption that some urban councils hostile to the agenda will seek to frustrate all efforts.

Recognising that millions of migrants are economic migrants with no real loyalty to Britain or interest in assimilation, Britain has to be hostile to their ambitions of making money. This is something Rachel Reeves is adept at, but her measures are largely geared to law abiding natives. If that can be turned around then we might get somewhere. After all, we are now seeing Poles leaving Britain of their own volition now they can make a better living in their home country.

But then we get to the more thorny issue of what to do about the Moslem problem. That’s going to require an entirely new politics which even Reform isn’t cut out for.

Yesterday we say yet another murderous attack on Jews, this time in Bondi Beach, Australia. While politicians have described the atrocity as “shocking”, there is nothing shocking about it. In every Western country, Moslems take to the streets and the mosques to tell us their intention to kill Christians and Jews. And then they go out and actually do it.

What is shocking is that this doesn’t elicit a meaningful response from authorities. What we get is the usually mealy-mouthed platitudes underscored by a tacit admission that they’ll allow it to happen again and again and again. And happen it does - because doing something meaningful means doing all the things they’ve avoided doing that they simply do not want to do.

There are reasons for this. Mostly it’s cowardice. Take robust measures targeted at the actually problem and you’re immediately open to cries of racism, followed by protest. But there’s a more pernicious reason. Politicians can’t be bothered. Having to take a firm line and stand on a principle puts you in the firing line, and that’s not what they want. They want the pay and prestige of elected office but none of the hassle that goes with it. Your safety and the survival of civilisation just isn’t important enough to them.

As such, they will only speak to the problems in generic terms, such as we’ve seen this week with Labour’s remarks on violence against women (a proxy for grooming). As much as it’s cowardice, many of them depend on the votes of the very people they should be picking fights with. The supine response of our political class is because they are lazy, cowardly and venal.

The policy response should be obvious. A line must be drawn once and for all. We need robust anti-sectarian measures and to shutter all mosques where radical preachers spread their poison. MI5 knows who and where they are. We’re going to have to ban the burka and other ethnic garb, ban Halal and reassert those “British values”. And then we’ll have to ban foreigners from working in the civil service and standing for election.

But here’s the thing. While these are all things that must happen, we can reasonably assume they won’t, even under a Reform government. And since there is nothing else in the mix likely to form a government any time soon, it doesn’t really matter if remigration as a concept is mainstreamed. Reform will adopt the rhetoric, but not the policies. Reform is likely to be the biggest electoral bait and switch since Boris Johnson.

If then, remigration isn’t the plan, I’d quite like to know what is. One thing that’s absolutely clear is that we cannot go on like this. It seems that all we can do is wait for the great collapse - because I don’t see a political solution. For all that the rhetoric is ramping up, there’s still no coherent movement on the right. There is too much fragmentation and no unity of purpose.

I have previously postulated that it will perhaps take a Reform implosion for politics to recalibrate along firmer lines, but my deliberations over the last year or so suggest otherwise. There is no great resurgence of nationalism on the horizon. It all leads to the same miserable dead end.

I’ve been using the term “far right” quite a bit lately to refer to a certain strain of nationalism. I got up close to it over the last year to take a long hard look at it. That is not to say all nationalists are far right, but there is a particular doctrinal nationalism that stalks the mainstream “new right”.

As it happens, I have no quarrel with the remigration agenda. I don’t see that as far right, nor especially do I think ethno-nationalism is far right. That used to be my benchmark, but ethno-nationalism is coherent whereas civic nationalism is not. Civic nationalism is fair weather nationalism and it doesn’t withstand economic stress. Ethnic solidarity is the natural state. Civic nationalism is a bureaucratic contrivance.

The actual far right, though, is puritanical in its approach to nationalism and remigration. There’s putting your own people first and then there’s naked race-based hate - particularly towards Jews. At that end of the spectrum you’re likely to bump into holocaust denial and economic collectivism on the lines of race.

Here’s where the lines start to blur in that a lot of the economic approaches of the far right are traditionally old socialist ideas (and explicitly anti-capitalist), which is why the spectrum bends like a horseshoe. You then get into isolationism and disengagement (anti-NATO politics - usually tied up in creative theories about “Zionists”). As such, there is a doctrinal far right nationalism, most commonly articulated by the likes of Nick Griffin. I never liked this stuff and I still don’t - and this is how I know I am not far right.

But there’s a reason I’ve been listening to them. The rub with these people is they happen to be right about a lot of things, not least immigration and demographics. The far right fringes have always had some of the best and most compelling essayists. They are not by any means stupid people. That’s the fundamental mistake the left keeps making - assuming they are. They’re certainly smarter than the average leftist.

What makes them compelling is that their critiques of the populist right are smack on the money, and a lot of their criticisms of Reform are quite similar to my own. Leading figures on the populist right tend to the intellectually lazy, frivolous people without a philosophical foundation. They still cling on to aspects of liberalism and boomer neoconservatism - particularly in their attitudes to Ukraine/Israel.

What should be noted is that this strain of quasi-fascist nationalism is distinctly British. It doesn’t quite track with the European far right, which is far further to the left on economics, and it’s a very different animal to American white nationalism. This is how I can tell when zoomers are addled with American Youtuber content.

The more you comprehend the constituent parts of the right, the more you see why the right is so fragmented. The only thing that marks them as right wing is their opposition to the contemporary left, but that’s the only thing that unites them. Otherwise, they have very little in common ideologically.

Meanwhile, the left throws the term far right around like confetti, to encompass Reform, Ukip and others. Having no fixed definition, they apply it to everything -including Tommy Robinson who is a populist civic nationalist. Any brand of nationalism is far right if you’re a leftist.

Where the waters start to get muddy is the recent leaning towards Christian nationalism, which can be “far right in its crackpot fanaticism. Again there’s a spectrum going all the way up to Christian religious conservatism which is dogmatically anti-abortion and anti-divorce. But these types tend to be philosemitic - placing them far at odds with quasi-fascist British ethno-nationalism.

For my part, I don’t like any of them. I suppose I am a conservative in search of a conservative party, and I think remigration is a necessary corrective to a grave and existential threat. You can keep all the racialist dogma that goes with it. I just agree that there are millions who are where who should be removed at the first opportunity. Precisely how many is a debate for when we’ve got the ball rolling.

What makes a lot of these factions so unserious is that they don’t have a firm understanding of their own ideologies. Ukip for instance, still has pretensions of being a libertarian party while being Christian authoritarians. You could loosely describe it as muscular civic nationalism, but it’s highly schizophrenic. Then you have the offshoots from Reform, which trade on all the same talking points as Reform but go deeper on the WEF conspiracy theories. Basically, they’re the crackpot right. Keeping track of them all and what they believe in is almost a full time job.

I think in the near future, we will see more leanings towards Christian nationalism in that thinkers on the right have now understood that our malaise is as much a spiritual crisis as an economic one. It won’t get anywhere because it’s totally insincere and it’s trading on the back of Charlie Kirk mania. Well adjusted normie Brits don’t go in for that sort of thing, and they’re not wrong to view it with suspicion. We like American bollocks in our films but we don’t like it in our politics.

The gap in the market is still for a coherent National Conservative Party with a solid policy base, but we lack the serious thinkers to establish anything like that. Crapola populism is as good as it gets - and it will remain tethered to civic nationalist ideals.

I would have liked to have seen a new “sensible nationalism” emerging out of the ever growing contingent of Reform sceptics, but apparently, once you step off the reservation, all roads lead to the far right with its solipsism and antisemitism.

This is why I don’t see a coherent right wing movement emerging any time soon. Many believe we will see a new movement of Fuentes inspired ultra-right zoomers coming of age when Farage retires, but I don’t see it. Zoomer edgelords are ultimately attention hungry children who like to trample on taboos, but they will just make arses of themselves. They may be shifting the Overton window at the moment, but they get cocky and make themselves repellent. Where they’re going, the British electorate will not follow.