QUOTE OF THE MONTH [bonus]

‘The Conservatives are the major party. And the Conservatives and the Liberals together have a majority in parliament. Labour and the Liberals don’t. They would therefore have to cobble together an alliance with an assortment of Scottish nationalists and people from Northern Ireland, all of whom would demand that the price of their support was that they would not get the same cuts imposed upon them as the English would. Now that would enrage the English, rightfully, even more than they would be enraged if the two losing parties decide to try and form a government.

So I think that however well meaning it is, it hasn’t been thought through and I think that from the point of view of the Labour Party, if we appear not to be accepting the decision of the electorate - we lost nearly a hundred seats, the biggest loss in our history apart from 1931 - and I think if we now decide that we’re just going to cock a snook at the electorate, or look that way, that the electorate will reap vengeance on us and we will suffer most grievously in the future.’

John Reid, being interviewed by ITN, speaking at the time about the attempt by Labour to cling onto office by forming a coalition of the losers.

The new Liberal/Tory coalition government has merely committed that they ‘will establish a commission to consider the “West Lothian Question”,’ and have positively committed themselves to the continuance of the Barnett Formula [which gives preferential subsidies to Scotland] in the short term at least.

It is not only the Scottish, Welsh and Northern Ireland nationalists who demand that extra subsidies be paid by the English to their countries. The Liberal Democrats have always been dependent upon the Celtic fringes and are equally committed to the plundering of England. While the Tories are too decadent and gormless to stand up for the more conservative English, who are actually voting for them.

We need an English party to defend English interests.

QUOTE OF THE MONTH

'Can you trust the Liberal Democrats? They are behaving like every harlot in history.'

David Blunkett

THE FRINGE EFFECT [again]

Following the general election in 2005, the English Rights Campaign posted an item on the effect of the fringe parties on the Tory vote [see the English Rights Campaign item dated the 10 May 2005]. That item highlighted the haemorrhaging of support towards UKIP, BNP and the then fledgling English Democrats on the nationalist issues of the EU and immigration, with the West Lothian Question looming up.

That effect has continued in the May 2010 general election too. UKIP have been cited as helping to unseat the Eurosceptic David Heathcoat-Amory in Wells, Somerset where the Lib Dems won by 800 with UKIP polling 1,711 votes. Labour held Dudley North with a majority of only 649 votes while UKIP polled 3,267 votes. Labour ministers John Denham, Phil Woolas and Ed Balls have all managed to win with majorities smaller than the UKIP vote.

It has been alleged that up to 10 seats have been thus affected. This is a gross underestimate of the importance of the fringe effect and Labour’s success in rigging the election. In Yorkshire, some of the constituencies referred to previously have now been won by the Tories. Cleethorpes, Selby and Ainsty [as it now is], and Brigg and Goole all now have Tory MPs. Direct comparisons are of course complicated by boundary changes.

However, in other constituencies the Tories have lost sufficient support to prevent them from winning. For example, in the longstanding safe Labour constituency of Don Valley, Caroline Flint clung on by a reduced majority of only 3,595. UKIP, the BNP and the English Democrats polled 1,904, 2,112 and 1,756 respectively - a combined total of 13.3% of the vote. In the neighbouring Doncaster North constituency, the combined vote for these 3 parties was a total of 16.3%. In the new constituency of Penistone and Stocksbridge, Labour won by a majority of 3,049 while the UKIP/BNP/English Democrats combined vote was 4,635 - 10% of the vote. The high vote for UKIP/BNP/English Democrats is widespread. Even in Alan Johnson’s Hull West and Hessle constituency, the combined vote was 3,980 - 12.7% of the vote.

In England, the Tories have a majority of 62 seats. In Scotland and Wales, Labour have a majority of 23 and 12 seats respectively. The Tories failed to increase their Scottish MPs at all. They still have only one. Gordon Brown is still holed up in Downing Street as a result of the manner Labour have rigged the constitution, allowing devolved parliaments, funded by English subsidies, but still packing the House of Commons with Left Wing Scots and Welsh MPs. Despite the obvious consequences of this, the Tories continue to refuse to support an English Parliament to put the English on an equal footing with the Scots and Welsh. All David Cameron’s craven crawling to the Scots [see the English Rights Campaign item dated the 24 September 2006] have failed to produce any meaningful electoral support from Scotland for the Tories.

Meanwhile, Labour continues to maximise mass immigration and the attendant industrial production and issuing of new British passports to immigrants. Roughly 80% of ethnic minorities vote for a Left Wing party. In London Labour polled more than the Tories, who failed to win marginals such as Eltham, Hammersmith and Westminster North, where the swing from Labour to the Tories was only 1.82%, 0.48% and 0.61% respectively. The combined UKIP/BNP/English Democrats vote in Eltham was 2,973 votes and the Labour majority 1,663. The Tory London Mayor, Boris Johnson, is actually campaigning for an amnesty for illegal immigrants.

The Tories have only managed to increase their vote from 33% of the vote [the percentage they won in both the 2001 and 2005 general elections] to 36%. If they do now manage to cobble together a deal with the Lib Dems, and do succeed in trying to grapple with the necessary spending cuts, they will have to face the English electors from a low base of support and explain why they refuse to stop mass immigration and why they continue to support the rigged constitution that cost England so dearly.

AN ELECTION RIGGED

Below is an item from the Adam Smith Institute website:

The West Lothian Question must be addressed
Written by Tom Clougherty
Saturday, 08 May 2010 07:00


The results of the general election have again highlighted the unfairness of our asymmetric devolution arrangements. In a sense, it didn’t matter much to Scotland who won the election – they have their own parliament and their own government, and pursue their own policies on many domestic issues. And yet they still got to send 59 members of parliament to Westminster, who will now spend most of their time voting on and debating legislation that only applies to England.

In such a tight election race, these Scottish MPs could easily have held the balance of power, and been able to wield enormous influence over policies that could never impact their constituents. That this hasn’t happened should be welcomed, but it shouldn’t distract us from the fact that there remains something fundamentally wrong with our constitutional set-up. If – as seems to be the case – political and electoral reform is going to be a major issue in coming months, devolution must be part of the discussion.

I’ve written many times before that the only solution to this ‘West Lothian question’ is for power to be devolved to England as it is to Scotland. The radical decentralizer in me likes the idea of Swiss-style localism, with power devolved to the English counties, but realistically an English Parliament is the more obvious solution.

What the ASI has recommended before is that the MPs representing English constituencies in the House of Commons be constituted as a separate English Parliament, which would elect its own first minister, and take over the Commons for several weeks each month to deal with English issues. Interestingly enough, if this English Parliament existed today, it would contain 298 Conservative MPs, 191 Labour, 43 Liberal Democrat, and 1 Green. That would add up to a Tory majority of 31, compared with being 19 short of a majority at the UK level.

This is not an argument about whether or not England should have a Conservative government. Rather, my point is that if Scotland can elect a parliament that represents their views, and if Wales and Northern Ireland can elect assemblies to do the same, why can’t England? It is a simple matter of fairness that ought to be on the agenda.

P.S. Britain’s geographic polarization – the Tories won 71 percent of the seats in the South, compared with less than 2 percent in Scotland – is a striking feature of the 2010 electoral map. To me, that mitigates in favour of genuine political decentralization, a theme I’ll be returning to in future posts.