Robin Tilbrook Autumn Conference Address: Structural Changes and Institutional Double Standards

We had a great weekend for our Conference in Rutland and an array of interesting speakers. I thought you might like to see some of my speech. The main point was as follows:-

Good morning Ladies & Gentlemen,

Hasn’t it been great to see Crosses of St George displayed on the way coming here? I think it is not only encouraging for us to see our country’s flag flown, but to realise that this is happening because of politics and for patriotic feelings. Usually when we used to see a Cross of St George flying it was because there was some sports match coming up when the England team is playing.

But in this case it is partly because people have woken up to the fact the British Political Establishment hates the very idea of England. I do not think this idea has fully hit public consciousness, but it is getting there.

The Origins and Spread of Grassroots Flag Flying Initiatives

The origin, I gather, of the flag being flown is from Epping, near me in Essex. Because the police were finding it awkward to criticise the mothers in pink who were demonstrating against illegal immigrants in the Bell Common Hotel. So they turned on a man who had the Cross of St George flag draped around his shoulders and claimed that our flag was offensive and people were not to wear it or display it. His reaction was to go and put dozens of flags up on the lamp posts around Epping. That idea quickly spread across the whole country.

It is clearly a small act of rebellion against the preferences of the British multi-culturalist Establishment, who are all too happy to see foreign flags flown, particularly Palestine at the moment, or to see Gay Pride flags flown, but they are not very happy to see even the Union Jack, except on public buildings and they are certainly not at all happy to see the Cross of St George.

A good example of just how outraged the multiculturalist Establishment is was a comment by the Black MP of Norwich South, Clive Lewis, who said that people Flying the Cross of St George were “Extremists” and that they are “trying to stake out territory”. This of course, Ladies and Gentlemen, is putting up the Cross of St George, the flag of England, in … England!

Personally I have had the Cross of St George flying outside my house 24/7 for years and I don’t mind if Clive Lewis thinks that makes me an extremist and I certainly fully intend to stake out the territory of England for our English Nation. What do you think Ladies and Gentlemen? Hands up all flag flying “Extremists”!

Examining the Framework of Asymmetric Multiculturalism

Let’s however remind ourselves that we live in the “Two Tier” UK. Consider these cases Ladies and Gentlemen:-

• Lucy Connolly - White English woman – does a mean tweet – gets 31 months imprisonment.
• Hadush Kebatu - Illegal immigrant - child rape - 12 months.
• Moussa Kadri - Muslim man - assault and wielding a knife and threatening to kill - suspended sentence.
• Ricky Jones - black man and Labour councillor - calling for people to have their throats slit - Not Guilty.

There is no denying we have a two tier justice system in England and it’s the English that are the butt of the British Political Establishment! We also live in the “Too Tier” UK whose authorities have colluded with and covered up the Pakistani Muslim Child Rape and Pimping Gangs and also whose politicians have lied to us about their Afghan Super Injunction, on secretly importing tens of thousands of Afghans at our expense as well as putting mass immigration on steroids.

The war correspondent, Aris Roussinos, recently wrote an article putting all this into a geo-political context. The article was called:- “The extinction of British liberalism”, in which he puts the context as follows:- “For all its purely domestic malignities, British politics is, like that of the European Union, merely a provincial outpost of those of America’s imperial centre.

A large part of Europe’s current woes is attributable to our leaders reshaping our societies according to the model both inspired and imposed by American hegemony in the 1990s, before being left in the lurch as our master changed course. Believing that, under the Pax Americana, globalisation would dominate the future, our leaders entirely reshaped our economies and societies for the world they saw coming into view.

Industry was allowed to wither in the certainty that cheap Chinese goods would sustain our lifestyles; international human rights, in realty a fig leaf for American military intervention against geo political rivals, was elevated above national interest in a way the Hegemon never once countenanced for itself; destructive energy policies were written into law in the illusory belief of a shared global mission to ameliorate climate change. Through a misreading of America’s early 20th Century experience, mass immigration was actively encouraged, in the genuine belief, that ethnic and cultural diversity, contrary to historical precedent would soon become an inherent strength. But now the American Hegemon has radically changed course, leaving its regional middle managers in Britain and Europe stranded in their 1990’s fantasy world and the political parties which adopted this world’s view facing collapse.”

The Disconnect Between Party Leaderships and Core Activists

Ladies and Gentlemen I normally do a round-up of where the other parties are. Let’s start with Labour.

The Existential Crisis Facing Labour

This Labour Government was elected by the votes of less than 20% of the electorate and only a few over 9 million votes. After a disastrous first year in government culminating in Angela Rayner’s ignominious resignation, one might assume that the only way was up for Sir Keir Starmer. In fact, he and his party face a much greater threat than ill-advised financial decisions by the deputy prime minister that is:- barely anyone supports them!

An important reason is the policy on Gaza. Since getting into office, Starmer has pursued a policy wildly out of touch with the views of most Left-wing activists. Again, I don’t mean voters. I’m talking about the sorts of people who shape public opinion — influencers, journalists and campaigners.

Although there are no surveys of Left-wing activists, there are surveys of Labour party members. (These are the small subset of voters who care enough about politics to actually join a party and try to steer it in their preferred direction.) A survey back in June found that 87% of Labour members thought the Government should be more critical of Israel, and 84% thought it should impose sanctions on the country. To date, the Government has applied a few token sanctions — though nothing remotely on the scale of sanctions against Iran or Russia.

Another survey of Labour members found that 71% thought the Government was wrong to ban Palestine Action, with only 21% taking the opposite view. In fact, it is only among Conservative and Reform voters where a clear majority supports the ban. Ironically then, that decision by Starmer was strongly opposed by his party’s own members but was actually supported by most people on the Right. You can see why Left-wingers might be slightly indignant. Further evidence of Labour’s disconnect with its activist class can be found on Twitter, where influencers like Owen Jones regularly accuse the Government of complicity in genocide. In fact, almost every tweet about Gaza by the Prime Minister or his now-reshuffled foreign secretary is littered with replies from Left-wing accounts saying things like “you’re going to The Hague”.

Starmer is presumably hoping that by the time of the next election, Left-wing campaigners will have forgotten about the war. But I wouldn’t bet on it. With activist energy focused on the Greens, Jeremy Corbyn’s new party and the SNP in Scotland, Labour’s performance could prove even more dismal than current polls suggest. Labour is of course in very deep trouble with Kier Starmer now the most unpopular Prime Minister at this stage of a term of office ever since records began.

Reclaiming Regional and Cultural National Identity

Labour’s unwillingness to care about England or the English was highlighted in an article recently in the Daily Telegraph (Tuesday, 2nd September) by James Kirkham, who wrote under the headline “The Left needs to rediscover its love of Englishness if it is to recover – a Leader who reclaimed the St George flag could end Labour’s knee jerk dislike of English National Identity, pausing for a moment, James Kirkham clearly has as sense of humour as the chances of Labour liking Englishness or adopting the Cross of St George is vanishingly small! He says that the Labour faithful choked back their horror when required to waive Union Jacks towards the end of Labour’s conference.

Anyway James Kirkham goes on:- “If you want to know why Kier Starmer is struggling, the answer is hanging on a lamp post near you now. For Starmer and Labour, the problem is written in red and white: it’s England.”

The fact that most of the people who are choosing to fly a flag this summer have chosen the Cross of St George over the Union flag is hugely significant but often overlooked in political conversations. Much like England itself. England is the largest part of the Union and the English its most numerous people, yet we have no one who speaks for us. Pausing again that is of course except for us English Democrats and we are not as big as we ought to be as you can see looking around this room Ladies and Gentlemen. This is a growing problem for almost everyone in politics, but most of all for Labour. Failing to speak for – and often actively rejecting – millions of voters is electoral madness.

This isn’t a new story. More than 20 years ago (James Kirkup) was a political reporter for the Scotsman Newspaper at Westminster. One of his areas of interest was English National Identity – would England ever gain cultural and constitutional status in the Union equal to that of Scotland? So he got to know the Campaign for an English Parliament and the handful of politicians who wanted England and the English to be properly recognised. Several of those politicians worried that a United Kingdom that failed to give England adequate representation and respect was heading for trouble, as English voters kicked back against a system and political culture that variously ignored, belittled and demonised their National Identity.

Not a lot has changed. Some success for English national football teams has made it mildly fashionable to fly the English flag when a tournament is on, but outside sport, the Cross of St George is treated as something dangerous. Andy Burnham, the Labour Mayor of Greater Manchester, recently accused people who fly our flag of “seeking confrontation”. Others in his Party have implied that it implies a whiff of the Far-Right. Where else in the world do elected politicians criticise people for flying their own flag? What would happen to a Scottish politician who castigated those who fly the Saltire?

For many in Labour, Englishness is awkward territory because they associate it with race, suspecting that some who say “English” actually means “White”… Most academic research suggests that roughly a third of the people in England see themselves as “English not British” or “More English than British”. That is more than 15 million potential voters. (Our potential voters Ladies and Gentlemen). As a group, the English were central to Brexit and decisive in the Tories landslide in 2019 . Labour did reasonably well with them last year, but now says James Kirkup the English are shifting towards Reform UK. That is not because Nigel Farage has built a stirring account of Englishness. Farage usually wraps himself in the red, white and blue and talks of Britain rather than England. But by accepting and celebrating the fact that nations matter he is the nearest thing that England has to a champion.

Constitutional Inequities Facing the English Electorate

Almost all politicians have neglected Englishness, but Labour’s failure here is the most striking. And the most culpable, because Labour cannot plead ignorance. They have been warned repeatedly, and by their own people. … To be fair, Labour isn’t the only party to ignore England and its position in the Union. The whole political class has ducked constitutional issues. The Labour MP, Tam Dayell’s, “West Lothian Question” about devolution – (why should Scots MPs be able to vote on English laws but not the other way around?) Has simply been forgotten.

David Cameron promised “English votes for English laws” the morning after Scotland’s 2014 referendum. A procedural fix was never going to be enough to address the cultural imbalance but even that fix was ditched by Boris Johnson in 2021. Since then silence at Westminster. But people notice. They see their flag treated as suspect. They see that other nations of the UK have their own institutions whilst England has none. They hear endless talk of Britain and little of England and Labour pays the price for ignoring its own. What do you think of that Ladies and Gentlemen?

I think it shows that what we are saying here in this Party is not only right and proper, but also something that an intelligent, educated, Scottish commentator can fully understand. There is no danger however that Labour will pick up on that. Let me give you an instance of just where Labour are on this:- I have already mentioned the Labour MP for Norwich South, Clive Lewis, who has claimed that anybody flying the Cross of St George is an extremist who is seeking to mark territory. What he seems to miss of course is that the territory that English people flying the Cross of St George are marking is England.

But what about an even more extreme example? Councillor Jeremy Newmark, who is the Labour Leader of Hertsmere Borough Council in Hertfordshire, who described Operation Raise the Colours as, and I quote, “An attempt by a bunch of criminals, extremists and nonces to highjack our national flag”. So there you are Ladies and Gentlemen for some Labour figures not only are we “Extremists” in wanting to fly the Cross of St George but also “Nonces”.

I think that this is the moment to consider which party is actually the party of nonces given Labour’s support and long term collusion with the Pakistani Muslim Child Rape Gangs, and also Labour’s continuing reluctance to progress the national statutory inquiry which under pressure it promised to do in June. Let us review that issue later. Before we address Labour’s role as a party of nonces, let us consider what the Labour activist and Trade Unionist, Paul Embury, had to say in his article “Operation Raise the Colours”.

“The weekend before last, I drove along the A12 through Essex – a route I know well. In the hour or so that I was on the road, I spotted several St George flags hanging from bridges. I’d never previously witnessed such a spectacle. And then, driving through a village near my home a few days later, I saw a flag affixed to a post outside the church. It wasn’t there the week before. Something seems to be happening out there. ‘Operation Raise the Colours’ has caught the wind. I don’t think any of us knows for sure where it’s heading, but it doesn’t take an expert to understand where it came from.

Ordinary English people know that our immigration and asylum system is utterly broken and are exasperated at the failure of successive governments to fix it. They see that globalisation and open borders have forced rapid – perhaps irreversible – transformation on their communities, and it makes them uneasy. But it is much more than that. They have also had enough of ‘asymmetric multiculturalism’ - the unofficial doctrine of the liberal-progressive elite which decrees that minority nationalities and cultures must always be enthusiastically celebrated while the majority nationality and culture must be downplayed. This is never said explicitly, of course. But public policy over recent decades has ensured that this has been the effect.

Throw in nearly 20 years of economic stagnation, falling living standards, diminishing job security, a chronic housing shortage and failing public services, and you have the perfect storm. Sooner or later, those who felt they had lost most from these seismic economic and cultural shifts were going to react. The flag crusade is just a part of that reaction. We also witnessed the blowback via the ballot box with the Brexit vote, and then on the streets after the Southport massacre. And we see it, too, in the major political realignment that is taking place, with Reform UK’s surge in the opinion polls and its hoovering up of support from significant chunks of the working classes, including voters in traditional Labour strongholds.

The elite class and its outriders among the commentariat hold their head in their hands, believing that it all heralds a return to the dark days of the 1930s, when fascism was knocking at the door and racial supremacists were on the march. Many are quick to demand to know what on Earth is the point of displaying a national flag in public? How will such an act help to raise GDP or wages, or improve the NHS, or make the trains run on time? In making such arguments, these people (many of whom, ironically, display the flags of the EU or Pride or Ukraine or Palestine in their social media ‘bios’) betray their own narrow-mindedness. Do they not appreciate that most ordinary citizens are not motivated solely by dry economic or transactional issues, and place a high value on such things as cultural attachment and place and belonging.

The catastrophising of some has bordered on the hysterical. Quite often, it is laced with invective towards the working-class itself. Witness, for example, a post on ‘X’ which, at the time of writing, has attracted almost a million views and nearly 10,000 likes. ‘The English working class has been so brainwashed by the right-wing media for more than four decades,’ opines the commentator (who displays the EU flag in his ‘bio’), ‘that it completely lacks the critical skills to identify propaganda and imagine a better future’. What a sneering, contemptuous caricature of working-class people – one that paints them as low-IQ dupes with no agency and no ability to form their own opinions on the basis of their personal experiences and powers of reason.

I do wonder how many of those who level such attacks on working-class voters have spent any length of time engaging with them or attempting to understand their lives. If they did, they would find that these voters are often far more intelligent and nuanced in their opinions than they are given credit for. I recently had a few tradesmen – a couple of painters and decorators and a carpet fitter – working in my home. At various points, I fell to talking with each of them about politics. We didn’t agree on everything, but their opinions were plainly thoughtful and considered. On issues such as Ukraine, immigration and free speech, their arguments challenged establishment orthodoxy – but in a way that was well-informed and subtle rather than obnoxious or crankish.

What came through was that these guys, all of whom had working-class roots, were decent, productive members of society who felt that the political establishment didn’t really care about them or their opinions. All were tempted by the message of Reform UK. None had a good word to say about Labour. As a person rooted in the labour movement, that saddened Paul Embery immensely. It is the alienation felt by people like this that has driven ‘Operation Raise the Colours’. The proliferation of flags across the country represents a cri de coeur from the forgotten millions. They are not agitating for the return of Empire. Instead, they are merely saying, ‘What about us?’

Sure, the far-right will leap on the campaign and perhaps even try to hijack it for its own ends. But it would be a gross error to conclude – as many on the Left seem to have done – that everyone supportive of it must be imbued with extremist politics. ‘Operation Raise the Colours’ does not signify the advance of fascism. Instead, the hoisting of every national flag by an ordinary citizen represents a small act of resistance. And that in itself tells us an awful lot about where we are as a country.” Ladies and Gentlemen what Paul Embery says also tells us a lot about Labour.

An Analysis of the Shifting UK Political Spectrum

Turning to the Conservatives

I don’t think that I can do better than quote the Daily Telegraph Sketch writer, Tim Stanley, who you may have seen several times on the BBC’s Question Time as the only right of centre commentator. Tim Stanley wrote about the speech of Mel Stride at the Conservative Party Conference under the headline:- “Mel does his best but this is like sitting in a cinema on a wet afternoon. I will say one thing for the Tory Conference 2025, it is not hard to find a quiet place to work. Attendance has collapsed; most of the awkward squad have lost their seats or have buggered off to Reform. The result: the Conservatives have been reduced to their affable core, a room of Jeremys and Isabellas with a house in Somerset and room for a pony… I arrive early for Mel Stride’s speech, assuming – as in previous years – that I would have to queue. The hall was barely half full. Mel did his best to rouse the audience, taking potshots at Reform with their shimmering dress… razmataz and “spinning plates”… I might attend a Reform function