Saturday 28 September 2013

Nation Revisited # 108


Nation Revisited # 108, October 2013

website: http://nationrevisited.blogspot.co.uk

 
The Spectre of Communism
Karl Marx and Frederick Engels published the Communist Manifesto in 1848. The first lines of it read: “A spectre is haunting Europe – the spectre of communism.” Collins English Dictionary defines the word “spectre” as - a ghost; phantom; apparition; a mental image of something unpleasant or menacing.

From October 1917 until December 1991 communist all over the world promoted the Soviet Union including the teachers and professors of the Frankfurt School; an informal group of academics who tried to bring about a “quiet revolution” by spreading propaganda amongst their students. Anti-communists accuse them of undermining national identity but the Communist Manifesto puts the blame on capitalism:

“The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most barbarian, nations into civilization. The cheap prices of commodities are the heavy artillery with which it forces the barbarians’ intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate. It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production: it compels them to introduce what it calls civilization into their midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves. In one word, it creates a world after its own image.”

Marx and Engels were right about the spectre of communism; a mental image of something unpleasant or menacing is still haunting us. Their manifesto predicted war between the classes and indicated Europe as the best place to start. But the terrible revolutionary conditions of the 19th century have passed into history and we have no need to be frightened of ghosts.

Despite the efforts of the Frankfurt School most young Britons emerge from the educational system as law-abiding, respectful and diligent citizens. Britain’s contribution to the arts is outstanding and we are world leaders in the fields of scientific research, pharmaceuticals, nuclear and precision engineering. Every generation has bemoaned modern morals and manners but given the right leadership our youngsters are capable of great things. The real and present danger to Britain and Europe is unrestrained global capitalism. A ruthless system that is committed to world domination, bereft of morality, dependant on cheap labour and addicted to perpetual warfare. It is not the ghosts of long dead academics that we should worry about but the living politicians, bosses and generals of the American military-industrial complex.

Representation of the People
Dave Cameron’s humiliating defeat in the Syrian debate was a rare victory for democracy in a country where membership of the political parties is collapsing and election turnouts average less than half.

Our most popular TV programmes are East Enders, Coronation Street and Emmerdale. They depict dramatized accounts of everyday life in London, Manchester and rural Yorkshire. BBC 2 is the most popular radio station with over 15 million listeners, this is a music station aimed at adults. Second is BBC Radio1 with 11 million listeners, this is also a music station but aimed at a younger audience. And third is BBC Radio 4 with 10 million listeners, this covers news, current affairs, the arts etc.

The most popular British newspaper is the Sun with 2.5 million readers, followed by the Daily Mail with nearly 2 million readers and the Daily Mirror with 1 million readers. They are a shameful waste of ink and paper. The Sun pioneered the use of semi-naked women on page three. The Daily Mail is obsessed with the Royal Family and the Daily Mirror caters to an industrial working class that has almost ceased to exist.

The great British public watches East Enders, listens to Radio 2 and reads the Sun. We also eat takeaways, shop at the local supermarket, and only go to church for weddings, christenings and funerals. Our unchallenging lifestyle is universally popular but it does not equip us to make informed political decisions.

Some American states used to have literacy tests for voters. They were outlawed by the Voting Rights Act of 1965. They may have been discriminatory but they restricted the franchise to those capable of understanding what they were voting for. In Louisiana potential voters were given a complicated test that defeated most of them.

In the UK the voting age has been dropped to 16 for the coming Scottish referendum and there is talk of extending voting rights to prisoners, lunatics and expatriates. Everybody is encouraged to vote for candidates who they have probably never heard of and know nothing about. And the party with the most votes gets to raise taxes, pass laws, make war and do what it likes until the next general election.

This system was devised in the age of the stagecoach to represent a privileged minority of male landowners. In those days communications were slow and MPs from outlying areas took weeks to get to Westminster. But in the age of universal suffrage and instant communications there are quicker ways to express our opinions. There is no reason why we shouldn’t have referendums by e-mail or text message. If the powers that be really believe in democracy they would embrace the idea; instead of waffling on about “the sovereignty of Parliament”. But if we adopted modern methods we wouldn’t need 650 MPs and 760 members of the House of Lords.



Captain Henry Kerby MP
In AK Chesterton’s book Facing the Abyss he described his dealings with Captain Henry Kerby MP. AK was something of an authority on conspiracies but he probably never knew that Kerby was an MI5 agent.

“What goes on in the minds of Right-Wing MPs intelligent enough to be aware of what their leaders are doing? In the middle 50s Captain Henry Kerby, Conservative MP for Arundel, asked me to visit him at the House of Commons. His object was to tell me that he and very many of his colleagues greatly admired the work I was doing in defence of British interests at home and overseas. I expressed my gratification adding that it would be even more encouraging were the Members to defend these causes from the floor of the House of Commons. “Never fear, it will come, it will come” he assured me. The years went by but nothing came. Then it occurred to me to ask why, if the others were afraid to speak out. Kerby did not defy the Devil.

Here as far as I can remember is his answer: “Look at the chaps on our side of the House, if they do not posses private means have this, that, or the other City directorship, or are political advisers to this or that big corporation they would struggle financially. Some of the biggest corporations have quite a bevy of political advisers, and not from all Benches! For my own part I have no City directorship or emoluments from any outside source. If I were to stand up in the House and hammer home the truths you publish, Central Office would not lose a day before going to work in my constituency. Someone else would be put forward as the official candidate at the next election and I would be ditched.”

Kerby’s ironical understanding of his colleagues in Parliament shows something of the reality of life in the Palace of Westminster, as it does the unreality of many popular conceptions of what takes place there. While it cannot be said that the politician is a greatly esteemed figure in modern Britain few people realize how great the difference between Parliamentary values and the values held in private life.”

Captain Henry Kerby MP (1914-1971) introduced an Early Day Motion in 1964 calling for the power to issue money to be restored to the Crown. This confirmed him as an enemy of international finance and a hero to the far right. He was also a fierce supporter of the duodecimal system who called decimalization:  “this metric madness, this alien academic nonsense, introduced by the back door by a bunch of cranks and the big business tycoons.”

We now know that Kerby was a wartime SAS officer who fought with Tito’s Partisans. He spoke prefect Russian and acted as a parliamentary interpreter during the visit of Nicolai Bulganin and Nikita Khrushchev in 1956. He retired from MI5 1966 but he continued to spy on his fellow parliamentarians. He tipped off Harold Macmillan about the Profumo affair, spread the rumour that Ted Heath was homosexual, and alleged that Harold Wilson was a Soviet agent. But despite his anti-socialist pretentions he ended his days as Harold Wilson’s personal spy inside the Tory Party.

This article is based on; Richard Davenport-Hines, An English Affair. Peter Wright, Spycatcher, and Freddie Feest, On Red Alert).

Gas and Hypocrisy
In recent years the British and French air forces under NATO command have bombed targets in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya killing an unknown number of civilians. The Americans have killed 2,809 Afghans and Pakistanis with pilotless drones (The Bureau of Investigative Journalism), and their client state Israel used napalm, depleted uranium shells, white phosphorus bombs and anti-personnel mines to kill thousands of Palestinian and Lebanese civilians. With this appalling record of aggression we have no right to usurp the function of the UN Security Council by intervening in Syria.

The British media doesn’t like the Syrian regime but they probably wouldn’t like the al-Nusra Front if they took a good look at them. They are mostly foreign mercenaries armed and funded by Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States.

The Emirate of Qatar operates the world’s third largest gas field. They are trying to build a pipeline to export gas from the Persian Gulf to Turkey. They have spent $3 billion trying to install a puppet regime in Syria because Bashar al-Assad is allied to rival gas producers Russia and Iran and will not allow it to cross his territory. Estimates of the potential European gas market run into trillions of dollars.

But the Syrian war is not just about gas; either poisoned or natural. It is part of the ongoing struggle between Saudi Arabia supported by the US, and Iran supported by Russia. Israel is happy to see Syria destroyed but there is no compelling European interest; Britain and France are just obeying orders. The centre-right government of Dave Cameron and the centre-left government of Francois Hollande are united in their unquestioning support for “American exceptionalism”.

Two years ago rioting mobs burned down Croydon town centre and terrorized the UK but the Syrians refrained from commenting on our misfortune. We have got a persistent housing crisis. Our borders are completely out of control and nobody knows how many illegal immigrants are in the country. Our public services are being starved of investment and youth unemployment is unacceptably high. We have got more than enough problems without sticking our noses into the Middle East. Following the decisive vote in Parliament we should stop pretending to be a world power and sack William Hague; a strutting, boastful, ridiculous Foreign Secretary who thinks he is Lord Palmeston sending a gunboat to put down a native uprising.

John Tyndall on Europe and the Commonwealth
John Tyndall had a long and turbulent political career but in death he has become the spiritual leader of the far right. He believed in restoring our ties with the white dominions and his followers are still pursuing that policy. His thoughts were set out in a National Front booklet from the seventies entitled “Britain: World Power of Pauper State”.

“Australia, New Zealand and Canada do not have to be won back into the Commonwealth; they are in it now. They have to be persuaded to join with Britain in making the Commonwealth more than just a phrase, in making it work as a co-ordinated body able to count in the balance of modern world power. South Africa and Rhodesia have to be persuaded to rejoin and thence to do the same for their co-members. If we were living in any period before 1918 it would be realistic to propose that these countries enter immediately into a full political federation which would grant to some supreme ruling body executive powers over foreign policy, trade and tariffs, defence and other major fields of decision. This was always a desirable course for the Empire and Commonwealth, and for a long time it might have been straightaway feasible had there been in the leading Commonwealth nation, Britain, a government with the determination to pursue it. Much water has flowed under the bridge since that time and the best prospect that the immediate future can offer is that the countries concerned may be persuaded to return to a relationship based on strong voluntary co-operation such as existed between 1918 and 1945.”

Britain tried to unite the Empire at Ottawa in 1932. But British Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin’s plan for Empire Free Trade was vetoed by the United States. We were in no position to defy America. British exports had slumped by 50% since 1929; we had a trade deficit of £100 million (£1.6 billion in today’s money) and 3 million unemployed. Eighty years later a reconstructed Commonwealth is just as unlikely because Canada is fully integrated into the North American Free Trade Area, South Africa and Zimbabwe are black-run states, and Australia and New Zealand have found new markets. The following quotation is from John Tyndall’s book The Eleventh Hour:

“In this book I have emphasized the national and British interest, and called for the building in Britain of a movement of nationalism. This is necessary because Britain is our country and it must come first in our priorities – along with those other countries sharing with us a British heritage. But none of this should obscure the fact that, at a certain level our struggle is global – just as we are confronted by a global enemy. I have acknowledged our spiritual and intellectual debt to nationalist thinkers of the era preceding 1914, and it is a considerable one. But in our thinking today and in the future nationalism must take on something of a different dimension to the one dominant at that stage of history. Over and above the rivalries of nations, there is the transcending interest of Western Civilization, Western Culture and – as the creator of these things – the White European Race. Here we must see “The West”, not in the form currently fashionable: as a coalition of organized in mutual defence of the dubious blessings of ‘liberal democracy’ and ‘capitalism’, but as a cultural and above all racial entity. In this regard, the peoples of Eastern Europe currently under communist rule are in truth part of the same entity.”

John Tyndall was a nationalist who campaigned against the European Union but he recognized our cultural and racial origins and he even accepted our kinship with the peoples east of the Oder-Neisse Line. The British people are worried about the economy, crime and immigration. Those implacably opposed to Europe will vote Ukip and carry on dreaming of Empire, but those of us who acknowledge “the transcending interest of Western Civilization” know that the Commonwealth will not be revived and that we must fully engage with Europe.

The free movement of labour policy was drawn up in the days of full employment but the founding fathers of the EU never envisaged mass migration from the former Soviet bloc. All the major states of Europe are experiencing the same problems so there will be no problem in changing the rules. And Angela Merkel’s stunning victory in the German general election means that Europe is on track towards political and economic union.

Contrary to the propaganda of the popular press the EU is governed by its member states. Margaret Thatcher negotiated her rebate, the Poles kept aspects of their legal system, and the Danes linked the krona to the euro. National requirements are being met within the framework of the EU. It’s up to us to make it fit for purpose.


Union Movement Policies
The world has changed dramatically since the demise of Union Movement nearly forty years ago. Communism has collapsed in Russia and turned into rampant capitalism in China. The European empires in Africa and Asia have gone. Britain is recovering from the worst recession since the thirties but we are still stumbling from one crisis to another. Our borders are almost unguarded against an invasion of economic refugees, our defence relies on NATO, our energy policies are in chaos and we are at the mercy of world trade. People are increasingly disillusioned with party politics but none of the existing parties offer a way out. We will not be developing Africa as envisioned by Oswald Mosley, and the UK demographic has changed. But the core policies of Union Movement have stood the test of time. They are outlined in the following leaflet from the early sixties.

Britain should join with Europe, the former white dominions and southern Africa in creating a great “third force” in the world, independent of both America and Russia. This “third force” should have a central government for its defence, the economy, finance and scientific development, with power to raise wages and control prices as production increased for a guaranteed market, insulated against unfair competition from the rest of the world.

The pressures on our housing and other social problems should be eased by stopping further immigration and by returning post-war immigrants to good jobs and conditions in their homelands to which prosperity had been returned by using the surplus wealth and production of united Europe. Britain should make a start now.

The housing problem should be relieved by taking it out of the hands of local authorities and entrusting it to the government, with power to treat it as an “operation of war”. That is, the government should organize the mass production of houses for the people, as they organized the mass-production of armaments during the war. The rents of the houses thus cheaply produced should be further reduced by the provision by government of low-interest loans for housing, paid for by high-interest loans for luxury construction or enterprise.

While there should be a central European government there should also be independent national and regional governments for each European country and the main regions. This would enable England, Wales, Scotland and other European countries to have their own parliaments for internal affairs and for the preservation of their national and regional cultures.

There should be freedom of speech for everyone, guaranteed by the government, which should maintain law and order in the State and take effective action against mob violence, which today denies freedom of expression to any view of which its agitators disapprove.

There should be freedom of the press, for both newspapers and the public. Any man who felt himself misrepresented in the press should be guaranteed (by law) equal space to reply in the newspaper concerned. This would free the public from the expense of seeing justice through costly libel actions and free the newspapers from the legal blackmail of a threatened libel action by some unscrupulous racketeer.

Government elected by the whole people alone should govern, and that both trade unions and employers must obey the law. But government should give clear economic leadership to get better wages and to stop price rises as science increases the means of production. Then we will have co-operation instead of conflict in industry.

The “brain drain” should be halted and a new spirit of national service aroused in our British people by relating all reward directly to skill, effort, initiative and responsibility. There should be “great reward for great service”, crowned by higher pensions drawn from the wealth of the new economic system.


Neville Bealing
I recently received an enquiry about Neville Bealing from Jose Bellido Anon, a postdoctoral scholar at Birkbeck College, London University who is working on the history of post-war Britain in the twentieth century. I was able to tell him that Neville Bealing was a political activist with the National Labour Party; a forerunner of the National Front led by John Bean and Andrew Fountaine. He spoke at their inaugural meeting in 1957, together with John Tyndall, and he wrote an article in the first issue of Combat calling for white solidarity and workers’ partnership.

I did not know Neville Bealing (I was only 12 in 1957) but his contemporaries remember him as an imposing figure who spoke several languages including ancient Greek and Persian. He was a follower of Francis Parker Yockey and part of a convivial group that frequented the Black Horse in Kentish Town; this included Bert Clare, Peter Greenslade, Frank Leonard and the enigmatic John Gaster.

In 2009 a non-political fellow linguist called Michael Rank posted the following article on his website:

“I am not impressed with GCHQ. I dare say Britain’s main intelligence gathering centre doesn’t feel the need to impress the likes of me (or probably you), but it could have been more helpful nevertheless.

I emailed GCHQ a few weeks ago about a colleague, Neville Bealing, who died recently aged 83. I was going to say a few words at his funeral in a week’s time, so I asked them politely and somewhat hesitantly if they could confirm that Neville worked for GCHQ (or its predecessor) about 50 years ago.

He had mentioned to a colleague that he had worked for GCHQ, and it must have been as long ago as the late 1940s or the early 50s as he worked for the company I work for as a translator for an amazing 50 years. He retired (reluctantly) only a year or two before his death.

I didn’t expect GCHQ to tell me much; just confirmation that he had worked there would have been enough.

But they didn’t even reply. Not so much as an acknowledgement, not even a computer generated one. This doesn’t surprise me hugely but it does make me angry. I don’t like to be ignored when I ask a polite, reasonable question…

Oh, as a tribute to Neville I would like to mention his other main claim to fame. He sat on Thomas Hardy’s knee as a baby. His father was a photographer in Shaftesbury, Dorset, so he must surely have taken a photograph of this great event, but Neville told me he had never seen a copy”.