Majorityrights Central > Category: British Politics

Last week the Scottish Labour Party held its annual conference in Oban.  Scots-fathered, Fettes-educated Antony Charles Lynton Blair, born in Edinburgh on 6 May 1953, was the main speaker (notwithstanding the Man of Gloom).

His speech, touchingly titled Together not apart, confirmed the fears running through the Labour left that on Thursday 3rd May 2007 they will lose control of the Scottish Parliament, and thus over the fate of the Union ... and thus over the fate of England.

Today, a staggering ICM poll appeared in the Telegraph (interestingly titled “England wants its independence” for most of the morning, before mysteriously switching to “Britain wants UK break up, poll shows”):-

A clear majority of people in both England and Scotland are in favour of full independence for Scotland, an ICM opinion poll for The Sunday Telegraph has found. Independence is backed by 52 per cent of Scots while an astonishing 59 per cent of English voters want Scotland to go it alone.

There is also further evidence of rising English nationalism with support for the establishment of an English parliament hitting an historic high of 68 per cent amongst English voters. Almost half – 48 per cent – also want complete independence for England, divorcing itself from Wales and Northern Ireland as well. Scottish voters also back an English breakaway with 58 per cent supporting an English parliament with similar powers to the Scottish one.

Now, the sap of nationalism that is rising here is of the constitutional kind, not racial.  It is about the ending of governance from Westminster.  Scots and Welsh have traditionally defined themselves against their English neighbour, and for years noisily protested that Westminster was too remote and too London-centric to serve their respective needs.  But until devolution in 1998 it was very hard to get an Englishman to think of himself as other than just British, and of Westminster as other than just his Parliament.  That is changing now in an organic and impressive way, and it threatens not just to deprive the Labour Party of power for a time in Scotland and perhaps permanently in England, but to destroy it root and local branch.

So one would certainly expect that when the Prime Minister came to the dais in Oban last week for his very last speech to the Scottish Conference, he came armed with the most persuasive and powerful arguments for the status quo that man - or political speech writer - can muster.  Here they are, and when you read them think not just of the threat to Labour from constitutional nationalism ... think of a future time when the liberal elite as a whole has to defend its interests against a racial nationalism - against the real thing.

Blair said:-

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Nick Griffin and Mark Collett have been found not guilty at Leeds Crown Court of the remaining charges of inciting racial hatred.  The pair were charged in April 2005 after the BBC inserted mole Jason Gwynne into the Party in 2004 to secretly film footage for the documentary “The Secret Agent”.  The verdict by the jury of seven women and five men was unanimous.

A goose has been shot here, namely that the Party can be routinely vilified out of pure bile and prejudice by the liberal Establishment, right and left.  A thresshold in its reportage by mainstream media has therefore been crossed, and the BNP now has the opportunity to move more freely if gradually closer towards its (unsoundly) sleeping constituency.

This morning the Telegraph leader demanded a debate about devolution for the English.  This follows on the launch of the pressure group, the English Constitutional Convention, at a meeting in the House of Commons today.

At that meeting the architect of Scottish devolution, Canon Dr. Kenyon Wright, made a clear moral argument for an English Parliament.

English people have a “sovereign right” to a Parliament of their own if they want one, the architect of Scottish devolution has said.

Canon Kenyon Wright said it was “undemocratic” that Scottish MPs could vote on England-only issues but not vice versa.

He said he wanted to see “a strong English Parliament” and a strengthened Welsh legislature.

Opponents say they fear the break-up of the United Kingdom.

But Canon Wright said creating an English Parliament would strengthen the union and “may well save it”.

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From a UPI article titled Gallic Intifada:-

Turf conscious bloggers in Paris’ rundown, mostly Muslim, suburban immigrant housing estates rival in violent messages that threaten to beat senseless and even kill any intruder caught in “our ghetto.” Almost every word is misspelled, in both argot slang and pidgin French. And these are not empty threats. An average of 14 policemen a day are injured in bloody clashes with jobless youngsters.

France’s Interior Ministry said 2,500 police officers had been “wounded” this year. The head of the hard-line trade union “Action Police” Michel Thooris wrote to Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy to describe conditions in housing developments turned slums as “intifada.” Police cruisers are pelted daily with stones and “Molotov cocktails” (gasoline-filled bottles with burning wicks that explode on impact) and Thooris said cops assigned to what was rapidly degenerating into “free fire zones” should be protected in armored vehicles. Entire tall buildings empty into the streets to chase policemen and free an arrested comrade.

“We are in a state of civil war, orchestrated by radical Islamists,” Thooris told journalists.

Meanwhile, the Telegraph has finally pondered these last two weeks of ministerial interventions in the veil row, and in this morning’s leader come up with ... the deeply obvious: Labour loses faith in multi-culturalism.

At his press briefing yesterday, the Prime Minister made it clear his Government’s approach to cultural diversity had changed. He may have couched his position in careful language, but the conclusion was inescapable: integration, rather than multi-cultural separatism, is now official policy. By saying that he “fully supported” the decision of Kirklees council to suspend the Muslim teaching assistant who had refused to remove her veil at work, and then reinforcing this point with the observation that the veil was a “mark of separation”, Mr Blair removed any doubt about the Government’s position.

He was, in effect, affirming that the contentious views expressed over recent weeks by Jack Straw, Ruth Kelly and John Reid were not maverick individual opinions, but part of a larger, concerted revision of the Cabinet’s stand.

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David Cameron, the kinder, more caring, more middle-of-the-road and yet, crucially, more chic Blair, a Blair for all seasons and all men, and everything you can possibly think of if you are not actually a Tory ... yes, that David Cameron, the unknowable one, has just gone even higher in the red-hot political-hip stakes.  That’s hipper than he was on his green, green bicyle.  Or when he signed up St Bob.  Superhip Dave has started two exciting video blogs.  If you can call watching him do the washing-up exciting.

But it is cool, isn’t it?  And, you know, warm at the same time.

So it is that the lead blog is an all about cool political me page.  Then there’s an other dudes I think are cool page for guesties.

John McCain is first up as a guestie - a shrewd move Washington-wise, as one expects from the manipulative, mysterious and vaguely unEnglish Steve Hilton.

Now, never let it be said that Big Dave and Little Steve aren’t willing to go where the bullets are flying.  Oh gosh, no.  They take comments - though you will have to register, and there’s a strong probability that certain questions will be adjudged much, much too uncool to get published.

Home Secretary John Reid has called for a mature debate on the immigration challenges facing Britain.

Mr Reid said: “We have to get away from this daft so-called politically correct notion that anybody who wants to talk about immigration is somehow a racist.”

Home Secretary and Scots tough guy Dr John Reid, trying to sound responsive and responsible today.

The problem is that the only discussion worth having is not really about immigration.  It is about the rights and interests of the natives.  It is about determining what they really want, and the practicalities of delivering that.  It is about John Reid’s own politics and the treachery of the political class to which he belongs.

None of that is on John Reid’s radar, of course.  Nor ever will be.

Meanwhile, he is showing a willingness to throw us one or two scraps of something like a public debate.  So here are a few basic suggestions that, if I could, I would make to his face, and which I am confident would shape the debate to be mature as he could possibly wish:-

1) Exclude the voices of immigrants, whose interests always lie in encouraging more immigration.

2) Debate not just on the basis of economics but on ethnic interests.  Project the demographics into the future, and tell us how things are going to be for our children and grandchildren.

3) Eliminate all the usual, rubbishy pieties about the “skills” of immigrants and the precious gifts of diversity.  They only signal your lack of seriousness.  Instead, be honest about racial mean IQ’s, propensities for criminality, black sexualisation etc.

4) Take your time.  The English majority has been subjected to a racist official campaign of some decades longevity.  Give them however long they need to recover their tongues and their sense of self-interest.

5) Be humble and penitent before the will of the people, even if you will never bring yourself to agree with it.  And you won’t.

David Cameron’s first big by-election test was yesterday, in leafy, suburban Bromley & Chislehurst.  He flunked it.

The late, great Eric Forth’s 13,342 General Election majority over Labour was reduced to a pretty desperate 633 over Ming Campbell’s Lib-Dems.  The ground opened up and swallowed Labour, meanwhile - their vote-share dropping from 22.2% at the GE to a paltry 6.6% and 4th place behind UKIP.

Overall, the number of votes cast to the four principal players fell by 40%, which one might expect at a by-election.  On the right of the spectrum the combined Tory/UKIP vote fell by a little more: 44%.  But it was a slightly different story on the left.  Despite Labour’s meltdown the combined Labour/Lib-Dem vote fell by 34%.  The Lib-Dems’ vote actually went-up by 17%.

It is reasonable to conclude that, in this constituency at least, there is widespread disdain for the government but no particular seepage from left to right, and certainly no enthusiasm for the Cameron agenda.  Indeed, there appears to have been an anti-Cameron vote - a case of the centre rejecting itself perhaps!  The killer for him would be if he was actually losing votes to the Lib-Dems for reasons other than the fact that the latter is always the Party of protest.  This, though, is impossible to determine based on numbers alone.

Meanwhile, Cameron’s carefully cultivated line on Europe has done him no good at all.  It came apart in his hands in the days before the poll, utter confusion prevailing over his wish to withdraw his Party from the federalist alliance in the European Parliament and to scrap The Human Rights Act.  It is difficult to see quite where he will go from here on Europe.  It is important to him, being the positive means by which he aims to bind the right of the Party to him (the negative one being that they have nowhere else to go).

They have UKIP, of course.  In Bromley & Chislehurst, Cameron’s Europe debacle surely helped Nigel Farrage to stem the decline evident at May 5th’s local authority elections.  He increased the vote at the last GE by more than half - though at these low numbers small swings can appear more significant than they really are.  UKIP might also have benefitted from the BNP’s reluctant endorsement, though we could only be talking about a hundred or two votes.

Cameron, then, and his little band of ambition modernisers have some thinking to do.  Blair might as well not bother, and chuck it in now.

There is a useful chart of the BNP’s local authority election results on its website, from which we can construe a few facts about them and the mountain they are climbing.  I think the present tense in that latter regard is entirely justified now, btw.  The climb, wherever it takes them, has properly begun.

The first thing to make perfectly clear is that it is a climb in three parts.  A base camp must be established in each local authority ward and Westminster constituency.  There must then follow a period of steady progress - hard graft with the object of familiarisation of the terraine and consolidation of further gains.  Finally, when all is ready and the electoral conditions are right, one may strike out for the summit.

What the BNP’s figures tell us is that besides the 32 mountaineers who planted the Cross of St.George on their particular summits on Thursday there are a further 225 in the middle phase of the local authority ascent.  They are comprised of about 75 second places and double that number of thirds.  And that, of course, does not include the twenty councillors the Party has in areas where no election took place this time, nor all those in the middle-phase in those areas.

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