Evening all, I mentioned the other day in the WhatsApp group that I was going to write something about my mental journey over the last 18 months or so - probably much longer if I was to analyse more, but it’s only the last 18 months that some things have become glaring to me and I’ve had to accept them, then understand where that leaves me.
I left Britain for Bulgaria in November 2023 and have lived here to this day. There were a few reasons for this that I’ve discussed previously, but to reiterate it was primarily that I was pretty despondent with the direction of the country and wanted out, at least for a while, but potentially permanently. Like many people the covid period popped a lot of bubbles for me about the relationship between the state and the people. I researched somewhere that ticked my wife and I’s hobby boxes, which meant specific weather and geography and combined that with better cost of living and a small or incompetent state that would have less chance of overreach and interference in our lives. Bulgaria fit the bill and we started the epic road trip out here.
The purpose of this piece isn’t to promote Bulgaria or to blog what our life here has been like, but some things are relevant to what I’m going to end up discussing. I’ll never have the insight Bulgarians do to their own land, but from my 18 months out here I think this on the whole is a great country. The people are kind and welcoming - even if on the surface they don’t appear it in the way that we’re used to in the Britain - and they will go out of their way to help you. Just last night we got trapped in a carpark because our British registration wasn’t recognised by the camera and within a few minutes a young guy called Nic stopped and spent half an hour on his phone to the carpark agency organising our release. I have many other examples of this kind of thing, it comes naturally to them.
Bulgaria to many people’s eye is a shit hole. If you’re used to Britain and land at in Sofia airport, you’ll be struck by the mix of soviet looking buildings interspersed with more modern ones. Get off the main routes, even in the capital city and there are still either dirt tracks or potholed metalled roads. As you leave the capital and drive through the small towns and incredibly beautiful countryside you’ll notice that nothing man made seems finished and it all just looks, scruffy - if it’s a grey winters day and raining some of them look positively war torn! Things are different here. Aside from the fact that Bulgaria is the poorest country in Europe - the average monthly salary is 600 EUR a month - people spend money making the insides of their houses nice and don’t waste their funds trying to impress the neighbours. It can be striking to think you’re walking in to a hovel only to be presented with an immaculate modern interior. Bulgaria is the oldest country in Europe with a vast history and this is where I’m going to start to get to the point. In the modern day, Bulgaria and its people are pretty much the bottom of the barrel, they’ve had and continue to have a hard time of it. But you will not find a more proud or knowledgable people of their history and heritage. Drive through any town and you’ll be forgiven for thinking there’s some kind of national holiday happening due to the amount of national flags you’ll see hanging from flag poles, lamp posts and houses. Even buildings that look like sheds or enclosures for animals, that are actually just poor people’s houses, fly the flag with pride. It’s incredibly uplifting and refreshing. They celebrate national, regional and folk cultural holidays enthusiastically as a people unapologetically and are still unaffected by the some of the internationalist corporate style events and celebrations. It’s like time traveling back to the Britain I remember from my childhood.
Living here as an immigrant has taught me a lot of myself, people, how we fit together, and what’s valuable in the world. To my mind I’ve been the model immigrant. I’ve deferred to Bulgarian people and culture entirely, I’ve done my best with my nonexistent aptitude, to learn their language - something they genuinely appreciate - and can get by day to day, although I’ll never get the hang of nodding ‘no’ and shaking my head ‘yes’. I’ve spent my money here and taken nothing from them to financially support myself. If circumstances were different and we didn’t have to return home due to my wife’s Dad’s health, then long term we would perhaps have looked to get Bulgarian citizenship as that was our initial plan. But the fact is that even with that piece of paper I will never be Bulgarian, I’m not of this place, they know it and I know it, regardless of whatever affection and respect I have for their nation, I will never be one of them and that’s fine.
Their attitude to their nation and seemingly encyclopedic knowledge of its history at all levels - which is telling of their education and family values - inspired me to look more at my own. I’ve never been a history guy, I think primarily because I don’t have a head for numbers and dates I find it hard to track it all mentally. My model of Britain’s history was something along the lines of: WW2 Hitler bad, Churchill good, WW1 and trench warfare before that, then industrial revolution and a bit of empire stuff, prior to that a civil war, kings and stuff, Anglo Saxons and Vikings, then stonehenge at some point! With anything prior to the 20th century basically just being a blur. I realised that my position in the world today was filtered almost entirely through a post WW2 lens, like everything prior to that was unimportant and actually maybe best forgotten, and I found that odd.
Once I looked more deeply into the history of the British Isles and its people I realised I’d missed a lot! I’d done a DNA test years ago when my wife did hers, but never really paid much attention to it. When I went back to it there had been many updates in accuracy and analysis that made the test far more than a gimmick. I found out that on my Mothers side I’m 50% Welsh, making her 100% Welsh - something I was surprised to find is quite rare, but most common in North Wales and West Wales - tracking with parts least touched by immigration and conquest. On my Father’s side I’m 42% English, 6% Scottish and 2% Irish. That’s quite a legacy of connection to a place and its history. On my Mothers side that level of Welsh ancestry is the product of many thousands of years and this made me reconsider the way I view my responsibility to the place I grew up in and its trajectory.
One of the things that doing Horizon Scan and The Scroll has caused is a recognition of how badly wrong many things are going in the the UK. Having to write and talk about it most days whilst I’ve been out here has led to it being on my mind most of the time. I’ve read and listened to many other people’s thoughts on the subject and that’s revealed a lot I was completely unaware of in terms of how we got here. My ability to get a handle on what’s going to happen comes from filtering new events and actions captured from a variety of trusted nodes, through a combination of my naturally high emotional intelligence (the only type I have), combined with an understanding and trust of human nature, then bounced off what has been shown to happen in the past. I’ve enjoyed doing it and I know many of you get something from it also. I have though, started to find it increasingly difficult to be the critic. Sat in another country pointing out the problems, decrying those who do nothing and those who are making it worse. I’m an irritating human, to none more so than myself and there’s only so long I can continue to do that before I drive myself nuts. So I think regardless of our requirement to return for my wife, eventually I was going to be drawn back to Britain, something I truly didn’t expect. SEG obviously ties into this too, I sit each day espousing an ethos to a community living primarily in a nation that needs it, whilst not being there myself.
So what’s next? We’ve joked about me getting into politics many times, but I think the slow transition into it might now be upon me. I stress slow, slow and local! Don’t get excited about the SEG party, that’s not where I’m headed. I’ve had to think long and hard about my worldview and the state of Britain and attempt to triage the issues. As I’m sure is obvious now to regular listeners of Horizon Scan and The Scroll, I’ve come to the conclusion that immigration and demographic replacement is the priority. In the same way as a catastrophic haemorrhage must be stopped or other injuries become meaningless, trying to fix any other problem in Britain must come second to the primary factor causing disturbance and putting pressure on it. I’m hugely disillusioned with politics as I know many of you are, and the last thing I want to do is get involved AT ALL, but bar getting the blokes together and doing a coup, attractive as that might be, trying to build something politically is our only option. So who to join?
Labour, obviously not. They’re currently a weird combination of a few incompetent robot communists being danced around on strings by the Dark Lord of globalism, Tony Blair. I respect Blair as an operator, I don’t know how you can’t, but I don’t want his version of the future, despite being sympathetic to some of the technology that would use.
The Tories are the biggest political stain Britain has ever had inflicted on it and over the past 100 years are more responsible for our current predicament than many people realise. What exactly about Britain have the Conservative party conserved? They must die as a party, never to be resurrected. As I’ve explained many times, each time they are about to die they reform into a new version that sells itself to the prevailing public narrative of the time, only to revert to type as soon as they hold power again.
Lib dems - 🤡
Reform are the Tory party’s new skin, how people don’t realise that by now is painfully frustrating. Farage has destroyed every party he’s been part of at the opportune moment to hand power back to the Tories. As I said in The Scroll, this Rupert Lowe fiasco was an entirely unforced error due to Farage’s hubris and was not in the plan. Lowe was meant to be killed off and Reform roll on forward until the call was made about who was rolling into who, Tories into Reform or Reform into the Tories. The result would be exactly the same party, bar the leader. Though I’m certain Farage would have stood down once the job was done, leaving either Jenrick or Yusuf to fight out the 1 & 2 spot. Things are far more up in the air than they have been to date with this process, Reform are trying to pretend there’s no problem but they’re hemorrhaging support. Don’t be surprised to see the Tories bin Badenoch, get Jenrick in and one up Reform while they’re floundering, hoping to soak up their old voters. But regardless, Reform will not reverse the immigration problem in Britain. They will only talk of mass deportations (if they do at all) when it’s illegals. This is a sleight of hand as anyone who gets to British soil claims asylum and is no longer illegal. So really you’re looking at foreign criminals in our prisons, a tiny number relatively that will do nothing to stop the future coming our way.
UKIP are a joke party of dancing marchers and mongs. Purely a distraction and sponge for the energy of otherwise good people who perhaps just aren’t the most well informed. They are a magnet for the ‘what about Tommeh?’ crowd and are now pushing Christianity as being central to what’s important in Britain, whilst almost entirely singling out Islam as the problem. They are civic nationalists, as many people are even without realising it and I would certainly have fallen into this categorisation in the past. For most of our lives this has been a workable way of doing things, but that time has past and will never come back. Civic nationalism says that anyone can be British if they uphold our values and integrate into our society. It’s very reasonable, it’s ‘nice’, it’s how you want and wish things would be. In practice that means that people come to the country in small numbers and live as we do recognising that British values and culture are dominant and desirable. You respect your heritage, but you recognise that that time is gone and you are British now. There are thousands of people who did this over a long period and were able to because they had something to integrate into. The increase in rate and numbers now means that those who come here have a separate community the same as the place they left to join, they get the familiarity of the people and culture they left, combined with better living standards. They have no reason to integrate outside of this and many, perhaps the majority, now have no desire to. The soil is not magic.
I wish we could be civic nationalists, but it is now the mentality that is being used as the last bastion of defense against turning Britain around. The only thing that does that is remigration.
Which leads me to Homeland. You’ll have heard me mention them a few times in The Scroll and on Horizon Scan, as I’ve been looking at them for a while. They are the only party who have remigration as a policy and as such are the only party who recognise the problem, talk openly about it and are working towards building a party that will implement it. Demographic replacement is real, it’s going to happen, it’s just maths. There are differing projections about how soon that will happen. Various studies have native Welsh, English, Irish and Scottish people being minorities in their countries by as soon as 2050, or as late as 2077, but the point is that at current birth rates and immigration rates, it WILL happen. You or your children will live as a minority in your own country. You have a responsibility to yourself and those you care about to understand what that means and come to terms with it as a reality. Not the ‘well maybe it’ll be ok’ version, the dark version, because that CAN happen if this is allowed to continue and I personally won’t gamble on it not.
After much research and forcing myself to confront what I know to be real, instead of what I’d prefer to be real, I joined the Homeland Party a couple of weeks ago. They are tiny, but growing, currently only around 1300 members. They are not trying to win the next election, their focus is on local community politics. They understand this is a long game in the same way that communists realised their struggle was generational and they must do ‘the long march’ through the institutions to control the levers of power. You have to start on your own streets and do the small things that make a difference to everyday people. I intend to start getting involved when I get back and see where it takes me. The party is young enough and small enough for me to take the skills I have with human nature and analysis and apply it early on to the party. If it becomes something it’s not meant to be, I’ll know. If it gets infiltrated, co-opted or contained, I’ll know. In some small way this is an experiment for me to see the reality of something like this party, compared to how the state/media represent it. The majority of the membership is mid 30’s and under, they are the prime target not only for bad actors to lead them down the wrong road, but also for good actors to show example and lead them in the right direction. Away from anger and frustration at something they love being taken from them, the instinct to lash out, and towards right action and responsibility.
I’ve seen nothing that concerns me to date or I wouldn’t have joined. They are young and they are online savvy, I recognise all of it from my online adventures, although I understand that without context, it’ll go over people’s heads. Many of the younger guys communicate in a way that may unnerve, because *shock* they’re young, frustrated and are playing around with the edgy boundaries of things, but their intentions are correct and they’ll learn as they mature.
They’re not a one issue party, they just recognise that without remigration you’re tiding the chairs on the Titanic; it must be the priority. The overriding factor in everything they do is ‘is this what’s best for our people?’ - ‘Our’ meaning the native English, Welsh, Scottish and Irish inheritors of the British isles. It isn’t dislike or hate of others, just love of our own. I think that is perfectly reasonable. All people are allowed to believe their people, culture and homeland are good and worth preserving, despite what western liberal society wants you to believe. They are a Nationalist party, not a right wing party. There are left and right leaning people within it. The policies that have been written already (available on their website) are a mix of what people will recognise as capitalist and socialist ideas, whatever works best for the British people in each case is the guiding mechanism. I think that’s refreshing.
As Homeland grow they are going to be attacked viciously and anyone involved is going to have to sacrifice personally to do so. As soon as the state and media cannot ignore us anymore, as they’re doing now, they will attack and they will do damage. I’ve accepted that. You will be called racist, fascist and any other thing that they believe will stick in order to do damage and undermine the only party advocating the policy that will reverse what successive governments have been trying to achieve for decades. But this is our own multi decade project. Will it succeed? I have no idea, the odds are very bad indeed, but that has only ever stopped the weak and scared. Unfortunately for me, I’m neither.
Where does that leave us lot?
Well because I know I’m surely going to get attacked at some point, I cannot bring you lot down with me. There will also I’m sure be those among you who think this is the end of the line anyway for this substack etc because you don’t agree with me, which I understand completely. With SEG I’ve always tried to make the point that SEG as a community is not me, we are genuinely everywhere and have all sorts of worldviews and politics, even if we have the ethos as a crossover point. I’m incredibly conscious that eventually someone will try to link the two things, me and SEG and conflate the two entirely. As we know with the media that means everyone with a SEG tattoo then becomes a far right racist. I can try and minimise that all I want, but eventually people are just going to have to have the confidence to stand up for themselves and what they believe SEG is.
So SEG continues and we’ll take it as it comes. Maybe we crowdfund for some of you to have laser tattoo removal!
As for Horizon Scan, The Scroll and the WhatsApp etc, I’m pretty open to suggestions. In this case my concern is two way. I know Homeland are going to be attacked and I want them to be successful if what they’re trying to achieve so I have to try and protect that and not be the weak link. I also don’t want you guys to get tarred with anything people may try to throw at me. I also know that to be valuable and effective as a member of the party and actually achieve something locally I’m going to have to go balls deep time and research wise. This doesn’t leave much time for the Scroll in any regular predictable way, so I think it’s the end for that as you know it. I’m also concerned that one of the fun elements of Horizon Scan is that I can say things like shooting bike thieves on site is a viable solution - you can see how that would now go down now I’m sure. I’m really frustrated by it, but I have to think about what’s actually important in the big scheme of things. I think for the moment Horizon Scan will stay, but I’m not sure for how long. I’ve noticed myself that Hugh and I’s personal focus’s are featuring more and more in each episode and it’s moving away from what it was originally intended to be. When was the last episode that Hugh didn’t mention Palestine and I didn’t mention immigration? I’m open to suggestions, but I’m not sure how we can keep doing it long term. The WhatsApp group is something I think we all find really valuable and I don’t want to close that down, we may just have to ban the Austrian painter and the like, it’s just too easy to spin that out of context.
Whatever happens with all of the above this month will be the last time I’ll take any paid subscriptions and anyone who wants refunding, particularly the higher tier guys, just drop me a DM and I’ll sort it. I’ll keep any discount codes etc running for as long as SEG is still a thing, so you’ll always have them. If anyone feels out of pocket or anything like that just DM me, no problem at all. Much of this is as much of a surprise to be as it is to you and I’m (as usual) making it up as I go along.
I think that’s pretty much everything. If you have any questions or you want me write and explain anything further either drop it in the WhatsApp if you’re in there or you can DM me via the substack and Patreon apps. Worst case email SEG and it’ll get to me.
The ethos has always been about personal responsibility and service, there is no one size fits all to that, you just step forward where you see need and do your best. This is my version.
Gaz
Good work Gaz.
Very well written Gaz