Christmas Party: Message and Pics

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One of the most important things about our Substack community is exactly that —we are a community.

While we won’t always agree on everything —which is healthy!—I do like to think that this community provides us with a sense of belonging, hope, and freedom to speak openly and honestly about the most important issues of our time.

If there is one thing that unites us, I would suggest, then it’s a desire to think and speak freely, to challenge the establishment, and call out misleading narratives.

Which is why, on Saturday, I was delighted to meet more than 100 of you at our annual Christmas Party! We joined together to raise a glass, meet some new friends, enjoy some live music and raise money for Haig Housing —a charity that helps find our military veterans decent housing. I don’t know about you but I had a great time.

As I said on Saturday, it’s been a great year for our community.

Just look at the numbers. At the start of the year, there were 22,000 of us from 50 countries; today, there are 64,400 of us from 173 countries.

And even these numbers don’t capture our reach. Each month now, more than 1 million people are checking out the Stack and our articles online, more than 1 million are watching our videos on YouTube, and nearly 15 million are engaging with our content on Twitter/X.

So, while there’s a smaller and more committed community of people who support our work and value the importance of pushing back (that’s you), there’s also a much larger number of sympathisers who are engaging and reading online.

And while we’re growing quickly, these numbers also do not reflect our influence on politics and the national conversation, which is both significant and visible.

Like the fact that our recently launched campaign against so-called “misinformation”, calling for the government and the British state to release information and data they are deliberately concealing if not hiding from taxpayers, has now gone mainstream.

I think one of the highlights for me this year was watching Rupert Lowe MP take the arguments we’ve made here and start demanding answers from none other than Prime Minister Keir Starmer, as well as watching policies and ideas that were first advocated in this Substack make their way into leadership campaigns and party manifestoes.

Long may it continue.

Or like the fact that this is now one of the only places that is consistently calling out things that the legacy institutions and elite class routinely downplay, if not ignore.

Such as mass uncontrolled immigration —which is making us poorer, not richer, an argument we were making long before the Office for Budget Responsibility finally came around to the same conclusion and one that many other platforms and magazines would also be making if there were genuinely committed to truth.

Or how we’ve been explaining to people across the country, in detail, exactly how Britain is being transformed, what is happening, and giving them the statistics and information they need to make sense of what their leaders are downplaying and, in some cases, what they need to campaign.

Or how we have consistently gone against the national conversation by showing, for instance, the sheer scale of our looming fertility and demographic crisis, what’s really driving the housing crisis, why multiculturalism is not working, and how the elite class remains firmly out-of-touch with the rest of the country on key issues.

All this reflects our ongoing willingness to challenge an elite consensus that works well for an elite minority but treats the Forgotten Majority with contempt. It’s what makes us a truly valuable and distinctive community of people.

And, as I also said on Saturday, when it comes to forecasting the political weather over the last year our track record has been very good indeed.

This Substack successfully called the outcome of the UK general election, including the re-emergence of Nigel Farage and the rise of Reform.

We were also, I think, one of the first to point out why Kamala Harris would be a disaster and Donald Trump would win a landslide, also pointing long before the election to how he would likely to do while expanding the post-2016 realignment.

We explained, even before the UK election, why Keir Starmer and Labour would quickly become a very unpopular government, and why people in Europe will continue to vote for national populists, who reject the liberal establishment.

We’ve also continued to track, in detail, the realignment of politics, explaining why parties like the British Tories are continuing to collapse while new parties, and a new politics, is now starting to emerge across Western democracies.

In short, I’d say that our political instinct has been spot on, reflecting how this Substack is much closer to the average voter and the mood ‘out there’ than much of the political, media, and cultural class that claim to speak for ordinary people but, clearly, do not really know them at all.

So, all in all, it was not only a great party but a great year for our community and one that we will continue to build on in 2025, with lots more offline events in the ‘real world’ (so it’s a great time to subscribe if you’ve not done so).

Lastly, looking ahead, next year will bring not only more parties but one or two announcements that will underline just how much louder and more influential our voice is set to become.

All I can say for now is ‘watch this space’ and, once more, wish you and your loved ones a Merry Christmas as we head toward … thank goodness … a break.

Best wishes and thanks again for being part of this community. Matt.

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