Is there an effective remedy to the danger of Islamic fundamentalism?

As the recent murder of Drummer Lee Rigby shows, Islamic fundamentalism and Islamist radicalisation is a threat to our lives and to Law and Order in our country, but we must not lose the perspective that it is not as a big a threat as was posed throughout the Cold War by the murderous, leftist regimes of the Soviet Union and Communist China, who together were responsible for the mass murder of perhaps as many of 150 million people.  They also threatened nuclear holocaust against the West and sought, at every turn, to infiltrate and undermine our society and often murder people who opposed them.   Nor as I implied in one of my recent postings have Islamists yet proved even as big a threat as the IRA was. 

However Islamists are undoubtedly a problem of our age and as the numbers of Muslims in our country have been rapidly increasing we need urgently to consider as a society whether anything can be done to remedy Islamist radicalisation. 

In the article below Melanie Phillips makes some eminently sensible points which it would be very encouraging, but totally naïve, to imagine that our current crop of political leaders would even dare to think, let alone utter! 

What do you think?

Here is the article:-

Until our leaders admit the true nature of Islamic extremism, we will never defeat it

By MELANIE PHILLIPS
PUBLISHED: 23:04, 26 May 2013 | UPDATED: 23:04, 26 May 2013

Ever since the spectre of Islamic terrorism in the West first manifested itself, Britain has had its head stuck firmly in the sand.

After both 9/11 and the 7/7 London transport bombings, the Labour government promised to take measures to defend the country against further such attacks.

It defined the problem, however, merely as terrorism, failing to understand that the real issue was the extremist ideas which led to such violence.

Accordingly, it poured money into Muslim community groups, many of which turned out to be dangerously extreme.

When David Cameron came to power, his Government raised hopes of a more realistic approach when it pledged to counter extremist ideas rather than just violence.
This approach, too, has failed. The Government still has no coherent strategy for countering Islamist radicalisation.

Following last week’s barbaric slaughter of Drummer Rigby on the streets of Woolwich by two Islamic fanatics, the Prime Minister has announced that he will head a new Tackling Extremism and Radicalisation Task Force.


And the Home Secretary has said she will look at widening the banning of radical groups preaching hate.

But at the heart of these promises remains a crucial gap. That is the need to define just what kind of extremism we are up against.

The Government has been extraordinarily reluctant to do this — because it refuses to face the blindingly obvious fact that this extremism is religious in nature.

It arises from an interpretation of Islam which takes the words of the Koran literally as a command to kill unbelievers in a jihad, or holy war, in order to impose strict Islamic tenets on the rest of the world.

Of course, millions of Muslims in Britain and elsewhere totally reject this interpretation of their religion.

Most British Muslims want to live peacefully and enjoy the benefits of Western culture. They undoubtedly utterly deplore the notion that the kind of carnage that occurred in Woolwich should take place in Britain.
 
Betrayal
And let’s not forget that, worldwide, most victims of the jihad are themselves Muslims whom the extremists judge to be polluted by Western ideas.

Nevertheless, this fundamentalist interpretation of the Koran is what is being spouted by hate preachers in Britain and on the internet, and is steadily radicalising thousands of young British Muslims.

Now the Prime Minister says he will crack down on such extremism. Yet after the Woolwich atrocity, he claimed it was ‘a betrayal of Islam’ and that ‘there is nothing in Islam that justifies this truly dreadful act’.

The London Mayor Boris Johnson went even further, claiming: ‘It is completely wrong to blame this killing on the religion of Islam’ and that the cause was simply the killers’ ‘warped and deluded mindset’.

Yet the video footage of the killers — who had shouted ‘Allahu Akhbar’ when butchering Drummer Rigby — records one of them citing verses in the Koran exhorting the faithful to fight and kill unbelievers, and declaring: ‘We swear by Almighty Allah we will never stop fighting you.’

Frankly, these comments by the Prime Minister and London Mayor were as absurd as saying the medieval Inquisition, for example, had nothing to do with the Catholic Church, but was just the product of a few warped and deluded individuals.
 
Power
Their comments were also deeply troubling. For if politicians refuse to acknowledge the true nature of this extremism, they will never counter it effectively.

But then, government officials have always refused to admit that this is a religious war. They simply don’t understand the power of religious fanaticism.

Of course, there are fanatics in all religions. Within both Judaism and Christianity,  there are deep divisions between ultras, liberals and those in between.

In medieval times, moreover, Christianity used its interpretation of the Bible also to kill ‘unbelievers’, because early Christians believed they had a divine duty to make the world conform to their religion at all costs. That stopped when the Reformation ushered the Church into modernity, and today no Christian wants to use violence to convert others to their faith.

The problem with the extremist teachings of Islam is that the religion has never had a similar ‘reformation’.
Certainly, there are enlightened Muslims in Britain who would dearly love their religion to be reformed.

But they have the rug pulled from under their feet by the Government’s flat denial of the religious nature of this terrible problem.

Some people instead ascribe the actions of the Woolwich killers to factors such as thuggish gang membership, drug abuse or family breakdown. But it is precisely such lost souls who are vulnerable to Islamist fanatics and who provide them with father figures, a sense of belonging and a cause which gives apparent meaning to their lives.

Many people find it incomprehensible that such fanatics remain free to peddle their poison. Partly, this is because the Security Service likes to gather intelligence through their actions. But it is also because of a failure to understand what amounts to a continuum  of extremism.

There are too many British Muslims who, while abhorring violence at home, nevertheless support the killing abroad of British or American forces or Israelis, regard unbelievers as less than fully human, and homosexuals or apostates as deserving the death penalty.

Such bigotry creates the poisonous sea in which dehumanisation and religious violence swim.

To the failure to understand all this must be added the widespread terror of being thought ‘Islamophobic’ or ‘racist’.

It is quite astonishing that universities mostly refuse to crack down on extremist speakers and radicalisation on campus — despite at least four former presidents of Islamic student societies having faced terrorist charges.

In a devastating account published at the weekend, Professor Michael Burleigh, who advised the Government on revising its counter-radicalisation strategy, described how this process descended into a ‘sad shambles’. He related how the Federation of Islamic Student Societies (FOSIS) had created a sexually segregated environment in which young people were being systematically indoctrinated in anti-Jew, anti-homosexual and anti-Western hatred by Islamist speakers on campus.

But although the Government condemned FOSIS for its failure to ‘fully challenge terrorist and extremist ideology’, with the Home Secretary even ordering that civil servants withdraw from its graduate recruitment fair, the Faith and Communities Minister, Baroness Warsi, actually endorsed it by attending one of its events at the House of Lords.
 
Lethal
Nor has the Government done anything to stop extremist preachers targeting and converting criminals in British jails at a deeply alarming rate.

On top of all this official incoherence is the paralysis caused by the excesses of the ‘human rights’ culture.
Thus the Home Secretary is facing a monumental battle to get through Parliament a Communications Bill that would give police and security services access to records of individuals’ internet use.

It is said that some of these extremist preachers exploit loopholes in the law. If so, then the law should be changed.

But we all know what would befall any such attempt. It would be all but drowned out by shrieks that we were ‘doing the terrorists’ job for them’ by ‘undermining our own hard-won liberties’.

Well, it’s time to face down such claims as vacuous and lethal nonsense.

The people threatening our liberties are Islamic radicals determined to destroy our way of life.

It is those who refuse to acknowledge the true nature of this threat who are doing the terrorists’ job for them.
And unless Britain finally wakes up from its self-destructive torpor, all who love civilised values — Muslim and non-Muslim alike — will be the losers.
m.phillips@dailymail.co.uk

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-2331368/Until-leaders-admit-true-nature-Islamic-extremism-defeat-it.html

Even the BBC now acknowledges the end of the “British” education system!

The Secretary of State for English Education, Scotsman, Michael Gove, has, it seems from this report, formally recognised that uniform educational standards and exam boards, etc., cannot be maintained across the various nations of the “United Kingdom”.

(This is the same Scot who, despite representing an English Parliamentary seat, said in February last year:- "When some of my colleagues say we need to re-visit the West Lothian Question or we need to have a new settlement that is fairer to people in England, I say 'no, remember the bigger picture'.")

The article below is interesting as an instance of the institutional collapse of the concept of Britishness and recognition of the fact by the principal mouthpiece of Britishness and also

one of its most self interested cheerleaders.

As people become more aware of what is happening, the value that they place on the Union of the United Kingdom will, I suspect, decline still further.

As long ago as 2011 the pollsters, Com Res were reporting that 36% of people in England supported English independence regardless of what happens in Scotland. That figure will certainly be considerably greater now.

Below is the article.

What do you think?

UK shared exam system faces break up

By Sean Coughlan BBC News education correspondent

 

The shared A-level and GCSE system for England, Wales and Northern Ireland has taken a significant step towards being broken up.

Education Secretary Michael Gove has written to education ministers in Wales and Northern Ireland saying the joint exam system no longer has a future.
England's exam changes have not been accepted in Wales and Northern Ireland.
The education minister in Wales, Leighton Andrews, says Wales will not give up the GCSE brand for exams.
"The time is right for us to acknowledge the three-country regulation of GCSEs and A-levels is no longer an objective towards which we should be working," wrote Mr Gove.
He also raised the question of what such separated qualifications should be called - saying that the "titling issue" of different types of A-level and GCSE needed to be resolved.

Mr Gove said he had received advice from England's exam regulator Ofqual saying that it will be "very difficult, if not impossible, to maintain comparable standards when the structure, content and even grading of these qualifications are diverging to such an extent".

Changes to A-levels and GCSEs in England, such as scrapping the modular structure and proposed changes to subject content, are not being followed by the devolved education systems in Wales and Northern Ireland.
Mr Gove also indicated last week that the grading of exams could be changed in England, moving away from the grading by letters - such as A*, A, B, C - and adopting a numerical ranking of 1,2,3 and so on.
Mr Gove, who met Leighton Andrews and Northern Ireland's education minister John O'Dowd last week, said the changes would mean "very different qualifications".
The mutual agreement over qualifications had already been strained - with divided views over last summer's disputed GCSE English results.
And there had been complaints that Wales and Northern Ireland had not been included in decisions about changing exams in England.
But instead of resolving such tensions, it now seems that Mr Gove believes the paths are dividing in a way that cannot be bridged.
"That is a natural and legitimate consequence of devolution," says Mr Gove's letter.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-22609674

AN EYE FOR AN EYE, A TOOTH FOR A TOOTH!

In the last few days there has been some talk of Old Testament values.
The Old Testament quotation and statement of Israelitish Law is “And if any mischief follow, then thou shalt give life for live, Eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, Burning for burning, would for wound, stripe for strip” and is taken from the Book of Exodus, Chapter 21, verses 23, 24 and 25. (Jesus reverses this for christians in the Gospel of St Matthew, Chapter 5 verses 38 to 42).

On Wednesday we had both an atrocity and, much less well reported, the echo of an older atrocity.  

I don’t personally know any of those involved in Wednesday’s atrocity but I wish every ill to the perpetrators and every condolence to the bereaved amongst the family and friends of Drummer Lee Rigby.

I was somewhat more personally connected to what happened in Hyde Park on the 20th July 1982 because, as an 18 year old, I was in the Brigade of Guard’s Brigade Squad for potential officers and trained with the admirable Lt Anthony Daly who was killed that day together with 3 other soldiers of the Household Cavalry.  His family were also friends of my family too. Had he lived he might have been retiring as a general now.

This is what was said about that incident:-
 
"Men and horses lay dead and dying in the park

Detective Inspector John Stevens was one of the first police officers to see the carnage of the IRA Hyde Park bombing in 1982
WE came on a scene of appalling devastation in the South Carriageway, on the bottom edge of the park.

A bomb loaded with 4in and 6in nails had been detonated by remote control in a blue Morris Marina, just as the Queen's Lifeguard, a detachment of the Household Calvary, was passing on its way from Knightsbridge Barracks to Horse Guards Parade. Men and horses lay dead or dying, and more than twenty people, as well as several horses, had been severely injured.

The regimental farriers, who had sprinted from their barracks when they heard the explosion, were splashed with blood from head to foot on their bare torsos and long leather aprons. Debris was scattered everywhere, and human remains were being taken away. The atmosphere was desperately tense, for there was every chance that a second bomb might go off.

The regiment's commander, Lieutenant Colonel Andrew Parker-Bowles, had raced to the scene on foot, and as he arrived had met a groom leading a severely wounded horse, which had blood gushing from a huge hole in its neck.

Immediately he told the man to take off his shirt and stuff it into the wound but that was impossible, for one of the groom's hands had been pierced by a four-inch nail, which was sticking out on both sides. Another man sacrificed his shirt and staunched the blood. But for that, the horse would never have reached its stable. It survived and became a hero Sefton and lived to the age of thirty."  http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/new...icle566235.ece

On Wednesday the Irish Republican, John Downey, who killed them was arrested.  He had not dared to show his face and had detonated the bomb that killed them by remote control from a cowardly safe distance and kept his hands clean of their blood.  Sinn Fein’s, Gerry Kelly, MLA has just claimed that arresting him now was “vindictive”.

Many of the similarities and differences between these two events are obvious but the most striking thing to me is that both demonstrate that the idea of multi-culturalism is clearly demonstrated in both cases to be deeply flawed and dangerous nonsense.  As we say in the English Democrats’ Manifesto:-
 
“It is a fact that during the past forty years people of many different cultures have come to live in England. Our country is in that sense a multi-cultural society. However, multi-Culturalism is an ideology which suggests that a mix of many cultures in one society is desirable and that it is the duty of government to actively encourage cultural diversity within the state. Further, it suggests that all cultures should be treated as equal. A logical extension of this is that all languages, histories and law codes should be treated equally. This is clearly impossible in a unified country. All ethnic groups should be free to promote their own culture and identity but the public culture of England should be that of the indigenous English. This position is consistent with the rights of indigenous nations everywhere.”

Here also are the comments of a genuinely moderate Iman about yet another recent and utterly appalling example of the same flaws in the current British Establishment’s concept of multi-culturalism:-

The Oxford sex ring and the preachers who teach young Muslim men that white girls are cheap

By Dr Taj Hargey

Daily Mail 15 May 2013

The terrible story of the Oxford child sex ring has brought shame not only on the city of dreaming spires, but also on the local Muslim community.

It is a sense of repulsion and outrage that I feel particularly strongly, working as a Muslim leader and Imam in this neighbourhood and trying to promote genuine cultural integration.

There is no doubt that the evil deeds of these men have badly set back the cause of cross-community harmony.

In its harrowing details, this grim saga of exploitation, misogyny, perversion and cruelty fills me not only with desperate sorrow for those girls and their families, but also with dread and despair.

If I were the judge in this case, I would hand out the harshest possible jail sentences to these monstrous predators, both to see that justice is done for their victims and to send out a message to other exploiters.

And when I say harsh, I mean it: none of this fashionable nonsense about prisoners being released only a quarter of the way through their sentences. There is no pattern of good conduct these men could follow behind bars that could possibly make up for all the terrible suffering they have inflicted on others.

Depravity

But apart from its sheer depravity, what also depresses me about this case is the widespread refusal to face up to its hard realities.

The fact is that the vicious activities of the Oxford ring are bound up with religion and race: religion, because all the perpetrators, though they had different nationalities, were Muslim; and race, because they deliberately targeted vulnerable white girls, whom they appeared to regard as ‘easy meat’, to use one of their revealing, racist phrases.

Indeed, one of the victims who bravely gave evidence in court told a newspaper afterwards that ‘the men exclusively wanted white girls to abuse’.

But as so often in fearful, politically correct modern Britain, there is a craven unwillingness to face up to this reality.

Commentators and politicians tip-toe around it, hiding behind weasel words.

We are told that child sex abuse happens ‘in all communities’, that white men are really far more likely to be abusers, as has been shown by the fall-out from the Jimmy Savile case.

One particularly misguided commentary argued that the predators’ religion was an irrelevance, for what really mattered was that most of them worked in the night-time economy as taxi drivers, just as in the Rochdale child sex scandal many of the abusers worked in kebab houses, so they had far more opportunities to target vulnerable girls.

But all this is deluded nonsense. While it is, of course, true that abuse happens in all communities, no amount of obfuscation can hide the pattern that has been exposed in a series of recent chilling scandals, from Rochdale to Oxford, and Telford to Derby.

In all these incidents, the abusers were Muslim men, and their targets were under-age white girls.

Moreover, reputable studies show that around 26per cent of those involved in grooming and exploitation rings are Muslims, which is around five times higher than the proportion of Muslims in the adult male population.

To pretend that this is not an issue for the Islamic community is to fall into a state of ideological denial.

But then part of the reason this scandal happened at all is precisely because of such politically correct thinking. All the agencies of the state, including the police, the social services and the care system, seemed eager to ignore the sickening exploitation that was happening before their eyes.

Terrified of accusations of racism, desperate not to undermine the official creed of cultural diversity, they took no action against obvious abuse.

Amazingly, the predators seem to have been allowed by local authority managers to come and go from care homes, picking their targets to ply them with drink and drugs before abusing them. You can be sure that if the situation had been reversed, with gangs of tough, young white men preying on vulnerable Muslim girls, the state’s agencies would have acted with greater alacrity.

Another sign of the cowardly approach to these horrors is the constant reference to the criminals as ‘Asians’ rather than as ‘Muslims’.

In this context, Asian is a completely meaningless term. The men were not from China, or India or Sri Lanka or even Bangladesh. They were all from either Pakistan or Eritrea, which is, in fact, in East Africa rather than Asia.

What united them in their outlook was their twisted, corrupt mindset, which bred their misogyny and racism.

If they had been real, genuine followers of Islam, they would not have dreamt of indulging in such vile crimes, for true Islam preaches respect for women and warns against all forms of sexual licence, including adultery and exploitation.

Contempt

By all accounts, this was not the version that these men heard in their mosques. On the contrary, they would have been drip-fed for years a far less uplifting doctrine, one that denigrates all women, but treats whites with particular contempt.

In the misguided orthodoxy that now prevails in many mosques, including several of those in Oxford, men are unfortunately taught that women are second-class citizens, little more than chattels or possessions over whom they have absolute authority.

That is why we see this growing, reprehensible fashion for segregation at Islamic events on university campuses, with female Muslim students pushed to the back of lecture halls.

There was a telling incident in the trial when it was revealed that one of the thugs heated up some metal to brand a girl, as if she were a cow. ‘Now, if you have sex with someone else, he’ll know that you belong to me,’ said this criminal, highlighting an attitude where women are seen as nothing more than personal property.

The view of some Islamic preachers towards white women can be appalling. They encourage their followers to believe that these women are habitually promiscuous, decadent and sleazy - sins which are made all the worse by the fact that they are kaffurs or non-believers.

Their dress code, from mini-skirts to sleeveless tops, is deemed to reflect their impure and immoral outlook. According to this mentality, these white women deserve to be punished for their behaviour by being exploited and degraded.

Brutish

On one level, most imams in the UK are simply using their puritanical sermons to promote the wearing of the hijab and even the burka among their female adherents. But the dire result can be the brutish misogyny we see in the Oxford sex ring.

For those of us who support effective and meaningful integration, it is dispiriting to see how little these criminals, several of them second-generation Britons, have been integrated into our society.

If they were possessed by the slightest sense of belonging or shared citizenship, they would have had some respect for the welfare of these girls.

Instead, they saw only people from an alien world with which they felt no connection. For them, there was no sense of kinship or solidarity for people in their neighbourhood who were not Muslims.

It is telling, though, that they never dared to target Muslim girls from the Oxford area. They knew that they would be sought out by the girls’ families and ostracised by their community. But preying on vulnerable white girls had no such consequences — once again revealing how intimately race and religion are bound up with this case.

We will build a secure society only when we are all taught to have respect for one another, regardless of creed or colour.

Horror over this latest scandal should serve as a catalyst for a new approach, but change can take place only if we abandon the dangerous blinkers of political correctness and antiquated multiculturalism.

When the Scots and English both want to be less British

The interesting thing about the Herald Scotland article by Ian Bell below, from the perspective of an English Nationalist, is that it clearly suggests that English Nationalism hasn't yet focussed on a political vehicle that is actually English Nationalist in perspective. 

I suspect that this does represent merely a staging post for many people who are waking up to their English National Identity. When they fully do so, and are represented by a proper English Nationalist party, then English Nationalism may well become the dominant political force in English Politics! 

I suspect that will be better for both Scotland and, more importantly from my point of view, England too.

When the Scots and English both want to be less British

Published on 18 May 2013

Ian Bell

COMPLICATED, isn't it?

David Cameron calls Nigel Farage's Ukip a bunch of "fruitcakes, loonies and closet racists". Mr Farage comes to Edinburgh and denounces demonstrators as racists after they accuse him of racism. He calls them scum, they call him a scumbag.

Having admitted before the English local elections that some of his candidates might be British National Party members, Mr Farage then draws the inference that some nationalists in Scotland are fascists, and scum, and anti-English racists. Gordon Brown recently likened Ukip's attitude towards immigrants to the provocations of Enoch Powell. Where does that leave the former Prime Minister on the crypto-fascist scale?

After his brush with a miniature version of the Edinburgh mob, Mr Farage asserted that he had never encountered such treatment before. That might be because elsewhere he has managed to present himself as the moderate, affable man in the pub who likes a laugh and a punitive immigration policy. Mr Farage's strategy is to portray Ukip as the mainstream party of "common sense". Some of us don't feel obliged to believe it.

Still, the speed with which Mr Farage translated jeers over immigration and homophobia into "anti-English racism" was mightily impressive. True, it appears that someone did suggest he could put his Union flag in a place where it would receive no salutes. True, someone else did demand that he should "Leave Scotland, go back to England", a sentiment your basic Ukip patriot wouldn't struggle to grasp. 

But seriously: was there a row in the Royal Mile over the man or his policies? "Anti-English racism" has become the default position of a lot of right-wing folk trying and failing to import this or that piece of ideology. When all else fails – for surely the vote-winning policy can't be at fault – it becomes the only explanation they can grasp. Some even seem to find it congenial.

Let the sponging Scots go. Independence for England. Dissolve (this is one of Ukip's) the Holyrood Parliament. There's a lot of it about. According to some recent research, there has been a fascinating parallel increase in the numbers of people identifying themselves as English rather than British. One conclusion being drawn is that this might explain the Ukip phenomenon.

We are not short of racists in Scotland. We don't lack for those witless enough to believe that all their problems would be solved if "something was done" about immigration. There are handfuls of blood-and-soil types hanging around the fringes of nationalism. None of it has thus far amounted to anything. The BNP and its predecessors spent years trying to work out why they couldn't turn Scottish prejudices into support, even at football grounds.

Ukip has the same problem. Why won't proudly-British reactionary Scots flock to its cause? Mr Farage and his friends have a prejudice for every occasion. With barely a third of voters in the mood for independence, meanwhile, you can accuse a few dozen radicals on Edinburgh's High Street of being anti-English, if only as handy distraction, but it's a struggle to pin the label on the whole country.

Mr Farage is not what you would call anti-nationalist. At the last General Election he stood for this ambition (from the Ukip manifesto): "No longer will our country have to grovel to the EU for permission to spend our own money to save our post offices, car plants or power stations, or to negotiate our trade deals and determine our destiny". 

The Ukip leader's conceptual difficulty is one of those squaring-the-circle problems. He shares it with all those Tory MPs who are giving David Cameron such grief. Seeking "independence" from the European Union is a proud and noble ambition. Seeking independence from the UK is but one step away from anti-English racism. Embattled in Embra, Mr Farage said: "Clearly this is anti-British, anti-English. They even hate the Union Jack".

The elision from British to English was, as always, fascinating. But if a chap doesn't know the difference between the Union flag and the Union Jack he's probably beyond help. Mr Farage's real problem is two-fold. First, you might find yourself detested if your policies are detestable. Secondly, what he calls anti-English racism is better explained by Ukip's success in making itself a repository for English identity.

Don't take my word for it. The research mentioned has been carried out by the universities of Edinburgh and Cardiff – non-aligned observers, you might say – along with the Institute for Public Policy Research for a work called the Future of England Survey. The full results mined from the 2011 census have yet to be released, but there are preliminary conclusions.

For example: in the census "70% per cent of the English population identified themselves as either solely English or English in combination with some other national identity. Just 29% of respondents identified themselves as feeling any sense of British national identity". Fully 55% of Ukip's supporters said they were "English not British".

Equally, when people were asked: "Which party best stands up for English interests?", Ukip topped the list, scoring 21% to 19% for Labour and 17% for the Tories. Writing in the Spectator earlier this month, Guy Lodge, Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) associate director, commented that "it is exactly those voters who feel more strongly English who also believe that England is getting a raw deal from its membership of both the European Union and the current political settlement in the United Kingdom".

Richard Wyn-Jones, professor of politics at Cardiff and co-author of the report, was meanwhile quoted in the IPPR's press release. He said the Ukip phenomenon is more than anti-European or anti-politics. It is a "much broader transformation in attitudes", one that is "bringing England and Englishness to the fore as a political community and political identity... Ukip is surfing a wave of existential angst about England's place in world."

Almost simultaneously, Professor John Curtice of Strathclyde University has produced a briefing paper for ScotCen (the Scottish Centre for Social Research), entitled Who Supports And Opposes Independence – And Why, using the 2012 Scottish Social Attitudes Survey. In part, this confirms what you might have guessed: 23% say they are "Scottish not British"; 30% identify themselves as "more Scottish than British".

So why isn't there 53% support for independence? Crudely put, because a Scottish identity is "a near-ubiquitous attachment that unites rather than divides most people in Scotland". Britishness is a different matter: "the more strongly British someone feels, the less likely they are to support independence". Among Scots generally, it is "how British they feel that divides them".

In short – this is my gloss – the SNP's task is not to encourage Scots to feel more Scottish, but to persuade them to feel less British. In that event, of course, a Farage will pop up, England's chosen voice, and accuse Alex Salmond of being anti-English. Nationalists will have to live with that.
One country wants to be independent of the other. The other, in this case, is England. The idea that the process will be amicable at every turn is naive. With Ukip on the scene and English nationalism resurgent, we probably haven't seen the half of it.

A Stuart Restoration to the Scottish Crown in an independent Scotland?

Towards the end of this article in the Herald Scotland (http://www.heraldscotland.com/mobile/politics/political-news/galloway-attacked-for-snp-catholic-slur.21116305?_=ae30b8a933a78e2172be69dea63c7fb56e0d0b37) I noticed something which may prove to be of momentous significance.  Here is the quotation:-

"SNP MSP Bob Doris said:- "It is the Westminster Parliament .... which institutionally discriminates against Catholics in the Act of Settlement – discrimination which an independent Scotland can and will consign to the dustbin of history in a written constitution for the 21st century."

The Act of Settlement is the law which governs who can be crowned Monarch.  In a way you might say the comment shows that the SNP are now committed to maintaining the Monarchy.  When I first met anybody with influence within the SNP I did point out that, by their then wholly republican stance, they were alienating support.  I suggested that they talked about maintaining the Monarchy and retaining the unity of the Crown as a social union.  I suggested if they did then their support was likely to be enhanced.  I was therefore pleased when my suggestion seemed to be acted upon and feel sure that the decision to do so has helped them up till now.

However what is suggested by the above words is rather more radical than might appear at first appear.

Consider for a moment the British Government’s recent tinkering with the Act of Settlement.  Here is an article which explains some of the detail.     

In round terms we will now have, if and when all the Commonwealth governments adopt it, a significant change to the rule excluding Roman Catholics. 
 
A Roman Catholic will not be able to actually become King or Queen but could marry a Roman Catholic as long as their children are Church of England, then they still can be in the line of succession to potentially become King or Queen.  Not all the Commonwealth governments have as yet ratified this so therefore this Act has not yet come into force, although it has been passed by the Westminster Parliament.

If the above quotation is accurate it would appear however that the SNP intend to adopt a different rule which allows for an actual practising Catholic to be Monarch. 
 
It should be remembered that the only reason that a relatively obscure German princely family from Hanover, and then subsequently an even more obscure princely family from Saxe-coberg became our Royal Family is because of the Protestant succession.  Indeed George I (originally the elector Georg Ludwig of Hanover) was placed something like 40th in the normal line of hereditary succession to the throne.  All the others before him who were Catholics were excluded by the Act of Settlement.  Indeed the senior line of succession for both the Crowns of England and of Scotland continued and arguably continue to this day in the Stuart family.

This comment by the SNP therefore opens up the prospect of a restoration of the Stuarts to the throne of Scotland.  It is perhaps even more surprising that the comment suggests that an independent Scotland, by pursuing a separate line of succession, would cease to be members of the Commonwealth.

I wonder if this is what was really meant, or whether this is merely indicative of a lackadaisical and casual ignorance of their significance?  If the latter then it may bring a storm down on the ears of Mr Doris.  What do you think?

ENGLAND SCOT FREE OF UK GOVERNMENT DEBT?

I recently came across the origin of the expression ‘scot free’ which turns out is nothing to do, as I had idly thought, with Scottish reivers (border raiders) getting back across the old border with their ill-gotten gains before they could be brought to face English justice. In fact the origin is as follows:-

'Skat' is a Scandinavian word for tax or payment and the word migrated to England and mutated into 'scot' as the name of a redistributive taxation, levied as early the 10th century as a form of municipal poor relief.

'Scot' as a term for tax has been used since then in various forms - Church scot, Rome scot, Soul scot and so on. Whatever the tax, the phrase 'getting off scot free' simply refers to not paying one's taxes.

It seems that people have been getting off scot free since at least the 11th century. The first written reference in to 'scot free' is in a Writ of Edward the Confessor (who died in 1066!).

This, funnily enough, is a more relevant, if somewhat less amusing, insight into the quoted remarks of Dr Matt Qvortrup http://www.cranfield.ac.uk/cds/staff/qvortrupmmatt.html, which as the report below shows has built on the comments that I reported quite a while back of the North Western constitutional law professor, Professor David Scheffer , who had already pointed out that if the UK Government were trying to insist that they were the successor state and that Scotland was a wholly new state then it logically follows that the Scots could achieve independence without any of the liabilities of the UK. That opinion is now confirmed in this report.

If Alex Salmond deliberately lured Goerge Osborne and Michael Moore on so that he could judo throw them into their own elephant pit, constructed of their own arrogance, ignorance and folly, then this result could not be bettered.

The additional significance of course is that there is a new race on because it is the first of the nations of the UK that get away with being new states that could get out “scot free” from under the massive debts that the profligate and spendthrift British political Establishment have built up for us.

To use another expression ‘what is sauce for the goose is certainly sauce for the gander’, so if Scotland could avoid the debts by becoming a new state so could England.

With over a Trillion pounds (£1000,000,000,000) worth of UK Government debt at issue getting away scot free from the debt mountain sounds quite appealing!

Independence for England anyone?

Here is the article from the Scottish version of the SUN newspaper. Could there be any agenda behind it not appearing in the English version?

Expert: Scotland can legally leave the UK and be debt free Split ends ... Dr Qvortrup says successor states took on liabilities in past break-ups

By ANDREW NICOLL, Scottish Political Editor

SCOTLAND can legally walk away from its share of the UK’s debt mountain and start independence with a clean slate, according to a top constitutional expert.

Lawyer Dr Matt Qvortrup says the nation could begin its life outside the union unshackled from a £125BILLION overdraft — equivalent to four years’ spending at Holyrood.

And the world-renowned academic believes his findings, based on studies of historic state separations, could have a massive impact on the independence debate.

He said: “Imagine — ‘vote Yes and send the bill to David Cameron’.

“Of course I am neutral and just an observer, but the world deserves to know the facts. Personally speaking, I think this could be a game changer.”

Dr Qvortrup’s explosive findings are published in a report that looks at national divorces dating from 1830, when Belgium left the Netherlands, until the break-up of Yugoslavia and the collapse of the Soviet Union in the Nineties.

His research found countries that split equally have historically shared the debts built up during their union. But if one partner continues as before as the ‘successor state’ — keeping its position on international bodies such as the United Nations — it shoulders the debts.

Westminster has already claimed that the remainder of the UK would carry on in that role after a Yes vote in the 2014 independence referendum.

It would hold on to its seat in Europe as well as at the UN and military alliance Nato — while Scotland would have to start from scratch and apply for admission to those bodies.

Dr Qvortrup — an academic at Cranfield University near Swindon, Wilts — said that would reduce Holyrood’s UK balance sheet to zero.

He said: “If Alex Salmond doesn’t want to share the debt and is happy to reapply to Europe, the default position in international law is that Scotland would not have to pick up the debt.

“That has to be known to the people before the vote next year so that David Cameron will know we are starting negotiations from the position that UK (remainder of UK) is the successor state. That has consequences. The one that pays the debt is the successor state.

“If you want to be the EU successor state and be in the UN Security Council, you can. You take all the spoils — but you also take the baggage.”

He added: “In Yugoslavia, Serbia Montenegro wanted to be the successor country but they were deemed not to be — which meant they were not landed with the debt. The position Scottish Secretary Michael Moore and Prime Minister David Cameron have is that as long as they are the successor state it’s all good.

“But the understanding about them having to pay the debt could be a good argument for the Yes campaign.

“All other things being equal, Scotland does not have to pay its share of the UK’s debt.”

The findings in the Qvortrup Report tally with the opinion of Professor David Scheffer of the Northwestern University School of Law in Chicago, US.

He believes Westminster’s reading of the post-indy situation is a “bold presumption that rests on very thin ice”.

And he says that negotiating a slice of the UK’s financial burden after a split would give Scotland bargaining power in talks.

However, the Vienna Convention treaty states: “When part of the territory of a state is transferred to another state, the state debt is to be settled by agreement.”

But only eight countries signed up to the convention — and the UK is not one of them.

A report published by Michael Moore in February said that a new Scotland would have to start from scratch as a new country — loaded with 300 years of UK debt. The analysis pointed to “the overwhelming body of international precedent including Irish independence in 1922”. It said: “In the event of independence, the UK would continue and Scotland would form a separate state. There would be an expectation that an independent Scotland would take on an equitable share of national debt, to be negotiated.

“The continuing UK would need to seek to ensure that a fair settlement applied to assets and liabilities.”

Finance Secretary John Swinney has already hinted he could be ready to walk away from the UK’s monetary liabilities if the SNP wins next year’s referendum.

When Chancellor George Osborne visited Scotland last month, he warned that he was unwilling to keep sharing the Pound with Scotland after independence. But Mr Swinney warned he was “playing with fire”.

He said: “The Chancellor argues that the UK would be the successor state, would hold on to the Pound and we couldn’t get access to that.

“If that’s his position, then the UK is obliged as a successor state to hold on to all of the debt.

“We would be liberated from a population share of the UK’s debt of £125billion.”

http://www.thescottishsun.co.uk/scotsol/homepage/scotlandfeatures/4924051/Expert-Scotland-can-legally-leave-the-UK-and-be-debt-free.html

An EU snake in the queen's speech grass?

Tucked away near the end of the Queen’s speech there is a significant EUish item. An example of our political elite not being totally honest with us?

There buried in the detail are some deceptive and bland comments about the European Union Approvals Bill which allows for authorisation for the UK ‘to support measures and programmes in the European Union’. Among three programmes listed, it includes Europe for Citizens which according to government briefing notes ‘aims to develop understanding of the EU, its history and policy-making processes and encourage civic participation in the EU’. It also aims to ‘promote remembrance of Europe’s history, particularly the wars and totalitarian regimes of the 20th century’.

If anyone wishes to know what is about to happen with matters EU in the UK, one place to start is at the European Scrutiny Committee website (ESC). What do we find there?
 

A ”Europe for Citizens” Programme with a budget of €229 million for the period 2014-20. It seeks to ensure continuity of funding for a range of activities already supported by the EU under the current Europe for Citizens Programme (2007-13). When did our press and politicians tell us about all this?

So just as David Cameron blows hot and cold over an EU referendum – signalling that he may “propose” a bill and then backtracking – we find that his British coalition government actually supports the objectives of the Europe for Citizens Programme, citing the fact that it has “synergies with the Government’s “Big Society” agenda and youth policies, as well as the focus on “localising action at the lowest possible level” and empowering individuals.” This is no more than brainwashing.

We also it seems have a Scrutiny Committee prepared to issue a conditional “scrutiny waiver”? And we have a parliamentary system that is supposed to scrutinise the government of the UK?

Here is the link to the official briefing note on the Queen’s speech. Click here >>>

https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/197434/Queens-Speech-2013.pdf

 

There were 9 UK wide Bills proposed, and 4 Great Britain only Bills, and one each for Wales and Northern Ireland and 3 for England and Wales only; These are: the Water Bill, the Offender Rehabilitation Bill and the Anti-social Behaviour Bill. 

There were also 3 bills with England only jurisdiction; one closing the Audit Commission, a Bill to enable HS2 and a Care Bill. 

There is also to be a new National Curriculum and exams reform for England only and Teachers pay arrangements and apprenticeships reforms all just for England only.

What real democratic mandate from the English Nation to reform our schools etc does a Scottish Minister in the British Government actually have? It would be good to have an English minister in an English Parliament decide these things after being elected by an constituency to represent the English nation!

PETER DAVIES – SIC TRANSIT GLORIA MUNDI (so ends worldly glory)!

As I am often asked about what happened with Peter Davies I will set it out here and then leave it. Peter was our party's first great electoral success and if that had been followed up then our Cause would have been helped greatly. It is disappointing that this wasn't possible.

Most of the details of Peter Davies’ life can be seen here in his entry in Wikipedia. Click here for the details >>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Davies_(politician)

For my part, my first awareness of Peter’s existence came about because our then Yorkshire organiser, Michael Cassidy (who had met Peter in UKIP and then the Referendum Party) where we had got him standing in a local election in Doncaster.

Peter had automatically become a member of the English Democrats on the basis of having previously been a member of a UKIP splinter party, Reform UK, which had recently merged with the English Democrats. I then got good reports back during and after the election that our message had gone down very well and that Peter was delighted with the fact that he had more than doubled his best previous performance.

I do not think I actually first spoke to Peter until Michael Cassidy brought him along to a National Council meeting. During the course of the next few months, with my active encouragement the strategic plan emerged to stand as much as our resources would allow in Doncaster and to start spreading our message and create brand awareness so when it came to the Mayoral election we would be in a good position to challenge. This plan went well with Peter standing in local elections and Michael Cassidy standing for us in the Parliamentary election.

Incidentally for those who think that it is practical to do a deal with UKIP, Michael Cassidy’s experience is telling. He had been, I think, the Secretary of the Regional Party of Yorkshire for UKIP and personally knew the organisers of UKIP within Doncaster. He wanted to stand in the Don Valley constituency which would have supported Peter’s local election candidacies, but UKIP’s local branch told him that that is where they wanted to stand. Michael therefore agreed that he would stand in North Doncaster, but when the nominations were announced by the Returning Officer, it turned out that UKIP had not stood in the Don Valley at all, but in North Doncaster in order to try and spoil our vote!

By the time of the run up to the Mayoral election and also the EU Parliamentary election which was to be held on the same date, I was aware that Peter was opinionated and seemed capable of making a good speech and dealing with question and answer sessions in a robust and mostly sensible way. I do not think, even with hindsight, that I had any information which should have led me to be wary. In any case it was probably either to put Peter up as Mayoral candidate or not to put up a candidate at all. I was keen to put up a candidate in Doncaster and mostly funded the election. We not only stood Peter as our Mayoral candidate but also put him on our Yorkshire EU Parliamentary list so that we would get a double mailshot and we used the EU Parliament election free delivery to mailshot the whole of Doncaster. I paid for this and for the Yorkshire EU Parliamentary deposit.

During the election campaign Michael Cassidy did tell me that things seemed to be going well and he did not need any further help. We were of course standing in the EU elections across England and therefore I was at full stretch.

I have since been told that even during that election campaign Peter threatened to resign. I understand that this was over the question of whether he could go off for a week during the campaign to go to the horse racing festival at Perth in Scotland. It was only when Peter came back from that and had the confirmation from Michael that we were doing well, that Peter actually began to do any serious campaigning.

We then had the sensational result that he was elected by a squeak on the second preferences. It was obviously a very exciting, if lengthy and drawn out count, with lots of re-counts during which all sorts of stunts were being played by the more partisan counting officials (including 600 BNP votes being mysteriously put in hidden amongst the Labour votes!).

Immediately after Peter was elected the first sign to me that he wasn’t going to be a “safe pair of hands” was when he gave an interview to Toby Foster for which he was totally unprepared and from which he flounced out in the middle of. When I discussed this with Peter, far from being sorry about it, he maintained that it was all the interviewer’s fault and that he would not give any further interviews with either Toby Foster or Radio Sheffield.

I did my best to repair the situation and did an interview with Toby Foster myself the following week on my way up to Doncaster to our new Mayor’s invitation.

At this time we were getting lots of media coverage and Peter was getting a flood of people saying how delighted they were that we had got him elected. Far from helping us respond to these letters and emails, he had his Council staff delete all of the emails and we never got any of the letters either. That was the first indications that things were not going to go smoothly.

Peter invited some of us up to Doncaster to celebrate and during our meeting we talked about the things that Peter could do to implement all relevant parts of our manifesto and the need to appoint a political advisor as his Chief of Staff. We had a National Council member available at the time, David Lane, who was willing to do the job. The second indication was when Peter initially said he would do it but didn’t in fact appoint him and became evasive about the reasons in the following weeks. At that point I thought it might be that he did not want to appoint David Lane, so I then invited him to appoint his close friend and agent, Geoff Crossman. He would not appoint him either. 

It was also becoming clear to me at this point that Peter was very disorganised and had a very poor memory for detail and was very inclined to make snap decisions without fully considering the situation, whilst also having no tolerance for those people he was dealing with in the Council who didn’t scurry obsequiously around him.

These were worrying signs and it was frustrating that we had got somebody elected to a high profile position of actual power, but yet he seemed to have no interest in implementing any aspect of our manifesto. I had become aware that Peter was volatile and headstrong, and it was unlikely that I was going to be able to get him to do anything that we wanted him to do.

I continued to try to get him to set up St George’s Day celebrations in Doncaster, but he would not do that; to focus the substantial community budget more on the English community, but he wouldn’t do that. He did not seem to have any strategic view as to what he was going to be doing in the Council, which was also frustrating. Having seen that the previous Mayor of Doncaster had fallen out with Labour and been independent for several years before the end of his tenure, I knew that I could not actually order Peter to do anything.

As a result of Peter’s election a significant number of people had joined the Party in Doncaster, but the reports that I was getting was that he was often falling out with individuals and the numbers were gradually dropping off.

In the first three years after his election we did nevertheless manage a significant number of candidates and have continued to regularly get the kind of votes that Peter had found he was getting once he started to stand for us.

There was then a highly critical report by Government Inspectors into the operation of Doncaster Council , which whilst it concentrated the heaviest fire on Doncaster’s Labour Party and Councillors, it was also clear that Peter was failing to respond to the situation in any sort of constructive way. I wasn’t entirely surprised by this stage. We nevertheless did our utmost to support Peter in what could have been a potential crisis.

We continued to lose good members of the Party in Doncaster, at least in part because of Peter’s behaviour but the next crisis was that Doncaster’s Labour Councillors decided that they would trigger a referendum on whether to keep the mayoralty. Peter had left dealing with this right until the very last moment and he then rang me in a panic asking me to help. I did and we produced a leaflet which won the day.

All the while Peter was being attacked on websites and in dishonest, utterly contemptible emails and blog entries from various sources including one particularly repellent individual called Jonathan Snelling, who is a failed Liberal Democrat candidate. It gradually became clear that many of the other attackers were people who had been pretending to be English nationalists but who were unmasked as being UKIP internet trolls (“UKIP’s Black Ops Team”).

When we won the mayoral referendum it was clear that we were in a good position to win the mayoral election again with Peter winning a further term. We now began to pick up indicators that Peter’s egotism had disturbed his sense of proportion to the point that he thought now, despite all the evidence to the contrary, that he had been elected entirely because of himself rather than as a result of any input from the English Democrats!

I suspect the Labour Councillors who he was regularly mixing with were astute enough to realise that Peter’s greatest weakness is his egotism and had played on him to try to divide him from us so that they would have a good chance of winning the mayoral election.

By this point it was becoming clear to me that there was a danger that Peter would spin us out long enough so it would be impossible for us to find an alternative candidate before Peter became an Independent. I made it clear to him, not only in conversations but also in writing, that if he did not stand as an English Democrat we would nevertheless stand. Perhaps as a result of this crystal clear warning Peter then started working on the active members of our Doncaster branch to get them to stay with him if he stood as an Independent. It was also becoming clear that he was openly trying to de-stabilise the branch and on at least one occasion he flounced out of the meeting, hoping that the branch would collapse.

I then invited him to a selection meeting by our National Council indicating that we had another candidate and there would have to be a selection. At this point he resigned and immediately began to attack the Party. He claimed that his resignation was something to do with BNP members, although there were no ex-BNP members in the Doncaster branch and he was well aware of the few people who came over from the BNP to us had done so 18 months or so before. In short Peter’s conduct towards us was not only a great let down and unwillingness to follow our manifesto, but also devious and disloyal.

Perhaps I should have immediately been put on my guard when he kept telling me that he was “loyal”! These words from his interviews in the media after his resignation show just what that meant:-

Peter was asked about his refusal to help us get St George’s Day properly celebrated in Doncaster by the Local Government Magazine and he said, and I quote,: - “I have never celebrated St George’s Day. I certainly think, in a racing town like Doncaster, that meeting fraternal colleagues in Perth is a far better use of my time than dancing around with a bunch of Morris dancers”.

Peter’s commitment to English Nationalism was not even skin deep.

Peter told the BBC last year that he had not been mayor very long before he “realised that being an English Democrat was a total irrelevance”.

Peter told ITV that:- “A good Mayor is a Mayor without a party. English Democrats policies have never played any part in my running of the town.”

By now Peter had become an ex-supporter of six political parties, having, as he had told me at one time, originally been a supporter of Labour and then for a longish while Conservative, Referendum Party, UKIP and Reform UK and finally the English Democrats.

If Peter had been willing to maintain even the façade of loyalty, even though he was never actually going to do anything that was English Democrat, he would nevertheless now be starting on his second term of office as Mayor of Doncaster as can easily be seen by the results, as together we would have had a majority of over 4,000.

Peter’s tenure office has been a disappointment but our troubles with him are by no means unique for any political party in dealing with egotists. Those of us that actually care about the Cause and are campaigning to make a difference for England for the better will carry on and in Doncaster we are already looking forward to the next elections. We saved our Mayoral Election deposit and again we showed that we are the second Party in Doncaster after Labour. This result shows that our support is good even in such difficult circumstances.

I am glad to see that out of the 43 candidates that we stood this May we have had a further 10,083 votes (plus an uncounted number of second preference votes in Doncaster).

UKIP - the earthquake?

I would like to congratulate UKIP on its 139 Council seats won in the recent local elections. It is sensational turn-out for a Party which had previously only had a small number of councillors - if you exclude the parish/town councillors which UKIP's figures often used to mention. It is not so long ago that they were getting tiny votes despite their huge EU resources.

 But the newspapers have been reporting remarks along the lines that it is an “earthquake”, a “seismic shock”, a “body blow” or the “death knell” of the British political Establishment. 

 To establish a sense of perspective and balance on this, I think it is worth pointing out that overall there are 20,680 councillors throughout Great Britain and therefore talk of body blows, let alone of anything fatal for the British Establishment is well and truly over-blown. 

An interesting and carefully worked out  and sobering analysis on the imapct that UKIP has had has been done by Nigel Farage's former right-hand man here >>> http://www.eureferendum.com/blogview.aspx?blogno=83861

 If we want to use an analogy or simile, then because the media have been so vocal about it, it is clearly a blow to the face and perhaps even a black eye to the Establishment, whereas the less well reported numbers of Green Councillor candidates elected would perhaps also be a bruise, but hidden under the clothing. In neither case could it sensibly be said that the British Establishment’s skin had been broken, let alone any bones! 

Having recently shed Peter Davies, our “maverick” mayor of Doncaster, who was an ex-UKIPer, to my personal relief, given his vain and egotistical character and unwillingness to do anything at all in our manifesto, I do not envy Nigel Farage’s coming job in having to deal with perhaps 147 Peter Davies’, let alone having to deal with fire-fighting all the scandals and ructions which will now develop amongst those of UKIP’s new Councillors, who never expected to be elected and who in the nature of a previously small party, as Nigel Farage candidly admitted, had not been properly vetted.

Despite all this I congratulate UKIP and Nigel Farage, in particular for having greened up the ground on the so called populist right vacated by David Cameron’s Conservatives and his Coalition. Many of us feel very much the same regarding the EU, immigration and law and order.

The big difference between the English Democrats and UKIP is of course on the question of England, which UKIP has no interest in at all, as amply demonstrated by their failure to mention England or the English in their two recent Party Election Broadcasts.

I fully expect that as we move towards the Scottish Independence Referendum, questions relating to England and the English Nation will gather greater momentum in the way that troubles within the EU have helped UKIP’s recent progress. I look forward with relish to the English Democrats’ getting coverage then.