Why the right can't unite
Why are the right struggling to come together at the moment?
Last year, the Reform party started to emerge as a credible force in UK politics. Although in the general election they only managed to secure 5 MPs in parliament, they did manage to secure 14.3% of the vote. Although I was sceptical (I didn’t have much confidence in Richard Tice and I thought that Reform’s policies didn’t go far enough), it seemed that Reform were gathering momentum and could even form a government at the next election.
Fast forward to a few weeks ago, when Reform turned on Rupert Lowe. I won’t go through all the ins and outs of it here, not least because it’s an ongoing drama. But my reading of the situation is that Rupert Lowe is a decent man and probably the most diligent of the Reform MPs in using his time on behalf of the British people, yet he has been treated abysmally by Reform and thrown under the bus. Quite possibly because Nigel Farage has a ‘Messiah complex’ and has a history of throwing people under the bus who challenge him.
If you’re someone in the UK who desperately wants to see the return of common-sense and pro-British policies, it’s a very depressing time!
Just in case non-UK readers are feeling a bit smug at this point, I should add it’s not just the UK. I’ve noticed a growing conversation happening online about the “woke right” — Konstantin Kisin was posting about this on X just yesterday. He has spoken a lot in criticism of the “woke right”, I’ve seen him talking about it several times in interviews etc. (Perhaps it’s part of the reason why I don’t tend to watch Triggernometry so much any more). I’m still not sure I know what the “woke right” really is, but there are certainly divisions among those who are opposed to the woke left.
So, why is it that the right seems to have such a big issue with unity at the moment? I’d like to suggest a few reasons.
Dirty tactics
It’s important to understand that the ‘other side’ in this war do not play fair. Part of the problem here is that ordinary people do not understand this, and expect that everyone is playing by the same rules. Good, well-meaning people like to see the best in everybody, and it can be hard to imagine that your opponent might be cheating. (Of course, ‘the right’ don’t always play by the rules either — but at the moment, I think most of the dirty tricks are coming from the other side, as they are currently the ones who hold most of the institutional and cultural power.)
What kind of dirty tricks am I talking about? There are two I’ve seen.
Firstly, infiltration. I’m sure there are people who are, for one reason or another, placed within communities in order to disrupt them.
Every so often I open up the Substack app to browse through articles from people I don’t follow. For a while it was recommending me articles by a particular woman who looked like she was ‘awake’ to the agenda: in her bio it said she was pro-freedom, anti WEF, etc. But, her articles were all critical of people on my side. For example, she’d written about how Brigitte Macron was obviously a woman, how Richard D Hall was crazy for suggesting that the Manchester Arena Bombing was a false flag, etc. Pretty much everything she wrote was critical of people in this way.
It strikes me as being somewhat incongruous when someone claims to be against the globalist establishment, but relentlessly critical of fellow truth seekers. I have been critical before of people like Miri and James Delingpole for their “everything is a PsyOp” approach, and I think we need to have the space to disagree. But, above all, we need to listen to the evidence — and I think this woman was not listening to the evidence.
Similarly, a few years ago, when I published a video on my YouTube channel about face masks, I had someone responding to me very aggressively. They said they initially had been reading Lockdown Sceptics (as it was then), but had changed their mind and realised that they were wrong. This man actually wrote a letter to the bishop about me, nearly getting me cancelled.
Of course, we know that people can be foolish, irrational, and malicious all by themselves without external pressure. However, we also know that there exist things like the 77th Brigade, who spied on people during covid. It wouldn’t at all surprise me if the people I’ve mentioned turned out to be working for the government or intelligence services.
People often accuse folks of being “controlled opposition” — that is, appearing to be ‘awake’ while secretly working on behalf of the government agenda. Although I can’t name names, not least because we can’t be sure of what happens behind closed doors, it does seem that this is a real phenomenon.
And it shouldn’t surprise us that this kind of thing happens. After all, if a government is capable of lying to construct a ‘false flag’ operation, it is also capable of trying to continue the deception by paying people to lie and disrupt.
The second dirty tactic I’ve seen is blackmail. This is, again, something most ordinary people would shy away from, but it seems that blackmail is a weapon wielded by the powers that be to keep people in line. I’ve seen this several times lately — most recently in this podcast from Candace Owens. A journalist tried to write a hit piece about her, and upon investigating, Candace found out that there was most likely some kind of blackmail involved.
I also remember Richard D Hall’s series on Madeleine McCann, where he talks about how the security services ‘use’ paedophiles to do their work: “Do what we tell you, or we will expose you”. Blackmail, it seems, is part of the modus operandi of the way they work.
Please understand here that I am not saying the ONLY reason for the disunity on the right is dirty tactics. This is only one of several, which I will explain below. But I think it is important to be aware that those who oppose us will go to almost any lengths to discredit, smear, confuse, etc. Jesus’ words come to mind:
I am sending you out like sheep among wolves. Therefore be as shrewd as snakes and as innocent as doves. Matthew 10:16
We need to be wise or shrewd in understanding the tactics used against us, and we need to make sure that we are not unwittingly playing into their hands.
Propaganda
Earlier on I was watching the latest episode of ‘WTF’ - the World of Taunton and Fox, a conversation between Larry Taunton and Laurence Fox. Laurence Fox was talking about how he’s switched off social media for a few months. He was talking about how powerful propaganda is — he said even though he doesn’t watch the mainstream media, he’s still exposed to it on occasion. He said what he gets from those times is something like: ‘Starmer good, Putin bad’. Is it any surprise that most British people think the same way if that’s all they hear on the mainstream media?
I think of someone like my Dad. My Dad is, I would say, fairly typical for his age — working-class background, conservative views, Christian. We have pretty similar political and moral instincts. However, over the last few years we’ve disagreed many times about things happening in the world. Why? He gets most of his news from the newspaper and the BBC. It often strikes me when we debate that it’s as if we’re living in different worlds! I’ve had the same experience with other friends / family members — there are simply many facts and opinions that they are totally unaware of. They are living in parallel universe, but they don’t realise it.
It’s made me realise how insidious propaganda is: people think that what they are reading or watching is the unvarnished truth, but in reality they are being spoon-fed a particular narrative. They are being influenced without their knowledge or consent. Their trust is being abused. Sadly, many British people have such a deep-rooted trust in the legacy media that they can’t bring themselves to switch it off.
This is another big reason why the right cannot unite: the truth creates unity, because — at the end of the day — you can’t argue with it. The truth isn’t a matter of ‘left’ or ‘right’, or ‘conservative’ or ‘progressive’, or anything: the truth just is. But if the media can control people’s views of the truth, they can keep people under control. The roughly 10% of people who dissent will be demonised as crazy ‘conspiracy theorists’.
This is why the government, through the media, were able to persuade people that covid was a terrifying deadly plague — even though I’m not sure, looking back, whether the disease called ‘covid’ was even a real thing. If the British people had been told the truth about everything that happened during covid, I guarantee that the outcome would have been the polar opposite of what happened.
Personality Cults
One of the things which the right seems to be particularly vulnerable to is personality cults. I saw this first-hand last year with Nigel Farage. I am a resident of Clacton, Nigele Farage’s constituency. I saw what happened last year when the general election was called. Initially, there was a local Reform candidate standing — but, when Nigel decided to stand, he was unceremoniously dumped and everyone started waving the flag for Nigel instead.
I remember having a good conversation with a canvasser who knocked on my door. (We had several canvassers for Reform, and none for any of the other parties. All of them had come in from outside the area). She said to me, “can you imagine a greater punishment for them [the government], putting Nigel in there?” Whereas Reform had been slowly gaining momentum before the election, when Nigel decided to stand everyone was galvanised into action.
What concerned me, and I said this on the podcast at the time, was that it all felt like a personality cult — putting too much faith in one individual. It doesn’t give me any pleasure to say this, but I believe I have been vindicated — and much quicker than I expected to be.
Earlier on, I mentioned the bust-up within Reform and said that Nigel Farage had a ‘Messiah Complex’. It does seem to be the case that he has a fragile ego, which has led to him getting rid of several people over the years who would otherwise have been allies — for example, Douglas Carswell, Ben Habib and Steven Woolfe. A lot of people have been cancelling their Reform memberships (although, as someone pointed out the other day, you cannot be a ‘member’ of Reform in the way that you can with other parties).
A friend of mine, who voted for Reform and was a fan of Nigel Farage, said to me the other day: “I’m not sure Reform will exist by the next election”. She said some of her friends were disgusted by the whole thing and were cancelling their memberships. Whatever happens to Reform, it seems to me they will never get anywhere with Nigel Farage in charge.
Note: I don’t want to simply be down on Nigel Farage here. A while back, I also noted that there were problems with Richard Tice / Isabel Oakeshott. They are now ‘partners’, that is, romantically, and both of them left their spouses to be with one another. I obviously don’t know all the ins and outs of what happened, but if someone can behave that way with a spouse can you trust them to run a political party / in government? Someone who deceives and cheats in private will also do so in public. I think the way that they have behaved with Rupert Lowe shows they are untrustworthy — notably Isabel’s deeply patronising interview on Talk TV about him.
As I’m not in America I can’t say whether one could make a similar case for Donald Trump. I am concerned from where I sit that some people seem to see Trump as a kind of saviour, but because I’m not on the ground there I don’t know if people see it as a similar kind of personality cult as Reform / Nigel Farage here.
The key question is, why is the right so vulnerable to the cult of personality?
I don’t think the problem is wanting to unite around a particular person in itself. At the end of the day you can’t put your faith in a political manifesto: manifestos are implemented by people, so you need to trust the people it is implemented by. God made us to be relational beings, it is natural to want a particular person to be a leader. The problem is not wanting to trust in a person per se. The Bible says:
Remember your leaders, who spoke the word of God to you. Consider the outcome of their way of life and imitate their faith. Hebrews 13:7
It’s not wrong to want leaders and role models. We just need to make sure they’re the right kind of leaders — the kind of leaders who will model good Christian character: selfless, generous, with integrity, committed to the truth, committed to God. (A bit like our late Queen Elizabeth II — she wasn’t perfect, of course, but I do believe she was a Christian woman and dedicated her life to service rather than lording it over us).
Given all this, I’d say the problem with the right at the moment is that (1) there is a dearth of people who have genuine Christian virtue, because there are so few Christians around. We shouldn’t be surprised when non-Christians act in self-serving and hypocritical ways, especially when they are in a position of power; (2) because there are so few Christians, few people are looking for someone with Christian virtue and would even know what to look for.
United around… what?
A decade ago, I wrote an article about the demise of the Sunday Assembly (an atheist ‘church’). I said then:
The problem is, I think in order for a group to exist it has to have something as its core to unite around. Every group in the world has a raison d’etre: a common interest of some kind, or a common goal. Something has to bring and hold a diverse group of people together. Now, I wonder whether atheism itself is enough to actually hold together a group of people. As I have blogged about before, atheism is not a replacement for religion: atheism is simply a belief that God (or gods) does not exist. Anyone can be an atheist – you can belief pretty much whatever you like as long as it does not involve belief in God/gods.
And this is what makes me wonder whether a godless assembly actually has enough at its core to hold onto people. If all people have in common is a belief that something is not true, can that bring them together? If, by way of analogy, I got together a group of people who didn’t believe in politics – and by voter turnouts there would surely be enough of them in this country – would they want to keep meeting to moan about politics? Founding some kind of group on a negative premise seems self-defeating to me. I don’t enjoy being disenchanted with politics, and I’m not passionate enough to really care about meeting with other ‘like-minded’ people.
The point is, it’s not enough to form a group around opposition to something. It’s not enough to be “anti-woke”, or “anti-Islam”, or any of the other things the right are anti at the moment. There has to be, at core, something that we are unashamedly for.
In order to have that, we must have not simply a vision for what we DON’T, want, but a vision for what we DO — a vision of the common good, if you will. We need to have a common vision to work on and build together. We need to have a moral bedrock on which to build, some moral vision towards which we are heading, some vision of the kind of society which we want to build together.
The left know this. They realised that you need something to bring people together, which is why they promoted wokeness and Islam. They both function in a ‘religious’ way, implicitly or explicitly, and they both have the power to bring people together — albeit to a limited extent. The point is, the unity that they provide, even if it is not perfect, is greater than the unity experienced on the right at the moment which has no unifying moral philosophy. This has been a very clever move which I think has exposed the right as being fractured and disunited.
The right has become secularised, and as it has done so it has abandoned Christianity — or at least, only paid lip service to it. There are a lot of ‘cultural Christians’ out there who might believe we are a Christian country in principle, but would never darken the doors of a church themselves. Not on a regular basis, at least.
What’s the solution here? I believe the right will never overcome wokeness and Islam until we believe in Christ more than they believe in social justice or Allah. Like I said in my last podcast, we don’t need Christianity simply as a better moral philosophy. We need a return to Christ himself.
The assistant minister at my old church used to say, “sin scatters, but the gospel gathers”. Sin causes divisions between us, but the gospel reconciles those differences and brings us together. I believe that if we can truly unite around the gospel, we’ll see a unity emerging which is greater than anything that Islam or wokeness can create. I believe that this is the only true way to create unity — in the political or any sphere.
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