Category Archives: Politics

The Camp of the Saints  tested against reality

English translation from the French by Norman Shapiro, Professor of French Romance Languages and Literatures Department 3089, Wesleyan University,  Connecticut, USA.   Email nshapiro@wesleyan.edu

The full English text can be found at https://archive.org/stream/CampOfTheSaints/Camp_of_the_Saints_djvu.txt

Robert Henderson

The French writer Jean Raspail’s The Camp of the Saints  was  published in 1973. It is notorious or famous,  according to your politics,  for its story of  the Third World poor successfully invading the First World. The invaders come  armed not with guns and bombs,  but the potent weapons of  their huge  numbers and  the knowledge  that  the self-destructive  ideology of Western elites  – what we would  nowadays call  the “anti-racist” part of political correctness  – had warped the minds of most of those  elites  and also  those  of the masses of  the First World,  who  have been beaten into a state  where they either cannot see when their own interests are being sacrificed on the altar of one worldism or are cowed to the point where  they are paralysed into inaction.

At the time of its writing the  book  was set in twenty or so years in  the future. As the story opens a  fleet of 100 ramshackle ships  dubbed the Ganges Armada  gathers in India and soon  sets off  for Europe.  In the ships are one million of the subcontinent’s poor.  The intention of the Armada is to run  the ships aground on European shores – this is a strictly one way voyage – decant their cargo and present the land on which they descend  with a dilemma, namely,  allow the million  to invade or resist them with force with the ultimate sanction being mass slaughter of the invaders.

It takes  the ships fifty daysto arrive on the northern shores of the Mediterranean with Southern France as the final  destination.   As the Ganges Armada sails the Western elites are either  starry eyed about their dream of a world in which there is no us and them – no nation states, just Mankind  with a capital M –  or paralysed by the one-world propaganda which has been so assiduously fed to them.

Even those members of the elite who do not  believe in the One Worldism  have developed the  peculiar state of mind which arises  when  propaganda is not only incessant but gainsaying the propaganda is seen as   dangerous.  Such people do not embrace the content of the propaganda,  nor play along out of abject and immediate  fear. Rather, they sublimate the fear and develop a feeling that to rebut the propaganda is somehow wrong, although if asked they could not say exactly where the wrongness lay.   The state of mind is akin to that of a person who feels that a sick joke is inappropriate if expressed in company even if it makes them inwardly laugh.  In short, they have been conditioned to think of certain ideas and words as unclean for no other reason that they have been told over and over again that these things are beyond the Pale.   As for the masses,  they have variously bought into the propaganda,   had their true feelings suppressed  by the constant propaganda as described above or  been censored out of public life.

But human nature has not been utterly transformed.  There is the natural  human response to trouble of thinking it will not happen. While the Ganges Armada is a long way off heads are buried in the sand with non-pc thoughts such as that the ships will all be sunk by rough weather and seas  before they reach Europe because of their decrepit state.  Hardly anyone in a position of authority or influence is realistic and honest about the outcome of the Armada if it reaches its destination , namely,  that it will be an invasion which if not resisted will overturn the societies into which the human cargo,  full of misery  and entitlement, is decanted.  Instead they either preach the  message that  the arrival of the Armada will be a great blessing for it will allow the West to show its generosity of spirit by welcoming the invaders with open arms or indulge in the hypocrisy of secretly hoping the ships will founder at sea.

But the weather is unusually clement and the Ganges Armada comes closer and closer until its arrival off the French Mediterranean coast is imminent.  This causes the vast majority of the population of the South of France  to abandon any pretence of seeing the ships’  arrival as anything other than a threat  and the vast majority  flee to the North of France. This is only a temporary place of safety and before  long much of the French elite also hot-foot it  to Switzerland ,  thinking wrongly that it will be a haven against the One Worldist mania –eventually the Swiss fall prey to the same lack of will to resist the invaders and opening their borders to the invading Third World hordes.

The most naïve of the  One Worlders advance towards  the point at which the ships will make landfall in the sublimely silly expectation that they will be welcomed with open arms  by the invading one million. Once they  arrive the One Worldist simpletons are at best ignored and at worst attacked. They also find that they are at risk from the Third World immigrants and their descendants who are  already in France.

When the Ganges Armada finally  arrives and  sheds its cargo of one million there is little resistance because not only have most of the population fled , but the  French armed forces prove worthless, most having been robbed of the will to resist the invasion with  brute force by the ceaseless propaganda which has been fed to them.   The result is mass desertions.

The Ganges Armada is only the beginning.  Other fleets full of  Third World  misery to west upon the West  are being prepared. Nor is it just a seaborne invasion. Even as the Ganges Armada is at sea huge numbers of Chinese are massing on the Chinese border with the Asiatic Russian territories.

The novel ends with France overrun and the white native French population reduced to not exactly slavery but an irrelevance as power shifts to the non-white migrants who were either in France before the Armada arrived or are part of the Armada and its successor Third World invasion. The same general thing happens throughout the West, with the white native population everywhere becoming subordinate, becoming strangers in a strange land which was once theirs but is now utterly changed.

How prophetic is  the Camp of the Saints? Raspail understood when he published the  book that it would not  be prophetic in the detail of his imaginings,    but only in his  general  message. Indeed, in  his short preface  he admits that the detail of the action in the book is unrealistic: “I had wanted to write  a lengthy preface to explain my position and show that this is no wild-eyed dream; that even if the specific action, symbolic as it is, may seem farfetched, the fact remains that we are inevitably heading for something of the sort. We need only glance at the awesome population figures predicted for the year 2000, i.e., twenty-eight years from now: seven billion people, only nine hundred million of whom will be white.”

The invasion of the First World has not occurred as  dramatically as Raspail portrayed it. If it had perhaps even the Quisling politically correct  politicians of the West would have been forced to resist it with force,  both because they feared the fury of the people they supposedly represented and for fear of what the reality would be if such an invasion force had landed.  Instead the immigration  has  happened piecemeal, surreptitiously.  There has never been a dramatic massing  of Third World immigrants to gain entry to the First World Promised Land in one fell swoop, just an  incessant trickle through numerous points of entry. The nearest events  to what Raspail describes  are the various boat people  arriving in the West  from Latin America, Africa and Asia. But although large in aggregate,  each individual attempt at invasion contains hundreds at best and most commonly in numbers of less than ten. When seaborne they come not as an imposing  fleet but singly or as a small flotilla  at worst.  More commonly their illegal entry is by plane, train or motor vehicle, a handful at a time.

Where Raspail was  strikingly astute is his prediction of the immense weight of “anti-racist”  politically correct propaganda which the West has seen. He l catalogues all the politically correct grotesquery  we have today with definitive characters.   There are those in positions of authority and influence such Albert Dufort, the trendy radio journalist,  who prostitute themselves and their country by representing  the  Ganges Armada  and the other soon to be launched Third World invasion fleets, not as a threat but as a great opportunity to show their humanity.  There are those drawn from the ethnic minorities already well ensconced in French society such as the  Algerian Ben Suad (who goes by the name of Clement Dio)  whose lives are devoted to biting the hand that feeds them.  Perhaps most forlornly there are the French  young who have  had their natural tribal feeling sucked from them: “ That scorn of a people for  other races, the knowledge that one’s own is best, the triumphant joy at feeling oneself to be part of humanity’s finest — none of that had ever filled these youngsters’ addled brains, or at least so little that the monstrous cancer implanted in the Western conscience had quashed it in no time at all. In their case it wasn’t a matter of tender heart, but a morbid, contagious excess of sentiment, most interesting to find in the flesh and observe, at last, in action.”  Chapter 1

All of this is most impressive because when the book was written political correctness was in its  early stages.  In Britain  a couple of Race Relations Acts  had been passed in 1965 and 1968, and one worldism, especially with a Marxist tinge, was very popular in academia. But there was no general  propagandising of the British population and punishments for being non-pc about race and immigration had barely begun to get a hold on British society. Even in the United States, the most advanced of states promoting  “anti-racist” measures ,  measures such as “positive discrimination” and “affirmative action”  were still in their infancy.  The secular inquisition of individuals accused of pc “crimes” that we know today with people increasingly  being sent to prison or routinely losing their jobs  did not exist. The long march through the institutions still had a good  distance to go.

The book’s general argument that the West would be subject to massive immigration which would radically change their societies  is correct.  In Britain the last national census  in 2011 showed this for the population of England and Wales combined :

White was the majority ethnic group at 48.2 million in 2011 (86.0 per cent). Within this ethnic group, White British1 was the largest group at 45.1 million (80.5 per cent).

The White ethnic group accounted for 86.0 per cent of the usual resident population in 2011, a decrease from 91.3 per cent in 2001 and 94.1 per cent in 1991.

White British and White Irish decreased between 2001 and 2011. The remaining ethnic groups increased, Any Other White background had the largest increase of 1.1 million (1.8 percentage points).

The population of England and Wales at the time of the census was”  56,170,900 in mid-2011, with the population of England estimated to be 53,107,200 and the population of Wales estimated to be 3,063,800”. In a generation the white population, British and foreign , has dropped by 8% and those describing themselves as white British  were only 45 million out of 56 million.

There is also strong evidence that the idea of deliberately encouraging mass immigration of the unassimilable to change Western societies  has been practised by  Western Governments. Think of the words of a Tony Blair special adviser  Andrew Neather :

Eventually published in January 2001, the innocuously labelled “RDS Occasional Paper no. 67″, “Migration: an economic and social analysis” focused heavily on the labour market case.

But the earlier drafts I saw also included a driving political purpose: that mass immigration was the way that the Government was going to make the UK truly multicultural.

I remember coming away from some discussions with the clear sense that the policy was intended – even if this wasn’t its main purpose – to rub the Right’s nose in diversity and render their arguments out of date. That seemed to me to be a manoeuvre too far.

Ministers were very nervous about the whole thing. For despite Roche’s keenness to make her big speech and to be upfront, there was a reluctance elsewhere in government to discuss what increased immigration would mean, above all for Labour’s core white working-class vote.

This shone through even in the published report: the “social outcomes” it talks about are solely those for immigrants.

And this first-term immigration policy got no mention among the platitudes on the subject in Labour’s 1997 manifesto, headed Faster, Firmer, Fairer.

The results were dramatic. In 1995, 55,000 foreigners were granted the right to settle in the UK. By 2005 that had risen to 179,000; last year, with immigration falling thanks to the recession, it was 148,000.

In addition, hundreds of thousands of migrants have come from the new EU member states since 2004, most requiring neither visas nor permission to work or settle. The UK welcomed an estimated net 1.5 million immigrants in the decade to 2008.

In May 2014 the British  think tank Policy Exchange  published a report  on racial  and ethnic minorities entitled A portrait of modern Britain.  The headline grabbing statistic in the report is the claim that ”the five largest distinct Black and Minority Ethnic (BME) communities could potentially double from 8 million people or 14% of the population [now] to between 20-30% by the middle of the century. Over the past decade, the UK’s White population has remained roughly the same while the minority population has almost doubled. Black Africans and Bangladeshis are the fastest growing minority communities with ethnic minorities representing 25% of people aged under the age of five.”

Because immigrants and their descendants  have a substantially greater propensity to breed than that of the native white British population and that fact coupled with  the  much younger average age  of immigrants than that of native Britons means that the Policy Exchange projections are realistic.

What the Camp of the Saints should do is force people to accept at both an intellectual and emotional level what mass immigration represents.   It is a form of conquest,  and conquest of the most pernicious and fundamental   kind when it consists primarily of  those who cannot or will not fully assimilate into the native population. Oncesuch  immigrants are  in a country in large numbers,  the country is faced with two terrible choices:  either capitulate to the fact of  their conquest and allow the country to dissolve  into a motley multicultural mess occupying a single territory or forcibly remove the  immigrants and their descendants through expulsion or  massacre.  Nor should it be imagined that the dissolution of the country into racial/ethnic  blocs will mean an absence of war. History tells a single simple story about racially and ethnically divided territories: violence is an inevitable and ineradicable  part of such societies and the more the different groups within a territory begin to be of equal size the greater the risk of conflict.

The question which Raspail brings us to is this, is the invasion to be permitted through an excessive and fatal excess sentiment or is it to be  resisted through force, including in the final extremity the    mass killing of men , women and children,  or will the invaders be permitted to come, breed and settle the territory of the original population? Mass immigration is conquest, just as surely as an armed invasion is conquest.  A people who forgets that or buries their collective head in the political sand hoping the bogeyman will go away is doomed.

There are weaknesses in the novel purely as a literary work,  although the fact that I am commenting on an English translation should be born in mind. There is little character development, the dialogue is feeble,  the language flowery, there is a good deal of Gallic intellectual exhibitionism and a considerable amount of what I can only describe as a third person stream of consciousness.  The last I must confess is not to my taste. Raspail also gives his story a strong flavour of the leftist student protest of 1968 and the widespread attraction to the Western intelligentsia of Marxism, especially in its Troskyite manifestations.  This seems like another world today  even though the period  is only 40 odd years ago and may make the work seem alien or simply dated to some readers.

But these  weaknesses do not diminish the importance of the book, for it is  Raspail’s general  message which   matters. The message is important both because its general thrust is true and for the shameful fact that it is saying things which if expressed in a new work being offered for publication today would ensure that it did not find a mainstream publisher in the West.

How the BBC fixes phone-ins – The Radio 5  Breakfast Programme phone-in on 6 May 2014

Robert Henderson

The think tank Policy Exchange  has published a report  on racial  and ethnic minorities entitled A portrait of modern Britain.  The headline grabbing statistic in the report is the claim that” the five largest distinct Black and Minority Ethnic (BME) communities could potentially double from 8 million people or 14% of the population [now] to between 20-30% by the middle of the century. Over the past decade, the UK’s White population has remained roughly the same while the minority population has almost doubled. Black Africans and Bangladeshis are the fastest growing minority communities with ethnic minorities representing 25% of people aged under the age of five.”

On 6 May BBC R5 decided to devote their morning Breakfast Programme  phone-in  hosted by Nick Campbell to the report.  Did the programme  address  the question of what the native British population thought of such a  radical change in the demographic composition of their country? Don’t be silly this is the BBC.  Instead the programme was devoted to asking  how welcoming Britain is to immigrants.  Campbell set the tone by  asking questions such as “Do you think this is one of the most welcoming countries across the world for immigrants” and making comments such as “The vast majority of people who come here, I’m sure, respect what are the cultural aspects of this country”. He also activated the pc  device of making discussion about immigration permissible by claiming that ethnic minorities and immigrants generally were often worried by ongoing  immigration.

But even with those  brakes  on any honest discussion of mass immigration and its effects on Britain, the BBC were nervous. Some frightful  non-pc people might get on and horror of horrors say that mass immigration was not the best thing to happen to Britain since sliced bread. So to make sure that such a ghastly  thing would not happen,  the BBC  unashamedly packed the programme with those who were either immigrants themselves or  the descendants of immigrants.

The studio guests were Rishi Sunak (Head of the Black & Minority Ethnic Research Unit at Policy Exchange),  Don Flynn from the  Migrants Rights Network and Gurinder  Josan  of the Sikh Council of the UK.

There were ten  callers put on air. Of these eight  were black or Asian, viz:

Mal –An  Asian of sub-continental origin who was sent to Britain at a young age.

Carl – He described himself as an Australian of mixed heritage. He is probably Asian from certain hints he gave.

Alex – He described himself as black. His voice suggested that he was raised in Britain.

Anoop –  A Kenyan Asian immigrant.

Ken –  A  old white workingclass man  from Luton.

Ravi – A Sikh.

Abdul – He described himself as Glaswegian with Pakistani and Irish ancestry.

Sabeena – Asian immigrant long resident in Britain..

Liz – A white lower-middle class English woman.  Lived in Leicester for  forty years before moving to Devon.

Bernie – A black man born and raised in Britain.

The general thrust of the comments by everyone except for Ken and Liz was that we all lived in a wonderful multicultural world, although there was a bit of victimhood whining by Alex and Bernie brought in the subject of slavery.  Abdul complained about recent immigrants getting council houses.  It is probable that he was deliberately put in to validate Campbell’s claim that many immigrants were against further immigration.

Ken was the perfect pc selected spokesman for the non-pc side,  old, white working-class,  inarticulate and palpably hamstrung by fear of saying something which could get him labelled a racist.  He emphasised the mixed nature of Luton and claimed that,  in his own experience,    abuse of  blacks and Asians was unknown and said he could not understand why black and Asian complaints were forever being heard  in the mainstream media.  This could have caused Campbell a problem because his complaint was about the practice of victimhood amongst ethnic minorities.  Sadly, Ken  then inadvertently blotted his pc copybook by  suddenly and irrelevantly recounting how he had asked his neighbour whether they wanted to be called  coloured or black. This  produced a snort of derision from Alex to whom Campbell eagerly went back to ask what he thought of Ken’s ideas and the question of victimhood and the media’s promotion of it went undiscussed. .

The nearest anyone came to expressing  outright dissent from the politically correct rubric was Liz. Her general point was that integration was a “two way street” and she was dubious about whether it was a “two way street”  because  immigrants were not always making an  effort to abide by the British way of life.  She made dangerously non-pc statements such as mosques in Leicester being  unwanted by the white population when they were first built and that immigrants to this country “should respect our religion”, but her complaints was surrounded by mantras such as “diversity is good” to ward off the pc Inquisition.  Campbell of course jumped in to correct matters, for example, by saying “What do you mean by our religion?”  But Liz kept veering off dangerously off pc message  and her contribution ended with this exchange with Campbell:

Liz:…if we both respect each other. If I went to another country I would respect their beliefs and wishes  and I would….” Campbell interrupts.  

Campbell: ““And the vast majority of people who come here, I’m sure, respect what are the cultural aspects of this country”. 

Liz : “Well if they do there will be no problem at all. Why is there a problem?  Why is there a problem in all these different cities? “

Campbell: “Is there a problem? Well, we have had  person after person saying it’s all going terribly well.”

Liz: “Well, I’m sure it is…” At this point Campbell cut her off.

That short exchange encapsulates the problem so many white Britons have when speaking in public about immigration and its  consequences. Clearly Liz wanted to express her fears  about the effects of mass immigration,  but she was so handicapped by fear of being thought a racist that she was l willing to agree with Campbell’s assertion there is no problem at the end because of her fear of being dubbed a racist.

I rang the phone-in after it had been going for about twenty minutes. Eventually the  producer phoned  me  back and said he would put me on. I waited on the phone  for over twenty minutes but never got on. There was the strongest of reasons  for putting me on: the programme was utterly unbalanced there being  not a single person who argued the case against mass immigration.

Had I got on I would have made these points:

  1. That no society anywhere welcomes mass immigration because mass immigration is invasion of territory, a surreptitious form of conquest.

2. That the permitting of mass immigration is the most fundamental form of treason those with power can commit.

3. All elites understand that mass immigration is  never wanted by any population and this leads them to suppress dissent,  as happens in this country now with people such as Emma West being charged with criminal offences simply because she spoke against immigration in a public place.

4. That mass immigration has already created the basis for considerable racial strife, something which will increase as the minority populations grow.

5. That mass immigration has already  resulted in many disastrous effects on British society such as minority ghettoes, a catastrophic housing shortage and a low wage economy.

I had made it clear that these were the issues I wished to raise when I spoke to the producer.  I suspect that the final decision is about who goes on is made by the programme  presenter . If so, Campbell must have seen my position on the question and deliberately excluded me.

My complaint is not that I did not get on the programme. Rather it is that no one expressing my views or anything like them  did so.

If there had been no post-1945 mass immigration into Britain …

Robert Henderson

Without mass immigration we would not have ….

1.. A rapidly rising population. http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2013/nov/06/uk-population-rise-ons

2. Ethnic minority ghettoes. http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/edwest/100047117/britains-ethnic-ghettos-mean-liberals-can-wave-goodbye-to-their-dream-of-scandinavian-social-democracy/

3. Race relations legislation, most notably the Race Relations Act of 1976. http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1976/74

4. Gross interferences with free speech such as those in the 1976  Race Relations Act  and 1986 Public Order Act arising from the British elite’s determination and need (from their point of view) to suppress dissent about immigration and its consequences.

5. Native Britons being  charged with criminal offences and,  in increasing numbers of cases,  finding themselves in  prison  for expressing their opposition to mass immigration  or  for being non-PC about immigrants and British born ethnic and racial minorities.  https://englandcalling.wordpress.com/2013/07/02/the-oppression-of-emma-west-the-politically-correct-end-game-plays-out/

6. Native Britons losing their jobs simply for beings non-pc  about  immigration and ethnic and racial minorities. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1239765/Park-ranger-sacked-racist-joke-wins-40k-compensation-tribunal-tells-council-skin-colour-fact-life.html

7. Such a virulent political correctness,  because the central plank of the creed  – race – would have been removed or at least made insignificant. Without large numbers of racial and ethnic minorities to either act as the clients of the politically correct or to offer a threat of serious civil unrest to provide the politically correct with a reason to enact authoritarian laws banning free discussion about the effects of immigration, “antiracism” would have little traction.   Moreover, without the massive political  leverage race has provided,  political correctness in its other  areas,  most notably homosexuality and feminism,   would have been much more difficult to inject   into British society.  But   even  if  political correctness  had been  robbed of its dominant racial aspect  whilst leaving  the rest of the ideology  as potent as  it is now,    it would be a trivial thing compared to the ideology with its dominant  racial aspect intact.   Changes to the status of homosexuals and women do not fundamentally alter the nature of a society by destroying  its natural  homogeneity. Moreover, customs and laws can always be altered peacefully. A  country with  large unassimilable minorities  cannot be altered peacefully.

8. State sponsored  multiculturalism, which is now institutionalised within  British public service and the state  educational system. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-12371994

9. Islamic terrorism. https://www.mi5.gov.uk/home/mi5-history/mi5-today/the-rise-of-the-islamist-terrorist-threat.html

10. The creeping introduction of Sharia Law through such things as the toleration of sharia courts to settle disputes between Muslims provided both parties agree. The idea that such agreement is voluntary is highly suspect because of the  pressure from within the Muslim population for Muslims to conform to Sharia law and to settle disputes within the Muslim population.  But even if it was always entirely voluntary, it would be wrong in principle to have an alien system of law accepted as a rival to the law of the land because inevitably it would undermine the idea of the rule of law and  further  isolate Muslims from the mainstream. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/women/womens-politics/10778554/The-feisty-baroness-defending-voiceless-Muslim-women.html

11. Muslims Schools which fail to conform to the national curriculum at best and at worst are vehicles for the promotion of Islamic supremacist ideas. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/educationnews/10777054/Ofsted-chief-to-take-charge-of-probe-into-Islamic-school-plot.html

12.  A calamitous housing shortage. http://www.jrf.org.uk/media-centre/shortage-homes-over-next-20-years-threatens-deepening-housing-crisis

13. Housing Associations which cater solely for ethnic and racial minority  groups. https://englandcalling.wordpress.com/2011/04/08/the-truth-about-social-housing-and-ethnic-minorities/

14. A serious and growing shortage of school places, especially primary school places . http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-23931974

  1. Health tourism on a huge scale http://www.spectator.co.uk/features/8880071/international-health-service/

16  Benefit tourism on a massive scale. http://www.migrationwatchuk.co.uk/pdfs/BP1_37.pdf

17 . Such crowded roads and public transport. http://www.london.gov.uk/media/assembly-press-releases/2013/10/fears-of-future-overcrowding-due-to-167-million-more-london-bus

18. Such a low wage economy.  http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2010/jan/17/eastern-european-immigration-hits-wages

19. Such high unemployment and underemployment. http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2013/11/13/uk-employment-figures_n_4265134.html

20. Such a  need for the taxpayer to subsidise those in work because of the under cutting of wages  by immigrants.  http://www.insidehousing.co.uk/majority-of-new-housing-benefit-claimants-in-work/6521183.article

21. Areas of work effectively off limits to white Britons because either an area of work is controlled by foreigners or British born ethnic minorities, both of whom only employ those of their own nationality and/or ethnicity, or unscrupulous British employers who use foreigners and ethnic minorities because they are cheap and easier to control. http://www.standard.co.uk/news/uk/800000-uk-jobs-advertised-across-europe–and-foreign-jobseekers-even-get-travelling-costs-8734731.html

22 As much crime (and particularly violent crime) because foreigners and British born blacks and Asians commit a disproportionately large proportion of UK crime, for example see http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2522270/Foreign-prisoner-total-11-000.html

and

https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/269399/Race-and-cjs-2012.pdf

and

https://englandcalling.wordpress.com/2011/11/04/the-black-instigated-and-dominated-2011-riots-and-the-great-elite-lie/

23.  Double standards in applying the law to the white native population and immigrants, with the white native population being  frequently treated more harshly  than blacks, Asians and white first generation immigrants. http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2011/12/07/female-gang-who-attacked-woman-spared-jail_n_1133734.html

24. Female genital mutilation. http://www.theguardian.com/society/2014/apr/15/fgm-first-suspects-charged-court

25. “Honour” killings. http://www.bbc.co.uk/ethics/honourcrimes/crimesofhonour_1.shtml#h2

26. Forced marriages. http://www.bbc.co.uk/ethics/honourcrimes/crimesofhonour_1.shtml#h2

27. Widespread electoral fraud. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/10557364/Election-watchdog-demands-action-amid-fears-of-Asian-voter-fraud.html

 

We would have ……

1. A very homogenous country,  as it used to be.

2. No fear of speaking our minds about race and  immigration.

3. No fear of speaking our minds about foreigners.

4. No fear of being proud of our country and Western culture generally.

5. No people being sent to prison for simply saying what they thought about race and ethnicity.

6. Much less political correctness.

7. Equality before the law in as far as that is humanly possible.

8. A stable population.

9. Plentiful housing, both rented and for purchase, at a price the ordinary working man or woman can afford.

10. Abundant  school places.

11. An NHS with much shorter waiting lists  and staffed overwhelmingly with native Britons. Those who claim that the NHS would collapse with foreign staff should ask themselves one question: if that is  the case,  how do areas of the UK with few racial or ethnic minority people manage to recruit native born Britons  to do the work?

12. A higher wage economy .

13. Far more native Britons in employment.

14. No areas of work effectively off limits to white Britons because either an area of work is controlled by foreigners or British born ethnic minorities, both of whom only employ those of their own nationality and/or ethnicity, or unscrupulous British employers who use foreigners and ethnic minorities because they are cheap and easier to control.

15. A much lower benefit bill for those of working age.

16. Substantially less crime.

17. An honest electoral system.

Alex Salmond’s attempt to disown the UK national debt should be a non-starter

Robert Henderson

During  February 2014 the Conservative, Labour and LibDem parties all  pledged not to enter into a currency union consisting of Scotland and the rest of the UK if there is a YES to independence in the coming referendum ( http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/scotland/10657721/Scottish-independence-Alex-Salmond-reveals-currency-Plan-B.html). In response   the SNP leader Alex Salmond  threatened that Scotland would not take  on a share of the UK national debt unless Scotland can share the Pound ( http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/scotland/scottish-politics/10634697/Scottish-independence-SNP-retribution-plan-over-pound-would-cripple-economy.html).

The idea that Scotland can just walk away from the UK National Debt  is a nonsense both legally and  as a matter of realpolitik.  Legally, the Union would have to be dissolved by an Act of Parliament because the Act of Union   contains no provision  for the Union to be dissolved, viz: “That the Two Kingdoms of Scotland and England shall upon the first day of May next ensuing the date hereof and forever after be United into One Kingdom by the Name of Great Britain …” (http://www.legislation.gov.uk/aosp/1707/7/section/I)

Consequently, the Act of Union would need to be repealed  formally or a further Act granting independence to Scotland passed with the Act of Union falling on the doctrine of implied repeal. Until either of those things are done there can be  no legal independence.

The passing of such legislation is entirely dependent on reaching terms. If  terms are not reached then there is no obligation of  Parliament to grant Scotland independence.  Moreover,  no Parliament can bind another. Consequently, if the  next General Election is held in 2015 ( before Scotland is  independent),  there could be no bar to a new Parliament refusing to accept any or all  of the terms agreed by the previous Parliament or of refusing to grant Scottish independence under any circumstances. Even if the previous Parliament had passed an Act granting Scotland independence on agreed terms, the incoming Parliament could repeal the legislation and nullify the independence.

A possible refusal of legal  independence is both inherent within the situation and reasonable. The idea of  holding a referendum to divide a state without agreeing  first the conditions for separation means as a matter logic  that independence is conditional on terms being agreed.  If that were  not so then Salmond could demand anything and could not be denied it because of the vote for indepenence.

That brings us to realpolitik. Its use is reasonable because  what is called international law is no law at all. That is so  because there is no supranational  agency which, as a last resort, has the power to enforce breaches of such putative law by armed force.

The realpolitik blocks to Salmond’s position are many and powerful.  For example, the  punitive measures Westminster could deploy to force Scotland to accept their share of the debt include  these:  vetoing Scotland membership of the EU, setting up border controls, denying Scots the right to work in England and  blocking the export of Scottish goods through  the rest of the UK .

Salmon has made much of Article 30 of the Edinburgh Agreement:

30. The United Kingdom and Scottish Governments are committed, through the Memorandum of Understanding  between them and others,  to working together on matters of mutual interest and to the principles of good communication and mutual respect.  The two governments have reached this agreement in that spirit.  They look forward to a referendum that is legal and fair producing a decisive and respected outcome.  The two governments are committed to continue to work together constructively in the light of the outcome, whatever it is, in the best interests of the people of Scotland and of the rest of the United Kingdom.

The Memorandum of Understanding has no legal  standing, viz:

2. This Memorandum is a statement of political intent, and should not be interpreted as a binding agreement. It does not create legal obligations between the parties (para 2 of the introduction –  http://tinyurl.com/Devolution-Memorandum ).

Consequently, the memorandum can be ignored with impunity as far as legality is concerned. Moreover, the language  of Article 30 is woolly. There are clearly issues where the best interests of two parties cannot be served. The question of  a currency union is one of them. Its creation would grossly disadvantage the remaining UK members  and grossly benefit Scotland. The international markets would immediately downgrade the currency and the  UK’s credit rating,   both because of the uncertainty of what Scotland would do when it had control over its spending and as a result of the long shadow of the Bank of England’s standing as the lender of last resort  for Scottish banks.  Scotland would gain immensely because they would have the use of one of the most stable currencies in the world and the UK taxpayer (in reality the English taxpayer because Wales and Northern Ireland do not come close to meeting their public expenditure out of tax raised in their territories) would shoulder the risk of Scottish banks defaulting.  Conversely, the refusal of a currency union would benefit the remainder of the UK and be very damaging to Scotland.

On the question of the Pound being  a currency  which is part owned by Scotland, the position is simple. Scotland only gained access to the Pound by the Union of 1707.  The Pound Sterling before the Act of Union  was the English currency. Sterling was pressed into service as the currency of first Great Britain. Article 16 of the Act of Union applies:

That from and after the Union the Coin shall be of the same standard and value throughout the United Kingdom as now in England . . .( http://www.legislation.gov.uk/aosp/1707/7/contents)

The Scottish Pound (worth only a few shillings Sterling in 1707) was abolished by the Act of Union. By leaving the Union Scotland  loses the legal right to the Pound Sterling.

It is worth noting in all the huffing and puffing from the SNP that in the 307 years of Union  Scotland has built up a massive debit balance between the taxes raised in  Scotland and the public money spent there.  Right from the off Scotland was given a much lighter tax burden than England through Article IX of the Act of Union, viz:

IX. THAT whenever the sum of One million nine hundred ninety seven thousand seven hundred and sixty three pounds eight shillings and four pence half penny, shall be enacted by the Parliament of Great Britain to be raised in that part of the United Kingdom now called England, on Land and other Things usually charged in Acts of Parliament there, for granting an Aid to the Crown by a Land Tax; that part of the United Kingdom now called Scotland, shall be charged by the same Act, with a further Sum of forty-eight thousand Pounds, free of all Charges, as the Quota of Scotland, to such Tax, and to proportionably for any greater or lesser Sum raised in England by any Tax on Land, and other Things usually charged together with the Land; and that such Quota for Scotland, in the Cases aforesaid, be raised and collected in the same Manner as the Cess now is in Scotland, but subject to such Regulations in the manner of collecting, as shall be made by the Parliament of Great Britain. (https://englandcalling.wordpress.com/the-act-of-union-1707/)

The population of  Scotland in 1707 was about one fifth of  England and Wales estimated six million or so. Had the taxation been the same in Scotland as in England , under clause IX Scotland would have paid around £400,000 not £48,000.

There  is  also the vexed question of how to ensure Scotland services  the debt after independence., It is all too easy to see them defaulting. The only practical way would be for the UK to continue to administer all the debt with Scotland paying the money for their share to Westminster. The idea that Scotland could create a new currency and pay for it with that would be a non-starter because such a currency would have no international credibility for many years. I have addressed  this subject in depth at https://englandcalling.wordpress.com/2011/06/02/the-wages-of-scottish-independence-public-debt/

Worryingly, not one Westminster politician has challenged Salmond or the SNP generally on the  claim that  Scotland could refuse to take on a share of the UK national debt.  This suggests that either that no Westminster politician  has considered the matter properly or that our political elite have already decided to sell England down the river in the event of a Yes vote by letting Scotland either have their currency union or to walk away from the UK without taking on any of the UK national debt.

What happens if Scotland votes NO to independence?

Robert Henderson

The Scottish independence referendum is deeply flawed as a democratic process because (1) the terms of independence have not been agreed before the referendum is held so Scottish voters will be buying a pig in a poke; (2)  the people of England, Wales and Northern Ireland have  been allowed no say in  whether Scotland should be allowed to secede from the union or, if they are to be allowed to leave,  the terms on which they may secede and (3) the political circumstances  of the UK if Scotland votes NO to independence have gone largely unexamined.

I have dealt with the points (1) and (2) [1]elsewhere and a great deal of public attention is being paid to what will happen if Scotland votes for independence. Consequently, I shall not further labour those matters. But point (3) does require attention because next to no attention is being paid by politicians or  the mainstream media to what happens if  Scotland votes to remain within the UK.  The question has so far engendered little more than vague talk about DevoMax with unspecified additional powers being given to Scotland.  As the vote is likely to be NO, this is a matter which needs to be publicly discussed  now not after the referendum when Westminster politicians may  cook up any deal they want, a deal which is likely to be,  as all the other devolution deals have been, to England’s disadvantage.

The complication of the next General Election

There is a very  awkward fly in the post referendum ointment: the referendum will be held in 18 September 2014  and a General Election must be held by 7 May 2015 at the latest. That raises the question of who  will be making the post referendum decisions at Westminster. With a General Election so close to the referendum it is improbable that any agreement on what will happen after a NO vote could be reached before the election. The parties might produce their devolution agendas for their election manifestoes but that would be about it.  Consequently, it is anybody’s guess as to which  party or parties in a new coalition would be making the final decision on any further devolution of powers  to put before Parliament. Equally important would be our ignorance of the size of the various parties in the Commons after the General Election, for this is an issue which is fundamental enough to make quite a few MPs vote against the party whip. A government with a small majority could easily find itself outvoted.   These facts mean that all the variations of probable governments – Labour, Tory or the LibDems  in coalition with either major party –  and the effects of the size of the majority of the  government need to be considered when judging the likely shape of devolution after a NO vote.

The moral balance after a NO Vote 

On the face of it, the narrower the margin of rejection of independence the greater will be the moral bargaining power of the SNP to obtain further powers on favourable terms. However that does not automatically mean generous terms would be forthcoming, because once a vote on independence is lost the politics of the Union come into play.

To begin with it is unlikely that another vote on independence would be held  for at least ten years and more probably fifteen or twenty years, even if there was growing support for it in Scotland. Westminster politicians are very short-termist and might well think the subject has been kicked into the long grass sufficiently far to forget about it. The fact that none of the major parties have shown themselves willing to take action to redress  the imbalance created by the present devolutionary settlement (with England left out of the equation) suggests they may wish  to restrict further devolution concessions to minor matters. However, as there is further substantial devolution of powers to Scotland (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-11863388) and quite possibly Wales (http://www.heraldscotland.com/politics/referendum-news/wales-in-line-for-extra-powers-after-major-review-of-assembly.1393858063) in the pipeline this may not be a serious bar  to additional serious devolution.

Then there is the self-interest of the three major British parties.   A strong case can be made for both the Tories and Labour  not wanting serious amounts of new power given to  Scotland. The Tories have ideological reasons; Labour and the LibDems the reason of crude numbers in the Commons.

The Tories are still at heart a Unionist party  and want to retain the Union as a matter of policy. Substantial new powers would weaken the Union and new powers given now would inevitably be deemed insufficient in the future, probably  in  the near future, because devolution is a form of appeasement and the appeased always come back for more. Moreover, every increase in devolved powers acts in effect as preparation for independence. Eventually Scotland would reach the stage where independence would not seem such a frightening thing simply because they were doing so much themselves.

As for Labour and the LibDems, they have a direct vested interest. Greatly increased powers for Scotland would make it next to  impossible to justify the present Scottish representation in the House of Commons.  Both Labour and the Liberal Democrats  have a  substantial reliance on Scottish  MPs at Westminster. Thus both parties  would have a strong incentive to deny Scotland substantial new powers to ensure that Scottish MPs are not severely reduced.

All three major parties have a further reason: if substantial new powers were granted to Scotland it would be next to impossible to deny them to Wales and  Northern Ireland and make the denial of an English Parliament ever more outlandish.

If the NO vote was overwhelming,  on the face of it there would be no great pressure to devolve substantial new powers. An SNP which had failed to deliver either independence or  DevoMax might  be seen to have shot its bolt if it cannot deliver on its promises beyond a few superficial changes. At best the SNP would be severely diminished and  at worst would  so thoroughly discredited that they would be finished as a serious political force, doubtless remaining as an entity but restricted to an ever smaller and shriller cabal of true believers.

But even if the referendum was lost by an overwhelming vote it is unlikely that the demands for further devolved powers would diminish, especially from Scotland. As mentioned above further powers are already on the horizon.  Nor would the demands for even more powers than those already proposed necessarily go unsatisfied. Devolution has already created well established regional political establishments and the presence of nationalist MPs in the Commons not only provides a permanent platform for further demands,  but the existence of cabinet ministers to represent Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland  and  Commons  committees to promote their national interests means that there are powerful administrative mechanisms to promote and develop further devolutionary powers. Unionist MPs may also continue the fatal game (from their point of view) of imagining that giving away more and more power is the way to maintain the Union. Nor should the House of Lords be overlooked because it  provides a very useful platform for both advocating further devolution and of influencing the Commons through committees of both houses and voting down and amending legislation

There is also the possibility of nationalist MPs  wielding disproportionate influence if there is a hung Parliament and their votes are needed to either help form a coalition or to support a minority government on an ad hoc basis.

The alternatives to an English Parliament

But regardless of whether or not a  NO vote was  won narrowly or by a large majority, the elephant in the room is an English Parliament. It might be thought that if  DevoMax becomes a reality,  an English Parliament will be seen as a  political necessity by all. That is far too sanguine.

There would  be politicians who would try to refloat the idea of the Balkanisation of  England  through regional English assemblies – an  attempt to revivify the project was made in 2012 by Labour MPs (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-16932030). But after the Blair  government’s attempt to introduce regional assemblies met with a humiliating rejection (78% voted no) in the area deemed to have the strongest regional identity in England, the North East  (http://www.theguardian.com/society/2004/nov/05/regionalgovernment.politics), it  is an idea unlikely to fly.

There would also be the practical problem of producing regional devolution throughout England. If each region had a referendum to say whether or not they wanted a regional assembly,  it is wildly improbable that there would be a vote for assemblies in every referendum.  Indeed the referenda might well result in a universal rejection of such representation   The only way all of England could be devolved to regional assemblies would be by Parliamentary action to impose it on England.  That would be very unlikely to gain the support of a House of Commons, not least because any government likely to propose such devolution – it would have to be a Labour government or a Labour/LibDem coalition –  would almost certainly have to rely heavily on MPs from non-English seats to pass such a measure because of the  heavy Labour and LibDem reliance on MPs from the Celtic Fringe (it is rare for  a Labour government with  majority of landslide proportions to even hold a bare majority of English seats). To force such a change on England through the votes of non-English MPs should be politically impossible.

If there was a Tory majority government or a Tory\LibDem coalition , that would make   a majority for  the imposition of regional assemblies without referenda very unlikely because the Tory Party has officially opposed regional assemblies. In 2004, the Shadow Minister for the Regions  Bernard Jenkin pledged  that if Labour set up  regional assemblies the Tories would  ”l end Labour’s phoney regional agenda. Every power that Labour gives to regional assemblies, we’ll give back to local councils.” (http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2004/oct/07/conservatives2004.conservatives2). Perhaps more importantly many Tory MPs are strongly opposed to regional assemblies on principle so even if the Party leadership wanted to change the policy it is unlikely they would be able to do so.  It is also worth noting that even in a coalition with the Liberal Democrats the Tories have managed to abolish unelected the Regional Development Agencies which could have been used as the skeleton for elected regional assemblies and the administration arising from them. (http://www.theguardian.com/uk/the-northerner/2012/mar/31/localgovernment-regeneration-gordon-marsden-regional-development-agencies-leps).

The other alternative which might be tried as an excuse to deny England a Parliament would be English votes on English laws. This would be difficult to implement because of the difficulty of deciding what was and was not legislation which affected England only.

It  might be possible to do it simply by saying that any policy area  devolved to the Scottish Parliament (which has the broadest devolution power) would also be treated as an English-only area of legislation. However, to do that would require the Welsh  and Northern Ireland assemblies to have the same powers,  because a good deal of the legislation currently  passed at Westminster covers Wales and Northern Ireland as well as England. This happens because Wales and Northern Ireland those countries have much less devolved power than Scotland. Whether Wales and Northern Ireland would be competent to receive such extra powers or would want them is debatable at best. It is worth noting that a recent BBC Cymru Wales poll  found that 23% of Welsh voters wanted to abolish the Welsh assembly (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-26378274).

That is the position at present. But if Scotland was to have DEVOMAX the other home countries would have to be given the same enhanced devolved powers otherwise we would be back to a variable geometry devolution.   That would greatly increase the importance of the competence and desire questions for Wales and Northern Ireland.

Apart from the difficulty of deciding what was an English-only affecting law, to exclude MPs from non-English seats from participating in English only matters would be to remove them from much of the discussion and decision making of the House of Commons. That would be so even with the current level of devolution enjoyed by Scotland. With DEVOMAX the position could  become absurd because MPs for non-English seats could easily end up being restricted to not much more than the classic federal issues of  foreign policy, diplomacy,  defence and management of the currency.  At that point the taxpayer might well ask what are we paying Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish MPs for?

There would be a further complication with the House of Lords. At the moment England uniquely amongst the four home countries has all its domestic legislation subject to Lords scrutiny and approval. That is bad enough as things stand, but if DEVOMAX was granted to Scotland but not England the problem would be greatly magnified. Conversely, if DEVOMAX was granted to all the home countries, then the Lords would become to a large extent redundant because most of the legislation it now deals with would be removed from it.

All in all it is difficult to see how anyone could seriously put forward English votes for English laws as an answer to the injustice England currently experiences with a substantial part of their laws being decided in part by MPs from outside of England while English MPs have no say about the legislation involved in the areas of devolved powers in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.

If the regional assemblies and English votes for English laws are ruled out then an English Parliament is the only alternative to the  increasingly unfair dichotomy between the governance of  England and the rest of the UK.  The neatest solution would be to go for a true federal solution.  Instead of having separate members elected to the Commons and national assemblies, a member should be elected to serve in both the Commons (when non-devolved  matters are dealt with) and their  national assembly to deal with devolved matters. The Commons should also serve as the English national Parliament with of course only English MPs sitting.  This would prevent any  great additional expense from either a new English Parliament or additional politicians. Indeed, there would be fewer with the ending of separate members for the Celtic Fringe national assemblies and the House of Commons.

Whether the Lords needs to be retained is debatable. I do not like single chamber parliaments because they have no brake on them, but it is not obvious what function  the Lords would have once and English Parliament was up and running. Perhaps the Lords (or some other second chamber) could deal just with non-devolved powers. That would at least place England on an  equal basis with the other home countries with all devolved issues being subject to a single chamber national parliament. If the UK had a written constitution, something sorely needed, the Lords could also act as a form of Grand Jury to decide constitutional questions.  

The one thing which is absolutely clear is that the practical need and moral justification for an English Parliament, which is already great, would be substantially advanced by a vote against Scottish independence and an increase in devolved power to Scotland.

Roger Scruton on the injustice done to England by devolution

Robert Henderson

Below are extracts from a talk by the philosopher Roger Scruton on the position of England within the UK since devolution . They were made one BBC Radio 4 (21 Feb 14)  in their Point of View series.

I have omitted the parts of Scruton’s talk which concern the historical and economic background because they are superficial , frequently wrong and often embarrassingly sentimental  – the final quote I offer gives a good idea of what has been omitted.

Where Scruton is on solid ground is his description of the situation England finds itself in now.  That is what  the quotes I offer  deal with. It is also very useful to have someone like Scruton with something of  a media profile speaking out on the subject of England’s current disadvantaged position.

Roger Scruton: United We Fall: Point of View http://www.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/series/pov  extracts

In all the complex changes  leading to the Scottish bid for independence  the English have never been consulted. The process has been conducted as though we had no right to an opinion in the matter. It was all about Scotland and how to respond to Scottish nationalism

“As an Englishman I naturally ask why my interests in the matter have never been taken into account. When the Czechs and Slovaks achieved their amicable divorce it was by mutual agreement between elected politicians. What is so different about Scotland that it decides everything for itself?”

The English tend to blame the migration which threatens to overwhelm them on a succession of Labour Governments. By allowing mass immigration into England and refusing to confront the European Union’s commitment to free movement of peoples the Governments of Blair and Brown seriously undermined the English sense of identity .  At the same time through the creation of the Scottish parliament gave a new identity to the Scots.

The effect of the Scottish Parliament, however, was not only to ensure the Scots governed themselves, but also to make it more likely that they would continue to govern the English.  The Labour Party did not want to lose those Scottish MPs since it was thanks to them and the Scottish vote that the Labour Party had achieved such  a large majority at Westminster. Scots were disproportionately represented  in the cabinets of both Blair and Brown. Tony Blair owed his position in the Labour hierarchy in part to the networks which had grown in that country.

 Elections to the Scottish Parliament show that the Scots have shifted their allegiance from the Labour Party to the SNP, but they still want the English to be governed by the Labour Party. Hence, they vote to place Labour politicians, whom they don’t  particularly want at home, in Westminster . As a result of this the English, who have voted Conservative  more often than Labour in all post-war Elections, have to accept a block vote of Labour Members of Parliaments sent to Westminster by the Scots.  The process  that  brought this about was one in  which the Scots themselves were given the final say in a referendum from which the English were excluded. In other words the process of devolution has an air of gerrymandering, the effect of which has been to secure a Labour bias in the Westminster Parliament while allowing the Scots to govern themselves in whatever way they choose.  

And the process continues. In response to Alec  Salmond’s bid for Independence the people of Scotland have been  granted another referendum but again the people of England have been deprived of a say. Why is this, are we part of the union or not?  Or are the politicians afraid that we would vote the wrong way?  And what is the wrong way?  What way should we English vote given that present arrangement gives two votes to the Scots for every vote given to the English? Should we not  vote for our independence given that we risk being governed from a country  that already regulates its own affairs and has no clear commitment to ours?

Suppose then we English were finally allowed a say in the matter? Which way would I vote?  I have no doubt about it. I would vote for English independence as a step towards strengthening the friendship between our two countries.  It was thanks to independence that Americans were able at last to confess to their attachment to the Old Country and to come to our aid in two world wars. Independence is what real friendship requires and the same is true for those like the Scots and the English who live side by side. 

Full text of Scruton’s talk at 

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-26173128

 

Frank Field calls for an English Parliament on Any Questions

Robert Henderson

Any Questions on 21 Feb 2014 (BBC R4) came from  Blundells School in Tiverton, Devon. The panel answering the question were the  Secretary of State for Scotland  and LibDem MP Alistair Carmichael, Conservative backbench MP Nadhim Zahawi  MP, New Statesman columnist Laurie Penny and Labour backbench MP Frank Field.  A classic example of the BBC’s idea of political  balance one might say  with two left leaning MPs in Carmichael and Field, an ethnic minority representative in Zahawi and a hard left ideologue in Penny.

The programme   contained this question: Will England be better off without Scotland? Carmichael and   Zahawi waffled about how successful the Union had been and  Penny exhibited routine hard left bile over the prospect of a Tory government in the rest of the UK if Scotland left the Union.  But then came Frank Field who upset the politically correct applecart by berating the present devolution settlement, suggesting that England would be well-rid of Scotland  and advocating an English Parliament. I have made a transcript of his words and the programme  presenter Jonathan Dimbleby’s interruptions ( The programme can still be heard on the BBC IPlayer  http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b03vh0d1  – Enter at 33minutes 54 seconds )

Frank Field: “I think this question is a really good example of how the elites whether in England or Scotland stitch up issues in that if you are giving one part of the United Kingdom a vote to say damn you we are leaving,  I think that should be a vote for all of us to decide. And I think we should be having actually a say  on whether we want Scotland to stay with us. And  I think that what we might well  find is that England would vote for Scotland to  leave  and the Scotland  would  vote to actually stay.”

Dimbleby: “How would you vote?”

Field: “I would vote for them to leave. For this reason, I voted against devolution. I feared that once we started this process the inevitability would be an independent Scotland. We have the unfairness now of this Government proposing issues which affect my constituents but don’t affect Scottish constituents and Scottish MPs vote on those issues affecting my constituents. …“

Dimbleby attempts to interrupt but Field shrugs him off.

Field “And therefore I support Alastair [Carmichael had suggested English devolution without specifying what it would be, but implied he was thinking of English regional devolution not an English Parliament].  I think we actually need as a first step in this an English Parliament. I don’t fear that because as we withdrew from Empire , particularly Scotland but also Wales and also Northern Ireland, began to gain a huge sense of national identity, of  not being associated with Empire and actually feeling a proper role for themselves. And I think England has been too giving in this situation, I think we need likewise with Scotland, and with wales and Northern Ireland  to begin to find out what our own identity is, how we then join together mix together,  govern together is something downstream, but I do think this huge injustice that the others have assemblies  or parliaments  and yet the English do not have their own Parliament to make their views known …. “

Dimbleby cuts Field off at this point and calls for further remarks from Carmichael who just waffles about  England having a voice rather than a vote in the question of Scottish independence.

Dimbleby then tried to distract the debate away from such an alarming  idea (for liberal bigots) as an English Parliament by calling for one of the ad hoc pseudo polls of the studio audience the BBC loves to use to propagandise the pc view on anything by asking for shows of hands for those for and against a proposition. In most circumstances they can be certain to get the “right” pc answer because  BBC audiences for political programmes are routinely   packed to ensure that the “right” pc answer will be given. However, Any Questions audiences are a little less  easy to predict and control than most BBC audiences because the programme often goes  to parts of England largely untouched by mass immigration. Tiverton is such a place.  Any Questions audiences tend to be drawn from the area of the broadcast  and consequently  the Tiverton audience was  less likely to be rigid with political correctness than the ordinary BBC audience  simply because it was a genuinely  English audience.

Dimbleby  put the questions “Who thinks  England  would be better off  if Scotland became Independent? followed by “Who thinks  England would be worse of if Scotland became independent?”. This produced the desired pc answer with a large majority saying that  England would be worse off.

So far so pc good. Then it all went horribly wrong.  Field immediately jumped in and asked Dimbleby  to put to the audience the question  ”Should England have a Parliament?” Dimbleby  did this and an overwhelming number of hands went up to say Yes, we want an English Parliament.   Such an  open expression of Englishness  was made easier for the audience because the politically correct have not made English patriotic sentiment a formal part of pc. Instead they have simply censured it from public discussion. Hence, the audience did not have the normal pressure of fearing that they would be called a un-pc bigots.

When Any Answers went out on 22 February no phone calls  were taken or tweets, texts and emails read out on the subject of Scottish devolution and where England should stand in a devolved UK.

The liberal bigot tendency who deny England a Parliament always claim that there is no demand for it. This is the exact opposite of the truth. The only reason there is no overt public demand is because the mainstream media and politicians refuse to address the issue.

Field’s view of England needing to find its identity, and indeed of the other home nations needing to do so after the end of Empire, is mistaken because true nations never lose the habit of knowing who and what they are.  Anyone who  believes  the English doubted the reality of their nationhood even at the height of Empire should read  Froude’s History of England (1850–1870), or wonder why when foreigners speak of the UK they to this day more often than not refer to England.  It is only a Quisling elite who suppress public signs of English identity and celebration. Take the politically correct brakes off  English society and the English will leave the world in no doubt of who they are.   The quickest and most certain way to achieve that is the establishment of an English parliament.

What the British people want from their politicians … and what they get

Robert Henderson

What do our politicians think of the electorate: precious little. All the major mainstream parties either ignore or cynically  misrepresent  the issues  which are most important to the British – immigration, our relationship with the EU, the English democratic deficit,  foreign adventures , the suppression of free speech and the precarious state of the economy. . These issues are  not addressed honestly because they either clash with the prevailing internationalist agenda or because to address them honestly would mean admitting how much sovereignty had been given away to the EU and through other treaties.

This antidemocratic failure to engage in honest politics is an established trait. The wilful removal from mainstream politics of vitally important issues has been developing for more than half a century. The upshot is that the British want their politics to be about something which is not currently on offer from any party with a chance of forming a government. The British public broadly seek what these days counts as rightist action when it comes to matters such as preserving nationhood, immigration, race and political correctness, but traditional leftist policies on items such as social welfare, the NHS and the economy (has anyone ever met someone in favour of free markets and free trade who has actually lost his job because of them?).

The electorate’s difficulty is not simply their inability to find a single party to fulfil all or even most of their political desires. Even on a single issue basis, the electorate frequently cannot find a party offering what they want because all the mainstream parties now carol from the same internationalist, globalist, supranational, pro-EU, pc songsheet. The electorate finds they may have any economic programme provided it is laissez faire globalism, any relationship with the EU provided it is membership, any foreign policy provided it is internationalist and continuing public services only if they increasingly include private capital and provision. The only difference between the major parties is one of nuance.

Nowhere is this political uniformity seen more obviously than in the Labour and Tory approaches to immigration. Labour has adopted a literally mad policy of “no obvious limit to immigration”. The Tories claim to be “tough” on immigration, but then agree to accept as legal immigrants more than 100,000 incomers a year from outside the EU plus any number of migrants from within the EU (350 million have the right to settle here). There is a difference, but it is simply less or more of the same. Worse, in practice there would probably be no meaningful difference to the numbers coming whoever is in power. The truth is that while we remain part of the EU and tied by international treaties on asylum and human rights, nothing meaningful can be done for purely practical reasons. But even if something could be done, for which serious party could the person who wants no further mass immigration vote? None.

A manifesto to satisfy the public

All of this set me thinking: what manifesto would appeal to most electors? I suggest this political agenda for the What the People Want Party:

We promise:

1. To always put Britain’s interests first. This will entail the adoption of an unaggressive nationalist ethic in place of the currently dominant internationalist ideology.

2. The reinstatement of British sovereignty by withdrawal from the EU and the repudiation of all treaties which circumscribe the primacy of Parliament.

3. That future treaties will only come into force when voted for by a majority in both Houses of Parliament and   accepted in a referendum . Any  treaty should be subject to repudiation following  Parliament passing a motion that repudiation should take place and that motion being ratified by a referendum.  Treaties could also be repudiated by a citizen initiated referendum (see 29).

4. A reduction in the power of the government in general and the Prime Minister in particular and an increase in the power of Parliament. This will be achieved by abolishing the Royal Prerogative, outlawing the party whip and removing the vast powers of patronage available to a government.

5. That the country will only go to war on a vote in both Houses of Parliament.

6. An end to mass immigration by any means, including asylum, work permits and family reunion.

7. An end to all officially-sponsored political correctness.

8. The promotion of British history and culture in our schools and by all publicly-funded bodies.

9. The repeal of all laws which give by intent or practice a privileged position to any group which is less than the entire population of the country, for example the Race Relations Act..

10. The repeal of all laws which attempt to interfere with the personal life and responsibility of the individual. Citizens will not be instructed what to eat, how to exercise, not to smoke or drink or be banned from pursuits such as fox-hunting which harm no one else.

11. A formal recognition that a British citizen has rights and obligations not available to the foreigner, for example, the benefits of the welfare state will be made available only to born and bred Britons.

12. Policing which is directed towards three ends: maintaining order, catching criminals and providing support and aid to the public in moments of threat or distress. The police will leave their cars and helicopters and return to the beat and there will be an assumption that the interests and safety of the public come before the interests and safety of police officers.

13. A justice system which guards the interests of the accused by protecting essential rights of the defendant such as jury trial and the right to silence, whilst preventing cases collapsing through technical procedural errors.

14. Prison sentences that are served in full, that is,  the end of remission and other forms of early release. Misbehaviour in prison will be punished by extending the sentence.

15. An absolute right to self-defence when attacked. The public will be encouraged to defend themselves and their property.

16. A general economic policy which steers a middle way between protectionism and free trade, with protection given to vital and strategically important industries such as agriculture, energy, and steel and free trade only in those things which are not necessities.

17. A repudiation of further privatisation for its own sake and a commitment to the direct public provision of all essential services such as medical treatment. We recognise that the electorate overwhelmingly want the NHS, decent state pensions, good state funded education for their children and state intervention where necessary to ensure the necessities of life. This promise is made to both reassure the public of continued future provision and to ensure that the extent of any public spending is unambiguous, something which is not the case where indirect funding channels such as PFI are used.

18. The re-nationalisation of  the railways, the energy companies, the water companies and any  exercise  of the state’s authority such as privately run prisons which have been placed in  private hands.

19. An  education system which ensures that every child leaves school with at least a firm grasp of the three Rs and a school exam system which is based solely on a final exam. This will remove the opportunity to cheat by pupils and teachers. The standards of the exams will be based on those of the 1960s which is the last time British school exams were uncontaminated by continuous assessment, multiple choice questions and science exams included practicals as a matter of course. .

20. To restore credibility to our university system. The taxpayer will fund scholarships for 20 per cent of school-leavers. These will pay for all fees and provide a grant sufficient to live on during term time. Any one not in receipt of a scholarship will have to pay the full fees and support themselves or take a degree in their spare time. The scholarships will be concentrated on the best universities. The other universities will be closed. This will ensure that the cost is no more than the current funding and the remaining universities can be adequately funded.

21. A clear distinction in our policies between the functions of the state and the functions of private business, charities and other non-governmental bodies. The state will provide necessary public services, business will be allowed to concentrate on their trade and not be asked to be an arm of government and charities will be entirely independent bodies which will no longer receive public money.

22. A commitment to putting the family first. This will include policies which recognise that the best childcare is that given by the parents and that parents must be allowed to exercise discipline over their children. These will be given force by a law making clear that parents have an absolute right to the custody of and authority over their children, unless the parents can be shown to be engaging in serious criminal acts against their children.

23. Marriage to be encouraged by generous tax breaks and enhanced  child allowances for children born in wedlock.

24. Defence forces designed solely to defend Britain and not the New World Order.

25. A Parliament for England to square the Devolution circle. The English comprise around 80 per cent of the population of the UK, yet they alone of all the historic peoples are Britain are denied the right to govern themselves. This is both unreasonable and politically unsustainable in the long-run.

26. A reduction to the English level of Treasury funding to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. This will save approximately £17 billion pa because the Celts receive overall approximately £1,600 per head per annum more than the English.

27. An end to Foreign Aid. This will save approximately £11  billion.

28. A written constitution to ensure that future governments cannot abuse their power. This will be predicated on (1) the fact that we are a free people, (2) the belief that in a free and democratic society the individual can be trusted to take responsibility for his or her actions and to behave responsibly and (3) that politicians are the servants not the masters of those who elect them. It will guarantee those things necessary to a free society, including an absolute right to free expression, jury trial for any offence carrying a sentence of more than one year, place citizens in a privileged position over foreigners and set the interests and safety of the country and its citizens above the interests and safety of any other country or people.

29. Citizen initiated referenda shall be held when ten per cent of the population have signed a petition asking for a referendum.

Those are the things which I think most of the electorate could embrace, at least in large part. There are also other issues which the public might well be brought to  support if there was proper public debate and a serious political party supporting them such as the ownership and bearing of weapons and the legalisation of drugs.

The positive thing about such an agenda is that either Labour or the Tories could comfortably support it within the context of their history.

Until Blair perverted its purpose, the Labour Party had been in practice (and often in theory – think Ernie Bevin), staunchly nationalist, not least because the unions were staunchly protective of their members’ interests and resistant to both mass immigration (because it reduced wages) and free trade (because it exported jobs and reduced wages).

For the Tories, the Thatcherite philosophy is as much an aberration as the Blairite de-socialisation of Labour. The true Tory creed in a representative democracy is that of the one nation nationalist. It cannot be repeated too often that the free market internationalist creed is the antithesis of conservatism.

The manifesto described above would not appeal in every respect to ever member of the “disenfranchised majority”. But its general political slant would be palatable to that majority and there would be sufficient within the detail to allow any individual who is currently disenchanted with politics to feel that there were a decent number of important policies for which he or she could happily vote. That is the best any voter can expect in a representative democracy. People could again believe that voting might actually change things.

The Scottish Independence Referendum – unanswered questions

Robert Henderson

NB UK2 stands for the UK containing England, Wales and Northern Ireland

The vote on Scottish independence is in 2014. The next UK general election is scheduled for 2015. The date for  Scotland to leave  the Union is 2016.  Assuming Scotland votes for independence these unanswered questions need addressing:

1. When will existing MPs sitting in Scottish seats be expelled from the Commons?  Will they be allowed to continue sitting in the Commons until the 2015 general election?

2. Will Scottish Westminster seats which fall vacant before the Independence referendum be filled in the normal way with a bye-election?

3. What will happen to Scottish Westminster seats which fall vacant after a  vote in 2014 to leave the Union but before the 2016 formal departure date?  Will there be a bye-election to fill the seat until the formal departure or will the seat be left vacant?

4. What will happen to peers who have hereditary Scottish titles or  are Scottish life peers?

Unless they are excluded from the Lords they would continue to have a say in UK2’s politics after Scottish independence.    The cleanest solution would be to insist on peers residing  in England, Wales or Northern Ireland and make any peer wishing to sit in the Lords divest themselves of any formal nationality other than British.  That would mean peers were in a different position to the rest of the population with regard to legal nationality, including MPs, who can at present hold more than one nationality.  The answer would be to make illegal the holding of anything other than British nationality by anyone sitting in the Lords or Commons .

5. What will happen to those holding  British passports who find themselves in an independent Scotland or wish to have Scottish nationality whilst living elsewhere? This would be a good time to deny dual nationality to British citizens generally.

6. What will be the position of Scotland and the rest of the UK (UK2) respectively with regard to the EU?  There is no precedent for an EU member splitting into  separate sovereign states and the component parts of the original EU state being taking back into the EU.  Both logically and legally it is difficult to see how the EU could  allow  either or both of Scotland and UK2  back in without a further Treaty agreed by the other 27 states. Several of those states would require referenda before such a Treaty could be approved.

7. What if Scotland or UK2 were refused admission to the EU or decided they  did not want to join the EU?  If one country was outside the EU it  would have to apply the barriers to trade that the EU states apply generally to those outside the European Economic Area (EEA)

8. What would happen to immigration between UK2 and Scotland? The danger is of  Scotland  allowing large numbers of people to enter Scotland knowing that these people would almost all head straight for England. Whether or not Scotland was a member of the EU, there would have to be strict immigration controls on those coming from outside the EEA and if either Scotland or UK2 was outside the EU, there would be a strong case for imposing border controls.

9.What currency will Scotland use? The position with the Pound Sterling is beautifully simple: Scotland was allowed to use the English currency after they signed the Treaty of Union in 1707, having discarded their Scottish Pound, which was only worth a few English shillings. If they leave the Union they break the Treaty of Union and consequently no longer have any legal right to use the Pound.  It would be a disaster for England if Scotland was allowed to use the Pound because in practice England would be the lender of last resort for Scottish financial institutions through the Bank of England and even without a financial catastrophe Scottish fiscal recklessness could generally weaken the Pound.  Scotland should have to choose between the Euro or a new Scottish currency. If Scotland has to reapply for EU membership she would probably be forced to take the Euro as all new state are obligated to do so.

10. How will the oil and gas revenues be divided? Even if this was left simply to a matter of what is in whose territorial waters  Scotland could get much less than they estimate (around 90%+) if the territorial waters are determined by lines drawn at the angle of the coast at the English/Scottish border. Moreover, a good deal of the oil is around the Scottish islands, who have been making noises about not wishing to be part of an independent Scotland. Shale oil and gas also comes into the picture. Most of the likely UK shale deposits are in England. It would be a grand irony if Scotland cut herself off from a share of the revenues from these by opting for independence.

11. From  what date will Scotland’s proportionate share of the UK national debt be calculated?  It would be significantly lower if calculated at the time of the 2014 referendum rather than the formal date of leaving in 2016.

12. How will Scotland finance the servicing of her proportionate share of the UK national debt?

If she retains the Pound this could be done simply by paying to the British Treasury the sum needed to service it. Scotland would be able to reduce the servicing charge by making payments to the British Treasury to reduce the debt.

If Scotland does not retain the Pound she would either have to join the Euro or establish a new Scottish currency. Either could be a very dodgy proposition. To safeguard UK2’s interests,  Scotland should be forced to raise the money, if she can,  through issuing her own bonds, converting these into a safe currency and then  passing the money to UK2. Alternatively she could buy safe currency and pass that to UK2.

13. Since the Union in 1707, Scotland has taken far more from the Westminster Treasury than she has raised in tax. What payment is Scotland to make to the rest of the UK to repay this subsidy from the rest of the UK (in effect from England)?

14. What will happen to the state holdings in the banks RBS and Lloyds?  At the moment these are both net liabilities not assets because the share value of both means the  £45 billion put into them by the UK taxpayer could not be recouped if the shares were sold.

15. How are the assets of the  UK to be divided between Scotland and UK2?  For the material assets which are physically fixed the only practical way would be for Scotland to retain what is in Scotland and UK2 to retain what is in UK2.  The moveable assets such as military ones could be divided,  but there would be little point in giving Scotland equipment they could not afford to use, for example, the larger surface ships or submarines. The Trident deterrent must be removed to an English base together with any other ships allocated to UK2 which are  currently based in Scotland and warship building retained in Portsmouth.   The only substantial overseas assets would be  the diplomatic operations in embassies and consulates. However, these have been scaled back over the past  thirty years. An agreement would probably  have to be made whereby the UK2 kept the properties and offset some of the Scottish share of the UK national debt against their notional share.

I6. If an independent Scotland cannot or will not maintain armed forces equivalent to those now stationed  in Scotland, what will happen to the men and equipment? Will the British Army absorb them?

17. There are many public sector jobs in Scotland which service the rest of the UK (http://www.theguardian.com/public-leaders-network/blog/2012/aug/14/unified-scottish-civil-service-not-that-simple). How long after the vote for independence will they be removed to the part of the UK which they actually serve?

18. Who will be responsible for paying the pensions of civil servants working in Scotland but servicing another part of the UK?

19. What proportion of the overall UK public  sector pension entitlement at the time of independence will Scotland be responsible for? This pension entitlement will include those paid to the armed forces, British Eurocrats and the diplomatic service.

20. At what date will the accumulated public sector pensions of the UK be calculated? Immediately after the vote for independence, the date of formal independence or what? The later the date the larger the Scottish liability.

21. Will those with Scottish nationality have to have work permits to work in UK2?

22. What will happen to the BBC? At the moment Scotland gets a very good deal because she pays in proportion to her population,  but gets the benefit of the entire BBC output, the vast majority of which is paid for by English TV licence payers. There is no reason why an independent Scotland should continue to do so.  They should form their own public service broadcaster (if that is what they want) and purchase BBC programmes on the same basis as any other foreign country.

The terms on which Scotland could secede from the Union should be agreed before any Scottish vote on independence. Agreement to the terms should be through  a referendum of voters in England, Wales and Northern Ireland. Only if accepted by those voters should the independence question be put to the Scottish electorate.  That question should be Do you wish to have independence on the terms offered by the rest of UK?

Is the English Defence League (EDL) the real deal?

Robert Henderson

The decision by the EDL  leaders Tommy Robinson*  and Kevin  Carroll to leave the movement  has been so abrupt that it raises severe doubts about the nature of the EDL.  (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/10363174/EDL-Leaders-quit-over-concern-about-far-right-extremism.html).

The resignations of Robinson and Carroll are made all the stranger because both men were enthusiastically purveying  the normal EDL  line at a rally in Sheffield on 21 September, only 17 days before their resignations were announced  (http://www.englishdefenceleague.org/tommy-robinson-in-sheffield/).  Here are a few samples statements made by Robinson at the rally:

“At what point does diversity become takeover?” (enter video at 1 minute 50 seconds)

“English girls in Sheffield are being groomed and raped… by members of the Islamic community”  (3 minutes 21 seconds)

“We don’t want any more mosques in this country”  (4 minutes exactly)

“People will no longer stand by and watch their towns and cities being taken over” (3 minutes 30 seconds).

It is rather difficult to square such comments with Robinson’s claims so soon afterwards that he now thinks the EDL is no longer  the vehicle to combat  Islamicists because it has been, he claims,  taken over by right extremists .

These recent Sheffield comments become  even stranger in the light of his Newsnight resignation interview on the day of his resignation when he says in response to a Paxman question that he decided to leave the  EDL in February 2013 – see http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=744_1381276885  – enter at 4minutes and 4 seconds). Robinson needed an exit strategy but this was just about as clumsy a one as it would be possible to construct. If he had really wanted to go as early as March why wait for six months?

Carroll’s Sheffield speech was primarily about the double standards of the police when treating Muslims and non-Muslims, but it included what looks like in retrospect a piece of howling cynicism   when Carroll boasted to the crowd that “We are getting bigger and stronger everyday”. (Enter the video at 12 minutes and 58 seconds –  http://www.englishdefenceleague.org/kevin-Carroll-in-sheffield/)

The ostensible reasons for the  resignations

During his various media appearances announcing the resignations Robinson said “I have been considering this move for a long time because I recognise that, though street demonstrations have brought us to this point, they are no longer productive.

“I acknowledge the dangers of far-right extremism and the ongoing need to counter Islamist ideology not with violence but with better, democratic ideas.” (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-24442953).

But he also laid  emphasis on the threats to his family and the fact that he was judged by what the more extreme members of the EDL did, viz: “When some moron lifts up his top and he’s got the picture of a mosque saying ‘boom’ and it’s all over the national newspapers, it’s me, it’s when I pick up my kids from school the parents are looking at me, judging me on that.

“And that’s not what I’ve stood for and my decision to do this is to be true to what I stand for. And whilst I want to lead the revolution against Islamist ideology, I don’t want to lead the revolution against Muslims.” (Ibid).

The problem with these reasons is that they have existed throughout the four years of the EDL’s existence.  That does not mean his fears are invalid but we do require an explanation from him as to why they have suddenly become intolerable.

Nonetheless, it is not implausible that Robinson  in particular may have simply tired of the harassment and worse he has experienced.   That the harassment has been considerable we know because  many  publicly reported instances of marches being hamstrung or stopped altogether and the frequent arrests  of  EDL members.  But there is also what goes on without getting into mainstream media reporting.  In his  recent Sheffield speech (enter the video at 5 minutes 44 secs)  Robinson  said that as a consequence of being charged with criminal damage valued at a paltry £30 (something he is still waiting to go to court about), the police obtained warrants to search his parents’ house and his house, the officers who arrived at his house he said were armed with machine guns. Robinson also  spent 18 weeks in prison earlier in the year and with three young children he does have reason to fear for their safety.

Is all not as it seems?

There is a well tried and tested intelligence service  technique of  setting up a front organisation which ostensibly provides a platform for those opposed to government policy or just the way society is organised.   The idea is that the front organisation acts as a light to a moth and attracts dissidents. This allows the security service to both monitor and manipulate those considered politically dangerous to the status quo.   The manipulation may be anything from infiltrating agent provocateurs to persuading  a dissident by one means or another to change their ideological tune.

What are the signs that point to a front organisation? Such things as rapid formation,  a ready supply of money both initially and as the organisation progresses, organisational skill and a failure to make any progress towards attaining  its claimed ends despite making a good deal of public noise.  MigrationWatch UK strikes me as a  classic example  of a front organisation – see http://livinginamadhouse.wordpress.com/2010/11/25/is-migrationwatch-uk-a-security-service-front-organisation/.

The other and very obvious  used security ploy is to infiltrate an existing dissident group and attempt to monitor and manipulate it.

Which is most likely in the case of the EDL? Well, it rose quickly and has displayed a certain organisational aptitude. It runs a decent website and can get marches, rallies  and demonstration up and running with sufficient people to raise them above the risible, especially when their performance is put in the context of the considerable harassment they have suffered both from the British authorities and the hard Left.

To those facts you can add the concentration on Muslims and the elements of political correctness in in their repeated claims that the EDL welcomes all creeds and colours and that they are a human rights organisation. A Machiavellian case can be made that it suits the  British political elite to have a “working class” protest group which concentrates on Muslims (because  it diverts attention away from the general question of mass immigration and its consequences) and plays the multiculturalist tune as it marches.  Such a case could also be made  for the political elite finding it useful to have an ostensibly independent grass roots  political movement opposing Islamist groups as a distraction from the insidious and much more damaging gradual imposition of Muslim ways on British society as the British elite generally give way bit by bit to Muslim demands. A  good example is the recent permitting of Muslim pupils to wear a beard, something  which is forbidden to non-Muslim pupils at the school (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/educationnews/10374528/Bearded-Muslim-schoolboys-barred-from-class-allowed-to-return-because-of-human-rights.html).

But on balance  I doubt whether this is a security front organisation because it simply is too uncontrolled.  If it is a front organisation it has not been very successful in channelling dissident behaviour.  Not only that but  most of the possible advantages for the political elite which I  listed above arise just as readily if the EDL is simply what it says it is, a spontaneous grass roots,  mainly working class movement.

How likely is it that the EDL will have been infiltrated by the police or the security services? You can bet  your life that it will have been.  Will the state  have been controlling the EDL leadership? Quite possibly, not necessarily from the first but at some point when they had found a lever to control the leaders.

There is also the possibility that the  EDL have been or still are controlled/assisted  by foreign security services or private organisations whether British or foreign. In view of the EDL’s concentration on Muslims alone, not immigrants in general,   the most likely sources for such infiltration are the Israeli security service Mossad or  Jewish individuals or groups whether Israeli or not.  Indeed, the EDL have a Jewish Division and have expressed support for Israel. (http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/juliankossoff/100059179/the-english-defence-league-the-jewish-division-and-the-useful-idiots/) .  However, it is not easy to construct a scenario involving Mossad or other Israel or non-Israeli Jewish interference with the EDL which would explain the clumsy  resignations of Robinson and Carroll.  What honestly would Mossad or any other Jewish organisation or individual gain from decapitating the EDL at this point? Because the EDL were running out of control?  That was no truer now than it had been all along. Because they believed that Robinson could ally with the Quilliam Foundation and neutralise aggressive Islam? Hardly in keeping with the normal Israeli government  and Jewish activist strategy and tactics, which are generally  pretty hardline in their rejection of any meaningful engagement with Islam.

A strong pointer to what may have  happened is  Robinson and Carroll’s  new association with (but not joined) the Quilliam Foundation, a body  which describes itself as a think-tank tackling extremism in all its forms, although its focus is heavily on Islamicist actors.   When Robinson and Carroll’s resignation were made public they appeared with two of the senior members of Quilliam, the chairman and co-founder Maajid Nawaz (a one time Hizb ut-Tahrir  member)  and Usama Hasan, Quilliam’s senior researcher in Islamic studies. Both Nawaz and Usama come from an extremist Muslim background. The narrative provided by both Quilliam and the two ex-EDL leaders is that it was engagement with Quilliam which led to the resignation of Robinson and Carroll, viz:

Quilliam is proud to announce that Tommy Robinson and Kevin Carroll, the leaders of the anti-Islamist group, the English Defence League (EDL), have decided to leave the group. Having set up the EDL, infamous for its street protests, in 2009, they wish to exit this group, because they feel they can no longer keep extremist elements at bay……

Quilliam has been working with Tommy to achieve this transition, which represents a huge success for community relations in the United Kingdom. We have previously identified the symbiotic relationship between far-right extremism and Islamism and think that this event can dismantle the underpinnings of one phenomenon while removing the need for the other phenomenon. (http://www.quilliamfoundation.org/press-releases/quilliam-facilitates-tommy-robinson-leaving-the-english-defence-league/).

The fact that Quilliam are involved  is decidedly interesting  because they have been seen by some as Home Office stooges as a result of the large amounts of public money pumped into the think-tank after its foundation in 2008. (http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2013/oct/12/tommy-robinson-quilliam-foundation-questions-motivation) .  There have also been rumblings about the large salaries drawn by the  senior members of  Quilliam, for example, Nawaz paid himself £77,438 in 2012 (ibid).

Quilliam’s Home Office funding ended in 2011 and its overall income dropped severely putting it into the red (ibid). When the Guardian tried to get an up to date set of accounts  they were ‘told by a press officer: “There is only one print copy and that that has gone missing.”’ (ibid)

The Guardian article suggests that the embracing of Robinson and Carroll by Quilliam may be a ploy to increase funding both through the publicity they are now receiving and because by widening their natural remit to include “right wing extremism”, viz:  “In 2010, when it began to look like Islamist extremism was slightly on the wane and there was an interest in far-right extremism, some people were slightly cynical that the Quilliam Foundation had originally said they were the specialists in Islamism but suddenly started to want to do work on far-right extremism as well. Some people feel that was a cynical land-grab to keep them in the media. But they are a thinktank that has to raise money and has to be visible.” (ibid).  This could well make them flavour of the month again with the Home Office.

What is in it for Robinson and Carroll?  Apart from taking them out of the EDL firing line, assuming they are genuinely worried about that, it could give them, especially Robinson,  an entry into the media and even access to public funds. Imagine a future for them in which they become the “right wing sinner who repenteth”.  Stranger things have happened, think of John Bercow moving from Monday Club enthusiast to his present devout political correctness.  Or it could be that Robinson and Carroll are merely being led to think that they have such  prospects and will be dropped soon, their utility to the politically correct project being judged to be exhausted.

The future of the EDL

The EDL website has a remarkably sanguine official view of the resignations , viz:

“We are grateful to Tommy and Kev for their hard work and dedication in helping to set up such a large and strong organisation as the EDL four years ago. We can easily appreciate the pressures and strain their leadership of the EDL has placed upon Tommy and Kev, not just personally, but also on their families and those dear to them. Not many people could have stood firm in the face of death threats, assaults, police intimidation and state interference. While we regret their decision to leave the EDL, we can understand their reasons and we respect them, as we hope everyone else will.

The EDL was founded for a reason. We had a cause in the beginning and we continue to stand by that cause now. We cannot at this moment say with any confidence what form the EDL will take in the future, but we can say with firm conviction that the EDL will continue to oppose militant and extreme Islam. We will further endeavour to apply our Code of Conduct and reject all Nazis, all extreme right wing organisations, and those who express racism either on our Internet forums, our Facebook pages or on the streets at our protests.

In these times of change, we are determined to fulfil our declared mission and carry on. Our next demonstration in Bradford will therefore go ahead as planned, with a number of guest speakers as well as the regular speakers and including ex-members of our armed forces. The EDL will continue its ideological struggle against Militant Islam and we collectively will not Surrender!” (http://www.englishdefenceleague.org/tommy-and-kevin-resign-from-the-edl/).

To put it mildly that is not a viewed shared by many EDL members judged by the comment on the various social media.

But the flight of Robinson and Carroll  from the EDL is not the main problem for the movement. The main problem is that EDL has always been ideologically confused. This is because the party tries to fit its aims within a politically correct envelope on anti-racism. Here is an extract from their mission statement:

“The English Defence League (EDL) is a human rights organisation that was founded in the wake of the shocking actions of a small group of Muslim extremists who, at a homecoming parade in Luton, openly mocked the sacrifices of our service personnel without any fear of censure. Although these actions were certainly those of a minority, we believe that they reflect other forms of religiously-inspired intolerance and barbarity that are thriving amongst certain sections of the Muslim population in Britain: including, but not limited to, the denigration and oppression of women, the molestation of young children, the committing of so-called honour killings, homophobia, anti-Semitism, and continued support for those responsible for terrorist atrocities.

Whilst we must always protect against the unjust assumption that all Muslims are complicit in or somehow responsible for these crimes, we must not be afraid to speak freely about these issues. This is why the EDL will continue to work to protect the inalienable rights of all people to protest against radical Islam’s encroachment into the lives of non-Muslims.

We also recognise that Muslims themselves are frequently the main victims of some Islamic traditions and practices. The Government should protect the individual human rights of members of British Muslims. It should ensure that they can openly criticise Islamic orthodoxy, challenge Islamic leaders without fear of retribution, receive full equality before the law (including equal rights for Muslim women), and leave Islam if they see fit, without fear of censure. “(http://www.englishdefenceleague.org/mission-statement/)

There are two problems with this stance. The first is what constitutes a moderate Muslim, not merely as things are,  but in a future in which the Muslim population of Britain will almost certainly be considerably larger,  both absolutely and as a proportion of the British population.  For any sincere Muslim there can be no question of moderation as we would understand the term in Britain, no equivalent of faint hearted Anglicanism where to mention God is felt to be decidedly vulgar,  nor a ready acceptance of criticism of religion.

There will be Muslims who eschew violence and Muslims who embrace it, but many of both the violent and non-violent would be comfortable with a state in which Islam was the faith of a majority of the population and in consequence placed in a privileged position. There would not have to be a formal Islamic theocracy, as there is not in Pakistan,  merely Islam as the majority religion with the state turning a blind eye to the oppression of non-Muslims.

The implications of this is that there could never be a movement which is simply opposed to the most extreme Muslim elements, because  potentially all Muslims will support the imposition of Islam as  not merely the dominant religion but the dominant way of life.

The second difficulty is why just Islam?  Islam may be the most aggressive and high profile minority  group at present, but they are far from being the only threat to the British way of life. Mass immigration generally constitutes such a threat, for heavy settlement of particular ethnic and racial groups, aided and abetted by the pernicious embrace of multiculturalism by the British elite, has produced what are in effect colonies in Britain of groups who have no wish or intention of assimilating or even integrating to a substantial degree.  Each of these groups seeks privileges for itself  which it frequently receives from an increasingly frightened political elite who fear any honest public discussion of what has been done through mass immigration will result both in inter-ethnic violence and public anger directed at themselves.

Many who have been drawn to or will be drawn to  the EDL  in the future will be generally hostile to mass immigration and its effects. Thus, it is improbable that the EDL will ever be able to be a single issue– anti-Islamist movement   promoting the multicultural message.

How will the EDL develop? It could simply become an increasingly marginalised group such as the BNP of National Front. However, it differs from  such groups in one potentially very important respect, namely, it is overtly representing England. That could give it greater staying power than the likes of the BNP  because it is filling a very real political void, that of a grass roots movement representing,  however imperfectly,  the resentments and fears of the English.

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*There is considerable dispute over Tommy Robinsons’s name. It is definitely not his true name, but whether his true name is  Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, Andrew McMaster or Paul Harris is a matter of some debate.  Yaxley-Lennon is probably his true name. For the purposes of this essay I shall  call him Tommy Robinson.