A crossroads for the British right
No sooner had I declared my intention to down tools for Christmas, I find myself reanimated over a debate between Connor Tomlinson and Daniel Finkelstein. I won’t bore you with the details because this post is an attempt to add some context.
The debate is yet again unfolding on the lines of Israel, where prominent Jews (and conservatives) are being asked to qualify why they support the Jewish ethno-state but oppose ethno-nationalism here in the UK.
Playing devil’s advocate here (as someone not especially fond of Finkelstein), in his mind his position is logically consistent in that he sees Israel as a necessary creation for the continued existence of the Jewish people, but reveals his true (boomer) identity believing Britain should continue on the basis of a shared civic identity - not for any nefarious reason, but because he’s very much part of the establishment (Peer and Times columnist) who believe Britain is “the world’s most successful multi-ethnic democracy”.
These people just haven’t updated their software because they never step out of their metropolitan suburban bubbles. They do not see that the British people are threatened by mass immigration because they don’t have a functioning definition of “British people” - and believe it extends to everyone and their dog, so evidenced by his incredulity that people think MPs should be exclusively British. This does not betray a Jewish communal agenda (as some would have it), rather it marks him out as a clueless boomer dinosaur who reflexively sides against the right when it comes to defending the status quo.
It also looks like Finkelstein is also failing to understand the distinction between the demographics-aware right and the far-right, but you can’t blame him for that lately since the ethno-right is attracting its fair share of low IQ antisemites marinated in conspiracy theories, which is very much a consequence of our fixation with American politics.
While you can contextualise it the way Connor Tomlinson does (which is not very far from my own reading of the circumstances) we are seeing a Fuentes-Owens inspired attempt to deconstruct WWII and the holocaust and attempts to rehabilitate Hitler, which obviously means Finkelstein has skin in the game. Underlying all this is an anti-Jewish conspiracy theory that Jews are conniving to destroy the white race through mass immigration, which is an age-old antisemitic trope.
As such, at a time when the fringe right is drifting ever more towards these antisemitic theories, you can’t really expect Daniel Finkelstein to see common cause with them even if Jews are threatened by mass immigration - particularly from Pakistan where antisemitism is part of the religious curriculum.
As it happens, it has not gone unnoticed by British Jews that they are threatened by rising Islamic sectarianism in Britain and there is concern among British Jews that the BBC is heavily biased, producing a report into the fears of British Jews without once mentioning Islam or Islamism.
This renewed debate is is something I've watched unfold for the last year. Identity politics begets more identity politics, and as ethnic minorities increasingly pursue their ethno-religious interests politically, it was only a matter of time before we saw a resurgence of ethno-nationalism on the British right. You cannot expect a civic national identity to hold when only the native population are expected to conform. I have more than a little sympathy with that view.
This, though, creates something of a dilemma for Jews, in that the survival of Britain as an ethnic British country is tied to their own survival as a protected minority (and protected explicitly by those “British values”, but once ethno-nats go down this particular rabbit hole it tends to walk hand in hand with antisemitic conspiracy theories - and before you know it, the ethno-right is spouting neo-Nazi tropes.
I've warned against it but it's sweeping leaves on a windy day. This very purity spiral is what killed the online momentum of the Homeland Party, where I was routinely accused of being a Zionist. Apparently, you have to be “anti-Zionist” to qualify as a nationalist.
I do not share this view at all. The point for me is that Britain was entirely able to accommodate Jews and their separate cultural practices when Britain was broadly homogenous, and tolerance was worth our while because a) it was no threat to us, and b) Jews have made a considerable contribution to British society. It was no real skin off our noses (or penises), not least because they were few in number and they don't proselytise.
Our tolerance, though, then extended to Islam and its barbaric, backwards values that very much was/is a danger to our safety and way of life, and their contribution is a net negative. Now, thanks to mass immigration, where natives are on track to become a minority in their own homeland, we, quite rightly, see less willingness to be tolerant, but it's a mistake to focus the intolerance on Jews.
The fact is, a self-confident demographically stable, homogenous country can accommodate minorities, but not when it's reached the point where they can no longer be considered minorities, persecuted or otherwise. As such, ethno-nationalism is the long overdue corrective, but instead of focusing on the very real threat of sectarianism (particularly of the Islamic kind), it chooses instead to focus on imaginary threats based on antisemitic tropes - to the extent where Jews are the primary target for remigration on the ethno-right. That's when it descends into neo-Nazism and crankery - which is why it remains electorally insignificant and politically impotent.
This is where you get into the doctrinal British nationalism that borders on economic fascism and national socialism which had an axe to grind long before mass immigration, and would in fact ally with Islamists to get at the Jews. (Nick Griffin got cosy with Islamists).
This is the wrong turn the ethno-right is currently taking, largely on the back of "anti-zionism" in the wake of the Gaza war, where antisemites have fallen for all the classic Palestinian propaganda, and transposed it on to Britain to suit their Jewish orchestrated Great Replacement narrative.
Ultimately, Jews continue to see themselves as a separate identity because they are a separate identity, and they keep being reminded of this because no matter how loyal they are or how successfully they integrate, contributing to law, medicine, music & theatre and even fighting in our wars, they are STILL the object of antisemitic hate - so being conscious of who they are is as much a survival mechanism as anything else. They lobby not for special treatment as Moslems do, but for protection.
You can credibly argue that this lobby has become part of the liberal blob acting against their own interests and against the ethnic interests of the English, but that's the debate we're currently having. It's important to be able to discuss that without throwing around accusations of antisemitism, but at the same time, antisemites are attempting to use it at evidence of a greater Jewish plot, and one which we must challenge, not least because it's so self-defeating for the right.
I take issue particularly with the antisemitism because it’s so very far from an accurate diagnosis. While Jews are indeed overrepresented in the NGOcracy which favours liberal immigration policies, it’s hardly a Jewish conspiracy. That the Jewish lobby reflexively sides with the left is part of a broader institutional obsolesce. We see this also in anti-racist organisations who fixate on the "far right" while turning a bling eye to the racist practices of Moslems (not least "grooming").
The anti-racism machine has become an institutionalised bureaucracy working on ancient software - of which the Jewish lobby is a part, and is now actively working against Jewish interests in the same way that our feral establishment no longer serves our own people. Much the same can be said of refuge NGOs working on a twentieth century ethos, unable to come to terms with the fact that refuge as a concept has become corrupted.
All of this is explained by the fact that the NGOcracy is a big business and if it re-evaluates its underpinning assumptions then they have no real reason to exist, and like all bureaucracies, they exist to self-perpetuate. The thought occurs that we see a similar dynamic in the USA, from the NAACP and a myriad of other race grifting NGOs right down to community level which owe their existence to the civil rights movement, but haven't had anything worthwhile to do for the last thirty years but need to keep the grift going. Few would say there was a black conspiracy to destroy the white race tied up in all these NGOs. It's just bureaucratic self-perpetuation.
It should also be noted that these NGO are satellites of a broader European legal order (UN, ECHR, EU) which is also obsolete. These entities were, in part, designed to prevent a repeat of WWII and the Holocaust, locking in an anti-majoritarian system which explains the rise of modern European populism. These unresponsive institutions are increasingly at odds with the demos, locked into a flawed legal system that facilities mass migration. Far from being a Jewish plot, we’re just looking at a legal order founded on post-war paranoias about nationalism - when the actual culprit was German ethno-supremacist imperialism.
The other cause of mass immigration is also linked to this obsolete system. Take the EU, for instance. We saw during Brexit negotiations how ideologically wedded the EU is to freedom of movement. The EU is built on the four freedoms and the view is that free movement of people is tied to the free movement of goods and services. This is a neoliberal economic ideology, but tied also to the idea that nations dependent on each other for trade and commodities would not go to war, and that a greater understanding can be fostered through exchange of peoples.
Even on a European scale I don’t think this was a good idea, but it became the entrenched ideology in the establishments of member states who in turn took this ideology to the WTO which is why we started to see visa clauses in FTAs. Immigration was seen as an economic lever, particularly by one Boris Johnson. The mass immigration we’ve experienced in recent years is entirely of our own volition.
We should also note that immigration has occurred in waves from disparate causes, from he war in Ukraine to the Chinese clamp down on democracy in Hong Kong, to the end of the war in Afghanistan - all of which was facilitated by our own government - motivated by a mistaken notion of playing our part on the world stage.
Brexit was the first real pushback against these establishment orthodoxies, and it now seems inevitable that we will leave the ECHR. Incidentally, it seems to have gone unnoticed that the intellectual architect of the Tory ECHR policy is Baron Wolfson of Tredegar, a notable Red Sea pedestrian.
You can very easily stitch together an antisemitic narrative by looking at all the donors and chairmen of leftist NGOs but the state Britain’s in is the culmination of decades of institutional decline and establishment hubris, and other European states can say much the same. It is precisely that which necessitates a political revolution, and if European civilisation is to survive then policy must be geared towards preserving European peoples.
As such, the resurgence of ethno-nationalism is both timely and necessary. If, however, that same movement abandons careful analysis in favour of lazy, convenient antisemitic narratives, then they will underscore precisely why this system (with “never again” as its root command) was invented in the first place. As to the “Jewish question”, Jews are caught between a rock and a hard place. Mass immigration clearly is not in their interests, but will find no allies on the right when Jews are at the top of their remigration list. That then underscores why a Jewish state is necessary. It is then for the ethno-right to explain why they favour an ethno-state for the English, but not for the Jews.
I see a future where Israel could be crucial allies for us. This anti-Semitism is a foolish distraction from serious thought.
Merry Christmas Pete
This is an excellent piece with genuine intellectual depth. The sort of article now conspicuously missing from supposedly conservative journals like the Spectator and Unherd. Merry Christmas.