Ladies & Gentlemen
I am glad to see you all here today and delighted to be back in Doncaster (Doncaster Logo) for our Spring Conference this year. Doncaster is a highly suitable venue for us today as one of the important things that we are doing today is announcing our candidate for the Mayor of Doncaster.
As I am sure you all know, at the last Doncaster Mayoral election four years ago, the English Democrats won the Mayoralty and got our candidate, Peter Davies, (picture) elected.
We had made a big effort for Peter and we had paid to have the whole of Doncaster leafleted, but, after the initial excitement of our electoral success had worn off, Peter proved himself consistently to be something of a disappointment, certainly to me, who had to put up with a constant barrage of threats from him to resign often over the most trifling of things.
Peter is now an ex-supporter of six parties – including UKIP. Amusingly, when Nigel Farage was trying to persuade me to become UKIP’s Deputy Leader (if I pulled the plug on the English Democrats), Peter was one of the people Nigel was not terribly keen on having back into UKIP. Peter had obviously left an indelible impression of egotism and disloyalty on Nigel Farage!
Peter refused point blank to appoint an English Democrat as his political advisor and instead appointed, in due course and without telling me, one of his former pupils to that £35,000 a year position.
Peter also refused point blank to do anything about helping us get St George’s Day properly celebrated in Doncaster. When I mentioned this refusal in my press release Peter was asked about it by the Local Government Magazine and he said, and I quote,: – “I have never celebrated St George’s Day. I certainly think, in a racing town like Doncaster, that meeting fraternal colleagues in Perth is a far better use of my time than dancing around with a bunch of Morris dancers”.
Ladies and gentlemen I am sorry to say that I think that that and other things that he also said proved beyond any reasonable doubt that Peter’s commitment to English Nationalism was not even skin deep.
For example Peter told the BBC last year that he had not been mayor very long before he “realised that being an English Democrat was a total irrelevance”.
Peter told ITV that:- “A good Mayor is a Mayor without a party. English Democrats policies have never played any part in my running of the town.”
This time however I am confident that we have a much better and much a more genuinely patriotic candidate to offer to the electorate of Doncaster and I am looking forward to formally introducing you to him later. I am also looking forward to this May to see whether we can win the Doncaster Mayoral Election for the second time running.
Since we last met in September we have been busy standing in various by-elections and in the Police Commission Elections, with, of course, various different results depending on the extent to which we have managed to build up any local brand awareness.
Before I talk about those results let me turn briefly to talking about the other political parties.
Amongst the “Big 3” political parties there remains almost no difference in policy terms. They are all internationalist, neo-liberal, social democrats and they also all have in common that they all hate the very “idea of England”.
Then on the so called “Left” we have Respect (logo), which is now in some disarray and also the much better organised Green (logo), the Watermelon party:- “Green on the outside and ……….”? The Greens nevertheless have only limited appeal outside of socially quite idiosyncratic places like Brighton.
We also have the Trade Union and Socialist Coalition (logo) who are making brave efforts at standing in various parliamentary by-elections but have yet to make any significant headway.
On the so called “Right” we have the BNP (logo), which has continued to decline and fracture and also several newly created splinter parties which have so far not made any significant progress, the British Freedom Party (logo) with its EDL connections and recently the British Democratic Party (logo) with its much more clearly defined Far-Right ethno-nationalist agenda.
Then of course there is also UKIP (logo), which is now doing very well in by-elections but has still not yet achieved any actual breakthroughs despite being far better resourced than any other party in the whole of the UK, except the big three.
You do have to bear in mind if we do compare ourselves with UKIP we are comparing a party which has no full-time paid officials and only such little money which we raise from your subscriptions and donations, all of which are of course extremely welcome and actually make it possible for us to campaign for England and the English Nation, but which on the face of it this would hardly seem to compare with the dozens of full-time salaried party activists that UKIP has and its income from the EU which alone is worth nearly £5m a year.
Despite all this income and resources, and despite acres of press coverage and huge coverage on the broadcast media UKIP have, as yet, failed to get a single person elected to Westminster, unlike I might add the far less well resourced Respect and Green parties.
Ladies and gentlemen to stand against all these parties there is only one party which cares for England; there is only one party that cares for the English Nation; there is only one party that cares for Englishness; there is only one party that seeks to put England first (logo). Ladies and gentlemen we are that party.
We owe it to England to take the rough with the smooth and to keep going until we do get ourselves fully established in the English publics’ mind with everyone knowing what the English Democrats stand for. Only then will we have brand awareness.
Interestingly our results show that we are already starting to build brand awareness in some parts of England.
Consider our Police Commissioner election results. We stood five candidates. We had to put a deposit of £5,000 for each candidate and we had to collect 100 signatures, so there was quite a steep entry price to the elections of not only money, but organisation and effort. We had almost no help with communicating with the electorate. We only got a single entry on a rather lacklustre Government website to put up 300 words about what we were standing for. That was my entry. 
Despite all these difficulties we saved every deposit. I think those who are here deserve a big hand.
Here in South Yorkshire where in the past we had not only got our Mayoral candidate elected and leafleted all Doncaster in the EU elections, but had also stood Kevin Riddiough in the Barnsley by-election, we came second on first preference votes. I am told that had we got onto counting the second preferences in South Yorkshire, that the vast majority of those were for us. This of course gives us great hope for the coming Mayoral election in Doncaster. That election is on the supplemental vote system like the Police Commissioner vote and like London’s Mayoralty.
We have since stood in the Rotherham by-election where our candidate, David Wildgoose, had previously stood as the Liberal Democrat candidate. We got 703 votes that is 3.3% and beat the LibDems (415 votes – 2.1%)!
In the recent Eastleigh by-election we again stood as our candidate a former Liberal Democrat, Mike Walters. We didn’t do so well there which shows the importance of brand awareness. We were beaten by the Monster Raving Loonies! (Logo). But ladies and gentlemen do remember that UKIP were regularly beaten by them until the mid 2000’s.
Also just for some more recent perspective (if we are comparing ourselves to UKIP), between 2005-10, UKIP contested 9 parliamentary by-elections.
In 4 of these it received less than 1% (including 2 which were less than 0.5%). Here are the results for UKIP between 2005-10:-
Livingstone – 0.4% – 2005
Dunfirmline and West Fife – 0.6% – 2006
Ealing Southall – 0.8% – 2007
Glenrothes – UKIP 0.3% – 2008
So ladies and gentlemen we can see that every smaller party has its ups and downs and given UKIP’s current profile we can see that the downs have no long term significance provided we “keep calm and carry on”!
Over the years we in your National Council have come to understand better where our votes come from. In Kent our Police Commissioner candidate, Steve Uncles, was up against Harriet Yeo who is a member of Labour’s National Executive Council.
Those of us who know Steve will not be surprised to learn that he cheekily asked her if Labour would agree to stand down to let us take a swing at a Tory safe seat at the next General Election.
She gave him a peculiar look (just as many of us have!). And she said: “but you are taking our core vote”.
Labour refer to their core vote as the “white working class”.
Now we do have a recent and statistical and authoritative picture of what the so called “white working class” call themselves and I am sure that most of you will long have been aware of this but the 2011 Census now proves beyond all reasonable doubt that what Labour calls the “white working class” think of themselves as and call themselves “ENGLISH”.
Indeed in the Census over 32 million people, that is over 60% of the people of England, called themselves “English Only”. A further, just short of, 10% call themselves “English and British”.
Of those that call themselves “British Only” the majority are of non-English ethnic origin.
Of these the people who are most vociferously against any mention of Englishness are, as the famous historian, A J P Taylor, pointed out over 50 years ago, British Scots, like David Cameron (picture), who with his “quite a lot of Scottish blood in these veins”, promised to fight “the sour little Englanders”; like William Hague (picture) who considers English Nationalism “the most dangerous form of all nationalisms”; like Michael Gove (picture), the Brit/Scot who is the Secretary of State for English Education and is busy creating changes to the national curriculum to promote Britishness. This is a list that could go on and on!
We also now know from the 2011 Census (picture) results why the British Establishment parties are so worried about Englishness – because if we English Nationalists were once able to galvanise even half all those people who consider themselves to be “English Only” to vote for an English Nationalist party, then that party would not merely win elections, it would be in government.
For example, the recently published 2011 Census results show that the Doncaster Metropolitan Borough Council area has 215,861 people (71.4%) who have stated they have only English National Identity and a further 30,413 (or 10.1%) who stated that their National Identity is English and British. However there is only a mere 37,581 (or 12.4%) in Doncaster who claimed to be “British only”.
So the tired old British Establishment Parties better watch out – or the rising sense of Englishness could sweep them away – just as ‘Scottishness’ is doing in Scotland!
Let us hope we can soon persuade a significant proportion of those English people to vote for England’s only national party. The English Democrats!
This May, we are also hoping to put up as many candidates as we can in the coming county council elections.
There is no deposit to pay to stand in county council elections and what I want us to try to achieve is what the well organised Greens do, which is to stand sufficient numbers of paper candidates to ensure that they get a Party Election Broadcast.
I have now had confirmation from the BBC that we need 394 candidates standing in the 31 English counties where there are elections. This year if we achieve that figure then we will get a Party Election Broadcast on all the broadcast TV channels and on many of the radio channels and we will also get coverage in the BBC news coverage about the elections of at least 6 minutes during the course of the election.
I accept that this will be a struggle but all of this would be highly valuable to a party which is still seeking to build up its brand awareness.
Ladies and gentlemen just consider for a moment what we are seeking to do here which is build up our brand awareness for the EU elections next year. We hope and intend to win some EU seats which will then get us some of the money and media exposure which at the moment is being frittered away to so little effect by UKIP.
Ladies and gentlemen I can assure you that if WE get an MEP elected that WE will apply the same approach as the Greens have and also the same determination and focus to getting English Democrats’ MPs elected – as it is only in Westminster that we can really start to make a difference for England.
Ladies and gentlemen, last but not least, I should mention that we need to understand that as we build our party and make progress we will be attacked more and more by our opponents.
Most of our opponents it seems are prepared to use dirty tricks and lies to smear us and cause trouble. We need to accept that this is what is happening and to ride it out.
I would not like us to descend into the same gutter tactics (picture) that our opponents are prepared to use, whether they be from UKIP’s “Black Ops” (picture), or from Labour’s dirty tricks department “Hope Not Hate.
I like to think of the RAF’s moto “Per Ardua ad Astra” (picture) which means ‘through difficulties to the stars’.
Ladies and gentlemen our generation is lucky that we haven’t got to fight and die for England, as did my uncle who was a Spitfire pilot during the Battle of Britain and was killed in the Scharnhorst and Gneisenau incident.
Ladies and Gentlemen at this point I must tell you that David Lane always seems to think that I am about to drop dead at any moment and that then you will all be left having to elect your new leader and Chairman, but just to reassure David that I didn’t actually know my uncle, as he was killed long before I was born, so you may not have that difficulty for a few years yet!
We do however have to remember the old Scottish adage that – “no one bothers to kick a dead dog!”
Another way of putting it was that of Mahatma Gandhi (picture) who said “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win”.
Ladies and Gentlemen, I don’t know about you but I am looking forward to the day when we prove that Mahatma Gandhi was right, that is the day when we win! (If I am spared! David!).
Ladies and gentlemen I do not believe that that day is very far away in the grand scheme of things, but it is of course still at least a couple of years away (ED logo). But think of where we have come from in just over 10½ years, from a room in 2002 with about 20 people in it, to now when we are now a national party.
We are creating such an impressive impression of size that I was asked this week by a Doncaster journalist whether our conference would be a boost to Doncaster’s economy!
In 2002 at that time almost nobody would dare to call themselves English or mention England; we have now made that mainstream; from that time when almost nobody was aware of the British Government’s discrimination against English interests, we now have made the electorate very aware of it; from that time when we had nobody elected to a time now when we already have a few people elected, let us go out from this conference and work not only towards building up the brand awareness of our Party and of our Cause, but also to get some of our candidates elected in this May elections!
Ladies and gentlemen thank you for listening to me and thank you also for coming to our 2013 Spring Conference. I hope you enjoy the day. I always think our conferences are highly enjoyable. It is always a pleasure to meet so many others who care about our Cause! Ladies and gentlemen thank you very much!