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 12th 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 23rd 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.
