Here is the main text of my speech to the English Democrats’ Spring Conference in Rutland on the 16th March 2024:-
Political Survey
Ladies & Gentlemen, as all our regular attenders know, I generally do a quick survey of the state of politics in our great, although sorely put upon, country.
For all of us gathered here who are both eccentric enough not only to be interested in politics but also to be patriots, I think things are becoming more and more interesting and maybe also encouraging as we get closer and closer to the inevitable General Election, which must by law be held on or before the 28th January 2025.
If Rishi Sunak or whoever the latest beneficiary of an internal Conservative Parliamentary Party coup maybe at the time, does not ask the King to dissolve Parliament and call an election before the 17th December this year, then the date will automatically be 28th January 2025.
Again for us eccentrics, who Jim there calls “crazed political types”, there have been a slew of exciting opinion poll results which have suggested that the Conservatives are now down to a predicted vote of about 20% of those that vote. The commentator, Patrick O’Flynn, has suggested that might actually be just 14%!
In any case the thing that is most interesting about that is that it is below 26%.
26% of the votes in a General Election or thereabouts is the lower tipping point of the first past the post system. We have been repeatedly told that First Past The Post voting system forces politics into a two party model. And of course for decades now, ever since the War, that has been the case.
Before the War I would remind those interested in political history that wasn’t the case, as we had shifting balances of the parties and coalitions. It was the War and the War time Government which led to the Post War two party system.
But back to 26% of the vote in a General Election. The perfect example from UK political history is 1983.
In the 1983 General Election Labour got 8,456,934 votes which was 27.6 % of the vote.
The SDP Liberal Alliance got 7,780,949 votes, 25.4% of the vote.
This led to the astonishingly disproportionate results 209 seats and 23 seats! This vividly demonstrated just how disproportionate the First Past The Post system is.
Going back to the first of these opinion polls which was a YouGov poll. It was the first opinion poll that really drew attention to where the Conservatives now are in terms of potential vote in the next General Election. It was commissioned by Lord Moylon, the Conservative Peer, who is, I think, an actual Conservative, rather than the type that we are all too used to which is a LibDem masquerading as a Conservative.
Lord Moylon’s poll showed the Conservatives on about 23%. It was a larger sample than is usual for YouGov polls of nearly 4,000 rather than merely 2,000.
Factoring in the effect of the tipping point inherent in First Past The Post, the estimated number of Conservative seats after the General Election victory was down from the current number of Conservative seats of 348. The prediction Ladies and Gentlemen was that the Conservatives would have 12 seats in the House of Commons. That’s right 12 seats, just 12!
I know that some sceptical people find that hard to credit, but Ladies and Gentlemen let me tell you what happened in Canada in 1993
This is what happened to the “Progressive Conservative” Government Party in the 1993 Canadian General Election, where they went from 156 seats - a majority of the Canadian House of Commons and being in Government, down to 2 seats and even the Prime Minister lost her seat!
The highly encouraging point is that the “Progressive Conservative” Party was irretrievably damaged and ceased to exist, never again becoming a governing party. Their politics, as their name sounds, was very similar to the current UK fake “Conservatives” who are in fact “Progressive” on every policy (although they are perhaps more adept at lying about it than the Canadian Party was).
The other quirk of the Canadian 1993 election is that the Party that really pushed the “Progressive Conservative” Party over the edge was called “Reform”. In that election Reform took many traditionalist and socially conservative voters off the “Progressive Conservatives” and helped to cause their total collapse. Reform never became a governing party in Canada and has now disappeared, but it was the icebreaker that caused the realignment of Canadian politics.
So Ladies and Gentlemen the excitement of the coming year is that we might wind up at last with one of the two limbs of the “Uni-party” crumbling to dust! The commentator, Peter Hitchins, has long said that it is only when one of the legacy parties collapses that the other will collapse too. (I do note that Professor Matthew Goodwin is hedging his bets on this a bit). *
You can already see some aspects of how the Labour coalition might collapse. We have the Corbynite and Galloway tendency. We already see some of Labour’s former MPs in the Workers Party of Great Britain of George Galloway! Opposed to them we see technocratic social democrats, like Kier Starmer. Labour could easily become two or three parties in the absence of any proper opposition.
So far as the Conservatives are concerned, you might say that they will recover but of course they may follow the Canadian example and never do so. After all their membership is already quite small for a Party of Government. They claim to have a membership of about 150,000, but if you look at their accounts you cannot really come up with an estimate of paid membership of greater than 50,000!
Ladies and Gentlemen the Conservatives are not a mass party any more, they are propped up by very large donations from big business, often in return for favours.
I will give you an example of such a favour. The big insurance companies were wanting to reduce their pay-outs for whiplash injuries in road traffic accidents. In return for about £9m donations to the Conservative party election funds, they have got a change of law enacted to cause reduction of whiplash compensation to a quarter of what it was before. They have also now got a system for making claims, which has to be on an on-line portal run by the insurance industry and is very discouraging and difficult. This has all led to vastly fewer claims and so much greater profits and directors Bonuses!
When it becomes clear that the Conservatives will never be in Government again, those donations will dry up entirely, as happened with the Progressive Conservatives in Canada, which, of course, led to them ceasing to exist. There was then a great realignment of Canadian politics. A realignment which I look forward to here. I am sure everyone in this room looks forward to that too!
I do think that Rishi Sunak’s hysterical outburst, on the steps of 10 Downing Street ten days ago, shows that he is beginning to realise how desperate his and his Party’s situation is.
So Ladies and Gentlemen this year could genuinely be an exciting year for real change for politics in England and in the UK generally. The year in which finally the wholly outdated Post War two party system is finally shaken off.
*
In a way a good sign of possible change was the election of George Galloway in Rochdale and the poor results for all the establishment parties. To miss-quote George Galloway MP:- “The two cheeks of the same backside and the bit in the middle!”
However it is worth bearing in mind, before we gloat too much that in the Rochdale By-election one of the features of that election was, that, not only did George Galloway win half of the votes of Muslims in Rochdale, but also that the over 60% of the Rochdale constituency who are English sat on their lazy apathetic arses still hoping that “they” (the mythical, benign establishment) that “they” would sort it out. Perhaps those idle voters were thinking that they were doing something for their community by supporting their football team from their sofa with a six pack!
Well I have here an excellent quotation from the Irish Nationalist, Patrick Pearce, who is one of the Leaders of the Easter Rebellion in 1916, he said:- “It comes to this: a Man cannot save his people unless the people themselves have some manhood. A Man, even if he be a Man-God, will live and die in vain for all who are voluntary slaves. Christ cannot save you if you want to be damned; much less can any earthly hero.”
Justice System
Normally in my conference speeches I confine myself to talking about mainly political matters. However I do think I should mention the ongoing process of politicisation of the police and courts. Lots of people have noticed that it is very much a two tier approach in dealing with public order matters.
This was just recently highlighted on one of the Saturday marches when someone dared to put up a placard saying that “Hamas are terrorists”, which, of course, is exactly the official British Government position. Nevertheless it was him that was arrested and his placard screwed up by the Met police and he was arrested with some degree of force and pushed to the ground with some minor injuries.
The Hamas supporters in the demonstration who were in the process of attacking him were of course not arrested.
The Metropolitan Police then put out a duplicitous statement, claiming that he was arrested for his own protection and de-arrested.
Obviously Mayor Khan as the Metropolitan Police Commissioner certainly won’t hold the Metropolitan Police to any account for this appalling display of bias and it also vividly exposes the Prime Minister’s 10 Downing Street comments as totally without effect.
We have also had the recent conviction and sentencing of Sam Melia of Patriotic Alternative. The subject matter of Sam’s conviction was the production of stickers saying such things as:-
“’It is okay to be white’”
“‘White lives matter’”
“Labour loves Muslim rape gangs’”
“‘We will be a minority in our homeland by 2066’” and
“‘Mass immigration is white genocide’”
During the trial the prosecution were at pains to say that nothing in the stickers was illegal. Consequently Sam’s conviction was for nothing more than his intention in producing these stickers which was claimed to be to stir up racial tension. Accordingly this really is a naked example of a conviction for thought crime only!
Unlike the female Hamas supporters a couple of weeks ago in the Westminster Magistrates Court who were convicted of displaying images of paragliders such as were used by Hamas to attack and murder Israelis on 7/10 where their Muslim Judge has been reported as having liked social media posts which were anti-Israeli. This Judge gave them a “Conditional Discharge”. Ladies and Gentlemen a Conditional Discharge I would say is the equivalent of a slap on the wrist where there is no physical contact!
Sam Melia on the other hand was sentenced by a Judge who on his social media seems to be a keen supporter of Nelson Mandela. He sentenced Sam to two years, immediate custodial, for his anti woke Thought Crime.
The only positive aspect of this is that two years for Thought Crime has attracted widespread condemnation not only in England but also in the United States with even Elon Musk saying it is appalling and commentators as far away as Australia also saying that it is appalling. It has therefore brought attention to just how dodgy our criminal justice system has now become in England due to the pervasiveness of Judges and Senior Police Officers who are selected primarily on the grounds of being woke Social Justice Warriors.
UK Defence
There is also the question on a more geo-strategic level of just how far gone our woke Armed Forces are.
The numbers in the armed forces are at their lowest numbers for centuries and also political correctness is pervasive.
The second most senior General of the Army who is a woman officer called Lieutenant General Dame Sharon Nesmith. She has called for the patriarchal and hierarchical nature of the Army to be dismantled!
There was also recent controversy in the Royal Air Force which has been found to have unlawfully discriminated against hateful White male recruits to be fighter pilots!
The net effect is as Daily Telegraph correspondent, Con Coughlin, said in a recent article:- “Wokery doesn’t win wars. It guarantees defeat”!
This is particularly the case when you consider how woefully ill-equipped the British Army now is. When you consider that not only is the Army smaller than ever but it actually has inadequate equipment. Much of its best equipment has been given to Ukraine.
I gather that there is now a regiment of artillery with no guns or ammunition. Most of the other artillery regiments have little or no ammunition.
Our tanks, out of fleet of notionally some 200, only have about 40 that are in working order and they are obsolescent!
The Army thinks that it will take three years to get to the point where they could deploy command a single Division on the battlefield and that Division will be seriously under-equipped by comparison with any one of the 40 Russian Divisions.
The Armed Forces chiefs and military experts to the Commons Defence Select Committee reported recently in a report entitled “Obsolescent and Out Gunned”. It warned that, were the “British Army to have to fight a peer adversary (a euphemism for Russia), in Eastern Europe in the next few years, whilst our soldiers would undoubtedly remain amongst the finest in the world they would disgracefully be forced into battle in a combination of obsolescent or even obsolete armoured vehicles, most of them at least 30 years old or more, with poor mechanical reliability, very heavily outgunned by more modern missile and artillery systems and chronically lacking in adequate air defence.
They would have only a handful of long delayed new generation vehicles gradually trickling in due to bureaucratic procrastination, military indecision, financial mis-management and general ineptitude. As Brigadier Ben Barry, Senior Fellow for Land Warfare at the International Institute for Strategic Studies warned that any “UK division would have half the anti-armour capability, only 30% of the tanks of a Russian tank division, two-thirds of the armoured infantry fighting vehicles, 20% of the anti-tank guided weapons and 15% of the self-propelled artillery.”
He went on to say “It would be very difficult for that reduced division to stop a Russian tank division. A Russian tank division would seriously over-match the reduced Third Division.” Ladies and Gentlemen “Over-match” is of course a very polite clinical way of saying could be defeated.
This of course means that if the stupidity and incompetence of British political leadership gets us in to a shooting war with Russia, then the British Army is likely to be defeated.
If we turn to the Royal Navy, the situation is in many ways even more dire as we haven’t even got the aircraft to go on the aircraft carriers, let alone the ships to support an aircraft carrier based fleet. So it would be probable that the Royal Navy would also be defeated.
We then have the gathering storm in the Middle East around Israel, not only the Hamas fighters in Gaza but Hezbollah in Southern Lebanon and the increasing threat of Iran as one of the leading regional powers. It was in answer to this that Grant Shapps chose to remove the last Royal Naval vessels patrolling near the Falklands and put them to use in roles which are supportive of Israel.
The result is that the Falklands are now largely unprotected just in the same way that they were just before the Falklands War. The British Government has learnt nothing about handling the Argentinians by that war. They are now again talking about sharing sovereignty with Argentina. Those of us longer in the tooth than most will remember that these were exactly the things that the Thatcher Government did which encouraged General Galtieri to invade the Falklands. We again now have a President of Argentina who is very keen to reclaim the Falkland Islands AKA Las Malvinas.
As the Government have stripped away most of the defences of the Falklands I think it is probable that the Argentinian invasion would be successful and that, once established, the British Armed Forces no longer have anywhere near the capacity to be able to retake the Falklands.
So Ladies and Gentlemen we are moving into a period where the British State has got us to the point where it may well be defeated in battle.
That is unchartered territory, but I do note that States which are defeated in battle often collapse, which I think is a sobering reflection on the challenges that we may face over the course of the next 10 years.
It would be the British State that is defeated. The UK is of course in some senses a multi-national imperial state. Empires, in particular, are very susceptible to collapse in the event of military defeat. I would expect independent Nation States to arise out of the ashes of the British State.
Parties
Let’s now turn to the Parties.
Conservatives
I have mentioned already quite a lot already about the Conservatives, so you will no doubt be relieved to hear that I do not propose to say very much more about them apart from the question about when the General Election will be.
I was speaking to a local Conservative Party Chairman, who would not have any access to the planning at the centre of the Party but thought his best guess would be that the General Election would be on the 2nd May. If that is the case that must impact on what we think of doing for our election plans on the 2nd May, which I will come onto later.
Labour
Turning to Labour it seems clear that Labour will win the next General Election. The main question is by what size of majority they will get. That partly depends on what happens with the SNP in Scotland. Partly on how far the Conservative Party collapses in the event of the election.
SNP
Turning therefore to the SNP. When Alec Salmond handed over the leadership of the SNP to Nicola Sturgeon it seemed as if the SNP had become the natural party of Government of Scotland. For years afterwards Nicola Sturgeon cruised on that legacy, but as a Far-Left ideologue she increasingly became detached from what any normal Scottish patriot would support.
What really finished her off was trying to insist that a convicted rapist should just because he decided to call himself a woman, that he should therefore go to a female prison. Even her most blinkered supporters found it hard to follow that convoluted and ludicrous and dangerous chain of thought!
The SNP’s fortunes have declined dramatically even since then with Yousef Hamsa seeming to want the entire 2 million population of Gaza to be admitted as refugees to Scotland, along with his in-laws.
Faced with this lunacy I should think that the SNP’s position will collapse dramatically, which means that Labour will get the benefit of that collapse and an increased majority in the House of Commons.
LibDems
There is nothing much to say about the LibDems except that they may become the second largest party in the House of Commons and therefore the official opposition.
Reform
Turning now to Reform. They seem to be making more and more of a success. Lee Anderson, the Former Deputy Chairman of the Conservative’s has now joined them.
But this is what a Conservative, Peter Franklin, from Conservative Home wrote about Reform which is I think an interesting and sensible comment and reflects what others have been saying too:-
“There is, of course, an overlap between the interests of Reform UK and those of its potential supporters. But the party has done a poor job of focusing on this common ground. The essential context here is the catastrophic failure of the last three prime ministers to deliver on the offer that won the 2019 general election.
Yes, Brexit got done, but the other key components of the winning formula – controlling our borders and levelling-up the country – have been betrayed.
This is an open goal for Reform UK, but they’ve barely bothered to take the shot. The focus on immigration should have been relentless, but just look at the party’s homepage. It’s a heap of soft libertarianism with a garnish of anti-wokery. Immigration gets a single mention.
As for anything resembling a levelling-up programme or an industrial strategy, we just get a load of green-bashing. Blaming Net Zero for this country’s problems has become to the populist right what Brexit is to the remainiac Left. It also forgets that cleaning-up the environment and protecting nature are nearly as popular with Red Wall electorates as they are elsewhere in the country.
So am I claiming that Reform UK doesn’t matter? Absolutely not. Any party with about ten per cent of the vote matters, even if First Past the Post denies them seats. A glance at long-term poll trends suggests that, since the second-half of last year, it is Reform, not Labour or the Lib Dem, who are responsible for the decline in the Conservative vote.
There’s always the possibility that Tice and Farage might do what they need to do to storm the Red Wall. But even if they stay stuck in their rut, they will still exert an influence on the British party system.
As the direct inheritor of the Brexit Party and spiritual successor to UKIP, Reform UK is the first port of call for the populist protest vote. The leadership may lack the vision and courage to move beyond this strategic position, but they make it very hard for a hungrier, savvier party to move into it.
As used to be the case with the Liberal Democrats, and the Liberals before them, Reform UK is the bed-blocker party. Along with the electoral system, it is an impediment to the raging populism that has disrupted politics elsewhere in Europe.
I don’t suppose the strategists of Downing Street have ever stopped to thank Farage and co. However, that’s only because neither the Sunakites nor the Trussites nor the Borisites understand the full extent of their errors.
Between them they’ve reduced the Conservative Party to a state in which it is acutely vulnerable to replacement by a rival party of the right. That this hasn’t happened (yet) is in no small part due to the influence – and limitations – of Reform UK.”
UKIP
UKIP we are now in an electoral pact with them so hopefully we will avoid standing against each other.
English Democrats
That brings me to the English Democrats.
In the local May 2nd elections most of England does have local elections and I would urge everyone to stand. It is relatively easy to do so in a local election.
So far as the more high profile elections are concerned, we are aiming to stand in Regional Mayoralties and in Police Commissionerships. The challenges are similar in both, but there is a bit more help for Regional Mayoralties as we can get a double-paged spread about us and our candidate. In a booklet that gets delivered to every single registered elector in the Region.
Regional Mayors are also the Police Commissioners for their Region and so it is that we want to concentrate on using the ballot paper description:- “English Democrats – More police catching criminals!.
Ladies and Gentlemen we have generally done quite well in Police Commissioner elections. Last time around I got just short of 43,000 which was about 10% of the vote. I would think I would need to at least double that in order to get in with a chance of being elected. The new electoral system is First Past The Post, whereas it may in many ways be helpful in this type of election but the previous system was supplementary vote system which mean that when I got 43,000 first preference votes, I may well have got another 43,000 second preference votes. So may be at about 85,000.
Even with a 2/3rd collapse of Conservative votes I probably need to get up to 100,000 to be likely to win.
If the General Election is called for 2nd May that will allow us to stand in our target areas and get constituencies leafletted by the Royal Mail.
So Ladies and Gentlemen as the English Democrats aim to be the tip of the spear of English Nationalism let us live up to what is said in that Bedrock of Traditional English Culture the King James’ version of the Bible and so quoting from St Paul’s Letter to the Ephesians and, in words that the Cameron appointed head of the Church of England would absolutely hate, I read:-
Ephesians 6:14-17
King James Version
“Stand therefore, having your loins girt about with truth, and having on the breastplate of righteousness;
And your feet shod with the preparation of the gospel of peace;
Above all, taking the shield of faith, wherewith ye shall be able to quench all the fiery darts of the wicked.
And take the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God.”
