The keynote speech at the annual Patriotic Alternative conference three weekends ago was delivered as always by Mark Collett.  Over its forty-minute length he set out a crystal clear statement of where we British natives are headed demographically and socially.  He stated plainly that the loss of living space and ancient family lines will continue into the future, and the oppressive control of the state will develop likewise.  Violence against us will be commonplace.  But Mark also asserted that visible and invisible constraints upon us will arrest any counter-development that might lead to a liberation from our travails.  Based on the failure of the BNP, in which he was so active, he eschewed hope for the political path.  He also had no time for talk of an eventual armed resistance (understandably so – no one should lightly wish war on his own people).  Instead, he held out hope for a greater and greater awakening and a gathering together in the face of all the escalating travail.  Unsurprisingly, as a “ground-up” theorist and activist he focussed on the “white working-class” who most bear the burden of the British Establishment’s seven-decade race project.  He is, then, driven by a realism which it would be wise to heed.  Even so, significant issues arise; three of which I will address.

First, for reference, here is the speech.  And here are the issues:

1. The limits of instinct and reaction

As Mark notes, Nigel Farage’s Reform Party is currently bound for government on a wave of public exasperation with the legacy parties, specifically in respect to what is termed “illegal immigration” but for many is really any and all immigration.  For others the Establishment’s very employment of the word “immigration” is dishonest, focussing minds on only the current ingress when, plainly, the problem is demographic, and one of ethnic and racial replacement.  For yet others it is more focussed on the politics and morality of the Establishment’s violation of our ethnic person … its abrogation of our native right over our homeland, its dehumanisation of our dissent, its engineering of all that is necessary for us to be blended out of existence.  But for thinking nationalists it is none of these things.  For none of them rise very far above that gift of instinct and reaction which we call racial awakening.  Part of normal human functioning and, therefore, essential to our people’s survival though it is, awakening is only a gate on the path to an authentic nationalist politics.  It does not guarantee the coming of lasting change.  Awakened or not, we remain enworlded, for World in this respect is the active principle in a trinity of formative influences of Mind also including the structuring and stabilising force of Relation and the serendipitous force of Events.  World alone, however, is inter-woven in the deep and particular histories of tribes and lands, gods and cultures, wars and techne, and philosophy.  It works upon us collectively, therefore, forming us, transmitting itself to the future through us.  What is without becomes what is within, made by unseen myriads of ideas, great and small, subtle and not so subtle, profound and not so profound, cascading down the generations, feeding into our conception of the real, of life, of sex, of good and truth, of faith, of ourselves, and of family and kind and the Other.

Of course, World changes in small ways with time by degrees, and it changes in large ways suddenly and periodically; and for a variety of suitably monumental reasons, one of which is the combined will of people we call revolution.  The periods between large change we call epochs.  Ours is much characterised by liberalism and modernity, and by Christianity before them.  It is impossible to fashion a purchase on this vast historical sum from a few random materials immediately to hand, such as reaction and critique.  Its weight is too much, its lodgement too complete and personal; such that everything that has happened will come to pass again because that is the essence of our social being.  We cannot, therefore, lightly propose epochal renewal when the epoch is thus embedded.  It takes a very special force to effect that, and there are not many of them. 

But such is nationalism, and such change - epochal change - is nationalism’s task; not a slate of managerial alterations or even the resolution of a big single issue, say mass immigration.  Those who think nationalism is just a means to a single end – any end – do not look at the world and see a regnant philosophical system.  They do not ask how we make our philosophy a system or make it regnant.  They are not revolutionaries.  But so deep and abiding are the respective meanings and distinctions of liberalism and nationalism that they cannot exist side-by-side.  If the two are brought together in the polity one must drive out the other or be driven out itself.  We are revolutionaries, therefore, or we are nothing.  For nationalists it is revolution then power, power then revolution.

The undertaking, then, can only ever commence from a fixed and holistic ideological place quite outside the character of the age.  But British nationalists must know that this place cannot be the Bowdenesque Nietzscheism from Mark’s days in the BNP, or the vestigial fascism of the movement which preceded it.  That type of thinking doesn’t engage with us.  It doesn’t refer to the existential crisis we face or to the noble cause, our life-cause, which answers that crisis.  It critiques liberalism not in the name of our emergent and ageless truth but in that of a noisy and non-real, vainglorious masculine spirit.  Invoking this martial straitjacket doesn’t take us to the nativist defence of homeland so much as to an attack on other natives and other lands, as was the employment of the mid-20th century original.  It deceives us as to its product, therefore.  It is the wrong ideology, at best a hobby politics for black-garbed dreamers and would-be hard-cases forever confined to the fringe of the fringe.  It is irrelevant, out of time, out of touch; and the mass of our people will simply not have it.

So where does that leave us as we wait or work for a viable ethnic philosophy to bestow upon us political relevance and momentum?  Well, even in the absence of philosophy Mark remains confident that nationalists would be able to speak truth to a Reform government, and influence its all-too-liberal civicism.  That truth-speak would necessarily be limited to critique, be that of Reform policy and actions, of the polity itself, of Islam and the multicult, of globalism and the Money Power, or of our ethnic decline and existential crisis.  But the fissure between liberalism and nationalism cannot be bridged.  As time goes by and need becomes ever clearer there must come a time when nationalists ask for nationalism.  Farage and Reform cavil and, in the absence of even a half-defensible argument, mechanically resort to the usual hate-labels.  And what then?  Do we accept that civicism is just the continuity of the disaster we thought we had left behind?  Do we go back to the white working-class who Mark talks about and say, “Sorry, but twenty-something years ago politics didn’t work for the BNP so there is nothing we can do?”  Or, alternatvely, “Sorry but we hammered on the door of the Electoral Commission, and they just won’t let us in so there is nothing we can do”.

There must be something we can do.  Public opinion really is rejecting the Establishment and all its works.  We do not yet know how far the zeitgeist will shift (with or without the efforts of nationalists).  All nationalists came to an awakening in much less propitious circumstances.  How many others will do so under the new conditions, and how fast?  It seems to me that we have to prepare for a positive development in that respect.  Now is demonstrably not the moment to turn our backs on party politics.  We must at least preserve some party structure so that if and when the opportunity arises we will be in a position to achieve the same breakthrough that civic nationalists are achieving now.

My guess is that this opportunity will come with the next five, perhaps six years.  Mark’s turning away from party politics is forced.  But his abrogation of it is a despairing act.  Given that a group of Scottish ex-PA guys have started a nationalist party and have got over the Electoral Commission hurdle, and given that political parties must do their own community activism in their own name, that abrogation could slowly but surely rob a purely activist PA of its relevance.  Party politics must be returned to the PA agenda in the hope and expectation that Reform actually means reform.

2. The middle-class is the political class

Now we must turn to the problem of class, leadership, intellect, and creativity, when class in our time is determined more by familial, behavioural and educational markers than by wealth or work and the social position these once ordained; and when many middle-class people are now under pressure from globalisation and race-replacement just as the working-class has been for the last thirty years (and many more will be so as the AI revolution hits). 

But at least the middle-class definitely exist, and not so different from the middle-class of generations past except its number has been boosted by the most able of the working-class whom Margaret Thatcher freed to strive for material wellbeing.  That cannot be said of the remaining working-class.  Certainly an emotional idea - almost an ideal - of working-class life holds on, but it is no longer representative of the reality.  The traditional, ethnically homogenous urban class of manual workers has gone; and along with it the deep root that is place and community, the dignity of hard, honest labour, the working man’s club, the trade union, the local Labour party, the cooperative, and Saturday afternoons on the terraces of the local football club watching local boys who lived alongside everyone else and married a girl from the hairdressers ... everything that marked that life has been ripped out and replaced by cheap modern junk.  In the sixties an elitist middle-class Labour Home Secretary Roy Jenkins fashioned divorce reforms to make the process of separating husband and wife “more civilised” for people like him.  Perhaps Oxford-educated liberal-leftists did manage to enjoy a more satisfying and varied sexual life as a result.  But nothing could be more destructive to working-class men and women.  The Jenkins reforms wrecked the nuclear family, and visited poverty, anomie, and emotional instability on vast swathes of children, who grew up only to communicate it to the next generation.  Jenkins did more than anyone, even Blair, to degrade the life of his own voters.  Betrayed in every sense today, white working class children suffer culture shock from the foreignisation of everything about them, and from the race propaganda fired at them like artillery rounds by the politicians and the media, by the entertainment industry, by the dateline corporations, and by the marxised teaching profession.  The boys sit at the bottom of the racial educational table, while girls suffer the sexual attention of black youths and, in Muslim areas, men of “mainly Pakistani heritage”.

About 40% of the population of England and Wales identifies as working-class.  Before WW1 it was 75%.  At least a quarter of today’s cohort would belong to the socially degraded, psychologically deracinated, often drug-taking, typically workless “underclass”.  Here family relationships are at their most unstable.  Lives are most chaotic.  Housing estates are most run down.  There is much lawlessness.  This demographic is the principal provider of the white prison population.  In inner cities its young mimic the vowel-sounds and syntax of black youth, and the behaviour too, to a degree.  These are the lost and helpless generations, socially adrift, economically abandoned, without realistic ambitions, seeking self-affirmation in all the wrong ways.  It will likely take two generations of loyal and wise government to pull them out of their existential mire.

Taken together, then, here is the “white working class” for whose “communities” Mark has fashioned PA as a national activist group operating at a local and regional level.  It’s a noble and necessary thing, opposed by an Establishment which weaponises the living hatred of the pathological left.  But then the Establishment wants only to complete its grand project of the degradation, dispossession, and deracination of the British natives.  The working class butterfly can never be broken enough on the big political wheels of our time: globalisation and economism, social liberalism, neo-Marxism and radical equality, foreign colonisation, anti-racism, racial equality and population replacement.  It sickens the moral sense that so much obvious harm can be directed with such malign and persistent energy at the most vulnerable segment of our people, and yet it is.

So Mark’s strategy is understandable.  This is the demographic living daily with the consequences of the race project.  This is the place one would sensibly look for reaction, notwithstanding the undoubted fact that the working-class of today is by no means the great mass of latent political will that existed into the 1950s.  But there are limitations to instinct and reaction, as explained above.  There are also limitations to a movement grounded only in the working-class, which can never raise itself from within to a pitch where revolution becomes a realistic possibility.  Protest yes.  Riot yes.  Revolution no.  Of course working-class activists will naturally consider that they can lead a working-class revolutionary movement.  But there has never been a full-system political revolution that was not first philosophised and strategised.  Intellectuals and ideologues always occupy the leading role.  Only by working at the level of the over-arching system can the lower-level of politics (say, a five year programme of “remigration” and restoration to our people) be concretised in policy.  It is a founding in philosophy which positivises all subsequent actions and sustains them for the necessary span of time.

In my essay for PA of February 2022 titled “What British nationalism can become” I sought to define a political movement and set out its stages of development from original thought to political activism:

A political movement, then, may be defined as a body of concern articulated by a well-educated cadre to an instinctually-guided, less educated mass.  In practise, one can readily distinguish five stages of articulation.  They are:

a) Pure philosophy: the conceptualisation and communication of new and significant insights into the life of Man. For there to be a revolutionary politics, the pure philosophy must address an especially great and pressing question about the human experience arising from the times.

b) Political philosophy: the propositional application of those insights, and related principles and values, to the organisation of national life and the conduct of power therein.

c) Political analysis: the methodological interrogation and/or critique of the existing political system from the standpoint of the above political philosophy.

d) Policy-making: Practical and programmatic correctives to the existing political system, or aspects thereof, according to the above analysis.

e) Politics: The promotion of b ,c and d above and, perhaps, the popular acknowledgement of some or even all of each.

So we can see that from around 2000 or so the focus of the nationalist movement has been on more conventional political activism and (some very occasional) policy work, with only the efforts of the late Jonathan Bowden as BNP Cultural Officer from around 2005 offering a smidgen of political philosophy.  I am informed that in the age of YouTube, Rumble and so on, as well as Substack, there is a more reflective cadre of university-educated guys offering analysis.  But has there been a single (necessarily written and, so, formal) word of founding philosophy?  As long as I can remember, the stock-in-trade of thinking nationalists has been analysis and commentary of each and every aspect of our racial circumstance.  But we need the whole oeuvre, from foundation to a politics of the masses, and for that we need creative minds as well as critical minds, policy specialists as well as party leaders; and these are the preserves of the educated middle-class.  Without them we are like an army bereft of an officer class.  Without them we are stuck with the Nietzscheism, Catholic Third Position, fascism, and traditionalism of the second half of the 20th century, none of which proceeds from the ethnic principle.

So this is our situation as Farage and Reform move inexorably closer to government and the Establishment closer to being held to account.  The clock is ticking for us, too, if we are to mount a meaningful political challenge.  Can we yet ground ourselves in a real philosophy of ethnicity, or must this be done solely by way of instinct and reaction​, with the consequent high probability of failure?  And from whom are we to receive such a philosophy but from re-engaged members of the educated middle-class determined to fill the current void?

3. We are ethnic nationalists, and it’s important

The following may seem like a minor point.  But it is actually a microcosm of the liberal academy’s perception of our nationalism and its profound difference from our own.  The principle at stake is this: we should never help opponents to dictate our terms of discourse.  So with that in mind ...

Mark serially employs the term “ethno-nationalist” as if it describes a meaningful philosophy.  But it is the a-philosophical invention (minus the hyphen) of the late Walker Connor, an American political scientist who sought to explain the nationalism of ethnicity through conflict and instability - an entirely negative and mistaken framework removing from us the pacific and preservational goals that our form of nationalism encapsulates.  And what does “ethno-nationalism” say to our people, anyway?  It is an artificial, confected term which vanishingly few non-nationalists use and most have never even heard of.  It speaks of something occluded, some specialised minority interest for white people who might not be very respectable, and who talk in dangerous ways about things most people politely avoid.  Definitionally, therefore, the term tends to seal us away from the true norm and universality of our political belief, and forces us into a box.  The norm and universality is what we should be stressing, of course; because if we don’t explain ourselves the box, which has an all too predictable label on it, will do the explaining for us.

Originally, Nick Griffin introduced the term not because he was a convert but to separate the BNP - then a new party - from the vestigial fascism of the past and to escape the mad screeching of the anti-fascist left.  It was a strategic decision though, obviously, the madness continued unabated.  No great “ethno-nationalist” ideological change then followed for the reason that no one in the party possessed a great “ethno-nationalist” ideology (nor could they, since none ever existed).  It was just a word game.

Etymologically, the prefix “ethno” appears in the academic disciplines of “ethnography” and “ethnology”, both of which attend to the cultural aspect of peoples.  Closer to our world of thought is “ethnocentrism”.  But there is no read across to the ethnic nationalism we profess.  Setting aside culture-centric thinking (which should always be set aside, obviously), the two academically accepted definitions for ethnocentrism are:

a) belief in the innate superiority of one’s ethnic group
b) a tendency to see other ethnic groups from the perspective of one’s own

… both of which feed into the very skewed and prejudicial framework of Connor’s (non-hyphenated) “ethnonationalism”, ie, as a source of conflict and instability, both apparently wrought by deeply negative and aggressive discrimination against other peoples.  But that caricature completely fails to address the existential, naturalistic, preservational, defensive (and, therefore, pacific) and truly universal attributes of the real thing.  No, ethnic nationalism is NOT about superiority except for the native’s superior right on the soil.  Nor is it just about “viewing” the Other.  It is about the life, survival and continuity of the people to whom one belongs and with whom one shares descent, interests, home.  Ethnocentrism in this context is love, nothing else.  It generates a natural “discrimination for”, as love must.  Its “view” of other peoples is humanistic, recognising the same human dignity one’s finds in one’s own kind, the same superior right on the ancestral land, the same right to live at peace and to destine by the people’s own hand and capacity, and the same unimpeachable right to defend all that.

This is our nationalism.  It is not captured by dictionary definition.  It is not Connor’s jaundiced confection.  We do not need his terminology nor that of the clutch of other sociologists and political scientists who, since the 1960s, have laid their audacious hands upon our worldview.  The best thing one can say for Connor’s “ethnonationalism” and, therefore, Mark’s “ethno-nationalism” is that these are oblique and tortuous ways to say “ethnic nationalism”.  They’re also entirely pointless.  When - not if - a foundational philosophy for the nationalism of ethnicity which I have attempted to represent here does finally arrive, its author, whoever that may be, will not title it in Connor’s way, or Mark’s way with or without the hyphen.  He or she will be too faithful to Truth and too original in conception to repeat the prejudices and errors of academics of the liberal past.