“No civilisation has invited invaders in and put them up in four-star hotels”: Professor James Orr

In a recent interview with the BBC, you said the Centre for a Better Britain will be driven by a “post-Brexit, pro-nation, pro-sovereignty, pro-Britain impulse and framework.” Does this mean that recent British governments were not driven by these factors?

There’s a caucus within the Conservative Party that likes to call itself the One Nation Tories—echoing Disraeli’s Sybil. But they’re not One Nation Tories. They’re No Nation Tories. They no longer believe in the nation; they believe in supranational structures to which we should subordinate our sovereignty.

The Labour Party, the other half of this duopoly that has wrecked Britain for 25 years, is made up of three client classes: the public sector class—loyal to their paymasters; the so-called rainbow people—hyper-liberal sexual progressives pushing identity politics; and finally, the Crescent—an increasingly confident political Islam that rejects the sovereignty of the nation-state altogether. None of these groups are loyal to Britain as a nation.

The reason there cannot be a better Britain with that duopoly is because they don’t recognise Britain, they don’t like Britain, they want to repudiate Britain—its heritage, its history, its people. Reform UK, on the other hand, is the only political force with a meaningful chance of success that still believes in the nation.

What happened to traditional conservative parties like the Tories in Britain or the CDU in Germany?

I suppose conservative parties are not always good at radically changing outlook and policies when the facts on the ground change. But in the past 25 years, we’ve faced unprecedented challenges—the fiscal suicide of net zero, crazy energy policies, mass unchecked migration, social and cultural disintegration. The Conservatives are chasing credibility with their own elites. They care more about being liked at a North London liberal dinner party than being cheered in a pub in Wolverhampton. That’s why someone like Nigel Farage resonates—he’s comfortable with ordinary people.

There was a wonderful moment a year ago: the England football team had a big game, and I remember Keir Starmer had put on a white T-shirt. He clearly hadn’t wanted to be seen supporting England, thinking a British prime minister cannot do that, but one of his aides must have thought, ‘At least put on a white T-shirt.’ This image, that “he’s not one of us,” is significant in the eyes of the voters. It’s more than just political optics. When Nigel Farage is in a pub, wearing an England top, surrounded by thirty people, smiling ear-to-ear, it looks like he actually belongs there.

There’s intellectual vitality on the Right now. There’s no intellectual energy on the Left, at all. It seems like a desperate, last-ditch attempt to exercise what mechanisms of state power, media power, and influence they still have to shore up a completely failing, sinking project. It feels like the Soviet Union in the 1980s, whose leaders were unable to respond to reality.

Another incident involving Keir Starmer was when he removed his poppy—the symbol of Armistice Day—from his suit before giving a speech about Islamophobia Awareness Month. Meanwhile, German leaders have said that Islam belongs to Germany. What kind of message does this send?

You can only think that Islam is some sort of constitutive ingredient in your national identity if you’ve entirely forgotten what your national identity is. Obviously, it’s descriptively correct that Germany is Islamifying very fast. In fact, Germany is on course to, once again, as a result of that Islamification, be the most antisemitic country in the world, certainly in Europe. An ideology built on not repeating what the Nazis had done in the 1930s has actually led to an outcome that has resulted in precisely that.

So what would a Nigel Farage-led government look like?

First, it would end the economic catastrophe of net zero. That alone will give the country an enormous kick in terms of productivity.

Then, immigration—leaving the European Court of Human Rights, getting out of Strasbourg, getting away from the jurisdiction of the foreign court. The whole point of Brexit was to reclaim our sovereignty, especially over our borders. And yet we remain under the jurisdiction of a foreign court, telling us who we can and can’t have in our own country, who we can and can’t deport, and for what reason. It’s absurd. There are lots of treaty commitments that we’re involved with that we would have to withdraw from. We need to exercise parliamentary sovereignty: the parliament needs to be put back in control, and the Supreme Court needs to be dissolved.

On tax and business—Britain is one of the most overtaxed nations in the developed world. Setting up a business is expensive and complicated. So Reform has to take a radical look at how tax is structured and how the incentives work.

The current government doesn’t know how to do anything other than make the country worse. That is going to increase support for Reform. And every time the Tories pop their heads up, everyone will be reminded of how badly they did for fourteen years, and that will also boost Reform. I firmly believe that by 2029, Reform will be approaching a massive electoral majority.

Reform isn’t the only national conservative party in Europe on the rise: there is Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National in France, the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) in Germany. Are these political forces on the verge of a breakthrough?

Since the migration waves of 2013–15, the rise of pro-nation, sovereignist parties has been quite extraordinary. The only thing that’s resisting them is the machinery of state, lawfare, espionage, demonising the press. Yet despite all of this, you’re seeing astonishing electoral success as voters get more and more frustrated that they are not being allowed to connect their vote to meaningful influence and democratic accountability.

Still, parties like VOX in Spain, Chega in Portugal, Lega and Brothers of Italy, AfD, Rassemblement National, Vlaams Belang in Belgium, Geert Wilders in the Netherlands, Fidesz in Hungary—they’re all gaining ground. Reform UK fits into that pattern. I think the future belongs to the Right all across Europe, but it’s going to be painful getting there: it will mean some shocking examples of attempting to lock out politicians who look like they’re going to be successful, declaring a party unconstitutional as they’re trying to do with AfD in Germany, or it will be the judicial activism against [Italian Prime Minister] Meloni when she tries to deliver migration policies that she was expressly elected on. I think in the end, the Right will break through, and we’re going to see a radical lurch to the Right over the next five to ten years.

Migration is one of the biggest topics for Reform. What do the voters think?

Migration is now the most important issue for voters in Britain, by far. And if you look at the other issues underneath it, those are all issues that are being made worse because of mass migration—NHS capacity, education quality, housing. We’re importing millions of people, very few of whom actually end up working in the NHS, contrary to standard liberal justification for allowing mass unchecked migration. But guess what? Migrants get sick too. In fact, they get sick and have more complicated medical issues and health issues than ordinary Brits.

If we look at education, there are vast swathes of London where you can’t send your kids to school because English is just not spoken anymore. Or they’re being taught in history how to hate their country and hate their heritage and be ashamed of everything their parents used to look up to.

The whole country is worrying about migration. The Times has started reporting data on the massively disproportionate numbers of sexual assaults by foreigners, migrants. Absolutely staggering numbers. Then there are the grooming gangs, and the mass rape of England’s daughters by rapist foreigners from morally backward cultures who we’ve hosted and paid for their accommodation for years.

People are angry. It’s not right-wing or left-wing to be angry about these developments. It’s a human reaction. Reform is the only political force that has shown any signs it’s serious about doing something about it.

What kind of long-term effect is migration having on society?

It is making it impossible for us to use the first-person pronoun. It is becoming impossible to say “We, the people.” I have nothing in common with those rapists in Oxford and Rotherham and Telford. I want nothing to do with them. I want them out of this country as fast as possible. They are not English, they are not British, they do not have any right to be members of our national family. And yet, I’m required by the liberals to pretend that they are as British as I am. No, when I use the word “we,” I will never have in my mind those people. Nor will I have in my mind the hundreds of people who land daily on the beaches of Dover, and who will magically get a passport in five to ten years’ time. This kind of toxic empathy, which we are supposed to have towards all people except our own, is unnatural. It’s an entirely alien way of thinking. No civilisation has invited invaders in, put them up in four-star hotels, and given them all the money they can possibly want.

And what kind of effect will another crisis, the war, have on Europe?

Do you mean the regional Slavic conflict between Russia and Ukraine?

You don’t think it’s a war?

I wouldn’t call it “the” war. It is a conflict happening in the world that I don’t care very much about.

Even so, it’s a conflict happening very close to our borders. We haven’t experienced anything like it since Yugoslavia in the 1990s. It is also propelling nations in Europe to engage in an arms race.

If Britain was in a better place, maybe it would be okay for politicians to care more about Kyiv than Kent. Right now, I’m worried about Kent. We can’t even protect Kent from illegal invaders. Why are we worrying about Kyiv? Let’s fix Kent first. Then we worry about Kyiv.

Nobody’s in any doubt that [Russian President] Putin is malevolent, mischievous, and evil. But he’s not mad. He’s not irrational. We assume that he’s Hitler, we assume that Ukraine must be Poland, and Kyiv is Warsaw, and we therefore sign up to the domino theory that once he gets Ukraine, he’s going to move on to the Baltics, then on to Poland; therefore we’ve all got to rearm. I just think it’s madness. I’ve seen no evidence that he’s mad enough to trigger NATO Article 5.

There are all kinds of reasons why Russia has had its eyes on Ukraine. It was provocative from 1991 onwards for NATO to keep expanding. NATO is a military alliance that existed for one reason and one reason alone: to defend Western Europe against the Warsaw Pact. The Warsaw Pact dissolved; NATO didn’t. And when Russia pointed this out, James Baker said to them in 1991 that NATO would expand “not an inch” to the east. And of course, the 1990s saw a lot more than an inch to the east. NATO got bigger and bigger.

This doesn’t justify what Putin did, but you start to see how implausible it is that the invasion of Ukraine is a harbinger of invasion in the rest of Europe, and therefore we’ve all got to come together.

I happen to think that it is a country’s most basic duty to be able to defend itself. Whether you’re a liberal, a Marxist, or on the far right, it is the most basic ingredient of the social contract. But we’ve been spending very little on defence, so it’s good that America has finally said to Europe after eighty years that it’s time to grow up, get on your own feet. It’s time to start earning some money and developing some independence. It is a thin silver lining of the Russia-Ukraine conflict that Europe has realised that it can’t keep relying on Uncle Sam.