Speech to Conference 15th September 2018 at Leicester

 Speech to Conference 15^th September 2018 at Leicester

On Saturday the 15^th 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 16^th 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. 

In Jonathan Foreman’s article “Theresa May is a failed Home Secretary and a bad choice for PM (http://reaction.life/theresa-may-failed-home-secretary-bad-choice-pm/) published in “Reaction” on the 2^nd July he wrote and I quote:-

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 1^st 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 1^st 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.