On May 10, 2025, I addressed the Traditional Britain Group Annual Luncheon in London.
The text of my speech is below.
As I speak to you today, we have recently seen Reform’s extremely impressive performance in the local elections, and if such a performance were to be repeated at a General Election, Nigel Farage would be our next Prime Minister. This is highly significant because it is the first time in living memory that there has been any disruption to the two-party system of government in this country by a new party of the Right. It tells us that voters are not only looking for change but are prepared to put their trust in Reform, doubtless in no small part because of Nigel Farage’s high profile.
It is interesting to note that one extremely skilful aspect of Nigel Farage’s public image is his appearance. Yes, like most politicians, he tends to wear dark suits when he appears on political programmes on television. But when he is canvassing and speaking in public, he alone among our party leaders and prominent politicians wears classic English country clothes. We see him wearing tweed jackets, Barbours, tattersall check shirts, ties with pheasants on them, yellow corduroys and red chinos. These things are the nearest thing we have to an English national costume for men. They at once mark out the wearer as an Englishman, but moreover they speak of his affinity with the rural rather than the urban, and with traditionalism rather than the modern. They are also quintessentially masculine. This is therefore not just clothes, it is a set of values. Of course, we will need to see whether Nigel Farage can follow this up with policies that match his appearance, but we can see from this that he is at least visually distancing himself from the current establishment.
What this image suggests is something fundamental to our identity as a nation. It is that of society on a human scale. We find this most clearly expressed in rural life because it is there that we see the traditional concept of Englishness in the rural professions, above all agriculture, as well as communities that are built around villages and market towns, most of which have managed to preserve at least some of their historic buildings. There has been much technological change in farming over the last few decades, but it has generally been absorbed within the same outlook as has always been characteristic of those who are in touch with the land and with livestock. There is above all a continuity and long-term view in rural life that is very different from the alienation that predominates in the urban setting. The rural existence is an indigenous way of life, and reminds us of our heritage, our identity, and that we are rooted in the very soil of our nation. It is also a life that includes not only purposeful activity but stillness and silence. As so eloquently summed up by the ruralist farmer and author Henry Williamson, “What is this life, if, full of care, we have no time to stand and stare?”
But our political class is generally opposed to rural life. It has become a regrettable aspect of our political system that it is now dominated by urban concerns and urban people, and that the voice of the countryside is increasingly excluded. This began with the Labour government of 1997, and many will remember the Countryside Marches in London in those years in protest at the government’s policy on rural affairs, including the Liberty and Livelihood march in 2002. We would have to go back before 1997 to remember politicians who had a genuinely rural perspective, such as the late Sir Richard Body, who was a great supporter of environmental issues and the natural and organic communities that are the bedrock of the countryside. Rather than this, we have seen in more recent years the banning of hunting and now potentially of trail hunting, the substantial increase in bureaucracy and regulation in farming, and now the potentially enormously damaging imposition of death duties on farms, many of which are worth a lot in terms of their land value but actually do not make much in terms of profit. The position seems to be that our present politicians want there to be fewer farms, presumably so they can cover empty farmland either with housing or with solar panels. They also want to feed our cows additives that reduce their methane output, a matter on which former Reform MP Rupert Lowe has expressed concern.
I do not believe our farmers will stand for this, as witness the tractor protests in London earlier this year, and nor do I think they will simply be bought off. To farm is to understand the profound connexion between ourselves and the natural environment, and to be the antithesis of those who we might rightly say know the price of everything and the value of nothing. If we understand Nature and its laws, then we know the fundamentals on which everything worthwhile is based, and also comprehend that to be against Nature is to be against life itself.
From a rural perspective, our view of the destiny of our nation is very different from that of our politicians. Since the 1980s, the dominant consensus in our politics has been that of internationalism. One reason why so much faith has been lost in our democracy – and as witness I cite the pitiful turnout at the last General Election – is because politicians are increasingly blatant in their rule for the benefit of an elite class, and in too many cases place their personal interests before any ethos of public service. They take their lead not from the working people of this country but from unaccountable international bodies, not least the World Economic Forum. I say that this is entirely wrong. Our government is elected by our people to rule for their benefit, to put the national interest first, and not to sacrifice it for the benefit of the so-called international community. And politics is about solving people’s problems. While I certainly have political disagreements with the Liberal Democrats, one thing I will say of them is that they have well understood the importance of engaging directly with local people on local issues and being visible and active in their local communities. We all need to learn from that example, because it achieves far more positive results than grandstanding on the international stage.
Our people see the increasing damage that this approach is doing in their daily lives. They are the ones who are faced with the harsh realities of the past decades. If we look to our towns that grew up around now-dead British industries, we now see a catalogue of neglect of these communities and more importantly a loss of hope. No government can look at generations of our people surviving on benefits because there are no jobs for them and say that is any kind of success. And we should remember that we lost our industries because they were sacrificed to cheap foreign imports. The argument is always that our industries are uneconomic and cannot survive amid market pressure. But market pressure in this context is not a neutral force. It represents nations competing not merely on the price and quality of goods, but nations competing for power and influence in foreign countries. If we do not want to sacrifice that power and influence as a nation, we must accept that the purely economic interest cannot always be the deciding factor.
There seems to be no solution to this situation coming from our politicians, and we now have a rampant cost of living crisis that shows no signs of being tackled effectively and that is yet again hitting the poorest in society the hardest. Our political class often seems to ignore the realities of life outside the Westminster bubble. Those realities in our towns and cities are of an increasingly fractured nation and also one that is increasingly plagued by violence and anti-social behaviour.
If we look at the causes of this, we can see a major reason being uncontrolled mass immigration. One problem that this creates is that we move from a high trust to a low trust society. If we look at historical British communities, even up to the last years of the last century, we see a predominance of a shared culture among our indigenous people. I remain to be convinced that there was anyone who lived through the Second World War who did not know all the popular songs of that era by heart. There was a cultural basis of Christian principle that even if it did not express itself in churchgoing, was still a part of our politics, our judicial system, our schools and our arts. And there was a justifiable pride in our nation as a civilised influence that had rightly been highly regarded around the world. And that is before we get to our many local traditions. All of this created bonds between people in a way that mere proximity never could. Even our customs were held in common. It was rightly said that when two Englishmen met as strangers, their first talk would be of the weather, and there were standards of appearance and behaviour that were part of our culture and observed by most people.
What Nigel Farage wears now was at one time not unusual to see in most men of the country and still can be found there. Away from this, it is not so long ago that we can remember when both young and not so young people would dress according to particular tribes and enthusiasms in music. Now, we have a predominance of “athleisure” which makes everyone look the same. That, of course, seems now to be the whole point, because most people no longer want to stand out or look distinctive.
High trust is what makes a society work. Low trust, on the other hand, occurs when people are forced to live and work with others who may hold very different and opposing values to their own. The Ancient Greeks understood this, and Aristotle expressed the view that democracy was only possible within homogeneous societies, whereas those which were fragmented would be ruled by despots. The key was philia, which he defined in his work Rhetoric as “wanting for someone what one thinks good, for his sake and not for one’s own, and being inclined, so far as one can, to do such things for him.” It can be seen that such a principle was historically present in our Britain, indeed it represents one of the finest aspects of the archetypal British character. Where it exists, it produces a unity and commonality in society which is then based on mutuality, trust and respect.
But our government in recent decades has not wanted a unified society. It has done everything to ensure that divisions, whether ethnic, cultural or class-based, have come to predominate in Britain today. Rather than strengthening democracy, this promotes an unaccountable rule which does not govern for the benefit of the people but rather for an elite sector that sees itself as having a responsibility to control the people by telling them what to do and what to think. The growth in the nanny state is due to this, and we can see the Covid lockdowns as a dry run for a controlled population that would willingly follow instructions from on high that deprived them of even the basic comforts of human contact with loved ones and the liberty of free movement.
As people are increasingly controlled by the state, so their liberties are ever more circumscribed. Opinion is now only permitted within narrow boundaries set by the political elite. We have seen people thrown in prison for statements that were not only conceded to have been legal, but in many cases were also true. We have seen something that I had only thought would happen in societies like Communist China; foreign websites unable to permit British visitors access, because they are unable to comply with the Online Safety Act. It is essential that we should regain our faith in freedom of speech and our commitment to it as one of the most fundamental freedoms that a civilised nation should uphold. On matters of politics and religion in particular, there must be a freedom to voice and debate all opinions openly, and we must end the belief that anyone’s right not to be offended should take priority over the principle of freedom of speech.
One major reason why we have ended up in this situation is that our society has been deliberately dumbed down. There has been a movement in government to prioritize safety and security rather than favouring risk and its rewards. This has led to a system of centralized control, a significant increase in regulation, and a tick-box culture that cannot cope with anything that is not objectively quantified, with technology increasingly used to monitor and enforce. Individual and local variation, and more significantly, any suggestion of difference or subjectivity, have been forced out in favour of uniformity and consistency. There is no greater enemy of excellence than this agenda. It favours the mediocre and the time-serving. And this is fundamentally against human nature, which represents a genuine diversity of all kinds and which flourishes in conditions of freedom.
My school and university education was centred upon academic excellence, and in those days it was rightly said that a person with a good degree from a top university then had the capacity to attain a reasonable mastery of any subject they might choose, because they had acquired the analytical and research techniques that they could apply to anything. The acquisition of a critical faculty was seen as essential. We would know what we considered good and bad and we would be able to justify those positions with some form of reference to the aesthetic foundations laid by others or to wider religious, moral or cultural principle. The traditional liberal education of the English worked on the tolerant and civilised principle that all ideas regardless of their merit should be heard, and that those which were bad or wrong could then be shown to be so through rational debate. An important principle of this was that people had the freedom to advance ideas that might later be shown to be wrong, or to change their mind about what they believed, without those things then being held against them. Someone’s politics, unless they were running for office, were generally held to be a private matter, and the topics of politics and religion were placed off-limits in certain social situations because of their capacity to cause division. Even when there was strong disagreement, it was right that we would echo Evelyn Beatrice Hall in her biography of Voltaire in saying “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”
Now, people are encouraged not to ask questions, and to accept blindly anything outside their specialism that is delivered by those who are proclaimed as experts, even when this is subjective opinion. This is an agenda all about control and the suppression of dissent, whereby those who defy the views of the mainstream are cancelled and many are afraid to speak their minds openly. One major reason why this has happened is because the ideas that are held by the mainstream in some cases will not stand up to rational debate, and therefore need to be protected by censorship.
We are also seeing the growth in political decisions which are made not based on accountability to the people of this country but rather are abdicated to nebulous international forces over which voters are given no say and which politicians will simply treat as beyond their control. We learned recently that our government intends to put pollutants into the air to dim the light of the Sun. The Guardian called this “barking mad” and they are right to do so – it is not only barking mad but potentially catastrophic. Eight states of the USA have recently introduced laws that prohibit solar geoengineering, but Britain still persists. And nobody here voted for anything like this. We were never asked. Yet the government has every intention of pressing ahead with this and anything else that will prove its loyalty to the United Nations’ Agenda 2030. It is to be hoped that Reform, which has expressed its opposition to net zero, will soon start to exert enough pressure to stop this dangerous lunacy in its tracks.
Unlike the United States, where the Constitution acts as a unifying force, we have nothing in Britain that could bind us together except for our own indigenous identity as an island nation, giving rise to our culture and its values which were once revered the world over. We have moved from a situation where immigrants to Britain at least in some cases admired and wanted to be a part of our culture, to one where immigration has now given rise to deeply divided communities in which there is no assimilation and the reasons for coming here are largely economic rather than cultural.
It is no coincidence that this has happened along with the promotion of globalist mass culture, largely online, in which we have lost much of the distinctiveness of our own cultural output and are now being fed the same bland globalist slop as the rest of the world. For this reason, I believe it is imperative that we should rediscover and reclaim our national culture in all its vigour and variety.
Some say that this is a downward spiral from which there is no escape. This is not so. All the problems that I have outlined could be solved in this country by a British government committed to restore our liberties and to once again put our national interest and our people first. It would take a tremendous effort, it would involve radical and major change, and it would be done in the face of enormous opposition by the current establishment, but it is nevertheless achievable and it would probably be easier than it might at first sight seem.
The vision which needs to be put forward is very different from the current viewpoint. It foresees a Britain that in many ways is less a part of the international community, that withdraws from its membership of international bodies where that membership is not in the national interest, just as we did with the European Union, and that focuses instead on meeting the needs of our citizens first and foremost.
The money that goes to meeting what are known as our international obligations would instead go to providing first class public services in which the public service ethos would be restored and self-interest deprecated. We should also ensure that Britain is self-sufficient and does not become reliant on foreign imports, foreign labour, or foreign ownership of our industries or our utilities, because with this comes the risk of ceding national control to interests which may at times not be favourably disposed towards us. We should once again take measures to encourage small business and revive our high streets, and not simply give in to the pressures of global big business. We should ensure that our police focus on violent crime and anti-social behaviour so that people again feel that they can walk the streets safely. This requires above all a visible police presence on the streets – officers walking the beat – and a return to local policing, where police officers serve their local communities, are themselves known there, and in turn know the people who form that community.
And we should ensure that our borders are protected and that any person who arrives in this country illegally, or is found to have done so subsequently, is not housed at the taxpayer’s expense, nor supported by our benefits system, but is instead sent back to their home country as quickly as possible. A full overhaul of the immigration system would be based on the fact that we should in all cases be training and employing our own people to fill job vacancies and not relying on cheap unskilled imported labour.
We can also see some excellent measures begun by Reform at the local level that could be scaled up nationally. The first is the end to net zero policies, which would bankrupt our country and are grossly disproportionate considering Britain’s minimal global contribution to carbon emissions. The second is an end to wokeism and the culture of diversity, equity and inclusion, which has far too often simply become a means to push Marxist ideas and to attack White people. We need D.E.I. to D.I.E.
These are some of the things that could be done with the right government. But what if this does not happen? What if things do not go well for us and we, the indigenous British, become a minority in our own country, as some predictions indicate will happen and as is already the case in several of our cities? It is imperative that we ensure our survival and preservation if this should come to pass. And there are still things we can do to ensure that what survives of us is something that reflects the debt we owe to our ancestors –the “democracy of the dead” as the late Sir Roger Scruton put it – and the responsibility we have to our descendants. And we can begin doing all of these things now. We should only put our energy into politics if there is a realistic prospect of winning power at least at some level. If not, we should bypass politics entirely and concentrate on other ways to improve our lives and prospects.
The first thing to do is to take every opportunity to promote solidarity among our people. We need to learn from other nations and peoples in the world who are unashamed about their identity and culture, and stand up for our own. That which is good for our people is to be prized. We need to keep our traditions and culture alive, and to ensure that whatever happens we never compromise the values that make us who we are. Where we stand, we stand in peace, and with dignity and integrity, and we never forget that our duty is to set an example, however difficult the circumstances we may face.
As consumers, we make choices every time we make a purchase. What if we were to decide wherever possible to trade and buy with our own people rather than with globalist corporations? What if we were to focus our purchases upon things that reflect our culture and values, rather than a culture and values which are imposed on us by others? What if, when we could, we started businesses or non-profits that would provide something useful and valuable to our communities? We can make these choices, but we are too often pressured into avoiding them. Let us resist that pressure. Often, small and local is the best way to be.
And lastly, we need never to forget ourselves and the noble mission in which each of us can play our part. I will end with the words of that great patriotic poet Sir Henry Newbolt:
To set the cause above renown,
To love the game beyond the prize,
To honour, while you strike him down,
The foe that comes with fearless eyes;
To count the life of battle good,
And dear the land that gave you birth,
And dearer yet the brotherhood
That binds the brave of all the earth.
(from “Clifton Chapel”)
Professor John Kersey 