Scottish journey

It’s been a largely Celtic week, spent either in Scotland or Wales – and driving through Cumbria between them. At least that’s the simplistic way of looking at it, though in fact my first trip to Scotland is to the east of the country, to Aberdeen and beyond. This was heavily settled by the Angles, with the result that the local Scots-English dialect is reckoned to be the closest living tongue to the English written down by Chaucer.

The Lowlands and North East Scotland have always been very different to the Highlands, although both parts of the country suffered the Clearances when ‘improving’ lairds threw the poor among their own kinsmen off their ancestral land and into the Industrial Revolution cities or ships bound for the colonies. The earlier Lowland Clearances are far less well known – as is the fact that the Enclosures movement in England involved precisely the same state-sanctioned theft and brutality.

But while the east of Scotland is in fact far less ‘Celtic’ than the neo-Marxist anti-English bigots of the SNP believe, the Lake District of Cumbria, generally assumed to be quintessentially ‘English’, isn’t. Its native population was largely untouched by Saxon invasion, although significant numbers of Vikings did settle there somewhat later. As in some other parts of rural England, however (even including Sussex) local shepherds until the middle of the 19^th century still counted their sheep in the remnants of an ancient Celtic tongue far closer to Welsh and Cornish than to English.

Anyway, the first port of call was Aberdeen (the name is Celtic, ‘Aber’ meaning the mouth of a river) where I had to take Richard to a University engineering course open day. It’s a big, granite-built, imposing but chilly city; still clearly benefiting from several decades of spectacular oil wealth. What’s going to happen now that one-off natural bounty has effectively been ‘blown’ by a succession of short-termist Tory and Labour chancellors?

I leave him to it and head off up the coast looking for somewhere to kill a few hours. I find it at Cruden Bay, a little fishing village tucked down among high sand dunes. The lady at the village shop sells me a pork pie laced with pickle and a bottle of water, and I climb the cliff path to see where it goes. There’s a stiff breeze and the place is deserted. From the top, I see to the north the ruins of a castle or stately home of some sort. It appears to be not much over half a mile away so I set off to have a look.

En route I make a detour to a cluster of ruined brick and concrete buildings – clearly the remnants of a Second World War radar station or similar installation. I think of how the operators and mechanics in the RAF at the time (my own father was a radio engineer, although he spent most of the war on barrage balloon warning signals around London and then on communications equipment in India) must have hated being posted up here in the long dark days of winter.

The path to the castle is not as easy as it looks, for a deep sea inlet gashes the landscape – spectacular but impassable. A wide detour inland is necessary before I find a farm bridge across the stream and a track back up to the plateau that ends in such spectacular cliffs over the cold, grey, foam-flecked North Sea. How many ships have been wrecked along these wind shores?

The castle is, frankly, monstrous; spectacular but a backdrop for nightmares. The dark, brooding grandeur of the place is given an added sad twist by the memorial stone that warns visitors that the cliffs are dangerous by telling them of little Nicholas French, who fell to his death nearby, aged seven, on March 3^rd 1999. Surely no parent can see such a thing without a mental shudder and feeling a dark cloud taking the edge off the brightest day?

The main tower, perched right on the edge of the cliff, has a stone staircase which still goes up three storeys. I climb up, wondering all the time just how old the place is; some of the stonework looks really ancient, but some of the bricks are quite wide, placing their part of the building much later that medieval castle building times. Plus, the remnants of wooden joists – and even one piece of flooring – can be seen jutting out from the walls; clearly the place had a roof until relatively recently. The view from the top is stunning but, with the warning of death on the cliffs, also slightly unsettling.

I tread gingerly down, hurry through the maze of roofless, windowless walls and carry on about a mile northwards, until stopped by the sheer, seagull covered cliffs of another inlet and a spectacular bay. Although there’s only a breeze the waves crash onto the rocks far below. So I turn back past the castle and head back to the car.

Rehab

As I go I fall to thinking that a big fence of just a few hundred years would join the two inlets, shutting off the castle and some acres of the windswsept but clearly fertile farmland on its landward side. All it would then need would be some ex-army instructors and tradesmen-teachers, some portacabins and a huge store of building materials – and it would make the perfect place for cleaning up young drug addicts and turning them back into human beings with skills, self-respect and a purpose in life.

Within a few minutes I’ve sketched out the whole plan, complete with sticks and carrots to encourage real effort to get off the P*k* Poison (as it’s known in places like Keighley). The ones making most progress would be moved into successively better accommodation in the steadily rebuilt castle. Privileges would include being taught sea-fishing from the tiny natural harbour nearby, and working and social trips outside the fenced headland for those who are ‘clean’ and about to ‘graduate’.

Failures? Well, they’re going to die anyway so nothing more would need to be done for them except to keep them away from innocent people, because smackheads wreck every family and community unlucky enough to be within thieving distance. But at least such places would give them all one real chance – something at present only available to the junkie children of the rich and famous, but not to those of the taxpaying herd.

I decide to look the place up online when I get home and find out more about it. When I do, I’m struck by several slightly eerie close parallels between the reality of the place and my own ignorant thoughts about it.

Slains Castle

“Slains Castle was built on the edge of a cliff-top in 1597 by the ninth Earl of Erroll but really became famous because of its association with Bram Stoker and Dracula. The author often visited the area and is believed to have been inspired to write the horror classic by the castle and the cliffs. While not a particularly attractive castle, it has lots of visitors because of the Dracula connection.

“The pretty village of Cruden Bay, along the rugged Scottish coast between Aberdeen and Peterhead, was once considered the finest resort in Scotland. In 1893 Stoker took a walking tour around the Scottish coast, ending in Cruden Bay. He had visited this fishing village five years earlier while researching an Irving production of Hamlet. The impressive ruins of 16th-century New Slains Castle overlooking the Bay might very well have provided the model for Castle Dracula. A footpath leads from the car park on Main Street to the Castle, but visitors should mind the perilous cliffs. One mile north of Cruden Bay, another dramatic clifftop path winds past Bullers of Buchan, a superbly beautiful natural area.

”In his later years, Stoker returned summer after summer to Whinnyfold, a village within walking distance south of Cruden Bay. According to a village legend, at certain times of the year the bodies of those who have perished during the previous year come out of the sea to join their spirits in Heaven or Hell. This legend inspired Stoker to write Mystery of the Sea in 1902. Earlier, in 1895, he wrote The Watter's Mou based on local characters in Cruden Bay.”

And as well as the dark, brooding past, there’s a possible rebuilding in the future. Another internet entry tells how there is at present a planning application to restore the place into a 35-apartment luxury holiday centre, apparently widely supported locally on account of the jobs it would create, but opposed by many visitors and Dracula fans.

Given that the place was fully roofed when Stoker wrote about it, and was only turned into a ruin after the First World War, there is to my mind no reason to leave it empty and wasted. I still think that a truly ‘tough love’ rehabilitation centre for the lost and tortured souls of our torn society would be a better use for the place than turning it into yet another yuppy playground, but the odds are strongly in favour of Money in ‘modern’ Britain, so I recommend you take a look at the old Slains Castle soon, before you have to pay an arm and a leg to go there, and the cawing of jackdaws, the whistling wind and the crash of the breakers are replaced by Barry Manilow in the air conditioned corridors of privilege.

I pick ‘the Boy’ up at just gone four and we decide to head for Edinburgh by way of a detour through Braemar and the Grampian National Park. There is still a blanket of snow lying beneath the birch and pine trees, and even more so on the wild, bare moors and mountains. As dusk falls we pass several big herds of red deer. Magnificent beasts, although even with profitable deer-stalking there are too many of them to allow the great Highland Forests to regenerate as it should now that there are fewer sheep around to keep the place as a green desert.

Wildlife

Wolves! That’s what they need around here. Reintroduced to provide the top of the food chain predation to keep the deer down to a reasonable and healthy population. There have been a number of such proposals, but sheep farmers have been distinctly unimpressed. The problem here is that the plans so far involve the wolves going into competition with the farmers. Just a bit more vision could involve the farmers in ‘farming’ wolves – or, more accurately, the tourists who would flock all year round to go on ‘Highland Wolf Safaris’. Totally wild wolves could be watched from hides, even spied on in their dens thanks to hidden TV cameras and the like. It would be magical.

As a matter of fact the wolf packs would generally only take sick or injured sheep or deer, so there would still be the income from more traditional farming anyway. And since there is no genuine record of a wolf attack on any human being, returning a bit of the wild world - and one of our most magnificent native totem/folklore animals – to our countryside would enrich the lives of untold numbers of people and help the local economy, with no ‘downside’ in sight..

We reach Edinburgh in the middle evening and meet up with Pat Harrington. Pat made international headlines back in the early 1980s when he combined being a student in North London with heavy involvement in the then National Front (in the days before it descended to being little more than a gang of skinheads). He had to brave demonstrations, sometimes involving several thousand screaming far-leftists, and even had to go to the High Court to secure his right to tuition and to sit his exams.

It was an outstanding display of moral and physical courage, on top of Pat’s considerable talents as a strategist, organiser and writer. Although we subsequently parted company (not on particular good terms, as is often the way in such things) I’m very glad that all that is now water under the bridge. Although he is not a member of the BNP he is doing very valuable work in, among other things, the independent nationalist trade union, Solidarity. (Take a look at www.solidaritytradeunion.org and join!)

We get through a fair bit of red wine discussing not so much the past as ideas for the future. It’s very useful to see our organisation through sympathetically critical outside eyes, and stimulating to talk to someone with a talent for “thinking outside the box”.

On the long drive home Radios Four and Five both run stories on the 200^th Anniversary of the Abolition of the Slave Trade in the British Empire. All too predictably, this is an excuse for an orgy of PC ethno-masochistic self-flagellation. Instead of glorying in the key role of Britain in providing the lead in ending an international evil, and reflecting on the fact that, without our guiding hand, slavery has returned to Africa and Asia, particularly in Muslim countries, all the programmes are about white guilt.

Again and again we are told the wicked lie that the Industrial Revolution and the foundations of Britain’s wealth and power all rest on the profits of the slave trade. I say ‘wicked’ quite deliberately, and on three grounds:

First, such anti-white fantasies actively encourages the racial hatred and deep resentment that turns many young blacks living in Britain into racist bigots with chips on their shoulder. Innocent white people in places like London and Birmingham will still be being mugged, abused, stabbed and raped by ‘hit back at whitey’ thugs a decade from now as a direct result of this propaganda. The ultimate irony is that if the understandably angry ones’ ancestors hadn’t been sold as slaves to white, Arab and Jewish slave-traders then most of them would have died in Africa’s endless round of plagues, famine, tribal wars and cannibalism, so they wouldn’t even have descendants to feel aggrieved;

Second, because wall-to-wall Victim Status allows many black people to evade responsibility for the failings of their own communities and families. Whatever blacks do wrong can be blamed on slavery, so there is no need – or even internal pressure – to strive to put things right themselves. Teaching an entire community always to blame others for an inescapably stultifying history guarantees further conflict and endemic failure. White left-liberals, in pursuit of their own ideological fantasy Utopia, thus condemn the very people they claim to regard as special and worthy of help to a continued cycle of powerless victimhood. Black failure starts with Roots and ends with black teenagers gunned down at the ice-rink;

Third, because it is a total distortion of history. Slavery certainly did make large sums of money for a handful of British slavers, for the captains of their ships, and for the owners of the plantations of the West Indies. Some of the fine Georgian houses in Bristol, London and Liverpool, and even a few stately homes, were indeed built on this human misery.

But there are hundreds of stately homes and thousands of rich town houses all over Britain that owe nothing to the African slave trade. The money for them, and for the horrible, pretentious, snobbish lifestyle captured in such excruciating detail by Jane Austen, came from the exploitation of OUR people.

The Georgian pillars, chandeliers and paintings of your average National Trust pile were made possible not by the slave trade but by little English, Scottish and Welsh children dragging carts in coal mines, by boys forced up chimneys and girls herded into mills and match factories until the poisons in such jobs gave them cancer. Irish ‘navvies’ crushed to death digging canal and railway tunnels or falling from the scaffolding while laying the bricks that built our Victorian cities. Generations of men and boys who followed the shoals of herring and whose wives and mothers mourned them with no graves when the sea claimed its due. The arthritic, half-starved English ploughmen plodding through the cold mud behind a million horses for generations, condemned to death or transportation if they took one of the hares that would devastate their own tiny vegetable patches behind their collapsing ‘tied’ hovels. The generations of orphan children and broken families who went to paupers’ graves at the workhouses that loomed over every poor family in the land.

Don’t let any snivelling, self-hating liberal tell you otherwise: The grandeur and wealth of this country was sweated, beaten, starved and stolen from our ancestors, not from anybody else. And whenever some foreign tyrant or ideology of change threatened to overturn that status quo, those same ancestors provided the cannon-fodder to die to defend it on a thousand battlefields by land and sea.

In denying all these historical facts, the present white-guilt slavery orgy coldly and deliberately shoves the far worse (wage slaves cost nothing, don’t have to be looked after, and are replaced for free by volunteers once they’re worked to death) suffering of the white working class. It’s the PC version of Holocaust Denial – our own people never suffered, were never exploited, in fact may as well never even have existed.

And since none of that happened to our ancestors, us native Brits have no special, first-nation claim to this land. Which clears the way for the liberal elite’s Genetically Modified population transformation and cultural destruction ethnocide of the British and general and the English in particular. My God, how I hate these vermin!

Glasgow meeting

No sooner home from Edinburgh than it’s time to head back to Glasgow. Security with me this time so we can stop anywhere for fuel instead of having to avoid service stations likely to be ‘enriched’. Jackie is also with us, sharing the driving and having a quiet word with key players in the party to help bring some feminine intuition to various leadership considerations.

The Glasgow meeting goes very well indeed. There are several splendidly effective and inspiring speeches from some relatively new local organisers, and morale is sky-high. I speak about the long-term strategy of sinking deep community roots and putting together a “coalition of the excluded” – by which I mean the genuinely excluded, not scrotes, low-lives and spongers – Christians whose core values are derided by the BBC and turned into crimes by our Masters; Tories whose party has deserted them to become a New Labour clone; council house tenants who are set to be sold along with their Residents’ Associations to the highest bidding giant corporation; and white youth in places like Pollockshields.

I conclude by touching on Scotland’s first two Clearances, when the elite of the day stole first the commons and small peasant farms of the Lowlands and then the clan lands of the Highlands from the people of Scotland, and urging all present to strive to resist a Third Clearance – the one that will come all too soon in the form of White Flight in a country with a population so much smaller than England but now facing a tide of mass immigration every bit as large. The message clearly strikes home, not just with those from Glasgow (“the asylum capital of Europe”), but also with people who have travelled down from small towns where East European economic migrants are pricing locals out of jobs and homes.

The collection is stunning: £12,000 there and then, plus a further £2,000 previously pledged but now handed in. This will help to pay for a leaflet for every home in Scotland, plus a TV broadcast, and is I believe guaranteed to bring the BNP the highest ever vote north of the border.

Back home to Wales and half a day in the garden. Because we’re so high up (1,000 feet) in such a generally wet area and with thin soil, growing things here isn’t easy. So I’m part way through turning the front garden over to raised beds made of old railway sleepers. This should help drainage, productivity, pest control and even the length of the growing season in the vegetable section, and make the flowers part easier to manage with rather limited time.

Then on Monday evening it’s off to North Wales and a meeting of Bill Murray’s fast-growing Prestatyn group. There are some seventy people present, all bar a couple from North Wales (some Welsh, some English incomers). There are four councillors present, including quite a senior LibDem, and all are apparently impressed. I do one of the Question & Answer session meetings, which helps an audience as varied as this one (all ages, all walks of life) get a full picture of the BNP.

It also highlights the fact that this is the one party that avoids spin and pre-prepared speeches to hand-picked audiences. Direct contact between politicians and the people. That’s the way democracy used to work, the way it works in the BNP, and the way - one day - it will work again, once the grip of the media moguls, the moneybags and the union bosses has been broken for good.