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By Alek Yerbury

Party Leader

 

Of all the qualities that made our people great, the greatest is the ability to organise. To create order out of chaos. To take an inundation of resources and people and arraign them in an efficient way. This quality is one which is supremely important in any political movement, because an organised force will always overcome a disorganised one, in the same way that a Roman legion fighting for each other would always overcome a mob of Celts predominantly fighting for themselves.

 

I know various people who attended the ‘Unite the Kingdom’ march on Saturday 13th. I did not, for reasons I have made clear in many forums, and I still would not attend any event organised or headlined by Stephen Lennon (AKA Tommy Robinson). I had a mixture of feedback, but then those people went for different reasons.

 

The real value in looking at that event is to assess it in terms of strengths and weaknesses especially in relation to the political ‘left’, or at least the political ‘establishment’. When you do this, it becomes obvious that the strength is in the numbers that turn up, and the glaring weakness is in organisation of those numbers. To illustrate this I’ll compare the standard organisation and operation of the ‘left’ and the ‘right’.

 

The ‘Left’

The political left are organised in a collectivised, hierarchical way. This is especially true of the activist left. They are organised in the same way that a military force is organised. The overall leaders pass instructions to sub-group leaders, who then disseminate those instructions to their own localised groups. Accounting for people is done at lower levels. For example, a Sheffield organiser will account for those in Sheffield and make arrangements for those people, and the ultimate organiser can simply deal with that ONE person instead of having to deal with everyone individually. Everything is organised around groups, and this saves enormous amounts of time and energy from being wasted. It is very easy to organise things like transport, protests, etc, without even having to resort to very generic ‘call outs’ on the public domain internet in the hope that people just turn up. The organisation makes people more reliable and makes communication a hundred times easier.

 

The ‘Right’

The political right, by contrast, is overwhelmingly organised around individuals. There is a real culture of ‘e-celebrity’ and idolatry of individual people, and these people are the only lynchpin of communication that exists between the ‘masses’ of supporters. The compounding issue here is that these individuals often have little ability to organise. Organising events on the ‘right’ involves a high-profile person putting out some generic information, and then expecting random people to turn up. You can never be certain who will even appear until the day, if anyone. It is effectively left to the whims of every individual, whether they simply feel like doing something on that particular day. The main reason for this lack of organisation is because most people on the ‘right’ do not communicate with each other, or even attempt to. There could have been a thousand people from the same postcode who turned up to ‘Unite the Kingdom’ and at least 995 of them wouldn’t have had any idea that was the case, either before or afterwards. They’d go home none the wiser.

 

Why is this important?

This contrast is important to highlight because organisation is the key to sustained and effective activity. 100,000 people turning up to one place for a few hours, then going home afterwards and doing nothing of political consequence, is politically impotent. If those people all went back to their own cities, towns, villages, and continued political activity in their own locality, along with all of the other people from that locality that went, every week, then it would have an enormous political impact. But that can only be done if people are organised and communicate with each other.

 

The ‘left’ at present constantly win, especially over a sustained period of time, because they have this ability to organise. Many people fuss over the way that they seem to perpetually ‘bus in’ hordes of activists, protestors and supporters on a weekly basis. This isn’t because of money – the individual cost is very low – rather it is because they are much more organised. Someone can safely lay out £500 on a coach knowing that they have a list of fifty names who will almost certainly turn up and reimburse them. Someone on the ‘right’ at present cannot do this because the attendance is so dependent on whims that the chances are that 90% of those who said they will turn up, won’t, and the person who laid the money out will end up out of pocket.

 

The biggest deficiency within the ‘right’ or within ‘nationalism’ is the lack of organisation, and this must be addressed in order to advance, because 100,000 people who are disorganised will always lose to 1,000 people who ARE organised. This is why we have this constant situation whereby no matter how many people on the ‘right’ turn up to something, it seems to make no political difference in the medium and long term. The lack of organisation and communication equals a lack of sustained activity which equals political impotence.

 

How do we ‘organise’ the ‘right’?

The first step, is to recognise that the existing ‘activist right’ – things like Unite the Kingdom – is inherently and pathologically disorganised, and stop attempting to organise that entire faction on its own. There is no conceivable way that one person or even a small group of people can go into an anarchic, chaotic, leaderless crowd of 100,000 people and somehow control it. I do not believe there is even the ability to recruit people at events like that, because the majority of people there do not actually want to be organised.

 

Once you are prepared to write off this faction of politics, then the real work can begin of looking for people who do in fact want to be organised and in numbers that you can actually control. Instead of seeking out the largest and most chaotic crowds, look for smaller ones where the ability to co-ordinate people or small groups of people is greater. Find semi-organised groups that exist at a smaller scale, for example local residents’ associations, community groups, protest groups, etc. These are much more workable than festival style events where the numbers are in six figures but the reasons people have for attending are so random that nothing can be done with them.

 

At a Party level, and we have already started the process of doing this, leadership at a Branch and Regional level must be given the information they need to effectively co-ordinate people, and we must start emulating the organisational strategy of the left, where the ultimate decision makers are not having to individually communicate with and account for every single individual person. Party Leaders cannot function as secretaries communicating between individual members or sub-unit leaders, passing messages back and forth. Those people MUST communicate with each other.

 

At the same time, the culture of idolatry of individuals and ‘celebrity’ must be worked against, because it is a complete hindrance to any political cause. Political action must be organised around ideals and movements, NOT around individual people. If the way that the ‘left’ organises yields them better results, especially in the medium and long-term, then instead of denigrating those methods, copy them.