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My Speech at the Joint English Democrats and UKIP Conference on 5th October 2024
Here is the shortened version of my speech delivered to the joint English Democrats and UKIP session in the afternoon of our conference at Bestwood Lodge Hotel, a fantastic Gothic country house hotel on the outskirts of Nottingham.
Ladies and Gentlemen, Fellow English Democrats and also UKIPpers welcome to our joint Conference here in Nottingham.
I know Robin Hood was said to have all sorts of troubles with at least one resident of Nottingham, however this Robin and we have a good relationship with this hotel, which is keen to invite us back for our conferences and still are, despite the spate of Leftist threats that the management recently received. Many thanks to the owners and managers for standing firm!
So here we are Ladies and Gentlemen, in this fantastic Gothic building, Nottingham’s Balmoral, where there was once a hunting lodge at which the last Plantagenet King Richard III heard the news that Henry Tudor, who became Henry VII, had landed at Milford Haven and was leading an armed rebellion against King Richard. Richard left them here and went to his death at the Battle of Bosworth in 1485.
The building was built by the Victorian Duke of St Albans, who was a descendant of Charles and Nell Gwyn.
As, with so much of England, if you dig down into history you are likely to find something of interest.
If you go further back into the foundations of England, Nottingham was one of the five Viking boroughs, which Alfred the Great’s children, Edward The Elder and Æthelflæd, the “Lady of the Mercians" incorporated into England with their English unification project which led to the ultimate result of England being united under Edward’s son, King Athelstan, on the 12th July 927 outside Penrith at Egmont Bridge. This unification of nearly 1,100 years ago makes England the oldest Nation State on earth!
It is this Ladies and Gentlemen that some commentators have recently been talking about. One of whom was Robert Jenrick, the candidate who is currently in the lead for Conservative leadership, who on saying in an interview that there were threats to English identity was then faced with an attempted gotcha line his by Sky News interviewer.
Ladies and Gentlemen Sky News has long been very hostile to any idea of Englishness. Adam Boulton is a particularly appalling example of Leftist bias.
When the English Democrats were in contention for second place with the Greens in the limited by-election at Haltemprice and Howden, in 2008, Adam Boulton pointedly refused to mention the English Democrats at all. When we had called for a recount, as we were just 44 votes behind the Greens, he simply said “Another party has asked for a recount” whilst he was interviewing the Green candidate!
So Ladies and Gentlemen if you think the BBC is bad, then I would say it is worth considering just how biased Sky News is!
Of course in a way we do not mind Sky News being as biased as it is since we do not have to pay for it but it is still worth noting.
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.
Take this recent story from the Daily Telegraph by Tim Stanley.
If Welsh pride is fine, why not English?
Tories should champion the UK’s Celtic cultures. But they must not fear embracing Englishness.
“In Wales it looks as if being anti-English has gone mainstream. The Labour-led assembly discriminates against second-home owners; a Welsh village blocked a housing estate lest English-speakers move in and become a “degenerate influence”; and Bridgend County Council has ended free transport for certain pupils unless they attend a Welsh language or faith school.”
We have also just had the election of the Austrian Freedom Party in Austria.
Geert Wilders, the veteran Eurosceptic, whose Party won the elections in the Netherlands last year. Despite leading his Party for Freedom to a convincing victory, he did not become prime minister.
It seems his calls for a Nexit referendum and for the Koran to be banned were too controversial for his eventual coalition partners.
In response to the result in Austria he said on X “The Netherlands, Hungary, Belgium, Italy, Germany, Portugal, Sweden, France, Spain, Czech Republic and today Austria! We are winning! Times are changing!
“Identity, sovereignty, freedom and no more illegal immigration/asylum are what tens of millions of Europeans long for”.
Here in England we English are under attack - writes Old Labour activist Paul Embery
Yes, there IS such a thing as English identity - The liberal progressive elites are on a mission to deny England’s history and culture
“In his 1941 essay ‘England, Your England’, George Orwell wrote:
England is perhaps the only great country whose intellectuals are ashamed of their own nationality. In left-wing circles, it is always felt that there is something slightly disgraceful in being an Englishman, and that it is a duty to snigger at every English institution… [A]lmost any English intellectual would feel more ashamed of standing to attention during ‘God Save the King’ than of stealing from a poor box.
I suspect that even the great man himself, a socialist and patriot to the core, would be shocked by the degree to which the anti-English sentiment he identified over 80 years ago has become even more embedded in the psyche of the nation’s political and cultural elites – and not just those who consider themselves to be on the left.
We all know the script. England has no distinct political or cultural identity – not a meaningful one, at any rate. Most of the good and revered things that are said to be ‘English’ are not English at all; they all came from elsewhere. Other than ‘diversity’ and ‘tolerance’, naturally. Those anodyne concepts must be cited ad nauseum in response to any enquiry of what it is that makes us proud to be English. But that’s about it. (Oh, and didn’t you know that St George was really a Palestinian?)
The bad things, on the other hand – they are all definitely English. Slavery and imperialism, for example. The English must forever be reminded of their responsibility for these evils and be expected to engage in regular bouts of self-flagellation by way of atonement.
It’s hard to believe that any other nation’s intelligentsia would be so determined to denigrate or deny its history and identity in this way. Many who demonstrate such a mindset hold the belief that any expression of Englishness can stem only from a feeling of superiority or xenophobia or pride in things about which the English should be unproud. While Scottish, Welsh and Irish nationalism are seen as largely benign – even admirable by those who deem these nations to have suffered historical oppression at the hands of their larger neighbour – English nationalism, even of the most innocuous, civic kind, is to be avoided at all costs. (I wonder if these people have ever troubled to learn about Scotland’s role in the Empire.)
Others are motivated by the view that, in this age of ever-deepening globalisation, national borders and identities are essentially redundant, and we are instead all now citizens-of-nowhere – part of a great global cultural blancmange. Anyone standing in the way of this phenomenon is deemed an opponent of ‘progress’ and treated as some sort of political or cultural dinosaur. This, I am sure, explains why even some politicians on the right remain nervous about promoting the politics of English identity.
Take a recent much-commented-upon segment of an interview of Tory leadership candidate Robert Jenrick on Sky News. Jenrick had argued in a newspaper article that English identity had been placed at risk by immigration, ‘non-integrating multiculturalism’ and a metropolitan establishment which ‘actively disapprove[s]’ of the nation’s history and culture. Now, one may disagree with Jenrick’s analysis. But the interviewer barely even considered the analysis on its own merits, instead pressing Jenrick repeatedly on the question of ‘What is English identity?’ – the clear implication being that there was no such thing. For that is the premise from which much of the commentariat starts: that Englishness is an illusory concept and there is nothing distinct about the country at all.
Jenrick’s intervention sparked a wider debate on social media and beyond, with the usual suspects lining up to deride the entire notion of English identity and argue that there is no such thing. When it comes to England of all nations – the birthplace of common law, a near-universal language, an unsurpassed canon of literature and poetry, the Anglican church, the Westminster system of government, the industrial revolution, and numerous popular sports – such a theory is patently ridiculous. You may not like or be interested in any of the aforementioned things. But to deny that they have over a thousand years helped to shape England into the distinct political and cultural entity it is today is to demonstrate ignorance of the highest order.
These attempts have over the past couple of decades engendered a sense of national dispossession throughout many of England’s communities – especially in the provincial quarters of the country – and led to an increase in the number of voters identifying as more English than British. This development has, in turn, had a tangible impact on our politics. As former Labour cabinet minister and current director of the Centre for English Identity and Politics at the University of Southampton, John Denham, wrote earlier this year:
In the first two decades of the 21st century, the politics of England and the UK were transformed by voters who emphasised their English identity. The votes of the ‘more English than British’ took Ukip from obscurity to agenda setter, secured the fateful promise of an EU referendum, and delivered the Leave vote. In the 2019 ‘Get Brexit Done’ election, Boris Johnson’s Conservatives gained the support of 68% of the ‘More English than British’, 50% of the ‘equally English and British’, but lost narrowly to Labour amongst the ‘More British than English’.
Those bent on ridiculing the whole concept of English identity might perhaps be wise to start recognising the impact of their words and actions on the wider political landscape.”
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.
Immigration
On this topic I can’t do better than quote:-
Professor Matt Goodwin – The economic case for mass immigration is COLLAPSING:-
“One of the most detailed studies, the Borderless Welfare State, at the University of Amsterdam, paints a striking and bleak picture. It’s based on incredibly detailed and reliable data on individuals in the population. What did it find? It found clear and overwhelming evidence that much of the immigration that’s flooding into the country is undermining the welfare state and imposing big costs on the economy.
Why? Because much of the immigration into the Netherlands, like much of the immigration into the UK, is being driven by less well educated immigrants who cling to the welfare state and take more out of it than they put in.
As Jan van der Beek’s research shows, the share of poorly educated people in the 25-65 age group among non-European immigrants (34%) is twice as high as among the native Dutch (17%). And because the poorly-educated are more likely to rely on welfare this is increasing the proportion of net recipients in the population, upsetting the balance. This is exactly why Milton Friedman said: ‘You cannot simultaneously have free immigration and a welfare state’. It’s also why other scholars warn mass immigration erodes social trust and support for welfare —not least as the native population begin to realise they are merely subsidising outsiders from very different cultures who often hate who they are and are a net fiscal drain on the economy.
As Jan van der Beek also finds, while poorly-educated immigrants are a net fiscal cost on Western economies, so too are migrants who are moving into the West to join family members, study, or seek asylum (as many in the UK are doing). In the UK, for example, while people often assume that international students are affluent PhD students from Chile the reality is quite different. More than 40% of graduate visa holders in the UK earn less than £15,000 a year, with many ending up servicing the low-wage, low-skill Deliveroo economy. Only migrants who are moving for work make a net contribution although even then the pattern is mixed. As van der Beek finds, whereas labour migrants from North America, Oceania and Japan bring a net fiscal gain to the economy of some £670,000, asylum migrants from Africa, like many of those arriving in the UK, cost the Dutch a net cost of £685,000 per migrant.
Family and asylum migration is especially costly (which has also been found in Belgium). In fact, in the Netherlands it’s estimated that granting one asylum request to one migrant costs Dutch taxpayers about £1.1 million —to cover the asylum-seeking migrant, their family members, and the impact of the second generation.
There are also enormous differences according to where migrant workers come from. On average, migrant workers from Africa, the Middle east, and Central and Eastern Europe are a net fiscal drain. Their education and income is low, making them, on average, net recipients of the welfare state. This is aggravated by higher rates of family-related migration that come with labour migration, which doubles the cost.
One example are low-skilled, guest-worker migrants from Morocco and Turkey who have grown from 55,000 in the 1970s to 935,000 since. In 2016, in the Netherlands, these guest-workers and their descendants were net fiscal recipients of an astonishing £8 billion –equivalent to 2.5% of all government spending—which is even more striking given they tend to be younger and in theory should be net contributors.
In other words, while the costs of mass immigration to the UK are finally starting to emerge in the research, if you look at far more detailed and reliable studies elsewhere in Europe they tell a consistent and worrying story. It is exactly the kind of low-wage, low-skill, low-educated, and non-European forms of immigration that the UK is now welcoming with open arms, much of it from places like the Middle East and Northern Africa, that is precisely the most financially costly and most likely to erode rather than bolster our national prosperity.
The most costly forms of migration are asylum-seekers from the Middle East and Northern Africa.”
On a Geostrategic Level
Ladies and Gentlemen as I explained in the Spring Conference we are moving into a period where the increasing incompetence of 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 that 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.
The electorate in England is 39,860,421.
In the General Election on 4th July 2024 (60% turnout) just 24,288,122 voted
The Conservative’s vote in England was 25.9% of the vote or 15.8% of electorate a total vote of 6,279,411 in England.
(6,828,925 (23.7% in UK)
(in 12th December 2019 the Conservatives got 13,966,454 - more than double!)
In the General Election Labour got just 8,365,122 votes in England that is just less than 21% of the English electorate
Conservatives
So far as the Conservatives are concerned, you might say that they will recover but of course they may follow the 1993 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 simply propped up by very large donations from big business, often in return for favours.
I wonder if any of the Leadership candidates can change the Conservative Party’s fortunes – Let’s hope not!
Labour
As I mentioned in my Spring Conference speech, you can already see some aspects of how the Labour coalition might collapse. We have the Corbynite and Galloway tendency. Opposed to them we see technocratic social democrats, like Free Gear Kier Starmer. Labour could easily become two or three parties in the absence of any proper opposition. Who would have guessed how quickly Kier Starmer’s reputation for honesty would have collapsed!
It is worth noting that under our current electoral system that any talk of “Majorities” in the wholly disproportionate “First Past the Post” system is false, none are genuine majorities. The winners just got a larger minority vote than their competitors.
Also Labour generally got almost exactly the same number of votes as they did in 2019. So there has been no Labour “Landslide” – only a “Conservative” collapse!
SNP
In the Spring Conference I said that faced with their Far Left lunacy I thought that the SNP’s position would collapse dramatically. This was correct which meant that Labour got the benefit of that collapse and an increased majority in the House of Commons.
LibDems
Got more seats in the House of Commons than is proportionate.
Reform
Turning now to Reform.
They won 5 seats and an Ulster Unionist has since joined them.
A key issue to note is “Short Money”
This is General funding for Opposition Parties – the amount payable to qualifying parties is £22,295.86 for every seat won at the last General Election plus £44.53 for every 200 votes gained by the party.
£44.53 for every vote 4,117,221 divided by 200 = 20,586 x 44.53 = £916,699
6 Seats multiplied by £22,295.86 = £133,770
Total £ 1,050,736 every year
This is what a Conservative, Peter Franklin, from Conservative Home wrote about Reform:-
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. UKIP’s General Election results were quite similar to the English Democrats results. I am looking forward to hearing Nick Tenconi’s speech.
English Democrats
That brings me to the English Democrats.
In the May 2024 Police Commissioner elections we were clearly the foremost party on law and order issues and we got 44,909 votes in Essex (13.6%); and 21,646 in West Midlands (10.1%) and 7,739 in Lincolnshire (7.2%) for the lowest campaign spending of all the parties which we were in competition with and another Councillor elected.
In the General Election our results were:-
GENERAL ELECTION RESULTS - 2024
|
Shrewsbury |
English Democrats |
241 |
|
East Grinstead & Uckfield |
English Democrats |
2,036 |
|
Leigh & Atherton |
English Democrats |
376 |
|
Bolton West |
English Democrats |
202 |
|
Makerfield |
English Democrats |
368 |
|
Dover & Deal |
English Democrats |
185 |
|
Bradford South |
English Democrats |
248 |
|
Newark |
English Democrats |
156 |
|
Brentwood & Ongar |
English Democrats |
189 |
|
Boston & Skegness |
English Democrats |
518 |
|
Great Yarmouth |
English Democrats |
171 |
|
Bury South |
English Democrats |
224 |
|
Dunstable & Leighton |
English Democrats |
77 |
|
Makerfield |
English Democrats |
368 |
|
Barnsley North |
English Democrats |
42 |
|
Barnsley South |
English Democrats |
149 |
As political parties both we English Democrats and UKIP exist to fight elections. I think we all should always keep in mind Bertolt Brecht’s famous saying “He who fights, can lose. He who doesn’t fight, has already lost”. We both need to keep up the fight!
