Will Labour save the Union?!?

A few minutes ago Labour won a huge victory in the Rutherglen & Hamilton West parliamentary by-election, caused by a successful recall petition against the disgraced SNP MP Margaret Ferrier, who had breached pandemic regulations.

This is a constituency on the outskirts of Glasgow, and was one of many that swung heavily to the SNP in 2015. Labour briefly took it back with a tiny majority in 2017, before losing again to the SNP in 2019.

Given the circumstances of the previous MP’s departure, no-one was surprised by Labour’s win, but what was remarkable was its scale: a swing of more than 20%, with Labour taking 58.6% of the vote (up from 34.5% four years ago).

With the collapse in the Conservative Party’s vote – losing their deposit on only 3.9% after polling 15% here in 2019 – it’s perhaps surprising that Reform UK made no impact at all, taking only 1.3% (almost identical to the UKIP vote in 2019). This was the second bad result in 24 hours for Reform UK: they managed only 6.3% in a local council by-election in Tamworth, where their candidate is also standing in the forthcoming Tamworth parliamentary by-election and there has been intense activity in recent weeks promoting him. UKIP also fielded their parliamentary candidate in this local Tamworth by-election and polled only 1.6%.

Back in Rutherglen, Niall Fraser from the Scottish Family Party fought an energetic campaign, opposing the absurd wokeness of the SNP and Labour on gender issues, but took only 319 votes (1.0%).

Perhaps the most significant aspect of this by-election result is that it is yet another signal of the end of SNP hegemony. Until the last year or two, many H&D readers might have been excused for being pessimistic about the future of the Union. But the SNP’s many crises look as though they might prove terminal for the cause of Scottish ‘independence’.

Another hopeful sign this week was a statement by Labour’s leader Sir Keir Starmer that he could not envisage circumstances where he would call a referendum in Northern Ireland on the future of the Union.

Of course H&D will continue to oppose Starmer and his party on almost all of their policies, and we can expect that (like the Tories) Labour will pursue policies that betray Ulster by stealth.

But that doesn’t stop us welcoming the total defeat of Jeremy Corbyn and his gang of IRA sympathisers, who had they somehow entered Downing Street would have betrayed Ulster to the IRA as well as abandoning our fellow Europeans to Vladimir Putin’s horde of barbarians.

The SNP are a less gruesome band of traitors, but their total defeat is again something to celebrate. One small step towards the renewal of the United Kingdom, which will of course also require the defeat of the other old gang parties!

The Rudolf Hess memorial, the Asian Marxist lawyer, and subversion in Spain – a strange tale of the new ‘European’ left

Edinburgh’s extradition court has been the scene of a drama played out across several episodes, demonstrating certain common factors among Europe’s enemies, and the deep historical roots of a challenge facing all European patriots.

H&D‘s assistant editor – writing at the Real History blog – today explains the strange story of the Rudolf Hess memorial stone, an Asian Marxist lawyer, and subversion in Spain – an extraordinary tale of the new ‘European’ left.

Visit this site after 12th October for an update direct from the extradition court in Edinburgh, where the fate of Vincent Reynouard will be decided. Click here to subscribe to H&D so that you can learn the full story in our November edition, and obtain the two-part interview with Vincent Reynouard in issues 115 and 116 of H&D.

End of an era for Scottish National Party

The death of Winnie Ewing, aged 93, marks the end of an era in Scottish politics.

It was Mrs Ewing’s shock victory at the 1967 Hamilton by-election that elevated the Scottish National Party from the political fringe and began its journey to become the dominant force in Scottish politics. She lived to see the SNP’s rise and the election of three successive party leaders as First Ministers of a devolved government at Holyrood – Alex Salmond, Nicola Sturgeon and Humza Yousaf.

But by the time of her death the SNP was in crisis and the second (and most successful) of those leaders, Nicola Sturgeon, was under arrest.

Moreover, just after Winnie Ewing’s death on Wednesday this week, her son Fergus Ewing – a Member of the Scottish Parliament – was threatened with expulsion from the SNP group at Holyrood after voting against the party’s coalition partner, Scottish Green Party co-leader Lorna Slater.

Canadian-born Ms Slater is being criticised by the Tories (and now by Fergus Ewing) for her promotion of a deposit return scheme involving a refundable 20p deposit on drinks containers. Problems and delays with this scheme have caused massive costs to Scottish businesses.

Fergus Ewing was already critical of many trendy policies pursued by the SNP under Sturgeon and Yousaf, and also strongly backed by their Green allies, including the highly controversial gender recognition law. He backed Kate Forbes, Yousaf’s opponent in this year’s SNP leadership election.

The Ewing family and Ms Forbes remain engaged in a battle for the SNP’s identity. They are of course not racial nationalists in any way, but they represent a form of very mild civic nationalism, as against the likes of Sturgeon and Yousaf whose vision of the SNP is environmentalist, left-liberal, and pro-‘trans’.

A third group of more old-fashioned left-wingers has partly broken away from the party to create Alba, led by Sturgeon’s predecessor Alex Salmond, but this has become irrelevant due to Salmond’s well-publicised character flaws and Putinism. Most of the SNP left-wing remains loyal to Sturgeon and Yousaf, despite continuing scandals that beset the party.

During the first half of the 20th century, some forms of Scottish and Welsh nationalism had something in common with fascism, but this tendency had been suppressed by the time Winnie Ewing put the SNP on the map.

Coincidentally, her victory at Hamilton in November 1967 (and the consequent explosion of the SNP onto Britain’s political scene) came just nine months after the creation of the National Front in February 1967, and four months before the NF’s first parliamentary by-election campaign. In 1989, halfway through her twenty years as MEP for the Highlands and Islands, Mrs Ewing caused controversy by joining the European parliamentary group then called the Rainbow Group, which included various types of nationalists including Italy’s Northern League (Lega Nord, now known as Lega).

But by contrast to the NF, the SNP were never racial nationalists and in recent years they have become the most shameless promoters of racial and cultural degeneracy. Winnie Ewing was no doubt genuinely appalled by some of this, but her own career effectively started the rot. In this sense her life’s mission was a failure, and the likely defeat of the next Scottish independence campaign will seal that failure, whether or not SNP leaders end up facing criminal charges.

Unionists fly the flag in Bellshill

With police investigations continuing, H&D cannot comment on the arrest of Nicola Sturgeon (former First Minister of Scotland) amid the continuing collapse of the Scottish National Party which she led from 2014 until earlier this year.

This entertaining shambles has already had an impact at the ballot box. This week in Bellshill, North Lanarkshire the SNP lost a council by-election to Labour, with a swing of more than 13% (enough to wipe out almost all of SNP’s Westminster seats if repeated at next year’s general election).

Labour of course are no friends of the Union either, but the Bellshill by-election was also good news for sincere patriots. As a recent Spectator article put it, the SNP is “sleepwalking into extinction”, facing “electoral nemesis”.

The British Unionist Party, formed in 2015 by activists from the Better Together campaign who successfully fought to preserve the United Kingdom in the 2014 Scottish referendum, won its first council seat in another North Lanarkshire ward in May 2022.

This week they contested Bellshill for the first time and despite a crowded ballot paper with no fewer than ten candidates, their candidate Billy Ross polled a creditable 4.3% finishing in fourth place. Mr Ross defeated the much hyped Alba Party (led by former SNP leader Alex Salmond), and various ‘protest vote’ parties. The anti-vaccination party Freedom Alliance and the much-diminished UKIP polled only 0.3% each: microscopic votes (just seven for Freedom Alliance and five for UKIP!) confirming their irrelevance.

This latest result for the British Unionist Party – combined with a strong set of results for Traditional Unionist Voice in last month’s local elections in Northern Ireland – shows that well organised smaller parties can make an impact even if they only win small numbers of seats.

Unionists can begin to influence mainstream politics, preventing major party leaders from pursuing their subversive and cowardly agenda of breaking up the UK.

After years in which republicans and fake ‘nationalists’ appeared to have history on their side, the tide is beginning to turn.

And for H&D readers, there is some reasonably good news from the ballot box at last! Patriotic parties in England are in steep decline, but there has been good news in recent weeks from Northern Ireland, and now to a certain extent in Scotland.

Sturgeon’s ‘trans’ obsession wrecks Scottish ‘nationalist’ project

Nicola Sturgeon yesterday announced her resignation as Scottish First Minister and leader of the Scottish National Party: she will remain in post until the SNP completes election of her successor, a process that will last for six weeks.

For several years Sturgeon (who took over the SNP from Alex Salmond in 2014) was rated as the most effective party leader in the UK – so much so that the Conservative Party succeeded at the 2015 general election by portraying then Labour leader Ed Miliband as a likely puppet of Sturgeon, in the event of a coalition government at Westminster.

When her embittered predecessor Salmond launched a rival party (Alba) two years ago, it proved a flop, failing to win a single election at any level.

But in recent months Sturgeon’s core project – Scottish independence, the SNP’s raison d’être – has seemed to be floundering. Opinion polls were starting to show that Scots would reject independence if offered a second referendum, and in any case such a referendum was not going to be offered until the present Tory government loses office in another couple of years.

Meanwhile Sturgeon had become obsessed by an increasingly weird ‘woke’ agenda, typified by the ‘Gender Recognition’ law that was passed by the Scottish Parliament but vetoed by Prime Minister Rishi Sunak. (Under the present devolution arrangements, Scotland has devolved powers in some areas, but does not yet have the right to allow a man to call himself a woman and demand access to female facilities.)

This political row turned into a scandal when a convicted rapist, Adam Graham, was found to have been moved to a women’s prison having decided that he is now a ‘transgender woman’ called Isla Bryson.

Eventually Graham/Bryson was transferred back to a men’s prison, but the First Minister (usually a fluent media performer) struggled to answer interviewers who asked her whether she regarded this convicted rapist as being a man or a woman!

Polls show that the majority of Scots oppose Sturgeon’s ‘gender recognition’ law, and she had failed to win over even a majority of SNP voters on this issue.

No doubt there were other reasons contributing to Sturgeon’s decision to quit (including personal factors), but there’s little doubt that the ‘trans’ issue derailed her leadership, which depended on holding together a broad coalition in favour of independence, rather than incessantly pandering to the ‘woke’ lobby.

Sturgeon seems to have made the mistake of believing her own legend, and revelling in flattery from her acolytes in the left-liberal media.

Her own favoured candidate for the leadership is Humza Yousaf – from a Pakistani family and theoretically a Muslim, but who fully supports Sturgeon’s woke agenda and is a fellow Glasgow MSP, responsible for Health and Social Care in her cabinet. If Yousaf were to win, it would mean that Scotland’s two largest parties were both led by Pakistanis. (Anas Sarwar has been leader of the Scottish Labour Party for the past two years.) Another possible pro-Sturgeon candidate, who might have had more chance of reuniting the party, her present deputy Keith Brown, a former Royal Marine commando who served in the Falklands War, ruled himself out.

While Yousaf is fully on board with the woke agenda, another candidate who has already launched her campaign is Ash Regan, who was among the leading rebels against Sturgeon’s pro-‘trans’ policy. Regan is an Edinburgh MSP: she resigned from Sturgeon’s government in protest at the “gender recognition” plans. Regan has advocated reuniting Scottish nationalism and bringing Sturgeon’s old enemies back into the party, but has no chance of winning the leadership and is more likely to end up in the wilderness herself, possibly in some future alliance with Salmond’s Alba party.

One likely candidate not standing is the initial bookies’ favourite Angus Robertson, who led the SNP contingent in the House of Commons before losing his Westminster seat in 2017 and restarting his career in the Scottish Parliament. Robertson was disliked for years by the SNP’s left-wing because of his role a decade ago in changing the party’s defence policy to a more pro-NATO stance. It’s likely that today’s left cares more about ‘culture wars’, and after Putin’s invasion of Ukraine there is little support for anti-NATO policies outside the fringe of the fringe (whether left or right). But Robertson remains personally unpopular among many of his colleagues, and clearly found less support than expected.

It now seems that the main challenger to Yousaf is Kate Forbes, Secretary for Finance and the Economy in Sturgeon’s cabinet and presently on maternity leave. Her biggest problem is that she is a practising member of the Free Church of Scotland, which takes a conservative line on ‘culture wars’ issues such as the ‘trans’ debate. Fortunately for Forbes, she was on maternity leave during the Holyrood vote on gender recognition last December, but social liberals and the trans lobby will doubtless vote for Yousaf. Ash Regan’s candidature will allow Forbes to present herself as a relative moderate and ‘compromise’ candidate on social issues, but for now Yousaf is the bookies’ favourite.

[NB: An earlier version of this article referred incorrectly to the Free Presbyterian Church rather than the Free Church of Scotland.]

Change to German electoral system – is Sir Keir watching?

This week the German coalition government of Social Democrats, Greens and Liberals began moves to reform the Federal Parliament (Bundestag) in what would be their country’s biggest constitutional shake-up for many years.

With electoral reform likely to be on the UK’s political agenda after the Conservatives almost certainly lose the next general election (due by January 2025 at the very latest) the choices made in Berlin are worth examining. Especially because their present government is ideologically very similar to a likely Labour-led coalition in the UK.

Germany has a hybrid system, with some MPs elected on a Westminster-style first-past-the-post system, but others elected via a top-up list so as to make the entire Bundestag represent the nationwide percentage share of the vote.

This hybrid system means that the Bundestag is not simply divided proportionally to match the parties’ share of the vote. For example, to gain proportionally-based seats, a party must poll at least 5% nationwide, or qualify for proportional top-ups if it wins at least three directly-elected seats. This happened recently with the far-left party Die Linke.

On the other hand, a party with a very strong regional base can end up winning more directly elected seats than a proportional carve-up would have given them. This is the case with Bavaria’s conservative party CSU. Extra seats are created to balance out such anomalies and are known as ‘overhang’ seats: these have meant that the present Bundestag is the largest ever, with 736 MPs.

This week’s proposed reform would eliminate ‘overhang’ seats, and fix the number of German MPs at 598.

At a basic level the reform is likely to be popular with voters, since it will save money and cut bureaucracy. And it’s a cunning move by the government because it will weaken the CSU. Even though CSU is the sister party of CDU, the present system of ‘overhang’ balancing takes no account of that, and gives an artificial boost to the combined CDU-CSU strength.

Reforming this would be likely to make any future conservative-led government more dependent on a deal with parties further to the right – presently AfD (Alternative für Deutschland) or whichever party succeeds AfD if it splits/declines. Unsurprisingly, the present reform is similar to a policy that the AfD itself promoted four years ago.

Here in the UK the party in a similar position to CSU (though very different ideologically) is Nicola Sturgeon’s Scottish National Party. The present electoral system gives the SNP grossly inflated importance at Westminster, relative to its share of the UK-wide vote. At the last general election SNP won 3.9% of the UK-wide vote, and 48 MPs (i.e. 7.4% of the House of Commons). The system almost doubled the SNP’s importance at Westminster, and this would be far more important in the event of no major party gaining a Commons majority, thus making Sturgeon and her allies kingmakers.

By contrast a more purely proportional system would probably give a populist/nationalist party (i.e. whatever replaces Reform UK and UKIP) more Westminster seats than the SNP. The other big winners from a change to a German-style system would almost certainly be the Greens.

Most importantly for racial nationalists, it would end the ‘wasted vote’ argument that has so far prevented many of those who sympathise with our ideas from voting for a racial nationalist party.