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Editor’s Note: The following is a transcript by John Morgan of a British National Party stump speech, once thought lost, that Jonathan Bowden gave in Liverpool on November 28, 2008. The title is editorial, and versions of the speech online have also been titled “An Anglosphere Call To Arms” and “Jonathan Bowden ‘We’re Not Ashamed’ Commemoration.” The video this transcript is based upon, which can be viewed at The Jonathan Bowden Archive here, is cut in many places. The cuts are indicated by asterisks in the transcript. If you have a complete audio or video recording of this speech that you are willing to contribute, please contact us. Some unintelligible passages are marked with question marks; please post a comment below if you have corrections or can fill in the gaps.
This means that we are — in Liverpool, in the northwest of England, throughout England, throughout Britain — in a very (???) position. This society has probably not been weaker, not been more broken, than it has been now for over a century and more. In 1908, we ruled a quarter of the planet, and people feared us. They didn’t like us, but they feared us. Now, we don’t control the streets. Certainly, our government doesn’t control the streets in most of the inner areas of our cities.
Four years ago, we had a third of our army and a third of our tank corps in Iraq, in the southern deserts. The Blair regime that did that, at America’s behest, and at Zionists’ behest within the United States, don’t control the streets of south London, don’t control the streets of Toxteth, don’t control the streets of Merseyside (???), don’t control the streets of Handsworth in inner Birmingham, where whites are 22% of the population. Many of our people have fled from the inner areas of our cities to get away from what has occurred.
Not one member of the political establishment — other than indirectly, like the present Minister for Immigration, [Phil] Woolas — will actually even address any of these issues because they’re unpatriotic, and they’re cowards, and they’re afraid. And they’re afraid of this party, amongst others. They’re even afraid of the people in this room.
When that list appeared on the Internet a short while ago,[1] whatever its source, that is an attempt to intimidate people from having a political point of view which is not regarded as acceptable by the current establishment.
* * *
You vote Labour in the North, say, putting it a bit simply, or Tory where I come from, where often you can’t even find a Labour councilor. Whoever you vote for, the same group of people with the same sort of ideas get in. They’re all internationalists. They’re all globalists. They all believe in an economic system that has failed. They all believe in mass immigration to allegedly fill the gap. They all believe in multiculturalism. They’re all tolerant of every faith, except those that sustained this society originally. They preach equality, but they have reneged on their commitment to the core people up here in the Northwest and elsewhere.
When people voted Labour in 1945 to have a change from the world of the 1930s, they didn’t vote for what this country now is in 2008. They didn’t vote for what they see flickering behind them on any news screen. They didn’t vote for the torture of babies to death in sink states in inner London boroughs. They didn’t vote for the prevalence of crime.
* * *
Many of the things that we see — family breakdown, prevalence of the usage of drugs as an escape, mass abortion as a form of social contraception, enormous immigration from the Third World. 70 million, that’s right, 70 million persons of color have entered the United States of America since the all-white immigration policy was done away with by Robert Kennedy in the late 1960s. That is why Obama was elected.
* * *
White Americans face minority status in New York City, in New York State, in California, in Texas — not in two or three years, but it may be five or six. In New York, they’re in a minority now. Texas is 50-50. Parts of California, you have to do complicated sums about how many Latinos are Caucasian and so on.
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Now, liberal-minded people would say, what’s he talking about? We’re all the same, and these divisions don’t really matter. No other county on Earth, no other groups of countries on Earth, no other regime — not China, not India, not Japan, not the new Russia, and so on — have invited the world to come in, has thrown their nationality away and opened the door and said, “Come in and make what you can with what we’ve got here.” No other group on Earth has done it.
In Japan, immigration has to be racially based and has to be congruent with those who are Asiatic, namely Japanese. In India, you have to have an “Indian parent.” You have to share “Indian culture” of one sort or another. To even have a business, you need an Indian partner. These groups are protecting their identity. They aren’t throwing it away on the basis of liberal ideas and globalist economics — which are failing.
If you want to be unemployed in the future, vote New Labour. If you want total crime, anarchy, and disorder in the cities, vote New Labour. And [David] Cameron will be no different. It’s a light blue tie and a little bit of spin and a bit more private sector involvement here and there. But the core of these parties is the same. And utterly the same. You watch them on a Wednesday in the House of Commons when they’re all screaming abuse at each other at Prime Minister’s question time. It’s synthetic abuse. They agree on 80%! They agree on multiracialism. They agree on multiculturalism. They agree on the disprivileging of the cultural right to domination of the white majority. They agree on all the social changes that have occurred since the 1960s. They agree on the collapse of the family, for which many of their policies are responsible: moral, social, economic, and ideological. They agree with what’s happened to our educational system.
Our educational system’s shot to pieces! And why do we know it’s shot to pieces? Because New Labour ministers will not send their own children to the schools that they expect others to go to. [applause]
* * *
Schools which increasingly will be based upon quotas and will be ideologized to a degree that every London school in Hackney does Black History every November. It’s a short course.
White Londoners from Hackney are very ironic, very acidic, very cynical about these sorts of things. But the fact that this ideology is rammed down people from a very early age shows a certain desperation to keep what has been created going. Many of our people drift around knowing nothing about our culture, nothing about our history. The imperial past has been completely erased. Most of our national heroes have been erased. You come to — I’m a southerner, quite obviously. I’ve been to Liverpool twice. The thing that strikes me when you come to Liverpool is the extraordinary nature of the buildings, these classical buildings and the power that they once represented. It opens one’s eyes. Liverpool’s presented (???) as the city of the dull and sponging and criminality. You look at these buildings, these were the buildings that ruled the world! The manifested power and glory for our kind of people!
What British politician today talks about British power and British glory? They’re ashamed to be British! They’re ashamed to be English. They’re ashamed to be white. They’re ashamed to be Caucasian. They’re ashamed to be civilizationally European in a British context. They’re ashamed of our past. They’re ashamed of the statues in the squares in this and other cities, the names of the individuals celebrated there. They can’t remember or don’t wish to if they can. They’re ashamed! Ashamed of these flags up here that are behind me. Well, we’re not ashamed! [applause] We’re proud of what we are!
Now we know what we are. New Labour say that we’re intolerant and that we want the absence of peace. These are the ones who put the troops into Iraq and into Afghanistan! [Tony] Blair’s had about seven wars in his ten years in power. [Gordon] Brown financed them.[2] This war has done nothing for us at all.
And we don’t control the streets in our own cities. And liberals say that we’re the intolerant ones, that we are the warmongers, that we represent the past, that we represent the national wars of the past. They’re fighting wars all over the world to impose their sort of ideology on all people, including our own.
If you listen to Brown closely, what’s his message? The message is that the whole world should be like the West. But what happens to Western people if everyone else is Westernized? The West is ours! It’s our culture. It’s our civilization. It’s not for universal export, nor is it for the whole world to come here and enjoy what we have, and have built, and have sustained, and have fought a struggle for.
Life is not a bowl of cherries, and liberal views about life are false. Men and women are not interchangeable. Marriage is not an optional extra if you wish to bring up children. Men should not be permitted to marry and bring up children as normalcy. A society that throws its own values and its own past in the road will have no future. You have to base things on glory and upon patriotism.
The only socialism, or the only social feeling that’s left, is patriotism. Patriotism is the remaining socialism. It brings everyone together. It admits inequality. It admits identity.
If the Left a hundred years ago, when the Labour Party was being formed in cities like this, had not rejected the idea of religion, had not rejected the idea of race, had not rejected the idea of ethnicity, had not rejected the idea of identity, they would have been the current that’s unstoppable in the world. But they rejected all of these things that make life tolerable for people.
One of their cardinal mistakes was the rejection of the idea of the family, nuclear and extended. Without the family, many people are bereft and have nothing. When everything falls apart, particularly economically — which is coming for many at this hour — the family is what you go back to. Outside a certain circle of warmth in relation to those who are related to you by blood, life for many can be as hard as the pavement out there.
This shows you the extraordinarily destructive nature of Left-wing ideas, which have been prevalent for much of the last century.
* * *
But the irony is, those ideas in a moderated, in a softer, in a more middle-class way, are in power! Those ideas are in power! We have a Left-wing capitalist society, something which most people thought would be impossible. A hundred years ago, you’d have been accused of being a political illiterate for saying that, but that’s what we’ve got: the values of the Left, the values of miscegenation, the values of multiculturalism, the values of multicultural identity, the values of a supermarket for ideas, the values of internationalism or any nationality but our own, the values of complete moral equality for all forms of life. These are norms! These are norms! Anyone who speaks against it is a monster, and it’s all based on a radical Thatcherite market of dog-eat-dog, and “there’s no such thing as society,”[3] and there’s no community, and there’s no such thing as solidarity with your own kind, and so on.
These views are regarded as reactionary or of the past. Well, they’re not of the past. They are of the present and of the future. Because if this country is to survive, it has to return to those sorts of values and go on.
What Britain was in the past can’t be brought back, and there were all sorts of problems with previous models as well. We have to build a new type of society in this country. It has to be done from the bottom up.
* * *
You put your own country and your own group first, whatever policy proposition is put before you.
* * *
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Europe’s just another tier of government that is removed from our people and which they essentially despise. One of the most remarkable things is that there’s now a majority — a majority to leave the European Union. And why do we want to leave the European Union? Because we dislike French and German people? No, that’s got nothing to do with it. It’s because we want to have sovereignty of our own nation-state, so we can decide who is British and who is not, so we can decide on our own economic affairs, so we can decide on our own military and cultural policies. The nation-state’s big enough for people to identify with, and small enough to make a difference.
People don’t identify with great big bureaucracies all over the world, they identify with their own country. Because if you’re not rooted in something, you have no past. And if you have no present, by virtue of that understanding, you have no future.
* * *
We have to toughen up as a people. We have to become more virile. We have to become stronger in the way that we once were. Many people secretly look to the people in this party as an insurance policy for what they fear might be coming. What do you think this society is going to be like in 50 years on present trends? We’ll be in a minority in most of the cities. Crime will be endemic. In many areas, we will be completely culturally disprivileged. The elite, financial and political and bureaucratic, will live in gated areas with their own security guards.
You go to a Third World country, the elite shops with men with machine guns. They go into gated estates in places like Kensington in West London, for example, and they swipe a card and the gate opens, they go in in the four by four, the gate shuts. There’s barbed wire everywhere. Because they’re afraid, they’re afraid of even just the street. This is how the elite in Brazil, Venezuela, and Egypt behave.
It’s coming here. It’s here already — unless people decide to vote in order to change it.
* * *
Our representatives want to go into a (???) like the European Assembly in order to destroy it — not because they’re against any European or white nationality, but because they want control here in their own countries where they can make a difference, where we can begin to clean up the mess that the elite has made for the last 60 years: Tory, Liberal, and Labour. Liberals don’t need to rule because their ideas are in power and the other parties switch about.
We are illiberal. We are democrats, but we are not liberals. We want crime to be punished. We want social justice for our own people. We want jobs for our own people. We want (???) for our own people. We want racial crimes against our own people to stop. We want our own country back. [applause] We want our own country for ourselves.
Identity is the basis of life. When somebody asks you who you are, you give your surname, you give a few family details. Some people will talk about career. But deep down, you will talk about nationality, you will talk about rootedness, you will talk about who you’re connected to in the past and in the present, and through children and grandchildren into the future.
This is why most of the ideologies which are contrary to the family feed criminality, feed despair, feed non-patriotic outlooks, feed desperation.
* * *
They have no strength to resist various forces that come from without. (???) want to bomb Western cities and put truck bombs in public places, for example, Western societies sort of pick up the pieces. They pick up the mess, they deliver up the bodies. There’s talk of tolerance and justice and integration. There’s some security service activism against a few militants, and the thing trundles on as if nothing has really happened. This is a society that’s sleepwalking towards various forms of destruction. And it has to wake up.
* * *
It’s time particularly for the English amongst the British to step forward! The Englishman, for too long, when somebody stands rubbing his foot in the tube or the tram or the bus, says, “Sorry!” instead of “Get off my foot!” We need to be more militant in terms of our own identity!
You turn on the BBC, for example, and every message, actual and subliminal, is in part directed against us, against our strength, against our past, against our glory, even to the degree that some of the people in those studios and on those editorial committees that put together those programs that aren’t conscious of it. But they’ve got a liberal mindset, they’ve got an ideology. They know what they’re doing. They breathe this liberal air all the time. It’s a shock to them when somebody says that they don’t agree with what this society has become. It’s a shock to them when they said Enoch Powell was right.
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And Enoch Powell was right! He certainly was right! In his constituency now, there’s a tower block in the middle of Wolverhampton in the Midlands. In that tower block, 32 languages are spoken in the block. 32. And one of them’s English. And one of them’s English, and that is his constituency. When he spoke in the late 1960s, he connected with a tradition of dissidents that links to Oswald Mosley, that links him to Joseph Chamberlain. These were establishment men who said that it can be done differently, and we need a new dispensation in this society.
Many people in this room will have voted Labour in the past, will have been involved in other forms of politics or no forms of politics. We need to bring together people from military backgrounds, from civilian backgrounds, from northern backgrounds, from southern backgrounds, from working-class backgrounds, from middle-class backgrounds, from upper-class backgrounds, from Scottish backgrounds, from Welsh backgrounds, from Irish backgrounds. We need to bring them all together.
And this flag can bring them together because the red stands for the social equity and a socialized state that doesn’t allow three to five million unemployed, the white stands for the ethnicity of the core nature of the island, and the blue stands for the innate social conservatism of many people who would hang the sort of murderers that we’ve seen parading across our media screens in the last couple of weeks in very sordid and degrading cases for all concerned. We’ll just get rid of them!
The beliefs in glory and patriotism and our past and our future – liberals believe that nationalism has disappeared, that the politics of identity has disappeared. They’re wrong!
* * *
I was once at a tube station in London, and some chap who was absolutely out of his mind on drink chucked himself under a train. And (???) he didn’t even get that right. He staggered up a moment later, covered in filth — because it’s very filthy down there where the (???) rails are, you know — staggered up again. And somebody said to a commuter who was next to me, “Care in the Community, you know.” And he just looked back and said, “What community?”
And it’s true. What community? Don’t forget, Care in the Community was another Thatcherite initiative from the 1980s.[4] But we actually do believe in community. We believe in individual freedom and responsibility within community. You can’t be an individual without a group. They’re not antithetical.
We believe in free speech. “It’s a British right, it’s an English right,” I hear you say. There’s very little free speech in this country at the moment. Law after law has been passed to prevent us from speaking as we would wish. In the 1990s, almost every other year since ‘97, New Labour has passed a law to prevent you saying things. Constructive equality act. An act which bans Islamophobia in relation to the alleged dissemination of (???). Extension of ideas of ethnicity to cover particular and prioritized religious minorities and present minorities. Homosexuality: no one, increasingly, can say anything critical of that. It’s too harsh, it’s too inegalitarian, it’s too heterosexualist (allegedly), it’s too elitist, and so on. All of these are combining to paralyze people.
Most people are very uneducated when they leave school these days, but they know what political correctness is. And political correctness is a dogma which is used everywhere. People say, “Oh, I made a politically incorrect remark,” and they giggle sort of nervously. And I say, “Don’t be afraid.” Why? We’ve become afraid to open our mouth in our own country! This is our country! We can say what we want! [applause]
* * *
One of the reasons I pitch things at a certain level, of course, is if you adopt a slightly sort of academic tone, if you like, you actually avoid any infractions in relation to these laws that have been passed. Labour has passed these laws, particularly to deny white working-class people the right to free speech in their own society. These laws are the nets. They’re designed to trap people so they can’t speak in the way that they feel comfortable. That is what they’re designed to do. It’s designed so that only liberal people, for which they believe educated people, can speak. No one else can say anything. And if they do, they’re sort of branded on the tongue immediately as one of those bigots, one of those outsiders, one of those intolerant people who advocate exclusivity rather than inclusivity.
Tony Blair said that our people fought in wars for reasons of tolerance and inclusion. That is a lie. When they went over the top in 1914, when they fired from a bunker in the desert in North Africa in the early 1940s, they weren’t saying, “Get that Howitzer out of my sight” for tolerance and inclusion. They were fighting for this country, and for their regiment and for their mates and for where they came from. That’s what they were fighting for.
They weren’t fighting for tolerance and inclusion. There’s no such thing. If you’re too tolerant, you’re on the ground with nettles growing over your body. You walk upright in the Sun if you’ve got any dignity at all. Life is intolerant! Life is unequal. Life is unfair. We’ve got to make sure that we are the winners in this life as a national group rather than the losers.
This country is stepping into the Second World, and the Third World looms. It’s here. Not just demographically and ethnically, but in its mindsets, in its ideas about itself, and so on. Gated areas. Segregated zones in cities. Having, as you do in the Third World, to bribe officials in order to get anything done — which is de rigueur outside Europe, maybe all over the world. These things are coming! You can sense that it’s in the air.
* * *
We wish to be a powerful country, even in modernity, if it’s a country of the second rank of pure power. We want to decide our own future. We want to decide who is British and who is not. [applause] We want to decide who is English and who is not. We want to decide what our history is and what it means and what it does not. We want English History Month, not Black History Month. We want our glory to be manifested again.
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If a member of the liberal democratic executive was sat over there, in imagination, he’d be saying, “It’s the past. It’s extremism.” Well, what has moderation done for us in the last 50 to 60 years? Always cutting the difference, always listening to the other person’s point of view, always bending over backwards, always moving back in order not to be too authoritarian or to be seen to be. This is the politics of (???). In the end, if you adopt that to the degree that we almost have done, we will disappear! We will disappear.
A woman said to me recently, in parts of London, England has disappeared. It’s true. Last time I was in Liverpool, somebody told me there’s a big Somalian community in (???). Why are they here? They’re here because of the Labour Nationality Act of 1948. They’re here at the Genocide Convention after the Second World War, again created in 1948. They’re here because they claim refugee status from a country that hasn’t had a state for 25 years. Their problems have been visited on us.
Liberalism’s a plug. It seeks a socket, it flips on the switch, and puts it in. And it plugs you into globalization in all areas: social, economic, ethnic, cultural, faith-based, military involvement — everything — so that we’re interconnected with the whole of the rest of the world. But not from a dominant position. This means you are a prey to every buffet and every storm that comes along.
And we have an establishment that’s too weak to stand up for our people, that doesn’t ideologically believe in doing so anyway. There’s not one member of the New Labour cabinet that would say they would be proud to be English and British in too aggressive a way. And that’s because these people increasingly are unpatriotic. They’re failures. They’re mild and effervescent traitors, and they need to be removed. They need to be electorally removed en masse. They need to be removed in the European elections. Their lower-tier representatives at council and district level need to be removed. Their Welsh parliamentary and Scottish devolved parliamentary cousins need to be removed. And finally the Westminster tier, the most difficult tier of all, the tier which you can only democratically attack by going above to the European Union dispensation and below to the counter one, like the GLA [Greater London Area] victory with Richard Barnbrook in London recently,[5] when you chisel up from above and below.
Because we have to have a future in our own land. And our future is not as a minority, not as a despised culture that’s one side of the curriculum, not dead white European males like Shakespeare who get five minutes every so often. We wish to be central. We wish to be dominant. We wish to be primordial in our country, in own land, using our own language, and in relation to our own traditions, military and otherwise.
* * *
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Notes
[1] In November 2008 a list of the British National Party’s members was published online. The leak was blamed on disgruntled former members. It was one of several leaks of the party’s membership roster.
[2] Gordon Brown served as Chancellor of the Exchequer under Tony Blair from 1997 until 2007. He became Prime Minister when Blair stepped down in June 2007. After the Conservative Party won the general election in May 2010, David Cameron assumed the office the following month.
[3] Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher infamously made this remark in an interview in 1987: “They are casting their problems at society. And, you know, there’s no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families. And no government can do anything except through people, and people must look after themselves first. It is our duty to look after ourselves and then, also, to look after our neighbors.”
[4] Care in the Community was a program which claimed to seek to take the mentally ill out of institutional facilities and provide care for them at home instead, or “in the community.” Critics said that this was in fact a smokescreen intended to allow the National Health Services to relieve itself of responsibility for a growing number of mental patients.
[5] Richard Barnbrook was elected to the Assembly of London on the British National Party’s list in May 2008. He later became an independent.