As the European Parliament sang the “Auld Lang Syne” and the Union Jack was removed from Brussels’s flag procession, the seemingly impossible became fact—Great Britain was out of the European Union. And the Tories are riding high once more in London. In 2016, Brexit was viewed as a major advancement for nationalism and populism. But did the Alt-Right overlook or misunderstand something in all the frivolity? The panel discusses the future of both nationalism and Europeanism. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit radixjournal.substack.com/subscribe
It's Monday, February 3rd, and welcome back to The McSpencer Group, the Internet's most Anglo-centric podcast.
Joining me are Celtic bard Keith Woods and exuberant Albion Edward Dutton.
Top issue, Brexit is for real.
As the European Parliament sang, the old long zine and the Union Jack was removed from Brussels' flag procession.
The seemingly impossible became fact.
Great Britain was out of the European Union, and the Tories are riding high once more in London.
In 2016, Brexit was viewed as a major advancement for nationalism and populism.
But did the alt-right overlook or misunderstand something in all the frivolity?
The panel discusses the future of both nationalism and Europeanism.
Well, Ed, welcome to the program.
I hope you've recovered from your heavy drinking and frivolity.
Free at last.
Free at last.
Thank God almighty you are free at last.
A nation once again.
A nation once again.
God save the Queen.
The English, the English, your English are best.
I couldn't give tuppence for all of the rest.
Yes, that is...
It's inwards past Calais, isn't that the phrase?
Oh yes, that's right.
There's fog in the channel.
The continent is cut off.
The Irish now are contempt is beneath.
He sleeps in his boots and he lies through his teeth.
He blows up policemen, or so I have heard, and blames it on Cromwell and William III.
Yes, that is pretty much the feeling.
Yeah, a load of us met up in a Nepalese restaurant, which we thought was very colonial, very nice colonial British Empire setting.
And then we celebrated heartily throughout the night.
And then we retired to a workplace of a friend who had a cellar where we could watch the television and we counted down, sang Old Lang Syne, which is important to reclaim.
from the Remainers of Lang Syne, because they've made out, we had all of the European Parliament, all of these pieces, I thought that was rather touching, actually.
That was respectful.
It was an attempt to get something which is associated with tradition, which we sing in New Year's Eve.
It's associated with tradition.
It's associated with times of change.
I felt it was an attempt to taint that.
With their maladaptive ideology and make it so that we felt that we couldn't use it ourselves.
Because it was the one thing that I thought, what are we going to sing at 1 in the morning in Finland, 7 o 'clock UK?
Old Lang Syne.
They tried to take that away.
So no, I wasn't happy about that.
They should sing something by Chumbawamba or something if they want to sing something.
Anyway, so yes, the main thing is the movement towards...
Freedom.
This is how the Irish would have felt in 1922 or whatever it was with the Free State.
And the movement towards freedom.
Ireland didn't get there until what year?
What year did you become a republic?
49?
48 or 9, yeah.
48 or 9?
Yeah, 49. But it's an important step along the way to being an independent country once again and not a vassal state of this left-wing overlord.
Well, speaking as an American, I'm glad that you're our vassal state again.
You know, our little island, our 51st state, we can kind of push you around once more.
It's going to be fun.
I doubt, I don't think those would be the dynamics of it.
As I've discussed before, there's no such thing as Americans.
There's English people, like yourself, who happen to live in America.
And it's the same relationship, I think, that Portugal ended up having with Brazil.
By the 1950s, the power centre had moved to Brazil.
But nevertheless, we're talking about Portuguese people.
That makes perfect sense to me.
With the British, the Canadians, the Australians, the New Zealanders, the one people, British people, and the Irish, and particularly their writers, as I discussed in my video recently.
And so I see no reason...
Mainly their writers.
With the exception of Graham Linehan.
And so I see the writer of Father Pet and other such things, a big train.
But I see no reason whatsoever why we should be unhappy about this.
This is an independent country, once again, which is excellent.
And also, it's finally winning at something.
I was thinking about this in political terms.
Sorry, Ed, can I cut you off?
Did you have a nice pint of ale with one of the new African migrants that Boris Johnson is bringing in to replace the Polish plumbers?
Yeah.
Did you celebrate that together?
Well, obviously not, because I was in Finland.
But anyway, one of the things which would have been...
I was in Finland this year, and I saw a lot of Africans.
I doubt you saw a lot of Africans in Finland.
I doubt you...
Where?
Where in Finland?
Well, Helsinki.
Oh, yeah.
Helsinki's gone.
I don't think that ever was really Finland.
But the proper Finland, it's not so much of an issue.
But yes, it's true.
It's certainly true that that is potentially a black pill, no pun intended.
But I think that has to be balanced with the positive sides of this.
Which is, first of all, finally winning at something.
I was thinking about this.
I don't think the right has won at anything actually implemented any change in a right-woods direction since perhaps the 1980s, since the late 1980s, when they had this situation where rabid leftists were promoting homosexuality and goodness at school, and Mrs Thatcher's government passed a law banning that.
They made it illegal for teachers to tell pupils that it was a good thing.
That it was okay to be gay and to encourage this kind of thing.
And that's the last time something moved in a rightwards direction.
Since then, everything's been in the leftwards direction.
Pretty much all victories have been victories of the left.
Very minor.
But actually to implement something, to implement something, this is a big thing.
This would be like actually to Donald Trump doing something.
I know he's done not that much, but he would do something.
So I think it pleases me.
I appreciate it's not perfect.
But it is pleasing.
All right.
Before I go to Keith, Ed, what do you think will happen, not necessarily in the immediate term, but in the next 10 to 20 years, which is a long time in politics?
What do you think will actually come from Brexit?
It's very difficult to say in the euphoria of it just having happened to have any kind of rational view.
You could come back to me in a few months and I might have calmed down.
I was exhausted yesterday.
It was my son's birthday party.
He had a birthday party at one of these, we call it Theo's Lakey Mar.
It's a bit like the thing you have in America, Chuck E. Cheese.
You know Chuck E. Cheese?
Yes, I had one.
I went to many birthday parties there.
I wonder if I had one.
Chuck E. Cheese is quite small.
It's mainly based around eating, and it's a small play area.
Whereas this is a massive aircraft hangar full of an indoor jungle.
I'm imagining a Finnish Chuck E. Cheese.
You eat weird raw fish and throw darts or something.
It's a lot like Chuck E. Cheese.
No, it's the nearest...
I didn't know about this, but there were these Mormons that were trying to convert me to Mormonism in Olu a few years ago, these two young girls.
About 2014.
They were about, I don't know, 20 years old.
These two young girls, one from Utah, they're from California.
And I said to them, look, I haven't got time to come and watch you get a load of shot glasses, and that's the equivalent of the church, and they all fall down, and you tell me about Joseph.
I haven't got time.
But I am taking my children to Nia's Lakeymar, or Hoplop, or the other one.
Why don't you come there?
It's free for adults, and I can sit there with you, and you can tell me about Mormonism, and then you can go on all the stuff for free.
And they thought this was a brilliant idea, but then they told their supervisor and he said, no, that's much too fun for your mission.
You can't do that.
But she compared it to Chuck E. Cheese.
She said it was like Chuck E. Cheese.
I went into a Chuck E. Cheese in Maryland and it was small and not very impressive.
Anyway, I was exhausted there because I've been celebrating so much.
I was almost sleeping there yesterday.
I was so tired.
So I'm not, I'm not, I don't, I do not, I cannot successfully augur what, what, what, We'll be going on 10 years hence.
But at least we won't be subject to ludicrous dictates from the European court.
At least we won't have more and more people coming in.
I mean, I was in a situation a while ago.
I was in London.
I ordered some pork scratchings at a bar in London, and the barman didn't know what they were because he wasn't British and he'd never heard of pork scratchings.
It was absolutely outrageous.
And the European Union did that, really.
Yeah, the European Union allowed for Europeans, for people who don't speak English very well, to be able to come into Britain and work in bars.
Whatever that is true.
Yes, it is terrible.
Because if you are a working-class English person, and you're a plumber, it's absolutely outrageous that you should have to compete with people.
Who are prepared to live off next nothing, who've got Poland to go back to if things go badly or whatever, and your business is being wrecked by competition from these people.
I get that, actually, but I would say as low-price immigrants go.
You couldn't do much better.
But yeah, you are right.
The evil totalitarian EU will no longer be regulating milk chocolate and other atrocities like regulating bananas and length of the banana and so on.
I mean, you must feel just...
You can mock all you like, but you must know that one of the things revolutionaries do...
You can mock all you wish, but one of the things that you must know is that one of the things that revolutionaries and whatever try to do is to undermine the confidence, to knock the confidence of the people.
And one of the ways they do that is by mocking their religion, by mocking the things they hold sacred, by mocking the things that hold them together, by undermining their sense of confidence.
And that was a big part of what the European Union was doing.
It was taking the things which make sense of our world, which connects us, that's important as well, which connects us to our ancestors in a kind of unbroken line.
Such as using imperial measures, or such as whatever it might be, and taking those away.
Or non-imperial measures.
No, imperial measures we use.
Such as those.
And taking those away so there's less of a connection between us and our ancestors, less of a coherent society and more of a sort of a bunch of amorphous blobs who can be controlled from on high and indoctrinated.
That's what a lot of what happened in 1984 was about.
Take away the language, take away individuality, take away the relationship to the past, cut off the past.
That's what political correctness does.
Suddenly we can't use this word and this word and this word.
And we're gradually cut off from the past, our connections with our answers, our sense of ourselves as a tribe.
And that's what they were doing.
And it was a deliberate policy to do that.
That's what they were set out to do that.
The idea was to create a sense of European-ness based around...
Forcing you to sing the Beethoven's Ninth Symphony chorale or things like that doesn't sound too awful.
No, precisely.
That's not perhaps an inherently bad thing.
If Europe is under attack from outside, perhaps it would be good to have a united Europe, but it wasn't that kind of united Europe that was going on.
It was a united Europe based around values and moral realism and all this kind of nonsense.
So it's a leftist project.
It didn't have to be.
But it is.
It's an Orwellian project which is attempting to suppress nationalism, to suppress people, therefore people of genetic interests, suppress their ability to talk about their own invasion and do something about it, and therefore we're best off out of it.
And Ireland is best off out of it, and Ireland is finally seeing the consequences now.
There's an election in Ireland.
When is it?
About 20 days' time?
Less.
It's less than two weeks now, I think.
Right.
And you've seen, and it's happened very rapidly, the change in Ireland over the last 20 years is absolutely catastrophic.
And as it is Europeanized and woke-ified and all of the people who, if you'd had abortion, would have been aborted, they haven't been.
Sorry?
And Brussels did that.
They somehow had an ability to change the immigration policies.
Brussels has attacked things which are...
Aspects of history, which are traditional things, in an attempt to make everybody the same and to suppress individuality, including at the national level, and also, of course, to impose free borders and free movement of people, which does that, because if you have diversity, it inherently undermines trust, it inherently undermines a sense of nationalism, it inherently undermines civic life.
So it does that, and also then to bring in migration.
I agree with the free migration within the European sphere.
I think actually some of the continental countries might feel lucky now that they've gotten the Great Britain out of there because Great Britain was engaging in demographic transformation at a much more rapid pace than any of these other continental countries.
So they might have been saved.
But Great Britain has moved from a general white...
That's absolutely true.
And Great Britain has moved from a white bloc, effectively, to a non-white, you know, globalized world.
But anyway, I won't do my blackpilling yet.
I'm going to wait.
It's an empirically inaccurate statement.
So according to the latest census, England is about 15% non-white.
If you look at somewhere like the Netherlands or...
Somewhere like that.
Or Belgium.
It's in a much worse state, about 25%, if not more.
So it's not accurate to say that there are countries in Europe that are less non-white than us, such as Finland.
But I think we're about average.
And there's many that are above average that are in a far worse state.
Fair enough.
I'll grant you that.
You have moved, again, to a less wiped political order by leaving the European Union, if we are to assume that the European Union actually has these kind of powers of national sovereignty.
I mean, the European Commission is ultimately the nation states controlling it.
But anyway, Keith, as an Irishman, what is your perspective on this?
Are you happy?
Are you dispassionate?
Yeah, I don't know.
I mean, I think it kind of remains to be seen what will happen regarding Brexit.
I mean, Definitely in the short term.
Pretty much every economic forecast says they're going to suffer slightly and there'll be a slight knock on effect to Ireland, but I'm not too concerned about that.
But in terms of Ireland's relationship with the EU, that's kind of an interesting one because we've probably benefited more than any country.
But at the same time, in the last few years, we've probably suffered more than any country as well due to some of the economic policies.
And I know Ed said we'd be better off out of the EU.
I don't think that's true at all.
We actually have the highest approval rate, and it's close to 90% for staying in the EU.
And that's mostly because of our economic model, which is completely reliant on foreign direct investment from US companies that then export to the Eurozone.
And that's where all our growth has come from.
But, you know, it's tricky.
It's like the EU...
You know, I know Ed says that the problem is it's a left-wing project, but I think it's more the neoliberalism.
I think the EU could actually do with a dose of leftism in economics, because if you want to look at Ireland as a good example of this, you know, we were an economic backwater when we joined DEC in the 70s, and it was investment programs from the EU and the infrastructure and such here that developed us into this first world tribe in modern economy.
But the big problem into the 2000s was that we have a unified monetary policy that benefits Germany, but there's no unified fiscal policy.
So you had, in the early 2000s, this low interest rate that's there solely for the German economy, for the German export economy.
And so you had countries like Ireland where there was something of an economic bubble and also countries like Greece and Italy able to access cheap credit.
And this was absolutely disastrous for these countries.
And this is why we were then forced by the ECB to socialize 64 billion euros worth of economic banking debt to prop up German and French banks.
So this was something, this was debt that was socialized by the Irish people for the stability of the European economy.
And I think this gets to the heart of the problem that's at the EU, which is that it would be better if it was just committed to full federalism.
It would be better if it was committed to full unification rather than this halfway house where there are elements that want federalism and then there are elements that want nationalism and you end up with this kind of confederalism and you get elements of each.
And so you have something like, you know, you have a unified monetary theory that...
It makes countries like Ireland or Greece or Italy suffer because they have monetary policy that isn't at all suited to them, that's set by Germany, and they have interest rates that don't suit their economy and are usually in the opposite of the interests of their economy because they have a complete different approach to Germany.
But then when those countries get into trouble due to that, you don't have the EU willing to, you know, something like you see in the US, you know, bailouts of states.
Fiscal policy, modern monetary theory, these sorts of Keynesian-type policies.
Instead, what you get is Germany comes and imposes austerity on countries like Ireland and Greece.
So you have a monetary policy that is unified, that benefits Germany, but then at the same time, there isn't the...
There isn't the power there, there isn't the will to be able to create a fiscal policy that would benefit Europe.
I mean, what the EU has been lacking the last decade is investment.
And what they did in response to the crisis was to pass a fiscal compact treaty that means that member states now can't run a budget deficit, which means that countries now are completely locked into this kind of...
Monetarist, sort of centre-right means of managing the economy that's all about balancing your books.
You know, this very German way of dealing with economics.
But it means that there's a complete lack of public spending and a complete lack of investments.
Then you have all these infrastructural problems like the massive level of youth unemployment, especially in the southern states.
So the EU project as a whole is...
It's lacking any kind of idealism.
It's got all these competing interests, and it's this constant battle between federalism and opponents of it.
And so you end up with this muddied sort of halfway house that doesn't actually benefit anyone, really.
Yeah, I mean, I think there...
I agree with everything you said.
Look, even though I might be much more supportive of the EU than most people whom I talk to in the dissident right...
I recognize these problems, and there are just kind of competing interests of Germany being still an export economy and an industrial economy that would benefit from a weaker euro in the sense that their stuff is less expensive, whereas you have been in Southern Europe.
I mean, Greece, I remember there was this Greek crisis.
Four or five years ago, in which they were actually benefiting from a stronger policy in the sense that they're a tourist economy.
They want money coming in.
And so you have these competing interests and obviously dramatically different cultures between...
Frankfurt and Athens.
And whether this can all work is a huge question.
And I get it.
And due to the fact that the EU is always this conspiracy of bankers and industrial...
It wasn't able to ever be idealistic.
There's no real Independence Day or National Day for the EU.
It started out as a common market.
I think there was some idealism in the sense of if we trade, we're not going to fight, which is reasonable.
But it never had that basic idealism of we are a people.
And you have to start there.
When you start in this conspiracy of bankers and plutocrats and bureaucrats, you end up in this, again, just this massive compromise in which everyone's unhappy.
I agree.
There are huge problems.
Go ahead, Ed.
It's a really significant thing about Britain.
Sorry, go ahead.
I'm sure it was violent towards us.
No, what were you going to say?
Yeah, no, the really significant thing about Britain leaving could be more the impact it has in terms of internal EU policy than what it has directly on Britain.
I mean, Francois Hollande and Christine Lagarde have both said that they think that this will sort of reinvigorate Europe, Yeah,
and it's always been pushing back against integration, and it would be one of the countries that would mostly push back against a policy like I mentioned, like having a unified fiscal policy to enact stimulus packages or whatever to fix these structural problems.
So you will see a realignment.
And there could actually be a realignment.
You know, it's interesting.
I mean, it could go a couple of ways.
But one of the things is there's this northern voting bloc and there's this sort of southern voting bloc of more Eurosceptic nationalist types.
And Britain, you know, it's 12.5% of Europe.
It had a large voting share.
And it was voting with the more liberal elements of France and Germany.
So with that gone now, there could be a shift to a more Italian style policy.
But then at the same time, I mean, from a sort of dissident right perspective or whatever, if Britain had stayed in and instead of sort of sublimating their nationalism into this, if they'd enacted it in kind of a nationalist government, then Britain could have actually led a more sort of Eurocentric Europe, if that makes sense, rather than this neoliberal style Europe.
Europe that's being run by Merkel and by Germany and France.
Can I add some comments?
First of all, the idea of British nationalism, perhaps rather like the EU, it started off as an economic union.
There was no British nationalism.
There was English nationalism, Welsh nationalism, Irish nationalism, Scottish nationalism.
And this notion of British nationalism gradually developed throughout the 18th century.
And you get things like a British national anthem, a British flag, a sense of British history, the playing up of Celtic things in the history of England, like Budacea or whatever, because these were things that united all of us, both because she was living in England and also then the other people in the Union were Celts.
And so this sense of Britishness kind of gradually developed from there.
And it worked because it was a British empire, a British movement that was in the, not just the economic, but in the ethnic and genetic interests of the British.
And I was thinking with Germany as well.
Bismarck's unification of Germany was a Prussian project in order to maintain peace, in order to maintain the interests of Prussia, really, and the Prussian nationalism, which then developed into this German nationalism and happily coincided.
With the rise of romantic nationalism and this idea of the Germans as one people because they all spoke German and all this, and they were ethnically German.
So there's no reason why something can't start as an economic project.
And then, which it did, remember, it was called the Common Market.
Then it was called the European Economic Community.
Then it was called the EEC.
Then it was called the European Community EC.
Then it was called the European Union.
So there's been this change in terms of the name alone tells you, the change from an economic thing to a nation-building thing.
And I think that could work quite well if it explicitly coincided with this being, potentially, in the interests of all European peoples.
What we have in common, ultimately, us Europeans, is we are a race.
And as a race, we have certain...
OK, there's people on the borders like the Finns or the Italians or the Spanish or the Portuguese that have various degrees of non-European blood.
But basically, we're a race and we have certain genetic interests for that reason.
If that could coincide with the Economic Union, which is what you got with Germany, it's what you got with Great Britain, or Britain rather, Britain, and there's various other examples throughout history, then fine.
But that's not what you're getting.
As Keith said, there is this mismatch of different intentions and different ideas.
I totally agree with that.
And I think some of those sentiments are kind of lurking.
You'll actually hear Brexit supporters talk about the racist EU and things like that.
I think we'll all chuckle at that.
But he's not entirely wrong.
I think some of those racial, basically autarkic qualities of having a great big market where you're protected from dumping from the outside, there is going to be more free exchange between countries.
You can travel more easily, you know, I think one of the biggest things that's promoted the EU was the Erasmus Project.
Basically, young people...
You know, a young German traveling to Spain and having a Spanish girlfriend that probably did more to promote European-ness than anything.
And these ideas are lurking there, and they could be accentuated.
I think if the EU...
I think the EU could probably stick around just on a purely economic basis.
But if the EU is going to be something, it's going to have to call upon that.
And look, Turkey and the EU, that's now out the window.
No one's even talking about that.
They were talking about that 15 years ago.
I remember when I was actually in Germany.
And you have people who are very flawed, like Macron, who he's a very flawed politician.
Granted.
But he is a highly intelligent person, and he's actually a person that I find resonates with a lot of things that I've said, to be honest.
A guy on Twitter actually gave a little conspiracy theory about that.
But anyway, he's talked about, ultimately, an EU army.
And you're either going to be America's...
Well, I could use the word bitch, but let's use the word pawn, because this is it.
Sophisticated podcast.
You're going to be, militarily speaking, and to a large degree economically speaking, you're going to be America's pawn, you might be Russia's pawn, you might be China's pawn, unless you can create a sense of European-ness that that is a bigger thing that ultimately the national identities are a part of, and that you have a real military bloc.
These ideas are lurking there.
I mean, when Macron says this, he's kind of treated as, oh, this is our intellectual president who's, you know, so on.
But he's right in the end of the day.
If the EU is to become something real and not this just, you know, thing that compromise that doesn't please anyone, it's going to have to embrace those qualities.
And I would also say in terms of nationalism...
It is no nationalism can resonate with federalism.
And it does in the sense of the Scottish National Party, which again, I'm not a huge fan of.
For many reasons, but they want to leave Great Britain in order to express their nationalism in the European Union.
You saw this again with Catalonia trying to secede from Spain a couple years ago.
You see this all over the place.
There's no real contradiction.
The EU is not going to disallow you from reading Shakespeare and wearing a tweed suit.
You can do that.
Nationalism of that cultural linguistic quality of we're connected to something, a continuum that's deeper than ourselves, not only is it not opposed to federalism, it can actually be kind of accentuated by federalism.
And it's the nation state You can see this in France.
You can see this in Germany.
You can see this in Great Britain, as you yourself have described.
The nation-state is responsible for the demographic catastrophe in Great Britain.
And the nation-state is much more responsible for bringing about this homogeneity and kind of the...
You know, least common denominator, last man, if you want to use that, much more than any federated Europe that has ever existed.
So first of all, can I just say, first of all, the nation state has been disastrous in this sense when it has been run by the kind of people that want the nation state to be in the European Union, such as Tony Blair.
and other such vermin.
So that's when the nation state has been a particular acute problem in British history, when it's been run by the kind of people who are pro-EU.
Because having those values of wanting mass immigration or destruction...
Enoch Powell was raging against the British Immigration Party long before Britain ever entered the EU.
He was totally against being in the EU as well.
I agree with that, actually.
I admire Enoch Powell tremendously.
He left the Conservative Party over that issue.
As for Erasmus, I have two thoughts on that.
One thing that tends to bond people together is having a language, the same language.
One thing that could be easier communication, nuance, whatever.
And one thing that's interesting about that is that...
Erasmus was quite good in spreading English.
I know.
It's a great irony.
It's British hegemony, or American hegemony, because you get people who are from Spain, and they go on Erasmus' term to Finland, and they speak English to each other, and they have a child, and that child ends up essentially trilingual.
English.
So the third thing I noticed is that the Erasmus thing seems rather lopsided.
So you'd get loads of foreigners that would come to, let's say, Durham University, where I was, or Aberdeen University, where I was.
But you wouldn't get many people from there that would do an Erasmus term.
I didn't know many British people at all that did an Erasmus term.
You would get it the other way around.
I noticed this when I was studying German at the Goethe-Institute.
I would try to speak German, obviously, as much as possible when I was there, but I would notice that...
A lot of there would be these kind of European lunch tables where you would have an Italian and maybe a Frenchman and maybe even someone from Japan or something.
There are lots of Japanese learning German.
I think their rich parents just send them off to six months to learn something to get them out of the house or something.
But they were all speaking basically American business English together.
And you can say, oh, this is a debasement of national culture.
And I agree with that to a certain extent.
But you could also say that we need a lingua franca that can bring us together as a race.
And sometimes these cultural differences, which can be beautiful and which we want to preserve, can actually prevent us from coming together in a way that I think we should.
And so there's actually a kind of, there's a certain benefit to dumbed down Americanization.
I mean, I'm saying this as me, I'm not...
We need a commonality that we can come together around as one people.
Hugely important to Kenyan nationalism, let's say, is Swahili or English.
Because it's the one way you can communicate in a country with 200 languages.
It's the great irony that you will unite in anti-Americanism while speaking American business English.
I mean, it's a great irony of the century, but who cares at some level, so long as it's working?
I'm not sure.
The other point that Keith, or was it you?
No, it was you.
I'm not sure that this will reinvigorate the EU.
I think one reaction to something like this happening is people tend to become more kind of authoritarian and inward-looking and strict.
Kind of like a religious reaction.
If you're under stress, you tend to become more religious.
And that finding could be transplanted to people becoming more kind of dogmatic and fundamentalist and ideological and fearful of somebody else breaking away and thus doing all they can to stop other people breaking away.
But then on the other hand, there's been a massive shock to their confidence for such a large state to break away.
And this will inspire people who want to break away in other countries that are...
That's the fear now for the people running the EU is they have this block in the south that there's clearly a strong Eurosceptic element and now Brexit has created this precedent.
So now that's always hanging over them.
But then at the same time, that's balanced with they've lost Britain who opposed most of the more Eurocentric policies that they were pushing through so it's now much easier for them to pursue them.
So it's kind of a double-edged sword for these people.
And Salvini, who I'm not 100% sold on, has actually said European things.
He's like, the issue isn't just to break away.
The issue is to create a Europe of nations.
And he's actually said some kind of synthetic dialectical things, which I've appreciated.
You can hear similar things from Orban and so on, a person I'm less enthused by.
Yeah, it's funny you mentioned Turkey, because that's...
That's fairly relevant to this because the country that was actually pushing most for Turkey to join the EU was Britain for many years.
And that gets to another one of these splits that's been within the European community, which is that does the EU go deeper and integrate the countries within it?
More strongly, or does it go broader and integrate more countries from the outside?
And that's kind of the neoliberal approach.
And I forget who wrote it, but there was a prominent Jewish neoliberal in the US that wrote a book, The Next Hundred Years, where he said that the most important relationship would be the US and Turkey.
To stop the over-reliance on Russia for gas pipelines and so forth, all this different stuff.
But one of the main things is trade with Turkey as well.
So that's a priority for US neoliberalism.
And Britain has been strongly pushing that.
Britain has strongly pushed the anti-Russia stuff.
They've pushed broadening the EU into this larger trading bloc for purely economic reasons.
And so, you know, that's off the table now with Britain out.
And so you might actually see a shift away from this neoliberal conception of a broader Europe as an economic trading zone and towards a more compact but more integrated Europe.
I agree.
And you have some people like Macron who's...
He actually was saying this, I believe, to a Danish gentleman who was talking about all these things that you love about being a Dane.
These are ultimately European and they are peculiar, but they're also bigger than that.
But let me kind of go off a little bit on this thing that I saw on social media this past weekend.
Apparently someone put up a door.
Right by the cliffs of Dover.
And it said something, you know, it's this way out or something like that.
Apparently that all of these people would open up the door and fall off the chalky cliffs of Dover or something like that.
But the question is really, you know, who is leaving?
I think one of the fundamental reasons for the anxiety over Brexit that led to the Brexit vote among normal workers was to a degree the Polish plumber.
I think that is real.
But it was fundamentally about this massive...
And it was fear over the migration crisis of 2015.
But again, the nation state of Great Britain is fundamentally responsible for this, and other nation states are fundamentally responsible for it.
The EU migration policy was effectively that any kind of refugee should stay in the country that he enters.
And it was not to grant him...
Or send him to London or anything like that.
It was a fairly reasonable policy that could and should be revised.
But that's what it was.
The demographic transformation of Great Britain was done entirely by London.
And Brussels has never had an ability to affect national immigration.
It affects internal immigration.
That is, a German or a Pole or a Frenchman can go to Great Britain to work or what have you.
Again, it's kind of like a one-step removed from the national immigration.
But the British immigration problem, the demographic change, is just fundamentally the responsibility of London.
And if anything, hordes of Poles and Germans or Italians or whatever improved matters in terms of the racial decomposition of Britain.
And it's just a fact.
So we have this situation.
Very much like Trump, in which all of these people are feeling these natural...
Healthy anxieties about what's happening, that they're being transformed.
And they project the problem onto Brussels.
But if you listen to the explicit language of the Brexiteers, they are going to bring in more people from the global south.
I have never heard a Brexit...
They might talk about, oh, the EU and 2015 migration, but that's all a sham.
They ultimately want greater integration.
He said explicitly...
This is not about racial nationalism.
This is about getting out of the stodgy, continental, Germanic EU and entering into a global market with, I guess, former British colonies and bringing them in.
It's about becoming more American.
And so it's something we see all the time on the right, which is bait and switch.
I think most of the people who voted for Brexit are people who have healthy instincts.
But I think they're a bit deluded.
All of those Pakistanis in London, all of those Muslims engaging in rape gangs in Rotherham and similar places, they're not exiting through that door.
that was set up on the Dover Cliffs.
They are staying put.
And if anything, their national identity is becoming kind of more firm about...
I just see the same dynamic that you see with Republican electioneering taking place with Brexit.
Previously, as a Euroskeptic skeptic, in the sense that I'm skeptical of the Farage types, the Daniel Hannon types, and so on.
But I would say, I mean, perhaps I should come out of the closet, as it were, in the sense that I think...
People like Oswald Mosley were right when immediately after the Second World War, they recognized the geopolitics at play.
They obviously recognized the genetic or racial dynamics at play.
And they said firmly, Europe a nation.
We can keep...
We can keep our cultural, linguistic, peculiar identity.
I think that's great, and everyone should strive to be kind of individualistic on a national sense like that.
But in terms of geopolitics and in terms of the real dynamic of the 21st century, which is race, it's Europe a nation.
And I hope the English stay English, but...
An Englishman taking an Italian wife and having children that are a little bit mixed blood to a certain degree and kind of mixed culturally.
Is this really the problem that we're facing today?
Is this an existential crisis?
Clearly, no.
Right.
So, a number of points I would like to make on that.
First of all, I think the key reason why people voted...
Anti-Brexit, voted Brexit, was not because of the EU itself.
It was because the elite liked the EU and they wanted to say yours to the elite.
And there's a small degree to which they changed the elite because they got these people that were on the fringes of, let's say, the Conservative Party and they put them in power, i.e.
people like Boris Johnson and various other people of his supporters.
And then the Labour Party were completely isolated and ultimately sort of been really massacred.
I can't believe they'll be in power for at least 10 years.
They'll probably be in opposition.
If they elect one of these two silly young girls standing to be leader, they'll definitely be in opposition for at least 10 years.
Who are they?
Rebecca Long-Bailey and Lisa Nandy, who's half Indian.
And then there's some chap called Sakir Starmer.
If he wins, they might do all right.
So hopefully he won't win.
So I don't think he will win because the Labour Party people that vote on these things are so woke.
So I think that it was an up yours.
It wasn't the EU.
You're right.
It's not the EU hasn't been.
You could argue the EU has been nowhere near as bad in terms of destroying Britishness than the government, particularly the Blair government.
And that is a key.
The Blair government and the Brown government, the subhuman scum that took over the country and should frankly be answerable one day to the British people in a tribunal.
The damage they did is incalculable.
There had been immigration before, of course, but that was from a baseline of nothing.
Nothing.
So apart from a few little things here and there during the empire.
And so consequently there was a big reaction.
But what happened from 2001 onwards?
Was this planned policy of destruction, rub the right's nose in diversity, suppress our freedoms, everything.
And the elite, people like David Cameron, I'm reading his memoir, his autobiography at the moment actually, it's quite well written, but you can see in places he goes into these silly ways.
The Michael Howard leadership of the Conservative Party in 2005 was far too right-wing.
Shut up.
The Michael Howard leadership of the Conservative Party is nowhere near as right-wing as, for example, it is now.
And he's saying, oh, it's faster than right-wing.
So if that's too right-wing, what does he think of Jacob Rees-Mogg and people like that, for goodness sake?
Absolutely ridiculous.
But he comes across as quite pleasant to read.
So I think it was up yours to the government, up yours to that whole system.
And those people that had done this immigration and had pursued all this damage, those people were also very pro-EU.
So I think that's where it...
And I think that if the government that's in power now doesn't do something about immigration, what Mrs Thatcher did was the immigration was far too high under Callaghan and Wilson, and so she cut it back down.
Right back down to very small numbers.
And for the whole of the 1980s and the 1990s, there were very small levels of immigration.
And the racial situation stabilized.
It really wasn't much of an issue by the end of the 1990s that these communities were kind of developed.
OK, you've got the beginnings of the grooming gangs and all this stuff.
But it sort of stabilized.
You didn't have to fear that your community that was white would become non-white.
The situation was the situation.
And so I think that's where the EU comes in, is the EU and that whole way of thinking about the world of leftism and change for change's sake and immigration is associated with that particular government.
And then Cameron, who really was a kind of blue Labour.
He really wasn't a major shift with the past.
And so it was a way of removing that ruling class or that aspect of the ruling class because they were pissed off with the government.
The solution to the problem that we have probably ultimately will be some kind of civil war because that's what tends to happen in all ethnically diverse societies, always, ever.
But that will be sometime, unless they can be held together somehow through some kind of...
I've seen some headlines about whites being a minority in Great Britain by 2060, I think was the...
The 2050 number was thrown about a lot in the 90s in the United States, and it's actually 2040 now.
We actually did a report that we think it's closer to 2035.
You know, again, we're just dealing with a few years, really.
But yeah, I mean, Great Britain is going exactly down the same direction as the United States, going down faster, because it's a little bit later, but more or less the same time.
The kind of things that happened when you became 20% non-white was about 1980.
Which was Reagan, the destruction of any kind of socialism, the country becoming far more right-wing and capitalist in a lot of ways.
That's happening in Britain now.
For example, free universities have gone.
Probably the healthcare system will go.
All these things that are sustainable if you're an ethnostate, because you're looking after each other when you're one big family, they go when an area becomes 20% to 30%.
Not of that ethnicity.
They fall apart.
You even get white flight at that point.
30% has been demonstrated in a number of studies.
Once an area is 30% non-white, then whites start to leave.
And it becomes overwhelmingly non-white very, very quickly.
There's a tipping point of 30%.
Or 25%, 30%.
So, yeah, we are going exactly the same way that America did.
When 20% non-white, it really started to change.
I don't know about Ireland, because Ireland doesn't have a free health service anyway, do you?
You have to pay to see a doctor £50 or something.
Yeah, well, we have...
They just hand you a bottle of whiskey, is what I heard.
No, we're moving to socialised, yeah.
But, yeah, I think we're 20% non-white now, which has been a pretty...
20%?
20%.
So more than us?
20% non-Irish, actually.
I'm not sure what...
I'd say well over half that is non-white.
But that's not due to the EU at all related to migration here.
That's mostly due to a Jewish Minister for Justice we had who in 2011 doubled our numbers of migrant migrants in one year when our economy was in the worst shape it had been in 20 years.
Mostly Nigerian and non-European migrants.
So that was purely a matter of political will by the centre-right political party.
Our version of the Tories, basically.
But yeah, I read an article by Peter Hitchens the other day, and he said that Hitchens thing for the last few years has been he wants the destruction of the Tory party so that a proper right-wing party could form in its place.
But he had an interesting take on Brexit.
He's kind of blackpilled about it, and he said that...
He wanted to sacrifice the Conservative Party to save Britain, but what Brexit may have done is sacrifice Britain to save the Conservative Party.
I mean, there is, like, you know, I think there is a perception among probably ordinary Brexit voters that Boris Johnson is somewhat nationalist leaning, but I mean, like, Johnson has outright said that he's the only British politician that will openly say he's in favour of migration.
And I think...
You know, this move to sort of like Bannon-style nationalism, this sort of economic nationalism, patriotism, all this stuff, it's very, you know, it's very cynical because it does play on sort of national or racial sentiment, but it's really contrary to the interests of that because it does lead to this kind of, you know, it sublimates like national pride into this.
Economic nationalism, which just ends up with nation states and this sort of race to the bottom to undercut each other and ultimately just kind of serves the onslaught of neoliberal capitalism that actually makes the races within those nations weaker to stand up to it anyway.
So in a weird way, it takes the force of nationalism and it subverts it into furthering the forces of internationalism.
So I think the Farage phenomenon, the Bannon phenomenon is definitely very contrary to where we're going to be going.
Absolutely.
I'll mention this as well.
I think one of the reasons why I am sympathetic towards the EU is because I recognize the total silliness of the...
bureaucrats there and in a lot of silliness regarding the its expressed ideology but it is a structure and it is a mechanism at the very And what we should be attempting to do is animate mechanisms.
So these mechanisms, whether it's the nation state, whether it's the EU, whether it's some institution that...
You know, it's subnational that you join.
We want to animate it and reorient it towards our spirit.
I mean, that's the challenge.
I mean, you can get out of the EU, you just have a new problem, which is now the nation state, which is filled with people who are just as silly.
Arguably worse than bureaucrats.
And so the same challenge is before you.
It's to animate that institution towards your end.
And I think the problem with bananism, alongside the economic kind of race to the bottom that you're talking about, is that it offers this false victory to people.
You can go get really mad at the liberals, get really mad at impeachment and re-elect Trump.
I actually, I think Trump...
But I can see him winning to a large extent due to the impeachment thing of people getting fed up and say, we voted for this guy and you're trying to cancel our vote.
We're going to vote him in again just to shove your face in the dirt.
But whether it's Trump or Bannon or Farage or Boris Johnson, it's all this false victory that just leads to delusion among these voters.
And again, the fundamental challenge of animating an existing structure exists.
So I do think that the EU is the proper structure.
I mean, flaws and all, it is the proper structure for the future.
And I don't think it's going anywhere.
And I think in 100 years, it will be there.
And hopefully, it will have an army.
It might actually have a kind of commandeered NATO even.
I mean, that's a possibility.
I'm obviously speculating here.
But I mean, that is where we need to go.
And where we don't need to go is towards the false right The Trump, the Farage, the Boris Johnson.
I just think it's just an obvious false path.
And we need to be thinking about 25 years ahead of where we ultimately want to be.
Now, where Britain fits into the EU, I don't know.
I mean, Britain has always been kind of pulled between...
America and Europe, and what its identity is, has been a question.
Maybe the EU will be stronger without Britain, without that kind of island off to the left.
It will be a more Germanic, you could say, Prussian continental land power.
I think that would actually be a positive.
Perhaps this is all a very positive development for the EU.
But I think the question really is, is like, where do we want to be?
And then let's start moving in that direction.
Just have an end in mind and move in that direction and not just kind of go along with the emotions of the public and say, like, oh, these Brexit voters, they've got good, healthy instincts, so we should just go along with them.
And we don't want to countersignal them or so on.
I think sometimes we're going to have to countersignal them.
And say, no, this is the right direction.
This is where we need to be going in the 21st century and beyond.
The great irony is the same skepticism to the EU as kind of a socialist institution that's taken all the member states' money and spending it on wasteful projects or whatever.
The great irony is what the Eurozone economy needs is Socialism.
Yeah, is socialism directed from a central authority in Brussels?
It needs a powerful stimulus package paid for by member states.
It needs transfers of wealth.
It needs long-term projects.
Something like...
God forbid I say it, the Green New Deal.
Something like that that does look long-term, that creates infrastructure, that solves this youth unemployment crisis, which has become absolutely systemic.
But the ECB was designed with the express purpose of to keep inflation low and keep prices low.
It's, again, this German-centric sort of center-right economic model.
And that's what the source of much of the hostility to the EU is from these poor economies that are suffering as a result of it.
So the EU is in this weird paradox where it's facing these Eurosceptical elements from these people that are opposed to any further integration.
But it's this weird kind of paradox where it needs this strong economic impetus and integration and this strong economic centralization to fix a lot of these underlying problems.
Absolutely.
All right, let's bookmark it.
This was a good discussion.
And, yeah, I think there's actually a lot more common ground in what we're saying than despite...
It's quite good, because I think it flows quite well.
And you are both obviously wrong on those things that you say.
But I think the positive thing about this is that I can help to, you know, teach you and whatever.
Oh, yeah.
You can teach us to be AF frivolous.
Nationalist, yeah.
Flag waving and champagne swilling.
Disagreements.
Use your country, yeah.
He's got lessons, he's taught us.
When is...
Keith, Keith, Keith, when is the Irish elect?
What's the date, did you say?
I don't know the date.
It's less than two weeks now, anyway.
Is it possible that somebody, you know, based could...
No, no, no.
Like, the aim...
I know the nationalist party leader, actually.
Their aim is to get one seat at this election.
So that's where they are at the minute.
Right.
And there's no Eurosceptic movement at all in Ireland.
There's an Our Exit party, the guy that runs it as friends with Nigel Frage, and it's a complete joke for movement.
The national party here actually isn't in favour of leaving the EU.