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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Earlier today I compared Gareth Young in unfavourable terms to Bernard Manning. In light of Gareth’s subsequent comments, I now accept this was entirely unfair. Bernard Manning was at least honest with himself about what he believed in and never took himself too seriously. It is clear that no-one could ever accuse Gareth of either.

My favourite line is this:

James’ idea that all decisions that affect England are best handled at a UK or local level are a mechanical, almost fascist (sic), idea of democracy; it’s not about what form of government the people would want, but rather what form of government we think is best.

Seriously: support for local government and self-determination is fascist? I’ve never disputed that if the English want an English Parliament, they are welcome to one. My argument is that if someone is offered steak (real self-determination and genuine decentralisation), why would you settle for meatloaf (a centralised English Parliament)? I’ve never said anything different. The fact that this challenges and threatens the English nats’ sense of security so much is a constant source of amusement for me.

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Alex Salmond’s White Paper on the future governance of Scotland has brought forth another round of English Lib Dems (and supporters of other parties such as Pravdale) bemoaning the fact that the Scottish Liberal Democrats are ‘undemocratically’ not backing the SNP’s support for a referendum. As I’ve said in the comments on Lib Dem Voice, this is a ridiculous argument as the Scots both voted against independence in the last Scottish Parliament election by two-thirds and reject independence by the same proportion in opinion polls.

But what annoys me most of all is that these people have ignored what the Scottish Liberal Democrats are actually calling for. What they are arguing for is not the status quo, or even for their own Steel Commission to be introduced verbatim. Instead, they are joining the growing call for a new Constitutional Convention, independent of Government and Parliament, to sort the issue out.

They aren’t alone either. The campaign for a Scottish Constitutional Convention is backed by a growing number of Scots. Iain MacWhirter made similar noises on CommentIsFree yesterday, as did Unlock Democracy.

The Scottish Lib Dems could do what Perfidious Albion is advising them to do, go meekly along with a referendum on independence that the majority of Scots don’t want, wasting millions of pounds of taxpayers money in the process and embedding the idea that Scottish politics is entrenched into unionism versus seperatism with the Conservatives, Labour and Lib Dems squashed together in an impromptu alliance on one end of the spectrum. Or, they could stick by their instincts and hold out for a process that has a strong chance of getting what the majority of Scots do appear to support: greater powers for the Scottish Parliament. In the process, they can put clear distance between both the the SNP and the nay-sayers within the Tories and Labour and present themselves as the champion of centrist Scottish politics.

When I see these two options before me it looks like a no-brainer, so what am I missing?

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Notwithstanding the understandable effervescence emanating from the party’s results service, I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that, overall, the elections yesterday were not very good for the Lib Dems.

With over a hundred councils still to declare (at least according to the BBC), it is hard to conclude anything much from them yet, especially when one recalls that last year’s results had us losing seats all day until we eventually ended up making a net gain of, erm, one. Nonetheless however, it is hard to see how we are going to recover to such an extent. At the moment (2pm), the BBC has us just a bit ahead of Labour in terms of net losses of councillors.

The positive side of that story is that where the Tories seem to be makiing the most impact, it is in areas where they are already strong. There is very little evidence of a Tory revival in the North (Gideon Osbourne breezily claimed on Today this morning that their gains in Birmingham was evidence of a Northern revival - one wonders if he has any idea of where his Tatton constituency actually is) - where they have been making gains, it is in the few places they weren’t wiped out a decade ago. Where they have been having landslide victories, they tend to already have an MP. Once again, national swing is only telling part of the story.

Partly because we are at the mercy of the electoral system, the Lib Dems have a sad history of failing to live up to our ever declining ambitions in Assembly elections, and once again we have failed to break our duck of 6 AMs. Back in 1999, I remember being confidently told by the then-Lib Dem Chief Exec that we would get 11-12 AMs. In 2003, at least one person predicted we’d get up to around 10. This year, people were talking of 7-9 AMs being a sure thing. The worst thing of it all is that, on paper, they should have been right. Because the system is only semi-proportional (2/3rds FPTP, 1/3rd list), each region has 4 top ups and we are the fourth party, we need to make fairly modest gains in each region to significantly increase our number of assembly members. In South Wales Central, we only needed an increase of 1% to double our Assembly Members. The fact that we have failed to do this twice now ought to be setting off alarm bells about how we fight the Welsh air war.

This was echoed by my own experience. I spent the last week being a footsoldier in a non-target constituency in Wales. We got a disappointing result, but our vote held up in our target polling districts. The national campaign didn’t just fail to boost us in the polls, it failed even to cushion the work we were doing locally.

Initial thoughts? All those ‘cheeky’ references in the media didn’t exactly help, however Lembit might like to dress it up. In and of themselves, I doubt they cost us votes, but they did make it tougher to get a coherent message across. They were an unnecessary distraction.

After three campaigns at the helm, Mike German can’t avoid responsibility. His performances on TV failed to impress. True, none of the Welsh Party leaders exactly set the world alight, but as the longest-serving leader, Mike really should have stood out.

The Scottish results are coming agonisingly slowly now. One thing everyone must surely now agree on is that Scotland must now either adopt a single electoral system for both locals and Parliamentary elections (Ken Ritchie of the ERS reported on News 24 that people seemed to cope with STV better than with AMS judging by the numbers of spoilt ballots, which is ironic given that STV is always presented by its critics as a ‘complicated’ system), or they should have each set of elections on a different year (a la Wales), or preferably both.

Like Wales, the Scottish results that have been coming in are static for the Lib Dems. However, the Scot Lib Dems have the mitigating factors of a) the SNP bandwagon and b) the fact that it is a more authentically proportional system than Wales, which makes it tougher to gain seats. Nonetheless, our failure to win seats such as Edinburgh Central and Strathkelvin & Bearsden was very disappointing.

But, behind closed doors of course, I doubt the SNP are exactly delighted with the result. It remains unclear whether they will win the plurality - at the moment it looks as if they haven’t - and even if they do, it will be by the smallest of margins and in the context of a clearly unionist majority in the Parliament. This isn’t the result that the SNP were confidently predicting last week. Support for their key policy has plummeted during the election campaign.

If Labour manage to form a coalition, this is the last hurrah for the SNP; if the SNP manage to form a coalition, it may well prove just as fatal in the longer term. Simply put, I remain doubtful that they will be capable of managing the transition from repository of protest votes to a party of government. I’m aware that people say that about the Lib Dems all the time, but we’ve now run Scotland for 8 years and not been punished by the electorate. Meanwhile, I am struck by the number of SNP policies that are merely lifted from the Lib Dems (and some, like local income tax, I don’t think are particularly well thought out). The real problem the SNP have is that they are a one-man band. What happens if the sheen of Salmond starts to get tarnished, if he goes under a bus, or if he simply gets bored? A power vacuum may yet emerge in Scotland, and that is a real opportunity for the Lib Dems, if they have the initiative and dynamism to take it.

Finally, there is the Ming Question. I think it is unfair to put too much blame at Ming’s door for this set of unimpressive results. After all, for all my frustrations, I’m accutely aware that our results in Scotland and Wales are almost identical to 2003, and the same questions were not being asked about Charles Kennedy at the time. Perhaps, in retrospect, they should have been, given that the Tories and the nationalists were in a much greater slump back then, and we failed to capitalise on the fact. I haven’t seen anything about Ming’s performance that gives me cause for concern; equally, I’ve seen a number of positive developments which haven’t yet had time to bed down. But the main lesson from this campaign seems to be that we need to work on our air war - there’s only so much we can do on the ground when the national party messages are not coming across and being drowned out by our opponents’.

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You may have noticed I gave myself a miliband or two of wriggle room when I said that my Friday post on Scotland was ‘possibly’ my last one.

Euan Ferguson’s hagiographic, and appallingly badly written, article about Alex Salmond in the Observer today got me hopping:

The border, slow epoxy, is setting. Every indication, every poll, not least that revealed in today’s Observer, is that the SNP has a convincing, unassailable lead, and that on Friday Salmond will form a coalition with Nicol Stephen’s Lib Dems, and become First Minister: and, in 2010, in keeping with his manifesto, will take the country into a referendum vote for independence.

Really? Nicol Stephen is currently ruling out a coalition unless the SNP block their plans for an independence referendum. And the latest, largest, poll, puts an SNP-Lib Dem coalition at having a majority of 1. Hardly a strong administration then - that suggests that for the Lib Dems to agree to it, their price would have to be rather high indeed.

But the biggest nonsense today has to be Salmond’s claim that independence was “not a one-way street“. The Scots can suck it and see - if they don’t like it, then they can run back to Mama England’s ever-loving arms.

At what point are the English going to be given a way on all this I wonder? Pretty much everything the SNP have been asserting assumes the good will of the English - a good will which is likely to be in rather short supply during the divorce proceedings. Why, for example, should we accept this “Union of Crowns” idea? If a referendum were held, would the English go along with it?

But the fact that Salmond is now saying this suggests that he now recognises that the independence issue is growing increasingly toxic for the SNP. He’s trying to shut down the debate - he has to still pay lip service to independence, but with so many platitudes as to render it almost meaningless.

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This will probably be the last thing I write on Scottish Independence this side of polling day as I’m off to Cardiff tomorrow.

Firstly, a group of 60 Scottish scientists have hit out at the SNP. We should remember that the Scottish Enlightenment was very much a product of the Union. A generation of outward looking Scots revolutionised everything from philosophy and economics through to engineering and architecture. It is this rich history that the SNP are so dismissive off.

Secondly, going back to my ponderings about what Scottish Independence would mean for the Welsh and Northern Irish, I wonder what the implications for Gibraltar would be? The Spanish are already challenging the UK’s occupation of Gibraltar - would they use the break up of the UK as an opportunity to press the issue once more? Would Gibraltar revert to the remaining UK (as someone pointed out to me the other day, we could no longer be the “United” Kingdom and instead would have to be called the Kingdom of England, Wales and Northern Ireland, or KEWNI), to Scotland, or to both? Would the Spanish have a case for claiming that the Treaty of Utrecht needs to be renegotiated given that one of its main signatories no longer existed?

Indeed, what is the SNP’s policy on all the other colonies as well?

Of course, this only affects a few tens of thousands of individuals scattered around the world. The SNP might consider their plight to be irrelevant. But I do wish they would at least acknowledge such issues instead of presenting independence as an opportunity for Scotland to have a completely fresh start. We have a rich, entangled shared history together which the SNP would like to turn their backs on but which, if they get enough votes next week, they will quickly find they cannot afford to.

Fortunately, it does appear as if the Scots have basically come to realise that, with the gap between the SNP and Labour closing by the day. At the outset of the campaign, support for Scottish independence was running at over 50%; despite outspending their rivals, the SNP have seen support for their flagship policy plummet by over 30%, down to the low 20s now. If any other party had presided over such a disaster, the media would be having a field day.

The best they can now offer the Scottish electorate is that they are ‘not Labour’ - but there are lots of parties that fit the bill. It may well be enough to win a plurality, but something tells it will be a pretty hollow victory for them. We shall see.

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Respect is due to Hot Ginger And Dynamite’s post rant about St George’s Day.

For the record, I’d love it to be a bank holiday as we don’t have nearly enough of them compared to the continentals. But that doesn’t mean I’m going to start waving a bloody flag all of a sudden, just as I don’t wear stupid bloody leprechaun hats on Paddy’s Day.

If you want to read lots of bleating and moaning about how people are being prevented from celebrating their patron saints day, go here.

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Either I’m psychic or Alex Salmond reads this blog and just does things to wind me up. Six weeks after being castigated for stating that Salmond launched his 2005 General Election campaign by standing in front of that ridiculous statue of Mel Gibson in Stirling on 6 April to mark the Declaration of Arbroath. I suggested this was dog whistle politics. It turns out I had misremembered this, and was instead standing next to an actor dressed as Robert the Bruce.

Well, two years later, he’s ditched the claymore, but he did indeed choose to mark the Declaration of Arbroath by standing in front of Hollywood’s most famous anti-semite (can’t find any useable photos online, but they’re all up on PA Photos if you have access).

No doubt my dear SNP friends will be quick to claim that this is irrelevant, that the SNP are civic nationalists not ethnic nationalists, and that I’m spreading lies again, but let’s be clear. By explicitly posing outside of this statue he isn’t merely associating himself with William Wallace and all the blood and tears that is associated with him - he’s associating himself with the film version of his story which was a pack of lies. Presumably we are to believe that the Queen is Wallace’s distant ancestor, and that’s why he is happy for her to remain the Head of State of an independent Scotland?

Oh, and lest I forget, Mel Gibson is an adherent of exactly the kind of ‘muscular christianity’ that Brian Souter is such a fan of. Are we starting to see a pattern here?

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Geoffrey Wheatcroft’s article yesterday about what to do about a problem like Scotland, got Lib Dem bloggers in a lather for wrongly accrediting the West Dunfermline By-election victory to the SNP, but what they should have noticed is that the rest of the article is even more nonsense.

His proposed ’solution’ is a Union of Crowns - both Scotland and England would have their own sovereign and distinct parliaments, but would be united as a dual monarchic union. He cites the example of Austria-Hungary.

There are two main problems with this idea: one anecdotal, the other rather more fundamental. Firstly, it is an inconvenient fact to this argument that Austria-Hungary was a dismal failure. It lasted 50 years, ended up splitting during one of the biggest bloodbaths the world has ever known, and if the Austrians and Hungarians I’ve spoken to about it are anything to go by, continues to poison relations between the countries to this day. It was the last hurrah of an already defunct empire. What’s more, with England 10 times larger than Scotland, it isn’t even a particularly useful comparison.

The other, more fundamental problem is where this leaves that other constituent parts of the United Kingdom, which Wheatcroft does not even name check in his article. Does Wales suddenly become part of England? I’m sure they’ll love that. And what about Northern Ireland?

The latter is an issue that I feel the SNP need to address as well. Most Northern Irish protestants are Ulster Scots and have more in cultural ties with Scotland than England. Indeed, the Unionists that I’ve known have generally been not so much pro-Union as anti-Ireland. Several have told me that they not only support Scottish Independence, but would want Northern Ireland to have some form of political union with the Scots under such a circumstance as well.

I can’t help but think that Scottish Independence is going to cause Northern Ireland some difficulty down the line. Will they be content with remaining in the UK, or will a movement for Ulster-Scots unity emerge? Or will they simply feel abandoned? Scottish Independence would potentially upset the delicate balance laid out in the Belfast Agreement. Presumably Scotland would remain in the Council of the Isles, but I would be amazed if it didn’t raise the question of whether it should have a wider role. This is a can of worms Northern Ireland could do without.

Scottish Nationalists like to wrap themselves in history, but I can’t help but feel that their self-obsessed crusade for independence means turning their back on a lot of history which is little too complicated and doesn’t fit neatly into an England versus Scotland narrative. I can’t see a United Kingdom really working without Scotland, but it does rather leave Wales and Northern Ireland in the soup.

UPDATE: Peter Pigeon has more on this and Wheatcroft gets a kicking in the Guardian letters column, including from Neil Ascherson, whose article Wheatcroft uses as the basis for his.

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A couple of weeks ago, I was castigated for saying that nationalism was an ugly thing, citing the example of “Scottish Nationalists chucking faeces through English people’s letterboxes“. I later apologised for capitalising the en in Nationalist (I never meant to imply I thought it was SNP policy), but insisted (and insist) that it is the sort of nasty thing that nationalism leads people to conclude it is acceptable to do.

Via the English Democrats, I now learn of a Scottish website encouraging Scots to do exactly this to their English neighbours as the ‘ultimate revenge’. Only it is plastic. And meant as a ‘practical joke’. Ho ho ho.

Of course, the English Democrats have gone off on one, suggesting it is possibly an offence. I’m in the very uncomfortable position of actually agreeing with them for once.

So, all my SNP friends who have declined to condemn their party for accepting half-a-million poonds from Scotland’s most famous homophobe and then failing to vote for legislation designed to outlaw discrimination on the grounds of sexual orientation, will you condemn this?

Just add your denunciation in the comments box below.

UPDATE: postapoo has gone down, but their jape has resulted in the first bit of publicity for the English Democrats in years. Sky News. Metro.

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