Democracy and British freedom

by Chairman Nick Griffin

JAMES Thurgood's incisive analysis of an important article by the Sunday Telegraph's Peter Jones deals a heavy blow to the cynically manipulated fiction that Britain today is a democracy. As such there is nothing in Mr. Thurgood's article on pages 10-12 with which any realistic and experienced nationalist can take exception. The existing system, clearly, is not to be condemned so much for what it is or what it isn't, but for the much simpler reason that it doesn't work. It has reduced Britain from world power to an indebted province of someone else's federation in just one lifetime. And, worldwide, the same system has reduced the white man from a Colossus who bestrode the globe to an endangered species.

Nor has the Peter Jones piece been the only article in the quality press over the last couple of years to be similarly 'almost treasonable'. Perhaps the trend began with John Berger's essay in the Observer back on 17th December, 1995. The headline arid sub-heading summed it all up: "The hollow men who rule us arejust decoys. Market forces hold the real power, breeding despair and violence."

Enlarging on his theme, Berger wrote of politicians in effect:-".... chatting on the front doorstep while the hi-fi, the camera, the old man's savings and the wife's jewels are beginning a one-way trip through the back window! "Their role, there on the doorstep, is to talk about something else while elsewhere the job is being carried out. Their profession is to create not a political debate but a diversion. Their speaking heads have become decoys."

The reason, he maintains, is the globalisation which has followed the collapse of the Soviet Union. With no present rival for hegemony, the 'money power' ( to use the description borrowed from A.K. Chesterton by Jeremy Seabrook in his own bleak Observer essay a few months later) is able to "impose across the world the necessary conditions for the optimum development of the market economy." Berger continues:-

"As this global plan advances, it increasingly demands a global depoliticisation. Otherwise the protests of the suffering majority may become too insistent. Our decoy politicians are the agents of such depoliticisation. Not necessarily by choice, but by compliance. They accept the global market's projection concerning the future as if it were a natural law, instead of examining it for what it is -- a powerful and cynical operation."

This steadily growing body of mainstream commentators who are adopting our analysis, even our terms, is an inevitable development. What is, however, less certain is how much good this shift in mainstream opinion in our direction will do the forces of organised nationalism. For, to a very large extent, this depends on how we read the situation and how we respond. Do we look at their growing fears and sneer "told you so!", or can we find ways in which to adapt (not ditch) our principles so as to provide practical and acceptable answers to the problems of which they are becoming aware. In short, while welcoming their belated understanding of the pitfalls of 'democracy' and free trade, what should we propose to put in their place?

As far as free trade is concerned, there's no problem. Protection may still not be fashionable, but it isn't heretical either. 'Democracy', on the other hand, is a concept regarded with superstitious awe, so much so that British politics may soon be constrained still further by an EC law making it illegal to advocate any other political system.

Additionally, although the mania for 'democracy' is largely a media fiction, it does have genuine roots in a much older belief-- a deep-seated part of the national mythos -- that "the liberties of freebom Englishmen" include various things, including the right to free speech, the right to trial by jury, and the right to elect his rulers. This mythos stretches back many centuries, through several civil wars and Magna Carta, to the Anglo-Saxon institutions of the Witan and the Moot, and to the wild individuality of the ancient Celts.

Even Anthony Ludovici, the British arch-apostle of aristocracy ( interestingly, himself of continental and -- in spite of his surname predominantly German, stock) acknowledged that the Anglo-Celt is, compared with his European cousins, an inveterate individualist. The first lesson of realpolitik must surely be that such a people will not warm to anybody whom they suspect aims to fasten a yoke of obedience around their stiff necks. The fact that this is what their present masters are doing should give us a big stick with which to beat the plutocratic oligarchy, not the cue to offer a different yoke.

While the 1930s nationalist opposition to liberalism was avowedly 'anti-democratic', the new alternatives were in fact all more concerned with representing the wishes of the people than were the old politicians, who paid lip-service to such egalitarian theories while feathering their own nests and displaying complete contempt for the ordinary people and callous disregard for their sufferings.

The important thing, however, is that time and circumstances have moved on since then. Some of the criticisms levelled against the parliamentary party system then are still justified, but in other ways the problems such a form of government throws up have, at least from the point of view of the electorate, changed. And if the problems, or the perceived problems, have changed, then so must our response.

Back in the 1930s, the thing which the electorates of several countries decided that nationalists could solve was the way in which bumbling, grey little men could do nothing to solve the problems of the day, particularly unemployment and poverty which left millions at near-starvation level. One issue which did not, however, arise, was the idea that the grey little men were remote. For they were still in contact with the public, at least at election time, when even small towns would see large and boisterous election meetings. It was not uncommon for the Prime Minister of the day to travel the country in a car driven by his wife, with one solitary police guard.

Sixty years on, the remoteness of the political class from the rest of the population is a major cause of disillusionment with the system. Illustrated by the urban legend of the New Labour candidate mistaking chip shop mushy peas for guacamole, the gap between the governors and the misgoverned is as wide in Britain as in any absolute monarchy of the past.

Another thing which has changed is that in the earlier part of the twentieth century the public did at least have some real choice between the main parties -- free trade or protection, Ulster or a United Ireland, Empire or anti-colonialism, private capitalism or Clause 4 nationalisation.

Now, again by contrast, there is no choice. 'Consensus politics' are openly admitted by serious commentators in mainstream newspapers to be little short of a conspiracy to deny the public a choice on the truly great issues of the day -- the relentless move to a federal Europe, abolition of capital punishment, the imposition of politically correctness in the media, schools and every institution in the land, Britain's ruinous exposure to the forces of globalisation, and, above all, immigration.

Not one of these disasters was asked for by the British people. Not one of these disasters would ever have gained the support of the British people in a free vote on the real issue in question. If democracy is a system under which the common man rules, then all the great problems which threaten the very existence of our race and nation are the consequence, not of democracy, but of its absence. Even the suicidal involvement of the British and American peoples in two World Wars was the result of plutocratic manipulation rather than the will of the ordinary man on the street. As Messrs. Jones and Thurgood point out, Britain is not a democracy. It could be termed an elective oligarchy, an elective dictatorship, a plutocracy, a media-ocracy, but it most certainly is not a democracy.

Political philosophers may argue that such a perversion is the inevitable logical end of this system. But we are not here to philosophise about politics, any more than we are to preserve in aspic the past attitudes of long-gone political movements which, in certain lights, may appear preferable to the rotten hypocrisy and utter smallness of the present Establishment. We are here to win the support of a large enough number of our fellow Britons to overcome that Establishment and to reverse all the evil which it has visited on our land and our folk.

The Establishment wants nothing more than to be able to present us to the public in a box of our own, neatly labelled 'Anti-democratic extremists -- want to take away your rights.' The time has come for us to cease merely uttering denials, but to challenge the very terminology they use in their one-sided political character assassination. Yes, of course they will still lie about us, but we can make sure that everything they say is 100 per cent untrue. Opinion polls have in recent years shown that politicians are held in lower regard by the public than any other profession, except perhaps for estate agents. In other words, most ordinary people are not fooled by the talking heads of the Establishment. It is therefore not inevitable that everything said about us by our enemies will be automatically accepted as true. What we do, say, write and believe ourselves is, in the long run, the crucial factor which will decide whether the public believe what they hear about us.

Let's take another look at that word 'democracy'. I admit that, to anyone who knows even a fraction of the true story of the horrors perpetrated in the name of democracy during and after the last war, the word is besmirched by associations with unspeakable hypocrisy, images of women and children burning alive under sheets of phosphorous, and judicial murder. But most people do not know the true story, never will know the true story and, more importantly, after more than fifty years, have far more pressing things to worry about and to influence their political choices in the future.

As we have already seen, Britain would be far better off had we actually had a more democratic system. And it is clear that a fast growing majority ofthe British people already understand that we do not have one, and would much rather that we did have. It is no use trying to appeal to these disgruntled people by proposing as a cure for the present lack of democracy some sort of benign semidictatorship. Even if that was, in fact, the best solution, it would be worse than pointless to propose it (i) because, as already pointed out, it is very likely that Euro-law will shortly make it illegal to propose any form of govermnent other than democracy (goodbye Plato, Jacques Santer knows best) and (ii) because turkeys don't vote for an early Christmas. Generations of propaganda about the value of the right to vote cannot possibly be eradicated, but the expectations which such a system builds up among electors -- i.e. that their representatives will or at least should listen to them, that their opinions count and should be acted upon can be turned against the present masters of the 'democratic' state. It's time to give up forever any thought of stopping this juggernaut in its tracks and to look for ways to use the weight of its myths and expectations against it by sidestepping and using verbal judo techniques.

The cloak of'democracy' may well be tattered by socio-biological and historical reality, but if it helps to keep us warm, who cares? It would certainly rest far more comfortably on our shoulders than on those of the puppets of the plutocracy. We are the only people who say what countless millions think. We are the only people who will do what countless millions want done. On all the key issues, we really do represent the wishes of the people. As James Thurgood points out, we must appreciate the value of slogans, appeals and doctrines as aids to the pursuit of power. Since the masses have been flattered into believing that, if they do not have a say in the affairs of state, they should have, why should we make our pursuit of that power any harder by giving them grounds to think that we disagree with them?

And what of our opponents? The people who hold the multi-racial state in such exalted worship that there is no infamy to which they will not stoop to preserve it for a little longer from its own fatal contradictions? The people who deny us the right-to-reply and to broadcasting time that successive BNP Manifestos have guaranteed to spokesmen of every political persuasion? The people who organise frenzied mobs to attack our election candidates, try to close down our meetings, march on our premises with the stated intention of tearing them down brick-by-brick? The people who order their political police to tap our phones, steal our computers,imprison our leaders and use informers to sow dissension in our ranks? Are these tactics democratic? No. What are they? By any genuine understanding of the term it is they are totalitarians, worshippers of their own state who will employ force and intimidation to preserve that state. Totalitarians! Not us, but Blair, Ashdown, Major, Condon, the worthies of the Guardian Trust, Michael Grade et al.

So rather than merely denying their charges that we are totalitarians and the enemies of freedom, we should take every opportunity to use the labels against them. We cannot call them 'Nazis' because National Socialism is based on the worship of race, which -- except for one particularly powerful minority within the governing minority -- is clearly not something of which they can be accused. But their worship of the liberal multi-cultural state is plain for all to see, as is their increasing readiness to use repression to impose it on the British majority.

Mention of National Socialism brings us to another key point. In forming a response to the corruption, inefficiency and downright boredom of inter-war liberalism, the nationalist revolutionaries of the 1930s naturally shaped their appeal and their tactics in order to utilise the forms of new technology available to them. Thus, for example, the recent invention of the spotlight, loudspeaker system and radio made it almost inevitable that a movement which aimed to give voice to the deepest aspirations of a nation would make great use of huge rallies and the spoken word. Having found that they had no real voice through the old party system in parliament, millions found their voice in a mystic communion with the one voice of their leader. Rightly or wrongly, they felt that he understood them, that he embodied their will. This is what led Leon Degrelle to give the title Hitler - Democrat to one of his last works.

Nor was this just a matter of mysticism. The plebiscites used in pre-war Germany to establish the popular will were certainly influenced by masterful propaganda campaigns (though the propaganda machine built by Goebbels was rudimentary indeed compared with the all-embracing, '24-hour, wall-to-wall multi-racial internationalism imposed by the 'British' media for a generation now), but they were free, votes. While they were not parliamentary, they were still essentially democratic.

But loudspeakers and radio speeches are old hat now. The public are rightly tired even of watching well-fed elderly men deciding their destinies at meetings covered briefly by the TV news. As the various media pundits already discussed have acknowledged, dissatisfaction with the remoteness of all this, and the sorry state to which it has reduced us, has created a vast mass of disaffected voters who could easily swing to a new force which offered anew system more in keeping with the national mythos of what good government should entail.

Fortunately, within the next five years, ten at the most, the continued march of information technology into every home will give, to any would-be revolutionary force which cares to grasp it, an unprecedented opportunity to remodel our entire system of government. Every telephone or every TV will be capable not only of relaying information about the issue at question, but of registering the opinion of its owner. It now seems to be generally accepted that it would be in order for Britain to hold another referendum over whether or not to hand more sovereignty to Brussels. Fair enough. How about a referendum on capital punishment then? On whether to allow imports from China to destroy our manufacturing base? On immigration?

Of course, steps would have to be taken to create a level playing field in such debates. Campaigners would have to be legally obliged to remain within strict spending limits. The media would have to be bound by strict rules of impartiality, the right-of-reply would have to be enshrined in law, and enforced without fear or favour by independent regulatory bodies. In·other words, the proposals for genuine freedom of speech made at the last election by the BNP, and the BNP alone, would have to become reality.

But wouldn't we be far more likely to get a chance to turn those proposals, and all our other policies, into reality, if we hammered out such a programme into a genuine and crystal clear commitment to freedom and democratic reform which would leave our liberal opponents exposed as the closet totalitarians they really are?

As James Thurgood rightly points out, the considerations of realpolitik must always be in our minds. Even though the misused word 'democratic' may stick in our throats, in a country whose population have a deeply ingrained belief in their right and ability to govern themselves, realpolitiks demand that we play the game by that rule. And, as already pointed out, we have more right to do so than anyone else. The British National Party must present itself at all times as the British freedom party.

A patient who has an infected leg is not likely to go to a doctor who promises to solve the problem by cutting it off! In our case, of course, the patient also happens to be the egomaniac Sultan of Zogland, who believes he has the right to perpetual good health and who has a long history of executing doctors whose advice or medicine he doesn't like. If we are to save him from his own folly, we will have to handle him very carefully. Even if the leg really does have to come off, we would be well advised to focus his attention on how natural-looking and efficient his leg will be after the operation, and gloss over the fact that it will be a bionic replacement.

None of this is at odds with our conviction of the need for responsibilty and leadership, which underpins not only the BNP constitution but also our worldview. Of course the masses cannot possibly understand -- let alone adjudicate on -- every facet of our national life. But this need not stop us from seeking to create a system where the masses -- informed by a British-owned media operating under the sort of guidelines already discussed -- have a say in the great affairs of the day through referenda as well as elections, but leave the routine running of the affairs of state to trained, non-party political experts.

Proposals on these lines would offer a real alternatives, based on British tradition and on human nature, for a genuine, popular, alternative to the present plutocracy. What could our opponents in the Old Parties offer instead? To answer that, we need only draw attention to their record. In their increasingly desperate efforts to impose an unworkable and destructive politically correct dictatorship on us they have done away with our freedom of speech, our right to bear arms, our right to self-defence, with the right to silence granted by Magna Carta, and our right to associate with whomsoever we please.

Now they have in their sights our right to trial by jury, our right to own books of which they disapprove, and our right to bring our children up with the values we learned from our parents. We should shout it from the rooftops: they are the tyrants, we are the ones who stand for national and individual freedom. To fight this creeping evil we do not need to look for models in other lands or in other times. Nationalists of all people should understand that, while certain principles are immutable for all time, systems of government are temporary things, differently suitable for different peoples in different instants of time. As our alternatives to elective dictatorship and creeping national tyranny we should proudly propose direct democracy and freedom.