Immigration: incoherence on the Right

This weekend I’ll be speaking at the Homeland Party conference as part of a panel. I’m not a member but, as ever, I will talk to all factions of the right. I’m a political analyst. It’s what I do. I’m interested to know where we agree and where we disagree.

As I understand it, Homeland has a BNP heritage, and I doubt I’m likely to agree with their policy platform (insofar as they have one). For some reason, ethno-nationalists tend to be socialist in outlook, and that’s never been my cup of tea.

The debate will almost certainly land on a recurrent theme we’ve seen on social media recently. The great civic nationalism versus ethnonationalism debate. The right is riven with infighting and philosophical bickering and I hope to bring a little clarity to it. At this end of the political spectrum, it’s every bit as frayed as the left and we are very much in the Judean People’s Front territory, with at least a dozen similar parties and indy-media personalities.

From what I gather, the actual far right doesn’t like Tommy Robinson because he is a “zionist shill” (whatever that means), and at the same time he is too far right for Farage and Reform, while immigration hard-liners of all stripes (myself included) reject the party for being too moderate and incoherent.

I can't say I align with any of the factions on the right. Tommy Robinson's shtick is that it's just the Muslims we need worry about, but I'm just as concerned by the rise of Indian sectarianism and the fact that India is no friend of Britain. Nor especially are Indians integrating. Meanwhile Reform is a civnat clown show that doesn't know what it stands for. It's never not going to be a cringefest. Amateurism and sloppiness are in the party DNA.

But then there's the ethno-nationalists, who always seem to have old fashioned socialist ideas and identical views to Corbyn when it comes to Red Sea Pedestrians. For me, if the word "Zionist" features heavily in your political rhetoric, you aren't to be taken seriously.

The problem we have is that all of them are symptomatic of a completely dysfunctional Tory party, which can't be trusted even if it did get its ducks in a row. I like Robert Jenrick and he's done his homework, but the party won't let him be as radical as he needs to be. Half the party would rather be out of office than do anything remotely conservative. A properly conservative leader needs to kick out the Lib-Dems in their ranks, but that cuts the party in half. If the party is going to rebuild as a conservative party it needs to carefully vet every new candidate.

As such, there isn't an intellectually coherent movement on the right, and nothing I can even half-heartedly support. I have a soft spot for Ukip but I'm under no illusions about its prospects - especially in its new guise as a Christian nationalist party.

I took a close look recently at the SDP but that’s a non-starter for me. I'm not a social democrat, I detest welfarism, and their ideas about an interventionist state are really just romanticising the twentieth century economy. Their lightweight manifesto is littered with gimmicks. They are halfway serious about immigration, perhaps more so than Reform, but I've heard it from the horse's mouth that large scale deportations will never be on the SDP agenda.

All of the parties have ideas about controlling the rate of influx but none have policies to address garbage immigration that doesn’t integrate, and contributes nothing. It is for this reason I set out my own manifesto.

Many have suggested that all these factions need to unite, but when you understand their fundamental philosophical differences, you see why that isn’t likely. Ethno-nationalists see civic nationalists as part of the problem. Civnats want immigration control but still essential consent to ethnic replacement.

Though I’d always considered myself a conservative civnat, recent debates have forced me to re-visit my own beliefs. Demographic trends can no longer be ignored, and the civic nationalist ideal lost to multiculturalism.

To understand the current dynamics it’s worth recalling that civic nationalism was the 1990's counter-argument to multiculturalism. Civnats (myself included) argued that you can have a multi-ethnic society just so long as all lived by the same basic set of values and lived under one law for all. As an ideology it gained traction because it was a way to talk about mass immigration without being called far right.

At the time, arguments about demographics and replacement levels of immigration didn't really feature in the debate. That was the domain of ethno-nationalist parties such as the BNP who were racist by their own admission.

As such, civnats elected to defer any debate about demographics, which was easily done because all the projections were in the distant future. Civic nationalism was the ultimate in political expediency. It became the political operating system of Farage and Ukip not least because euroscepticism needed to disambiguate from the BNP.

But the thing about people is that most of us get to a certain age where we stop interrogating our own beliefs. Very few people evolve politically with age and they seldom want break their programming from their formative years. This explains Reform's reluctance to wade into the deep end of the immigration debate. Not forgetting, the same old political imperatives apply. Nobody wants to be seen as racist, and so long as there's an ideological distinction with ethnonats, someone else is the bad guy. Nice and convenient.

But a quarter of a century (and several million immigrants) later, the arithmetic isn't quite balancing. Civic nationalism didn't take hold. Multiculturalism did, along with the two-tier policing and justice we see today.

To be a coherent civic nationalist, therefore, you not only have to define the parameters of the multi-ethnic society (and the one law for all doctrine), you also have to enforce it. If you're at all serious about building an egalitarian colour-blind society, you have to strip the statute book of equality legislation, cut all funding of "community relations" NGOs, shutter extremist mosques, and enforce the borders.

If, like Farage, you're going to talk about being open and welcoming to those who share our values, you have to define them, and you have to acknowledge that third world imports generally don't share our values. The concept of queuing at a bus stop is seemingly completely lost on sub-Saharan Africans, and we'll be here all day if we expand the debate to Muslims and Indians.

As such, the is a prejudicial component to civic nationalism if the objective is a functioning society. Immigration has to be in sustainable numbers and from culturally and economically similar countries. Moreover, after a decade of effectively open borders, a great deal of corrective action is necessary to remove those who cannot and will not integrate - at the very least to prevent the kind of sectarianism we're seeing.

As such, I would argue that any party that calls itself civic nationalist but has no robust policies to establish and defend the overarching culture, then it is not, in fact, civic nationalist. You are essentially indistinguishable from all the other political parties - who all know that there are problems but won't go as far as doing something about it in fear of being called racist.

The main distinction between civic nationalism and ethno-nationalism then, is that the former surrenders to ancestral Britons becoming a minority - just at a slower rate than non-nationalist parties. Some people are relaxed about this so long as Britain remains a broadly liberal first world democracy.

That's an arguable position, but hardly credible when the door is open to the third world, and when there is little evidence that most of them are ever fully integrated. If anything, the rate of immigration has sent integration into reverse.

The point here, is that in the contemporary context, an *ideologically coherent* civic nationalist party would have policies that were 90% similar to an ethno-nationalist party. Ethnats are defending an ethnicity whereas civnats are defending a culture - and both require robust enforcement and coherent ground rules. Ethnats argue, however, that our culture is the product of our ethnicity, ancestry and history. Are they wrong? I doubt it.

Of course we can absorb newcomers, but accepting people from radically different cultures with radically different values changes what we are. Usually for the worse. Arguably societies must mutate to survive but when we have such a massive rate of influx, beyond our absorptive capacity, we become an ungovernable hellscape with no common binds.

I think the distinction between what civnats and ethnonats want is actually pretty slender, to the point where it isn't really worth making the distinction. You are either a nationalist who wants good government so that our nation and survives and prospers, or you are something else entirely.

Civnats, though, must realise that the demographic argument is no longer some distant dystopian future. It's in the here and now, and something that must be addressed before we reach a state of Lebanonisation. You cannot be a doctrinal civnat unless you recognise corrective action must be taken - and that involves a degree of remigration.

With Farage skirting around the problems, stopping short of anything approaching robust policy, and (like Tommy Robinson) surrounding himself with token ethnics, he has effectively surrendered to multiculturalism, calling for national unity on the basis of opposition to the incumbent parties. But what then would change were Reform to become the incumbent?

Maybe they'll stop the boats and deport foreign criminals. That's good as far as it goes, but how does that address the rising sectarianism and the legacy problems of garbage immigration? The short answer... it doesn't. As such, we can bin the notion that Farage is a civic nationalist - because he isn't even a nationalist in any sense that matters. Reform is just a 90's brain Tory party.

Of course, Farage is smart enough to know that ethno-nationalism is an electoral dead end. Identarian parties are prospering on the Continent but something gets lost in translation when it lands in Britain. It’s politically toxic even if the majority favours robust immigration controls.

As much as anything, the debate is policed by a nexus of well funded far-left organisations whose goal is to smear anyone whose views they disagree with. Just today, I've had a mention in Searchlight magazine (the usual tawdry smears instead of attacking my arguments). There was a time when that would've been deeply concerning but its followers appear to support Mengele style surgical experiments on the mentally ill, and cheer on Hamas rape-murder squads. There'll be more antisemites at their events than anything I attend. I'd thank them for the exposure but I have burner accounts with more followers.

The party that succeeds, therefore, is the party that somehow manages to strike the right balance of patriotism and robust immigration policy, while rejecting the far right baggage (i.e. white supremacy and weird conspiracies about Jews). Whether that’s the Homeland Party or not I don’t know. I doubt it. There seems to be a strand of thought on the fringes that equates globalists with Jews, and that mass migration globally is orchestrated by them. That won’t wash in a country that prides itself on the defeat of the Nazis.

Again I conclude that most of these fringe parties are symptomatic of the mainstream parties no longer representing their traditional bases. Nobody seriously believes Labour represents working class interests, or that the Conservative Party is in any way conservative. A functioning Labour party would want to protect workers from exploitation and wage depression that goes with high levels of immigration and illegal immigration, and if the Tories were remotely concerned with conserving anything, they wouldn’t be holding the door open for third-worlders with values radically different to our own.

As Nick Dixon observed on his Substack the other day, Robert Jenrick appears to be outflanking Reform on immigration. Today,Jenrick has said that India and other countries that refuse to take back illegal migrants should face visa bans and cuts to aid. This is getting dangerously close to coherent policy. If he comes close to a policy to grapple with Islamist sectarianism, then I might start to believe the Tory party can be salvaged. If he does, the writing’s on the wall for Reform, and very probably the looney bins on the fringes. Though it may spur Reform into establishing a coherent set of immigration policies. Stranger things have happened.

Though the Overton Window has shifted substantially since the election, there is still a long way to go before the key issues are properly addressed, and until they are, I will probably remain a political nomad out in the wilderness. Civnats, ethnats and Tories are all likely to disagree with me as much as I disagree with them.