THE LADDER TO POWER – THE ONLY NATIONALIST STRATEGY THAT HAS EVER WORKED IN BRITAIN

Introduction – the View from Today:

The “Ladder Strategy”, a practical blueprint for how the Nationalist Movement could advance to its ultimate objective of national government, evolved on the ground in the 1960s and ’70s in branches of the John Bean iteration of the British National Party and the mid-1970s National Party breakaway from the National Front.

It was first articulated in a coherent form, as expounded here, by leading 1970s and ‘80s Nationalist activist Steve Brady, who had himself been involved in its implementation by the Blackburn and Lewisham and Southwark Branches of the National Party in the mid-’70s. An implementation rewarded by the unprecedented election of two Nationalist councillors in Blackburn in May 1976 and a 26% vote in a council election in Deptford, South London, for the NP later that year. In the latter case, the National Front, despite being much bigger and better known, but wedded to a strategy aimed at winning national media publicity rather than the NP alternative sinking local roots and sustained campaigning in the community, was easily beaten by the NP, gaining only 18%. Had the NF stood aside in the wider interests of the Movement, the combined vote would have seen the NP candidate elected.

Steve shared his experiences, and the strategy they embodied, at NF political training weekends at Liss House, in rural Hampshire, in the early 1980s. Young activists trained at these camps went on to apply the strategy in the latest iteration of the BNP in the 1990s and 2000s, with resounding success, culminating in the election of over fifty councillors across the country, including four at County Council level, and two Members of the European Parliament.

Meanwhile, Steve Brady, by now a member of the National Directorate of the Flag section of the National Front after Nick Griffin split the party in early 1986, documented the strategy in these two articles published in the Flag NF ideological magazine Vanguard in late 1987.

In the first article, Steve explains why the previous Nationalist strategy of trying to win support and grow itself by attracting national media publicity through marches and demonstrations was fatally flawed, because the national media “central nexus” is irreconcilably hostile to our Movement and, understandably from its point of view, refused to allow itself to be used in this way. So the coverage thus obtained in TV and newspapers, what would now be termed the Mainstream Media, MSM, was relentlessly hostile and negative. As Steve once put it, we were “giving our worst enemy a vital message to give to our best friends”. Therefore this strategy had failed and, he argued and events were to prove, would continue to fail.

Instead he argued that we should communicate with our target audience, the White British public, directly and in person, via the so called local nexus, via knocking on their doors and campaigning on local issues in their communities, aided by carefully produced national and local printed media, a Party newspaper and local leaflets and newsletters. In the second of his articles, Steve explained that this would build the first, foundation, rung on the Ladder to Power. Which in turn would enable the building of the second, and so on.

That ladder was based on the simple idea that if, as the Movement does, you face a high barrier, a political wall, keeping you from your target, national power, you do not persist with futile attempts to jump it in one leap, hoping, inevitably in vain, for a boost over from a hostile MSM. Instead you build a ladder, where constructing each rung of itself endows you with the resources in terms of membership and public support to aspire realistically to build the next rung, and so on all the way to Government.

This was scoffed at by our enemies at the time, given that the Movement then struggled to achieve even the lowest rung anywhere, despite earlier success, rendered ineffectual by the factionalism, disunity and selfish egotism that have been the persisting bane of our Movement. However, when seriously implemented, locally in Tower Hamlets in the early 1990s and then nationally from 2000 on, the strategy demonstrably worked. By 2010, with dozens of Nationalist councillors and two MEPs, our enemies were not laughing at all. Under better and broader leadership, the BNP would by then have been poised realistically to hope to attain its first national MPs by the 2015 General Election. Instead Nick Griffin destroyed his second Nationalist party.

But the strategy here reproduced is still valid and would still work. Even on a local scale with a tiny organisation, H&D Editor Mark Cotterill was able to use it to win election to Blackburn council, so even small, local groups can, and should, start to climb the ladder now. This actually probably shows that even the credit Steve gave to using the Central Nexus to get the organisation’s name across to the public is misplaced – the public at large had never heard of Mark’s party from the central nexus, but using the local nexus effectively won him the seat anyway. Future movements may well be able to ignore the central nexus, the MSM, pretty much, as long as they use the local nexus and follow the Ladder Strategy based on it. Unlike any alternatives put forward and in some cases tried again and again for the best part of a century, it actually works.

Therefore we reproduce it here, unedited. It does show its age and its origin, but we believe that in no way undermines its essential validity and usefulness.

However, obviously given the articles are nearly 40 years old, and written by a senior member of his particular Nationalist group, the details are occasionally dated and slanted to boost the author’s faction at the time and reflect its own particular ideological position on some issues, a position not necessarily required for the strategy described to work. The resources of the Flag NF in late 1987 are, notably, not understated! Although it is true, for example, that the group’s Birmingham Branch did begin to implement the Ladder Strategy, their organisation collapsed before they got very far with it.

It collapsed because, as the author himself later admitted, whilst it was true, and probably still is, that most of the British public are sympathetic to a broad British Nationalist programme of social conservatism, economic radicalism, and maintaining the essential ethnic identity of our homeland, by 1987 few of that public would have taken the National Front seriously as a potential vehicle for such a programme.

Its earlier futile national media/central nexus-oriented strategy, leading to a self-defeating reliance on marches which our opponents were able to make ever more violent, repelling much of the public, had already discredited it beyond repair.

In hindsight, the NF should have switched from a central nexus strategy to and exclusively local nexus oriented one after its last march not portrayed as “NF MARCH SPARKS RIOT”, Red Lion Square in June 1974. Our opponents discovered then, and know now, that violent opposition to our, originally peaceful, demos is used by the MSM to blame us for the violence and put people off. This may not be true, however, for local community protests, e.g. against “asylum seeker” hostels, where our opponents will be dealt with by the local community.

However the NF had persisted with a central nexus strategy based on marches long after its political sell-by date and had become linked in the public mind with the skinheads and football hooligans who were needed to make the marches physically viable, and whose presence the MSM central nexus was delighted to publicise. After they had seen off the Griffin faction, most of the Flag leadership realised the NF had poisoned its own PR water by 1992, and walked away. It is possible that, if they had persisted long enough in a community/local nexus communication strategy, they might have detoxified their brand directly with the public, eventually. We will never know.

More notably, this was all written many years before the rise of the Internet and social media. However, I am sure the author of said articles would argue that this new technology is less of a radical alternative way of taking our message to the public than it seems, being essentially more a part of the old central nexus than the local one or some new nexus connecting us and the public..

It is true that unlike when using the MSM itself, Nationalists can control the content of their own messages on these media. This is certainly most useful, especially, it could be argued, for communicating ideological and political education to other Nationalists rather than the general public. Nonetheless as far as taking our message to the public goes it lacks the direct personal contact with Nationalists which is the key strength of the local nexus approach in overcoming MSM smear propaganda.

Also, and most importantly, a communications strategy based on the Internet and social media is fatally vulnerable to the fact that this medium, like the old TV/newspaper MSM central nexus, is totally and absolutely controlled by our irreconcilable enemies, Zuckerberg and his ilk, who can, often have and always if we look like getting anywhere using those media will, simply pull the plug and shut us down. They still control the medium and can silence the message.

This is not true of, and only of, the local nexus on which, and only on which the Ladder Strategy is based. That Strategy can proceed perfectly well in the face of unrelented MSM bile and the total exclusion of Nationalists from the Internet and social media, which may well happen. “New Technology”, while certainly worth using while we still can, is not a quick fix or an easy way around the enemy control of our media.

There is no substitute for the hard graft of talking to our people direct themselves, campaigning on issues which of themselves may be of little direct relevance to our Nationalist ideology but which matter to the communities involved, and building, step by step, the ladder which will, as trying it has shown, bring us ultimately to power, and thus save our Race and Nation. There is no other, easier way or simple short-cut to do that. Here is the way to win that we know works.

Click here to read The Road to Power, Part 1 (first published in Vanguard, October 1987).