Scottish justice or “due deference” to French-Zionist lobby? The Reynouard case hangs in the balance [report now translated into four languages!]
On 21st September, a Scottish Crown prosecutor asked an Edinburgh court to show “due deference to France” and extradite a man who is accused of no crime under Scottish law. H&D’s assistant editor Peter Rushton reports from the court. This article and related material also appears at Peter’s Real History blog and now also in Spanish by clicking on this link. Also now available in German translation at this link and in French translation at Vincent’s own blog. And Vincent’s open letter to President Macron is now also available in German translation for the first time.
The revisionist historian Vincent Reynouard was appearing at Edinburgh Sheriff Court for a full hearing of his extradition case. This was almost exactly ten months after his arrest in the Scottish fishing village of Anstruther, where Vincent had been working quietly as a private tutor and completing his most important historical revisionist work concerning the so-called “massacre” at Oradour.
He was arrested in a raid by Scottish police, working with Scotland Yard detectives, at the request of French prosecutors who wish to jail him for revisionist videos concerning both Oradour and the alleged homicidal ‘gas chambers’ at Auschwitz.
None of these revisionist works contravenes Scottish or English law, but the UK authorities were heavily lobbied by the Jewish charity ‘Campaign Against Antisemitism’ and by the ultra-Zionist peer Lord Austin (formerly Ian Austin MP).
The sheer absurdity of this situation – the criminalisation of a scholar – was brought home to me by two incidents (one trivial, one serious) at the Edinburgh Court while waiting for Vincent’s case to be heard.
A sticker for the Edinburgh branch of the St Pauli supporters’ club was displayed in the lavatory at the Court. Supporters of St Pauli (a football club based in Hamburg) are notorious worldwide for their violent ‘anti-fascism’ and Marxism. It is impossible to imagine that a sticker promoting any violent ‘racist’ or ‘fascist’ group (from, for example, supporters of a club such as Lazio, Chelsea, Millwall or Oldham) would have been allowed to remain on display at a court!
The other incident was more serious. Vincent’s case was being heard in a courtroom that specialises in extradition, which of course meant that more than two hours were taken up (before Vincent’s case began) by a long procession of procedural, pre-trial discussions of a range of unconnected defendants, including alleged gangsters from Eastern Europe.
By far the most serious of these procedural discussions involved a defendant appearing by video link. This was the notorious ‘Real IRA’ terrorist and assassin Antoin Duffy (aka Anton Duffy), who in 2015 was jailed for 17 years for conspiracy to murder two ex-UDA members (Johnny Adair and Sam ‘Skelly’ McCrory) exiled in Scotland after their expulsion from the UDA.
Duffy is still serving this sentence in a top-security Scottish jail, but he is also now wanted by police and prosecutors in the Irish Republic, to face charges of murdering Denis Donaldson, an MI5 agent inside the IRA, who was killed in 2006. This is why Duffy was appearing on the same day as Vincent, in the Edinburgh extradition court.
H&D cannot yet comment on the latest specific charges – but it is beyond dispute (based on earlier convictions and years of police and MI5 covert surveillance) that Duffy is one of the UK’s most dangerous terrorists. Extradition procedures are designed for those accused of actual crimes: yet this week in Edinburgh (and in fact for the past ten months) Vincent Reynouard – a scholar, not a criminal – has been subjected to these same procedures.
As we have also seen with persistent abuse of the Terrorism Act by the UK authorities, those who simply seek to tell the truth about European history are persecuted by UK authorities who choose to follow the instructions of shadowy international lobbyists rather than UK law.
Nevertheless, there are reasons to be optimistic about Vincent’s case. He was very ably represented by his solicitor Paul Dunne and advocate Fred Mackintosh KC (who also practices as a barrister in England). It should of course be emphasised that Vincent’s defence is (rightly and properly) based on legal arguments, not on his historical and political views per se. As in any other such case, it should not be inferred that either Mr Dunne or Mr Mackintosh is in any way sympathetic to Vincent’s opinions, or indeed that either of them have any views or expertise on historical or political matters. They are experts on extradition law, not on historical revisionism or national socialism.
Due to Vincent having already spent ten months in jail (for something that isn’t even a crime in the UK!) the initial French warrant has been discharged.
This initial warrant was based on his having already been convicted and sentenced (in his absence) by a Parisian court. But he is no longer extraditable on those grounds, because that sentence has (in effect) already been served in Scotland, while Vincent awaited this extradition hearing.
Having dealt with the discharge of the first warrant, Mr Mackintosh proceeded to address the second.
Since it involves new charges (rather than a prior conviction) the ‘ticklist’ of the old European Arrest Warrant (now operating in revised form post-Brexit) doesn’t apply. Mr Mackintosh therefore pointed out that the traditional extradition principle of “dual criminality” operates in this case.
In other words, the Edinburgh Court must be satisfied that the conduct of which Vincent is accused would potentially be criminal in Scotland as well as in France.
The judge should (Mr Mackintosh continued) draw inferences as to Vincent’s “intent”, by looking at his overall conduct, and by studying the entire transcripts of his videos, not merely accepting the prosecutors’ interpretation of certain phrases taken out of context.
He highlighted one video, on which the prosecutors had based a large part of their case, and emphasised that the judge should study the full translated transcript carefully. This was a video published on 22nd February 2020, whose title translates as “The Jewish Problem – what solution?”
Vincent’s counsel did not dispute that his videos contain what has been termed “Holocaust denial”, that some of them address the “Jewish problem”, and that one in particular “denies” the historicity of the “Oradour massacre”.
But Mr Mackintosh’s central argument as to why Vincent should not be extradited began with a judgment in 2015 by the European Court of Human Rights, in the case of Perinçek v. Switzerland.
The relevant aspect of this judgment (which involved a Turkish political activist accused of “denying” the Armenian genocide committed by the Ottoman Empire during the First World War), is that the European Court spelled out the very different laws among European states regarding “denial” of genocide.
Among those European countries that have signed up to the European Convention on Human Rights, the Court noted:
“there are now essentially four types of regimes in this domain, in terms of scope of the offence of genocide denial: (a) States, such as Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, the Netherlands and Romania, that only criminalise the denial of the Holocaust or more generally of Nazi crimes (Romania in addition criminalises the Nazi extermination of the Roma, and Greece criminalises, on top of the Holocaust and Nazi crimes, the denial of genocides recognised by an international court or its own Parliament); (b) States, such as the Czech Republic and Poland, that criminalise the denial of Nazi and communist crimes; (c) States, such as Andorra, Cyprus, Hungary, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, Malta, Slovakia, Slovenia and Switzerland, that criminalise the denial of any genocide (Lithuania in addition specifically criminalises denial of Soviet and Nazi crimes vis-à-vis the Lithuanians, but Cyprus only criminalises the denial of genocides recognised as such by a competent court); and (d) States, such as Finland, Italy, Spain (following the 2007 judgment of its Constitutional Court cited in paragraph 96 above), the United Kingdom and the Scandinavian States, that do not have special provisions criminalising such conduct.”
The European Court was clear, Mr Mackintosh said, that the UK had not chosen to make any form of “Holocaust denial” a specific criminal offence.
He added that in Vincent Reynouard’s case, the prosecution therefore had to satisfy the Scottish court that Vincent’s conduct (as alleged in the extradition warrant) met the test either for a S.127 Communications Act offence, or a breach of the peace (a common law offence).
The question of what behaviour can constitute a “breach of the peace” under Scottish law has been revised several times during recent decades – and is a matter on which Mr Mackintosh has special expertise, having for example written an article for Scottish Legal News on this very topic.
Such conduct must be serious enough to “cause alarm to ordinary people”, and it must “threaten serious disturbance to the community”. The relevant judgment was delivered in 2014 by Lady Clark of Calton, and Mr Mackintosh said that Lady Clark had reminded the lower courts that “for conduct to be likely to cause a reasonable person to suffer fear or alarm there has to be something further than annoyance and distress”.
Mr Mackintosh explained that the test of whether conduct “threatens serious disturbance in the community” necessarily involves considering the full context. He quoted several cases in Scottish courts involving racial and sectarian abuse at football matches, where a crucial element was that this abuse had been directed at (or delivered in close proximity to) rival supporters, in the incendiary context of a football match attended by supporters of opposing teams.
In a 1981 case against communist activist Mike Duffield, the Sheriff Court had ruled that shouting pro-IRA slogans while selling the Marxist newspaper Fight Racism Fight Imperialism and the pro-IRA newspaper Hands off Ireland was a breach of the peace, despite this being carried out at the stadium of Glasgow Celtic, where many fans hold similar views.
And on the other side of politics, there had been a breach of the peace case involving a National Front activist selling the Young NF paper Bulldog outside the Hearts stadium in Edinburgh.
But in all these cases – and especially bearing in mind recent clarifications of the law in Scotland – it was essential to assess the wider context of the words used – in Vincent’s case, words used in videos broadcast online.
There were eight such videos referred to by French prosecutors in the present warrant. The first related specifically to Oradour. The second, third and fourth presented detailed arguments as to why (in Vincent’s considered opinion) there had been no homicidal ‘gas chambers’ at Auschwitz, explaining that conventional ‘Holocaust’ history is based on specious evidence. The fifth and sixth discussed the “Jewish problem” or “what to do about the Jews”. And the seventh and eighth returned to the topic of Auschwitz, the ‘gas chambers’, and broader ‘Holocaust’ themes.
Mr Mackintosh emphasised that in the case of six of these eight videos, Vincent Reynouard had not been calling for any form of action. None of the content potentially qualified as personal abuse, and none of it could be seen as “threatening”. The videos amounted to a historical critique – which might well be controversial, but not illegal in Scotland.
In the case of videos 5 and 6, Vincent was responding to a correspondent. The prosecution had chosen to isolate certain phrases out of context, but Mr Mackintosh said that once seen in context it was clear that Vincent was stating his opposition to any policy of “exterminating” the Jews.
The test that the court had to apply was not whether “reasonable people” would reject Vincent’s views, but whether these views threatened “serious disturbance to society”. Were the court to accept the prosecution’s argument, it would amount to ruling that discussion of controversial arguments regarding the ‘Holocaust’ had become a crime in the UK. Mr Mackintosh said it was open to Parliaments in London and Edinburgh to make ‘Holocaust denial’ a crime, but they had (so far) chosen not to do so.
Therefore to be criminal, Vincent’s words would have to cross a further line, a further evidential test, in order to be regarded as a “breach of the peace”.
Mr Mackintosh then turned to the alternative test, S.127 of the Communications Act. For Vincent’s videos to be considered criminal in this context, they would have to be not merely offensive, but “grossly offensive”.
Prosecutors had rested much of their argument on the precedent of the Chabloz case, as tried in the London courts during recent years – not a binding precedent, but, they argued, very much a “persuasive” precedent in this case. [Chabloz has in recent years been excluded from British revisionist circles, due to her treacherous and malicious conduct in betraying Robert Faurisson’s final meeting to the ‘anti-fascist’ publication ‘Hope not Hate’. But her earlier actions have, as we predicted at the time, served as a precedent to threaten the liberty of Vincent Reynouard.]
On appeal, Chabloz’s conduct had been found to go beyond satire, having crossed the legal line into deliberate, malicious abuse. By contrast, Mr Mackintosh argued, the judge in the present case would find (if he examined the full transcripts of Vincent’s videos) that his arguments – even when highly controversial – were delivered as a calm, academic analysis, not as crude anti-semitic abuse in the Chabloz style.
Mr Mackintosh referred to the leading S.127 case in relation to interpretation of what is “grossly offensive”, namely the Collins case, and the judgment of Lord Bingham.
This had made clear that what is “grossly offensive” has to be assessed in the context of the standards of an “open, just, multiracial society” – a contemporary context that is “reasonably enlightened, but not perfectionist”.
In other words, Mr Mackintosh emphasised, the words complained of had to cause gross offence, not simply “to people who care about the Holocaust” and who, for whatever reasons, hold different views to Vincent, but to broader society.
Were ‘Holocaust denial’ or disputing the historicity of Oradour to be deemed criminal per se, the question would necessarily arise – what about the Amritsar massacre, what about the Armenian genocide, and many other controversial historical subjects?
Mr Mackintosh concluded his argument by addressing the question of proportionality. An extradition court is required to consider whether the alleged offence is sufficiently severe to attract a custodial sentence. For example, recent instructions to the lower courts had emphasised that defendants should not be extradited for minor public order offences.
He noted that even in the Chabloz case – where the defendant had been convicted for gross offensiveness which was of a very different character to Vincent’s videos – this had not led to custodial sentences.
It would therefore, Mr Mackintosh argued, be both wrong in law and disproportionate for the Edinburgh Court to extradite Vincent Reynouard to France.
In his argument, the prosecutor (Advocate depute Paul Harvey) insisted that Vincent’s videos did pass the evidential test for the Court to regard his conduct as either (or both) a breach of the peace, and/or “grossly offensive” under S.127.
He invited the judge to consider Vincent’s words in one of the video transcripts, where he had stated that “there is a Jewish problem”, and that in his analysis of this problem he would “go further” than Adolf Hitler. “Naturally, the Jews exploit the situation: to dominate, even to subjugate us.”
Mr Harvey described these words as “the most appalling anti-semitism”, and asked the judge to view all of the videos complained of in the French warrant, in the light of this “anti-semitism”.
Questioned by the judge on this point, Mr Harvey said that (in the prosecutors’ submission) each video should be looked at as a separate breach of the peace offence, but should also be interpreted overall as a “course of conduct” by Vincent.
The mere fact that the UK had no special provision criminalising “Holocaust denial” did not in itself absolve the defendant. When expressed in the terms used by Vincent, Mr Harvey insisted that “Holocaust denial” could be interpreted as criminal under UK as well as French law.
Quoting the case of Rangers fan William Kilpatrick, who had posted on Facebook endorsing the sending of “bombs and bombs” to Celtic manager Neil Lennon, Mr Harvey argued that under Scottish law, intending or inciting a specific action was not necessarily relevant to whether certain words were a “breach of the peace”.
Mr Harvey maintained that some of Vincent’s words in the video could reasonably have led to his being charged with a breach of the peace under Scottish law, because they were calculated to provoke a disturbance of public order.
In fact, he argued that Vincent’s words were potentially a more serious crime than breach of the peace in a football stadium: because they could be viewed online at any time, anywhere in Scotland. Incitement to specific criminal action did not, the prosecution argued, have to be proven.
Mr Harvey added that Vincent’s “crimes” had to be looked at in the context of the very different cultural context in France, and the more serious risk of “anti-semitism being incited”. While the words Vincent used could, Mr Harvey argued, be prosecutable even in Scotland, the Court should take account of the fact that in a French context, they were even more serious.
Unsurprisingly, the prosecutor rejected the defence argument that Vincent’s words were calm, academic discourse. He said they were comparable to the Chabloz case, where it had been established that once a clearly anti-semitic motive had been established, espousal of “Holocaust denial” was ipso facto grossly offensive.
Mr Harvey accepted that (under UK law) not every instance of “Holocaust denial” was criminal, but he maintained that in the cases of both Chabloz and Vincent Reynouard, denying the “Holocaust” did amount to “gross offensiveness”, and therefore contravened S.127.
The prosecutor said the judge would need to apply the proportionality test very carefully. Unlike, for example, a drugs or theft case, Vincent’s criminal conduct was highly context-specific, where the appropriate sentence might differ enormously between Scotland and France. The judge should therefore “respect and give due weight” to French circumstances involving their history, and even present day “racial relations”, which meant that a French court “is justified in taking a severe approach to this”.
Given Vincent’s long and repeated record of “criminal conduct”, Mr Harvey concluded that a custodial sentence in France was not only possible but highly likely: “I urge you to show due deference to France and their different traditions.”
In a brief reply concluding the hearing, Vincent’s counsel Fred Mackintosh said that if the judge accepted the prosecution’s argument, it would amount to saying that any “racist” statement on Facebook or YouTube, regardless of context, would be a breach of the peace. He urged the judge to reject this argument and to recognise that “Holocaust denial” when expressed in Vincent’s terms, is not a crime in Scotland – neither a breach of the peace, nor grossly offensive.
The judge said that he aimed to have read all relevant material and considered the arguments fully, in time to pass judgment on 12th October.
Clearly, the Vincent Reynouard case has become a vitally important test of whether historical revisionism will be criminalised in the UK via a ‘back door’ route, without any honest and open discussion in Parliament.
We shall make a further assessment of the broader context soon. But it should be recognised by all concerned that there will be no surrender of the basic principles involved. In the UK, Spain and Canada, European traditions of free historical inquiry are under attack. We shall defend those traditions, by any and every method that proves necessary.
[UPDATE: On 12th October the Edinburgh judge Sheriff Dickson ruled that Vincent should be extradited to France. For a report on this extraordinary judgement, click here. Vincent remains in Edinburgh Prison, pending an appeal in January 2024.]
They shall not grow old
On this day in 1918 – at the 11th hour of the 11th day – the guns fell silent following Europe’s true Holocaust. The war between European brothers that began in 1914 was over.
Today as every year – both on 11th November (originally known as Armistice Day), and on the following Sunday (Remembrance Sunday) – we remember the fallen.
And this year, ten years after his death, we at H&D remember our great friend and comrade Ralph Hebden, Royal Marine Commando and dedicated racial nationalist, who died during a training accident in Scotland in March 2013 at the age of 32.
They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.
Labour’s multicultural crisis!
Though it still seems very likely that Labour Party leader Sir Keir Starmer will become Prime Minister in about a year’s time, the latest crisis in Palestine has raised problems that are rooted in Labour’s historical commitments to both Zionism and the UK’s multiracial society.
For most of its history, the Labour Party has been pro-Zionist – with the partial exceptions of the Attlee government that presided over a war against Jewish terrorists from 1945-48, and Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the party during 2015-20.
Successive Labour leaders (ever since Attlee’s government saw the first large-scale West Indian immigration) have become ever more committed to the vision of multiracialism and multiculturalism.
Until the 1980s it never occurred to any politician that Islam and in particular solidarity with fellow Muslims in Palestine would become a factor in British politics. Even racial nationalists during the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s emphasised other reasons why non-European races and cultures didn’t belong here. Religion was rarely taken seriously as a political division (apart from Protestant v Catholic divisions in Ulster and some British cities).
But now significant numbers of Muslim councillors and MPs (as well as some pro-Palestinian, non-Muslim Labourites, usually either from the Corbynite left-wing or worried about Muslim voters in their areas) are rebelling against their leader’s support for Israel.
Starmer seems determined to distance himself from Corbyn and take Labour back to the Tony Blair era (or even the era of Harold Wilson, who from 1963-76 was the most pro-Zionist Labour leader in the party’s history).
Yet the brutality of Israel’s assault on Gaza has shocked some Muslim councillors so much that they have quit the party.
Much of the trouble has come in areas of Lancashire that are well-known to the H&D team from the 2000s when racial nationalism flourished in some racial flashpoint areas.
The leader of Burnley council has quit Labour together with ten colleagues, instantly removing Labour’s control of the council. For now they are in an independent group, and the council’s future direction is uncertain.
Councillors have also quit Labour In nearby Pendle, while in Blackburn (where H&D editor Mark Cotterill was once a councillor) there have been defections from both the Tories and Labour.
Yesterday three members of Haringey council in North London (this time non-Muslim Corbynists) joined the exodus.
For now it seems obvious that Starmer will stick with his pro-Zionist policy whatever happens. But if Israeli policy becomes even more brutal, he will start to come under pressure from more mainstream voices in his party, and the split will widen.
The tragedy in all this of course is that while Muslim councillors are prepared to speak for their brothers and sisters in Gaza, there is no racial nationalist party of any size able to speak for indigenous Britons.
Mark Collett calls on nationalists to avoid Tommy Robinson’s Mossad trap
The leader of Patriotic Alternative, Mark Collett, has today called on nationalists not to answer Tommy Robinson’s call to go to London, where Robinson and his backers hope for a confrontation with pro-Palestinian demonstrators.
As H&D has argued for many years, ‘Tommy Robinson’ is a career criminal and a Zionist shill.
Mark Collett is rightly pointing out that those who go to London this weekend – though they might have the best of motives – will be playing the Zionists’ game and will contribute nothing to the patriotic cause.
New Isabel Peralta Twitter and YouTube accounts after Instagram ban
The YouTube and Instagram accounts of our European correspondent Isabel Peralta were banned this week in the latest acts of online censorship against the true European resistance.
In response to this attempted censorship, Isabel has returned to Twitter with a new account.
A new YouTube account has already been created and archival material will be uploaded soon, both on this new channel and at Odysee.
Isabel has also created a second Telegram channel, both as a back-up and (for now) as a channel for discussion.
Further updates will be posted soon, both here and at a new website which maintains up to date links to all Isabel’s social media accounts.
Click here to follow the new Isabel Peralta channel.
H&D Issue 117 published
The new issue (#117) of Heritage and Destiny magazine is out now. The 32-page, November – December 2023 issue, has as its lead:
Is there really such a thing as British Nationalism? – Justin Barrett and Ian Freeman debate the issue
Issue 117
November – December 2023.
Contents include:
- Editorial – by Mark Cotterill
- An Irish view on so-called British Nationalism – by Justin Barrett
- Right to Reply – Yes Britain really is a nation – Our people are Britons, and we are British nationalists by Ian Freeman
- Edinburgh court criminalises revisionism – by Peter Rushton
- Book Review – My Crusade or Ours? – by Panait Istrati, edited by Troy Southgate – reviewed by Ian Freeman
- Reds and Media fail yet again to stop H&D‘s annual meeting, which just keeps getting better!
- How two British nationalists (and a former KGB spy) exposed an elite network of subversives – by Peter Rushton
- Millwall by-election 30th Anniversary Dinner – by Tony Paulsen
- Radical German nationalism in the 2020s: Peter Rushton interviews Dritte Weg leader Matthias Fischer
- Racial Complexities – A Path Towards Rectification – by Hugh Perry
- AfD’s Maximilian Krah: a question of loyalty? – by Peter Rushton
- From the Other Side of the Pond – by Kenneth Schmidt
- Ukraine – Europe’s front line against barbarism – by Peter Rushton
- Obituary – Carlos Whitlock Porter 1947-2023 – by Mark Cotterill
- Book Review – Fifteen Minutes of Hell, The Battle of Lewisham – by Stephen Maggs – reviewed by Mark Cotterill
- Two full pages of readers’ letters
- Movement News – Latest analysis of the nationalist movement – by Peter Rushton
If you would like a sample copy of this issue, please send just £5.00 or $10.00 to H&D, 40 Birkett Drive, Preston, PR2 6HE, England, UK – or if you would like to subscribe please go to – http://www.heritageanddestiny.com/publications/journal/ – for full details or email – heritageanddestiny@yahoo.com
10 years on: remember Golden Dawn’s martyrs – Giorgos Fountoulis and Manolis Kapelonis
Ten years ago today – on 1st November 2013 – the Athens headquarters of the Greek racial nationalist party Golden Dawn was attacked by ‘anti-fascist’ terrorists. At least a dozen bullets were fired and two Golden Dawn activists – Giorgos Fountoulis (27) and Manolis Kapelonis (22) – were killed.
No-one has ever been charged with these murders.
Five weeks earlier, many Golden Dawn members including their leader Nikolaos Michaloliakos had been arrested. Following years of pre-trial detention and house arrest, 68 party officials were convicted. In effect the party was banned.
The enemies of Greek nationalism – in fact the enemies of Europe – operate with their left hand via Marxist and anarchist terrorism, and with their right hand via the courts.
In 2013, eight days after the murders of Giorgos and Manolis, H&D‘s assistant editor spoke at a rally outside the Greek Embassy in London. This week racial nationalists from across Europe gathered in Athens. Even today, the treacherous rulers of Greece fear the legacy of Golden Dawn – and they especially fear those who are inspired by the memory of Giorgos Fountoulis and Manolis Kapelonis.
A ban on all public gatherings has been imposed and several rail and metro stations have been closed. Twenty–one activists from the Italian organisation CasaPound were detained at Athens airport as they arrived to pay tribute to the Golden Dawn martyrs.
H&D readers join our European comrades in remembering Giorgos and Manolis. Their heroic sacrifice will continue to inspire resistance to the betrayal of Europe. And on the day when the true Europe is fully liberated, we shall continue to pay tribute to their memory.
30 years on: Remember the victims of the Shankill bombing
Thirty years ago today, IRA terrorists killed nine local residents, including two children, by exploding a bomb inside Frizzell’s fish shop on Shankill Road, Belfast.
Frizzell’s was one of those family-owned shops that are fast disappearing from the UK’s high streets (where it’s now unusual to find a specialist fishmonger, or indeed any store owned by a local family rather than by a big chain or immigrants).
Opened by Alan Frizzell in 1966, it was at the heart of the Shankill community for 27 years until it was destroyed by the IRA bomb, which was partly intended to murder senior officers of the Loyalist UDA who regularly met in a room above the shop. (They failed in this intention because the bomb exploded prematurely.)
By bombing Frizzell’s, the IRA also knew that they would kill and maim large numbers of civilians, including children, just as they had done eight months earlier when they exploded a bomb outside a McDonald’s in Warrington, Cheshire, killing two young children. The Warrington bombing (like the bombing of the Harrods department store in London) was almost certainly carried out in cooperation with the IRA’s militant left-wing allies in England, who organised ‘Anti-Fascist Action’.
Today we remember the victims of the Shankill bombing and all the Ulstermen and Britons who were killed by the IRA and other republican murderers.
And in remembering, we also resolve that we shall never surrender to the IRA’s subversive agenda of breaking up the United Kingdom. Quis separabit.
Tory slump continues: civic nationalists still struggling for relevance
Yesterday’s parliamentary by-elections showed Rishi Sunak’s Conservative government heading for a 1997-style landslide defeat. Despite this Tory collapse, civic nationalist parties are nowhere near the level of support that they enjoyed in the pre-Brexit era.
Each of the by-elections was in a very White constituency, so Labour’s victories owed nothing to ethnic minority support. Mid Bedfordshire is a very affluent collection of villages and small towns, and has never previously elected a Labour MP. Tamworth is more mixed socially (though not racially), with far more working-class voters, and was strongly pro-Brexit. Under its earlier name SE Staffordshire, but with similar boundaries, it fell to Labour at a by-election in 1996 and in the Blair landslide a year later, but at other times has been solidly Tory.
Apart from the Tories, the biggest losers were the United Kingdom Independence Party. UKIP polled 18.5% in Tamworth at the pre-Brexit general election in 2015, but yesterday UKIP candidate Robert Bilcliff managed only 1.7%.
The Heritage Party – a UKIP splinter group that in recent years has specialised in peddling conspiracy theories and anti-vaccination campaigns – had an even more embarrassing result in Mid Bedfordshire, where Heritage candidate Alberto Thomas polled only 0.2%. Just slightly ahead of Mr Thomas with 0.3% was Antonio Vitiello for the English Democrats (a party that has just reached an electoral pact with UKIP).
After these results there are bound to be serious questions as to whether UKIP, the Heritage Party or the English Democrats have any future in electoral politics. The EDs do at least have a rationale for continued existence, as they have the distinctive policy of campaigning for an English Parliament.
The much better-funded Reform UK again proved itself to be (by far) the strongest of the civic nationalist parties, and in Tamworth their candidate Ian Cooper managed to save his deposit, the first Reform UK candidate to achieve this since party leader Richard Tice almost two years ago in Old Bexley & Sidcup.
Mr Cooper polled 5.4% and finished in third place, at last breaking his party’s miserable run of twelve lost deposits.
But it’s important to recognise the following factors:
- Tamworth was a very strongly pro-Brexit constituency;
- The circumstances of this by-election, caused by the resignation of a Tory MP who was found to have made repeated homosexual assaults while drunk, were obviously ideal for a right-of-centre, ‘protest vote’ party.
- The Conservative vote collapsed, but lifelong Tories chose to stay at home and were not inspired by Reform UK’s lukewarm civic nationalism.
- A significant number of voters would have been confused by the Reform UK candidate having the same surname as the Tory candidate – previous research has shown that this type of confusion is always a factor (though only a minor one) when there are two candidates on the ballot paper with the same surname.
It’s not unduly cynical to point out that in each of yesterday’s by-elections, Reform UK just happened to select candidates who had the same name as one of the rival candidates from a major party. In Mid Bedfordshire, Reform UK’s Dave Holland lost his deposit but managed 3.6%, no doubt helped slightly by the non-coincidence that the Liberal Democrat candidate was named Emma Holland-Lindsay.
It’s a shame that Reform UK is so bereft of serious policies and serious ideological inspiration that it resorts to these shabby tricks, but even with the benefit of such ploys it’s becoming obvious that Richard Tice’s party is on the road to nowhere. Reform UK is at most a minor irritant costing the Tories a few hundred votes and will perhaps hand a few extra seats to Labour as Keir Starmer heads for Downing Street next year, but the party has nothing more to offer.
One much smaller party will be reasonably satisfied with their result. Britain First took a big gamble in choosing to stand in Tamworth where their candidate – deputy party leader Ashlea Simon – has no local connections. However, Ms Simon and party leader Paul Golding perceived that Tamworth is strongly pro-Brexit and felt that especially the White working-class section of its electorate might prove receptive to Britain First’s message.
After carrying out a serious and energetic campaign in Tamworth, Ms Simon polled 2.3% and finished in fourth place (ahead of the Greens and Liberal Democrats).
H&D is not especially sympathetic to Britain First’s brand of civic nationalism, with its intense focus on hostility to Islam and its insistence on multi-racialism. But we can see that while this is far from an outstanding result, it is much better than the three previous large scale BF campaigns, at the Rochester & Strood and Wakefield by-elections, and the 2016 London mayoral election.
In short, this was not a great result for Ms Simon, but certainly not a disaster – bearing in mind that the party has far less resources than Reform UK and does not enjoy the regular hype on GB News that is still given to Tice’s party.
With the BNP moribund, the NF barely functioning as an electoral party, neither PA nor the Homeland Party yet being registered, and the British Democrats yet to take off as a significant force at the ballot box, Mr Golding and Ms Simon will be regarded by some H&D readers as the next best thing to having a real racial nationalist party.
However, for some of us the lesson of this week’s by-elections is that all forms of civic nationalism are failing – not only failing to offer principled opposition to the zeitgeist, but also failing in their own terms at even the shabbiest and most ‘pragmatic’ level of politics.
The 4.6% polled at yesterday’s Mid Bedfordshire by-election by a local parish councillor standing as an independent parliamentary candidate – and the low turnouts in both constituencies (especially Tamworth) – show the extent of public disillusionment with the mainstream parties. Some form of nationalist party ought to be capable of getting its act together and mobilising this disillusionment, even with only a fraction of the funds that have been wasted on UKIP, Reform UK and various pro-Brexit splinter parties.
Mossad’s investment in the Le Pen dynasty finally paying off?
Last week Marine Le Pen and Jordan Bardella (the president of her Rassemblement National party) gave unequivocal support to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Le Pen’s niece Marion Maréchal, who next year will lead the European parliamentary election slate of a rival nationalist party Reconquête!) is an even more staunch and longstanding Zionist, saying that “France must stand unambiguously alongside Israel in this new ordeal.”
Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised, since Marion Maréchal’s real father Roger Auque was an agent of the Israeli intelligence service Mossad.
In a new article at the Real History blog, H&D‘s Peter Rushton examines the strange connections between the Le Pen dynasty and Mossad.
