In grotesque but sadly predictable fashion, Ian Duncan-Smith, the millionaire ex-Guards officer, and Secretary of State for Work and Pensions (square peg, round hole), is threatening to stop housing benefit to unemployed people who refuse to uproot themselves in order to find non-existent work elsewhere. In other words, a rehash of the classic “Get on your bikes” Tory dogma from the 80’s. While this proposal will no doubt propel many Daily Mail readers to erotic spasms of ecstasy, the English Radicals are curious to know - which part of the UK has labour shortages at the moment?

Or perhaps he has visions of sending them somewhere even further afield, such as Romania, or Hungary? After all, we’re in the EU now…….

Mr Duncan Smith, here are some facts from the real world for you to think about. 

For every new job vacancy that appears, the number of applicants is in double, sometimes treble, figures. 

Government plans to raise retirement ages for those already employed, will make a bad situation worse by preventing younger people from entering work.

Many newer jobs are currently filled by workers from the EU, mostly young men and women from eastern Europe, prepared to live in overcrowded, cramped conditions, working for long hours and low pay? Back to Victorian values, hurrah! 

Finally - there simply aren't enough jobs to go around in our crowded island.

Ironically, Tory policies from the Thatcher era were responsible for the demise of industrial areas that now have massive levels of unemployment: the “Free Market”, the beloved doctrine of global capitalism-loving Tories everywhere, dictated that foreign made goods made in sweatshop conditions, thus undercutting English goods, should be allowed to flood our markets and kill our home industries, whether it be coal or cloth, shoes or steel. The only solution they can dream up to compete with foreign manufacturers, is for English workers to gradually accept third world pay and conditions - hence this latest Tory plan, to make us compete feverishly for imaginary jobs.

And what was New Labour’s answer to the Tory demolition of British and English industry? Borrow money to create public sector non-jobs for the educated middle classes, whilst at the same time using the benefits system to create junkie-like dependency in the working class areas worst affected by industrial collapse, to ensure both groups' future support at the ballot box. Labour were in power for 13 years, yet their poorest seats are even poorer now, incredibly, than when they first took power! The economic mess we are currently in, can be traced back to both party’s short term “fudge” tactics, each one leaving a mess for the other one to clean up, but finding when they return to power much of the original mess is still there, plus some dodgy new carpet stains from the recently evicted tenants. 

It is not the job of government to spend taxpayer’s money hiring people to shuffle paper, or to make unwanted widgets, in order to make unemployment figures look better. The job of government is to protect its home industries - and therefore jobs - from unfair foreign competition, by heavy taxation on cheap, slave made imports, levelling the playing field for our higher waged workers to compete. It is the job of government to encourage foreign manufacturers to build factories here, not by bribery in the form of grants, but by allowing them to be classed as English companies while based here, to sidestep the heavy taxes we would otherwise impose. England is a huge market for any company – if they want to sell here, they should have to “make” here.

Only when your government has done ITS job, Mr Duncan-Smith - when you have created the framework for English industry to flourish, stemmed the tide of potentially unlimited EU economic immigration and allowed the elderly to retire at a reasonable age, will you be morally entitled to ask the unemployed to “get on their bikes” and fill the new jobs as they appear. Until then, the English Radicals suggest you live up to your reputation as the “quiet man” of politics.

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As the 300th British serviceman to die in Afghanistan is laid to rest this week, David Cameron tells us it is “desperately sad”, but “essential for British security” that we are there. I’m sure the English Radicals are not the only ones who find this “security” angle impossible to swallow. On the contrary, the British presence in Afghanistan is endangering the safety and security of the British public, by inflaming the anger of British Muslims – as can be seen from the Islamic “rent a mob” presence every time a regiment returns from a tour of duty. Lest we forget, the 7/7 bombers were almost to a man, British born Muslims, protesting against the British presence in Afghanistan and in Iraq.

And unless the Taliban are planning direct action by driving across Asia and Europe in Toyota 4x4’s to spray us all with semi-automatic gunfire, the security angle doesn’t really bear scrutiny, does it, Dave? 

You can’t invite people with strong links to other countries to live here, and then expect them to keep quiet when you start a war in that country. So in fact, the British presence in these Islamic countries is undermining British life, by dividing its citizens.

The British state wants its cake and to eat it: an idyllic “multi-culti” Britain, with all colours and faiths holding hands and skipping joyfully through the meadow together, while it occupies a land many of those British citizens hold dear, to prop up a corrupt regime on behalf of a bigger corrupt regime. And there lies the real reason Britain is in Afghanistan: to legitimise the American presence there. Why are the Americans there? Because of its strategic importance, oil pipelines, opium (production is up since the invasion, strangely) and mineral wealth recently estimated at one trillion dollars. 

If you look at the operation from an American viewpoint, it’s been a fantastic success: through warfare, thousands of miles from your own borders, you have destabilised a country with incredible resources and strategic value which you are now the ruler of, your local puppets are in place and doing your bidding, all that remains is to strip it of its value, and when that’s achieved you can pull out, job done. What’s a few thousand NATO dead, or a hundred thousand Afghan dead, when there’s big money to be made?

So in effect, the “300” that the title refers to – the dead British servicemen who lost their lives in Afghanistan – did not die to bring democracy to the Afghan people, or to safeguard women’s rights as we are sometimes told, but to promote and safeguard the commercial interests of global capitalism for our “special relationship” partner, America. We really should be more choosy who our friends are.

For the love of Allah, Dave, grow a pair, stand up to “hopey-changey” Obama, and pull our troops out of Afghanistan, before another “300” die in vain. British Muslims will thank you for it (could be votes in it, Davey boy!) and the wider British public will thank you for it. As you are fond of telling us, sometimes difficult choices have to be made: you make one for a change, and see how you like it. The English Radicals would do it in a heartbeat.


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Even before they’ve got their feet under the Cabinet table, the Conservative-LibDem Coalition government has drawn up plans to force the weakest in our society to pay for the mistakes of the wealthy. Cameron says that ‘we’ will all share the pain of the next few years of financial austerity, but with eighteen millionaires in the Cabinet I very much doubt that ‘we’ all will. The fact is that the capitalist system under which we live needs to keep its foot on the throat of the poor so that they are ‘industrious’ – in other words work for next-to-nothing – and targeting the unemployed and the older citizens, by forcing them to work longer before pension age, is part of the process.

Recent surveys have shown that, on average, there are five unemployed claimants chasing every job vacancy, in some areas this rises to fifteen, especially in the north of England, the very areas that will also be targeted for cuts in public service jobs. In fact, these public service jobs that the ConDems now seek to wipe out, were actually created in areas of high unemployment; areas that had once contained major manufacturing, or mining, jobs that were then wiped out by a previous Tory government. So for the present regime to target these jobs is not just cynical, it is criminal, because every loss of public service employment affects the vulnerable in society, whether as clients or as workers.

If we examine the background to these plans to target the poor a bit more then we can see the real cynicism of capitalism and its political frontmen. The ConDems have announced plans to do away with the default pension age, despite evidence that there are hundreds of thousands of men over fifty who are long-term unemployed and facing age discrimination wherever they look, and nearly a million under-25s who are unemployed and can’t get onto the job ladder to start with. The fact is that if they do away with the pension age then the unemployed sixty-five year olds will now get £64 Job Seekers Allowance, instead of £100 pension and a bus pass, along with a gateway to many other age-related benefits, thus saving money for the government (and putting it into the pockets of the bankers). Similarly, by forcing the unemployed to do menial work for their £64 weekly JSA, it can create an unemployed labour army to replace the thousands thrown out of work from public services. It can then add to this unemployed labour army (similar to what the Nazis set up in 1933 by the way!) by forcing the disabled to work and pushing young mothers out to work earlier (and then the Tory right will complain when all the little Jakes and Joshes start running riot on their estate through lack of parental supervision). The new mastermind of the government’s attack on the vulnerable is an expert on poverty, Frank Field MP, whose Birkenhead constituency has consistently been one of the poorest, not just in Britain, but in Western Europe. Of course, Frank’s Labour government actually increased the gap between rich and poor so, coupled with his thirty years of watching Birkenhead live below the breadline, he really is the man to help the ConDems create more poverty.

As English Radicals who know our history, we have witnessed this cynical attack on the weak before, ever since the onset of the industrialisation of our country, politicians and businesses have worked cap-in-hand to force the poor to be ‘flexible’; ensuring they make slave labour wages acceptable by deterring men and women from claiming benefits. The capitalist system needs competition for jobs to keep wages low, and this means either maintaining high unemployment, or encouraging mass immigration; with the former the system will then make claiming benefits difficult, with the latter it highlights ‘racism’ and ‘xenophobia’ to prevent opposition to its activity. Both high unemployment and mass immigration force poorer communities into more hardship, whilst the capitalist system benefits. But, as we are now seeing, Governments also force the poor to pay the cost when there is economic failure; so the banks get bailed out whilst the unemployed and pensioners suffer. Capitalism is evil and the politicians who cynically front it are criminals.

The English Radical Alliance is different to every other political party in that we wish to see the capitalist system replaced by one which protects English workers from exploitation and encourages more people to run their own businesses or own shares in the company they work for. We wish to see a system that breaks up the monopoly of the big banks and localises more of our financial services, so making them more accountable to people at the grassroots. This system, Distributism, is a much fairer and more tolerant than the evil system that we have now, and we call upon the unemployed and the elderly to join us now in a crusade to wipe out capitalism in our country, and the criminals who run it.

In the weeks and months ahead, ERA will be campaigning against the government’s attack on the vulnerable, and encouraging the unemployed to seek legal advice regarding their conditions in connection with the minimum wage and employment rights. If the unemployed are punished at a time when there are fifteen vacancies for every claimant AND the government itself is creating unemployment through public service cuts, then this may well need to be addressed in the courts; governments are not above the law. ERA stands firm besides the vulnerable in our society and will defend the right of every English man and woman to live in a dignified manner.


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The English Radical Alliance today launched an archive service for its News and Radical Views. It is hoped this service will demonstrate the wide ranging issues ERA campaigns on and allow website browsers to see how ERA has been at the forefront of many campaigns.
The comments section to the news items is currently closed.

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David Cameron’s ‘Big Society’ proposals on face value admittedly look quite promising from an English Radical perspective. However there is a certain fable about the scorpion and the frog that rings alarm bells in our ears. For those that are not familiar with the tale a frog offers a scorpion a ride on its back across a river, only for the scorpion to sting the frog half as they were midstream. ‘Why on earth did you do that?’ asked the frog, ‘Now we shall both die?’
The scorpion shrugged and replied, ‘I could not help myself. It is my nature’.

The Tories have their own distinctive nature. Cameron’s Conservative Party remains the party of big business, of the multi-nationals and of the Lord Ashcroft’s of this world. They are poles apart from the sole traders, local shopkeepers and small businessmen of this country and die-hard Tories would shun any thought of encouraging co-operatives. Like the scorpion, the Tories are a party with a sting in their tale.

Yet Cameron’s Conservative’s ‘Big Society’ wishes to return decision making on planning and housing to local councils. Communities will be given powers to save local facilities threatened with closure such as pubs and Post Office’s and have the right to bid to take over local state run services such as libraries.  A bold move, and one on face value we as English Radicals thoroughly support as it is in line with our distributist principals. However I think a lesson can be learnt here from history.

In the Thatcher years of the 1980’s there were other superb opportunities offered to ordinary people. We were told we could be shareholders in our utility companies and become players on the stock market. Enter characters such as ‘Buzby’ and ‘Hissing Sid’ to sell the idea to the trusting public, an idea snapped up by people thinking they could make a tidy sum within a few months. To be honest, many did make a profit – but years down the line we are all now paying the price for the family silver being sold.

So how is that relevant to Cameron’s big society? To begin with the Conservative’s are a capitalist party, a party of big business and not a distributist party, a party of community interest and co-operatives. When they talk of returning decision making to local councils they do not mean to local people as we do in the English Radical Alliance. They mean local council’s hiring more expensive consultants, that often have no connection with the local area. This will be at the council taxpayers expense.  When they talk of communities taking over shops, pubs and libraries, they do not mean supporting these, they mean the capitalist ideology of ‘sink or swim’, ‘survival of the fittest’. Just as large, very often foreign owned companies came in and snapped up the ordinary peoples share in our utility companies, you can be assured vultures will be circling over the heads of these new community initiatives waiting to pick off the weakest. Nothing will be put in place to prevent community managed shops and services from facing unfair competition or helping to support them. It is the way of the sting in the tail capitalist Conservatives. 

Mr Cameron is playing distributist politics, but only offering part of a distributist package. It is like selling you a car with no engine and then expecting you to take your driving test in it straight away. The English Radical Alliance believes in real community initiatives and a complete distributist package. Local decision making by local people, local economic networks, opportunities and support for community initiatives, co-operatives and small businesses and doing our utmost to ensure all survive through training and ensuring unfair competition does not exist.

The fable of the frog and the scorpion may be an ancient tale, but history does have a habit of repeating itself and I am sure ‘Buzby’ and ‘Hissing Sid’ lurking somewhere in Cameron’s closet are now waiting to embark on their comeback tour.

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English Radicals are disgusted by the actions of the two sides in the BA dispute: Chief Executive, Willie Walsh, grins like a Cheshire cat as he contemplates the freehand he will get to sack and bully his workforce following the Unite union’s decision to go on strike; while for their part, Unite leaders are less interested in the future for their members than they are about dictating the future of the Labour party. Both sides in this dispute have clear goals: Walsh was brought in to BA to prune its workforce and turn it into a flying version of Netto. Whilst the Unite leaders want rid of the New Labour leadership and beating up the flying public on the eve of a General Election was the obvious weapon of choice.  Sadly, it is the BA workforce, bullied by the management and by the union, and the general public who want to fly, who are the innocent victims of this Left versus Right industrial battle.

Many people have commented on how this ‘Spring of Discontent’ is like some throwback to the 1980s and, in some ways, they are right. Like then there are industrial leaders who want to shed jobs in a time of recession, regardless of the poverty and hardship this will cause for their workforce. And also, like then, the workforce was part of a trade union that had political motivations as its primary goal, rather than the welfare of its members. Sadly, this is always going to be the case when our businesses are part of global corporations and our unions are run by extremists. The BA workers have a strong argument; BA’s problems are not caused by the workforce but by the decisions made over recent years by its management, yet it is the workforce who will pay the price by losing their jobs, or by working longer hours for less money (and won’t that be a comfort for you when you’re half way across the Atlantic?). But, and it is a big but, being right doesn’t get you anywhere if you are badly led and badly advised. The miners were right in the 1980s, but they were lions who let themselves be led by a donkey called Arthur Scargill, a man more interested in bringing down a government than in protecting his members jobs. And so it is with Unite, they are led by men who want to bring down Gordon Brown and the New Labour leadership, even if that means losing the General Election and, therefore, allowing into power a party that would decimate the public and private sector workforce in order to maximise the profits of its global capitalist backers.

The sad fact is that the BA workforce should have given greater consideration to guerrilla action against BA management rather than taking on Walsh AND the public with a strike. They should also have examined the motives of their union leadership and not allowed themselves to be cannon fodder in the class warfare ambitions of a pair of Marxist losers like Derek Simpson and Tony Woodley. Crucially, the union leaders have failed to bring out the majority of their members and have left those on the picket line at the mercy of Willie Walsh’s axe. However, before the public blame the workforce for this strike, they should also examine the actions of Willie Walsh. He has deliberately set out to provoke a strike regardless of how this will affect the general public. He’s been clever. He knows that, with a General Election due, he will get the support of both major parties. Whilst, for their part, the travelling public will obviously support him (solidarity with a bullied workforce will be low on the priority list of a modern ‘me-first’ society). And so, after this strike, he will be unopposed when he sets out to decimate the workforce and trample on its working conditions.

English Radicals believe that companies such as BA would be better-off being owned by their workforce rather than by global corporations who can hire hit men like Walsh to duff up the workforce and make the customers lives difficult. Furthermore, co-operative businesses would not require the presence of obnoxious Marxist-led unions, whose sole reason to exist is to bring chaos and disorder to our lives. The BA strike is a primary example of how Capitalism and Socialism cause hardship and disruption to our society, there has to be a better way of doing things.

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Following the recent general election, the Conservatives could cleverly engineer a situation which would eventually allow them to achieve two things – form a comfortable majority government, and make some massive public spending savings without upsetting their core English vote. How can they do this? By biting the bullet and accepting they will never have a mandate to rule in Scotland.

There are now two democratic deficits in the “United” Kingdom: the perennial one of England being the only home nation that does not have its own parliament, and now the blatant Labour/Tory split between Scotland and England. The Conservatives returned only one MP in Scotland, while Labour won an outright majority with 41 of the available 59 seats.

Bad times are coming to Britain, the chickens of 13 years of continuous Labour misrule, plus the effects of the capitalist generated recession are about to come home to roost in the form of massive cuts, tax hikes and redundancies. One thing is worth remembering however – ALL the main parties, support the capitalist system which dragged us into recession and which allows multinational corporations and banks to dictate to national government.

ERA believes the United Kingdom is dead in all but name anyway – how can you call it political union, when the three smallest nations have their own parliaments or assemblies, while the largest one, England, does not? Westminster is the BRITISH government, and allows Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish. MP's to vote on matters affecting only England – a classic example is the third runway at Heathrow, deeply unpopular in south east England, but pushed through anyway by Labour dragging their Celtic MP's down to vote for it. 

How could the Tories achieve the aim of an English parliament? By being patient and not entering into coalition with the Lib Dems. The Lib Dem's only other option is to work with Labour, who are already discredited in the eyes of the English public, so to work with them is to be tainted by association.

Once the IMF come in and enforce the inevitable spending cuts and tax increases that have to be implemented – of which England will bear the brunt - who will the electorate blame? The Lab/Lib Dem government! It would not surprise us if another election has to be called within a year – if the coalition breaks down, Britain would be ungovernable, and a new mandate would have to be secured. If the Tories stood on a ticket of cutting England loose from Labour-dominated and state subsidised Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, they would easily secure enough seats in England to have an absolute majority in the British parliament at Westminster.

An English only government would do away with the Barnett formula, which is an English taxpayer funded, British government subsidy to the celtic nations for everyone who lives there – how do you think the Scots can afford free care homes for their elderly? Free prescriptions? Free university education? The Scots constantly remind us that North Sea oil revenue should go straight to Scotland – but who foots the massive unemployment benefit bill in Scottish, mostly Labour, constituencies, or the massive public sector employment wage bill in Scotland? The English taxpayer. We would be quite happy for Scotland to keep their oil revenue, if it meant they  used it to pay for all the good stuff listed above, that the English can only dream about having. The oil will run out one day, as things stand the subsidy never will.

By formally breaking up the Union, a new English government would only be concerned with England. Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland would once again be separate self governing nations, and more importantly, self financing. A “Council of the Isles” could be convened once a month to discuss issues that affect inter-nation issues, other than that England would have little need to concern itself with the internal affairs of our celtic neighbours. 

We could say be patient Mr Cameron – another six or twelve months in opposition, and the prize will be there for the taking and you can deliver fairness to the people of England with the first steps towards a new independent English nation. However in reality, just as the leopard never changes its spots, we suspect Cameron’s Conservative & Unionist Party will not take the final plunge and dissolve this dis-United Kingdom. In any case, independence is just one step towards liberating the people of England. The other is delivering political and economic systems that inspire our nation, and which offer opportunity, aspiration and fairness. Sadly neither Mr. Cameron’s Tories nor any of the other political parties offer such a package. For that you have to turn to the English Radicals.