As British Democrats our concern for the indigenous British peoples also encompasses the welfare of our national homeland, the British Isles. Our visceral attachment to this land means that we are more concerned than most when we hear that not only are we suffering alien invasion on an unprecedented scale, but as our population increases by 500,000 per annum, our beloved country is slowly shrinking. And with their typical short-termist attitude to investment in necessary large infrastructure projects, our government hides it’s head in the sand, while continuing to throw vast sums of our money at foreign wars, foreign populations and Foreign Aid, without any call for accountability as to where this money ends up. 

Meanwhile, here at home we have a ticking environmental time-bomb in the problem of coastal erosion. Experts have predicted that 40 metres of our coast will be lost in the next 20 years, and 100 metres by 2069. Currently, the Holderness coastline in the East Riding of Yorkshire is rapidly eroding at an average of 1.8 metres a year, while Norfolk, Suffolk, Sheppey and the Isle of Wight all have a considerable number of properties at risk from coastal erosion. Unsustainable invasion from without coupled with a shrinking landmass – a recipe for environmental disaster. 

Securing it’s land defences should be any government’s priority, and this, coupled with ending unsustainable immigration would be a priority for any British Democrats administration. We say ‘British taxpayers money should be spent for the benefit of British taxpayers’.

 There are many factors causing this erosion, amongst them:

  •  Rock type – these cliffs are often comprised of less-resistant boulder clay which slide when wet.
  •  Naturally narrow beaches – many of these beaches give less protection to the coast as they don’t reduce the power of the waves and this is exacerbated by man-made structures such as groynes, which were installed to stop long-shore drift, but have the effect of pushing the problem onto unprotected beaches elsewhere even more.
  •  Powerful waves – waves at Holderness have travelled long distances over the North Sea, gathering energy on their journey.

The area around the Suffolk village of Dunwich which features in some of Turner’s paintings, was once a mile further inland but has been steadily eroded by centuries of longshore drift as waves approached the coast at an angle. Soft geology and extreme weather create the perfect environment for erosion.

I had been interested in the whole question of coastal erosion for a while but this was brought into sharp focus on reading an article about the town of Happisburg on the Norfolk coast. During the last 20 years, 34 homes have crumbled into the water in Happisburgh due to coastal erosion. One resident thinks her home could be the next  and she feels she may have spent her last Christmas there. When this lady, moved to Beach Road 18 years ago, her three-bedroom semi was in the middle of the street with two rows of houses between her house and the cliff-edge. But punishing weather conditions have eroded so much of the coast’s soft sandy rock, that her house is now the last one before the cliff edge. When her parents had bought the house in 2000, a surveyor had confidently assured them that it would be at least 150 years before the cliff eroded.

This mother-of-two believes her house is not only worthless but she would have to pay the  £2,000 for it to be demolished. The house opposite was valued at £1 before it was taken down. Meanwhile the cliff edge looms ever closer. She will be forced to abandon it when it comes within 5m (16ft) of the edge and it is already just 7 metres away.


Happisburgh, home to about 1,100 people, is so susceptible to erosion because the cliffs are formed of boulder clay which is prone to slippage. In addition, it’s narrow beaches offer little protection against the powerful North Sea waves pounding it’s coastline.

Authorities tried erecting wooden and concrete defences, but they fell into disrepair as the cost of maintaining them rose. North Norfolk District Council used £3.2m to purchase the most at-risk homes for a reduced price under the Pathfinder Project in 2011, helping some people move further inland. Another lady whose cliff-top bungalow fell into the sea in 2013 and now lives in Beach Road said ‘I’m reminded of the problem every day. It focuses my mind and I am setting up an action group to defend Happisburgh. We can’t just let it fall in the sea’.

The government, forced into being seen to be doing something, have announced that Happisburg village benefit from a £36m fund known as the Coastal Transition Accelerator Programme. Cash from the programme will be shared between the two embattled areas of North Norfolk and East Riding. However, NONE of this money will be used on new defences, which has left many people in the village, understandably, very upset.

This is the living nightmare that these and many other other communities living on the coast face each day, whose homes could at any time, just slip into the sea. 

The government says Happisburgh ‘cannot sustainably be defended from coastal erosion’. Instead it will help facilitate the ‘managed transition of communities from high-risk land’. This is typical of the short-term, penny-pinching attitude that we have come to expect from our government when confronted with the need to invest in this country’s infrastructure. 

While putting this article together, I thought about the current green lobby’s love affair with wind turbines and wondered whether offshore wind turbines might have a beneficial effect in protecting our endangered coastlines. I was surprised to come across the following in a 2018 article in Physics World entitled ‘Offshore wind farms could protect coastlines’:-

‘Offshore wind farms may have a greater capacity for coastal protection than first imagined. Scientists had shown previously that arrays of turbines placed in the sea may buffer storm surge and flooding. Now simulations featuring data from Hurricane Harvey suggest that smart wind farm designs have the capacity to protect coastlines from heavy rains.

 Ideas on the table include adjustable turbine blades that could lengthen or shorten depending on whether the objective is energy extraction or storm protection. There’s also more to discover regarding the optimum layout of an offshore array, balancing energy generation efficiency against the performance of the wind farm as a weather defence. One way to marry the two functions would be to make the setup dynamic. With floating turbines, you could even think of moving them strategically closer or further apart and varying their distance from the coast depending on the weather.

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Another article on the Climate Change Committee website entitled ‘Current approach to protecting England’s coastal communities from flooding and erosion not fit for purpose as the climate changes’, argues that a new long-term approach to coastal management is required as coastal communities, infrastructure and landscapes in England are already under significant pressure from flooding and erosion and these threats are only set to increase in the future. The upshot is that certain coastal communities are unlikely to be viable unless urgent action is taken. The article goes on to claim that the problem is not currently being confronted with the requisite urgency or openness. Coastal management is the responsibility of a complex patchwork of legislation and a variety of organisations and Shoreline Management plans are not  even legally binding. This article goes on to state that ‘Implementing current policies to protect England’s coast would cost £18-30 billion’. So in true short-termist fashion the government will just kick this issue into the long grass.

However, we British Democrats, as true environmentalists, see the protection of our native habitat as one of our main priorities and acknowledge that net immigration of 500,000 per annum combined with a slowly shrinking landmass poses an existential threat to our indigenous population and their historic landmass. So, we would suggest that re-directing the foreign-aid budget, £18.6 billion in 2020, would go some way towards funding the required measures to shore-up our threatened coastline. Even Africans themselves agree that foreign aid is a bottomless pit and has failed to improve people’s lives and has instead lowered their living standards. Corrupt and incompetent officials have squandered and misappropriated these funds. Aid cripples Africa and fosters dependency (Africa in Fact: The Journal of Good Governance in Africa).

With the funds re-directed from foreign aid used in conjunction with the offshore-wind turbine solution, this could provide a win-win outcome of coastal protection AND renewable energy. What is needed is a government that is prepared to take the long-term view in the best interests of the people who elected them. 

The British Democrats look to be such a government.