By Mike Newland.
Remember Margaret Thatcher’s famous ‘swamping’ speech?
Not if you are under 50 but it was a pivotal national moment with a lesson for us we‘d do well to heed.
In 1978, Margaret Thatcher said on television that she understood people’s fears about being “swamped by people of a different culture”. This single phrase electrified those who rightly perceived that the political class would never halt immigration until the British people had been diluted into non-existence. Simply too many political and economic advantages in it for their class.
At last a major politician had breached the taboo about discussing such matters which Enoch Powell’s rather obvious statements ten years before had been increasingly employed as a device to justify. A sigh of relief echoed from one end of the country to the other.
When the Tories won in 1979, many of those who had campaigned against national self-destruction within the National Front and other groups lamented their own lack of an electoral breakthrough but were reassured by Thatcher’s victory.
There are many anecdotal tales about people saying to National Front supporters that they were not needed any more. “We’ve won!” went up the cry. People honestly expected an end to mass immigration. At last the political system had got to grips with the aberration which it had permitted and encouraged from the 1940s onwards. It had taken 30 years but democracy had finally triumphed. People were naive in those days!
Hugo Young’s biography of Margaret Thatcher relates that she could never really do much about immigration because Tory grandee and shadow Home Secretary Willie Whitelaw would not let her. She famously said that ‘every Prime Minister needs a Willie’.
No serious policy commitment concerning immigration resulted from Thatcher’s words. Whatever Thatcher’s private views, which do appear to have been genuinely on the side of immigration control, it was simply a trick to gain support. We have since become very accustomed to that particular trick. It appears unconvincingly at every election.
Aneurin Bevan described how he climbed the political ladder at each stage thinking he’d have the power. He was disappointed every time. The power was always a level higher up.
If even the Prime Minister is helpless to stop migration, which appears to have been the case whatever Thatcher’s personal beliefs, then what sort of system are we living under? This did not, of course, prevent the great lady from hinting at what she could not deliver when seeking a vote.
Roll on time and we now have probably the most politically pregnant moment since 1978. We have another unlikely aspirant to influence from outside the narrowest confines of power telling us that he too hears our cries.
Nigel Farage is widely believed to be in favour of halting immigration. For some while UKIP spoke of a five year halt to migration permitting time to integrate the existing migrants. Let’s put aside for the moment the utter impracticality of integrating millions who for decades have been told precisely the opposite – that they should remain as different as they wish in the cause of ‘enrichment’.
UKIP was formed as a single issue pressure group which sought to leave the European Union. It treated immigration quite gingerly as an issue until it saw the BNP winning very substantial votes and decided it was now safe to climb aboard. This was a godsend to a party whose only real objective had never really set the country on fire. It should have done but European power over Britain appeared too remote to the public. UKIP never really wanted to be involved seriously in the immigration issue but the opportunity was too tempting to resist once others had broken the ground.
For the last two years, Farage and UKIP have evaded hard policy concerning immigration by the venerable artifice of saying policy was ‘under review‘. At one point Farage admitted to the press that he had no policy on immigration. Yet the entire country seemed to believe that Nigel was firmly tied to the ship’s wheel in wishing to halt it. People heard what they wanted to hear.
At last UKIP’s new policy on immigration has appeared on their redesigned web site. Sort of. It’s mercifully brief and equally lacking in any content allowing us to know what we all want to know. How many more and what about illegals already here?
Let no man claim UKIP has been traduced by selective quotation. Here is the Monty in full.
‘Protect our borders
• Regain control of our borders and of immigration – only possible by leaving the EU
• Immigrants must financially support themselves and their dependents for 5 years. This means private health insurance (except emergency medical care), private education and private housing – they should pay into the pot before they take out of it
• A points-based visa system and time-limited work permits
• Proof of private health insurance must be a precondition for immigrants and tourists to enter the UK’
Now it’s rumoured that a manifesto is in preparation. But we are being asked to vote now in the European election so we must judge UKIP on their available words.
Leave the EU? Tick. The rest is so full of holes it tells us nothing as to the practical working of UKIP’s policy.
As any hospital can tell you, ‘emergency medical care’ is in practice such an elastic concept that it effectively means just about all medical care. Just about anything kills someone sometime. Who is going to say no? A hard-pressed GP alone in his office with an angry immigrant?
How are we going to enforce private health insurance except perhaps initially on entry? What do you do if they are too poor to renew the premium or refuse to? Throw them out? You’d need 100,000 new civil servants to genuinely police compliance with immigration rules and they‘d be stymied by appeals to the courts. There is a better way. The only way. Don’t let people in.
Private housing? The cheap labour singleton army often live umpteen to a dwelling in private housing.
A points-based visa system? What does that mean? How many will be let in and on what basis? One point for entry and one if you can breathe? We are not given even a hint. Will visas be renewed? And why do we need more people anyway which is the implication of points-based entry? Ah yes! Skills-shortages in the unskilled labour sector….
What happens after five years – which itself suggests migrants will be let in to work for a very long period? Citizenship?
The fact is that UKIP’s currently stated migration policy – without any hint about numbers being given and taken as a whole – suggests further mass migration.
Without numbers being stated no one can confidently claim that UKIP would mean serious immigration control. The Tories at least offered a figure at the last general election even if they had no intention of implementing it.
Are we running 1978 all over again with a popular opposition politician – about to make a major breakthrough – making noises on television about migration he knows to be simply dog whistling for votes and which will never be reflected in any serious action?
3
The experience of talking about immigration with a small number of English people, I do not know that many, and I say ‘English’ not British, is that ordinary English people just do not perceive Immigration as a problem. They have a total inability to focus on the subject and any attempt to drive them into an immigration corner simply means they will deflect the discussion into trivialities. The Nationalist agenda simply does not motivate them. Although, I was totally gob smacked recently when someone else interjected an unasked expression of true Nationalist sentiment into a conversation. I thought that is new experience, an ordinary English with an activated Nationalist point of view.
The general English take on history and politics is still loaded down with the fantasies of yesteryear. I would say the English are still mentally forty-five years behind the times. But not so long ago they were fifty years behind the times. Said it before, that the English are not sharpest tools in the box and they really need to buck their ideas up. As a Nationalist it does not do to wish for sort of dire economic collapse that has been so confidently predicted for years but for my part I wish it would happen because it would kick the English into using their brains again.
People are pack animals. They know immigration is off official limits so are wary of the subject. Once it looks vaguely OK to talk about it they will. If that happens and we are creeping in that direction.
Don’t undestimate the difference between the public face people put on and the realities. Christ you can be shunned or get squeezed our of your job just for expressing opposition to immigration in a workplace.People are very careful.
There is a dire but slow economic collapse. There is mass unemployment and under employment. No prospect of even stabilising government borrowing and things only be kept vaguely level by artificially low interest rates. Only bubbles keep the show on the road.
I am in my thirties and I have been saying, and writing about, such things for years. When will nationalists learn and begin to treat our predicament with the earnest attention it deserves? Democracy? Don’t make me laugh!
Regards,
N.G.
They will know it when Ed Milliband becomes PM next year and proceeds to carry-on where evil Tony left-off. It is almost a certainty the Tories will lose (not that I have any affection for them) mainly because of the ultra-Thatcherite and NON-NATIONALIST loons of UKIP splitting the Tory vote in crucial Tory-held marginal seats. It will be interesting to see if the media who have so far subjected UKIP to virtually no real scrutiny of their absurd GLOBALIST ‘policies’ (ie all the measures Nigel writes-down on a stained beer mat in his local) suddenly and inexplicably turn-off their bloated coverage of this ‘party’ once the EU elections are over. I suspect they will. If only the British people were aware of how they are being blatantly manipulated by the media into supporting this ‘party’!
We must stop Miliband becoming Prime Minister
As I said my tiny straw poll of English people and English people because it looks that Scotland will go its own way probably on the thinnest margin in September, English people do not buy the Nationalist agenda. Of course I only know people in the South East who do not have the motivation of people in the North but these people, good people in their way, are simply incapable of appreciating the Nationalist agenda.
I really think that part of the problem is an actual decline in the national intelligence of the English in recent years. They simply cannot envisage the Nationalist position. The natural curiosity that made England great in the past has almost totally disappeared as a racial characteristic in modern times.
No one likes to state this fact because it is just too horrible to think about. If you talk to these English people they will be friendly and then if the matter is pressed they become irritable. It is like a form of faery enchantment that has entrapped and made them incapable of grasping new ideas.
As for a slow motion national economic crash, that will simply become part of the English world view and they will accept it without changing their political views.
The English have to be told who they are, it is necessary to hang a big sign around their necks because they really are that difficult.
I think the English Democrats may have a bit of the right idea the English state must re-emerge from the obfuscations of history. It depends on what happens on the 18th September.
Maybe the Brit Dems should start strategizing now.
I’m not sure about the English not buying the nationalist agenda.
I’d say they don’t buy it if it’s described as the ‘nationalist’ agenda and that is partly the fault of the nationalist movement which has often been a circus. The Griffin gang is not exactly an advertisement is it?
If you ask people would you like immigration reduced and control by the EU then most will agree. If that were not the case UKIP would not be doing so well and Cameron would not have duplicitously pledged to cut net immigration to tens of thousands.
But push people personally about it and they get edgy for very good reasons. Like seeing all those pilloried in the papers for ‘racism’. They fear they’ll end up the same way if they get personally identified with views which are commonplace.
Exactly. If you compare the old party’s website today to that which existed in 2010 and before, it is certainly not a good advert. The articles are poorly-written, often on irrelevant topics that the electorate are simply not interested in and the comments section is clearly not moderated much as so many of the comments are written by people who can (at best) be described as eccentric or (at worst) as downright weird/extremist along with the bizarre avatars they use to describe themselves. It’s basically like looking-in on the machinations of a small cult talking to itself.
We need a moderate and principled nationalist party (ie NOT UKIP) but one that presents itself well like UKIP generally does.
Surely, the difference between the massive, winning vote for Thatcher in 1979 and the coming large vote for Farage’s UKIP, is that back then people thought that an Establishment politician would actually deliver as promised; but now large numbers no longer have that belief, hence the coming Protest vote.
Richard has hit the nail on the head. The reality is at last taking hold with the electorate that the Established parties are betraying them. The breaking up (and hopefully destruction) of the LibLabCon cartel is a big prize that a properly organised and disciplined nationalist party will hopefully be able to take advantage of in the near future. Right now however, the nationalist movement is splintered and in disarray and there is no credible challenger. Withdrawal from the EU is another big prize, that nationalists have been fighting for since 1973. UKIP is not, and does not claim to be nationalist, but it is on its way to achieving the above. In the absence of any credible true nationalist candidates in the vast majority of constituencies in this years Euro election and next year’s General Election, it is not a betrayal of nationalism to vote for UKIP. It is the most sensible tactical vote available.
If UKIP gets a big vote it may embolden them to be more robust on the immigration issue.
On the one hand their supposed immigration policy accounts for most of their support but on the other they are terrified of losing their special status with the likes of the BBC if they are too specific.
The nationalist movement proper is in disarray because it was always only the tiniest numbers within it who were willing or able to do any real political work. Those few are now mostly utterly disillusioned by the circus act they had to put up with in order to work within nationalist groups. Which culminated in the ‘Griffin effect’. A glorious celebration of why in 40 years they’ve got nowhere. Who the hell wants to tramp the streets while your group is largely run by carpet baggers?
I say we should think ourselves lucky anything is happening at all even if you feel UKIP to be limited.
Lord Beloff described the British as a ‘nation of Quislings in peacetime’. UKIP’s airy fairy suits them. No offence given here. We’re British.
Mike Newland is right about the public and private faces of the English about immigration.
One of the chief characteristics of the English is hypocrisy. Where other people are much more open and honest , the English will say one thing and think another privately. They do this because they are polite ( still ) and law abiding and this is a reason why England was a civilised place to live.
leave if You don’t like it
(Party Member) Reading the above you can see that our duty, in the absence of a B.D.P. candidate is to vote for the awful UKIP. We Nationalists know he is opening the door for us. The left know this and have been criticizing Ukip throughout the media. Traditional Labour voters who have realised that Immigration is taking their jobs, or at least keeping their pay down, will shock many and in the Euro Elections will vote Ukip in droves. They have realised the Labour Party has betrayed them !
(Party Member) Anyone on our website who is too outspoken against Ukip is probably a Labour Party member, flying a ‘ False Flag’.
I think that is a pretty wild accusation to make, John, with little real evidence to back it up with. Those of us who are critical of UKIP have real and genuine reasons for that stance. The fact is UKIP is NOT a genuine nationalist party of any description. It is a GLOBALIST ultra-Thatcherite Tory Party which is merely against the EU and even then its opposition is mainly because it is filled to the brim with small business people who used to be staunch Tories but have now turned against the EU as they see the EU as the enforcers of certain minimum rights for workers which have increased the cost of running small businesses but which are needed.
Its economic policies are even worse than the Tory Party’s and are entirely embracing of free trade and economic globalism which Britain has already had enough of and which has caused a severe decline in our manufacturing base. We have an economy which is too dominated by services and particularly finance and that is one reason why we find it difficult to get out of recessions unlike Germany who have retained a strong (home-owned) high-tech manufacturing base to their economy.
It’s flat tax policy would see ultra-wealthy people pay even less tax than they do now. I am NOT in favour of high taxes for anyone – -45-50% is about right for the very rich – but you still need to keep a progression in the tax system so that those with the broadest shoulders (ie the very rich) pay their fair share.
All this probably goes some way to explaining why UKIP has so far failed to gain any real support amongst those who would tend to vote Labour. It seems as if a small proportion of these kind of people are waking-up to the reality of UKIP. Last week, the fanatically pro-UKIP Daily Express published a letter from a reader who precisely pointed-out UKIP’s manic embrace of economic globalism and also correctly surmised that UKIP’s very strong support of free market economics means their supposed opposition to mass immigration is very weak to non-existent.
UKIP is basically a ‘cast off’ party for disenchanted anti-EU Tories if you look carefully at what they stand for (ie beyond the EU issue)
I think it is utterly deplorable that since UKIP started to rise in the polls the numbers of people in Britain who want to get out of the EU HAS GONE DOWN according to this website: http://www.eureferendum.com.
To put it bluntly, UKIP are in business NOT to get Britain out of the EU but to PREVENT OTHERS FROM DOING SO.
(Party Member) Mark Reckless, a Conservative M.P. from Kent , sent out 45,000 postal voting papers asking the In or Out question regarding the European Union. I was very pleased that the return was 80% in favour of withdrawal. Sadly however, only 3,756 voted. British people, compared to Europe, the U.S.A. and beyond, are just not political. Very few ever actually join any political party. Ukip have bucked this trend and people who are Anti European Union and Anti Immigration, are joining a political party for the first time. They should have joined our classless British Democratic party and it is up to us to work hard to ensure that in the future, they do !
It’s half term and also spring so today I thought that I would take my 5-year-old son, also called Matthew, to the park to get some fresh air and appreciate some of the beauty of nature. We visited a park in Chingford, Essex and as soon as we arrived we treated ourselves to an ice-cream before enjoying the swings, slides, roundabouts and climbing structures.
Matthew is a very outgoing little boy so he soon got into conversation with other children which meant that I was soon engaged in conversation with their parents. This of course was very pleasant but within a matter of minutes I had come to realise that what was once a delightful park often frequented by English working class parents and children had become a cosmopolitan multi-ethnic place where one could hear almost every language spoken under the sun! The people I spoke to were mainly Eastern Europeans but there were Africans, Asians, Kurds, and various other ethnic groups who I had trouble identifying. What struck me was that it reminded me of the biblical story of the Tower of Babel. I rarely heard an English voice.
I last visited this park a year ago and although there was a heavy Eastern European presence then it has now become almost exclusively Eastern European with a number of other ethnic groups just beginning to make their presence felt. I began to resent this and thought back to the time when I was a child when my mother used to take me to the park. I never heard a foreign voice and only played with English children. That’s because there were only English children to play with! I would of course have played with any children of any nationality but this is not my point. What has happened to the demographic of this small but beautiful park in Chingford is a microscopic picture of what is happening to the country generally. And just as there seemed to be an absence of English working class parents and children in this park so too the working class seem to be disappearing from the political landscape.
We do not have to look far to see why this has happened. Maurice Glasman, senior adviser to Labour leader Ed Miliband during New Labour’s long period in office, described recently in a national newspaper how New Labour was completely taken over by a politically correct elite who went to war with their traditional working class supporters. “Working class men can’t really speak at Labour Party meetings about what causes them grief, concerns about their family, concerns about immigration, love of country, without being stereotyped as racist, sexist and nationalist”, he said. How true this is. The reason for this of course is that the working class, according to this elite, are no longer to be trusted. They had after all voted in Margaret Thatcher on three occasions and therefore could no longer be seen as a progressive agency of social change by the New Labour elite. What was needed was a new class of ‘huddled masses’ that New Labour could rely on; a new constituency that would vote for New Labour and bring about the desired political goals so beloved by the Left.
New labour, elected in 1997, set out to punish the working class for their lack of socialistic evangelicism by promoting mass immigration to make Britain, in the words of Andrew Neather, a New Labour advisor, truly multicultural and to “rub the Right’s nose in diversity”. This act of betrayal by New Labour was not part of their manifesto proposals at any time during their period in office. The true scope and purpose of this new policy of mass immigration was to be kept secret from the electorate at large and from New Labour’s core white working class voters in particular.
As the process of mass immigration proceeded apace the traitors of the New Labour elite promoted a revisionist history to justify their catastrophic policy, i.e. that Britain had always been a nation of immigrants and that we needed to make amends for historic crimes. Attack after attack came from pro-New Labour ideologues and supporters like Eddie Izzard, who produced a television series called Mongrel Nation in which he attempted to demonstrate that the English were not really English at all but a product of foreign invasions and centuries of immigration.
The contempt that this new elite had for its traditional core vote was well encapsulated in the discussion between Gillian Duffy, a traditional Labour supporter, and Gordon Brown when she dared to voice her fears over immigration from Eastern Europe. Brown referred to her as a “bigoted woman” simply for expressing a concern about mass immigration!
The English working class in recent years have had their very identity continually questioned and deconstructed; they have been constantly abused by the Left and called chavs. They have become the only group that can now be abused with impunity. The party of their fathers and grandfathers has betrayed them and many have been left to rot as minority groups in what were once their towns and cities. White working class boys have fallen behind every other group in secondary level education as the focus has been on ethnic minorities over the last few decades. New Labour has betrayed both them and every working class child today who finds himself alone in a school full of every ethnic group but his own. These children will continue to be betrayed because they will not be taught an identity. If they are lucky some will get taught some British history, a revised version, but some British history nevertheless. If they are English forget it! No English history, this is verboten!
There will be many more parks in London in the not too distant future where white working class English families are conspicuous by their absence as these parks begin to reflect the new demographic of Eastern Europeans and Third World immigrants.
It is truly astonishing what has happened to this class over the last 30 years. Their children, especially those trapped inside ethnic inner-city ghettos, have become rootless with no sense of identity and subject to a black urban underclass cultural frame of reference. What hope for these kids?
I took my boy for some lunch after our time in the park and as he ate his food I looked into his eyes and swore to myself that I would do everything in my power to ensure that he knows who he is and to make him proud of his history: his English history. I also hope that one day in the future when he is a parent he will be able to take his children to the local park and that they will be able to play with other children who share their identity and culture. Current demographic trends however suggest that this will not happen.
(Party Member) Superb article and sadly how true ! In 1978 we Nationalists had every reason to believe we would do well, with plenty of actual support and even more sympathy, from all sections of society. Then came the swamping speech. It was a masterstroke as not only did it sideline us Nationalists but it won over many traditional Labour people to the Conservatives as their areas were being encroached upon by Immigration for the first time. Since then the Conservatives always falsely pretend to ” do something about Immigration” before Election time as the Mistress of success had shown, it is an Election Winning Tactic.