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Aug. 9, 2020 - Radio Renaissance - Jared Taylor
45:04
Matt Tait: "Tragedy and Hope: Lessons from the Plight of British Nationalism" (2015)
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Our first speaker is Matthew Tate.
He is from Buckinghamshire, near London, England, and he showed a commitment to our people early, joining the British National Party in 2004 at age 18, and he established a local section of the party all by himself,
and he stood for election several times.
And a number of his election campaigns made national news, in particular when he stood in the Queen's own hometown.
of Royal Windsor in 2007 when he won 15% of the vote.
Mr. Tate left the BNP in 2010 after reluctantly coming to the conclusion that there were problems internally in the party that were going to keep it from making any more progress.
Since 2010...
He has founded a website called westernspring.co.uk, which has become one of the most popular British racially oriented sites.
He has also enraged liberals by starting a group called the Legion Martial Arts Club, which trains people in self-defense.
And he is going to draw on his many years of experience in nationalist politics in Britain to speak to us today about lessons that can be drawn from the plight of British nationalism.
Please welcome Matthew Tate.
Well, it's a real pleasure to be here.
Having got to meet some of you yesterday evening, it was clear to me that this is a very strong and varied group of very decent, mostly white, straight, cisgendered, decent, normal people.
And on that basis alone, we can be sure that the SPLC will be classing us as a hate rally.
I'd like to extend my thanks to Jared Taylor for the invitation to speak today.
I'm particularly honoured to be the opening speaker and to help set the tone for a conference which I've attended several times before and enjoyed greatly.
The ultimate date in the diary to get together with your friends and to recharge those batteries and discuss everything that you struggle to discuss with perhaps the people in your everyday lives at work or in your own family even.
So it really is a fantastic experience to come to these conferences and I hope that you all enjoy it just as much as I have so far this time and also have done twice before.
In those previous conferences I've managed to make some great friends It lasted the distance of thousands of miles over the oceans, and I've had several visitors come to stay with me in England, and I sincerely hope that this trip will enable me to renew those friendships,
as it already has, and to make some new friends as well.
AMREN is part of a global movement, a global movement within which I've been a member in my own country.
It's a movement that is immensely powerful.
To be on the side of righteousness in the face of adversity is something that truly gives you a sense of something that you never really experience in the mundane existence that most modern people live today.
I've personally seen transformations of characters, people who were just very average or perhaps would even have considered themselves to be well below average types of people who have transformed themselves into something greater, something far more Glorious and valuable in their own lives through being involved in this cause.
As Jared says, I joined when I was 18, and I did so because I always felt like I wanted to be involved.
I always felt like I wanted to understand the way the world is and why it is that way.
And having read the BNP's website, I came to the conclusion that, however controversial it was, that it was utterly reasonable and correct, and that...
The only thing that a decent person could do was to commit themselves heavily and to get involved.
When I got involved in 2004, the party was just about to go into this sort of golden era, so I joined just at the right time.
I was able to experience many victories, starting off with local council elections where we would...
We get 10%, 15%, 20%.
Suddenly we were getting 30% of the vote and coming close to winning.
And then, bang, victory.
And that taste of victory was very, very, very powerful.
And the only thing we wanted to do was to win more, and to win more often.
And we set about doing exactly that.
And over the coming years, we got to the stage where we had councillors in...
Pretty much all regions of England and even into Wales as well.
These victories led on to further professionalisations of the party and to us being able to contest seats at a much more national level.
I'm sure that I don't need to tell you about the victories that the party enjoyed, including getting someone elected to the London Assembly, Richard Barnbrook, and also two members of the European Parliament, which really was...
The crowning jewel in the victory of the BNP in its life.
That was in 2009.
For my part, it was very much a regional role that I played in this.
And I live in a part of the country which is not considered to be radical territory.
It's solidly conservative.
It's a commuter belt type of area with very wealthy people.
The kind of place that the BNP would never have really stood.
What I really wanted to do was to help the party become associated with these high-status areas in the country and to show that we were a party that represented British people, whether they were from a difficult place to live in an old mill town in the north of England or an inner-city area of East London,
or whether they lived in the home counties.
We managed to get national press coverage for standing in the Queen's.
Hometown of Windsor, as Jared has said in my introduction, and also in a town called Henley-upon-Thames, which is a sort of quintessential postcard English town.
It really was an honour to be involved in these campaigns.
I got to meet people who I would never have normally got to meet in regular life, and I was able to come into contact with members of the public who showed me just how much of a hunger there really is for change, just how much of a hunger there is for...
Old values and for a sense of national identity which has been eroded since the war.
I remember a particular experience of being in East London and helping to get the first councillors elected in the borough of Barking and Dagenham, which is a very deprived area.
And I would come across people who just wanted to give.
And that really touched me.
They had so little to give and all they wanted to do was to give as much as they could.
And there was a particular old gentleman who would write us a cheque for £10 and send it to me.
And then I would sort that out for him and send him something in reply and a thank you note.
And every time I sent him a thank you note, he would send me another cheque.
And I didn't know at one point whether to write to him and thank him again, because I might be at risk of bankrupting him if I was to continue to be so thankful for his contributions.
Thank you.
It's a great shame that, as you know, really I'm here to talk to you about the tragedy of what's happened with this party that I've been involved with and have given so much to.
Over the years, since 2010, there's been a mass exodus of members.
The vast majority of the members who really made the party tick and who really were able to push the party forward and to really have achieved the things they did achieve, those people have almost entirely left that party.
I can pretty much announce to you, to anybody here who is in any doubt about that party, that at this stage, it really may as well not exist.
So how did it go from the glories of successes at national and even international Pan-European Council level, success to where it is today in abject failure?
And I was told yesterday that the party this year will be standing eight candidates in the election.
And when I stood in 2010, we stood over 300 candidates in the country.
There are a number of complex issues which really are interlaced here and need to be understood to really understand exactly how we went from the first case scenario to the scenario that we're in now.
One of those things was that Nick Griffin himself was very much the party.
He was very much a micromanager of the party, and he was really allowed to do that for a long time on the basis that he was delivering success, which he was.
But really, tragedy came out of that because of a number of things to do with his own particularities, and also the fact that he and Andrew Bronze, who was another leading light in the party, ended up being elected to Europe.
And it was almost a...
A Pyrrhic victory in the sense that we got them elected and we sent them away.
We sent them to Brussels.
And they were no longer really in the country to lead the party.
There have been scandals over the years to do with money and financial impropriety.
Frankly, I'm not going to support any of those claims because I don't feel that there is enough evidence to support them.
But what I can attest to is that I saw the party go from being run on a shoestring A couple of hundred thousand pounds a year to millions of pounds per year in the space of only two years.
This was a massive, massive growth and I think that to a certain extent the party was a victim of its own success in this regard.
It didn't really quite know what to do with this money and it was clearly obvious to everybody involved who was donating that this money wasn't being spent wisely, was often being wasted or misplaced and certainly it led to other questions about...
Where money may have been going.
There are many strengths and many weaknesses to Nick Griffin as a politician and I'm sure you're aware of the strengths that he has as a speaker.
He's spoken at Emrin before and he was...
An absolute stalwart in the face of adversity for year upon year upon year.
I mean, to go through the attacks that he had to suffer and to carry on, I have nothing but respect for somebody who can go through that experience.
However, he was a man who perhaps only completely trusted himself in an atmosphere of paranoia, which is certainly not completely unreasonable.
At one point, he did make a suggestion that he would step aside from leadership of the party and allow someone else to take over, but that never happened.
And I think that was because, perhaps in his mind, the control of the party and keeping the party in the hands of somebody who is genuine was perhaps more important than making sure that it had the strongest leadership that it could, at risk of perhaps employing people who we weren't so sure of,
or who hadn't proved themselves so long over the years.
There were several instances which really acted as quite acute issues for the decline of the party, one of them being Nick Griffin's appearance on Question Time, which many, many were very critical of, and certainly he could have done better.
Also, his dealings with the invitation that he had to the Queen's Garden Party, where Andrew Bronze did what most politicians would always do, and that is just to go and be glad of being in attendance, whereas...
Nick likes to try to make politics perhaps where it shouldn't have really been made.
It was my experience in the party that all too often people would come along who were of good quality, good calibre, experienced people.
They'd built a business or they were well qualified in a particular area or they were just all round good eggs and you could tell.
And these people were often sidelined in favour of people who were much more likely to be just sort of blindly loyal to the leadership.
One of the key lessons that we all need to learn from this situation is that we really must allow people to flourish and we must give responsibility and positions to the people who deserve those places.
After all, we can't do this alone.
We need lots of high-quality people doing their part and playing the part that they can play best.
There is a little more around The party itself that I think is worth understanding in this context, and that is that in 1997, Tony Blair became the Prime Minister and ushered in a long period of time under New Labour.
Nick Griffin also became leader of the BNP around that time, and it's always been the case that a radical right-wing party will do well under a left-wing government and not so well under a Conservative government.
In 2010, David Cameron became Prime Minister.
And really it was in 2010 that the situation had begun to change away from success and towards failure.
And I think that it is worth bearing in mind that greater context.
It was often said in the party that the greatest recruiter that we ever had was Tony Blair.
And the reason for that was that he was so hated.
So hated.
And he still is today, I'm glad to say.
Something also very interesting, I believe, is...
The willingness of the press to talk about immigration.
I've got some friends in Sweden, and they tell me that there is just no popular press that will address the issue of immigration.
In Britain, though, it sells, and it's on the front cover of certain newspapers.
I'm sure you will have all come across the Daily Mail online, which is the biggest online newspaper in the English language, I believe, in the world.
Now, this website is absolutely huge.
Even the paper copy is the most well-read newspaper in the country, and it will regularly run front-page stories on very controversial subjects, including immigration.
The Daily Express is another newspaper that also does likewise, and they've really begun to step up this sensational headlines about this subject in around about the turn of the millennium, in around about the year 2000.
The BNP kind of had its growth phase in a situation where we were being led by an incredibly unpopular socialist left-wing politician who was flooding the country, literally flooding the country with foreigners from the third world,
and at a time when the popular press were addressing and stirring up people's interest in this particular issue.
And yet there was nobody to capitalise on that at all, apart from the BNP.
UKIP did exist at that time, and I have been asked to speak a little bit about UKIP, which I will do presently.
One of the key problems I saw within the party as well was the inability of us to provide people with a suitable place within the structure of the movement.
Often people would come along, and they would come to a meeting, maybe a few meetings, you'd get to know them a bit, realise they're a high-caliber person, and there wasn't really anything you could give for them.
You couldn't say, this is the way...
That you can help the cause.
Thank you for coming.
This is a place that we think you could fit in.
Would you like to fill this place in our movement?
And one of the things I'm going to be talking about a bit again today is the lack of broadness of the movement is a problem.
Particularly in Britain, it has always been about a political party.
Now I believe that a political party is an important part of any solution to our problems, but it should not be the entirety of the solution.
And that is what it really has become in Britain.
Over here, I think that you have a broader spectrum of movement because being involved in party politics is so difficult, and I understand that.
It's often been said that people's impression of you is 70% how you look, 20% how you speak, and 10% what you say.
And I think you can see that that's the way politicians are selected these days.
If we want to have people who can survive in these high-pressure, high-attention positions, we need to make sure that they tick these boxes.
We need to make sure that they look good and that they speak well.
And really, details of policy and manifesto decisions is something that isn't particularly crucial.
Most of the time, when I was involved in politics...
The debates would be about should we be in favour of this?
Should we be against that?
How much should we be against that?
How should we define it?
Constantly trying to get that 10% of the important elements right and not focusing enough on the 70% or the 20%.
Our message is our messenger.
I'm going to say that again because I think this is absolutely crucial.
Our message is our messenger.
In retrospect, the way that the BNP used to go about things and the way that I used to speak to people, I now feel was kind of lazy.
You know, we would say, we want to bring back national service.
We want to give our young people more confidence.
We want to give them new skills.
We would change the schools.
Life under our party, with our policies, would make your life better.
So vote for us.
But that doesn't usually work in the real world, does it?
I mean, if you go to your employer and you say, you know, you give me some money now and I'll do the job later.
It's not going to work.
Thank you.
Something that I talk to people about is the Aryan mindset.
Now, I know that the Aryan word has a kind of connotation to it, but I kind of like it because someone told me that it means Noble.
And I think that that's what we all try to live up to.
We try to be noble people.
I think a noble person goes about things rather differently.
I think that the ambitions that we have need to be drawn from a different angle.
I think that we need to lead by example.
I think that we need to create now, show people what we can do, show them the example, show them how the world can be different, led by us.
And in doing so, then we can say to them, imagine what we could do for you if you voted for us and you gave us money.
That's the way around to do it, not the old way.
To give you a bit more of an understanding of the current environment in the UK, there are numerous other groups that exist, including the old National Front, which existed before the BNP.
It's still there.
There is, of course, the group, the EDL, which sometimes people often ask me about.
There is another party led by Andrew Bronze, who is the other BNP, MEP, and that party's called the BDP.
So we have a kind of alphabet soup of small political parties that are still existing.
Most of these really, however well-intentioned they might be, they may as well really not exist, because they are really hardly there.
Something may come of it, and I'm sure that...
If anything can come of it, then people will be working towards that.
But really, in the UK at the moment, there is one group and one group only which is seeming to achieve anything.
Anything real and anything public.
And that is the UK Independence Party, UKIP.
Now, this is a very controversial subject and something that is debated hotly amongst my friends all the time.
Can you trust UKIP?
How staunch are they, really?
Because it is very, very hard to say.
It's very hard to know what they're doing to use as a reputational shield.
They sometimes have really cringeworthy press conferences where Nigel Farage hugs someone of every different race and gender and maybe stands there with a transgendered person as well just to show how tolerant he is.
It's all very embarrassing.
But, you know...
If we could achieve the victory we want to achieve and build the world we want to build, and we have to do that, then we just have to hold our noses and do it.
But the question is, is that really what they're doing, or are they sincere?
I can't really answer that, but I certainly want to say that I'm hopeful about what I'm seeing from the UK Independence Party.
First and foremost, we've lived in a one-party state, almost...
As rigidly as you do here in the US, we have the Labour Party, we have the Conservative Party, and we have the Liberal Democratic Party.
No party other than those three has ever won an election in Britain, going back hundreds of years since they were created.
It was always the Conservatives and the Liberals.
And then in the early 20th century, the Labour Party took over from the Liberals, and ever since then, it's been...
Labour Party or the Conservative Party or a mixture of those.
For the first time in the country's history, a non-Lib Lab Con political party has won an election, and not just an election, a national and even supranational election, the European elections, beating the Conservatives into second place.
Now, the irony, of course, is that the UK Independence Party are the most well-known force against that parliament.
We've voted in people who don't want to be there to be there.
That's down to them.
At the moment, the talk is all about the general election.
We have a general election coming up in May, only in a couple of weeks' time.
And we're really discussing, could they win?
And frankly, yes, they could.
The polls have been up and down as high as 20%, and at the moment seem to be floating around about 15% due to many attacks in the press.
But they could win seats in Parliament, and that is hard because we have a first-past-the-post system in every constituency.
And although they have 15% of the vote, they may end up with 0% of the seats if they don't get enough seats in one area.
But, personally, I find the idea of breaking the deadlock in politics in my country a good sign, and I hope that it's a stepping stone to stauncher things.
There's a great deal of potential in my country, and although I'm here really to give bad news about the party that I've dedicated so much of my adult life to, I'm very positive about the things that could come.
Public opinion polls show that 80% of British people want to see...
A complete or a near-complete stop to immigration into our country.
That, to me, is a great sign.
Something even more controversial, which I was absolutely shocked about, was I read in a poll that 25% of British people support forced repatriation of all immigrants, whether they were born in the country or not.
Thank you.
I think we can work with that.
Our movement today is very divided, very lacking in so many areas.
Really, when you consider the parts that we have within our movement, and then you compare it to another group that isn't really even particularly significant.
I'd like to give you an example comparing it to the Mormon Church.
I think about 1 to 1.5% of the Mormon Church of the U.S. is Mormon.
Members of the Mormon Church give 10% of their income before tax to the church.
Yet, they're still a very minority and not particularly powerful group, right?
But, I mean, look at us.
We're way, way down, multiple leagues down from there.
We've got a lot of work to do.
But our movement could be so much more.
And in the end, I think that people are going to be much more receptive to...
Things that are going to benefit them than something like a particular brand of religion.
What our movement should be like and could be like is a broad and all-encompassing network of aligned groups dedicated to People's individual personalities, whether they are into being outdoors or whether they are studious and academic,
whether they are paleoconservatives or radical racialists, whether they are scientific or whether they are religious or artistic.
We need a group for every demographic, and that should be part of the network that we create as leaders of this movement.
We need a place for everybody.
When someone comes along with skills, they need a place, they need a home.
And a one-size-fits-all solution, for me, is a non-starter.
I'd like for you all to take a somber moment to examine your own commitment to this cause.
I don't think I need to stress to you the urgency and the life-and-death situation that we are in for our race and our culture.
You should know that.
But, realistically, how committed...
Is each one of us to achieving the ends that we wish to achieve?
And I would give you an example.
If you have a pet dog, I found out that the average pet dog costs more than £100, so probably $130 to $150 per month.
How many people here have a pet dog who is costing them more than they give to the cause?
I'd ask you all to ask yourselves that question.
What about your cable TV subscriptions?
What about if you're a smoker?
Smoking is very expensive in the UK.
Ten cigarettes a day could be very, very expensive per month.
I think it's something like £150 per month.
I can count on my one hand the number of people that I know who give more than £150 a month to saving their race and nation and culture.
So I'm going to say to you that the greatest problem that we have isn't deciding the right ideology.
It isn't deciding...
The right group to support.
It isn't deciding the right name for a new political group that you're going to create.
It isn't about your personal blog.
The problem that we have is us.
The problem that we have is that we say we are against liberalism, yet we continue to live the liberal lifestyle.
Our money, we pay in taxes to our government who are against us.
We invest the money that we earn in pension funds that go into corporations, Immigrants to come in and work and replace us.
We watch television and we read newspapers that propagandize against us and brainwash our children against us.
So far, we've chosen the comfortable liberal lifestyle over doing what's necessary.
And doing what's necessary is hard.
And when you look at our situation that we're in, we must realize that we are not committed enough and that everything is down onto us to become more committed, to do more.
And I know that's easier said than done, and I might be able to get you excited about this now, but in the end, you're going to go home and the effect will wear off, perhaps.
So... What we need to do as a movement to move towards a true movement of greater commitment is we need to produce more value for the people within it.
Just like they do in churches and other organizations like that where there is regular social activities.
Regular activities of all different kinds so that you're part of an actual true community.
Not an annual conference that you come to and you see your friends once a year.
Not something that is intermittent.
We need a separate culture.
And others have said this better than I will say, and I will leave that for others to put to you.
But we need that separate culture.
We need to start living like a different kind of people.
We need to have an opting in.
Having a white skin is not what it's about.
You have to opt in.
To our community.
You need to make the decision what you care about most.
What we could do is if we were committed, I mean, think of the things that we could do.
We don't have to say to people, imagine what our school system would be like if we were in charge.
what we should be doing is saying, we are going to have our own school.
Thank you.
We are not alive as a true community.
We are in a kind of embryonic stage where a community could come from where we are now.
But there is a lot of work to be done.
What we need to work on is a broad base, a broad spectrum of different groups catering to different people's individual tastes and wants and personalities.
And to that effect...
I have created several of these kinds of breakaway groups, and I'd like to say that the BNP was quite good with this, although they didn't particularly deliver very well.
They had the Christian Council of Britain, which was a group, obviously, for Christians who were of traditional mindset in Britain.
It was aligned to the party, but not of the party.
And there were other groups like the Solidarity Workers' Union and other things like that.
They had begun to broaden the movement beyond the political party, and I support that 100%.
Even if the way that they did it in the end did not work particularly well.
Now I'd like to show you a video from the Legion Martial Arts Group which I...
I run.
The idea of the group is to get people together and get them outside.
Most of the people who come have never been involved in political parties, and they wouldn't be interested in coming and sitting in a room listening to talks.
But they are interested in coming out to the woods and learning how to defend themselves, learning how to build fires, to skin rabbits, and to do the things that their ancestors used to do.
And in self-improvement, the message of our group really is based upon two quotes.
One from Gandhi, be the change you wish to see in the world.
And also of Leo Tolstoy, many people dream of changing the world, few dream of changing themselves.
So let's have a look at the video, please.
Thank you.
Our next event is coming up in a couple of months, and we're looking to grow this every time.
We're getting people inquiring from all around the world, actually, and one of the fighters in there was actually from Brazil.
My particular organization, really, that I'm representing is Western Spring, and our website is westernspring.co.uk.
And in there, there's an About Us section where we have a series of quite lengthy articles which discuss the reasons why we believe that the way things were done in the past...
We're unsuccessful and also why we believe that these other methods that we advocate will be successful and is the only way of achieving what we wish to achieve.
So I'd ask you to read those for more information if you would like.
My lasting message to you really is that our message is our messenger.
We need to lead by example.
All too often I hear people saying about how fantastic we are.
Aren't our average IQs so high?
Yeah, that's great, but what are we doing?
We need to go out there and create.
We need to go out there and live and produce things like the people who we like to aspire to did.
And first of all, you kind of have to overcome a certain amount of individualism and your own particular tastes, and we have to start working as a group.
There's very little you can do on your own.
So now I'm going to make a plea to you to be tolerant.
Try to tolerate each other.
However awful the person sitting next to you might be, and however much you might not want to talk to them, try to be friends.
Because in doing so, you may find that you can actually achieve something and really look back on that with pride.
This is not a hobby.
This is a life...
Life and death struggle.
And my duty is to tell you that you ain't doing enough.
And that counts for me as well.
I'm not doing enough.
I'm not doing enough.
But none of us are.
But we need to get serious.
And I don't just want to tell you off.
I don't want to just tell you to get serious.
I want to say, we need to...
Discuss seriously why we aren't committed enough.
We need to decide what the things are that we need to do to make us committed.
And personally, I think it's that community spirit.
Because when I've been to different churches around the country, in my own country, and I've seen the spirit that they have and the community feeling that they have and the things that they can achieve together, to me, that's what it's based on.
It's very hard to give up something.
Without having something to replace it.
And in these kind of situations, they would say, I don't have a problem not drinking alcohol.
I don't have a problem fasting.
They're happy to pay their tithes of 20% or whatever to their church because they have the Holy Spirit.
And that's what we need.
We need our own spirit of the Aryan mindset of the Creator.
Of the great ancestor who we look to.
We need to find that spirit and fill ourselves with that.
And it's not something that can be done once a year.
This kind of thing needs to happen very regularly.
It needs to be weekly.
In fact, it needs to be more than once a week.
I think it's got to be at least twice a week.
We should have church.
Church for our cause, that is.
Other church can be chosen at will.
I'd like to leave you with a quote from...
John Tindall, who was the founder of the British National Party, I've carried this quote in my wallet for a number of years, and I'd like to share it with you as my close, and then leave time for questions from you.
Today, from out of the chaos and the ruin, wrought by the old politics, new men are rising.
These new men of the new age...
Are working night and day across the land to forge the sinews of a movement which their lives and mine are dedicated.
Excuse me.
Above them they work are the spirits of legions of mighty ancestors whose bones lie at the bottom of the oceans and beneath the soil of five continents where the men and women of our blood have borne the British flag and stamped the mark of British genius.
Today we feel the voices of these past generations calling down to us in sacred union.
Thank you.
Thank you.
What is the relationship, if any, between the Scottish independence movement and the movement to preserve the white race?
I suppose very sadly, not very much.
I would say largely the Scottish nationalism has been twisted.
Into a kind of victim mentality, sort of semi-communist aligned left-wing point of view.
In the main, of course there are many, many Scots who are nationalistic and who are certainly on our wavelength.
But unfortunately they don't have any particular outlet or organisation.
Certainly the Scottish National Party are nothing to do with us and are pretty much as opposed to us as the SPLC would be.
It is a great shame.
I don't particularly take sides in the independence debate in Scotland.
If they'd have been independent, I'd have wished them very well.
But I suppose I'm quietly glad the union has been preserved.
And I wish that more Scots would come forward, whether they're in favour of independence or not, and join in with our struggle.
Thank you for a fine talk, Matt.
I just wonder, could you say a couple of sentences about the character and prospects of Liberty GB?
Liberty GB, I do know the guys who run Liberty GB, and they seem very sincere, very decent, well-educated people.
They are a very, very small group.
I'd put them in the category, quite honestly, of groups that may as well not exist.
And I don't mean that in a rude way, but really, when you think of it in the grand scheme of things, they hardly exist.
They are only a small, very tiny number of people.
I probably know all of the leaders, and there's about three.
I can't say a great deal about their politics.
I know that they aren't quite as ideologically pure, in my opinion, as the BNP was at the right moment in the BNP's history.
I certainly think that they are a better step ideologically than UKIP, but unfortunately UKIP exists and could have power, whereas LibertyGB really are a micro-party that has got a lot of work to do to become significant.
Are you aware of any organization now that has regular meetings and provides the social structure, the weekly gatherings that you say are so important?
Are there any organizations now that are growing, that are doing that?
Yes, there are.
Not as many as we need.
There is a very strong group, which you may have come across on YouTube, called the London Forum.
They have meetings on, well, not a weekly basis, certainly, but they have very fine meetings with great speakers and very well-organized meetings, indeed, on a monthly or semi-monthly basis.
There are other groups around the country which largely are autonomous groups that have broken away from the BNP in the last few years.
So there are lots of regional groups, all of different names.
They've created their own name.
They maybe have their own website.
And it's a group of friends in a town or in a county or in a particular region of the country.
And yes, there are groups who get together very regularly socially.
I have one in my area which really is just a continuation of the members I was friends with in the BNP.
And we get together relatively regularly because we're friends.
I appreciate your constructive thought about how to move forward.
But when you look to churches as a model for communities, proximity does a great deal of work in building that community.
And without proximity, things that seem very easy get very, very hard.
And I'm wondering if you could talk about that in light of the fact that we have a lot of people from disparate locations in this room.
Thank you.
That's a good question.
I'm aware, of course, having driven with a couple of friends 12 hours.
I mean, I've never driven 12 hours in my life.
I think there's 12 hours worth of road in Britain to drive on, frankly.
So a 12-hour drive in this country was quite remarkable.
I would say that we just need to try.
I think that these...
These groups are essential.
They have to happen.
They will be more easy to organize in certain areas where there are concentrations of friends and contacts already.
I think that if you have to travel more than an hour, there's a significant barrier to it being successful.
So I think, yeah, you are completely right.
It needs to be really local.
it should really be a 10 minute drive or less to be very regular and for it to be a true thriving organic community so I just think we need to start small don't try and run
Thank you for the talk.
Do you personally support UKIP and why or why not?
And what do you think the chances are of them winning seats in the general election?
Well, as I said, I find it hard to really identify The value of UKIP, whether they are as staunch as they need to be or whether they will do the things they say they're going to do.
I personally feel, as I said, that it's a great move in the right direction.
They will act as a stepping stone.
I think strategically, if I was going to be the leader of a political party...
I think that the UKIP strategy is as good as it can get.
You choose something that is utterly reasonable and you just hammer it and hammer it and hammer it against the establishment.
And that is to get out of the European Union.
And the vast majority of the country want to do that.
So strategically, if you can get people to vote for you on something that's utterly reasonable and everybody wants and none of the other political parties will touch, you're building yourself a supporter base.
So what I hope that UKIP will do is they will transfer that.
And they are beginning to do this.
They're really becoming more known for being anti-immigration.
They're not anti-immigration.
I don't see immigration enough for my liking though.
Thank you.
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