An Introduction to the ENGLISH DEMOCRATS 1066

The English Democrats are the countries fastest growing political Party. At a time when the three main parties all confirm that their membership is actually declining, this is quite an achievement.

The Hastings & Rye Constituency Party was formed in the autumn of 2009 to represent the people of Hastings & Rye in the forthcoming General Election, expected to take place in May 2010. We are an autonomous Branch of the main party and form part of the East Sussex Branch.

We support the National aims of the Party fully and these are explained elsewhere on this website.

Our Founding Member is Rod Bridger who currently serves as our Branch Chairman and has been selected to represent the Party as our Parliamentary Candidate next May. Rod was born and bred in Hastings way back in 1947 and reckons that makes him a ‘bit’ over 25. He is married to Carol and they have 6 children, 4 of whom are in turn bringing up their families in Hastings. Rod admits that Hastings is in his blood and he is passionate about the town.

Rod has served his country seeing Active Service in the Far East and prior to recently retiring after almost 10 years service with Hastings Borough Council, he served a further 10 years with Sussex Police. One word that has appeared a number of times in the last sentence is ‘Service’. This word is very important to Rod, who freely admits that in this day and age of Political Correctness, he is a dinosaur. He doesn’t actually see anything wrong in this as he believes that Service to the community should be the leading principal for anybody who works within the public domain.

Indeed, it is this conviction that first brought him into politics. As Rod Bridger recently said “I had been in the political wilderness for many years. I could see the harm that was being done to my country and to my town. Ten years spent serving the community forced me to witness the contempt and arrogance that both elected members and council officials heaped upon the very people that they were meant to be serving. It was here that I realised that I am a dinosaur. I believe in service and it is this that brought me into conflict with the system on more than one occasion. I must stress that not every council worker is out to work as little as possible for as much as possible and indeed not every elected member is there purely for their own ends, it’s just that I did not come across very many of the other kind. A few of both are very hard working individuals who share the same principles that I hold so dearly.

I investigated a number of parties in the hope that I would find a political home where I could be at ease with the policies of that party and possibly play a small part in salvaging both Hastings and England. The main three parties fell at the first hurdle as there is insufficient space between them to slip the proverbial cigarette paper and after all, they are the one’s who are totally responsible for the appalling situation that the whole of the United Kingdom finds itself in today. How we can expect our modern politicians to effectively manage the country when they have their snouts buried so deep in the trough, I do not know. As I extended my investigation it led me to many dark corners of the political world. Suffice it to say that some of the stranger parties that are out there range from the weird to the downright dangerous, some even leave a particularly nasty taste in the mouth and these parties can be found on both extremes of the political spectrum. Finally, gratefully, I stumbled across the website for the English Democrats and realised fairly quickly that I was in agreement with the majority of policies of the party, certainly there was noting with which I violently disagreed. The rest, as they say is history”.