Long time readers of this blog will be aware that Quaequam Blog! is a great friend of the English Nationalist movement (and indeed nationalism in general). So it brings me great sadness to have to report to you that a schism has emerged between the English Democrats and their candidate for London Mayor, Matt “fathers4justice” O’Connor:

The problems O’Connor discovered were that there was no party machine in London as promised, no advertising budget as promised, and they were economical with the facts about whether we’d be funded by backers. His recent party election broadcast which he organised also had amendments made without his knowledge.

He also struggled with an organisation that didn’t share his ideas and vision as evidenced in the difference between O’Connor’s official www.voteenglish.org site and the main party site.

On one occasion he was called racist and anti-Semitic by a senior member - a claim O’Connor described as ‘absurd’. He is also profoundly disappointed that they are now deliberately trying to smear him whilst at the same time the party was happy for him to stand.

Said O’Connor this morning, ‘It is sad but inevitable that they are trying to cover up their own internal problems. They did not deliver on their part of the agreement. It is extremely regrettable that this happened at this stage but I cannot stay in the party where people say things like that or where we have no sensible funding. I also had a clear vision to raise the issue of an English Parliament which they didn’t share.’

Nadine Taylor, Matt’s Campaign Manager resigned several weeks ago because she could not work with the level of incompetence within the party. O’Connor recognises now “that I should have listened to her advice”.

‘Descending to abusing somebody who campaigned in the Anti-Apartheid movement would be laughable if it were not so offensive. I am truly sorry for the good men and women in the party that this happened and while I wish the party every success, my record speaks for itself. Fathers 4 Justice has existed for the same amount of time as the English Democrats and F4J is a household name, with more members and wider recognition. The reality is that my resignation may generate more publicity for them than they achieved in the last six years.

‘Later this year I will launch a new campaign to raise issues like Tartan Taxes. Awareness is everything and they would probably stand to benefit from it.’

English Democrats Leader Robin Tilbrook was quick to issue a stern rebuttal:

I am obviously very disappointed that Matt O’Connor has issued this statement but I have to admit, not entirely surprised. What I now say is in sorrow, because Matt has done the cause some good but, contrary to what he now claims, Matt approached the English Democrats Party to put himself forward to be our mayoral candidate. In January he came to our National Council meeting in Leicester to urge us to select him and promised to “give the campaign 110%”!

During several discussions, he was made fully aware of the problems confronting a candidate for a smaller political party which is challenging the Establishment Parties - not least the problem of raising sufficient funds to fight an election campaign especially given the lack of media coverage of non Establishment candidates.

Within the bounds of our limited manpower and financial resources, Matt has been given 100% support by the English Democrats and many of our London members who have campaigned for him, and for England’s cause. Day in and day out, for many weeks the English Democrats have paid for all the campaign expenses that have been incurred. At no time has any funds been received from Matt.

Unfortunately - and this is not a subject I would have wanted to air publicly had it not been for the statement released by Matt O’Connor this morning seeking to blame us - it became apparent that there were problems with Matt’s candidacy arising from his own personal problems, not least following his disappearance from the campaign for several days, to the extent that I advised him to seek professional counselling regarding alcohol abuse, which he did. Matt did not disclose this problem to us when he urged us to select him as our candidate.

Despite this counselling, Matt again went missing last Saturday; - neither his office nor his partner seemed to know of his whereabouts and he could not be contacted at home. Indeed the Party prepared a statement last night raising concerns at his disappearance, as we were becoming genuinely worried for his safety.

Now, he has stated that he has resigned, although he cannot, of course, at this late stage, remove his name from the ballot paper.

This is all a great pity for Matt personally - he obviously has personal issues that he needs to address - but it also a pity for English Democrats’ candidates standing for the London Assembly - of which we have a full slate. They feel badly let down by Matt - but the campaign for English Democracy goes on!

The assembly campaign is running well and we have great hopes of getting a candidate elected, particularly on the party list, to campaign against the Establishment’s discrimination against London and England. The campaign for fair spending for London, an end to the Tartan Taxes, and real democracy and freedom of speech, will go on.

So I urge the people of London to give their vote, particularly their list vote, to the English Democrats. England’s cause is far bigger and more important than any one individual!

To lose one Mayoral candidate is unfortunate, but to lose two smacks of carelessness. Taking sides in this debate is like choosing between my children, but it has to be said that O’Connor brought with him a slickness that the English Democrats will miss. Whether that slickness was an unambiguously good thing however is another matter. Their recent PEB was a bile-filled attempt to resemble will.i.am’s homage to Barack Obama “Yes We Can” which ends up looking more like “Careless Whisper” by George Michael. And not in a good way. Can you say David Brent? Yes we can:

Sarcasm aside, it is hard to feel sympathy for a party and candidate whose sole objective seemed to be to piss off the Scots as much as possible, making exaggerated claims about “Tartan Taxes” and claiming that the only things the Scots ever gave to the world were “deep fried Mars Bars and Irn Bru.” The English Democrats also managed to cause me great amusement earlier this year by getting apoplectic about the SNP’s suggestion that Berwick might want to come back to Scotland, forgetting the fact that one year earlier they stood in the Welsh elections on a platform to do exactly the same thing with Monmouthshire. This is the disease of nationalism; the inability to see how bloody ridiculous you are being.

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Since I’ve been blogging light in recent weeks, I’ve not commented on the ongoing mess that Labour have got themselves into over the scrapping of the 10p rate of income tax. There isn’t much I can add that hasn’t been said a thousand times before. It is of course ludicrous that the Labour backbenchers have suddenly woken from their slumber on this issue, a year after we warned them what the implications of this reform would be. That the BBC have given the rebels such an easy ride for their johnny-come-lately rebellion is just par for the course.

But they do appear to have been bought off remarkably easily. The main measures for helping those hurt by scrapping the 10p rate seem like a total crock.

Let’s start with the retrospective raising of the winter fuel allowance. This is going to apply to all pensioners between 60 and 64, including my partner’s mother who is already roughly £50 a week month* better off due to her enjoying the full impact of cutting the basic rate from 22p to 20p. This is just throwing money around at random in the hope that some of it will stick.

And then there is the pledge to raise the national minimum wage for younger workers. First of all, this will only help those earning the absolute minimum wage for 18-21s. Someone working full time on the London “living wage” (£7.20 an hour) will still be whacked by the tax rise and yet only earns £13,000 a year. Secondly, it should be pointed out that any such an increase will mean that at least some of the cost of raising the winter fuel allowance is going to be paid out of increased tax revenue generated from young earners. The very lowest earners are going to be subsidising a benefits rise that will help many of the wealthiest (and yes, I do accept that the winter fuel allowance helps poor people as well, but still).

I’m all for raising the NMW for young people so it is comparable to the NMW for older workers, but this rise is happening for all the wrong reasons: getting the government out of a fix rather than doing what is right in the first place.

Surely it is unacceptable to have people on minimum wage paying income tax anyway? It is just a deadweight cost to the economy. The government should be working to narrow the gap between personal allowance and the NMW, not widen it. What possible economic reason is there to make employment even more expensive and wages even more inflationary?

But my greatest fear is that if the Labour rebels really are so easily bought off, they will capitulate over 42 days quite easily as well. They really are a useless shower. Give them a totemic act of class warfare like fox hunting to get self-righteous about and they will push the government to the limit. But helping poor people? Defending civil liberties and the rule of law? What is the bloody point of them?

* Oops! Good job I corrected that before anyone else spotted it.

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There are few crossovers between this blog’s twin main obsessions (2000AD and Libby Dem politics). A few years ago there was some dig at the Lib Dems in a strip called Thirteen but that’s pretty much your lot.

So you takes your references where you can get them, as the accompanying panel taken from this week’s Ten-Seconders strip demonstrates. Who could they be referring to I wonder?

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Quentin Davies - defected
Andrew Pelling - whip withdrawn over allegations of wife-beating
Derek Conway - whip withdrawn over expenses scandal
Bob Spink - whip withdrawn before he could resign. Now a member of UKIP.

My prediction at the start of the year that Cameron would have a bad year has remained unfulfilled, but this has mainly because Labour are having such a God awful year that Cameron’s problems have faded into the background. But losing 4 MPs - 2% of the total Parliamentary Party - in less than a year suggests a shambles whichever way you look at it.

How long before we see Cameron having to sack number 5? One MP who has survived scandal up until now has been James Gray. But for how long? The Mail reports:

Only last month, MPs of all parties were being urged not to hand out jobs to family members because of the scandal over Conway receiving taxpayers’ cash for his sons when they weren’t actually doing any work.

Now Gray, an ex-shadow defence spokesman, appears to have ridden roughshod over Cameron’s demand by putting Mrs Mayo on the payroll.

It is the latest twist in a sorry tale - and another act of bravado by the 53-year-old MP for North Wiltshire.

Last night he confirmed that mother-of-three Mrs Mayo, 45, was on his staff. “It is true, but I am not prepared to go into detail about my private life,” he told me.

In the wake of his split from Sarah, 53, it was disclosed he continued to pay her £2,400 a month from his staff allowance even though she had stopped work as his secretary two years before in order to undergo cancer treatment.

He secured permission to pay her until the terms of their separation were agreed last April. It is not known how much he is now paying Mrs Mayo.

See also: Wiltshire Gazette and Herald, Derek Conway: Shades of Gray?

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Reporting a recent piece of research published by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, the Times adopts this approach:

A CHARITY set up by an ardent Christian to fight slavery and the opium trade has identified a new social evil of the 21st century - religion.

A poll by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation uncovered a widespread belief that faith - not just in its extreme form - was intolerant, irrational and used to justify persecution.

Pollsters asked 3,500 people what they considered to be the worst blights on modern society, updating a list drawn up by Rowntree, a Quaker, 104 years ago.

The responses may well have dismayed him. The researchers found that the “dominant opinion” was that religion was a “social evil”.

Would it have dismayed him or confirmed his beliefs? After all, as a Quaker, Rowntree was a non-conformist. No other faith group has done more to promote secularism worldwide than the Quakers and as a group which has been at the sharp end of organised religion in the past, they have some considerable experience of religion as a social evil.

Besides, the full report paints a more nuanced picture. Religion is only listed as the ninth “evil”, while a decline in values is listed third. If people are decoupling religion from values that can only be a good thing and I suspect Rowntree would have approved as well.

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Finally, the government doing something sensible for a change.

I wonder if the same law will apply to organised religions making unjustifiable claims as well?

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Readers may recall me mocking the Ham and High a couple of years ago for condemning the Labour party’s “flying pigs” advert on the grounds of anti-semitism. Words therefore fail to learn that the same paper has allowed the BNP to take out paid advertising on their pages.

The paper appears to have confused the two concepts of “freedom of speech” and “suckee suckee - one dollar!” - to be fair, many people who lack a moral compass do. But does anyone seriously believe that if this advert had been anti-jewish as opposed to anti-muslim they would seriously go ahead with it? In that part of North London?

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A great bit of propaganda here about the need for more UK children’s TV, ably assisted by Donna’s granddad.

A sceptic of the existing license fee arrangements, I have to say that children’s television is on my shortlist for what public money should be paying for to go on TV (as opposed to, say, twelve week long advertorials to subsidise Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musicals). Of course that ought to apply to all channels, not just the BBC.

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I’m still trying to be on my best behaviour by not commenting here on the London elections, but I can’t let this comment by Lib Dem Voice’s resident troll Laurence Boyce go unchallenged:

Please allow me to provide my own advice for London voters.

First preference: State your first preference for Mayor of London.
Second preference: State your second preference for Mayor of London.

Because it really is as simple as that.

I didn’t comment on Laurence’s previous advice on electoral politics as he was clearly on a massive wind up. After noon on 1 April, it ought to have had a “don’t feed the troll” neon sign hung above it and can be summed up thus: “me, me, me, me, me, me, me.” I don’t however question that his opposition to proportional representation is genuine. It is however one thing to oppose any electoral system that would prevent tactical voting; quite another to claim - as he has done today - that it is an irrelevance.

The May 1997 election would not have been as spectacular as it was were it not for tactical voting on an industrial scale. This isn’t the eighties (don’t be confused by Laurence’s designer stubble); tactical voting is no longer a controversial electoral tactic. All parties encourage it or discourage it according to what happens to be to their personal advantage in every election. The electorate intuitively understand this and exercise their preferences accordingly. Of course, all this negativity has a corrosive effect on our political system, but it is a product of the system not something individuals trying to make the best of a bad job ought to feel particularly guilty of. If you hate it so much, change the system, don’t whinge.

To claim then that the SV system is as simple as giving your ideal two choices a first and second preference vote is somewhere between laughably ignorant and criminally misleading. As an opponent of electoral systems that would dispense of such tactical voting, Laurence simply can’t be allowed to have it both ways.

Opponents of PR like to accuse its proponents of being anoraky. Anyone who has spent more than five minutes at an Electoral Reform Society AGM can hardly disagree, but when the debate moves beyond the merits of individual systems and instead focuses on broad principles, it is the other side who start to sound distinctly hairy palmed.

I might prefer STV as an electoral system but I’m really not personally that fussed so long as it achieved three things:
1. The overall votes cast should broadly reflected in Parliament. A minority party with 35% of the vote should not be sitting pretty on the government benches with 56% of the MPs.
2. Voters should have a choice of candidates, not just parties. I’m realistic that in most cases the electorate will simply vote on party lines but bad eggs should not be unaccountable simply because they are high up on some closed party list.
3. Voters should not be forced to choose between stating a genuine preference and having their vote count, or between voting positively for a party and voting negatively against one.

Any system which achieves those aims is fine by me and I will happily refrain from getting too bogged down into the details. Yet when I talk to opponents of PR, they bombard me with weird arguments about why Parliament should reflect the popular vote, why the public should be denied a choice of candidates (a feature of the first past the post system - which is just as much a closed list system as the one used for European Elections) and either that tactical voting is an irrelevance or some beastly thing that people should somehow be prevented from doing - and ultimately the only way to achieve that would be to outlaw any political party beyond the first two.

All those arguments are intensely complex and downright weird. They genuinely involve patiently explaining the logical equivalent of black = white and that all swans are purple. Terribly clever these fellows, far far too clever for their own good. Blessed with exceptionally flexible spines and neck muscles, they can disappear up their own sphincters on a whim. They are capable of the most obscurantist argument the collective membership of ERS can only dream of.

Asking the most hardcore electoral reformers to focus on broad principles rather than detail is an exercise in futility, but the next time some Tory calls you an “anorak” simply for believing that votes ought to count for something, ask them why and hand them a raincoat.

Finally, back to Laurence for a second, it is probably a good thing he isn’t a Londoner. A committed atheist, it is hard to see how, out of principle, he could vote for any ticket other than Unity for Peace and Socialism.

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LighterLife, already in my bad books over TOAST and fat suits, are the subject of a BBC investigation tonight:

The liquid-based programme, aimed at people who are three or more stones overweight, involves dieters consuming just 530 calories a day for 12 weeks.

But Inside Out has heard from some dieters who have experienced disrupted periods, hair loss and water poisoning.

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