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Aug. 8, 2020 - Radio Renaissance - Jared Taylor
44:52
Adrian Davies: "Nationalist Movements in Western Europe" (2014)
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Our next speaker was educated at Cambridge and London universities and at the Sorbonne.
He lived for several years in France, where he developed a great and profound knowledge of French politics, patriotic politics.
Later on, he became a barrister, that is to say, a courtroom lawyer in Britain, which means he gets to wear a genuine 18th century horsehair wig when he goes before Milord.
And Adrian Davies, in that capacity, has defended many of our British comrades who have been the victims of the oppressive anti-free speech laws that our British cousins have unfortunately passed.
Adrian Davies has been involved in patriotic politics for more than 30 years.
He even made a run for Parliament at one point, but unfortunately it was not successful.
And I'm glad to say that despite his open participation in dissident politics, Adrian's law practice continues to thrive, so he is a shining example of someone who can be dead set against the system and nevertheless thrive within the institutions of the system.
It can be done.
And today, Adrian will speak to us about patriotic and nationalist movements in Western Europe.
Please welcome Adrian Davis.
Thank you very much, Jared, for that very generous introduction, and I hasten to add only one thing to it, which I don't think that I have thrived quite so much as I would have done if I had avoided controversy rather more assiduously than I have done.
It's a happy coincidence that I'm following a very excellent speaker on nationalism in Eastern Europe and what it has to teach us, Unplanned between the two speakers, but I think probably orchestrated by Jared as master of ceremonies,
these two talks are going to fit together rather nicely as a diptych or two bookends.
And in some respects, my perspectives are going to be quite similar to your previous speaker, Mr. Organs, and in other respects, they're going to be quite different.
So let's begin with a look at...
I'll outline for an American audience which I will assume does not have an enormously detailed understanding of how politics in Europe operates.
Some of the most striking and obvious similarities and differences from politics in the United States.
First, no country in Europe, most certainly not including England, Has anything approaching First Amendment guarantees of freedom of speech that you do?
That carries obvious disadvantages.
In some countries, not only ordinary rank-file people, but those elected to high public office have been prosecuted under various forms of so-called racial incite laws for making speeches that amount to the expression of Political or historical opinions.
Notorious cases including, for example, one very eminent member of the Front National, Bruno Golnisch, who was pursued through the French courts, after the European Parliament obligingly lifted his parliamentary immunity from prosecution so that could be done.
So there is nothing here, as I say, equivalent to the guarantees of free speech written into your constitution, which I personally think are the most attractive aspect of the United States Constitution.
On the other hand, the fact that we do not enjoy those advantages actually has some benefits.
It prevents...
What might be called the lumpenproletariat element in the movement, from mouthing off using obnoxious and genuinely hateful language about ethnic minorities and so on, that sympathy serves to put the majority of people off our cause.
And actually, I'm not so sure that the system has not done us more favors than injury.
By enacting laws which have prevented the kooks, inadequates and klutzes in our own ranks from publicly making fools of themselves to quite the extent that they're allowed to do if they enjoy the benefit of complete protection on freedom of speech.
So there is that.
The second thing is that while we do not have your First Amendment rights, we enjoy other advantages over dissident and minority parties in the United States that
are very valuable.
We need to find someone to propose you,
someone to second you.
And eight people to be your assentors.
So, so long as you can get ten people out of an electorate of probably 70 or 80,000 to sign your papers, away you go.
And you pay what is called a deposit, which is a present £500 or about $800, which you get back off the authorities if you get more than 5% of the vote.
So, your total investment to stand in an election can be very modest.
And there are also some controls in most European countries by the state on how much money political parties are allowed to spend on electioneering, which again tends relatively to favour small parties that can't raise a lot of money over large parties that have relatively unlimited budgets.
So it's not all bad.
And I would add to that that while every European country has its own electoral system...
At least at the level of elections to the European Parliament, the system is consistent across Europe and is a semi-proportional kind of system, which rejoiced in the unlikely name of modified de ont after a Belgian politician or mathematician,
I think he was, who invented it.
That does mean you get roughly proportional representation, at least at that level.
I say we face some disadvantages compared to you, but we also have some very, very considerable advantages.
As to the general political conditions in Europe today, in much of continental Europe, the recession that afflicted effectively the whole of the industrialized world bit very severely.
And there continue to be serious problems in many, particularly southern European countries, which are the result of adopting the single European currency, the euro, which most European countries have adopted.
England has not, nor has Denmark, but most European states have.
And this one-size-fits-all currency does not work at all well and leads in effect to...
It's institutionalized under-competitiveness in much of Southern Europe that has led to a considerable degree of suffering on the parts of peoples in those countries.
So the economic situation in Europe remains, well, difficult.
It is no longer as bad as it was four or five years ago, but it remains difficult in some Southern European countries.
It's very, very difficult indeed.
Moving on, then, from the parameters in which politics takes place within Europe and the particular economic conditions affecting the continent at the moment to European parties that stand for, broadly speaking,
what shall I call them?
Some would call themselves nationalists.
It's a term I don't like, and I'll come on to my reasons why.
But parties that essentially stand for preserving ethnic identity, tradition, and national culture, how do matters stand at the moment?
Many of you will have read Charles Dickens' famous novel, A Tale of Two Cities, which is a rather jaundiced Englishman's view of revolutionary France and England during the period known as the Terror in France.
I could give a talk entitled Tale of Two Countries.
This would be rather a depressing talk because, you see, if I had been standing before this audience 30 years ago when I was spending a year in France studying at the Sorbonne...
I could have talked to you about the political situation in France, where the Front National was making extraordinary progress, things were looking very good for the future, morale was very high and there was everything to hope for, and my own country, England, where the nationalist movement was fragmented,
discredited, divided, imploding, and utterly hopeless.
And if we fast forward on 30 years to today, what do we find?
We find that in France, the Front National is making tremendous progress, there's everything to hope for.
Hope for, in England, the nationalist movement is divided, fragmented, engaged in a catastrophic electoral collapse and total implosion, and everything has remained the same.
And a little bit about the reasons for that.
Now, France, I think, at the moment, is, in Western Europe, the country where political developments are most encouraging.
It has just had its local elections, in which the Front National, its leading nationalist party, performed very well indeed.
It took control of 13 municipalities in France, which was an impressive achievement.
One of those, the 7th Island Dispo of Marseille, which is the second city, was an extremely impressive victory.
And indeed, all the others were distinctly notches in its belt, so to speak.
That, though, is really only a preliminary for the Europe-wide elections to the European Parliament that are going to take place on the 22nd of May.
And here, the prospects for the Front National are...
With the main centre-right opposition party, the UMP, and it may well pipit at the post to become the first party in terms of votes and representatives in the European Parliament from France.
Which would be absolutely extraordinary, considering that a few years ago, its vote after internal difficulties had riven the Front National and led to a split between different factions, had fallen nationally to about 9%.
This is just a moment.
Speaking of spursy work, especially if you've drunk too much coffee in the previous talks.
Why is the Front National doing so well?
Well, there are a number of reasons.
Some of those are completely external to the Front National, and to that extent it has been the benefit of a windfall.
The president of France, François Hollande, is the most unpopular and least respected president of the Fifth Republic, which, as one of our earlier speakers pointed out, has endured since 1958, which is something of a record in French political life since 1789.
How does he get elected?
Did he have somebody that crazy?
He wasn't hated when he was elected.
He became enormously unpopular within nine months of his election.
It is extraordinary.
The reason why he was elected was that his predecessor was a vain narcissistic loon, Sarkozy.
He's the sort of man who made George Bush seem like a statesman in many ways.
And the French reacted to having a vain narcissistic right-wing loon by electing a vain narcissistic left-wing loon.
But Hollande has become an object of ridicule in France for all kinds of reasons.
One of which is that even by the impressive standards of French presidents, he is a serial adulterer.
Well, he isn't really an adulterer, he's never been married, but he carries on, his personal relationships are chaotic.
He's now had to appoint his former mistress to his cabinet, which must be rather interesting.
But that's the marxie named Ségolène Royale.
with whom he was at daggers drawn but he has essentially managed to wreck the French economy by applying The
French people are...
Considerably more politically astute than some Europeans, and they have worked out pretty well that both sides of the establishment coin, each is as bad as the other, and simply flicking the coin up so it sometimes comes up heads and sometimes tails still leaves you with the same bad penny in charge of the state.
What is particularly interesting with the Front National is that not only has it garnered a very, very large proportion...
of the working class vote which now regards the Socialist Party as standing for nothing more but the rights of the enormous immigrant communities in France to ever larger shares of an ever shrinking pie of state largesse to be distributed to various client groups of whichever parties in power at the time.
It has also got substantial support from the middle classes.
That is a phenomenon which, frankly, no comparable group in England has ever achieved.
And the reasons for it require careful study and much more analysis than I can possibly give it in a 30-minute speech.
It is beyond a doubt the case that there is a right-wing nationalist, corporativist, intellectual tradition in France which goes back not decades but centuries, which means...
That we are not fighting constantly against a prevailing political climate.
Well, they are not fighting constantly against a prevailing political climate in which their ideas are simply alien to much of the society in which they operate rather differently from those operating in Anglo-Saxon societies, is a point I'll come back to.
But on the other hand, the supposed causal link that some of our own thinkers...
have sought to elaborate between the successes of, say, Alain de Benoît from the late 1960s, early 1970s, in creating the new Reich School of Thought in France, which has had tremendous influence, and the political success of the Front National,
is certainly not one that obviously and clearly follows any closer analysis of the political situation.
Apart from anything else, Jean-Marie Le Pen, Alan de Benoit, cordially detested one another and could scarcely be in the same room.
The one regarding the other as a defeat intellectual and the other regarding Le Pen as, I suppose, an anti-intellectual who preferred the right.
I would make high regard for both men, so I'm not going to get into that quarrel, but I would simply say that it is not quite so clear as some might think that the emergence of that current of thought...
Which is called the new right in France, has led to the political success of the FN.
The political success of the FN is based primarily upon the increasing defection of a working-class electorate, not only from the Socialist Party, but from the Communist Party, which was a serious political force in France for a very,
very long time.
In a way which, say in England, it never was.
That working class electorate has seen the cities in which it lives transformed into areas that bear no real resemblance to France as it was half a century ago, or even 30 years ago in many places,
and the people are now kicking against it.
So we see there favourable political circumstances.
Yes, a general trend of disillusionment amongst working-class voters looking for a new electoral home.
And I must also say that we have also seen what I think is quite brilliant, political leadership from Marine Le Pen, for whom I have tremendous admiration.
She is a controversial figure amongst many in France.
Particularly because many supporters of the Front National come from a very traditional Catholic background, and she's a divorced or separated woman, which they don't like at all, and she's also relatively liberal on issues such as abortion and feminism, which they also don't like.
But what she has done is to connect well with the French people and to project her party's message.
In just very slightly different and more nuanced language, she's been able to garner a much larger measure of support than did her rougher and readier father.
Now, as I say, that hasn't pleased everyone, but I don't believe that she's someone who has betrayed any essential principles.
I think she has made necessary tactical accommodations to what had to be done to turn...
A party that was polling 9% of the vote into a party that was now polling well over 20% of the vote could easily become the largest single party in France and could well become a credible future party of government.
The successes they obtained in the local government elections put them in a good position.
One shouldn't exaggerate this.
They took 13 municipalities only in a large country.
And they missed, albeit by a hair, their two principal targets, Avignon and Perpignan, which are large towns in the south of France.
Let me explain a little bit about the French electoral system.
It's rather different from yours and rather different from ours.
They have a two-round system.
Unless one of the candidates polls more than half the votes in the first round, which sometimes but infrequently happens, all candidates who have polled less than 15% of the vote are eliminated.
And the survivors go through to a second round.
And then in that second round, whoever polls the most votes simply wins.
And they just missed that in their two main targets, polling rather over 49, but just below 50% of the votes.
But that is the situation, as I say, there.
The Front National is going to do very well in May and is certainly going to be the standard bearer for the parties of the right in Western Europe.
The other country where I think we can safely anticipate very good results is Austria.
The nationalist movement there, the principal standard bearer there is the Austrian Freedom Party.
This has also had its vicissitudes over the years.
The very controversial leadership of Herr Haider, its former and since deceased, after a rather unfortunate accident when he decided to drive at 80 miles an hour to drink a bottle of vodka on a mansion road, which was not going to work out well and didn't.
Herr Haider managed to split his own party, which for a long time...
It led to both factions, the pro-Heider faction, which is called the Alliance for the Future of Austria, and the anti-Heider faction, which retained the old party name.
They were both represented in the Austrian legislature.
The vote was so high that even Splint, they were still being elected.
But now the FPO faction has clearly predominated.
It is again likely to poll well over 20% of the vote in Austria at the European elections in May.
So this is a very, very happy situation indeed.
Now, the downside from at least some people's point of view is other countries where we see the reverse phenomenon happening.
And I'll talk a little about England.
This is obviously the country about which I know most.
A great many people in this movement in England and indeed on this side of the pond placed far too much hope in the British National Party as I attempted to warn people that they shouldn't over many years and was not listened to.
It has now comprehensively imploded to such a level that it is probably at a strength of some...
10% of what it was five years ago.
The reasons for that are complex.
But the principal beneficiary has been the United Kingdom Independence Party, which is an extraordinary phenomenon in British political life.
It is nominally the fourth party, but it too might conceivably...
Topped the poll in our European elections in May, if only because the electoral system, being a proportional system, is much more favourable to small parties than our system of election to the Westminster Parliament, where, effectively, it's a straightforward first-past-post system.
UKIP is a very strange phenomenon.
If you imagine a more successful version of the Tea Party in the United States...
You are working on roughly the right lines.
I would analyze it as a party composed of men and women whose instincts are inherently sound and who realize that things have gone very, very badly wrong with their country.
So that they are reacting to a wholly justified sense that England is no longer what she was, even 30 years ago.
The demographic transformation of some parts of the country is absolutely astonishing.
London, the capital city, now no longer has an indigenous British majority.
It's mistaken to say that it has a non-white majority.
It doesn't.
But that is only because there has been such enormous white immigration into London from Eastern Europe, and indeed, incidentally, from France.
We have a French community of about a quarter of a million in London now.
Who are refugees from the country's failed socialist experiment.
We also have lots of other people from European countries, indeed no small number of Americans.
So while London is about 55% people of European descent, it's only about 45% native British.
Even one generation ago, this would have seemed quite incredible.
While there were, in those days, areas that had already been, how should I put this, very profoundly enriched.
The unfortunate indigenous residents of those areas might say colonised, but that would be a very, very wicked thing to say, I wouldn't dream of using such language.
Those areas were inner city areas that were, shall we say, confined, well, confined to inner city areas in a small number of major cities.
Now this phenomenon has spread out from those inner city areas.
And we have a non-Indigenous population of who knows how many, because our government's lost control of the borders, can't carry out the proper census, can't calculate what composition the population is.
But so far as we can tell, probably somewhere in the region of 15% of the population of the country is not of Indigenous origin and increasing rapidly because of differential birth rates.
But actually the impact is more than that figure suggests, because much of England, contrary to what you may think, is actually not that heavily populated.
There's an enormous concentration of populations in a number of major conurbations.
But those kind of figures include, well, first of all, they include the whole of the United Kingdom.
They include Scotland and Northern Ireland, which are very few ethnic minorities, and indeed Wales is pretty few.
And they include rural areas of the north-east, and the north-east of England are very, very affected by immigration, East Anglia, the West Country and so on.
In the major urban areas, London, the West Midlands, the East Midlands, the proportionate figures of non-Indigenous population are very, very much higher.
And they have a huge impact upon the electoral process.
They naturally favour the Labour Party, which is our left-leaning party, which has always taken the side of the immigrant against the Indigenous population.
We are now, as I say, seen with the United Kingdom Independence Party a measure of reaction.
UKIP's origins are very strange.
It began as a group of monomaniacal cranks whose obsession about our relationship with the European Union effectively seemed to take up every moment of their waking days.
It has now changed quite considerably and become a much more broadly based populist party.
This has...
It is a very, very ideologically unformed party.
It has no deeply thought-out ideas.
It is, in the truest, most literal and dictionary sense of the word, a reactionary party.
To that extent, I agree with its opponents.
It is a reactionary party in the strict sense of the word.
It does not have very much my way of original thought.
It reacts to the bad things that it sees happening, often by harking back to an earlier idealised and nostalgia-depicted version of Britain which never really existed.
But it is, I think, essentially healthy in its general development.
It has certainly replaced the BMP as the party of protest almost completely.
And the scale of this process will be demonstrated conclusively on the 22nd of May, as will be seen.
The really interesting questions for the future, I think, are these.
Will UKIP emerge into something that more closely approximates to what we would wish to see, or will it be successfully co-opted by the system?
And indeed, as one of our more thoughtful libertarians, Sean Gabb, pointed out at a meeting in London, which I attended a few weeks ago, even if it is co-opted into the system,
will that be at a high price to the system?
In other words, in order to co-opt and contain this wave of dissent, will the liberal establishment have to meet broader parameters of debate than it does at the moment?
For a very long time in England, it's been almost impossible to say that immigration, I mean in polite circles, that immigration is anything other than a benefit to the country.
How it can be a benefit to a country which is overpopulated and has chronically high structural unemployment to have millions of people
because everyone else has been telling me for decades that we're being enriched by this process, and it confers only benefits.
Which include, for example, schools where most of the children can't speak English.
It includes communities so alienated from the mainstream of society that many of their young men are going off to Syria to try and overthrow the legal regime of that country and replace it with an Islamic theocracy.
Then they're going to come back to England, having learned all kinds of useful skills in setting improvised explosive devices, door-to-door combat with the 4th Division of the Syrian Army that probably uses rather rougher crowd control tactics than the Metropolitan Police and other What are the useful skills they'll be able to apply in terms of causing very major trouble in England?
But our establishment has hitherto, as I say, said that immigration is nothing but a benefit.
Now, let's say, do not assume that this new party which has emerged is going to solve all our problems.
Many people here have been enthusiastic over various manifestations that have taken place in the United States, the Tea Party, the Ron Paul movement, and so on.
And broadly speaking, the UK phenomenon is somewhat similar to them.
They have some of the right ideas, but they are still too obsessed with certain Anglo-Saxon concepts that I think we need to put...
Unlimited individualism, the supposed unqualified benefits of free market competition, and so on.
The biggest driving factor behind immigration into England hasn't been some sinister conspiracy.
Attribute it to the usual suspects by paranoics and nationalist movement.
It's been the requirement of capitalism for cheap labour.
It's exactly the same phenomenon as it exists here.
And that has driven the drive down the price of labour by bringing in lots of poor people from poor countries who pay to work for less.
It's not rocket science to understand that.
And as I say, what we have now seen...
Is the emergence of this new party, which remains a force to watch?
I have to say I broadly assess it positively, not because I think that where it is now is where we want to be, not because I think even that its present leadership is ideal, it's anything but.
Anything but idea.
I've met Nigel Farage a few times.
He has some very, very good qualities.
He's a remarkably good platform speaker.
He has an excellent natural rapport with the British people.
And he comes across well on television.
On the other hand, he has other less attractive qualities.
Some of which he seems to share with leaders of parties of this kind all over the world, such as a belief that he alone is fitted to guide the party's fortunes, and anyone who might think that in any way he'd made any kind of mistake or whatever is a traitor,
enemy plant, etc., and ought to be expelled straight away.
You get the general picture.
You've all come across people like this.
So it's not ideal, and as I say, it is caught up.
This whole fetishization of individual liberty, of the free market, of the general kind of myths of the Anglo-American world that are not, I think, actually conducive to the long-term survival of our people at all.
As to other countries in Europe, we see a mixed picture.
In some, such as Germany, there is no serious kind of opposition to the existing establishment at all.
The small groups that exist there are essentially neo-Nazi cranks who anyone in their right mind would go out of their way to avoid.
It is a striking contrast with Austria, the other main German-speaking country, where, say, nationalist parties have emerged to become very, very serious players.
One of the most curious phenomena that we now have in Europe, which leaves me quite bemused, is what you might call what could only be described as liberal nationalism.
This consists of white middle-class liberals who don't like what's happening to society.
Because they have correctly grasped that societies with large numbers of people from the third world who adhere to different religious belief systems and completely different social ethos aren't going to like liberalism.
And the most fascinating example of this is the Dutch Freedom Party, which is going to be, again, another pretty successful party in May, the Wilders Party.
This is a party which basically wouldn't...
I wouldn't mind who came to Holland, so long as they adopted Dutch social mores, which, if you think San Francisco writ large, is pretty well what Dutch social mores, at least so far as the Dutch political establishment thought, not maybe the farmer living in a rural area of South Holland,
what the Dutch political elite thought.
Well, surprise, surprise, they discovered a large immigrant population from mainly conservative Muslim countries didn't quite share.
Their attitudes on things like gay marriage and so on didn't go down well.
And you now have this quite extraordinary phenomenon of liberal anti-immigration activists so that Wilder's party has reached quite a strong level of support and beginning.
From a position which would hardly have commended itself to members of American Renaissance, he's now beginning to adopt ideas.
It's more and more difficult to distinguish from our own.
He got himself into considerable trouble.
With the Bien-Pensant class, by leading supporters of his party in the mass chanting of, do we want more Moroccans in Holland?
To which the leader gives the answer, no, no, no.
And the audience, of course, enthusiastically erupts.
The Dutch press also erupted, but not quite so enthusiastically.
However, I don't think it's going to do him very much harm long-term with the ordinary people, who again have to live with this phenomenon.
But it is certainly strange to see in what was once the most socially liberal and to all outward appearances the most utterly degenerate country in Europe.
Thank you.
I can't resist an anecdote in that respect because it takes me on to the neighboring state of Belgium where we have seen sadly a phenomenon of a nationalist movement that has been successfully undermined by a more establishment Flanders is an interesting example
of a region where the nationalists have been to some extent, well to a large extent, successfully undercut by an establishment-sponsored, if you like,
false alternative.
And the Flemish bloc no longer enjoys the Flemish interest.
I keep forgetting it's illegal to call it the Flemish bloc because the Belgian state banned that party for being too successful, a good example of democracy in action, European style.
You may be amazed to learn this, but...
Banning political parties, which become too successful, is actually quite a common resort of European elites.
There's a number of times.
It was done in France in the 1970s with Ordre Nouveau.
It was done in Belgium with the Flemish bloc.
The Greek state is probably going to do it as the Golden Dawn Party, which is perhaps not entirely a party to my taste, but nevertheless enjoys the support of a large section of the Greek electorate.
The Italians seem to be doing it at the moment.
One of their small right-wing parties, whose offices they raided, carefully take away all the nomination papers for that party's candidates in the European elections.
That's a good way to make sure they don't win any seats, isn't it?
You get the police to raid the offices and take away the nomination papers.
So this sort of thing goes on.
But in Belgium, the Flemish bloc was once the dominant party in the Dutch-speaking part of Belgium, or Flemish-speaking part of Belgium.
It has now, as I say, been somewhat undermined.
It's interesting, again, to compare that situation with the prevailing situation in France, where attempts to create a civic nationalist alternative to the Front National have miserably failed.
The nearest is a party called Debout la France, which perhaps best be translated as France, get off your knees, which was created as a supposedly respectable alternative.
This hasn't gone very well.
Our principal left-wing anti-racist newspaper, Searchlight, which resembles the Southern Poverty Law Centre that you all know and love so well over here, recently pointed out that the Boula France has not done its reputation of respectability much good by recruiting a mayor who said that Hitler's principal crime was not killing enough gypsies.
This is supposed to be a respectable party?
You know, it didn't work out too well, that one, did it?
So it has, however, unfortunately, this kind of trick has worked in...
It has worked in Belgium.
In Scandinavian countries, on part of these very briefings, I have no particular expertise in them, Denmark and Norway have reasonably encouraging developments.
Again, the Danish People's Party has been one of the very successful nationalist parties in Europe and continues to be so.
Sweden is a catastrophe.
It seems to be the country in Europe most determined to bring in more and more and more people who are as little like the indigenous Swedish people as they possibly can and settle them in their big cities.
So they turned Sweden into a replica of Africa.
The best analysis of this I've ever seen was the translation into English from a Danish newspaper, the Jutland Times, which said, we can't stand our Swedish cousins.
They're so like us in many ways.
They appear to have gone collectively insane.
They don't see their multicultural experiment has completely failed.
They seem to want to carry on with it and, as I say, turn their country into something that no Swede will recognize.
So we see, as I say, very mixed phenomena across Europe.
We will, I think, see, however...
Politics unfolding generally in a positive direction for those who have nationalist, traditionalist and conservative views because quite frankly the objective factors playing out in Europe are working in our favour.
Indigenous populations now feel marginalised in many parts of their own country and it makes them angry whereas even a generation ago they were complacent.
And equally, the system cannot deliver the easy and widespread economic prosperity that it could even 30 years ago.
I would not venture...
One of our more cynical socialist politicians, with amusing and witty character in his own way, Harold Wilson, once in a week is a long time in politics, and I'm certainly not going to try to forecast five or ten years ahead.
But I remain cautiously optimistic, and my...
Predictions, I suppose, will be that you should watch above all France, where the Front National is positioning itself in such a way that he could one day be a serious contender for government.
I think I'm probably reaching the end of my allotted time, especially if we're going to try and take
questions, so I'll wind up there.
Jared tells me that we have time for some questions and I'll gladly take any questions that we have.
Yes, sir.
I am asking which country in Europe is most destroyed?
Well, that's a very, very difficult question.
It depends what you mean by most destroyed.
A country is destroyed if it has internalized an ideology that's contrary to the interests of its own people.
And to that extent, the outward manifestations are less important than the inward state of the nation's spirit.
And that was actually a point which I think John Morgan brought out very, very well indeed.
Countries in Eastern Europe which had suffered absolutely terribly under communism in a way that we cannot begin to imagine if we live in Western Europe or America in terms of brutality and repression and police terror.
Have come out of it with their spirits apparently unbroken.
What we now see, Russia...
...led by a former KGB agent as probably the most powerful force for nationalist, traditionalist values in the whole world, something that has seen insane.
So what country in Europe is most damaged?
I would say those countries are the most internalised to the false values of bourgeois liberalism.
Sweden would actually be a pretty strong contender, in my humble opinion.
You're right.
In terms of those which have the worst problems of burgeoning...
Minorities from unassimilable groups who are hostile to the host countries.
Probably a toss-up between the French and us, I'd say.
I have a second.
Who is the worst war criminals of all time, bar none?
Well, that's a very, very interesting question, and not one that I think I would even begin to be able to answer.
Two questions.
Do you think that Wilders' party in Holland has any chance of becoming, Wilders himself has a chance of becoming Prime Minister?
I don't think that President Trent does.
I think the only country in Europe where I could even see a nationalist, well, there are only two where I could see nationalist governments credibly coming to power in the next ten years.
Those would be France and Austria.
Wilders, I think, will play an important role, an increasingly important role in Dutch politics.
But as you may know, Dutch politics tends to coalition.
You don't often get single-party governments in that country.
In many continental countries, I think continental European countries, we call the mainland of Europe the continents, bad English habit.
Because they have proportional representation in one form or another in elections in the national legislature, you don't get single-party governments.
At the moment, in England, we have a coalition government, which is a great rarity in England in peacetime.
But in most European countries, a coalition government is the norm precisely because their system of elections, the legislature, means that a large number of parties from far left to far right are represented in it, and you assemble and cobble together a block of several.
But that's what I think the builders.
How is Paul Weston doing in England?
Below the discernible measure at which you could record perception.
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