by John Kersey

The Heritage and Destiny Annual Meeting – “Honour the Past – Conquer the Future” – took place at Preston, Lancashire, on 9 September. This year, the meeting honoured Derek Beackon and Andrew  Brons, and remembered Sir Oswald Mosley and Ian Stuart Donaldson.

The text of my speech to the meeting is below. A video will follow in due course.

Mr Chairman, ladies and gentlemen, the theme of our meeting today is “Honour the Past – Conquer the Future”, and I am going to address that theme. Let me begin with a few views on where we are politically at the moment.

Our political system has changed radically in the past forty years. The most significant change has been that we are no longer ruled in the national interest. Our Prime Minister often seems weak and ineffective precisely because he is. The policy and the agenda are not being set in Westminster any more. Instead, they are set internationally, by a web of treaties, international agreements and international organizations – the World Economic Forum, the World Health Organization and the United Nations among others – to which our nation is tied and by which it is controlled. It is through this web that the global corporate interests who pull the strings operate, allied to a plethora of think tanks, academia, the media and non-government institutions through which their funding is channelled and their influence bought. It looks a lot like an unelected world government. And in this context, nations are forced into lockstep. If Rishi Sunak wanted to change any of this, he can’t, because he simply doesn’t have the power to do it.

I don’t deny that there are still people today who go into politics because they have a genuine concern for people and want to make their lives better. I am well aware we have a number of them here today. However, most successful politicians at national level are there because if they please their masters, they can move effortlessly from political office to positions of money and influence with the corporate sector and its wider web of influence. They don’t get to change the agenda, but they do get to benefit from it.

At the moment, the British system of democracy is broken. Even when the Conservative Party was delivered a true mandate from the people of Britain at the last election, resulting in an eighty-seat majority, they have achieved nothing significant since Brexit, and the Brexit they have delivered was not the one the British people voted for. The agenda that the government have enacted is that of the globalists, and it has nothing to do with the interests of the ordinary people of this country, who are increasingly regarded by politicians with contempt and disregard. The proof of this can be found in the Liz Truss government, which tried to introduce some actual conservative policies only to find itself blocked by the same international financial markets that are controlled by the global corporations.

On the face of it, the Conservative government claims to be of the right. Yet their actions prove entirely otherwise. The truth is that the Conservatives gave up being of the Right around 2005 and instead adopted a Faustian pact. The deal was that they would not challenge the globalist and authoritarian left agenda. In return, they would be allowed to enrich themselves and benefit both personally and financially. We now have the biggest gap between rich and poor since before 1939. The poor are taught to know their place and that if they step out of line, they will be crushed. The rich are taught that if they speak out, they will be cancelled.

When we see our politicians shrug their shoulders faced with our grotesque cost of living crisis, we are witnessing the truth of their powerlessness. They, of course, are insulated from the misery inflicted on ordinary folk. But they are also controlled from above. In the 1970s, we had a socialist government that promised, and largely delivered, a cradle to grave welfare state. We had a working NHS, a working education system and cheap public transport. The present government spends far more money now than it did then, but it is no longer concerned with improving the lives of its citizens. It will spend our money on war with Russia, green policies and overseas aid, and leave our elderly to freeze. It will shut our schools because it did not fund the investment necessary to keep their buildings in good order. It will allow our public transport system to be run for profit by private, and often foreign, companies who are out to fleece us of every penny they can. And the line between private and public interest in the NHS has become so blurred that it often seems that doctors are simply salespeople for Big Pharma.

And if politicians question the tactics that are being used by their corporate masters, they are cast out. Consider Andrew Bridgen, MP, who lost the Conservative whip for voicing the concerns of a cardiologist about the harm being done by Covid vaccines. If you want to be part of the globalist club, you can’t criticise Big Pharma, however many people happen to be dying suddenly. And you also can’t escape the agenda for more control over people’s lives. Whether it be state surveillance, central bank digital currencies, net zero or the increasing merger of the state with the corporate world, nobody prominent in politics is standing up for freedom or privacy. It’s more than their job’s worth.

That censorship also extends to the way in which we are losing the freedom of speech that many of us consider to be an integral part of the character of our nation. The mass public use of the internet is now around twenty-five years old. We had two good decades during which there was a great deal of opportunity, entrepreneurialism and plenty of chances for independent voices to be heard.

Now we are entering into a new age of censorship and control where the online environment is being drastically remodelled according to the corporate agenda. Giant online corporations – Google, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter – have shut out the competition in a massive centralization of market power, and everything is being made subject to a commercial purpose, usually the serving of advertising. It is also being actively controlled. What you see on these platforms is not random, but instead a carefully manipulated algorithmic nexus of advertising and content designed to lead you to spend more time and money on the platform.

The globalist interest is overtly censoring whatever it finds unacceptable, often under the pretext of “disinformation”. And much of what is presented as spontaneous reaction online has in fact been carefully arranged and manipulated behind the scenes. This is why when the media reports on particular stories, we as seasoned observers can predict which facts will be omitted from the story and what reactions are going to be allowed. And every time we feed these systems data, it is gathering that data and using it to profile us.

This situation gives free rein to militant interest groups, who can use the minority group that they claim to represent as a means to push woke ideas online and to cancel those individuals who question them. These people seek to make others afraid to oppose them, because the power that they can muster online is capable of destroying businesses and individual livelihoods.

This kind of bullying goes unquestioned and unchecked because it suits the globalist agenda. Globalists don’t necessarily believe in the agenda of the militant interest groups, but they find that agenda to be an extremely useful tool in their aim to bring an end to national identity, culture, a cohesive society and to overcome any other barrier to people becoming compliant, faceless servants of global power. So it is happy to push Marxist ideas that destroy our institutions and our society, and that reduce it to atomised individuals whose will to resist has been broken and who are caught up in the distraction of Marxist identity politics where nothing is genuine or permanent and everything can be manipulated. Likewise, the relentless push of mass immigration is another attempt to break down those aspects of society that will resist the globalist agenda.

A successful society depends on a relatively high level of trust between its members. This is how our society used to be, and the trust level has gone down rapidly in the past thirty years. Where there is low trust, society falls apart and in a worst case scenario we are left with a Mad Max world. And this, ultimately, is why the globalist agenda will fail.

In the future, we will need to adopt a more selective and critical approach to technology. Technology in itself is neutral, but in practice it becomes controlled by forces that are often hostile to us. Everything is presented to us in terms of convenience. But that convenience comes at a price. And convenience is not good for us – it turns us into passive consumers.

We are also facing an imminent revolution of artificial intelligence. It is predicted that in the future most online content, including writing, music and film, will be generated by AI rather than written by humans. So again we have a choice. We will need to stand up for humanity and its values. The individual and the imperfect are always preferable to sterile perfection. Rather than become more like machines, we need to reemphasise our true nature and our connection to the divine.

There is precedent for this in one of the most successful examples of a group maintaining its culture separately from the mainstream. I am talking about the Amish in the United States. Contrary to popular belief, not all Amish groups completely reject modern technology, but all of them consider it critically before they accept it. They ask the important questions; is this for the good of our people? Will this help or hinder our way of life and our values? And will it interfere with our relationship with God? Mankind has only been industrialised relatively recently. If we look at the way in which we have existed through much of our history, we find organic communities living close to nature. The stresses of the city and the impositions of modern life are not our natural state. We need to find alternatives that replace machine-scale living with human-scale living.

Here is an uncomfortable truth; efforts to wake up the masses are a waste of time. For years we might have thought that the day would come when the British people as a whole would speak truth to power and bring about positive and meaningful change. But the pandemic showed this to be a fantasy. It hasn’t all been bad news, though. We have succeeded in raising awareness. The issues that we care about are at least now firmly on the national agenda even if they are being discussed by others and not on our terms. And never believe the lie that there are not many, many people out there who will agree with everything we are talking about as long as they do so in private and in situations where they risk nothing by giving their opinion. Unfortunately, the reality is that most people will compromise when it comes to truth. As long as they have a minimal level of comfort and safety, and sometimes not even then, they will not rock the boat. They have been conditioned by the political classes to know their place. They are where the globalists want them; weak, afraid and controlled.

So I’m here to talk to those of us who are awake, because it’s in your hands that our future lies. If we are going to keep our people, our culture and our way of life alive, we need to be concentrating on doing what is necessary to survive. Nobody is coming to save us. Certainly we should continue to engage with electoral politics when that is possible, but we need to take other measures too, because the change that is going on around us is too rapid for us to endure. The rate of immigration to our country is deliberately being kept high not least because it is preventing the building of a serious united resistance movement. The globalists know the truth is that in order to rule, you first divide.

The first thing I want to emphasise is that we will be judged by our descendants as to how we conduct ourselves in the present and coming adversity. We must provide them with an example to follow. Each of us is the result of the love of thousands. Let us listen to the voices of our ancestors as they tell us to fulfil our destiny and do our duty as we preserve their values and meet the challenges of our age with resolve, strength, integrity  and wisdom.

And we should be aiming not only to survive, but to really live. All of us see plenty of content on social media that is devoted either to complaint, to passive endurance or to escapism. To despair or to embrace nihilism is all too understandable, but this is a defeatist, soul-killing mentality that does no honour to our ancestors. We need to keep a proper perspective and accept that whatever our fate may hold for us, we need to genuinely love life and get the most out of it that we possibly can. We were born for this life and we have no other. Our lives have purpose and meaning, and there is still plenty of pleasure and fulfilment to be had. Rather than gravitating to those schools of thought that teach us to hate our lives, that destroy pleasure and that suppress our vigour, the best thing to do is to embrace the simple truth that there is no point worrying about things that we can’t change.

We need to truly engage with life to get the best out of it. Our movement talks a lot about the fulfilment of family life and I can certainly recommend that from my own experience. But for those who don’t have a family, there is still a lot to enjoy. Men of my father’s and grandfather’s generation cultivated interests that absorbed them and kept them going, as well as providing a means to get involved with like-minded others should they want to. We could also talk at length about the benefits of getting out in nature, and the fulfilment that comes from developing your spiritual life.

But above all one of the best things to do is actively to engage with our rich culture and heritage, whether as an enthusiastic observer or fan, or as someone who makes or does things. And so I’m going to talk about creativity, and specifically about music.

An important truth about doing anything creative is that the point at which you’re going to achieve anything worthwhile is when you stop worrying about whether what you’re doing is any good. You need to turn off your inner critic and stop listening to outside critics. In art or music you need to be able to make mistakes and to revise what you’ve done as you develop further on your artistic journey. The more you put in to your work of yourself, the more meaning it will have both for you and for others. And the more you develop yourself through absorbing as much of our culture as you can, the more you will have to say through any creative output.

At the present time, creativity is subjected to commercial exploitation and control by an establishment that says that the only definition of having “made it” is to achieve commercial and critical success on their terms. They say of us that we have no culture, and only the Left has. And it’s easy to say that when being left-wing is a requirement for their promotion. But musical freedom comes the moment you say it isn’t about the money or the fame, or about what anyone, powerful or not, thinks of it. It’s about the need to engage with our culture and community, to create, to communicate and to inspire. The reward isn’t money or fame. The reward is doing it and making your audience feel that you have connected with them in a way that nothing else can.

At the moment, the mainstream of music is stagnant. There’s nothing there that is going to inspire anybody, however heavily it is promoted. We need to get back to music that is made live in our own communities by our own people. We need music that bursts with raw truth, energy and attitude. We need people to rediscover our traditions of folk music, art music and British rock ‘n’ roll. And when this happens, we will find out again that one song can influence and inspire more people than dozens of political podcasts.

A lot of attention lately has focused on Oliver Anthony’s song “Rich Men North of Richmond”. Whatever happens to him in the future, we won’t forget that this was a song that spoke for a generation and that reflected some hard, universal truths. And it came from one man and his guitar, standing in a wood, originally recorded on his mobile phone.

You don’t need anyone’s permission to get out there and make music. You don’t even need formal training – many musicians learn simply by copying the records they like. And you don’t need anyone’s approval. Whatever you do, some people will like it and others won’t, and everyone will have an opinion. But if it is truly yours, if it speaks your truth in your language, as the latest link in a chain stretching back to the bards who inspired our ancestors, then it has an integrity that nobody can take away. You will have created a legacy that has the potential to reach beyond your own life and that can share your ideas, your outlook and your emotions in a way that could be an inspiration for others.

My own field is Western art music. It’s the richest legacy we could possibly have. It speaks to us of the best that we can be. It is a living, breathing artform with divine power and essence. And there is no barrier to discovering it. Every great musical work is available to listen to online for free. Never let anyone make you think that the very best in our culture and heritage is not your birthright. Try it, and you might well find you like it – because your ancestors certainly did.

This year, sales of cassette tapes reached their highest level since 2003. Vinyl is already firmly re-established. That shows that people are coming back to the depth and richness of analogue sound. Where digital sound is clinical and inhuman, we need to get back to recordings that sound real again. Again, it’s about prioritising the things that define us.

So I say to you today, do creativity, whether in music, or art, or poetry, or anything else that you can do. Do it for our culture, for our heritage and for our people. Do it so that once again our culture is a grass roots movement, by and of the people, and not a top-down movement where everything is dictated by commercial masters. And do it because we need creativity to inspire us. Let me end with the words of Irish poet John Anster,

What you can do, or dream you can, begin it,
Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it,
Only engage, and then the mind grows heated—
Begin it, and the work will be completed!