This French postcard from 1942 depicts our mother Europe sheltering her chicks with Switzerland and Sweden nearby and Britain heading towards the USA. Note the Star of David on the lid of the American box, and the striking image of Marshal Philippe Petain on the postage stamp. Seventy-eight years later things are much the same.
The Marshall has gone from France but their current president, Emmanuel Macron, fancies himself as 'Father of the Nation'. Switzerland belongs to EFTA which is just outside the EU. Sweden is a member of the EU but with her own currency and an air of detachment. The Swedes, like the British, talk about 'Europe' as though it's a separate place. And Britain is still drawn to America where the Star of David is as dominant as ever. As the French say: "Plus ca change..."
The big difference today is the coronavirus pandemic that has circled the world. When the EU offered us ventilators to treat the infection, Boris Johnson put Brexit before breathing by rejecting them, but now he has tested positive. His petty nationalism is in contrast to the co-operation between the EU states that are helping each other. President Donald Trump insists on calling it "the Chinese virus" but viruses don't recognise nationalities, even paranoid North Korea is effected.
Our Day Will Come
We have quit the European Union just in time to be struck down by the coronavirus pandemic. Boris Johnson is doing his best but the crisis has revealed that we have fewer hospital beds and doctors than Spain or Italy. It has also exposed the fragility of our gig economy. Tim Martin the boss of Wetherspoons who is an apostle of the free market has told his redundant workers to get a job at Tescos.
Boris is spending money like a drunken sailor to show his concern for the workers, but at heart he is an old-fashioned Tory who described the poorest twenty percent of the population as: "chavs, losers, burglars and drug addicts." He called single mothers: "uppity and irresponsible" and accused their children of being: "ill raised, ignorant, aggressive and illegitimate." When Ken Bigley was beheaded by Isis terrorists, his home city of Liverpool mourned him, but Boris Johnson condemned: "the mawkish sentimentality of a society that is hooked on grief and likes to wallow in a sense of vicarious victimhood." Nevertheless, the punters still voted for him.
When slavery was abolished in America most of the liberated slaves stayed on the plantations because there was nowhere else to go, and it seems that the British electorate are in the same position. We don't trust the Labour Party, and if we vote Liberal Democrat our vote will be cancelled out by an unfair 'first past the post' system. So we stay where we are, with a government directed by the unelected advisor Dominic Cummings.
Our new Home Secretary Priti Patel has vowed to cut inward migration by 70%, and treat all applicants equally. We shall have to see what happens but every Immigration Act so far has failed to stem the tide.
Much of our industry relies on imported labour and some of our biggest companies are foreign-owned. This makes our workers vulnerable to cutbacks and redundancies. HSBC have announced 35,000 redundancies worldwide, many of them in the UK. Naturally, as a Chinese bank they are looking after their own people. And the same is true of Honda who will be making their electric cars in Japan.
Is there any hope? Yes, we can talk, read and write. We can express our contempt for the Old Gang parties and propose alternative policies. Ideas can't be destroyed and nothing lasts forever. One day our class-ridden country will be liberated from plutocracy. The blatant hypocrites who preach peace and make war will be gone. So will the inverted racists who promote every nation except our own. Not to mention; faux patriots, metric martyrs, Luddites, Morris dancers, flat earthers, conspiracy freaks, Holocaust deniers, and assorted fruitcakes who support Boris Johnson. Don't despair comrades; our day will come.
Union Movement Policy
Under Priti Patel's points based immigration policy our fellow Europeans are to be excluded but West Indians, Africans and Asians are welcome. The Tories are anxious to improve trade with the Third World and they have already promised China and India that they will make life easier for their students and workers.
They have separated us from Europe but those of us who believe in genuine liberation are not satisfied with a country divided by class, where ex-servicemen sleep in doorways and beg for food, and where whole families live in bed and breakfast accommodation. We despise the politicians who misgovern us and we recall Union Movement's policy from 1948 which is still relevant, except for point six about Africa.
1) To secure the Union of the European peoples.
2) To resist the menace of International Communism and
International Finance.
3) To win the consent and enthusiasm of the people for a new way of life.
4) To win power in Britain by the vote of the people.
5) To abolish the Party game and thus to create a system of united national action.
6) To develop Africa as an estate of the European which can solve the economic problem of our continent.
7) To abolish the values and influence of class which rests
on hereditary wealth and impedes the life of the nation.
8) To provide continuing security in creative service of the people for the man who has built his own means of livelihood and desires his children to follow after him in heredity, science, art, craft, profession or business.
9) To assert the right and will of the whole British people above every faction and thus to enable all to earn what they are worth with full security in sickness and old age.
10) To create a new sense of service and a new morality in the State.
Union Movement no longer exists but Mosley's ideas are still discussed and Brexit has actually encouraged the European movement. As the elderly Brexiteers pass away the younger generation will reverse the decision to leave Europe. It's only a matter of time.
Letter From America by Robert Lyons
Thanks Bill for the latest issue of "Nation Revisited", excellent reading and informative reading as always.
Enjoying the sun and warm weather here in Florida.
I know back in the day the only problem we ran into on the streets was the Jewish Defence League, I have no idea whatever what happened to them, now the opposition group is Anfifa, and it seems to be both Jews and non-Jew leftists, Anarchists and Communists and they go after everybody from Trump conservatives to NS. I believe our worst enemy in the old days was the FBI, the FBI was insidious, using every behind the scenes dirty trick in the book, their main weapon was finding out where you worked and getting you fired.
While in London in 1961 I was accosted several times by Special Branch, mostly they wanted me to know they were watching me and wanted me to talk to them, at the time I wouldn't talk to the FBI, I certainly wasn't going to talk to them but I did notice that Special Branch was more polite than the FBI who were a bunch of rude, crude, dogs as far as I was concerned.
With great sadness I read of the passing of Carl Harley, what a wonderful gentleman. I'm so happy I had the honor of meeting him. I really enjoyed the personal notes about Carl, thanks for including them.
(As a young man Robert Lyons was active in the National States' Rights Party. He attended the international camp at Andrew Fountain's estate in Norfolk in 1961. He is seen here 50 years later outside the door of the old BNP headquarters in Princedale Road).
Anti-Semitism
The current hysteria surrounding anti-Semitism is unjustified. With the Holocaust never far from our thoughts most people are sympathetic to the Jews. But criticism of Israel is another matter, and so are crimes of prominent Jews such as Robert Maxwell and Bernie Madoff. It is not anti-Semitic to say that the Israeli Defence Force is as bad as the Nazis when it comes to their brutal occupation of Palestine, and it's not anti-Semitic to describe Maxwell and Madoff as criminals of the worst type.
Anti-Semitism was much worse before the war. Arnold Leese of the Imperial Fascist League published a book in 1934 accusing the Jews of the ritual murder of Christian children. He was found not guilty of seditious libel but was sentenced to six months hard labour for public mischief. He celebrated his release by publishing another book called 'My Irrelevant Defence' which was just as bad. Leese remained a dedicated anti-Semite until his death in 1956.
At a meeting of the Nordic League in May 1939 AK Chesterton, the former editor of 'The Blackshirt', called for the Jews to be strung up from lampposts. The Home Secretary, Sir Samuel Hoare, decided not to prosecute because Chesterton was only preaching to the converted at a private meeting. In 1948 he published a book entitled 'The Tragedy of Anti-Semitism' but he continued to campaign against 'international finance'. He founded the League of Empire Loyalists in 1954 and the National Front in 1967.
Oswald Mosley, the leader of the British Union of Fascists, always denied being an anti-Semite. Richard Thurlow wrote in 'Fascism in Britain':
Contrary to the claims of several authorities, the use of political anti-Semitism by the BUF has to be seen as a genuine belief rather than a cynical device to prop up an ailing movement. Mosley was not an ideological anti-Semite but he became convinced that some Jews were acting against the British national interest through their role in international finance, and that others were trying to destroy the BUF through physical violence.
Jeremy Corbyn has spent a lifetime campaigning against racism but he is accused of anti-Semitism for criticising Israel. It's ironic that the Jews are so sensitive when their national home was founded on racial supremacism.
The Coronavirus Pandemic
A highly infectious virus first identified in China is killing thousands of people throughout the world and causing serious economic damage. The governments of the leading nations have pledged billions of dollars in 'New Deal' rescue packages but many businesses will not survive.
This conversion to Keynesian policies follows twelve years of austerity that failed to balance the books. The brutal policies of the Tories took no account of social welfare. Margaret Thatcher shut down the coal mines because they couldn't compete with cheap gas, but a generation later some of the mining villages have still not recovered. She believed implicitly in market forces but John Maynard Keynes realised that economics depends on common sense as well as mathematics.
In 1937 he published his groundbreaking book 'The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money'. In 1940 he entered the Treasury and in 1944 he organised the reconstruction of the British economy based on the Bretton Woods Agreement. Keynes' formula called for state intervention, a welfare system, low interest rates fixed by a nationalised Bank of England, and strict banking regulations.
His theory worked and the British GDP rose by 2.4% a year for two decades. But in 1972 the Bretton Woods system collapsed because of cripplingly expensive wars in Vietnam and the Middle East. The price of oil tripled and President Richard Nixon imposed the Petrodollar system under which the USA protects any state that uses dollars to buy oil, and threatens any state that does not. Cast adrift by America, the UK joined the Common Market but we still looked across the Atlantic for protection.
Against this uncertainty, Margaret Thatcher came to power in 1979 on a false promise to control immigration. Instead, she deregulated the banks, encouraged casino capitalism, cut social spending and allowed property prices to escalate. The eventual result was the financial crisis of 2008 when Lehman Brothers crashed and the Royal Bank of Scotland had to be rescued by the British taxpayer. Since then we have lived under the black cloud of austerity, but it hasn't reduced the national debt or improved productivity.
When Harold Macmillan was asked what prime ministers fear most, he famously answered: "Events dear boy, events." Boris Johnson has a massive majority, a weak opposition, the prospect of a trade deal with America, an attractive young girlfriend with a baby on the way, and the total support of the popular press. But he has been overtaken by events.
He boasts that we have "got our country back" but the current crisis proves that we are part of the wider world. Already, the Exeter-based airline Flybe has collapsed with the loss of 2,400 jobs, EasyJet has grounded its fleet and Virgin Atlantic and British Airways are laying off staff.
Boris Johnson's arrogance has served him well. He has risen to the top of the political dung heap and hopes to emulate his hero Winston Churchill. He is trying desperately to avoid an economic meltdown but the outlook is grim.
Surely the global capitalist system won't be brought down by a mere virus? That remains to be seen, but in HG Wells' classic story 'The War of the Worlds', the Martians were defeated by just such an organism. Viral infections, like influenza, tend to start in Asia and follow the trade winds around the world.
The coronavirus is a natural part of creation but people with over-active imaginations are blaming the usual suspects for spreading it as part of a diabolical plot. It's wicked to mock the afflicted but these conspiracy theorists really need to control themselves. It's hard to accept reality when you have been abusing fantasy for many years, but former addicts have quit alcohol, smoking, drugs, and gambling. Conspiracy theory is just another compulsion that can be beaten.
Nation Revisited
This blog seeks reform by legal means. All articles are by Bill Baillie unless otherwise stated. The opinions of guest writers are entirely their own. We uphold the United Nations' Declaration of Human Rights, Article 19:
"We all have the right to make up our own minds, to think what we like, to say what we think, and to share ideas with other people."
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