The wreckage of the British right

This is not a subject I enjoy writing about, especially on X because it brings out all the cranks and weirdos. But then if something is contentious then I am obliged to write about it.

There’s a video going around where an AdvanceUK meeting is gatecrashed by an antisemitic crank. Ben Habib handled it as best anyone can when not prepared, but you do have to be prepared for such eventualities in these times. The individual in question opens with a misquote of Charlie Kirk - which pertains to a particularly American conversation about Jewish funding of NGOs and cultural institutions.

First off, I am seriously sick of this American colonisation of our debate by Youtube addled losers. Ben Habib rightly pointed out, being far more polite that I would’ve been, that a lot of the money that funds the institutions that undermine our democracy comes from the British government.

Here you have to understand a little more about the NGOcracy. If you look at the top ten refugee organisations in the UK, what leaps off the page is that they are not charities as such. They do not exist to simply collect money to distribute to the needy, as many envisage charity work to be. They are corporate entities, and they are as much a business as any law firm - with huge turnovers. Primarily, they are government contractors exempt from the usual rules of business because they are “charities”. They are all service providers to the government - be it logistics, distribution or legal appeals. Some are are vertically integrated.

Migrant Help, for instance, is a 24/7 asylum helpline, offering legal representation, and destitution prevention; and assists tens of thousands with benefit claims. They rake in £50m+ in asylum support contracts. If you look at the top ten list, they all tell much the same story. NGOs are not acting out of the goodness of their own hearts and activists are in the game because it’s a very lucrative high status career. We also find that many of them in the mix are Christian organisations.

As to the funding of subversive cultural institutions, the very worst of them are the National Trust, the Royal Society and the BBC. All of them funded by you. This is a debate that Britain needs to have - away from the crankery of American influenced very online cranks. If we allow this kind of crap to infiltrate our political parties then they will die - and deservedly so. There’s a reason the far right is electorally insignificant.

The argument made by the Advance UK troll hinges on a misquote of Charlie Kirk. He said “Jewish donors have been the No. 1 funding mechanism of radical open-border, neoliberal, quasi-Marxist policies, cultural institutions and nonprofits. This is a beast created by secular Jews and now they’re coming for Jews, and they’re like, “What on Earth happened?”

That’s the actual quote. The individual in question quite deliberately omitted “This is a beast created by SECULAR Jews *and now they’re coming for Jews*”.

That changes the entire context if you don’t have sub-GCSE comprehension skills. It’s important to note what Kirk was talking about. He is talking about the liberal cultural complex - in which *secular* Jews are disproportionately influential. It has unwittingly played midwife to woke politics - which turns on critical race theory - which itself is anti Jewish. It has created the very monster on American campuses (the environment in which Kirk operated) that makes it unsafe for Jews.

Kirk was saying that these secular Jews have a lot of explaining to do in that they failed to understand the beast they were nurturing, because their institutional default is to back left wing civil liberties movements as ably illustrated by Connor Tomlinson the other day.

There’s a reason for this, in that the American right which opposed the civil liberties movement was also profoundly anti Jewish, and as a cultural institution, it behaves in the same way that bureaucracies do, failing to understand evolving threats. It is institutionally and habitually leftist by default, same as the black vote has traditionally voted democrat.

Since about 2014, we’ve seen the traditional voting patterns disintegrating - with blacks and hispanics increasingly backing MAGA, recognising that the contemporary left exploits them. There’s been similar movements in the American Jewish population as they way up the fact that their support for the left is not at all reciprocated - but the legacy Jewish organisations and NGO alumni have failed to keep pace - and continue to feed the beast. As such, Kirk is right. Secular Jews have a lot of explaining to do.

For America, there is a very pertinent conversation to be had about Jewish funding of subversive leftist organisations, in parallel to a debate about the extent of Israeli political influence over the White House. I’m not denying that, nor would I. But it is a very American debate - and considerably less relevant to Britain.

Of more concern is the influence Islamism has in British politics. For starters, there is the Moslem bloc vote which is now returning its own sectarian MPs, and the Ukip effect exerted on the Labour party by the Moslem bloc vote influences our foreign policy, particularly pertaining to Pakistan immigration and our schizophrenic posture towards Israel. Islamism is deeply rooted in academic, particularly sociology and politics departments, and Islamic groups have their own circles within the civil service and the police - not forgetting total dominance in local politics. They also have their own network of very dodgy NGOS.

This woman in the video abuses the Kirk quote for her own purposes, then goes on to state that the Talmud is as bad as the Koran, or words to that effect. That’s probably true in that all religious texts contain some ugly stuff, but it isn’t Jews raping their way across Northern England or blowing up pop concerts or running Baradari crime syndicates. Jews are integrated and their cultural contribution is enormous. If you lived through the latter years of the twentieth century then there’s strong chance that your favourite band/movie/comedian/screenwriter/author is of Jewish origin. Meanwhile the cultural contribution of Moslems fits on a postage stamp.

You can argue that there is an active Israeli/Jewish lobby in the UK - which indeed there is, but I struggle to see that it’s malign in that it’s the one thing that’s stopping the Labour party caving into Islamists. The woman in the video is clearly motivated by a hatred of Jews, and I’m sure the naziesque cross she’s sporting is not coincidental. Her argument is dishonest and piss weak, and it’s to Ben Habib’s credit that his party members recognise her for what she is.

Whatever the extent of Jewish influence, it’s maddening that ethnats obsess about Jews to the exclusion of all other matters, when the fact is that Britain has become a feeding frenzy for all manner of foreign powers. If it isn’t Russian oligarchs warehousing money in London property, it’s Indians buying up strategic assets and Moslems installing Sharia by the back door - while free trade neoliberals open our borders to cheap imports. I think we need a whole raft of anti-sectarian measures and new laws concerning foreign influence/ownership, and that should also extend to Israeli interests. That the online right is exclusively fixated on Jews is utterly bizarre.

When it comes to the anti-Jewish conspiracy theories on the ethno-right, my disdain is not “zionism” - as some accuse. I have the same antipathy toward the reductive and simplistic theories of the populist right when they mong on about Klaus Schwab, globalists and the WEF. The truth is far duller - that the international order us underpinned by a galaxy of international organisations, forums and standards bodies.

This is something we identified during the Brexit debate when the Brexiteers were waffling about “EU regulations” Our research (Leave Alliance) showed that the EU was not the origin of most EU regulation, and in fact the EU was a rubber stamping house for standard, regulations, frameworks and agendas passed down to it from above - particularly the UN. Most EU energy and climate regulations were designed by UNECE with a view to implementing the UN sustainable development goals. We then found that most technical regulation is developed by lobbyists through the standards organisations, and then handed over to the EU for gold plating. Much of it is then proliferated globally through FTAs, the WTO and various climate accords. They all copy each other.

By contrast, the WEF is just a TED Talks talking shop for liberal internationalists. In this system, there is no single all powerful lobby. It really all depends on the subject matter. Agri giants dominate food and trade regulation, while shipping giants such as Maersk lobby for sulphur limits on ship fuel in order to shaft competition. Then we find green NGOs are often corporate lobbying sock puppets (including the palm oil industry).

Influence peddling is much the same on the national level, where we see active foreign lobbies for just about every country on earth. There is an Israeli lobby but also a large Indian lobby, a Bangladeshi lobby and even an Iranian lobby. They’re all in competition with each other. This is one of the reasons I favour a ban on foreign born MPs.

The belief that the Jewish lobby is all powerful in Britain is one I find as ridiculous and illiterate as the WEF shtick. It is true that the Jewish lobby has preferential access, partially to the Labour party, but that’s because of the century old relationship the party has with Jews. Historically, they are integral to it, as they are modern British society. It’s a fact of life but I don’t see it as a shadowy, malign conspiracy. The left as a whole are anti-native because they are internationalist neoliberals who don’t believe in borders.

This is an evolution of the ideology underpinning the creation of the EU - which held that countries which were economically interdependent would not go to war, and through economic integration, borders could be abolished. This was the Monnet doctrine; an ideology that spread to the WTO. An interwar ideology given form in the wake of Nazi Germany - to prevent a return to war.

It’s bollocks, of course, but contemporary open borders ideology is a mutation of that ideology - rooted in neoliberalism, which has many advocates - some of the leading lights of which have been Indian. This gives rise to globalisation. Subsequently we’ve seen the anywheres versus somewheres debate - which has underpinned the collapse of globalisation ever since 2016 - as Europe’s economic and cultural power receded.

As such, the suggestion that it has all been orchestrated by a shadowy Jewish cabal is as offensive as it is ridiculous - and the same goes for the populist crapola about the WEF.

This all leaves me once again politically homeless. I have no patience for the simplistic tropes and slogan driven populism of Reform/AdvanceUK, and their approach to immigration is far too weak, but then on the flip side you have the online nationalist right, with a more robust immigration approach, but it’s teetering on the brink of old school neo-Nazism and national socialism - and they couldn’t organise a functioning party if their lives depended on it.

There’s still the Tory party, I suppose, since I still basically believe in free markets and good government, but I have no home in the Tory party because it’s still populated by liberals, warmongers and pro-EU internationalists. The “one nation” critique of populism and nationalism is broadly correct, in that populism has no serious answers and solipsistic isolationism will not protect Britain, but one nation Tories are basically defending a dying liberal status quo which we can’t be rid of soon enough. They don’t have an alternative vision.

Meanwhile, I’m not taken with the restorationists either. I don’t think ECHR exit will achieve anything, and a great repeal doesn’t actually do much without better parliamentary oversight, leadership and statecraft. The right keeps scapegoating the civil service and the ECHR for their own lack of initiative. It’s also based on a nostalgic idea of how the British state used to function, but I think we’d find that had social media been around at the time, it would have been every bit as dysfunctional and its corruption would be exposed for all to see. I’m also not one for throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Our constitution must always evolve.

As such, there is still a gap in the market for a proper National Conservative party which prizes national resilience, independence, balanced public finances, free markets, international engagement, proper borders, and robust defence of our nation and its peoples. But then that’s never going to come. The right is never going to settle on a coherent vision. It will remain fragmented and in competition. In the absence of a serious alternative, we’re stuck with Reform (however mediocre) just in order to tread water. Least-worstism is here to stay.