The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters - November 17, 2025


PREVIEW： Realpolitik #21 ｜ How to Fix Britain With Northern Variant

Topics
civic nationalism vs. ethno-nationalism
Hosted by
Callum Edmunds Carl Benjamin Connor Tomlinson Harry Robinson John Wheatley Joshua Ferme Edward McLaren Elizabeth Heverin
Mentioned
Lib Dems Melanie Phillips Firas Maldad Peter North Tony Blair Britishness Krishna Vishnu Pete
PREVIEW： Epochs #237 ｜ The Fourth Crusade： Part II with Furius Pertinax PREVIEW： Brokenomics ｜ Mosquebuster with Gavin Boby

Episode Stats


Length

19 minutes

Words per minute

144.73

Word count

2,830

Sentence count

174

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged

Toxicity

1

sentences flagged

Hate speech

28

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode of RealPolitik, I am joined by Peter North, a Northern Vevolutionist and a regular contributor to the right-wing media, to discuss the differences between ethno-nationalism and civic nationalism.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.160 Hello, welcome to a new episode of RealPolitik. I am your host, Firas Maldad. I'm joined today
00:00:05.640 by a very special guest, Peter North, Northern Variant. You all know him on X, you all follow
00:00:11.240 him. One of the most astute commentators on British politics on the right, and always
00:00:17.740 very, very realistic, to the extent that he upsets some people by being too realistic.
00:00:23.820 And that's why I thought it's very important to hear from him, understand his perspective,
00:00:28.620 learn from him, and see what he has to say. Pete, thank you so much for joining me.
00:00:33.960 Thanks for having me. Good to be here.
00:00:35.560 My pleasure. My pleasure. Tell me a little bit more about you. You don't exactly fit as
00:00:42.620 an ethno-nationalist, and you don't exactly fit as a civic nationalist. Tell me a little
00:00:47.560 bit about the evolution on your thinking on the question of nationality. Because I know 0.82
00:00:53.560 at some point you were closer to the civic nationalist position.
00:00:56.040 Yes. But you are also not a pure blood and soil ethno-nationalist. You're somewhere
00:01:02.980 in the middle. Help me understand this, please.
00:01:05.900 I'm not 100% sure I do understand it myself. This is part of the self-analysis that I've put
00:01:14.480 myself under for the last couple of years. The thinking I was doing was along the lines of
00:01:25.820 what is the actual difference between ethno-nationalism and civic nationalism in policy terms. Now,
00:01:34.680 take civic nationalism. This is predicated on some notion of civic identity and these
00:01:43.040 British values. Well, who defines what those British values are? And assuming we could have that debate and
00:01:52.440 agree on something, well, these British values are going to be contemporary. They're going to be
00:01:59.680 liberal. And so then if you take it upon yourself to define these values as the basis of your society,
00:02:09.400 then it requires two things from you on a policy basis. You have to demand certain sacrifices of
00:02:16.260 incomers that they buy into your civic identity and that you defend those values robustly.
00:02:25.260 And these are the two things that the multicultural state is not willing to do. 1.00
00:02:33.020 And so in order to enforce these kinds of things, you say, if you're coming in from
00:02:37.620 the third world, you leave your third world cultural practices at the door. No, you can't wear a hijab. 1.00
00:02:44.020 No, you can't eat halal. No, you can't do... You set what you believe in because, you know,
00:02:49.700 British contemporary mindset is we don't like animal cruelty. We want our women to have the same rights
00:02:56.960 and freedoms as the rest of us. We want gays to be able to live their own lives according to
00:03:04.340 their own needs and desires within the law. This is the basis of our modern liberal society. But of
00:03:14.060 course, though Britain is predicated on these liberal values, liberalism is dying. So you then
00:03:24.400 get a situation where the civic identity based on these liberal ideas is a gulf away from where the
00:03:32.180 people actually are. And in fact, we're already there. There is already a massive gulf between what
00:03:37.940 ordinary working class voters think and where the progressive liberal Blairite Labour Party is.
00:03:45.200 And the two now actively despise each other. And so there's no basis for a civic contract there.
00:03:53.960 And so I then started thinking about how you would further enforce this civic nationalism.
00:04:01.120 You would have to shutter the mosques that are preaching radical Islam, which is rather a lot of 1.00
00:04:09.080 them. You would have to expel the 40,000 or so on the terror watch list. You know, ban halal, 1.00
00:04:17.520 do all these inherently authoritarian things, which would be authoritarian in the defense of liberalism.
00:04:26.040 Um, and when you actually look at, uh, remigration strategies, um, put forth by the ethno-right,
00:04:35.280 um, the, the two are remarkably similar. They are 95% the same. Now, so what, where I start veering
00:04:46.380 towards the ethno-right is when, uh, when civic nationalism was being mooted, it was, uh, around
00:04:55.440 2003 as a replacement to, um, multiculturalism because it was, the debate was very much around
00:05:04.500 multiculturalism has failed even then. And it brought about authors like, uh, Melanie Phillips 1.00
00:05:09.940 and her Londonistan book. And, um, quite a lot of the commentators at the time were all saying
00:05:16.140 multiculturalism has failed. We need a replacement for it. And at the time the BNP was rising and this 1.00
00:05:22.660 was the politics that was beyond the pale. So we, we needed a, a mechanism that people, ordinary people
00:05:30.400 could buy into and see the logic of. And civic nationalism in its own right is one that seeks
00:05:37.260 to be fair to the outsider, to bring them in, to call them part of our family, uh, uh, our national
00:05:44.160 collective and to creative framework where everybody's operating on the same page. And superficially,
00:05:52.300 uh, that's fair and that's right. And that's where I'd like to be. That's Britain's character
00:05:58.060 in terms of our generosity. But, uh, there comes a point where the, the, the scales start to tip
00:06:05.700 where, um, you have third world migrants arriving in this country. They move to the cities where the 1.00
00:06:13.140 economic opportunities are, where there are people who speak their language and practice their faith.
00:06:18.540 So they integrate in with their own, their offspring, go to schools where their children
00:06:25.680 are not immersed in British culture, um, because they're not, they're not among British people. Yes.
00:06:32.840 And so you can have your confected rituals of teaching your pupils how to sing all verses of
00:06:38.600 Jerusalem and sing, God save the King in assemblies. Um, but to be truly integrated, um, and we did have
00:06:47.920 integration. I remember growing up in Bradford, um, I would say about 10 to 15% were Asian students,
00:06:54.980 uh, um, pupils, um, there'd be Muslims, there'd be Hindus, uh, Indians, um, and they would become
00:07:04.500 our friends. They didn't have a choice because they were outnumbered and they had to adopt,
00:07:09.280 uh, our slang. Uh, they had to watch the same television programs. Um, not least cause there
00:07:15.780 were only four channels, but, uh, they were being immersed in British culture, not just the, uh,
00:07:22.760 not just the bureaucratic definition of British values, teaching, uh, teaching Britishness as a,
00:07:29.180 uh, as a module in a, uh, an education curriculum. You really have to be, uh, around British people
00:07:36.040 to understand it. And, uh, that was possible, um, around, you know, 1990 to the year 2000 at that
00:07:45.080 particular rate of immigration. Cause I think the 91 census still has us about 95% white, uh, that
00:07:53.760 starts to radically change. And as I say, kids, kids from migrant families are growing up with very 1.00
00:08:00.640 little exposure. The only actual white British person, uh, that they'll meet are the four or
00:08:06.520 five remaining kids who, uh, who go to that school either because their parents don't particularly care
00:08:12.960 enough to get them out of there, uh, or they're too poor to move. Um, because generally as a rule,
00:08:18.740 anyone who can get away does this explains white flight. And this isn't, um, this is just human
00:08:25.520 nature. People seek out their own kind. We, uh, uh, uh, we are gradually abandoning our cities, 0.97
00:08:31.980 moving to the shires. You're seeing the population of North Yorkshire expanding because it's people
00:08:37.700 moving away from Bradford and Leeds because they're seeking the safety and the familiarity of their own
00:08:43.780 people. Same as foreigners coming into this country will go to the cities where they can find 1.00
00:08:48.100 their own people. So you're getting to the point where there's nothing left to integrate with.
00:08:54.940 And as such, the integration process that was happening is now in reverse. Yes. And you're now
00:09:02.900 starting to see, um, that there was a time when the Pakistanis was starting to integrate into Bradford.
00:09:10.900 They would drop their Punjabi, Punjabi shop signs and you'd see an Anglicization of Pakistani culture 0.98
00:09:18.460 in Bradford. And you believed it was possible on a long enough timeline, but now that's not happening.
00:09:23.720 They're reverting to wearing the ethnic garb of their home country, speaking and actually campaigning 0.97
00:09:30.300 in, uh, at general elections. And I noticed this, I was at a new, I think I was speaking, uh, or attending
00:09:40.300 a new culture forum meeting in Newcastle. I thought I'll make a day of it. So I went up, uh, and had a
00:09:48.480 drive through, um, Sunderland on the way cause never been thought of being nice to take a look. And this was
00:09:55.420 just before the general election. And what I expected to see in Sunderland was rows and rows of,
00:10:01.660 uh, labor posters in windows. Cause it's a traditional labor stronghold working class area.
00:10:07.900 Um, sorry, what year was this? Uh, last year, um, uh, last election. Yeah. Uh, and I would have
00:10:14.140 expected even in its current state, I would have expected to see the odd labor poster or billboard
00:10:19.280 here and there. Um, or maybe reform even, but actually the reality, no outward sign there was
00:10:27.480 even an election happening at all. But you drive the great, drive down the Great Horton Road in Bradford
00:10:35.060 and it's a sea of electioneering and it's all, every single poster, billboard has got a candidate,
00:10:42.400 um, and something about Gaza and the Palestine flag. And this is this alien politics that's growing 0.81
00:10:51.880 up in our cities. And so this is the beginnings of, uh, ulsterization. Yes. We are seeing the
00:10:59.580 fragmentation, this great melting pot that we were promised by Tony Blair, um, and a little bit
00:11:06.580 before that all the dogmas about, you know, we all, we're all essentially British. We're not.
00:11:14.220 And this is, uh, uh, all of this was based on a conceit and it was a conceit that we went along
00:11:19.980 with out of politeness because it is in our nature to be generous. Yes. And we still want to be that
00:11:26.100 way. We still want, but we can't be because you start bumping into the reality that not only are
00:11:32.600 they not integrating, they don't want to, and even if they did want to, they couldn't. So, um, this puts
00:11:40.200 me outside of the realms of civic nationalism because I no longer believe that a viable civic
00:11:48.760 identity can be established that everyone will buy into because it will demand of white English people 0.92
00:11:56.020 that they give up something of their own identity in order to accommodate foreigners. But that would 1.00
00:12:03.000 only work if foreigners were also willing to give up something of their religious and ethnic identity 0.96
00:12:08.680 in order to form this, this, uh, mythical, uh, melting pot, melting pot utopia. It hasn't happened.
00:12:16.780 It's not going to happen. And so you are seeing manifested in the politics. Increasingly, you see
00:12:23.720 ethnic minority enclaves electing, uh, people on an ethnic basis to do with issues in Gaza or their
00:12:31.740 home countries. And they come to parliament to lobby for things in their own ethnic interest. They
00:12:37.800 come to parliament to lobby for a new airport in the backhills of Pakistan. Uh, and so my parliament,
00:12:46.160 our parliament has become this internationalist arena for, uh, ethnic grievances, gripes, and agendas.
00:12:53.720 The only sort of United nations instead of a British. Yes. Yeah, essentially. And where we're getting
00:13:00.980 to now is everybody, uh, I noticed, um, I don't know her name, but, uh, just a couple of weeks ago,
00:13:09.860 uh, uh, a black Caribbean MP sitting there in her ethnic garb standing up talking about reparations. 0.95
00:13:17.960 And it's like, I'm just thinking, oh, we're on the hook again, uh, another immigrant community 1.00
00:13:23.460 with a handout. And then I look at this and think, well, who is the ethnicity, uh, that is not
00:13:31.040 represented in this parliament? And of course it's the white English people, because you've got the
00:13:35.880 Lib Dems who will always go to bat for foreigners. White English people are at the absolute bottom of the 0.89
00:13:43.300 list of any priority, um, for labor Lib Dems and to a large extent, the Tories. And I, I just kind of
00:13:52.740 think, um, uh, uh, we, for some reason, this is permissible for ethnic minorities to form their own
00:14:02.800 ethnic voting blocks, their own, uh, enclaves, their own power bases, their own agendas, their own 0.57
00:14:09.180 lobbying bases. So we get foreign funding coming in, uh, to places like, uh, Tower Hamlets and Bradford
00:14:17.260 funding certain international agendas. Um, we need to be alert to this. This is national security threat
00:14:24.540 kind of thing. Uh, and yet this is permissible and it's all part of diversity and multiculturalism.
00:14:32.940 And we're supposed to welcome all of this. It's a bit of diversity upon, but of course,
00:14:39.100 it's subordinates our own politics and our own ethnic interests and subverts them.
00:14:43.260 Yeah. Yes. Um, I never wanted, uh, yeah, I've always been suspicious of blood and soil ethno 0.92
00:14:52.140 nationalism because it is the gateway to a darker politics. And, um, if I'm in a room full of ethno
00:15:01.980 nationalists, um, not all of them are bad people, not all of them have got ugly politics. Um,
00:15:07.580 just people who have arrived at that position through the same logical process I have.
00:15:12.300 But if you walk into that room, you're, you know, you're in the company of some dark politics and
00:15:19.820 places that you wouldn't necessarily want to go. I've certainly noticed there's a,
00:15:23.740 a, uh, a seam of quite vicious antisemitism that just, it just creeps me out to the extent that I,
00:15:32.540 um, the more right wing and doctrinally pure the ethno right gets, the less I want to have
00:15:39.820 anything to do with it. But I don't see anything intellectually coherent about the current civic
00:15:45.580 nationalism. So I occupy the space in between that doesn't actually have a definition.
00:15:50.940 And I think it's just the sensible center and forgive you for interrupting you.
00:15:55.580 Yeah.
00:15:55.980 For, for somebody from the Middle East, what does being British mean? It means somebody who's
00:16:03.020 descended from British people.
00:16:04.380 Yes.
00:16:04.860 It means somebody with British ancestry. What does somebody Chinese mean? Somebody who
00:16:09.420 looks Chinese, speaks Chinese, is Chinese. And these things to the rest of the world are extremely 0.82
00:16:16.220 self-evident. Um, you, you look at East Asia, the level of racism within East Asia towards other
00:16:22.940 East Asians is off the charts. Uh, you look at the religious nationalism of India or Pakistan, 0.93
00:16:31.340 and again, it's completely off the charts. These are peoples that have very clear definitions of who they
00:16:37.260 are. And they are in a, in a very real way, the universal norm. The West has adopted Americanism
00:16:48.620 to a very large extent as a sort of melting pot, as a sort of come from wherever.
00:16:54.460 Yes. But that Western countries are built on immigration and which of course, which is 1.00
00:16:59.900 absolutely nonsense, which is absolutely factually nonsense. Uh, but that Americanism was primarily
00:17:06.300 aimed at white Europeans. If you were a white European Christian seeking, and Christian played
00:17:13.100 an important part of it, uh, although Jewish was also part of it as well. Um, if you were a European 0.85
00:17:20.300 Christian, you were welcome to leave the baggage of Europe's wars and come to America, but I don't 1.00
00:17:26.220 think it included shrines to Vishnu or Krishna or anything of that sort. Um, it was predicated on a
00:17:33.900 shared system of beliefs that, okay, we have our ethnic and language differences, but the moral framework
00:17:40.220 is Christian. Well, America of course is built on, um, uh, philosophy. Uh, there's an, there is an underlying 0.91
00:17:48.940 philosophy that everybody bought into. And part of that goes, uh, it is, you know, free markets and
00:17:55.900 commerce, the land of opportunity, freedom. It's built on this idea of freedom. So, um, that civic
00:18:02.620 identity is, uh, it's wrapped up in the dollar sign. Everybody coming to, uh, find their own part of
00:18:10.780 America and, you know, put their stake in the ground and build something around it. And of course,
00:18:15.580 it's a country that's big enough for that to happen. And so you did have, um, you did have like
00:18:21.500 Amish settlements and you could even have an Indian settlement somewhere in the, because it's big,
00:18:26.380 vast country with, um, it's interesting how, uh, um, exclusively American sports events are still
00:18:36.140 called the world series. Um, or, uh, you know, the world championship of a sport that's only played in
00:18:43.500 America because America in itself is a contained world. And, uh, it's one of the reasons, uh,
00:18:52.460 America doesn't really play by the same trade rules, trade FTAs as Europe does, because America
00:19:00.300 is a country that sitting on so much of its own reserves of everything from oil through to minerals,
00:19:06.700 its own talents, uh, its intellectual resources. It does not need trade in the same way that a little
00:19:14.620 island moored off the, uh, coast of Europe does. If you enjoyed this piece of premium content from
00:19:20.220 the Lotus Eaters, head to our website where you can find more.