So the election has come and gone. How have the nationalists fared? Let’s just say not very well and if you consider the collapse in the BNP vote, it would appear that many people are returning to the traditional parties or simply not voting at all. So, what does this say for English Nationalism?
If we continue down the current path, it might be another twenty years, if ever, before nationalism begins to impact upon the political scene at Westminster. Can the country wait that long? We may be little more more than a small sub-unit of a federal EU by then and still funding Scotland’s spending luxuries!! So what do we nationalists do?
I believe we are focussing to much upon process rather than objectives. We are all just doing what is usually done in such situations; form a party, push leaflets through letter boxes and hope people will vote for us. Given the annual nature of local elections and the longer cycles of national elections, this approach could take years and is really expensive. Where as many people strongly sympathise with our cause, they still vote conventionally because we are to small to impact upon many of the major day-to-day issues facing them. If your family is facing a crisis because your job is not looking good, English Nationalism is not got to help you much – your problem is here and now. So the usual processes are not going to be effective in winning sufficient votes and they will not be effective quickly enough.
So let’s go back to our objectives. What do we want? We want a self-determining England that is not run from Brussels. We want our England to be on a fair footing when compared to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland and not be the cash cow for the UK. Some may even want England out of the UK. The question we have to ask, is our main goal to achieve these objectives or to form a successful political party? I suspect the former is the correct answer – and can our beloved country await the latter?
There are a number of single objective campaigning organisations within England that are striving towards the objectives we are seeking. The best known is probably the Campaign for an English Parliament (The CEP), but there are others such as Justice for England and the European Referendum Campaign that are all working hard at persuading people of their cause. All these campaigns require support and funding as well becoming highly activist on the ground.
We know that there are many Euro-Sceptics in the traditional parties. We know there are many who are coming round to the concept of an English Parliament. If the campaigning groups raise the volume and adopt a higher profile, more and more people will pressure their MPs for answers. If the public are educated to the real facts of what is going on, then they will agitate for change. The Daily Express has already swung in behind the Euro-Sceptics and the Daily Mail would appear to be going in the same direction. Why, because both papers have listened to their readers and realised there might be something there after all beyond a few whining little Englanders!
The campaigning approach will allow people to support the causes (our objectives) without having to align with a particular nationalist party. They can remain Tory, Labour, Lib-Dem or UKIP; no one will use the smear ‘BNP in Blazers’ with them. We know that UKIP already has the 1997 Committee which is pushing to have the cause of an English Parliament adopted by the party. The ground is fertile if we nationalists adopt the right strategy. We become the carriers for ideas that will spread like a virus into the conventional political arena and make those ideas main stream.
England is at five minutes to twelve and we must move quickly. The current electoral approach simply does not give us that time.
