Brexit: The Long Walk To Freedom (Part 1)

“When a nation rises up ardent to fight for its freedom and honour, it is always a minority that really fires the multitude.”

Oswald Spengler

Issue 2 of Caledonian Voice – The Voice Of The National Liberal Party In Scotland. Whilst obviously written from a Scottish point of view, its main article argues that ‘the EU holds no loyalty to the nations or peoples of Europe itself.’ Caledonian Voice looks at the EU policy of allowing the 'free movement of capital and labour' between EU member states. It notes that this has meant that Scottish industry has ‘upped sticks’ and chased – and exploited – the lowest wages across Europe. ‘At the same time we have seen a massive influx of Eastern European workers, who understandably want to improve their lives but the result of their movement has placed enormous strains upon local services.’It believes that the EU (and the political elites) exist to benefit big business and not ordinary working families and communities. Therefore, we must ‘move away from the centralist and bureaucratic EU towards a Europe of free nations working together where needed but at all times retaining their independence and national and regional cultural identities.’ Caledonian Voice sums up its position with the slogan: ‘For a Europe of free peoples and nations – not a Europe of bankers and super-rich elites!

ON THURSDAY 23rd May 2019, the electorate of the United Kingdom went to the polls to vote in the European Elections.  Ironically, this was virtually three years to the date (23rd June 2016) since the same electorate had voted to leave the EU.

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The National Liberal Party – NLP – campaigned to leave the EU in 2016.  Thus it came as no surprise that we asked our members and supporters to ‘lend’ their vote to the main anti-EU grouping (the Brexit Party) during the May 2019 EU election.

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There were many reasons why the NLP wanted Britain to leave the EU.  However, the main reason is that the raison d’être of National Liberalism is the concept or principle of Self-Determination.

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For us the principle of self-determination can be applied largely in three areas; National, Political and Economic.  The website (1) of the National Liberal Party describes these three areas thus:

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• National Self-Determination seeks to ensure decisions affecting the collective future of a nation are taken by ALL the people via referendum. This may be ‘External’, for example: the creation or maintenance of a nation state, or ‘Internal’ – framing/updating a constitution to reflect how a people should rule themselves. (We favour independent nations and liberal, democratic, states).

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• Political Self-Determination seeks to ensure that the collective will of the people as well as the variety of political opinion is reflected in decision making. Thus, for example, we favour greater use of referendums to meet the former, and PR to reflect the latter (we favour a system close to the Swiss model of Direct Democracy).

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• Economic Self-Determination seeks to distribute ownership as widely as possible and as close to the individual as practical by favouring home ownership, self-employment, small businesses, cooperatives and employee shareholdings. (We believe that ownership is the key to economic and social health: where workers obtain a just reward for their labours and gain a feeling of well-being through their having a genuine personal stake in society).

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The above principles underpin many National Liberal policies but others are rooted in common sense and usually aim to strike a balance between conflicting opinions, as befits a centrist party.

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Ever since the original People’s Vote of June 2016, the NLP – and in particular its youth wing, Liberal Future (2) – has effectively provided a running commentary on the ever changing events relating to Brexit.  The NLP and LF have also promoted the belief that Brexit represented a move towards popular sovereignty and democratic renewal (3).

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With the above in mind, it came as no surprise that the NLP would take a principled and pragmatic approach to the EU elections held earlier this year.

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Therefore, prior to the election in May, Jagdeesh Singh, a National Council member (4) of the National Liberal Party called upon National Liberals to ‘lend’ their vote to the newly formed Brexit Party, led by Nigel Farage (5).  In a statement (6) released just prior to the election, Mr. Singh stated:

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“We invite all UK citizens, to use the Euro election on 23rd May 2019, to re-affirm and express their wish for independence and self-government for the UK; by voting for the BREXIT PARTY.

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The whole issue about Brexit is about the rights and freedoms of small nations to freely run their domestic and international affairs on trade, immigration, security, health, education and more, from an independent position.  Certainly not by control and domination by an overriding and overarching superstructure like the European Union.  By taking a positive and assertive stand for Brexit, we (the people) are sending out a principled and fundamental message to not only to the EU and our UK government (as we already have in the 2016 Referendum).

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AT THIS ELECTION…..

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WE URGE YOU TO ‘LEND YOUR VOTE’ TO THE BREXIT PARTY, as a collective of pro-Brexit voices.  Self-determination of our affairs, domestic and international, is going to shape our future economy, public services, NHS, global trade and more.  We are sending out a message to big, imposing, domineering state structures across the world that small is beautiful and powerful!  Small can and will succeed! Small is democratic! Big is imposing, suffocating, centralising, diminishing and undemocratic!

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Vote for democracy! Vote for self-determination! Vote for the Brexit Party!”

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It should be obvious from this statement that the NLP doesn’t support the Brexit Party per se. We recognise that the are many and vast differences between ourselves.  For instance, we are opposed to both capitalism & socialism whilst we feel that the Brexit Party are, at root, a national capitalist organisation.

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The decision to ask National Liberals to vote for the Brexit Party wasn’t taken lightly as we had to balance principle – our belief in Self-Determination and the fact that the UK should have left the EU after article 50 was triggered – and pragmatism – in that it was necessary to send a large contingent of anti-EU MEPs to Brussels to safeguard our interests.

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Readers will be well aware that the Brexit Party (which was only formed in April 2019) were the big winners of the EU Election.

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According to European Parliament Liaison Office in the United Kingdom (7) there ‘are 73 UK MEPs.  They are elected in Great Britain and Northern Ireland.’  The ‘UK is divided into 12 electoral regions made up of the nations and regions of the UK.  Each region has between 3 and 10 MEPs and each MEP in a region represents each person living there’.

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The Brexit Party had 29 MEPs elected and won the European elections with more votes than the Tory and Labour Parties combined.  Indeed Mr. Farage’s group won nearly 32 percent of the vote – with well over 5 million votes.  The scale of the Brexit Party’s victory can be seen by the allocation of the other seats – here the Lib Dems won 16 seats (20.3), the Labour Party won 10 seats (14.1), the Greens seven (12.1) and the Tories four (9.1).

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To put the Brexit Party’s result into context, for EU elections – and as noted above – the UK is divided into 12 regions – Scotland, Northern Ireland, North West England, Wales, North East England, Yorkshire and the Humber, West Midlands, East Midlands, South West England, South East England, London and East of England.  Of these regions, the Brexit Party topped the poll in nine of them.

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Despite the efforts of pro-Remain spin-doctors (8), this was the third time that the pro-Brexit vote for self-determination had triumphed.  The first time occurred in the 2014 EU elections, where the UK Independence Party – UKIP – became the largest UK grouping with 24 seats – around 27% of the popular vote.  (In contrast, Labour won 20 seats with 24% of the vote, the Tories collected 19 seats with 23% of the vote whilst the Lib Dems only managed 1 seat with a poor 7% of the vote.)  The second time was, of course, the original People’s Vote – the EU Referendum in 2016.  And the third time was the May 2019 EU election.

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So what are we to make of the rise of the Brexit Party?

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To be continued …

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“ONCE MORE let me remind you what fascism is. It need not wear a brown shirt or a green shirt – it may even wear a dress shirt. Fascism begins the moment a ruling class, fearing the people may use their political democracy to gain economic democracy, begins to destroy political democracy in order to retain its power of exploitation and special privilege.”

Tommy Douglas (1904 – 1986), Premier of Saskatchewan and the leader of the Canadian New Democratic Party.

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FOR THE National Liberal Party – NLP – the main lesson from the Brexit vote is that Britain is totally divided over the result.

However, the main division is not down to the ‘usual suspects’ be they national, racial or class-based (although it could be argued they all were determining factors to some extent or another).  Nor is it between ‘left’ and ‘right.’  The real division – the fault line – is between those who accept democracy and those who don’t.  Indeed, this is currently manifesting itself as a battle between the people and the elites.

Professor Matthew Goodwin (who is Professor of Politics in the School of Politics and International Relations at the University of Kent) correctly described this battle like this:

‘Brexit was the first moment when a majority of people outside of parliament formally asked for something that a majority of people inside parliament didn’t want to give. And leavers knew exactly what they were voting for, as almost every study has shown, they wanted powers returned from the European Union and lower immigration. But many were also asking for something else: A radical shake-up of what they see is a broken settlement, a place where London gets a lot and everywhere else gets little, where left behind workers have good reason to feel left behind, and where all of us are right to worry about inequality, corporate power, and whether our politicians are even listening.’

However, the denial of democracy goes way beyond the result of the original People’s Vote of 23rd June 2016 – aka the United Kingdom European Union membership referendum, also known as the EU referendum, the European referendum and the Brexit referendum.

According to the Electoral Commission – https://www.electoralcommission.org.uk/who-we-are-and-what-we-do/elections-and-referendums/past-elections-and-referendums/eu-referendum/results-and-turnout-eu-referendum – 46,500,001 people were eligible to vote.  Of these, 33,551,983 exercised their right to vote. This represented a massive turnout of 72.2% – one of the biggest exercises in participatory democracy the UK has ever seen.  Of those who voted, 17,410,742 voted to leave the EU whilst 16,141,241 voted to remain.

We feel that – no matter what way individuals voted – the vast majority of the electorate would have expected Westminster to honour the result of the EU Referendum.  As we all now know to our cost, Westminster is unwilling to acknowledge (and swiftly act upon) the popular will of the people.  In layman’s terms, the entire electorate has been shafted.

• IN PART TWO of this series we’ll take a look at how the actions of Westminster – in denying democracy to the people – may impact on future elections.  Indeed, how will the electorate view ‘democracy’ from now on in?  We’ll also be offering various solutions (with specific reference to referendums) to this problem.

• DON’T FORGET to viral out our original e-posters via Social Media:

Trust The People – Not The Politicians! http://nationalliberal.org/trust-the-people-not-the-politicians

Parliament Is Not The Answer! http://nationalliberal.org/new-nlp-poster-parliament-is-not-the-answer

Power To The People! http://nationalliberal.org/power-to-the-people

Parliament Doesn’t Represent The People! http://nationalliberal.org/parliament-doesn’t-represent-the-people

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THE National Liberal Party – NLP – hopes to promote the idea of Self-Determination For All! by standing for election in the Greater London Assembly elections.  These are scheduled for May 2020.

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Some information about our campaign has already been posted up – http://nationalliberal.org/self-determination-for-all-3 – and we intend to produce regular updates as our campaign progresses.  We’re initially looking for 25 London-based candidates who’d like to represent their people & nation.  Candidates must be prepared to help partly self-finance their campaigns.  If you think that you fit the bill, please contact us as soon as possible by e-mailing natliberal@aol.com

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In the meantime, however, we thought that it would be appropriate to provide some general background material relating to self-determination and explain why we feel that it’s such an important concept.

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A general statement – relating to the concept of self-determination – has been produced by the NLP.  We’re serialising it over the next few weeks, so that fellow self-determinists can read, digest and comment on it.

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Our first section related to National Self-Determination and now we continue on with Political Self-Determination.

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As debate is free with the NLP, we’d appreciate any comments, suggestions, queries or constructive criticism relating to our statement.  Please post them (in the comments section) on either the National Liberal Party Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/NationalLiberalParty/ or the National Liberals Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/groups/52739504313/ when you see this article posted up.

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Here’s our general statement relating to self-determination – let us know what you think:

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SELF-DETERMINATION FOR ALL!

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THE DISCONNECT between professional politicians and the people has never been greater. The decisions taken by the former are more often viewed as self-serving in the eyes of the latter.

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Professional politicians, often labelled as so-called ‘elites’, are largely divorced from the everyday experiences of the great mass of people. Thus, we should not be surprised that they are often seen to take political positions and decisions at odds with most people.

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The answer to this gulf between the present day ‘rulers’ and ‘ruled’ is found in the principle of Self-Determination; i.e. Putting decision making into the hands of the individual rather than ‘others’.

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PRINCIPLE OF SELF-DETERMINATION

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This principle can be applied largely in three areas; National, Political and Economic.

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• National Self-Determination seeks to ensure decisions affecting the collective future of a nation are taken by ALL the people via referendum. This may be ‘External’, for example: the creation or maintenance of a nation state, or ‘Internal’ – framing/updating a constitution to reflect how a people should rule themselves. (We favour independent nations and liberal, democratic, states).

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• Political Self-Determination seeks to ensure that the collective will of the people as well as the variety of political opinion is reflected in decision making. Thus, for example, we favour greater use of referendums to meet the former, and PR to reflect the latter (we favour a system close to the Swiss model of Direct Democracy).

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To be continued.

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• ALSO CHECK OUT:

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Self-Determination For All! http://nationalliberal.org/self-determination-for-all-3

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#SelfDetermination4All http://nationalliberal.org/selfdetermination4all

THE RAPID ADVANCEMENTS in both Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Robotics has made many people fearful about their future – especially when it comes to employment. For, as this report notes – https://home.bt.com/tech-gadgets/future-tech/9-jobs-overtaken-by-robots-11364003046052 – around 35% of the jobs we do today in the UK could go to robots by 2034. The obvious question here is that with over a third of all jobs disappearing, how will people be able to live?

To try to answer this question Devon Voice – The Voice Of The National Liberal Party In Devon – is reproducing an article by Brian Bergstein from MIT Technology Review – see the original here https://www.technologyreview.com/s/611418/basic-income-could-work-if-you-do-it-canada-style/ – which looks at the introduction of a trial system of Universal Basic Income in Lindsay, Ontario, Canada. The Universal Basic Income (UBI) is generally understood to be a guarantee from the government that each citizen receives a minimum income which is enough to cover the basic cost of living. The UBI is also designed to provide financial security – particularly in the not-to-distant future where it can offset job losses caused by technology.

This is the third and final part and should be read directly on from from part 1: http://nationalliberal.org/devon-voice-debate-1-–-universal-basic-income-for-devon-part-1 and part 2 http://nationalliberal.org/devon-voice-debate-1-–-universal-basic-income-for-devon-part-ii As always, debate is free with Devon Voice & the NLP. Therefore, we’d appreciate your views on this article (and the idea of Devon introducing the UBI) when it appears on either the National Liberals Facebook site – https://www.facebook.com/groups/52739504313/ – or the National Liberal Party Facebook site – https://www.facebook.com/NationalLiberalParty/ One big worry for us is that governments could use UBI as a means to ‘control’ people. Therefore, National Liberals must think long and hard as how any future UBI is paid. Maybe this’ll be the subject of a future Devon Voice debate?

It goes without saying that there are no official links between Brian Bergstein, MIT Technology Review, Devon Voice and the National Liberal Party. Please note that Devon Voice has kept the original North American spelling and phrases as they are.

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Basic Income Could Work – If You Do It Canada-Style (Part 3)

A Canadian province is giving people money with no strings attached – revealing both the appeal and the limitations of the idea.

A simple US graphic which explains Universal Basic Income (UBI). Rapid advancements in Artificial Intelligence and Robotics will see more jobs disappear. Therefore, Devon Voice asks: How will we take care of our workers when there’s no work?

After all, she says, Canada does many other things to strengthen its safety net and reduce inequality. For one, it has universal health care. School funding in Ontario is primarily allocated at the province level rather than being heavily dependent on local property taxes, as it is in the US. Canada also traditionally spends about 1 percent of its GDP on workforce-development programs, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. That’s about half of the proportion in other advanced countries, but it still dwarfs the US figure, which is about 0.3 percent.

Funding a different mind-set

Tony Tilly is the outgoing president of Fleming College, which specializes in preparing people in Kawartha Lakes for careers in both white-collar work and trades. About half the students don’t come right from high school; they’ve already been in the workforce and hope to learn a new skill.

He supports a basic income because he thinks it could help people break out of poverty that has beset their families for generations. But even if the program continues past the three-year trial period, Fleming’s essential challenge would remain: how to prepare students for a world in which more and more tasks are being automated.

Fleming is still priming its graduates to work in traditional strongholds of the regional economy: jobs tied to the environment and natural resources, infrastructure development, mining, construction, and government. But the school is trying to instill a different mind-set from the one students had when Tilly became its president 14 years ago. They now get more emphasis on so-called soft skills: teamwork, problem-solving, personal interaction. Above all, he says, they need to know “not only how to do some particular job but how to contribute overall to the success of an organization, whether it’s a manufacturer or a provider of social services.”

If the basic-income plan works as expected, Fleming might get even more students than it otherwise would. Dana Bowman could be one of them.

It’s been years since she last had a paying job, as a receptionist. She has been on disability for a variety of ailments, including skin cancer and arthritis. But she feels she is up to doing some part-time work. In 2015, two years before the basic-income trial, Bowman asked a case worker if she could get help paying for transportation to a Fleming campus that offers classes in social work. The official said that would lead to cuts in other benefits Bowman relied on. The message Bowman says she got was: “You’re unemployable. You’re not worth investing in.”

In contrast, the basic-income plan ensures a minimum for her without micromanaging how she spends it. For every dollar that recipients earn above the minimum, their payout from the province will be cut by 50 cents, but no one is made worse off by working.

Even being able to consider that prospect, Bowman says, has been good for her. “I don’t feel ‘less than.’ I feel ‘equal to.’ Not feeling guilty walking down the street, thinking, ‘I didn’t do enough today,’” she says. “People want to do something. People aren’t inclined to do nothing.”

WELCOME TO the first debate hosted by Liberal Worker – the voice of National Liberal Trade Unionists. As many readers may know, supporters of the NLTU are different from many of our fellow trade unionists in that we’re not socialists (or capitalists). Neither are we particularly ‘into’ class definitions. We feel that class distinction has become increasingly blurred. Also to simply define someone by the class is very restrictive: living, breathing human beings are purely described in economic terms and everything else – say, their character or natural talents – count for nothing. Despite this, as trade unionists, we’re naturally very interested in the lives and well-being of ordinary working folks.

With the above in mind, a comrade has brought our attention to the following untitled article which was published way back in July by the Independent Working Class Association. According to the IWCA, it was established ‘to promote and celebrate the political independence of the working class, and to pursue the political and economic interests of that class with no consideration for, and regardless of, the consequences to the existing political and economic structures.’

The IWCA seem to be more in tune with ordinary working folks and aren’t afraid to talk about real social issues like immigration, anti-social behaviour and drugs. They are miles away from the trendy, metropolitan ‘middle-class champagne socialists’ who seemed to have taken over the Labour Party. These are just a couple of reasons why we’re happy to reproduce an article from their Facebook page which effectively looks at black knife crime in London knife crime, and the left’s insane Politically Correct reaction to it. This article will also be posted up on the National Liberal Trade Unionist Facebook page – https://www.facebook.com/groups/277840098977231/– and we’d invite our readers to post any comments up once they it.

Liberal Worker Debate (1) – How Should Workers View Stop & Search?

London’s Metropolitan Police have produced this graphic to address knife crime in the capital. Whilst the message is clear enough, Liberal Worker believes that the vast majority of ordinary working folk would support much tougher measures such as Stop & Search. What do you think?

SINCE 1 June there have been over 40 murder attempts in London ending in 12 fatalities. Yet if the figures are to be believed there has been a significant drop in knife crime since the re-introduction of stop and search. Yet the left continue to express their disgust at the use of the tactic. As an alternative they point to a supposedly more enlightened approach pioneered in Glasgow, but in deliberately ignoring one critical component, they again betray the minority ethnic communities they claim to cherish.

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A week before the 2011 riots erupted, police went through 32 doors on the Pembury estate in Hackney in just one morning. Gang members were the target, the enormity of the operation illustrating both the scale of the problem and the surveillance and other resources required to combat it. And that was just one estate. A similar focus was required for many others across London. So in the run up to the shooting by police of Mark Duggan it was this focus that the gang leaders were increasingly unhappy with. Thus the killing became the catalyst for the gangs to hit back in a coordinated show of force. Coordinated in the sense that a truce was declared between the gangs that lasted for the duration of what the IWCA described at the time as a ‘lumpen rebellion’.

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In the aftermath, the Government declared ‘war on the gangs’ while the IWCA analysis predicted the authorities had ‘learned their lesson’. And so it proved. According to the Times, stop and search “was all but abandoned after Theresa May, as home secretary, accepted findings that it was partly to blame for the riots”. Abandoned alongside the tactic were black working class communities, easy prey for the next generation of gangsters and killers (but then who speaks for them?). Inevitably, with the police disabled, the stabbings and shootings began to increase. A process which was further accelerated under new Mayor Sadiq Khan, who on the campaign trail had infamously promised to ‘do all in his power to further cut its use’.

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But with stabbings quickly hitting record numbers, stop and search plus Section 60 notices (whereby police can stop and search without reasonable excuse across entire areas) were ushered back in. Since then, the use of the new powers has increased by 400 per cent, with a consequent 30 per cent reduction in killings and a 20 per cent fall in knife injuries to under-25s in the year to April.

Now, in a circular argument “fears have been raised of backlash over stop and search” according to a headline in the Times, suggesting the relative success of the policy may lead to further unrest. This is not only to confuse cause and effect, but also to muddle priorities. A condition Hackney Labour councillor Mete Coban represents in an effortless way. Tweeting from Stratford on June 16 he wrote: “Just came across 4 police officers at Stratford Station searching 2 young black boys for no reason. When I asked them [police], why are you searching them, one of them told me, ‘I have to stop these people getting stabbed’. This cannot be our response to knife crime. Disgusted.”

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“Does Mete think that Section 60 orders are a more significant problem than gangland stabbings? Does he think stop and search is somehow the root cause of the knife crime problems?” inquires journalist Mary Wakefield. Yes, is the answer: because as it is already accepted in liberal circles that stop and search aligned with racial profiling was one of the root causes for the riots in 2011, it is not much of a stretch to seeing stop and search as the root cause for knife crime as well. Or as Katrina French of the monitoring group Stopwatch sees it: “Blanket Section 60 orders are an admission that you don’t know what is going on. It’s more about social control than crime prevention”. Of course when the idea of a police database was set up to allow them to know precisely ‘what is going on’, howls of “disproportionate” emanated from the same quarter. A similar puerility infers that as ‘social control’ is the authorities’ real objective, another gang orchestrated rampage which mainly involved looting, robbery, and arson would not only be justified but embraced as politically progressive.

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If we challenge the Metes and Katrinas as to what they would consider a more proportionate response to the daily round of butchery, they will gleefully point to the Glasgow model where, according to liberal mythology, a cuddlier strategy has proven to be an overwhelming success. This is to close your eyes to one significant caveat. When the Violence Reduction Unit was set up in Glasgow in 2005, stop and search was regarded as paramount. By 2010 the tactic was being employed four times more than in England, and sentences for being caught in possession more than doubled to 5 years in jail.

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Moreover, as recently released Scottish government figures demonstrate, it was when stop and search was at its most intense that serious assaults and attempted murders showed the most dramatic decline. In short, it was only after the habitual carriers had been jailed or otherwise dissuaded that the more holistic, community based approach had a chance to bed in. Naturally, the effective targeting of the habitual carrier is precisely what liberals are set against.

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London has, of course, a number of aggravating factors (the sheer size of the place, sensitivity surrounding the ethnicity of victims and perpetrators alike, plus the mammoth profits from the drugs trade would all need to be factored in), but the adoption of the innovative hard line approach pioneered in Glasgow still looks like the most practical policy not only for the capital at present but for other English metropolitan areas as well. As for the madness assailing a left who blithely step over still warm bodies to shout ‘institutional racism’, there is however no legislative remedy.