SPEECH – SPRING CONFERENCE 2020

SPEECH – SPRING CONFERENCE 2020

Thank you to all those who have been involved in organising today – you know who you are!

Thank you all also for coming to our Spring Conference here in the lovely and historical English City of Shrewsbury and helping us to fully takeover this hotel!

Thank you also Ladies and Gentlemen for ignoring the mainstream media’s hysteria and scaremongering over the Coronavirus. 

Ladies and Gentlemen I just want to confess that not even my own wife would claim that I am very sympathetic! 

The other day she was telling me that as a result of her cancer treatment pills she has got tinnitus, which is a constant ringing in her ears, and so she could not hear what I was saying.  I said that I had an old friend of mine who had tinnitus who I thought had got cured. 

So she immediately took my phone and texted my friend.

Here is what the text says:-  “Robin was just mentioning over our romantic pub lunch that you used to suffer from tinnitus and now it's gone. I now suffer from this, it must be all the political talk!! I just wondered  how you got better?”

We got his text back:- “Hi Claire, firstly I'm most flattered that one of my myriad afflictions should be a talking point during your romantic lunch, but I'm afraid that tinnitus is still very much with me. Just a kind of white noise/background  hiss which I've sort of got used to. So if you come across something that helps do let me know, and sorry to learn of a fellow sufferer!  Partners aren't always as sympathetic as they might be, which is something you may experience..Batten down the hatches..and all the best”

So I responded:-  “Oi! what do you mean about lack of sympathy? I just told her to stop moaning and pay attention!”

So you can see Ladies and Gentlemen that there is no use coming to me if you have got a cough!

Also Ladies and Gentlemen I am not sure if you heard the rumour, that has been going around on social media, that the famous actor and dancer, John Travolta, went into hospital, about this time last week, with a temperature saying that he thought that he had got Coronavirus but after testing him the doctors said that it was not Coronavirus – it was “Saturday Night Fever”!

I am sorry Ladies and Gentlemen but our National Party Secretary, Stephen Morris, insists that I always tell a terrible joke!

So Ladies and Gentlemen let’s have a “2020” vision look around the world at what is going on which seems likely to make a difference for England, the English Nation or for the the only campaigning English Nationalist party – the English Democrats.

On the subject of Coronavirus clearly we do not know how much disruption is going to be caused by government reaction to it – just look at Italy and China!

As a disease however, it certainly doesn’t seem that it is going to be nearly as bad an epidemic as the Spanish flu epidemic in 1919, just after the First World War, which is thought to have killed 80 million people worldwide. 

This looks more like a particularly bad but ordinary flu. 

Flu routinely kills many hundreds of thousands of people every year around the world.  People who have, as the doctors keep telling us, “underlying health problems”. 

Most people catch flu, or apparently this virus too, either by being in a confined space where someone with flu is sneezing and they breathe in some of that mucus spray, or even more likely from shaking hands with someone with flu, who has just sneezed or coughed into their hand or even fiddled with their nose and then touching their own eyes, nose, or mouth before washing their hands. 

So Ladies and Gentlemen remember to be careful to wash your hands.  I think, in the circumstances, we all should be quite open about doing that.

Coronavirus does however look like it is going to have a big impact on the world economy, partly because of the hysterical way in which it is being dealt with.

Maybe the result will be that globalism and internationalism will be less popular as people are having it vividly demonstrated that, the more interconnected the world becomes, the quicker disease and invasive species and, for that matter, criminality, will cross borders. 

Ladies and Gentlemen we are living in a moment in history when the downside of globalisation is made more apparent to people than it usually is.  This may be an opportunity for the case for economic nationalism to be more carefully considered.

The Chinese economy will struggle to recover quickly from the kind of drastic shutdown that has been imposed there and it may be that the heavy handed way in which the Chinese Communist Party has dealt with this crisis will encourage more Chinese people to challenge its stranglehold on power in China. 

President Trump must certainly be hoping that that will be the case! 

Although I did see a disturbing report that the Chinese Government and police have been using the crisis to dramatically increase IT surveillance.  We must be on our guard that the British State doesn’t try to do likewise!

By the time that we are having our Autumn Conference we will know who the President of the United States will be for the next four years. 

From the abysmal way in which the Democrats have been handling their presidential candidate selection process, it is looking pretty good for President Trump being re-elected. 

Turning to domestic politics, did you notice the way that, on the BBC’s Question Time last week, Matt Hancock, the Secretary of State for English Health was talking as if he had jurisdiction over Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish health when talking about “our Nation” and “our Country”.  Did you notice he was never once challenged even by the Scottish, Fiona Bruce?

Well Ladies and Gentlemen, however much ignored by the BBC, the Mainstream Media and the British Political Establishment, the “English Question” will simply not go away until it has been properly answered.  Ladies and Gentlemen it’s one of our roles to make sure of that!

But Ladies and Gentlemen getting back to our 2020 vision of our politics. 

So far as the Conservative and Unionist Party is concerned, Boris is still in his “honeymoon” period and despite the constant sniping and carping by the BBC etc., they won’t be able to make a dent in his popularity until towards the end of this year when we can see how much of a betrayal of Brexit his actual deal with the EU is going to be.

Ladies and Gentlemen I read an interesting article on ‘UnHerd’ recently trying to explain Boris’ approach to speechmaking and arguing. 

It was UnHerd: “The two faces of Boris Johnson”

Here are some extracts:

The PM's classical education instilled a rhetorical world view well-suited to our times

Boris Johnson may not strike you as a master of rhetoric. He seems to shrink from, rather than rise to, big set-piece speeches and tends to affect a kind of embarrassed shuffle. When they do come, his sentences rush out in staccato dribs and drabs, and he pauses after each one as if awaiting praise for having managed to utter it. Barack Obama he is not.

And yet, in terms of understanding what is going on behind those darting blue eyes, and predicting what we might expect in the months and years ahead — now that he has nominally delivered on his pledge to ‘get Brexit done’ — you could do worse than read up on the rhetorical tradition of the classics that dominated his education.

The rhetorical world view, descended…from (the Roman poet) Ovid, sees people as changeable and contradictory like the universe they inhabit; they are the sum of their outward performances rather than possessing a single inner truth.

Young men in the ancient world were educated in rhetoric in a way that would be unrecognisable today — learning massive passages for recital, taught to speak with equal conviction on either side of a question and to become masters of ad-libbing and stylistic flourish. The aim was to win at all costs. Very few modern paths of education are even comparable, but Boris Johnson’s journey through Eton, Literae Humaniores at Balliol, and the Oxford Union is probably the nearest equivalent. Footage of him reciting huge chunks of Homer from memory certainly calls it to mind.

This rhetorical education produces a very particular kind of person:

“Rhetorical man is an actor; his reality public, dramatic. His sense of identity, his self, depends on the reassurance of daily histrionic re-enactment… His motivations must be characteristically ludic, agonistic. He thinks first of winning, of mastering the rules the current game enforces. He assumes a natural agility in changing orientations. He hits the street already street-wise. From birth, almost, he has dwelt not in a single value structure but in several. He is thus committed to no single construction of the world; much rather, to prevailing in the game at hand.”

Such high-minded literary theory may seem a long way from today’s No 10, but it lends credence to the notion that when, say, Boris Johnson writes one column in favour of Brexit and another column against it before coming to a decision, it is not simply an act of cynicism.

But in a political context, his rhetorical world view is proving spectacularly well matched to the times.

The ability to be two things to two different people may sound duplicitous to our modern ears; to rhetorical man it is the highest accomplishment. But which viewpoint is really more deluded?

In a similar vein, Boris’s success at the general election was to appear, simultaneously, pleasingly jingoistic and anti-establishment to Brexit voters, and liberal and sensible enough to Tory remainers. Was this a trick, or just good politics? Who else but a Janus-faced leader could have brought together a coalition so deeply divided?

So the message Ladies and Gentlemen is – when listening to Boris make a speech, or reading one of his articles, or give an interview – relax and treat anything said as a performance devised to win – a bit like you would listen to an actor in a play!

Turning to Labour:-

Labour have got their leadership elections at the moment in which it looks quite possible that Keir Starmer might be going to win. 

Keir Starmer is a “full on” Remainiac who said in their recent leadership debates that he did not rule out campaigning for a Labour Government under him to re-join the EU.

Labour generally has not learned the lesson that the English Labour network has been trying to tell them that they need to be more patriotic and pro-English.

Or the lesson General Election should have shown them about the unpopularity of political correctness and multi-culturalism. 

This was shown vividly when Trevor Philips, the anti-racism campaigner and Labour’s former appointed Head of the Racial Equality Commission, who was suspended from the Party for commenting on the existence of Pakistani Muslim Child Rape Gangs. 

That was said to be Islamophobic! 

Nobody who wishes Labour ill should be unhappy about that decision! 

Just listen to this extract from the Charges that have been brought against him to get a flavour of the attack upon him and their denial of the truth.

Draft Charge

Mr Phillips (the Respondent) has engaged in conduct prejudicial and/or grossly detrimental to the Party in breach of Chapter 2 Clause L.8 of the Labour Party Rule Book 2019 by engaging in conduct online which:

a)    May reasonably be seen to demonstrate hostility or prejudice based on race, religion or belief:

He has said:-

·       Item 5 – “But the most sensitive cause of conflict in recent years has been the collision between majority norms and the behaviours of some Muslim groups.  In particular, the exposure of systematic and longstanding abuse by men, most of Pakistani Muslim origin in the North of England”

That Ladies and Gentlemen is a charge against him!

What about:-

“A group of Germany’s five million or so settled Muslim migrants had, for some reason, suddenly and inexplicably decided to run amok and that to some Muslim men in Germany, basic norms of decent behaviour are irrelevant”

“she asserted that it was ‘improper’ to blame recent migrants; but then advised women in public to stay at least an arm’s length away from possible attackers – presumably with men of Arab or North African appearance in mind.  It has since emerged that the German’s are not alone in experiencing this kind of cultural conflict”.

    

Another:-

b)    May reasonably be seen to involve Islamophobic actions, stereotypes and sentiments;

·       Item 3 – “Muslim communities are not like others in Britain and the country should accept they will never integrate, the former head of the equalities watchdog has claimed”.

“He told a meeting at the Policy Exchange think tank in Westminster on Monday that Muslims ‘see the world differently from the rest of us’.”

          Or:-

·       Item 4 – “the unacknowledged creation of a nation within the nation, with its own geography, its own values and its own very separate future”

          Or:-

·       Item 5 – “At a recent conference of Muslim scholars, I had the privilege of addressing a hundred or so people at a leading British University.  Most of the audience were Muslims themselves.  The event took place just a few days before Remembrance Sunday. I noted that just three people in the room displayed a poppy, myself, a (white) journalist and one Muslim attendee.  Raising the point, I could see the incomprehension on the faces of those without poppies; they weren’t meaning to offend, but as a group, they couldn’t see why they should”.

Now spare a thought for the Liberal Democrats! 

They were crushed in the General Election so badly that their Leader, Jo Swinson, who only a few weeks before had been boasting about her being a potential Prime Minister, in the event she actually lost her seat!

The Liberal Democrats had so nailed their colours to the EU mast that it is difficult to see what they have got left. 

Did any of you see the ghastly Liberal Democrat MP, Leyla Moran on Question Time last week?  She is the one who boasts about being a “Pan Sexual”.  She was holding forth in a most self-righteous manner about Boris’ Home Secretary, Priti Patel, having allegedly shouted at somebody.  However Ms Moran was arrested not so long ago at a Liberal Democrat Party Conference, for assaulting her then boyfriend.  What can I say?

Then let’s turn to UKIP.

I think we should all be grateful to UKIP for its long and ultimately successful fight for an EU Referendum.  I do think that UKIP would have struggled, having achieved the referendum, as the public thought that its job was done, even if UKIP hadn’t descended into its increasingly vicious leadership problems.

UKIP had many good people in it and those who can support English patriotism should be welcomed to our Party.

Then turning to the Brexit Party which in many ways was not even technically a party, as it is a Limited Trading Company owned by Nigel Farage.  The £7.5 million which it raised is in effect Nigel Farage’s property. 

Nigel is now talking about setting up a new party which he has claimed is going to be called the Reform Party, but as there is already a Reform Party registered with the Electoral Commission. Also Nigel has managed to thoroughly alienate Katherine Blaiklock, who actually set up the Brexit Party and so actually understood the process of getting a party registered.  I would be surprised if Nigel manages to get anything that actually works as a political party off the ground. 

I also suggest that Nigel’s erratic behaviour over whether or not he was supporting the Conservatives during the last General Election would give many people pause for thought before supporting his next venture.

Then outside of England, the Scottish National Party still seems to be going strong. 

Scottish patriots don’t seem to have fully woken up to the fact that the Scottish National Party is dominated by a woman, and her supporters, who are Internationalist, Europhile, Socialists!

The problem is similar in Wales, with Plaid Cymru.

In Ireland, Sinn Fein might well be in Government in the South if they had been able to put up a full list of candidates in their recent General Election. 

Sinn Fein now are very strange, multiculturalist, Internationalist, standard bearers for the Irish Nation. 

It seems then that Celtic “Nationalism” has gone down the blind alley of Internationalism, Europhilism and Socialism and is also in favour of mass immigration into their countries.

I think this whole weird faux nationalist attitude is best summed up by Nicola Sturgeon in the TV Leadership Debates in the General Election. 

She had previously said that she was embarrassed by the fact that her Party is called the Scottish Nationalist Party.

In the debates she claimed that her ambition for Scotland is for Scotland to become an “Independent, Internationalist, Country” - within the EU!  What can I say?

Let’s now turn to ourselves.  I recently did an interview with David Clews of the Unity News Network which is on YouTube. 

In that interview David said that although he is both Scottish and a passionate Unionist, that he could see that there is a slot on the political spectrum for an English Nationalist party and he thought that we could be that party!

David is a Unionist, and so is not very keen on English Nationalism, but he does see that the present party spectrum simply does not represent English patriotism, which is an increasing view point in England.

The English Democrats have been at the spearhead of this issue for over 17 years and in that time have distributed over 40 million leaflets.  We all know from personal experience that it has been a slow burn for many English people to wake up to but it is now happening!

There are still many many hurdles to overcome, both for our Cause and for our Party but together we can overcome these. 

Where we are on an equal footing with our opponents in an election, we have taken up the 25% of the vote, like we did in Doncaster, so the voting system matters to us as does the spread of votes. 

I am going to argue later that this should focus us on those elections which are on the Supplementary Vote System, like the Police Commissioners and Electoral Mayors.

Parties need money and manpower to fight campaigns. For a year now we have been working on developing our Party’s recruitment and fundraising and have made great strides but there is much more to do but we do.  We can however do so confident in the Justice of our Cause!

Our job is to make the most of our Party and our fight for England and for the English Nation.  Our job is to make the most of it every opportunity, if – to use a phrase from the Brexit campaign – If, we want our country back!

Ladies and Gentlemen do we want our country back? 

Back not just from the EU but also from the Globalists?

Back from the Internationalists?

Back from Big Globalist Corporate Business?

Back from Big Internationalist Trade Unions?

Back from a British Political Establishment which wants to break up England?

Let’s make it happen Ladies and Gentlemen!

Let’s campaign to get England back!

Let’s work hard to make it happen – For England and St George!

MY SPEECH TO THE ENGLISH DEMOCRATS’ SPRING CONFERENCE, MARCH 2018

MY SPEECH TO THE ENGLISH DEMOCRATS’ SPRING CONFERENCE, MARCH 2018

Welcome Ladies & Gentlemen to our Spring Conference here near Huntingdon which was central to Oliver Cromwell’s Eastern association and so an important part of English history. Also as many of you will know, we are not far from the village of Tilbrook, from which my family takes its surname from.  So where would be more appropriate for us to hold our Spring Conference?

Also what an interesting time isn’t it to be talking politics for patriots and nationalists? 

Not only have we have had Trump and the Brexit vote but also the hysterical reaction of Remoaners and Remainiacs on finding that they are actually not the majority and that other people do have opinions. 

Isn’t it a laugh ladies and gentlemen when they constantly claim that it is Russia that is inspiring those of us on our side of the fence, whereas it is in fact just that liberal so-called democracy had so long denied us a voice that they had grown to assume that our voice did not exist.

On the continent, we also have just had the Italian elections in which the Centre Left have been reduced to a small rump.

The Austrians have elected a nationalist orientated government. 

There were already nationalist governments in most of Eastern Europe, but all across mainland Europe the Left and Centre Left are in retreat and patriots and nationalists are advancing. 

Even here in England last Monday we had a launch by the University College of London’s Constitution Unit who have produced a report comfortingly entitled from our Party’s point of view:- “Options for an English Parliament”. 

Ladies and Gentlemen I do recommend reading it as it does give you a clear idea of the state of the arguments, but I think the subtext is that we were so right to adopt English Independence as our policy because it is the answer that cuts through all the various quibbling objections which those that do not want to allow England any sort of democratically united voice make to any idea of an English Parliament, English First Minister or English Government. 

Those of us who for years campaigned on a federalist ticket will recognise so well the kind of technical arguments and objections which have been raised against the key emotional point that England and the English Nation are not been fairly or democratically treated as things stand at the moment in the so-called “United Kingdom”.

I think it is also worth talking about the state of the various parties.  Let me take these in no particular order, but starting with the Conservatives. 

Obviously the Conservative and Unionist Party, as the Party in Government, does have many apparent advantages, not least that over Brexit.  Despite all the muddle and confusion and arguments, the Conservatives are somewhat more coherent than Labour on the idea that we must actually get out of the European Union! 

As you will expect, and I expect you all are too, I am strongly in favour of getting out, not only of the European Union, but also the European Union’s Customs Union and of the European Single Market and thus fully and properly get out.  There is no Brexino (Brexit In Name Only) for me!

However it is worth noting that IF the overwhelming majority of Remainers in Parliament sabotage a full Brexit but we are still out of the key constitutional institutions which are the European Union itself, there is then no constitutional problem with adjusting any of the other agreements at a later stage.

Whereas while we are in the European Union we have the constitutional difficulty that we are not allowed to change the basis of the way we work with the European Union. 

This means that further progress on the European Union will be down to our own politics and if our People can be persuaded to vote for a party who wants to do a more thorough job of Brexit then that can be done at a future date.

That is therefore an important constitutional position for us to get to. 

The Conservatives will be judged by whether they deliver on this.  If they fail to do so it will damage them irreparably because what became clear during the Brexit referendum was that their MPs who are mostly dishonest Europhiles who had pretended to be Eurosceptics in order to get themselves selected by the overwhelming majority of Conservative Party members who are Eurosceptics. 

Indeed Theresa May and her Remainer colleagues are so worried about the Leave majority of Conservative members that they are wanting to take away from local Conservative party members one of the few rights that remain to them, which is a role in selecting their local candidate to be their MP.  In recent months there has been a push by Conservative Central Office for the selection of MP candidates for the next General Election to be entirely in the control of Central Office and therefore, for as long as she is Leader, of Theresa May and her acolytes. 

Turning to Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour, the massive majority of Blairite  Remainiacs in the Labour Parliamentary Party has fully pushed Jeremy Corbyn into adopting a more pro-EU position that is on remaining within the Customs Union. 

Coming out of the Customs Union is vital if there is to be any agreements with any other nations.  If we are in the Customs Union, not only can we not reach agreements with other nations on trade, but also the other nations wouldn’t even be interested in talking to us because they would know that they can trade with us by dealing with the EU and we would have to obey what the EU decides. 

So this is a troubling change of position on the part of Jeremy Corbyn but it illustrates something that has been happening within Labour for a long time, which is that Labour’s elite has been losing touch with its core traditional vote, or,as they call it the “White Working Class”, or as I would call it “English Workers”.  Our candidate for the South Yorkshire Mayoralty, David Allen, memorably and pithily put it in a recent BBC interview that Labour are “traitors to the English working class”. 

More and more English people are realising that Labour is outright hostile to England and to English interests. 

Labour now is an internationalist and increasingly metropolitan, statist and multi-culturalist party.  This is the same trajectory as all the Social Democrat parties across Western Europe.  The result across Western Europe has been that Social Democrat parties are no longer supported by their country’s working class.  So, for instance, in the recent French elections, we saw that French working class voters mostly supported the Front Nationale and not the middle class ideological obsessives of the French Social Democrat parties.  As the Doncaster MP, Caroline Flint put it that Labour’s “Sister Party” in France was reduced to 6%.

I fully expect that, with the Blairites in Parliament, and with Jeremy Corbyn’s small parliamentary support group of Far-Left MPs, and with their middle class supporters in Momentum etc. that the divide between the Labour Party and its traditional support will grow eventually into an unbridgeable chasm.  We can only look forward to that day!

So far as the Liberal Democrats are concerned, they, I think, have shrunk into almost a total permanent irrelevance, as have the Greens. 

UKIP is of course of interest to us, as during the time of its rise and when the prospect of an EU Referendum dominated political discussion, they seemed on the verge of becoming a fully established and influential political party.  However following the EU Referendum result their one and only issue has dramatically declined in importance as we have now had the Referendum and because they are not, and could never be, in Government they can have no influence over what happens now. 

This problem for them has of course been compounded by UKIP’s leadership problems.  Because there never was any real agreement on policy outside of the EU issue within UKIP, it would always be very hard for any Leader to successfully unite all the various different opinions within UKIP.  But in addition to that, their Party structure is one where there has always been problems about their Leader’s position.  Nigel Farage went so far as to say in his arguments with UKIP’s NEC that members of UKIP’s NEC were the lowest grade people he had ever come across! 

This is a bit difficult to take at face value, given that quite a few of them are successful professionals and business people.  This must really be an expression of frustration at the degree of difficulty in dealing with them that he experienced as UKIP’s Leader. 

Nothing could more clearly exemplify this difficulty than the forcing out of their latest Leader, Mr Bolton, based mostly on the scandal of him having left his wife. 

I wonder who here follows Guido Faukes on the internet?  He made a joke about the UKIP leadership elections which made me chuckle, saying that it was like watching three bald men arguing about who got the hair brush!  Think about that ladies and gentlemen! 

Then let’s turn to us.  We English Democrats have a wide-ranging platform based on the English nationalist position of looking after the interests of the English nation.  We are not a single issue party and never have been. 

Indeed it is worth illustrating how we came to be a Eurosceptic party.  We didn’t come at it from the UKIP angle of simply being hostile to the EU.  We came at it from analysing whether it was possible to be an English nationalist and to be pro the EU.  We came to the conclusion that you simply couldn’t manage it.  It couldn’t make any logical sense. 

This is because the EU wants to break up England into “Regions” so they are against our very existence as a Nation.  The EU also costs us a lot of money.  All the £19bn that people were arguing about on the back of the Red Bus is money that comes from English taxpayers, as only England has a net tax revenue.

Also the EU is not very democratic. 

So we get laws made for us in an undemocratic way that are against our interests and cost us a lot of money! 

So it was clear that supporting the EU could never be a position that any sensible English nationalist could take. 

It is worth considering by comparison with all the fuss that has been made about the EU that actually the Union of the United Kingdom is a much bigger issue. 

Not only because the House of Lords in 2009 showed that the maintenance of the Union was costing English taxpayers £49bn a year, as opposed to the then £9bn or so pounds that the EU was costing us. 

But also, as has been shown rather graphically with the alliance between the Conservatives and the Democratic Unionist Party, we get political decision-making made in Westminster in the interests of other parts of the United Kingdom and of Britain generally, but not in the interests of England. 

Our Party’s political position is one where even the Leftist academics of the University College of London’s Constitutional Unit have said that we have “legitimate grievances”.  Ladies and gentlemen just let that sink in.  We English nationalists have, even our opponents now accept, “Legitimate Grievances”!  What have we got? We’ve got …!

Consider also what Labour’s attack dogs, dirty tricks departments, Hope not Hate had to say about the issue.  Here is what they said based on a Populus opinion polling survey:-  “Thirty-nine percent (39%) said they were willing to support a … party focussed on defending the English, opposing immigration, challenging Islamic extremism, restricting the building of mosques”.

What do you think of that Ladies and Gentlemen?  The question then arises how can we turn “legitimate grievances” and political opportunity into power? 

The first point Ladies and Gentlemen is that we all have to accept is it is a very difficult transition.  If it wasn’t difficult, lots of others would do it.  But, and it is a big but, it can be done.  It is not only being done in Italy, as we were talking about earlier, but also it can be done here.  It takes a lot of effort at grassroots and commitment on our part.  We need not only to stand in elections but we need to focus on trying to do better in them.  We have already got to the point, as acknowledged by the academics of University College London, that our message has got out to quite a lot of people. 

That is not surprising Ladies and Gentlemen because we have now distributed somewhat in excess of 40 million leaflets since we were founded.  We have been consistently the lone small voice crying in the wilderness for English nationalism. 

Let us move forward from that and become the voice that the British mainstream media cannot ignore and that our political opponents ignore at their peril.  We are going to have some discussions later about what can be done.  I will therefore leave that at this point.  But I do encourage everyone who is willing to help to think about standing in elections and doing the work that is needed to do well in elections. 

If we turn to the state of politics generally in the UK; let me ask you this question

IS THE UK’S POLITICAL BRITISH ESTABLISHMENT NOW A CLASSIC “CARTEL DEMOCRACY”?

A few weeks ago I was reading an article by the Conservative MEP, Daniel Hannan’s, in the Sunday Telegraph called in the print edition “Coalition politics has turned European democracy into a beige dictatorship”. 

In that article he says:-

“Several Western European countries have had German-style traditions of permanent coalition. In some of them, favoured parties were more or less permanently in office. These became known as the “cartel democracies”, because the ruling parties used legal and financial barriers to prevent newcomers from breaking through. Austria, Belgium and Italy were textbook cartel democracies for most of the post-war era.”…

You can always spot the symptoms. The public sector grows as the various coalition partners scrabble to find sinecures for their supporters. In Austria during the Christian Democrat/Social Democrat duopoly, every position, from the headmaster of a village school to the director of the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, might be allocated according to party membership card. These membership cards, by the way, were actual physical things: the Italian versions, beribboned and bemedalled, were especially magnificent, signifying, as they did, a precious IOU.

Cartel politicians, being unchallenged, could award themselves handsome perks, such as legal immunities and high salaries. When I was first elected to the European Parliament, MEPs were paid at the same rate as a national parliamentarian in their home country. The Austrians, Italians and Germans earned twice as much as anyone else. The cartel parties were quite flagrant in their attempts to stop newcomers from posing a challenge. In Belgium, for example, restrictions on private donations made parties dependent on state funding – which was then withdrawn from the Flemish separatists following a parliamentary vote by their rivals.

Secure in office, the old parties were able to ignore public demands for tax cuts, immigration controls, powers back from Brussels or anything else they could fastidiously dismiss as “populist”. Because leaders from a previous generation generally decided who could stand on their party lists, politics remained stuck in a Fifties corporatist consensus.

Only in the Nineties did the system start to break down. Fed up with the complacency and sleaze of their semi-permanent rulers, voters began to grope around for battering rams to smash open the old system. In Italy, they found  a Trumpian avant la lettre – Silvio Berlusconi, who made a point of issuing no party membership cards. In Austria, they turned to Jörg Haider’s anti-immigration Freedom Party. In Belgium, they elected the Flemish nationalists. Only in Germany has the old partitocracy remained intact – at least until now.

Last year, Germany’s Christian Democrats suffered their worst result since 1949. The Social Democrats suffered their worst result since 1933. How will it look if the two losers get together to form a government based on all the things that had characterised the old racket – more immigration, deeper European integration, little economic reform, and the dismissal of all opposition as unconscionable populism?”

These comments chimed strongly with my experiences of the way in which Labour and the Conservatives have embedded themselves within the State, in such a way that for years now it has seemed to matter little which party was technically in power.  The classic “LibLabCon” even when the other party is in power many of the key people within what is supposed to be its rival still have plum political patronage jobs. 

So I looked further and found the BBC’s Home Editor, Mark Easton, had written an article which was published on the 12^th June 2017.  Which asked:- “Has British democracy let its people down?”

Mark Easton’s reply is:-

 “Parliamentary democracy is one of the British values that English schools are now required, by statute, to promote during lessons - not debate, not discuss, promote.

If some teachers interpret their new role as propagandists for this kingdom's existing system of governance, that would be a shame, because right now there are questions about how well our form of democracy is serving the UK.

Far from providing the stability and legitimacy it promises, one could argue that our democratic system has served to expose and deepen social divides.

Some would say it has even contrived to leave our country vulnerable at a critical moment in its history.

Rather than seeking to close down critical challenge of our form of democracy, do we need a serious and urgent conversation about how we can improve matters?...

Our two main political parties were founded and evolved to deal with the social and economic challenges of the industrial revolution.

Conservative and Labour, Left and Right, capitalism and socialism - these ideological movements were a response to the economic and cultural challenges of power moving from the field to the factory.

But power is moving again, from the national to the multinational.

How citizens think we should respond to that shift is the new divide in our politics.

It is less about left v right and more about nationalism v globalism….

…Old-fashioned political tribalism is actually on the wane…

And the diminution of local government in England, the weakening of the trade union movement, the impotence of political protest movements, the increasing centralisation of overarching authority to one house in Downing Street - these add to the sense that the "demos" (people) are increasingly excluded from the "kratos" (power).”

I think that much of what Mark Easton had to say here is right, particularly in his analysis of what the division now is; not left and right, rather globalist/ internationalist as against nationalist/patriotic.

It was said by many of the more astute commentators, including Professor Matthew Goodwin of Kent University, that the appeal of Euroscepticism and of Brexit to English nationalists anxious to “get our country back” and to “take back control” was, when focussed solely on the EU, somewhat misconceived. 

Professor Goodwin in particular was saying that for people who identified themselves as being English, that their desire to get back control was a confused response because the problem wasn’t the EU, it was the British Political Establishment which is seeking to break England up and to change English society and English communities in ways that English people don’t want.

Its support of the EU was a system of this attitude so the real struggle ought to be focussed on England and on the English taking back control.  The British State and British Political Establishment not only no longer cares about them or about what they think about things, but also actively works against English interests.  Its default position is internationalist or globalist. 

I thought therefore I ought to look at what academics have written about “Cartel Parties” and see whether that is a concept which helps to explain the problems of power that we have currently got in England. 

This article actually found that the UK was not a Cartel democracy but that is because the article was written in 2001 and not in 2018!  For the last 20 years we have lived in the sort of political environment which is all too clearly explained in this paper.  The key points of the article are here:-

“Cartel parties in Western Europe?

Changes in organizational structures, political functions and competitive behaviour among the major parties in Denmark, Germany, Switzerland and the United Kingdom.

By Klaus Detterbeck

University of Göttingen

Introduction

Among the various attempts to pinpoint the changes in West European political parties which have been going on over the last decades, the cartel party model (Katz & Mair 1995) has been one of the most provocative of…   In their article Katz & Mair (1995) are constructing an evolution of party types from the late 19th century onwards to show how parties have changed from being party of society (mass parties) to being part of the state apparatus. The provocation, the cartel party model entails, lies in its claim that the established parties in Western Europe have adapted themselves to declining levels of participation and involvement in party activities by not only turning to resources provided by the state but by doing so in a collusive manner. The inter-penetration of party and state, so the argument goes, has been achieved through co-operation between the major parties - most obviously by unanimously introducing and expanding public subsidies to themselves. The former opponents now run a party cartel which excludes new and smaller parties. These changes on the level of party competition are associated with decisive changes in the internal balance of power among the individual cartel parties, their relationship to society and the quality of the democratic process in Western democracies per se. Thus, Katz & Mair (1995) are depicting a fundamental change of party democracy in Western Europe since the 1970s. Precisely because the consequences of the alleged cartellization would be so dramatic - a self-referential political class unremovable from power dominating politics and determining their own infrastructure- it is necessary to empirically review the central hypotheses of the cartel party model.

Three dimensions of party change

Analytically there are three dimensions on which Katz & Mair (1995) are describing party change since the 1960s and on which they are conceptualizing the cartel type. I will look at them in turn:

·        Political role: representative vs. governmental functions

·        Party competition: cartellization and exclusion

·        Organizational structures: parlamentarization and stratarchy

The political role of parties concerns their position between the sphere of society and the sphere of the state. The cartel party model postulates that West European parties have increasingly lost their capacity and their eagerness to fulfil their representative functions for society (interest articulation and -aggregation, goal formulation, political mobilisation), whereas they became more strongly involved in executing governmental functions (elite recruitment, government formation, policy making). The professional party leaders thus became more concerned with the demands of the parliamentary arena than with interpreting party manifestos or discussing politics on party congresses. The near exclusive dominance of parliaments and governments enabled parties to rely on a new source for financing and staffing their organizations which made them relatively independent from party members or donors. Cartel party are therefore characterized by a weak involvement of party members and historically related interest groups (classe gardée) in party activities on the one hand, and by an emphasis on governmental functions and state resources on the other hand.

Turning to the level of party competition, the mutually shared need for securing the flow of state resources has changed the relationships of the political opponents towards each other. In a process of social learning - facilitated through the daily interaction of professional politicians from different parties in parliament - the party actors realized that there are common interests among the „political class“ which laid the basis for collective action (von Beyme 1996; Borchert 2001). The process of cartel formation has two facets: cartellization aims at reducing the consequences of electoral competition, basically through granting the losers, the established opposition a certain share of state subventions or patronage appointments. Exclusion aims at securing the position of the established parties against newly mobilized challengers. This can be achieved through setting up certain barriers for newcomers in the electoral competition (e.g. thresholds), excluding them from access to public subventions or media campaigns, or excluding them from access to executive office by declaring them unacceptable coalition partners („pariahs“). However, a cartel doesn’t have to be closed completely. The co-optation of new parties which are willing to play according to the established rules of the game may strengthen the viability of a party cartel. Katz & Mair (1995) argue that the formation of a party cartel poses a fundamental problem for the West European party democracies as it denies the voters the possibility of choosing a political alternative – “none of the major parties is ever definitively out“ (ebd.: 22) -, and gives munitions to the rhetorics of neo-populist parties on the political right. In the long run, cartellization will widen the gulf between voters and politicians and make it increasingly difficult to legitimize political decisions.

The organisational dimension is concerned with the balance of power inside the parties. The “mechanics” of internal decision-making are determined by the structural and material resources of the various “faces” within the organisation. Cartel party are characterised by a further strengthening of the “party in public office” which can be explained by their direct access to political decisions in parliaments and governments, their access to the mass media as well as by their better access to state resources (e.g. parliamentary staff). The dominance of party executive organs through parliamentarians, the marginalisation of party activists (e.g. through member ballots) or the professionalization of election campaigns are organizational indicators of the cartel type. The second organizational feature of cartel parties consists in the vertical autonomy of different party levels. Whereas the national (parliamentarian) party elite tries to free itself from the demands of regional and local party leaders as far as political and strategic questions on the national level are concerned, the lower strata insist upon their autonomy in their own domains, e.g. the selection of candidates or local politics:  Each side is therefore encouraged to allow the other a free hand. The result is stratarchy“ (ebd.: 21).

Although the causal relationships between these three dimensions are not clearly spelled out by Katz & Mair (1995), it seems to be the logic of the argument that the increase of vulnerability (less party members, more volatile voters) caused party change. Vulnerability brought about a declining capacity of parties to fulfil their representative functions (e.g. interest articulation) which led them

a.) to concentrate on their governmental functions (e.g. selecting leaders, seeking parliamentary majorities, passing laws) and,

b.) to collude with their established opponents in order to secure the required resources for organisational maintenance.

The freedom of manoeuvre which party leaders needed to do both led to internal party reforms which strengthened the “party in public office”. As a result of these changes, the linkages between the professionalized party organisations and the citizenry further eroded, which in turn intensified the trend towards the sphere of the state and towards inter-party collusion (see Young 1998)…

The core element of the cartel party type can be seen in the self-interested co-operation between the major parties which aims at securing organizational resources (public subsidies, patronage) and career stability (income, reelection, alternative political jobs) for the individual politician.

So what do you think?  Can we cut through all the barriers?

Let’s also look at what the British Political Establishment is up to:-

THOSE IN POWER DEFINE THE MEANING OF “EXTREMISM”

In the Guardian on the 23^rd January edition there was an article by Peter Walker, the Political Correspondent, entitled

“New national security unit set up to tackle fake news in UK”.

The key extracts are:-

“The government is to set up a dedicated national security unit to tackle fake news and disinformation, Downing Street has said.  The prime minister’s spokesman said.

One specific area agreed as needing new resources by the national security council as part of the NSCR is the spread of fake news, he said.

“We are living in an era of fake news and competing narratives. The government will respond with more and better use of national security communications to tackle these interconnected, complex challenges.

“To do this we will build on existing capabilities by creating a dedicated national security communications unit. This will be tasked with combating disinformation by state actors and others.”

The unit will “more systematically deter our adversaries and help us deliver on national security priorities”, he added, saying there was as yet no information on where it would be based or who would staff it.”

It is worth noting that Oxford Dictionary’s definition of “extremism” is:– “The holding of extreme political or religious views; fanaticism”.

Anyone who is not a fully signed up multiculturalist or, to quote the Judicial Appointments Commission (on the requirement for judicial office in our cartel democracy), a person “who can demonstrate a life -long commitment to equality and diversity” should bear in mind what I explained in one of my previous articles called “Fight the Good Fight with all thy might” when I pointed out that now even a scripturally based Christian has been re-defined by the British Government as an “extremist”!

Also the expression of any view at odds with the official one is likely to be classed as “offensive” just like the Electoral Commission calling our slogan “England worth fighting for” offensive.  

This means of course that we are now truly in a political landscape where it can rightly be called out saying what John Tyndall did years ago, that:-

“The first lesson is to realise that it is our lack of power not our so-called “extremism” that is the big deterrent and anyway what is “extremism”? 

At different times across history extremism has meant different things. 

So what has changed since then?  Has the truth changed?  Is what was true then no longer true now?  No.  What has changed is power.  Power then was in different hands and that is what we are up against.  Those who have the power today…. they are able to determine what is mainstream and respectable and what is extreme.  

We have to understand that “extremism” is a meaningless term.  It is entirely what the current makers of public opinion decide it will be.  No more, no less. 

Our activity must be geared to the winning of power.  That still has to be said to some people… They are crusaders for the truth but they don’t relate it to necessities of winning power.  It cannot be said enough. 

‘Power is what must be won.’

First just a little bit of power, then more power and finally complete power. 

Activity geared to anything else is a waste of time. 

But we one day will be answerable to our grandchildren and our grandchildren are going to say to us when that great time of decision came what did you do?  Did you give in or did you fight? 

Are we going to say to them well the struggle was too severe.  The odds were too strong. Perhaps we left it a bit too late.  We hadn’t a chance and therefore we lost our country, we lost our nationhood? 

Or will we be able to say to them with pride and honour I was one of those who fought and there were more and more who came and fought with me.  I went off into the streets and worked and struggled for our Cause.  We stood firm like the men at the Alamo, like the men at Rourke’s Drift, like the men at Blood River.  We fought to the bitter end and we won!”

So it is worth bearing in mind that what is meant by the word “offensive” is also changing.

In the English Democrats Judicial Review Case in which we were judicially reviewing the Electoral Commission’s removal of our long registered description saying ‘England worth fighting for!’ They claimed this is now offensive.  Evidence was produced of the Electoral Commission’s thinking which read as follows:-

“LE: I would retain all the descriptions except the ‘fighting for’ one.  They all advocate support for England, which is itself exclusionist (ie, it excludes other parts of the UK).  But favouring one part of the UK is an established policy position that parties can and do hold, not just in relation to England.  If the slogans referred to the English I would be more concerned, as that is a distinction based on race.  I don’t think you can read ‘English’ into ‘England’ in this instance.  In my view the phrase “worth fighting for” is commonly used and understood in a non-violent context.  Phrased like ‘ideas worth fighting for’ or ‘relationships worth fighting for’ are common (try a Google search), and would not be read to mean physically fighting for them.  If this description was seen in the context of all the others, I think it would be reasonably clear its intention was non-violent.  Seen on its own, however, as it could be on the ballot paper, I think that it is arguable that the only way to ‘fight for England’ is a violent or militaristic way.  Seen on its own, I think it can be viewed as offensive in the context of this by-election.  It’s the potential for that to happen which leads me to conclude that we should remove it.”

So it now appears that it is okay to say as one slogan does which is still registered with the Electoral Commission ‘Fighting for Wales’ and of course the Scottish Party is allowed to ‘Fight for Scotland’, but the English are not allowed to be “exclusionary”!

I produced evidence in court of the Oxford Dictionary’s meaning of ‘offensive’ which is defined as follows:-

ADJECTIVE

1.  Causing someone to feel resentful, upset, or annoyed.

‘the allegations made are deeply offensive to us’

‘offensive language’

1.1 (of a sight or smell) disgusting; repulsive.

‘an offensive odour’

2. attributive Actively aggressive; attacking.

‘offensive operations against the insurgents’

2.1 (of a weapon) meant for use in attack.

‘he is also accused of possessing an offensive weapon’

2.2North American Relating to the team in possession of the ball or puck in a game.

‘Shell was an outstanding offensive tackle during his 15 years with the Raiders’

But clearly the Establishment wishes to be able to re-define what it considers to be “offensive” rather than taking account of what ordinary people think or even what the Oxford Dictionary says that the word means!  As per George Orwell’s 1984 “War is peace, freedom is slavery and ignorance is strength!”

Welcome to the Age of “Cartel Democracy” in the UK where even our English language has been co-opted into the Cartel Parties determination to dominate us all and extinguish English nationhood.  

So Ladies and Gentlemen who here is willing to let them win without a fight?