Category Archives: general election

HOW MUCH ENGLISH MONEY WILL BE USED TO BUY DEMOCRATIC UNIONISTS’ SUPPORT IN THE HOUSE OF COMMONS?

HOW MUCH ENGLISH MONEY WILL BE USED TO BUY DEMOCRATIC UNIONISTS’ SUPPORT IN THE HOUSE OF COMMONS?
The current level of Barnet Formula style annual block grant from the English taxpayer to Northern Ireland is standing at £10.4 billion per year.  That is somewhat more than the total net subscription/subsidy to the European Union that so much of the argument during the European Referendum campaign was about! 
That adds up to a subsidy to every man, woman and child in Northern Ireland of £5,437 more public money than they will averagely have paid in taxes being paid to the population of Northern Ireland which is as per the 2011 Census, £1,810,863 (£1.8m).   This means that, as set out in the House of Commons Briefing Paper number 04033, published on the 8th March 2015, whereas the average Government spend per head in England was £8,638 in Northern Ireland it was £11,106. 
Dominic Lawson, the son of Mrs Thatcher’s Chancellor of the Exchequer, Nigel Lawson, and who is a former Editor of the Sunday Telegraph, wrote in the Sunday Times on June 18th (see below) that “there are no more successful shakers of the magic money tree than Northern Ireland’s politicians”.  The question is how successful will the DUP be in shaking the English magic money tree? (or as I would rather put it picking English pockets!).
I seen reported rumours of an extra 1.4 Billion or an extra £2.5 billion and have even heard a rumour, which like all such rumours of course is un-attributable and unverifiable, that the demand may even be an extra billion for every one of the ten DUP votes in the House of Commons.  If the latter is true, that would of course then lead to a doubling of the figures which I gave above, with over £10,000 of English Taxpayers’ money being spent on average for every man, woman and child in Northern Ireland!
In the past we in the English nationalist Cause have tended to compare our country’s treatment with that of Scotland.  This is partly because of the success of the SNP in highlighting the independence issue for Scotland and thereby successfully blackmailing the British Political Establishment to try to buy Scottish votes for the Union.  This latest development will of course not be generally about buying Northern Irish votes for the Union, but specifically buying the votes of the 10 DUP MPs in the House of Commons.
It will be interesting to see whether English People do begin to realise that they are being taken for fools with perhaps by as much as £20 billion of cuts on English hospitals, schools, roads, students etc., because of the fact that that money has been spent in Northern Ireland.
As mentioned above Dominic Lawson wrote in an article on June 18 2017, 12:01am, in The Sunday Times
“We are all being DUPed into a merry splurge”
In the article he writes:- “The DUP is socially conservative — reflecting the communities it represents — but in other respects it is to the left of the party May leads. Or, perhaps more accurately, it is populist. Its manifesto opposed the Conservative policy of removing the pensions triple lock and introducing means-testing for the winter fuel allowance. At the same time it advocated that the province be exempted from the BBC licence fee and air passenger duty. Its determination on this last point is apparently what’s holding up the deal: the chancellor, Philip Hammond, is understandably reluctant.
You get the picture. There are no more successful shakers of the magic money tree than Northern Ireland’s politicians. Figures released by the Office for National Statistics last month showed that while Scotland consumed £2,824 more in public expenditure per capita than it raised in taxes — a source of irritation to the English — the average inhabitant of Northern Ireland consumed £5,437 more public money than they paid in taxes. There has been a payment from London to Ulster of about £10bn in each of the past three years, slightly more than the UK as a whole has been paying — net — to the EU.
Obviously, the latter is to foreign countries, while the colossal transfers across the Irish Sea are to poorer fellow countrymen and women, with all the demands of solidarity that status entails. But it is quite a racket. To give just one example: if a legal chambers in London gets a call from Northern Ireland, the clerk will take it with a song in his heart. While legal aid in England has suffered drastic changes in allowable charges, in Ulster legal aid is, as one practitioner put it to me cheerfully, “still the same old gravy train”.
In England legal aid was one of the non-ring-fenced areas of spending that most felt the effects of what David Cameron and George Osborne offered as the solution to a national credit card maxed out by Gordon Brown: “austerity”, they called it, and the word stuck.”


GENERAL ELECTION RESULTS

GENERAL ELECTION RESULTS
Amongst all the Tory angst and delusional crowing from the Labour side, as well as the fall out for the Liberal Democrats there has been very few reports about the English Democrats’ results. 
Before getting on to those I would just like to point out that, although Theresa May made many mistakes in both the calling and the conduct of the General Election, the sheer numbers of people voting Conservative did actually go up quite significantly. 
The Labour vote went up by slightly more, but the results aren’t a product of their increase in the vote, they are a product of more effective targeting by Labour than by the Conservatives. 
In particular Mrs May made the mistake of calling the General Election whilst it was still during the Universities’ term time and therefore lost several seats by small margins because of the student vote.  It also appears that some Labour student voters voted twice from some of the more idiotic boasting on social media!  I shall be drawing that to the attention of the police and of the Electoral Commission. 
Despite having somewhat increased their seats the Liberal Democrat Leader was forced out as a result of a coup within the Liberal Democrats.  This appears to have been orchestrated by Brian Paddick, whose only known achievement is to have been a senior policeman promoted, so far as one can tell, mainly because of him being gay, rather than because of any merit of his as an effective police officer. 
Tim Farron has expressly confirmed that it is no longer possible to be a Liberal Democrat and a genuine practicing orthodox Christian, let alone a scripturally based Evangelical Christian. As I have said in a previous blog, our politically correct British political Establishment has now decided that it is a breach of “fundamental British values” (sic!) to believe as Christ states in the New Testament:- “I am the way, the truth and the life:  no man cometh unto the Father but by me” (John 14.6). 
So far as UKIP is concerned, they have, of course, not only failed to win any seats but also lost the one seat that they had actually won in Clacton. They also lost almost all of their deposits. A result made worse by their leadership’s decision to stand 377 candidates instead of the 106 which would have been all that would have been required in order to qualify them to get all the publicity that they did in fact get during the election. 
So far as the English Democrats are concerned, we were not prepared for the election and, indeed, had spent all that was available on our standing in the local and Mayoral elections and so were only able to put up 7 candidates with the short notice given.  Most of our candidates did not distribute any leaflets, but in any case the issue, as we now know over many years’ experience, is not so much getting a single leaflet out, but much more importantly having the manpower resources to knock on doors, to have got data on our potential supporters already collected and to be allowed to do further leafleting of all potential supporters to make sure that they did actually turn out and vote. 
As our results show we are nowhere near achieving that yet. 
We do however fully intend to be at the position where we can win some seats at the next General Election. 
That is the aim which I am setting the English Democrats and we will be working towards achieving that and hope to be successful in doing it, provided of course that the next General Election isn’t called on another sudden whim by whomsoever happens to be the then Leader of the Conservative Party!
Here are our election results:-
North East Cambridgeshire – Stephen Goldspink – 293
Barnsley East – Kevin Riddiough – 287
Barnsley Central – Stephen Morris – 211
Holborn & St Pancras – Janus Polenceus – 93
Clacton – Robin Tilbrook – 289
Bradford South – Therese Hirst – 377
Doncaster North – David Allen – 363
I would also like to say thank you very much to our candidates for standing in the General Election and for keeping the flame of English nationalism burning. 
To quote the English theologian and historian, Thomas Fuller, in his religious travelogue ‘A Pisgah-Sight of Palestine And The Confines Thereof’ of 1650:-
“It is always darkest just before the Day dawneth”!

THERESA MAY’S JUNE 8TH GENERAL ELECTION DEBACLE


THERESA MAY’S JUNE 8TH GENERAL ELECTION DEBACLE

What a difference two months make in the new weak and wobbly British political landscape!

Two months ago we had the usual county council local elections occurring with some of George Osborne’s new “Metro” mayoral elections. Theresa May and the Government was regularly reassuring people that there was not going to be any General Election until 2020.

We are told that Theresa May then, on a walking holiday with her husband in Wales, decided that she was going to call a General Election.

Certainly in terms of the strategic and logistical background it does generally seem to have been an ill-considered and whimsical decision. One thing that we do know about May is that she does not consult widely. She only talks candidly to an inner circle of loyalists who are said to number no more than eight, including her husband and Nick Timothy and Fiona Hill West.

It has been leaked that nobody in the Cabinet was consulted about the decision and they were simply presented with a fait accompli that the decision had been made and that they were going for it. The same appears to be true about the disastrous manifesto and her further poor decision not to take part in any head-on TV debates with Corbyn.

The result is that her reputation has gone from Machiavellian Mastermind to Blithering Blunderer within the space of a few weeks!

Jeremy Corbyn on the other hand, to listen to journalist reports, has gone from Unelectable Loony Lefty to Populist Pied Piper in the same period!

Ignoring the hype what can sensibly be identified as the elements of May’s poor decision-making!

Politicians often think that they are the masters of electional planning. It is however true that whilst they have a lot of experience of the tactics of electioneering, they may not be the best judges of strategy and what needs to be considered at a strategic level.

Two startling examples of Mrs May’s failure to think through the strategy is that, if she had merely had the election a month later, the students from the universities would have been dispersed to their homes all over the country, in many cases not having a vote registered there and the string of Conservative losses such as Canterbury, Bath, Bristol West, etc. and Nick Clegg’s loss of Sheffield Hallam would not have taken place. Those are completely explicable in terms of the student vote. The fact that issue wasn’t even considered before timetabling the election must demonstrate vividly the lack of strategic planning within her process of decision making to call the election.

Another issue which is difficult to reconcile with any suggestion that there was a strategic element in the decision-making process is that the Government only needed to wait until October 2018 before the new House of Commons boundaries would come into force. These boundaries have been calculated on current populations and are thought to make it much easier for the Conservatives to get an overall majority. For a Conservative Leader to ignore that advantage in deciding to call an election shows a staggering lack of strategic thinking.

More generally I do not think that Theresa May succeeded in persuading voters that the election was really necessary for the purpose that she claimed to be calling it, i.e. as a mandate to push through her Brexit negotiations. Her unwillingness to take part in televised debates helped to make Jeremy Corbyn look a much more effective leader than she was. Her frankly rather silly slogans didn’t help to improve her standing.

We can’t however ignore the further example of catastrophic decision-making process which led to her producing her manifesto, without proper consultation with her Cabinet colleagues. It made even pensioners in English country towns and villages all across the land who had never voted for any other party other than the Conservatives in their lives, question whether they really wanted to support such a blunt attack on their interests. 

Indeed the manifesto was so bad in terms of populist appeal, that if you were minded towards a conspiracy theory then you might think that Mrs May had actually tried to lose the election! Personally I generally are more inclined to “cock-up” this “conspiracy” theory. I think that what has happened is not only a demonstration of Mrs May’s inadequacies, but also more generally how poor the British parliamentary system is at producing people to occupy leadership positions who genuinely have any real leadership abilities and characteristics.

Theresa May is one example of somebody with virtually no natural leadership ability. So of course was Gordon Brown another example. Jeremy Corbyn seemed to be similar but the fact is that when he was able to break out of the Westminster bubble effect, he does seem to have shown some considerable personal leadership qualities. The fact remains though that the establishment’s party system regularly seems to give people leadership titles and puts them into leadership roles which they are clearly personally unsuited to filling.

Some coverage of the Clacton campaign

 As a candidate in Clacton I was contacted by the local paper:-
Dear General Election candidates for Clacton
The Daily Gazette will be running a series of ‘big questions’ over the next three weeks, which will see all candidates asked to give 200-word answers to each of three questions.
For the Clacton seat, your answers will be published on May 17, May 24 and May 30.
The first question is:
How did you vote in the EU referendum? Do you stick by that decision? And why?

I replied:-

“I campaigned and voted for Leaving the EU and I am delighted by the result and the shockwaves that it has sent through the British Establishment. The next big issue is the “English Question”.
That’s the rights and interests of the English to be fairly treated!”
 
That was published on 16th May 2017 with this article:-

A SELF-DECLARED Little Englander is campaigning for Clacton to have the UK’s biggest St George’s Day Party.

Solicitor Robin Tilbrook, 59, from Ongar, will be standing for the Clacton seat in the upcoming General Election.

Mr Tilbrook, leader and chairman of the English Democrats, is hoping former Ukip voters will turn to his party.

He said: “We have been campaigning for quite a long time on the ticket of trying to get an English parliament, first minister and government within a federal UK.

“The union of the UK costs us much more money as English people than the EU ever did.

“A House of Lords committee looking at the Barnett Formula in 2009 reported that the union costs us £49billion a year, which is what England subsidises Northern Ireland, Wales and Scotland every year.

“There are some very serious issues that need to be addressed in Clacton and properly funded by Government, whether that is health, mental health or infrastructure.

“It is all down to where the money goes.

“The Government spends far less per every man woman and child in England than they do in Scotland.”

Mr Tilbrook said a fairly-funded England could afford to fund crime prevention and to fund health services, including an increase in doctors and to maintain Clacton Hospital’s minor injuries service.

He added: “In terms of uplifting things, we would pledge for Clacton to have the biggest St George’s Day celebration in England.”

 
(Here is a link to the original >>> http://www.clactonandfrintongazette.co.uk/news/15289602._Little_Englander___anti_knife_campaigner_and_finance_graduate_fight_to_be_MP/) 

SHOULD WE HAVE PROPORTIONAL REPRESENTATION?

SHOULD WE HAVE PROPORTIONAL REPRESENTATION?

There are arguments put up by the, mostly self-interested, defenders of “first past the post”. First past the post is the current system for electing Members of the House of Commons, under which the candidate who gets the most votes wins the seat. These are not to be on the basis that it is a fair system, or even that it is a democratic system, but rather that it is the system of voting which has traditionally produced a strong government. This is said to be unlike many European countries which have proportional representation; Italy being the example often quoted.

There are increasing difficulties with this defence of first past the post. One is that it is not very historic. Before the Second World War there were often coalitions and, in any case, the current party alignment cannot sensibly be considered as going back before the re-establishment of the Conservative Party in 1922 over the issue of Irish Independence.

The defence also suffers from the difficulty that our Nation’s social conditions have now changed and a smaller proportion of the electorate is voting. Even during General Elections the results frequently show no more than about 60% turnout of the registered electorate. This is a registered electorate which probably only represents 80% of those who are eligible to be registered as electors.

Also the support for parties other than Labour and the Conservatives across Great Britain has been steadily increasing. This is not only in the striking cases of the nationalist votes in Scotland and Wales, but also in England.

Also the two main post-war Establishment parties, the Conservative and Labour Parties, have ceased in any meaningful way to be mass membership parties. In the late 1950’s the Conservatives had over 2½ million paid up members and Labour had nearly 2 million, whereas the Conservatives now have perhaps 100,000 paying members (if you allow for all their various concessions) and Labour may now have 150,000 paid up members. The Parties themselves are therefore no longer either representative of, or even in touch with significant strands of public opinion. Indeed both parties are now more representative of what the commentator and journalist Peter Oborn called the elitist “Political Class” rather than of any strand of democratic populism.

In these circumstances it is not perhaps surprising even if regrettable that the leaderships of both of these increasingly unrepresentative parties are anxious to hang on to the increasingly undemocratic first past the post.

To illustrate how undemocratic the system is, it is worth considering that Tony Blair won his last landslide majority in the House of Commons in 2005 with the votes of just 21.6% of the electorate.

David Cameron, despite the current unequal size of some constituencies favouring Labour, has won his parliamentary majority with the votes of just over 26% of the electorate.

It is therefore obvious that the “first past the post system” has a tendency to clothe the Establishment party with the votes of only about a quarter of the registered electorate with the parliamentary appearance of being a democratic majority.

Consider also in the recent General Election the numbers of votes required to elect a Liberal Democrat, a Green, SNP, UKIP, Conservative or Labour.

Here are the figures:-

Party 
Votes per seat 
Conservatives 
34,244 
Labour 
40,290 
SNP 
25,972 
Lib Dem 
301,986 
DUP 
23,032 
Sinn Ffein 
44,058 
Plaid Cymru 
60,564 
SDLP 
33,269 
UUP 
57,467 
Ukip 
3,881,129 
Green 
1,157,613 

This is a voting system whose democratic credentials are increasingly threadbare.

It is in these circumstances that parties like the English Democrats, and, indeed, all of those who care for the health of our county’s democracy and for the ideal that the political system should deliver policies which are in accordance with the majority of our Nation, are calling for proportional representation.

There are a variety of systems of proportional representation, the details of which could easily run to the contents of a full (and tedious) text book. Suffice to say that almost all of them deliver results which would be much more representative of the political will of the People of our Nation. As most European political systems show, when not tested to destruction by EU idiocies, (such as poor suffering Greece), proportional representation produces reasonably stable governments which are a better reflection of their country’s national will than our current electoral system.

Robin Tilbrook

Chairman

English Democrats

Unfairly selective invitations to hustings


During Parliamentary Elections there are often Hustings events. These are often organised by schools, churches or local media. All candidates are often invited but sometimes the organisers are selective about whom they invite – not always fairly.

Wherever we have been the victim of unfair selection I am urging people to protest about selective invitations to hustings. Here is my correspondence:-

Dear All

Please find below a letter that I have written to my Returning Officer regarding electoral expenses, together with a letter that I wrote to Brentwood County High School regarding one of the hustings that I was not invited to.

Please adapt these letters to write to your Returning Officer regarding any hustings that you know that you were not invited to and to the person organising the hustings.

Letter to Returning Officer

Re: General Election 2015 – Candidates Expenses Returns – Hustings

I am writing to put you on notice that there were, I believe, at least three hustings (there may well have been more) in the recent General Election in the Brentwood and Ongar constituency where I was not invited to take part. The Electoral Commission’s Husting Events Rule 8, as enclosed, has made it clear that in the circumstances that not all the candidates were invited to take part in any hustings that the candidates who were invited have to make declaration of the cost of that hustings as part of their electoral expenses.

I am therefore giving notice that I do require this cost to be included in the other candidates expenses forms and require you to reject any of the other candidates’ expenses forms if they do not include these items.

I would confirm that I was only invited to one hustings, which was the Radio Phoenix FM hustings. The other candidates I believe were invited to all other hustings and therefore the cost of each of those hustings should be included in their returns. I am aware that I was not invited to either the Brentwood High School hustings, or Brentwood School hustings or the Anglo-European School hustings. All three of these hustings should therefore appear in all the other candidates’ expenses returns.

Please confirm receipt of this letter.

Yours faithfully

R C W Tilbrook

Chairman

The Headmaster

Dear Sir

Re: General Election Hustings

As you may know, I was one of the six candidates in the recent General Election for Brentwood and Ongar.

I note that you did not invite me to take part in the hustings which your school organised but which the other candidates were invited to.

Perhaps you had not read the enclosed explanation of the rules on hustings prepared by the Electoral Commission, as you did not send me any explanation for my exclusion, let alone the “objective reasons” specified in Rule 6.

Be that as it may, I would now ask you to let me have details of the cost of the hustings and also to confirm that you have notified the other candidates of that cost, which must be included in their election expenses returns as a donation which your school has made to their campaigning.

Yours faithfully

R C W Tilbrook

Returning Officer

B Borough Council

Dear Madam

Re: General Election 2015 – Candidates Expenses Returns – Hustings

Thank you your telephone message regarding my letter to the Council dated the 20th May. I have written letters to the organisers of the hustings, and enclose copies for your information.

Yours sincerely

R C W Tilbrook

The ‘shy’ English nationalists who won it for the Tories and flummoxed the pollsters


The ‘shy’ English nationalists who won it for the Tories and flummoxed the pollsters

After the General Election I was called into the Russia Today Westminster Studio at Millbank Tower to give an interview on my view on what had happened. Here is a link to this video>>> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PzrCSDkjIac&feature=youtu.be .

It is interesting to see that Professor Eric Kaufmann of the London School of Economics has produced a similar analysis. Here is the link to his analysis >>> http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/politicsandpolicy/the-shy-english-nationalists-who-won-it-for-the-tories-and-flummoxed-the-pollsters/

What do you think?

General Election

While this election has been not only very long and was fixed in the calendar for several years, it has been interesting to see that there has been much more polling evidence than usual, particularly with Lord Ashcroft’s polls.

It has also been interesting to see that despite the £100 million or more that the Establishment parties and UKIP have spent between them on billboards, leafleting and social media based canvassing and telephone canvassing it seemed to have made very little difference between the two main parties until the last moment; more of that later!

These were interesting elections in the second tier of parties about the SNP, the Liberal Democrats and UKIP. Now we see their results!

So far as UKIP is concerned the result was a devastating disappointment. Not only has UKIP proved a disappointment to English nationalists, as per one of my earlier blog articles, but won’t even have satisfied their British nationalist supporters.

The SNP’s results in Scotland have brought the end of the Union very much back onto the agenda. One of the burning issues of the next five years will therefore I think be the need for a voice for English nationalism.

In the last 18 months it has been UKIPs time in the sun. Their failure to deliver leaves, I think, the way wide open for the only English nationalist party to come forward.

The English Democrats are now an experienced party of campaigners dedicated to England and our English nation and will not be blown off course by the winds and noise of political storms and while we may not agree with the Scottish National Party on the vast majority of their policies, the one thing that we do agree with them on is the need for an effective voice for our Nation.
 
In an imaginary play we might have:-
 
Stage directions: Enter – triumphant SNP contingent.

Exit – dejected Liberal Democrats and UKIP contingents.

Enter – determined band of English Democrats with Cross of St George flat flying to cries of horror and alarm from the British Media Establishment chorus!

Thoughts on our Campaign Press Launch, April 2015

Thoughts on our Campaign Press Launch, April 2015


It has been one of the recurring bug bears of trying to get our political party up and running and publicised, that whenever we are entitled to a little bit of coverage, the coverage that we have actually been given has generally been the niggardly minimum that the BBC can get away with.

As part of standing in the General Election or any major election the rules say that we are entitled to a press launch to be covered by being mentioned on the BBC News and on the BBC website and perhaps also an interview on the BBC’s Politics Show.

Over the years the BBC have chosen to minimise the effectiveness of that coverage by various means. On one occasion they showed supporters milling about rather than the display we had organised or anybody making a speech. On other occasions they have panned around to show that the rest of the room is quite empty. Of course they knew that it would be as this is a completely artificial arrangement, designed only to get some publicity rather than proper meeting! On some occasions they have shown me making a speech but done a voice over of whatever not so encouraging thing they wanted to say about us!

So on this occasion I thought there wasn’t much point in making a great effort to prepare a detailed speech. So, of course, this is the first occasion where they have actually broadcast my speech, or, at any rate, part of it, on the BBC Parliament Channel! Here is a link to view the outcome of that >>> http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b05qqfjp/election-2015-english-democrats-campaign-launch.

Naturally had I known that they were going to broadcast 10 minutes of speech, I would have made sure that it was much more punchy and slick. I would also have focussed more on covering the key points as to why England is so badly disadvantaged by the current constitutional arrangements.

On the bright side, perhaps what they have done in this case is part of the growing recognition of the English Democrats. In future I may need to expect my speech to be covered! If so, I can promise far less um’s and r’s!

What do you think of the video?

Also here is what was put up on the BBC website >>> Election 2015: English Democrats launch campaign with attack on ‘traitors’ – BBC News


What do you think?

ENGLISH NATIONALISTS CAN CELEBRATE A MERRY CHRISTMAS EXPECTING A BETTER NEW YEAR!


ENGLISH NATIONALISTS CAN CELEBRATE A MERRY CHRISTMAS EXPECTING A BETTER NEW YEAR!


I would like to wish everyone a very Merry Christmas and Happy New Year. I am glad to be able to do so after a year that has seen several developments which give some cause for optimism that events and the mood of the country are beginning to visibly move towards the need for a whole England/English National reform of our politics!

The General Election next year gives a focus to our efforts in the coming year but it will be after the election that the most interesting developments are likely to work themselves out, especially in the light of current opinion polls.

Before then we have the interesting prospect of much more England focussed debates following on from William Hague’s EVEL White Paper! All treats for us!

Wishing you and England too a very Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!