Speech
to Conference 15th September 2018 at Leicester
On Saturday the 15th
September we English Democrats had a successful and very pleasant conference at
our usual September venue in Leicester, at which, amongst others, I delivered
my keynote speech as follows:-
Ladies
& Gentlemen, Fellow English Democrats and English Nationalists
Thank
you Stephen and to all who have helped set up today.
As
Henry VIII might have said to each of his wives in turn “I will not keep you
long!”
I
am delighted to welcome you again to the geographical centre of England.
Although the City of Leicester itself may not be typical of England demographically
I was interviewed a few months ago when the BBC’s opinion poll of 20,000 plus
people showed to the EDL’s horror that over 80% of people living in England
regard themselves as English and it turned out that Leicestershire is one of
the areas where people are most proud of being English. So Leicester is not only a suitable location
for our meeting today geographically but also in terms of generalised support
for what we English Democrats as a Party stand for.
Ladies
and Gentlemen the English Democrats formally launched in August 2002 so we have
passed our 16th birthday. If
we were an individual we would now be legally allowed to own property but we
would not yet be able to vote and would not yet be liable to be called up to
the Armed Forces if there was a war! We
are however now one of the oldest of the smaller parties to be still
standing. Our long period of campaigning
does give us the advantage of having both experience and understanding of the
tasks ahead of us and of what is required to achieve success.
In
that time many of the other parties that started have either disappeared or all
but disappeared, whether that be Liberty GB, the National Front, British
Democrats, British Freedom, UK First, the Jury Team, Christian Party, Respect,
the BNP.
What
almost all those parties had in common was that they were focussed on Britain
and Britishness. We are still waiting to
see what happens with UKIP after March next year, but we should never lose
sight of the fact that we are the only campaigning English Nationalist Party.
It
is we English Democrats that have kept the flame of English nationalism burning
in the dark days when it was flickering under the impact of the EU sponsored
attempt to break England up. In those
days we had with ministers, such as John Prescott, denying that there even was
such a concept as English nationality.
We had the then Leader of the Conservative Party, William Hague,
claiming unsmilingly that “English nationalism was the worst form of all
nationalisms”. What is more even when Hague made a pathetically limited nod in
the direction of the existence of England, by proposing English Votes for
English Laws, his initiative could then be described in all seriousness in
parliament by a Scottish Lib/Dem as Hague having descended into the “gutter of
English nationalism”!
So
there you are Ladies and Gentlemen back then the concept of our nationhood
didn’t even exist, but if it did it was the worst form of all nationalisms and
it was a “gutter”!
Now
on the other hand our opponents increasingly hate us because not only do they
continue to dislike what we are saying but they fear that it is we who “are the
future now”!
The
famous Italian philosopher of government and author of the books “The Prince “and”
the Republic” recommends that “it is better to be feared than loved”, especially
of course by our opponents!
An
expression of that is that some within Labour are now anxious about their all
too obvious anti-Englishness and this had led to the setting up of the English
Labour Network. This Network led by the
former Cabinet Minister, John Denham, has had a lot of success in publicising
the issue. John Denham has even just
recently gone so far as to call for an English Parliament although his plan is
to use existing MPs part time and so not acceptable or workable.
In
the meanwhile the Conservatives initiative in changing the procedures of the
House of Commons to provide for a system of English Votes for English Laws or
EVEL has shown itself to be almost completely useless in empowering English
MPs, let alone in providing a proper forum for the voice for the English Nation
to be heard.
The
English Question meanwhile becomes more and more of practical significance. We
now have negotiations occurring about Brexit issues, such as fishing rights in
our territorial waters, in which the English fishermen are not represented at
all by anyone that cares for their particular interests, whereas the Scottish
fishermen not only have the Scottish Government, but also the British
Government. This has led to the British
Government not arguing effectively for English fishermen and also giving
preferential treatment to the Scottish fishermen, who of course are having
their corner very well fought for!
There
are many other similar instances of this.
In some ways the most significant of which is the fact that further cuts
have had to fall on English services in order to pay for the extra money to be
given to the Democratic Unionist Party’s pet projects in Northern Ireland to
get them to continue to prop up the Conservative Government.
Also
of course England continues to be discriminated against by the British
Government on spending – This was confirmed recently yet again by House of
Commons Library Service which published a paper in November last year which was
brought to my attention recently.
Things
seem to have changed since Churchill’s famous wartime colleague quipped:-
“There
is nowhere in the world where sleep is so deep as in the libraries of the House
of Commons”.
The
report has the figures for the financial year 2016/17 of the Barnett
Formula. The Barnett Formula determines the differential spending on
UK citizens depending on which of the UK countries those citizens live
in.
The
summary of the House of Commons research paper shows that England has the
lowest national average spent on every man, woman and child. This
was £8,898 in 2016/17. In Northern Ireland by contrast, it was
£11,042 for any man, woman and child.
If
you live in the English “Regions” of the South East, East of England, East
Midlands, South West or West Midlands you get less spent on you than even the
average of England.
It
is only in London that the British Government spending is more than even any one
of the other Nations of the UK. It is slightly more than Wales! London
has £10,192 for every man, woman and child, instead of the Welsh average of
£10,076!
This
Barnett Formula spread in payments, which advantages Scotland, Wales and
Northern Ireland is only for so-called “identifiable expenditure”, which is
about 88% of the total public spending of the UK. The costs of the
Foreign Office and of the membership of the EU, and of Foreign Aid and of the Defence
parts of the 12% of total public spending are not covered by the Barnett Formula.
Also no allowance is made for the policies under which the British Government
has headquartered British State agencies in Scotland and Wales, as for instance
the DVLA and HMRC. This is of course a yet further method of
increasing the British State subsidy to those nations.
It
is worth pointing out that Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland get yet a
further method of subsidy at the moment.
This is through the EU. The contributions to the EU which
come out of English Taxpayers’ pockets (as that is the only part of the UK for
which there is a net tax revenue) are funnelled back to Scotland, Wales and
Northern Ireland as EU payments, under the so-called “Conduit Effect”.
Some
of the additional subsidy to London is not part of the Barnett Formula but is
explained by the British State spending money on the security of its political
class with its large expenditure on armed police to guard the State’s
buildings. Notably is also spent on the
provision of diversity barriers and all the other paraphernalia of running the multi-culturalist
British State.
The
other aspect of this of course is that London is now in John Cleese’s words “no
longer an English city”. The subsidy coming into London is from the
predominantly English Regions to the predominantly non-English communities
within London. This is the fiscal background to the anti-English,
metropolitan, inter-nationalist, multi-culturalism of the Labour Party’s
predominance in London.
In
the last few weeks The Scottish Conservative Party under their multiculturalist
Leader, Ruth Davidson, have been gloating again about Scotland’s “Union
Dividend”.
Here
is a quotation of part of their press release:-
“Scotland
now raises eight per cent of UK total revenue, while receiving 9.3 per cent of
spending.
Total
spending per person in Scotland for 2017/18 was £1576 per head higher than the
rest of the UK, compared to £1448 per head the previous year.
Scottish
Conservative shadow finance secretary Murdo Fraser said:
“If
Nicola Sturgeon wants to continue her threat of her second referendum, she has
to come out and explain where she would find £13 billion to fill this deficit.
“Assuming
that can’t be done, the prospect of another divisive and unwelcome vote must be
removed for good so Scotland can focus on what really matters.
“Yet
again, the union dividend has been made clear.
“By
being part of the UK, Scotland received an extra £1576 for every man, woman and
child last year above the UK average. For a family of four, that’s more than
£6000 in additional public spending.
“If
Scotland was to be ripped out the UK, this spending would be slashed
drastically, meaning schools, hospitals and infrastructure would be hit.
“Any
Scottish Government would also have to massively increase taxes and borrowing
to help make up the difference, something the hardworking public simply
wouldn’t accept.
So
looking around us at the political scene today we have the Conservative Party
in obvious turmoil over Brexit. This
matter has now reached a point where if they continue on their current
trajectory they may well wind up destroying themselves permanently as an effective
political party of government. If Brexit
is not properly delivered I do not think there is any exaggeration to say that
the Conservatives will have destroyed their reputation for competence, for
honesty and for being patriotic. If that
really happens then the Conservatives will be finished as a serious contender
for Government.
In
a middle of a battle it is often impossible for any onlookers or most
participants to understand the plans of the commanders on each
side. That is even more the case in a political battle where all
sides puff out stories like chaff out of a Second World War Lancaster Bomber to
confuse the political radar of opponents and often also of supporters!
In
the case of Brexit, this is a complete reversal of the British Establishment’s
foreign policy in the last 40 years. This means that it is the most significant
reversal of British foreign policy in almost the entire careers of all the
parliamentary participants - so the chaff deluge Ladies and Gentlemen is
huge!
Brexit
is also a direct challenge by the voting public to the British Political
Establishment. Which is part of the reason why the Remain elite have
got themselves into such a state of hysterical denial over the situation.
At
the centre of the conundrum as to what is happening is of course Theresa
May. All those who have met her and know her, whom I have met, have
assured me that she is not especially intelligent and certainly not any sort of
an intellectual. She is however apparently very devious and
controlling and a vengeful and obsessive
micro manager.
Few
who follow British politics would deny that she is a deadly political
infighter. Indeed Theresa May is to Westminster what Cersei Lannister is to
Westeros in “Game of Thrones”: no one who challenges her survives unscarred;
the welfare of her realm is a much lower priority than her craving for power.”
Foreman
also wrote that:-
There
is also little evidence that Mrs May has paid much attention to the failure of
several forces to protect vulnerable girls from the ethnically-motivated sexual
predation seen in Rotherham and elsewhere. Nor, despite her proclaimed
feminism, has Mrs May done much to ensure that the authorities protect girls
from certain ethnic groups from forced marriage and genital mutilation. But Mrs
May managed to evade criticism for this.”
Foreman
continues:-
“When
considering her suitability for party leadership, it’s also worth remembering
Mrs May’s notorious “lack of collegiality”. David Laws’ memoirs paint a vivid
picture of a secretive, rigid, controlling, even vengeful minister, so
unpleasant to colleagues that a dread of meetings with her was something that
cabinet members from both parties could bond over.
Unsurprisingly,
Mrs May’s overwhelming concern with taking credit and deflecting blame made for
a difficult working relationship with her department, just as her propensity
for briefing the press against cabinet colleagues made her its most disliked
member in two successive governments.
It
is possible (Foreman says), that Mrs May’s intimidating ruthlessness could make
her the right person to negotiate with EU leaders. However, there’s little in
her record to suggest she possesses either strong negotiation skills or the
ability to win allies among other leaders.”
So
that article was right, Ladies and Gentlemen, Theresa Mayis now certainly the
Conservative’s version of Gordon Brown as I predicted in 2016.
So
it was to me rather doubtful that when Theresa May repeated her tedious mantra
that “Brexit means Brexit” that she necessarily meant us to understand what she
was thinking. I wondered whether that was simply a smokescreen to
deflect criticism or analysis of her position?
Given
that she had a parliamentary majority before she called her unwise General
Election it seemed to me likely that in doing she wanted to reduce the
influence of Brexiteers so that she could do whatever she wanted to do with
Brexit, which I felt was very likely not to be what anybody who really
supported Brexit would want.
Some
corroboration to my suspicion was given by Jeremy Hosking when he said that he
thinks she is deliberately trying to sabotage Brexit. Such an approach
certainly seems to be consistent to what we know of her character.
Jeremy
Hosking said that:-
GOVERNMENT
“incompetence” over the Brexit talks is part of Theresa May’s strategy to keep
Britain tied to the European Union.
Jeremy
Hosking, a City financier, alleges that one of Mrs May’s aides frustrated his
attempt at last year’s general election to donate hundreds of thousands of
pounds to Tory candidates under a “Brexit Express” campaign. In a letter to The
Sunday Telegraph, Mr Hosking said: “Those who think the Government is
vacillating or making a mess of Brexit due to incompetence are wrong.
“It
is part of a strategy. It’s going to plan and the inference from the experience
of Brexit Express is that the Prime Minister herself is probably implicated.”
Mr
Hosking offered to give £5,000 to 140 Brexit-backing Tory candidates to fight pro-Remain
candidates at the last election through “Brexit Express”.
He
said: “Brexit Express’s offer was spurned by the Conservatives.
“It
was made as difficult as possible to contact the constituencies that had been
(easily) identified, let alone give Tory candidates the money. It was indicated
to us by high-ranking party officials that the roadblock to our £700,000
Conservative Party donation lay within No 10 itself.
“We
were allowed to assume the blocker was Fiona Hill, Theresa May’s chief of staff
[who has now departed]. The layman’s presumption that the purpose of the last
election was to strengthen the position of the Government externally in the
exit negotiations is therefore false. The real purpose was for the Government
to face down its core of Brexiteer MPs internally.”
Unfortunately
there is very little that any of us, who are not within the inner circle of the
Conservative Parliamentary Party, can realistically do about this situation It
may therefore be worth considering what her position will be if Brexit is
actually betrayed as suspected. In this respect I cannot do better
than quote the opinion of one of the key architects of the Brexit vote, Dominic
Cummings who wrote:-
“On
the referendum: a letter to Tory MPs & donors on the Brexit shambles
Further,
lots of what Corbyn says is more popular than what Tory think tanks say and you
believe (e.g nationalising the trains and water companies that have been run by
corporate looters who Hammond says ‘we must defend’). You are only at 40% in
the polls because a set of UKIP voters has decided to back you until they see
how Brexit turns out. You only survived the most useless campaign in
modern history because Vote Leave killed UKIP. You’re now acting like you
want someone to create a serious version of it.
Ask
yourselves: what happens when the country sees you’ve simultaneously a) ‘handed
over tens of billions for fuck all’ as they’ll say in focus groups (which the
UK had no liability to pay), b) failed to do anything about unskilled
immigration, c) persecuted the high skilled immigrants, such as scientists, who
the public wants you to be MORE welcoming to, and d) failed to deliver on the
nation’s Number One priority — funding for the NHS which is about to have a
very high profile anniversary? And what happens if May staggers to 30 March
2019 and, as Barwell is floating with some of you, they then dig in to fight
the 2022 campaign?
If
you think that babble about ‘the complexity of the Irish border / the Union /
peace’ will get you all off the hook, you must be listening to the same people
who ran the 2017 campaign. It won’t. The public, when they tune back in at some
point, will consider any argument based on Ireland as such obvious bullshit you
must be lying. Given they already think you lie about everything, it won’t be a
stretch.
Yes
there are things you can do to mitigate the train wreck. For example, it
requires using the period summer 2019 to autumn 2021 to change the political
landscape, which is incompatible with the continuation of the May/Hammond brand
of stagnation punctuated by rubbish crisis management. If you go into the
2022 campaign after five years of this and the contest is Tory promises versus
Corbyn promises, you will be maximising the odds of Corbyn as PM. Since 1945,
only once has a party trying to win a third term increased its number of seats.
Not Thatcher. Not Blair. 1959 — after swapping Eden for Macmillan and with over
~6% growth the year before the vote. You will be starting without a majority
(unlike others fighting for a third term). You won’t have half that growth —
you will need something else. Shuffling some people is necessary but extremely
far from sufficient.
Of
course it could have worked out differently but that is now an argument over
branching histories for the history books. Yes it’s true that May, Hammond,
Heywood and Robbins are Remain and have screwed it up but you’re deluded if you
think you’ll be able to blame the debacle just on them. Whitehall is better at
the blame game than you are, officials are completely dominant in this
government, ministers have chosen to put Heywood/Robbins in charge, and
YOU will get most of the blame from the public.
The
sooner you internalise these facts and face reality, the better for the country
and you.
Every
day that you refuse to face reality increases the probability not only of a
terrible deal but also of Seumas Milne shortly casting his curious and
sceptical eyes over your assets and tax affairs.
It
also increases the probability that others will conclude your party is
incapable of coping with this situation and, unless it changes fast, drastic
action will be needed including the creation of new forces to reflect public
contempt for both the main parties and desire for a political force that
reflects public priorities.
If
revolution there is to be, better to undertake it than undergo it…
Best
wishes
Dominic
Cummings
Former
campaign director of Vote Leave"
Cummings’
letter is particularly interesting considering that the leading commentator on
voting patterns, Professor Sir John Curtice, has recently pointed out that now
it is 70% of the Conservative Party’s electoral support that
are Leave voters.
If
the Conservative Party betrays the Leave vote they will also reveal, what many
patriots have long known, that the Conservative Party is not a genuinely
patriotic party.
The
Conservative Party elite is part of the globalist establishment and thus
fundamentally hostile to nationalism or patriotism. It will
therefore be good for the political prospects of genuine patriots and
nationalists if the Conservative Party wrecks itself on Brexit!
I
think the public reaction is a function of the extent to which the public have
taken notice of the issue of Brexit. I
heard it once put this way, that most people don’t think about politics at all,
they rarely watch the news, they don’t read a newspaper and so if you manage to
get them to think about politics at all it’s rather like people seeing politics
out of their peripheral vision of the corner of their eye. If you think of it that way then most people
never look directly at any political issue or person or politician. To get them to actually look even out of
peripheral vision.
If
somebody actually manages to get the public to look directly at them then
politically that is a game changer.
So
this means that the current parliamentary parties of the British Political
Establishment and, in particular, the Conservative Party, which I want to talk
about in this article, have lived their whole careers, up until the Brexit
vote, in at most the peripheral vision of the voting public. This
has always meant that as long as politicians are looking as though they are
going to say the right things whenever they come into view in the public’s
peripheral vision, the public’s gaze flicks away from them and they are allowed
to get on with it unchecked.
It
is because of this lack of attention that the public does not hold Establishment
Politicians properly to account and does not put any serious effort into
thinking critically about the politicians that are being
elected. This is the situation in which the current generation of
parliamentarians have grown up and in which they have developed their careers.
So
if, for example, you take Theresa May, she is a politician who has basically
been able to get away with lying about what she stands for throughout her whole
political career. Thus in order to get selected by the Conservative
constituency party, any Conservative MP who is not genuinely a Eurosceptic has
had to lie to claim that they are a Eurosceptic otherwise they would not get
selected by the predominantly Eurosceptic Conservative Party
membership. Once selected, in order to get elected, they have
had to continue lying and pretending that they are Eurosceptics, because in
most Conservative seats they would not get elected if they said that they were
Europhiles.
Theresa
May, for example, when she became Home Secretary, on any objective basis she
did an appalling job of being Home Secretary. On almost every promise that she
and the two Conservative Governments that she got elected but she failed to
deliver on almost any of the policies that had been promised. The most
glaring of which of course is on immigration, where they were elected on
promises to keep immigration down to the “tens of thousands”. In
fact, she presided over the biggest influx of mass immigration in the history
of England, with, in her last year as Home Secretary, more immigrants arriving
in that one year than had come to England in the entirety of the thousand years
before 1939!
However
whenever the public’s political vision flicked over her, there she was saying
that was what she wanted to try and achieve a dramatic reduction in mass
immigration. That was enough to satisfy the public so that their
gaze moved on and so no critical analysis was brought to bear in holding her
accountable for her actual lack of achievement!
This
current generation of parliamentarians might have continued to live out their
whole political careers just as previous ones had done, without there being a
moment where the public would be willing to make any effort to properly hold
them to account. That would however have been without the Brexit
vote!
As
a result of the EU referendum on leaving the EU, the public, for the first time
in at least a generation, really focussed on a political question and gave an
unequivocal answer based upon the largest turnout that has occurred for decades. The
unequivocal expectation of voters was, and is, that the public’s decision would
be implemented. This is where trouble has occurred for our dishonest and
deceitful Remainer MPs, who had comfortably expected to be allowed to continue
making decisions that suited them and their agendas without any proper
accountability to the electorate for the rest of their careers.
Theresa
May is just one of those parliamentarians who had expected to be able to carry
on lying her way out of any inconvenient situation.
It
is in that context that she has dishonestly conducted her own hidden Brexit
policy which she unrolled to the startled gaze of her Cabinet colleagues at
Chequers.
Theresa
May’s Chequers’ proposal is not only completely contrary to the public’s
expectations following the Brexit vote, but is also directly contrary to
Theresa May’s Lancaster House speech about her “red lines” when she was still
repetitively chanting “Brexit means Brexit”. Now the public is turning its
eyes towards Theresa May and is focussing and so is noticing that she is a
dishonest and incompetent Remainer, who is, in Jacob Rees Mogg’s words “a
Remainer who has remained a Remainer”. This is despite the public’s
vote and despite her pledge to implement it in her otherwise ill-judged General
Election manifesto.
This
leaves me somewhat torn between two conflicting feelings!
For
the country, and as a patriot, I think that what Theresa May is trying to do is
a travesty and a terrible missed opportunity, but as the Leader of what The
Times newspaper was recently kind enough to call an “insurgent party”, I cannot
help but relish the prospect that the parliamentary Conservative Party led by
Theresa May could well be now heading irrevocably in a direction in which the
public will clearly see that the leadership of the modern Conservative Party is
composed of dishonest, incompetent, and unpatriotic Europhiles.
When
the public truly realises what the modern Conservative Party leadership stands
for, I think it likely that the public will regard them as unfit to hold
Government Office ever again.
It
may well be that many of the seventy plus per cent that Professor Sir John
Curtice of Strathclyde University has identified as being “Leavers” who have
been voting Conservative will decide not to come out to vote for the current
alternative Establishment party (i.e. Corbyn’s Labour) but that does not mean
that they will vote again for a Conservative Party that has so clearly and now
noticeably betrayed the trust that was placed in them.
The
purging of the Conservatives from being a Party of Government is the first step
required for a reconstruction of our national politics.
We
need a politics more in line with the two opinion blocks of real
voters. These are for the patriotic, anti-mass immigration,
pro-Brexit, pro-traditional values and pro-welfare and NHS
nationalists. Against this block is the internationalist, pro-EU,
anti-patriotic, liberal values, pro-mass immigration, individualistic
cosmopolitan block.
The
current mishmash of views is one in which the Establishment parties are at
cross purposes with most voters. Most of us like some of what Labour
has to say and also some of what the Conservatives have to say but we don’t
like all of what either of them have to say. So, at the moment, voters
have the awkward and unappetising choice at elections of having to choose
between the least worst party, rather than being able to choose a party they
actually fully agree with. Changing that ladies and gentlemen would be a
reform of our politics well worth seeing!
Theresa
May was then anointed as Leader of the Conservative Party and Prime Minister on
the back of promising to implement Brexit with her opaque slogan of “Brexit
means Brexit”. Since then we have been treated to a series of broken
promises on top of her longstanding track record of claiming to support
reducing immigration to the tens of thousands, when in fact allowing the
largest influx of immigrants since Blair swamped us with millions of Eastern
Europeans!
Here
are just some of Theresa’s whoppers
“There
should be no general election until 2020.” General election: 8 May 2017.
“There
should be no decision to invoke Article 50 until the British negotiating
strategy is agreed and clear.” Article 50 triggered: 29 March
2017. Cabinet Brexit strategy agreed: 7 July 2018.
“If
before 2020 there is a choice between further spending cuts, more borrowing and
tax rises, the priority must be to avoid tax increases since they would disrupt
consumption, employment and investment.” NHS spending increase, funded
by “us as a country contributing a bit more [tax]” 17 June 2018.
In
her 2017 party conference speech May made the promise again: “With our
economic foundation strong – and economic confidence restored – the time has
come to focus on Britain’s next big economic challenge: to foster growth that
works for everyone, right across our country. That means keeping taxes low.”
“I
will therefore create a new government department responsible for conducting
Britain’s negotiation with the EU and for supporting the rest of Whitehall in
its European work. That department will be led by a senior Secretary of State –
and I will make sure that the position is taken by a Member of Parliament who
campaigned for Britain to leave the EU.” Theresa
May takes personal charge of Brexit talks: 24th July
2018.
“The
Conservative Party can come together – and under my leadership it will.”
Labour
on the other hand have a different set of problems. Brexit is one as they did of course stand on
the promise that they were going to support Brexit properly, whereas a large
proportion of their MPs do not want to do so.
Many
of these Remainiacs are heavily involved in the campaign to get a second
referendum vote in order to overturn the Brexit vote.
Such
a second vote does run the risk of causing a breakdown of the civil order
because of course the message is that voting doesn’t count and we will get told
to re-vote until we get the answer that the Establishment wants. That message is a message guaranteed to call
forth the resort to force.
What
the campaign to overturn the Brexit vote has shown is not only that the
political Establishment is not at all the democratic entity which they were
trying to pretend they were, but instead they are only democratic when they are
getting their way. As soon as they are
not getting their way they are not democratic at all.
What
it also shows, as also does the Conservative Government’s failure to properly
deliver Brexit, is that in the British State, the central apparatus has
degenerated to the point that the British State and British Political
Establishment seem to be actually incapable of re-emerging from the EU as a
fully functioning sovereign state. From
the point of view of insurgent English nationalism that of course is great news
in the longer term, since it makes the dissolution of the UK inevitable. Or as Willian Hague put it in the Daily
Telegraph on Tuesday:- “The United Kingdom could be headed for a major
constitutional and political crisis”.
Labour
has of course been for the last six weeks or so been besieged with allegations
of anti-Semitism. It is however worth
bearing in mind why these allegations have been suddenly given prominence. The principle cause has been the aggressive
lobbying by pro-Israeli Jews to adopt the Israeli drafted definition of
anti-Semitism, which would make it impossible to argue with pro-Israeli Jewish
politicians or other lobbyists to point out that conflict of interest would be
obvious if it was pointed out. This of
course gives Israel a particular advantage in lobbying which no other state
would have and is on the face of it a wholly unreasonable demand.
Imagine
that this is the demand of Russia’s lobbying for Russia. Imagine what a kerfuffle we would have to put
up with from the MSM and British Establishment politicians!
Labour
have of course now given way on this, but having taken so long over it the
Jewish lobby is still pushing for yet more concessions and privileges.
Despite
all this controversy I think it likely that if the Conservatives do actually
mess up Brexit that we will wind up with a Corbyn Government come the next
General Election.
In
the meanwhile the Liberal Democrats, the party of open Euro-fanatics, continues
to bump along at low levels of support.
It now looks like Vince Cable, their current leader, is seeking to
change his Party’s rules. He is apparently
angling for a Labour MP to come forward and to defect in order to become a
candidate to be Leader. It will be
interesting to see what happens there!
The
SNP in the meanwhile has got itself into some difficulties with Nicola Sturgeon
having been so keen to tick the ‘#metoo’ box after the Henry Weinstein scandal
in Hollywood that she introduced a complaint system for sexual behaviour
complaints which does not allow the accused to know very much at all about what
the complaint is, or who the complainant is, let alone complying with the
traditional legal rules of natural justice or indeed even the European
Convention on Human Rights which requires the full disclosure of the
complainant and the opportunity for the accused to challenge them and subject
them to cross-examination and to see and challenge all the evidence. This had
led to a split between Nicola Sturgeon and Alex Salmond, with Alex Salmond
raising by crowdfunding more than double what he needed to bring a claim in the
Scottish Court of Sessions against the Scottish Government based on their
unfair treatment of him. I have offered
my support to him which he thanked me for with the salute “Yours for England”! From what I have heard from him of the case
I would fully expect him to win, with yet further embarrassment for Nicola
Sturgeon.
UKIP
has had a bit of a bounce in recent times with it seeming to become more likely
that we might not leave the EU. This is
I think a mistake by people and indeed some journalists to think that this
would happen. At the moment we have the
Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty expiring at midnight on the 29th March next
year. That is the full two years from the
service of the Notice under Article 50 and which is set out in Article 50. As you know I am a lawyer so you may like
the story of the Judge who said to the accused “have you anything to say before
I pass sentence? “ Accused “Yes Guv - for Gawd’s sake keep it short”! But before you get your hopes up you know
that we lawyers never do!
1.
Any Member State may decide to withdraw from the Union in accordance with its
own constitutional requirements.
2. A Member State which decides to withdraw shall notify the European Council
of its intention. In the light of the guidelines provided by the European
Council, the Union shall negotiate and conclude an agreement with that State,
setting out the arrangements for its withdrawal, taking account of the
framework for its future relationship with the Union. That agreement shall be
negotiated in accordance with Article 218(3) of the Treaty on the Functioning
of the European Union. It shall be concluded on behalf of the Union by the
Council, acting by a qualified majority, after obtaining the consent of the
European Parliament.
3. The Treaties shall cease to apply to the State in question from the date of
entry into force of the withdrawal agreement or, failing that, two years after
the notification referred to in paragraph 2, unless the European Council, in
agreement with the Member State concerned, unanimously decides to extend this
period.
Ironically
the Remoaners are now in a constitutional bind.
They were keen to celebrate when Gina Miller sued the Government over
Article 50, but what she achieved was a ruling from the Supreme Court that the
Government cannot deal with Article 50 under the prerogative powers of the
Crown, but requires a full Act of Parliament to do so.
This
now means that any extension to the notice period would require a full Act of
Parliament. I think that is highly
unlikely. Also I don’t think the
European Union actually wants us to remain in after the Article 50 notice has
expired because they are worried that we may then return an exceptionally large
proportion of Eurosceptics but the EU Parliament election in May 2019.
In
all circumstances I think it is virtually certain that we will be out of the EU
by the 1st April and at that point UKIP will no longer have any MEPs
or any of their money either. UKIP had
an NEC meeting last weekend and have blocked their forthcoming conference from
voting allowing Tommy Robinson to become a member. So this goes to show that despite the
potential prize of further mass membership and new role for UKIP under Gerald
Battan’s leadership, who after all is a man who is sincerely opposed to
Islamism and indeed Islam itself, UKIP has decided as a quiet life so clearly
come the 1st April, UKIP will be a redundant party.
There
are two other parties which I think are worth mentioning in this round up. One is the For Britain Party led by Ann Marie
Walters. She made a fundamental tactical
error in standing in Lewisham East and getting a derisory vote which was a tiny
fraction of what she had when she last stood there for UKIP. The principle issue focussed on by the For
Britain Party is fighting back against Islamism.
Whilst
I think most of us English Democrats would agree with that as an issue, it is
of course mainly a subset of the wider issue of mass immigration. In a sense properly thought of is simply
totemic or a symbol of that threat to our English culture of the uncontrolled
and unchecked mass immigration which the British multi-culturalist
Establishment has forced on England over the last 20 or 30 years.
Instead
of confronting that issue fully For Britain instead focus on Islam.
The
Islamic question also has an impact on, not only our culture, but also our
traditional values, which of course multi-culturalists are opposed to. The For Britain campaigning position is
however to support the multi-culturalist opposition to traditional values and
call for people to oppose Islam because Islam’s opposition to gay rights and
gay marriage rather than because of Islam’s opposition to traditional English
values.
Ann
Marie Walters is of course personally not interested in Englishness or English
culture because she is of Irish origin.
This of course leads her to support the multi-nationalist British
position.
There
is then an even smaller party, the Democrats and Veterans Party who is led by
John Rees-Evans the former UKIP leadership candidate. This Party has a strong link to former
soldiers particularly ex-paras. In my experience of them they are refreshingly
decent but the Party does have a curious positon on policy making which means
that they don’t propose to set out their own policies from a centralised policy
making approach, instead they propose to use a direct democracy approach so
that members can make policy. In
principle this sounds fine but of course it does lead directly to the kind of
situation that the then Green’s Leader, Natalie Bennett found herself in when
she was being interviewed by Nick Ferrari on LBC and also Andrew Neil on the
BBC, which was that she was forced into the position of having to try to defend
a policy that she hadn’t approved herself or indeed understood and she was made
to look a complete fool and had what she called a “brain fade”!
Personally
I wish the D & V Party good luck but I would expect them to find it hard to
make progress where they haven’t got a central point to what they are
campaigning about or an identity.
There
was an attempt to create a very similar party by Sir Paul Judge with his Jury
Team on which he spent over £½ million of his own money trying to set up but
for it only to get nowhere.
Steve
Bannon, formerly Donald Trump’s leading election campaign organiser, says that
in the modern world it is the nationalists against the internationalists. The trouble for any British nationalist party
is that Britishness is of its nature internationalist. Therefore any British party which is also
talking about nationalism is on both sides of the divide with the obvious mixed
messages that is bound to create.
Englishness
on the other hand is a proper nationalism so we English Democrats have no such
difficulties in being proper and consistent nationalists! Thank you Ladies and Gentlemen for being such
good listeners.
