The political commentator Peter North has commented on the relationship between the recent Reform Party funding scandal and the abrupt changes in how patriotic Britons are protesting the horrors of mass migration. Mr North believes that the Establishment-backed attack on Reform and its funding may mark the beginning of the slow death of the Reform Party. If that’s the case Mr North believes then it heralds the end of Britons being able to use the party political system to affect change that benefits them. Setting aside the issue that Reform should have been wiser when it came to potentially dangerous Establishment hit jobs on the party, which I believe they should have been, if the Establishment and its pet and very well resourced NGO’s can destroy a party like Reform, then it will encourage Britons to lose all faith in the political system, with potentially ugly results.

In a piece entitled ‘The End of Civilised Politics’, written just after the Dover protest, Mr North describes the attack on Reform as an example of ‘powerful vested interests’ going all out to destroy the preferred political vehicle of Britain’s ‘disenfranchised working class’. The potential destruction of Reform does indeed look the way that Mr North has described. It’s a show of power by the Establishment, a message to working class Britons, that they will take away any political means of Britain’s working classes expressing dissatisfaction with the way that Britain has and is being governed.

I agree with Mr North that what may come, after it becomes widely understood that there is no more any political way of achieving change, is that things might get very very ugly indeed.

Mr North said:

“They cannot stop the change that’s coming, but now they’ve just ensured it will not be done through the ballot box. It will be done in the streets, and it will not be pretty. What we saw in Dover yesterday was just a taster. For the last few years we’ve seen disparate ad hoc protests at migrant camps and in the town squares, all easily corralled and contained, but eventually it will be happening everywhere, all at once.

Moreover, an ineffectual lightweight like Andy Burnham will be no more equipped to handle it than Starmer was. This is so far outside his margin of expectation, and they have no answers except the same clumsy tone-deaf rhetoric and the same corrosive two-tier policing. If they wanted an all-out war, they’ve certainly got one now.

That is where the party collapse and the street politics meet. From here, you’re going to see a lot more manifestations of what we saw in Dover yesterday, and if you’re a middle-of-the-road conservative, you’re not going to like the politics it represents. It’s an ugly side of politics.”

Sadly Mr North may well be correct. What comes next is not the peaceful family-friendly demonstrations about ‘taking our country back’ as represented by the Tommy Robinson tendency. What might come next is thousands of angry disenfranchised young men without hope, who’ve abandoned any trust in the party political system because the Establishment has taken that route away. It’s never good for a society to have masses of men and more pertinently young men who have abandoned hope of political change. It is this cohort, the people who believe that they’ve got nothing left to lose now, who will demonstrate in a manner similar, or worse, than what we’ve seen recently in Dover and Portsmouth.

These bands of angry young men will not be led by those who are basically liberal civic nationalists such as Tommy Robinson, they will be led, as Mr North said, by what he describes as the ‘grotbags’ of politics. These are indeed the radicalised fanatics, the extremes of ethno-nationalism, the Christian nationalists and others of this ilk who have so far been pretty quiet but might come to the fore as leaders if conditions are conducive to that happening. We might even see a resurgence in the sort of street politics espoused by the likes of the old British National Party or the Mosleyites. Groups like these are able to present themselves as lifebelts for working class communities who feel let down and oppressed by the Establishment. Reform was at least a political means by which Britain’s forgotten and downtrodden could express their views and maybe effect the sort of change that the increasingly oppressed Briton could choose via the ballot box but if that is taken away then we are into ugly street politics territory.

The response by the Establishment to this new street politics of the angry and the dispossessed is going to be predictably oppressive. There will be masses of the sort of two tier policing and justice that we saw in the wake of the protests following the Southport Atrocity. There will be long sentences in gaol dished out even to those who are on the fringes of disorder, people will lose the ability to work because of government inspired blacklisting and people’s property might be confiscated as punishment for speaking out of turn. The education sector might be mobilised to encourage children to inform on parents’ political views to the state and social services, especially in those parts of the country where services have been politicised by the left, will destroy families on the grounds that one or more members of said families are classed as ‘extremists’. The protests are going to get nasty, the people behind the protests will be nasty and so will the response from an Establishment that wants to cling onto power, elected or otherwise, at all costs.

I don’t want any of this. For about a decade I’ve called for political solutions for the problems that the political classes and in particular the liberal left have created. I’ve done this and taken this position because for professional reasons I’ve been too up close and personal with extremists of both the Left and the Right and they morally repulse me. We may be entering a situation where protests are not led by nice guys like Tommy Robinson but by shrewd thuggish types who cannot be reasoned with.

Where we are at present, as Mr North said, is in the very early stages of ‘proto-IRA territory’ where people who have been beaten down by the Establishment turn away from peaceful political change. They may do this because that route has, with the possible destruction of Reform, been blocked and they may turn towards those who despite the violence or even because of it, see the ‘grotbags’ as their only hope against a political system which has clearly turned against them.

I’m astonished at the stupidity of the attacks, which may end up being terminal, on Reform. Those who have done this and who are on the Left should know history and should understand that when you take away a political safety valve then things can get very nasty and ugly pretty quickly. History is littered with leftist revolutions that came about because monarchs and governments became inflexible and deaf to the pleas of their long suffering citizens. Intransigence on the part of leaders and an unwillingness to reform politics killed off the Tsarist system in Russia and was a factor in other leftist revolutions. The Left must know that having thousands upon thousands of angry disenfranchised men has been a pre-requisite of many leftist revolutions and may well become the key to potential trouble coming from the street politics Right in Britain. The Left are stupid to believe that closing off the electoral and social safety valves whether that be by destroying parties that represent a significant proportion of national opinion or curtailing freedom of speech might not be the big ‘win’ they might think it might be. Curtailing speech rights and removing electoral safety valves does not make the opinions that the left dislike go away, it just sends them into dark corners where they can more easily radicalise.

I don’t like it but I find myself in agreement with Mr North that we are in for a period of quite nasty ‘interesting times’.

Link

Mr North’s piece on the end of electoral politics and the beginnings of some possibly nasty street politics.

https://www.northernvariant.co.uk/p/the-end-of-civilised-politics