A Worldwide Rebellion
Reform UK is the latest version of UKIP, a populist-nationalist party that's short on policies apart from a general dislike of foreigners. Its leader, Nigel Farage, has managed to remain respectable despite his views on immigration. This sets him apart from the little parties of the far right; NF, BNP. BDP, BM, and many more, that have virtually identical policies.
Reform UK is tipped to win the next general election but I don't believe it. The big business interests that control this country will either take over the Party, or have it crushed by repressive legislation.
Whatever happens, the non-parliamentary parties of the far-right will continue to split and splinter into little groups based on a website and half a dozen members.
So why do I encourage some of them and write articles for them when they are far too insular and reactionary for my liking? Because they are part of a rebellion against liberal-democracy that's sweeping the collective West, but I don't expect any of them to come to power in the UK. The British people are brave and hard-working but politically unconscious. When the French rose up against the aristocracy the English Chartists assembled a quarter of a million supporters in Kennington Park but they went home peacefully when an officer told them that they were upsetting his majesty.
In the 1930s Oswald Mosley's British Union of Fascists held impressive marches and meetings all over the country, but they were shut down and locked up in 1940 under Defence Regulation 18B. After the war they regrouped as Union Movement and fought the 1959 election in Notting Hill, but they never recovered from the Second World War. When my friend Roger Claire joined Union Movement at the age of 16 he asked the North London organiser Fred Shepherd "How long will it be before we come to power", Fred replied: "At least six months."
UM was followed by the National Front which became a mass movement until it was wrecked in the1979 general election by Margaret Thatcher who said that she understood people's fear of being "swamped" by immigration.
Next came the British National Party which achieved electoral success in local elections and the European Parliament, only to be overtaken by Nigel Farage with his fake nationalist party UKIP.
When the great uprising happens it will probably come from abroad. In the meantime I will continue to beat the drum for European Nationalism.
Letter to the editor of Heritage and Destiny
Britain currently faces a choice between trading with the EU or the USA, our first and second markets. We depend on world trade because we have nearly 70 million mouths to feed and we only produce half of our food and energy.
We have been a trading nation since the 18th century, when the East India Company pioneered global capitalism. In those days we had the largest navy in the world and the confidence that comes with imperial power: "We don't want to fight, but by jingo if we do, we've got the men, we've got the ships, and we've got the money too."
But things are different today. The world is divided into trading blocs that wage economic warfare - sanctions and tariffs - according to their political viewpoints. The collective West imposes sanctions on Russia because of the war in Ukraine that has devastated the German economy. The Germans benefitted from cheap gas and oil from Russia but in order to obey American foreign policy they have cut their own throats.
The United States is a huge country with abundant natural resources and the ability to feed and defend herself. President Donald Trump can threaten the world with trade sanctions because he has no fear of retaliation. The US has everything a modern country needs - except perhaps Russian uranium for their nuclear power stations.
Britain, on the other hand, has a declining industrial base, low productivity, and armed forces too small to defend our islands. Keir Starmer should know these facts but he struts around the world threatening Russia and China as though we still had an empire.
It's time for British politicians to wake up and smell the coffee. We are not an imperial power and it's time we stopped pretending to be. We should train our own people in the skills we need and stop importing labour from overseas. We should encourage our birth rate by tax incentives. We should limit our foreign aid to those countries that take back their own nationals. And we should mind our own business when it comes to foreign wars. Economic reality will decide our trading arrangements.
A Photographic Mystery
This photo was sent to me, about twenty years ago, by another former UM member, Terry Savage, a keen photographer who certainly had the skill to doctor a photograph, but again, why would he?
This is the only picture I have of my old comrade Otto Abbeysakera, the Sri Lankan man to the left of Jeffrey Hamm. In those days we opposed communism more than immigration, and nobody objected to having a brown-skinned man in our ranks, especially one as brave and loyal as Otto.
I joined Union Movement in 1973 when it had practically ceased to operate as a political party. But I had attended Mosley meetings since the 1960s and I knew many UM members through the Bladebone pub in Bethnal Green. Fraternisation between members of Union Movement, the League of Empire Loyalists, and John Bean's BNP, were strictly forbidden but they happened anyway - so much for total obedience.
Beyond Brexit
The 2016 referendum on the UK's membership of the European Union resulted in a narrow win for the Brexiteers. They promised that Brexit would end mass immigration, boost our economy, and restore our sovereignty. In fact; immigration has doubled, our economy is flatlining, and we are still tied to NATO, the European Court of Human Rights, the United Nations, and various international treaties.
God works in mysterious ways and so does geopolitics. The war in Ukraine has promoted Keir Starmer to the position of generalissimo of the Coalition of the Willing, a European army in all but name.
Of course, this will not be the first time that the IK has fought a war in alliance with other nations. We defeated Napoleon with the help of Dutch and Prussian soldiers. We fought the Russians over Crimea with the French. We narrowly defeated the Afrikaners with Australian and Canadian troops, we fought the Germans in WW1 with France, Russia and America, and we repeated the performance twenty years later in WW2.
Apart from the Falklands war, most of our military entanglement have been in alliance with America as part of NATO or the UNO.
Our warmongering mass media are screaming for increased defence spending, even at the expense of the old and infirm. They are even proposing conscription to build an army to fight the Russians and the Chinese. Our standing army of 75,000 men would have no chance against the millions of soldiers available to Russia and China, but if the principle nations of Europe each contributed 100,000 men we could have a European army of over half a million.
Such an army would not be welcomed by the Daily Mail, the Daily Express, or the Telegraph. They are so anti-European that they still give the weather forecast in degrees Fahrenheit. They probably don't know that Daniel Fahrenheit was born in Poland.
There is no reason why we should be hostile to Russia or China. The Ukraine problem dates back to Katherine the Great who won Crimea from the Turks. And the Chinese problem is totally misrepresented in our mendacious newspapers. The opposition party in the Taiwan parliament is in favour of reunification with China. Macao and Hong Long are booming as part of 'One China', and there is no reason to suppose that Taiwan would be any different.
We are not about to go to war but Keir Starmer is copying Adolf Hitler who rescued the German economy with defence spending. At a recent trip to Barrow in Furness he inspected three nuclear submarines being built for the Royal Navy and boasted that defence spending would employ thousands of British workers.
In a world turned upside down we have gone beyond Brexit. The UK Labour Party always supported socialism and opposed war, but now they have reversed both policies. The anti-Europeans always hated the idea of a European Army but now they are supporting it. And the Americans under Donald Trump are returning to their traditional isolationism.
The UK is part of Europe by history, geography, race and culture. Brexit is merely an aberration.
The present leadership and direction of the European Union leaves much to be desired, but the concept remains viable. We don't propose to do away with the Westminster parliament because it's dominated by liars and fools, so why should we do away with the EU because it is similarly afflicted.
President Donald Trump knows that 300 million Americans can't go on defending 500 million Europeans against 170 million Russians. NATO is not fit for purpose but the security of Europe remains a priority. Let us therefore invest in e European Defence Force and a peaceful foreign policy.
Economic Fantasy
Left and Right extremists believe that banks create money out of thin air. If this was true Lehman Brothers, the fourth biggest investment bank in the world, would not have gone bankrupt in 2008, they would simply have created some more money.
Following the collapse of Lehman Brothers governments all over the world tightened regulations to stop overtrading. This has contributed to the global recession but it has restored confidence to the banking industry.
The numbers involved in national debt are unimaginable, but President Donald Trump is determined to clear the United States' astronomical national debt of $36 trillion. If he succeeds, or makes a meaningful start, it will have a knock-on effect all over the world.
The UK was technically bankrupt in 1945 following six years of World War Two. We borrowed so much money from Canada and the USA that we only cleared our debts during the premiership of Margaret Thatcher. Unfortunately, a succession of spendthrift governments has put us in debt again; we are currently borrowing just to keep going, but everybody knows that it can't go on. We must live within our means and forget about foreign aid and increased defence spending.
We don't need two gigantic aircraft carriers. These ships are designed to operate east of Suez where we no longer have imperial interests. They are a remnant of Empire when Britain ruled the waves.
And we don't need the eye-wateringly expensive Trident missile system, we could fit nuclear warheads on cruise missiles to defend our homeland, but we should not get involved in foreign wars requiring intercontinental ballistic missiles.
If we restrain defence spending, abolish foreign aid, stop mass immigration, and make an effort to clear our national debt, we can have a decent country that looks after people instead of taxing them into the ground.
There is nothing magical or mysterious about the banking system, it has evolved over the centuries to serve the financial needs of the nation.
It is pure fantasy to suggest that the system is about to collapse, or that the dollar will be replaced by a return to the Gold Standard.
Interest rates and currency conversions are determined by the Market. And as Margaret Thatcher said: "You can't buck the Market." Liz Truss proposed a budget that spooked the Market and she was gone almost immediately. There is no point in dreaming of 'sovereignty' when we are part of a global capitalist system. All we can do is to regulate the banks and outlaw vulture capitalism.
Nation Revisited - https://nationrevisited.blogspot.com
European Outlook
All articles are by Bill Baillie unless otherwise stated. The opinions of guest writers are entirely their own. The editor reserves the right to shorten or otherwise amend articles submitted for publication. We seek reform by lawful means according to the UN Declaration of Human Rights, Article 19:
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