Emma West & English Nationalism

John Opie, “Boadicea Haranguing The Britons,” before 1807

1,445 words

German translation here

At the time of writing, Emma West is being held in custody awaiting a further court appearance. Following her well-publicized anti-immigration polemic she has been accused of committing racially/religiously aggravated intentional harassment. If she is found guilty she will face a maximum sentence of two years imprisonment.

The offense of ‘intentional harassment’ was created with the Public Order Act 1986. One of the stated objectives of the Act was, “to control the stirring up of racial hatred”.[1] In 1998, the Crime and Disorder Act introduced new ‘racially or religiously aggravated’ offences.[2] This means that some crimes are treated by the courts as more serious if it can be proven that there was a religious or racial element to the crime. If the accused can be shown to have displayed hostility to the victim’s racial or religious affiliation during the course of committing a crime, then the crime will be judged to have been religiously or racially aggravated. To give an indication of how seriously this is taken, the maximum prison sentence for intentional harassment is six months, but if it the crime is judged to have been racially or religiously motivated the maximum sentence shoots up to two years.

Such laws are enforced enthusiastically by the authorities in England and are a useful means of censoring political opposition under a legalistic guise. The British National Party (BNP) leader, Nick Griffin, was acquitted in a series of trials in 2006 of using words or behavior intended to stir up racial hatred, another offense from the 1986 Public Order Act. This related to a sting operation carried out by the BBC which had an undercover reporter secretly filming a BNP meeting for the subsequently broadcast program, The Secret Agent.[3]

More recently, Simon Sheppard and Stephen Whittle were imprisoned for inciting racial hatred for material appearing on the Heretical Press website. They were charged with offenses under the Public Order Act: publishing racially inflammatory material, distributing racially inflammatory material and possessing racially inflammatory material with a view to distribution. Sheppard was sentenced to four years and ten months, Whittle to two years and four months (later reduced on appeal).[4]

The case of Stephen Whittle is particularly interesting. A successful author, Whittle’s books had been published by Creation Press, Headpress, and Richard Branson’s Virgin Books. His interests were the decadent and extreme manifestations of post modernity: the serial killer, the occult, sexual perversion, and other types of heresy. All this was unremarkable. At some point he decided to write articles for Simon Sheppard’s website (www.heretical.com) describing the Jewish power behind the scenes, its manipulation of political actors, and the deleterious effects of their immigration policies on the native population. The last essay published on the site before he was arrested was titled “Brave Jew World.”[5] All of this proved to be a heresy too far. No one outside the ‘far-right’, and not many within it, spoke out in favor of the author’s freedom of speech when he was imprisoned.

Along with the censorship of those who wish to speak for the native population is the displacement of that population. In the last decade almost two million immigrants (not including illegal immigrants) have come to the UK. The UK’s population is predicted to grow by seven million in the next 16 years, five million of which growth will be due to immigration.[6] Part of the reason that the liberal establishment is so keen on these debilitating levels of immigration is that they wish to destroy the native population’s ability to represent itself effectively. This was what lay behind the Labour government’s secret conspiracy to increase immigration. The Labour government decided that high levels of immigration would, “rub the Right’s nose in diversity”.[7] The secret document revealing that the government wished to use immigration as a tool for social engineering was only made public as the result of a Freedom of Information request,[8] and has generated little abiding interest in the media. The fact that immigrants are more likely to vote Labour makes this the most outrageous act of gerrymandering in political history.

The levels of immigration in England are disproportionately larger than in Wales or Scotland and some places are already effectively lost. The same is true in the education system where white children are now a minority of the pupil population in London, Slough, Leicester and Birmingham.[9]

Mrs West’s protestation that someone who is black cannot be English may lead her to prison but it is not a false statement. There is a great deal of confusion over the distinction between English and British, and this is compounded by the existence of the United Kingdom. In brief, the English are descended from the Angles and Saxons who came to this country from around the fifth century onwards. The Scottish are descended from the Scoti, an Irish tribe, and the Welsh from the British who lived in England when the Angles and Saxons arrived. (‘Welsh’ is from an Old English word, wealisc, meaning foreign). The history of the United Kingdom is succinctly summarized by Tony Linsell in An English Nationalism:

Wales was conquered by Edward I in 1284 and became part of the Anglo-Norman state. Scotland was united with England by treaty in 1707 thus creating the United Kingdom of Great Britain. The 1801 Act of Union with Ireland created the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. Following the Easter rebellion, or revolution, of 1916 the Irish Free State, consisting of 26 southern counties, gained its independence. The northern six counties remained a part of the United Kingdom, which now consists of Great Britain (England, Scotland and Wales) and Northern Ireland.[10]

The key point to note about Britain and the United Kingdom is that they are political entities made up of alliances of distinct nations. The English, Welsh and Scottish all retain their distinct attitudes and allegiances despite belonging to a political entity known as the UK. The importance of English nationalism in this is that Englishness cannot be bought, sold, given or taken away. It is a birthright which belongs to every English person but to no other. UK citizenship is a cheap matter of possessing a passport, and can be given to anyone, no matter what their ethnicity. Britishness is a political concept. Englishness is an immanent and existential status: it is non-negotiable.

For the present British establishment Mrs West is an embarrassing anomaly: an English woman who won’t turn a blind eye and keep quiet. It is likely that with the ongoing censorship of the native English, and their further displacement, this dying breed will be wiped out once and for all.

For the situation to have any chance of being reversed it is imperative that any nationalist movement in England must be an unashamedly English Nationalist movement. British nationalism is, to begin with, an oxymoron, as it seeks to exploit nationalist sentiment for a multi-national project. The problem with this is that vast numbers of foreign people now see themselves as British and have the documentation to prove it. British nationalists tend to be hamstrung by their attachment to the Union, as that very Union is the entity responsible for the threateningly high levels of immigration that assail us. The purpose of the Union was to provide a framework within which distinct national identities could co-exist, and it is still performing this function today, extending its hospitality to the four corners of the globe.

The Union has had its day and needs to be broken up. To renounce British nationalism in favor of English nationalism is not, as some seem to believe, an admission of defeat, it is in fact the first step to regaining our birthright and our homeland. As Alain de Benoist put it, “A democracy based not on the idea of rootless individuals or ‘humanity’ but on the folk as a collective organism and privileged historical agent might be termed an organic democracy.”[11] This recognition of the organic reality of the folk, freed from abstract political accretions, is the most secure foundation on which we can build.

 Notes

1. Public Order Act 1986, http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1986/64

2. Crime and Disorder Act 1998, http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1998/37/contents

3. “BNP leader cleared of race hate,” http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/bradford/6135060.stm

4. “Internet racism pair lose appeal,” http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/north_yorkshire/8486884.stm

5. The columns for Heretical Press were written under the pseudonym Luke O’Farrell, http://www.heretical.com/ofarrell/index.html

6. Migration Watch UK, http://migrationwatchuk.org/pressReleases#305 and http://migrationwatchuk.org/pressArticle/91

7. “Labour wanted mass immigration to make UK more multicultural, says former adviser,” The Telegraph, October 23, 2009, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/law-and-order/6418456/Labour-wanted-mass-immigration-to-make-UK-more-multicultural-says-former-adviser.html

8. “The deceit of Labour’s immigration policy,” The Telegraph, February 9, 2010, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/telegraph-view/7199457/The-deceit-of-Labours-immigration-policy.html

9. “Ethnic minority pupils increase by 57% in a decade,” http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-15738876

10. Tony Linsell, An English Nationalism (Norfolk: Athelney, 2001), 124.

11. Alain de Benoist, The Problem of Democracy (London: Arktos Media Ltd, 2011), 98.