Politically incorrect religion: the PM and the two covenants

Giles Fraser – a left-wing but pro-Brexit Anglican vicar – has recently drawn attention to the religious background of Theresa May, newly appointed Prime Minister.  It is well known that Mrs May is a vicar’s daughter. Less well known (as Fr. Fraser points out) is that her father was on the most extreme Anglo-Catholic wing of the Church of England.  This carries politically incorrect implications that Fr. Fraser chooses not to discuss.

During Mrs May’s childhood her father – Fr. Hubert Brasier – was successively vicar of two countryside parishes near Oxford: St Kenelm, Enstone, from 1959 to 1970; and St Mary the Virgin, Wheatley, from 1970 until his death in 1981.

In her appearance on the BBC’s Desert Island Discs in 2014, Mrs May chose as one of her eight records the hymn ‘Therefore we before him bending’.  As Fr. Fraser writes in his Guardian article:

Now this really is a fascinating choice. First, because no one who wasn’t a proper churchgoer would ever have heard of it. And, second, because it betrays the enormous sacramental influence of her high church father. Benediction, the worship of the blessed sacrament – or “wafer worship” as Protestant scoffers often describe it – is pretty hardcore Anglo-Catholic stuff. That’s why she was named after a 500-year-old Catholic saint. As time goes on, this background is bound to shape her ministry – and yes, that’s how she will think of it.

During her Desert Island Discs interview, Mrs May recalled:

“a hymn which sometimes, if my father and mother and I were alone in the church, we would just kneel down and sing …’Therefore we before him Bending'”

There is a reason why this hymn would have been sung by the vicar’s family in the absence of the congregation: this particular hymn (known to Roman Catholics down the centuries as Tantum ergo) is theological and political dynamite!  It is sung during a service formally known as ‘Benediction of (or with) the Blessed Sacrament’‘.

This service is seen by the more Protestant (‘low church’) end of the Church of England as illegal: earlier in the last century there would sometimes be legal action taken against Anglo-Catholic vicars by parishoners if Benediction was introduced into their church. Very likely this was the reason for Fr Brasier singing this service in private with his family. Certainly the current website of St Mary’s, Wheatley, does not suggest that it is today an exceptionally “high church” parish.

Several decades later a wider issue is raised by the words of the Tantum ergo (written by the great scholar St Thomas Aquinas in the mid-13th century).  Latin being a very precise language, there is no room here for modern liberal fudging: St Thomas writes that we venerate the blessed sacrament – the body and blood of Christ – as we celebrate the transition from the old covenant (between God and his ‘chosen people’, the Jews) to the new covenant (between God and Christians).

The English words of the hymn sung by Theresa May and her family are obscure, but the Latin original is clear: et antiquum documentum novo cedat ritui.  The ancient document – the old covenant – gives way to the new rite, represented by the substance of Christ’s body and blood in the form (the ‘accidental’ appearance) of bread and wine.

Cedat is the important word here: the Latin verb cedere meaning to surrender, yield, or give way – as in English to cede territory after a war, to concede in an argument, or indeed to succeed – as Prime Minister May has succeeded David Cameron.

Modern, liberal Catholic spokesmen have sometimes argued that the old covenant with the Jews remains in force alongside the new covenant sealed by Christ’s death and resurrection. Ironically Fr. Brasier’s old parish at Enstone includes the village of Heythrop – which was the original base of Heythrop College, London University’s specialist theological college founded by the Jesuits.  Modern tutors at Heythrop – such as former principal Brendan Callaghan – have been in the forefront of those arguing that the divine covenant with Jewry remains valid. Pope Francis recently insisted that the Church “recognises the irrevocability of the covenant and God’s constant and faithful love for Israel.” He added: “it is clear there is an inseparable bond between Christians and Jews.”

Yet if Prime Minister May truly believes the words of the hymn she sang as a child – the words she chose to take with her to the BBC’s putative desert island – she cannot believe this, any more than she could believe that David Cameron retains Prime Ministerial authority alongside her.

This raises a contradiction for Mrs May, who has identified herself very strongly with the Zionist bandit state of Israel – whether through conviction or political convenience, one cannot tell.

In April 2015 (as Home Secretary) Mrs May addressed Britain’s largest Zionist youth movement in a speech celebrating the 67th anniversary of Israel’s foundation, a catastrophe known to Palestinians as the Nakba.

Mrs May explicitly referred to commemorating Yom Hazikaron, the day on which “We remember the sacrifice of those who fought to achieve and protect that independence.”

This means most notably those Zionist terrorists who died fighting against British forces and Arab civilians during 1945-48, and includes those who were executed for atrocities such as the murder of Lord Moyne and his driver Lance Corporal Arthur Fuller.

How can an educated person at one and the same time believe in the words of St Thomas Aquinas in the Tantum ergo – the traditional teaching of the Christian church down the centuries – yet at the same time celebrate the creation of the State of Israel as a fulfilment of the old covenant with Jewry, which had – according to that Christian doctrine – been abrogated?

How can a British political leader publicly “remember the sacrifice” of Jewish, anti-British terrorists as though they were heroes?

Perhaps for an aspirant Prime Minister any heresy, any betrayal, any hypocrisy is conceivable for the sake of personal ambition.

Another Dodgy Dossier

Guest column by Frederick Dixson

How could anyone vote to leave the European Union now that we know that we will all be £4,300 a year better off by 2030 if we stay in? Except, of course, that we will all be better off anyway even if we leave, just by not quite as much!  All of that is assuming that economic growth continues at a predictable rate until 2030. And in economics nothing is predictable. If the Treasury is trying to look ahead fourteen years to 2030, try instead to look back fourteen years to 2002 and ask yourself how many economists then predicted the crash of 2008 – answer, none.

It’s not just dodgy forecasts that we can pick up from the Treasury’s document. There are also all those little things which the Treasury chose to ignore or brush aside but which will have quite a significant, and positive, effect should we choose to leave. To mention a few of those positive things; freedom from regulation, freedom to trade with the rest of the world, freedom from having to pay millions of pounds in tribute to the EU every day, freedom from the colossal cost to our infrastructure (schools, housing, transport, NHS) of mass immigration.

With mass immigration I come to the issue which, I suspect, is the real concern of readers of Heritage and Destiny. It is beyond belief that the Chancellor of the Exchequer in a government which is pledged to reduce mass immigration to the tens of thousands, has predicated much of his strategy for economic growth on continuing mass immigration adding a further 3.3 million EU migrants to our population by 2030! This implies 235,000 EU migrants per annum and does not include those from outside the EU, nor births to all the newcomers and to those “Non White British” already living here.

So here are some facts – not forecasts because the implications are obvious – of my own. Excluding the other countries of the United Kingdom whose populations are more or less stable and which attract little immigration, the population of England at the census of 2011 was 53 million of whom 42 million (80%) declared themselves to be White British. (It may be of interest to note that the population of England according to the census of 1951 was then 42 million, almost all White British). The 20% who are not White British have 35% of the children born annually in England, adding around 240,000 to their number every year. Annual net immigration, excluding British citizens returning to the UK after a spell abroad, is now running at 363000. So the total annual increase in the Non White British population is in the order of 600,000, a figure which can only go up as children are born to the future new arrivals. Given these figures it is easy to see how the Office for National Statistics has calculated that White British people will be a minority among under 18s by 2037, just 21 years from now.

Our national identity is being ground out of existence and Englishmen such as George Osborne and David Cameron are throwing the entire government machine into hastening the process. They must be thwarted.

The Myth of the Muslim Vote

Many nationalist blogs and forums would have you believe that Muslim voters exercise significant political power, forcing party leaders to curry favour with them at the expense of White voters.

But is this true?  There is no doubt that the number of Muslim voters in Britain has increased dramatically in recent years, as children and grandchildren of the original Asian immigrant generations have grown up, and their numbers have been swelled by more recent arrivals from Africa.  Also there is no doubt that Muslims tend to turn out to vote at elections, in much greater proportions than some other minority groups such as the (mainly Christian) Afro-Caribbeans.

Nevertheless to have real influence even in a very close contest such as next week’s general election, Muslims would need to have two extra factors on their side: they would have to be concentrated in potentially marginal seats, and it would have to be credible that they could switch between the major contending parties.

The truth is that neither of these factors apply.  There are forty constituencies (out of the UK total 650) that are more than 15% Muslim, and of these only five are truly in the balance: two Lib Dem held seats being targeted by Labour (Birmingham Yardley and Bradford East), and most crucially three presently Conservative seats on Labour’s key target list (Pendle, Dewsbury and Ilford North).  In the latter case the importance of the Jewish vote (6.5% – plus ethnic Jews who are listed on the census as ‘no religion’) partly counterbalances the Muslim vote (15.3%), and the odds are that pro-Israel Tory MP Lee Scott will survive. Meanwhile in Pendle and Dewsbury the influence of UKIP will probably combine with Muslims moving from Lib Dem to Labour, and produce Labour gains.  In Bradford East the incumbent Lib Dem MP David Ward has desperately burnished his anti-Zionist credentials in a bid to avoid what seems sure defeat.

Of the rest 33 are safe Labour while one – Brent Central – is a certain Labour gain from the Lib Dems this year, and is such an ethnic and religious hotchpotch that its 21.2% Muslim population could never be seen as decisive anyway. Birmingham Hall Green was close in 2010 only because of the strong Respect campaign by local councillor Salma Yaqoob. With her retirement and the decline of Respect everywhere outside George Galloway’s Bradford, Hall Green is sure to be safe Labour this year.

That leaves just Bradford West – 51.3% Muslim and sensationally won by George Galloway in a 2012 by-election – where we really do see a contest that is all about the Muslim vote, though with many local peculiarites (in this case ‘local’ means Pakistani village politics transferred to Yorkshire).  Galloway will almost certainly win, but this underlines the real truth that Muslim voters will have very little influence on the outcome of the 2015 General Election, and very little influence on the next government.

Research article on MH 17

The Heritage and Destiny website today publishes a guest article by Ivan Winters, exploring some of the facts behind the shooting down of the airliner MH 17, widely blamed (indirectly) on Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Click here to read this exploration of MH 17 – Some Facts!

 

MH 17: Some facts!

A guest article by Ivan Winters

Rather like my previous article re the Ukrainian protests and the overthrow of a democratically elected President (see H&D Issue 60) all I intend to do in this article is to provide a ‘primer’, a starting point for the reader to launch their own enquiries and lay to rest some of the more idiotic narratives going around. I made comments in the last article about the poor quality of Western media coverage of the situation during the ‘Maidan protests’ and the need to use alternative sources. It has got even worse during this incident. I cited Al Jazeera (AJ) and Russia Today (RT) as two useful sources in my previous article although I did caution that RT is of course putting the Russian regimes spin on things. RT coverage has deteriorated with the network putting forward various barely credible alleged versions of ‘events’ all of which conveniently blame the ‘Ukraine’ or ‘the West’. Most of these claims can be easily debunked by a little research. The next day forgetting the previous day’s narrative which has been debunked RT comes out with another version of events!! In fact at least one RT journalist, Sara Firth, resigned over RT’s handling of the issue. The only station that has remained credible is AJ but AJ has not been giving much airtime to the MH17 incident. This is because AJ’s ‘heroes’ in Gaza, Hamas, have been having a noisy neighbourhood spat with Israel and AJ is giving that a lot of airtime.

A further problem is that among the various claims and counterclaims made by both parties observers are effectively told by both sides that they must take everything ‘on trust’ with little of the primary evidence being made available. We went to war in Iraq on the basis of a ‘dodgy dossier’ now we are not even being allowed to see the dossier merely listen to each sides ‘interpretation’ of their alleged evidence. This includes the fact that the US is known to have electronic intelligence aircraft (ELINT) and satellites monitoring Eastern Ukraine. Both AJ and RT have shown pictures of State Department Press conferences in Washington where the spokeswoman has refused to give any primary evidence from these sources just ‘interpretation’. The evidence given has included such things as pictures from the Ukrainian Security Service (SBU) allegedly showing a Russian SA-11 rocket launcher being transported on a civilian low loader and photographed allegedly passing through a town close to the Russian border, Krasnodon (Pic 1).

The photo has now been taken down from the SBU site but is still quoted by Western sources to prove Russian complicity in this incident. Why has it been taken down. Because some Western sources working on the Internet did what Western media failed to do – check out the pictures. Looking at Pic 1 despite the cruddy resolution clearly visible over the top of the low loader are some trolley bus wires and to the left is the edge of a large roadside advertising hoarding. The border town where this is alleged to have been photographed has a trolley bus system but nothing else fits the photo! In fact some detective work suggests this was taken some distance from the border on the outskirts of Luhansk (Pic 2).

Just too add to the disinformation the Russians used the same photo (Pic 1) and said it was taken in the city of Krasnoarmeysk a city controlled by the Ukrainian Army since May 11th . But Krasnoarmeysk has no trolley bus system. These discrepancies are analysed further here. A further light is thrown on the situation because as I mentioned above the missile launcher was being transported on a civilian low loader. If, as claimed by the Ukrainians this was a Russian supplied system that is rather odd as the Russians have a range of military tractor/trailer units to transport their systems on. Use of a civilian low loader suggests an ad hoc arrangement, the sort of thing that could well be improvised by civilian based separatists. In fact ‘Paris Match’ magazine did something which major news sources had failed to do. A phone number can be seen on the low loader in some photos. They dialled it ! The owner of the haulage yard told them it had been stolen ‘earlier this month’.

Talking of military and civilian low loaders leads to another confusing report which covers in detail. This is a report of a tarpaulin covered missile launcher on a military low loader filmed on a ‘dashboard camera’ a couple of kilometres inside the Russian border (Pic 3). The missile unit was originally identified as a SA-11, the type of missile most sources accept was fired at MH-17. A closer look at it by Dr Richard North noticed that not only was it on a military low loader it appeared to be longer, with a longer overhang over the hull of the launcher and (just visible under the tarpaulin) more track wheels (7 not 6). It appears to be a SA-12 a different missile launcher with a longer range and greater altitude than the SA-11. In his research Dr Richard North even found a company in New Orleans, USA, that makes diecast models of the SA-12 launcher and military low loader! Could the Russians have shot down MH-17 with a SA-12 from their side of the border and left it to ‘separatists’ with the shorter range SA-11 in the Ukraine to claim the ‘credit’ (or catch the blame !)? The SA-12 has totally different radars from the SA-11 and it is almost certain US ELINT aircraft would have detected the aircraft was being tracked by the ‘wrong radar’. (Rather than bore readers witless if you want more read the long, technical articles, on SA-11 and SA-12 on Wikipedia).

What we have after this long convoluted discussion and various attempts to muddy the waters mainly by Ukrainian and Western sources is that it appears MH-17 was shot down by a SA-11 missile fired from a separatist controlled area of the Eastern Ukraine. How did they get the launcher? Some of the pictures show a number painted on the side of the launcher ‘312’. This matches with pictures on a Facebook page relating to the soldiers in a Ukrainian air defence unit. A picture from early this year, before the outbreak of the ‘separatist uprising’, shows a launcher numbered 312 at the unit base in Donetsk. This base was stormed by the separatists at the beginning of the uprising and a lot of the equipment seized. The Ukrainians claim the missile launchers seized were ‘non-operational’ but they would say that to hide their embarrassment at a lot of high value equipment being seized wouldn’t they ? Some of the separatist commanders in various interviews (rants!) have claimed that ‘civil organisations’ in Russia gave them help fixing ‘non-operational’ equipment they seized. This could be true or it could be a ploy by the separatist leaders to make it appear they have more support than they really have to impress the local East Ukrainian population.

One final factor that is not being mentioned by the Western Press. On July 14th a Ukrainian Antonov An-26 transport was shot down over the separatist controlled region at 21000ft. The altitude of this aircraft meant that it was too high to have been shot down by a shoulder fired missile. A SA-11 or similar system was obviously deployed in the region. Three days later MH-17 was shot down. The question that is being asked is why didn’t the Ukrainian and/or US governments order international air traffic organisations to close the air zone over the Eastern Ukraine to civilian flights as a high altitude capable missile system was deployed in the area? As an aside according to the ‘Wikipedia’ entry for the SA-11M1 (the type used in the Ukraine) there was an old technology 1980’s IFF (Identification Friend or Foe) system fitted but I note that the citation for this item (citation ‘8’) is a duff link ! Has their been some ‘friendly editing’ of the entry ? How much skill does the crew need to have to use the IFF (if it exists) competently? As a matter of fact by July 17th some airlines were taking a longer route over the Black Sea to avoid this war zone. Did the Ukrainian government desperate for foreign currency keep routing flights over the area so they could charge the ‘transit fees’ to airlines? Or did the Ukrainian and/or US governments hope for an ‘own goal’ by the separatist manned missile launcher crew which the Western governments could then try to link President Putin too?

I mentioned above the Western governments tactic of blaming everything on ‘Putin’ and refusing to show any of their alleged ‘primary evidence’. The Ukrainian attempts to support the West in this have consisted of dodgy photos which they have had to take down when they are challenged. I mentioned earlier the ‘dodgy dossier’ in Iraq but in 2003 some Western media questioned the accuracy of that dossier. Even the BBC did so with it’s then reporter, the excellent Andrew Gilligan. Now we have a celebrity magazine Paris Match doing more research than the major news organisations like the BBC!  A researcher working with a laptop in Wibsey, South Bradford is doing major research on the subject in between his normal ‘duties’ such as putting together anti-EU briefings. I mentioned in my previous article the work that can be done using ‘alternative media’ compared to the traditional news sources but it is strange (or deliberate ?) that the traditional media are not making efforts to improve the quality of their fact finding. They are, by their lack of efforts to research on these major issues, destroying their own credibility and handing their audiences over to the alternative media. I will close with one excellent quote. Former US Secretary of State, Dr Henry Kissinger may be 90 but he has still got all his marbles: ‘Demonizing Vladimir Putin does not make a Foreign Policy!’

 

A Maverick Psychologist’s Jail Diary – by Simon Sheppard

25 January 2013. My probation officer’s hastily-arranged visit had ended just a few minutes previously, he ostensibly unaware of what was about to go down. I was in the hallway experimenting with how many boxes of TOA sheets could be loaded onto my sack trolley when about four policemen started pushing the door, which had been slightly ajar. Instinctively I tried to push it back but they pushed harder. One said “Don’t worry we’re the police.” A few moments later one of the officers confronted me, the one I was shortly to dub ‘PC Believer,’ and asked me if I was Steven W., my former co-defendant. It was his idea of a joke. When that was got out of the way I was arrested “under Section 19 of the Public Order Act 1986 on suspicion of distributing material intending to stir up religious hatred” an offence which, unless I’m very much mistaken, doesn’t exist. Asked if I understood why I was being arrested, I said “No.”

More officers shortly arrived and began donning rubber gloves to start going through my computers and possessions. PC Believer asked me, now in handcuffs, and having great difficulty coming to terms with the situation, if I was on drugs. I was in shock. They tried to arrange my coat over my hands so the handcuffs wouldn’t be visible during the walk to the police van: “I’ve done nothing to be ashamed of” I said. After being loaded into the back I was driven to York.

Discussions at York

In an anteroom for people waiting for the custody desk was a swarthy, Eastern European gypsy woman who spoke no English. I shortly learned she’d been arrested for purse-dipping (pick-pocketing). Mindful of my caution (“Anything you say may be taken down…”) I chose my words carefully, and mentioned to PC Believer that the presence of both her and me was an interesting juxtaposition, pointing out that while I was in handcuffs she was not. He responded with some rubbish which made it evident that he was a committed adherent to political correctness. I remembered him telling the newly-arrived officers – three I think – who were about to embark on a search of my flat to “knock yourselves out.” Clearly me and PC Believer were not to be the best of buddies.

He told me that handcuffs were at the discretion of the arresting officer – him. I said that as a police officer he had a vested interest in believing that his job furthered a functional society, mentioning cognitive dissonance, but that my conclusion was that the police role nowadays is to foster a dysfunctional one. I’d recently come to the conclusion that by the enforcement of political correctness, practically everywhere the police go they make things worse.

The constables in the room, now about four, waiting with their charges, reverted to chatting among themselves. It was a long wait for the custody desk. PC Believer was evidently a keen gardener and picking up on the discussion about fertiliser, to pass the time, I related how while hitchhiking I had once been given a lift by a pair of “sheep-shit rustlers.” They had found the theme hilarious and had picked me up to share the joke. The contraband, if such it was, was in the boot of the car. The second arresting officer, who was more amiable, moved to sit opposite me and take up the conversation. He pointed out that the “sheep-shit rustlers” had probably committed no crime. There was a digression into coronial law, that apparently while a body is with a coroner it is his property. I replied that politicians have been creating so many laws to justify their existence that there is always some law which can be quoted as being broken. While living in Market Weighton I learned of a story, which I told the assembly, of a farmer who’s practice had been to drive his horse and cart to a pub a couple of miles away. There he would drink a skinful and invariably pass out. When he did his drinking friends would, by long-standing habit, carry him out to the cart and load him into the back. Then one would give the horse a healthy slap on the backside and it, well used to this routine, would walk the farmer home through the deserted country lanes. This continued for several years until “one of you lot” laid in wait for him one night and had him for being drunk in charge of a vehicle.

At this PC Believer objected to the categorisation and implicit tainting of himself which had been implied by the term “one of you lot.” I replied that it is well-established that humans sort into categories, and in any case he was wearing a uniform. “I don’t want to talk to you any more” he said. “That generally means that you’ve lost the argument” I replied. Apparently there was a serious proposal in rural Ireland recently (County Kerry to be exact) to issue licences or permits to allow driving over the limit. The argument was that the traditional Irish culture of drinking, music and story-telling was under threat. One of the officers made a remark about the damage that ensues when a family is wiped out by a drink-driver, but in this case we are talking about a short journey along rural roads at perhaps 30mph with probably the biggest danger posed by the driver being to himself.

Formally interviewed

More than an hour later at the custody desk my handcuffs were finally removed. The sergeant behind it looked around 17 (he later told me he was 30) and after that I was shown to a cell. An hour or two passed and then I was pulled out to be interviewed by two detectives. I was asked if I wanted a lawyer present: I declined, knowing that one wouldn’t be much help in this case and that everyone would have to sit around for several hours while he arrived. The interview was recorded on DVD disc – this was new, I was told it could record video if necessary. The lengthy interview consisted of questions about the Spree Killers article I’d written (and by this time had published) in Heritage & Destiny. I had learnt already that my supposed offence was connected to the local library, and my growing suspicion was confirmed that it was this article. Someone had kindly made me some copies for free, and I had given the last one to the only male employee at my local library. He, apparently, had referred it to his female superior and both she and he had made statements for the police. However absurd it seemed, the police were treating it as a potential criminal offence!

The interview was exceptional in consisting chiefly of an elaboration of evolutionary psychology and the concepts and mechanisms detailed in the Spree Killers article. It was very exhausting, because the article had truly been at the forefront of knowledge. Some additional background was added however. David Buss pointed out in one of his books that the very fact that we are here, each individual one of us, is proof of an unbroken lineage: every one of our ancestors, going back countless generations, must have successfully found a mate or else we wouldn’t be here. By the same measure, the fact that we have white skin is proof that men have fought to preserve that difference. At some time the mutation would have occurred, and if the distinct population had not defended itself it would have been wiped out or assimilated by a darker one.

Also discussed was the wide variation in genes and language in African and New Guinea tribes, and the ability of the former to identify members of their respective tribes, even though they all look similar to us. In New Guinea there are reported to be over 400 languages, even tribes living a couple of miles apart speak different languages. One account relates how two neighbouring tribes had a minor dispute, so one decided to play a trick on the other. On a certain day they exchanged their word for ‘yes’ to mean ‘no’, and the word for ‘no’ to mean ‘yes.’ Trade with their neighbours was certainly interesting for a while.

The mass suicide cult

The two officers went through the article, questioning me on various points, until we came to the part at the end about the government’s “suicidal immigration policies.” It took me a few moments to think of an example, because there are so many, but then I realised I had it from the Government’s own mouth. No less than the Chief Medical Officer had stated just a week or so previously that antibiotic resistance should be treated as a critical threat, on a par with terrorism or nuclear attack. The warning was that we could all be wiped out by a common bacterium which had acquired antibiotic resistance. What was left unstated was that the major source of antibiotic resistance, particularly tuberculosis, is India and Pakistan. There, incorrectly-stored antibiotics are sold from market stalls like Smarties. Asian schoolchildren visiting relatives, for example, bring the resistant bacteria back to Britain.

The most notable feature of the interview however was the testimonial I received at the end. One of the officers said I had “a great mind” and other things which were plainly intended to send a message to the CPS (Crown Prosecution Service) to back off. This is certainly not the first time I have received sympathetic treatment from police officers – one even apologised on behalf of the State for the actions it was taking against me – but this was actually on record, obviously being spoken for the benefit of that DVD recorder. Definitely a novelty. With these and other officers I had by this time discussed episodic memory (similar to snapshot memory), neurotic transfer (spurious false confessions) and the Stockholm syndrome.

A couple of hours later I was called out of my cell again and stood before the custody desk. The teenage-looking custody sergeant told me I was being given bail until March. Then I waited in a glass-walled booth for a few minutes, and was beginning to think that, against all the odds, I might actually be going home. Shortly however I was re-arrested for recall to prison. The form stated as official reason “poor behaviour.”

Police cells until Monday

Rather like the early days in the tank at California, in the bowels of a skyscraper in Los Angeles, it takes time for the shock and sense of unreality to fade. It seemed as if I would only get a few minutes’ sleep before the constant noise of the fan, or the ever-present light, would cause me to wake with a jolt, when I would realise all over again that I was back in a cell. According to the normal routine I should be shipped to the nearest reception prison, Hull, midday on Saturday. However heavy snow put paid to that, and I was told I would be held in York until Monday. At least I was given paper, a pencil and some books to read, but it would be better in a proper jail where I could make my own tea and have a smoke. That is invaluable when you’re under stress.

On Sunday however the cell door opened and I was told I was being moved to Harrogate as they were running out of cells. The officer told me it was 3 o’clock, and so disoriented was I that I assumed it was 3pm. It was actually 3am. This, a new facility, was even worse than York. I only had inferior horror books to read – as if I’d want to read those in a situation like this.

Back to jail

I ended up on the induction wing in Hull. First in a cell with a flap on the cell door and then I was moved to one without. I seemed to be constantly being asked if I wanted methadone. The first time a female officer opened the flap and posed this question I laughed, but after that it ceased to be funny. One time I woke up thinking I had fallen asleep inside a swimming baths, the acoustics around the wing being quite similar. Jail was just like before and I settled down to reading a book a day and watching the TV, which had had its settings disturbed and only had about three channels, at night. I normally don’t have a TV at all but you can’t read all the time: after a while your eyes start automatically scanning the lines without taking anything in. Fortunately one of the stations was a film channel. Most importantly, I was on my own and this compensated for a lot of things. Another novelty I saw immediately was that the expiry date on the long-life milk cartons we were given every evening was later than my release date. My licence expired on 16 April and they couldn’t hold me after that. In jail you notice these things.

I took part in a few cosy cell-huddles during association. One time the conversation turned to criminal (probably drug) matters and someone said “He looks well dodgy, he does,” meaning me. “I don’t want to know” I said and beat a hasty retreat. Later I caught up with the speaker leaning against some railings and joked with him “The accusation of dodginess is a compliment, coming from you!” because he was indeed dodgy. Another time there was someone I was told felt stress in any social interaction. This was one of those times when I put my psychologist’s hat on. I said it was not my area but thought that social empathy as a sort of ‘brain muscle’ which usually operates automatically and unconsciously.

Social empathy

This ‘brain muscle’ becomes evident when one is sick or dealing with people with mental illness. A patient in a hospital becomes rapidly exhausted by visitors, for example. Our natural tendency when transacting with another individual is to reach some midway point, to achieve some reference for further understanding. This capacity for social empathy must confer considerable survival advantage because its energy allocation has a high priority, so that in normal everyday life we hardly notice it. Only when someone is sick does that energy drain become noticeable. When talking to someone who is psychotic, one must curb the natural tendency to reach a midway point otherwise one is drawn to share the other’s psychosis. This is why attendants at mental institutions can mock and mistreat patients: they are broadening the gap between ‘us’ and ‘them’ to protect their own mental health. Reportedly mental health workers have a tendency to go senile early. Mental illness can be contagious.

So in this individual the part(s) of the brain which I call the ‘brain muscle’ may have been weak or dysfunctional, much as I have difficulty recognising faces (prosopagnosia). Then I launched into some procedural analysis, saying that the natural domain for the male is things, taking apart car engines and so forth, while the natural domain of the female is relationships. All relational activity is really sex for the female. We were interrupted before I got any further.

I’ve had various prison names: “the Professor,” “Jackanory” (because I told stories) and “Reader.” As far as stories went, their favourite seemed to be the one about the origin of the term “rule of thumb.” I would tell about the judge (it was reputedly Sir Francis Buller) who, from the bench, ruled that it was lawful for a man to beat his wife providing the stick was no wider than his thumb. This was in the days of coverture, when a husband was responsible for all the debts, and even criminal acts, of his wife.

Sociopathy and psychopathy

I think one thing of significance was learnt during this brief (5½ weeks) jail stint. In my own mind at least I have established models of the sociopath and the psychopath. A clear distinction between the two has never been obvious, according to the definitions I have seen. According to the Oxford Dictionary of Psychology, psychopathy features “superficial charm, pathological lying, egocentricity, lack of remorse and callousness.” I have met and become aware of several psychopaths, both inside and outside prison.

Probably the most dangerous type is the psychopathic politician, representative examples being Tony Blair and Nick Griffin just for starters. Because of their influence, having clear definitions is important.

My conclusion is that the sociopath exhibits superficial charm, pathological lying, lack of remorse and callousness but lacks egocentricity. All the psychopaths I have met have had a compulsion to “get one over” the other person, to always come out on top. The psychopath always has to come out better, to prevail in whatever the particular contest is. This also works in business, where the psychopathic businessman always has to feel that he has come out ahead (I think I met one such once; he was also exceptionally promiscuous). Psychopathic politicians generally use legal means, but the criminal psychopath will exploit the advantages and weigh the risks of using illegal ones.

The individual I recently shared a cell with exhibited superficial charm, pathological lying, lack of remorse and callousness but without any sign of that ruthless compulsion to prevail. The ego seemed normal or near-normal. Moreover his ploys were crudely executed, making the manipulations obvious. He was compared to a true psychopath with whom I had shared a cell in Leeds prison: that individual had lain awake at night plotting how to trick me out of more tobacco. I don’t remember him ever actually asking me for a smoke, that would have been tantamount to surrender. His manipulative ability was exceptional: it’s likely that he had manipulated the staff into putting me into his cell, solely because I had tobacco.

A sportsman has a strong will to win, and strives to do so, but he is not a psychopath. Here is an important distinction, because real, physical activity is involved: it might be running, swimming or throwing. The athlete’s own physical limitations are of account. The psychopath has only moral and legal constraints (the former being more fluid). His activities are cerebral: he is devoid of conscience and limited only by his ability to manipulate others and plot a path for himself.

The prisoner with whom I talked about ‘brain muscles’ evidently had a social disorder, but I don’t think it could be deemed sociopathic. Most of the time during association periods I leant against a radiator and read. I would try and read a part of some educational book (psychology or science) then after I’d done my daily quota, pick up a novel again.

Move to Northallerton

After 13 days at Hull I was moved. Northallerton is a small but old prison which had formerly been a Young Offenders Institution. There were two wings, a large one for Category C prisoners and a smaller one for Category D. I had been Category D at Wolds and while at Hull I had received paperwork again stating that I was Category D (which qualifies you for an open prison). Inexplicably however on my move to Northallerton I became Category C, so was located on the larger wing. I saw the Cat. D wing several times during trips to and from the prison library, and the regime there was that the cell doors were open all day, but it wasn’t as if there was anywhere to go. It was only about seven cells long and was reminiscent of a Lilliputian tower block. I found it rather claustrophobic. They made a big thing of the fact that there was a carpet on the floor.

One character I was re-acquainted with from a couple of years before had a persistent compulsion to shave his body. I doubt if anywhere was spared. I had shared with him briefly at Wolds prison but now he had a cell to himself, which was a good thing. I used to be woken at five in the morning to the sound of him scratching with a razor. I told him about the neurotic paradox, which is that regardless of how illogical or detrimental an individual knows his behaviour to be, he cannot stop himself doing it. Nowadays the fashionable term is OCD, but formerly these maladaptive behaviours were classed under the general heading of neuroses.

At Northallerton I finally managed to get hold of some toothpaste, but then came a disappointment. After mercifully spending three years inside without toothache it now struck with a vengeance. Having toothache inside and being dependent on the prison dentist is no joke. Prisoners’ teeth are often extremely poor, due to all the drugs. However the nurses’ station did me proud and soon I had clove oil and painkillers. A week or so later the dentist herself was much less impressive and I elected to struggle on with the clove oil. Both prisons gave me immunisations; at Northallerton there had been a recent measles outbreak. At Hull during one of the induction talks a man revealed incidentally that antibiotic resistant gonorrhoea was now at large in Britain – it could be controlled but not cured. This valuable warning was not delivered by a medic though, I don’t think I was aware of a single male medical worker in either of the prisons. Northallerton was more feminine than Hull, with pairs of female officers sitting together to gossip while keeping an eye on the prisoners.

Shortly after arriving at Northallerton an Imam walked into my cell, dressed in full gown and garb, asking about religious matters. He started acting on behalf of the Christian chaplaincy by inviting me to Christian services. This is the second time this has happened, a Muslim acting for the CofE in prison, there’s been some kind of directive about it. It’s also practically impossible in British jails not to eat Halal food. I got rid of him as quickly as I could and engaged the chaplain later. One had already got an earful about Holocaustianity being a post-Christian quasi-religion, and quoted Chesterton, that when people stop believing in God they don’t believe in nothing, they believe in anything. In Holocaustianity we have Auschwitz as Calvary, Hitler as the Devil and the Jews as completely innocent, sacrificial lambs. Us “racists” and “Holocaust deniers” are cast as the angels of Satan, seeking to disrupt the coming multiracial utopia. I think this end-times scenario is called a secular eschatology.

One man told me his situation “on the out” had been so grim that he deliberately set about having himself sent to prison. A catalogue of woe followed, the details of which I cannot give here since they would identify him and I was sworn to secrecy. Another set of people seemed incapable of managing money, short and in debt in whatever situation they find themselves, apparently never having been other than dependent on the State. Of course the prison currency is tobacco. The trick to getting by in prison is to see the best in people, and the truly bad individuals are a definite minority, certainly in the jails I have been in. There were a couple of ex-policemen in this jail, in for smuggling tobacco, and I had regular chats with one of them. I asked him if he would lose his pension but he said no, he’d paid into it for years so it couldn’t be taken away. An oft-made pronouncement of mine was “If our country was governed properly, 80% of these people wouldn’t be here.”

One time I was standing in the queue for food and immediately in front of me a couple of prisoners were mock-fighting. One of the dummy swings came uncomfortably close, I backed away and some remark was made about my retreat. “I’m a writer not a fighter” I said. The prison authorities were very good about forwarding mail, and the other prisoners were in awe of the messages of support I received. Some were plainly jealous of the money I was sent. I told them you have to be a political prisoner to get such treatment.

A heretic inside

Word soon got around among the prison officers and inmates that I was a “Holocaust disbeliever” and this led to some interesting debates. The prison environment lends itself to some obvious parallels and my argument ran as follows: “Imagine this is the 1940s, and we are losing a war against Russia. The Russians are invading from the north, and all the prisons up there are being evacuated southward. This wing, designed for 300, is packed with 1,500 people, six to a cell instead of two, with people sleeping on the floors in addition. Moreover, the people coming in from the north are carrying fleas, which carry typhus. The Russians have control of the air. Attempts to bring food or medicine to the prison are frustrated, because any train or lorry is being shot to pieces by aircraft. That is what happened in the closing days of the war with Germany.”

I have deliberately mixed the order and location of some of these exchanges to save possible embarrassment. One officer got a bit heated about the topic. “You can stick your beliefs up your arse! Three-and-a-half million people died!” he said angrily. I’m not normally very quick verbally, and usually only think of a suitable reply half an hour too late, but on this occasion I immediately retorted “It was six million last week!”

Many times I came up against a stock argument: “My grandfather was at Dachau/Belsen/wherever.” Then I had to patiently explain, for the umpteenth time, that even in the orthodox version of events there were no mass exterminations at the camps on German territory. It was all supposed to have happened in the East, chiefly at Auschwitz. I sometimes told of the time I visited Dachau years ago, when I was still a believer. I had sensed that something was wrong. It had been brewing even before I saw the notice tucked away in a corner, along the lines of “This shower room was never used for extermination but was constructed after the war for demonstration purposes.”

I noticed that a certain washroom-toilet always had at least one prison officer stationed outside. This apparently was for the sole purpose of stopping inmates having a sly smoke inside. When I realised what was going on I dubbed them “smoking guards” and told one that “the present regime makes the Nazis look like kindergarten teachers.” A couple of days later I was passing off the wing, and had to give my name for the movement record. “Sheppard” I said, “political prisoner.” “Jawohl” replied the officer and I walked off chuckling.

One of the prison libraries had a display about Holocaust Memorial Day. This prompted me to tell all within hearing that when the German administration at Auschwitz learned that the Russians were advancing, they offered the inmates the choice of staying and waiting for the Russian “liberators” or marching with them several hundred miles to another camp. Almost the entire camp chose to flee with the Germans and march. One of the few that didn’t was Otto Frank, because he was in the camp hospital recovering from typhus.

On my birthday, 19th February, only a couple of days after I got access to a computer, my ‘Appeal against Recall’ was faxed off. The paperwork said there were “complaints to the Police by members of the public that he had distributed written material glorifying spree killers.” I had given one copy to one male librarian, and the article had even been shown to Probation beforehand. My appeal said that on the basis of the information I had been given, I had not breached my licence conditions at all. I tried to contact my former lawyer to assist but learned later that his firm didn’t have the necessary contract. Apparently firms need special Legal Aid contracts for matters of prison law and actions against the police. So I did the right thing going ahead with it myself.

What passes for work

In the mornings I was enrolled on a pointless computer course. I was able to skip most of the word-processing (not much to learn there, I’ve been doing it for decades) but reached new heights with Powerpoint. How can anyone ever manage without it? Scores of  pointless print-outs had to be made, while at the same time the content witters on about recycling and reducing waste. The atmosphere there was okay however, and I was able to sketch some notes for a future article. There were some lively discussions as well; one young man said he believed in equal opportunities and I said that it was never about equality, only superiority. I quoted the survey I did in Hull in 1997, where 80% of the unemployed were male but 69% of the people working in the unemployment benefit offices were female. Then look here I said, with a huge proportion of probation officers and other administrators being female. “Do you think then that women shouldn’t work?” I was asked. “Not while there are men on the dole” I said and continued, “Women are crooks who steal men’s jobs.” “You can’t say that!” someone said. “I just did” I replied, to howls of laughter.

It was notable how the presence of even a single member of one of the “protected groups” stifled free discussion. I was sitting beside a Pakistani one day and said to him, “Do you know that the Nazis had a Muslim division?” Of course he didn’t.

The worst part of prison is having a psychopath for a cell-mate, or sharing a cell with someone otherwise severely dysfunctional (into this category I include the large number of TV addicts, whose first action on waking is to turn it on). Fortunately I only had to endure this for a week or so. Hence the worst part, which I came to dread, was the work detail I had in the afternoons. This was billed as “Business Administration” but its primary purpose seemed to be keeping Manchester College in funds. Daily committee meetings, with minutes taken, pathetic “theory” exercises on how and why to give a presentation, mind-numbing minutae concerning health and safety and how to use a computer. The whole atmosphere stifled any initiative and ability. The obvious observation was that if this was how business at large was run it was no wonder the country was bankrupt.

A trickle of real work came though the door, but the important thing seemed to be completing the Manchester College forms. It had all the characteristics of a New Labour box-ticking scam. Prison when all is said and done is just a microcosm of wider society, although with added restrictions and exaggerations of policy. This afternoon work session came to epitomise the mediocrity of society at large. That is, a society replete with institutional incompetence, steered by people of doubtful ability, only a willingness to toe the party line. Some organisations go along with the dogma, having to adhere to the letter of the law, and of course there will be rationalisation (reducing cognitive dissonance, in orthodox terminology). The most insufferable however are those who wholeheartedly embrace this rubbish, and for whom box-ticking is a way of life.

One time there was a discussion about bullying, a poster was being produced about it and everyone was invited to sit around the table and contribute. I piped up from the far corner, “What about bullying by the state of people who refuse to go along with their dogma?” “We’re not talking about that” was the answer. A few days later my frustration boiled over to an argument with the supervisor, at one point drawing a cheer from the other prisoners. “This is all to keep people like you in fancy salaries” I said. “I wish” was her response. “Well it’s a lot more than I get” I said. The plain fact was that here we had large numbers of men working on these vapid courses, no doubt designed and marked by women, while the prison population is 94% male. We were paid about £1 per day for our contribution, and a large proportion of inmates are in prison due to being unemployed and having nothing to do except take drugs and commit crime.

The last day

It all happened on 5th March. In the morning I met a police officer who told me there would be “no further action” in respect of the Spree Killers article. This was a relief, although it might have been interesting to see how it played out. How would the media spin the trial? In essence, it is the case of a writer – indubitably in this context, a journalist – being tried for an article which had already been published after complaints by two librarians!

I asked the police officer for clarification about whether I would get into trouble for posting the SK article on the Heretical site. He seemed to be aware of my appeal against recall, but said I had little chance of release before the remaining six weeks of my licence were up. In the afternoon, the normal supervisor was on “maternity leave” (this is an approximation), some men were supervising instead and I actually got some work done. During a discussion of criminal matters one young lad said something of such naivety (he’d confided some incriminating information to a lawyer) that the laughter took a while to die down.

After work came tea, then a smoke then association. About 18:30 I was leaning against a radiator as usual when an officer approached and said “Mr Sheppard?” I was thinking, ‘What trouble am I in now?’ but said that I was. “Immediate release” he said, “You’ve got five minutes to pack your stuff.” “You’re joking” I said. I suspect he was enjoying himself. No, he insisted, pack your stuff. He eventually had to come and get me while I was giving things away to my shaven-headed friend and others who had got the word.

The corridor which led off the wing seemed much busier than usual, and maybe others had gathered to watch me go. As I was passing through I recognised the one who had dubbed me “Reader” and gave him my alarm clock. I’m afraid my last words to my fellow prisoners were “If this turns out to be a joke I want it back!”

At Reception something was said about this happening only once a year. It was like being in a Hollywood film, enjoyable but thoroughly implausible. I quoted a film I had watched a couple of nights before, featuring Sharon Stone as a sharp-shooting gunslinger. As if! “Why can’t a girl be a gunfighter?” one of the officers asked, clearly another pc believer. The fact is that even the male ones are a Hollywood myth: their pistols were wildly inaccurate and I have seen a claim that bullets were very expensive at the time, making a mockery of all those trigger-happy shoot-outs. Whether this is true or not, handguns are still hopeless at distance even today, and the oft-repeated theme of shooting through ropes to free someone from the noose, hitting silver dollars in mid-air, or any of the other displays of astounding accuracy, are pure fantasy.

Then there was a walk to the gates with another officer, and we fell to talking about American prisons. I told him I much preferred British ones, and that the American justice system is cruel, quoting a case I had seen of a young black of 17 or so who had held hostage a group of college girls at gunpoint. None of the young women had been shot, raped or even hurt, but he got 50 years. “I’m not overly sympathetic to blacks who hold up college girls” I said, “but 50 years is a bit steep. We all do stupid things sometimes and anyone can make a mistake.” “They would have been in fear of their lives” he said, adopting the opposing stance. “That’s a fear crime” I replied, “it’s impossible to measure and everyone is trying to scrabble to the top of the victimhood ladder.”

Shortly we arrived at the ‘lock,’ the staggered doors which are the prison entrance and exit for vehicles. Normally all releases take place first thing in the morning; processing of departing prisoners is begun even before everyone is opened up for work movements. I was shown to a glass panel and run through a series of questions which were checked against the paperwork. Then a button was pressed, the heavy door slid aside a few feet and with a cheery wave to the officer behind the glass I stepped outside. I had a pint of bitter in a pub on the way to the train station, but it was not until I reached York and familiar territory that the realisation that I was free again finally struck home.

Librarians get writers imprisoned

Among the property returned to me was the Parole Board report though I didn’t look at it until later. It directed my immediate release but made no mention of the appeal document I had sent. This affair brings to four the number of times librarians have acted as snoops and eager agents of the police: one in Lancashire and three in Yorkshire. These incidents reveal a level of collusion between librarians and police which would put the East German Stasi to shame. What seems to be happening is that the librarians fawn over the PCSOs (a sort of new, amateur police) and the PCSOs are apparently desperate to ingratiate themselves with the full-time police. The latter seek to score points with their superiors and win politically-correct credentials. In the papers I think I can see the work of the “policewoman from Hell” I had the misfortune to meet in January 2012.

The ambivalence of librarians getting writers imprisoned quite defies comprehension. I had an interesting letter in jail from a lady who had formerly been a librarian telling me how things used to be. On reading it I remembered myself meeting that attitude of public service and serving members of the public impartially, regardless of their political perspective.

The perfect crime

It doesn’t require a lengthy jail term to know how to accomplish the perfect crime. In fact our prisons are full of failures, because successful criminals don’t get caught. (The cynic might remark that the most successful ones are in government.) It’s quite simple really. Do one, really well-planned job, then stash the proceeds as a nice nest-egg for the future. Above all, keep your trap shut and resist the temptation to flaunt your ill-gotten gains. Where most people go wrong of course is that they get greedy, do it repeatedly and sooner or later they make a mistake – usually sooner, for most of the prison population. Or they establish a pattern which eventually leads straight to their door and shortly thereafter to the back of a police van.

It strikes me now that this is what the Establishment has done. They’ve been banging away at me and others with similarly heretical views, to keep the puppet-masters happy for a while. That is, until they demand yet more repression to quell their resurgent insecurity and paranoia. And Big Sister has been getting away with it helped, in my case, by a certain judge at Leeds Crown Court. This time she may have gone too far, though most of my disgust is for the librarians, because they don’t have the excuse of being obliged to follow orders.

Not atypical of the cost of amateur crime was that committed by a man I shared a cell with in Armley, Leeds. He got five years for a £30 theft. One night, on his uppers (short of money) and the worse for drink, he demanded money from a taxi-driver. The Pakistani swore under oath that he had brandished a knife, thus it qualified as armed robbery. My cell-mate, an industrial fitter, insisted this was false, and also told me he had never been in trouble with the law before. All this depends of course on whether what he said was true, but I had no reason to doubt him. Within a few days of his arrival in jail, before he knew what was going on and how better to deal with such matters, he had his Rolex watch stolen, a more significant theft than the one which cost him his liberty.

Questions of identity

Until 16 April 2013 I must see probation officers at least weekly, one being as part of a “Healthy Identity” programme for “extremist offenders.” My reaction to this topic was that our sense of identity is an illusion. That is the current attitude, as I understand it. To have a true meta-brain would require a separate organ ‘above’ the brain, and this then involves having one above that, and so on. So evolution has taken a short-cut to avoid this complexity and provided the same benefit (survival advantage) by giving us the illusion of having a unique identity. Many visual processes have evolved using similar short-cuts, hence the large number of optical illusions.

I discussed collective identity once as I was being driven home after one of the police raids. I talked to the officers about the Stalinist raids against political dissidents, where an arrest team would pick someone up at four in the morning. My take was that with a police force in the traditional British model, consisting almost exclusively of white males, government-directed raids of a similar kind might initially take place, following orders. However after a while resistance would emerge, and the police would find some means – fudging or losing paperwork, taking sick leave and the like – to avoid executing orders they considered unfitting. If the police force were to become heterogeneous however, filled with women and ethnic minorities, they would follow such orders unquestioningly, perhaps even eagerly. A deracinated population is (simultaneously and equivalently) feminine and impressionable. It derives its identity solely from the State and mass media. A police force of this complexion would do absolutely anything the politicians wanted, regardless of traditional British values.

This is evidently the ‘long-term plan,’ though I would not claim that it is necessarily deliberate or even conscious. It is simply the logical conclusion of certain instincts being uninhibited. I am confident however that it will not come to this – other instincts will prevail, not least the Occidental respect for objective truth.

A strategic analysis

There is also the female policy of Marginal Defection to consider. In Marginal Defection, the female (the Protagonist in this game) optimally proceeds just below the threshold at which the male is provoked. This game is mentioned, but not yet named, at the foot of p. 36 of All About Women and described more fully in my forthcoming book ‘Sex & Power.’ Closely associated with Marginal Defection is supra-maximization and Going Too Far (GTF). Supra-maximization is manifest by repeated efficiency drives, being unable to tolerate incidental losses, being unable to throw anything away etc. When employed in Marginal Defection, supra-maximization is expressed by the player trying to achieve the maximum possible payoff; the temptation to do so cannot be resisted. This is one reason why in a feminine environment GTF is inevitable, and ultimately spells the demise of players employing this policy.

Today we have societal mediocrity, institutional incompetence, not only mores but our very identity being defined by an overweening mass media. If we are to analyse this in terms of game strategies, we must consider the possibility that the harmful policies now being promoted are the product not just of misguided delusion, but also of disguised malevolence. In other words, there is a population (the Protagonist) encouraging its opposite player (the Opponent) to follow detrimental policies. I call this Malign Encouragement.

An obvious adjunct to Malign Encouragement would be for the Protagonist to suppress criticism of the policies it promotes. Another adjunct would be to suppress, for example by stigmatisation, any attempt to correct the problems the Protagonist thrives on creating. My experiences are offered as contemporary expressions of these adjunct strategies, and may serve as illustration.

 

BNP crushed in local elections

The England First Party’s greatly improved local election vote in Preston is detailed in the party news section of this site.

Elsewhere this year’s elections resulted in a series of crushing defeats for the British National Party, all of whose defending councillors were defeated, with zero gains.

The BNP’s disastrous election – which included a record low vote in the London mayoral contest – brought unwelcome headlines in all national media, from the Guardian to the Independent to the BBC.

A detailed analysis of the results is now online.

The Local Elections – a nationalist post mortem

On 3rd May 2012 almost all of the diminished band of British National Party councillors were wiped out. Every single BNP representative facing the voters was defeated – most by a large margin. For the first time Nick Griffin had to explain a set of election results that lacked a single redeeming feature, a single fig leaf to cover the utter bankruptcy of his politics. Characteristically he was left boasting not of any election result, but of a £500,000 legacy from a sadly deluded supporter who had believed the hype of earlier years, an appropriate final scene for the black comedy of monstrous greed and moral corruption into which Griffinite politics has descended.

For nationalists the biggest questions are now:
1) Is it time for a decisive break from the BNP?
2) Have any of the present alternatives to the BNP demonstrated in this year’s elections that they are the way forward?

The following analysis is related to election results, not to ideological preferences, and I have tried to look at the
facts objectively. However, my tentative conclusions could be summarised as follows.
• Even making allowances for the general pro-Labour trend this year, affecting all parties, the BNP results in the 2012
local elections were dire.
• Some local councillors (whether standing for the BNP or as independents) bucked the trend to some extent, though
whether this was due to a personal vote or a more efficient campaign, this was not enough to stave off defeat.
• One or two of the stronger BNP branches (such as Rotherham and Salford) managed to steady the ship and even increase
their votes compared to 2011 or 2010. However these results should be viewed with care, as they sometimes
merely reflect having had UKIP opponents for the past two years but not in 2012.
• Some individual campaigns by non-BNP nationalists achieved reasonably good results, but there is no consistent
evidence to show that this reflects one ideological form of nationalism having a generally stronger electoral appeal
than another. Neither traditional nationalists nor modernisers nor “civic” nationalists can point to the 2012 elections
as evidence for a monopoly of strategic electoral wisdom.
• In short, the 2012 elections prove the political bankruptcy of Nick Griffin’s BNP but do not in themselves suggest
that nationalists should abandon a “broad church” strategy in favour of either ultra-hardline racial nationalism, an
exclusive focus on hostility to Islam, or a non-racial “civic” nationalism.

The London Mayoralty and the GLA

The highest profile election was of course in London, where four years ago Richard Barnbrook was elected as a
BNP member of the Greater London Assembly. The GLA is far more significant than most local councils, and its members
are entitled to a substantial salary and staff. Moreover the election system is favourable to smaller parties.

In effect Londoners had three elections in one. The mayoral contest was a two horse race between Conservative
incumbent Boris Johnson and his Labour predecessor Ken Livingstone, though voters were allowed two preferences.
In theory this removed the “wasted vote” argument that has always reduced nationalist votes, but in practice the BNP
sabotaged their own campaign by selecting Carlos Cortiglia as mayoral candidate. Mr Cortiglia was born in Uruguay,
and as a young man thirty years ago he publicly supported the Argentine invasion of the Falkland Islands. This was
hardly likely to enhance his appeal to patriotic voters!

To make matters worse, a series of sleazy scandals hit the BNP in the run-up to the election, implicating both Mr
Cortiglia and the party’s lead candidate for the GLA, London organiser Steve Squire. Cortiglia was utterly humiliated
by the worst London mayoral result in the history of the BNP polling just 1.3%, compared to 2.8% for Richard Barnbrook
in 2008, 3.0% for Julian Leppert in 2004, and 2.0% for Mike Newland in 2000.

It was Mr Squire who in better circumstances should have had a chance of being elected. The “list” section of the GLA election only required 5% to win one of the eleven seats, a hurdle which Richard Barnbrook just managed in 2008 when the BNP list polled 5.3%. Yet this year’s BNP list headed by Mr Squire couldn’t even manage half of the votes required, polling just 2.1% across the capital.

The detailed results made for even worse reading, as there was not a single area of London where Mr Squire and his colleagues could muster anything like the required support. In the BNP’s strongest GLA constituency (Havering &
Redbridge) the party list attracted only 3.9%, down from 11.5% four years ago; while in City & East (the constituency that includes the former BNP stronghold Barking & Dagenham) their list vote fell from 9.9% to 3.3%. Needless to say,
in the weaker areas the BNP vote fell to joke levels: 1.2% in prosperous West Central, 1.3% in multi-ethnic Lambeth & Southwark.

Nor was this due to an irresistible UKIP surge. UKIP did increase their list vote across London from 1.9% to 4.5%, but some of this was at the expense of the Tories in areas well away from the BNP’s strongholds. For example in City & East, although to the BNP’s shame they did lose to UKIP this year on the list vote, this reflected more the BNP’s drop of 6.6% than UKIP’s modest increase of 1.9% (which would have come partly from the 3.3% fall in the Tory vote). The addition of the National Front to this year’s ballot paper inflicted little damage on the BNP, as they only polled 0.4%, and the English Democrat vote was similarly insignificant at 0.9% (almost identical to last year’s 1.0%). Demographic change and a very heavy (perhaps semi-fraudulent) turnout of Asian Labour voters in parts of City & East also played their part, but the fact remains that the BNP only mobilised 5,702 list voters in this entire GLA constituency. By contrast at the 2010 borough elections in just one section of City & East – Barking & Dagenham – the BNP picked up more than 15,000 votes, despite 2010 itself not being a vintage year for the party, and the borough elections using a less favourable electoral system.

Havering & Redbridge was a similar disaster. UKIP’s list vote here rose from 3.8% to 8.0%, while the BNP fell
from 11.5% to 3.9%. So the BNP’s drop was 7.6%, but UKIP’s rise was only 4.2% (a fair slice of which would surely
have come directly from the Tories, whose list vote here fell from 40.9% to 37.9%). Admittedly here the EDs were more
significant, as it is one of the few areas of the capital that has seen any sustained ED campaigning, but even their increase
was not substantial, from 1.6% to 1.8%. The real story is of BNP decline rather than a surge by rival nationalists. The NF
list vote in Havering & Redbridge was again insignificant at 0.6%.

The third level of the GLA election is the first-past-the-post constituency section, where voters cast just the one option,
as in a normal Westminster or council election. The BNP had no chance of winning any of these, but whereas four
years ago three nationalist candidates managed the 5% needed to save their deposit (two from the NF and one from the
BNP) this year every single nationalist lost his deposit: the best performance was Paul Borg with 4.1% for the BNP in City
& East, but even that was less than half the 2008 vote.

Why were the results in London so dreadful? Part of the answer is that despite Ken Livingstone’s personal
unpopularity, this was a much better year for Labour, as compared with 2008 – so right across the country Labour was
eclipsing the BNP as well as other parties. Also it is fair to say that other nationalist parties in London didn’t perform
well either. Contrary to expectations, even the much-hyped UKIP failed to regain either of the two GLA seats that they
had won in 2004 and lost in 2008. As detailed above, the BNP vote did not swing heavily to UKIP or to the EDs or NF.
But the conclusion is unavoidable: the BNP had a particularly bad election – much worse then rival parties – and
this was especially bad in London, where what should have been the best BNP campaign turned out to be the worst,
reaching tragi-comic proportions. Demoralisation and ineffective campaigning led many potential nationalist voters to
stay at home.

Defeated Councillors

Elsewhere in England numerous BNP council seats were up for re-election, some of which had already been forfeited
by resignations or defections. Five BNP councillors sought re-election: Sharon Wilkinson (Burnley), Adam Grant
(Pendle), Will Blair (Rotherham), Cliff Roper (Amber Valley), and Pat Richardson (Epping Forest). Two former BNP
councillors defended their seats as independents: Martyn Findley (Nuneaton & Bedworth) and Tom Bates (Calderdale).
One ex-BNP councillor defended his seat as an English Democrat: Seamus Dunne (Three Rivers). Two wards (in
Rotherham and Amber Valley) that had elected BNP councillors in 2008 were contested by new BNP candidates this
time, their predecessors having quit the party and left politics, while a further ward in Nuneaton & Bedworth had been
won by the BNP in 2008 but was already lost at a 2009 by-election following the BNP councillor’s resignation.

So in total there were eleven ward seats up for re-election where there had been BNP victories in 2008. Only one
of them saw a split nationalist vote this year, but none of them were retained by the BNP, indeed in two cases the party
did not even field a candidate this year.

The highest profile of the defending councillors (and one of only two with any realistic chance of re-election) was
Sharon Wilkinson, the last remaining BNP councillor in Burnley. Her council ward in Hapton with Park once had three
BNP councillors: but after this year’s polling day there were fewer BNP district councillors in the whole of the United
Kingdom than there once were in this single ward!

To be fair to Cllr Wilkinson, though defeated, her personal vote and strong campaign in the ward produced one
of the best BNP performances in the country this year – almost 10% higher than Derek Dawson’s debacle in the same
ward last year. Nevertheless Cllr Wilkinson’s 423 was the second worst number of votes ever recorded by the BNP in
Hapton with Park, and her 30.4% was down 8.2% on 2008.

Other BNP target wards in Burnley this year saw far bigger defeats: 11.3% for Paul McDevitt in Rosegrove with Lowerhouse (less than a third of the BNP’s peak performance in this ward); 10.4% for Derek Dawson in the Gannow ward that had three times elected BNP councillors; and just 9.6% for arch-Griffinite factional (dis)organiser Chris Vanns
in Whittlefield & Ightenhill, where the BNP’s Barry Birks had gained a seat in 2003. A dispirited and divided Burnley BNP was unable even to field candidates in four of the wards that they had once held. There were no UKIP candidates or rival nationalists standing against the BNP in Burnley this year, nor was there significant demographic change of the sort that has confronted nationalism in London. The party’s problems were self-inflicted – or rather, inflicted by the failures of the party leadership.

The two BNP councillors in Amber Valley, Derbyshire, managed to fall out both with their party leader and with each other. Cllr Cliff Roper in Heanor East was a supporter of the BNP rebel faction led by Andrew Brons MEP, while Cllr Lewis Allsebrook in Heanor West initially backed Nick Griffin as one of the ten signatories on the party chairman’s nomination paper last year, but soon parted company from the movement completely. The baffled voters of Heanor were treated to a blog on which Cllr Allsebrook spent virtually all his time attacking BNP colleague Cllr Roper. In theory each of these BNP councillors were due to seek re-election on 3rd May, but Cllr Allsebrook chose to stand down, and the new BNP candidate for his ward Adrian Hickman finished bottom of the poll with 18.2%, a fraction up on 2010 but less than half the winning vote four years ago. Cllr Roper did at least try for re-election, but fared almost as badly, third out of four candidates with 19.1%, again slightly up on the 2010 BNP vote of 15.6%, but only just over half his 2008 winning vote of 36.5%. (There are no elections in the Heanor wards in odd numbered years.)

The remaining Amber Valley results were even worse, presumably reflecting a concentration of local campaigning
resources on the effort to retain Heanor. In Codnor & Waingroves, Emma Roper polled only 4.1%, compared to
14.4% in 2010 and 16.6% in 2008 (while UKIP polled 13.9%, having not contested this or any other Amber Valley wards
in 2010 or 2008); Alan Edwards in Ripley & Marehay polled 7.5%, slightly down on 2011’s 8.5%, but massively down
on 2008, when the BNP polled 22.0% here.

Cllr Adam Grant was thought to be the other BNP councillor in with a chance of re-election, in what on paper had become the party’s strongest ward in the country – Marsden ward, Pendle, especially as he faced an Asian Labour opponent this year. Cllr Grant took 39% here in 2008, but this fell to 34.2% and he lost by just 37 votes to the Conservative
candidate – a rare Tory victory on a generally poor night for the governing party. The remaining Marsden ward BNP councillor, Brian Parker, does not have to face re-election for another two years. Elsewhere in Pendle, Veronica Cullen polled 10.8% in Clover Hill, where the BNP has three times finished runner-up with a peak vote of 25.8% in 2003.

Martyn Findley had been a notably active councillor for Barpool ward, Nuneaton & Bedworth, but resigned from the BNP last summer. He sought re-election as an independent this year – never an easy task, even for an energetic patriot such as Cllr Findley, who like Adam Grant in Pendle faced a tight three-way contest with both Labour and the
Conservatives aiming to unseat him – but had the added complication of a spiteful and vindictive spoiler campaign from the West Midlands BNP organiser, Alwyn Deacon, who split the nationalist vote. Cllr Findley finished a strong second with 19.4%, while Mr Deacon finished a humiliating fourth with just 8.3% – the worst ever BNP result in the ward.

Other BNP candidates in Nuneaton & Bedworth also took a severe beating. In Poplar ward the party’s vote fell
from 20% to 10.8%, while in Camp Hill ward – won by Darren Haywood for the BNP in 2008 with 36.1%, but lost
by Alwyn Deacon at a by-election in December 2009 after Cllr Haywood’s resignation – the branch organiser’s wife
Yvonne Deacon finished bottom of the poll with 8.4%.

Cllr Tom Bates in Illingworth & Mixenden ward, Calderdale – who was the last remaining BNP councillor in
the former stronghold of West Yorkshire – quit the party last autumn and stood this year as an independent. He also
finished a strong second with 32.4%, helped by having no BNP opponent. This was a big increase on the last two BNP
votes here: 18.3% in 2011 and 22.5% in 2010. But Cllr Bates’s own vote had fallen from 38.3% in 2008. There wasn’t
a single BNP candidate anywhere in Calderdale.

In Rotherham the BNP’s only remaining South Yorkshire councillor Will Blair was badly beaten in his Maltby ward, finishing third with 16.9%. (However one should bear in mind that Cllr Blair’s victory in 2008 had been achieved with only 23.0% of the vote, thanks to a crowded field of independents and other candidates protesting about a local issue. The BNP vote had already fallen to 16.2% in 2010 and 12.2% in 2011.) Ex-BNP colleague John Gamble, who was elected alongside Cllr Blair in 2008, had already been forced to resign his seat due to non-attendance, and the new BNP candidate in his Brinsworth & Catcliffe ward, Terry Fieldhouse finished runner-up with 29.5%. Mr Fieldhouse’s vote was well down on the 40.7% winning vote in 2008, but represented an improvement on his 17.1% in 2011 and 17.6% in 2010. Almost certainly a fair slice of this improvement was down to facing an Asian Labour candidate this year, but as the ward is 97.8% White this can hardly be seen as an encouraging result. (In 2009 the new Labour councillor in question, Shabana Ahmed, was a speaker at the TUC Women’s Conference on an anti-BNP motion, where she was described as a “Hope not Hate activist”.)

Despite losing these two seats, Rotherham proved one of the best remaining BNP branches at this election (and
the only effectively functioning branch in Yorkshire) – greatly helped by the decision of the local UKIP, which had
fielded almost full slates of candidates at the 2011 and 2010 elections, not to stand against any of the BNP candidates
this year. Had this resulted in any BNP victories, no doubt there would have been allegations of an electoral pact, but it
could of course have been pure coincidence. In any case, the effect was to push Marlene Guest’s vote in Wingfield ward
back towards its 2008 level. Mrs Guest polled 28.5%, up from 17.1% in 2011 and 15.4% in 2010, but below the 29.2%
she achieved in 2008 or the BNP’s peak vote in the ward, 30.8% for Joanna Kirby in 2007.

The last BNP councillor in Epping Forest – Pat Richardson in Loughton Broadway ward – was badly beaten
into fourth place, polling only 11.4% in a ward that she had won with 39.7% in 2008. The BNP had won seats in different
Loughton wards at several elections since 2004, but this year failed across the board. Mrs Richardson’s husband
Tom polled just 4.7% in Loughton St Mary’s, and there was no nationalist candidate in the Loughton Alderton ward that
elected BNP councillors in 2004 and 2006. In Loughton Fairmead (similarly won by the BNP in 2004 and 2006 but
never since) the former BNP election strategist Eddy Butler was a first-time English Democrat candidate, polling 12.2%.
This was less than half the 28.2% BNP vote in the ward in 2008, but as Mrs Richardson lost two-thirds of her 2008 vote,
Mr Butler can possibly claim relative success.

While most BNP branches have faced a haemmorrhage of activists over the last year or two, the loss of Mr
Butler’s expertise has hit Epping Forest BNP especially hard, and both he and the Richardsons had to cope with strong
campaigns from the Loughton Residents Association, whose candidates won six of the seven Loughton wards.

Seamus Dunne – elected as a BNP councillor in Ashridge ward, Three Rivers, in 2008 with a majority of 18 –
quit the party in August 2010 to sit as an independent in support of Eddy Butler’s dissident faction, and later followed
Mr Butler into the English Democrats in June 2011. He was boosted this year by the absence of any BNP or UKIP rival
(UKIP having stood against him in 2008 and polled 5.3%), but nevertheless lost to Labour, polling 22.4% compared to
33.8% in 2008.

Cllr Dunne had been one of only five English Democrat councillors nationwide, and this figure fell to three. No
gains were made, and in addition to Cllr Dunne’s defeat the party forfeited its only seat on Peterborough Council. Cllr
Stephen Goldspink (who had defected from the Conservatives to the EDs in 2009) was unable to defend his ward since
he had moved out of the city and no longer had a qualifying business connection.

So this left both the BNP and the EDs in exactly the same position on the council scoreboard: each with two
remaining district councillors and one county councillor, but having lost every seat they were defending this year and
made zero gains.

The relative positions and expectations of the two parties are of course very different in other respects. One
startling aspect of this year’s election was the total disappearance of the BNP in some of its former strongholds.

Collapse of BNP strongholds

Following the strong BNP results in Oldham and Burnley at the 2001 general election, the party became a serious challenge
to Labour in a cross-Pennine swathe of councils around East Lancashire and West Yorkshire. It was in this area
that the foundations were laid for the European Parliamentary victories of Nick Griffin and Andrew Brons in 2009.
Yet the BNP’s decline in what had been its best branches has long been apparent, and was confirmed this year.

The first North West branch to put Griffin on the map – Oldham – was long ago the first to desert him, and it was no
surprise to see not a single BNP or other nationalist candidate in Oldham this year. (Even UKIP only had one Oldham
candidate, so this is a case of BNP suicide or misadventure, rather than what the BNP chairman would once have called
attempted murder.) As mentioned above, Burnley lost its last BNP councillor, failed to contest several of its former
wards, and saw record low BNP votes in the rest.

In Blackburn with Darwen – England’s most racially divided borough – the BNP had no candidates in most
of its former target wards, including the Mill Hill ward won in a 2002 by-election – and contested just two. In the no
hope ward of Roe Lea, Nancy Shaw’s vote fell from 8.4% to 5.8%; while in the working-class Shadsworth ward David
Bradley achieved a record nationalist low of 11.3%, where in 2006 the BNP’s Sue Grimshaw had polled 34.9%. This is
the part of town which (under a different ward name) elected National Party leader John Kingsley-Read to Blackburn
council in 1976. Now it has seen the rise and disappearance of another nationalist party.

As with Oldham and Burnley, no other nationalist party has picked up the BNP’s lost voters in Blackburn. There
were only three UKIP candidates in the whole of Burnley, none of whom made any impact, and none at all in Blackburn
with Darwen. The For Darwen Party was another of those resistance movements by traditional boroughs subsumed
by a larger neighbour due to local government reforms in the early 1970s. In this case there was a racial subtext, since
Darwen is very White and Blackburn almost half Asian, but the For Darwen Party rose and fell in the space of five years
between 2007 and 2012, losing every ward they were defending this year. Former BNP branch organiser and For Darwen
councillor Trevor Maxfield now sits as a Labour councillor for Earcroft ward!

Across the Pennines in Calderdale, the BNP failed to field a single candidate for a council which Nick Griffin
once predicted would be the first BNP-controlled town hall. The rest of West Yorkshire was similarly bleak, with
no candidates in Kirklees (where the BNP once had three councillors) or in Wakefield (where there was a full slate
of nineteen candidates in 2010). As mentioned above, former BNP councillor Tom Bates stood as an independent in
Illingworth & Mixenden, while Dave Jones in Todmorden flew the flag for the BPP (until it was taken off him by the party leadership in mid-campaign – see below), but there were no UKIP or English Democrat candidates anywhere in Calderdale; and just three UKIP and one ED in Kirklees.

Wakefield was another matter – here we see the risk of the BNP’s continued decline allowing UKIP to establish itself. Across Wakefield UKIP fielded ten candidates, six of whom finished runner-up. They polled 25.2% in Normanton (BNP 2010 13.3%; BNP 2008 15.9%); 25.3% (in third place) in Wrenthorpe & Outwood West (BNP 2010 10.9%; 2008 12.4%); 24.0% in Altofts & Whitwood (BNP 2010 11.2%; BNP 2008 16.6%); and 20.4% in Airedale and Ferry Fryston (BNP 2010 11.3%; BNP 2008 20.9%). In 2010 and 2008 UKIP had only a single Wakefield candidate (in Wakefield North ward) and even he was in last place behind the BNP.

In Bradford (where the BNP had held six council seats at various times) the party now has no representation, and
only managed a single candidate: Eric Baxendale in Queensbury, who gained only 15.5% and was pushed into fourth
place by UKIP’s 24.9%. Eight UKIP candidates stood across Bradford, two of them in former BNP wards Wibsey and
Queensbury, in the latter case finishing well ahead of the BNP. In Wibsey UKIP polled 23.5%: well below the votes of
around 30% that the BNP managed in 2004, 2006 and 2007, but notably higher than last year’s ED vote of 6.5% or the
latter day BNP results of 16.4% in 2008 and 12.6% in 2010.

Bradford UKIP had only four candidates in 2011, one of whom was easily beaten by the BNP in Queensbury, and
their four campaigns in 2008 included finishing behind both the BNP and the EDs in Wibsey. As in Wakefield, there is
clearly potential for UKIP to put down roots in Bradford if nationalism fails to get its act together, though the big difference
is that the Democratic Nationalists have established a foothold in three Bradford wards. Two of the three DN
votes increased substantially this year, though still well short of the BNP’s peak levels. Liam Kernaghan in Tong polled
11.5%, up from his 6.0% last year.

Leeds BNP also managed just a single candidate: Kevin Meeson, who was runner-up to Labour in Middleton Park for the sixth time. Mr Meeson’s was one of the better BNP results this year – his 21.3% was slightly higher than last year or 2010, though well down on the 37.4% he polled in 2008. Many of the key activists from Leeds BNP defected last year to the English Democrats (whose results are assessed below), and this year there were further defections to the EDs in Barnsley (see below).

Stoke had no elections this year, but the other former BNP strongholds in the West Midlands produced some of the party’s worst results. In Sandwell there were only two BNP candidates, compared to a slate of 24 candidates in 2010. Former BNP councillor John Salvage in Cradley Heath & Old Hill ward polled just 8.6%, and acknowledged that he had been only a paper candidate, while Terry Lewin in Hateley Heath ward scored a record low of 7.5%, less than half the BNP’s 2010 vote in this ward and barely a quarter of their 2007 vote. Sandwell once had four BNP councillors, yet now can only manage feeble ‘paper’ campaigns. Has any party ever fallen so far, so quickly? Yet again no one can blame a UKIP bandwagon, as there were no UKIP candidates in Sandwell.

In next door Dudley, where Nick Griffin’s deputy Simon Darby was once a BNP councillor, the BNP organisation
now barely exists and fielded just two candidates. Simon Foxall in Halesowen North was bottom of the poll with
3.4%, and Robert Weale in Hayley Green & Cradley South similarly trailed the field with 4.0%. Here there was a big
contrast with Sandwell: UKIP fought all but two of the Dudley wards, though their branch organiser Malcolm Davis lost
the party’s one council seat to Labour. Cllr Davis (a former Liberal Democrat) based most of his campaigning around
opposition to mosques, but was defeated by an Asian candidate in St James’s ward, which has relatively few Muslims
and was 80% White at the 2001 census. That census showed the ward to have more Sikhs than Muslims! (Each around
4%, though it’s likely Muslims have overtaken them since.) The result shows the limitations of Islam-obsessive or
Brussels-obsessive politics.

In Gornal ward, Dudley, the UKIP vote was 23.7% – similar to the BNP vote of 25.3% in 2006. The most obvious
UKIP attempt to hijack a BNP-lite vote involved minor local celebrities Bill and Star Etheridge, the husband and
wife who last year had been set to stand as Conservative candidates but were forced out by the party hierarchy after
posing on the internet with golliwogs in an “anti political correctness” stunt. In Sedgley ward Bill Etheridge finished
runner-up for UKIP this year with 27.1%, while in Upper Gornal & Woodsetton Star Etheridge was third with 16.5%.
Kevin Inman polled 4.5% for the NF in the latter ward, having polled 24.6% in the same ward for the BNP in 2008.
Sedgley by contrast has never had a BNP candidate, being more of a Conservative/UKIP type ward.

In Simon Darby’s old ward Castle & Priory, which he lost at the 2004 elections after boundary changes, UKIP
actually slipped back, finishing third with 16.8% (down from 18.8% last year). Despite Dudley being one of their better
branches, the evidence still suggests that UKIP is better poised for eating into an anti-Cameron Tory protest vote than
making progress into more working class areas, where Labour is solidifying its position, thanks both to benefit cuts and
the implosion of the BNP.

In Solihull there was only one BNP candidate – Simone Neal in Smith’s Wood ward, whose vote fell from 13%
to 8.4% – and as last year the former BNP ward Chelmsley Wood was not contested. They thus failed to take advantage
of UKIP’s internal problems after the Solihull UKIP branch apparently went on strike in support of party dissident Nikki
Sinclaire! The beneficiaries were the English Democrats, who put up a slate of five candidates, though none managed
to reach 10%.

Alongside Epping Forest, Thurrock was once the strongest BNP council in southern England (outside London).
In recent years it has been one of the areas worst hit by internal divisions, with former councillor Emma Colgate quitting
politics entirely and many activists defecting to the National Front. This year there was just one BNP candidate,
Thomas Mayhew who polled 6.1% in the Grays Riverside ward, where until the catastrophic 2010 split his party had
consistently achieved well over 20%. The NF results in Thurrock and elsewhere are discussed separately below. UKIP
had only fielded two candidates in Thurrock four years ago; this year they actually gained a seat, in Aveley & Uplands
ward, and put up almost a full slate, only missing out the traditionally strong nationalist ward Tilbury St Chads which
was contested by the NF. The UKIP gain was in a traditionally Conservative ward which nevertheless used to have a
strong nationalist vote. UKIP overtook the BNP here in 2010 when putting up for the first time, and Thurrock BNP’s extinction
gave them their chance. Suspicious minds would suspect a deal here, with the NF avoiding Aveley & Uplands,
in return for UKIP giving Mick Griffin a free run in Tilbury St Chads, which looked the best potential NF ward. If so it
was in my opinion a big mistake for nationalists to encourage UKIP’s growth in any way.

In Sevenoaks – the only South Eastern council where the BNP has ever held a councillor – there were no elections this year, but since former councillor Paul Golding’s departure to join Jim Dowson’s Britain First organisation, there has been no BNP organisation there in any case. No nationalist party contested Mr Golding’s former ward of Swanley St Mary’s, which was won by Labour.

So much for the councils where the BNP was defending seats, or where they had ever held seats in the past: a complete wipeout, with only Sharon Wilkinson in Burnley and Adam Grant in Pendle performing anything like the party’s better years. What of the many other councils where the BNP has never won seats, but at one time posed a serious electoral challenge?

BNP decline in every region

One of the most dramatic declines this year was in the North East region, with no BNP candidates in Gateshead or
Sunderland, and only two in Newcastle. These three councils saw a total of 48 BNP candidates in 2008 and 52 in 2010.
The only North East branch to field a serious BNP slate was South Tyneside, with eight candidates including George
Gilchrist, who managed 13.3% in the Primrose ward where Pete Hodgkinson had polled 32.9% for the BNP in 2008.
The remaining two candidates in Newcastle saw dismal results. Bill Curry in Denton ward polled 3.2%, less than a
third of his 9.8% vote in 2008, while in Fawdon ward Anita Cooper’s vote fell from 8.1% last year to 5.0%. There were
no UKIP or ED candidates anywhere in Newcastle or Gateshead, though there was a slate of seven UKIP candidates in
Sunderland, including one impressive result for John Defty in Hetton ward. Mr Defty contested the ward for the first
time last year, making an immediate impact as runner-up with 29.0%. This year he ran Labour much closer, polling
43.3%, which even in the absence of a Conservative candidate was a very good result. Again there is a grave danger that
if nationalism remains in the doldrums, UKIP could put down serious roots in other parts of the North East.

Yorkshire BNP has virtually ceased to exist. Aside from the disappearance of its former West Yorkshire strongholds
mentioned earlier, the South Yorkshire branches were also devastated by defections and disillusionment. Barnsley
was perhaps the strongest BNP branch never to win a council seat, but this year there were only four BNP candidates
– compared to twelve for the English Democrats, led by former BNP organiser Ian Sutton.

In Monk Bretton ward Jane Hubbard fought her fourth election for the BNP, and had the benefit of no ED or UKIP opponent, but still polled only 11.4% – less than half of her 24.4% vote in 2008. Similarly in Stairfoot ward, Sandra Baker’s vote fell to 7.8% – the first time that the BNP had polled in single figures here, despite again having no ED or UKIP opponent. The two wards that saw a BNP-ED battle produced contrasting results. In Kingstone ward
Nathan Walker for the EDs (6.4%) finished just ahead of the BNP’s Danny Cooke (6.1%). But in Cudworth ward four
time BNP candidate Terry Hubbard – though seeing his vote fall to 10.2% from 16.3% last year, not to mention 24.8%
in 2008 – still finished well ahead of the EDs’ Carol Stacey with 4.8%. UKIP polled 9.2% in Cudworth, one of only
three wards they contested in Barnsley, where their highest vote was 18.9% in the semi-rural Penistone East ward. Their
results tended to confirm the present stage of UKIP development: they could take votes of the Tories in southern suburbs
or northern market towns like Penistone, but haven’t yet reached the stage where they can replace the BNP in working
class areas.

Nevertheless the clear winners of the internal nationalist battle in Barnsley were the EDs. Ian Sutton finished
runner-up in Darton West with 19.4% – 6% up on his BNP result last year, though still far short of his 28.7% in 2008.
Similarly his ED colleague Colin Porter polled 14.1% in Central ward, up from 11.3% for the BNP last year.

Elsewhere in South Yorkshire, Sheffield BNP completely disappeared this year after declining badly in 2011.
UKIP put up a full slate of 28 Sheffield candidates, up from seven last year. Their best results were 27.5% in Stocksbridge
& Upper Don, and 22.1% in Woodhouse – neither of which had been strong BNP wards. The BNP had contested
Stocksbridge & Upper Don once in 2007, polling 10.1%. In what had been the strongest Sheffield BNP wards, UKIP’s
results were more modest: 12.9% in Southey (2008 BNP vote 25.5%); 17.8% in Shiregreen & Brightside (2008 BNP
vote 21.2%); and 12.6% in Firth Park (2008 BNP vote 19.4%).

Doncaster BNP also failed to field a candidate for the first time since 2006. This is of course the one area of England
where the English Democrats have tasted real electoral success, winning the mayoral election in 2009, but Mayor
Peter Davies still has no English Democrat councillors. This year the seven ED candidates polled between 12.9% and
28.3%. UKIP had just one Doncaster candidate, and the ex-BNP candidate Dave Owen again contested his local ward
Stainforth & Moorends, this time for the Democratic Nationalists, polling 16.6% and equalling the second best of his four
previous BNP results here.

In Nick Griffin’s European constituency of North West England, there were no bright spots whatsoever for his
party, apart from the brave efforts of defeated councillors Sharon Wilkinson and Adam Grant. Aside from the disasters
in Burnley and Blackburn referred to earlier, other once promising branches became BNP-free zones, even in areas close
to the home territory of the party’s election organiser Clive Jefferson. Only one BNP candidate stood for Carlisle City
Council compared to nine in 2010 and eight in 2008. It has been obvious for a couple of years that the Cumbrian BNP –
whose votes made a big contribution to electing Nick Griffin as a North West MEP – is in decline, and this year’s Carlisle
candidate Stephen Bingham confirmed it, polling 7.2% in Currock ward, where Brian Allen took 28% for his party in
2008. There were eleven UKIP candidates across Carlisle, though their results weren’t great, ranging from 4.5% to 14.6%.
In Morton ward, for example, where the BNP polled 20.7% in 2008, UKIP managed only 10.6% this year.

Another area where the BNP briefly flourished – greatly assisting Griffin’s Euro victory – included Merseyside
and a couple of councils between Liverpool and Manchester. This year there were no BNP candidates in Sefton or
Knowsley. In St Helens none of the three candidates managed more than 6%: Paul Telford, who had polled 11.4% in
the strongest St Helens ward – Thatto Heath – in 2008, managed only 5.5% this time.

The only one of these three boroughs with a UKIP presence was Sefton, where a slate of nineteen UKIP candidates
polled between 4.5% and 28.9%. Moreover they almost equalled the best ever BNP performance in Ford ward,
polling 13.2% compared to the 13.8% that the BNP managed in 2008.

In Liverpool itself the old BNP branch split at least four ways, with the bulk of activists joining either the National
Front, the English Democrats, or the new British Freedom Party (see below for a comparative assessment of these
parties’ results). Only Mike Whitby, the hapless North West regional organiser, and a lone colleague were left as BNP
candidates for Liverpool City Council. Despite thus being enable to concentrate their meagre resources, the results were
predictably disastrous. Mr Whitby finished bottom of the poll with 1.2%, while Christopher Beatson polled 3.9% in
Belle Vale, down from a 2008 BNP vote of 9.2%.

As we go to press, Mr Whitby remains under police investigation after being arrested on suspicion of submitting
fraudulent nomination papers, but one suspects that even the vindictive, anti-nationalist British state will take pity on
such an abject political failure.

UKIP had eight Liverpool candidates, polling between 3.1% and 6.5%, and are well placed at present to inherit
the modest nationalist vote on Merseyside from the various squabbling post-BNP factions – unless some form of strong
and united post-Griffin force emerges.

Three North West BNP branches retained sufficient vigour and (patchy) loyalty to Nick Griffin’s leadership to
field substantial slates of candidates this year. Wigan managed five candidates, and in Ince ward Henry Morgan was
able to increase the BNP vote to 14.5%, given a free run this year following the death of last year’s EFP candidate Ian
Hague. Yet their results were eclipsed by two former BNP activists standing as Independents: Chris Garfin in Leigh East
polled 19.1%, and Gary Chadwick in Leigh South 17.6%. None of the rival parties made any impact in Wigan this year.
Even UKIP only had one candidate, Arnold Foster who polled 16.3% in Shevington with Lower Ground ward, splitting
the Tory vote and contributing to Labour gaining the ward.

Salford – one of the most loyally Griffinite BNP branches – put up eight candidates this year as well as contesting
the inaugural mayoral election. In Langworthy ward David Spencer benefited from the absence of UKIP to increase
the BNP vote to 13.3%, Gary Tumulty similarly increased his vote in Irwell Riverside to 11.8%, and Brenda Leather in
Cadishead likewise from 7.1% to 12.8%.

For whatever reason, UKIP and the BNP mostly avoided fighting each other in Salford this year. Only Claremont
ward saw a head to head contest: Eddy O’ Sullivan, who had polled 16.2% here as Salford BNP’s lone candidate in 2006,
managed 7.2% this year compared to UKIP’s 8.5%. In Swinton South the BNP’s Kay Pollitt polled 7.3%, ahead of the
EDs’ John Mulcahy with 4.8%. Elsewhere in Salford, UKIP’s seven candidates polled between 7.6% and 34.6%. The
latter was a somewhat atypical result! UKIP’s candidate for Broughton ward was a prominent Lubavitcher, originally
from Stamford Hill, named Shneur Odze. He was previously (like his father) a Conservative councillor on Hackney
Borough Council, and continued to stand for the Tories in 2007, 2008 and 2010 after moving to Salford. The remarkable
increase in the UKIP vote in Broughton ward, from 7.6% to 34.6%, shows that tribal voting is not confined to the
Muslim community!

Of the three contiguous boroughs to the east of Manchester, Stockport has proved itself the most loyal to Nick
Griffin’s leadership (compared to the extinct Oldham branch and the divided Tameside). However the truth remains that
Stockport has less potential for nationalist votes than the other two. Five time Reddish North candidate Paul Bennett’s
BNP vote held steady at 11.3%, only slightly down on his 2008 peak vote of 14.6%. But the other perennial Stockport
BNP candidate – Duncan Warner in Manor ward – polled his worst ever vote, bottom of the poll with 4.8% in a ward
where he twice polled almost 14%. UKIP had seven Stockport candidates, mostly in the more affluent parts of the borough
which the BNP doesn’t contest. One UKIP result was interesting: 11.8% in Brinnington and Central ward, most of
which is the sort of White working class estate that has strong nationalist potential. (The BNP polled 6.3% here in 2010.)
If UKIP get their act together and put down roots in this type of area, taking advantage of BNP decline, then nationalists
should be worried.

Next door in Tameside the BNP fielded only two candidates compared to five last year and fifteen in 2010. For
the first time UKIP finished ahead of the BNP in the latter’s former target ward Hyde Newton, where Rosalind Gauci
polled only 8.2% compared to a peak BNP vote of 27.5% in 2008. The result should give pause for thought to the EDL
and others who preach that violent racial conflict will help nationalists at the polls. An apparent racial attack on a white
youth took place in early February, right on the border of Hyde Newton ward: a few weeks later Nick Griffin and the
EDL’s Tommy Robinson arrived in town with their entourages for a demonstration. Locals clearly weren’t impressed. as
the racial nationalist vote in Hyde collapsed a few weeks after these self-regarding gladiators put on their show. Perhaps
it got them more donations than votes: perhaps that was the point? It certainly had nothing to do with politics.

The other BNP candidate – Robert Booth in Droylsden East – was similarly crushed, polling 8.8% (way behind
UKIP’S 18.0%) in a ward where his predecessor David Lomas took 32.7% in 2008. Tameside clearly has massive nationalist
potential, but local activists need to abandon Nick Griffin’s discredited party and go back to the drawing board.
Former BNP candidate Roy West polled 12.3% as an independent in Dukinfield ward, up from his 10.9% vote in the
same ward last year for the BNP. UKIP’s votes in Tameside were surprisingly patchy. On the one hand they pipped
the BNP in Hyde Newton and hammered them in Droylsden East, but on the other hand they finished way behind the
English Democrats in Stalybridge North and Dukinfield-Stalybridge, and polled poorly in the two strongest Tory areas
of Tameside, Stalybridge South and Hyde Werneth.

Manchester BNP’s decline has been less dramatic but still unmistakeable. This year Manchester had two BNP
candidates, compared to five last year and eight in 2010. As elsewhere, even this opportunity to concentrate shrinking
resources did not help a party in freefall. Branch organiser Derek Adams, who last year was a parliamentary by-election
candidate in Oldham East & Saddleworth, polled 8.5% in Higher Blackley, the ward where at his first outing in 2008 he
achieved 27%. (UKIP took 7.6% in Higher Blackley.) Meanwhile in Moston ward Gareth Black managed only 7.5%,
down from 15.9% in 2010, despite having no UKIP opponent. UKIP had a slate of ten candidates across Manchester,
up from six last year and three in 2008: their best vote was 13.5% in Woodhouse Park, up from 7.2% last year and 4.5%
in 2010 (when they finished behind the BNP’s 6.3%).

In the much diminished West Midlands BNP, only the Birmingham and Coventry branches put up slates of candidates
comparable to past years. Of the eleven Coventry BNP candidates, the highest vote was 7.2% for Rose Morris
in Henley – which was the lowest ever BNP vote in that ward. For some reason, perhaps connected with its famous
wartime experience of intensive German bombing, nationalist votes in Coventry have always tended to be lower than in
comparable Midlands cities, even though they have had good NF and BNP branches at various times. Thus the decline
in BNP votes there this year was less dramatic than in some other branches: Coventry was falling from what was already
a modest electoral base. UKIP had four Coventry candidates, defeating the BNP in Lower Stoke ward by 7.3% to 3.2%,
and in Binley & Willenhall by 15.6% to 3.1%.

Birmingham BNP had a parallel experience: of their eighteen candidates the best vote was 7.5% in Tyburn ward,
but even this was well down on the 19.9% achieved here in Birmingham BNP’s peak year of 2006. Four wards saw an
NF-BNP split, with the BNP finishing easily ahead in all cases. These included Shard End – the strongest nationalist ward
in Birmingham – where Mark Neary polled 25.9% for the BNP in 2006 but defected to the NF the following year. This
year Mr Neary polled 1.1% for the NF in Shard End, and Kevin McHugh for the BNP managed 6.5%: in other words the
combined nationalist vote was less than a third of the BNP’s 2006 vote.

UKIP also put up eighteen Birmingham candidates, polling between 1.7% and 17.8%: the latter in Shard End,
which should be one of the most worrying UKIP results for nationalists. UKIP first contested this ward in 2010, when
they polled 3.5% to the BNP’s 13.5% (even in an election where the BNP was already in decline). In 2011 they overtook
the BNP, by 9.0% to 6.6%, and the gap has really opened this year: UKIP 17.8%, BNP 6.5%.

In Wolverhampton’s Bushbury North ward, five-time BNP candidate Simon Patten managed 14.3%, slightly
higher than the past two years and helped by facing an Asian Labour candidate, though well down on his 2007 peak vote
of 22.4%, even though he again had no UKIP opponent. Elsewhere in Wolverhampton, the six UKIP candidates continued
to improve their results – for example in Oxley ward UKIP polled 15.4% this year, up from 8.4% last year.

Apart from the Amber Valley debacle mentioned earlier, most of the stronger BNP areas of the East Midlands had no
election this year. In Derby the three BNP candidates managed to poll around the same votes that they have managed for
the past two or three years. Paul Hilliard in Chaddesden ward, for example, polled 14.7% – only slightly down on his 2008
peak vote of 17.9%. UKIP had six Derby candidates, none of them facing the BNP. They managed one very impressive
result, 32.8% in Alvaston ward, up from 11.5% last year.

The Eastern England region is another to have been devastated by internal splits. The death of Thurrock BNP
has been mentioned earlier: other defunct branches this year included Basildon, which had fourteen BNP candidates in
2008 and 2010; Broxbourne, twelve in 2008 and ten in 2010; and Southend, seventeen in 2008 and 2010. In fact there
were only three BNP candidates across the entire region this year, compared to 86 in 2008.

UKIP put up slates of fourteen candidates in Basildon; eight in Broxbourne; and seven in Southend. In West
Shoebury ward, Southend, UKIP finished runner-up with 35.8%: in 2008 it was the BNP who were runners-up in this
ward with 18.8%. That year UKIP didn’t contest West Shoebury, and had only three candidates across Southend, with
none in Broxbourne and four in Basildon (all of whom finished behind the BNP). Broxbourne represented a real missed
opportunity for nationalists this year, as following boundary changes the entire council was up for election. There was
once a strong BNP branch in the area, which elected Ray Johns in 2003, but after defecting to the English Democrats
last year local nationalists did not stand for any party this year.

Nick Griffin and his diminished band of sycophants live of course in a parallel universe, and continue to shrug
off any responsibility for their party’s terminal condition even as they shamelessly seek further donations from the gullible.
An example of the pathetic state of a once honourable party is the position of South East regional organiser Nick
Prince. At the end of February 2012 Mr Prince was giving extra responsibility as acting regional organiser for the South
West. In other words he is responsible for a region stretching from Kent to Cornwall. The BNP’s head office announced
“it is his [Mr Prince’s] aim to rebuild the region in the same manner as he has in the South East.” What did this rebuilding
amount to this year? There were only four BNP candidates in the entire South East region. In his own Hastings branch,
Mr Prince polled a record low of 3.6% in Hollington ward, where in 2008 Victoria Britton took 15.5%. What is it about Mr
Prince that recommends him so highly to Nick Griffin?

The BNP’s rivals

The previous South East BNP regional organiser Andy McBride is now with Britain First, a nationalist group
founded by Nick Griffin’s former chief fundraiser Jim Dowson. This group is very active online, and has registered
the name National People’s Party for electoral purposes, but has yet to field any candidates. Another new party that
did make its debut at this year’s elections was the British Freedom Party (not to be confused with the Freedom Party,
which was active in the Midlands about a decade ago and had a councillor in Staffordshire). The BFP was founded in
the autumn of 2010 by BNP dissidents including former webmaster Simon Bennett, former legal adviser Lee Barnes,
Liverpool activist Paul Stafford, and former South West regional organiser Peter Mullins, who became the BFP’s
founding chairman.

Last year the BFP was effectively taken over by former UKIP parliamentary candidate Paul Weston, a fanatical
Islamophobe and pro-Zionist who has been planning for some time to turn the party into the political wing of the English
Defence League. Since the EDL is essentially oriented towards street marches, and most of its activists are football
hooligans who have no interest in party political activity, Mr Weston’s strategy is difficult to work out. However at the
very least the BFP needed a handful of reasonably credible results before the scheduled big announcement two days after
the elections at a rally in Luton, when EDL leader Tommy Robinson was expected to announce a merger with the BFP.
Sadly things did not go according to plan. The BFP put up five candidates in Liverpool and one in Basildon.

Tony Harms in Laindon Park ward, Basildon, managed 4.2% (well behind UKIP’s 18.5%) – but this was in a ward
where BNP veteran Dave King had polled 17.1% in 2008. The BFP votes in Liverpool were even worse, ranging from
0.6% (just seventeen votes!) for Peter Stafford in County ward, to 2.8% for Peter Squire in Norris Green.

While the BFP’s results were an unqualified disaster, there were mixed fortunes for two other rival options seeking
to win over defections from the sinking BNP. The National Front had a poor return for its investment in this year’s
London elections. Its first ever London-wide slate polled just 0.4%, while its GLA constituency candidates polled between
1.2% and 1.4%. There was no NF mayoral candidate for financial reasons.

Elsewhere in the country some of the NF’s 35 candidates enjoyed better fortunes. The best vote was 16.9% for
Mick Griffin (no relation!) in Tilbury St Chads ward, Thurrock – by far the best nationalist vote in the borough this
year, though well below the 41% polled in this ward by Angela Daly for the BNP in 2008, when she was only 61 votes
behind Labour. Other NF candidates in Thurrock included the first ever BNP councillor Derek Beackon, who polled
6.3% in Chadwell St Mary, down 1.2% on last year and way down on the 29.3% polled by the BNP in 2008.

In Irwell ward, Rossendale, the NF’s deputy chairman Kevin Bryan polled 16%, 3.2% up on last year and his
highest vote since leaving the BNP. Mr Bryan’s last BNP vote in Irwell in 2008 was 23.9%. Like Mr Bryan, the NF
candidate in Tipton Green ward, Sandwell – Adrian Woodhouse – is a former BNP candidate. This year he polled 11.5%,
0.6% down on last year. Though it is obvious that demographic change in Tipton Green – once a major nationalist target
– has now made it unwinnable, Mr Woodhouse has fought a brave battle against the tide. A fourth NF candidate to
poll in double figures was Peter Greenwood, former BNP branch organiser, in Hopwood Hall ward, Rochdale, who took
10.5% in the ward’s first ever nationalist campaign. Rochdale has seen a number of anti-Muslim demonstrations after
several local Asians were charged with paedophile “grooming” offences, but this has not been translated into party political
activism. There were no BNP candidates in the town this year – just Mr Greenwood for the NF and Ricky Akehurst
for the English Democrats in the multiracial Kingsway ward, who polled 7.9%. Nor were there any UKIP candidates in
Rochdale.

In several areas NF candidates flew the nationalist flag after the collapse of BNP branches. These included John
Richards in Deckham ward, Gateshead, who polled 6.2% (compared to previous BNP votes in the ward of 8.6% in
2010, 13.9% in 2008, and 12.7% in 2007); and Paul Birleson in Millfield ward, Sunderland, who polled 5.2% (compared
to previous BNP votes of 6.1% in 2010, 7.8% in 2008, and 8.6% in 2007). Bob Batten fought his fourth NF
campaign in Howdon ward, North Tyneside, finishing runner-up with 10.5%, fractionally down from last year’s 11.3%.

Hull NF again was one of the few NF branches to field a slate of candidates: of their four contenders, branch organiser
Nick Walsh picked up the best result, 9.1% in Ings ward, up from 5.1% last year. Amid the collapse of the local BNP,
Tim Knowles of the NF increased his vote slightly in Langley Mill ward, Amber Valley, from 7.7% to 8.7%. However
in Stockbridge ward, Knowsley, Andrew Brennus of the NF was not immune from the chaos that overwhelmed nationalism
in Merseyside this year: he polled 5% compared to 7% for last year’s BNP candidate in the same ward.

Better by some distance than any of the NF results was Mark Cotterill’s result for the England First Party in
Ribbleton ward, Preston, where the H&D editor’s vote increased from 15.5% to 22.0%. This was one of the most
improved nationalist votes anywhere in the country, and unlike most of the other handful of improved votes was not a
consequence of UKIP pulling out, or any other such complication.

Where some BNP traditionalists have headed to the NF, a fair number of BNP “modernisers” have joined the
English Democrats. Last year they enjoyed some success, gaining two council seats in Boston, Lincolnshire, but there
was no repeat this year. As mentioned above, the EDs lost the two council seats they were defending this year, and made
no gains. Their best hope was in Morley South ward, Leeds, where former BNP councillor Chris Beverley was making
his second attempt to regain the seat he held from 2006 to 2010. Despite an energetic campaign, Mr Beverley slipped
back this year from 19.6% to 15.1%, with an increased majority for the Morley Borough Independents (MBI). Across
Leeds the EDs put up a slate of eleven candidates – a significant achievement in itself. Fighting his second campaign as
an ED in Morley South, after four for the BNP, Tom Redmond also slipped back slightly to 8.0%, with MBI again the
victors. By contrast in Ardsley & Robin Hood ward, Joanna Beverley increased her vote from 15.0% to 17.1%, thanks
to having no UKIP opponent for the first time.

The highest profile BNP defector to the EDs, former East London election strategist Eddy Butler, contested
Loughton Fairmead, Epping Forest, under his new colours, polling 12.2% in a ward that the BNP won in 2006 with
34.5%. Like his Morley colleagues, Mr Butler was contending not only with the general anti-nationalist trend this year
and the rancid atmosphere left behind by the decay of the BNP, but also with the phenomenon of a strong local independent
party. Past experience suggests that these groups can be very strong for a while (often at nationalist expense),
but they don’t last: examples include Morecambe, Boston, Burnley and Darwen. On the positive side, by fracturing
traditional tribal party loyalties, but then failing themselves, such groups can help create political space for a well organised
nationalist party – as happened for a while with Steve Smith’s Burnley BNP branch, and last year with the EDs in
Boston.

Two other Essex branches put up substantial ED slates. In Southend a branch partly made up of BNP defectors
put up ten candidates: the best result by far was for Stephen Riley in Kursaal ward, who finished third of five candidates
with 16.9%. Mr Riley had no UKIP opponent, and in fact his vote was double last year’s UKIP vote of 8.4% in the same
ward. Back in 2010 the EDs were crushed in a crowded field of candidates, polling only 1.6% to UKIP’s 4.9% and the
BNP’s 6.5%. But Mr Riley’s result this year in Kursaal is better even than the BNP managed when unchallenged in their
best year locally: 15.4% in 2007. In many ways the Kursaal result was a greater achievement than the predictably strong
ED votes in Rochford, a branch mostly made up of members who were in the party prior to the BNP defections. Long
term ED John Hayter polled 32.2% to take second place in Trinity ward, the highest ED vote this year – well ahead of
UKIP’s 12.9% and only 74 votes behind the Tories – while Paula Hayter polled 19% in Wheatley ward. Bear in mind
that even in the 2010 general election year, when most minor party votes were reduced, the EDs polled 24.6% and 31.2%
respectively in these wards: in Wheatley that year they were the only opposition to the Tories! So these are not by any
means typical areas and should be treated with caution.

In Liverpool the ED mayoral candidate Dr Paul Rimmer finished ahead of the BNP and the NF, but still polled only
1.4%, with UKIP on 2.4%. The five ED candidates for Liverpool City Council (including three former BNP candidates)
polled between 2.2% and 6.2%. The latter, Steven McEllenborough in Warbreck, equalled the best ever nationalist result
in his ward, while Neil Kenny (one of the ED minority in Liverpool who are not ex-BNP) polled 3.2% in Riverside ward,
which had never previously had a nationalist candidate. Former BNP organiser Steven Greenhalgh’s ED vote of 3.1% in
Old Swan ward was less than a third of the 9.8% BNP vote here in 2008.

Potentially more interesting was the ED progress in Tameside, where they put up three candidates as against one
last year. BNP defector Greg Shorrock polled 13.3% in Dukinfield-Stalybridge ward, better than any of the previous
BNP results here, while Andrew Fogg’s 7.0% in Stalybridge North was higher than the UKIP vote and Tameside ED
branch founder David Timpson increased his vote in Ashton St Michael’s from 8.3% to 11.5%, thanks to no longer having
a UKIP opponent.

The jury is still out on Eddy Butler’s claim that the EDs represent the best electoral option for post-Griffin nationalism.
This year about half of the evidence might tend to support him, but the other half contradicts him! In any case,
for most former BNP members there remain serious ideological objections to joining the EDs, which could only perhaps
be overcome by incontrovertible and consistent evidence of an extended electoral appeal: so far that just isn’t there.

What is clear is that racial nationalism continues to struggle north of the border. The BNP failed to field any Scottish
candidates this year due to incompetence, but the NF fielded a surprising slate of six in Aberdeen, polling between
0.5% and 2.1%, while BNP splinter group the Britannia Party put up four candidates in Glasgow, barely troubling the
returning officer with votes between 0.2% and 0.5%. One curiosity in Scotland was the victory of Colin Wyper, a former
BNP member elected as an independent in Dee ward, Dumfries and Galloway. Mr Wyper’s brief membership of the
BNP (in 2005) was discovered as a result of the leaked membership lists, and publicised by the local press during the
campaign, but it didn’t seem to do him any harm! Mr Wyper, a wedding photographer in Gretna, fought a campaign
based on local issues and despite his brief BNP membership doesn’t seem to be in any sense a nationalist.

There were few nationalist candidates in Wales either, though former BNP national treasurer John Walker polled
3% as an Independent in the Shotton Higher ward of Flintshire, and was elected to the Hawarden Mancot ward of the
Town Council, shocking historically aware Liberals nationwide!

The EDs invested a great deal of energy campaigning for cities to adopt directly elected mayoral systems, but
in the two cities which held mayoral elections this year they (and other nationalists) performed poorly. In Salford they
selected a former carnival queen – unfortunately a male one, Mr Michael Felse, who finished eighth with 3.5%. The
BNP’s Eddy O’Sullivan was sixth with 4.4%, while UKIP’s Bernard Gill was third with 7.3%. In Liverpool things
were even more complicated, with the NF’s Peter Tierney twelfth on 0.6%; Mike Whitby of the BNP eleventh on 1.0%;
and Dr Paul Rimmer (who like Mr Tierney was once a BNP activist) ninth with 1.4%. Even UKIP only managed eighth
place with 2.4%.

A far more radical post-Griffin option was until recently offered by the British Peoples Party, who once again
fielded Dave Jones in Todmorden ward, Calderdale, as their sole candidate. Mr Jones increased his vote for the second
year running, from 5.6% to 8.5%, despite anti-fascist leaflets and websites showing him with a gun and a swastika flag,
not to mention the complication of being expelled by his own party in the midst of the campaign. For further details see
Movement News in the forthcoming issue of Heritage and Destiny.

One nationalist party that had a good 2012 was the Democratic Nationalists, who again fought three wards in Bradford. Former BNP councillor Jim Lewthwaite increased his vote in Royds from 11.3% to 15.1%, which is definite progress in rebuilding the wreck of Bradford nationalism, though a long way from the votes of over 30% that were achieved here five or six years ago. Liam Kernaghan in Tong ward increased his vote from 6.0% to 11.5%, though Neil Craig in Wyke slipped back from 10.9% to 9.6%. The only DN candidates outside Bradford were Dave Owen in Doncaster, who had fought the Stainforth & Moorends ward four times previously for the BNP and polled 16.6% this time, equalling his second best BNP performance; and Gary Topping in Waterside ward, Pendle, who was the first ever nationalist candidate in his ward and polled 7.8%.

There will be much pondering of the 2012 elections in the weeks to come. They undoubtedly represent a turning
point in British nationalism: the point at which the BNP ceased to be a remotely credible electoral force.

Other tentative conclusions that can be drawn from the evidence above include:
• The most decisive BNP defeats have tended to be in what were once their strongest areas, including the complete or
near disappearance of entire BNP branches in numerous former strongholds.
• While UKIP undoubtedly had a good year in general, particular UKIP results showed a patchy performance and
(with a handful of exceptions) the party continues to make little impact in working class areas, especially in the
North of England.
• Strong individual campaigns succeeded in achieving results that were well above the general anti-BNP trend, but
these strong results were also achieved by several non-BNP parties and independent nationalists. It is very difficult
to build a nationalist political brand without the sort of national media hype that at different times has magnified
both UKIP and the BNP, but some of this year’s results show that it can be done.
• There is no evidence that one or other ideological variety of nationalism has a significantly greater electoral appeal
than another. In particular, the total humiliation of the British Freedom Party, and the defeat of the most actively
Islamophobic UKIP councillor Malcolm Davis in Dudley, tends to disprove the argument that nationalists should
focus on an EDL-style agenda.
• What works is what always has worked: putting serious effort into a campaign with quality literature, combining a
focus on local issues with a clear and locally relevant message on national issues.

England First Party exposes Preston Mafia

2012 is a Guild year in Preston – a year when Prestonians are meant to be proud of their home city.  Preston Guild is a unique civic celebration, held every twenty years since 1328.

Yet this year there is a shadow over Preston Guild – a ghost at the feast.

For the record of the man who was Preston’s Guild Mayor at the last festivities, and who had led the City Council for the previous decade – the late Cllr Harold Parker – is again under scrutiny as part of an investigation into what was termed the “Preston Mafia”, a description coined not by political opponents but by his own Borough Treasurer!

The England First Party believes that both the Labour and Conservative Parties have serious questions to answer about corruption and political chicanery in Preston, and that a full enquiry is needed to get to the bottom of the scandal.

—–

On 24th April 2012 the disgraced Labour politician Frank McGrath was ordered to serve a further two year prison sentence, after failing to obey a court order to repay almost £1 million of the proceeds from his life of crime.  This in itself might seem bad enough: but to understand the full dimensions of the affair we must look back to 7th August 1991, when a team of twenty Lancashire Police detectives carried out simultaneous raids across Preston.

The targets of these police raids included Preston Town Hall and the homes and offices of Cllr Harold Parker, leader of the council since 1982, and his deputy Cllr Frank McGrath.

Rumours had been circulating for years about the improper business relationship between these two senior Preston councillors and Owen Oyston, a millionaire businessman and supporter of the Labour Party, featured as early as March 1984 in an investigation by the BBC’s Watchdog programme.   A particular focus of these investigations was the redevelopment of Preston Docks.

Cllr Harold Parker effectively controlled Preston Council’s decisions over the dockland development while being paid a £450 monthly retainer by Oyston, who had a major financial interest in the project, and receiving numerous other benefits in kind from Oyston interests.  Meanwhile his deputy leader Cllr McGrath became a millionaire in 1987 through his investment in Oyston’s company Red Rose Radio, which owned local radio stations in Preston, Manchester, Leeds and Cardiff.

The police raids in 1991 were codenamed ‘Operation Angel’ and led to criminal charges against Frank McGrath and several of Preston Council’s most senior officials, including the chief executive and deputy chief executive.  Also raided were the offices of Tustin Developments, a company owned by Iranian exile Hossein Ghiassi and his California-based brother, who had won substantial contracts for the Preston Docklands project.

Frank McGrath was charged with multiple counts of fraud and theft in January 1992.  Yet despite millions of pounds being spent on ‘Operation Angel’, his trial and almost all of the subsequent ones collapsed.  It now seems that the interests of justice took second place to political machinations.  Much of the campaign against Owen Oyston and his corrupt Labour cronies had been funded and organised secretly by prominent Conservatives, notably:

• Lord Blaker, former Conservative MP for Blackpool South, who served as a Foreign Office and Defence minister in Mrs Thatcher’s governments during the 1980s.  He died in 2009.
• Sir Robert Atkins, Conservative MP for Preston North from 1979 to 1997 and an MEP for North West England from 1999 to 2009.
• Bill Harrison, property tycoon and millionaire Tory donor who regularly hosted Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher at his Preston home during her visits to the North West.  He died in August 1999.  (Like his arch-enemy Frank McGrath, Mr Harrison lived in the affluent Preston suburb of Fulwood, though in even grander style at Greyfriars Hall.)

This Tory trio worked through local Preston residents activist Michael Murrin and Blackpool based private detective Chris More, who managed to access the confidential bank and income tax details of Cllrs Parker and McGrath.  Yet when it came to prosecuting the targets of Operation Angel, the Tory party at national level proved most unhelpful, as did some very senior police officers.

Mrs Thatcher’s Attorney General Nicholas Lyell prevented the release of files implicating Balfour Beatty, the construction giant and major Tory donor, in the web of corruption surrounding the Preston Docklands development.  This was very good news for Labour’s Cllr Frank McGrath, as it seriously handicapped the Operation Angel investigation into his affairs.

Fortunately for McGrath, although the Conservative Party were no friends of his, they were on very friendly terms indeed with Balfour Beatty, which had been founded a century ago by the Conservative MP for Hampstead, George Balfour, and retained close links to the Tories.  Operation Angel happened to coincide with the controversy over the construction of the Pergau Dam in Malaysia, with more than £200 million of British taxpayers money authorised by Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd.  A judicial review later found that Hurd had acted unlawfully in approving the Pergau project, which was being constructed by Balfour Beatty and another company with strong Tory connections – Cementation International, employers of the Prime Minister’s son, Mark Thatcher.

So although Balfour Beatty’s own offices had been raided and police had discovered a payment of £140,000 from Balfour Beatty to Cllr Frank McGrath’s Isle of Man company bank account ‘Global Enterprises’, Attorney General Sir Nicholas Lyell decided at the end of 1993 to drop all aspects of the case that involved this major Tory donor.  Cllr McGrath arrogantly told the press: “I offered no comment to the police when they questioned me and I understand the company did the same.”

No doubt Balfour Beatty were relieved when they were able to resolve their own embarrassing involvement in the Preston Docklands scandal by paying back £1.3 million to Preston Council in 1998.

Owen Oyston might have thought he had escaped the long arm of the law with the collapse of Operation Angel, but justice caught up with him in May 1996 when he was convicted of rape.  Oyston’s friend Peter Martin, a former policeman, had regularly supplied girls from his model agency.  One of them – a 16 year old girl – was raped by Oyston, who was jailed for six years.  Later that year Peter Martin was jailed for 20 years after admitting a series of rapes and assaults on young girls recruited through his model agency.

Cllr Frank McGrath went on to become Chief Executive of the Oyston owned Blackpool Football Club, and it took a few more years for his luck to run out.  During 2003 McGrath met convicted criminal Silvano Turchet, who was on day release from a prison sentence.   McGrath described himself as an accountant and business adviser, though he had no accountancy qualifications.  Nevertheless for some reason Turchet decided that McGrath was the ideal man to help him with his next business enterprise.

This turned out to be the large scale importation of heroin, which Turchet brought in via a private plane, flying into a small wartime airfield at Sleap, Shropshire.  In May 2006 Turchet was caught red-handed when police raided the airfield and found him about to unload a cargo including heroin, cocaine and ecstasy.  He is now serving a 21-year prison sentence.

During 2004 and 2005 McGrath had laundered hundreds of thousands of pounds of drug money for Turchet.  Despite claiming that he was entirely ignorant of the source of these funds, McGrath was convicted of money laundering in February 2010 and given a four-and-a-half year prison sentence.

Ian Cruxton of the Serious Organised Crime Agency (SOCA) commented:

“Serious organised criminals are motivated by money which buys them lifestyle and influence. Those who help them through money laundering enable the profits of crime to be invested in further criminal activity and this affects us all.
“SOCA doesn’t stop when it has caught and convicted the criminals. We will go after their wealth and we are determined to make sure they can’t use it or enjoy it.”

This SOCA policy led to the current attempts to recoup some of Frank McGrath’s ill-gotten gains.  He was ordered to repay £925,000 and this week failed to do so, resulting in an additional two year prison sentence.

Yet many Prestonians are left wondering whether justice was really done over Operation Angel twenty years ago, when Frank McGrath and others succeeded in escaping jail.  His old boss Cllr Harold Parker was never prosecuted, despite extensive investigations into his role as Owen Oyston’s representative during the Docklands development.

Cllr Parker retired from Preston City Council in 2009 due to ill health and died a few months later, after 45 years on the city council and its predecessor, Preston County Borough.  He was made an Honorary Alderman, after previously being awarded the Freedom of the City and given the title “Guild Burgess”, which dates back to a 12th century award to Preston by King Henry II.  Cllr Parker’s portrait hangs in the Town Hall, a public insult to anyone who cares about honesty in public life.

If Preston council tax payers are to have confidence in their political representatives and their police force, it is time for the criminal career of Frank McGrath and his cronies – whether Labour councillors or Tory businessmen – to be fully investigated by an independent inquiry.

2012 Election Preview

On 3rd May 2012 voters in more than 180 councils across England, Scotland and Wales will be going to the polls, with nationalist politics at its lowest ebb for more than twenty years.  Approximately 5,000 council seats are up for election, including the Greater London Assembly and mayoral elections in London, Liverpool and Salford.  The Conservative and Labour parties will be contesting virtually all of these seats, and the majority will have Liberal Democrat candidates.  One big talking point among politicians and journalists is the threat from a wide range of fourth parties: but sadly very little of this threat is coming from nationalists.

The two biggest “minor party” challenges are from the Green Party, with almost 1,000 candidates, and the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP), with just over 700.  Opinion polls published in mid-April put UKIP on 9% – for the first time ahead of the Liberal Democrats on 8%.  Yet the majority of voters will not have a UKIP candidate, and UKIP’s policies of Thatcher-style free markets and fanatical pro-Zionist, neoconservative foreign policies put them a long way from most British nationalists.  As a Daily Telegraph columnist recently put it, “UKIP is a party with no grassroots” – and has little capacity to build a genuine challenge to the political establishment.

The Greens are a more substantial political force than UKIP.  They have one MP in the House of Commons, are the largest party on Brighton council, and are close to controlling Norwich City Council.  Yet few people believe they will ever be more than a protest vote, and their catalogue of politically correct crankery makes them anathema to most nationalists.

For many nationalists, George Galloway’s Respect Party is even worse, as it was formed out of an alliance between Muslim immigrants and fringe Trotskyists.  Yet despite being written off more than once, Galloway (left) made a stunning comeback to Westminster at the Bradford West by-election, and from what had been a declining base Respect seems to have mobilised a substantial slate of candidates for the local elections – even they represent a far more serious short-term electoral threat to Labour than anything nationalists can manage in 2012.

For the first time since Derek Beackon won the Millwall by-election for the BNP in September 1993, no one from either the depleted ranks of nationalist activists, or from within the political establishment, is seriously expecting gains for nationalist parties at this election – least of all in London.

In the Greater London Assembly elections the BNP will be aiming to retain the seat captured by Richard Barnbrook four years ago.  Having quit the BNP in despair in 2010, Mr Barnbrook is not seeking re-election and the BNP’s lead candidate to replace him is the party’s London organiser Steve Squire, a London sex shop owner with a record of selling the so-called “date rape drug”.  Meanwhile the BNP’s mayoral candidate Carlos Cortiglia is a Uruguayan immigrant who once claimed to have volunteered to fight for Argentina in the Falklands War.

You really could not make it up!  The BNP lurches from one self-inflicted disaster to another.  This year there will be 137 council candidates from the BNP compared to 612 last time these particular seats were contested in 2008.  In fact this is the lowest total of BNP candidates at local elections since 2002.  There are no candidates at all in some of the party’s former strongholds.  Take West Yorkshire, where the BNP fielded a total of 83 candidates in 2008 but only two this year across the councils in Leeds, Bradford, Calderdale, Kirklees and Wakefield.

Among the few BNP branches still putting up a substantial slate are the eight candidates in Salford; seven in Stockport; six in Burnley (including defending councillor Sharon Wilkinson); eight in South Tyneside; eighteen in Birmingham; eleven in Coventry; and eight in Nuneaton.  However Nick Griffin’s authority even in his own party has declined to such an extent that numerous BNP candidate are open rebels who are demanding his resignation.

Elsewhere in the country various nationalist dissidents who have at various stages during the last decade seen through BNP leader Nick Griffin are standing either as independents or for a variety of other parties, while many more are biding their time and building towards a post-Griffin relaunch of nationalism later this year.

The largest of the factions so far is the English Democrats, who are fielding 86 candidates in various council elections around the country, as well as a GLA slate and mayoral candidates in Salford and Liverpool.  The strongest ED slates are eleven in Leeds (including former BNP councillor Chris Beverley), seven in Doncaster (where the EDs won the mayoral election but have no councillors), and twelve in Barnsley, including former BNP organiser Ian Sutton.  Former BNP election guru Eddy Butler is standing in Loughton Fairmead ward, Epping Forest but of course many ED candidates are civic nationalists who have no past connection with the BNP or any other racial nationalist party.  These include party chairman Robin Tilbrook (right) in another Epping Forest ward: High Ongar, Willingale & The Rodings.

Rival English nationalist parties formed from splits in the EDs during the past few years have promised a lot on internet forums but delivered little.  Neither the English People’s Party nor the One England Party will be fielding any candidates.  For that matter neither will the National People’s Party, formed by a small group of former BNP officials including Nick Griffin’s former chief fundraiser Jim Dowson – nor the For England Party, created in 2011 by former councillor Michael Johnson after his resignation from the EDs.

The only one of the new parties which is putting up any sort of electoral challenge is the British Freedom Party, which will have five candidates for Liverpool City Council and one in Basildon.

With the England First Party deciding to target just one council area – Preston – so as not to disrupt the recruitment of BNP activists for a post-Griffin realignment, the main nationalist challenge outside the BNP and the (semi-nationalist) English Democrats is coming from the National Front, Britain’s oldest nationalist party.  The NF will have 35 candidates nationwide, but its efforts this year are heavily concentrated in London, where candidates for the GLA include party chairman Ian Edward and former BNP national organiser Richard Edmonds (left), as well as former BNP parliamentary candidate Tess Culnane.  There are three NF candidates for separate councils in North East England; four in Hull; one in Maidstone; four in Thurrock (including former BNP councillor Derek Beackon); one each in Southend and Basildon; one in Amber Valley; four in Birmingham; two in Sandwell; one in Dudley; one in Knowsley; one in Rochdale; and one in Rossendale.  Surprisingly the NF also has eight candidates in Scotland (where the BNP has been completely wiped out) and two in Wales (the same as the BNP).  Former BNP activist Peter Tierney will be National Front candidate for Mayor of Liverpool, where he is up against the BNP’s North West regional organiser Mike Whitby as well as yet another ex-BNP candidate – Dr Paul Rimmer – standing for the English Democrats.  Last year Dr Rimmer had a brief sojourn as a UKIP candidate for Liverpool City Council, while Mr Whitby is only eligible to stand because he rents a defunct pigeon shed in Liverpool!  The BNP has reached the truly desperate stage when it has to employ these sort of tricks to field a mayoral candidate in a major city.  Mr Whitby actually lives in Wales, and is standing as a council candidate for Wrexham on the same day as the Liverpool mayoral contest – but the Liverpool BNP branch has collapsed so completely that this was the only way they could find a candidate.

Meanwhile the Bradford-based Democratic Nationalists (founded by BNP dissidents in 2008) are extending their influence beyond their home city, having helped organise a series of nationalist unity meetings in late 2011 and early 2012.  The DNs will have three candidates in Bradford (including former BNP city councillor Dr Jim Lewthwaite); one in Pendle (former BNP activist Gary Topping); and one in Doncaster (former BNP mayoral candidate Dave Owen).

Once again flying the flag for hardline national socialism will be Dave Jones of the British Peoples Party, standing in Todmorden ward, Calderdale.  At the start of the campaign West Yorkshire Police arrested Mr Jones for supposed “election fraud”, but this will not obstruct his candidature.  In fact the investigation is a shocking waste of police time, prompted by the far left’s harassment of the people who had signed Mr Jones’s nomination paper.  One of these people ludicrously claimed that she had signed the paper not knowing what it was, hence the police investigation.  There is no chance of even the politically motivated Crown Prosecution Service proceeding with charges against mr Jones on this basis.

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