Tag: Sinn Fein

A Personal Take On The Euro Elections 2024

On By JacIn Europe, European Union, Globalism, Russia, Wales, World Economic Forum27 Comments

It might seem odd for me to be writing about elections to the EU parliament 8 years after Wales voted to leave the EU, but I’m doing so because these results are important, and will have repercussions for us.

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THE BIG PICTURE

There was a swing to the right across the continent, but of course the media found it almost impossible to engage in honest reporting. There were crude references to the 1930s, or even suggestions that the swing was largely due to a low turnout.

Watching the exit polls and the early declarations on Sunday night, on the BBC, CNN, and Euronews, I was struck by the way commentators used terms like ‘centre’, ‘centre left’, ‘socialists’, even ‘green-left’, but never ‘far left’.

While on the other side there’s rarely a ‘right of centre’; that side of the spectrum begins with ‘right wing’ or ‘far right’, even ‘hard right’. (Yeah, well hard!)

There’s also the ‘populist right’, whatever that means. (Answers on a post card.)

I got the impression that some of those misinforming me would have liked to slip into Antifa black bloc and yell, ‘Nazi!’, ‘fascist!‘, and ‘transphobe!’ Displaying commendable restraint the Beeb limited itself to images like this, linking Austria with Germany (Anschluss), and showing raised arms. (Nudge, nudge.)

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When it came to Gorgeous Geert Wilders, there was an early attempt (Netherlands voted on Thursday) to suggest that his Party for Freedom PVV had somehow tanked, even though projections had it increasing its representation in Brussels from 0 to 7 MEPs. (As it turned out, the PVV won 6 seats.)

Done by making the rather silly comparison with the national election last November, which the PVV won.

The talking heads were almost united in bemoaning the swing to the right, but chose to focus on the personalities, or the possible line-up in the EU parliament, rather than address the reasons for the upheaval they were witnessing.

Those reasons being unsustainable levels of immigration and the hardships being imposed by the completely unnecessary drive to net zero.

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THE VIEW FROM THE EAST

The picture across the continent is too big and complicated for me to look at every country. What’s more, the picture in the east, from Finland to Romania, is coloured to a greater or lesser degree by the war in Ukraine, and attitudes towards Russia.

For Finland was ruled by Russia until 1917, then Stalin invaded in 1940. Anti-Russian sentiment is widespread in the Baltic States. Poland borders Ukraine. Hungary tries to play the honest broker. Many Romanians fear Russia will push west, towards and beyond Odessa, to link with Transdnistria, where there is already a Russian military presence.

So I’m going to focus on Central and Western Europe. Where results are marginally easier to read, and then, due to the size and influence of some of the countries involved, the consequences will be felt beyond those countries’ borders.

I should also point out that in a number of countries the EU elections were held on the same day as local or national elections. Which can confuse the picture, and also influence the result of the EU poll.

I’m going to focus on France, but I’ll also zip around a few other countries; including of course, Germany. Once the economic and industrial powerhouse of the continent . . . but then came net zero.

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LA BELLE FRANCE

As I’ve suggested by focusing on France, the big story of the elections was that Macron got his ass kicked by Marine Le Pen’s protégé, 28-year-old Jordan Bardella.

Marine Le Pen fought hard for National Rally (NR) to shake off the worst of her father’s legacy, but no matter what did she was stuck with the name. Bardella, of mainly Italian background, but also having an Algerian great-grandfather, has no such problem.

I know what you’re wondering, and you should be ashamed of yourselves! Ach y fi! Click to open enlarged in separate tab

Also in the mix, almost unnoticed, was the Reconquête! party. It linked with a few others to fight under the La France fière banner, got 5.47% and 5 seats. Founded as recently as 2021 by Éric Zemmour, the son of Arabic-speaking Berber Jews from Algeria.

I mention this because Zemmour is usually said to be further to the right, and more hostile to Islam, than NR.

The map below shows that NR came top of the poll in every départment other than Paris. A reminder of a problem found across the West – the disproportionate influence of a metropolitan elite.

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By which I mean, politicians, the media, self-styled ‘progressives’, academics, countless thousands in NGOs and similar gangs living off the public purse.

In response to his drubbing Macron has gone for broke and called a parliamentary election. His job won’t be up for grabs, but he’ll be there to undermine his party, and the liberal left more generally, by reminding French voters he’s now a lame duck president.

An example of a weak man acting tough. And it invariably ends in disaster.

Something that cost Macron and his party votes was his call for what sounded very much like war with Russia. This Spectator article from March 10 suggests Macron made his remarks about intervention in Ukraine to combat NR’s 10% lead in opinion polls ahead of the EU elections.

This cunning plan was so successful that the eventual gap was 16.2%, with NR getting 31.4%, to Macron’s Renaissance getting just 15.2%.

The plan to give Putin what for was not well received by his neighbours and allies. (‘”Follow me!“, he cried, sabre held aloft . . . then looked back and saw he was alone.’)

Incidentally, the French Communist party got just 2.36%. Now if that don’t warm the cockles of your crypto fascist heart, missus, then I don’t know what will.

Back in the days of Gladio there was a real worry, in London and Washington, that France (and Italy) might actually elect a communist government. How times change!

Macron is now urging the French to ‘say no to extremes’ in the elections at the end of the month. Rejecting his brand of banality, mediocrity, and incompetence, does not make people extremists.

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Wise up, mon ami – your bateau has sailed.

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A ROUNDUP

Next door to France, in Belgium, there were also national and regional elections. With a turnout of 87.42% for the federal election. The big winners in the regional elections for Flanders were Eurosceptic Flemish nationalist parties, though Vlaams Belang – the ‘separatist’ party – did not perform as well as expected.

On the national stage, the same two parties topped the poll. Other, mainly francophone parties, trotted in behind them.

As in France, the big loser was the party running the national government, but unlike France, there was also a national election, which the ruling coalition lost. This resulted in prime minister Alexander De Croo handing in his notice to the king. But he’ll hang on until a new coalition is formed.

Belgian politics is ‘messy’. A small country divided by language and regional rivalries, with its capital, Brussels, also serving as the EU capital.

In Italy, there was no big surprise. Giorgia Meloni’s Fratelli d’Italia, heading the national government coalition, came top. And although the usual suspects call her the ‘heiress to Mussolini’ and a neo-fascist, I fear she may be little more than a political chancer with a real talent for self-promotion.

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An example would be her visit to Albania just before the EU elections, to inspect the centres where would-be migrants will be held while Italy vets their claims. This Rwanda-style deal seems to be pissing off many of the comrades, so it has that in its favour.

And those whose applications fail will presumably be recruited by Albanian gangs and end up over here tending cannabis factories. Everyone’s a winner!

We can’t ignore Germany, the largest member of the bloc in terms of population and just about everything else. As in other countries we’ve looked at, the results were a disaster for the party or parties running the national government.

Olaf Scholz’s Social Democrats, who head up the ruling coalition, came a poor third with just 13.9%. The big winners were the Christian Democrats (with their Bavarian ally) on 30%, and to the right of them, the AfD on 15.9%. The Greens came fourth with 11.9%.

Catching up on reports as I wrote this I came across something that indicates how the political focus has shifted to the right.

Associated Press is one of the most reliably Globalist mouthpieces. A joke as a news organisation, it can be relied on to spout the Davos-UN line on climate, ‘refugees’, etc.

Normally, AP would be horrified by advances for conservatives, but here it seems to be taking consolation from the success of the German Christian Democrats.

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Scholz says he won’t be calling an election, but the decision may be out of his hands.

The BBC found similar comfort in a ‘resurgent’ centre-left in France. Mmm. I’m sure there was a Straw Clutchers party standing somewhere.

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Next door to Germany, in Austria, it was a similar story. A big surge in support for one of those parties that puts leftists into Wolfie Smith mode.

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We’ve looked at France, Germany and Italy, so the other large country in the west is Spain. There, it was a familiar tale, though with a strange twist.

I quote from the Reuters article I just linked to: ‘Alvise Perez, a far-right social media influencer running against what he describes as universal corruption, managed to obtain three seats with a campaign mostly conducted through the messaging app Telegram.’

Here’s a link that might tell you more about Señor Perez, who dedicated his victory to an 81-year-old man who’d been sent to prison for shooting a burglar.

I’d hoped to bring results from Ireland, where there were also local elections. But counting has been slow, and when I was finishing off this article yesterday evening the results for the Euro elections had still not been finalised.

I would also have liked to tell you about the local elections, but that would have meant a lot of digging. The insurgent parties and individuals I’ve mentioned here in recent times are probably included among Independents and Others in the box below

It’s worth noting that Sinn Féin was topping every poll until it became clear that it supports open borders, which hurts its working class base more than other groups.

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But I can tell you that John Moran is the new mayor of Limerick.

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YOUNG EUROPE

In order to explain a few more things about Poland, France, the wider picture, and the standard of BBC journalism, I’m using the two clips below.

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Polish premier Tusk is a Globalist and Permanent War party puppet, and therefore a favourite with the BBC.

But Auntie disapproves of his rival, the Law and Justice party, so it has to be labelled ‘right wing’. But when there’s another party, even more likely to bring on an attack of the vapours, such as the Confederation party, it must be branded ‘far-right’.

But note, the panel also reveals that this party from beyond the Pale is the most popular among 18-29- year-olds. While the other panel tells us that in France 18-24-year-olds have swung behind Le Pen’s RN.

Across Europe young people are rejecting the parties of the centre, and the greens, to move left and right, with the right gaining far more than the left.

This swing to the right among the young is significant. For we’re not dealing with the ‘gammons’ so beloved of leftists and their media, those sad caricatures nostalgic for a time when white families appeared in TV adverts.

This support from young people is rooted in events of the here and the now. And that’s why I find it so encouraging.

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FINAL THOUGHTS

I see these European elections as a blow for the Globalists. They also see it, and they’ve been quick to respond. The head of the UN’s refugee agency, Filippo Grandi, ‘criticised the politicisation of migration in European elections‘.

Listen, pal, you and your Globalist mates, the politicians you’ve won over, the European Commission, the media you control . . . you all politicised the issue long ago, by doing away with border controls, and by demonising those who oppose your plans.

You are in no position therefore to criticise decent people who’ve had enough of your behaviour. The fightback is underway, both in Europe and the USA.

For the day after he took office, your puppet Biden opened the southern border. Now that his handlers finally realise how unpopular a decision that has proven to be, and with a presidential election looming, they’re back-pedalling like crazy.

Let’s also remember the damage being inflicted by the climate scam. It’s destroying the Welsh countryside, making everything more expensive, while personal freedom suffers from the restrictions it demands.

Which is why, on July 4, I expect a rag-bag of candidates, some of them off the wall, one or two sought by various constabularies; with a back-of-a-fag-packet ‘manifesto’, and a leader used by leftist yobs for target practice, to do rather well.

Because that’s where we are. Think well on’t.

♦ end ♦

© Royston Jones 2024

Wildlife Trusts – Not To Be Trusted

On By JacIn Colonialism, Environmentalism, Globalism46 Comments

In a sense, this is a follow-up to a piece I put out in February called ‘Wildlife Trusts, Crazy Money, Hidden Agendas‘. Perhaps a variation on a theme.

Though this is not quite the piece I originally promised. Perhaps I’ll return to the sweat lodges and other joys in the ‘Bhutan of Wales’ (“ample parking space“) at some later date.

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ABOUT MUCH MORE THAN NEWTS

What you have to understand about modern environmentalism, certainly in Wales, is that it’s no longer fleece-jacketed innocents protecting red squirrels or tagging birds. It is now intensely political. And financially lucrative.

Lucrative, as long as it promotes a certain interpretation of the world.

Which means, in practice, that environmentalists work for BlackRock and other Globalist corporations; Bill ‘jabs and bugs’ Gates, Klaus Schwab and the World Economic Forum.

And even if environmentalists don’t realise it, if they’re just useful idiots, then that don’t matter none – what matters is that they do what they do.

And as I suggested, they’re getting paid handsomely for it. Here’s one example.

Total income for the North Wales Wildlife Trust went up from £1.83m in 2019 to £6.17 in 2023, a rise of 237%. But in the same period, funding from the ‘Welsh Government’ rose from £309,480 to £3,760,000, an increase of 1,115%.

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Similar increases in the funding awarded to the other wildlife trusts, river groups, etc, correlates with the ramping up of the ‘Welsh Government’s war on farmers.

Which meant blaming just about anybody other than Dŵr Cymru for river pollution.

But environmentalists weren’t confining themselves to persecuting cows, and matters scatological; for they were also pushing the anti-car agenda.

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THE WAR ON CARS I

An example of this would be defeating plans to upgrade the M4 around Newport. Here’s Friends of the Earth reminding us of its role in that campaign.

Which is fine with me because that’s the raison d’être of environmental groups. But if opposing M4 improvements was ‘Welsh Government’ policy, and if ‘WG’ funded various groups to support that policy, then that puts a different complexion on things.

As FoE stated, one of the major reasons for rejecting improvements to the M4 was to protect the Gwent Levels. Which was also the reasoning given by the first minister.

Mark Drakeford said he would not have gone ahead even if it was affordable because of the impact on the Gwent Levels.

But the environmentalists’ war on roads didn’t end with saving the Gwent Levels. (Though not from solar farms.)

I’ve written a number of times about the ‘Welsh Government’s decision to abandon all new road schemes. Let’s begin in June 2021, with the announcement of a ‘freeze’ on new road building.

Then, in September 2021, came news of a panel . . .

. . . of climate change and transport specialists . . . led by Dr Lynn Sloman MBE, a transport consultant based in Wales

Despite what the ‘Welsh Government’ wanted us to believe, Dr Lynn Sloman is not ‘based in Wales’; she actually lives in London, where she sits on the Transport for London board, headed by mayor Sadiq Ulez Khan.

Dr Lynn Sloman is, predictably, an anti-car fanatic. And her connection to Wales is a holiday home in Cwm Einion, near Machynlleth. To which she presumably drives.

Dr Sloman’s panel delivered the result required in February 2023 – no new roads!

This impacted on just about every part of the country, and deprived communities of long-awaited and much-needed, improvements. It meant no third crossing of the Menai, no by-pass for Llanbedr, no by-pass for Llandeilo.

This was of course welcomed by both Rachel Sharp, CEO of  the officially defunct Wildlife Trusts Wales; and her trusty henchman, Tim Birch, of Extinction Rebellion.

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But there is one issue on which environmentalists could and should be more vocal.

We’ll ignore the energy consumed in manufacturing wind turbines, then the damage inflicted on the environment from shipping them to Wales; widening roads, felling trees, ripping out hedgerows to get them to where they’re being erected.

Instead’ let’s just focus on the damage they cause in situ.

Wind turbines destroy peat deposits. They scar hillsides with access roads and cable trenches. Hundreds of pylons are needed to carry whatever’s generated in Wales to England. The turbine blades kill birds, bats, and all manner of insects.

There are also threats to human health from infrasound, flicker, and worrying over your home losing value due to its proximity to wind turbines.

Yet environmentalists have little to say against wind turbines. That’s because their ‘outrage’ can be switched off and on, as required, by their paymasters.

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THE ‘FOXES’ OF ENVIRONMENTALISM

We often hear: “Farming occupies around 90% of ‘our’ land“, as if it’s something undesirable. It’s very revealing, because those who say it seem genuinely horrified that so much of Wales belongs to hairy-arsed peasants.

A recent example of the ‘90%’ fixation came in an article in ‘Welsh Government’ mouthpiece Nation.Cymru by Dr Malcolm Smith. He was ostensibly writing about the ‘Welsh Government’s Sustainable Farming Scheme (SFS).

Smith wants us to believe that carbon emissions increase global temperatures when there is no link whatsoever, and then rather gives away his own position on SFS with:

Trees, it seems, aren’t welcomed by most farmers.

This obsession with the amount of land held by farmers seems most prevalent among politicians and middle class enviro-grifters who want Welsh farmers off the land they and their corporate patrons covet.

I say that because no one has ever come up to me in a pub, a supermarket, or any other setting, grabbed me by the lapels and shouted – ‘Isn’t it bloody awful that farmers have so much land?‘

Nobody. Honestly!

Which makes the support these spivs get from Welsh socialists difficult to fathom. And the support from those socialists who claim they want independence inexplicable.

Maybe this subservience can be explained by something I read last week. Someone was trying to explain why Sinn Féin has fallen for the Globalist-Woke-Left agenda.

It is a lingering symptom of what Ruairi Ó Bradaigh once described as the intellectual inferiority complex of men who were absurdly impressed by . . . bourgeois lefties and liberals

I think that explains a lot of what we see in Wales. Particularly the insecure among us, who can’t resist a bit of flannel delivered in a ‘posh’ accent.

What Ruairi Ó Bradaigh called “the intellectual inferiority complex” always lurks in the Welsh psyche. And it seems to afflict socialists far more than it affects those of us on the political right.

Welsh leftists like to see themselves as ‘progressive’, which then leaves them wide open to the blandishments of the ‘foxes’ Malcom X refers to here.

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ANOTHER WARNING FROM IRELAND

For some time now I’ve been paying closer than usual attention to what’s happening in Ireland, where the uniparty establishment has enthusiastically signed up to the Globalist agenda. It’s been open borders, war on farmers, and recently, referendums that hoped to re-define ‘woman’ and ‘family’.

Both referendums were heavily defeated, and the preening, obnoxious, Varadkar soon resigned in the hope of salvaging his political reputation. Because he fears there’s worse to come as the people wake up and fight back. (Something the Irish have a history of doing.)

And the Irish people are waking up. And demanding a return to sanity. Especially when they look around and see who’s been allowed into their country.

For example, one result of open borders is that Ireland is now home to the Nigerian Black Axe gang, which deals in romance fraud and other online scams . . . with a little murder, drugs, and extortion thrown in.

Just think about that. A Nigerian criminal network is actually based in Ireland. How the hell was that allowed to happen!

Well, as I just mentioned, because the Irish establishment obeys the Globalist agenda; and no-questions-asked immigration is an integral part of that agenda, designed to destabilise western societies.

Then, last week I was directed to news about moves to punish people who want to live in the countryside. (Unless, presumably, they’re Nigerian gangsters.)

You can read the whole publication if you like. But the opening paragraph tells you exactly where it’s going. And how it’s justified.

Moving Together . . . a commitment in the Climate Action Plan 2023 . . . to alleviate the impacts of car-dependency

Someone wants the Irish countryside emptied, and populations concentrated in urban areas. Now why should that be?

Wales may be heading in the same direction.

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THE WAR ON CARS II

I say Wales may be headed in the same direction because the ‘pieces’ are already there, we just need to put them together to see the bigger picture.

Earlier, we looked at environmentalists, funded by the ‘Welsh Government’ or Globalist corporations and multi-billionaires, campaigning against road improvements. In league with former Sustrans rep in Wales, and until so very recently, chauffeur-driven deputy minister for climate change, Lee Waters.

Waters welcomed the halt on new road projects with:

As the review points out the by-pass that was demanded to relieve congestion often ends up leading to extra traffic, which in time brings further demands for extra lanes, wider junctions and more roads

I suggest Waters and his allies stand for half an hour one summer day outside the ‘Vic’ in Llanbedr, or The Castle in Llandeilo; and ponder that the shit forming a skin on their iced tea, the shit they’re also inhaling, comes from cars and trucks in low gear inching their way through a traffic bottleneck.

And it could all be avoided with a by-pass!

Consider this, gentle reader: the man who can ignore the effects of low-gear emissions on human health – because it serves an element of the agenda – can also impose 20mph speed limits, guaranteed to increase harmful emissions – and justify doing so on health and safety grounds!

But when it can be used to serve another element of the agenda, air quality becomes a consideration. For Nicola Lund recently reminded us in ‘Message to Wales – On Yer Bike (Part 2)‘ that the Welsh Government’ is also promising air quality legislation, and a ‘national road user charging framework’.

So where might that lead, if we put it all together?

Let’s look at Llanbedr, which sits on the A496 running up the coast from Barmouth. A busy road, and especially so in summer.

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With a combination of no by-pass, air quality legislation, and a ‘national road user charging framework’ in place, many people will give Llanbedr a miss. Some will avoid that road altogether.

The map above shows that travellers between north and south will still have the A470, so the effects would be very localised, but highly damaging.

There’s one more consideration I want to throw into the mix.

I have consistently supported plans to raise council tax on holiday homes and restrict numbers of holiday lets*. And I will continue to back measures that might return domestic properties to local use. But . . .

Tourism means cars, camper vans, etc. So are the measures against the worst excesses of tourism doing the right thing for the wrong reason? By which I mean, are they just part of the bigger plan to restrict car journeys in Wales?

Putting it all together – and irrespective of the stated justifications – what we’ve just looked at will result in a seriously damaged rural economy, and could lead to the kind of rural clearances being talked about in Ireland and elsewhere.

Yet it all fits perfectly with the Globalist-environmentalist agenda.

*I received a communication on this very matter yesterday!

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CONCLUSION

Where the Globalists have been clever is in funding or promoting ideas, organisations and lobbies that push their agenda.

This includes, cyclists, vegans, renewable energy enthusiasts, advocates of CBDC, and of course, environmentalists.

We’re at a stage now where an environmental lobby is waging war on our farmers while also working with the ‘Welsh Government’ to make us view cars as something evil, to be done away with.

But what’s being targeted is not really farmers and motorists, but land and freedoms. Which is the essence of the Globalists’ power grab – promote fear and confusion in order to seize assets, restrict freedoms, and exert control.

As I said earlier, ‘environmentalists’ are no longer fleece-jacketed innocents. So see them for what they really are. Who they work for. And treat them accordingly.

♦ end ♦

© Royston Jones 2024

A Welsh Take On Irish Politics

On By JacIn European Union, Globalism, Ireland, World Economic Forum9 Comments

At the end of January I gave an outsider’s view of the two referendums being held in Ireland in early March on Articles 39 and 40 of the Constitution. (Click and scroll down.)

‘The Family Amendment‘ was seen as a move away from the heterosexual nuclear family towards the vacuous “durable relationship“, with the added worry that illegal aliens could use the change to bring in just about anybody, claiming there was a relationship.

The vote was 67.7% No.

The ‘The Care Amendment‘ was presented as rejecting the ‘old-fashioned’ thinking of a woman’s place being in the home, but widely seen as rejecting motherhood altogether, and opening the door to other interpretations of ‘woman’.

The vote was 73.9% No.

The highest No vote ever recorded in a referendum. Higher even than that against the suggestion to reduce the age of eligibility for election to the office of President to 21.

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RESULTS, LOSERS, WINNERS

You can’t really argue with figures like that, but of course some will try. Predictably, the Irish Times had a stab at it with:

The timing was rushed, the rationale unclear, the propositions confusing and the campaigning lacklustre.

Of course. If only things had been better explained . . .

Whereas the Guardian would have us believe: “Critics said they (the government) ran a lacklustre, confusing campaign that perplexed voters and alienated progressive allies“.

Both use “confusing” and “lacklustre“.

The problem for the Irish Times is that it’s part of the problem, in that it belongs to the metropolitan elite. Which means that to honestly address the problem, and the reasons behind the referendum defeats, would need a degree of self-examination that might be too painful.

For the truth is that, in Ireland, as throughout the Western world, the uniparty Globalist system supported by the Irish Times is cracking, and the disconnect between rulers and ruled has rarely been wider, except in those periods prior to revolutions.

In Ireland, that uniparty is made up of Fine Gael, Fianna Fáil, Sinn Féin, Labour, and of course, the Greens.

I’m sure that in Dublin’s better restaurants, this elite looked at returns like those from Donegal and Mayo, and gave each other the kind of knowing looks it was hoped would convey sagacity, but in reality merely confirmed their prejudices.

Because they’re unlikely to learn from these votes. The bubbles in which they live, across the Western world, are linked to each other, support each other, reinforce the Globalist message – and are hermetically sealed against the views of the people.

But their problems were not confined to the rural West, for working class Dublin also said No very forcefully. As did other urban centres like Cork, Galway, Wexford, Limerick, Waterford.

Even the posher parts of the capital went rogue. It was left to the outlying southern suburbs to return the only Yes vote. And that was by a hair’s breadth.

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One explanation I heard – and we’ve all heard this one before – was that unpopular governments shouldn’t give the mob a chance to vent their anger with by-elections and referendums.

But that simply reinforces how out of touch Taoiseach Leo Varadkar’s government is. For they didn’t seem to realise that a lot of people out there really hate them.

And let’s remember that the whole uniparty political establishment urged a Yes vote.

And yet, we can see why this disaster happened. For in addition to a political class and its hangers-on talking to no one but themselves, even those they trusted to inform them got it badly wrong.

I’m referring now to the opinion polls. Below you see polls conducted weeks and days before the votes predicting comfortable Yes votes. Who the hell were they asking?

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Are opinion polls also part of the problem? Or are they just a waste of time, completely unreliable?

The unity of the Irish political establishment was in marked contrast to referendums I remember in Wales: joining the EU, Sunday opening of pubs, devolution in ’79, devolution again in ’97, the Brexit vote.

For these, political parties often lined up in opposition to each other, and we even saw divisions within parties.

That’s why these Irish No votes are so significant. A monolithic political establishment, its loyal media, and the serried ranks of its NGO grifters, was told to go away unto a far place, and there do unspeakable things to themselves and to each other. (Shudders!)

The size of the anti-establishment majorities in these referendums could mean that the proposed hate speech legislation is now dead. Because the establishment always knew it was unpopular at home, and drawing critical attention abroad.

So it will perhaps be shelved. I mean, they can’t push it through as if nothing has happened. And they certainly can’t afford another referendum.

Time to go into laager.

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IS SINN FĒIN ON THE WRONG SIDE OF HISTORY?

Few things brought home to me the almost surreal nature of unfolding events more than the leader of Sinn Féin, Mary Lou McDonald, being called “a traitor to the Irish people”.

And in Dublin Castle of all places!

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To understand what I’m getting at, you have to remember that for centuries Dublin Castle was the centre of British rule in Ireland. To the point where “The Castle” could even be used as a synonym for British rule.

McDonald’s predecessors would not have seen the inside of Dublin Castle unless they’d been taken in for the kind of ‘questioning’ that sometimes ended with a bullet or a noose. In the Civil War (1922-1923) it was the turn of IRA men to be tortured and killed by Free State forces.

Modern leftists will put a class spin on the Civil War, but those who fought on were holding out for what had always been the objective – a 32 county Republic completely independent of England. They remained true to their ideals.

Whereas those who’d sold out, accepted Partition, Dominion status, and the rest, liked to portray themselves as realists, or pragmatists.

Armed anti-Treaty members of the Irish Republican Army (IRA) in Grafton Street, Dublin during the Irish Civil War. (Photo by Walshe/Getty Images) Click to open enlarged in separate tab

Nothing should show how much things have changed from the days of British rule than a leader of Sinn Féin strolling around Dublin Castle to public acclaim. I stress should – but Mary Lou McDonald was heckled by Irish nationalists!

Another reason for that hostility was the elephant in the room – immigration. Large numbers of undocumented young men being imposed, hundreds at a time, on towns and villages across the land. Sinn Féin supports open borders.

With no pretence any longer that those arriving are refugees.

They now apply for international protection status. You start your trip, then before arriving in Ireland you destroy your documents, when interviewed you claim some nasty men back home want to kill you, and bingo! – you get a house and hundreds of Euros every week to stroll the streets making a nuisance of yourself. Or worse.

Said to be the best deal in Europe.

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The Dublin Castle incident links with immigration to inform us that a new kind of nationalism seems to be emerging, one that’s more focused on Irish identity than the ‘progressive’ mish-mash that’s corrupted Sinn Féin.

Immigration is increasingly described as the new ‘Plantation’, with all that that implies given the history of Ireland.

But then, traditional Irish nationalism, Fenians, Republicans, always spoke primarily for the Gaelic Catholic Irish. Even Connolly, the socialist, talked of “the Irish race“.

Certainly Tone, Emmett, Parnell and others were Protestant, and there was always an open (if unrealistically optimistic) invitation to northern Unionists; but fundamentally, it was Ireland for the indigenous Irish.

We seem to have come full circle. It’s now ‘Ireland for the Irish’ again.

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And why not! How can our leftist brethren (whom I cherish, dearly!) shout that Palestine belongs to the Palestinians yet argue that Ireland belongs to anyone other than the Irish?

But that’s exactly what they do argue. For according to them only the ‘far right’ believes in nations . . . well, European nations, anyway.

And, finally, what’s happening in Ireland now throws up another bizarre twist, in that through its rejection of the Globalist agenda, and its reaffirmation of eternal verities, the new Irish nationalism is finding admirers among Six Counties Loyalists.

As people wake up to the Globalist agenda for the West; with Net Zero, the ‘de-growth’ strategy, the promotion of cultural Marxism, and waves of migrants, we shall see many alliances that would once have been regarded as impossible.

◊

THE YEAR AHEAD; IN IRELAND AND BEYOND

Next for Ireland are the European elections and the local council elections, to be held on the same day in June, but at a date yet to be announced. (Maybe the uniparty will only tell its own supporters the date, to avoid another hiding!)

Here’s the current state of the parties.

Click to open enlarged in separate tab

While I’m hoping for the best, I still worry that contesting national elections may be too much, too soon, for the Irish Freedom Party and the Farmers’ Alliance. I hope I’m wrong. I’m certainly more confident after the referendum results.

I know the IFP is standing candidates for the Euro elections, but I’m not sure about the locals. Nor am I sure if the Farmers’ Alliance is standing in any elections.

Of course, the elections across the EU will be fascinating because of the anti-Globalist surge, and the (correct) perception that the EU is part of the problem, facilitating the Globalist agenda through legislation, funding, and other means.

Then there’s the UK general election at some time in 2024. With the WEF’s choice for prime minister, Rishi Sunak, finally facing the electorate. But in Westminster Labour, Lib Dems, SNP, Plaid Cymru and Greens form a uniparty with the Tories, so the only option is to vote for Reform.

Then, as if I needed to remind you, in November it’s the US presidential elections. Donald Trump has seen off all challengers for the Republican nomination, while Joe Biden never really had much opposition. Which would worry me if I was a Democrat.

(But also keep an eye on the Independent candidate, Robert F Kennedy Jr.)

Biden cannot win a fair election against Trump. A Trump victory should mark the beginning of the end for the Globalists’ plans. And this is why I fear that those with most to lose might try something stupid, and sell it to their lapdog media and their cultish supporters as ‘defending democracy’.

For, yesterday, after both men’s nominations were confirmed, someone got Sleepy Joe to say, “the threat Trump poses is greater than ever“. ‘There you go. If Trump is such a ‘threat’, then maybe the rules don’t apply.

Whatever happens, I’m reasonably sure we’re at the high-water mark of Globalism. From now on it must ebb. Too many people have woken up.

The only question is whether Globalism goes out with a bang, or a whimper. And that is a very big question.

♦ end ♦

© Royston Jones 2024

The Globalist Plantation Of Ireland

On By JacIn Ireland, World Economic Forum34 Comments

I’ve been following recent protests in Ireland against large numbers of unvetted male migrants being imposed on unsuspecting communities. My interest is due to a long-standing affection for Ireland and its people, together with a keen interest in Irish history.

Which explains what you’re about to read.

♦

BACKGROUND

I suspect Ireland is being used as a testing ground by Globalist schemers. Specifically, through persuading or pressurising the Irish government and wider establishment into accepting mass immigration.

This has promoted hostile reactions in many cities and towns. From Dublin to small towns in Connacht most of us have never heard of.

Emboldened by support received from the media, NGOs, and elsewhere, the Irish government has decided to go for broke in an attempt to silence popular opposition to its open borders immigration policy with draconian legislation.

I’m referring to the Criminal Justice (Incitement to Violence or Hatred and Hate Offences) Bill. Legislation that has already been noted outside of Ireland, and condemned by, among others, Elon Musk and Donald Trump Jr.

The mainstream media leapt to the Irish government’s defence. Musk and Trump are wrong, while lesser mortals criticising unrestricted immigration and the problems it brings are elsewhere denounced as “racists“, “fascists“, “far right“, etc.

The image is that of Michael Collins, imprisoned at Frongoch, then leader of the IRA during the War of Independence, but killed by the anti-Treaty IRA in the Civil War. Click to open enlarged in separate tab

The proposal still has some way to go before it becomes law.

But if it becomes law then it will be a sad day for free speech. For those behind this attack on freedom were so desperate to silence just about everybody that diverged from the official narrative that they neglected to actually define ‘hate’!

Which might mean that ‘hate’ will be whatever the state, the NGOs, the media, or the World Economic Forum, decides it is at any given time.

As is pointed out in this long tweet by Senator Rónán Mullen.

Let’s be blunt, legislation like this – for we see it elsewhere – is designed to silence indigenous White populations being forced into accepting demographic and social change on the orders of the UN, WEF, subordinate bodies such as the EU, and governments at national and sub-national level.

And it’s one-way legislation. For let’s again be blunt, no Muslim is ever going to be arrested for calling an Irish person a “Christian bastard“; no Black African for using the term, “White c**t”.

It’s worth thinking about developments over there because what’s happening in Ireland may have ramifications way beyond that country.

◊

‘REFUGEES’

Let’s have a little background, to establish what I’m talking about, and to help us avoid the confusion that is deliberately encouraged by those I’ll be discussing.

The discontent, protests and, on occasion, violence, has been caused by the political establishment of the Republic, its bought media, paid-for NGO bleeding-hearts, unhinged Leftists, and various useful idiots, insisting that the thousands of able-bodied young men now being brought into Ireland are genuine refugees.

Everyone knows they’re not, but no one is supposed to say it. Anyone who does say the truth – and that includes mothers pushing buggies – will be vilified as “racists, etc., etc”.

The Irish ‘far-right’ on the march. Click to open enlarged in separate tab

To make a fraught situation even more combustible, politicians, civil servants and others will tell a community it’s to receive Ukrainian refugees, “Sure, it’ll be women and children” . . . then the trouble starts when busloads of healthy young men arrive who have never seen the steppe under snow.

From the official side there is dishonesty and deception all along the line. But they can get away with it because they control both the political system and the media.

And talking of the media, here’s a piece that appeared a couple of months ago in the Guardian.

And it is purest Guardian. For rather than deal with the issues, and Irish people’s justifiable concerns, Irish journo Colin Gannon uses the article to stress links between the far right in England and what he claims to be their Irish counterparts.

Presumably in an attempt to reinforce his message he says some rather silly things.

Click to open enlarged in separate tab

The suggestion that it’s unfair to view young males, “because of their age and gender“, as being more problematic is especially silly. Just ask yourself who’s more likely to be violent and to engage in crime – is it children, women, older people, or young men in large groups and far from home?

Gannon then suggests that working-class communities are not “integrating refugees“. But why should they, seeing as the state makes no attempt? Unvetted young males are simply dumped on working-class communities. Often without warning and usually without consultation.

This Guardian article would not have been written a decade ago. I say that because it’s another example of how liberals and socialists now hate the once-eulogised White working class.

Which then explains why they pin their hopes for changing Western society on bringing in a new population. No matter how disruptive doing that that might prove to be.

Because of course middle class liberals and socialists – for there are few working class socialists left – will be largely insulated from the problems their zealotry causes.

◊

THE PERFECT STORM

In addition to being lied to over ‘refugees’, Irish people are angry at the influx because the health service is creaking and there’s a severe housing crisis.

Ireland has one of the most acute housing shortages in the world. It has the lowest number of dwellings per head in the OECD, and average house prices are now eight times mean income (compared to three times as much in 2010).

In the article I’ve linked to you’ll also read, just after the clip above: “The situation is so bad that 70% of young people in Ireland say that they are considering emigrating due to the cost of living, which is mainly driven by housing costs“.

When young Irish people see ‘refugees’ being housed ahead of them, they become frustrated, and they become understandably angry. Parents also become angry at the prospect of their children having to emigrate.

For emigration has painful memories for the Irish. Economic prosperity was supposed to mean that mass emigration was a thing of the past.

As I’ve just suggested, we shouldn’t even be talking about emigration, because Ireland is now a prosperous country, with a per capita GDP and a standard of living above that of the UK, and well above third world Wales.

Which makes me wonder why those running a rich country can’t organise the housing sector better.

Or is an insufficient supply of housing also part of the agenda?

◊

THE WHY

The mystery remains as to why Irish politicians inflict these problems on their people.

For there is no upside to bringing in tens of thousands of unvetted men who have, to date, committed many murders, countless rapes and lesser sexual offences, and all manner of other crimes.

There are now machete-wielding Nigerian street gangs terrorising Irish towns and cities. Roma tribes run criminal empires on Irish streets.

It’s all very well arguing that “only a minority” commit crimes, but none of these crimes would have been committed if unvetted migrants had not been allowed into Ireland in the first place.

For example, if the welcome mat had not been laid out for Muslim extremist Yousef Palani then the two gay men he killed last year in Sligo would still be alive.

Those arriving are not, as one officially-connected joker suggested, all doctors and engineers who will be a benefit to the country. People are quick to guess that the specimen they see shitting in the street is not a graduate of the Medical University of Vienna.

So why are the major political parties in favour of the unrestricted immigration of people they know are not refugees?

To answer that I’m going to throw out a theory that might explain why Ireland seems to be targeted by the Globalists. For we can be reasonably certain that the WEF has a hand in it.

But before that, let’s set the scene.

◊

THE HOW

Ireland is a small, homogenous, but developed and centralised country. Which makes it very easy to control by manipulating its political establishment and media.

In addition, Ireland has a worldwide profile that is largely due to the emigration of recent centuries, certainly since the Famine of the 1840s.

Because so many Irish went to the USA . . . because Hollywood ‘adopted’ the Irish . . . because it’s almost mandatory for US presidents to visit and be photographed sipping Guinness (however contrived their Irish link) . . . because people around the world drink in what they think are ‘Irish’ pubs . . . because fountains run green on St Pat’s Day . . .

Click to open enlarged in separate tab

Fact and carefully cultivated fiction combine to give Ireland a global profile like no other small country.

A profile enlarged in a darker way by the violence of The Troubles in the 1970s and 1980s.

But all combine to give a global image of a small country populated by a proud and  pugnacious people who have fought all-comers to maintain or regain control over their land and their national destiny.

A perception that makes Ireland the ideal exemplar for open borders and unrestricted movement of populations. For if the Irish, with their history, are welcoming an influx of strangers, “Why are you being so racist”?

But how would it be achieved?

◊

THE WHO (NO, NOT THEM)

Well, let’s look at this article from the Irish Examiner in March, which tells us, “Ireland’s reliance on large multinational intellectual property has resulted in GDP for 2022 exceeding the EU average by over 130%.”

The Irish economic miracle owes a great deal to lowering the rate of Corporation Tax from 40% to 12.5%, a change phased in between 1996 and 2003. This, plus an educated, English-speaking workforce, is what attracted the multinationals.

Elsewhere, the article tells us:

Multinationals including Apple, Facebook, Pfizer, and Google, among others alone accounted for almost 56% of the so-called total value added to the economy, up from 53% in 2021, the CSO said. Sectors dominated by multinationals, including information and communications, expanded greatly.

The four companies mentioned are stalwarts of the World Economic Forum. Apple, Facebook and Google censor or take down anything too critical of the Globalist agenda. Those three are currently fighting a losing battle trying to stem the flow of bad news for Pfizer and other manufacturers of Covid ‘vaccines’.

But what if they and other multinationals contributing so much to the Irish economy threatened to leave unless the Irish establishment accepted the Globalist agenda and agreed to WEF demands on open borders?

Of course, I could be wrong. Maybe Fine Gael, Fianna Fáil and Sinn Féin have adopted their position on immigration without any pressure from anywhere.

Genuinely believing that by encouraging into Ireland Albanian gangsters, Muslim fanatics, Nigerian street gangs, Roma crime clans and all the rest, they’re doing the right thing for Ireland.

But if that’s the case, then Ireland has real problems.

◊

WHAT DOES THE FUTURE HOLD?

I see a resurgent Irish nationalism emerging. I say that because those protesting against what they call a ‘Plantation’ (with all that that term means in Ireland) have no hesitation in invoking the memory of those who fought against British rule.

Now this should be Sinn Féin territory, but that party is compromised by its support for the establishment’s ‘refugees’ scam.

Three of the executed leaders of the 1916 Rising. L to R: Padraig Pearse, Thomas Clarke, James Connolly. Click to open enlarged in separate tab

In fact, Sinn Féin is in a very difficult position altogether. It may still be the largest party in the Republic, but a poll published Saturday says 75% of those questioned think Ireland has taken in too many ‘refugees’, with SF supporters especially unhappy.

Small wonder that ‘insurgent’ parties are emerging to capitalise on the disconnect.

What I also notice is that the struggle we see developing is no longer focused solely on ‘refugees’. For as the bigger picture emerges, and people understand better the Globalist agenda, other things start falling into place.

I’m talking now of the wider agenda that demands a strategy of de-growth to combat a non-existent ‘climate crisis’; that undermines the agricultural sector in order to control food production and supply; that promotes sexual deviance and targets children; that encourages anti-White racism; that attacks the foundations of Western civilisation such as nation, family, faith, culture, traditions.

Which, I suspect, explains the reference in the tweet below to “degeneracy and totalitarianism“.

Tricolours at every demonstration of resistance to Globalism. But it’s rejected by the Left-Globalist opposition – which still wears masks. Click to open enlarged in separate tab

Earlier I said, “what’s happening in Ireland may have ramifications way beyond that country“. I said it because what we are witnessing in Ireland is, in effect, the World Economic Forum, United Nations and European Union being challenged.

And the challenge is not restricted to the issue of ‘refugees’. Irish farmers can see the writing on the wall, they’ve had visits from their Dutch counterparts, and they too are organising against the Globalist anti-farming agenda.

The Globalists’ anti-Western agenda is being challenged everywhere. We Welsh should study how it’s being resisted in the Netherlands, Italy and, especially, Ireland.

Because those buffoons in Corruption Bay are fully signed up to The Agenda.

♦ end ♦

Elections, May 2021

On By JacIn Brexit Party, British Nationalism, Cardiff Bay, Conservative and Unionist Party, Elections, Englandandwales, European Union, Greens, Liberal Democrats, Plaid Cymru, Wales, Welsh Assembly, Welsh Government, Welsh Independence, Welsh Labour, Welsh Nationalism, Welsh Parliament62 Comments

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 next elections for the Welsh Parliament are just over six months away; so this week I’m taking a break from crooks, money-launderers, con men, enviroshysters, third sector leeches to focus on politicians.

Reading that, the cynics among you will say, “So no great change there, then, Jac!”.

How dare you be so disrespectful of our tribunes! Go stand in the corner!

♦

THE 2016 RESULT

Let’s start by reminding ourselves of the overall result from the previous election in 2016.

‘Abolish the Welsh’ refers to the Abolish the Welsh Assembly Party, a harmless bunch of anti-Welsh cranks not a gang of loonies bent on genocide. Well not yet, anyway. Click to enlarge

The first thing you might notice is that despite these elections being organised under a system of proportional representation the result, certainly for Labour, the biggest party, gives an outcome not a lot different to first past the post.

You’ll also see that the main challengers get seats roughly in line with their share of the vote, with the smaller parties generally losing out. It’s a system designed to protect the Labour-dominated status quo in Wales, while also stifling ‘insurgent’ parties.

This system has worked to perfection in Wales because the Conservatives are unlikely to ever gain a majority of seats. And when Labour fails to get a majority then Plaid Cymru or the Liberal Democrats will always be there to help.

After the 2016 election Labour went into coalition with the sole Liberal Democrat AM. Which meant that parties with a total of 38% of the vote were able to form an administration.

Is this really how PR is supposed to work?

♦

THE LABOUR PARTY

At the risk of sounding uncharitable, the great thing the Labour Party has had going for it is . . . not being the Conservative Party. The advertising campaigns, the policy drafting, the tub-thumping and the sloganising could all have been ignored in favour of the simple message – ‘Vote for us, cos we’re not the Tories’.

And it’s worked, for almost a century.

In England, the decline of traditional industries, and their associated trade unions, have weakened the Labour Party. Labour in Scotland suffered the same problem, exacerbated by the rise of the Scottish National Party to the point where Labour is hanging on for dear life, with just one Westminster MP left.

In Wales, Labour has fared better because we’ve been spared the corrupting influence of prosperity, and also because there is no equivalent of the SNP. Of course, Plaid Cymru likes to view itself as the Welsh SNP but the SNP set out to destroy the Labour Party in Scotland whereas Plaid Cymru seeks to keep its Welsh branch alive and in power.

How Labour will do next May depends to a considerable extent on perceptions of the Conservative government in London. For while Scotland has a vigorous national media allowing elections to be influenced by Scottish issues, the absence of a Welsh media worthy of the name means that here we tend see Englandandwales elections.

The exception being perhaps areas with high numbers of Welsh speakers who are less reliant on news from London.

On issues of the day, there is a general and widespread belief that the self-styled ‘Welsh Government’ has handled the Covid-19 pandemic better than Johnson, Hancock, Jenrick and the rest of the gang up in London.

But then, being seen as less incompetent than that crew is no great achievement.

When we address purely Welsh issues, it’s difficult to think of anything Labour has to crow about. For Wales continues to fall behind other countries in areas like wealth, health, housing and education.

Cardiff seems to be prospering but away from the Lesser Wen the country can be divided into post-industrial areas experiencing managed decline and rural areas undergoing engineered population change from Welsh to English.

Labour leader, Mark Drakeford, is less oleaginous than his predecessor, Carwyn Jones, but still a difficult man to like. Despite the Brownie points gained for Covid-19 there remain plenty of bear traps for him to negotiate between here and next May.

By any criteria one cares to apply, Labour has been a failure since 2016. Labour has failed Wales since the dawn of devolution in 1999. But for the reasons I’ve given, Labour will still emerge as the largest single party, with around 30% of the vote.

But well short of a majority of seats.

If nothing else, such a result should increase calls for more Senedd Members and a system of true proportional representation.

♦

THE CONSERVATIVE AND UNIONIST PARTY (CUP)

The last few years have been a series of peaks and troughs for the CUP, with Brexit almost tearing the party apart under Theresa May. Things took a turn for the better when Boris Johnson became party leader and won a famous victory in December . . . since when it’s been downhill again.

In last December’s election the Tories won a number of seats in the north, most notably, Wrexham, held by Labour since 1931. But the overall vote in Wales only increased by 2.5%. The real story was that Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party saw its Welsh vote go down by 8%.

Things have not gone well for the CUP since that December election for all sorts of reasons. Such as a number of the new intake being pretty odious specimens.

The new MP for Ynys Môn, Virginia Crosby, has appeared on this blog a number of times, usually defending her colleague and MP for Rossendale and Darwen, Jake Berry. Berry owns properties around Rhoscolyn and earlier this year people were asking if he was breaking lockdown restrictions to travel between his Welsh properties, his London home, and his constituency.

Then Delyn MP Rob Roberts got into trouble for asking young staffers to “fool around with him”. While Wrexham new girl, Sarah Atherton, wondered why the military weren’t dealing with the refugee/migrant boats crossing from France.

While old favourites like Alun Cairns, the MP for the Vale of Glamorgan, continue to amaze with their talent for finding little sidelines to supplement their meagre incomes.

The situation does not look like improving for the Tories, for two main reasons.

Let’s look first at Covid-19. As I said in the previous section, the Conservative government in London has had a disastrous pandemic: incompetence, lies, contracts to cronies, it’s all there, and this will be remembered next May.

As if that wasn’t bad enough, the Tories seem determined to alienate even more people by insisting that the ‘Welsh Government’ is being anti-English when – for perhaps the first time ever – it prioritises the interests of Wales.

That’s certainly what was said by Secretary of State for Wales, Simon Hart, and Alun Cairns. Which makes them either complete bell-ends or calculating politicians.

I believe it’s the latter, because in spouting this nonsense, the Tories are playing to a particular gallery. I’m thinking now of the anti-Welsh, gammony element that might otherwise be seduced by the growing number of splinter group parties on the BritNat fringe. (I’ll come to them later.)

The other problem of their own making is, again, Brexit. Of course Wales voted for Brexit, but I’m sure very few of us voted for privatising the NHS, chlorinated chicken, and undermining the Welsh farming industry. I certainly didn’t.

But it’s now become clear that a No Deal Brexit was always the favoured option for the CUP leadership in London. Which will mean the City of London remains at the centre of the biggest money-laundering network in the world; the NHS is opened up to US Big Pharma; and we have to get used to food products from the USA, where standards in both hygiene and animal welfare are more ‘relaxed’.

All the Welsh CUP MPs voted for this deal. Which is not clever for people representing constituencies with large numbers of farmers . . . and their extended families . . . and contractors to the industry, and so many others who rely to a greater or lesser degree on agriculture for their livelihoods.

There will be a price to pay next May for the coronavirus cock-ups and the shafting of our farmers. And while the Tories in Corruption Bay weren’t responsible, it’ll be some of them who’ll pay the price.

Other factors working against the Conservatives will be the Englandandwales media/election paradigm and the Vera Lynn Fan Clubs competing for regional votes.

For all these reasons I expect the CUP representation in the Welsh Parliament to fall.

♦

PLAID CYMRU THE PARTY OF WALES

Although Plaid Cymru won 12 seats in 2016 the party is now down to 10. Lord Elis Thomas, the constituency member for Dwyfor Meirionnydd, left to become a Labour-supporting Independent; and Neil McEvoy, the regional AM for South Wales Central, left to sit as an Independent before forming the Welsh National Party (WNP).

A further change since 2016 is that Plaid Cymru also has a new leader in Adam Price. Perhaps the best thing that can be said about him is that he’s not former leader, Leanne Wood.

For most Welsh voters Plaid Cymru is the party of Welsh independence, but as I’ve argued, Plaid Cymru is a party that sought more autonomy for Wales, more funding for Wales, and the creation of a new class of politicians and administrators made up of . . . well, the kind of people who populate the upper echelons of Plaid Cymru.

This was to be a system that created a new class that Djilas would have recognised enjoying prestige and influence without the responsibility of having to fund it. Devolution, with a bit more power, many more sinecures, and lots more money, is the end of the line.

Plaid Cymru was always Cymru Fydd resurrected, not a Welsh Sinn Féin. Until, that is, it moved to the left in the 1980s and really screwed itself up. Enjoying only a brief period of coherence under the leadership of Dafydd Wigley and the first Assembly elections in 1999.

Today we again see a schizophrenic party where Welsh-speaking social conservatives from the rural heartlands mix uncomfortably with some real oddballs and a few with views that should have denied them membership.

Plaid Cymru is today one of those confused leftist parties that is vehemently opposed to intolerance . . . except when it’s those it approves of being intolerant.

As a leftist party Plaid Cymru believes that, thanks to the capitalist system, we’re either going to fry due to global warming, or else we’re going to drown from rising sea levels, so Wales must play its part in trying to avert these outcomes.

In practice, that means supporting wind turbines that create no jobs and simply exploit Wales. Where profits flow to a City hedge fund, or a multinational, or a state-owned energy company from Scandinavia.

Except on issues that are largely irrelevant to Wales – where Plaid Cymru can play gesture politics – the party comes across as weak and indecisive. Take holiday homes. Plaid talks the talk but it won’t walk the walk.

At present Welsh local authorities can impose a council tax surcharge on holiday homes up to 100%. The only council that levies the 100% is Labour-controlled Swansea. (And despite what you might think, there are many holiday homes on the waterfront, in Mumbles, and of course around Gower.)

Independent-run Powys recently voted to impose a surcharge of 75%.

But Gwynedd, where Plaid Cymru is in control, imposes only a 50% surcharge. It’s a similar picture in Ceredigion and Carmarthenshire.

On independence, Plaid Cymru has been outflanked and overtaken by Yes Cymru. While on the party political front there are two new challengers in the form of Gwlad and the Welsh National Party (WNP). Both are unequivocal about prioritising Welsh interests, and are fully committed to achieving independence.

So you really have to wonder what Plaid Cymru stands for nowadays, and where it’s going. That’s certainly what Welsh voters will be doing in May. Many will conclude that Plaid Cymru has hit the buffers.

Which certainly seems to be the case.

For while opinion polls tell us that more and more people are prepared to consider independence, those same polls show little or no increase in support for Plaid Cymru. Recent polls show 51% of Labour voters prepared to consider independence, but only 71% of Plaid Cymru voters!

What’s going wrong for Plaid Cymru?

In a nutshell, Plaid Cymru believes that the only acceptable vision of independence must be well to the left of centre, pro EU, in favour of open borders, anti Trump, and dragging a whole baggage train of ishoo-of-the-month idiocies that turn off most voters.

Dogmatic to the point of being unelectable.

Plaid Cymru always failed to engage with the urban, anglophone population. After the disappointment of Brexit, the success of the Brexit Party (winning the May 2019 EU elections in Wales and the UK), and BoJo’s victory last December, many in Plaid Cymru – like the US Democrats – have given up trying to win over stupid, racist, poor whites.

They find it preferable to retreat into their cocoons of progressive self-righteousness in the echo chamber of social media.

Which is why I believe Plaid Cymru will lose Ceredigion and also end up with fewer Members from the regional lists.

♦

LIBERAL DEMOCRATS

There’s a temptation to be very unkind in this section . . . but it’s not in my nature to put the boot in when somebody’s down. And boy! are the Liberal Democrats down.

Down to a single Member, Kirsty Williams, the constituency MS for Brecon and Radnorshire. After the debacle of 2016 Ms Williams threw in her lot with Labour and became Minister for Education. You probably haven’t noticed.

It’s an amazing decline for the party of David Lloyd George, but entirely predictable when we consider the quality of leaders and representatives in recent years at both Welsh and UK level. I’m not sure if Ms Williams holds group meetings with herself but I’m sure she will have thought the same thing many a time.

And yet, despite currently being down to a solitary representative, the Liberal Democrats could be the big winners in May next year.

As I’ve suggested, the CUP has pissed off a lot of people, and most certainly a lot of farmers. Few will know that better than Kirsty Williams, a farmer’s wife.

Obviously, I’m not privy to what goes on at Welsh Liberal Democrat Party meetings (I can never find the telephone kiosk!) but I’m sure Kirsty Williams has hopes for the seats of Montgomeryshire to the north and Ceredigion to the west. (If the students in Aber’ and Lampeter have forgiven the Lib Dems for reneging on tuition fees.)

So I’m predicting that the Liberal Democrats could double, or even treble, their representation in May 2021. These are the three constituencies mentioned, and there might even be a regional list seat.

♦

VERA LYNN FAN CLUBS

This is where it gets tricky, because the landscape on the BritNat right is forever shifting. Hardly surprising when we look at the personalities involved, and realise how many of them are often described as ‘interesting’, or ‘eccentric’ (code for ‘absolute nutter’).

Back in 2016, the big winner among this section of the electorate was UKIP, with 13% of the vote and seven seats. The Abolish the Welsh Assembly Party did not stand constituency candidates and got just 4.4% of the regional vote (which was still more than the share won by the Green Party of Englandandwales).

Since 2016 UKIP has had eight or nine UK leaders, numerous resignations, and in Corruption Bay is now reduced to the solitary – but dapper – form of Neil Hamilton. In fact, I’m not sure if Neil Hamilton isn’t the current party leader. Or was that last month?

Not so long ago the Abolish lot was the fringe of a fringe, but now it boasts two Members of the Senedd, Gareth Bennett and Mark Reckless. Though you’ve gotta be pretty desperate to boast about those two.

Others who were returned under the banner of British exceptionalism were Nathan Gill, Michelle Brown, David Rowlands and Caroline Jones. Following his resignation in 2018 Gill was replaced by Mandy Jones. Michelle Brown now sits as an Independent.

I would have loved to have been a fly on the wall at those UKIP meetings because by comparison ferrets in a sack are models of harmony and co-existence.

The most recent development is that Rowlands and the Jones women have formed a new group, the Independent Alliance for Reform. And if that name doesn’t stir something deep inside you – other than wind – then you are beyond hope.

It is obviously designed to be interchangeable with or to complement Aux barricades!

And all the while, in the wings, observing, is Nigel Farage. Will his Reform Party put in a late appearance, or will it be the promised relaunch of the Brexit Party? Though with Brexit almost done what would be the platform?

For let us remember that the Assembly elections of May 2016 were held just ahead of the EU referendum and were almost overshadowed by it. This propinquity benefited Ukip.

One thing’s for sure, if all the parties we’ve looked at in this section fight all the seats then we’ll be royally entertained by the stars they’ll recruit from Wetherspoons and other squelchy underfoot salons. A goodly number of whom will have to withdraw before the election after saying or doing something really stupid.

The BritNat right has no hope of a constituency seat, so hopes rest on the regional lists. Which means that a lot will depend on whether they fight each other or come to some arrangement.

I suspect there are still enough “Brexit means Brexit” types out there to win 3 seats.

♦

THE SERIOUS ABOUT WALES PARTIES

Looking around Wales and seeing the mess this country is in is painful enough, but when you realise that none of the existing parties offers any hope of meaningful change, then new parties will be formed.

And that’s exactly what’s happened; and why we have Gwlad and the WNP.

I am a member of Gwlad and played a small part in its creation, but it was easy for me to withdraw to the blogosphere because the party is in such capable hands.

I like to think that Gwlad combines patriotism with pragmatism. For example, in believing that relying on handouts from London, as Labour and Plaid Cymru prefer, only perpetuates the misconception that Wales could never stand on her own two feet economically.

There are radical yet practical proposals across the board. We’ve already touched on Plaid Cymru’s fear of upsetting second home owners – a number in their own ranks – with meaningful levels of council tax; well, Gwlad does not hesitate to demand a 500% council tax surcharge.

It’s all here in the Manifesto for 2021.

Predictably, the criticism levelled against Gwlad by Plaid Cymru is that we shall “split the nationalist vote”. This is nonsense, because Plaid Cymru has already split – or certainly, limited – the nationalist vote by its inflexible and off-putting socialism.

This is borne out in recent elections and in even more so in recent opinion polls.

What Gwlad will do is reach out to those who want, or would be prepared to consider, independence, but could never vote for a hard-line socialist party also lumbered with the tag of still being a party only for Welsh speakers.

Gwlad could come through a crowded field to win a constituency seat and should certainly collect 3 or 4 regional list seats.

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Of course, I’ve met Neil McEvoy a few times and we exchange the occasional e-mail, Wales is a small country after all. But I really don’t know much about his new party beyond what I read in the media.

Though I do know a few others involved with the WNP.

Over the years I’ve sunk a few pints with Councillor Keith Parry . . . and I’m still haunted by a car journey one very rainy night as I tried to concentrate on the road ahead while my mate and Keith’s Jewish wife argued over the Israeli-Palestinian conundrum.

I feared it was all going to end in a fight and a fireball car crash. Phew!

Many observers try to say that Neil McEvoy only took the course he did in forming the WNP because he was effectively thrown out of Plaid Cymru. They couldn’t be more wrong.

Neil has been in politics a long time, and he knows what’s wrong with Wales. On one level it’s London’s political, economic and cultural stranglehold, but on the local level it’s the Labour Party and Plaid Cymru.

Labour holds power on local councils and in the Senedd . . . simply to be in power; to stop someone else getting the salaries and the expenses, attending the bun-fights and the jollies. Labour has little intention – and no real incentive – to improve the lives of our people because for a century it has capitalised on Wales’ deprivation.

Plaid Cymru, as I’ve said, is a party of gestures and abstractions. It is the twenty-first century political equivalent of those medieval divines who would argue over how many angels could dance on the head of a pin.

But actually doing anything? Forget it!

But if one of his constituents persuades him they’re getting a raw deal, then Neil McEvoy will take up the case and demand something be done about it. And he sometimes ruffles feathers doing it. But if kids are sharing a bedroom with rats, or there’s water rippling down the kitchen wall . . .

Neil McEvoy is a do-er, a man who believes in the direct approach; and that makes the anguished attitudinisers of Plaid Cymru very nervous. And never more so than when he confronts the Labour Party.

On two major issues, the ‘nuclear mud’ being dumped off Cardiff, and the forged signatures on cladding certificates, Plaid Cymru has behaved abominably. None worse than Llywydd Elin Jones. But she couldn’t have behaved as she did without the backing of Labour and Plaid Cymru.

Sticking it to the man may outrage the sensitive flowers of Plaid Cymru but it goes down well with real people, on the streets of Cardiff, and elsewhere in Wales. People want their problems solved, they do not want to be patronised, or taken for granted, by an aloof and self-serving political class.

The big test will come in the constituency seat of Cardiff West, where McEvoy will be standing against First Minister Drakeford. Plaid Cymru will of course be splitting the nationalist vote in the hope of securing victory for Mark Drakeford.

Neil McEvoy’s street cred and his sheer hard work might win Cardiff West next May, plus a couple of regional list seats.

∼

My very personal belief is that Gwlad and the WNP should not get in each other’s way next May. Neither has the strength yet to fight a full national election so it’s in their interests, and more importantly, it’s in Wales’s interests, for there to be some kind of deal.

♦

FINAL THOUGHTS

I obviously can’t account for all those who might be standing next May, there’s bound to be a wild card or two. But what you’ve just read is how I see it panning out.

Other factors will I’m sure influence voters. Perhaps the UK government’s Internal Markets Bill; supposedly about ‘repatriating’ powers from the EU but which, in reality, gives BoJo’s gang the power to trample all over devolution.

Perhaps it will even be used to challenge the 1707 Act of Union.

More specific to Wales is a growing awareness of and dislike for the chumminess of Cardiff Bay. The air of cronyism and unaccountability exemplified by Labour and Plaid Cymru refusing to bring in a register of lobbyists.

The problem in this area is obvious, but there are always excuses for doing nothing. This is because Labour and Plaid Cymru are too close to those who might be held to account by such legislation.

Another issue that might influence some voters to take a punt on a new party is the widespread perception that Cardiff gets everything. Which doesn’t change when an MS goes to Cardiff promising to speak up for his area . . . only to be sucked into the swamp that is Corruption Bay.

But perhaps we should remember Harold Macmillan’s response when asked what was most likely to influence or derail political plans. Supermac is said to have replied: “Events, dear boy, events.”

In other words, that which cannot be foreseen. Six months is a very long time in politics.

♦ end ♦

 




General Election 2019

On By JacIn Brexit, Cardiff Bay, Devolution, Ireland, Plaid Cymru, Public Funding, Scotland, Welsh Labour191 Comments

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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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.

Click to enlarge

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.

Click to enlarge

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.

Click to enlarge

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.

 As Robert Burns put it: Such A Parcel Of Rogues In A Nation.

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ENGLAND

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.

Click to enlarge

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’.

Click to enlarge

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.

Click to enlarge

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.

♦ end ♦

 

Carry On Brexiting

On By JacIn British Nationalism, Civil Service, Colonialism, Colonisation of Wales, Conservative and Unionist Party, Demographics, Devolution, Englandandwales, English Nationalism, EU Funding, European Union, Housing, Ireland, Media, Scotland, Welsh Government, Welsh Independence, Welsh Labour, Welsh Media, Welsh Nationalism46 Comments

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.

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BREXIT AND THE MAIN POLITICAL PARTIES

The EU referendum was held on June 23, 2016. For a number of reasons I voted to leave. Explained here in EU Referendum: Why I Want OUT! with my celebratory thoughts contained in Brexit, Wexit: Things Can Only Get Better!

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’.

click to enlarge

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.

click to enlarge

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!

◊

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.

click to enlarge

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.

◊

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.

♦ end ♦

General Election 2017

On By JacIn Colonisation, Conservatives, Englandandwales, Liberal Democrats, Plaid Cymru, Welsh Independence, Welsh Labour, Welsh Nationalism84 Comments

Those of you who’ve read Cneifiwr’s latest post, about his canvassing experiences, will I’m sure have enjoyed him waxing lyrical about wrens and shimmering vistas, country lanes and tinkling rills . . . well you’ll get none of that fancy bucolic stuff here. This is the opinionated old git section of the Welsh blogosphere.

Last Thursday gave us what was perhaps the strangest election of my lifetime. Not just because of the result and the way the Tories lost the commanding lead they’d held at the start of the campaign, but also because of the combination of factors not present in earlier elections, specifically, the recent surge of the SNP, the influence of Brexit, UKIP and the realignment of that party’s deserting voters, and post-election, the entrance of the DUP. So let’s consider the bigger picture before looking at the results in Wales.

♦

NORTH OF THE BORDER

The Unionist parties and the London media are cock-a-hoop over the ‘defeat’ suffered by the SNP, but was it really such a defeat? In the 2010 general election the SNP won 6 seats out of a total of 59; in May 2015, following the independence referendum of September 2014, the party won 56 seats, gaining 50% of the vote (an increase of 30%). That was clearly a freak result, that was unlikely to ever be repeated.

On Thursday, support for the SNP was down to 36.9% and 35 seats, leaving it still the largest party, and by some distance. This falling off in support can be explained quite simply – independence and whether or not to have a second referendum is the issue in Scottish politics now. Those who want independence generally voted SNP, while those who are opposed to independence, or remain to be convinced, tended to vote for whoever had the best chance of defeating the SNP candidate. As a rule of thumb, tactical voting accounts for the gains made by Tories, Labour and Lib Dems.

It certainly explains what happened to Alex Salmond. The swing against him was 11.8%, but the swing to the Tory victor was 29%. What happened in Gordon was that the Lib Dems (treacherous bastards even to their own) deserted poor Dai Evans. Yet the Lib Dems still gained 3 seats where tactical voting benefited them.

Though I’m sad to see him go (if only temporarily) I enjoyed hearing Alex Salmond in his concession speech quote from that rousing Jacobite song, Bonnie Dundee  with, ‘And tremble, false Whigs, in the midst of your glee, Ye hae no seen the last o’ my bonnets and me!’ Because those who think they’ve seen off the SNP threat, and put Salmond back in his box, should be warned against counting chickens.

Though it’s not always as simple as Unionists gathering behind the candidate most likely to thwart the devilish Nicola Sturgeon, Scottish politics is much more complex and nuanced nowadays, as this BBC piece makes clear. I was particularly struck by the contribution of John Dowson of Dumfries, a lifelong Labour voter, who wants independence, but was thinking of voting Tory because he also wants out of the EU. If he did indeed vote Tory, then his vote will be wrongly counted as a vote against independence.

Because that’s something else you have to understand about Scotland, not everybody who wants independence votes SNP. And how many SNP Brexiteers voted Tory for a hard Brexit, but will vote Yes in another referendum?

♦

OVER THE WATER

When I was a young man, before the Troubles, Northern Ireland was almost a one-party state, and the one party was the Ulster Unionist Party, the UUP. There was no other Unionist Party, UK parties did not contest seats over there, and through gerrymandering, intimidation and various forms of electoral fraud such as personation the Catholic voice was almost silenced. (The Unionist election day call to the faithful was, ‘Vote early, vote often’.)

With the Troubles came a widening divide between the two communities and a hardening of attitudes. One result was the creation in September 1971, by the Reverend Doctor Ian Kyle Paisley, of the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP). From its outset it was more hard-line on the Union and ‘terrorism’ than the rather more patrician UUP, and also more conservative on social issues. Hardly surprising given who’d formed it and its links with his Free Presbyterian Church of Ulster.

The polarisation reached its inevitable conclusion on Thursday when the UUP failed to win a single seat, as did its Nationalist counterpart, the Social Democratic and Labour Party. Sinn Féin won 7 seats, the DUP won 10, and the other seat, North Down, was held by Independent Unionist Lady Sylvia Hermon (née Paisley), widow of Sir Jack Hermon, one-time Chief Constable of the Royal Ulster Constabulary.

As I write this Theresa May has agreed a ‘confidence and supply’ agreement with the DUP rather than a formal coalition, but either way, for the Tories it’s stepping back into the nineteenth century, back to an age of John Bull nationalism, Fenians, the rejection of Darwinism, contempt for the undeserving poor and the stoning of poofters.

On the issues of today the DUP wants a hard Brexit but a soft border with the Republic. Talk about having your cake and eating it! So on that issue at least they’re in tune with the Conservatives.

The Reverend Doctor Ian Paisley, founder of the DUP, leader 1971 – 2008

Any co-operation with the DUP shows a) how desperate Theresa May is to hang on to power and b) how ignorant she is of modern Irish politics. For a start, any co-operation between the Tories and the DUP might threaten the Good Friday Agreement, because seeing Arlene Foster, the DUP leader, in Number 10, will raise fears on the Nationalist-Republican side that the UK Government is no longer impartial in its approach to Northern Ireland.

It should also be explained that the 7 Sinn Féin candidates elected will never be MPs because they refuse to take the Oath of Allegiance to the English monarch. This of course affects the arithmetic in the House of Commons and means that with 643 MPs The Conservatives need just 322 votes. So with the Tories having 318, the DUP 10, plus Lady Hermon tagging along, the ‘Understanding’ has 329 votes. What could possibly go wrong?

Well, playing the Orange Card or relying on Unionists may have paid dividends a hundred years or more ago, but in recent times it’s tended to go pear-shaped, as Sunny Jim found out in 1979, and in the twenty-first century the Conservatives getting too close to the DUP might even jeopardise 20 years of relative peace. This could all end in tears.

Given the close cultural, historical and other ties between Scotland and the north of Ireland one might have thought that their London masters entering a Faustian pact with the DUP would be welcomed by the Scottish Tories, but as might be expected, the DUP is against same-sex marriage, and the lesbian leader of the Scottish Tories, Ruth Davidson, is hoping to get married soon.

Woe! woe and thrice woe!

♦

DOWN BY ‘ERE

LABOUR, ETC

Already, a great deal of nonsense has been spouted by all sides involved on Thursday, so here’s my attempt to give an impartial view. Taking the bigger, Englandandwales picture, it’s obvious to everyone that Theresa May made a massive miscalculation.

The longer the campaign went on the more people turned away from her dalek-like performance and warmed to Jeremy Corbyn’s awkward sincerity. May cannot campaign, she even seems incapable of a genuine smile, or interacting with the Great Unwashed, and yet the Conservative campaign was almost all about her. Quite incredible.

The Prime Minister is clearly on borrowed time. She will never be allowed to lead another election campaign, so her survival might depend to some extent on the pact with the DUP working. One reason she’s still in place is that there’s no obvious replacement. But one will emerge.

That said, this was still a big defeat for Labour, and it’s absurd to celebrate as a victory what is really nothing more than relief at avoiding complete annihilation. Just check the numbers. The Tories may have got the worst possible kind of victory, but Theresa May is still in number 10 and Labour is still in opposition. Which from Labour’s perspective is probably the best outcome.

Because the Labour Party is still at war with itself, and we are now presented with the nauseating sight of former critics changing their position on Corbyn because the slimy, self-serving bastards know a meal ticket when they see one – and this bloke can keep them in a job. (For a number of them, he already has!)

But of course these moderates and Blairites are now even more uncomfortable in a party where the left is strengthened. Will an emboldened Momentum now embark on a campaign of deselections? Which makes you wonder what exactly anti-Corbyn Labour victors were celebrating in the wee small hours of Friday. It can only have been self-preservation and hanging on to a cushy, well-paid job with expenses galore.

Like these two in Port Talbot. Kinnock père hates Corbyn with a vengeance (he reminds him of Derek Hatton), yet here he is celebrating like his boy has scored the winning try against England. In reality, it’s a case of, ‘Tidy, mun, the Kinnock name will continue to shine, boy, one day you’ll be prime minister . . . like I nearly was . . . nearly . . . prime minister . . . Sheffield . . . oh, God! I need a drink’.

This picture is a celebration of personal and family ambition. The Labour Party and what it might achieve for the downtrodden masses is incidental or totally irrelevant, for in the case of the Kinnocks the party’s real purpose is to serve as a vehicle for dynastic ambition. Today’s Labour Party contains more chancers and careerists than at any time I can remember.

PLAID CYMRU

The headline figure is that Plaid Cymru fell back, its vote down 1.7% on 2015. By comparison, the Tories, who we are told were the losers on Thursday, saw their vote increase by 6.3%. Labour’s vote went up by 12.1%, making it clear that in Wales it was Labour that gained most of the former UKIP vote. It would appear that ‘Welsh’ Labour distancing itself from Corbyn paid dividends.

Yes, Plaid gained Ceredigion, but let’s put that victory, by just 104 votes, into perspective. Ceredigion is a seat held by the party at Assembly level, it has been previously held by the party at Westminster level, and was won by an impressive young local after the sitting Lib Dem, or his supporters, were caught telling porkies.

In Arfon, Plaid held on by the skin of its teeth, 92 votes to be exact. How much this result was influenced by the votes of English and other foreign students in Bangor is something we might learn later. Though I have to confess to asking myself many times,‘Who is Hywel Williams?’, because the political firmament remains unlit by his presence. (In fact, I often confuse him with Albert Owen, the Labour MP for Ynys Môn!)

In addition to Ceredigion there were four other seats where Plaid Cymru entertained hopes of success, these were: Ynys Môn, Llanelli, Rhondda and Blaenau Gwent. Here are the results:

click to enlarge

The only comfort Plaid Cymru may be able to draw is that the party’s vote increased in Blaenau Gwent, but in last year’s Assembly election the same candidate, Nigel Copner, came within 650 votes of Labour minister Alun Davies. Furthermore, this is a volatile constituency, won with a handsome majority in 2005 by Independent Peter Law, the incumbent MP who’d left Labour over all-women shortlists.

Following Law’s death, the seat was held at a by-election in 2006 by Dai Davies. In the 2007 Assembly election Blaenau Gwent was won by Law’s widow, Trish, before returning to Labour in 2011. In last week’s election Nigel Copner was helped by Dai Davies.

So maybe there’s no comfort to be drawn from the result in Blaenau Gwent after all.

♦

After the smoke had cleared on Friday Plaid Cymru was back to square one, holding four rural seats where it relies on a socially conservative and largely Welsh-speaking support. It made no progress whatever in the urban and more anglicised areas that make up the greater part of the country. This is a party going nowhere.

Except, maybe, backwards. For in the case of Llanelli, this Westminster seat has been a target for Plaid Cymru since Carwyn James got 8,387 votes against Denzil Davies in 1970.

Then came the 1980s when the bright young things took over, ‘reaching out’ beyond Plaid’s core vote to all manner of minority groups, most of which didn’t give a toss about Wales. Much of this was due to Dafydd Elis Thomas . . . what became of him? But it laid the foundations for the party we see today.

Plaid Cymru’s message is more attuned to the youth vote, the Remainers, the ethnic minorities, of major English cities, than to post-industrial wastelands filled with angry and poorly educated white people who don’t give a toss about trans-gender issues or the latest advances in green technology. Plaid Cymru only gets away with this mis-targeting in the west due to its cultural appeal.

In 2007 Plaid Cymru had the chance to run the Assembly as the largest party in coalition with Conservatives and Liberal Democrats. The leftists and the wimmin rose up with shrieks of horror at the prospect of aligning themselves with the crypto-fascist, baby-eating Conservatives – and Plaid instead became Labour’s little helper in the One Wales Agreement.

Nothing’s changed, this sucking up to Labour goes on and on, I know that one Plaid politician was recently told to stop using the #redtories Twitter hashtag.

A few years before 2007, Plaid removed its most successful leader, Dafydd Wigley, in a squalid coup.

Though never a member myself, many tell me that Plaid Cymru undermined Cymuned, one of the most promising movements Wales has seen in recent decades, but today just a shadow of what it might have been.

Plaid Cymru is either a party making major strategic errors, or else this is a party that has been compromised. Either way, it’s of no further use to the Welsh nation. As things stand, Plaid Cymru is of more benefit to England than to Wales because it’s every colonialist’s dream of a ‘national’ party.

I often think that if I was running the secret state I’d want a party in Wales just like Plaid Cymru. A party that makes the occasional unimportant gains, can keep enough people enthused with the hope of ‘next time’, and, most importantly of all, act as a block on the emergence of a party that might actually threaten the Union.

Unless Plaid Cymru can reform itself into a truly Welsh party, appealing to the whole country, regarding all other parties as opponents, rather than potential partners, then the time has come for Plaid Cymru to stop wasting everybody’s time and leave the field to those with fresh ideas and a different approach.

♦ end ♦

Brexit, Wexit: Things Can Only Get Better!

On By JacIn British Nationalism, Cardiff, English Nationalism, European Union, Ukip, Welsh Government, Welsh Labour, Welsh Language, Welsh Media, Welsh Nationalism106 Comments

THE REFERENDUM RESULT

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

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

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

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

Nissan Sunderland

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

REACTIONS AND FALL-OUT

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

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

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

Brexit taxi

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

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

BBC Brexit graduates

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

Tweet John Niven

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

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

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

Brexit Glasto

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

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

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

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

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

Jeremy Smith

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

Tweet Jeremy Smith apology

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

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

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

THE POLITICAL CONSEQUENCES

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

March on the Assembly

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

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

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

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

LOOKING AHEAD

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

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

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

northern-powerhouse-1000x290

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

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

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

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

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Ukip Should Copy Sinn Fein

On By JacIn British Nationalism, English Nationalism, European6 Comments

It’s been difficult to avoid the UK Independence Party lately, the media loves them and has been promoting them so enthusiastically that one could easily forget that Ukip doesn’t have a single MP, does not control one local authority, has no representatives in the Scottish Parliament or the Notional Assembly for Wales, and is just a rag-bag assortment of fruitcakes and bigots led by a back-slapping, ‘Did you hear the one about . . . ?’ type you avoid at social occasions, a man who appeals to that section of English society which views itself as being a cut above the average BNP English nationalismsupporter. More couth, innit!

I say ‘English’ rather than British because Ukip is fundamentally an English phenomenon. Something we have always known, and was recently confirmed by research conducted by the Scottish Centre on Constitutional Change, the Wales Governance Centre (Cardiff University), and Institute for Public Policy Research. The findings were that within England Ukip support was strongest among those who identified themselves as being English rather than British. With the result that 29% of people in England told researchers they planned to vote for Ukip in this month’s elections to the European Parliament; in Wales the figure was 20%; and in Scotland 10%. We can safely predict, for reasons that need not detain us, those areas of Wales, and those sections of Wales’ population, from which Ukip will get most support. Which ties in with a well-documented and growing sense of English nationalism.

But this is very different to the English nationalism of the imperial heyday, or even that of WWII; for this is not pride in success, or even obduracy; this is something much more difficult to admire. It’s a resentful and hating Englishness. One result of which is – perhaps for the first time since the Norman takeover – many English now view themselves almost as the underdogs; beset by enemies within and without, those enemies having one thing in common – they’re all bloody foreigners. A nationalism that is both self-pitying and ready to lash out in all directions. (So beware! for in this weltanschauung we Celts – certainly those of us who oppose English domination – are little different to ‘bloody foreigners’.)

Ukip letter WM
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Worrying though that might be, there is at least a logical linkage in the rise of such a sentiment and the growing support for Ukip. That said, there are also glaring inconsistencies in Ukip’s position. An obvious one was highlighted by a letter in today’s Wasting Mule from a Derek Griffiths of Llandaff. Before launching into a paean to the EU Mr Griffiths makes the more valid point that, “Ukip is inviting us to return its candidates to the very institution from which it is campaigning for the UK’s withdrawal”.

My immediate thought on reading that sentence was, ‘Well said, that man . . . but, wait, isn’t there another political party in these islands that contests elections to an institution from which it wishes to disengage?’ Yes, there is, and how does this other party deal with the dilemma? The party I’m talking about is of course Sinn Féin.

The answer is abstentionism, which has been a central tenet of Irish republicanism for over a century, and is still followed by the five Sinn Féin MPs elected from the Six Counties to the Westminster parliament. Which seems to me and, I’m sure, many other people, to be a logical, and morally defensible, position. So why doesn’t Ukip follow Sinn Féin’s lead and refuse to send its elected representatives to the European Parliament in Strasbourg? After all, if Ukip voters are as sincere in their opposition to political links with the Mainland as Sinn Féin voters are in their opposition to the English connection, then there should be no problem. Otherwise, the fact that Ukip’s MEPs do go to Strasbourg could be misinterpreted.

So I suggest that, in order to avoid the accusation that they are just a bunch of two-bit chancers and hypocritical gravy train riders, Ukip candidates for the Euro elections on May 22nd should state in advance that, if elected, they will adopt the principled and ideologically consistent position of refusing to take their seats in the European Parliament.

P.S. For those minded to be silly, or hoping to cause a distraction, here is a statement from Sinn Féin regarding Westminster expenses.