With the other speakers

On September 7, I was one of the speakers at the Heritage and Destiny Memorial Meeting in the North of England. Here is the speech I gave.

Video of the speech is at https://odysee.com/@Nationalism:3/04_Prof.-John-Kersey-(7th-Sep-2025)-5MB:e

Our theme today is The Roots of the British, and so let me begin by reminding us just who the British are. Firstly, I want to refer to the work of geneticist Adam Rutherford, who has done extensive work on historical genetics and has applied statistics and probability to questions of descent. His findings are that if you are of predominantly British descent, and were born (or are descended from someone who was born) in the 1970s, it is virtually impossible that you are not directly descended from King Edward III of England[i]. And if you are descended from him, you are also a descendant of William the Conqueror, Alfred the Great, and every ruler of Europe in the 10^th century. So, on the basis that I am talking here to an audience comprised of British people of British descent, I have a message for you: the blood of kings runs in your veins. You are the descendants of British men and women of greatness whose names will live evermore in history. You are the connexion between them and future generations. You need not only to know your ancestors but to honour their example. Be truly who you are. And, by the way, that means that almost everyone in this room is related to everyone else. We are all distant cousins.

In our literature, the figure of William Shakespeare is not only the greatest British writer to have ever lived, but in my view, the greatest in the world. And if we want to hear some of his words that speak to us just as clearly today, let us go to the orchard in Swinstead Abbey and listen to the words of Philip the Bastard, son of King Richard I, who has just seen his uncle King John die:

This England never did, nor never shall,
Lie at the proud foot of a conqueror,
But when it first did help to wound itself.
Now these her princes are come home again,
Come the three corners of the world in arms,
And we shall shock them. Nought shall make us rue,
If England to itself do rest but true[ii].

And today, England has again helped to wound itself. We can rightly ask at the moment, “who runs Britain?” The answer isn’t Keir Starmer.

We can find the roots of what has happened in the ideas of the Socialist Workers Party. Its former leader Yigael Glückstein (known as Tony Cliff) devised the concept of “deflected permanent revolution” in a 1963 essay, which holds that where the proletariat cannot take power, a section of the intelligentsia can work towards a bourgeois revolution. Cliff defines very accurately the position of the intelligentsia regarding the working class by saying “The intelligentsia are anxious to belong without being assimilated, without ceasing to remain apart and above. They are in search of a dynamic movement which will unify the nation, and open up broad new vistas for it, but at the same time will give themselves power.” [iii]

So this is not classical Marxism, which is class-based and concerned with the struggle of the working class. Instead, this contemporary ideology addresses itself to issues of race, gender and identity politics, and to what it identifies as oppressed minorities. It operates through the intelligentsia, which can be drawn from any class and is identified by its access to university education and the professions. If we were to analyse it academically, we would most accurately describe it as post-Marxism. It rejects classical Marxism for its reliance on grand narrative, and instead is anti-essentialist, not economically determinist, and strongly based on Gramsci’s concept of hegemony. Although it is primarily directed against the politics of the Right, it is also opposed to the traditional Left. It has no time for the socially conservative elements of Labour or for the socialism of Jeremy Corbyn.

The communist Antonio Gramsci advanced the idea of cultural hegemony, in which a ruling class maintains its power through establishing its ideology as so-called “common sense” so that it becomes a universal norm that is firmly established in the social order, particularly through education and the media[iv]. The idea is that this ideological takeover comes to be seen as natural and inevitable rather than having been achieved by force. For that reason, its proponents take an approach of pushing forward gradually, manufacturing consent, and embedding their ideas through entryism into every public institution.

And so this quiet revolution has been undertaken by the liberal middle class of today. This is a class which defines itself by adherence to specific beliefs and ideological conformity, and it is that which keeps it apart and above. The beliefs are often deliberately absurd – that men can become women, for example – but that is the whole point. These beliefs are shibboleths, and they are used to mark people out as belonging to the middle class. In addition, the choice of shibboleths is deliberate. By making someone believe and pledge public allegiance to something which is obviously false, you destroy their moral fabric and their sense of what is right and wrong. The overall aim is that of culture war, in which everything that is traditional in British life is to be attacked and destroyed. It will be replaced by a society whose members are isolated, atomised, without cultural or moral values, and compliant with whatever their masters want them to do. It seems very clear now that the Covid lockdowns were a trial run for this.

This system doesn’t rely on anything as obvious as state ownership. On the contrary, it spreads its control through a multitude of bodies, many of which are in theory private, but all of which are broadly committed to post-Marxist ideas. They are charities, trade unions, universities, political and special interest lobby groups, and non-government organizations. They are united by their opposition to the nation-state and everything that Britain has stood for culturally. They includes groups that have significant ideological differences, but when it comes to achieving the overall aims, there is an agreement that these differences should be smoothed over and ignored.

Parliament has spent several decades giving away its power to unelected bodies. In doing so, it created the ideal environment for this post-Marxist takeover. In 2012, Christopher Snowden commented on this phenomenon during the Blair era in a paper for the Institute of Economic Affairs, in which he said, “In the last fifteen years, state funding of charities in Britain has increased significantly while restrictions on political lobbying by charities have been relaxed. 27,000 charities are now dependent on the government for more than 75 per cent of their income and the ‘voluntary sector’ receives more money from the state than it receives in voluntary donations.

It has been argued that state funding weakens the independence of charities, making them less inclined to criticise government policy. This paper argues that there is a deeper problem if government funds and/or creates pressure groups with the intention of creating a ‘sock-puppet’ version of civil society which creates the illusion of grassroots support for new legislation. These state-funded activists engage in direct lobbying (of politicians) and indirect lobbying (of the public) using taxpayers’ money, thereby blurring the distinction between public and private action.

State-funded charities and NGOs usually campaign for causes which do not enjoy widespread support amongst the general public (e.g. foreign aid, temperance, identity politics).”[v]

Yes, these charities, which include one with which we are all familiar – Hope not Hate[vi] – do receive money from the state. But more than this, they can easily be funded by other interests who intend to further the post-Marxist agenda. And these other interests can stay in the shadows, without any serious scrutiny.

With so much devolved to these groups, our Parliament is effectively bypassed as a place of cultural influence. Instead, what rules is the web of special interest groups which effectively decides what government policy should be and tells politicians what to do. It is entirely deliberate that this system is out of touch with the electorate. It is being ruled by post-Marxist activists who are working to bring about a position where their ideas form a Gramscian hegemony and will go unchallenged. The electorate has no relevance to these people, since most of them are unelected and unaccountable. Writing recently in The Telegraph, Allison Pearson said “It’s as if we were under occupation by a group of hyper-liberal progressives who have infected every corner of national life with their weird, righteous dogma, endlessly searching for proof of native loathsomeness and treating any pushback as proof of guilt.” [vii]And that is precisely what is happening.

The primary aim of the activists can be summarized as being first to break down any institution they infiltrate, and then to rebuild it with their people and their principles in absolute control. We can see this with the NHS, and with the effect of net zero policies on manufacturing, farming and energy. It is entirely deliberate. Sometimes the destruction is obvious, as with the removal of historical monuments and the renaming of institutions to obliterate the memory of figures who do not fit the post-Marxist agenda. The wider agenda is to destroy tradition and the nuclear family, and to put such a burden of tax, censorship and debt onto people that they will become entirely dependent on the state as the only option that can save them.

And what of mass immigration? There is one reason above all others why the post-Marxists favour mass immigration, and it is because bringing foreigners into this country with no assimilation whatsoever is an extremely effective way to attack and destabilise British culture. For the post-Marxists, the more different the immigrants are from British people, the better. When there is no common people, there is no common culture and a low trust society, allowing those in charge to divide and rule. And when the British people are preoccupied by mass immigration and the problems it causes, it takes their focus off the people and organizations who are encouraging it to happen in the first place.

As part of the post-Marxist project, all resistance to the hegemony must be suppressed. Our culture is deliberately being dumbed-down. Many of us will remember a popular culture of thirty or forty years ago that relied not on formal education but on the native intelligence of our people and their willingness to build on the formidable cultural roots of the British. It was a culture that did not talk down to people and that gave a high priority to the discovery and exposure of working-class talent. There was an assumption that wherever people found themselves in life, they could better themselves.

Since then, our British popular culture has been replaced by a globalist mass culture dominated by the internet, and this consists increasingly of people being told what to think by others. AI is the newest manifestation of this, but what we see as the product of AI is exactly what is decided that we should see by those in power. We have also lost many of the individual voices that once made the online environment a haven for the intellectually curious. Instead, we now have a dominance of online material that is overwhelmingly and crassly commercial, often AI generated, and that is pitched at a moron level of cheap sensationalism. This is the bread and circuses approach that keeps people down. It is not just about turning people into mindless consumers, but it is far more about breaking down their resistance. The ugliness of much modern art and architecture, and the soullessness of much modern commercial music, is part of the same phenomenon.

We also see a loss of aspiration. At one point, it was possible for someone from the British working class to succeed through a combination of talent, hard work and good luck. Now, the system deliberately disadvantages White working class boys in particular[viii]. In the post-Marxist new world order there is no place for those who want to better themselves, and there is no place for those who might have the intelligence to dissent or rebel.

It is still possible for someone from the White working class to learn a trade and do well. But tradesmen have no access to national power. Even the lowest member of the managerial middle class has more access to power than a successful electrician or plumber. And the liberal middle class is there because they have been compliant enough to jump through the post-Marxist ideological hoops of the universities and employment. They compromised early, and learned that if they were to get on and become part of the intelligentsia, they would need to abandon thinking for themselves and fit in to the prevailing establishment.

What also keeps people down is the web of monitoring and control. This was the major change to workplaces during the Blair era and now it dominates every office. It is a culture whereby everything a worker does is pre-planned and monitored. There is an obsession with data as a means of measuring accountability but the reality is that this is a system that knows the cost of everything and the value of nothing. It is an attempt to get rid of any subjective measure of value, and yet it is precisely that subjective measure that makes us human. Everything is now tied up in a stultifying bureaucracy that serves no real purpose in terms of making work better or more effective, but takes up enormous amounts of time and effort. Why should it predominate, then? Because it is a method of ensuring that people are too busy, tired and ground down to complain or revolt. The system is there to control them, and ensure that uniformity is imposed and individuality is destroyed. It’s exactly the same tactic that was employed in the Soviet Union.

This change to our culture also promotes short-termism. This is in contrast to the post-Marxists, whose project is long-term and designed to progress slowly over the course of decades and multiple generations. The long-term outlook is one which can be identified particularly with the principles of faith, folk and family, and understands our generational context as the bridge between the past and the future. We can talk about this in the context of religious belief, but far more important is the residual effect that religious belief and specifically Christianity has had on our national culture. The Christian Faith was there in the background, providing the basic principles by which we lived in every aspect of British life. When this is taken away, because we will find the post-Marxists in the churches just as everywhere else, we have been left with a society that has no common moral foundation and whose members can be easily controlled from above.

Freedom of speech is one of the first casualties of this process. We have already established that the intelligentsia relies on shibboleths to determine its membership, and that these include ideas that are obviously wrong and absurd. For that reason, free speech must be suppressed because if these ideas are subject to challenge, they will be shown openly to be wrong and absurd. In Britain today, we have lost what was one of the foundations of our society – that all should be able to speak freely and that ideas, particularly political ideas, should be subject to robust debate. Now, there is ever-increasing censorship, and as ever, if you seek to know who rules you, ask who you are not allowed to criticize. We have also become a permanently divided nation. It really is a two tier system consisting of the post-Marxist establishment on one side and everyone else on the other. You cannot have compromise and civilised debate with people who believe that anyone who is opposed to them is (in their very limited understanding) “Nazi scum”. The philosopher Hans-Hermann Hoppe advances a proposal for a society based on liberty in his 2001 book “Democracy, The God that Failed”, and says that democrats and communists, as well as those who advocate alternative, non-family and non-kin-centered lifestyles, will need to be physically removed from society[ix].

Every working day the Prime Minister is greeted by a procession of men and women in suits telling him what he should do and what he should say. These are the people who are pulling the strings that make the politicians jump, and the post-Marxists have significant direct or indirect influence on them. They are embedded inside the Civil Service, and because most government ministers have no actual expertise in their fields, they are the ones with the power.

How do the post-Marxists do it? Well, they have worked tirelessly to get their ideology into every institution that has power. Think, for example, of the police. The 1999 Macpherson Inquiry branded the police “institutionally racist” and the response was that the police were then taken over by post-Marxist ideology in order to purge themselves. If you were to ask most public institutions before the Black Lives Matter protests whether they were racist, they would respond by telling you that they did not discriminate on the grounds of race, and tried to treat people of different racial backgrounds equally. But since the post-Marxists have imposed Critical Race Theory on them, those institutions will now tell you that they are not merely “non-racist”, they are “anti-racist”. And what they mean by “anti-racist” is that they have now completely adopted post-Marxist teachings on race.

It might be thought that if we simply elect the right government, this could change. Well, in order for that to happen, we will need politicians who actually understand the problem. One of the few people in politics who did articulate something on these lines was Dominic Cummings, who referred to the web of influence I have described as “the blob”[x]. If any politician is to succeed in changing Britain, they must have a strategy for not only purging but replacing the blob, and ensuring that it cannot become a mere vehicle for post-Marxist entryism. And if Reform are going to win the next election, I hope they are listening.

As the electorate, we must also have a realistic view of the limits of what Members of Parliament can do. If we ask why there is no significant progress in our country despite changes of government, why we remain culturally stagnant, and why no matter who is nominally in power, the ideology is the same, then we need to look to the fact that politicians are only the public face of the problem, and too often they are simply puppets. The real control, and the real damage, is going on all around them, but they have no willingness, nor perhaps the capability, to resist it. If we support the mainstream parties, our choice is between what we have now, which is a government of activists who are going to support the agenda of the blob, or what we saw with the last Conservative government, which gave up challenging the blob and simply went along with it. In other words, you get exactly the same outcomes whichever party is in power, but with the Conservatives it happens slightly slower.

Many of us have argued in the past for a small state. I think we can now see that this argument has caused the problems we now face. When government devolves its responsibilities to unelected and unaccountable bodies, they get taken over by post-Marxist ideology, and then government either supports this ideology or else does not have the power or the will to do anything to oppose it. There is no alternative but for government to take back what it has given away.

So our country is in an emergency situation, and we therefore need appropriate solutions. There is an immediate need for a strong patriotic national government that will make it its business to tackle the blob, and that will take back power from the post-Marxists by whatever means necessary. It will need to make itself an enemy of the middle classes which have come to depend on post-Marxist ideology, and to instead ally itself with the working class of this country, and that will mean that it cannot be composed of career politicians. It will need to be prepared to fight every dirty trick that the professional classes can throw at it, and it will need to abolish many of the laws that have been introduced since 1997. It will also need to oppose the powerful financial interests that are working through charities and NGOs to push post-Marxist ideas into national policy. It will need to put a complete stop to illegal immigration and begin an extensive programme of repatriation. Lastly, it will need to rebuild our economy so that we are no longer dependent on foreign ownership, because this always comes with strings attached.

It will not be easy and it will not be quick, but we are now in an existential crisis where this is the only option, and we need men and women who are able to commit to making Britain great again and restoring a decent and civilised society.

So let us end by going back to the Bard,

And you, good yeoman,
Whose limbs were made in England, show us here
The mettle of your pasture; let us swear
That you are worth your breeding; which I doubt not;
For there is none of you so mean and base,
That hath not noble lustre in your eyes.
I see you stand like greyhounds in the slips,
Straining upon the start. The game’s afoot:
Follow your spirit, and upon this charge
Cry ‘God for Harry, England, and Saint George!”[xi]

NOTES:

[i] See https://www.waterstones.com/blog/family-fortunes-adam-rutherford-on-how-were-all-related-to-royalty
[ii] Shakespeare: King John – Bastard, Act 5 Scene 7
[iii] Tony Cliff: “Deflected Permanent Revolution” (1963) retrieved from https://www.marxists.org/archive/cliff/works/1963/xx/permrev.htm
[iv] See Thomas R. Bates: “Gramsci and the Theory of Hegemony”, Journal of the History of Ideas Vol. 36 no. 2 (Apr-Jun 1975), University of Pennsylvania Press, pp. 351-366, retrieved from https://www.jstor.org/stable/2708933
[v] Christopher Snowdon: “Sock puppets; how the government lobbies itself and why”, Institute of Economic Affairs Discussion Paper no. 39, June 2012, retrieved from https://iea.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/DP_Sock%20Puppets_redesigned.pdf
[vi] https://register-of-charities.charitycommission.gov.uk/en/charity-search/-/charity-details/1013880
[vii] Allison Pearson: “Nigel Farage speaks for the millions ashamed of what Britain has become”, The Telegraph, 2 September 2025, retrieved from https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/09/02/nigel-farage-house-judiciary-committee-free-speech-starmer
[viii] See Julie Henry “Why White working-class children fail: The race divide in English schools”, The Telegraph, 30 August 2025, retrived from https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/08/30/why-white-children-fail-the-race-divide-in-english-schools/
[ix] Hans-Hermann Hoppe, “Democracy: The God That Failed: The Economics and Politics of Monarchy, Democracy and Natural Order”. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers (2001), pp. 216–218 “”There can be no tolerance toward democrats and communists in a libertarian social order. They will have to be physically separated and removed from society.”
[x] See for example https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8458865/New-report-blames-Whitehalls-blob-civil-servants-scientists-coronavirus-failures.html
[xi] Shakespeare: King Henry, Henry V – Act III, Scene I

This speech is released under a Creative Commons CC BY 4.0 licence, which means it can be freely reproduced and quoted from providing the author is acknowledged.