English Advocates plan to strip ethnic minorities of their rights

English Advocates - a Facebook page run by Lee Ingram - has started a new campaign. It hopes to ensure that all ethnic minority citizens will be barred from holding positions of authority in England, and that anyone who stands in the way of this movement will be arrested.

The Advocates believe themselves to have solid legal grounds for this endeavour, using a quotation from the Bill of Rights 1688 as a basis:

In their rush to justify their racist agenda, however, the English Advocates have grossly misrepresented the document in question.

Here is the relevant passage in full:

New Oaths of Allegiance, &c.
And that the Oathes hereafter mentioned be taken by all Persons of whome the Oathes of Allegiance and Supremacy might be required by Law instead of them And that the said Oathes of Allegiance and Supremacy be abrogated. 

Allegiance.
I A B doe sincerely promise and sweare That I will be faithfull and beare true Allegiance to their Majestyes King William and Queene Mary Soe helpe me God. 

Supremacy.
I A B doe sweare That I doe from my Heart Abhorr, Detest and Abjure as Impious and Hereticall this damnable Doctrine and Position That Princes Excommunicated or Deprived by the Pope or any Authority of the See of Rome may be deposed or murdered by their Subjects or any other whatsoever. And I doe declare That noe Forreigne Prince Person Prelate, State or Potentate hath or ought to have any Jurisdiction Power Superiority Preeminence or Authoritie Ecclesiasticall or Spirituall within this Realme Soe helpe me God.

So, what the Advocates are quoting is part of a pair of oaths. Oaths are binding only to people who actually make them, and the Bill of Rights does not specify who is required to make these oaths.

In this day and age, of course, nobody is required to make either of these oaths - the fact that one of them mentions William III and Mary II indicates just how outdated this section of the Bill of Rights is. These oaths are historical artifacts, nothing more.

This is not the only fatal flaw in the English Advocates' plan. Notice that the second oath refers specifically to positions of religious authority; this is evident even in the section quoted by Ingram and company, who are apparently unaware of what the word "ecclesiastical" means.

As anybody with any knowledge of English history will tell you, the Bill of Rights was drafted at a time of great strife between Catholics and Protestants. The reference to "noe Forreigne Prince Person Prelate, State or Potentate" is not directed at immigrants or descendants of immigrants living in England, but rather to individuals and bodies based in foreign countries - it is an obvious allusion to the Roman Catholic Church.

Lee Ingram, the man behind English Advocates.

To recap, Lee Ingram and his comrades are making three fatal errors in their reading of this document:

1: That the oaths are legally binding to everyone in the country, even those who have not actually made them;
2: That "foreign" refers to ancestry, rather than geographic location;
3: That the second oath covers all positions of authority, rather than merely religious authority.

Nice try, Lee. But while the replies to your post demonstrate that your followers have fallen for your misrepresentation of the Bill of Rights, not everyone is quite so gullible. Any legal expert would laugh their socks off if you came to them with this nonsense.

This is not the first time that Ingram has expressed interest in removing the rights of ethnic minorities.  Take a look at these posts he made at the now-defunct Cross of St. George forum back in 2007 (the thread is archived here):

The article he links to, with obvious approval, is hosted on the white supremacist website Heretical Press. Written by Kenneth McKilliam, a Nazi sympathiser who was closely involved with the BNP during its early days, the article argues that Jews should not be allowed to hold positions of authority in Britain:

Being prohibited aliens by the Edict of Expulsion Jews have no right to sit in our houses of parliament, nor on our local government councils. They have no right to be in the judiciary nor to hold office in the executive of government nor in the police force. All purported laws and purported acts of parliament in which Jews have taken part in the voting are illegal, unconstitutional: null and void. 

Stripping ethnic minority groups of their rights, it would seem, is a cause dear to Lee Ingram's heart.

The failure of the Steadfast Trust's English Community Groups

Late last year I wrote a post with a rundown of the various English Community Groups that had been set up at the behest of the Steadfast Trust. With this organisation currently on ice, we should not be surprised that its ECGs are in pretty poor shape themselves:

The Ipswich ECG appears not have made any moves since 6 January.

The Portsmouth ECG seems to have frozen up a week before its Ipswich cousin.

The Southampton ECG - a group so obscure that I didn't even know it existed when I wrote my last rundown - let out its death rattle at the same time.

The Essex ECG,  I believe, closed its doors in late 2014.

The Dorset ECG merged into the English Volunteer Force, a not-particularly-significant EDL splinter group.

The Northants English Welfare Society is still active - but it seems unlikely to attract widespread support, given that its frontman Walter Greenway is an unabashed Nazi sympathiser. Incidentally, "Walter Greenway" is a pseudonym, and the man in question also appears to go under the name "Gamlegorm the White". I am unsure what his real name is, but a short while back I received hits from someone searching for "ragnar northants english welfare society", "gamelegorm the white walter greenway" and "walter greenway northants english welfare stephen osborne". Make of that what you will.

 A typical posting from the Northants English Welfare Society.

Recently, however, there has been one more nail in the coffin: ECGL.org, the official website of the Leicester ECG, has closed down as a result of its domain expiring on 17 September.
For a bit of background, the ECGL - the most prominent of the ECGs - was founded on 2011. In March last year it announced that it would rebrand as a nationwide group called English Advocates.

This is where things get a little fiddly. The ECGL Facebook page changed its name to English Advocates and the group's Youtube channel rebranded as "Ethnic English", but the ECGL website remained and the old group was, officially, still active. Ingram (or one of his cohorts) even restarted its Facebook presence as a separate page.

But that second ECGL Facebook page closed as well. Now, with the closure of the website, all that is left of the English Community Group Leicester is the English Advocates page - which is basically just Lee Ingram ranting:

Lee Ingram argues that living in England is as bad as living in war-torn Syria.

I took the opportunity to archive the ECGL website just before it went down. Of particular interest is the photo gallery, where I found this image...

Hmm, wonder what those papers they're distributing could be about...?

Well, it just so happens that the site offered a closer look:

Now, what does that stack of fliers on the left say...?

Ah, yes. Woden's Folk.

For those unfamiliar, Woden's Folk is a neo-Nazi cult that believes Hitler to have been an avatar of the god Woden. The cult is eagerly awaiting the return of Woden/Hitler, in the belief that he will save the Aryan race from the dark forces of Judaism. Lee Ingram and his pals, for reasons of their own, felt that this cult was worth promoting.

If you're reading this, Lee, please don't insult my intelligence by claiming that you were unaware of the cult's neo-Nazi beliefs at the time. We're talking about a group with "Woden" in its name. That alone should have been more than enough to set off alarm bells.

The Steadfast Trust's English Community Groups were meant to represent ordinary English folk. Instead, they ended up as magnets for neo-Nazis. Had anyone voiced these concerns at the beginning of the project, they would doubtless have been dismissed as Anglophobes. However, as history has shown, those concerns turned out to be entirely valid.

Of course, the failure of the English Community Groups is just one of many casualties in the short history of Englisc nationalism. My report on the impending demise of the Anglo-Saxon Foundation turned out to be overoptimistic - the forum's domain was renewed for another year - but we need only take a quick look around the movement to find numerous other groups that have bitten the dust. English Shieldwall? Dead. Englisc Resistance? Dead. Steadfast journal? Dead.

Englisc nationalism will never gain a foothold amongst the English. Simple as that.