By Dave Stevens.
A British nature reserve in Norfolk, at Cley-Next-the-Sea, has been strewn with live munitions and closed because a foreign military aircraft based in our country has crashed in it. The HH-60G Pave Hawk, a modified Black Hawk helicopter, which landed there on the evening of 7th January, killing four foreign soldiers, is part of the American 48th Fighter Wing, based at a US airbase at Lakenheath, Suffolk. A terrible loss of life and bereavement for the families of those killed in what appears to be an accident.
This foreign military base is insultingly and falsely designated ‘RAF’ Lakenheath. Although RAF personnel, like any other Britons, trying to enter this bit of British soil can do so only with the permission of the armed foreign soldiers guarding it.
It is one of a network of US bases scattered across Britain in which 11,000 American military personnel garrison our country. British people cannot enter these areas of American-occupied Britain without US permission and the British Government has no control over, or necessarily knowledge of, what goes on in them.
The excuse for these foreign troops on our soil was that they were needed to help defend Britain from the Soviet Union. As the Soviet Union no longer exists, and has not done since 1991, this has certainly not been true for the past twenty years.
In fact it never was true. The purpose of the American bases in Britain was not to help Britain defend itself from the Soviets. It was to help America attack them. From Washington, Britain was an unsinkable US aircraft carrier anchored off the coast of Europe, 3500 miles nearer to the USSR than the US homeland, from which the Americans could much more effectively nuke Russia.
An expendable US aircraft carrier. For whole of the 1950’s and most of the 1960’s, the Soviets could not reach the US homeland with most of its nuclear arsenal. But they certainly could reach Britain with all of it. This meant the Americans could launch a nuclear strike on the Soviets from their British bases safe in the knowledge that we, and not they, would bear the brunt of any Soviet retaliation.
Worse, thanks to the terms under which US forces and missiles were emplaced in Britain, the US could launch that strike, and bring down massive nuclear retaliation on our heads, without the permission or even prior knowledge of the British Government. This reached the point where a senior British civil servant quipped that we should answer the 18th century American slogan about Britain – ‘No Taxation without Representation’ – with a 20th century British response to them – ‘No Annihilation without Consultation’…
This possible annihilation, in which Britain and the British people were to be thrown on the nuclear fire to serve US interests, very nearly happened at least once. On Saturday 27th October 1962, in response to Soviet missiles in Cuba which were not the slightest threat to Britain, the US was within minutes of launching a nuclear first strike against the Soviets by firing sixty THOR Intermediate Range Ballistic Missiles based all along the East Coast of Britain. The British Government had only a vague knowledge of this and no power to stop it.
We now know that the Soviets would have responded with a multimegatonne bombardment of every major city and strategic site in the UK with hydrogen bombs which would have killed over 95% of the British people and destroyed Britain as a functioning society.
The doddery Tory Prime Minister of the day, Harold Macmillan, once the penny dropped that the US was on the point of sacrificing fifty million British people to get Russian missiles removed from an island 4000 miles away from us, simply went into a total funk. He ignored increasingly desperate pleas from senior Civil Service and military officials even to begin activating the – pathetically inadequate – Civil Defence plans that existed to save as many Britons as possibly from the rapidly impending holocaust.
He also dithered about placing Britain’s own semi-independent nuclear capability, the V-bomber force, on full alert, putting them on only partial alert so they would mostly have been destroyed on the ground when the Soviet nuclear missiles struck. He did allow the RAF to ask the Americans if we could have some atomic bombs to put in them please – most of the ‘British independent nuclear deterrent’ was actually held by the Americans on RAF bomber bases under lock and key guarded by armed American soldiers.
Fortunately for all of us Britons – we would almost certainly all be long dead otherwise – the Soviets came to a last minute agreement with the Americans whereby the Soviet missiles in Cuba would be withdrawn in return for the similar removal of American missiles on the Soviet border in Turkish-occupied Western Armenia. The Soviets had sent missiles to Cuba in response to this provocative US emplacement of American missiles a few miles from the Soviet border in the Caucasus region.
None of this game of nuclear chess between America and Russia played out in the Caribbean and Asia Minor would have been of much concern to us in Britain but for the US bases on our shores, which made our nation an expendable pawn to be sacrificed in their game.
As Nationalists and indeed the leading Conservative J. Enoch Powell pointed out then, and it is still true now, these US bases, and the NATO treaty that made Britain a US satellite, did not and do not make Britain safer. On the contrary, they make us a lot less safe. They very nearly killed us all.
The Cold War is gone. But the foreign bases are still there, with foreign warplanes still roaring a few feet over British fields. Or crashing on to them. Fortunately, this time only scaring a few ducks but potentially killing British families in their homes. Worse still, potentially dragging British civilians, as successive Labour and Tory/LibDem Governments seem happy to drag British soldiers, into American wars for American and not necessarily in the slightest bit British interests.
As Nationalists have been saying for over fifty years, there should be no foreign military bases on British soil and no surrender of British foreign and defence policy to foreigners through the likes of NATO. We are lucky we are still alive to give – and the British people alive to hear – that message. No thanks to the Americans! That Black Hawk down in a Norfolk marsh should be a wake-up call for action…
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I was an ardent pro-American Cold warrior. Are you the David Stevens I knew in Ealing in the 1980s?
A long overdue article in my opinion. I find the presence of US forces in Britain an insult as it is a tangible example of Britain’s vassal state status in respect of the US. For that matter why are there any US bases in Europe these days anyway – the Soviets are long gone and so should the Americans. Britain, indeed Europe, should tell the US military to “sling their hook” and end their de-facto occupation. The defence of Britain is a British concern and responsibility – it has nothing to do with the US. Nationalists should campaign not just for the removal of US forces from this country but also for Britain’s exit from NATO. Furthermore Britain should speed up its removal of forces from Germany and close down overseas bases, such as in Cyprus, which in no way serve the British interest these days. Britain is not an American colony, it’s high time that Whitehall and Washington understood that.
I have thought for a long time now that we should not have any foreign military bases on our soil here in Britain. We should also not have our own foreign military bases in Germany, Cyprus or anywhere else for that matter.
As nationalists, we believe that the role of our armed forces is strictly to defend our own territory. Global interests should not decide where we put our military personnel, and we should not accept any foreign military personnel to be stationed here for their own national interests either. How long might it be before we see EU military stationed here? One of the future ambitions of the EU is to create a European army, navy and air force. That would mean the incorporation of all of our own armed forces into them. If these did exist in the near future we would inevitably have even more foreign military personnel on British soil.
I would like to see the defence policy of the BDP changed so that we add that we demand the immediate removal of all US military equipment and personnel from Britain. We would also oversee the return of all our own armed forces from overseas, closing all our existing foreign bases accordingly.
It’s hard to imagine that 20 years before the ‘Cuba crisis’ of 1962, our merchant and American seamen suffered a substantial loss of life in the dark frozen waters of the North Atlantic carrying arms to supply the Russian Red Army. The story of ‘PQ17’ springs to mind. Soon after World War II, they want to obliterate us. Not a very comradely act!
In post-war Britain, we became the 51st state of the USA and we continue to be so. We should be an independent nation with no foreign troops on our soil.
Many of our senior citizens during war time would state there are only three things wrong with the ‘Yanks’: overpaid, oversexed and over here!
So long as we allow ourselves to be dragged into America’s wars we remain a target – Lee Rigby being but one example. Would this young man still be alive today if Britain had not got involved in Iraq and Afghanistan? Probably yes. Add to that how the Yanks are spying on British citizens via their NSA and control over GCHQ Cheltenham and I say its time to dissolve the special relationship, which these days is not unlike that between a man and his dog.
I agree wholeheartedly, James. The so-called ‘Special Relationship’ is indeed ‘special’ as it is very much one-sided. Britain needs to recover its national self-confidence and that means we should be subservient to no one.
(Party Member) Well said Geoff. The removal of any foreign military bases from British soil should be part of our policy. In fact we have discussed several policies ranging from the road fund license, housing and other items. Maybe it’s time for Policy Document No.2 to be formulated and published as we launch into 2014 which will be the turning point for Nationalism in Britain.
Our ‘special relationship’ with the USA is really only a historical one these days. As for the British bases overseas, these are historical too. We had Gibraltar, Malta, Cyprus and Aden to safeguard our ships’ passage to India and Australia and New Zealand. With air travel, these strategic bases may not be so important as they were.
However, we should hang on, I think, to Gibraltar, as the majority of the people there want to stay British, with British laws rather than Napoleonic Spanish ones.
Many people dismiss Gibraltar’s strategic value to Britain and think it has no importance at all but they are wrong. Whilst it is true to say it has far less than in the past, it still does have some particularly whilst the people of the Falkland Islands wish to remain British. Gibraltar played an important role in helping the task force that was sent to recover the Falklands in 1982.
But it is entirely up to the people of Gibraltar to exercise their right of self-determination and if they choose to want to remain British (as a huge majority of them do) then the British government should support them in that.
We should definitely hang on to Gibraltar as the wish of the vast majority of Gibraltarians is to remain British. We should respect their right to self-determination.
When the Americans asked the incumbent left-nationalist President of Ecuador whether they might renew the leases on two air bases in that far away land, they were expecting a negative response. To their surprise, back came the answer: “Yes, but on certain terms”.
What, the Yankee imperialists asked, might those terms be? Well, came the reply, the Ecuadorian air force must be granted two bases in New York state in return!
As Dave Stevens points out, the Soviet Union collapsed a long time ago, and the supposed Soviet threat (which, in so far as it ever really existed, was itself the consequence of fighting the second of the two calamitous and avoidable wars with Germany that were the undoing of both England and Germany) has long since disappeared.
Despite that, our abject apology for a political class is less willing to stand up to the presence of an unwanted American garrison in Airstrip One than the president of what is, quite literally, a banana republic. That, needless to say, reflects badly on England, not Ecuador.
For far too long what passes for foreign policy in once Great Britain has been (as Enoch Powell rightly pointed out) to find out what the Americans want and do it, without a thought to whether British interests might diverge from American interests.
Surely it is time, compañeros, for Great Britain to declare independence from the United States of America!