Don’t worry, I won’t be looking at every incident we’ve witnessed in recent weeks, or dwelling on the insane sentences handed down for poking your tongue out at cops, or being a couple of streets away from a riot.
This post is made up of assorted observations and musings about the situation in the UK and elsewhere, particularly the USA. And while the different sections may not at first sight appear to link, believe me, they do. Taken together they help explain why we are where we are.
Well, that’s certainly what I think. But you’re free to form and express your own opinion. Because that’s how democracy should work.
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INTRODUCTION
We are witnessing a co-ordinated assault on the white working class. And so we need to ask why, for the first time ever, this group finds itself under attack from all sides.
Because in times past workers and peasants were defended by radicals, thinkers, certain churches, even poets. More recently they had political parties. But today, the white working class is not simply abandoned, it is openly reviled.
I’m old enough to remember a time when the working class was the ‘vanguard of the revolution’, extolled by the comrades and lauded by intellectuals. Horny-handed sons of toil who would lead us to the Promised Land, or the Sunlit Uplands (depending on which ticket you’d bought).
But a major ‘problem’ with members of the white working class always was that despite voting for socialist parties most were not socialist, let alone revolutionary. Most just wanted something better for themselves and their children.
I can confirm this from my own background and upbringing.
And as was discovered in a famous blind survey done in 1929 in Germany, even those who voted for socialist parties could switch to the right because they were socially conservative, believing in law and order, the family structure, and the homeland.
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Cracks appeared in the 1980s, with Margaret Thatcher in the UK and Ronald Reagan in the USA, both of whom enjoyed working class support. Then came flirtations with UKIP and the Brexit Party; the fall in trade union membership; before finally, and fatally, voting for Brexit in 2016.
In the same year, many of their blue collar cousins voted for Donald Trump. Making 2016 the watershed year, the final rupture between lower orders and an elite now being worked into frenzies by contrived ‘crises’.
Those the left had once revered were now redundant, in more senses than one.
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‘MY SELFISH GRAN!‘
One of the most revealing pieces in the wake of Brexit came from the BBC. I assumed some executive sent a crew down to interview his kids and their friends at Glastonbury. The video produced was a hoot.
One boy interviewed blamed his gran, “who’s going to probably die in the next couple of years“. No thought from the arrogant little sod that his gran, and her generation, have contributed their lives to the country they live in, and that gives them a say in the future, however little of it they see.
Another report from the BBC said that ‘non-graduates’ were more likely to have voted Leave. In other words, the futures of Arabella and her chums at ‘Glasto’ had been blighted by a bunch of thick bastards. How could the oiks be so selfish!
The reporting after Brexit, and then the Trump victory in November, got a little febrile. For some of our betters it really was the end of civilisation as they’d imagined it – people were no longer listening to them!
And it reeked of caste arrogance.
But as I say, doubts had been growing for some time about the trustworthiness of the white working class; 2016 merely confirmed the worst fears of the metropolitan elite.
It would have to be replaced. (The white working class not the metropolitan elite.)
And so it came to pass that the hard left and the metro elite (often difficult to tell apart) fell in with the Globalist plan to replace the ‘useless eaters’ with migrants from countries that might appear to be shit-holes, but had been thriving and prosperous democracies before the arrival of the (now increasingly vilified) white man.
Or so we’re expected to believe.
And so, to replace the white working class the left adopted minorities and migrants. But to ensure success they would need more minorities, and more migrants. That’s why today we have 69 genders, DEI, open borders, and ‘‘the global majority‘.
The last in that list is the latest variant of, ‘Let’s all gang up on Whitey!‘ It seems to believe a Chinese nuclear physicist will identify with George Floyd.
Naked racism. But so ‘progressive’.
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A BRIEF NOTE ON GLOBALISM
I’ve explained Globalism enough times on this blog, but for those who missed it, or weren’t paying attention, I’ll give a quick recap.
By Globalists I mean unaccountable corporations like BlackRock and Vanguard; equally unaccountable supranational bodies such as the EU Commission, the UN (and its many agencies); and multi-billionaires who fund far left politicians and public officials, who breed and release mosquitoes, or who manipulate the weather.
To the point where most national governments in the West are little more than the Globalists’ local management teams.
Those that reject Globalism will be isolated and attacked, traduced by the Globalist media. We’ve seen it with Trump, Farage, Milei, Le Pen, Meloni, Orban and many others, including Putin. The pattern is consistent and predictable.
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NOTHING NEW
Political leaders being just figureheads takes me back to the early ’60s, and a phrase that’s haunted me since then. It was something said by Lee Harvey Oswald in Dallas Police HQ.
To insistent reporters, he says, “I’m just a patsy“.
Let me make clear that I don’t dispute Lee Harvey Oswald was involved in the plot to assassinate John F Kennedy. But I believe that by the time that recording was made he’d twigged he was being sacrificed to draw attention away from others.
And so he was silenced, by a shady individual, originally from Chicago, and with strong Mafia ties, who just waltzed in off the street with a gun in his pocket.
I’m afraid that’s how the USA has been run for a long time. And deep state control worked fine under the uniparty system. Which is why Globalism could be viewed as the deep state’s uniparty model taken beyond the USA.
The deep state that has orchestrated regime changes, invasions, proxy wars, that have killed millions, and brought misery to many millions more.
Of course liberals and leftists oppose this behaviour.
Yet when the deep state / Globalists preach ‘diversity’ and ‘saving the planet’ the left can’t get their placards and paint out quick enough.
Are they really that stupid?
The Uniparty. (Though fitting that Jimmy Carter is slightly detached.) Click to open enlarged in separate tab
If Lee Harvey Oswald is ancient history to you, then remember Jeffrey Epstein, who could have destroyed many powerful people, perhaps the deep state itself . . . if he hadn’t conveniently suicided himself in 2019. Done in a high security facility that suddenly suffered malfunctioning CCTV cameras and absent guards.
Then, just last month, a strange young man was allowed to walk around a crowded field with a rifle, use a rangefinder to judge the distance to his target, put up a ladder, and crawl over a roof to fire shots at Donald Trump.
Everybody saw him – but nobody did anything until the shots had been fired. Then he too was killed before he could talk.
Shortly afterwards Joe Biden was told he’d resigned as figurehead president. (You didn’t think stumblin’, mumblin’ Joe was really in charge!)
So who do you think’s running the USA right now? I’ll tell you.
The same people who’ve been calling the shots for 60 years or more (apart from one recent interlude), and will continue to run the USA, and the West, if the votes can be rigged to get Harris elected.
Which neatly brings us up to the modern period.
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COVID, WORLD HEALTH ORGANISATION, DONALD TRUMP
Trump in the White House did not build the wall he’d promised, but neither were the floodgates opened (as would happen under his successor). However the deep state couldn’t risk him having a second term.
So let’s recall how things worked out.
The presidential election was scheduled for November 3, 2020. Covid was first reported in China – at a US-funded lab – in late 2019. The first case outside of China was reported in Thailand January 13, 2020.
The WHO is a UN agency. One that has increasingly – and largely thanks to Covid – taken on itself a role that it was never set up to fulfil. To the extent of over-ruling elected governments to enforce lockdowns, travel restrictions, and censorship.
For the WHO complements the political and economic agendas of the WEF and other Globalist organisations.
Things came to a head earlier this year with the WHO’s plan for a global pandemic treaty, which was rejected by a number of countries. There were many reservations about handing so much power to a body of unelected bureaucrats.
It may also have failed because it was rushed through. And if it was rushed through, then it could have been the prospect of Trump winning in November that explains the haste.
The events of 2016 proved that the white working class in the anglosphere was losing faith in its elites and the systems that sustained those elites.
Though in the UK, the political establishment tried to carry on very much as if Brexit had never happened. While still managing to blame (non-graduate) Brexit voters for just about anything that went wrong.
In the USA, the priority became stopping Donald Trump being re-elected in 2020. Which was successful, thanks to the ‘relaxations’ on the security of the voting process – justified by Covid!
Four years on the priority is again stopping Donald Trump.
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ELON MUSK TO THE RESCUE
Since the tragedy in Southport we’ve seen riots, ‘counter-protests’ (when there was no protest to counter), and the police and judiciary acting with unprecedented celerity and firmness.
Counter-protests in which everybody seemed to be carrying Socialist Workers Party placards. (An organisation many suspect is controlled by MI5.)
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With a few exceptions, those brought before the courts and sent to prison have been white and working class. Usually from communities in northern England suffering economic decline, that may also have known ‘grooming’ gangs.
A process defended by a media that long ago prostituted itself to the Globalist elite.
A media that tells you the countryside is ‘racist’, controlled by white men all of whose ancestors kept and brutalised slaves, and where cows are destroying the planet. It’s a fascist hell behind that hedgerow!
When minds are fucked up with crap like that it’s only a short step to marching with placards declaring, ‘Gays for Hamas’.
Which may explain why fewer and fewer of us bother with the established media. We get our news from the internet, and the most popular social media platform is Elon Musk”s X. Which is why it’s being targeted by the Globalists and their puppets.
Not just just because Musk allows free speech, but also because he plans to put tens of millions into the Trump campaign coffers. Additionally – though few seem to know – because he’s planning to launch a rival search engine to Google.
I’m a big fan of The Simpsons, recording episodes from Channel 4. I must have hundreds saved. Last Thursday, feet up on pouffe, I watched Series 26 Episode 21.
In which Bart gets bullied at the school dance. So mom Marge calls a town hall meeting that votes to outlaw bullying. And do you know what happens? People start accusing those they don’t like – of bullying. And the accused get arrested.
Every trivial little thing becomes ‘bullying’. For example, Homer accuses Apu at the Kwik-E-Mart of bullying because he put too much ice in Homer’s soda.
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Later, Homer sits on the couch with children Lisa and Bart watching more arrests on TV. Lisa sagely concludes, “The police are arresting basically anyone they want to.” Homer replies, “Lisa, you’ve got to learn to trust your government“.
Then he picks up a table lamp from alongside the couch and says into the lampshade – in an obvious attempt to convince whoever might be listening – “Which is what I do”.
Inevitably, Homer too is arrested, when the Flanders boys next door complain about him bullying their father. As he’s being ‘cuffed, Homer says, “Oh, I never dreamed that a law I had abused could be applied to me“.
Homer eventually has to crawl, literally, to beg Ned Flanders’ forgiveness, which is slow in coming. For the real punishment is publicly humiliating and neutering a ‘bully’.
There is a political message in this episode on a par with anything that used a more serious format to warn us of totalitarianism.
But if you still don’t get it . . . substitute for bullying ‘hate speech’, ‘disinformation’, ‘racism’, ‘misinformation’, ‘Islamophobia’.
And check your lampshades!
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CONCLUSION
I’ve referred throughout to the white working class, but what’s really at stake is the survival of the countries built by white people. What were once prosperous and stable democracies, now under attack from all sides.
On the one hand we have the Globalists, but we don’t see them, for they operate through their captured politicians. And at street and societal level, they work through pressure groups, NGOs, uncontrolled immigration, climate hysteria, and just about anything that can make the West ‘wobble’.
And of course the Globalists still have traditional media. Because when you control the narrative you can lie to your heart’s content, and call anyone who challenges you with the truth a ‘conspiracy theorist’, or a pusher of ‘misinformation’.
As we saw a few weeks ago.
When a misidentification of the Southport killer as a Muslim immigrant was quickly capitalised on to become Starmer’s Reichstag Fire moment.
1/ A silly mistake became ‘misinformation’, and was used to bring in a crackdown on social media that was surely already planned.
2/ The UK government and the media introduced ‘Islamophobia’ into the mix in order to further justify the crackdown. (And maybe future legislation.)
3/ Attributing the riots to the initial misidentification of the killer allowed the government to avoid the real cause of the riots – uncontrolled immigration.
Leaving us in a sort of stand-off.
For the time being, a disgruntled white working class has been cowed, but the cause of the anger cannot even be whispered, let alone addressed. Yet we know that when people are backed into a corner, frustrated and angry, they often lash out.
The onus is therefore on the UK government to defuse the situation by reaching out to its own people, to assure them they are not victims of a ‘two-tier’ system, and to at least listen to their concerns.
What they must not do is punch down harder on the white working class, or anyone else expressing dissent. Only dictatorships do that.
Let me start by explaining that the title does not refer to the sad buggers in forgotten communities who vote Labour out of force of habit, nor the careerists they vote for.
I’m dealing with those who bring city streets to a standstill waving terrorist flags and shouting anti-Semitic slogans. Antifa, BLM, and all the other representatives of grievance politics.
And the Quixotic beings forever battling ‘fascists’ and ‘transphobes’, ‘climate deniers’ and ‘Islamophobes’. Those who think the white man is genetically evil.
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IN THE BEGINNING
I’d considered writing something along these lines for a while, but the trigger for what you’re about to read was something that happened a week ago.
I put out a post on X that linked to Google maps to show the heat island around the Senedd, with nary a blade of grass to be seen near the building whose denizens want to plant trees everywhere . . . preferably on what today are working farms. It struck me as mildly hypocritical.
Among the responses was one from someone called Ben Wildsmith.
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He seemed to suggest that vegetation does not grow near the sea. Making the marram grass of my childhood summers in Port Eynon a false memory. The palms lining tropical beaches, and trees running down to more northern shorelines, must be equally imaginary.
So I got to wondering about Ben Wildsmith.
Let’s give some background for what’s coming. At the Trump assassination attempt one man died after shielding his wife and daughter from the shooter, His name was Corey Comperatore, aged 50, and he was a firefighter.
In one of those theatrical gestures that Americans seem to like, Donald Trump, at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, kissed the fire helmet of the dead man.
Which prompted Ben Wildsmith to put out this post on X. The message reads: ‘Yer Da kisses dead men’s helmets’.
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‘Yer Da’ is Scouse for ‘your father’, and the rest is a crude reference to a human penis. However you think about it, it’s distasteful. I mean, is it addressed to Trump’s children? Or is it something really, really clever that’ll be understood by leftist necrophiliacs?
That helmet belonged to a man who put his life on the line in the job he did, and then gave that life to save his wife and daughter. Doesn’t he deserve better?
Well, no – because he was a Trump supporter. That means he can be ‘othered’, and vilified. Because that’s how too many in the modern left think. Including the brainwashed young man who tried to kill Trump. And this nutter.
Reminding us that those who urge ‘tolerance’ are often the most dangerously intolerant.
They suffer a kind of tunnel vision; which is never a good thing, unless perhaps you’re in a tunnel. But as long as sufferers stick together, they see no problem.
Take the July 4 general election. There were people in Wales celebrating a Tory-free Wales as if that was going to make everything better. Of course it won’t; but these people are so fixated on the Conservatives being the source of all evil that they’re incapable of seeing the truth.
Wales has had 25 years of socialist rule from Corruption Bay and it’s been disastrous. But everything’s gonna be fine now – because we’ve got no Tory MPs!
‘Cleansing rain’! Wow! Click to open enlarged in separate tab
Ben Wildsmith was one of those rejoicing, in his Nation.Cymru column. Yes, Ben writes for that site funded by the ‘Welsh Government’. Ben also likes to think of himself as a poet and a musician.
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LOST
I believe the left in the Anglosphere started losing its way in the late 1970s. The answer to human misery was certainly losing ground in the UK then (partly due to over-reach), and this culminated in the Winter of Discontent.
Which helped Margaret Thatcher’s Conservatives get elected in May 1979. Her position was then strengthened by an unlikely combination of an Argentine military junta invading some islands nobody’d heard of, and the antics of the extreme left.
In the USA, Democrat Jimmy Carter won the presidency in 1976, but was not re-elected due to his administrations’s perceived weakness over the US hostages taken in Tehran. Republican Ronald Regan won the presidency in 1980, and was re-elected in 1984.
To cap it all, after years of obvious decline, but also thanks to a collapsing economy, and a costly and unpopular military intervention in Afghanistan, the Soviet Union started falling apart in 1988/89.
This was crucial, so it’s worth considering how the end of Soviet Communism affected politics in the West. Or certainly, this is how I see it.
On the one hand, the US military-industrial complex had grown rich and powerful by holding up the Soviet bloc as an existential threat.
But in his farewell address in January 1961, less than three years before his successor, John F Kennedy, was assassinated, outgoing president Dwight D Eisenhower, warned:
. . . guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence . . . by the military-industrial complex
With the Soviet empire gone, those Ike warned against were left almost without a raison d’etre.
But with China not yet powerful enough to be a credible replacement there was little alternative but to stick with Russia. The regime had changed, but post-Communist Russia still had all those nuclear warheads. And a space programme.
Which posed a problem for the left, because since 1917 many socialists in the West had looked to Russia for inspiration, even orders.
Remarkably, the left, traditionally critical of US foreign policy in Latin America, Vietnam and elsewhere, eventually fell in with military-industrial complex thinking.
This was achieved because many leftists began to regard the new Russia under Yeltsin, and then Putin, as a betrayal. And when Putin came all out for nation, church, family, tradition, the left turned on him.
When he banned gay marriage the comrades became apoplectic.
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Putin’s position on these matters also made him a target for the Globalists, who ridicule religion (but only Christianity), and seek to undermine the family unit, erase national differences, and destroy Western traditions.
This led to a fear among both Globalists and the military-industrial complex that the new Russia might serve as a dangerous example to the West. This became another reason to treat Russia as the enemy, and to villainise Putin.
And so it was full speed ahead to NATO encirclement of Russia, EU enlargement, the 2014 Kiev coup, provoke war in Ukraine and . . . I wonder what comes next?
Something else that must be understood about the collapse of the Soviet Union is that it killed off any lingering belief in the Communist economic model. It just didn’t work. Few saw that more clearly than the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
The lesson for ‘our’ socialists was that their war against the corrupt and evil West would need to take a different form. Which meant cultural Marxism; initially the relatively benign ‘political correctness’, with this softening-up process leading to the mind-numbing idiocies of Wokeism that followed.
Yet Russia in the early 1990s, with its vodka-loving president, and gangsters fighting over state assets, was a bit of a shambles. In the public mind it was not perceived as the same threat as its superpower predecessor.
Other ‘threats’ were needed as a supporting cast.
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FOUND
In the UK, the initial cleansing under leader Neil Kinnock wasn’t enough to win Labour the general elections of 1987 and 1992. A complete re-brand was needed, and it came with Tony Blair and New Labour which, after victory in 1997, stayed in power until 2010.
New Labour was a kind of Margaret Thatcher tribute band.
In the USA, the left seemed to be largely incorporated into the Democratic Party, and to some extent de-fanged.
The collapse and disintegration of the Soviet empire, and with it the removal of a unifying focus for Western concerns, was also a problem for supranational bodies that like to influence public perceptions and political decisions.
The answer they came up with was ‘global warming’, or ‘climate change’. This racket fulfils an almost identical role to the Cold War; because as well as focusing minds and frightening people, it’s used to dictate human behaviour, curb individual freedoms, and satisfy corporate greed.
And when it came to more immediate military ‘threats’, well there was a theatre company of sociopaths out there with dodgy moustaches . . . and oil. To raise the curtain, and stress the importance of oil, Saddam Hussein conveniently invaded Kuwait in August 1990. Less than a year after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
And as we soon learned from US and UK spokesmen, Saddam had Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD). People who knew that to be a lie were helped to commit ‘suicide’.
Perhaps Saddam felt encouraged to invade after the US had funded and armed his bloody war with Iran from 1980 to 1988. Done, not because the Americans had any liking for him, but because the Ayatollahs had deposed their Shah in 1979. And of course, as payback for the hostage crisis that so embarrassed the USA and brought down the peanut farmer from Georgia.
(Though rumours persist that certain US agencies dragged their feet over the hostages in order to make Carter look bad, and help former CIA boss George H W Bush get elected. What a thought!)
These forays into the lands of oil initially wrong-footed the left. Normally, the comrades would oppose Western powers invading countries over natural resources. But Saddam Hussein Al-Tikriti was a difficult bloke to defend.
So by 2010 the left is onside with the thinking of the military-industrial complex agenda, has bought into the Globalists’ climate scam, and is open to adopting any lunacy that can be deployed to challenge Western values and institutions.
With a Conservative government returned in 2010 the left felt it was time to flex its muscles again.
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RE-PURPOSED
In the USA, blue collar workers and southern whites had been switching to the Republicans for some time. And this continued under Obama.
While in the UK, many lower-paid workers had lost their fear of voting Tory with Margaret Thatcher, some moving to even more ‘exotic’ destinations on the right.
Which meant that Labour and Democrats needed to replace these lost voters. In the USA there was a push to register more voters from minority groups. But that took a dangerous turn when the left started arguing that to ask voters for ID was ‘racist’.
Now, in the run-up to the 2024 presidential election, we’ve seen Democrats demand that undocumented, illegal migrants be allowed to vote.
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The thinking behind this is pretty obvious.
The military-industrial complex may have taken shape to further US imperial ambitions and enrich US corporations, but it soon spread its influence to UK politics, and NATO.
Ban the bombers are afraid of a fight Peace hurts business and that ain’t right
At its simplest . . . corporate America gains from making the weapons for the military. The quicker the products are used, and replaced, then the bigger the profits.
But the military-industrial complex also profits from ‘rebuilding’ the countries wrecked by the weapons it’s produced.
This report from 2005 explains how Halliburton did it in Iraq. And with the fighting still taking its bloody toll along the Dnieper BlackRock and JPMorgan have been quick off the mark to set up a Ukraine Reconstruction Bank.
Should that happen, then WWW, or Radnorshire Wildlife Trust, or even Bute Energy, could throw you off your land, or out of your home – to save the planet.
When they’re not supporting the US military-industrial complex and the most corrupt country in Europe, the comrades are promoting the Globalist land grab agenda of Jamie Dimon and his buddies.
As I’ve said before, 2016 saw the process ratcheted up because, through Brexit and the election of Donald Trump, the lower orders had proven themselves to be both stupid and racist. The gloves were off.
Which is why we are where we are. And seeing the West so weak, socialists may think their time has finally come. But I believe their time has come, and gone.
The entitled, attention-seeking clowns, with their half-baked ideas, have become an embarrassment. Certainly Ed Miliband thinks so. The days of performance socialism may be coming to an end. People have had enough.
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FINISHED
Miliband is close to those hoping to benefit from net zero, carbon capture, and all the other elements of the climate scam. So he may not just be speaking for himself.
There are governments in Europe hanging on for dear life, dreading the next election. The UK has a government with no real mandate. France seems to be falling apart. The West is being flooded with ‘refugees’ who are nothing of the sort. Following an assassination attempt on the man likely to be the next US president, there was a palace coup to remove the incumbent!
All because people are waking up to the truths. They know they’ve been lied to in so many ways, and for too long. Those who’ve lied to us are getting worried.
Change is inevitable. Possibly major change.
Finally following Ike’s advice and reining in the military-industrial complex, curbing the power of the Globalists, and dealing with the clowns who serve their agendas without realising it, is the best hope for a just, peaceful, and prosperous world.
But if it’s too late and the worst happens; then when you see that mushroom cloud, you can at least console yourself by knowing there are no Tory MPs in Wales.
I mention Globalism regularly, and now I’m devoting a full piece to explaining what I mean by that term. So if it bores you, turn away. But if you want to learn something, stick around.
I advise you to stick with it because those I’ll be talking about already influence your life in so many ways. And they want even more influence, to the point of absolute control.
This piece is, of necessity, long, over 5,000 words, but it’s broken up into easily-manageable sections.
But don’t expect anything next week!
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OUTLINES
By ‘Globalism’ I mean wealthy individuals and powerful organisations imposing their will on the rest of us. Achieved in part through supranational organisations subverting or winning over national and sub-national governments and their various agencies.
Though that list is not exhaustive. I should probably include Big Tech and Big Pharma. Though not the traditional media, for despite its – thankfully declining – influence the mainstream media is now entirely controlled by and serving as a mouthpiece for those mentioned above.
For much of what we’ll cover I would also include the US deep state. Those who have interfered in global and domestic affairs since WWII. Responsible for the overthrow of Mossadegh in 1953, the JFK assassination in 1963, the Kiev coup of 2014, and now piling on the indictments in a desperate attempt to stop Donald Trump running for president next year.
Among the investment corporations we must mention BlackRock, where chairman and CEO Larry Fink is also on the Board of Trustees of the WEF. Profiting hugely from the Ukraine war, BlackRock hopes to make further profits from ‘rebuilding’ whatever’s left of the country after the war.
Keeping a slightly lower profile are other investment vehicles including Vanguard, the world’s second-largest asset manager. Then, and seeing as we are talking big money, and investments, the major banks are of course involved.
BlackRock, Vanguard and the rest are not companies as we have known them. They manufacture nothing. They create nothing. They grow nothing. They scarcely exist in the realm of the physical. They are amorphous, multi-tentacled entities that suck in other people’s money and use that money to grow their own power over those who trusted them.
This is important because if you understand what Dimon is saying, why he’s saying it, and if you also understand the context, it’ll help you grasp the Globalist agenda.
Because believe me, he spells it out.
The chief executive of JP Morgan has suggested that governments should seize private land to build wind and solar farms in order to meet net zero targets.
Jamie Dimon, the longstanding boss of the Wall Street titan who donates to the Democratic Party, said green energy projects must be fast-tracked as the window for averting the most costly impacts of global climate change is closing . . .
“We may even need to evoke eminent domain we simply are not getting the adequate investments fast enough for grid, solar, wind and pipeline initiatives.”
“Eminent domain” is the US equivalent of compulsory purchase.
This one-minute video might help you understand things a little better.
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AN ATTACK ON THE WEST
But more than an attack on the West the New World Order is an assault on Europe. By which I mean the continent and culture of which we are part, not the political union. An attack on the continent’s economy, on its ethnic and cultural integrity, and on its civic and societal stability.
This is to be achieved partly by the pursuit of Net Zero resulting in ‘degrowth’. Also, through promoting sexual and other perversions. The assault on Europe also insists on unrestricted immigration, of young males who’ll reject European values and hold White people responsible for their own cultures’ failings and inadequacies.
Not entirely correct, but you’ll get the gist. Click to open enlarged in separate tab
Understand that and you’ll understand how fundamental the EU Commission is to the Globalists achieving their genocidal objectives. You’ve already heard from Jamie Dimon, and banks play a big part in this project, so you shouldn’t be surprised at Coutts Bank recently making Nigel ‘Mr Brexit’ Farage a non-person.
For the undermining of the West increased dramatically following the twin shocks 0f 2016 – Brexit and Trump. These were wake-up calls for the Globalists.
And if you’ve taken all that in then you should have no difficulty understanding that a White, Christian country defending the nuclear family, preaching patriotic virtues and eternal verities, a country that refuses to bow to the Globalists, must be brought down. Yes, here I’m referring to Russia.
Returning to the West, we are being targeted for a number of reasons:
1/ The West is wealthy, not just its countries, but also its citizens. Europeans have high levels of personal wealth and assets. A lot to lose, or be stolen.
2/ Europe has to be crushed because the Globalists envision resistance from intelligent, educated people figuring out what’s happening and challenging the agenda. As we see happening.
3/ For all sorts of reasons other parts of the world still look to Europe for leadership and inspiration. A broken Europe sends out a powerful message.
Perhaps the clearest proof that Globalism is an assault on the West is the anti-White racism that is now prevalent in the media, in academia, in Hollywood and other cess-pits where luvvies are encountered.
You know the kind of thing . . . White man says something hurty to Black man, media goes ballistic over ‘racism’. Black man kills White man, media says nothing.
This racism went full-throttle when a career criminal died in a botched arrest a few years back. Now we are asked to dismiss all the achievements and accomplishments of the European race, ignore all the benefits the White man has given humanity, in favour of childish sloganising like ‘White privilege’ and ‘Black Lives Matter’.
All manner of idiocies must be employed because of course the real reason cannot be stated. And that reason is that race is being used to burden White people with guilt in order to undermine their confidence, done in pursuit of the bigger objective which is to destabilise and weaken the West.
Though sometimes the obsession with race goes too far and they make themselves look complete idiots. (Full article here.)
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What thought processes were tripping their fevered way through that Wokie mind?
What would really worry me would be that whoever did that, plus his / her / its superiors, think it was a good thing to do, and that only ‘racists’ would complain.
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LAND
The J P Morgan CEO was talking about taking over farmland, which he justifies by saying, “green energy projects must be fast-tracked“.
But it’s not really about green energy, and it’s certainly not about saving the planet. It’s partly about reconfiguring land ownership. And it’s partly about control over food production, because whoever controls the food supply controls the people.
“But you’re wrong, Jac, it’s about emissions, mun“. No, it’s not, you idiot! Emissions is just another pretext, this one imposed on Ireland and other countries by the European Union, a body I’ve told you is controlled by the Globalists.
Irish farmers are getting angry because, in addition to what you’ve just read, their government also wants to bring in EU-inspired nitrates legislation, perhaps similar to what we saw in Wales from Lesley Griffiths (and Gary).
Farmers protest in Bandon, Co Cork, July 13, 2023. Click to open enlarged in separate tab
As if Irish farmers didn’t have enough to worry about, all their MEPs also voted for the EU’s Nature Restoration Bill. Another unconvincing pretext. And another illustration of how the Globalists exploit the environmental agenda.
And of course, as I’ve reported here a number of times recently, there is growing anger at the Irish government’s open borders policy that sees hundreds of unvetted young males dumped on small towns across the country.
But having mentioned land, it’s natural to consider the food supply. We’ll return to the ‘refugees’ later.
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FOOD
In a nutshell . . . the objective is to use environmental arguments to undermine livestock farming and make large swathes of land available. Which will either be bought by governments, as was proposed in the Netherlands, or else by major corporations like BlackRock, and banks like J P Morgan.
Even if the land is initially bought by governments it will eventually pass to the corporations, the banks, and very wealthy individuals. (Governments will dress up such sales as being good for the national finances.)
At this point you may be worrying that if farmland is taken out of production there’ll be no meat produced, but don’t worry – alternatives are already lined up. These seem to take two forms; either insects, or laboratory-grown ‘meat’ churned out of 3D printers. Honestly!
In reality, Italy is moving in the opposite directly. For the government there recently banned lab-grown ‘meat’. Though the BBC explains this perversity, in the article’s opening sentence, as the work of a “right wing government“.
The implication being that to insist on real meat is a form of fascism.
Gates’ interest in farming even extends to buying farms. Lots of farms.
And it should go without saying that Gates is big in the World Economic Forum. Just like Larry Fink of BlackRock, and Jamie Dimon of J P Morgan.
Image: Sky News. From 2008. It’s difficult to find a more recent one of Gates with WEF CEO Klaus Schwab. Click to open enlarged in separate tab
What a system Bill and his buddies have worked out! They have an organisation telling us that we humans, with our cars, our household heaters, and our farm animals, are destroying the planet.
We must therefore give them all up – and they’ll look after us!
The land made available by the abolition of farming can be smothered with Unreliables to make lots more money for BlackRock, Vanguard, J P Morgan and others. Or perhaps the land will be used for greenwashing, or handed over to the Globalists’ allies in the environmental lobby for ‘re-wilding’.
The truth is that how the land is used in future is less important than getting the farmers off that land in the first place. That is the priority.
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HOMES
With that priority being part of a bigger process that sees wealth and assets transferred from individuals, small investors and family businesses to mega corporations and multi-billionaires. It has been described as the biggest transfer of wealth in human history. And it probably is, because it’s not restricted to farms.
Soon, some company owned by a mega corporation, maybe the one pushing up your mortgage, will come along and say, “Hey, look, your house has obviously become a liability, so sell it to us and we’ll let you carry on living there with just rent to pay.”
Just think about that for a minute. By paying into a pension fund or an insurance policy controlled by one of the big investment corporations, which also controls the lender handling your mortgage, you have contributed to losing your home.
What a system! They can’t lose, you can’t win!
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THE CLIMATE SCAM
This section is headed ‘The Climate Scam’ because that’s what the hysteria about the climate really is – a scam.
But don’t just take my word for it, here’s a Nobel Prize winner saying it. Though of course he has now been ‘deplatformed’ so people can’t hear what he has to say.
That’s how the Globalist narrative is pushed. You buy those who can be bought and silence those who can’t be bought.
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To explain why climate hysteria is being used in the way it is, just think of those black and white movies from the ’50s about alien invasions of Earth. They always result in the bickering nations putting aside their differences to combine and defeat the global threat.
Not even those we’re discussing here could come up with a credible alien invasion, but the principle holds – fear.
Anthropogenic climate change would affect us all and if those wanting to persuade us it was happening had bought enough scientists, brainwashed a generation or two of children, and owned the mainstream media, then it could be done.
And that’s exactly what’s happening.
But they’re struggling because the planet isn’t playing ball. Which is why the original threat of ‘global warming’ became ‘climate change’, ’emissions’, or anything else attributable to human activity . . . and therefore open to restriction and control.
More recently CO2 has been demonised on the absurd premise that carbon dioxide is destroying the planet by being linked with rising temperatures. There is no connection between carbon and rising temperatures, and Earth flourished in the past with higher levels of carbon in the atmosphere.
But the Globalists know this. The ‘dangerous carbon’ scam is really being pushed because it provides a means of taxing us and restricting our freedom of movement, while also providing profits for the Globalists in the forms of carbon tax, or carbon capture often known as ‘greenwashing’.
And of course from ‘green energy’, often on land from which farmers have been removed.
But not only does the commercialisation of carbon provide profits for the Global elite in new and innovative ways, it also provides opportunities for more traditional criminals. As this case from France tells us. Here’s a case from Germany. And a third from Spain.
With the weather and the climate not co-operating, those who would rule us are now contemplating, both publicly and in secret, how they might influence the weather to persuade us of their claims.
This is a truly frightening prospect. For if the Globalists could control the weather, then they would control the world. Floods, droughts, blizzards, thunderstorms – on demand.
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SEXUAL DEVIANCY
Anyone who’s studied history knows that sexual deviancy and excess often play a role in bringing down civilisations. This regularly links with other signs of decline such as a falling birth-rate, as was the case in Sparta; and a reluctance to defend one’s borders, which contributed to the decline of imperial Rome.
The Globalists know their history.
Sexual deviancy and associated mental disorders are being promoted widely today, but only in the West. Much of it dependent on the idea that biology counts for nothing and a person can be whatever sex or gender they choose to identify as.
The irony being that those who push this defiance of science are the same Globalist puppets who shout “Trust the science!” when it comes to locking people in their homes because of a virus no worse than flu, and in defence of the climate scam.
When I talk of sexual deviancy you know what I mean. I’m talking of ‘Pride’ months that never end, and of ‘drag queens’ demanding to be in close proximity to children.
Here’s where I stand. Any man dressing as a woman and seeking access to children is a pervert. Any individual or agency allowing these perverts access to children is as guilty as the perverts.
‘Drag queens’ go hand in hand with the promotion of ‘trans rights’. Which again, is often a cover for perversion or proof of mental ill-health.
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A man dressing as a woman does not become a woman; and he has no right to enter women’s spaces or to compete in women’s sports.
The only people who believe that women have penises and men can have babies are the unhinged, the brainwashed, and the intimidated. But encouraging them are those who see these lunacies as yet another tool (forgive the pun) to use in the destabilisation of the West.
The role the media plays in this is significant, and alarming. On the one hand the media will promote and defend the perverts, while attacking those stating biological facts or defending the rights of women.
An appalling example from the BBC came to light a few days ago.
A ‘drag queen’ named Andrew Way, of Wrecsam, who performed as ‘Miss Gin’, was convicted of making contact with a 14-year-old boy with the intention of meeting up for sex. Way had previous convictions.
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In the first report, the BBC told us that Way was a ‘drag queen’, and that he’d been organising a Pride event for Welshpool, Powys. The first re-write removed the ‘drag queen’ reference. The second re-write removed the mention of the ‘Pride’ event.
Leaving us with us a man with no relevant associations or history who simply made a genuine mistake. Could happen to anybody.
For which of you hasn’t made innocent online contact with a 14-year-old boy, claimed to be 30 years younger than you really are, intended to send a photo of a puppy but chose the wrong jpeg and sent a photo of your genitals, and then been understandably horrified to have Plod knocking on the door?
Now we come to one of the more obvious manifestations of the Globalists’ anti-West agenda. And while everybody can see the influx of undocumented, young male migrants, it’s amazing how few people see it for what it really is.
That’s because like all the other courses on the Globalists’ menu this one comes with a heavy garnish of lies.
To begin with, most of those now arriving on the south coast of England are not refugees. They are young men looking for easy money and easy sex. If they were simply seeking safety, then they could have found it in any of the safe countries they passed through, including of course France.
While that might apply to those coming from the Maghreb and sub-Saharan Africa, too many of the young men from Albania, Georgia and other countries will be coming to engage in criminal activities.
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And who can blame certain countries with high levels of crime, or full prisons, for wanting to export some of their problems? That’s what Fidel Castro did back in 1980 with the Mariel Boatlift.
The USA was welcoming Cuban ‘refugees’, but many of those who arrived were criminals, sent over by Castro to cause problems for the USA. The great movie Scarface, starring Al Pacino, is about one such criminal, Tony Montana.
Why wouldn’t Algeria or Turkey be doing the same thing in 2023? How can anyone know the truth when thousands upon thousands of unvetted young men are being allowed into Europe every year?
Of course, those who oppose mass immigration and open borders are ‘racist’ according to the Globalists and their left-liberal shills. But as I say, everything from the Globalists is decorated with lies.
There’s the one about the ‘refugees’ being “mainly women and children“, but we only see young men. But that’s OK because they’re escaping war and conflict . . . which, if true, would mean they’ve run away, leaving parents, grandparents and siblings defenceless.
But the real gem, and this takes a bit of unravelling, is that these young men should be welcomed because Europe has a falling birth-rate and they’re needed to fill job vacancies.
Right, let’s work backwards.
1/ If the immigrants were needed to do low-pay jobs that natives of the country won’t do, then why are they paid benefits higher than the wages in those jobs?
2/ The economies of Europe are heading for recession, led by Germany. Which mean a loss of jobs.
3/ Globalists want to reduce the Earth’s population by some 6 or 7 billion. So why be alarmed by a falling birth-rate?
4/ Globalists also want to introduce Artificial Intelligence (AI) which will mean far fewer jobs for humans. This links with the increasing talk of UBI.
Finally, we must take into account considerations of ‘multiculturalism’, ‘cultural enrichment’ and ‘inclusivity’. Which of us hasn’t drifted off to sleep wishing Wales was more multicultural? Come on, be honest!
Being honest . . . these ‘benefits’ are turd polishing of Olympics standard, just ask the Swedes. Or the French. Or the Irish. Or those protesting outside the Stradey Park Hotel in Llanelli.
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IDELOGICAL CONSIDERATIONS
What I’m describing displays elements of fascist corporatism (but with corporations dictating to governments rather than co-operating), yet its foot-soldiers are almost exclusively Greens, left-liberals and avowed Marxists.
It’s a curious hybrid of a type we may not have seen before, and perhaps that accounts for so many people being confused by it.
Perhaps we could put ideologies aside, and view the Globalists’ ambitions in a historical context. Rich, powerful men (and it’s almost always men, both historically and with today’s Globalists), have always believed that their wealth should give them control over the common herd.
In a feudal system such a belief could be enforced with violence. In more recent centuries, with the gradual spread of democracy, it was argued that the franchise be restricted to ‘men of substance’.
The future envisioned by the Globalists is a kind of shadow democracy, a world where we still have a vote . . . but using it will be futile because the political establishments in every country will have been captured, and at elections we’ll be offered a host of parties and politicians – all signed up to the Globalist agenda.
The uniparty state will have arrived. We already see it on a Wales and a UK level. Across the water in Ireland, And in many other countries, where any party seeking to escape the Globalist ‘consensus’ is always dubbed ‘populist’, ‘far right’, ‘extremist’, if not outright ‘racist’ or ‘fascist’.
The message is clear: there are ‘accepted’ parties and parameters; those that reject the consensus put themselves beyond the Pale. They will be mercilessly vilified.
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SOCIALISM SUBVERTED
I’ve had an interest in politics for a long time now, but I can’t recall any time when I felt more disappointed with the left. Let me explain.
When I was younger I disagreed with socialists, obviously, but I still accepted that most of them wanted to improve people’s lives. But I found their class politics divisive, and most of them tended to be hostile to my hopes for Wales, or even to my national identity itself.
While the more extreme socialists wanted to bring down capitalism, which to them meant the West.
The socialists I grew up with believed in science-driven progress freeing people from cults and superstitions like organised religion. They saw themselves as children of the Enlightenment.
Then the left started adopting ‘ishoos’, many of which were inimical to the interests of those it had previously claimed to represent, which led to a rupture with the working class. Obvious by 2016 with Brexit and Trump’s victory.
To the point where, today, too many socialists pretend to believe in the unscientific and biologically impossible fantasies of unhinged narcissists. But there remains one constant – the hard-liners still want to bring down the West.
Maybe this is the key to understanding how the comrades today side with some of the wealthiest capitalists and biggest corporations on the planet.
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RUSSIA, UKRAINE, THE WEST
I set out my position on this tragedy in April last year, in Ukraine: A Personal View. Obviously, that piece, written not long after the conflict started, could be updated, but I can’t think of anything I’d change.
I’ve already mentioned that Russia is a target for the Globalists because it’s a White, Christian country, where traditional values of family and nation are still respected, and the trans cult is rejected.
But over and above these issues there are – as always – more venal considerations. Russia is the biggest country on Earth, with vast natural resources, and no doubt there are resources yet to be discovered. The untapped wealth is incalculable.
Standing between the Globalists and this wealth is Vladimir Putin, and a country increasingly suspicious of the West since the Kiev coup of 2014, the billions of dollars poured into Ukraine, and of course the blowing up of Nord Stream 2, which deserves a mention.
Nord Stream 2 was a pipeline bringing natural gas from Russia to Germany. Cheap, reliable energy, in an agreement that benefitted both countries. As this Guardian article from just before Christmas 2021 article puts it: ” . . . keeping 26m German homes warm at an affordable price”.
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But for the Globalists, Nord Stream 2 presented a problem. The problem being that the arrangement gave Russia too much influence in Europe’s largest economy – at their expense.
As I keep reminding you, Globalism is, fundamentally, a war against the West; that is, Europe, the USA, Canada, and a few other countries.
This war being waged by the Globalists has twin objectives: the accumulation of global power and assets into very few hands, while making it very difficult for us to protest against what is happening.
The first will be achieved by using existing financial systems, and freedom from political interference through control of Western political establishments. The second by using the media and Big Tech to denigrate and to silence critics.
And it will all be achieved without a mandate, for no element of the Globalist agenda would survive a popular vote, so it must be implemented surreptitiously.
An example might be covering Wales in foreign-owned wind turbines offering us nothing. Or allowing men into women’s toilets because they claim to be women. Or the imposition of ULEZ / 20mph / 15-minute neighbourhoods. Or perhaps being made to give up your car, or your gas cooker.
The list of things demanded by the Globalists and their useful idiot allies pushing the Woke agenda is endless. And they all work against our best interests to serve contrived ‘problems’.
Though ‘useful idiots’ may not be the correct term in all cases, for some of those now serving the Globalist agenda are singing their old refrains.
I can remember a time when vegans were regarded as dotty but harmless, found on the fringes at Liberal Party conferences, they were the ones with the scruffiest beards and the broken sandals.
But in recent years vegans have emerged into the limelight, to the point where local councils and education authorities are now taking meat off the menu at schools and other establishments. It’s happening in Oxford, Edinburgh, Exeter.
Now why is that? Of course! – it’s because veganism serves the Globalist agenda against livestock farming, so it must go mainstream. And the captured media will ensure that.
I have never harassed or bullied a vegan or a vegetarian. (My daughter is a veggie.) They can eat whatever they want – but so can I. Unfortunately, my easy-going attitude is not how Globalism operates. Because Globalism is totalitarian, and before long the only choice will be veganism, or going hungry.
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CONCLUSION
There’s so much more I could have included in an essay on how Globalists operate. But where would I start?
With the lies surrounding Covid? The role of ‘Dr’ Bill Gates in that bonanza? The interplay between governments and Big Pharma? Were Covid lockdowns a trial run for climate lockdowns?
Then there’s Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC). For the path we’re on now leads inexorably to a system in which cash is outlawed, and every transaction you make is recorded and noted. Step out of line and you risk being denied access to your own money.
I’m not making this up. It’s how things are done today in China, and despite the obvious differences, the Globalists are big admirers of how the Chinese Communist Party can keep 1.3bn people under control.
But the left-liberal media in Canada and elsewhere loved Trudeau for it, and weighed in and accused the truckers of being ‘extremists’, and ‘racists’. And all the while their Globalist masters beamed.
(The sight of a Confederate battle flag has a wondrous effect on leftists, Wokies and, now, Globalists.)
Looking at the bigger picture it’s clear we are approaching a world in which the political, economic, military and cultural influence of the West on the rest of the globe will be weakened.
Which could mean that Globalism might be a misnomer, for what really confronts us is a last-ditch attempt by the USA, with allies in Europe and elsewhere, to maintain its hegemonic position over an increasingly multi-polar world where doors everywhere are being slammed in Uncle Sam’s face.
‘Globalism’ limited to North America and western Europe because Russia and China are obviously out of reach, India and other major Asian players are reluctant to comply. And now we see Africa increasingly detach itself from the Western sphere.
Whether what I’ve written about here is indeed global, or more limited in its scope and ambition, is irrelevant for the outcome. I say that because it will affect you in exactly the same way.
Those I’ve referred to as ‘Globalists’ present an existential threat to the West and to our individual freedoms. For they want to erase nations, to destroy the nuclear family, control how we live, where we live, what we eat, how far we can travel, how fast we can travel, whether we can afford to heat our homes, what we are allowed to say, and who we are allowed to listen to.
You’re free to dismiss my warnings and follow the sirens’ call. But if that is your choice, then enjoy your freedom while you can.
Because your ability to make such decisions will not last for much longer. Not unless you start defending the basic freedoms you have always taken for granted.
PLEASE APPRECIATE THAT I GET SENT MORE INFORMATION AND LEADS THAN I CAN USE. I TRY TO RESPOND TO EVERYONE WHO CONTACTS ME BUT I CANNOT POSSIBLY USE EVERY BIT OF INFORMATION I’M SENT. DIOLCH YN FAWR
♦
Well, what an election that was, for all sorts of reasons. I shall start this analysis with a quick look around the other countries before homing in on Wales.
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NORTHERN IRELAND
If we are to believe the BBC then the results were bad for both major parties, the Democratic Unionist Party and Sinn Féin. Certainly SF lost Foyle (Derry) but it was to the nationalist Social Democratic and Labour Party. To compensate, the party won North Belfast, where Belfast Lord Mayor John Finucane triumphed.
John Finucane was just a lad in 1989 when Loyalist assassins burst into the family home and killed his solicitor father, Pat. Loyalist killers controlled by MI5.
Yes, votes for both Sinn Féin and the Democratic Unionist Party were down but it was the DUP that lost (in total) two seats, not SF. The cross-community Alliance Party won North Down, and in addition to Foyle the SDLP won Belfast South.
For someone who remembers the Troubles – and even the time before the Troubles – it’s quite amazing how politics has changed in the Six Counties.
Until the Reverend Dr Ian Paisley formed the DUP in 1971 the Ulster Unionist Party dominated the political scene, and it wasn’t until 2004 that the DUP became the largest Unionist party in terms of seats at Stormont and in Westminster. Now the UUP has no MPs and got just 11.7% of the vote last week, but even that was an improvement of 1.4% on 2017.
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On the other side, the similarly hegemonic SDLP has been eclipsed by a party that until quite recently was dismissed by the British media as the mouthpiece of the IRA. I can recall when we weren’t allowed to actually hear SF spokespersons – we could see them, and see their lips move, but the words had to be spoken by actors!
That was one of the more bizarre episodes in British broadcasting history. If we were allowed to hear what they said but not them say it, then I can only conclude that we were being protected from the harsh Ulster accent.
Northern Ireland, with more Republican/Nationalist MPs than Unionist MPs, plus one MP representing a party that is neutral on the border, and with Brexit thrown into the mix, is probably moving towards a referendum on Irish reunification.
For this debate is no longer framed by tribal loyalties. The old Protestant-Unionist objections to unifying with a poor, ‘priest-ridden’ country to the south are gone. The Republic today is both more liberal and richer than the North. What’s more, it’s in the EU, and Northern Ireland voted to Remain.
In any future referendum it will not just be Republicans and Nationalists voting for reunification, it will also be members of the Protestant middle class, business people and, especially, the young.
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SCOTLAND
The headline result is of course that the SNP ‘won’ the election with 48 out of Scotland’s 59 seats. Though as we know, Boris Johnson has already refused to allow a second independence referendum, so how might events unfold?
Some suggest that the Tory government in London should play the SNP like a fish, paying out a little line (concessions), then reeling in (refusal) . . . until its energy is exhausted and it can be ‘landed’ (accepts no referendum).
Basically, faffing about in the kind of way that would suit Johnson perfectly.
An interesting metaphor that ignores too many unavoidable pitfalls and a number of imponderables.
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First, there’s ‘Getting Brexit done’, which served as Johnson’s mantra throughout the recent election campaign. Yet 62% of Scots and every single council area voted against leaving the European Union. That is a fact that cannot be changed – Scotland voted by a large majority to remain in the EU.
Which means that in fulfilling this election pledge he cannot possibly renege on Johnson will further antagonise many Scots. Even some of those who voted Leave but now wish to respect the majority vote.
Then there’s the Scottish parliamentary elections of May 2021. If London proves obstructive and the SNP turns this election into a mandate for independence we could enter a Catalonia-style morass. God knows where that might lead.
Another imponderable is how Labour supporters might vote in a referendum. They’ll be confronted with a choice between independence and Tory rule. Some will choose independence. How many take this option could prove decisive.
Then there are those who voted Leave but want independence, and may have lent their votes to the Tories last week in order to ‘Get Brexit done’. How many of these are there?
Imponderables aside, four fundamental facts are unavoidable:
1/ The SNP has won a massive victory.
2/ Consequently, the Tory government in London has no mandate to rule Scotland.
3/ Scotland voted to remain in the European Union.
4/ Consequently, London has no mandate to take Scotland out of the EU against its will.
Looking beyond the SNP – difficult given how it dominates the scene – we see that once-mighty Labour is reduced to a single seat, Edinburgh South. The Liberal Democrats are holding on to Orkney and Shetland, Caithness, Sutherland and Easter Ross in the far north, Edinburgh West and Fife North East.
The last of those is interesting because the SNP held this seat by just two votes, the smallest majority in the House of Commons. This time around the anti-SNP vote piled in behind the Lib Dem again and pushed Wendy Chamberlain over the winning line with a majority of 1,316.
Though the Lib Dem’s UK leader, Jo Swinson, she who had talked of becoming prime minister not so long ago, narrowly lost her Dunbartonshire East seat to the SNP.
Elsewhere, the Tories, who had been shaping up to become the natural home for Unionist votes lost seven seats to bring their total down to six. Given that they now hold large, rural constituencies (especially the three along the border) this means that the map gives a somewhat inflated view of Tory support.
Though it should be remembered that in all six Conservative seats the SNP is second, sometimes just a few hundred votes behind.
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Sometimes a party’s share of the vote can tell as much if not more about its overall performance than the number of its MPs. The figures for Scotland make poor reading for Unionists in general and for the new government in London in particular.
‘Getting Brexit done’ may have worked as a slogan in England, and Wales, but it seems to have had the opposite effect in the land that gave us the very word sluagh-ghairm. Which is perfectly understandable given that Scotland voted Remain.
With its separate legal and education systems, with the Kirk, with its banks and different banknotes, Scotland always was a different country. Soon it might be a very different country.
Whatever happens, we can guarantee that the greater the prospect of Scottish independence the dirtier the British state will play. And it certainly played dirty in the 2014 independence referendum campaign. Explained in this remarkable video, London Calling: BBC bias during the 2014 Scottish independence referendum.
I urge you to set aside an hour of your time over Christmas to watch it. Those you’ll see in the film are not wild-eyed conspiracy theorists, these are people who know the score. On the plus side, the BBC is now so discredited that it could never again play the influential role it played in 2014.
Scotland will soon regain the independence that was surrendered in 1707 by an unrepresentative parliament whose members had been bullied or bribed into supporting the Act of Union.
Reporting of the election in England was dominated by words like ‘landslide’ and talk of crumbling ‘red walls’. The reality is rather more nuanced, and disturbing for anyone wanting cultural harmony and social cohesion.
The truth is that in England the Conservative share of the vote increased by just 1.7% on 2017. The real story is the collapse of the Labour vote, down 8.0% on 2017. The Liberal Democrats were up 4.6%, the Brexit Party 2.0%, and the Greens 1.2%.
But if we look behind those bare figures we find where and why the Tories did so well. Those areas of the Midlands and the North that voted Leave in June 2016 saw the Tory vote increase substantially, while Remain areas saw the Tory vote go down.
The problem for Labour was that they lost out in both. That’s what happens to ditherers.
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The cities remain Labour, especially London; which meant that in the Midlands and the North the cities and conurbations did not collapse with the rest of the ‘red wall’. The West Midlands conurbation remained largely Labour, as did Merseyside, and Manchester, Sheffield, the Leeds-Bradford conurbation, plus Hull, while in the north east – Sedgefield and Blyth Valley not withstanding – Labour holds a swathe of seats from Newcastle upon Tyne North all the way down to Middlesbrough.
It is the smaller towns and cities, the former mining districts, that will be represented by Conservative MPs for the next few years. Without doing an in-depth check it looks to me as if Stoke on Trent was the largest English city to ‘defect’.
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So why did Manchester and Birmingham stay Labour while Bury, Scunthorpe, Dewsbury, Wakefield and many similar towns go Conservative? Almost certainly because the major cities of the Midlands and the North share certain features with London that make them more challenging for the Tories.
These features are:
1/ A generally younger population, with many students.
2/ Large immigrant populations plus settled ethnic minority communities.
3/ The presence of a ‘progressive’ middle class.
4/ More diversified economies that have coped with recession better than coalfield areas and towns built on a single industry.
5/ They attract more investment.
Which results in the rich and poor of England linking arms and facing off against those in between. Which is a strange thought, because for the greater part of the twentieth century politics in England split along class lines, a division that pitted Tory-voting shires and suburbs against Labour voting cities and industrial regions.
Going further back, to the nineteenth century, it was the new industrialists and others – through the Liberal Party – that represented the interests of the lower orders against the Oxbridge-educated Establishment of aristocracy, landowners, bankers, Church of England, army, civil service.
But last Thursday we entered a new paradigm. When so many people on the minimum wage are prepared to vote Tory then you know something has changed.
Students of politics will immediately recognise the parallels with the USA, where Donald Trump managed to get support from the richest sectors of US society and some of the poorest. Leaving the Democrats with a minority of the white working class supplemented by ethnic minorities, immigrants, and white liberals.
Brexit may have brought these US divisions into sharper focus in the UK but they would be there even without a debate over EU membership. People in the ‘neglected’ areas might have voted Tory last Thursday even without Brexit.
I say that because another reason they voted Conservative was because Labour, the party they once regarded as theirs, has drifted away, hijacked by the hard left, the detested metropolitan elite, and others who look down on them and regard their patriotism with revulsion.
Remember this from the Rochester by-election in 2014? Thornberry is back, and now one of the leading contenders to succeed Corbyn. Click to enlarge
As Jon Sopel, the BBC’s North American editor put it in this article (which is well worth reading): ‘Labour in the UK lost the working class, but gained the woke. And that will give the party sleepless nights over the coming months and years.’
Labour lost the election because it has alienated too many of the patriotic white working class. An as yet unquantifiable percentage of which might be mopped up by whatever party Nigel Farage comes up with next.
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WALES
Let’s be brutally frank, there were just two things that saved ‘Welsh’ Labour from a worse kicking last Thursday.
The first was the terror felt by too many in the region twixt Blaenafon and Kidwelly at the prospect of rotating grandparents in the graveyards of Salem, Jerusalem, and yea! even Caersalem.
The second was the absolute fucking uselessness of Plaid Cymru. Because if Jon Sopel is right, about the Labour Party in England, then here in Wales the woke have become Plaid Cymru.
Yes, I know, Plaid held its four seats . . . and failed to come second in any of the other seats it contested. Leaving Plaid Cymru in serious danger of becoming a regional party within a small country, representing a constituency that is rural and largely Welsh speaking in an urbanised and largely anglophone country. Now there’s a party with a future!
Though, in fairness, Plaid Cymru has tried to break away from the ‘rural, Welsh-speaking’ strait-jacket. Unfortunately, rather than appealing to patriotic English speakers in the cities and towns the party allowed (encouraged?) the takeover by socialists who tar any critic with the ‘fascist’ brush, and those who insist that anyone who doesn’t accept a man with a penis as a woman is a ‘transphobe’.
Pick the bones out of that. Click to enlarge
Then, before the election, Plaid’s strategists (don’t laugh!) decided that it would be a splendid idea to go into a Remainer pact in a few seats with the Liberal Democrats and the Green Party of Englandandwales. In a country that voted Leave!!
This is why, last Thursday, when presented with the open goal of a Labour Party in chaos, a Conservative Party made untouchable by the fear of spinning sounds from the local boneyard, and the Lib Dems led by a delusional woman, Plaid Cymru’s vote actually fell, in real and percentage terms!
The only consolation is that Plaid Cymru is probably finished. No party with such limited appeal, making such disastrous decisions, is entitled to any future. What’s worse, in Plaid’s four seats the party’s supporters are social conservatives of the kind despised by those who now control the party. How long can this misalliance last?
Maybe it would be best for Plaid Cymru to drop the pretence that it’s a mainstream party and rebrand itself as the loony left party it has become. This would allow the emergence of another national party on the right to represent the ‘fascists’ and the ‘transphobes’, the patriots and those who’d like to build up an indigenous economy rather than rely on a begging-bowl variant of devolution.
At heart, Plaid Cymru is a Devo Max party securing the maximum number of careers, sinecures, peerages, etc., for those it represents, within the colonial system. Which means having enough power to indulge its lunacies without the responsibility of having to fund any of it.
Here we have a woman whose party has just had a truly dismal election congratulating winning candidates from other parties – just because they’re women! Click to enlarge
But things are not looking too good for this model of devolution at the moment. For a start, Labour is in deep and serious trouble on a UK level and this might extend to the 2021 Assembly elections, with Plaid Cymru in no position to keep the gravy train on the tracks.
Who’s to say the Tories won’t win an outright majority in 2021?
Worse, Plaid Cymru’s obvious weaknesses coupled with Labour’s self-destruction might encourage the new Conservative government to undermine or do away entirely with devolution.
At the very least, London could take more control over funding. An article by Martin Shipton dealt with this possibility in Saturday’s Llais y Sais. Here’s a link to the WalesOnline version, with a clip from it below.
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Now picture the scene . . . Boris Johnson rocks up in Swansea (or it could be Wrexham, Merthyr, Blaenau Ffestiniog or Pembroke) and says, ‘Now listen chaps, I can see that with this bally devolution most of the moolah stays in Cardiff, and that’s jolly unfair. In future, the Bozmeister will dish out the goodies himself – and I guarantee that it will be fair shares for all!’
This will of course result in demonstrations in all corners of the land defending the status quo, demanding that the money be given to the ‘Welsh Government’ . . . for it to divert into the poverty racket (third sector, to you). I foresee hastily-scribbled placards being borne aloft insisting that even spads and lobbyists have to eat.
Yes, I’m joking.
But it won’t be BoJo undermining devolution. Labour and Plaid Cymru, plus their parasite friends down Corruption Bay and elsewhere, have already done the job for him, to the point where few would put up much of a fight if the Tories tried to do away with devolution altogether.
Devolution has been an abysmal failure because nobody wanted to make it work for anyone but themselves. Nobody in London or Cardiff.
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CONCLUSION
I have chosen to look at all the countries of the United Kingdom because while the Tories’ campaign was all about getting Brexit done, everyone knows that achieving that objective will jeopardise the unity of the state.
I have argued since the EU referendum in 2016 that Brexit and the chaos it could unleash, the knock-on effects in Scotland and Ireland, would offer great advantages to Wales if we only had the sense and the determination to seize them.
But for Wales to capitalise on these opportunities we need politicians, and political parties or movements that want Wales to be a country that benefits the Welsh, rather than a haven for retirees, refugees, colonists, third sector parasites and ‘investors’ looking for easy money.
But I’m deeply pessimistic; for this election suggests that Wales will be in no position to take advantage of the opportunities coming our way. We shall just drift towards assimilation.
PLEASE APPRECIATE THAT I GET SENT MORE INFORMATION AND LEADS THAN I CAN USE. I TRY TO RESPOND TO EVERYONE WHO CONTACTS ME BUT I CANNOT POSSIBLY USE EVERY BIT OF INFORMATION I’M SENT. DIOLCH YN FAWR
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BOBBY MUGABE LIVES!
Plaid Cymru held its annual conference last Friday and Saturday in the Grand Theatre in Swansea. Very few of those attending would have been familiar with the venue, or even the city.
For Plaid Cymru is invisible in Swansea; not a single councillor, moribund branches, and little or no interest from the Jack-in-the-street. This can be explained by a perception among my ain folk that Plaid Cymru is a party for rural Welsh speakers, leftie extremists and the Cardiff middle class.
That said, YesCymru has a healthy presence in the city, but this is one of the branches mercifully free of Plaid Cymru control. Which probably explains why it flourishes.
But back to the conference, where there was an election for the position of chair, between incumbent Alun Ffred Jones and Dr Dewi Evans. Alun Ffred represented the party establishment while Dr Evans was the outsider, promising to readmit Neil McEvoy AM to the party.
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Alun Ffred won quite handsomely in the end, by 400 votes to 135, which was only to be expected, all things considered. For around 8,500 members were unable to vote.
By which I mean that (and despite their unfamiliarity with Swansea) the venue favoured the Leannistas. This vociferous claque augmented by the party hierarchy plus the lobbyists and third sector memsahibs found in the Bay Bubble. For the great majority of these live in the south.
In addition, everybody and his uncle who might support Alun Ffred was dragged to the Grand. For example, I’m told that the family of Mr Bethan Sayed was well represented.
‘But, surely’, you interject (almost plaintively), ‘in order to properly gauge the wishes of the members postal votes were allowed?’ Yes, you’d think so . . . but no, for this is Plaid Cymru. In an existential interpretation of the democratic process, if you weren’t there then you didn’t exist.
There is no chance of a Plaid government in 2021, or any other time. Click to enlarge
And even if you were there, there was no guarantee you’d be allowed to vote, certainly not if there was any suspicion you might vote for Dr Evans. I’ve been told of one group from Wrecsam that had reluctantly renewed their memberships, gone down to Swansea – only to be told they had no votes.
It seems there was an arbitrary cut-off point in September for joining the party or renewing memberships, one that few were informed about.
And talking of keeping things within certain circles, Dr Evans was denied access to the membership lists, so he was unable to reach all the members. While some establishment branches refused to let him address their members!
Comment to Nation.Cymru, Saturday evening. Click to enlarge
I could go on, but I’m sure you get the picture. The shade of Bobby Mugabe was playing the Grand on Saturday.
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“CARIN’, WE ARE, INNIT”
Apart from the election, what else happened? Well, in a nutshell, Plaid Cymru reminded us that it has lost interest in the great majority of us, the leadership preferring to play gesture politics while riding unicorns.
What do I mean?
For a start, the big thing now is Brexit, or rather, no Brexit . . . or is it no deal Brexit? No, wait! it’s avoiding no deal Brexit. The question is, how.
“A few weeks ago senior Plaid Cymru figures were pushing the line that the party would head into a general election with a clear commitment to revoke Article 50 and stop Brexit.
Since then they’ve rowed back slightly: the party’s official position now – backed by conference delegates – is that it favours a second referendum, unless the prospect of a no-deal Brexit remains.
Faced with the prospect of leaving the EU without a deal Plaid would revert to revoke.
In reality, it is hard to see how the prospect of a no-deal Brexit could be taken off the table completely ahead of any general election, and a senior Plaid figure told me it is inevitable therefore the party’s manifesto commitment will be to stop Brexit in its tracks.
How that plays out in the leave-voting areas the party’s targeting for the next assembly elections remains to be seen.”
Got it?
Plaid Cymru is of course in some electoral arrangement with the Liberal Democrats, led by Jo Swinson. The woman who has urged Scots to vote Tory to halt the SNP, and who has said that in the event of a second referendum giving another Leave vote she would refuse to accept it.
How can a socialist party like Plaid Cymru possibly do deals with a party led by this woman? Clearly Brexit clouds the judgement and brings on a severe bout of myopia.
Then, as if to reassert its socialist credentials, Plaid reiterated it’s commitment to giving £35 a week for every child in every low income family in Wales. Which sounds fine, until you realise that there will be no such legislation in England, which will mean that the kind of women who have seven or eight semi-feral children by half a dozen different fathers will view this as an incentive to move to Wales.
Worse, agencies in England, in daily contact with our ‘Welsh’ third sector and social housing bodies, will ensure there is a steady supply of such people.
The developed world has a problem with its ageing population. This problem is exacerbated in Wales by people from England retiring to Wales. And yet, while the problem is universally acknowledged, here in Wales our self-styled ‘Welsh Government’ sees an ageing population as an asset, something be proud of.
Part of a response I received to a FoI to the ‘Welsh Government’. Click to enlarge.
Wales is more attractive to England’s elderly because here they can have £50,000 under the mattress before care home charges kick in, whereas in England – a richer country! – the figure is a measly £23,250.
On this issue Plaid Cymru agrees with ‘Welsh’ Labour (it usually does) and wants to go further, by introducing legislation that will make Wales even more attractive to elderly English people by abolishing care home charges altogether!
Click to enlarge
Which means that Plaid Cymru is going for a double-whammy of further Anglicising Wales while simultaneously making us poorer. Some national party!
I say ‘poorer’ because of course Plaid Cymru has no economic strategy, no ideas on how to build a healthy Welsh economy to provide well-paid jobs for our people. A socialist party like Plaid Cymru prefers not to think about ugly things like making money, encouraging economic growth, etc.
So how does Plaid Cymru expect to pay for this generosity, this ‘Caring Wales’?
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THE ‘KEPT WOMAN’ SYSTEM OF DEVOLUTION
Let’s get something straight – the upper echelons of Plaid Cymru do not want independence. That the leadership occasionally mentions independence should not be taken seriously, it’s only done to dupe the rank and file.
All this stratum wants is a Wales that creates institutions in which a colonial elite of politicians, professionals and administrators can prosper. We are almost there; with a few more powers devolved to the Assembly, such as justice and policing, this colonial elite might be satisfied.
Let me explain what I mean by a colonial elite.
A ‘kept woman’ is maintained for his pleasure by a wealthy man. She has a place of her own, enjoys the good things of life, is allowed her opinions and foibles . . . but must never forget who pays the bills.
Over the past twenty years we have seen a ‘kept woman’ class emerge in Cardiff Bay. (And not just women of course.) And just like a kept woman this class is expected to ‘repay’ the one picking up the tab.
In Wales, this takes the form of legislation and ‘strategies’ that are usually of more benefit to England. Such as promoting a crass form of tourism that is destroying Wales, but keeps English tourists’ money in the UK. Or ‘saving the planet’, which in practice means allowing English investors to cover Wales with wind and solar farms, or forcing Welsh farmers off their land to make way for ‘rewilders’. Then there’s reducing the threshold for care home payments to less than half that of England to encourage English retirees. Now Plaid Cymru wants to do away with care home fees entirely, while also encouraging an influx of undesirables.
In return, and just like a kept woman, the colonial elite is allowed to indulge its whims and fancies, but must avoid issues that might annoy the London pay-masters.
Made obvious by the truth of contemporary Wales. Our post-industrial areas are in managed decline, our rural areas are being colonised, Clwyd disappears into north west England . . . but while Wales dies Leannista-controlled Plaid Cymru is only concerned with niche issues and minorities.
Regional AM visits Swansea but it’s woke issues and third sector concerns. No interest whatsoever in the people born in the city. Click to enlarge
All because we live under a colonial system from which the only native beneficiaries are the colonial elite and its hangers-on. That’s how it must be.
Made easier by having a civil service operating in Wales that answers to London, and two political parties (Labour and Plaid Cymru) that together know less about economics than I do about the Large Hadron Collider. (And I know sod all.)
Which is why what passes for ‘the Welsh economy’ is increasingly controlled by major English companies, cross-border utilities and others, or else we have spivs arriving with a sackful of promises and pockets stuffed with grant application forms.
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SOMETIME, MAYBE, NEVER
Plaid Cymru leader Adam Price tells us there will be a referendum on independence before 2030. Mmm. Five years from now Scotland could be independent and Ireland reunified.
Setting a target of 2030 makes it look as if Plaid Cymru isn’t exactly enthusiastic about independence. (Which, as I’ve explained, it isn’t.) And then there’s Brexit.
Image courtesy of BBC Wales News. Click to enlarge
If the UK crashes out of the EU, and if this results in serious shortages of medicines, foodstuffs and other essentials leading to civil disorder, to troops on the streets holding back hungry people at bayonet point, are we seriously expected to wait for a referendum some time ‘before 2030’?
Looking at it from the other side; if Plaid Cymru and other Remainers get their way, and we stay in the EU, there will still be civil unrest, probably far right terrorism and maybe a real coup. So do we accept it all, patiently waiting for a referendum some time ‘before 2030’?
There are troubles ahead whether the UK stays in the EU or not.
So does Plaid Cymru have a contingency plan for a chaotic post-Brexit/no Brexit period and its possible constitutional consequences? At the very least, why not insist that a referendum on Welsh independence be triggered by a Scottish Yes vote?
In fact, does Plaid Cymru have any plan beyond staying in the EU (and the UK) and then having a referendum some time ‘before 2030’?
I’m reminded of the wisdom imparted by great-aunt Fastidia before she went on the lam. She clutched me to her bosom (I can still smell those lavender moth-balls!) and said, ‘Always remember, lovely boy, when the shit hits the fan it’s time to leave the room’.
The time to leave the room is fast approaching. But all Plaid Cymru can offer Wales is the delusion that if we stay in the EU it’ll be daisy-chains and puppy dogs all the way to a nice referendum . . . some time ‘before 2030’.
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Wales deserves better than a system of ‘kept woman’ devolution serving only a colonial elite. We deserve a more open, more honest, and more democratic political party, concerned solely with Wales, its people and their problems.
A party that is ready to seize the opportunities that Brexit will present.
PLEASE APPRECIATE THAT I GET SENT MORE INFORMATION AND LEADS THAN I CAN USE. I TRY TO RESPOND TO EVERYONE WHO CONTACTS ME BUT I CANNOT POSSIBLY USE EVERY BIT OF INFORMATION I’M SENT. DIOLCH YN FAWR
♦
INTRODUCTION
As you may be aware, Leanne Wood, the Plaid Cymru AM for Rhondda, and former party leader, has been criticised by the Assembly’s Standards Commissioner, Sir Roderick Evans QC, for calling me an “arsehole” in a tweet back in January.
Here’s the WalesOnline report of the decision, and here it is on BBC Wales. I supplied a statement to WalesOnline/Western Mail some of which appeared online but the print version was all Leanne Wood with me unable to get a word in.
UPDATE 21.09.2019: Arseholegate rumbles on. In this piece in today’s Llais y Sais Ruth Mosalski claims I am “no stranger to courting controversy”. A convoluted way of calling me controversial. But nothing I say, of itself, can be controversial; it becomes controversial when I am attacked by those I’m writing about here. So if they ignored me – as they claim they want to – then there’d be no controversy.
Note that the headline in the online (WalesOnline) version reads: ‘The quandary facing AMs as they’re asked to reprimand Leanne Wood for calling Jac o’the North an arsehole’. But the print version carries the headline: ‘The Quandary facing AMs over Leanne Wood’s Twitter outburst’.
The facts are that following the tragic death of Steffan Lewis, the Plaid Regional AM for South Wales East, I made a comment on Twitter about his successor, Delyth Jewell. You can see it here, together with Leanne Wood’s response and my answer to Leanne Wood.
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Why did I say that? Partly because, according to Ms Jewell’s stated interests, she is concerned with ‘women’s right’, which were already well represented in the Assembly, and ‘international development’, for which the Assembly has no remit.
Further, Ms Jewell had a background in the third sector, and as I put it in my post, Delyth Jewell AM: a clarification, ” . . . the Welsh Assembly, and Wales, needs another representative of the third sector like the Uighurs need more concentration camps.” (A reference to China’s oppression of its Uighur minority.)
Let me finish with Delyth Jewell by saying that since she took up her seat I have, on occasions, been pleasantly surprised by her commitment to Wales and the cause of independence. The same can never be said for Leanne Wood, to whom we now turn.
But before we do, I’m sure you won’t mind me finding space for another tweet from the same thread; this contribution by Marc Phillips, Plaid Cymru treasurer, erstwhile candidate, former party chair, and consort to Helen Mary Jones, the AM for Mid and West Wales.
Click to enlarge
“Neanderthal prick” is a curious insult, and rather dates him. For it is now agreed by archaeologists, ethnographers and others that we were always wrong to portray Neanderthals as grunting, primitive inferiors to modern humans. They were equally intelligent and culturally developed.
Which allowed the two to interbreed, certainly in Eurasia. Which in turn means that almost everyone reading this has some Neanderthal ancestry. Are we all ‘pricks’? Should we care? Who is Mr Helen Mary Jones anyway?
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THE COMPLAINT AND THE RESPONSE
Let me make it clear from the outset that I did not make the complaint, nor did I encourage the person who made the complaint. I became aware of the complaint later in the process.
Here is Sir Roderick Evans’ report to the Assembly containing correspondence between him and Ms Wood, but I’m afraid much of it has been redacted, presumably by Sir Roderick’s staff. I’m going to go through the correspondence and pick out what I consider to be important.
Let’s start with the letter of complaint, which can be found on page 7. Reading it now, I note that it also mentions Marc Phillips, though I’m not clear whether he was also being complained about. Perhaps not, because he’s not an AM. All in all, a clear explanation of what the writer was complaining about.
Click to enlarge
Now I want to turn to a few of the things Leanne Wood said in her defence.
Let us turn to page 12, where I am described as, “a persistent, pernicious influence on Welsh politics”. I found this interesting because so many of my critics, a number of them allies of Leanne Wood, tell me things like, “Nobody reads your bullshit, Jac”, or “Nobody cares what you think”, while another favourite is, “You’re a nobody”, yet they keep coming back, time after time, to tell me this . . . after reading something I’ve written!
At the risk of sounding immodest, I suggest the important word in the quote from Ms Wood might be ‘influence’.
The next paragraph refers to an article of mine that has been redacted. But speaking of it Ms Wood writes: “A prime example came during his feverish campaign to “expose” a so-called conspiracy between Plaid Cymru under my leadership and the lobbying firm Deryn (there was no such conspiracy) to oust Neil McEvoy from the party. I believe I have a strong case of defamation against Mr Jones for the blog posts he wrote on this subject.”
Again Leanne Wood gives herself away, this time by mentioning Neil McEvoy, and my support for him. She then tries to deny collusion between her and her close supporters on the one hand and Deryn Consulting on the other to marginalise Neil McEvoy, if not to destroy his political career.
To avoid any doubt, I repeat, there has most definitely been collusion, and it was no one-off meeting.
On to page 15 and the final paragraph of Leanne Wood’s letter of 31 January to Sir Roderick Evans. In which she writes: “I don’t regret using the only type of language that someone like Jones understands.”
Just 14 words, but what a huge sentence that is! It seems to be a good example of something I wrote back in June 2016. Where, in EU Referendum: Why I Want OUT!, I said, ” . . . many on the Left seem to believe they are both intellectually and morally superior to their opponents”.
Though what does she mean with, “someone like Jones”? Do I belong to a sub-species? Am I some kind of untermensch? Forget anything I’m accused of saying, this is the language of intolerant extremism, whether it comes from the left or the right.
With “someone like Jones” I am being ‘othered’. And we all know where that can lead.
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CLIQUE AND CLAQUE
From her subsequent statements, it appears that Leanne Wood is refusing to accept the decision against her. Which is worrying, for the principle involved goes well beyond whether she was justified in calling me an ‘arsehole’. And for this reason.
If we allow Leanne Wood, or her collaborators and followers, free rein to decide who or what is misogynistic, or racist, or homophobic, or transphobic, or whatever, then they will abuse that freedom to their advantage; in order to silence critics and stifle political debate.
It follows that if this extreme minority – a small percentage of Plaid Cymru members and an even smaller percentage of the population at large – is allowed to dictate the terms of political discourse then democracy is in peril.
This is why there must be an impartial authority to judge on such matters.
For when a democratic system becomes intimidated by a zealous minority promoting extreme agendas and pursuing personal vendettas it ends in tragedies such as the death of Carl Sargeant, and the ongoing persecution of Neil McEvoy.
It was significant that among the first to leap to Leanne Wood’s defence were Labour politicians and Cathy Owens of Deryn Consulting. As I predicted.
Click to enlarge
In pursuit of their objectives these cliques use insults and smears that get taken up and chanted by inhabitants of a world where there is no room for doubt. Where everything is black and white, right and wrong. Agree with them or face their wrath.
There are some in Leanne Wood’s claque of such total certitude, seeking a transcendental level of wokeness, that they have more in common with suicide bombers than with normal political activists.
This is why I challenge them at every opportunity. Someone has to.
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FAULT LINES
I suppose on one level #arseholegate – as it has been dubbed by the interesting new ‘site Bubble.Wales – is a local skirmish in a global culture war, along predictable fault lines.
In this wider conflict the left has been getting hammered. There was the victory of Donald Trump; then the Brexit vote; the EU election victories, first for Ukip (2014) and then the Brexit Party (2019); plus populist/nationalist leaders and governments being elected all over the place, from Hungary to Brasil to India . . . and now, to cap it all – BoJo, and with Brexit fast approaching!
These defeats are partly explained by a shift away from the left by the (mainly) white working class in Europe, the USA and elsewhere. This is important, because for centuries middle class liberals and leftists have argued that they speak for those unable to speak for themselves.
This patronising myth is now exploded, leaving some of our erstwhile elite feeling distinctly uncharitable towards ungrateful proles. For those who were considered to be dumb and inarticulate have now found their voices, and they’re not singing the Internationale or the Red Flag.
This leaves the left scrabbling around to recruit, even invent, oppressed minorities. ‘What’s that, Mrs Jones – you’ve got ingrowing toenails! Join us and we’ll defend you against the ingrowingtoenailphobes. That Jac o’ the North is one of ’em. Bastard!’
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I have to say this, and I hope I don’t upset anyone with what needs to be put bluntly. When it comes to sex, as long as it doesn’t involve children, animals, coercion or inflatable dolls of Marge Simpson, I really don’t care what consenting adults get up to in private. (Just don’t make a cause or a career out of it.)
I felt the need to say that because a disproportionate number of my nastiest critics seem to be . . . well . . . let’s say, of non-heterosexual orientations. Attracted to Plaid Cymru by Leanne Wood they now feel bitter that she’s been deposed, and some seem to hold me responsible! So I am a ‘misogynist’, a ‘homophobe’, a ‘transphobe’, etc., etc., etc.
But I am none of those things. And that includes misogynist, despite what Leanne Wood would like people to think. Ask any woman who knows me. And valid criticism of a politician who just happens to be a woman is never misogyny.
To suggest otherwise is censorship. And usually comes from those who move in closed circles, divorced from the concerns of the general population. This too is dangerous.
But it explains why the most virulent attacks on me come from within the Cardiff Bay Bubble, and from those in other parts of Wales stupid enough to still believe that Corruption Bay is a force for good in Welsh life.
PLEASE APPRECIATE THAT I GET SENT MORE INFORMATION AND LEADS THAN I CAN USE. I TRY TO RESPOND TO EVERYONE WHO CONTACTS ME BUT I CANNOT POSSIBLY USE EVERY BIT OF INFORMATION I’M SENT. DIOLCH YN FAWR
The clue to my motivation lies in my use of the word ‘Wexit’, for I believed then, and I believe even more strongly today, that Brexit, especially a disastrous and damaging Brexit, can lead to Welsh independence. And Welsh independence is my priority; more important by far than membership of the EU.
In addition to voting for Brexit I confirmed my trip to Tartarus by supporting Trump, and more recently, by voting for the Brexit Party in the recent EU elections. Then there’s my backing for Neil McEvoy, and the regular criticism of Plaid Cymru.
Oh, yes, and of course I attack the Labour Party on a regular, almost daily, basis.
So, all in all, I suppose I’ve made a few enemies.
My rap sheet is enough to reduce certain people to bouts of carpet-chewing rage. These, it should be said, tend to be Plaid Cymru members and supporters; more especially what some call the ‘Leannistas’, the woke left, currently nursing their wounds after so many recent defeats and now lashing out blindly at people like me.
Which is ironic in a way, for I am only following Lenin’s dictum, “The worse, the better”. By which he meant that the population at large will be more receptive to revolutionary change when the system they’re familiar with starts disintegrating.
It may be cruel, it may be cynical, but old Vlad was spot on. For the Bolsheviks would never have come to power if Russia had stayed out of World War One and the Czar had introduced adequate reforms.
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BY THE LEFT
There are no half measures with these people who attack me.
If you don’t support Extinction Rebellion bringing cities to a standstill then you’re a climate change denier. Vote for Brexit and you’re a fascist/racist/white supremacist. Refuse to accept that ‘chicks with dicks’ are 100% women and you’re a transphobe. The list of crimes people like me can commit – without even knowing it! – is endless. And these ‘crimes’ increase by the month.
Though many of my critics are happy to engage in rational debate, and there’s even banter. But then there’s the darker side, those who just want to screech at me.
Here’s a recent example from Twitter of what I’m talking about.
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I don’t know who Aled Gwyn Williams is (is he the one in the cap?), and I’ve no idea what motivated him to put such ugly slanders on social media for my grandchildren to be teased about.
I shall deal with the first paragraph in a minute.
As for the second paragraph, I am none of the things he lists. Though perhaps he’s trying to say the same thing with “fascist”, “racist”, and “authoritarian & white-supremacist”. (I can almost hear the spluttering as he repeats himself.)
As for being “homophobic”, well, just ask my gay friends.
The final smear is that I am a “defender of violence against women”, but I have no idea what the hell he’s trying to say. Does he think I stand outside windows listening to domestic arguments and shouting, “Go on, pal, punch her!”
Displayed here we see the absolute self-belief of the true fanatic (political or religious); convinced that he/she is right and anyone he/she disagrees with is not only wrong, but evil.
Which makes them no different to those they claim to oppose. For the right, we’re told, is intolerant, that it ‘others’ people, who can then be vilified and humiliated. Precisely what Aled Gwyn Williams tried to do to me in that tweet.
Support for the old axiom that says there’s no real difference between the extremes of left and right. They operate in almost exactly the same way.
But yes, I did vote for Brexit; and yes, I did support Trump; and yes, I did vote for the Brexit Party in last month’s EU elections; and yes, I certainly want Boris Johnson to become prime minister: and yes, I did help form Ein Gwlad – because I want Welsh independence!
An increasing number of people across the political spectrum now agree that Brexit delivered by Boris Johnson with his head up Trump’s arse will threaten the Union.
The exclusive English nationalism preached by Boris Johnson makes many more Scots, Irish, and Welsh question the English connection.
This is a good thing. As this Irish tweet I picked up over the weekend understands. (Though I’m not sure about Wales as a fifth province!)
Click to enlarge
When Johnson is announced as new Tory Party leader and prime minister tomorrow he will face a choice. Either to soldier on with a rebellious minority in his party capable of derailing his plans, or to call a general election in the hope of removing his critics and increasing his majority.
Despite the obvious discord in the Labour Party there’s no guarantee that Johnson could increase his majority, that’s because any election will be fought on the issue of Brexit, which will see certain parties standing aside to give a single anti-Brexit candidate a clear run at the Tory opponent.
His best option then might be an electoral pact with the Brexit Party. The Tories could concentrate on the suburbs and the shires, while Farage’s crew could focus on those ‘left behind’ areas that voted for Brexit in 2016.
Such a pact will confirm the split in the Conservative Party.
For as I’ve said somewhere before, in recent decades ‘Europe’ has been to the Tories what Irish Home Rule was to the 19th century Liberal Party. The Liberals split in 1886 with the breakaway Liberal Unionist Party eventually merging with the Conservative and Unionist Party.
A victory for the pact would give Boris Johnson – and his thirsty deputy, Nigel Farage – the majority needed to turn the UK into an offshore tax haven where everybody whistles The Dam Busters tune before settling down to yet another meal of chlorinated chicken.
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A LITTLE BIRD
While it’s difficult to understand the unprovoked attack from Aled Gwyn Williams, he is not alone. Not so long ago a very similar assault was mounted by someone called Huw Marshall who, again, is a complete stranger to me.
Ifan Morgan Jones also came out swinging with a ludicrous charge of Antisemitism over something I’d written that included George Soros. But in my piece I never mentioned that Soros was Jewish. To which I might add that, as a good conservative, I support the state of Israel because it’s an ally of the West.
But why would complete strangers want to attack me, and do so by telling lies? I mean, if you don’t like me, or you don’t agree with me, then don’t read this blog, don’t follow me on Twitter, etc. Am I that influential?
Which makes me wonder whether we are really dealing with a few individuals who’ve taken an intense dislike to me/my views or if there’s more to it.
Let’s think about it for a minute. I criticise Plaid Cymru. I helped form Ein Gwlad. I continually attack the Labour Party. I am an outspoken supporter Neil McEvoy. I regularly refer to Cardiff Bay as ‘Corruption Bay’ (or “a cess-pit”). For years I have exposed the corruption, cronyism and waste of public funding in the third sector . . .
Thinks . . . who might share my interest in those things, but from a perspective opposite to mine, and might be able to influence, directly or indirectly, people who don’t know me?
One obvious suspect is Deryn Consulting, the lobbying firm that acts as a link between Labour, Plaid Cymru, the third sector, and others that together make our country a corrupt and impoverished laughing-stock and a magnet for crooks and chancers.
At this point I should add that I’ve also attacked Deryn more than once.
To understand how Deryn operates – they are lobbyists and ‘influencers’ after all – just think of Welsh public life focused on Cardiff Bay as a web, with Deryn as a fat, hairy-legged spider at the centre.
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Deryn was instrumental in the sacking of Carl Sargeant and must bear considerable responsibility for his suicide. Deryn also co-ordinates the unremitting campaign against Neil McEvoy.
If you doubt how influential Deryn is in Welsh political life then read this piece by the lawyer representing the Sargeant family at the resumed inquest the week before last into Carl Sargeant’s death. There are passages there that almost jump off the screen.
Particularly the section below.
Extract from Dr Neil Hudgell’s account of the Sargeant inquest. Some might argue that Deryn set itself up as accuser, judge and jury. Click to enlarge.
Why would Carwyn Jones make TWO phone calls to Deryn almost immediately after hearing of Carl Sargeant’s death? Was it, ‘Oh, dear, ladies . . . tell me what to do now.’
Maybe I should explain that the Cathy Owens mentioned by Dr Hudgell is the leading director of Deryn, while the other woman also figured in Guido Fawkes’ coverage of December 2018, where we read: “Jo Kiernan: Deryn employee and named at last week’s Inquest as co-ordinating a bullying campaign against Sargeant when she worked as Carwyn Jones’ chief SpAd.”
I’m not saying that Aled Gwyn Williams, Huw Marshall, Ifan Morgan Jones, and the rest of my critics are taking orders from the nest (or maybe it’s the bunker nowadays) but they seem to share the Deryn mindset that will not tolerate critics or divergent views.
And never forget that Deryn is a creation of devolution, prospering thanks to weak and malleable politicians in a devolved system still controlled from London. Deryn would not survive independence.
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‘HIS NAME IS ROYSTON JONES AND HE’S NOT ON OUR SIDE’
Is what Aled Gwyn Williams wrote in the first paragraph of his tweet.
His tweet is addressed to “Welsh Self-determinationists”, which I assume to mean those who want Wales to be independent. But I have been a nationalist all my life, check with anyone who’s been around since the 1960s.
It follows, then, that when he says I’m not on ‘their’ side, he must mean some grouping other than those wanting independence. As Williams is a hard-line socialist he can only be alluding to the comrades.
I am a lifelong opponent of socialism.
So my real ‘crime’, in Williams’ eyes, is being hostile to socialism.
Williams seems to be active in YesCymru and supports All Under One Banner Cymru. Two groups some fear have become too close to Plaid Cymru.
The small increase in membership in the wake of Adam ‘Soundbite’ Price’s victory may already have been offset by resignations over the party’s treatment of Neil McEvoy, which will of course only strengthen the influence of the ‘Leannistas’.
I’m not the only one who sees this drift to the left. Here’s a tweet put out a week or so ago by writer Siôn Jobbins, asking if he’ll be welcome at Plaid’s Summer School, seeing as he’s not a socialist.
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Though it could be that not all the leftists trying to capitalise on the increase in support for independence belong to Plaid Cymru, there may be even more exotic elements trying to muscle in.
Below we see a picture from a recent AUOB Cymru tweet showing some kind of street furniture or utility box in Cardiff presenting an interesting display. In the centre we see nationalist hero, John Jenkins, leader of Mudiad Amddiffyn Cymru, who was sent down for 10 years in 1970 for his role in a 1960s bombing campaign.
John, now 85, has lived in Wrecsam for many years.
We also see a couple of YesCymru stickers, a football fans for independence sticker and Wrexham fans against the Sun (newspaper). But it’s the other three that intrigue me.
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On the top left we see the Starry Plough of the Irish Citizen Army, led by James Connolly in the Easter Rising of 1916. This was a socialist organisation that fought alongside the larger, and nationalist, Irish Volunteers led by Padraig Pearse.
The one at the bottom right carries letters printed backwards to look Russian, a communist red star, and the slogan ‘Free Wales’.
Finally, the black one on the left reads ‘Wxm (Wrexham) Antifa No Pasaran!’ Antifa are left wing thugs who first took to the streets of the USA following Donald Trump’s victory, ostensibly ‘fighting fascism and racism’.
Now they resort to bombing and attacking anyone who doesn’t agree with them. A recent victim was journalist Andy Ngo, who wrote: “Antifa operates by a very broad definition of ‘fascists.’ By antifa’s telling, fascists include mainstream conservatives and even centrist journalists who dare criticize them.”
I know exactly how he feels.
You have to wonder what’s going on when the self-appointed promoters of inclusivity beat up the gay son of Vietnamese boat people. I hope to God we don’t have any nutters in Wales preparing to emulate Antifa.
And I’m disappointed to see AUOB Cymru apparently endorse Antifa.
So on a Cardiff street we see a collection of stickers linking independence with socialism, with some pretty hairy and intolerant expressions of socialism at that.
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THE CRUCIAL EIGHTEEN MONTHS
Partly due to events beyond our control Wales will soon be closer to independence than at any time in the past five hundred years. But the mood is also being influenced by what is happening here in Wales.
Our homeland is deprived and exploited because devolution has been a miserable failure. For what has devolution given us – Deryn! This realisation has resulted in the Labour Party losing credibility by the day; but I fear Plaid Cymru will be reluctant to take advantage of the opportunity presented by Johnson in No 10 and Drakeford in the Bay.
Instead, Plaid Cymru will chase rainbows and form Englandandwales anti-Tory or anti-Brexit alliances. This loss of focus is due to the party’s leftward drift coupled with the ephemeral appeal of being ‘taken seriously’ by appearing on TV with Caroline Lucas.
And when Johnson makes his move, Plaid Cymru will rush to support the Labour Party in defending ‘the devolution settlement’.
I say, fuck the devolution settlement. It wasn’t worth having in 1999 and it’s been seriously devalued over the past two decades. All our efforts now must concentrate on independence. And to achieve that goal we must reach out to as many as possible of our people.
This cannot be done by demanding a socialist feminist republic (as was heard at AUOB’s first rally on May 11). And if balaclava’d Antifa thugs start beating up people they disagree with, then any hope of independence will be lost. Wales may have a radical past but most of us today are socially conservative.
It should go without saying, therefore, that Wales needs a broad-based movement for independence that must either be ideology-free or else it must accept all ideological standpoints.
And so I’m asking All Under One Banner Cymru if there’ll be a welcome in Caernarfon on Saturday for people who don’t support Plaid Cymru, and people who are not socialist; for those who would have fought alongside Pearse rather than Connolly, who don’t obsess over a second referendum and who regard Antifa thugs no differently to the thugs who follow Tommy Robinson.
I ask because there are clearly some who feel that the drive for independence should be controlled by the left; and maybe they’ll only accept independence on their terms. Either way, it’s insulting and offensive to those holding different views who have worked for independence for over 50 years.
I haven’t prepared any in-depth or weighty post for this week; instead, I’ve put together a few things I’ve been thinking about, or been sent, that might also be of interest to you. You know me – always trying to please!
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COALITIONS
One of the more bizarre responses to the 2016 EU referendum result came from Leanne Wood, then leader of Plaid Cymru – ‘Let’s go into coalition with Labour!‘, she suggested.
Quite what this was supposed to achieve no one seemed to know, but it struck me at the time as a predictable response from Plaid Cymru’s clenched fist and beret tendency. Those who would still regard the Tories as ‘the real enemy’ even if ISIS invaded the Rhondda Fach.
Ideally, of course, Plaid Cymru would like a coalition with Labour, but thanks to Comrade Corbyn’s vacillating that is not possible. So with that hope dashed, Plaid now seeks a deal with the Liberal Democrats, the Greens, Change UK and the SNP.
Let’s consider the SNP first. Things are very different in Scotland, where the SNP will be hoping to win every seat in the next UK general election; so the chances of them doing a deal with other parties, which would almost certainly mean standing down in some seats, is a non-starter.
The SNP could even turn the next general election into a vote on independence and EU membership, especially if Westminster refuses to allow another independence referendum.
Next up is Change UK. If you’re unfamiliar with this lot, then let me explain that they’re a bunch of preening egotists who couldn’t get their own ways in their previous parties. Before the next election comes around clashing egos will have destroyed this collective huff of a party and that’ll be the end of Change UK.
On to the Greens, aka the Green Party of England, for there is no Wales Green Party. Worse, last year Greens in Wales voted on whether to set up a separate Green party and decided to stay as the Green Party of Englandandwales. Which means that Plaid Cymru wants to work with a party that refuses to recognise Wales as a country!
Note how the BBC reports it, as if common sense prevails against dangerous separatists seeking to sunder a sacred bond. Click to enlarge
Finally, the Liberal Democrats, the party that kept the Tories in power at Westminster between 2010 and 2015, and the party that – with its single AM – helps keep Labour in power down Cardiff docks. A gang of opportunistic and amoral politicos that would sell their grannies for a sniff of power.
Despite decades of trying to promote themselves as the ‘nice’ party I have a deep and abiding contempt for the modern Liberal Democrats. I had time for old Geraint Howells and a few others from the genuinely Welsh Liberal tradition, but the modern party is a venomous thing not to be trusted or handled.
Containing individuals like Callum James Littlemore, who is ‘Diary Manager’ for local party leader Jane Dodds. (She needs a diary manager!) I thought for a minute it was a typo, and he worked on her farm, but apparently it’s true. Anyway, young Callum bears out all I’ve thought about LibDems.
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Though he can’t have been in Wales for long if he thinks Plaid Cymru “support divisive nationalism”. Listen to Uncle Jac: Plaid Cymru is a bunch of evasive, wishy-washy, ishoo-botherers, forever seeking distractions to avoid confronting any specifically Welsh issue. Brexit being the latest such distraction.
Let’s hope we hear little more from Littlemore. (Couldn’t resist it!)
Ruling out the SNP for the reasons I’ve given, these are the parties that Plaid Cymru is ready to co-operate with thanks to Plaid’s fixation with Brexit. What would Plaid get in return – I mean, would these parties campaign for Welsh independence, or even greater devolution? I think not.
It also means that by turning the next election into a single-issue affair Plaid Cymru will ignore the things people care about. Done in order to line up with England’s Brahmin left, thereby alienating thousands upon thousands of people that must be won over if Wales is to escape the humiliation long ago imposed on us by John Bull; a colonial system loyally maintained into the present day by ‘Welsh’ Labour and its rag-bag of hangers-on.
There’ll be a price to pay for this posturing, this self-indulgent myopia. I sincerely hope.
Made possible by Secretary of State for Wales (1979 – 1987) Nicholas Edwards, who set up, in April 1987, the Cardiff Bay Development Corporation (CBDC), to be run by his good friend and fellow High Tory, Sir Geoffrey Inkin. The CBDC became the conduit for pumping hundreds of millions of pounds of public money into land owned by Associated British Ports (ABP), of which Edwards was a director.
The CBDC was wound up in 1999 and Edwards – Lord Crickhowell since 1987 – stepped down from the board of Associated British Ports Holdings Ltd 28 April 1999.
Of course, Edwards/Crickhowell didn’t have it all his own way. For example, despite donning his Welsh National Opera tricorn he failed to get a new opera house to the Bay, but learning from that disappointment he made sure that the ‘consolation prize’ of the Notional Assembly building was located on his patch.
And while it was being built he saw to it that ABP continued to coin it by having AMs and staff use Crickhowell House – at £2m+ a year.
Crickhowell House/Tŷ Crughywel/Tŷ Hywel, click to enlarge
Crickhowell House was soon renamed Tŷ Crughywel, and is now Tŷ Hywel, apparently in honour of Hywel Dda. Which looks very much like an attempt to hide the Crickhowell connection, for I’m not aware of Hywel Dda having any local connections.
Despite having moved into the new Senedd building over ten years ago the ‘Welsh Government’ still agreed a series of leases that bind it – and us – to Tŷ Hywel until 2049, or Armageddon, whichever comes sooner. Guaranteed to cost us many more millions of pounds.
I mention this to give the background to what we see today in Cardiff Bay; the squalid and incestuous wheeler-dealing, the lying and the backstabbing, the cronyism, the incompetence, and the waste of public money.
The latest example of the incestuousness comes with Daniel Bryant leaving lobbyists Deryn for Plaid Cymru. This ménage à trois involving Deryn, Plaid Cymru and the Labour Party is not good for democracy or for Wales.
But this is what devolution has done. It has given us a class of people, divorced from the real world, who study politics, help out local politicians in their spare time and then, when they finish university, get a job working for a politician, or lobbyists, making contacts, and getting on their party’s list of approved candidates.
They then become politicians and make decisions affecting the lives of people with whom they have little contact and for whom they may have little concern. I say that because politics is no longer about serving the people, it’s a team game of abstractions and all that matters is scoring points against the opposition. (Though in Wales it often seems to be just two ‘teams’ involved.)
This system of musical chairs that begins with teenagers choosing a ‘career’ in politics goes a long way to explaining why Wales is in the mess she’s in today. And also why, alone in western Europe, Wales has no register or regulation of lobbyists – because the lobbyists won’t countenance such legislation!
Speak out in favour of such legislation – as Neil McEvoy has done more than once – and you will be hounded and vilified – by lobbyists, your own party, and anyone else the lobbyists can influence. Is this democracy?
Of course not, but it is Corruption Bay; and those we find lurking there today are worthy successors to the Cardiff Bay Development Corporation.
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REMOTE CONTROL
For anyone who missed it over on Jacqui Thompson’s blog, soon-to-be-retired Carmarthenshire chief executive Mark James plans to stay active with Ffynnon Consultancy Ltd . . . of Brighton. A company formed 23 April 2019.
‘Why Brighton?’ you ask, and the answer is because that’s where his mates are. ‘Mates!’ Yes, you must remember his partners from the Cardiff Bay property business. I wrote about it in Baywatch and Baywatch 2. In particular, Mark Philip Carter, a director with James of Building and Estate Solutions Today Limited.
That company is based in Cardiff, but Carter has other companies based at the same Brighton address – 161-163 Preston Road – where we find Mark James’s new venture. Companies such as Friend-James Accountants LLP, Friend-James Ltd and Opher Ltd.
The two directors of Ffynnon Consultancy are James and his missus. He with 400 shares, she with 100.
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It was always unlikely that when James retires later this month, and surfboards out of county hall on a flood of tears, that he would put on his slippers and take up some innocent pastime like counting his money, or evicting bloggers.
But now, with his own consultancy, his protégée Wendy Walters taking over his job, and Emlyn ‘Two Barns’ Dole keeping the councillors in check, James should be able to run the show by remote control!
For as the old saying has it – You can’t keep a good man down. Or in this case, a vindictive and manipulative megalomaniac, and Private Eye Shit of the Year 2016.
You know he can’t just walk away – for there is a Wellness Village to build!
Talking of which . . . there’s something nagging me, for there is another company with a very similar name to James’s new venture. This being the Ffynnon Consultancy Group Ltd.
What’s interesting about the Ffynnon Consultancy Group is that its entry in the ‘Welsh Government’s Directory of Welsh Businesses tells us: “At the Ffynnon Consultancy Group we identify and establish business connections across a wide platform of business sectors in the UAE and the GCC”.
‘UAE’ is of course the initials of the United Arab Emirates, and ‘GCC’ stands for Gulf Cooperation Council. So why would this obscure little company be operating in the Gulf?
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I ask because I’m sure you’ll remember that it was links with that part of the world that led to suspensions at Swansea University and the halting of city deal funding for the Wellness Village.
The sole director of the Ffynnon Consultancy Group – a one-share company that appears never to have traded or done anything since being formed in June 2016 – was Angela Louise Williams of Llandybie, until she was replaced last Friday by Kevin Williams of New Quay, Ceredigion, with the company’s registered address also transferring to New Quay on 3 June.
Given the Gulf connection, I got to wondering if there might also be a link with Swansea University, the Wellness Village, or with outgoing Carmarthenshire CEO Mark James’s new company Ffynnon Consultancy Ltd?
In the hope of getting answers I e-mailed Ffynnon Consultancy Group and received a reply from Kevin Williams, who expressed surprise that Companies House had allowed registrations from two companies with such similar names.
He assured me that neither he nor Angela Louise Williams had any links to either Carmarthenshire County Council or Swansea University. So that would appear to be that . . . just an amazing coincidence . . .
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M4 OR NO M4
As I write this, on Monday evening, the word is that tomorrow the ‘Welsh Government’ will not back the proposed M4 ‘relief road’ through the Gwent Levels and Newport docks. So, on that assumption, here are a few points that immediately popped into the cavernous Jac cranium.
Let us hope that this unexpected decision heralds a new era of development and investment spread across the country, thereby obviating the need for an M4 ‘relief road’.
Presumably the announcement will be accompanied by promises to invest in public transport. Again, I urge that thinking goes beyond the Cardiff region, because there is a country out there.
Nothing would prove this administration’s commitment to both Wales beyond Cardiff and public transport better than a west coast railway line from Carmarthen to Bangor.
Finally, this decision might deter commuters from Bristol and elsewhere moving into Wales for cheaper housing – have you thought about that? Well, have you!
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CAPTION COMPETITION
And, finally, this week’s caption competition. I am grateful to the person who supplied this wonderful photograph of Paul and Rowena Williams of Weep for Wales fame. The picture comes from the XscapeNow Facebook page.
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These crooks are former owners of the Radnorshire Arms Hotel in Presteigne, The Knighton Hotel, Plas Glynllifon, Seiont Manor Hotel and other establishments from Northumberland to Cornwall.
I can’t help thinking that holding an illustration of criminals being caught by the police might be seen as tempting fate.
PLEASE APPRECIATE THAT I GET SENT MORE INFORMATION AND LEADS THAN I CAN USE. I TRY TO RESPOND TO EVERYONE WHO CONTACTS ME BUT I CANNOT POSSIBLY USE EVERY BIT OF INFORMATION I’M SENT. DIOLCH YN FAWR
I’m telling you this in the hope of proving that what follows is both intellectually and on all other levels consistent with what I wrote three years ago. Consistency being in short supply in Welsh politics at the moment.
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AS I WAS SAYING . . .
I explained in June 2016, with the six points reproduced below, why I believed Brexit could result in Welsh independence.
We shall lose the EU hand-outs and these will not be replaced by Westminster.
Leaving the EU will result in economic meltdown.
The City of London will be replaced as Europe’s No 1 financial centre.
Brexit is fundamentally English nationalism.
Post Brexit the UK will experience the most repressive and anglocentric government ever known.
Scotland will probably become independent.
Since writing that I have also come to believe that the Brexit shambles, and the possibility of a hard border in Ireland, could well result in a reunified Ireland.
I concluded my pre-referendum piece in June 2016 with, ‘If you care about Wales, and if you want to see Wales survive and prosper as a nation in her own right, then you must vote to leave the European Union as the precondition for leaving the United Kingdom’.
I wrote that because I hoped for the debacle we see now, the confusion of political parties imploding and new ones appearing out of nowhere, with the emergence of an intolerant English nationalism that tries to shout everybody else down. I also wanted economic collapse. Does that make me irresponsible? Maybe, but only in the short term.
∼
After the referendum Plaid Cymru’s leadership should have sat down, held hands, and engaged in an honest discussion in the hope of figuring out why so many Welsh people had gone against its recommendation and voted to leave the EU.
Had they done so they might have realised that many Welsh voters were pissed off with falling standards in health, education, housing and so many other fields; and they were relatively poorer than they’d been ten or twenty years earlier, with their concerns ignored by politicians they felt to be ‘distant’ and out of touch.
So they allowed themselves to be seduced and they took their frustrations out on the EU by voting for Brexit.
An honest inquiry like that should have made Plaid Cymru realise that many Welsh people were pissed off enough to vote for Brexit because devolution had failed them due to the ‘Welsh’ Labour Party being less than useless.
But when presented with the ever-open goal of England’s management team in Cardiff Bay Plaid Cymru always prefers to put the ball over the bar.
Wales voting for Brexit was as much due to Labour’s and Plaid Cymru’s inadequacies as it was to London’s neglect, proven by the situation in Scotland. There the SNP took Labour on in a no-holds-barred struggle – and won. With the result that since the SNP took control in 2007 things have visibly improved across the board for most Scots, and this influenced their vote in the EU referendum.
For by 2016 not only was Scotland doing much better than Wales by every measurable criterion, but the SNP had successfully convinced a majority of Scots that any problems affecting them could be attributed to London, not Brussels.
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Plaid Cymru’s failure to emulate the SNP’s success was due to the party spending almost two decades doing no more than a little light sparring with Labour prior to elections. The enemy was always ‘them wicked Tories, innit’, even when the Conservative Party was in opposition in Westminster!
A major reason Wales voted for Brexit in 2016 was Plaid Cymru’s failure to emulate the SNP. Worse, when not cwtching up to Labour the party was pushing a discredited ideology and obsessing over ‘niche issues’ rather than the everyday concerns of real Welsh people.
Plaid Cymru is now repeating past mistakes by linking up with groups like the Green Party that view Brexit, and Wales, through an Englandandwales prism. But it has no alternative because it failed to create a Welsh dimension for Brexit.
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RED QUEEN TOPPLED, PAWNS FIGHT ON!
Since the overthrow of the Red Queen it appears that Plaid Cymru has, confusingly, moved further to the left! Not only that, but the party has reneged on its 2017 election promise to secure the best Brexit deal for Wales by recently coming out as a hard-line Remain party.
Both these trends were in evidence a week last Saturday at the All Under One Banner Cymru march in Cardiff. Not only was the event restricted to Plaid Cymru and its offshoots but there was as much if not more talk of socialism and EU membership than of Welsh independence.
One speaker, Sandra Clubb, of Undod – Plaid’s ‘independence-but-only-if-it-means-a-socialist-dystopia’ group – even called for a socialist feminist republic. I bet that would be jolly!
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Sandra Clubb is the wife of Gareth Clubb, Plaid Cymru’s CEO.
Consider this: Plaid Cymru was never able to shake off the perception that it’s a party for Welsh speakers. This belief limited the party’s appeal and cost it the votes of otherwise well-disposed, Welsh-identifying anglophones.
Rather than learning from this difficulty Plaid Cymru is now further limiting its appeal by saying, ‘We are the party of independence – but also a socialist party wanting EU membership’. Thereby alienating non-socialists and those none too keen on the EU . . . in a country where the majority voted for Brexit!
This self-destructive positioning can only happen when there is a monumental misjudgement of the public mood brought about by echo-chamber ‘debates’. Social media does indeed have a lot to answer for.
As for the undoubted increase in support for independence, this is due to the same anger as influenced the Brexit vote – but with three more years of it! And there are more who feel this way.
With growing numbers of people increasingly pissed off it’s inevitable that some will look with fresh eyes at Welsh independence. But this has little or nothing to do with anything Plaid Cymru has done.
Yet we see Plaid Cymru trying to ride this wave, and even control it, by presenting itself as the only party offering independence. Which explains why Ein Gwlad was not even informed of the Cardiff march, let alone invited to participate.
One obvious manifestation of this mood has been YesCymru.
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A GOOD IDEA BEING SUBVERTED?
I was so glad to see the emergence and growth of this new movement, bringing many new faces into the independence tent by avoiding ideologies and having no links with any political party – as is the case with All Under One Banner in Scotland. But it couldn’t last.
That’s because despite having made little or no contribution Plaid Cymru still wants to both capitalise on and control the growing mood for radical political change within Wales. While also being the local franchise for a UK-wide anti-Brexit movement of the woke and the ‘progressive’.
My understanding of YesCymru is that it’s a loose collective of independent local groups. But to counter centrifugal tendencies it has a Central Committee, and a Constitution. Towards the end of last year, first at an Annual General Meeting, and then at an Emergency General Meeting, both were changed to personnel and rules more attuned to the thinking of Plaid Cymru’s leadership.
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To cover all the bases, in January, Plaid Cymru launched Undod, an outright socialist group, which as we’ve seen, is calling for a socialist feminist republic. Now some tell me I’m out of touch, so maybe there are tens of thousands marching for this feminist republic. If so, they have not marched past Château Jacques.
And although YesCymru maintains the pretence of being ‘a non-party political grassroots organisation’, this pretence is wearing a little thin. A couple of recent incidents will explain what I mean, in relation to both the EU and Plaid Cymru.
Last Wednesday, Nigel Farage visited Merthyr, and the local branch of YesCymru was out protesting. More than that, they blocked a road to stop people from attending the Brexit Party rally.
Then on Saturday, when Plaid Cymru was out leafleting in Chepstow, the local YesCymru crew turned up in support.
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We’ve seen (in the passage of the Constitution I linked to above) that YesCymru claims to be ‘non-party political’, but what does the Constitution say about the EU?
What it says is (my highlighting):
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That reference to ‘the wider European family’ could mean cousin Helmut in Düsseldorf, but I suspect it hints at something else.
If you’re going to write something as soppy and vacuous as what we see in the panel above then why not start with something along the lines of, ‘A new relationship based on mutual respect between the nations of these islands’ before moving on to Europe and the wider world?
Though in fairness, I must say that many YesCymru branches do remain ‘non-party political’, and also avoid the Brexit debate. Using a rule of thumb, the further a YesCymru branch is from the poisonous influences of Cardiff Bay the more likely it is to be true to YesCymru’s espoused principles of neutrality and focus on independence.
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WAITING IN THE WINGS
As a student of history, I know that Welsh independence is more likely to emerge from political chaos and economic disaster than from the Tory party anchoring itself on the centre right, Farage’s new party imploding, ‘Welsh’ Labour and its third sector continuing to run Wales (down), the UK remaining in the EU, and Plaid Cymru . . . well, just being Plaid Cymru.
For these, or any combination of them, will keep Wales in the UK.
Which is why I have always believed that leaving the EU acrimoniously and using the resultant shitstorm to our advantage will be the best outcome for Wales in the long run. I say that because this election on Thursday isn’t really about the EU, or Brexit; it’s a preliminary skirmish for an impending conflict to determine who controls the UK.
In Scotland, the SNP is using the 2016 Remain vote to push for a second independence referendum that it might well win. Across the water, la revanche du berceau continues to undermine Unionist supremacy, with the possibility of more moderate non-Catholics preferring unification with a now secular and prosperous South to remaining in a poor, bigot-heavy statelet.
Quite possibly the Brexit Party will cobble together a manifesto and stand in the next general election – which might be called before the year is out – which means we might end up with a coalition of Boris Johnson, Jacob Rees-Mogg and Nigel Farage.
Of course, such a troika will need to reach out beyond England, but it already has allies north of the border and in the Six Counties in the form of the Conservative and Unionist Party, the DUP, Orange Lodges, Glasgow Rangers fans and assorted Loyalist gangs.
And they’re already on the streets. Saturday saw a little sabre-rattling in Glasgow.
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There are dark forces waiting in the wings, using organisations and groups like those in the panel above. These shadowy elements are determined to gain power by one route or another. (And I’m not the only one who sees this.) Which is why nothing must distract us from the bigger picture and the best interests of our people.
Voting for the Brexit Party and encouraging their shadowy friends to show their hand is more likely to draw a response that results in Welsh independence than voting for Plaid Cymru in a meaningless election when the party’s long-term objective seems to be – wait for it! – a return to the status quo ante referendum!
Do you recall those halcyon days, boys and girls? When Wales was a land of milk and honey (or beer if you preferred); those talented and imaginative politicians in Cardiff Bay ruled wisely, making all corners of our land prosperous, and we all danced in the streets shouting, ‘Good old Carwyn, may he reign forever!’
Cos I must have missed it.
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CLARIFICATION: From the many comments received to my Facebook page it seems that some people think I actually support the Brexit Party. Let me explain . . .
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The Brexit Party and their shadowy friends are the means to an end. Socialists will understand this as ‘raising the revolutionary consciousness’ of the masses. Putting it bluntly, Dai Public is more likely to want independence after a kick in the nuts than yet another patronising pat on the head.
Call me cynical, call me an absolute bastard, but I’m a realist, and I know that just drifting along as we have done for 20 years – which is what Plaid Cymru wants – will get us nowhere.
It was neatly summed up in a letter in today’s Western Mail where someone concluded by saying that Brexit would result in “economic collapse and the breakup of the UK”.
Which is exactly what I’m saying. Short-term pain for long-term gain.
I felt compelled to put finger to keyboard because I’m tired of hearing arguments for the EU but against the totality of Europe. The kind of people guilty of this are now taking an increased interest in Welsh independence.
What I hope to explain is that despite being a Brexiteer I regard myself as a European, and that’s because I see Wales as part of a wider European civilisation. This being so, Wales cannot leave Europe, we can only exit the European Union.
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THE LEFT AND EUROPE
For me, there are two main variants of the left. On the one hand we have the hard left, or old left, some of whom may even be ‘tankies’, still mourning the demise of the USSR. Then we also have the soft or new left, who like to view themselves as ‘progressives’, but who I often view as the ‘butterfly’ left, flitting from one colourful issue to the next.
Another difference would be that, unattractive as it was, the old left, the Marxists and the Trotskyists had a coherent ideological basis in the writings of assorted philosophers and political theoreticians.
By comparison, the new left is almost without form or ideological substance, being made up of those who believe that what’s important to them, or the latest popular issue, is of vital importance to humanity (whether humanity is interested or not). Which often makes the soft left appear to be nothing more than a loose alliance of single-issue groups – ‘We’ll support you if you support us’.
The Labour Party contains both varieties, with the old left perhaps in the ascendant under Corbyn, but Plaid Cymru is very much home to the latter.
In the good old days of the Soviet Union the hard left had an example to hold up as an alternative to the Western model. An idyll exemplified for me by Peter Sellers’ shop steward in I’m All Right Jack, who dreams of Russia as, ” . . . all them corn fields and ballet in the evening.” A line that never fails to make me smile.
” . . . all them corn fields and ballet in the evening.” click to enlarge
The economic collapse of the USSR discredited the hard left’s alternative model, and opened the door to the soft left, with no obvious political agenda beyond changing the West from within through social and cultural pressure.
Even in the good old days of the Soviet Union, among elements of the left, hostility to the capitalist model spilled over into a rejection of the achievements of ‘decadent’ Europe and its offshoots.
As with the old, so with the new, which often dismisses centuries of human achievement as being all about ‘dead white men’.
Yes, these achievements often went hand in hand with colonisation, exploitation and even slavery, but millions of Europeans were also enslaved, by Turks and North Africans. How many today have heard of the Sack of Baltimore in west Cork? Communities from Cyprus to Iceland suffered from Muslim slave-raids.
The Crimea, the fate of which now so vexes Western governments, was taken by the Russians in 1774 to stop the peninsula being used by its Tatar population to export thousands of captured Russians and Ukrainians into Turkish slavery every year.
By even using the term ‘European civilisation’ I will have had a few leftists reaching for their smelling salts (or whatever they use), for it will have conjured up images of wicked capitalists, oppressors and colonialists, pith helmets and shackles.
Their chosen interpretation of Europe is as distorted as their view on almost everything else. It’s chiaroscuro without the light. In its distortions the touchy-feely left can ignore the genocide being practised by China against the Uighurs yet hold up something said by a politician of the right as a crime against humanity.
This comment (possibly to a piece on Nation.Cymru) refers to Steve Bannon. Now I accept that Bannon is not everybody’s cup of tea, but remarks like this display a myopic ignorance of history that is truly worrying. Click to enlarge.
For them, crimes can only be committed by white men. When it comes to global warming it’s rapacious white men destroying the planet, never developing economies with their coal-fired power stations, or third world countries destroying vast areas of forest every year.
This ‘blame Whitey’ approach betrays another dangerous failing of the soft left, and that is the refusal to accept that the past is another country, they did things differently there; which results in them judging people from previous eras by contemporary mores.
The fact that someone in 1887 was homophobic makes them a creature of their time, not a monster to be vilified by immature individuals who are easily outraged. I’ll let you in on a little secret – back in 1887 most people were homophobic.
To conclude: I’m proud to be a European. I reject the European Union.
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THE LEFT AND BREXIT
The hard or old left has usually been hostile to the Common Market and then the European Union, the ‘Rich Man’s Club’ as Marxists were wont to call it. But the real reason for the hard left’s hostility was the same as my original enthusiasm – we both saw the EU as a bulwark against the Soviet bloc.
Three decades after the demise of the USSR the comrades of the hard left still have a lingering affection for Russia. The fact that Putin is viewed as a threat by the West goes some way to explaining the hard left’s ambivalence towards the EU, and Corbyn’s refusal to take a stand on a second referendum, or anything.
The other consideration for the hard left, and Jeremy Corbyn, is that Labour voters from Sunderland to Stoke to Swansea voted for Brexit. They also voted against out-of-touch elites, so Labour really can’t afford to be perceived as aligning with the metropolitan elite.
Jeremy Corbyn and his supporters need to hold on to their middle class support, their ethnic minority support, and their white working class support if they are to form a government. And the largest of those three constituencies remains the white working class in post-industrial areas.
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Generally speaking, the soft left wants the UK and Wales to remain in the European Union. This they regard as the only option for ‘progressives’. This is why we hear them berating Brexiteers as ‘gammons’, ‘racists’, ‘Nazis’, and calling for a ‘People’s Vote’.
The soft left can afford to be openly hostile to Brexit and those who support it partly because these ‘progressives’ are free of electoral concerns and partly because they have ‘disengaged’ themselves from the white working class they regard as irredeemably stupid and reactionary. For the reasons already given, Labour and the old left behave differently.
Whether or not they had achieved this status before the Brexit vote, the new left, the ‘progressives’, have certainly become the patronising metropolitan elite those who voted for Brexit wanted to punish.
I outlined earlier the soft left’s largely negative view of Europe and its history, culture, and contribution to humanity, so why is it supportive of the EU? I can only assume that in their minds there must be some disconnect between the Europe of the Borgias and Wagner with the European Union. For isn’t the European Union Napoleon’s (even Hitler’s) dream realised?
Apparently not.
And that’s because the soft left regards the EU as ‘progressive’. The EU is perceived as breaking down national barriers, welcoming migrants, and generally being a force for good in the world.
Which is fair enough, and entirely consistent with the soft left’s wider – dare I say, globalist? – outlook, but perhaps inconsistent with support for Welsh independence.
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THE LEFT AND INDEPENDENCE
As I hoped when I voted for Brexit in 2016, the utter cock-up that politicians are making of the process has both increased the demand for Scottish independence and the likelihood of Irish reunification.
Wales has not been immune to this counter-London shift in public opinion, and now we see a marked increase in support for Welsh independence. This has taken a number of forms including the formation of Ein Gwlad, a new, Wales-focused nationalist party, and also YesCymru, a group campaigning for independence.
YesCymru now seems to have been joined by other groups. One being IndyCymru and, more recently, Undod, and it’s on the second of these I wish to focus. Undod is a socialist grouping, perhaps formed following a failed takeover of YesCymru.
I have no problem with Undod being socialist, as far as I’m concerned, the more the merrier, with just one proviso – the desire for independence must transcend all that divides us.
Which is why I was disappointed to read on Nation.Cymru the old-style sloganising about, “international solidarity . . . unfettered capitalism . . . foreign capital . . . rising threat of the far-right in Wales and beyond . . . excesses of Tory rule . . . “.
A disappointment compounded by seeing no reference to the Labour Party that has mis-managed Wales for two decades. Admittedly, in its conclusion, the article says, “Devolution has shown itself to be incapable of protecting us against the excesses of Tory rule”, without mentioning that devolution could have done more – as it has in Scotland in recent years – had it not been for the Labour Party.
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And the dismissal of “foreign capital” I find odd. Given the traditional neglect of Wales from London (whichever party was in power), and the cowardice and incompetence of the English Labour Party in Wales in its managing of devolution, had it not been for companies and capital from Germany, the USA, Japan, France and other countries investing in Wales we’d have been in an even worse mess.
I’m at a loss to understand how a socialist Wales, which I assume would be hostile to both indigenous entrepreneurialism and foreign investment plans to sustain us. Answers on a postcard, please. (But for God’s sake, don’t tell me it’s state-owned industries!)
Even so . . .
I have said it before, and I will repeat it here – I would accept a Welsh socialist republic if that was the route to independence. I say that because for me, independence is the priority, everything else can be worked out later.
Obviously I would not be happy in a socialist republic and I would seek to make changes, but after we had won our independence; and in the meantime I would defend that socialist republic against all external threats.
Finally, we must consider Catalonia. Over the past year or so I have noticed members of the soft left advocate independence for Wales, remaining in the EU, and support for an independent Catalonia. I’m unclear how such a position can be intellectually rationalised, but some obviously have no problem with it.
From where I stand, anyone belonging to a small European nation within the EU, and seeking independence for that nation, should have been disgusted both by the Spanish state’s treatment of Catalan political leaders and also by the EU’s silence.
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You can read here what the great Breton singer Alan Stivell recently said. I feel the same. (For those too young to remember, here he is singing Tri Martolod.) Like me, Stivell wants a Europe that respects all identities. Not a Europe that promotes homogenisation and tolerates or encourages state terror.
The new/soft/touchy-feely/butterfly/’progressive’ left is wrong about lots of things. Certainly wrong about Europe, and the European Union. Despite this unpromising start we can only hope that its approach to independence is more clear-headed, and sincere.
But I want to make this absolutely clear: anyone imposing ideological preconditions on the kind of Welsh independence they will accept is clearly more concerned with ideology than with Wales, and therefore does not truly believe in Welsh independence.
Although it’s still 2018, in this post I look forward to the year ahead.
Already, at Westminster, we see chaos and in-fighting in both major parties, though there is within the Conservative Party an element that knows where it wants to take us. Maybe the question is how big this element is and how much support it has within the wider establishment and elsewhere.
Here in Wales we also see chaos, infused with hopelessness. For after twenty years of managing decline the Labour Party has given up all pretence at serving Wales and elected Mark Drakeford as ‘leader’. Apart from Neil McEvoy there seems to be no effective opposition to the slow drift towards greater deprivation and ultimately assimilation.
The latter may even be offered as a solution to the former – for as we’ll hear, ‘devolution has obviously failed Wales’. Many, unable to differentiate between the Labour Party and devolution, will agree with that.
Beyond the chambers of government politics is returning to the streets, with the far right resurgent. The element I’ve referred to within the Tories wonders whether these Wetherspoon’s warriors could be used to advance its agenda; but it needs the excuse, the crisis, to justify such an alliance. Will Brexit provide it, or perhaps some other unforeseen eventuality?
Let’s start by asking how we got here.
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THE FETISHISATION OF THE POPPY
After the Scottish National Party took control of the Scottish Parliament in 2011, and a referendum on independence loomed, the UK establishment had cause to be grateful to an almost forgotten Serb nationalist. Though Gavrilo Princip could never have known that the events he set in train at Sarajevo in 1914 would be so shamelessly exploited by another tottering empire a century later.
For the one hundredth anniversary of World War One allowed our masters to fetishise the poppy and go so far over the top that, had they been at the first day of the Somme, they could have been half way to Berlin by nightfall.
Hiding behind ‘The Glorious Dead’ and piously mumbling ‘Lest we forget’ became mantras against the threatened departure of the Scots, Sinn Féin on the brink of becoming the largest party in the Northern Ireland Assembly, and mounting divisions within England.
I’m not suggesting that hopes of Scottish independence were drowned in a sea of poppies, partly because the referendum took place on 18 September 2014, when the poppy cult had not yet reached tsunami proportions, with ‘weeping windows’ and other examples of necrolatry.
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But the BritNat offensive had already opened on other fronts. Television playing a major role. Consider this: in the final year of the Labour–Lib Dem coalition in the Scottish Parliament (to May 3, 2007) there were just 25 separate shows that had ‘Britain’ or ‘British’ in the title.
By January 2014, with the SNP in power, and with the independence referendum looming, the number of ‘Britain’ / ‘British’ programmes had rocketed to 516! This was no coincidence.
More recently, the ‘Everything is British’ agenda became almost laughable in its desperation when compliant supermarkets branded whisky and even haggis as ‘British’. (Though in fairness, the German supermarket chains Aldi and Lidl did not surrender to this diktat, most probably delivered as, ‘A quiet word, old chap . . . ‘.)
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There is no escaping it; the fear of Scottish independence coupled with the turning tide in the north east of Ireland, with Brexit thrown into the mix, has combined to give us a very nervous British establishment.
Just how desperate that establishment is, and how far it might go to preserve it’s influence, or hold the Union together, remains to be seen. But the augurs are worrying.
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ENTER STAGE RIGHT, THE FAR RIGHT
A taste of what to expect was perhaps seen in George Square, Glasgow, when ‘celebrating’ Loyalists went on the rampage on September 19, 2014, the day after Scotland voted to remain in the UK.
It was all there in plain sight – union flags, Nazi salutes, destroying Saltires and attacking anyone who didn’t agree with their interpretation of Britishness. (White, Protestant, monolingual, royalist, Islamophobic, misogynist, homophobic, xenophobic.)
The problem posed by a state becoming more diverse yet containing a growing minority moving in the opposite direction is pretty obvious.
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The extract below taken from The Herald makes clear who was behind the George Square violence, for it explains the connection between a certain Glasgow Rangers supporters group, the English far right, and Northern Ireland paramilitaries.
“The entire loyalist demonstration had indeed been orchestrated online, it turned out. You sent us the online poster headed “Scotland Said No” asking for demonstrators to come to the city centre at 6pm. The poster was circulated widely by Britain First, the far-right party set up by ex-BNP members, which has a strong following in Northern Ireland and the west of Scotland.
Then you sent us Facebook postings from ordinary Rangers fans, horrified at what their fellow fans were planning. One read: ‘I am a Rangers supporter. The Rangers pages have been drumming up support to riot at George Square all day. It’s disgusting. I am ashamed of them.'”
I was surprised no one asked if there was official involvement in the George Square riot. Because we know that during The Troubles Loyalist terrorists were almost an extension of the UK state due to the intelligence, training and arms they received. While the intelligence services formed links with the National Front during the exile in England of Roberto Fiore.
Thankfully, Wales has been largely immune to this evil, though there is a little clique in Swansea, associated with the city’s football club. They used to call themselves Swansea Loyals and had a website showing photographs of their visits to Glasgow and Belfast. The website was taken down but the gang remained.
Some made their continued presence felt with the display of a union flag at the Liberty Stadium, but now, perhaps encouraged or motivated by the developments we’ve considered they feel emboldened. New banners have appeared, such as the one you see below.
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For those unable to ‘read’ the symbols, let me interpret. ‘Swansea Loyal’ is self-explanatory, loyal to the interpretation of ‘Britishness’ we saw in George Square. The badge on the right is that of Swansea City, on the left Glasgow Rangers, with those badges flanking the red hand symbol of Ulster. ‘Quis Separabit’ (‘Who shall separate [us]?) is the motto of the outlawed Ulster Defence Association (UDA).
Let me make clear that not all Rangers fans are bigots, not all Rangers fans support the UDA, and some Rangers fans even support Scottish independence, but let us also remember that among the various ditties sung by Gers’ fans is the notorious Famine Song which urges those of Irish Catholic descent in Scotland to ‘go home’.
Defenders of the banner have argued on Twitter that the motto has also been used by the British army regiment the Connaught Rangers (disbanded 1922), the Order of St Patrick (dormant order of chivalry), and the Irish Guards regiment, which is still active but – like so many units of the British Army – recruits from just about anywhere bar Russia. (Though my old mate Vladimir Vladimirovich has other ways of knowing what’s going on.)
I have tried before to explain how intertwined the histories of Scotland and Ireland are; exemplified by Glasgow Rangers being supported by the descendants of Scots who settled in Ulster, while Celtic fans are often the descendants of Irish immigrants to Scotland.
Wales has no such links. For which we should be thankful, it means we have been spared the hatred and the violence that results from these connections. And I don’t want to see this poison introduced into Wales, which is one reason why I oppose the Swansea Loyals.
The other reason I oppose these buggers is because they are anti-Welsh. They would destroy everything that distinguishes us as a nation and merge Wales into England.
It’s unsurprising then that going into coalition with an extremist party such as the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) presented no dilemma for modern Tories.
Further encouragement for the fringes came from the rise of Ukip, while out on the streets and in social media the far right has found its voice in Tommy Robinson and others. A few years ago such people would have been ostracised, now they’re invited onto Newsnight, Question Time and other television programmes. (Though the invitations are usually from the BBC.)
What we’re dealing with here could be viewed as a continuum, one that extends, in one direction, from the BNP or the EDL or National Action to Ukip and then the Conservative Party; and in the other direction to Glasgow Rangers, affiliated ‘Loyal’ groups with other clubs, the Orange Order, and assorted terrorist groups. Giving us an extended continuum from the Tory Party to Loyalist terrorists.
And there seem to be extreme BritNat parties springing up all the time. I drew your attention in November to the Democrats & Veterans Party, which has a presence in Swansea and even a Welsh co-ordinator. (Though of course he’s not Welsh.) And who could forget Shane Baker, the bargain basement Baldrick of Nebo, another who has come to live among us.
As we’ve seen, this atmosphere of over-zealous and intolerant Britishism affects everything from haggis to Nicholas Soames of ‘Skye’ fame, grandson of Sir Winston Churchill – it even infects darts players!
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The far right is today more accepted by the establishment and the mainstream media than at any time I can recall. I remember Margaret Thatcher back in the 1980s urging people to reclaim the union flag from the National Front, but we hear no such calls today. ‘Unity’, is the cry, under the umbrella of unquestioning and increasingly intolerant Englishness/Britishness.
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THE STARS OF ILL OMEN ALIGN
I believe that the poppy cult, tabloid campaigns against ‘Ungrateful Jock bastards’, Great British Cushions (BBC2, also available on iPlayer), all contributed towards the Brexit vote.
Whether that was the intention of those who whipped up this spittle-speckled BritNat hysteria is something that might become clear in the years ahead.
And it seems I’m not the only one feeling concerned. Already the UK government has put troops on standby for a no-deal Brexit, and I’m sure Cobra has other plans that we won’t hear of.
But the threat doesn’t really come from this direction, and I’m not sure that Brexit, even a no-deal Brexit, would be enough to prompt a putsch that had any hope of support within the establishment. The best hope for the putsch-minded in the period of uncertainty and recriminations following a no deal or bad deal Brexit might be to take over the Conservative Party and by extension the government.
Maybe the bigger threat comes from the fall-out from Brexit, in Scotland and Ireland. For I can predict with certainty that the bigger the cock-up over Brexit, or the more damaging the consequences, the greater the likelihood of Scottish independence and Irish reunification.
The threat of either could be the ‘trigger’ for the putsch. Both could plunge us into an Algeria/OAS (Day of the Jackal) situation with ‘loyalist’ rebels in the ‘breakaway’ territory linking with the far right and certain politicians in the ‘mother country’ . . . justifying ‘intervention’.
Another trigger could be the death of the Queen, now 92. There would be wide-spread resistance to Charles becoming king, and attempts to by-pass him and install his son William would stir up a constitutional hornets’ nest.
Tommy Robinson is obviously popular with these squaddies. Picture courtesy of Sky News. Click to enlarge
I mentioned earlier that the UK government has troops on stand-by but how reliable is the British Army, drawn largely from the same disgruntled white working class that fills the ranks of the far right? And it’s not just a few smiling squaddies posing with Tommy Robinson we need to worry about, there are some nasty buggers hiding in khaki.
The reason Brexit is dangerous – and the very reason we are facing Brexit – is because we Welsh are trapped in a state in irreversible decline where political leaders and a great portion of the population refuse to accept this reality.
A deluded populace enduring falling living standards guarantees the volatile political atmosphere welcomed by those promising to restore England’s greatness. And if that means curbing ‘the excesses of democracy’ and banging up a few ‘traitors’, then it will be done.
And because the English are masters of the political euphemism we shall never hear the words coup or putsch. It will be: ‘Uncertain times . . . national emergency . . . desperate measures . . . great reluctance . . . avoidance of civil unrest . . . suspension of habeas corpus . . . unfortunate necessity . . . national unity . . . abolition of Scottish Parliament and Welsh Assembly . . . necessary . . . recruitment of auxiliaries . . . ‘
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WHAT WILL BE THE WELSH RESPONSE?
Despite the foot soldiers being ready and the plotters dreaming up titles for themselves, any talk of a putsch, or even a coup within the Conservative government, remains speculation. Yet it cannot be ruled out, while staying in the EU would excite the far right even more.
So what should be the Welsh response to any economic, constitutional or other crisis in 2019? Nationalists like myself will obviously argue even more strongly for breaking away from a divided and dysfunctional UK state. After all, the confusion I’ve described here is one reason I voted for Brexit.
You might argue that, ‘Wales also voted for Brexit, so Wales too is divided’. Wales voted for something, but the majority of Leave voters are to be found in the pissed-off but Welsh-identifying population from Blaenau Gwent to Swansea Bay. Present these with a different vision, a Welsh vision, and many can be won over.
But what of the left? Knowing the left as I do, many will view a putsch, even a half-hearted power grab, as a ‘British’ issue and start organising trips to London to be seen at whatever pointless rally metropolitan luvvies have organised.
That’s because too many on the left in Wales are trapped in a British mindset, which they like to disguise as ‘internationalist’ and flaunt in contradistinction to what they depict as ‘narrow nationalism’. But it’s never been anything other than a cop-out, just another way of saying, ‘We don’t really care about Wales’.
As a result, the left in Wales has been English colonialism’s greatest asset for a century, ever since Labour replaced that ‘too Welsh’ Liberalism that so alarmed Alderman Bird. Aided in more recent times by a left-controlled Plaid Cymru.
A leftism that dismisses any critic as a fascist in the hope of silencing them. And the smug, sanctimonious bastards who employ this censorship argue they’re defending freedom of expression, and claim the moral high ground!
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If the worst happens and the lunatics take over the asylum the left in Wales will have a choice. It can either seek to restore the asylum’s management, or it can choose to escape the asylum and build an independent Wales.
Come to that, why wait for a Dad’s Army putsch? Wales is a rich country made poor by the system we have now – what are you waiting for?
Seeing as no one knows what kind of Brexit the UK government wants, and because so much of what you’re reading and hearing on the subject is either biased or just ill-informed, it falls upon Uncle Jac to shed a little light on the matter. Because there are implications in Brexit for the unity of the UK, and these are already being addressed with covert strategies that may be reported in the mainstream media but are not identified for what they really are.
To make the best sense of what follows you must understand that the whole debate has moved beyond Brexit to the point where it is now about two unions, the EU and the UK, and also the future of the Conservative and Unionist Party. Not to be outdone the Labour Party is also confused, but there we also find other issues at play.
The overall UK vote was 51.89% Leave to 48.11% Remain. In Wales 52.53% voted Leave. By comparison, Scotland voted 62% for Remain.
Since then, from the UK government, it’s been a revolving stage of pantomime, tub-thumping jingoism, farce, soap opera and slapstick, but now, as the end approaches, things are beginning to take a darker turn.
But before getting to the creepy bits let’s consider where we are with the main UK political parties.
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EU membership has been a divisive issue within the Conservative Party for half a century or more. In the hope of settling things prime minister David Cameron announced in February 2016 that there would be a referendum. He also stated that he would be campaigning to stay. When he lost, he resigned.
Since the referendum it has been almost impossible to separate what passes for ‘negotiations’ with the EU from the ongoing civil war within the Conservative Party, with the internecine fighting being a prelude to the inevitable leadership contest.
We’ve now reached the stage where it seems to be the incumbent Theresa May versus Boris Johnson. ‘Bonking Boris’, reviled by ‘progressives’ and opposed by many in his own party. Yet Tories of a more pragmatic bent may see him as a winner.
Not least because Boris Johnson has achieved that priceless political status of being universally recognised by his first name. How many politicians today can say that?
And don’t forget that Johnson was elected mayor of multiracial London in 2008, beating Comrade Livingstone, and increasing his share of the vote in getting re-elected in 2012, again by beating Livingstone. There will be a number in the Conservative Party who’ll see a lesson there for a future tussle with Comrade Corbyn.
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At the time of writing this the elite against whom I and many others voted in June 2016 is pushing for a People’s Vote on the “final Brexit deal”. Having lost the vote in 2016 they’re hoping for a re-run and a different result . . . but believe me, it’s got sod all to do with ‘the People’.
If that headgear is compulsory then this campaign is doomed (click to enlarge)
The English Labour Party in Wales is generally supportive of this initiative because by and large our MPs and AMs want to remain in the EU. But their leader is proving more cautious, for Jeremy Corbyn seems to understand better than his Wales-based representatives why Labour voters in the post-industrial areas and the lower socio-economic brackets voted for Brexit.
Corbyn is reluctant to further alienate this white working class, and so, sure of the loyalty of his Momentum base, and believing that his ethnic minority and middle class voters have nowhere else to go, he seems to have concluded that the best option is to keep ’em guessing.
Others in Labour are less reticent about speaking out against Brexit and in favour of a second referendum. Here in Wales Labour politicos have reminded us how much money we’ve received from the EU, which doesn’t really help their cause because too much of that money has been frittered away by successive Labour management teams in Cardiff docks with no discernible benefits accruing to the areas in need.
But what the hell! – we’ve got the biggest third sector money can buy.
Carwyn Jones however is now prepared to articulate a possibility that others would rather leave unsaid. Laid out in a Times article on Monday headlined, “Brexit, handled badly, contains the seeds of the UK’s own destruction”. This article was a trailer for a speech Jones gave to the Institute for Government.
He’s not alone in seeing the possibility of Brexit breaking the UK apart – it’s one of the reasons I voted for Brexit – but I’m sure he takes the side of his Tory masters and will do his best to maintain the Union. Why change the habit of a lifetime?
But Carwyn’s masters are not blind to the danger either, and are implementing measures to counter the threat, certainly in Scotland and Wales. Northern Ireland is, as ever, different.
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IRELAND
Without knowing anything about the Flight of the Earls, the Plantation, Partition, or even the Troubles, most people are vaguely aware that the politics of ‘Ulster’ or the Six Counties is dominated by whether this part of Ireland should remain in the United Kingdom or whether it should join the rest of the island.
(Though this does not apply to Karen Bradley, Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, who seems to have imagined a homogeneous population made up of individuals who take a pin into the polling booth.)
As things stand, those wishing to stay part of the UK remain in a majority, but a majority being whittled away year on year by demographic trends. So that by 2030 there will probably be a Catholic majority and a referendum on reunification could choose a united Ireland.
Brexit has added a new ingredient to the mix and might accelerate reunification.
Because the prospect of a ‘hard’ border after the UK exits the EU will not only be bad for business, it also raises fears of a return to violence. This has resulted in a number of people hitherto opposed to a united Ireland prepared to consider that option in order to stay in the EU. And let’s not forget that Northern Ireland voted by 56% to 44% to Remain. The only party pushing a Leave vote was the Democratic Unionist Party, predictably following the BritNat line.
The border as it used to be . . . . and might be again? (Click to enlarge)
Yet one of the alternatives, that of somehow keeping the Six Counties within the UK and the EU by having the customs border somewhere in the Irish Sea, has Mrs May’s DUP allies shouting ‘No Surrender!’ and strapping on their Lambeg drums.
The other option seems to involve no change in the constitutional status of Northern Ireland and a ‘soft’ or invisible border, with customs checks carried out by technology that doesn’t exist, or possibly by leprechauns.
The question of whether there should be a united Ireland could of course be resolved with a referendum, allowed for in the Good Friday (or Belfast) Agreement (Schedule 1,2). But the power to call such a vote rests with the Secretary of State. As we’ve seen, at the moment that is Karen Bradley, who thinks people in the Bogside don Orange sashes when the humour is on them.
So we’re in the absurd position of the Secretary of State having the authority to call a referendum , ” . . . if at any time it appears likely to him that a majority of those voting would express a wish that Northern Ireland should cease to be part of the United Kingdom and form part of a united Ireland.” Which, when you consider it, is a very good reason for the British government NOT to call a referendum.
The political situation is further complicated by the fact that the Northern Ireland Assembly collapsed in January 2017 and seems unlikely to get back on its feet any time soon.
There is little the British state can do to influence things in Northern Ireland for a number of reasons: 1/ the Republic’s government keeps a close eye on events; 2/ Ireland is now crucial for the EU because it will soon be a land border; 3/ there’s the interest from the USA, for no American politician can ignore the Catholic Irish-American vote.
And as I’ve suggested, the UK establishment is resigned to losing Northern Ireland in 10 or 20 years time anyway due to ‘the revenge of the cradle’, so the worst Brexit can do is hurry up that process. While never having to deal again with Northern Ireland politicians is a prospect most civil servants welcome.
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SCOTLAND
In Scotland, things are very different.
The 2014 Scottish independence referendum gave the UK establishment one hell of a fright and may only have been won at the last minute by the intervention of senior politicians promising everything short of independence in The Vow. Though Brexit is causing a rethink for the man behind it.
The Scots voting to Remain coupled with the growing prospect of a ‘hard’ Brexit is increasing support for Scottish independence. This has prompted the UK state go on the offensive. It’s worth focusing on two, ongoing elements of this attack.
First there’s the crude and unambivalent ‘Britification’ campaign, most visible in the packaging of Scottish goods with the Union flag. In the image below we see whisky and, even weirder, that quintessentially Scottish delicacy, haggis, branded as ‘British’!
But the alternative name for whisky is Scotch. Can you imagine anyone going into a bar and saying, ‘Give me a large British, barman’? Which might get the response, ‘A large British what, sir?’ As for haggis, branding it with the Union Jack is liable to lose sales because people might think it’s counterfeit, something like Albanian ‘champagne’.
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In the main it seems to be the supermarkets at fault rather than the manufacturers, for I’ve read that Lidl and Aldi, the German chains, have stuck with Scottish branding.
I can imagine a meeting deep in the bowels of Whitehall between representatives of the main supermarket chains and high-ranking civil servants to discuss ‘promoting a sense of shared Britishness in these difficult times’, and perhaps achieving the objective without even mentioning Scotland.
(But I warn them now, if they come to put a Union Jack on my laverbread they will have to pry it from my cold, dead hands.)
The other point of attack has been the allegations against Alex Salmond former leader of the Scottish National Party and former Scottish first minister. Let me say that I don’t know whether these allegations are true or not, but the motivation behind them is crystal clear.
I first understood what it was all about watching Newsnight soon after the story broke. It had been broken by the Daily Record, the Scottish version of the Daily Mirror, and therefore the mouthpiece of the Labour Party, once dominant in Scottish politics but now languishing in third place as the Unionist vote coalesces behind the Tories.
The assistant editor responsible was a cocky Ulsterman named David Clegg, and without knowing his background I would hazard a guess that he has never voted for Sinn Féin. He was positively bouncing at being interviewed over his ‘scoop’ . . . and then something rather strange happened – he kept talking about Nicola Sturgeon, Salmond’s successor in both positions!
The light bulb flashed above the old Jac noggin, I took a sip of Malbec and nodded sagely.
And so it came to pass that where there had been unity of purpose in a political party determined to achieve Scottish independence, now they were at each other’s throats! Or at least, that’s what newspapers were reporting. And desperately hoping that the Scottish public would believe it.
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What we see in Scotland suggests that secret polling has confirmed the British government’s worst fears – the Brexit cock-up has created a majority for independence.
Added to the blatant BritNat bias the BBC in Scotland has exhibited for some years we now have government-controlled newspapers in a constituent part of a democracy. Were this happening anywhere else it would be reported, and condemned . . . by the very media outlets that have so readily submitted to government control.
What absolute hypocrites!
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WALES
Here in Wales the Britification campaign has been less obvious and offensive, partly because we have less indigenous produce to be plastered with Union Jacks, due in large part to the unwritten rule that says any successful Welsh company is only allowed to reach a certain size before being taken over by an English rival.
That said, the campaign has taken other forms, two examples will suffice to explain what I mean.
To begin with, early last year that most colonialist of ‘Welsh’ organisations, Cadw, announced that there was to be a ring of steel erected near Flint castle to celebrate the 2017 Year of Legends, one of the regular, tiresome, and often insulting tourism marketing ploys.
Ring of Steel is an obvious reference to the castles built by Edward I to encircle Gwynedd and subjugate its inhabitants. Cadw knew this. The proposed structure was soon dubbed ‘The Anus of the North’, an epithet that then seemed to transfer to Ken Skates, the hapless minister for culture or some such in England’s Cardiff management team.
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After a public outcry, political opposition, and a petition that attracted 10,000 signatures in a matter of days, this squalid and deliberate attempt to celebrate English conquest was dropped.
But then came the renaming of the Second Severn Crossing as the Prince of Wales Bridge. Again, this was widely opposed, with little support from within Wales, but it went ahead in a secret ceremony.
The renaming idea is attributed to Alun Cairns, the oleaginous Secretary of State for Severnside, but I’m not so sure. I believe the idea came from the same source as the ‘request’ for supermarkets to smother Scottish produce under the Union Jack. Cairns was only too happy to oblige.
Alun ‘Tippy-toes’ Cairns is now one of the most ridiculed and reviled politicians in Welsh political history, even more so than some of his predecessors such John Redwood; for while we expected no better from them, Welsh-speaking Cairns is viewed as a turncoat.
Having mentioned Severnside, the renaming of the bridge and the removal of the tolls will begin what we are asked to welcome as the great property bonanza in the south east. In practice, no bridge tolls and cheaper property prices on the Welsh side of the bridge will encourage a population movement into Wales.
Replicating what we see in the north as commuters from Manchester and Merseyside are guided away from exclusive communities in Cheshire into the commuter communities planned for the A55 corridor.
Maybe we should now add Gwent to this map (click to enlarge)
These machinations on the part of the UK state, coupled with the cowardice and incompetence of the English Labour Party in Wales has predictably resulted in a reaction.
In the past couple of years we’ve seen the emergence and growth of YesCymru, the launch of new party Ein Gwlad, and the realisation within Plaid Cymru that a hard left party obsessing over issues that mean nothing to 99% of the Welsh population is going nowhere.
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There can no longer be any doubt that there is a Britification agenda operating in Scotland and Wales. Because the BritNats driving the Brexit process are awake to the fact that if they win they risk the Union. More moderate elements can also see the risk to the Union and even though they might oppose Brexit they have little alternative but to join in the Britification offensive.
Yet Boris Johnson, Jacob Rees-Mogg and the rest must push ahead because their political reputations and their places in history are now tied up with Brexit. They cannot afford to fail. If they succeed, they know it will be easy to use the rallying-call of ‘Save the Union’ to reunite the Conservative Party, and leave the other parties no alternative but to fall into line.
The real worry is that the Britification and dirty tricks we’ve seen so far in Scotland and Wales could be nothing compared to what we might experience after the Brexit shit hits the fan.
