Issue 10, June 2006

Nation Revisited

No 10, June 2006

An occasional email to friends

Striking a Balance

The BNP claims to be a modern nationalist movement situated half way between the civic nationalists of UKIP and the neo-fascists of the BPP. Although they accept that these categories are inexact and that there are good people on all sides. This stratification is the result of being tied to a manifesto that tries to cover every eventuality but has the effect of alienating people. It would be impossible to draw up such a document without courting controversy. Stopping immigration is the main issue and virtually every right-thinking Briton agrees with that, but some of their policies are nothing but personal bees in the bonnets of the leadership. These include; flirting with Christianity, an obsessive antipathy to Islam, the acceptance of American hegemony and continued opposition to the economic alliance that has given the British people their highest ever standard of living. It’s a case of too many policies.

Benito Mussolini, who knew a thing or two about coming to power, replied to the newspaper “Il Mundo” when they demanded to know what the fascists stood for: 

“So the democrats of Il Mundo want to know what our programme is. It is to break the bones of the democrats of Il Mundo. And the sooner, the better.”

The BNP are probably trying to attract refugees from Dave Cameron’s reformed Conservative Party. Dave has drawn up a candidate list comprised of ethnic minorities and gays. He thinks that this will encourage people to vote Tory. Why he thinks that any sensible gay or black person would ever support him is a mystery known only to Dave and his army of political advisors. But the BNP are hoping to capitalize on the Tory dissidents who are trying to escape the manic embrace of the Cameronians.

It’s all very well to appeal to conservatives but they do just what it says on the tin; they want to conserve things as they are. At the moment we have got a 10% non-European population, collapsing law and order and a political police force that stifles all dissent.

Who in their right mind would want to conserve that? Nationalism in a democratic regime must be revolutionary. We are fighting for the survival of Britain as a European nation and for social justice, not to preserve an obsolete class system based on inherited privilege and unequal opportunity.

The trick will be to strike a balance between what is perceived to be respectable and what must be achieved if Britain is to survive. There must be some decent individuals within the old gang parties but their leaders have been utterly contemptable.

Nationalist Election Results                                                                              

1959               Union Movement                             2,821

                      National Labour Party                      1,685                            Total  4,506

1964               British National Party                       3,410

                      Patriotic Party                                  1,108

                      League of Empire Loyalists              1,046

                      National Democratic Party                   349                                      5,913

1966               British National Party                       5,182

                      Union Movement                             4,075

                      National Democratic Party                   769

                      Patriotic Party                                     126                                     10,152

1970               National Democratic Party              14,276

                      National Front                                 11,449

                      British Movement                                704                                      26,429

1974 (Feb)      National Front                                 76,865

                      National Independence Party              1,373                                     78,238

1974 (Oct)      National Front                                 113,843                                   113,843

1979               National Front                                 191,719                                   191,719

1983              National Front                                    27,065

                     British National Party                           14,621

                     Nationalist Party                                      630                                    42,316

1987              British National Party                               553                                        553

1992              British National Party                            7,631

                     National Front                                      4.816                                    12,447

1997              British National Party                          35,832

                     National Democratic Party                   10,829

                     National Front                                      2,719                                    49,380

2001              British National Party                          47,129

                     National Front                                      2,484                                    49,615

2005             British National Party                         192,850

                    National Front                                       8,079                                  200,929

 

Jeffrey Hamm                                                                                                     

Jeffrey Hamm was born in Ebbw Vale in 1915 and grew up in the grinding poverty of South Wales during the Depression. He qualified as a schoolteacher and moved to London in 1936. He became an active member of the British Union of Fascists and attended many meetings and marches including the great Earls Court rally of 1939 where 30,000 people cheered Mosley’s call for peace. He was inspired by Mosley’s famous words: “We have lit a flame that will never be extinguished. Guard that flame until it illuminates Britain, and lights again the path of mankind.”

In 1940 Jeffrey Hamm was working as a schoolteacher in the Falkland Islands. He was arrested under 18B and shipped to South Africa where he was detained until 1941. On returning to the UK he joined the Royal Armoured Corps. Soon after leaving the army in 1944 he formed the British League of Ex-Servicemen and Women, a charitable and political movement. The Ex-Servicemen held meetings in East London and were regularly assaulted by the fanatical 43 Group, but they defended themselves and kept alive the spirit of British nationalism. In 1947 at the historic meeting at the Memorial Hall, Farringdon Street, more than 50 nationalist groups, including the Ex-Servicemen’s League, came together to form Union Movement and invited Sir Oswald Mosley to be their leader.

Jeffrey Hamm supported Mosley throughout the 1950s when Union Movement regularly filled Trafalgar Square with successful and orderly meetings. He helped to organize the 1959 North Kensington election campaign where Mosley got a disappointing 8% in an election marred by allegations of missing ballot papers. He opened the Ridley road meeting in 1962 that was wrecked by an organized mob of screaming communists. He stood himself in Handsworth, Birmingham in 1966 and got 4% despite being blatantly misreported by the “ Birmingham Post.” The newspaper fell foul of the Press Council but they were not prosecuted.

In 1969 Jeffrey Hamm took part in a BBC documentary about the Battle of Cable Street of 1936. He put the record straight that it was the Reds who had fought the Police and the BUF who had complied with the law, and got 23% in Bethnal Green six months later.

In another BBC interview in 1976 he was asked if he had wasted his time in politics, he replied: “friends often say that to me, but what are they really asking me to do? To give up what I believe in because it is difficult, and to take up something I know to be wrong, because it is easier. That seems to be so absurd that I must reject it out of hand.”

Jeffrey Hamm acted as Mosley’s ADC and following the leader’s death in 1980 he continued to publish the Union Movement newspaper “ Action” and maintain Action Society. His autobiography “Action Replay” was published in 1983. He died in 1994.

Jeffrey Hamm was a brave and decent man who believed passionately in social justice and European solidarity. He was a true and loyal friend who will always be remembered by those who had the privilege of knowing him.

The Ability to Change                                                                                           

Political parties must develop in response to changing circumstances. The League of Empire Loyalists was founded to defend the British Empire in 1954 but India had already been granted independence along with Pakistan and Sri Lanka. Within a decade most of the former colonial territories had been transformed into sovereign states with seats at the UN, a national airline and a corrupt dictator who ruled on behalf of his tribe. By the time that the LEL merged into the National Front in 1967 the empire was gone and the White Dominions had become more American than British.

The NF adopted the League’s antipathy to Europe instead of the old BNP’s Europe of the Nations policy. In the late Sixties the NF were still campaigning against decimalization, let alone the “Napoleonic” system of metric weights and measures. They abandoned the protectionist policies of Keynes and Mosley and supported Enoch Powell’s call for free trade. John Tyndall tried to steer the party away from “market forces” and advocated self-sufficiency, but NF policy became a contradictory mixture of economic nationalism combined with the pursuit of cheap imports.

This policy has been inherited by the modern BNP. They call for increased trade with Canada, Australia and New Zealand but go on: “…the BNP calls for the selective exclusion of foreign-made goods from British markets and the reduction of foreign imports.” Presumably the old dominions are not “foreign” but are true blue British untainted with French, German or Italian blood. But the BNP has moved light years towards Europe compared with the implacable hostility of the LEL. They now advocate cooperation between European nationalist movements in order to reform the EU: “Hence our need to form close links with people on our wavelength right across the present European Union, for the nationalist revolution is likely to be internationalist in scope.”

A party tied to an inflexible manifesto will eventually become fossilized and divorced from reality. The old imperial system exported British manufactured goods and imported colonial food, but the Empire has gone and so has much of our manufacturing industry. Self-sufficiency has not been achieved for over a century, even during the war we relied upon Atlantic convoys to supplement domestic food production. Although we export food we are a net importer with 60 million mouths to feed. It is true that modern farming methods are much more efficient but we would need to completely reorganize agriculture to grow enough food.

The anti-European Union brigade harp on about our financial contribution but the fact remains that Britain has never been as wealthy as we are today after three decades of membership. The troubles of the modern age are all immigration-related; drugs, violence, street crime, benefit fraud and prostitution have grown out of all proportion. This has been made worse by the change in our police from being crime fighters to being political enforcers. The suicidal liberalism that infects Britain is also rife in the rest of Europe; but these problems are not the result of our membership of the EU but directly caused by the British Government’s obsession with immigration.

Views on the News                                                                                                     

Recent articles in the BNP papers have highlighted their involvement with religion.

As usual Mosley got it right in his 1961 book “Mosley Right or Wrong?”

Question 254. Do you believe in complete religious toleration?

Answer. Yes I believe in complete religious toleration. All shall be free either to worship as they wish, or to keep their religion to themselves. And I have no great respect for anyone who tries to introduce such questions into politics in order to advertise his part in them. It is nearly always the sign of a humbug and a charlatan.

One of the many fallacious arguments put up by the old gang is that we need immigrants to support our state pension scheme because our native birthrate is too low, Apparently we still haven’t got enough immigrants so we are importing still more and making everybody work until they drop. It doesn’t seem to have dawned on the social engineers that immigrants also grow old and need looking after. Perhaps they will bring in more immigrants to look after the present immigrants, and so ad infinitum. The only way to make a pension system work is to take it away from the State. Governments of whatever complexion will always squander our contributions on things that have nothing to do with pensions.

Court Martial proceedings brought against British and American troops in Iraq are the result of placing men under constant attack. It is no surprise that atrocities have been committed in Iraq, just as they have by all armies in all wars. Men react badly when their comrades are killed and codes of conduct get forgotten in the heat of battle. Any war crimes in Iraq are the fault of the politicians who ordered the war after ten years of crippling sanctions and a saturation-bombing offensive against crowded cities. Every excuse for the war has been shown to be a lie. There were no weapons of mass destruction. There was no tangible link between the Saddam Hussein regime and 9/11.

And the thousands of victims still being slaughtered prove that far from improving life for the Iraqis we have destroyed the infrastructure of the country and brought untold misery to the population.

Recent scandals involving Labour Cabinet Ministers have resulted in sackings and promotions. The usual game of musical chairs in which those who pretended to be experts in one department suddenly find themselves in charge of something completely different. If a Ministry is seen to have failed the incoming Minister simply blames his civil servants and says that the department is not fit for purpose. The outgoing Minister is blameless and so is the Prime Minister who appointed him, or her. Politicians are not held accountable and their massive salaries, pensions, perks and houses are protected.

This is inexcusable conduct from a government that is supposed to be socialist and that came to power in protest at Tory sleaze. The Labour Party have shown themselves to be every bit as corrupt and greedy as their Tory predecessors. John Prescott playing croquet in the sumptuous grounds of his grace and favour mansion says it all. The old class warrior has taken to the good life like a natural-born aristocrat sprung straight from the loins of the nobility.