Total Visits

Wednesday 29 June 2022

WHAT LESSONS ARE THERE FROM THE WAKEFIELD PARLIAMENTARY BY-ELECTION?


 

 

WHAT LESSONS ARE THERE FROM THE WAKEFIELD PARLIAMENTARY BY-ELECTION?

 

Therese Hirst stood in the Wakefield Parliamentary By-election for the English Democrats.  We did a full Royal Mail leaflet drop and some further leafleting and canvassing.  The turnout was poor, at just short of 40%. 

 

Although our vote of 135 votes sounds unimpressive, it is worth bearing in mind that we did beat UKIP who had 124 votes, who seemed, from what we could see, to have done a lot more canvassing and had an active media presence.  We also beat a few others of the long list of candidates. 

 

Our cost per vote was a bit more expensive than we are used to at £17.94, but it is worth comparing that with the Britain First candidate, Ashlea Simon, who with her 311 votes, according to what they have said over the internet, Britain First paid over £96.46 per vote!  (Rumour has it that this might actually have been even worse at £160 per vote!).

 

The Reform Party and the Liberal Democrats may have spent even more per vote, as both of those may have spent the full allowance of £100,000 to get 513 and 508 respectively! 

 

Both of those parties suffered dramatic losses in the numbers of people voting for them.  In the 2019 General Election the Brexit Party (now called Reform), got 2,725 votes and the Lib Dems got 1,772 votes. 

 

The only winner of the day, in terms of increasing their number of votes, was the Yorkshire Party (Lib Dems in mufti) who went from 868 votes in 2019 to 1,182 votes in this By-election. 

 

The interesting fact about the Labour and Conservative vote is that Labour is not on track to rebuild its “Red Wall” at all, contrary to what the Mainstream Media has been saying. 

 

The Labour vote went from 17,925 in 2019 to 13,166 in this recent By-election.  That is a drop of 4,759 votes when the Conservatives had not only put up last time a tokenist Pakistani Muslim candidate, who turned out to be a homosexual paedophile and alcoholic. Also this time they had put up another Pakistani Muslim in a constituency where there are relatively few Pakistani Muslims but is not far from Bradford or Rotherham and therefore white working class voters are aware of what has been going on there.

 

From their candidate selection you would almost think that the Conservatives wanted to lose that seat.  Maybe they actually did because of course the Conservatives need Labour to exist so that they can continue to say on the doorstep that people cannot vote for what they really support because they might let Labour in! 

 

The Conservatives were duly punished with a drop of their vote from 2019 of 21,283 down to 8,241. 

 

That dramatic drop and the decline in the percentage of people voting actually suggests that the majority of those who voted Conservative in 2019 did not go back to Labour and Labour may have permanently lost them. 

 

Whilst this did not give us much comfort in this By-election what it does suggest is that the “Red Wall” voters are still very much up for grabs if any one patriotic party can break free of the pack.  I remain of the view that it is English nationalism which will surge when that time comes. 

 

We are of course entering very choppy economic waters and it maybe that will wake people up and make the electoral system more fluid than it has been since the War.

 

 

Wednesday 8 June 2022

DESPISED – WHY THE MODERN LEFT LOATHES THE WORKING CLASS BY PAUL EMBERY


 

DESPISED – WHY THE MODERN LEFT LOATHES THE WORKING CLASS BY PAUL EMBERY

 

I have recently been reading the very interesting book ‘Despised’ by a Labour Party member in which he tries to explain why Labour has come adrift from its working class roots.  The book is well written and a good read. 

 

The following extract particularly caught my attention and I think will be of interest to any English nationalist:-

 

“The sense of national dispossession that has taken root over years in … in England beyond the cities shows no sign of dissipating.  A feeling of disenfranchisement began to take hold around the turn of the Century, with the advent of devolution in Scotland and Wales solidified into a more general resentment at being “forgotten” and then the emergence of a new sense of Englishness, with large numbers of people beginning to identify as English rather than British.  There was a clear mood developing among the English: We are sick and tired of being ignored. 

 

In the EU referendum, this mood manifested itself in the clear rejection of the status quo, with over 70% of those who identified most strongly as English voting Leave. (A similar percentage of those who identified the least strong voted Remain).  The writer and campaigner Anthony Barnett, has illustrated how much of the Leave vote was driven by distinct sense of grievance among the English.  Comparing the towns of Wigan in North of England and Paisley in Scotland, it explained how they were similar in the sense that both were “once thriving centres of imperial industry… now grappling with impoverishment” and “social and economic equivalents”.  Yet in the referendum, Wigan voted 64% for Leave and Paisley, on an identical turnout, the same percentage for Remain.  Barnett concluded that it was the national factor at work. 

 

In 2018, a poll for the Centre of Towns Think Tank showed that the towns in which people identified most strongly as English – often places which had undergone fundamental social and economic change – were most inclined to feel that Westminster did not reflect the concerns of their part of the country. 

 

As this sense of English discontent grows, it does so outside of normal political structures and institutions – principally because it has no other choice.  Neither the Conservative nor Labour Parties, for example, maintain a specifically English section; and there is no major party, assembly or parliament representing solely England.  English voters also see the obvious democratic imbalance of having MPs representing constituencies other nations of the UK vote on laws affecting England while, thanks to the devolution, their counterparts representing English constituencies have no corresponding right.

 

A YouGov survey for the BBC in 2018 highlighted the extent to which English identity had become a feature of peoples’ lives, with 80% of respondents saying they identified strongly as English.  This feeling had taken hold particularly in coastal and former industrial towns, with two thirds of respondents in those places saying they felt a sense of English pride.  By contrast, less than half of respondents in the major cities felt the same thing. 

 

Labour has a particular problem with England, not having beaten the Conservatives in the share of popular vote there since 2001.  It is widely accepted that worries among English voters that undue SNP influence over a future Labour government played a crucial role in helping the Tories achieve a majority in the 2015 General Election.  Out of the 60 seats lost by the Labour Party at the 2019 General Election, 48 were in England.  This was, in large part, the vote that the Party had always taken for granted, with many of the losses occurring in traditional working class heartlands – the so-called “Red Wall” and non-metropolitan seats – where the sense of patriotism and “being English” was heightened.

 

A post-election report by the English Labour Network showed that more voters in England were likely to identify as “more English than British” than the other way round, and that this group was instrumental in delivering victory for the Conservative Party.  Among these voters, Labour won just 10 votes for every 27 won by the Conservatives.

 

The authors, who included former Cabinet Member, John Denham, concluded that Labour’s failure to promote itself as a patriotic party or even to mention England in any of its political messaging, as well as its lack of any plan to devolve power within England, had alienated voters who emphasised their English identity.  And on the contentious issue of immigration – unquestionably a significant factor on the doorstep – they wrote, perceptively; “These voters have been disconcerted by mass immigration.  Their strong sense of identity and community has been disrupted by changes they were not expecting.  While some of this reaction is based on racism and for the most it is more (a) sense of uncertainty and loss of a stable community.  At least some Labour figures and activists have stereotyped anyone who is not actually in favour of large scale migration as bigoted.”

 

In its disregard for the growing sense of English dispossession, Labour has repeated a catastrophic mistake it made in Scotland – a failure which led to its virtual wipe-out there – of not paying due attention to the politics of national identity.”

 

Paul Embury then goes onto talk about the idea that Labour could become patriotic.  He is of course writing from the perspective of a member of the Labour Party and formerly a senior trade union official in the Fire Brigade Union (from which he was unfairly dismissed by its Europhile leadership for his support of Brexit). 

 

Then in his chapter setting out “What is to be done?”  In which he sets out what Labour should do to recapture the English vote, he suggests:-

 

“In particular, the sense of national dispossession of disenfranchisement felt by the English must be addressed. One way of doing this would be to grant them direct political representation through the creation of a parliament for England to take its place inside a Federal United Kingdom”. 

 

For my part I am happy to say that I think that it is highly unlikely that a Labour Party whose leadership would take the knee in support of the Marxist Black Lives Matter Group, would even for a moment contemplate adopting the camouflage of being a English nationalist party. 

 

In these circumstances I think Paul Embery is usefully identifying a gap in the political market for English nationalism.  It is our job within the English Democrats to organise ourselves so that we can place our party in that gap!