Tag: Charles de Gaulle

An Election and a Referendum

On By JacIn Devolution, EU Funding, Greens, Plaid Cymru, Scotland, Third Sector, Ukip, Welsh Assembly, Welsh Government, Welsh Labour66 Comments

This post examines two important votes being held in 2016; the Welsh Assembly elections on May 9th and the EU referendum on (possibly) June 23rd.

First, we shall look at the elections to our beloved and respected Assembly, wherein may already be found talent dazzling to the point of being a hazard to pilots (not that many of those intrepid aviators will be heading for the local airport) before moving on to consider the anticipated EU referendum

WELSH ASSEMBLY ELECTIONS

At present, Labour has 30 of the 60 seats, and is almost certain to lose a few, the only questions are, which ones, and to which other party or parties will those seats be lost?

To help you make comparisons I have compiled the table below, which shows each party’s percentage of the vote in 2011 compared with the percentages predicted by the latest available poll. You will note that the figures in the recent poll do not add up to 100, this is almost certainly due to respondents stating their intention to vote for the kind of minor parties that combined to give us the ‘Other’ figure in the 2011 results.

Assembly elections poll

These poll figures look credible for Labour but rather odd for the other parties due to little or no difference between the constituency votes and the regional list votes. Even so, the poll confirms that Labour will be the biggest loser and Ukip the biggest winner.

Though the level of Ukip’s support is rather surprising seeing as the party keeps choosing unknown or unattractive candidates (the one often mutating into the other) and in other ways shooting itself in both feet. It begins to look as if Ukip’s leaders could be filmed sacrificing Romanian migrants on Aberystwyth promenade, bollock naked with their nether regions painted bright green, and still not lose support.

As for the other parties, it’s very much a case of little or no change which will, after almost a year of Tory government at Westminster, be a relief to the Conservatives; an even bigger relief to the Lib Dems following their near-extermination in the last May’s UK elections; but a major disappointment to Plaid Cymru, who should be the main beneficiary of Labour and Lib Dems losing support.

Though looked at from another angle Plaid’s level of support might pleasantly surprise some. Let me explain. The Party of Wales would have us believe that it’s a radical party, offering change, improvement. Yet down in Carmarthenshire, where Plaid became the larger party in a coalition last year (after the ‘Independents’ refused to work with Labour any more), Mark James, the tyrannical and vindictive chief executive, carries on as if nothing has happened!

The other party to be disappointed by the poll findings will be the Green Party of Englandandwales. Despite claimed increases in membership, and Welsh people being spotted in the ranks, it seems that the Greens still have difficulty in attracting support. But then, this is a party so English, so frightfully middle class in its membership and support, that it makes the Tories look like a Welsh proletarian rabble.

As I’ve been predicting for some time now, after the Assembly elections we shall probably see Labour in coalition with Plaid Cymru. Though if by some some electoral miracle Labour can cobble together a coalition with Lib Dems and Greens that leaves Plaid Cymru out in the cold, then Plaid will be condemned to another five years of impotence. A period the party may struggle to survive.

Ukip will do very well. In June last year I predicted the Kippers would gain 7 seats, and in October I upped my estimate to 10. (The latest poll suggests 9.) If, as is now being predicted, the EU referendum is held in June, and that EU campaign overshadows the Assembly elections, then Ukip will be the only beneficiary because all the other parties are pro EU and will be singing the same song.

And here’s a thought to cheer you all up. If the Assembly elections are indeed dominated by the EU referendum debate then it is not inconceivable that Ukip could win seats in ‘volatile’ constituencies that in May will be five- or even six-cornered contests. Gaining a percentage of the vote in the low to middle twenties could do it.

‘Nathan Gill, AM for Ynys Môn’ has a certain ring to it, n’est pas?

Gill of course is currently an MEP, which is a handy link to the next part of this post.

THE EU REFERENDUM

THE BIG PICTURE

When I was young and idealistic, the matinee idol of the nationalist fringe, I considered myself to be quite the ‘European’. With my study of history, my admiration for Charles de Gaulle, being avowedly anti-communist, and after reading The American Challenge, I persuaded myself that a strong Europe was needed as a bulwark against both the USSR and the USA.

I still believe I was right, but the world has moved on. For a start, the Soviet Union is no more, and its demise was the cue for the USA to begin its advance in eastern Europe, first with its war on Serbia and then by gradually encircling Russia with newly signed up members of NATO. Have you ever stopped to think how weird that is?

NATO started life in 1949 as an alliance to deter the Soviet Union from invading western Europe (if indeed the USSR ever had that intention). It was a Cold War organisation, from the era of Dr Strangelove, which should have ceased to exist along with the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact, yet NATO has expanded since the Cold War ended. This is bizarre.

Strangelove

Unless of course you understand that the USA (and to a lesser degree, the ‘West’) must have enemies. Now this presents a problem for a country bordered only by friendly and peaceful Canada to the north and to the south by a third world state where the strongest armed forces appear to be those of the drug cartels.

Clearly this lack of a credible threat is an inconvenience to the military-industrial complex, neocons, the National Rifle Association, big corporations, news media, and politicians looking to make a name for themselves. So ‘enemies’ have to found elsewhere, which has resulted in a succession of ‘threats’ being exposed since the Second World War. These are often pantomime villains of dusky hue, with difficult to pronounce names, and living in far-off lands of which most Americans know very little. Plus of course we have the post WWII constant – USSR / Russia.

At this point many of you will be wondering why, in a section headed ‘The EU Referendum’, I’m banging on about NATO and US foreign policy. There are two principle reasons.

First, a single political unit allows the US – as we are now seeing with TTIP – to gain preferential access to the richest market on earth through influencing just a few people. The danger here should be obvious to all. Second, the EU is viewed by many US policy-makers as a sister-body or even an extension of NATO. It’s no coincidence that NATO and the EU have marched east almost hand in hand.

Let me try to explain the NATO-EU link with the table I’ve compiled below. It gives the dates that eastern European countries joined first NATO and then the European Union. And it has always been in that order (sometimes simultaneous), but never is EU membership allowed before joining NATO.

The delay in Albania’s accession to the EU can be explained by the fact that the country is a ramshackle land with large parts, especially the area bordering the Serbian province of Kosovo, controlled by people-smugglers, drug-traffickers, organ-harvesters and a motley assortment of old-fashioned vendetta-pursuing, blood-feuding bandit chiefs. Albania’s chief export is gangsters.

NATO

An exception to the NATO-followed-by-EU rule is of course Turkey, which has been a NATO member since 1952. No surprise then to learn that there have always been voices in the upper reaches of the EU arguing in favour of admitting Turkey. ‘Bridge to the Islamic world’ and other bollocks has been spouted in support of this idiocy. The truth is that the USA wants to reward its faithful ally – and currently chief Bear-baiter – so it periodically applies pressure on the EU to let Turkey join the club.

Turkey, that backward, Islamist state where the security services bomb their own people. Turkey, the country that persecutes its fifteen million Kurds and has a very ambivalent attitude towards ISIL. Turkey, that just a century ago introduced the world to the concept of holocaust with its butchering of the Armenians.

In the ongoing conflict in Syria the USA has encouraged Turkey to provoke Russia, and although the US may belatedly be trying to rein in its proxy, there remains the possibility that this dysfunctional country could start World War Three. If Russia does retaliate to Turkish provocation then we (and here I have to mean the UK), as fellow-members of NATO, are Treaty-bound to line up with Turkey.

How do you feel about going to war with Russia because Turkey has done something stupid and deliberately provocative?

THE VIEW FROM WALES

Leaving aside these wider concerns, what should be our approach to this referendum from a purely Welsh perspective?

‘Wales does well out the EU’ is a mantra trotted out by those urging us to vote to stay in. ‘Does well’ is just a euphemism for hand-outs, we export little. In other words, we get EU grants because we are so bloody poor. Which makes this ‘argument’ just another defence of begging-bowl politics, an acceptance of Wales’ poverty and deprivation.

And what has happened to the billions we’ve received in EU funding? Where are the great infrastructure projects? Where is the multi-skilled workforce we’ve trained? Where are the successful indigenous companies the funding was used to start? Nowhere to be seen, bois bach!

That’s because the greater part of this windfall has been wasted on the shysters and parasites of the Third Sector. Most of whom – unsurprisingly – seem to have Labour Party connections. 

If the UK left the EU then the UK government would have to make up the lost EU funding. If it didn’t, we’d have to go without the Third Sector. (Don’t cry!) And if the UK government didn’t make up the shortfall, then it might cause a few more people here to wake from their slumbers.

Looking further afield, the UK leaving the EU would have far more serious repercussions for England, more specifically south east England, and to be very, very specific, the City of London. Because if the UK left the EU then many of the banks, investment houses and other financial institutions would decamp for Frankfurt, Paris, Zurich, Berlin, etc.

This would result in tens of thousands of very well paid jobs being lost to London, and a few hundred thousand more would be lost in a knock-on effect. So just spare a thought for all those Lamborghini salesmen, tailors, high-class hookers, hairdressers, tattooists, coke suppliers, estate agents, jewellers, etc., etc.

eu_logo

Remove the City of London from the balance sheet and the economy of England heads south very fast. With the City of London creating less wealth the UK economy must suffer, and despite the malaise being centred on London we can be sure that – as ever – the Old Etonians will see to it that peripheral areas suffer most.

This should serve as another wake-up call to the slumberers who unquestioningly believe that London rule is best for Wales.

Another argument used is that we must vote to stay in the EU to prove how different we are to England (assuming the English vote to leave). A position that invariably cites the fact that Scotland will definitely vote to stay in. Let’s look at this argument in a bit more detail.

First, Wales is not Scotland. The obvious stated, let me add that many hundreds of thousands of Scots will vote to stay in the EU for reasons that have little or nothing to do with the EU itself. It’s all about promoting independence, hoping that England – or Englandandwales – votes for Brexit.

Should there be a vote south of the border to leave the EU, and should that decision lead to Scottish independence, then it will reverberate here no matter how Wales voted. Scottish independence will concentrate minds in Wales no matter how it comes about and will make redundant whatever views may have been held in Wales when Scottish independence was just a vague possibility.

So let me spell it out. How Wales votes in the EU referendum is almost unimportant. The vote is being hyped up in Wales by those posturers who like to regard themselves as ‘progressive’, and done in order to show how superior they are to the ‘xenophobes’ who want to leave the wonderful EU. Smug, precious, and self-deluding bollocks!

CONCLUSION

There is no party standing in the Assembly elections for which a nationalist can honestly vote. That being so, there is an argument to be made for voting for any party that might help weaken the regional socialist party that for decades now has done so much damage to the Welsh cause.

Personally, I probably won’t bother voting. There’s a temptation to toddle along to the polling station and scribble ‘None of the above’ on my ballot paper, but that’s always struck me as a bit desperate unless part of an organised campaign.

When it comes to the EU referendum I shall definitely vote to leave the EU. That’s because the EU we know today is a great disappointment for someone of my age who genuinely wanted to see a strong and democratic Europe play a leading role in the world.

Instead, we have a byzantine nightmare that I suspect no one properly understands, a monster created by bureaucrats that seems to have been subverted to serve US economic and strategic interests rather than working for the good of Europeans.

And yet, I could still be converted to a united Europe, a European army, a European diplomatic corps . . . but my Europe would need leaders of stature, not the anonymous, paper-shuffling committeemen we are cursed with today.

If only the General would come back . . .

The Chain That Binds

On By JacIn British Nationalism, Scotland20 Comments

In a sense, this post is a sequel to the previous one, so maybe the The British Propaganda Corporation should be read or re-read before starting here.

That done, let’s start with asking, what is the connection between the Queen of England and a fascist thug giving a Nazi salute in the George Square riot the day after the Scottish referendum? Answer: They’re both Unionists, both believe in preserving the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. And that, monarchists and other apologists might suggest, is nothing more than an unfortunate coincidence, for there is a world of difference between Elizabeth II (I in Scotland) and those Nazi-Loyalist thugs.

Chain 1But that ‘world of difference’ is filled by many groups and agencies that overlap and interlink to make up a chain, and while many in this ‘chain’ would refuse to acknowledge having anything in common with some of the other ‘links’, or even that the chain exists, but they have and it does. I have tried to explain what I mean in the collage on the left (click to enlarge). The ‘links’ are, in clockwise order: the monarchy; government / political parties; the civil service; the City of London and the financial sector; academia (don’t kid yourself, higher education nowadays is all about lucre and influence); the media; big business; the military and intelligence communities; and finally, the assorted fringe political parties and groups making up the extreme Unionist Right that we saw in Glasgow on September 19th.

This chain has always existed but it has been brought into sharper focus of late. Partly – though indirectly – because the ideological politics of Left and Right that many of us grew up with is all but dead, as Tories, Labour and Liberal Democrats fight over the centre ground. This ‘Rush to the Centre’ has been observable for many years now, since Blair and Mandelson blessed us with New Labour, but the fear of appearing too different became even more obvious during the referendum campaign, when we saw the London-based parties unite – almost coalesce – against Scottish independence. (Ukip may offer an alternative to this Centrist hegemony, but it doesn’t take us beyond the sovereignty and unity issue.)

Victory for the forces of the Union in the referendum should have been the end of the matter, and that is certainly what the ‘chain’ wants everyone to believe – ‘dead for a generation’, etc – but it’s not, and for two main reasons. First, the cause of Scottish independence attracted support from those outside of Scotland wishing to shake up or reform this corrupt, unequal and decadent state. Which in some ways made the debate over Scottish independence a surrogate Left / Right contest, with the Yes campaign offering optimism and hope, while the No campaign urged people to stick with the tried and failed. The George Square thugs (here’s one) gave a glimpse into a dark and primitive past that everyone but them is thankful to have left behind. Second, the Yes campaign gained almost 40 per cent of regular Labour voters, yet the Labour Party is London’s only real hope of holding on to Scotland.

For anyone in any doubt about the nature of the riot and the rioters, this MailOnline account will help explain how repulsive these people are. The headline reference to ‘Nazi-saluting thugs’ should not be dismissed lightly, for when it comes to Nazis the Daily Mail knows what it’s talking about!

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Suggesting that shrewder and more devious elements might employ people like the Nazi-Unionists seen in George Square may be dismissed as silly speculation, but when I first saw the pictures and videos of what happened there and in the streets nearby on September 19th, two thoughts occurred to me. The first was, given the previously exhibited logistical skills of those involved, the violence seemed to be surprisingly well organised. Second, if these people feel so passionately about the issue (and obviously they do), where had they been during the referendum campaign? Because apart from a relatively peaceful Orange parade in Edinburgh on September 13th I don’t remember seeing or hearing anything of them. The first could be answered fairly easily if the rioters had help in orchestrating the trouble. And the second answered by arguing that these assumed ‘helpers’, realising what a boost the Nazi-Loyalists would have provided for the Yes camp, persuaded them to lie low until the referendum was over, with, perhaps, the promise that they could have their fun on the 19th, whatever the result.

Government agencies certainly do work with the most unsavoury allies to pursue certain objectives. As an extreme example, back in the 1970s the Italian secret service used the neo-fascist group Nuclei Armati Rivoluzionari (Armed Revolutionary Nuclei) to commit terrorist acts that were then blamed on the Brigate Rosse (Red Brigades), and used as justification to crack down on the Left. Perhaps inevitably, the fascists went too far, culminating in the 1980 Bologna railway station bombing that killed 85. ‘Ah, but that was Italy’, you might Griffin Fioresay. True, but when one of the prime suspects in the Bologna bombing, Roberto Fiore, came to London he seemed to enjoy a charmed life. The reluctance of UK authorities to extradite him is attributed by many, including anti-fascist magazine Searchlight, to the fact that Fiore was co-operating with MI6. Perhaps helping MI6 (and MI5) put together a reformed National Front, made up of a new cadre with university education and a bit more political nous than your average skinhead. Among these was a young Nick Griffin. (Fiore may still run a language school in London.)

After Griffin and his colleagues Derek Holland and Patrick Harrington became leading lights in the National Front in the early 1980s, and under Fiore’s tutelage, they began moving the NF in a different direction, such as trying to link with Gaddafi, and the US black nationalist Louis Farrakhan. This was – as you might imagine – resented by other NF members and so by 1983 Griffin and his allies had almost broken away from the NF with their Fiore-inspired Political Soldier faction. This new National Front began to take up curious positions on a number of issues.

For example, I recall the Green Party and other environmental groups demanding that the NF stop showing its ‘support’ for them with unauthorised ‘advertisements’ in NF News and other media. That was odd, but then came an episode even odder – NF News came out with a front page splash telling the world that the National Front now supported Meibion Glyndŵr! There were two ways of looking at this. Either the National Front had radically changed, and really did support environmentalists and Welsh nationalists or, its intelligence service handlers were using the NF to inflict reputational damage on those it viewed as threats to the established order. It soon became clear which was the correct interpretation.

In 1989 a major commemoration was planned for George Taylor and Alwyn Jones who died at Abergele in 1969, when a bomb they were carrying exploded prematurely on the eve of the Investiture. The National Front insisted they were coming – they’d been ‘invited’! Which of course was a lie, but the media lapped it up, giving uncritical coverage to anyone claiming to represent the NF; one spokesman I recall hearing used the name ‘Drax’. I can also remember travelling to Bangor the day before the event to give a Radio Wales interview in which I made it clear that no one had invited the National Front to Abergele, and if they did turn up there would almost certainly be trouble. In the event, and as might have been expected, the National Front did not appear. They never intended to turn up, it was a propaganda exercise to a) discredit the event and b) deter people from attending.

There were other instances of suspected fascists believed to be run by the intelligence services trying to infiltrate Welsh nationalist organisations. One curious incident involved Y Cyfamodwyr (The Covenanters) when two rather suspect individuals, claiming not to know each other, wrote to the secretary using the exact same envelopes; unmistakable due to being the type with a pre-paid ‘stamp’ embossed on the top-right corner of the envelope. Remember them? These were rare even then, perhaps unobtainable today. ‘Someone’ had obviously supplied both these characters with the same envelopes.

But it won’t just be infiltration you’ll need to worry about. For the security services will also seek to ‘turn’ trusted individuals within your organisation or movement. There will often be those with little ‘weaknesses’ vulnerable to such a tactic, which can be very effective. I have said it before and I will say it again, I believe that Plaid Cymru was compromised at a very high level decades ago. This accounts for the party’s lack of success and the bizarre and otherwise inexplicable action taken when the party threatened to be successful.

And of course, I haven’t ventured across the water, where murderous collaboration between police, army, intelligence services and Loyalist paramilitaries went on for over twenty years. Some of those in George Square on the 19th of September may have had knowledge of such collusion. (Though Ireland is not a valid comparison with Scotland due to the levels of violence and the deep-rooted communal divide encountered there.)

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The behaviour exhibited in Glasgow told us a lot about those belonging to the extreme Unionist Right. On the one hand they swear loyalty to the monarch and profess their love of Britain . . . yet they sing God Save the Queen and Rule Britannia wCharles de Gaullehile giving Nazi salutes! (No wonder the MailOnline was outraged!) To me, these people are the ideological descendants of those who would have co-operated with Nazi invaders in 1940. Of course, the collaborators of 1940 would have justified their position by arguing that the ‘British’ (i.e. the English) had no quarrel with their German cousins; the real enemies were communist Russia, and England’s ‘natural enemy’, France, which provides another instructive example.

More specifically Algeria, and colonial France’s withdrawal from that country. To explain . . . the French settlers in Algeria felt betrayed by de Gaulle’s decision in 1961 to give Algeria independence and so they threw in their lot with extreme Right-wing politicians in France plus elements of the armed forces and the intelligence community to create the OAS (Organisation de l’armée secrète). This provides the background and context for Day of the Jackal.

The British Unionist Right is feeling betrayed today; in fact, it’s raison d’étre nowadays seems to be the fight against one betrayal after another. Northern Ireland will soon have a Catholic majority, Scotland is on its way to independence, while Mother England is being simultaneously swamped by immigrants and swallowed up by ‘Europe’, then there’s them kilometres and litres . . . To those Unionists who know their Wagner, we are approaching Götterdämmerung. Would it be stretching things too far to compare the position of Ulster Loyalists and their extreme BritNat allies today with that of the pieds-noirs and their supporters back in the 1960s?

What we can state with absolute certainty is that links between state security agencies and ‘patriotic’ groups is universal. The United Kingdom is no exception.

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Despite what I’ve written I have no direct evidence that those responsible for what happened in Glasgow on September the 19th, not even those who travelled to the city to ‘celebrate victory’ by intimidating and attacking people, were directed or manipulated by any third-party agency. I am just a man who has been involved in both mainstream and ‘fringe’ politics for almost half a century and who has observed things along the way.

What I will repeat is that the ‘chain’ exists’, and it defends its collective interests. That should have been made clear to everyone by the behaviour of the media during the referendum campaign, and by the hysterical interventions from banks and big business. In addition, you know that MI5 has infiltrated the SNP in the past, for example, during the 1979 referendum campaign. And then there’s the long-running mystery of the death of Willie McRae. Scotland’s enemies will use every conceivable tactic to thwart independence, and they’ve got a whole box of tricks.

Given that the ongoing independence campaign is much more threatening to the ‘chain’ than anything that happened in 1979 MI5 would not be doing its job if it didn’t infiltrate the parties and groups that make up the campaign. The strongest weapons you have to fight them are truth, belief in your cause, and the trust of the awakened Scottish people. So build your own ‘chain’, and don’t restrict it to Scotland, for you have friends everywhere, among the silenced and the marginalised, those in need of hope and inspiration. These people are depending on you – go for it!