YOU'RE NEXT

by James Lawrence

Well, you can't say they didn't try. Over the course of an anti-Brexit campaign based solely on scaring people with the prospect of losing money, the political establishment in Britain pulled out all of the dirty tricks that have worked so well for it in the past: vastly outspending the opposition, doing their best to gerrymander the voting, rallying the global plutocracy to aid them in their scaremongering, decrying the opposition as xenophobic morons and whipping up "anti-racist " persecutions against them, and even pouncing on the still-warm corpse of a murdered woman to make a final attempt to sour the public mood against nationalism. 

Even so, the public told them to get stuffed. Should this not be taken as evidence that the British people, after all this time, have still not descended to the state of homo economicus? A race long assumed to have degenerated into a mass of talking pigs, terrified of rocking the political boat for fear of spilling a few miserable pennies over the side, have shown an atavistic flash of courage that has no doubt chilled their masters to the bone.

THE RECENT UK SUB-NATIONAL AND LOCAL ELECTIONS

Sign of the times: London's new mayor.

by Colin Liddell

Earlier this week a number of elections below the UK state parliamentary level were held in Britain. This included elections for the Scottish Parliament, the Welsh Assembly, some local councils, and the mayor of London.

Usually midterm elections favour the chief opposition party, which in this case is the Labour Party, with its recently-elected leader, the extreme Leftist, Jeremy Corbyn. This time they didn’t. Instead of winning hundreds of council seats as is usual, Labour actually lost a handful, as well as control of one council Dudley in the West Midlands (population 312,900 – 93% White).

LESSONS FROM THE UK ELECTIONS

by Colin Liddell

The UK elections have come and gone, and the story is now quickly fading into the twilight. So, what happened? What did we actually learn?

PODCAST 28: HANGING THE PARLIAMENT

Unfortunately, a "hung parliament" doesn't mean quite what you would want it to mean, merely being a British expression for a parliament in which no political party has a majority. With the UK general election just round the corner, Andy and Colin discuss what is sure to be one of the most interesting elections in British political history, with the only certainty being uncertainty.

THE MILIBAND MASQUERADE?

Milibang!

by Colin Liddell

Democratic politics always has had an ugly side, both in the types of personalities it attracts and the devious behaviour it encourages. The main reason for this is that it allows the broad masses to vote, lowering the audience IQ to a level that incentivizes the low-grade deceptions of unscrupulous politicians.

Ugly as it is, it certainly didn’t get any more aesthetically pleasing when Ed Miliband was elected leader of the Labour Party in 2010. With his robotic style and rubbery face, he evokes Mr. Bean possessed by the last of the Body Snatchers, or a piece of “Wallace and Gromit” claymation gone wrong.

For the present general election campaign, which will end on May 7th, a long, hard effort has gone into making “Ed” seem warm and personable – he was actually fitted out with a (rather ugly) wife shortly after becoming leader and was also designated as the father of her two children, although they clearly resemble their mother much more than their supposed father.

In an attempt to 'humanize' this unlikely leadership material he was also carefully coached on body language, facial gestures, voice, and positioning. The process has some similarities to a necrophile heating up the inamorata with which he has just eloped from the local mortuary.

THE CRUCIBLE OF CONSENSUS AND THE COUNTER CURRENTS OF BRITISH POLITICS

A cup of tea, how very British!

by Colin Liddell

You'll probably have heard the expression "two cheeks of the same arse" to describe the false political dichotomy of two "centrist" parties offering themselves up to the electorate and producing the usual effluence.

This is almost always the case in US elections, and it has certainly been the case in UK elections, where the "centre right" Conservative Party and the "centre left" Labour Party typically contest power. Except that it's not really power, because whichever party gets in, only gets in by twisting itself into whichever awkward shape conforms best to the dimensions of the crucible of power.

AN ALTERNATIVE HISTORY OF SCOTTISH NATIONALISM

by Kevin Scott

The remarkable rise of the Scottish National Party (SNP), which is now a liberal-left party led largely by 1968 leftists, masks the ethno-nationalist roots of the party and the broader ethno-nationalist undercurrent of the Scottish Nationalist movement as a whole. In this article, we intend to explore some of the personalties that made up this early movement, their activities and detail some of their ideas that influenced the early SNP and which would make the likes of Alex Salmond, the current leader of the SNP, cringe in embarrassment, even though they make up a substantial section of the SNP's early history and political direction.

MUTUAL INDEPENDENCY

by Kevin Scott

Last month, closely following the impressive march for Catalan independence through the streets of Barcelona in Spain, Scottish nationalists also staged a large march through the streets of Edinburgh in an attempt to rally the Scottish people to the cause of Scottish independence to be decided in a referendum planned for 2014.

Under the firm leadership of Alex Salmond, the Scottish National Party (SNP) now rules in Scotland, but he is demanding greater powers to deal with Scotland's troubling social and economic problems in the middle of an economic downturn caused by a credit crunch in the international financial markets and a debt crisis at the heart of Europe.