Poppies, Row on Row

On 28/11/201628/11/2016 By JacIn British Nationalism, Devolution, English Nationalism, European Union, Iraq, Media, Royalty, Scotland, Welsh Assembly, World99 Comments

PART 1: ‘THE BEAUTIFUL GAME’

This autumn has seen a succession of spats between the football associations of the ‘home’ nations and FIFA the international governing body of the game over displays of poppies, which FIFA deems to be a political symbol. These disputes reached something of a fever pitch last week when FIFA laid a number of charges against the Football Association of Wales (FAW) linked to the game against Serbia on November 12 (which I attended).

Press reports suggest that one of the charges was that fans had worn poppies in their coats! Which, if true, is insane. For not only would such a charge infringe personal liberty but also open up a vat of worms for those having to decide what qualifies as a political symbol. (At the game I wore a discreet Glyndŵr flag lapel badge.)

Consider Barcelona, one of the biggest clubs in the world, intertwined with Catalan identity and the independence movement. Everywhere at their stadium you will read it spelled out for you – Mes que un club (more than a club). Their big rivals are of course Real Madrid, the club of ruling Castille, the club of the monarchy, and the multi-ethnic – but definitely unified – Spanish state.

Last week Barcelona played in Glasgow against Celtic, an intense, occasionally tetchy, but nevertheless enjoyable game that saw the magnificent Celtic fans waving their Irish tricolours and singing their Irish rebel songs. Across town you’ll find arch-rivals Rangers, whose fans wave union flags and sing ditties such as The Billie Boys (‘Up to our knees in Fenian blood, etc’).

There are hundreds of other clubs in the world with an intensely partisan identity that is overtly and unmistakably political, or even ethnic. Until very recently only Basques were allowed to play for Bilboko Athletic Kluba and even though that rule now appears to have been relaxed Athletic Bilbao and the other Basque clubs retain an intensely nationalistic ethos. (Though Celtic and Rangers may be unique in that the fans are animated by the history and politics of another country.)

Come to that, what about international games, such as the one between Wales and Serbia that caused FIFA’s representative such concern? As with every competitive international game there were national flags, and national anthems – aren’t they ‘political’? Come to that, national teams, the raison d’être for FIFA, are obviously political because they represent nation-states or, in the case of Wales, a nation without a state.

Whereas on the other hand, the Serbs might argue that Serbia is a nation-state but too many Serbs are stranded outside the homeland, in Bosnia, Montenegro, Macedonia, Kosovo. And yet, Kosovo, a breakaway province of Serbia, handed over by NATO to Albanian gangsters was, in a blatantly political decision, admitted to both FIFA and the European governing body, UEFA, in May 2016. Too late to qualify for the World Cup Finals in Russia in 2018, which is just as well, because Russia doesn’t recognise Kosovo.

In other words, football at club and international level has always been political. Whether it’s the England team giving a Nazi salute in 1938, the so-called ‘Football War’ between Honduras and El Salvador in 1969, or German football fans welcoming refugees (last year). So for FIFA to try to punish Wales for individuals making the personal decision to wear a poppy is absurd. Worse, it could be dangerous; for does FIFA now wish to dictate what people wear to football matches?

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Early in the second paragraph I qualified my criticism of FIFA with “if true”, partly because I find it difficult to believe that anyone would try to dictate what football fans wear, and partly because it could be that what FIFA meant by ‘fans in the stand’ was the display organised by the FAW, not far from where I was sitting with my son and grandsons. (Being aware of this stunt in advance I was praying that our section of the crowd wouldn’t be involved. Taid being thrown out could have spoilt the night even more than the late Serbian equaliser.)

This stunt was arranged by placing cards on seats which, when held up, combined to give the image of a big poppy. This was rather naughty of the FAW, and very silly. Naughty because it forced people to be part of something about which they might have had reservations, and silly because it was sticking two fingers up to FIFA, which had already warned the FAW that the players should not wear poppies on their shirts, nor should there be other displays. But then, the Sun, the Daily Mail and other good friends of Wales said it should be done, so that presumably made it OK.

Now if it is this display of poppies organised by the FAW that FIFA is objecting to, and if it results in points being deducted and Wales not reaching the World Cup Finals, then I believe that the officials of the FAW will have failed us all and should consider their positions.

I say that because the duty of the FAW is to manage the game in Wales in the best interests of the member clubs, the national team and the fans, not to jeopardise the best interests of Welsh football by falling into line with the cynical and engineered poppy frenzy.

Personal freedom is one of the cornerstones of a democratic society, and must be defended. And that’s why FIFA is wrong if it charges the FAW for individual fans choosing to wear a poppy in their lapel. But considerations of personal freedom also put the FAW in the wrong for forcing individuals to be part of that poppy display.

I think we’re entitled to answers, from both FIFA and the FAW.

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PART 2: “SQUEAKY BUM TIME”

Demanding that everyone, including footballers, wears a poppy for the weeks leading up to Armistice Day and Remembrance Sunday is quite recent, maybe no more than a decade old. Here’s a photo from a Scotland v England game played on Saturday November 14, 1999, the day before Remembrance Sunday. There are no poppies. There was no one-minute silence before the game.

It’s fitting that the photo comes from 1999, and was taken in the home city of Sir Alex Ferguson, the great Manchester United manager, because that year almost certainly marks the start of “squeaky bum time” (a period of nervousness and uncertainty) for those who were soon promoting the poppy and what they wanted it to stand for.

Because 1999 was the year of the first elections to the Scottish Parliament and the Welsh Assembly. The SNP got 28.7% of the vote and 35 out the 129 seats in Scotland, while in Wales Plaid Cymru achieved 28.4% of the vote and 17 out of 60 seats. So even though Plaid Cymru did better than expected there was nothing for our masters to get overly concerned about in either country, yet within the establishment there were those who already feared where devolution might lead.

September 11, 2001 saw the attack on the World Trade Center in New York City, soon followed by retaliatory US and UK air strikes against Al Qaeda and Taliban targets in Afghanistan. To be followed by ground troops. January 4 2002 saw the first US soldier killed by enemy fire. The conflict dragged on.

The USA and UK invaded Iraq to remove Saddam Hussein in March 2003. All kinds of reasons were proffered to justify this aggression but none were convincing. It was regime change linked to oil, and another ‘All be home by Christmas’ intervention that dragged on, and on.

Then, in July 2005, London experienced suicide bomb attacks that killed 52 people, and carried out by British-born Islamic terrorists. These bombings were the most extreme expression of the growing anger within Muslim communities in Europe and the USA at the West’s military interventions in the Islamic world.

The May 2007 elections to the Scottish Parliament saw the SNP’s share of the vote climb to 32.9% of the vote, giving it the most votes, and with 47 seats (one more than Labour) it was now the largest party. Squeaky bum time was really upon us (or them).

By the end of 2007 it became clear that the Western world was entering a period of economic turmoil. It was equally clear that the recession had been caused by irresponsible lending by banks and mortgage institutions coupled with the imaginative trading of debts and other worthless packages. As with Afghanistan and Iraq, it was the USA and the UK leading the way, with other countries quick to blame ‘the Anglo-Saxon economic model’ of quick-buck trading having no concern for the wider economy, let alone society as a whole.

By 2010 everyone knew that the UK was up shit creek economically, with the public purse bailing out criminally irresponsible banks. The public turned against banks and the City of London. The UK was still bogged down in Afghanistan and Iraq. Al Qaeda had been overtaken by the much more ruthless ISIS, which had support from young British Muslims.

To cap it all, the Monarchy started losing what had been its 90+ per cent approval rating. I suspect this started with the death of Princess Diana in 1997, made worse by divorces and scandals, with the prospect of Charles becoming king viewed with concern in certain quarters.

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So our elite consulted that well-thumbed manual, ‘Cunning Plans For When Things Go Pear Shaped”. And there, in among chapters headed, ‘Blame Somebody Else’, ‘Start A War’, ‘Scapegoat A Minority’, ‘Do A Runner With The Loot’ and ‘Pray For Divine Intervention’ they found ‘Whip Up A Frenzy Of Faux Patriotism’.

This explains why, in the mid to late noughties the largely neglected poppy saw the first drops of revivifying water and became the symbol not of sacrifice in war but of British identity and ‘pulling together’. The UK media played its role with an enthusiasm almost unknown in democratic societies.

Could it get any worse for the establishment? Yes it could, for in May 2011 the SNP took 44% (+13%) of the vote and 69 seats, giving it a clear majority in the Scottish Parliament. There would now be a referendum on Scottish independence.

Television companies responded by going into overdrive in promoting British unity. In the final year of the Labour – Lib Dem coalition in the Scottish Parliament (to May 3, 2007) there were just 25 television programmes with ‘Britain’ or ‘British’ in the title. Between January 2013 and January 2014, with the SNP in power and the independence referendum looming, the number of ‘Britain’ / ‘British’ programmes had risen to 516!

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Which brings us to where we are today. To the point where the now regular autumn hysteria has reached absurd proportions. Here are a couple of examples.

On the evening of Friday November 18 I watched a televised football game (Brighton & Hove Albion v Aston Villa) and I couldn’t understand why the players had poppies on their shirts a week after Armistice Day and five days after Remembrance Sunday. Then the commentator told us it was to commemorate the last day of the Battle of the Somme!

So are we now compelled to remember every date that someone, somewhere, deems significant? And if so, where does this end? Can anyone remember any other instance of poppies being worn after Remembrance Sunday?

Nowhere is the poppy cult more slavishly followed than at the BBC. It is now obvious that from mid or late October no one is allowed to appear on any BBC programme without a poppy. (Though Evan Davis on Newsnight held out longer than most.) So terrified is the Beeb of falling foul of the Sun and the other directors of the national mood that anything that moves is liable to have a poppy pinned to it.

But this fear of manufactured British patriotism can bring its own problems, such as when someone at The One Show pinned a poppy on the Cookie Monster from Sesame Street. This outraged some for “trivialising the sacrifice of millions”, but as Dara Ó Briain suggested, it might have been satire, somebody having a pop at the poppy fascists. Here’s how the story was covered in Heatstreet, MailOnline, The Express, and the Huffington Post.

As the BBC discovered with the Cookie Monster, when you’re dealing with poppy fascists it’s difficult to do the right thing. Perhaps the rule for broadcasters should be to pin a poppy on everything that breathes irrespective of whether it wants to wear one or not. Which might result in an apologist for ISIS appearing on Newsnight or Channel 4 News wearing a poppy.

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PART 3: CUNNING PLANS GANG AFT AGLEY

What I hope I’ve explained is that the past decade has seen a poppy cult engineered to engender a sense of Britishness, patriotism and unity, in order to counter threats from within and without; also to divert attention away from military blunders and other cracks in the façade of the British system that had led people to question the roles of the armed forces, the Monarchy, the City of London and other institutions.

To some extent this has worked. For example, the first referendum on Scottish independence in September 2014 was ‘won’. Then, the prince who many would like to see accede to the throne instead of his father has knocked out a few sprogs, and the ‘Ah!’ factor always works for the House of Sachsen-Coburg und Gotha.

Yet the success of this strategy is now causing problems that the Elite had not foreseen. You’ll note that I’m talking now of an ‘Elite’, so let me explain myself. Perhaps the best way is to refer back to my post EU Referendum: Why I Want OUT! where I wrote of an Elite that opposes “nation-states, national identities, local governments, languages other than English, regional tastes and peculiarities. In fact, many of the things you and I cherish.”

Those behind the relentless promotion of the poppy are linked to that global Elite. They opposed Scottish independence and they were against Brexit, for they believe in the Elite’s agenda of globalisation and mass migration as these drive down wages and help destroy the national identities that are viewed as an obstacle to globalisation.

The problem is that for most English people ‘Britishness’ and ‘Englishness’, ‘Britain’ and ‘England’, are synonyms, and the English make up almost 80% of the UK’s population. Which has meant that by clumsily promoting the poppy and British nationalism as a short-term fix for assorted problems the Elite unleashed insurgent English populism that resulted in UKIP and Brexit, and may now take us on a journey no one foresaw.

This revolt against the Elite is not confined to the UK. Donald Trump is President-elect of the USA. François Fillon is the Centre-right’s candidate against Marine le Pen, and he will fight that election on a platform that Donald Trump would approve: making friends with Putin, cracking down hard on Islamic extremists, opposing same-sex couples adopting children, etc.

When the French go to the polls in April to elect a new president it will be a choice between a weak and demoralised Left on the one side, while the alternatives are the Hard Right and the Very Hard Right. Then, between Fillon and le Pen, attitudes to the EU could be the main and defining difference.

The liberal, globalist, ‘do your own thing’ consensus we’ve lived with since the 1960s is almost dead. Accidentally killed by an Elite that over-reached itself, assisted by a Left that had been allowed to dictate the social agenda (because it complemented the ambitions of the Elite) but so detached itself from the concerns of most people that ‘liberal elite’ is now a term of abuse.

For me, it’s one of the great political ironies that an annual propaganda exercise to defend established interests favouring the EU, centrist politics, globalisation and unrestricted immigration has breathed life into forces representing their very antithesis. But so fitting.

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Inglorious Isolation

On 07/10/201607/10/2016 By JacIn British Nationalism, Colonialism, Colonisation, Colonisation of Wales, English Nationalism, European Union, History, Patagonia69 Comments

A Brief Follow-up by the Guest Writer of the Previous Post

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Since 1982, the diplomatic position of the British state on the Falklands-Malvinas sovereignty issue has deteriorated markedly from an already weak condition.

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Britain no longer has any support among the countries of Latin America.

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The US does not recognise Britain’s sovereignty claim and has been urging Britain to enter into discussions with Argentina on the sovereignty issue.

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Russia has questioned Britain’s claims and senior politicians have highlighted the brazen hypocrisy of Britain’s stance on the issue of self determination for the people of Crimea.

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China unequivocally backs Argentina’s sovereignty claims.

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The EU currently takes no position on the sovereignty issue but accepts Britain’s de facto administration of the Falklands-Malvinas on the basis of solidarity among member states, despite having a number of member states with profound and undisguised sympathy with Argentina’s claims. Surely, even this position of neutrality will disintegrate post-Brexit.

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Currently, the only countries I have been able to identify that continue to support the British arguments are Canada and Taiwan. (The latter for very obvious and self-serving reasons, Jac.)

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This must surely be the time for Wales, Scotland and Ireland to use the next meeting of the British-Irish Council to join the international consensus in urging the British state to commence discussions with Argentina immediately on the Falklands-Malvinas sovereignty issue.

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Jac adds . . . Until I started looking for links for this piece I hadn’t realised myself just how isolated Britain now is on the issue.

While digging I also came across the recently broken story that Israel had supplied Argentina with weapons during the war. Hardly surprising perhaps, given that Buenos Aires has one of the largest Jewish communities outside of Israel. So with Jewish boys in the conscript army we should not be surprised by this revelation.

Though many of the accounts I read, including the one linked to, personalise it by attributing the decision to Israel’s prime minister at the time, Menachem Begin, who had fought against the British in the late 1940s. He was even quoted as having invoked the name of an old Irgun comrade hanged by the British by way of justification.

Other reports of this revelation inevitably described Begin as a ‘terrorist’, which got me to thinking . . . Why is it that all my life I have heard people around the world described as terrorists by the British media and British politicians – did these people come to England and terrorise people?

Of course not, these ‘terrorists’ – De Valera, Kenyatta, Grivas and all the rest – were in their own countries, defending their own peoples. Theirs was a fight against imperialism. Yet the British/English interpretation is that the empire was benevolence manifest, consequently only unhinged terrorists could want to break the imperial connection.

With the empire gone and England becoming isolationist the focus has changed, now the ‘enemy’ is anyone who isn’t English. Anyone who is different, and that includes us Welsh, unless of course we submit to the will of the xenophobes and reject everything that makes us Welsh. For in the new dispensation, to stand up for Wales and Welshness is to be an intolerant and divisive nationalist (© T. May).

This new and ugly Englishness, and all its ranting prophets and hangers-on – particularly those in Wales – must be treated with a combination of contempt and ridicule. And if that fails, then we must do to them as they do to others and shout them down.

This is no time to retreat to the moral high ground. Fight fire with fire.

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The National Trust

On 21/08/201603/07/2017 By JacIn Colonialism, English Nationalism, History, Public Funding, Scotland, Tourism, Welsh Government67 Comments

A GUEST POST

What is the National Trust for?

According to the 1907 Act, the National Trust was established “ . . . for the purposes of promoting the permanent preservation for the benefit of the nation of lands and tenements (including buildings) of beauty or historic interest . . . ”

But for which nation?

In Scotland, this question was answered in 1931 by the establishment of a distinct legal organization formed “in order to carry out work and confer benefits in Scotland similar to those carried out in England and other parts of Britain”.

The National Trust for Scotland is managed by its own board of trustees, elected by and answerable to the Scottish membership.

In Wales, this question finds its answer not in any Act of Parliament or of the Senedd but in the experience of visiting a National Trust property in our country. I recommend a visit to “Powis [sic] Castle”.

The magnificent red stone castle near Welshpool was the historic seat of the rulers of Powys – a kingdom with an unbroken history from the Roman civitate of Viroconium (Welsh: Caer Gwrygon; English: Wroxeter), from which the royal court moved to Mathrafal in the early eighth century, and thence to Castell Coch, the red castle, in the early thirteenth century. Today, this castle continues to be known to the National Trust as “Powis Castle”, with their rigid adherence the place names attributed by English cartographers of the nineteenth century (Carnarvon, Llanelly, Powis) and in resolute opposition to the norms of Welsh orthography.

The castle remained in the hands of the descendants of the Welsh royal dynasty of Mathrafal until the late sixteenth century, when it was purchased by a branch of the powerful Welsh lordly family of the Herberts who remained in possession until the early nineteenth century.

Is the Castle presented by the National Trust in the context of this extraordinary and enchanting history? The thousand year story of the kingdom of Powys and the descendants of its ruling dynasty? Nope. Seemingly of no interest to the National Trust.

The main exhibition presents some of the loot acquired by Clive of India, father of the British Raj, famed for his atrocities, maladministration and self-enrichment. This notorious nabob’s connection with the Castle? His son acquired it (by marriage) in the early nineteenth century.

Try asking for a guidebook for the Castle in Welsh as I did during my visit, and you will receive a response from the National Trust staff that is as replete with scorn and derision as it is unproductive.

There is no doubting for which nation’s benefit this property is being preserved by the National Trust. For the fellow-countrymen of Robert Clive, son of Market Drayton, and squire of Esher in Surrey.

As noted above, Scotland’s heritage under the custodianship of the National Trust for Scotland is managed by a board of trustees elected by the Scottish membership of the NTS. The guiding principle by which the NTS carries out its mandate is expressed as follows:-

“Scotland’s rich cultural heritage is not only an invaluable economic and social resource, it is what gives Scotland’s people a sense of belonging and identity; as such it is one of our nation’s most precious assets.” Read it for yourself.

How much longer do we have to wait in Wales for our own extraordinary historical, architectural, cultural and environmental heritage to be preserved, managed and presented by an organization answerable to our nation, and properly equipped and informed to fulfil its mandate for the benefit of our nation?

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Jac adds . . .

I agree with everything our guest writer says, and I would go further, adding that a nation with the interpretation of its past entrusted to those with an interest in effacing all memory of that past is as good a definition of colonialism as I can think of.

Some reading this might argue, ‘Ah! but don’t forget, we have Cadw‘. Really! Cadw is little more than English Heritage (West). And then we have the regional archaeological trusts, staffed with third-rate English diggers and their teams of willing young female volunteers, always looking for evidence of Anglo-Saxon settlement.

Returning to the National Trust, it’s not simply what it currently owns that angers me but its perennial acquisitiveness. I’m thinking now of the regular appeals for money to buy a Snowdonia farm – in case someone buys it, packs it up, and takes it home with them? Think about it – we are expected to buy a piece of our homeland for an English organisation! (Yes, that’s another definition of colonialism, and of stupidity on the part of those Welsh who fall for it.)

It is almost twenty years since we voted for devolution, and little if anything has changed in the fundamental relationship between Wales and England. The English National Trust is proof of that. At the very least we need something comparable to the National Trust for Scotland, if only as a stop-gap measure.

This nation should have no trust in the English National Trust or any similar body.

Regular readers might remember that I mentioned Powis Castle in a piece I wrote back in 2012 on nearby Dolforwyn. Here’s a link.

UPDATE 22.08.2016: The page from the Cadw website shown above was very quickly removed. I copied and posted the image late on Sunday night and when I checked at 11am on Monday, there it was – gone!

Brexit, Wexit: Things Can Only Get Better!

On 27/06/201604/11/2017 By JacIn British Nationalism, Cardiff, English Nationalism, European Union, Ukip, Welsh Government, Welsh Labour, Welsh Language, Welsh Media, Welsh Nationalism106 Comments

THE REFERENDUM RESULT

In my previous post I set out my reasons for voting to leave the European Union. I didn’t think I’d be on the winning side, but there you are.

On Thursday night I’d planned to watch the results programme for a bit and then head to bed around midnight. My expectations of defeat seemed to have been met with the announcement of a substantial rise in the value of the pound and bookies telling us that one of the horses in this race was en route to the knackers yard. It wasn’t long before Nigel Farage conceded defeat.

But then a different mood began to take hold as news filtered through that pollsters, bookies and other self-appointed interpreters of the public mood might have got it wrong. For it seemed that up in north east England, in Newcastle, and Sunderland, the unwashed were in revolt. Then the results started to arrive.

Newcastle, where the Remain campaign had expected a substantial majority, was 50 / 50. (Were they blaming the EU for the Toon getting relegated?) Then came Sunderland, where Leave achieved 61.3%. (But the Black Cats escaped relegation!) Some pundit reminded us that Sunderland has a big Nissan car plant, located there to access the European market, so why were people voting Leave. Cue for much tut-tutting and superior mutterings about voters being ‘uninformed’ (i.e. stupid). It wasn’t long before Nigel Farage ‘unconceded’, and had a celebratory pint.

As more results became known a picture emerged suggesting that results could be predicted with near-certainty by checking an area’s indicators of wealth – poor areas were voting to Leave, rich areas voting to Remain. There were of course exceptions, such as Liverpool (58.2% Remain), a result some attributed to the pro-Leave Sun newspaper being boycotted in that city. This may have played a part, but let’s not overlook the fact that Liverpool has received billions in EU funding, perhaps more than the Valleys. What’s more, in Liverpool people can see what the funding has been spent on, and by and large they approve.

Perhaps the divide in England was summed up with this article in the Guardian by John Harris headed, ‘If you’ve got money, you vote in . . . if you haven’t got money, you vote out’. The picture in Wales was almost identical; and yet, just a few short months ago Plaid Cymru was hoping for a substantial Remain majority to contrast Wales with England. (Making me wonder yet again what ‘Wales’ this lot claims to be the party of.)

During the night itself, the voice that stood out for me was that of John Mann, the MP for Bassetlaw in north Nottinghamshire (to the east of Sheffield). Mann made it clear that the referendum had been largely won for Leave by Labour voters in the ‘forgotten’ post-industrial regions of England (and Wales) of which the metropolitan elite knows little and cares less.

A few others also saw the true picture, but these were a minority. I found this article from the Guardian by Mike Carter compelling, it details a meandering walk from Liverpool to London.

The picture in Scotland was the one we’d expected. Even so, it was strange to hear English Remain supporters blame the SNP for not getting enough of its support out, which – it was argued – might have swung the whole UK result. The claim seemed to be that because everyone knew which way Scotland would vote, many Scots Remain supporters stayed at home. In Glasgow, the largest authority, the turnout was just 56.2% (66.6% Remain), whereas in the September 2014 independence referendum the turnout was 75% (53.5% Yes).

In the North of Ireland the picture was rather more difficult to interpret because the two Unionist parties followed different courses. The Democratic Unionist Party (the party of the late Rev Dr Ian Paisley) urged its supporters to vote Leave, while the Official Unionist Party favoured Remain. Both Sinn Féin and the Social Democratic and Labour Party wanted to Remain. And of course, hovering over any political debate in that part of the world is the wider consideration of relations with Britain and the Republic of Ireland.

The result for the whole of the Six Counties was 55.8% Remain, telling us that many Unionists voted with nationalists and Republicans to stay in the EU. Though it’s unlikely that many of them would allow their referendum vote to be seen as support for a re-unified Ireland, which seems to be how Sinn Féin is choosing to interpret the result. Yet almost everyone views the return of a visible, patrolled border with the Republic as a dangerously retrograde step.

REACTIONS AND FALL-OUT

The chaos that has ensued is being attributed to a number of factors, with ‘uncharted waters’ being among the favoured analogies, and not just with those of a nautical bent. Of course it’s true; no one has ever been in this situation before so no one is quite sure what happens next. Certainly our politicians seem to be lost.

Though it’s significant that those who led the Brexit campaign – Farage excepted – seem to be backtracking. Strange behaviour for victors. They remind me of a gang of young tearaways who went to start a fire in their school but didn’t mean to burn the whole place down.

We can now divide the Brexiters into two camps (as indeed they split themselves during the referendum campaign). First, we have those who want to disengage from the EU but regard ‘losing’ Scotland and Ireland as too high a price to pay, hence the backtracking. These can be regarded as BritNats. While on the other hand we have those who want to go the whole hog and have an England independent of the EU, independent of Scotland and Wales, independent of just about everybody and everything. We could be unkind, but let’s call these the EngNats. They include the twat in this article who believes that Catholic Croatia is not part of Europe.

But what really struck me about the reporting of the referendum and its result was the uncomprehending anger of London commentators, luvvies and others who know less about the lives of people in Sunderland and Swansea than I do about yak herders on the Eurasian steppe. ‘How could they be so stupid?’ was their cry.

The BBC – wedded to the US-NATO-EU line I wrote of in my previous post – didn’t actually call those who voted Leave ‘stupid racist bastards’ . . . it was marginally more nuanced. Perfectly illustrated with the picture below for an article on the BBC website.

Some of course did not hold back. Among the more offensive Remainers I encountered was a John Niven; apparently he’s a Scottish writer now living in some Buckinghamshire slum. I can’t say I’ve read anything he’s written, and I certainly haven’t troubled Amazon since reading this asshole’s tweets.

The message from infuriated Remainers was consistently offensive, insulting and intimidating. This is the liberal elite at its worst – still feeling superior but angry and confused because its collective will has been thwarted by the untermensch. Summed up rather well by his article by Brendan O’Neill in the Spectator, The howl against democracy.

The ironies and paradoxes abound. Here we have a group that has for months demonised and belittled others as bigots, yet if poor whites qualified as a minority then the commentariat would be equally guilty of bigotry!

When the BBC wasn’t telling us that ~~thick bastards~~ non-graduates voted for Brexit, it was consulting opinion among groups thoroughly representative of the population. One such group was those attending the Glastonbury Festival, an event covered to an excessive degree by the Beeb. Unsurprisingly, the sons and daughters of the Corporation’s bigwigs and their friends were simply ‘devastated’ at the referendum result.

Just put yourself in the position of a single mother on hearing those views, perhaps a young woman bringing up two or three kids on a sink estate or a flat above a moneylender on a decaying High Street in a forgotten town. Will they make her regret voting Leave? No, but I’ll tell you what it will do, it’ll make her feel angry, hearing people who have so much, and can look forward to so much more, condemning her for her desperation.

Yet another example of hypocrisy. For while the liberal elite and the Leftists accuse those who voted Brexit of causing divisions it is they, who largely control the media, with their patronising bullshit about stupid poor people racists, that risks turning social divisions into yawning chasms.

Another popular theme was that of the young being deprived of their futures by selfish old gits. The Wasting Mule got in on the act with this piece from its Saturday edition. Dan Baker is nineteen years of age and studying in Paris. He believes that we who voted Leave have “succumbed to ignorance”. But then, Dan is 19, and knows everything.

So there you are – you’re stupid and racist for voting Leave, while the ‘more mature’ among us are thoroughly bloody selfish for not dying off pronto, as we would if we really cared about Dan and other deprived youths.

As in England, the insults were flying here too. One my attention was drawn to was a comment from an Englishman making a living out of covering Wales with wind turbines. (This link to his LinkedIn profile no longer works as the page has been removed. Possibly connected with Smith being reported to South Wales Police for a Hate crime.) Not only does he think the country that gives him a living is a pimple on the buttock of his homeland but he also re-tweeted another insult about us deserving a Darwin Award, given for stupidity by the kind of smart-arses who are now lashing out in all directions.

UPDATE 29.06.2016: Around 6pm on the 28th this appeared on Smith’s Twitter account.

I’ll conclude this section with another piece that appeared in the Mule, this one by regular columnist Carolyn Hitt. Now in the past I might have been a little unkind to Carolyn Hitt, lumping her with Jason ‘Jase’ Mohammad and the other bollocks-spouting muppets in our very own Cardiff bubble.

Carolyn Hitt wanted to tell us that she grew up in the Rhondda, an area that attracted migrants from all over, and that the referendum result had “shaken to the core” her “sense of self as a Welsh person”. Serious stuff. But then she goes and blows it all by arguing that in voting to leave the European Union “the majority of Welsh voters threw in their lot ideologically with Middle England”.

‘Middle England’, be buggered! Middle England voted to Remain. The kindest thing I can suggest is that Ms Hitt had not checked the map, or the results, before rushing into print.

THE POLITICAL CONSEQUENCES

Since the referendum result became known the UK has been in a state of political chaos. the only politician who seems to know what she’s about and what she wants is Scottish National Party leader Nicola Sturgeon.

Prime Minister Cameron stood down soon after the result was known and now there’ll be an election to choose his successor as Tory leader. As the new leader will lack a mandate he or she will almost certainly call a general election. The original hope seems to have been that this could be done at a leisurely pace without interfering too much with everyone’s summer holidays, but pressure from the EU seems to have speeded up the process and the new leader is expected to be in place by September 2nd. Boris Johnson is the front-runner, with Theresa May as the ‘Block Boris’ candidate.

We’ve always known that the Conservative Party in Westminster is split on Europe, but what this referendum exposed is how detached from its traditional support the irredeemably metropolitan Labour Party has now become. Made obvious by the fact that those areas that voted most heavily to Leave are areas where Labour has dominated for decades.

Now the prospect of a general election before the year’s out has concentrated Labour MPs’ minds and they have turned on their hapless leader Jeremy Corbyn who, they believe, could never win an election . . . which would of course result in many Labour careerists losing their seats. The problem is that while Corbyn may lack support among MPs he has the backing of party activists, many of whom are Leftist agitators and activists who took over the Labour Party around a year ago to elect him leader.

So we have the Labour Party itself split between members and representatives, with a third element being the Labour voters who chose to leave the EU last Thursday against the advice of the party. These disillusioned voters have no truck with the comrades and little faith in the MPs. Consequently, the Labour Party is in one hell of a mess – and I haven’t even mentioned Scotland, where the Labour Party, for so long dominant, is almost dead and buried.

The picture is different in London, where the vote to stay in the EU was 59.9%. This can be explained by greater wealth, the presence of the liberal elite / Leftist types who now control the Labour Party, plus of course large numbers of immigrants. London may have provided good news for the pro-EU campaigners but it also tells us how divided England has become.

Here in Wales, Cardiff, which has long sought mini London status, grabbing all the goodies for itself, achieved that ambition last Thursday when 60% of its voters chose to Remain against a national figure of just 47.5%. Two capitals unrepresentative of the countries that support them.

The vote in Wales so outraged the youth of Cardiff that ~~many thousands~~ a few dozen were persuaded to take part in a ludicrous march on the Notional Assembly, among their demands were a second referendum (and a third if that was lost), tattoos on the NHS, and votes for foetuses (possibly eggs). Though I didn’t spot Dan Baker among them. Perhaps the poor boy is in his Paris garret drowning his sense of betrayal with glass after glass of pastis.

It only remains to discuss Plaid Cymru. When the full horror of the defeat dawned on the party leadership the immediate response from leader Leanne Wood was to propose a Labour-Plaid coalition. A response typical of those for whom Plaid Cymru is an alternative socialist party rather than a nationalist party. This suggestion was quickly dropped as opposition from within the party mounted.

Though on the weekend immediately following the referendum, when we might have expected the Plaid Cymru leadership to be monitoring and debating a constantly changing situation and planning ahead, Leanne Wood and Jill Evans MEP, were attending a two-day feminist event in Cardiff, and there were other Plaid wimmin there as well.

The latest news seems to be that Plaid is belatedly trying to emulate the Scottish National Party, but it may be too late. I say that because the SNP has for years been appealing directly to the Scottish people, in direct competition with the Labour Party, to the point where it was eventually able to supplant Labour; whereas Plaid Cymru has farted about with Greens, ‘feminists’, and other cross-border ‘progressives’, only focusing on Labour and Wales when forced to do so at election times, and then, almost apologetically.

LOOKING AHEAD

There will be no clean break with the European Union, things will get very messy from now on, and for the obvious reasons. There may be no break at all.

Just about every pillar of the UK establishment supported the Remain campaign, and they won’t give up without a fight. (A fight most of us will not even realise is happening.) So we can expect increasing calls for a second referendum, perhaps after the general election. (It will be interesting to see what is in the manifestos.) And already we are being reminded that the referendum result is not binding, it was a ‘consultative’ exercise. With most MPs in favour of EU membership that opens up another route for the Remainers.

Even so, there will still be dangerous divisions and tensions between London and the rest of England, tensions that have been obvious for some time, prompting initiatives such as HS2 and talk of a ‘Northern Powerhouse‘, which as we know plans to absorb and assimilate northern Wales. Initiatives that might benefit Manchester, Liverpool, Newcastle and Leeds – all of which voted Remain (though only just in the case of Newcastle and Leeds) – but will do little for Hull, Plymouth, Carlisle, Peterborough, Barnsley, Isle of Wight, Stoke, Dagenham, Wolverhampton, Doncaster, Dartford, Blackpool and countless other smaller cities and towns that voted decisively Leave.

I have already dealt with the divide between England and Scotland. While UKIP and other EngNats might be resigned – even glad – to see Scotland go the BritNats will do all in their power to hang on to the country. So expect to hear promises of a ‘federal structure’ for Britain, which might – as with devolution – see Wales offered the same as Scotland to avoid showing fear of the SNP.

It seems that politics in Englandandwales – as in the USA and continental Europe – is moving to the Right. For few of those who voted Remain did so for the noble and altruistic reasons the metropolitan elite and the commentariat ascribe to themselves – most voted to stay in the EU out of perceived self-interest. City traders in their Cotswold retreats who voted Remain and former steel workers in Ebbw Vale who voted Leave were driven by a very similar impulse.

The next general election could be a choice between the English Centre Right and the English Extreme Right, BritNats and EngNats. Scotland will of course be insulated by the SNP and slowly extricating herself from this threatening mess (perhaps helped by the EU). Wales’ defence however will be limited to a rump Labour Party made up of careerists and mediocrities, a temporarily resurgent Hard Left, and Plaid Cymru. Which is really no defence at all.

So I say, yes, by all means capitalise on the current chaos, but what Wales really needs is a national movement promoting independence for the right reasons, rather than some ad hoc alliance formed in reaction to Brexit that will fall apart once the threat passes. A national movement unconcerned with the views of metropolitan ‘progressives’ and concentrating solely on defending and promoting Welsh interests.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ END ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Ukip Uniting Wales?

On 23/02/201623/02/2016 By JacIn Colonisation of Wales, Demographics, English Nationalism, Plaid Cymru, Ukip, Welsh Labour131 Comments

Last Saturday night, whilst yet again sacrificing my sobriety for the Argentine economy – a very nice Viñalba Patagonia Sauvignon-Merlot – I rummaged through the various images and tables I’ve compiled over the years and came across one I decided was worth putting out again, on Twitter. It was very well received. (Possibly because I can’t be sure I’ve ever used it before.)

In fact, it took wings. At the time of posting it’s up to 7,444 Impressions, 1,230 Total engagements, 720 Media engagements, etc., etc. Must be one of the most popular tweets I’ve put out. Anyway, those who missed it can see it below (click to enlarge). It takes various statistics from the 2011 Census and locates them on a map of the 22 local authorities.

Some of the feedback I got tried to link the large numbers of English people resident in certain areas with the increase in support for Ukip. In fact, this seems to be a common explanation for the rise of Ukip in Wales, used by nationalists and even those of a more British orientation. In this interpretation, Ukip is another form of English nationalism, just a bit less virulent and less openly racist than the British National Party.

Yet I knew this couldn’t be true because of the support for Ukip in the Valleys, at both the May 2014 European elections and the 2015 UK general election. But even so I thought it might be worth going back to the 2011 Census to compile a table showing the various factors that might prove / disprove this theory, or otherwise explain what’s happening.

Before unveiling the new table you can remind yourselves of the 2014 Euro election results with the table below that I produced at the time (click to enlarge), the results of the 2015 UK general election are here, and an analysis can be found in my review of that contest here.

The statistics I’ve used to compile the new table are, first, the different labels people chose to use when identifying themselves in terms of nationality; then, whether born in Wales or England, and finally, the Ukip vote in the 2014 Euro elections.

It had to be done this way because the Census stats are given by local authority area, with the Euro vote available by the same divisions. The 2015 UK general election results were of course given by constituency, and while most constituencies can be grouped within local government boundaries there are some that straddle council borders, one being Carmarthen West and South Pembrokeshire, which makes aligning constituencies with council areas very difficult.

Even so, the pattern is consistent. Those areas that gave support to Ukip in 2014 also gave support in 2015, though at roughly half the 2014 level in percentage terms, 13.6% against 27.6%. (Also worth bearing in mind is that the turnout for the Euros was 32% and for the 2015 general election 65%.) This was entirely predictable, more noteworthy, and a better guide to the increasing level of support, was that the Ukip vote went up from 2.4% in the 2010 general election to 13.6% in 2015.

As I started collecting the figures and adding them to the new table, it soon became apparent that there isn’t a single answer to explain the rise of Ukip in Wales – there are two!

First, and as I suggested above, in the Valleys authorities, with their small percentages of English residents, most Ukip support must come from people who identified in the 2011 Census as ‘Welsh Only’. (The same can be said to some extent of the cities.) Which might be seen as holing below the waterline the idea that Ukip is nothing more than an English nationalist party, or at least suggesting that other factors are at work in the urban areas of the south.

Yet the more rural areas do tend to support the ‘English nationalist’ interpretation, especially in the north. Travelling along the coast from west to east we see that Ukip topped the polls in 2014 in Conwy (with 30.2%), Denbighshire (27.0%), and Flintshire (32.7%). Given the makeup of the population in this region it is entirely reasonable to assume that the majority of Ukip’s support comes from those identifying as English or British, with most of these born in England.

Elsewhere we find results that may have been shaped by other factors. For example, Ukip’s relatively low vote in Ceredigion (20.2%) can perhaps be attributed to indigenes and academe combining to reject M. Farage. The same factors may have been at work in Gwynedd, where Ukip saw it’s worst result (19.8%). Perhaps the Welsh language also played a part. Back in the north east, it has been suggested that the Wrexham figure (32.4%) was influenced by the large numbers of EU migrants in the town.

Others may see pointers I’ve missed, or simply choose to come to different conclusions. But we can be sure that a party that gained the same 30.2 per cent in areas as diverse as Conwy and Blaenau Gwent is in one sense a national party, and in another sense, a party appealing to two different constituencies in the same country.

If I wanted to be provocative (though as you know it’s not in my nature) I could argue that Ukip is the only truly national party in Wales. That Ukip is the only party with support across the country, from golf club Blimps on the Costa Geriatrica to the helpless and the hopeless in the Heads of the Valleys.

Who’s to blame for this? Obviously Plaid Cymru. First, for lacking the balls to oppose the colonisation of our rural areas. Second, for being so utterly insipid, so ‘Let’s-cwtch-up-to-Labour’, that the party has no appeal for thousands upon thousands of people in the south who are pissed off with Labour and seeking another party to vote for.

That these desperate people, these ‘Welsh Only’ identifiers, have found Ukip more attractive than Plaid Cymru says more than words could ever say, and everything you need to know about Plaid Cymru.

Maybe for next Christmas some enterprising and politically astute manufacturer of novelties will have crackers containing the puzzler:

Q: Who is responsible for the popularity in Wales of the English nationalist Ukip?

A: The ‘Welsh nationalist’ Plaid Cymru!

Next time you hear a Plaidista get on their high horse and adopt a tone of moral superiority vis-à-vis Ukip, trying to tell us what a parcel of rogues they are, remind them who created this monster.

Thoughts on Election Day 2015

On 07/05/201510/05/2015 By JacIn English Nationalism, Plaid Cymru, Scotland43 Comments

I have, reluctantly, voted for Plaid Cymru. I did so because I want to show my support for the Scottish National Party and its mission to destroy this increasingly ugly construct called the Union. A ‘Union’ that was never anything other than England’s mini-empire in these islands but which, in recent decades, has corrupted further into a fiefdom of the City of London that now treats large parts of England herself as backward provinces to be ruled over by those who know best.

I made this decision because even though my views on Plaid Cymru have not changed since writing Plaid Cymru: Ninety Wasted Years this election is all about Scotland and maintaining the Union. Why else would we be hearing of the possibility of a Conservative-Labour coalition? Why else would the tabloids be running front pages in their Scottish editions that simper, ‘WE LOVE YOU, PLEASE STAY!’ while their editions south of the border pander to English nationalism with ‘FUCK OFF YOU SCOTCH BASTARDS!!!!’ (Maybe I exaggerate slightly.)

The reasoning that led me to vote Plaid today was summed up in a tweet I put out earlier, and the sentence with which I ended that tweet can be explained thus. Plaid Cymru contains many ‘pragmatists’, and others whose loyalty to Wales I question. These people will lose sight of the bigger picture to accept a few more crumbs, and at the back of their minds will be the possibility of again serving as Labour’s little helper after next year’s Assembly elections. If crumbs and coalitions come into play then it could transpire that Plaid Cymru will do the dirty on the SNP.

Why do I say that this election is all about Scotland? Well, to begin with, tell me what’s happening anywhere else that isn’t influenced by what’s happening in Scotland. Or just ask yourself, why is Labour unlikely to win a majority? It’s because of the seats it’s predicted to lose in Scotland to the SNP. Why are we even talking of a Conservative-Labour coalition of National Unity? it’s because of the threat posed to ‘national’ unity by the SNP. And of course the fact that these traditional enemies are contemplating coalition tells us that there are no longer any ideological differences between them, preserving the Union is the only game in town.

After being in Scotland last September for the independence referendum I wrote a few posts on Scotland, and in Beginning of the End on September 23rd, I wrote, “Scottish independence is guaranteed within a decade, and it probably won’t need a referendum“. Nothing has happened since to make me change my mind. We are entering the most turbulent period in the constitutional history of the United Kingdom since the partition of Ireland in 1920. The next few years will witness the slow, possibly messy, unravelling of the Union, and it will come about because of what is happening in Scotland . . . and the reaction to it in England, and not just from the politicians.

I am confident that five years from now we Welsh will be living under a very different constitutional settlement. How different that settlement is will depend on many factors, not least how Plaid Cymru plays its hand. To lose sight of the bigger picture, or to suffer a loss of nerve, would be catastrophic. Yes, to some extent Plaid Cymru must ride the SNP’s coat-tails, but the next few years will offer the chance of establishing a system in Wales that finally serves Welsh interests.

To throw all that away for crumbs and coalitions, and not to hold out for the bigger prize – as I fear Plaid Cymru will do – tells our masters that we Welsh, as ever, will settle for less, and they will treat us accordingly. So my message to Plaid Cymru is . . .

STICK WITH THE SNP! BREAK THE UNION!

UPDATE 08.05.2015: The election results from Scotland, with the SNP winning 56 out of 59 seats, means that constitutional change is now inevitable. The problem for us is that the abysmal failure of Plaid Cymru might mean that many in London will conclude that Wales is ‘safe’. The best hope may be that the new Tory government makes an issue of ‘reforming how the UK is run’ (including ‘English votes for English laws’) to avoid being seen as capitulating to the SNP.

Who Killed Gabor Sarkozy?

On 20/04/201506/06/2015 By JacIn Colonisation of Wales, English Nationalism, Social Housing26 Comments

The previous post, about the disgraceful attack on Plaid Cymru’s Ceredigion candidate Mike Parker by the Cambrian News was, fundamentally, about unsavoury people moving to rural Wales to escape England’s multi-racial towns and cities.

Some fourteen years ago, in a magazine article, Parker did no more than put in writing what everybody already knew – rural Wales has become the destination of choice for many white flighters who, once they have no ‘darkies’ to hyperventilate them, turn their anglocentric focus onto us Welsh. Though of course their contempt is often dressed up as opposition to ‘nationalism’ . . . an argument undermined by white flighters attacking any expression of Welsh identity as ‘nationalism’. Those being discussed here tend to be middle class, and will usually have bought a property in Wales.

There is of course another kind of influx, one I myself have dealt with more than once. I’m talking now of criminals and undesirables of all kinds, moved to Wales by some agency or charity, and as those in this group can rarely afford to buy a house, or are under some kind of ‘supervision’, they tend to find accommodation with only-in-it-for-the-money housing associations and irresponsible private landlords. This is very lucrative because extra payments await those open-hearted enough to take in ‘vulnerable’ people (i.e. those given to criminal activity) who are being ~~dumped a long way away~~ given a fresh start. A number of such specimens were brought to the attention of a wider public in my posting Neighbours From Hell of June 2013.

But you mustn’t imagine that there are just two, discrete groupings, because there are all sorts of overlaps, giving us, for example, middle class criminals, working class racists, and those who manage to endear themselves to the host community by being both racist and criminal. It’s right to make this clear because those I shall be writing about from now on are most definitely racist and criminal.

*

My attention was drawn to this category by a comment made by ‘Brychan’ to my previous post. In the comment Brychan reminded me of the murder in October 2011 of Gabor Sarkozy, a Hungarian national working as a takeaway delivery driver on the north coast. Sarkozy was kicked to death by James Siree (alternatively Si’Ree), 22, and his uncle Gary Bland, 42. It was the callous and brutal murder of a hard-working family man by two drunken thugs. When I read the reports of the trial, and once I saw that they lived in Rhyl – that favourite dumping ground for England’s undesirables – I wondered about their backgrounds, though I must have been busy with other things because I didn’t do any checks at the time. ‘Brychan’ did, and I’m thankful to him for putting me on the trail of these scumbags.

Siree is the son of Ian Si’Ree, and lived with his father on Vale Road in Rhyl. When police investigating the murder searched the Si’Ree home they found images on the father’s computer that clearly suggested an interest in under-age girls. He was prosecuted and the case came to court but he escaped quite lightly because, according to Judge Niclas Parry, he had “no convictions for anything similar”. Si’Ree may have had no convictions for that type of offence there had certainly been accusations, as this 2001 report from the Bradford Telegraph & Argus makes clear. This report from the same source, a month later, tells us that Si’Ree has upped sticks from Bradford, but does not tell us where he’s gone.

So we have Si’Ree Snr, the paedophile, Siree Jnr and his uncle the murderers, and then, to give us the expected hat-trick, we learn that the family are also fascists, with Ian Si’Ree actually standing for the BNP at council level (in 2008), Westminster level (2010), and for the Welsh Assembly (2011). Though if this is his Facebook page then he now calls himself Ian John. If I’m wrong, then there is an Ian John living in Rhyl who went to school in Bradford and has photos of James Siree on his Facebook page.

*

What is the system at work here, a system that brings scumbags like the Sirees and Bland to Wales, a system now so obvious that there can be no point it denying its existence? Who is in control of this system, how does it operate, and who in Wales is facilitating it? For the answers to these questions I am indebted, again, to ‘Brychan’, this time for directing me to the Ministry of Justice and its various departments dealing with offenders. You can read what he told me (copied from an e-mail) here.

We have a system that seeks to remove offenders, or persons under investigation, from the immediate area of the alleged offence, and also to resettle those leaving prison. Such requirements would not cause Wales undue problems were it not for the fact that, as ‘Brychan’ puts it, “A housing authority in England can say ‘no thanks we’re full’, even to Her Majesty’s Courts and Tribunal Service, but in Wales the housing legislation gives priority to offenders”. The fact that this loophole has not been closed tells me that this legislation was no oversight, it exists for the purpose it serves. Obviously some areas will suffer more than others.

Though we mustn’t pile all the blame for this problem on social housing providers, for private landlords also play a big role. In a town like Rhyl, that has outlived its raison d’être, decline results in many redundant buildings, making it inevitable that ‘investors’ will move in knowing they can maximise their investments by capitalising on the social residue of England’s cities. The same thing is happening in similar communities; I have reported previously on problems in Llanelli; it’s a big – but largely unreported – issue in Blaenau Ffestiniog at the moment; and it’s happening in the Valleys. In fact, any community in Wales with irresponsible housing associations or large numbers of cheap private dwellings for sale risks having offenders, problem families, deviants and misfits dumped on it.

So we understand the mechanics of this phenomenon, but that doesn’t explain why no one speaks out against it.

*

Why don’t the police complain about having a regular influx of criminals from outside their force areas, resulting in more work for forces we are constantly told are ‘over-stretched’? Probably two reasons; first, they can hardly complain against the government department that controls police forces in Englandandwales, and second, they probably get financially compensated.

Social housing providers don’t regard this system as an imposition because they get paid handsomely for taking in offenders and ‘difficult’ tenants, that they will persuade themselves are ‘victims’ of something or other – ‘the system’ a cruel world, global warming – and then wash their hands of the suffering and misery their tenants inflict on the wider community. Private landlords share the same attitude towards high-return offender-tenants. Media outlets and politicians in Wales turn a blind eye because to raise the issue risks allegations of being ‘racist’, or worse, ‘anti-English’. An incredible insight into social and political attitudes prevailing in Wales.

I say this because in other societies there are taboos against using the ‘N word’ and other offensive epithets, but here in Wales it’s the ‘E word’. Using the term ‘English’ runs the risk of attack from media and politicians. To the point where no one must be described as English in a negative context. If Charlie Smith, recently dumped in Barmouth, rapes his 80-year-old neighbour, or is caught selling drugs outside school gates, then Charlie is without nationality . . . but if he rescues a drowning pooch then Charlie will be restored to his Anglo-Saxon patrimony, a true son of Alfred and Harold.

*

Clearly, in answer to the question used as the title for this piece, Gabor Sarkozy was killed by James Siree and Gary Bland. But in the wider sense, Gabor Sarkozy was the victim of the system I’ve described. There are countless other victims, such as the old woman killed in Rhyl for £25 as she made a cup of tea for Wolverhampton murderer George Johnson, and the children raped in Carmarthenshire by the paedophile gang from London re-housed in Wales.

The terrible irony is that this system of exploiting Wales for the benefit of England has been made easier by devolution. In a pre-devolution system with the same law in England and Wales offenders and problem tenants would be spread around in the social housing system (though the problem of private landlords in Rhyl and elsewhere would remain), but different legislation in Wales – supposedly introduced for the benefit of Wales! – has made worse the problem described in this report.

We have a system of sham devolution making it possible for civil servants in Wales – answering to London – to introduce ‘Welsh’ legislation for the benefit of England. Which makes the current system of ‘devolution’ both indefensible and unsustainable. Either we revert to the pre-devolution system of the same laws for Wales and England or we move forward to give Wales real power, but this latter option can only work when we have politicians and civil servants dedicated to putting Welsh interests first. At present, we lack both.

There is no point in politicians continuing to posture and play silly games, going down to Cardiff docks and deluding themselves that they are doing anything useful when in fact the country is run by civil servants serving England’s interests, giving us a system of faux devolution that results in people being murdered, and children raped, a system over which these puffed-up buffoons have no control, and lack the balls to demand control.

Until there is far-reaching change in the relationship between Wales and England the system responsible for the killing of Gabor Sarkozy is guaranteed to claim many more victims.

The Poppy as a Fig Leaf and Other Observations

On 27/11/201427/11/2014 By JacIn British Nationalism, Corruption, English Nationalism31 Comments

Last Thursday found me entertaining visitors from the USA in Rhuthun, a pleasant town I’m rather fond of, where I was amazed to see a few people still wearing poppies. Even stranger, there were large poppies fixed to lamp-posts! (This, remember, was November 20th.) This reminded me that the of wearing of poppies may originally have honoured The Glorious Dead, but nowadays the poppy is used to relentlessly promote British unity and patriotism. Understandable, I suppose, for social cohesion is always desirable, but the growing economic disparities defeat that object, leaving the poppy exposed as a fig leaf behind which a corrupt and increasingly reviled elite seeks to hide.

A political elite supported by a media that is looked upon by the rest of the world’s journalists with a mixture of awe and revulsion. Led of course by the BBC, the State mouthpiece that played such a prominent role in seeing off the threat of Scottish independence in September. Following behind is the print media, those newspapers that have hacked phones, paid bent coppers, etc., then denied doing anything wrong before – after being exposed – arguing that everything they did was in the public interest.

As I say, events in Scotland have played a big part in influencing the recent behaviour of the UK media and the output of the ‘entertainment industry’. In the final year of the Labour – Lib Dem coalition in the Scottish Parliament (to May 3, 2007) there were just 25 separate programmes that had ‘Britain’ or ‘British’ in the title. Between January 2013 and January 2014, with the SNP in power and the independence referendum looming, the number of ‘Britain’ / ‘British’ programmes had risen to 516! Yet we are supposed to believe that the threatening political situation in Scotland had nothing whatever to do with this upsurge in patriotic productions south of the border. Read more about it here.

This discredited elite and loathsome media also promote ‘Remembrance’ with a considerable degree of coercion, one only has to watch television in the weeks leading up to November 11th to realise that no one is allowed to appear on UK television without a poppy. The poppy must appear everywhere, from footballers’ shirts to newspaper front pages. (There’s something rather odd about seeing German and Argentine Premier League footballers with a poppy on their shirts.) The only Premiership player I’ve seen with the courage to refuse was James McClean, when with Sunderland (now with Championship side Wigan). Something else I’ve noticed is that the commemoration of ‘Armistice Day’ now seems to start around mid-September.

I make that observation because when I was a boy people would wear poppies on November 11th (or the Sunday nearest to that date), these were then either placed on graves or left on the mantlepiece, perhaps for next year; but now, like Christmas, the whole thing starts earlier every year. And just as sybarites of your acquaintance insist they wouldn’t really bother with all the over-eating and getting steaming drunk “if it was’t for the kids’, so the sinister and discredited elements I’m referring to want us to believe that the poppy cult is motivated solely by respect for The Fallen. I say cult because that’s what it has become. If anyone doubts what I’m saying, then just recall the Tower of London display this year and the crowds turning up to worship at the ‘shrine’.

Stepping back from that exercise in overkill we can see the bigger picture and the poppy cult as just one tactic in a wider strategy. For with the unity of Britain beset by threats as diverse as the SNP and jihadism, yet with nothing in modern Britain able to serve as the focus for a unifying loyalty, a discredited establishment is forced to employ the past, and to exploit those beyond all criticism. (The wisdom of which is questionable, given that those who died on the Western Front can be seen as victims of the same discredited establishment.)

Of course, this promotion of an unquestioning patriotism that tolerates no criticism has its risks. Such as encouraging those on the uglier fringes of English / British nationalism into believing that this State-sponsored nationalism shows approval of their stance on various issues – not least immigration – which then results in the kind of behaviour we saw in George Square, Glasgow the day after the independence referendum. By waving Union flags on every conceivable occasion, by making endless programmes with ‘Britain’ or ‘British’ in the title, the British elite and its media encourage the extreme Right to think its beliefs are being endorsed or gaining acceptance. Which leads on to another problem.

For many of these SuperBrits are Nazis, and admire the army that killed so many British soldiers. I have never quite understood the reasoning at work here, does the English extreme Right think Britain should have made common cause with the Nazis in World War Two, maybe fought alongside them against the Russians? It’s obvious there are many who see no contradiction in being a Nazi and a British patriot, as we saw in George Square, with people bawling out Land of Hope and Glory before yelling Sieg Heil! This confusion probably explains the nutter who gave a Nazi salute at the Remembrance Day service in Wrecsam. He may genuinely have believed that a Nazi salute is an acceptable way to show respect for Britain’s war dead. Think about that.

This ‘confusion’ presents a dilemma for our masters. Because I believe there are sinister forces within the establishment who think that in a shit-hitting-the-fan scenario, with Muslim neighbourhoods becoming no-go areas, Scotland declaring independence, social unrest among the English underclass, the thugs of the BNP and Britain First, Rangers fans and assorted other misfits would make ideal foot-soldiers, so we mustn’t be too hard on them. But it’s playing with fire.

Another problem for the British establishment presented by White Van Dan and his ilk is that while the Unionist elite desperately seeks ways to defeat Scottish nationalism, to combat the alienation of ethnic and religious minorities, and hold the UK together, the English Right is circling the wagons. It wants as little as possible to do with foreigners of any description or complexion, and the ‘scrounging’ Celts can also sod off if they so wish. How far can the British Unionist establishment go in appeasing those who want nothing less than an English England, and are as ready to see Britain dismembered as any Scottish nationalist? It’s a circle that cannot be squared without convincing English nationalists that Scotland and Wales are little more than subject territories, with the predictable consequences . . . in Scotland, anyway.

This dilemma almost certainly explains the swift removal from the shadow cabinet of Emily Thornberry last week. You may recall that during the Rochester and Strood by-election (won by Ukip) Ms Thornberry tweeted a photograph (shown above) with the caption, ‘Image from Rochester’. She was accused, among other things, of being “snobbish”. It would be difficult to prove in any court of law what Ms Thornberry meant by that tweet, it all depends on what you read into it, but Mrs Thornberry’s party leader, and the media, decided she had insulted the patriotic English working class and so she had to go. A curious decision for a political party that no longer understands the working class; but then, with Ukip on the rise Ed Miliband must pretend he’s a soul-mate to car dealer and cage fighter Dan. Incidentally, Dan says he put up the flags for the World Cup and just forgot to take them down. Reminder: England started packing their bags to come home on June 24th.

Something that must be ignored by the establishment is that The Glorious Dead of previous generations were prepared to die for a country they loved and an establishment they believed – despite a few black sheep – was basically honest and doing its best for the country. They even believed what they read in their newspapers, and heard on the ‘wireless’. None of this applies today, which is why so many people are searching for political, religious and other alternatives, and why the poppy has become a fig leaf behind which a discredited elite tries to hide its obvious and multiple failings. And when it’s not poppy time then it’s sport, or royal weddings / pregnancies, or any other Great British Bollocks.

Britain today displays many of the features associated with civilisations in a state of terminal decline. The imperial family is not respected as once it was, too many have brought on it shame and ridicule. Few pay any attention to organised religion, other than ‘subversive’ faiths from the farther reaches of the empire. The political elite is distrusted as never before, perceived by the masses to be liars interested only in lining their own pockets. The money-lenders are crooks and the merchant class avoids paying taxes. With the result that the gulf between rich and poor grows year on year. The capital still prospers while provincial cities decline, and one of the more important provinces threatens to break away altogether. The masses grow restless and look to new leaders, back-slapping populists who can be found in the taverns and the wine shops. These are clearly dangerous times for the established order, so it must pretend to listen to the masses, promise to be strong against the foreigner, provide bread and circuses, while recalling the days of glory and urging the restless masses to be more like their unquestioningly loyal fathers.

That paragraph could have been about the decline and fall of imperial Rome (or France just before its Revolution) but I am of course writing about modern Britain, and I didn’t need to make up anything. As we know, things turned out badly for Rome and they’ll turn out badly for Britain’s discredited elite. The Britain I grew up in is disappearing before my eyes, and as with Rome, the collapse is not due to the barbarians at the gates (or indeed within the walls), it is due entirely to a corrupted, self-serving elite having become divorced from, and contemptuous of, the great majority of the population (though there’s some irony in the Daily Mail reminding us of this). This situation can persist only until enough of the ruled realise the true nature of those ruling them. We have almost reached that point.

The more one looks at modern, shyster-run Britain, with its never-ending scandals that must result in splurges of ever more contrived and unconvincing calls to patriotism, the more we should appreciate Dr. Johnson’s prescience in making the constantly re-forged link between patriotism and scoundrels.

And what of Wales? There will be those who argue that everything is fine, relax! chill out! while others will tell us we can all be rich and happy by replacing the incumbent shysters with a different crew of shysters. Of course we can. Others may pretend that devolution will save us. Well, we’ve had fifteen years of devolution and unless you’re a property developer in Cardiff or a Third Sector grant-grabber then you haven’t seen any benefits. Next year could give us a coalition government with the Tories linking up with the friendly face of fascism. Isn’t that something to look forward to? Wake up, the only hope for Wales is to start disentangling itself from the disaster unfolding before our eyes. That disaster is England.

I would readily honour the memory of those who lost their lives in combat if doing so hadn’t become politicised by those for whom I have no respect. Perhaps Wales should have a different poppy, one to honour the dead without being associated with those seeking to exploit the dead.

Miscellany: MEWN, Oxbridge, Nathan Gill

On 19/06/201421/06/2014 By JacIn English Nationalism, Swansea, Third Sector, Welsh Labour15 Comments

MEWN: ANOTHER THIRD SECTOR EMBARRASSMENT FOR ‘WELSH’ LABOUR

Another Swansea-based ethnic minorities charity is being investigated by police. This one is Mewn, the Minority Ethnic Womens Network. Funded mainly by EU money dished out by the Welsh European Funding Office (WEFO) this charity is now in liquidation. As it is a charity (No. 1082587) there are a number of documents available on the Charity Commission website. Where we learn, among other things, that the most recent accounts were received on May 6, 95 days late, and that the MEWN secretary is Yvonne Jardine, a Labour councillor in Swansea. UPDATE JUNE 20: Within 24 hours of the original post I learnt that another Labour councillor, Erika Kirchner, resigned as director on May 6. Lucky Erika! Not there when the excrement came into contact with the air-circulatory appliance! Update ends. In fact, there seems to have been a rather curious relationship altogether between the Labour council in Swansea and MEWN.

For example, and I quote now from a document issued by Swansea council: “MEWN have had their Payroll run through the Council for a number of years. The arrangement is that the Council pays their staff through our Payroll system, and MEWN reimburse the Council. Therefore due to MEWN going into administration the Council is now one of the Creditors.” How common is such an arrangement? MEWN is also registered with Companies House, Number 03965481. From a ‘Welsh’ Government letter to AMs we learn that MEWN was gazetted on June 16th, but there is no word on who initiated the liquidation.

One entry in the accounts that caught my eye was the piece about staff costs (panel, click to enlarge). You will see that between 2012 and 2013 staff costs increased from £129,479 to £235,570. I suppose this massive increase in workload is attributable to the Swansea race riots and the subsequent pogroms (which went largely unreported outside the city).

UPDATE JUNE 20: Things are becoming a little clearer, though no clearer on what exactly happened to bring about the downfall of MEWN Swansea. What I’ve now learnt is that until last year there was another outfit, based in Cardiff, called Minority Ethnic Womens Network Cymru (Mewn Cymru) which operated “throughout Wales” . . . as did, according to the Charity Commission, the Swansea-based outfit. Were they in competition?

According to the Companies House website (click on panel to enlarge), the Cardiff crew was dissolved on January 14 this year. But it was in reasonable financial health so I assume that what happened was that someone pointed out that having two organisations with the same name, doing the same work, was a pretty obvious example of the kind of duplication for which the Third Sector is rightly condemned, and so some time last year the two merged. This would account for the increase in staff and associated costs of MEWN Swansea. Update ends.

The fate of MEWN will inevitably bring back memories of AWEMA, another Swansea-based, Labour-linked outfit in the business of ~~milking EU funding~~ promoting ethnic minorities. It may be worth starting the long trawl through what I’ve written on AWEMA from this post of November 2012, which mentions MEWN. I should warn you that these posts come from my old Google blog, and may be incomplete due to Google denying me access to transfer them to my new blog.

I earlier mentioned Councillor Yvonne Jardine, a Labour councillor for Morriston. Councillor Jardine is a BME activist of Afro-Caribbean origin, and yet another Labour councillor with no local roots. I have written many times about Swansea’s non-local Labour Party councillors . . . the Scouse leader (and his wife); the students; the English ex-MP Trotskyite and his Austrian wife; the West Brom fan with responsibility for the Swans’ Liberty Stadium, and many others. (Just type ‘Swansea council’ into Search at the top of the sidebar.) There will come a time in the not-too-distant future, when the veterans of the genuinely local Labour Party, Byron Owen, Robert Francis Davies et al, will have retired and Swansea Labour Party will be just a weird and dangerous collection of drifters, chancers, political opportunists, entryists, kids fresh out of college and single-issue nutters – running a city they know nothing about! My city!

I tell you, boys and girls, the Labour Party in Wales is an empty shell waiting to be cracked. It cannot find local candidates in Swansea and other areas; it relies for votes on folk memory and convincing the stupid that everything wrong with Wales is the fault of the Tories; many of its heartland seats almost went to Ukip in the recent Euro elections . . . all we need to crack the shell is a nationalist party more loyal to Wales than some laughable belief in socialist solidarity . . . or environmental agendas . . . or keeping Wales GM free . . . or sucking up to the metropolitan left-liberal-Green ‘consensus’ . . . In other words, a party nothing like Plaid Cymru.

THE OXBRIDGE CHIMERA

(No, that is not a statue of Huw Lewis at Oxford or Cambridge. That’s just how it came out in the still from the BBC clip)

I see that another non-issue has been revived by the ‘Welsh’ media and the ‘Welsh’ Labour Party (in many respects, one and the same). This time it’s the national shame of so few Welsh youngsters going to Oxford and Cambridge. Read all about it here in this load of bollocks on the BBC Wales website telling us that Paul Murphy MP and one-time Secretary of State to Wales was appointed our ‘Oxbridge Ambassador’ by the ‘Welsh’ Government. Did you know Wales has an Oxbridge ambassador? Nor me. Sad, isn’t it; really sad.

What we have here is yet another example of what Labour does so well – telling us that ‘Everything’s better in England’. (Which of course it is, with Labour running Wales.) Designed to make us see everything English as superior . . . thereby making anyone wanting to put distance between Wales and England a complete fool. In order to amplify this blatantly political message the ‘Welsh’ Government is prepared to subsidise a brain drain while ignoring 99% of Welsh youngsters. It reminds me of my schooldays, when the headmasters of certain local schools were in competition to see who could get the most pupils to Oxbridge every year, as if the rest of their charges were unimportant. God knows I’m no socialist, but there was something distasteful about that back in the ’60s, and ‘Welsh’ Labour promoting the same exclusivity today is equally distasteful. Shame on you!

Here’s an alternative strategy. Improve the higher education sector in Wales; start promoting quality rather than quantity. Treat our universities as places to educate the future of the nation rather than businesses, making loot from piling high third-rate English students and flogging degrees in Asia to anyone with the requisite folding.

NATHAN GILL MEP

Unless you’ve been asleep for the past few weeks you will be aware that our new Ukip MEP has been making the news. (Scroll down to recent posts.) This publicity has generated much interest and prompted a few people to start their own enquiries, I’m glad to say.

Among these is someone who was as intrigued as I was by Gill’s company, Burgill Ltd, having a planning application approved by Hull city council on May 6, 2009 when the company’s petition for liquidation was heard on November 26 the previous year, and the liquidation registered by Companies House on February 12. He suspects laws may have been broken if a) Hull city council was not informed that Burgill had been liquidated or b) if someone was still trading with a liquidated company.

Another mystery for which I would appreciate clarification is the fire on November 5, 2001 (also reported in the posts below). The fire – described by my informant as “suspicious” – was at the disused (possibly converted) Plane Street Methodist Church off Anlaby Road in west Hull. The Hull Daily Mail account describes Nathan Gill as having responsibility for the building in his capacity as “general manager of Kingston Care, based in Holderness Road, east Hull”.

There was certainly a company called Kingston Care extant at that time, but based in York, not Hull. It was in the business of providing ‘lodgings’, and seems to have been run, from their home, by a middle-aged couple named Morris with no other business involvement. Which is odd, because people with a bent for business usually have more than one company to their name; some fail, some succeed. Kingston Care had liabilities of £211,938 in September 2001 which had reduced to just £4,981.00 by August 30, 2002. An insurance pay-out, perhaps?

There cannot be two companies with the same name trading at any one time. So Nathan Gill was either working for the middle-aged couple in York, or else Kingston Care was his (or his family’s) company and the Morrises were allowing themselves to be used as a front. What’s the story?

Nathan Gill: The Biblical Backstory

On 15/06/201407/03/2016 By JacIn English Nationalism, Ukip11 Comments

BOOK OF NATHAN

SYNOPSIS OF A LOST BOOK OF THE OLD TESTAMENT, RECENTLY DISCOVERED BY WANDERING BEDOUIN IN THE RUINS OF A COPTIC MONASTERY NEAR YSTRADGYNLAIS

FROM CHAPTER 1

And lo, it came to pass, when the daughter of the alderman waxed strong in the land, she who smote Argies and miners, those of a damp disposition and others who followed false prophets, that the patriarch Gill heard a voice in a dream saying, ‘Best go where you’re not known, lad’. Troubled by these words the patriarch asked, ‘But where shall I go, Lord?’ ‘Follow the setting sun into the land wherein dwell the Welshites’, spake the Lord, ‘for they are as thick as that which droppeth from a camel’s bum and will let anyone settle among them, no questions asked’.

So he and his wife (for unlike many of his Mormon creed, he had but one), forsook their dwelling in the city called Hull, in the land of Ing-er-lund, and prepared to journey into the wilderness. They took with them the fruit of their loins, prized among these was young Nathan, of whom we shall learn more anon. Though they gave away not their chattels and materialistic encumbrances, for of these and the shekels the Gillites were uncommon fond.

FROM CHAPTER 2

Arriving in the land of the Welshites they were stunned by both the beauty of the place and the gullibility of the people. Patriarch Gill saw there were many in need of the laying on of hands, so he became an homeopath, dispensing treatment to all who needed it . . . but especially women . . . and even more especially, those women who could be persuaded to disrobe. Yeah, verily, he was an horny old patriarch. Small wonder that he was condemned by the elders of the temple and thrown in a cell by the authorities.

Young Nathan, meanwhile, was growing into a man, of sorts. A faithful attendee at the temple (notwithstanding his father’s little difficulties) while being instructed in letters and figures by local wise men, and women, at the Coleg that is called Menai. But then, as he attained man’s estate, a voice spake unto him, ‘Go to Hull’, it said, ‘return to the land of your fathers and claim your patrimony’.

This perplexed young Nathan, for he knew not the voice. ‘Is that you, Lord?’ ‘Well, sort of . . . think of me as a rival network giving better service for your particular needs’. ‘What are you called?’ ‘I am known by many names, but you can call me the E O’. So Nathan forsook the land of the Welshites and travelled east to seek his fortune.

FROM CHAPTER 3

Upon arriving in Hull he laboured in the family business of offering succour to the halt and the lame, the wizened and the widows, for his parents had taught him there was lucre to be made from providing pallets for the aged. He soon betook himself a wife, and begat children, but this union ended badly, and in recriminations. (At this point the manuscript is damaged, but our experts are working to fill the lacunae.)

Nathan was next mentioned in ancient local texts when an abandoned holy place with which he was connected ‘caught on fire’, on the night that is called Guy Fawkes. ‘It was the act of wicked children’ spake the son of the patriarch, but others were less sure, and some suspicious souls even raised accusing fingers against Nathan himself.

FROM CHAPTER 4

Patriarch Gill, now bethought himself to send his son, and his daughters (for the patriarch had been married ere he knew Nathan’s mother) to a great land across the sea, wherein dwelt many of the Mormonites. There they were married to devout Mormonite spouses. After the wedding, and the celebrations, Nathan, together with his new wife, returned to Hull. His sisters also returned from these arranged marriages with their new husbands.

Soon after their arrival the E O conjured up a vision for Nathan. In this vision Nathan saw many strangers coming to his beloved Ing-er-lund, men of a strange race and a heathen faith (which made it acceptable to enslave them). These people, known as Polandites, could be employed tending to the wizened ones, and even greater wealth could be gained from also providing these Polandites with pallets (nothing too fancy, you understand).

FROM CHAPTER 5

And it came to pass that Nathan created the company known as Burgill. And it prospered. The Polandites tended to the crones and when their labours were over they returned to the straw pallets provided by Burgill. Nathan owned many tents, large and small, in the city of Hull, wherein the Polandites did dwell.

Though this harvesting of the Polandites was not without its problems. For the tax collectors came unto him saying, ‘Oi, we suspect that you are doing all your business in ready shekels, with little being entered on the parchment rolls kept by your scribe’. This vexed Nathan full sore, for he knew it to be true, but consoled himself with the knowledge that the tax collectors could prove nothing.

It was during this time of plenty – for Nathan, not the Polandites – that the E O came to him again, saying, ‘Listen, son, there’s another way you can do yourself a bit of good out of these Polandites’. ‘How so, E O?’ enquired Nathan. After a deep sigh, the E O spelled it out, ‘A lot of people are getting angry about all these Polandites and others coming to Ing-er-lund (blesséd be her name), so pretend to agree with them, tell them you’ll put a stop to it’. Nathan was delighted, ‘That’s brilliant . . . hypocritical, but brilliant’. ‘Of course’, continued the E O, ‘you’ll have to leave that shower you’re with now and join Ukip’.

FROM CHAPTER 6

And it came to pass that Nathan abandoned the sepulchre of the Toryites to become a follower of the prophet Nige. A loud and hearty fellow was Nige, much given to raucous laughter and wine, and very fond of the ladies (not unlike the patriarch Gill in the latter respect). Nathan was smitten with Nige and vowed to follow him all his days (or until one of them got banged up).

‘What is our message, O Nige, for the marketplace and the caravanserai, the highways and the alleyways, the taverns and the temples?’ ‘Simple, son, “Vote for us and we’ll stop the Polandites and all the rest coming over here taking your jobs”’. ‘But I have many Polandites in my service, Nige’. ‘Fear not, Nathan, for if anyone doth uncover thy little secret we can use it to prove thou art not racist, merely in favour of controlled immigration. Though as for the undeclared shekels you’ve trousered, you’re on your own there, my son’.

Whereupon the E O appeared unto Nathan and spake in this wise, ‘I knew you’d like the prophet Nige, think of him as my emissary on earth. And if it all goes pear-shaped for him, you can take over.’

FROM CHAPTER 7

And so it came to pass that after certain problems in his business dealings in the city of Hull Nathan returned, with his new family, to the land of the Welshites. There, he began to preach at the people saying, ‘Vote for me, lest the land of the Welshites become deluged with strangers’. ‘Too right!’ they responded, especially those who had, like Nathan, come from Ing-er-lund!

Nathan proved unelectable among those who knew him on the island where he dwelt, but in a different casting of ballots he gained many votes from those who knew naught of him. For the criers and the tellers of tales in the market place, those on whom the people relied for their news, failed to ask, ‘Who is this Nathan that comes among us asking that we heed him, and follow him?’

Nathan’s prize for victory in this ballot was being allowed to go to an far place that he claimed was the root of all evil – Eu-rope. There he was free to do more serious trousering of shekels, the ones that were called euros. And there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth among the Welshites, who cried, ‘If only we’d known then what we know now . .

* AMEN *

Nathan Gill: It Just Gets Worse

On 07/06/201407/03/2016 By JacIn English Nationalism, Ukip59 Comments

My previous post on Nathan Gill MEP is the most popular I’ve ever written. It even got taken up by the print media, or rather, it was cursorily written up by the Wasting Mule with that account then repeated by newspapers from the Independent to the Belfast Telegraph plus BBC Wales which, unintentionally no doubt, introduced humour with a quote from Peter Hain accusing Gill of “bare-faced hypocrisy” (when it comes to hypocrisy Mr Hain is a man who knows of what he speaks). Martin Shipton, who wrote the Mule account, focused solely on the contradiction inherent in Gill representing a party that is anti-immigration and anti-EU while employing workers from eastern Europe and the Phillipines. As if that were all there is to it. It’s not, there’s a lot more.

As might be expected, one ‘paper that got involved rather more enthusiastically was the Hull Daily Mail, through its reporter Angus Young. First with this, and then this. The second report is the more interesting for a number of reasons. First, it shows us a younger, fresh-faced Nathan Gill. Also because it tells of his (or someone’s) plans for Plane Street Methodist Church off Anlaby Road in west Hull. A report of the fire suffered by that building on November 5th 2001 can be found to the right (click to enlarge). The report quotes Gill as blaming the fire on kids with fireworks, but my informant describes the fire as being more “suspicious”, and says it followed the refusal of planning permission for the building.

In this report Gill is described as “general manager of Kingston Care, based on Holderness Road, east Hull”. Holderness Road we know well from my previous post; Gill had a number of properties there and it is also the location of a Mormon church, but Kingston Care is a new player in this farce. The only company I can find with such a name is based in York, and is in the business of the “provision of lodgings” (see below left). No member of the Gill family is mentioned among its directors. This company was finally struck off in November 2006. Could there have been two companies, operating at the same time, in the same area, with the same name? Seems unlikely. So was Gill working for Kingston Care?

The newspaper reports thus far have, without actually using the word, described Gill as a gangmaster, a term we more usually associate with those using east European labour in agriculture, or illegal Chinese immigrants for cockle-picking. He housed migrants who either worked in the Gill family business or else were contracted to Hull city council and other bodies. With the latter paying Gill £x to supply labour, and him paying those workers £x minus his cut, on top of which, he was getting paid rent by everyone living in his bunkhouses, almost certainly in cash. This recruitment of foreign labour is defended by Gill on the grounds that he couldn’t get local labour, though comments to the Hull Daily Mail articles question this claim.

My original informant made contact again yesterday, to tell me that Nathan Gill, together with his brothers-in-law, was operating migrant labour accommodation in other cities, Portsmouth and Plymouth were mentioned. The rents were collected, presumably in cash, by a “Polish Lithuanian” who was then – according to my informant – falsely accused of theft when money went ‘missing’ from Burgill Ltd. It is suggested that if this ‘rent-collector’ could be located, and was prepared to talk, then the potential for bean-spilling would be considerable. I was also told of Nathan Gill and his sister(s) being sent to the USA to marry approved Mormon spouses! Which, if true, would presumably mean that the brothers-in-law allegedly involved with Gill as gangmasters would be US citizens? And seeing as they are all Mormons, I have to ask again; was this Gill’s personal scam or a business venture to improve further the already healthy finances of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints? After all, they were exploiting Catholic Poles, little better than heathens in the eyes of Mormons.

This information, if true – and my informant has been very reliable up to now – means that Gill wasn’t just recruiting workers for care homes in Hull due to a shortage of local recruits, but was in the migrant labour business big time, as I say, a gangmaster. In fact, the exploitation of migrant labour, rather than care homes, may have been his – and the family’s – business. In which case the care homes could be viewed as a ‘front’. Enquiries now need to be made in Portsmouth and Plymouth to see if evidence can be found for Gill operating in these cities as he was in Hull.

Finally, just before posting I received another contribution, suggesting that what Gill had told the Wasting Mule, about Burgill Ltd sinking “when the HSBC ended its borrowing facility in the wake of the banking crisis”, may be untrue. My informant suggests that what really happened was that a creditor lost patience and filed for compulsory liquidation. Plausible, for Burgill was always run at a loss. Quite amazing, considering that it had two sizeable income streams: the Gill care home(s), Hull city council and other clients; then the rent from an unknown number of foreign workers. My guess is that Nathan Gill and his associates were making a lot of money from their activities but not all of it – perhaps very little – went through the Burgill accounts. This would explain the “skimming” allegations made by my informant and the suggested interest of the tax authorities. It may be worth going through the Burgill accounts with a fine-tooth comb.

Nathan Gill was employing people for whom he was also landlord. Anyone who crossed him risked losing both job and ‘home’, in a strange land, with whose language and customs they were unfamiliar. An arrangement owing more to the nineteenth century or the third world than twenty-first century England. This would have given him a very powerful hold over these unfortunate people.

*

This other informant earlier sent me news of doings on Anglesey, mainly concerning Michael Ronald Gill, Nathan Gill’s father. In 1988 Gill senior was sent down for indecent assault, with other charges of rape and buggery left on file. Gill Senior, after 20 years in the RAF, set himself up as a homeopath, with ‘consulting rooms’ in Llanerchymedd. There he hypnotised women, many of them Mormons, persuading them to take off their clothes, after which he ‘treated’ them. I can’t believe I’m writing this, but these women then paid him for his ‘services’. Anyway, read it for yourself, though I should say that the pages from the Holyhead & Anglesey Mail were sent to me as A3 photocopies, so the quality isn’t perfect, and page 2 is incomplete. But I’m sure you’ll get the gist of it.

All this tells us that Gill pere is, or was, over-sexed, but there are other nuggets in the report that should interest us more. Among these is the news that Michael Ronald Gill was expelled from the Mormons some five years earlier for “preaching false doctrine”, and left the Gaerwen congregation after “certain problems” . . . whatever these might have meant in practice, we have to assume that it did not mean ostracisation, seeing as Mormon women still sought out his homeopathic talents. Elsewhere in the newspaper report, a representative of Bangor Rape Crisis Line is quoted as saying: “In the past he (Gill) has already served 18 months for theft . . . “. So what was that about? Was the crime committed back in Hull, or after the Gills decided to inflict themselves on Wales?

I am grateful to Cneifiwr for drawing my attention to this amazing coincidence. Here we have two Englishmen, with the same surname, of roughly the same age, moving to western Wales and practising very similar scams in order to satisfy their sexual perversions. A truly amazing coincidence. Are they related? (I had picked up on this Carmarthenshire case earlier, and covered it in my Neighbours From Hell post, but failed to remember it when writing about Nathan Gill and his father.)

My overseas contributor also drew my attention to this news item from October 2011. Used tyres were being illegally stored and sorted at an address in Menai Bridge before being exported to Ghana. A search warrant was executed for an address in Llangefni. Now, think hard, who do we know living in Menai Bridge, with a very close family member living in Llangefni? Anyone tempted to dismiss this as yet another example of Jack the Lad behaviour should ponder that imported worn tyres is one of the biggest causes of deaths on Ghana’s roads. This was no victimless crime.

Despite all that, I would not have brought up the now elderly Ronald Gill’s crimes were it not for two things. First, Nathan Gill himself, more than once, entertains us with talk of “the family business”, which means he was a business associate of his ‘homeopath’ father. Second, Ronald Gill became a shareholder in Burgill Ltd.

*

From what I know of the Gills, I wouldn’t trust them to run a burger van. They come across as a dishonest, dysfunctional and rather odd crowd. I can’t help thinking that, if they’d been poor, then the social workers would have been in there when the father was sent down in 1988. But despite everything, they managed to put over a mirage of pious, middle class respectablity which we now know was a deceit. But shouldn’t we have known this earlier, before the European elections of May 22nd?

If we refer back to my May 15 post, Wales Euro Elections 2014: Runners & Riders we see 44 candidates representing 11 parties standing for the 4 seats. Most can be dismissed as no-hopers (and that includes the Liberal Democrats), which leaves us with the top candidates of five parties. The No 1 candidates for Labour, Conservative and Plaid Cymru were all seeking re-election, they were known, as were many of the others. The only unknown quantity guaranteed to be elected was Nathan Gill. He should have been the focus of the election coverage – Who is he? What do we know about him? The Welsh media made no such enquiries.

I am convinced that if what we know now had been known to the electorate before the election then Ukip would have got many fewer votes. It might not be stretching things too far to say that the Welsh media, or the lack of one, could be largely responsible for Wales being lumbered with Nathan Gill.

Nathan Gill, Ukip MEP, Another Dishonest Politician?

On 02/06/201412/04/2016 By JacIn Corruption, English Nationalism, Ukip90 Comments

Evidence has come to light suggesting that one of our recently elected tribunes may have been less than honest with us. (Well, with you, actually, because I don’t believe in any of the buggers.) I appreciate that the very thought of an untruthful politician may be a shock to some of the more delicate among you, so I can only suggest you gird up your loins, grit your teeth, and perform any other contortions that might help you endure what follows.

As the title of this post informs you, the politician in question is Nathan Gill, the Ukip candidate elected on May 22 to the European Parliament. Now Mr Gill looks a presentable forty-years-old man; happily married with five beautiful children, a dutiful son and a successful businessman to boot. It can be guaranteed that he gained the votes of many women, especially those of a certain age. That’s the JFK factor, exploited, since Dallas and the arrival of wall-to-wall television and social media, by Clinton, Blair, Obama, Cameron, and many other politicians in the English-speaking world. With the predictable corollary that those who fail the JFK test often suffer politically: Richard Nixon, Michael Howard, Gordon Brown et al. Lies may have forced Nixon from the White House but liars who pass the test are more likely to escape, or at least delay, retribution. This worshiping of the photogenic is yet another example of the superficiality of the Anglo-Saxon world today, the victory of style over substance. But I digress . . .

There are three specific areas in which Mr Gill was less than honest with the electors of Wales. The first two can be dealt with fairly quickly, but the third is a little more involved, so you’ll need to pay attention. It might also help you understand this post if you could refer back to an earlier post, Nathan Gill, Ukip No 1 in Wales; I would suggest keeping that earlier post open in a different window (or browser) so you can refer to it when necessary. (Here’s the link to the Ukip website from which the information came), with the bio panel from the site below.

NATHAN GILL, MORMON

People tell me that on other election literature produced by Ukip there were references to Gill being a ‘Christian’, which is unlikely to alarm anyone, but the Ukip election leaflet delivered to my house went straight in the bin, so I don’t know what it said. This was partly due to my views on English supremacism and partly a reaction to some of the insulting rubbish put out by Ukip in Wales. Whatever the leaflets may have said, none mentioned that Mr Gill is a Mormon. My belief is that few would have refused to vote for a ‘Christian’, but many would have been less ready to vote for someone belonging to one of the more exotic varieties of Christianity such as the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (LDS).

Seeing as Mr Gill is a Mormon, what is his attitude to gays and same-sex relationships? Come to that, what does he think of the kind of heterosexual relationships enjoyed by that pork swordsman, legendary drinker, and all round sybarite, Nigel Farage? Does he really see his party leader as ‘a bit of a lad’, Everyman re-born for the twenty-first century, or a sinner bound for Hell?

The fact is, we should have been told that Nathan Gill is a Mormon. We were not. The information was deliberately withheld. That was dishonest.

NATHAN GILL, PROFESSIONAL POLITICIAN

Ukip makes great play on the claim that they, unlike the ‘established’ (and discredited) political parties, are not made up of ‘professional politicians’ but of ordinary people who’ve just had enough of the professional political class. There’s no doubt that this plays well with an electorate that now puts politicians on a par with sellers of ‘pre-loved’ automobiles, and vendors of dwellings whose descriptions bear no reality to their true condition.

This situation is alleged to have come about due to young people studying politics, then working as assistants or advisors to politicians, before going on to become tribunes themselves. This process, it is alleged, divorces its practitioners from ‘real life’ and the concerns of ‘real people’, for whom Ukip of course speaks. It’s a message that resonates and, unlike most of Ukip’s messages, this one is based in truth.

In the address I used in the earlier post (right) Mr Gill first says, “From an early age I have been interested in politics . . . “, before telling us that he resigned from the Conservative Party to join Ukip in 2005. But then, confusingly, he proudly and emphatically states, “I am not a career politician”. Which is it? Maybe if we ask what he was doing prior to his election it might help. Ah, yes, he was working as assistant to his predecessor as Ukip MEP, John Bufton. So he’s a professional politician just like those his party vilifies. Another question mark against Nathan Gill’s honesty.

NATHAN GILL, BUSINESSMAN

In the earlier post I mentioned a number of business ventures with which Gill and his family had been, or still are, involved. One was Burgill Ltd, compulsorily wound up in February 2009 with debts of some £116,000. This was involved in the letting of property, Incorporated with Companies House on St. Patrick’s Day 2004. The directors at Incorporation, each having one share, were Nathan Gill and his mother; with Gill’s address given as 51 Park Road, Sproatley, Hull, East Yorkshire, England, and his mother living at a house in Bryan (sic) Aethwy, Menai Bridge, Anglesey, England (sic). The proposed Registered Office was in Scarborough, North Yorkshire, with the Agent in Preston, Lancashire.

I was unable to get much more information on Burgill at the time I wrote the earlier post, and felt disinclined to pay for documents from Companies House. That all changed late on Thursday night when I received a strange comment (since removed) to the post, some of which I can paraphrase here: “Nathan Gill . . . Burgill . . . migrants mainly from Poland . . . housed 46 people in one very large house on Holderness Road, Hull, 6 bunk beds per room . . . a perfect candidate for Ukip?” It would have been easy to dismiss this comment as coming from someone with a grudge against Gill or an anti-Ukip agenda, but when I made further enquiries things began to look less far-fetched.

Below you’ll find a series of documents linked to Burgill Ltd bought from Companies House. In chronological order, they are: 1/ Certificate of Incorporation (17 March, 2004); 2/ Debenture referring to mortgage taken out by Burgill (13 June, 2005); 3/ Annual Return (March 17, 2008) which now has the Registered Office in Llangefni, Nathan Gill living at a different address in the town, and his father having joined as a shareholder (Anglesey has now relocated from England to Gwynedd. Still wrong, but an improvement.); 4/ Details of the winding-up (12 February, 2009); 5/ the Current Appointments Report I downloaded on Friday May 30, which confirms the compulsory liquidation, tells us the accounts are long overdue, and reminds us that Burgill’s business was “Letting of own property”. (If they don’t show, then click here.)

Further enquiries revealed more information on Burgill and Nathan Gill which ties in with the mysterious comment sent to my blog. For example, trawling the internet I came across this piece which locates Burgill Ltd at 778 Holderness Road in Hull. More digging unearthed information about a planning application from Burgill, to Hull city council, for a new detached dwelling close to 709 Holderness Road. Also on Holderness Road, at 443, is a care home which seems to have been Gill’s parents’ business. Incorporated on March 27, 2001 it traded as the Pink Panther Resource Centre until it changed its name in March 2003 to Gill Enterprises Yorkshire Ltd, though now based in Menai Bridge. The attraction of Holderness Road may be explained by the fact that a Mormon church is located on this thoroughfare. No. 778 is almost directly opposite the church, across the dual carriageway of the A165 Holderness Road. (Click to enlarge aerial view below.)

UPDATE JUNE 3: I now learn there was yet another property on Holderness Road, this one No. 711 (also known as ‘Tower Grange’). This is the most likely candidate to be “the very large house on Holderness Road, Hull, 6 bunk beds per room . . . ” mentioned in the comment to the earlier post on Gill. According to my informant this substantial building was sold to another company, by Burgill Ltd, with planning permission for a two-storey extension of nine two-bedroom and five one-bedroom ‘apartments’, which would tie in with this document. Though Gill’s original planning application was for a three-storey extension of eleven two-bedroom ‘apartments’ and five one-bed. (This may also be relevant.) Elsewhere in that city with which we are becoming familiar, you may recall that on the Certificate of Incorporation for Burgill Ltd Gill’s address is given as 51 Park Road, Sproatley (a commuter village to the north east of the city). Well, I’m told that Gill “had four Polish guys living there and he never declared the cash”.

In what they say will be their last communication, my informant also refers to a church – presumably in Hull – owned by Gill for which planning permission was refused . . . with the building subsequently suffering a “mysterious fire”. (Though I make no connection between the two.) After which a compulsory purchase order was issued by Hull city council. I fear that in Nathan Gill we could be dealing with a very naughty boy, a very naughty boy indeed (even by the standards of Ukip), and a man totally unfit to represent Wales in the European Parliament. As ever, I would be grateful for more information.

Mentioning the Mormons again makes me ask out loud a question that keeps nagging at me. In my experience many religious sects have a very unChristian regard for lucre. They seem not to have read about Jesus expelling the money changers from the Temple. So while this post is premissed on the assumption that Nathan Gill was in business for personal profit, what if Burgill Ltd was in reality being run on behalf of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints?

Returning to the planning application (details below) for a new detached dwelling close to 709 Holderness Road, this is dated 3 April, 2009, despite the petition to liquidate Burgill being presented and heard at Llangefni county court by district judge Jones-Evans on 26 November, 2008, and the company registered as liquidated by Companies House on 12 February 2009! So how can a company that to all intents and purposes has ceased to exist have a live planning application? I’m open to explanations.

Next stop was the DueDil website, which has yielded much information in the past, and came up with the goods again. The chart below gives a pretty good outline of the rise and fall of Burgill. It starts in March 2005 with the company having assets of some £230,000 – a property, maybe accounting for the mortgage referred to above? – with assets peaking at £405,525 on 30 March, 2006 (was another property bought?). Things changed little until March 2007, after which it was downhill all the way, with no recording of cash after that date. Suggesting (and I stress suggesting) that after March 2007 assets were sold to pay off liabilities, for these always exceeded assets, and the last entries tell us that by March 2008 Burgill Ltd had liabilities of £116,571 and assets of just £504.00.

So what was Burgill’s business? Did it involve, as my informant suggests, Polish migrant workers and bunk beds? That scenario is not so implausible. Due to its location on England’s east coast Hull has always traded with the Baltic and would have been a port of entry for people from that region when Poland and the three Baltic States joined the EU on May 1, 2004. (Remember, Burgill was Incorporated on March 17, 2004.) An enterprising young fellow, with local links, might see money to be made. What we know for certain is that Nathan Gill was involved in the property business in Hull during that period, so if not Polish migrants packed in like sardines, what type of business was he running?

At this point let me briefly mention other information received that refers to “sub-letting”, and the suggestion that what’s on paper may not be a true reflection of Burgill’s financial position, as Nathan Gill is alleged to be a man who likes to deal in cash . . . much of which is said to have gone missing as Burgill dived south . . . which set off alarm bells with the tax authorities. It is also alleged that ‘Bishop’ Gill had another wife, with whom he was involved in an acrimonious custody battle, and that – how can I put this? – imaginative means were employed allowing the cash-rich Mr Gill to claim legal aid. These are all serious allegations, and there may be more ready to surface.

Perhaps we should expect no better, for Ukip is a Ship of Fools, skippered by an arsehole and crewed by chancers and oddballs who regard probity, fidelity, and the better angels of our nature as irritants or obstacles to the satisfying of their baser instincts. They don’t much care about the destination of their craft – they signed on simply to enjoy the cruise and rake in the hated Euros. Far from being a break with a corrupt system Ukip is all the problems of modern politics magnified and made more repugnant. Nathan Gill adds another ingredient to the Ukip mix with his Mormon beliefs. Can we in future expect to see Ukip emulate the Tea Party in the USA by attracting Christian Fundamentalists and Evangelicals?

All this would be bad enough, but for a Welshman there is another consideration. Ukip is, as I mentioned earlier, an English supremacist party; it is the political voice of every social media bigot and internet troll who thinks we Welsh are an inferior people who would be ‘nothing without the English’, and that everything Welsh is, by definition, inferior to what England has to offer. The sort of swivel-eyed nutter, eaten up with hatred – often, it must be admitted, self-hatred – who will not be happy until every last vestige of Welshness is destroyed and Wales fully assimilated into England. It is scum like these that keep the Ship of Fools afloat in Wales.

I shall end this post by calling on Nathan Gill to, finally, be honest. Tell us why you withheld the information about being a Mormon, and how that faith influences your attitudes to contemporary issues. Why did you try to present yourself as a political virgin when you clearly are not? What exactly were (or are) your business interests in Hull with Burgill Ltd, and perhaps other companies; was it the exploitation of migrants from that place you hate so much – ‘Europe’? Finally, Nathan Gill, do you really think it’s wise to go to the European Parliament accompanied by so many skeletons, with others almost certain to emerge?

Trying to bluff it out will only make things worse, Mr Gill; I suggest you reconsider your position as an MEP.

Jac o' the North

Category: English Nationalism