Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin - The Badenoch Paradox

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Oct. 16, 2024 - Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin

12:54

The Badenoch Paradox

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	This conundrum begins with a statement from Steve Laws, a right-wing activist who published a tweet mocking the fact that the Conservative Party was preparing to select an African immigrant to be the leader of the party.
	Many people took exception to this, such as my friend Konstantin Kissin.
	Kissin pointed out the brute fact of political reality in Britain.
	He said, The simple fact of life, whether you like it or not, is that the only leader who can deliver genuinely right-wing policies on immigration is going to be an ethnic minority.
	That's just a fact given where the country's media and institutional elites are.
	Being racist to and about the only people who can solve your problems is the height of stupidity.
	What he's saying here is that the political context of Britain as it stands is currently dominated by a left-wing paradigm that holds that nativist concerns, that is, the concerns of the white British majority, and particularly the English majority, to be unacceptable areas of political discourse.
	Through this lens, not wanting an African woman to be the leader of the purportedly right-wing Conservative Party and potentially Prime Minister of the UK is considered to be racist, by which is meant that it expresses a form of ethnic particularity in its requirements for representation.
	This is a liberal ideological tripwire, and Constantin is probably correct to say that because of our current state of affairs, it is likely that only someone from an ethnic minority background is going to be able to step over it without institutional resistance and enact any kind of change that would be in accord to native interests, such as ending mass immigration.
	Badenock herself is aware of this and uses it as one of her primary selling points.
	In a recent interview with The Telegraph, she said as much.
	They can't paint me as prejudiced.
	That is, they can't say that she's a racist because she's a black woman.
	The left are the real racists and the Conservative Party will continue to struggle under the fire of the left's false allegations.
	It's worth noting that the Conservatives have already had three women and an Indian man as Prime Minister, whereas the Labour Party have only had white British men, and it makes no impact on the left's opinion of them.
	But the Conservative Party is trapped in a 2016 holding pattern and refuses to learn anything about the philosophy of their opponents, a philosophy they themselves end up actually following.
	To Constantin, I replied that it speaks volumes then about the two-tier nature of our society.
	If only a member of an ethnic minority can enact certain political agendas, whereas a member of the white British majority cannot, then that's a clear-cut example of how there are rules for some and rules for others based on race, and the Conservatives seem to be fine with it.
	Constantin agreed and said this.
	Constantin agreed and said, of course, which I've been fighting as best I can for years as you know.
	And he has, because Constantin recognises the injustice of forcing the native people of our country to live at the bottom of a two-tier system.
	He would rightly characterise it as a form of oppression, because it is.
	But this then brings us to a strange place.
	If we agree that it's wrong that only an immigrant can articulate a pro-nativist position, that is, a position that advances the interests of the native people primarily, then we admit that pro-nativist interests are politically permissible.
	There is just some kind of ideological roadblock in the way.
	And it ought to be possible for a native white British person to express the same thing.
	However, if when a pro-nativist position is adopted by a native British person, and this is categorised as racism, we then are indeed prescribing a pro-nativist position from being expressed by a native, which is a function of our political environment that Constantine agrees is wrong because in itself it creates and reinforces a two-tier system.
	The parochial interests of the British, again particularly the English, are not therefore politically actionable by the English themselves, which is essentially the same as saying that the English are not entitled to speak in their own case.
	To break out of this two-tier system in Britain, we would have to therefore permit an Englishman to advocate for the native interests of the English, which is what is prescribed by liberal individualism.
	This is being sidestepped by Badenock and Constantine in saying that only an immigrant is capable of advocating for nativist policies, but this merely subverts the current system of oppression, rather than abolishing it.
	The oppression remains, and to escape this new liberal form of tyranny, the nativist position would have to be advanced by a native, as it would be the only way to prove that we are not still committed to a two-tier system.
	But of course, this would be a form of collective acknowledgement that liberal individualism can't accept and necessarily locks out non-natives from what is otherwise admitted to be a valid political position.
	It's clear that the issue is the ideological roadblock, which is tantamount to saying that liberalism itself is oppressive and creates the paradox in which the liberal would have to admit that people needed to be liberated from liberalism itself.
	Constantin is not a liberal ideologue.
	He elsewhere accepts that it is proper and just for, say, Israel to act in the interests of the Israelis while being led by an Israeli, and this is not an unacceptable form of political action.
	It is not unreasonable for Israel to wish to have a nativist agenda enacted by their own elected representative who himself is an Israeli.
	It's actually completely normal and democratic to have majoritarian representation done by a member of the majority.
	The paradox, in fact, resolves itself when we admit that this is the case, and we are left asking what we were even doubting in the first place.
	If we are still unsure of the legitimacy of this position, we can turn the question around and instead ask for the affirmative case rather than the negative case.
	Why ought we to have a foreigner as the British Prime Minister?
	There are actually non-liberal answers to this question, but they would be found outside of the realm of current political necessity.
	It could be that we wish to invite a stranger to cure the distempers of an entrenched political paralysis, or because we are unable to agree upon a suitable native governor of our own, and so wish to choose an outsider who might not be partial to one side or another.
	Such things are historically attested.
	However, this isn't the situation in which we find ourselves, and so no evident answer presents itself.
	Why would we want a foreign national to be the head of the government, or even a member of the cabinet?
	We must be appealing to some standard other than what is good for the British people, which moves us towards more undemocratic grounds.
	The majority ought to be free to choose one of its own as its representative, which is something we see in any other democratic country in the world.
	And if we don't do this, we open up the possibility that someone who does not have the best interests of the British people at heart to be in control of the nation, would we be comfortable having a Chinese head of government given how suspect the Chinese Communist Party is?
	Why open up this potential avenue of catastrophe if we don't actually have to?
	And I don't mean to be impolite, but we have already seen enough of what might be called dual loyalties due to the ethnic inheritance of non-native politicians in this country.
	Rishi Sunak was installed as Prime Minister and held Dilwali in 10 Downing Street, something the British public didn't assent to, and was very open about his Indianness, and this was something that India was also overjoyed with.
	Are we then to believe that it was a coincidence that Indians were the largest group of foreign immigrants during his two years in office?
	And what about the current foreign secretary, David Lamy, who has been banging the drum for reparations for Caribbean people for years because he identifies himself as one of them?
	I'm afraid, as Caribbean people, we are not going to forget our history.
	We don't just want to hear an apology.
	We want reparation!
	He will also identify himself as English when challenged on this, but is thrilled also to be a dual national of Guyana.
	This issue is clearly not something that is in the interest of the British people, and it took Keir Starmer to put his foot down and outright refuse reparations to put Lamy in his place.
	Why would we want people of dubious loyalty in charge of the country?
	And questions of foreign influence over the country are very much still pertinent.
	Sunak himself, limping along as the legacy leader of the Conservative Party, ironically raised them in Parliament today, questioning whether China had too much influence over British universities.
	But when confronted by Sweller Braverman, his then home secretary, over levels of immigration into the UK, Sunak said that he didn't see it as an important issue for the British people.
	This is, in fact, why it is desirable to have a British person as the head of government, rather than someone of foreign extraction.
	It allows us to avoid any questions of dual loyalty, and it also speaks to deeper issues of representation and belonging.
	There is a distinctive scrutonian we that can be articulated when the representative is a native British person, which is not present when that person is not British.
	This is not about a rational calculation, this is about a felt experience of interconnectedness that is at stake.
	That is not to say that a non-British person could not do a good job.
	Indeed, Bedenock herself may well be an effective executive.
	But there is more to the position of head of government than simply making decisions over others.
	As India's celebration of Sunak becoming Prime Minister demonstrated, there are deeper, symbolic and metaphorical questions that arise, questions of embodiment and essence, which don't just go away when you call them racist.
	In the last analysis, it is not objectionable to say that the head of government in Britain ought to be a British person.
	In fact, it is completely reasonable to demand that they must be British.
	Even the United States, the great success story of liberalism, requires presidential candidates to have been born within its territorial boundaries.
	There is of course much more that could be said about all of this, but a sensible resolution to this paradox is simply that no, we ought not to have foreign leaders, nor foreign members of government, nor foreigners leading political parties.
	And cries of racism are not sufficient to refute that fact.
	If such a thing is racism, then racism itself has become a very elastic term, which ignores the reality of political loyalties and human nature, and is itself not a suitable tool to solve this problem.
	That we are discussing such a possibility is frankly bizarre and contrary to what a national state is for in the first place, the political expression of the native inhabitants of that country.
	The fact that this is one of the most important issues of our time shows us just how far to the left we have gone.
	Anyway, if you are deeply tired of talking about politics, I completely sympathise, and I have a little gaming channel that I use quite often.
	As you can see, it's mostly for chilling out and doing fun hobby stuff.
	People ask me where I get the time to do any of this, and the answer is that this is what I'm doing when I decompress from a day's work from about 9 o'clock in the evening onwards.

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