Western Goals Institute
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
 |
Please see the discussion on the talk page. |
The Western Goals Institute (WGI) was an "ultra-conservative" (refer:Searchlight magazine, London, January 2006, p.23) pressure group in Britain, re-formed in 1989 from Western Goals (UK), which originated in 1985 as an offshoot of the U.S. Western Goals Foundation. Its stated intent was anti-communism, although it was also known for its opposition to non-white immigration into Europe and Britain. The Institute and its predecessor were affiliated with the World Anti-Communist League: WGI had sent a delegation to the 22nd WACL Conference in Brussels in July 1990 and from 1991 WGI was the UK chapter of the senior World League. It is said that in 1992 the World League declined to be further associated with the Institute, although the issue is unclear.
Contents |
[edit] Aims
Its stated aims were to "combat the insidious menace of liberalism and Communism within all sectors of British society" (The Times, 13 October 1989), and at the same time to create "a powerful international axis of the right". To the latter end, the group forged links with parties such as the Front National of France and the Conservative Party of South Africa.
WGI Director Stuart Notholt described the WGI's international strategy as follows:
- Western Goals works to establish networks and links with conservative groups dedicated to the preservation of the cultures and identities of western nations. We are conservatives who believe in traditional conservative values. A multi-cultural society does not work. We wish to protect the way of life we had before immigrants arrived. It was a mistake to permit these people to come here. Politicians must now accept this. Large numbers of immigrants reject European culture and wish to remain alien in religion and culture. We want European culture in European countries. We would seek to have treaties with countries to permit resettlement. (BBC Radio 4 interview, 1991).
WGI Directorate 1990 (Stuart Notholt, Gregory Lauder-Frost, Andrew V R Smith, Mark Haley).
The London magazine City Limits (21 June 1990) stated that "Western Goals is talking the same blunt authoritarian language as many Tory backbenchers and rank and file Tories. It is a group to be reckoned with... having a formidable list of honorary patrons and Vice-Presidents": these were General Sir Walter Walker, KCB, CBE, DSO, former North Atlantic Treaty Organization Chief of Staff, Major-General John K. Singlaub of the World Anti-Communist League, US Military Intelligence, and Major Patrick Wall, MC, VRD, RM.
Its list of Vice-Presidents included Professor Antony Flew, Professor Tryggvi McDonald, Rev. Martin Smyth, MP, the Tory peer Lord Sudeley, Dr. Harvey Ward, former head of the Rhodesian Broadcasting Corporation (today the Zimbabwe Broadcasting Corporation), Colonel Barry Turner, Royal Engineers (retired), the Rev. Basil Watson, OBE, MA, RN (retired), and Gregory Lauder-Frost of the Conservative Monday Club. The Directorate consisted, until the mid-1990s, of Andrew V R Smith, Stuart Notholt, Gideon Sherman (son of Sir Alfred Sherman), and others.
The group issued regular Press Statements and published a variety of policy papers.
[edit] Conservative Party links
The WGI initially worked towards its goals within the British Conservative Party, in particular via the right-wing Conservative Monday Club with whom it shared some members.
In the late 1980s, WGI's predecessor, Western Goals (UK), had established a parliamentary advisory committee of Conservative MPs which included Sir Patrick Wall, Nicholas Winterton, Neil Hamilton and Bill Walker, as well as Martin Smyth of the Ulster Unionist Party. In 1991, Western Goals was accused in a newspaper report of engineering a "take-over" of the Conservative Monday Club, and there were reports that some veteran members believed the Club had become "more extreme" (Observer, 24 February 1991). Club Political Secretary Gregory Lauder-Frost rejected these claims in a right-of-reply letter published the following week.
In December 1991, after a visit by French right-wing leader Jean-Marie Le Pen at the request of the Institute, its Director Andrew Smith was quoted as saying "There is scope for a radical right alternative outside the Conservative Party (UK). The Tories have betrayed their principles since Mrs Thatcher fell. With this contact with European leaders we are laying the foundations for a new party." (Observer, 8 December 1991). The possibility of founding a new right-wing party, on the model of Le Pen's Front National, appears to have been abandoned by Smith after the Conservative Party's win in the April 1992 General Election ensured that proportional representation stayed off the political agenda for the foreseeable future. However even at the time, the gradual defection of the parliamentary advisory committee and the decision of the leadership of the Monday Club and associated MPs to stay away from the Le Pen meeting made the prospect unlikely.[2]
In September 1992, Sir Norman Fowler, in an attempt to distance the Conservative Party from the Institute, said that "No one in Western Goals is known by Central Office to belong to our party". This followed the Institute's invitation to Jean-Marie Le Pen, and 31 year-old Italian parliamentary deputy, Alessandra Mussolini, to address fringe meetings at the 1992 Conservative Party conference (although the both were unable to come to Britain and the meetings were subsequently cancelled). The invitation to Miss Mussolini were said to have "caused outrage", and led to calls for a ban on her entering the country (Daily Mail, 3 September 1992). The Institute rejected Fowler's remark, saying that the majority of those associated with the institute held Conservative Party membership.
The Jewish Chronicle reported on 25 September 1992 that Marc Gordon, director of the libertarian International Freedom Foundation urged the Conservative Party to expel members of Western Goals, and in the same newspaper on 2 October, Julian Lewis (now a Member of Parliament, then deputy head of Conservative Central Office's Research Department), said he would strongly advise local associations that Western Goals was hostile to Conservative objectives. The Guardian subsequently accused the WGI of attempting "to infiltrate fascists into the Conservative Party" (Guardian, 18 August 1993), a claim that the WGI disputed as "rubbish".
[edit] Global links
WGI supported the continuance of apartheid policies in South Africa, and hosted a visit to the UK, in June 1989, by the hierarchy of the Conservative Party of South Africa, a hard-line breakaway from the National Party of South Africa, including its leader Dr. Andries Treurnicht. A press conference was held for the delegation in a committee room of the House of Lords on 5 June, (refer: The Tribune, 2 June, and The Independent 2 and 6 June 1989). Conservative Party of South Africa MP Clive Derby-Lewis, then a member of the State President's Council, was made an honorary vice-president of the WGI.
On 25 September 1989, Baron Sudeley chaired a Western Goals dinner at Simpson's-in-the-Strand for El Salvador's President, Alfredo Cristiani, and his inner cabinet. The guest list included figures such as Sir Alfred Sherman - policy advisor to Margaret Thatcher, Lord Nicholas Hervey, Professor Antony Flew, Andrew V R Smith, Dr. Zigmunt Szkopiak, Colonel Barry Turner,R.E.(Retd)., Sam Swerling, Gregory Lauder-Frost, W.Denis Walker, and Dr.Harvey Ward. [Refer: The Daily Telegraph and Times, Court & Social page, 26 September 1989.
In Europe, Western Goals gave their open support to the French Front National, the populist far-right political party led by Jean-Marie Le Pen. On 12 October 1989, WGI hosted a controversial fringe meeting at the Conservative Party Conference in Blackpool, addressed by Front National Member of the European Parliament, Pierre Ceyrac. Western Goals also examined the possibility of links with the hard-right German party The Republicans, which in 1989 had six members in the European Parliament.
On 12 August 1989, a delegation from the Western Goals Institute attended a large anti-communist demonstration at Moln, near Lübeck, where 20,000 people had gathered. It was organized by Die Deutschen Konservativen e.V., which was led by another media personality, Joachim Siegerist, now a parliamentarian in Riga, with whom the WGI had contacts. [3]
Major Roberto D'Aubuisson, a member of El Salvador's ARENA party and a reported death squad leader, was briefly President of Western Goals prior to his death in 1992, when he was replaced by Conservative Party of South Africa MP Clive Derby-Lewis.[4]. Derby-Lewis was convicted under South Africa's Emergency Legislation in 1993 for conspiracy in the assassination of Chris Hani, Secretary of the South African Communist Party.
The group hosted social events including an Annual Dinner at the Grosvenor Hotel at Victoria on 24 November 1989 when the guest of honour was Kenneth Griffith, who spoke out against non-white Third World immigration into Britain and Europe. On 20 November 1990, they hosted the General Franco Memorial Dinner, commemorating the anniversary of his death. This was also chaired by Baron Sudeley. A WGI notice in The Times stated that the late ruler of Spain was "remembered as a hero against communism".
Andrew Smith, writing as Director of the WGI, had a letter in The Times on 19 March 1990 attacking left-wing regimes and "British businessmen and British army officers who keep Mozambique's communist dictatorship in power".
Gregory Lauder-Frost, writing on behalf of WGI in a letter published in The Daily Telegraph on 9 October 1991, stated that "Most of the refugees [to Britain] are economic migrants, and the government should deport them as soon as possible, just as they are deporting Vietnamese economic migrants from Hong Kong."
Western Goals hosted a dinner for Jean-Marie Le Pen and his team at the Charing Cross Hotel in the Strand, London, at the beginning of December 1991 which was widely reported, with an exclusive appearing in The Mail on Sunday on 8 December. There was a large demonstration against the dinner outside the hotel and some damage to property took place, notably the hotel's front doors and surroundings, which were smashed. Western Goals director Andrew Smith later said that "On reflection the Le Pen visit was the zenith and also the beginning of the end."[5]
[edit] After 1992
The negative media publicity, the departure from the Directorate of Andrew V.R. Smith (replaced by Stuart Millson), and the end of the Soviet Union, meant that activities diminished, and lack of adequate finance reduced any subsequent campaigning to their occasional policy papers, the glossy newsletter, press releases, and letters to editors
Western Goals may have supported the anti-communist cause with more than rhetoric. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (2 July 1993) lists the Western Goals Institute as an "impediment" to the elimination of racial discrimination in South Africa, saying of the Institute that it "claims to be devoted to protecting the Western way of life by offering self-defence training to white South Africans".[1]
Yorkshire-based Anthony Murphy, who had been a prominent local Conservative in Bradford, and Chairman of the Yorkshire branch of the Conservative Monday Club, was the group's Secretary from 1993 to 1996.
In a circular letter to supporters in late 1993, WGI stated that "the WGI remains opposed to a non-traditional Britain, and Europe, and we condemn the slide into general degeneracy visible everywhere. We condemn unacceptable numbers of immigrants, whether born here or not. We object to our economies being run by multi-nationals whose first consideration will never be the national good, but internationalism and profit." Some have argued that the last sentence quoted above is as opposed to Thatcherism as it is to more left-wing ideas.
The group sent representatives to The Right Conference in London on 21 May 1994. WGI Vice-President, Gregory Lauder-Frost, had a letter in The Scotsman in October 1994, on behalf of the group, opposing constitutional devolution, and another writing again as Vice-President, appeared in the London Evening Standard on 4 January 1995, which called for "witch-hunts" of traditionalists within the Conservative Party to cease, and for "the party to return to its original philosophies".
On 1 March 1995, the Guest-of-Honour at the Western Goals Annual Dinner, chaired by Gregory Lauder-Frost and held at the Grosvenor Hotel in Victoria, was Ulster Democratic Unionist Party MP, Peter Robinson, (The Times, Court & Social page, March 2, 1995).
In January and February 1996 WGI issued two 'Opinion Papers' as Press Statements, headed "The Monarchy in Crisis - Our Opinion", and "Crush the IRA" (Provisional Irish Republican Army), calling for the army's Special Air Service (SAS) to be deployed in Northern Ireland, for Sinn Fein to be proscribed, and for a formal declaration by the British government that Northern Ireland would remain an integral part of the United Kingdom in perpetuity.
In July 1997, Western Goals formally complained by letter to the BBC's Director-General that the BBC was "promoting minorities and minority opinion at the expense of the majority population" and that it had an institutionalised left-wing bias. Also in July 1997, Lauder-Frost, writing on behalf of the WGI, made a formal complaint to British Airways opposing the abolition of their traditional logo on plane tails, to be replaced by a logo which, in their response, BA said "represents a willingness to embrace different cultures".
On 4 February 1998, Western Goals sent a letter to the Evening Standard over their headline "Britain attacks Iraq Arsenal". The letter asked "what was the United Nations doing when the Soviet Union had all these weapons of mass destruction?" It called for Iraq's sovereignty to be respected. On 1 March that year, several of the 'Old Guard' from Western Goals went on the first Countryside Alliance march through London, followed by a luncheon at the Lansdowne Club.
In January 1999, the group wrote to The Daily Telegraph on two occasions, on the 21st attacking Margaret Beckett's 'instructions' to the hereditary peerage not to obstruct the legislation which would remove them from the House of Lords, and on the 28th, when they commented on the report of that day that Islamic terrorists were now living and training in Britain, and called for a halt to immigration. Their last sentence said "the alternative will be a disaster-in-waiting for all of us."
Their December 1999 mailing carried a personal letter from General Walker on WGI notepaper, calling for vigilance against 'the enemies within' and saluting Western Goals' 15 years of activity in Great Britain. The organisation folded in 2001 following the death of General Sir Walter Walker.
[edit] Notes
- 1 The Guardian, 24 April 1993, "Guns, Goons and Western Goals, David Pallister, David Beresford and Angela Johnson report on the international connections of Clive Derby-Lewis, arrested by Chris Hani murder investigators"
- 2 The Guardian, 24 April 1993, "Guns, Goons and Western Goals, David Pallister, David Beresford and Angela Johnson report on the international connections of Clive Derby-Lewis, arrested by Chris Hani murder investigators"
- 3 The Guardian, 24 April 1993, "Guns, Goons and Western Goals, David Pallister, David Beresford and Angela Johnson report on the international connections of Clive Derby-Lewis, arrested by Chris Hani murder investigators"
- 4 The Scotsman, 1 December 1994, "Court turns down appeals by murderers of Chris Hani"
- 5 The Guardian, 24 April 1993, "Guns, Goons and Western Goals, David Pallister, David Beresford and Angela Johnson report on the international connections of Clive Derby-Lewis, arrested by Chris Hani murder investigators"
[edit] References
- Western Goals archives now held by the Traditional Britain Group, BCM Box 9045, London, WC1N 3XX.
- Various newspapers and TV programmes.
[edit] Some WGI publications
- The Mandela Myth WGI Viewpoint Paper, by James Gibb-Stuart. June 1990.
- The Finance Factor WGI Viewpoint Paper, by James Gibb-Stuart. no date, but probably 1991. (Gibb-Stuart had addressed the Conservative Monday Club Young Members' Group 1989 Annual Conference on the subject of "Financial Subversion").
- Global Freedom Report, the Bulletin of the World Youth Freedom League (WYFL), published by the WGI, London, August 1991, (carries special reports and pictures of WGI Director Andrew V R Smith at the World Freedom Day celebrations in January 1991 in Taipei).
- The Conservative Ethic by James Gibb Stuart, April 1994, [Distributors only].
- The Right Way Forward WGI Viewpoint Paper, by Gregory Lauder-Frost, September 1994. (Issues covered: the monarchy, the Monday Club, a Free Press, Education and History, Religion and Christianity).
- Western Goals Political Briefing Papers - glossy 4-page bi-annual editions. Editors: Gregory Lauder-Frost and Stuart Millson:
Special April 1997 General Election edition headlined Britain: Province or Nation?. January 1998 edition headlined Britain Awake!, with inside stories on FN Successes in France, Rural Britain: the heart of the nation and Christianity and the Millennium. September 1998 edition headline: New Labour and the New Face of Conservatism with an inside article attacking the unveiling of 'left-wing' statues at Westminster Abbey. February 1999 edition headline states: NO to Blair, NO to the Euro, with inside articles on The Death of Free Speech and Nationalism. The Winter 1999 edition was headlined The lies, the shame, the betrayal of Ulster with an inside editorial attacking the Conservative Party, and another article entitled Withdraw from the EU NOW!
