A people’s petition

I’ve been surprised by some of the comments on yesterday’s post in which I set out ten basic demands for a street protest movement. The list is just my suggestion, but the point is that we’ve seen dozens of protests and demonstrations, and there is never any formal agenda behind them. That’s why they seldom accomplish anything. If we are going to assemble at scale then we must be able to deliver a clear set of actionable demands. We can always come back for more if we succeed.

While I’ve been making the point for some time that we do need to develop a detailed policy platform, that kind of work is the domain of political parties - to refine their offering and give them direction. It’s as much so that political parties themselves know what they would do with power. A street movement, though, communicates through banners and placards, so any demands have to be concise and self-explanatory, and likely to secure the agreement of everyone involved.

This is where we have to learn from left wing protests movements. If this is going to succeed then it will need some serious money behind it, and we’ll have to provide pre-printed placards just as the left does. Very often we see a narrow selection of well crafted messages centred on specific objectives and themes. Our demands have to speak to our main priorities, which at this point is less to do with constitutional tinkering or broader policy objectives, and more to do with existential matters such as immigration.

My thinking here is that there is no uniting the right under a party political banner. The ethno-nationalist right belongs to a very specific ideological nationalist framework that has very little in common with conservatism, and there is major disagreement on fundamental principles. As we have seen with Restore Britain, Thatcherite civic nationalism does not cohabit well with doctrinal British nationalism, and neither fits in especially with other strains of right wing thought. They all tend to dislike each other which is why there is no political unity.

I’ve lost count of the number of “Unite the right” initiatives, all of which have come to nothing, because the British right is not homogenous and is mainly defined by its opposition to the left. That entrenched disunity is what makes party politics a futile endeavour for the time being, and I don’t think that is going to resolve any time soon, and especially not while Farage is in the mix. He is the barrier to any insurgent party developing a coherent policy platform.

Because of that, the right is probably going to lose the next election, especially if it drops before 2029, so in the interim we have to do something useful. We have seen Tommy Robinson jamborees in London, and while they do serve a function in letting the wider public know that they’re not alone in how they feel, and that we are not “far right thugs”, this activity is of limited use because it isn’t making any specific demands of government, and there is no focus to any of this activity. That’s why a charter of demands is needed.

The list items I suggested were chosen because they’re understandable, most of the right agrees with them, are immediately actionable, and in my view the most pressing concerns. You may have better suggestions.

It certainly could be the case that a street movement publishes a pamphlet elaborating on these demands, but this is not about harvesting policy ideas. It about finding the distilled priorities of everyone who identifies as right wing, and converting them into protest sentiments.

The point is to popularise and prioritise. The job of political parties is to turn such sentiments into actual policy, but a street movement doesn’t deal in detail. It deals in exclusively in sentiment. The job of the street movement is to make itself impossible to ignore - to the extent that there is political gain if parties support the charter. This runs concurrently with party political activity.

Ideally, such a charter should seek to secure a million signatures (a people’s petition) backed by regular street demonstrations around the country, preferably with charter ambassadors in parliament. I already have some ideas on how to establish this. It will involve distributing materials and banners at demonstrations, and building up a network of serious people who understand the mission. We don’t even have to organise the protests ourselves, we can simply turn the ones that already exist into something more focussed.