Gains for TUV in Ulster council elections

Most results are now in from the local council elections in Northern Ireland, held on 18th May. These elections were postponed by a fortnight due to the STV proportional representation system, which meant that counting could not have been completed before the Coronation, had voting taken place on 4th May at the same time as the English elections.

As has previously been highlighted by H&D, Rishi Sunak’s supposedly ‘Conservative’ government seems happy to abandon the Union. Ministers made clear that they hoped unionist voters would swing away from the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), led by Enoch Powell’s former campaign manager Sir Jeffrey Donaldson, towards parties that embrace Sunak’s sell-out agenda.

In fact DUP seems to have held on to most of its support, while there were significant gains for Traditional Unionist Voice (TUV), the party that refuses to surrender sovereignty to Dublin and rejects a “sea border” between Northern Ireland and the rest of the UK.

TUV won nine seats in total, a net gain of three. They held on to their five seats on the Mid & East Antrim Council; gained a seat in Cusher (a rural area of County Armagh); regained a seat in Ballymoney while gaining another in Causeway; and gained a seat in the Court area of Belfast.

The latter gain was especially symbolic, as Court DEA includes the Shankill and previously elected a councillor from the Progressive Unionist Party (PUP), a party formerly aligned with loyalist paramilitaries but which in recent years has pursued a ‘woke’ agenda.

Until a few months ago, TUV might have expected even greater gains. But the party’s leaders would argue that it has succeeded in pulling DUP back towards its traditional agenda.

This election was a disaster for the two arms of liberal/leftwing unionism. The once-powerful UUP’s vote across the province fell from 14.2% to a new low of 10.9%, and it lost 21 of its previous 75 council seats. While the PUP disappeared from the electoral map completely, and its future now seems in doubt.

Madrid authorities seek to jail H&D writer in blatant political prosecution

Isabel Peralta – European correspondent of H&D who recently addressed our meeting in Preston – is in court this week in Madrid, where the authorities aim to jail her for three years.

The case has been brought under Spain’s equivalent of the UK’s racial incitement laws, but as our assistant editor Peter Rushton explains in this article, Isabel is being targeted in blatant political machinations: not only by the Spanish government, but also by lobbyists working in the interests of the Moroccan government.

For this and other reasons which we shall disclose in a later article, the prosecution of Isabel Peralta is a disgrace to Spanish justice. If she is convicted, the matter will be appealed if necessary as far as the European Court. Spanish politicians and Moroccan lobbyists are the true criminals, working against the interests of Spain and against the interests of Europeans.

The case dates back to 18th May 2021, when a demonstration was held outside the Moroccan Embassy in Madrid by a Spanish nationalist youth group. Isabel was at the time a leading activist in this group.

In an interview and speech, both of which were later broadcast on YouTube, Isabel explained the purpose of this demonstration: to draw attention to the attempted blackmail being exerted by the Moroccan Government, who were threatening to flood Spain with immigrants unless Spain accepted Moroccan control over Western Sahara.

This is a diplomatic dispute that has been going on for more than half a century, ever since Spain gave up its colonial control over the province once known as Spanish Sahara. Morocco seeks to grab the entire area for itself, but is opposed by an independence movement called Polisario Front, which is backed by Algeria.

It is in Spaniards’ economic interest to back the Polisario, partly in order to remain on good terms with Algeria, which supplies Spain with natural gas. But for the past two years the Moroccan government has exerted blackmail on Spain.

Morocco’s main weapon is control over illegal immigration into Spanish territory. They have indicated that they are prepared to turn the immigration tap on or off. And Spain’s socialist government is naturally unable or unwilling to take firm action against the consequent flood, just as it fails to resist mass immigration from elsewhere.

Essentially this was the background to the demonstration addressed by Isabel Peralta in Madrid in May last year. The demonstration targeted both the Moroccan government’s blackmail, and the Spanish authorities’ weakness.

Isabel’s interview and speech was making a serious and well-informed case. She explained that the demonstrators had come to the Embassy “to stand up to the indecency of our politicians who look the other way, while we suffer unprecedented racial replacement”.

She emphasised that “the problem here is not Morocco. The problem is what purports to be our own government, which with impunity sets off this explosion: the arrival of immigrants on a massive scale.”

Since politicians were not prepared to stand up to the Moroccan government’s blackmail, Spanish nationalist youth had to come forward. Isabel concluded her interview with words that require some explanation to British readers: “We shall not allow another Green March.”

The Green March – on 6th November 1975 – was the deliberate incursion by 350,000 Moroccans (organised by their government) into what was still Spanish colonial territory, in what is now Western Sahara. Because Spain was beginning its decolonisation, its soldiers were ordered not to open fire and to accept what was essentially an invasion.

So the Green March was a Spanish surrender, abandoning their responsibility to their former colonial subjects. Spain signed the so-called Madrid Accords, which effectively rewarded Morocco for their illegal invasion. (Part of the problem was that this was happening during the last weeks of General Franco’s life: he was dying and incapable of exercising any political authority.)

During her speech to the rally outside the Moroccan Embassy, Isabel picked up the theme that had concluded her interview: “Now as in 1975, they are trying again and they are coming with force, and 5,000 now seems like a lot to us, but in ten years they will seem like few, because if we do not stop them this will be our future: immigration in Europe will supplant our race, our diversity, our religion and our culture, and we are the only ones who are going to fight for it.”

The context is very clear: Isabel is correctly comparing the surrender in 1975, when the Spanish government gave in to Moroccan invaders and betrayed the indigenous people of Western Sahara, to the potential surrender in 2021-2022, when today’s Spanish government is similarly weak in the face of Moroccan threats.

It turned out that Isabel was absolutely correct. Not only has the Madrid government continued to allow floods of immigrants, it has also surrendered to Morocco’s blackmail. In March 2022, almost a year after Isabel’s comments, Spain’s socialist government carried out a U-turn and adopted a pro-Moroccan position, abandoning the decades-long Spanish policy that Western Sahara’s future should be settled by a referendum of its inhabitants.

The U-turn threatens vital trade deals including the supply of natural gas from Algeria.

The entire situation is a shambles, rooted in the inability of Spain’s socialist government to stand up for Spanish interests.

As so often across the West, when the arguments of nationalists are vindicated, the authorities’ response is to persecute us. And as so often, weakness in the face of an invader or a blackmailer merely invites further invasion and further blackmail.

This time it is our correspondent Isabel Peralta who is on the frontline. As they prepared their surrender to Morocco, the Spanish authorities launched a prosecution of Isabel, which has come to court in Madrid this week. Prosecutors are asking for her to be jailed for up to three years.

In presenting her interview and speech as inciting racial violence, prosecutors have deliberately ignored its political context. They have not only deliberately distorted her speech, they have even omitted crucial words from the transcript. Isabel clearly said that the demonstration was anti-immigration, but not motivated by hatred of any race. Such hatred, she emphasised, would be absurd since our entire political outlook is based on recognition of racial differences. We are motivated, she pointed out, “by admiration and devotion to our own race in the face of a threat to its very existence”.

The political manipulation at the heart of this case is obvious from official papers that I have examined.

Ten days after the demonstration, Madrid’s political police were visited by Sofia Bencrimo, an employee of a charity that promotes the integration of immigrants. Later the same day these police officers sent a report to the prosecutors: this was the first step in the process leading to Isabel’s criminal trial.

The political police (duly followed by prosecutors) presented Ms Bencrimo’s complaint against Isabel as though it reflected a charity standing up for ordinary immigrants who felt threatened by Isabel’s words. In the entire prosecution dossier of more than 90 pages, which I have studied in detail, Ms Bencrimo’s is the only complaint from anyone outside Spanish officialdom.

Yet the organisation this complainant represented – the Ibn Battuta Foundation – is not as simple as police and prosecutors pretend.

Its president is Mohammed Chaib Akhdim, a veteran politician and businessman with close personal and financial ties to the Moroccan government – the very people whose actions were being exposed and criticised in Isabel’s speech.

Chaib is a former MP in both the Catalan and Madrid parliaments for the left-wing party PSC (Socialists Party of Catalonia). But he is also a wealthy businessman with financial interests in his native Morocco, and in particular stands to benefit from Morocco taking control of Western Sahara. Since 1992 he was been director of business development in Morocco for COMSA Industrial, a company with vast interests in engineering and construction projects in Morocco, including the disputed territory of Western Sahara.

It is a remarkable coincidence that the “charity worker” who brought the complaint against Isabel Peralta was an employee of Chaib’s foundation.

H&D fully supports our brave and brilliant comrade Isabel. We look forward to her victory over this politically motivated prosecution – however long that victory takes.

We shall be reporting further on the development of this case, and on the related political persecution of Isabel in Germany, which was assisted by border security in our own country who disgracefully detained her for more than six hours a few weeks ago during her visit to England. Check this website and our January edition of H&D for more extraordinary revelations about the state of European justice.

Europe’s future is neither Washington nor Moscow!

H&D readers will probably be divided in their response to this morning’s news that Russian forces have invaded Ukraine.

Having for a lifetime become used to rejecting the lies of our own governments, European nationalists sometimes become too credulous in accepting the propaganda lines of rival governments. The Ukraine crisis is a sad example.

A vast range of European dissident movements – including ‘populists’, civic nationalists and racial nationalists – have become uncritical adherents of the Moscow line. (This is an eerie echo of the 1930s when many ‘democratic’ socialists in the West became fellow travellers of Stalin.)

Yet through the fog of war on this first morning of the invasion, it ought to be possible to discern some basic principles.

Having opposed Washington’s aggression in Iraq, we should (without any illusions about our own influence or lack of it) also oppose Moscow’s aggression in Ukraine. Let’s be clear – our political struggle is not for instant victory but for the next generation of Europeans. That’s why our struggle must have firm foundations of ideological principle.

As a matter of principle, we should refuse to take fees from Moscow propaganda outlets such as RT while this aggression continues.

And we should prepare for what happens next. Putin’s hubris is likely (as the Ancient Greeks knew) to end in nemesis. If some sort of ‘Western’ victory – and the destruction or weakening of Putin – is indeed the outcome, it won’t change the fact that ‘Western’ liberalism is profoundly sick, and it won’t make NATO the defenders of European interests.

The true Europeans – racial nationalists who reject both Washington and Moscow – will need to build true European unity.

New remake of old (1919) medal

One of our readers in Bangor (County Down) has had these enamel pin badges made up (20mm diameter – gold brooch pin back fitting). It’s a round badge with a Union Flag in the centre, on a gold background. In the outer-circle are the words “ONE FLAG” at the top; and “ONE PARLIAMENT” at the bottom; in gold lettering, on a back background. The badge has a nice gold trim.

The badge is a re-make of a 1919 medal, produced by Unionists in Ireland pre-partition, to oppose “Home Rule”. They supported just ONE Parliament – the one in London, and just ONE flag – the Union Flag of Great Britain and Ireland (as it was back then).

He was given the medal (which badly needs repairing now) by his late father – who had it given to him by his father in the 1940s. He hopes to leave it to one of his sons, but would like it repaired first. If anybody knows of anywhere that could repair the enamel on it please let me know?

Anyway, back to the NEW badges, he has just had made (50% of the profits will go to H&D). These are on sale for only £3.00 each (or two for £5.00) – plus £1.50 p&p (UK only) – for overseas sales please contact me re postage charges. If you are interested please email heritageanddestiny@yahoo.com

Dublin, Sinn Fein and Biden attempt conquest of Ulster by stealth

Last night’s resignation of Edwin Poots after just three weeks as leader of the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) has led to much sniggering among the liberal media establishment in London.

Yet this is far more than an internal party crisis for the DUP – it reflects a fundamental crisis over the meaning of democracy, and national/cultural identity.

Sinn Fein – political wing of the terrorist IRA – is trying to force through an ‘Irish Language Act’ as part of its invented ‘national culture’. Absurdly this would give the ‘Irish language’ equal status to English as an official language throughout Northern Ireland, even though it is a language that hardly anyone in the province speaks. Literally no-one in Northern Ireland speaks ‘Irish’ as their first language: even south of the border, only 1% claim to do so. Sinn Fein leaders regularly embarrass themselves when forced to stumble through a sentence or two in ‘Irish’.

As has been shown in several countries during the last century, imposing a language is part of a cultural struggle to achieve or compromise national sovereignty, which is clearly the case here.

The Dublin government and Joe Biden’s White House are part of a coordinated campaign to conquer Ulster. They are assisted by the provisions of the Good Friday Agreement, requiring that any devolved government in Stormont must involve a coalition of the largest Unionist party and the largest Republican party (in effect insisting on a DUP – Sinn Fein coalition).

Would President Biden be happy if the constitution forced him to share power with Donald Trump, regardless of the election result? Would President Macron of France, who had the cheek to imply that Northern Ireland was not part of “the same country” as the rest of the UK, be happy if he were forced to share power with Marine Le Pen and enact sections of her party’s agenda?

Yet that is what the Agreement imposes on Ulster.

Sinn Fein’s chutzpah knows no bounds. In response to Mr Poots’s resignation, Sinn Fein MP Chris Hazzard said that the DUP was “struggling to come to terms” with a “modern, progressive society”.

This from Sinn Fein – whose progressive modernism includes wishing to impose a language long dead (if indeed it ever existed in this form); a party rooted in barbaric terrorism, whose leaders (including the then Deputy First Minister!) openly scoffed at the law last year when holding a mass funeral for IRA godfather Bobby Storey.

The ultimate progressive modernism of Sinn Fein / IRA and their allies in Dublin and Washington is to force through the abandonment of Ulster identity and the imposition of Dublin rule against the democratic will of Ulster’s citizens.

That’s what lies behind the Irish Language Act and the EU’s trade protocols, and that’s why British patriots should stand with Loyal Ulstermen – whatever it takes – against this betrayal and in support of the United Kingdom’s integrity.

Ulster’s uncertain future as Northern Ireland marks centenary

One hundred years ago today Ireland was partitioned with six of Ulster’s nine counties becoming the new province of Northern Ireland.

While the terms “Ulster” and “Northern Ireland” are often loosely treated as synonymous, the sad truth is of course that three Ulster counties – Cavan, Donegal and Monaghan – were consigned to rule from Dublin a century ago.

Ulstermen in these three counties who remained loyal to the United Kingdom – as well as their fellow loyalists in the three other Irish provinces of Connaught, Leinster and Munster – were abandoned by the London government for whom they had fought in the Flanders mud just a few years earlier.

Nor was this a straightforward religious divide. Many Catholics across Ireland remained loyal to the Crown, a topic that will be discussed in a forthcoming H&D book review. While today’s anniversary partly represents the successful resistance by generations of Ulstermen to malign plots by 20th and 21st century liberals and trans-Atlantic “new world order” advocates, it also reminds us of that original betrayal of loyalists abandoned (often to a bloody fate) south of the border.

Ironically the centenary of Northern Ireland coincides with a political crisis in Ulster’s largest political party – the Democratic Unionist Party. Whoever becomes DUP leader will have to negotiate treacherous political waters during the Brexit transition process.

Though Boris Johnson is technically leader of the “Conservative & Unionist Party”, the latter half of his party’s name seems to have been forgotten in Westminster and Whitehall.

It will be the job of loyal Ulstermen and their friends on the mainland to remind Johnson (and if necessary his successor) that the “sovereignty” supposedly regained by Brexit is meaningless if accompanied by the betrayal of almost two million of our compatriots, and the surrender of sovereignty over more than 5,000 square miles of Northern Ireland.

We look forward to the day when the British Isles are again reunited in some form of federal structure, when England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland (north and south) stand together in the common struggle for racial and cultural survival.

Northern Ireland (at the 2011 census) was 98.2% White – by far the Whitest component of the British Isles. For all its founders’ pretence of ‘nationalism’, the Irish Republic is by contrast only 92% White and getting darker every day, especially in Dublin; Wales and Scotland are roughly 96% White; and England is of course the most multi-ethnic part of the UK – roughly 85% White.

Brexit Day – is it?

H&D correspondent Peter Hollings, writes from Leeds, Yorkshire.

Tonight there will be lots of people around the country celebrating Brexit Day. 11pm this evening marks the point at which the United Kingdom will finally get rid of the EU shackles that have blighted our lives for so many decades now.

At least that’s what all those out and about later today will be thinking as they vigorously wave their Union Jack flags and vociferously belt out Rule Britannia loud and proud into the night sky.

Whilst patriots across the nation are collectively giving the two -fingered salute to Brussels I’ll be looking on from ‘afar’ and directing a wry little smile at all those who for whatever reason think we have somehow achieved a monumental and history-making victory over our globalist oppressors.

Don’t get me wrong, I always enjoy seeing we Brits come together in acts of celebration regardless of its nature. Whether we’re singing patriotic songs and waving flags at events such as The Proms (minus the LGBT flags of course) or coming together in acts of remembrance for our war heroes, or celebrating sporting victories on the world stage for example, nothing gladdens the heart more than seeing our people openly and proudly wearing their patriotism on their sleeves.

My problem is that these Brexit celebrations are being held way too early and I feel that there are going to be an awful lot of patriots who are going to be disappointed and deflated in the coming months and years.

The fact of the matter is that a true Brexit, that is to say a return to full sovereignty, will not occur for many years to come. This is because only a true Nationalist government will ever have the will to protect and maintain our full sovereignty.

Consider the following:

1) Britain will legally leave the EU and enter a ‘transition period’ which runs until December 31. During this time the UK will remain subject to EU laws and free movement of people will continue.

2) We will continue to pour billions of pounds into the EU’s coffers during that transition period. We will have all of the usual costs but none of the representation whilst we maintain our expensive financial obligations towards the EU budget.

3) There’s a very real probability that the transition period will be extended (despite Boris Johnson’s rhetoric to the contrary) for a further one or two years delaying our departure further. Who is to say that the extension period won’t be continued for even more years after that?

4) The Northern Ireland question is far from complete. The architects of our destruction want a united Ireland in an effort to further dismantle our Union just as they want to see an ‘independent Scotland and an independent Wales (and Cornwall for that matter) eventually.

Northern Ireland will continue to follow EU rules on agricultural and manufactured goods, while the rest of the UK will not.

Additionally, the whole of the UK will leave the EU’s customs union but Northern Ireland will continue to enforce the EU’s customs code at its ports.

THE EUROPEAN COURT OF JUSTICE WILL MAINTAIN PRIMACY OVER UK LAW in certain matters because of these afore-mentioned NI trading agreements. This is not regaining full sovereignty or achieving a full and hard Brexit.

5) The Tory government says that after Brexit EU citizens will no longer have priority status when it comes to the issue of entry into Britain. We will, in all likelihood, see an actual reduction in the numbers coming over from the likes of Poland and Romania etc but in my opinion it will mean an increase in those arriving from Africa, the Far East, the West Indies, India, Pakistan and the Middle East. Our enemies are not going to stop mass immigration and the Great Replacement project just because of Brexit or should I say BRINO (Brexit In Name Only).There’s no call for celebration here wouldn’t you agree?

6) Britain/USA trade deal. Does anyone seriously think that a trade deal negotiated on behalf of Britain by Tory arch-capitalist globalists and Israel ‘Firsters’ will secure a deal that is actually good for Britain, because I don’t? Trump is waiting in the wings with his fellow neo-Con hawks to stitch the UK up ‘big-time’.

Any deal concluded will without a shadow of a doubt be good for the USA and bad for America’s ‘bitch’ – because that is how they see us and it’s how they see the rest of the world also. I expect our NHS to become a casualty eventually of any future trade deal in spite of persistent denials by the Tories who say the NHS isn’t for sale.

7) Even Farage has acknowledged that we will not have our full fishing rights and waters returned to us after Brexit negotiations are concluded. If this is so I have to ask what other areas of British life we are going to have to accept compromises on?

As there is still so much uncertainty ahead of us it really does surprise me that the Leavers are so willing to prematurely indulge in celebration and triumphalism at this early stage in proceedings.

I’ll save my celebrating for when I see a complete cessation of mass immigration into Britain. I’ll crack open the bubbly when I see Islam eradicated from our shores. I’ll pat myself on the back when I see a return of an above average birthrate figure for native Brits and a reduction in the birthrates of all the various foreigner groups residing here.

ALL IS CERTAINLY NOT LOST, BUT ALL IS FAR FROM BEING WON YET.

For me the flag remains at half-mast for the time being.

NF holds successful AGM

On Saturday 28th September 2019, the National Front held a most successful AGM.

This Annual General Meeting of the National Front took place at a key social and political moment in our country’s history: we are all witnessing a potentially major shift in political power in Britain. Parliament at Westminster is in turmoil as the MPs of the Remainer faction seek to sabotage the Referendum result and betray the winning seventeen million plus votes cast by the patriotic majority of Britons who want out of the hated European Union..

Speaker after speaker at our AGM focussed on the – unprecedented in our lifetime – events at Westminster. The basic question addressed by each and every speaker was: how best do we respond to the blatant betrayal of the Brexit vote that is openly being planned and committed by the anti-British party politicians of the old failure parties.

Step One: Never trust a word of the Tories. Theresa May never kept her promise to take us out of the EU; one would be very naive to think that BoJo, as he is known to friend and foe alike, will do any better.

We had an impressive line-up of speakers:

– Steve Smith of Burnley, the man who got the BNP onto the winning streak in the 2000s. Steve told us how to win and how to rebuild British Nationalism. Steve said that everything kind and beautiful is being poisoned by the multi-racial nightmare forced onto us. It is possible to to win, Steve assured us.

– Former NF chairman and former MEP Andrew Brons, as guest-speaker, cautioned us that the Establishment in its desperation to hold on to its illegitimate power will get increasingly vicious. Andrew said that it is our duty to maintain our racial-nationalist principles: never to sell out to civic/ multiracial nationalism, but equally never to break the law: but to tread carefully the narrow patriotic path, ignoring the blandishments and the traps of criminally intentioned agent-provocateurs. Always keep it legal, was Andrew’s much appreciated contribution to our AGM.

– Richard Edmonds, NF press-officer, reminded the audience of our past achievements: The NF had shown in its earlier years of the 1970s that the NF could build a nation-wide movement in record time; and the British nationalist activists of the BNP in the 2000s showed that we could successfully win elections up and down the country and see dozens of our brave men and woman candidates elected to public office. The turmoil and political turbulence at Westminster give us the opportunity to resurrect our nationalist movement.

At this point, a guest speaker from New Zealand addressed us. We are in a global fight to save the White race, Chris confirmed. Chris then informed us of the massive damage done to our movement in New Zealand by the criminal actions of the terrorist who attacked the mosque at Christchurch. This part really emphasised Andrew Brons’ advice. Our guest from New Zealand stressed that we Nationalists should get serious, because our opponents, the Globalists, are very serious.

Deputy chairman, Jordan Pont, called for more activism on the ground; Jordan thanked all those who had helped him campaign in the Spring council and parish elections in Sheffield. Jordan said that he could never sit at home and do nothing. Our Deputy chairman called for nationalist unity. Unity is the key, he declared. Both Jordan and NF Chairman Tony Martin, called for supporters to travel down to our capital to support the National Front Remembrance Parade to the Cenotaph at Whitehall, on Sunday afternoon the 10th November.

The concluding speaker was NF chairman, Tony Martin, who thanked all those members, activists and supporters who had helped to make 2019 yet another year in which the NF kept the flag flying. Tony was able to give us the political background to the shutting down of our web-site, which Tony assured us would be only temporary. In his report, Tony informed us that the NF had deliberately abstained from putting up candidates at the 2017 General Election, because we wanted it to be a straight fight between the Leave vote and the Remainers of the corrupt anti-British Establishment. Tony emphasized our primary opposition to mass-Immigration, “Britain has not got a housing crisis, Britain has got an Immigration crisis.” Tony’s final point here was that Repatriation should be promoted by us in a positive sense, with respect for and understanding for the ethnics.

English Democrats leader begins court battle to save Brexit

Robin Tilbrook, Essex solicitor and leader of the English Democrats, has begun a court case intended to save Brexit by establishing that Prime Minister Theresa May did not have the legal authority to delay our departure from the European Union.

Mr Tilbrook claims that the original exit date of March 29th remained legally valid, and that therefore we have already left the EU.

His argument states:

“Her purported request for an extension of the date of departure and the Government’s purported agreement to such an extension is and was unlawful and is and was null and void.”

Robin Tilbroook is presently a candidate for Epping Forest District Council, in the Chipping Ongar ward. The English Democrats’ greatest electoral success came in 2009 when their candidate Peter Davies was elected Mayor of Doncaster.

The government’s initial reply to Mr Tilbrook’s case is expected next week, and the High Court is then expected to set a hearing date.

Is the Falklands more British than the UK?

This week’s overwhelming vote by residents of the Falkland Islands to remain subjects of the British Crown – with only 3 votes against and 1,513 in favour – has led some observers (including the BBC) to ask the dangerous question: is the Falklands now more British than the mainland “mother country”.

Its population certainly more closely resembles Britain as it used to be: i.e. White.

The same is mostly true of British expatriates around the world: more than 200,000 in South Africa and New Zealand; more than 600,000 in the USA and Canada; 1.3 million in Australia; and more than 750,000 in Spain.

In the case of many expatriates the changing nature of their native country was a major reason for choosing to leave it, and their identity is not with today’s Britain, but with the once and (we hope) future Britain.

Meanwhile the Falklanders (and the inhabitants of other sometimes embattled remnants of empire such as St Helena and Gibraltar) hold fast to a strongly British identity as a symbol of defiance against those who would sell them out – in the case of the Falklands, to their intermittently aggressive neighbour Argentina.

London’s dispute with Argentina, which led to a brief military conflict in 1982, has flared up again during the last year, and might take another turn with the election of an Argentine Pope – the former Archibishop of Buenos Aires, Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio, who has become Pope Francis I.

Last year he told a congregation in the Argentine capital at a memorial service for the 1982 war:
“We come to pray for those who have fallen, sons of the homeland who set out to defend his mother, the homeland, to claim the country that is theirs and they were usurped.”

One might expect him to take a more diplomatic line now that he has become Pope. Some commentators have suggested that the Falklands controversy might delay a papal visit to the UK, but even in the immediate aftermath of the 1982 war memories were short. Argentina and Tottenham Hotspur football star Osvaldo Ardiles was sent on a diplomatic season’s loan to Paris St Germain in 1982-3, but soon returned to the London club for the 1983-4 season and remained for five years, even coming back as manager in 1993.  Ardiles and his fellow Argentine Spurs star Ricky Villa were inducted into the Tottenham Hotspur Hall of Fame in 2008.

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