Nationalism, identity & natural law | Exploring the English contribution to political philosophy | Preserving continuity. https://teapaw.org/t.co/CoZ3Gjml0m
Joined December 2022
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We really have reached Soviet levels of gaslighting.
A man is murdered, and somehow, the real problem is that people are angry about it.
Children are gang raped, and somehow the real problem is that people keep mentioning it and “dividing communities.”
This is moral inversion.
No. Crime divides communities. Institutional failure divides communities. Cover-ups, euphemisms, cowardice, and elite contempt divide communities.
Useful tip: If someone has to cite their place of birth, how long they’ve lived somewhere, or where their parents lived to justify their ethnic identity, that’s a pretty good indicator they’re relying on something other than ancestry to establish their claim. If ancestry already established it, why would those explanations be necessary?
The point is simple: they’re presenting evidence of where they or their family have lived as though it were evidence of who their ancestors were. But birthplace and residence cannot establish ethnic descent. No amount of explanation can turn one into the other.
Carl Wilkinson retweeted
I invited @EvaVlaar to Britain to attend a Restore Britain event - the Home Office has not allowed that to happen. My thoughts on a dark day for free speech in our country...
Not every form of politics involving identity is identity politics.
Take the nation-state. It brings together two distinct but interdependent things: the nation and the state. Their legitimacy and stability depend upon the relationship between them.
The United Kingdom is a multinational state, comprising the historical nations of England, Scotland and Wales, with Northern Ireland presenting a more complicated question of national belonging.
The state draws its legitimacy from the peoples it governs and exercises political authority on their behalf. Questions about who constitutes those peoples, their historical continuity and their collective interests are not identity politics. They are fundamental questions of politics itself.
Identity politics is something different. It organises political claims around particular group identities, seeking recognition, influence or accommodation within an already established political community.
The distinction is between the political community from which legitimate authority arises and particular interests seeking representation within it.
Liam’s argument also contains a deeper contradiction.
Magna Carta, the Glorious Revolution and the Scottish Enlightenment did not emerge from abstract individuals without history, culture or inherited loyalties. They were achievements of particular peoples, developed through particular institutions over generations.
The principles they produced may have universal application, but their origins were anything but universal.
You cannot celebrate a nation’s political inheritance while dismissing the historical people who created, preserved and passed it down.
Nor does recognising that inheritance require rejecting individual liberty. The two are not mutually exclusive.
Identity politics is not British.
How is this different from Birmingham councillors banging on about Islamist interests over our collective greatness?
Being British is great because Britain represents so many great ideas that have brought us, and the world, wealth, freedom and joy.
We became great because we championed the free exchange of ideas and goods. Property rights. Capitalism. Freedom of religion. Freedom of choice and expression.
Our national interest is interwoven with that individualistic instinct. That’s not globalism or “liberalism”. It’s British. The Scottish Enlightenment. The Glorious Revolution. Magna Carta.
English identity is critical to this story. But it’s precisely because we looked beyond our narrow ethnic interests that we became who we are.
Reject this charlatan. Reject collectivism. Reject this freedom-hating bore.
Have a pint and a cigarette. Make some money.
Back our real national interest and what we really are: free and equal people.
Carl Wilkinson retweeted
Restore Britain now considers the entire British immigration system fundamentally illegitimate.
The scale of the betrayal has been extraordinary.
Successive governments have opened our borders, handed out permanent settlement and granted citizenship on a scale the British people never voted for.
There are Conservative, Labour and Reform politicians who are wholly responsible - they must be held to account.
We do not accept that their traitorous decisions should bind future generations forever.
In short - we will not accept the third-worldification of our beautiful country.
From today, November 2nd 2026, every new grant of immigration status or citizenship under the existing system will be reversed by a Restore Britain Government.
We will introduce retrospective legislation to revoke every one of those grants upon taking office.
Those affected will be assessed under Restore Britain's stringent immigration Red List, not the failed rules of previous governments.
Those who meet our new requirements may qualify for time-limited permission to remain - in small and manageable numbers, delivering benefits for our people whilst protecting the demographic security of our nation. Our Red List will ensure that.
Those who do not meet those requirements will be required to leave. Politely at first, then not.
We will abolish Indefinite Leave to Remain entirely, revoke existing ILR grants and end the routine scam progression from temporary visas to British citizenship.
We will also legislate for the retrospective cancellation of naturalisation grants, with the exception we have set out for citizenship obtained through marriage to a British citizen.
The British people have every right to elect a government that fundamentally changes the immigration system - other governments have manipulated the system to import millions.
We will do the same, but to deport.
Restore Britain will not simply slow down the consequences of mass immigration.
We intend to reverse them.
The soft right wants the fruit after accepting the destruction of the root.
It wants national solidarity without inherited peoplehood. Social trust without the historical relationships that sustain it. Shared obligations while accepting a liberal philosophy that regards unchosen obligations as obstacles to individual freedom.
And when the consequences become impossible to ignore, it offers assimilation, patriotism and the familiar appeal to British values.
But it will not question the assumptions that brought us here.
Instead, when others begin questioning the foundations of the liberal settlement, the soft right rushes to police the boundaries of acceptable dissent. The argument becomes one of tone, respectability and extremism rather than the premises themselves.
This is what I call soft-right containment.
It concedes the failures of liberal progressivism while defending the philosophical foundations upon which it rests.
It mistakes conserving the existing political settlement for conserving the nation.
And that is the great irony of establishment conservatism: when liberalism’s contradictions become impossible to conceal, those who claim to oppose it so often become its most reliable defenders.
Carl Wilkinson retweeted
Britain ran the slave trade. Britain sent seven-year-olds into the mills.
And Britain ended both. 🇬🇧
How can one country be the villain and the hero? It can't. There were two Britains.
One owned people. The other did the work.
When slavery ended, historians counted every slave owner living in Britain. About three thousand, in a country of sixteen million. 📜
Bankers, merchants, lords and MPs. The other Britain couldn't vote them out: most men had no vote, and no woman had one. 🗳️
Take Samuel Greg. In 1784 he built Quarry Bank Mill at Styal, in Cheshire. By the time he retired, it was the biggest cotton mill in the country.
More than half his workers were children. Many were orphans from the workhouse. 🧵
Four thousand miles away, the Greg family owned the Hillsborough sugar plantation on Dominica, worked by enslaved Africans. 🌴
The blankets they slept under were made at his mill. Orphan children here. Enslaved Africans there. Making money for the same family.
So who stood up to them?
In 1787 a young campaigner called Thomas Clarkson went to Bristol. ⚓
Thompson, landlord of the Seven Stars pub, refused to help trick sailors onto the slave ships. Instead he took Clarkson round the dockside pubs at night, at real risk to himself.
The crew lists showed two slave ships to Africa had killed more British sailors than eighty-three ships to Newfoundland. Their stories helped turn the country against the trade.
Manchester didn't even have an MP. So more than ten thousand people, about one in five in the town, signed a petition to end it. ✍️
In 1830 Richard Oastler heard about Bradford's mills. One boy of about ten worked from six in the morning till ten at night.
Oastler wrote to the Leeds Mercury. He called it Yorkshire Slavery. 📰
In April 1832, thousands of mill workers walked to York to fight for their children. They called it the Pilgrimage of Mercy. 🚶
Against slavery, women went door to door. One petition in May 1833 carried 187,000 women's names. Not one of them could vote. 👩
Then came two dates.
28 August 1833: Britain signs the law to end slavery across most of the Empire. 🇬🇧
29 August 1833: the very next day, it signs the Factory Act. No child under nine in most textile mills. 🏛️
Neither law was a gift from the slave owners. Both were won by people with no vote, no money and no power.
So next time someone tells you "Britain did this", ask them: which Britain?
Odds are five thousand to one you come from the side that won.
Watch the full story. 🎥
Be part of us. 🧵👈🇬🇧
Be Proud Of Us. 🙏🇬🇧
You condemn ideological reconstruction while endorsing the erosion of the human connections that help people resist it. Kinship, cultural inheritance and the continuity of a historical people sustain loyalties that neither the state nor the market creates.
Yet you treat those attachments as suspect when people defend them against the demands of “integration”. Integration into what, if the nation itself becomes nothing more than a population sharing an economy?
You cannot tear down the bonds that sustain a people and then act bewildered when abstract ideologies occupy the space they leave. Calling the result “communism” does not excuse your part in weakening those bonds.
Yes, the English are waking up. Calling them racist for defending their continuity will not make their attachments disappear. They will resist as a people, drawing on the very loyalties you dismiss.
Europe’s peoples have ties to family, place and inherited ways of life that run deeper than any political programme. If you cannot understand their determination to endure, you do not understand the Europe you claim to defend.
"I think the West is waking up to what it is fighting - AND NOW WE'VE WOKEN UP"
Alex Phillips delivers a MUST-WATCH monologue on the “threat to the West”, reacting to overnight reports of riots in Poland.
@ThatAlexWoman
Carl Wilkinson retweeted
He died today, 1,087 years ago. 🕯️
The first king of all England. 👑
Alfred's grandson. 🛡️
927: he marched on York and the Vikings ran. ⚔️
937: Brunanburh. Five kings and seven earls dead. 🩸
Two years later he was gone. No children. 🍂
What he left us was our country. 🏴
We call his grandfather Great. We should call both of them Great. 🙏
Proudofus.co.uk
Be part of us. ☝️🇬🇧
Be Proud Of Us. 🙏🇬🇧
Much of what you are discussing was lawful under the legal systems of the time, though we find it morally objectionable today.
If we apply modern moral judgements retrospectively and turn them into inherited financial obligations, where does that principle stop?
Five generations? Ten? A thousand years?
Who owes whom, and on what consistent principle?
My objection to ILR isn’t whether the qualifying period should be five, ten or fifteen years. It’s the entire principle behind it. I would abolish ILR altogether.
If someone comes to Britain on a work visa, they come here to work. That is the basis on which we granted permission. It should not automatically become a pathway to permanent residence. If they subsequently wish to become British citizens, they should return to their country of origin and apply through a separate citizenship process.
The present system creates the very circumstances subsequently used to argue against reforming it.
The Government establishes a route from temporary residence to permanent settlement. People understandably build lives, form relationships and raise families along that route. Those circumstances are then invoked as reasons why the Government cannot change the rules or require people to leave.
Article 8 of the ECHR adds another complication, as family and private life claims can be used to resist removal even where the original permission to enter was granted for employment.
We’ve created a system in which temporary immigration progressively generates claims to permanent residence, and the consequences of that policy become the justification for preserving it.
There is a legitimate question about honouring commitments already made. But that is entirely different from accepting that temporary employment should create an expectation of permanent settlement.
Changing the qualifying period from five years to fifteen, or compromising at ten, does nothing to resolve that underlying contradiction. It merely postpones the point at which it arises.
This is the poverty of purely civic nationalism. A passport establishes citizenship, not a people’s historical origins or continuity.
Once those distinctions disappear, British, French and German become little more than administrative categories. A nation is more than a collection of taxpayers.
Carl Wilkinson retweeted
The scenes in France make me so sad. When I return from London to my home in rural England, I have a bitter sweet feeling. It’s so nice to return to civilisation, but I wonder how long it will be until this place is taken from me too.
You spent decades promoting a hyper-individualised society, treating people as economic units to optimise for productivity and encouraging competition, mobility, and individual self-interest at the expense of community and belonging.
Now you condemn people for acting on the very principles you encouraged, while invoking national duty and collective sacrifice when you need their labour, their money, or their lives.
Before lecturing the British people about responsibility, perhaps government should examine its own.
You cannot neglect the reciprocal obligations that sustain a nation and then expect unconditional sacrifice from the people you have neglected.
Britain maintains Trident for a reason. It exists to deter existential aggression that could threaten our country’s survival. Any Russian attack on Britain is far more plausibly going to involve cyberattacks, sabotage, infrastructure disruption or limited conventional strikes than an invasion of the British Isles or an all-out nuclear attack.
In most conceivable circumstances, Britain would have political choices to make about the nature and extent of its response.
What the Army Chief appears to be asking for, however, goes considerably further. He wants the population prepared to accept sacrifices and support military action before the government has established precisely what conflict it expects Britain to fight.
You cannot establish public consent to an unspecified future war by first obtaining abstract agreement that national defence is important.
Army chief says politicians to start 'frank conversation' with public to prepare for war trib.al/tnbIX0Q
Matthew sounds like a Soviet commissar proudly announcing record wheat production while millions starve.
The statistics are glorious, comrades!
Carl Wilkinson retweeted
"Stop the boat" is an easy slogan but putting into practice is not easy. There are all sorts of legal pitfalls.
However, there can be no doubt that the most promising way of achieving this aim is to detain all illegal migrants once they land, thereby disrupting the traffickers' business model.
This post digs deep into the procedures needed to make this happen, in such a way as to make a scheme lawyer and judge proof.
As far as I can see, this breaks new ground so, in a complex subject, comment would be welcome.
This could be Burnham’s first big political mistake. I don’t think he anticipated the attention his claims about Russian interference in Brexit would attract.
As Prime Minister, he cannot simply make the allegation and move on. The government now needs to produce the evidence, explain what interference occurred, and establish whether it actually affected the result.
Russian interference and Russia changing the referendum outcome are two very different claims.
Then publish the evidence. What exactly constitutes Russian interference here? Propaganda, social media manipulation, covert funding?
Foreign interference is serious, but evidence of an attempt to influence voters does not prove the referendum result changed.
What, precisely, is Burnham confirming?
Andy Burnham becomes first PM to confirm Russian interference in Brexit referendum
@campbellclaret and @RoryStewartUK's exclusive interview with @andyburnham on tomorrow's episode of Leading is out in full at midnight.
15,000 likes for a basic category error is farcical.
American and Australian are national identities of modern settler states. Their equivalent here is British, not ethnic English.
A Black person born in Britain can be a British citizen without English ancestry, just as a white Australian can be Australian without Aboriginal ancestry.
English also refers to a historic people who existed long before the British state.
You’ve substituted British for English, then Anglo-Saxon for English ancestry.
Liberals celebrate a liberal speech from a liberal pretending to be a conservative, and apparently this marks the great conservative revival.
What's changed, exactly?
A minor shift toward Kemi in the Reform Express - times are changing albeit slowly..
I doubted Kemi Badenoch – but now I can see her becoming prime minister express.co.uk/news/politics/…
