Monday, 27 August 2012

Issue 91, May 2012


Nation Revisited                                        

May 2012, # 91 
 
A Dismal Science
 
The ICM/Guardian poll of October 2011 shows 40% in favour of our membership of the EU and 49% against.  But only a minority vote for UKIP or the far-right parties that want to break away from Europe.  Many of those who claim to be eurosceptic have accepted the necessity of the European Union and will not risk their jobs and mortgages by voting to go it alone.
 
Some withdrawalists have started to think outside of the box of insular nationalism that was set in stone when the National Front was founded in 1967. But most of them remain firmly stuck in the past. They are convinced that the sovereign debt crisis is a European problem, even though it affects Japan and the USA.

In the unlikely event of a far-right government coming to power in the UK there would be an immediate flight of capital out of the country resulting in the collapse of the pound. The rest of the world would react to their protective tariffs by imposing trade restrictions that would leave us struggling for food and oil. Their dream of deporting millions of immigrants would be unaffordable. And their plan to resurrect the Commonwealth would be dismissed by hard-headed Australian, New Zealand and Canadian businessmen committed to trade deals with Asia and the USA.

Murray Rothbard was a so-called free-market economist but he was right when he said: “It is no crime to be ignorant of economics, which is, after all, a specialized discipline and one that most people consider to be a ‘dismal science.’ But it is totally irresponsible to have a loud and vociferous opinion on economic subjects while remaining in this state of economic ignorance.”
 
Bradford West
 
The Labour Party imported millions of immigrants in the hope that they would vote Labour.  But George Galloway has shown for the second time that this is not necessarily so. He won Bethnal Green and Bow with Bengali support and he won Bradford West thanks to the Pakistanis. The Zionist businessmen who back the established parties will not be pleased to see George Galloway back in Westminster. He is a fearless opponent of war and exploitation who will not be shut up by the powerful Friends of Israel. He is accused of “playing the race card.” But, as he points out, he is a Scottish Catholic; it was the Labour Party who put up a Pakistani Muslim candidate to exploit the immigrant vote.
 
George Galloway’s landslide victory overshadowed the rest of the results but at the bottom of the poll, just ahead of the Loony Party, we find UKIP and the National Democrats. They were never going to win in a constituency that’s 37% Asian but BNP candidate Paul Cromie managed to save his deposit in the same area with 6.9% in 2005. There are still plenty of disgruntled whites in Bradford but UKIP only managed 3.3% and the National Democrats got just over 1%. These figures show that last year’s riots and the austerity budget have not helped the far-right.

There is a desperate need to stop non-European immigration and start repatriation. But the public must be persuaded that such objectives are achievable. We must present them with coherent policies based on self-sufficiency within a restructured Europe. People know that an isolated Britain would struggle to survive and could not mount a massive programme of resettlement.

Bob Mellish
 
In NR #88 we remembered the handful of Tory MPs who dared to make a stand against uncontrolled immigration. A reader has pointed out that Bob Mellish the patriotic Labour Party MP for Bermondsey was an early campaigner against Commonwealth immigration as well as a convinced European.
 
He was born into a large working class Catholic family in Deptford in 1913. He started the war as a sapper and ended it as a major in the Royal Engineers fighting the Japanese in the South East Asia. He was elected to parliament in 1946. 

He argued in the House of Commons, and in the Daily Express, that the Malawi Asians expelled by Hastings Banda in 1976 should not be admitted to the UK:
 
 We cannot go on like this. I do not care what those on this side of the House, or the Opposition side or anywhere else, say. Problems at local level will become worse and worse for our own people unless something is done. All hon. Members know that people come to their surgeries describing the most distressing conditions – terrifying conditions. People born and bred in their own constituencies have been on the housing waiting list for as long as six years. But on the points system, one must give immigrants preference. People cannot come here just because they have a British passport – full stop.”

“I am not a racist but I am not a humbug. This tiny island of ours is not much more than a dot on the map and the time has come to face the situation. It won’t go away. We’re bulging with more than a million unemployed, there’s a shortage of housing, and every family in the land, just about, is battling to maintain standards. My views are not really different than Labour’s policy over the years. We instituted the voucher system of entry control. I am opposed to the floodgates being opened so that everyone can come crowding in, much as I sympathise with people who need help.

On the 50th anniversary of VJ Day Roy Jenkins expressed regret at the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But Bob Mellish said: “While on board we heard that the war was over. I have never prayed so hard nor been as grateful for anything as I was for that atom bomb. It was the finest thing that ever happened that we should have dropped it on those villains. When we reached Port Swettenham the ramifications would have been unbelievable. Thousands of lives would have been lost and, at the time, I thanked God for the atom bomb.”
 
He was one of the last of the decent Labour Party that stood for the British working class. He was hounded out of his constituency by the Militant Tendency. They tried to install Peter Tatchell as the local MP in 1983 but he was soundly rejected by the people of Bermondsey who returned the Liberal Democrat Simon Hughes. 
 
Bob Mellish spent his remaining years in the House of Lords and died in 1998. 
 
We Don’t Need Cheap Labour
 
The majority of the UK electorate wants to stop Third World immigration but they are frightened of being called “racists.” They are influenced by newspapers, radio and television stations that have always championed immigration.  It was only the sudden arrival of a million Poles that caused papers like the Daily Mail to call a halt. If they had been black or brown the popular press would not have dared to risk prosecution under the Race Relations Act.
 
Those of us who believe in “Europe a Nation” have little in common with parties like the BNP; except for the need to control immigration and start repatriation. Mosley dismissed any similarity between Union Movement and the far-right parties but most of them were founded by his former supporters. Their protectionist policies are the same as the pre-war BUF and so are their slogans; “Britain for the British” and “British jobs for British Workers” came from the pre-war Mosley movement, as did the “Old Gang” and the “Money Power.”

The Bradford West result was disappointing but the BNP only averaged 6.2 when they won two seats in the Euro parliament, and in the last general election their national average was 1.9%. These figures reflect the twin obstacles of white flight and defeatism. Those who can afford to have moved away from “enriched” areas and no longer see immigration as a problem. And those who are too poor to escape have given up the struggle. The influx is slowing down because we don’t need cheap labour. We are still in recession, unemployment is unacceptably high and wages are static. Even the political class admits that the last thing we need is more immigrants. Their open-door immigration policy has been a disaster. Some immigrants have successfully assimilated but most of them cling to their own cultures and refuse to integrate. We will have to re-dress half a century of misgovernment.

Traitors
 
According to the BNP website George Galloway is a traitor. An unsigned posting headed “The Islamist Curse on Britain’s Streets” says: “The pro-Islamist traitor George Galloway has gone native, surrounding himself with Muslim thugs…” They believe that anyone sympathetic to their perceived enemy is a traitor. If America or Israel attacks Iran the British government will take the same view and opponents of the war will be treated as Fifth Columnists. It happened before in 1940 when Oswald Mosley and his supporters were detained without charge or trial under Defence Regulation 18B.

Our most famous traitor was Guy Fawkes who tried to blow up King James 1. Kids still chant: “Remember, remember the fifth of November, gunpowder treason and plot. I see no reason why gunpowder treason should ever be forgot.” And after 400 years we haven’t forgotten it. Guy Fawkes was certainly guilty. He tried to kill the Protestant King James and replace him with a Catholic. He didn’t hate his country; he wanted to save it from what he considered to be a heretical religion. In his own mind he was a patriot who served God and country.

William Joyce and John Amery were hanged for assisting the enemy in time of war. Joyce broadcast Nazi propaganda on German radio and Amery tried to recruit British POWs to fight on the Russian Front. Both men accepted their fate and went to their deaths bravely. They put their ideology above their obligation to a plutocratic state engaged in a fratricidal war. The keeper of the Queen’s art collection Anthony Blunt spent most of his life spying for the Soviet Union but he died peacefully in his bed. It seems that treason, like beauty, is in the eye of beholder.
 
John Amery stated his case in 1942.
“Only what you do and how you act can be the determining factor to decide whether, betrayed, we intend to react and take our place in the lines of civilization, or whether we are a race played out, who accept foreign interference, foreign control, and who go forward to the loss of all we possess, because we have neither the courage nor the desire to preserve our heritage.” 

On the morning of his execution William Joyce wrote to his friend Angus Macnab.
 
“I am now so far moved away from all earthly things that the remaining minutes of my life seem like tenants who have not paid their rent. Thank you for your devotion to me and above all for your prayers. More I will not write save to say that when we meet again, we shall regret nothing that has happened now.”
 
Are these the words of traitors? Rebecca West had no doubt when she wrote “The Meaning of Treason” but Mary Kenny was not so sure in her book “Germany Calling.”
 
Gloom & Doom
 
According to the far-right our way of life is being destroyed by the rise of Islam and the survival of the white race is threatened by the black and brown birthrate. Global warming is turning our countryside into a desert; atmospheric pollution is choking us and rising sea levels are drowning us. If we escape al-Qaeda and step carefully over the black babies, wear anti-biological warfare suits and respirators and stay on high ground we might survive long enough to be blown to bits by an Israeli nuclear strike. As William Butler Yates wrote: “Things fall apart: the centre cannot hold.”
 
In fact we are recovering from the banking crisis of 2008. Austerity is biting but we have gone through recessions before and we know that we will survive. The UK is still 85% white and at long last the government has started to control immigration. The unemployable underclass still has to be fed and housed but at least we are now aware of it. For years welfare dependency was ignored but now even the liberals accept that something must be done. We still have a crippling national debt but the coalition government is trying to reduce borrowing and spending. The IT revolution continues to change the world. Advances in medical science are wiping out diseases. Unemployment is too high but most of our workers have got a job. The expectation of life is increasing and the infant mortality rate is falling.

The far-right’s alarming predictions all came to nothing. We didn’t have a war with the Soviet Union and the Russian Federation is now a parliamentary democracy with a market economy. We didn’t lose our identity when we joined the EU. We have not been bitten by rabid dogs running through the Channel Tunnel. We were not inundated with unemployed Italians. And we have not had German troops goose-stepping through England’s green and pleasant land.
 
We are occupied by 9,382 American servicemen but they don’t seem to worry about that. 

They are convinced that the UK has been hijacked by an unholy alliance of capitalists, communists and Muslims. In the real world these groups have little or nothing in common but in the tortured imagination of the far-right they are part of a vast conspiracy to destroy the white race in general and Britain in particular. This is more or less the same plot outlined in the “Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion” but since the death of John Tyndall, and Nick Griffin’s historic rapprochement with Israel, the Jews have been replaced by the Muslims. The following posting is by “British Bulldog” on the official BNP website shows the extent of their paranoia: 
 
“Absolutely wonderful to see the British National Party coming together and sending out a message of real hope to the indigenous people of Britain and show that there IS a real alternative to the treasonable traitors of the Multicultural Marxist Lib/Lab/Con/BBC establishment cabal of criminals that have wrecked OUR country for so many decades.” 
 
The London Mayoral Election
 
The BNP’s candidate for the London Mayoral Election is their press officer Carlos Cortiglia. He was born in Uruguay and came to this country in 1989. There have been xenophobic comments from the usual suspects and the question is not if easy going Londoners will vote for him but if his alleged supporters will. He performs very well on television and answers questions with clarity and intelligence. A welcome change from some of the tongue-tied candidates we have seen in the past. 
 
Carlos is not the only candidate with exotic connections. Boris Johnson, the sitting Conservative Party Mayor of London, is the great-grandson of Ali Kemal a liberal Turkish politician who was stoned to death by a nationalist mob in 1922 during the Turkish War of Independence. His unfortunate family history has not deterred Boris from a career in politics. He is tipped to be re-elected.

The Labour candidate Ken Livingstone was twice Mayor before Boris. His election telecast featured a multiethnic cast of actors urging him to fight for London. Ken is reported to have burst into tears when it was screened; the rest of just threw up. It may have increased his popularity with the ethnic minorities but it will probably have the opposite effect amongst the white British population. 
 
Brian Paddick the Liberal Democrat candidate was formerly Deputy Assistant Commissioner in the Metropolitan Police; a background that inspires little confidence amongst the victims of crime in the capital. 
 
The UKIP candidate Lawrence Webb is calling for stronger measures on law and order and tighter immigration controls. He is also worried that proposed EU legislation might restrict the financiers of the City of London.

The Green Party candidate Jenny Jones thinks that road charging is the only way to control London’s traffic. This will not please the motorists but she obviously puts honesty ahead of popularity.
 
Siobhan Benita is an independent candidate with intelligent policies and high-profile supporters including Sir Gus O’Donnell.  She was formerly a senior civil servant who resigned over the government’s health reforms.

The media are accused of treating the minority candidates unfairly by giving prominence to the established parties. All the candidates are focusing on local issues but Londoners will probably vote the same way as the rest of the country. Immigration and Law and Order are important but the big issue will be the economy and the key voting areas will be the leafy suburbs rather than the inner city. Ken Livingstone will get the immigrant vote but Boris Johnson can depend on the Tory commuters. 
 
The Mad Scribbler
 
Ambrose Evans-Pritchard tried to wreck Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential election campaign by dishing the dirt on the Whitewater scandal. But his timely intervention on behalf of the Republican candidate failed and Bill Clinton was elected with a decisive majority. He got 43%, George HW Bush got 37.4% and Ross Perot got 18.9%.  Following extensive enquiries by the American authorities Bill and Hilary Clinton were cleared of any wrongdoing.
 
He tried again to upset the American judicial system with his 1997 book “The Secret Life of Bill Clinton.” He claimed that the Oklahoma City bombing was a failed operation by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. But his “evidence” was consigned to the FBI’s bulging conspiracy files. The mass-murderer Timothy McVeigh was convicted and executed for the worst terrorist attack in American history prior to 9/11. He was a US military veteran who belonged to a right-wing militia movement.  An American spokesman dismissed Ambrose Evans-Pritchard as “a pain in the ass,” and the Washington Post dubbed him “the mad scribbler.”

Having outworn his welcome in the USA he turned his attention to Europe. He predicted that the euro would collapse soon after its introduction in 2001. But more than a decade later the euro is still going strong and he is still hoping for an economic catastrophe. He led the screaming for Greece to be thrown out of the eurozone and coined the phrase “Club Med” to introduce a racist element into the discussion. But when the European Central Bank guaranteed the Greek deficit he immediately turned on Spain and is now predicting her downfall.
 
The Daily Telegraph boasts that it sells 180,089 more copies than The Times but it is still losing circulation. It sold 690,445 copies in 2009 but is now selling 686,679. The Barclay twins must have noticed that their newspaper is failing. The much derided euro will probably last longer than their strangely shortsighted International Business Editor.

If he does get fired BNP leader Nick Griffin could do with an editor for his party newspaper The Voice of Freedom. It’s not as reactionary as the Daily Telegraph but it’s just as boring. A conspiracy freak with an irrational hatred of the European Union might be the ideal choice.
Journalists have every right to push their own opinions. But there is a difference between reasoned argument and demented fantasy. The federal government of the USA is not engaged in a war against the people. And the leaders of the European states are not trying to wipe out all things British. Ambrose Evans-Pritchard is not just a harmless crank obsessed with the EU. His negative reporting has done a lot of damage to the European economies including the UK. Every time he talks down the euro he helps to put another Briton out of work.
 
Historical Context
 
AN Wilson in his modern history “Our Times” remembers the 1950s.
Churchill told the cabinet that “the continuing increase in the number of coloured people coming to this country and their presence here would sooner or later come to be resented by large sections of the British people.
 
The blatant racism of the old war hero shocks a later generation. For this reason, it is convenient for historians to suggest that it was only “extremists”, such as Sir Oswald Mosley, who thought in this way. (Mosley tried to revive his old fascist thugs of pre-war days and stood for Notting Hill in the 1959 election.) It was in Notting Hill, where many blacks had settled, that the race riots had occurred in 1958. It is easy, and correct, to see Mosley as inflammatory. Less easy for the imagination to absorb is the fact that when it came to his views on black people, the leader of the British fascists had views that were commonplace for a white man of his generation. They were shared by Sir Winston Churchill. They were shared by the hero of El Alemein General Montgomery (1887-1976). 

After the war Clement Atlee as Prime Minister sent Monty to Africa to provide a confidential report on the suitability of giving the Africans self-government. It was a shock for the liberal-minded Clem to be told by Monty, after a two-month fact finding-tour, that “the African is a complete savage and is quite incapable of developing the country himself.” He recommended making the whole of sub-Saharan Africa into a British-controlled bulwark against communism, to be aligned with South Africa. His advice was only to come to light in 1999, and a fellow peer, Lord Chalfont, commented that “his reputation is irredeemably damaged.” 
 
It’s difficult to put history into perspective. Half a century ago racism was normal and race mixing was frowned on. But times change and we change with them; at least superficially. We would not use the same language today but few would disagree with Churchill and Mosley’s sentiments. And Monty’s assessment of Africa has stood the test of time. Black Africa has generally gone backwards since the white man laid down his burden. South Africa still has enough whites to maintain a modern economy but Zimbabwe is only kept going by the Chinese. Most of sub-Saharan Africa is constantly at war, totally corrupt and living at subsistence level.
 
The liberal regimes of the late 20th century were a reaction to the regimentation of two world wars. They gave us the social state but they saddled us with an unbearable burden of debt. The current mood is a reaction to the near collapse of the banking system.  All over the world people are returning to tradition values. The Arabs are turning to Islam and the Europeans are flirting with nationalism. The Global capitalist crisis has provoked a reaction that threatens to sweep away liberal democracy. Churchill, Mosley and Monty do not seem so old-fashioned after all.

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