Category Archives: remainers

MAY 2018 ENGLISH LOCAL ELECTION RESULTS


MAY 2018 ENGLISH LOCAL ELECTION RESULTS?
So what have we learnt as a result of the English 2018 local elections? Are they a political “watershed” milestone in English politics?
The first thing to note was that so far as the Labour Party was concerned, despite wildly optimistic predictions from the ideological Left and others, like Sadiq Khan, Labour only did well in areas where there was either a preponderance of politically correct Middle Class, mostly State employees, often with non-traditional value lifestyles, or in areas heavily dependent of welfare benefits, or where “ethnic minority” immigrant populations have become dominant. Labour is continuing on its path of becoming the multiculturalist “Rainbow” Party!
Elsewhere in England, Labour made very little progress.  As Prof Matthew Goodwin of Kent University and Prof John Denham of Winchester University and also the English Labour Network were correctly predicting that, in all the areas where people still predominantly identify themselves as being “English”, under its current policies (where Labour politicians can barely mention England or the English), any hopes of a Labour breakthrough were doomed.  This has proved to be absolutely correct. 

See: John Denham: Why does our Labour Party refuse to talk about England? >>>> https://labourlist.org/2018/04/john-denham-why-does-our-labour-party-refuse-to-talk-about-england/

And: Why Labour Needs An English Manifesto >>>> https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/labour-manifesto_uk_5a7d8cd3e4b044b3821c372f

Such progress as Labour did make can be explained either: 1/ by a collapse of the Green vote, (most of whose voters went back to Labour except for where the “Progressive Alliance” was effective; for instance in the London Borough of Richmond upon Thames, where 29 seats changed hands.  Almost all of these were lost by the Conservatives, and they all went to the “Progressive Alliance” of Liberal Democrats and Greens.  This success has led to some support from Labour MPs for Labour to join it >>> https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2018/may/07/labour-mps-revive-campaign-for-progressive-alliance, ;
Or 2/ by the third of former UKIP voters who appear to have voted Labour. 
These former UKIP voters have probably gone back to Labour on a conditional basis thinking that Labour is still committed to its General Election promises of ensuring a full Brexit.
However if Labour’s Parliamentary Party continues on its trajectory to become more Remain supporting and undermining of Brexit, this vote may easily be switched next time to parties that are genuinely in support of leaving the European Union.  It would appear that Labour’s deceitfulness and disingenuous on the Brexit question has to some extent worked – so far!
So far as the Conservatives are concerned, they are projecting this result as a great success, given that it was mid-term into a Government.  However it seems obvious from a look at the statistics that in fact their success, such as it was, was dependant on both hanging onto their own vote and also recruiting an average two-thirds of the former UKIP vote. This means that their continued success is very dependent on their Government maintaining a reputation for working towards leaving the EU.  This is however a Government which will have had to have achieved Brexit by the time of the next General Election. If they have failed to deliver a satisfactory Brexit by then, this result contains a strong hint of severe troubles to come for the Conservative and Unionist Party!
The result also does show that the Conservative leadership have again successfully used their long-standing tactic (also true of the majority of “Conservative” MPs, including Theresa May) of being dishonest and disingenuous by pretending to be Eurosceptics.  It is worth remembering that when the decision time came in the EU referendum they came out as Europhile “Remainers”.  If their true position has become clear, to those that voted Conservative this time, by the next election then I would say “woe betide” the Conservative Party – if there is then a credible alternative. 
The leaders of both Labour and the Conservative Party, Jeremy Corbyn and Theresa May, are clearly both liabilities for their parties, not only personally but also through political ideology.  If either Party were to exchange their current Leader with someone more in tune with real mainstream opinion in England, then their rivals would be in serious trouble come the next General Election.
So far as UKIP leadership is concerned the results were disastrous.  I understand, but didn’t hear her say it, that their Suzanne Evans MEP has said that the results show that “UKIP is over”. 
In my view, UKIP’s Party members and voters have done England a tremendous service in forcing Cameron to give us the EU Referendum and helping to ensure that it was won for Brexit. 
It was always going to be difficult for UKIP to adapt itself, given the disagreements amongst its members and supporters on most other issues other than wanting to come out of the EU, UKIP’s Leadership troubles have of course also contributed dramatically to breakup of UKIP support.  Having blocked UKIP branches from supporting a democratic Brexit voice for England with a ‘Brexit’ English First Minister they have failed their membership by gifting to the Conservatives the Eurosceptic position.
What these election results show however is that, if Brexit is not satisfactorily delivered by the Conservatives, and English interests continue to be ignored by both Labour and the Conservatives then there is a crying need for the English Nation to have a political party which will speak up for us. 
UKIP leadership has missed its English democratic chance but UKIP’s membership does have a natural place to go if they want to! They still can make their voices heard above a corrupt and out of touch British “Remainer” elite.
I, of course, think that English voice will be only found in the English Democrats.  In the coming months, I and other English Democrat activists, will be working to encourage over to our Cause of open English nationalism, all those English voters who care about England’s future, to come over to us so that will be able to effectively represent the English Nation. My message is:- Don’t give up your political voice, Don’t allow yourself to become a ‘ sad returner’ to the tired and old LibLabCon political group. England needs you! The English Democrats are here for you!
As Helen Lewis, the Deputy Editor of the New Statesman (aka Helen Lewis-Hasteley and married to Jonathan Hayes the Digital Editor of the Guardian) said on BBC Radio 4 on the 4th May just before the 9.00 o’clock News, the only way for UKIP to have been able to come back would have been as an English nationalist party.  Being a Labour “Remoaner”, she of course thought that would be “ugly”.   I will leave you to imagine what I think of that!

WILL THE EU COLLAPSE BEFORE THE BRITISH GOVERNMENT REMAINERS CAN GET US OUT OF IT?

WILL THE EU COLLAPSE BEFORE THE BRITISH GOVERNMENT REMAINERS CAN GET US OUT OF IT?
I read an interesting article recently in the Daily Telegraph entitled “The Brussels empire is collapsing before our eyes – but Remainiacs just don’t see it” by Professor Gwythian Prins who is Emeritus Research Professor at the LSE and applied historical methodology to the task of trying to work out what the risk of the EU’s collapse is likely to be.  

I thought the analysis was both interesting and quite compelling.
Here is the article:-
The Brussels empire is collapsing before our eyes – but Remainiacs just don’t see it 
There are two strange things about ‘remainiacs’ – the self-important 5% of the country who are trying to halt Brexit. The first is well known. It is their disrespect for the biggest winning democratic vote for any issue or any government in British history. But the second is not. This is their weird attitude to the EU. 
Their frantic ‘virtue-signalling’ finds all fault with Britain and none with the unelected Brussels machine in our mud-wrestling ‘negotiation’ to leave. But what is the actual state of health of this institution to which they would keep Britain shackled in a ‘Hotel California’ Brexit – one where you can check out anytime but you just can’t leave? 
I am an historian and cultural anthropologist, so I decided to compare the EU to similar complex social systems in the past, using the academic tools of my trade. 
My main finding should worry Mr Selmayr, the German uber-bureaucrat who just took effective charge of the EU in a surgical coup d’état last month. And it should reassure everyone who voting to leave the EU in 2016. 
By getting out now we may just avoid the cliff-edge of major crisis in the EU. And the ‘remainiacs’ just don’t see it. 
If we apply a famous technique for analysing the risk of collapse in complex societies to the EU, we find that it is squarely within the zone of that risk. How so?  
First, we have to identify what sort of institution the EU is. Well, it looks like an empire. It walks like an empire. It certainly talks like an empire – listen to Mr Tusk. It treats its subjects like an empire. They grumble rebelliously, as vassal-states do. Its rulers, the Brussels elite, feather their nests just like their predecessors in function did in the USSR. In 2007 the President of the Commission, José Manuel Barroso actually called it an empire. I think we may safely say that the EU is an empire. And empires collapse. Is this one facing that risk? And if it is, how would we know? 
The leading methodology today for analysing the risk of collapse in empires was first used by an American archaeologist in a comprehensive review of mainly ancient empires. He borrowed it from the world of finance and adapted it to measure the perceived marginal benefit that you either do – or do not – get if you increase the complexity of a social structure. 
Professor Tainter’s point is that empires are only strong when the benefits from increasing complexity are positive. It is when more complexity yields less benefit that an empire enters the zone of risk of collapse. So I ran the detailed history of the European ‘project’ through this methodology and the results show pretty clearly that since the introduction of the Euro, the ‘project’ has been badly on the slide. What’s happening? 
Across the EU – not just in Britain – we, the peasants, are revolting! The facts are stark. In referenda and increasingly in national elections too, since Denmark and Sweden rejected the Euro, we have had almost twenty years of rejection after rejection of the EU’s wishes by the people. 
The premature introduction of the Euro to try to force the pace towards political union was the Federalists greatest mistake. It infected the entire ‘project’ with a wasting disease that remorselessly destroys its legitimacy. 
The next crisis was 2005/6 when the Dutch and the French rejected the ‘EU Constitution’ only for it to be rammed through as the Lisbon Treaty. 
The Irish bridled, so they had to be whipped over the fence at the second attempt. The Brussels elite reran referenda when they could because they believe their own Vanguard Myth which tells them they know best. 
Or, in 2015, they simply ignored the Greek referendum and imposed even harsher terms on this troublesome colony. The biggest cluster-crisis started then, grew with Brexit and Germany’s immigration crisis. 
The revolts in Italy and now in Hungary are just the latest and possibly most threatening. All this evidence of citizen rejection while Brussels responds with further bureaucratic complexity, has plainly taken the EU into the Zone of Risk of Collapse where it now stands. 
In order to deter any other prospective escapees, Brussels is shaky but defiant, bullying, hoping to dishearten the British (some hope!), intent on punishing us for taking back control. Hardly a sign of self-confidence. 
Across the EU, the cost in terms of alienation mounts as citizens, resentful of being treated so contemptuously, rationally choose less complexity at the national level. Less complexity is no catastrophe. It’s the historical norm. And that’s the key. If people don’t regard an empire’s power as legitimate, they rebel. Empires are like Peter Pan’s fairy friend Tinkerbell. They can only live if all the children clap. And across Europe, the people aren’t clapping any more. This empire is collapsing before our eyes but it’s no crisis for the ‘Brexiteer’ Many, only for the ‘remainiac’ Few. 
The Government should understand this evidence. We are by far the stronger party facing this rickety EU. Stop being so timid. Thank goodness that ordinary people had to good sense to get us out in the nick of time. 
Gwythian Prins is Emeritus Research Professor at the LSE. His report is published on the university-based website ‘Briefings for Brexit’ set up by academics who back the majority decision to leave the EU.
What do you think? 


REMOANERS/REMAINIACS MAY HAVE "NARCISSISTIC PERSONALITY DISORDER"!

REMOANERS/REMAINIACS MAY HAVE “NARCISSISTIC PERSONALITY DISORDER”!
The article below caught my eye recently.  I thought the author’s take, on the self-serving and somewhat callous and socially abusive attitudes of the British Political and Managerial Establishment, as well as that of globalists and internationalists, is rather well explained in the article.  Although the author has fallen into the regrettable jargonistic approach of all too many academics in British universities who seem to take a somewhat snobbish view about explaining things in language that could be easily understood by lay people. 
I am not a psychologist or psychiatrist but when I was at university I was interested in psychology and did do a course on it before deciding that I didn’t think that Freud and Jung etc., really offered both useful insights into human nature.  Also I realised that their theories came with deeply demoralising, not to say amoral, philosophical core.   Even so it is interesting to see the theory of “Narcissism” being applied rather effectively to criticise management and politics.
The thought provoking article also prompted me to wonder whether the same theorising could be applied to the petulant, spiteful and socially abusive behaviour of Remainers, who are exactly the sort of people to whom this theory of Narcissism should be applied.  This behaviour is exactly the sort of behaviour that the theory of Narcissism would predict that a self-serving elite would react in this way when they didn’t get their way and when they felt deprived of their sense of entitlement, both in the case of the vote for Brexit in the UK’s EU Referendum and also in America as a result of the election of Donald Trump!
Consider this:- 
“Narcissistic personality disorder (NPD) is a personality disorder in which there is a long-term pattern of abnormal behaviour characterized by exaggerated feelings of self-importance, an excessive need for admiration, and a lack of understanding of others’ feelings.  People affected by it often spend a lot of time thinking about achieving power or success, or about their appearance. They often take advantage of the people around them.”
Sound familiar?
Then consider this:-

Signs and symptoms

“Persons with narcissistic personality disorder (NPD) are characterized by their persistent grandiosity, excessive need for admiration, and a personal disdain for, and lack of empathy for other people. As such, the person with NPD usually displays the behaviours of arrogance, a sense of superiority, and actively seeks to establish abusive power and control over other people. Narcissistic personality disorder is a condition different from self-confidence (a strong sense of self); people with NPD typically value themselves over other persons to the extent that they openly disregard the feelings and wishes of others, and expect to be treated as superior, regardless of their actual status or achievements. Moreover, the person with narcissistic personality disorder usually exhibits a fragile ego (Self-concept), an inability to tolerate criticism, and a tendency to belittle others in order to validate their own superiority.
The DSM-5 indicates that persons with NPD usually display some or all of the following symptoms, typically without the commensurate qualities or accomplishments:

  1. Grandiosity with expectations of superior treatment from other people
  2. Fixated on fantasies of power, success, intelligence, attractiveness, etc.
  3. Self-perception of being unique, superior, and associated with high-status people and institutions
  4. Needing continual admiration from others
  5. Sense of entitlement to special treatment and to obedience from others
  6. Exploitative of others to achieve personal gain
  7. Unwilling to empathize with the feelings, wishes, and needs of other people
  8. Intensely envious of others, and the belief that others are equally envious of them
  9. Pompous and arrogant demeanour
What do you think? 
Here is the full text of the article:-
“Narcissism is increasingly being observed among management and political elites. Recognising how it underpins policy making and how it becomes increasingly prevalent in socially destructive ways is key to re-engaging citizens with the political process, writes Marianna Fotaki.
Derived from the ancient Greek myth of a beautiful youth Narcissus, who died through falling in love with his own image, the term narcissism – coined by Sigmund Freud – has travelled widely in the past one hundred years, shaping popular culture, business and public policy.
Psychoanalytic ideas present an important framework for understanding the rise of the culture of narcissism in work, management and organisational settings. Narcissism, is applied to individuals who are incapable of empathy, unable to relate to and totally unaware of other people’s needs, or even their existence. Under growing uncertainty and the ruthless striving for innovation that characterises late capitalism, it is increasingly observed in business leadership. In 2000 Michael Maccoby argued narcissists are good news for companies, because they have passion and dare to break new ground.
But even productive narcissists are often dangerous as they are divorced from the consequences of their judgements and actions, whenever these do not affect them directly. They will strive at any cost to avoid painful realisations of failure that could tarnish their own image and will only listen to information they seek to hear, failing to learn from others. Popular portrayals of corporate figures as ‘psychopaths’ who unscrupulously and skilfully manoeuvre their way to the highest rungs of the social ladder are presented as fundamentally different from the rest of humanity. However, this is a misconception obscuring the pervasiveness of narcissism and mechanisms that enable it.
Susan Long has persuasively argued that whole societies may be caught in a state of pathological perversion whenever instrumentality overrides relationality – that is, whenever narcissism becomes dominant, other people (or the whole groups of other people) are seen not as others, like oneself, but as objects to be used. For instance, when markets are seen as anonymous ‘virtual’ structures, employees may be seen and treated as exploitable commodities. Such behaviours are pathologically perverse in that people disavow their knowledge of the situations they create through narcissistic processes.
Public policies have been subject to these pathological perversions. Separating risk from responsibility in the financial sector was not merely about creating perverse incentives enabling people to engage in greed through financial bubbles that were bound to burst, but about disengaging policy makers from the all too predictable consequences of such policies.
Another example is the dramatic shift in public policy that has occurred in Europe where instead of ensuring liveable wages, access to affordable health care, public education and a clean environment, there is an increasing preoccupation with how to unleash the alleged desire of citizens to enact their preferences of how public services should be provided. The justification is that citizens want to choose between different providers to ensure that they get the best quality. However, at least in health care services, this is not borne out by the evidence. In reality, the logic of consumerist choice valorises individualism and narcissistic self-gratification by undermining the institutions created to promote public interest. The re-modelling of the public organisations as ‘efficient’ (read flexible and dispensable) business units, the widespread privatisation of the Commons and the diminution of the value of the public good are just a few of the means by which this have been achieved.
We see the effects of these changes in the NHS: imposing a market ethos on health care staff, and a focus on indicators and targets, has led to the distortion of care. Studies have shown the long term reality of the suffering, dependence and vulnerability of mentally ill patients is disavowed, and the complexities of managing those in psychological distress are systematically evaded. It is replaced by work intensification and demands on the overworked front line staff to show more compassion. Equally, the needs of patients for relational aspects of care are ignored as they do not fit with the conveyer-belt model of services provided in 10-minute slots by GPs in England.
The institutionalisation and systemic sanctioning of such practices involving instrumentality, disregard for sociality and relational ties, and pathological splitting from one’s own actions – all originating in individual narcissistic processes – constitute a state of pathological perversion on a societal level. The increasing narcissism among management and political elites is also enabled by the public at large, who may be projecting on to them their own desire for power while splitting off ambivalent feelings emerging from this desire. The progressive marketisation of public services illustrates both the insensitivity of policy makers to the impact of their policies on those who are less able to benefit from them (i.e. the less affluent and less-well educated citizens) but also in appealing to the narcissism of voters. Thus the issue of how much choice is possible and what are the inevitable trade-offs involved (between choice and equity or quality and efficiency in public health systems) is sidestepped by politicians and their constituencies.
A narcissistic denial of reality deflects the citizens’ attention from a much needed social critique. Understanding how narcissism underpins policy making, and how it becomes increasingly prevalent in socially destructive ways of managing employees and manipulating the public, is therefore a necessary first step towards re-engaging with the political process.”

(Here is a link to the original article >>> Narcissistic elites are undermining the institutions created to promote public interest

http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/politicsandpolicy/narcissism-and-perversion-in-public-policy/)

THERESA MAY TRUMPED ON ISLAMIST TERROR TWEETS BY TRUMP!

THERESA MAY TRUMPED ON ISLAMIST TERROR TWEETS BY TRUMP!

Sometimes there is justice in the world! 

Theresa May, the Remainer politician, who has, like most of the Tories in Parliament made out throughout most of her political career that she is a Eurosceptic, but she was revealed, when the EU referendum came, to be the untruthful Remainer that we always suspected that she was really! 

Theresa also makes out that, as a Church of England vicar’s daughter, she is a practicing Christian, whilst in fact she was the prime driver behind “gay marriage”. 

As Prime Minister Theresa rushed to welcome Trump when he was inaugurated as President, despite her private office having been very partisan against him in the Republican primaries and also in supporting Hilary Clinton in the actual election for the US presidency.

This, of course, is the very same Theresa May who has had the temerity to lecture Donald Trump on what he should tweet about Islamist threats!

(It is an interesting reflection on the great value of the American constitutional guarantee of the right to “Free Speech” that Ann Coulter and Trump and indeed any other Americans are free to re-tweet the videos or to make comments like Jayda Fransen has made, However because Miss Fransen has made those remarks within the UK she is being prosecuted for hate speech. How ironical that old phrase from Rule Britannia, “Briton’s never, never will be slaves” is now becoming!)

Well Theresa has been well and truly bitten now hasn’t she with Donald Trump’s response?

Theresa and some of her fellow Conservative MPs exposed themselves in their knee-jerk responses to be unpatriotic appeasers. Many of the same were exposed as “Brexit Mutineers” by the Daily Telegraph just a few weeks ago. Now here they are again standing shoulder to shoulder with Emily Thornberry, Yvette Cooper and Sadiq Khan. All of whom are yet again showing that they are more attached to multi-culturalism and Islamist appeasement than they are to acting in the best interests of our country – which is clearly to have the best possible relationship with the Government of the United States!

I doubt whether it is irrelevant that this spat took place at the very time when Theresa May and her Government are in the process of betraying the interests of the country over Brexit in offering to pay £50 billion of English Taxpayers’ money to the EU simply for the privilege of being allowed to engage in trade negotiations, with no real prospect of those trade negotiations actually resulting in any trade agreement, let alone one which is advantageous to our Nation!

These people are not only hopelessly incompetent, but also are unpatriotic even to the UK.

Of course it goes without saying that they also all hate the very idea of England and of the English Nation!

REMAINERS ARE TRAPPED BY THE RESULT OF THE GINA MILLER CASE

REMAINERS ARE TRAPPED BY THE RESULT OF THE GINA MILLER CASE
One thing that is all too obvious when trying to deal with any part of Government these days is the striking degree of incompetence.  This may well be the result of the selection for jobs by multi-culturist, PC tokenistic, tick-boxing rather than by trying to select the best people for the job?
There is also, of course, the vast and casual waste of taxpayers’ money! 
One of the less remarked upon things is the huge volume of unnecessary, overly prescriptive, complicated and downright ineffective legislation that Parliament passes.  It seems to be all too prevalent that the qualification for being in our legislature is to be utterly incompetent in dealing with any matter relating to the Law!
I remember a few years Lord Phillips of Sudbury, the Lib Dem Peer who had been a high quality solicitor in private practice, retired from the Lords saying that he thought the whole thing was pointless when our State is now passing over 10,000 pages of legislation every single year?
The result of this deluge of legislative verbal diarrhoea is that it is no longer possible for anyone to know the law, let alone for any citizen to know where they stand as against the State.  The whole legal system has been swamped and is a muddle. 
In a way nothing is better as an example than the latest twittering amongst the twitterati about whether Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty could be revoked and thus keep the UK within the EU and block the EU referendum.
This is a typical example of our political class’ incompetence. There are of course two bodies that have jurisdiction on deciding this. One is Parliament.  All the commentators who are Remainers were gleeful about Gina Miller’s case being taken up to the Supreme Court where there was a ruling that Parliament had to legislate in order for the Government to be legally able to serve the Article 50 notice (https://www.supremecourt.uk/cases/docs/uksc-2016-0196-judgment.pdf .  Bizarrely they are now claiming that Parliament by mere resolution could overrule the effect of that Statute! This is a basic error, not only of law, but of the constitution, since it is elementary that no Parliamentary resolution can override a statute.
In the circumstances the only way in which Parliament could overturn the Article 50 notice Act (European Union (Notification of Withdrawal) Act 2017)  would be by a further Act of Parliament. 
So we have the amusing and delightful situation where Remainer MPs are trapped by the Miller case, whereby they cannot undo the Article 50 Notice at this end of the process without a further Act of Parliament.
Realistically this is politically impossible and would probably be ineffective in any case for reasons which I will explain below. 
The other jurisdiction and body which would determine whether a revocation of the Article 50 Notice was valid is the European Court of Justice.  Whatever the EU Commissioner might think, or the Council of European Union Governments or the EU Parliament think, the final word would be with the European Court of Justice.  That decision would probably take 5 years during which the situation of the UK would be in a permanent state of uncertainty. 
This Twitter stream has all been brought on by the Brexit Secretary, David Davis, confirming what was logically obvious, which is that the default position on whether there is a deal is that there is no deal. 
Given that the EU has set itself up to be as difficult as possible in this negotiating process, they always made it very likely that there would be no deal, but the Remainers seemed to think that they were going to have some opportunity to decide whether or not whatever was offered was going to be sufficient.  David Davies confirmed that in the event that Parliament rejected whatever deal was offered, then the effect would be that there was no deal.
Since David Davis is likely not to be bringing back very much in the way of a deal anyway we now have massive inertia tending towards no deal from both the EU side and from the UK side.
Fortunately the effect of no deal isn’t at all what the Remainers are saying.  It is simply that we go into the normal world trade on free trading terms and on a WTO basis, just like most of the other countries that trade perfectly successfully with the EU. 
The EU for their part also go onto the same WTO terms with us.  Since the balance of trade for the last 30 years has been more or less constant in their favour it is right to say that the EU will lose more than we will.  Our Government receipts from their payment of tariffs is likely to be much greater than the EU’s receipts from our tariffs.  Our profligate and wasteful Government might even be able to pay its way with a balanced budget, at least for a little while, based upon these extra receipts!

Tony Blair, the ghost of ‘Prime Minister’s Past’, comes out of the cupboard to frighten us over Brexit!


Tony Blair, the ghost of ‘Prime Minister’s Past’, comes out of the cupboard to frighten us over Brexit!


I was interested in the coverage over last weekend of Tony Blair’s foray in the Brexit debate. All the commentators and papers seem to be reporting that he is very much “yesterday’s man” and that nobody was listening to what he had to say. I thought that was an interesting deflection from the likely purpose of his intervention.

The first thing that we need to bear in mind and accept about Tony Blair is that he remains one of the slickest British political operators of recent times. The idea that he has completely lost his touch at his age is frankly incredible.

So what was he trying to achieve? Well for a start the “people” that he was calling on to “rise up” were not you or I. He was, no doubt, focussed on supporting his old friends Peter Mandelson and Peter Hains and the motley crew of Europhile/Remainiac Lords to “rise up” and use their undemocratic position in the Upper Chamber of our legislature to block the democratic vote.

This is of course exactly the sort of thing that so-called “liberal democracy” is all about, whereby the institutions of the State have a role in preventing “we the People” from getting our way on anything which the British Political Establishment doesn’t think we ought to get our way on. This is normally done behind closed doors with an orchestrated effort by the mainstream media to bamboozle us in to thinking that it is done as a result of a mass demand, rather than just because of a small gang of elitists.

Given the decisive EU referendum result, that covert option is not open to Remainers.

Blair would have been well aware of this and has put himself up to be the “scapegoat” and “whipping boy” for those of us who do not like what he was saying, whilst at the same time emboldening the Remainers opposition in the House of Lords.

It is an often ignored part of politics that by standing up for what you believe in, you do embolden others to do the same. This works just as well for those of us in “insurgent” parties as for those in the Establishment.

I firmly believe that Blair’s behaviour is better explained by a calculated effort to take the flack and thus embolden more of a protractive Remainers’ battle in the House of Lords than would otherwise have happened.

We will have to see over the course of the next few weeks how effective that call has been!

THE BBC THINKS “LEAVE” VOTERS ARE:- ‘POOR, THICK, OLD WHITES’?


THE BBC THINKS “LEAVE” VOTERS ARE:- ‘POOR, THICK, OLD WHITES’?

The BBC’s Freedom of Information specialist, Mr Martin Rosenbaum, has published an article which I produce below, in which he claims that the data shows that the poorer, less well-educated, or elderly “white” population voted more heavily for Leave than for Remain in the EU Referendum.

Although he does quote briefly Dominic Cummings who was the internet and data focussed campaign director of Vote Leave. Dominic Cummings says the better educated are more prone to irrational political opinions because they are more driven by fashion and by group mentality.

In effect Mr Rosenbaum dismisses this view since it does not suit his or the BBC’s agenda to acknowledge that in today’s England the better educated have been subjected to a more longer and more sustained effort to convert them to ensure that they emerge as left, liberal internationalists and far more likely to support the EU’s transnational statist agenda.

Mr Rosenbaum also ignores those analysts who have talked about “Clacton man” as being of the sort that he has characterising as Leave voters and also “Crawley man” who has higher education qualifications and is an aspirational, striving middle class person.

In my view however the most glaring failure of the article is so very typical of the BBC group mentality. This is over the question of what he calls “ethnicity”. The first point to make is that he has clearly made no effort to understand what the law means by the word “ethnicity”. This has been set out now for decades, clarified in the Mandla – v – Dowell-Lee [1983] UKHC7 case in the House of Lords Appeal Court, which in effect ruled that ethnicity was limited to self-identified sub-sets of a national racial group i.e. that Sikhs without any of their Sikh specific clothes or styles or equipment were indistinguishable from other North Indians, but because of their cultural markers and self-identification were an identifiable sub-set of North India and therefore an “Ethnicity”.

On this legal basis the English, for example, are an identifiable sub-set of British and therefore an ethnicity.

The English have also been specifically accepted by courts as a national identity, national origin, nationality and as a racial group.

Despite this long established legal position, Mr Rosenbaum uses the word ethnicity in a context which shows he has virtually nothing in the way of a definition behind the word except that they are perhaps non-“White”.

This leads him to the absurd position of talking about “Asian” as if they were all the same. So it is a monochrome world in which he cannot tell the difference between a Sikh, a Muslim, a Hindu, an Indian, a Pakistani, a Bangladeshi, a Gujarati, a Tamil etc! Nor does it seem that Mr Rosenbaum is able to tell the difference between the English, the Scottish or the Welsh. This leads him to ignore one of the key findings of the Ashcroft polls which was that of the top 30 Leave voting local authorities, 100% – that is every single one of them – were constituencies which had the highest proportion of people who responded to the 2011 Census stating that they were “English only”.

Isn’t it interesting and certainly typical of the BBC that its group think mentality even now still makes it impossible for it to understand or accept that the English had by and large and very sensibly realised that the EU was and is an enemy of “the very idea of England”?

So no Mr Rosenbaum. The English are not poor, stupid or uneducated, they are merely people who care for England and didn’t want to see England broken up into EU “Regions” and overwhelmed by unrestricted mass immigration from other parts of the EU. Also they don’t want or to be made to pay for the poor and economically failing parts of the EU – when we have got enough problems that need to be fixed before we can think about dealing with other people’s problems!

Here is the article:-

Local voting figures shed new light on EU referendum


The BBC has obtained a more localised breakdown of votes from nearly half of the local authorities which counted EU referendum ballots last June.

This information provides much greater depth and detail in explaining the pattern of how the UK voted. The key findings are:

The data confirms previous indications that local results were strongly associated with the educational attainment of voters – populations with lower qualifications were significantly more likely to vote Leave. (The data for this analysis comes from one in nine wards)

The level of education had a higher correlation with the voting pattern than any other major demographic measure from the census

The age of voters was also important, with older electorates more likely to choose Leave

Ethnicity was crucial in some places, with ethnic minority areas generally more likely to back Remain. However this varied, and in parts of London some Asian populations were more likely to support Leave

The combination of education, age and ethnicity accounts for the large majority of the variation in votes between different places

Across the country and in many council districts we can point out stark contrasts between localities which most favoured Leave or Remain

There was a broad pattern in several urban areas of deprived, predominantly white, housing estates towards the urban periphery voting Leave, while inner cities with high numbers of ethnic minorities and/or students voted Remain

Around 270 locations can be identified where the local outcome was in the opposite direction to the broader official counting area, including parts of Scotland which backed Leave and a Cornwall constituency which voted Remain

Postal voters appear narrowly more likely to have backed Remain than those who voted in a polling station

The national picture

Education

A statistical analysis of the data obtained for over a thousand individual local government wards confirms how the strength of the local Leave vote was strongly associated with lower educational qualifications.

Wards where the population had fewer qualifications tended to have a higher Leave vote, as shown in the chart. If the proportion of the local electorate with a degree or similar qualification was one percentage point lower, then on average the leave vote was higher by nearly one percentage point.

Using ward-level data means we can compare voting figures in this way to the local demographic information collected in the 2011 census. Of the main census statistics, this is the one with the greatest association with how people voted.

In statistical terms the level of educational qualifications explains about two-thirds of the variation in the results between different wards.

The correlation is strong, whether based on assessing graduate and equivalent qualifications or lower-level ones.

This ward-by-ward analysis covers 1,070 individual wards in England and Wales whose boundaries had not changed since the 2011 census, about one in nine of the UK’s wards. We had very little ward-level data from Scotland, and none from Northern Ireland.

It should be noted, however, that many ward counts also included some postal votes from across the counting area, and therefore some variation between wards will have been masked by the random allocation of postal votes for counting. This makes the results less accurate geographically, but we can still use the information to explore broad national and local patterns.

Age

Adding age as a second factor significantly helps to further explain voting patterns. Older populations were more likely to vote Leave. Education and age combined account for nearly 80% of the voting variation between wards.

Ethnicity

Ethnicity is a smaller factor, but one which also contributed to the results. Adding that in means that now 83% of the variation in the vote between wards is explained. White populations were generally more pro-Leave, and ethnic minorities less so. However, there were some interesting differences between London and elsewhere.

The ethnic dimension is particularly interesting when examining the outliers on the graph that compares the Leave vote to levels of education.

wards in Birmingham illustrate the pattern of ethnic minority populations being more likely to support Remain.

There are numerous wards towards the bottom left of the graph where electorates with lower educational qualifications nevertheless produced low Leave and high Remain votes. This is where the link between low qualifications and Leave voting breaks down.

It turns out that these exceptional wards have high ethnic minority populations, particularly in Birmingham and Haringey in north London.

In contrast, there are virtually no dramatic outliers on the other side of the line, where comparatively highly educated populations voted Leave. Only one point on the graph stands out – this is Osterley and Spring Grove in Hounslow, west London, a mainly ethnic minority ward which had a Leave vote of 63%. While this figure does include some postal votes, they are not nearly enough to explain away this unusual outcome.

In fact, in Ealing and Hounslow, west London boroughs with many voters of Asian origin, the ethnic correlation was in the other direction to the national picture: a higher number of Asian voters was associated with a higher Leave vote.

Overview

This powerful link to educational attainment could stem from the lower qualified tending to feel less confident about their prospects and ability to compete for work in a competitive globalised economy with high levels of migration.

On the other hand some commentators see it as primarily reflecting a “culture war” or “values conflict”, rather than issues of economics and inequality. Research shows that non-graduates tend to take less liberal positions than graduates on a range of social issues from immigration and multi-culturalism to the death penalty.

The former campaign director of Vote Leave, Dominic Cummings, argues that the better educated are more prone to holding irrational political opinions because they are more driven by fashion and a group mentality.

Of course this assessment does not imply that Leave voters were almost all poorly educated and old, and Remain voters well educated and young. The Leave side obviously attracted support from many middle class professionals, graduates and younger people. Otherwise it couldn’t have won.

While there was undoubtedly a lot of voting which cut across these criteria, the point of this analysis is to explore how different social groups most probably voted – and it is clear that education, age and ethnicity were crucial influences.

After these three key factors are taken into account, adding in further demographic measures from the census does little to increase the explanation of UK-wide voting patterns.

However, this does not reflect the distinctively more pro-Remain voting in Scotland, since we are short of Scottish data at this geographical level. It is clear as well that in a few specific locations high student numbers were also very relevant.

To a certain extent, using the level of educational qualifications as a measure combines both class and age factors, with working class and older adults both tending to be less well qualified.

But the association between education and the voting results is stronger than the association between social or occupational class and the results. This is still true after taking the age of the local population into account.

This suggests that voters with lower qualifications were more likely to back Leave than the better qualified, even when they were in the same social or occupational class.

The existence of a significant connection between Leave voting and lower educational qualifications had already been suggested by analysis of the published referendum results from the official counting areas.

The data we have obtained strengthens this conclusion, because voting patterns can now be compared to social statistics from the 2011 census at a much more detailed geographical level than by the earlier studies.

The BBC analysis is also consistent with opinion polling (for example, from Lord Ashcroft, Ipsos Mori and YouGov) that tried to identify the characteristics of Leave and Remain voters.

Local patterns

The data we have collected can be used to illustrate the sort of places where the Leave and Remain camps did particularly well: it is hard to imagine a more glaring social contrast than that between the deprived, poorly educated housing estates of Brambles and Thorntree in Middlesbrough, and the privileged elite colleges of Market ward in central Cambridge.

It is important to bear in mind, however, that most of the voting figures mentioned below also include some postal votes, so they should be treated as approximate rather than precise. It is also important to note that the examples are limited to the places for which we were able to obtain localised information, which was only a minority of areas. The rest of the country may well contain even starker instances.

Leave strongholds

Of the 1,283 individual wards for which we have data, the highest Leave vote was 82.5% in Brambles and Thorntree, a section of east Middlesbrough with many social problems. Ward boundaries have changed since the 2011 census, but in that survey the Thorntree part of the area had the lowest proportion of people with a degree or similar qualification of anywhere in England and Wales, at only 5%. And according to Middlesbrough council, the figure for the current Brambles and Thorntree ward is even lower, at just 4%.

Second highest was 80.3% in Waterlees Village, a poor locality within Wisbech, Cambridgeshire. This area has seen a major influx of East European migrants who have been doing low-paid work in nearby food processing factories and farms, with tensions between them and British residents.

Other wards with available data which had the strongest Leave votes were congregated in Middlesbrough, Canvey Island in Essex, Skegness in coastal Lincolnshire, and Havering in east London.

Remain strongholds

The highest Remain vote was 87.8% in Market ward in central Cambridge, an area with numerous colleges and a high student population, in a city which was strongly pro-Remain.

This was followed by Ashley ward (85.6%) in central Bristol, a district featuring ethnic diversity, gentrification and alternative culture.

Next highest was Northumberland Park (85.0%) in Haringey, north London, which has a substantial black population.

Other wards with available data which had the strongest Remain votes were generally located in Cambridge, Bristol and the multi-ethnic London boroughs of Haringey and Lambeth.

In the middle

The count for Ashburton in Croydon, south London, split 50-50 exactly, with both Leave and Remain getting 3,885 votes, but that did include some postal ballots.

Nationally representative

As for being nearest to the overall result, the combined count of Tulketh and University, neighbouring wards near the centre of Preston, was 51.92% for leave, very close to the UK wide figure of 51.89%. The individual ward of Barnwood in Gloucester had Leave at 51.94%. Both figures however contain some postal votes.

Given that a few councils provided even more detailed data down to the level of polling districts, it is possible to identify some very small localities that were nicely representative of the national picture.

The 527 voters in the neighbouring districts of Kirk Langley and Mackworth in Amber Valley in Derbyshire, whose two ballot boxes were counted together, produced a leave proportion of 51.99%. And this figure is not contaminated by any postal votes.

So journalists (or anyone else for that matter) who seek a microcosm of the UK should perhaps visit the Mundy Arms pub in Mackworth, the location for that district’s polling station.

Similarly, the 427 voters in the combined neighbouring polling districts of Chiddingstone Hoath and Hever Four Elms to the south of Sevenoaks in Kent delivered a leave vote of 51.6% (again, without any postal votes).

Switching areas

The data obtained points to 269 areas of various sizes (wards, clusters of wards or constituencies) which had a different Leave/Remain outcome compared to the official counting area of which they were part.

This consists of 150 areas which backed Remain but were part of Leave-voting counting areas; and 119 in the other direction.

The detailed information therefore gives us an understanding of how the electorate voted which is more variegated than the officially published results.

Scotlandvoted to Remain – but some wards backed Leave, analysis shows

Every one of Scotland’s 32 counting areas came down on the Remain side. Yet, despite the fact that most Scottish councils did not give us much detailed information, we can nevertheless identify a few smaller parts of the country which actually backed Leave.

A cluster of six wards in the Banff and Buchan area in north Aberdeenshire had a strong Leave majority of 61%. There is much local discontent within the fishing industry of this coastal district about the EU’s common fisheries policy.

An Taobh Siar agus Nis, a ward at the northern end of the Isle of Lewis in Na h-Eileanan an Iar (Western Isles), also voted Leave, if very narrowly.

And at a smaller geographical level, in Shetland the 567 voters in the combined polling districts of Whalsay and South Unst had an extremely high Leave vote of 81%. The island of Whalsay is a fishing community, where EU rules have been controversial and in 2012 numerous skippers were heavily fined for major breaches of fishing quotas.

London

Ealing and Hounslow are neighbouring multi-ethnic boroughs in the west of London with large Asian populations, where – in contrast to the national picture – non-white ethnicity was associated with voting Leave, particularly in Ealing. Both boroughs shared a varied internal pattern of prosperous largely white areas voting strongly Remain, poorer largely white areas preferring Leave, and the Asian areas tending to be more evenly split.

Ealing voted 60% Remain, with Southfield ward hitting 76%, but in contrast the Southall wards which are over 90% ethnic minority were close to 50-50.

In Hounslow the richer wards in Chiswick in the east of the area voted heavily Remain (73%), but the poorer largely white wards at the opposite western end in Feltham and Bedfont voted Leave (64-66%). Osterley and Spring Grove was also 63% Leave, the highest Leave vote in any individual ward in the UK with a non-white majority for which we have data.

The south London borough of Bromley narrowly voted Remain. Those parts which did not do so by a significant margin were the Cray Valley wards, largely poor white working class areas; and Biggin Hill and Darwin wards, locations to the south which contain more open countryside and lie outside the built-up commuter belt.

In Croydon in south London, places which voted Leave by substantial amounts were New Addington and Fieldway, neighbouring wards with large council estates.

Other areas

Beyond the areas with the strongest backing for Leave and Remain, examining the detailed breakdown of votes in various places gives greater insight into the pattern of support for the two sides – as can be seen from the following examples.

In several places (for example, Birmingham, Bristol, Nottingham, Portsmouth) there was a strong contrast between the Leave-voting populations of large, rundown, predominantly white, housing estates in the urban periphery, versus Remain-voting populations in inner city areas with large numbers of ethnic minorities and sometimes students.

Birmingham had several wards with large Remain votes, although the city as a whole narrowly voted Leave. These pro-Remain wards tended to be the more highly educated, better off localities, or minority ethnic areas which strongly backed Remain despite low levels of educational qualifications. I have written about this before.

In Blackburn with Darwen, Bastwell ward had the highest Remain vote at 65%, compared to only 44% in the area as a whole. This ward has an ethnic minority proportion of over 90%. Other Blackburn wards which voted Remain were also ones with high minority populations.

Bradford voted to Leave (54%), but the area included some starkly contrasting places which went over 60% Remain: the prosperous, genteel, spa town of Ilkley, and strongly ethnic minority wards in the city, such as Manningham and Toller.

Bristol voted strongly Remain on the whole (62%), but there were some striking exceptions, particularly the large, deprived, mainly white estates to the south of the city. Hartcliffe and Withywood backed Leave at 67%. Similar neighbouring wards (Hengrove and Whitchurch Park, Filwood, Bishopsworth and Stockwood) also voted Leave, as did the more industrial area of Avonmouth and Lawrence Weston to the north west of the city.

As a county Cornwall voted to Leave. But one of its six parliamentary constituencies, Truro and Falmouth, voted 53% to Remain, possibly linked to a significant student population.

In Lincoln, which voted 57% to Leave, Carholme ward stands out as very different – it voted 63% to Remain. This ward includes Lincoln University, and 43% of the residents are students

Middlesbrough voted 65% to Leave. As already noted, it had several wards with extremely high leave votes of over 75%. But one ward, Linthorpe, voted very narrowly to Remain – a comparatively well-to-do inner suburb which includes an art college; and another ward, Central, which contains Teesside University, nearly did.

Mole Valley in Surrey exhibited a dramatic contrast between two neighbouring districts with very different demographics and housing. The highest Remain vote was in the very prosperous location of Dorking South, which voted 63% Remain, but the neighbouring ward of Holmwoods, dominated by large estates on the edge of the town of Dorking, voted 57% Leave, the area’s highest Leave vote.

Nottingham voted narrowly to Leave, but the inner city ward of Radford and Park voted 68% Remain. This has both a comparatively high proportion of ethnic minorities and considerable numbers of students from two nearby universities. There was a lot of variation within the area. Bulwell – a market town to the north of the city with many social problems – voted 69% Leave

There was also a high Leave vote in the housing estate locations of the Clifton wards in the south of Nottingham.

Oldham voted to Leave at 61%, but Werneth, the city ward with the highest ethnic minority population, voted Remain (57%). Other wards with high minority populations also voted Remain.

central wards in Oxford had high Remain votes

In Oxford the cluster of polling districts which included Blackbird Leys and other deprived estates on the southern edge of the city voted to Leave at 51%. In contrast the central areas containing colleges, university buildings and student accommodation voted to Remain at over 80%.

Plymouth voted 60% Leave, but Drake ward which includes the university had the city’s highest Remain vote at 56%.

Portsmouth was another place with wide variation. Paulsgrove ward, with its large estate on the edge of the city, had the highest Leave vote at 70%, whereas at the other end of the spectrum Central Southsea, an inner city ward and student area, voted 57% Remain.

Rochdale voted 60% Leave. The place which bucked this trend by voting 59% Remain, Milkstone and Deeplish, was the most predominantly ethnic minority ward. Central Rochdale had the second highest Remain vote and is the other ward that is mainly not white.

Walsall voted strongly Leave (68%). The only ward which voted Remain, Paddock, is both a comparatively prosperous and multi-ethnic locality.

The most local data

A few councils released their data at remarkably localised levels, down even to individual polling districts (ie ballot boxes) in the case of Blackburn with Darwen and Bracknell Forest, or clusters of two/three/four districts, in the case of Amber Valley, Brentwood, Sevenoaks, Shetland, South Oxfordshire, and Tewkesbury.

This provides very local and specific data, in some cases just for neighbourhoods of hundreds of voters.

At its most detailed this reveals that the 110 people who cast their votes in the ballot box at St. Alban’s Primary School in central Blackburn split 56-52 in favour of Remain, with two spoilt papers.

It also discloses stark contrasts in some neighbouring locations. The 953 people who voted at Little Harwood community centre in north Blackburn had a Leave vote of only 31%, while the 336 electors who voted in the neighbouring ballot box at Roe Lee Park primary school produced a Leave percentage over twice as high, at 64%.

Postal votes

The very detailed data we obtained also provides some rare evidence on the views of postal compared to non-postal voters. Campaign strategists have often deliberated on whether the two groups vote differently and should be given separate targeted messages.

Most places mixed boxes of postal and non-postal votes for counting, so generally it’s not possible to draw comparative conclusions. However there were a few exceptions which recorded them separately, or included a very small number of non-postal votes with the postals.

These figures indicate that postal voters were narrowly less likely to back Leave than voters in polling stations. Data covering five counting areas with about 260,000 votes shows that in these places the roughly one in five electors who voted by post backed Leave at 55.4%, one percentage point lower than the local non-postal support for Leave of 56.4%.

The counting areas involved are Amber Valley, East Cambridgeshire, Gwynedd, Hyndburn and North Warwickshire.

The data

Since the referendum the BBC has been trying to get the most detailed, localised voting data we could from each of the counting areas. This was a major data collection exercise carried out by my colleague George Greenwood.

We managed to obtain voting figures broken down into smaller geographical units for 178 of the 399 referendum counting areas (380 councils in England, Wales and Scotland, with a separate tally in Gibraltar, while in Northern Irelandresults were issued for the 18 constituencies).

This varied between data for individual local government wards, wards grouped into clusters, and constituency level data. In a few cases the results supplied were even more localised than ward level. Overall the extra data covers a wide range of different areas and kinds of councils across the UK.

Electoral returning officers are not covered by the Freedom of Information Act, so releasing the information was up to the discretion of councils. While some were very willing, in other cases it required a lot of persistence and persuasion.

Some councils could not supply any detailed data because they mixed all ballot boxes prior to counting; some did possess more local figures but simply refused to disclose them to us. Others did provide data, but the combinations in which ballot boxes were mixed before counting were too complex to fit ward boundaries neatly.

A few places such as Birmingham released their ward by ward data following the referendum on their own initiative, but in most cases the information had to be obtained by us requesting it directly, and sometimes repeatedly, from the authority.

(Here is the link to the original >>> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-38762034)

THE CONSEQUENCES OF THE BREXIT SUPREME COURT CASE


THE CONSEQUENCES OF THE SUPREME COURT CASE


The Brexit Supreme Court case result, was not so surprising, given the shambolic and incompetent way in which the Government’s lawyers, led by the Attorney General, had conducted the case.

As I have mentioned in a previous posting not only did they agree to things that they certainly should not have agreed to, making life much easier for the Remainers to win the case, but also failed to argue the points that they ought to have argued. The most significant failure was to do what the Government had promised to do in the booklet that they sent out to all voters i.e. to immediately implement the decision and also David Cameron and Jeremy Corbyn had both stated in Parliament that if Leave won then the Article 50 notice would be served the very next day. Here we are, however, months later with it still not served and now there is an irreversible ruling by the Supreme Court that there now has to be an Act of Parliament to authorise the service of the Article 50 notice.

It is not, however, certain that the Supreme Court ruling is bad news in the longer run. This is firstly because we do not know whether Theresa May’s Government will easily be able to get an Article 50 authorising Act of Parliament through Parliament. Maybe it will go through quickly. In which case the court case has been something of a waste of time with regard to the process of Brexit.

If, on the other hand, it is blocked in Parliament that will give Theresa May a “cast iron” Cause to have a snap General Election. I suspect that, if that happens, Labour will be very seriously damaged and UKIP would be completely wiped out since May would be campaigning for Article 50 to be activated.

The other reason why it is not certain whether this court case might not be a good result in the longer term is for us as English nationalists.

In the Supreme Court Judgment it has been made crystal clear that Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have no role in Brexit.

The immediate response of the Scottish National Party has been shrill and, with all due respect to Nicola Sturgeon, ill-considered. I always think it is tactically unsound to get involved in battles that you cannot win. Far better to be more modest in your aims in order to have small victories.

In First World War military doctrinal terms I am for “bite and hold” rather than the French military doctrine of the “Offensive à outrance” under which massed ranks of infantry with fixed bayonets were poured into the “beaten zone” of chattering machine guns. The delusional French “Offensive à outrance” was developed because of the French nationalist revanchist obsessional wish to be revenged for the humiliation of the Franco-Prussian War; perhaps a somewhat similar state of mind to Nicola Sturgeon’s increasing departure from reality.

Quite apart from the incongruity and philosophical incoherence of a Party claiming to be nationalists want to be ruled from Brussels, I would also just comment that Nicola Sturgeon’s strategy is quite incoherent, given that she claims she wants to get into this fight because Scotland is going to be taken out of the EU against its Will. However if she were to succeed in her Independence Referendum in getting Scotland out of the UK, Scotland will then be out of the EU as well! Go figure!

In any event it looks as if there is going to be a second Independence Referendum for Scotland, perhaps in 2019.

So far as English nationalists are concerned that is undoubtedly good news, since it is not unlikely that it will further awaken English awareness of the Scottish political class’s contemptuous attitude towards England and us English.

Anything that helps English People come to awareness of their Englishness and raises their consciousness of the separateness of England and its separate Interests is good for English nationalism!

There is, in addition, the juicy possibility that the British Constitution as it currently stands will be blocked and incapable of activating Article 50. If that does prove to be the case then the only way out of the EU for England will be the dissolution of the United Kingdom. This would trigger automatic exit, by bringing to an end the UK which is the Treaty Accession State. Ironically enough that would mean that Scotland and Northern Ireland are automatically out, not only of the UK, but also of the EU!