Ashley Mote, the former UKIP MEP who left to join a far-right European group as an independent, has been convicted of benefit fraud.

The MEP was claiming thousands in unemployment benefits between 1996 and 2002 but failed to notify the DWP of changes to his circumstances.  He was elected as an MEP in 2004 for UKIP but the party withdrew the whip later that year when he was accused of benefit fraud.  In 2005 he joined another group in the European Parliament and in 2007 he co-founded the “Identity, Tradition and Sovereignty” right-wing nationalist group.  In 2006, Ashley Mote was in talks with the English Democrats about joining their party but they evidently fell through.

Hat-tip: English Democrats

The Scottish National Party has caused a bit of an upset both north and south of the border by pressing ahead with its manifesto promise of holding a referrendum on Scottish independence.

All the other parties in the Scottish Parliament with the exception of the Greens who are in coalition with the SNP, have promised to jointly fight the proposal and the British establishment is similarly horrified that democracy might actually take place on terms that are not favourable to their agenda.

The British government have actually claimed that the Scottish people do not want independence, citing a survey saying that only 30% of Scots want it.  Which is presumably why more people voted for the SNP than any of the British unionist parties, including Liebour who have controlled Scotland for 50 years.  The survey they are quoting should be treated with a pinch of salt as well.  They claim that English people don’t want an English Parliament because their years old survey says so even though every poll for the last few years has shown increasing and consistent majority support for one.  They also claimed that English people wanted regional government, particularly in the North East euroregion, where it was rejected by 78% of residents in a referendum.

There is a convention in Westminster that any manifesto pledge will travel through Parliament unopposed and unmolested.  The Scottish Parliament is far too young to have established such a precedent but one would have assumed that it would have adopted this basic Parliamentary convention.  Whether it has happened until now I couldn’t say but it clearly isn’t going to happen now that the SNP is in power.

We all know what independence means for Scotland but what about for England and Britain?  Well, Britain is a dead duck and I think we all know this – even the British politicians and our faux-British no-mandate Prime Minister who seem intent to cling on to the last shreds of Britishness rather than let it die with dignity.  It is clear that Britain cannot continue for long without Scotland.  It may only contain less than 8% of the population and cost the English taxpayer billions in subsidies but it constitutes about a quarter of the land-mass and a disproportionate amount of the ruling elite, hence the term “Scottish Raj”.  With Scotland gone we would be left with a “united” kingdom consisting of England, Wales and Northern Ireland.  Both Wales and Scotland already have a degree of self-government, independence is only a small step from devolution when you’ve had the trappings of statehood for several years.

But I don’t think it will be down to Wales and Northern Ireland to dissolve the union – that honour, I believe, will fall to the English.  There is a growing feeling of disappointment amongst the English that they have been left out of the devolution process whilst the rest of the UK get to rule themselves and England.  The British identity is declining rapidly as more and more people identify themselves with an English identity instead.  It will take a few years before independence actually happens, even if the referendum takes place and gives the right answer, by which time the British identity will pretty much exist only in Westminster.

So why are British politicians so keen to keep the union together?  Simple really – how can you be a British politician if Britain doesn’t exist?  An MP elected in Scotland couldn’t be a Minister of State if Scotland wasn’t in the UK any more could they?  No Mandate Brown couldn’t be Prime Minister if the country he was elected in was no longer in the union and how would Liebour keep their majority if they didn’t have their Scottish MPs to rely on?  I’m not sure what the motivation of the Tories is for maintaining the union other than the fact that they’re the Conservative and Unionist Party and that Dave the fuckwit Cameron is clinging to the vain hope that the Tories will ever be electable north of the border.

The british government still insists that devolution has strengthened the unioin despite the fact that nationalists now control Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland thanks to devolution and it is because of devolution that the SNP is in a position to hold a national referendum in Scotland on independence.  The lack of devolution to England, coupled with Liebour’s loss of the Scottish and Welsh devolved governments means that the union is on its last legs.  The only saviour of the union is federalism – a federal British government with all four home nations as equal partners is the only way the UK will survive and even then it’ll only be a sticking plaster.  By the time my kids are my age I don’t expect there to be a United Kingdom at all.

The British government’s own Foreign Affairs Committee has criticised the delay in calling for a cease-fire when Israel invaded Lebanon saying that it has damaged our reputation.

When Israel decided to punish Lebanon because a group of terrorists kidnapped a couple of their soldiers, Traitor Bliar waited a few weeks before calling for the illegal attack on Lebanon to stop.  The Committee said that acting sooner could have saved Lebanese and Israeli civillians.

It was a while ago now and Israel does this sort of thing so often, you may have forgotten what happened during this event.  The Americans sent them lots of shiny new bombs to blow people up with.  Israel deliberately targetted tower blocks full of civillians because they said Hezbollah stored weapons in them.  Israel evicted the entire village of Qana and then blew up the convoy of people they’d just evicted.  The invasion went on for weeks and they still didn’t get their soldiers back.

Despite the human rights abuses and indiscriminate targetting of civillians, the UK waited several weeks before calling on the Israeli’s to stop and even when the UN eventually got the UK and US to agree to a resolution ending the Israeli invasion, Israel still dropped 3.5m cluster bombs on Lebanon.  This was 90% of the cluster bombs dropped throughout the campaign – a clear demonstration of Israel’s contempt for international law, the UN and the will of the international community.

The Committee also says that the British government is wrong in refusing to deal with the elected democratically elected Hamas government in Palestine, calling it “counter-productive”.  THe British government considers Hamas a terrorist organisation but, unlike in Northern Ireland where it accepts Sinn Fein as a seperate entity to the IRA despite openly being its political arm, they refuse to deal with the political arm of Hamas.