I have set aside my philosophical writings for a time while I work up a full paper on the political benefit, methods, and viability of campaigning for a United Kingdom referendum on securing the future of the four native British peoples.  It is a suggestion I made recently at Patriotic Alternative’s site, and the subject of a limited correspondence with Laura Towler.  I’ll be publishing some sections of the paper here, but the full paper will be sent to Laura in an attempt to kick-start nationalism in this country.

Introduction

On 23rd June 2016 the voters of this country went to the polls after a four-month national campaign to render to government and parliament their decision in the United Kingdom European Union membership referendum.  It was the latest of fourteen referendums held since Edward Heath’s Northern Ireland referendum on Irish unity of 1973.  A pointless and ill-conceived exercise though that was, it nevertheless set the precedent by which British governments have since resorted to referendums on constitutional matters ranging from parliamentary voting reform to devolution for the north-east of England.  In that time also, two further referendums were planned.  But circumstances intervened and they were never held.  Although in British politics referendums still constitute an extra-ordinary process of consultation (many, including most nationalists, would argue deference¹) they are now firmly established as the democratic instrument by which enduring national questions over which parliament understands itself not to possess constitutional competence are passed to the people to be settled.

That said, we should not run away with the idea that this is ever done from politicians’ dedication to high principle, and quite without the worldly stain of political calculation.  The politics of referendums is very plainly beholden to the politics of keeping or getting of power.  In all but one case², referendums in Britain have either been resorted to by government in response to a long-running public campaign³ or have flowed from the election of a new government which, in opposition, had adopted the campaign’s cause⁴, invariably for its own electoral purposes.

Political opportunism and self-interest, therefore, are material considerations for any government asked to hand the people definite and direct control over a great constitutional question.  Accordingly, governments can and do refuse to turn to the people even when doing so may be morally unimpeachable, just and strictly logical, and the cause popular.

A striking example is the point-blank refusal of successive governments in the wake of Scottish and Welsh devolution to grant the electorate in England a vote on England’s representative inequality within the Union.  The formal discussion has been of the constitutional disruption⁵ a parliament for England and a government of England would produce.  But one’s overwhelming suspicion is that the real issue is the craven self-interest and careerism of the Westminster class, which will brook neither challenge nor change.

This being the case, how much less likely is it that any Westminster government will cede a demand from, by its own estimation, politically irrelevant British nationalists and “populists” for decision in the matter of our respective ethnic survival in the lands which bear our respective names?  The political class is only too well aware that the population change it has deliberately wrought upon the natives of this land has never been legitimised by our consent, and it is only too well aware why.  It has, in consequence, done everything in its power to close its ears to our voices,  sullying itself by sullying that voice; and this it has done, and will go on doing, for the sole purpose of erecting a justification, as it supposes, for its total betrayal of us, its total betrayal of our children.  Why, after the setback that its internationalism suffered on 23rd June 2016, would it call down destruction upon its head by ceding to us control over its demographic weapon and, thereby, over its own fate?

This paper will explore how Patriotic Alternative, acting as the wellspring of native opinion, might set about breaking the illusions of representation and respectability with which the political class clothes itself, and by which it commands the political stage, and our people with it.  In essence, what are the difficulties of actually engaging with government and making the demand for a referendum on the survival and continuity of the four native peoples of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.  What are the difficulties of making such a referendum necessary for government … any government ... to grant or at least to attempt, in the glaring light of day, to publicly refute and refuse?  How could those difficulties be overcome?  What are the benefits for nationalism of fighting the fight anyway, win or lose?  And how might it be possible for the nationalist cause to triumph against all the odds, as the Leave cause triumphed against the exact same forces a little over four years ago?

To each of these questions this paper will attempt to provide an answer.

Notes

¹ The single most extraordinary accident of British history is that the identity of the constitutional sovereign is contested.  In the popular imagination the monarch remains sovereign, a view supported by references to oaths of allegiance traditionally sworn to the monarch by various national institutions.  This, of course, ceased to be an historically coherent view from the moment outside the Banqueting House in Whitehall in 1649 when the axe fell on the neck of Charles Stuart, as definitive a statement of parliamentary supremacy as there could be, which supremacy was confirmed in law fifty years later under The Crown and Parliament Recognition Act.  That Act is still fully in force in the United Kingdom, for which reason no serious commentator has advocated for the unbounded sovereignty of the monarch for generations.  The actual contest is between parliament and people, the case for the former resting on the opinion of one authority, the Whig jurist AV Dicey, and on one of two contradictory statements by Edmund Burke (MPs as representatives not delegates).  But it is enough for lawyerly parliamentarians set upon staking a claim for MPs’ freedom of action.

The identity of the sovereign goes to the heart of the referendum process, for it determines whether voters issue a decision or advice.  If it is only advice, then the “sovereign” parliament may note what the people have said in a referendum but then do as it pleases anyway.  Unsurprisingly, in 2010 the House of Lords Constitutional Committee opined that referendums are advisory.  But the debate was not settled, and as recently as October 2019 the Leader of the House, Jason Rees-Mogg, explained to members that parliament is sovereign within its own legislative sphere only because the people are sovereign.  He received no compelling counter-argument from the large Remain majority then in the Commons.

It is the opinion of the author of this paper not only that the primary constitutional documentation shows the people to be sovereign, and the same documentation and likewise The Bill of Rights 1689 and, by implication, the 40+ Representation of the People Acts from 1832 onward Representation of the People Acts show that people to be the final source of authority (which is only ever lent to elected representatives, never given), but that the identity of the sovereign is specified in the Coronation Oath Act of 1688; and that identity is “the people of this Kingdome of England” and by extension Wales and, with the Acts of Union, Scotland.  Note that the specification here is “people” not of course “subjects” or “citizens”, and “the people of”, not “a people in”.  Words used in founding constitutional documents are definitive, not descriptive; and this document defines the people of England in the year of 1688 as separate and distinct from any other, and thus they can only remain.

It is, therefore, the opinion of the author that once a people is identified as the sovereign, then sovereign it must remain unless it consents to the contrary; for its ethnic person is constitutionally inviolate.  There is no power in the land (not the monarch, not the executive, not parliament, not the judiciary) and no novel legal instrument (not, for example, the Nationality Act of 1948) which can constitutionally force change upon or replace the sovereign, or meddle with the rule of succession by descent.  For such would be a usurpation.  Neither government nor parliament can constitutionally possess the power of usurpation.  To be doubly clear, if either does take that power unto itself it does so unconstitutionally, and the sovereign has the constitutional recourse to all necessary action to defend itself.

² The exception was John Prescott’s ludicrous North-East England devolution referendum of 2004, which Tony Blair’s New Labour government insisted upon for internationalist ideological reasons, and was duly humiliated at the ballot box.

³ The 2004 Referendum debacle was most untypical for Blair.  He frequently stood accused of superficiality and manipulativeness but few questioned his political timing or his feel for the public mood.  He used the referendum mechanism more than any prime minister before or since.  A man of ignoble political motives, he was nevertheless fortunate with the historical moment, which gifted him the opportunity to preside over one undeniably noble and just cause: peace in Northern Ireland.

Far and away the most infamous example of a “long-running campaign”, and a warning to all about the failure of politics to recognise community bounds and interests, was the Troubles in Northern Ireland.  At the end, the effective victory of the British Army and security services over the IRA enabled the London government to offer the exhausted republicans a way out in the form of a peace process and ministerial roles at Stormont.  The result was the 1998 Northern Ireland Belfast Agreement referendum, won for “yes” with 71% of votes cast.  Sadly for Blair, the Nobel Committee elected not to be overly magnanimous with its Peace Prize of the same year, but awarded it only to the actual architects of the peace, John Hume and David Trimble.

⁴ The Labour Party also provide us with an example of an opposition co-opting a campaign for its own electoral purposes, the case in point being Scottish devolution.  Scottish discontents are as old as the Union itself, and demands specifically for a Scottish Assembly date back at least to the 1940s. By the early 1990s they had become electorally central to the Labour Party.  The then Labour leader John Smith described it at his party’s 1994 conference as “the settled will of the Scottish people.” He was right.  The enabling part of the ballot, held by Blair’s government in 1997, produced a 74% “yes” vote and, at least in the short term, entrenched Labour Party power in Scotland.

⁵ In fairness, the Westminster political class is not wrong in its suspicions that a parliament of England would render irrelevant both the Westminster parliament and the British government, and unbalance the Union.  Given that Scottish Devolution did not douse the demand for Scottish independence, as expected by the Labour Party, but only impelled greater force to it, a parliament for England would be highly likely to have the same radicalising effect over time.  There could be no guarantee that England would be prepared to subsidise the Scots in perpetuity via the Barnet Formula, or that an Anglo-centric administration would accord the Union the same mystical import that Westminster does.  Further, a specifically English politics would invite real nationalism, not just the civic counterfeit, into the hermetic society of politics when even the counterfeit is ideological anathema to that society.

So the preference of the political class has been to manage the issue with gesture politics such as English votes for English laws (EVEL).  Today that management is such that not even EVEL is in operation.  For all practical purposes, the hopes for a parliament for England are now almost entirely vested in the Scottish National Party’s on-going campaign for independence.