Millwall – 30 years on (by Tony Paulsen)
16th September 2023 was, as many readers of H&D will know, the thirtieth anniversary to the very day of Derek Beackon’s remarkable win for the BNP in a by-election for the old Millwall ward of Tower Hamlets, at that time way back in 1993 the first victory for an overtly racial nationalist party in seventeen years, and arguably an even more impressive win than the two seats taken by the National Party in Blackburn in 1976, as Derek fought all three system parties, not merely two of them.
Happily, Derek, unlike many other veterans of the struggle in the 1990s, still marches in our ranks in body as well as in spirit, and took the place of honour at a dinner held (appropriately and not perhaps coincidentally) for thirty in a fine venue in South Essex to mark the anniversary. Particular thanks are due to Jane, who organised the function with military precision and did a marvellous job of work in finding the venue and selecting the variety of dishes on the menu.
The guests began to gather around 6.30 p.m., but disruption on the London Underground, especially the eastern end of the Central line meant that we began a little late, which slightly curtailed the speeches, more on that below. By 7.30 we were however all seated for dinner.
After enjoying the excellent food served in a grand old dining room, guests settled down to listen to three very different speakers give us their perspectives in two cases, on the way in which Millwall was won, and in the third, its significance for us to-day.
Chris Roberts, who chaired the proceedings with his usual skill and aplomb, first introduced Steve Smith, sometime BNP organiser in the East End of London (not to be confused with another fine nationalist and winning election strategist, Steve Smith, sometime BNP organiser in Burnley: I am told that there is a photograph of the two of them together, which I would love to see!).
Steve told us about the background to the BNP’s “rights for whites” campaign in the old East End, emphasising that the Millwall victory was not a bolt from the blue. Rather it should be seen as the culmination of a four year long campaign led by a fairly small but very committed group of activists who worked hard and long and applied real political intelligence to the situation to take the ward.
The cadre (to coin a phrase!) responsible for the victory had identified the weakness and complacency of a sclerotic Labour party and seen the potential for an electoral surprise, which they had pulled off in the teeth of violence from political opponents and vicious attempts at intimidation from the Metropolitan Police, by then already a highly politicised and vindictive arm of the state.
Paying tribute to Derek, Steve said that he had been the best councillor that the people of Millwall ward had ever had. While sadly the seat was lost in the “all out” election of 1994, the total number of votes cast for Derek in 1994 was much higher than in 1993, but the Labour party mobilised its London wide activist base to drive turnout up from 44% at the bye-election to an unprecedented 66% in May of 1994 and take the seat back. Nevertheless, that did not detract from the significance of breaking the taboo against electing candidates from outside the system and lighting a beacon, so to speak, for our movement.
Next up was Eddy Butler, who made his name as the BNP’s elections guru in this campaign. He spoke about the strategy and tactics deployed to convert raw electoral potential into a real win. We should not, he said, be coy about “borrowing” winning strategies from our opponents.
He made no secret of the fact that he had both studied and applied the strategy and tactics which the local Liberals had used (despite the misgivings of their national leadership) to progress from no seats at all on Tower Hamlets council in 1974 (when it was a Labour party fiefdom) to overall control by 1986.
The Tower Hamlets Liberals, he said, had used racist dog whistles thinly disguised as localism, notably their “sons and daughters” policy of giving council housing to the families of long standing council tenants, the implications of which policy were obvious.
The BNP learnt from and applied these methods, and also the campaigning skills of the Liberals, notably door to door canvassing, which led to real engagement with the electors.
Eddy paid tribute to the late Richard Edmonds, whose own electioneering skills are not always fully appreciated even by his many friends in the movement.
After Barry Osborne polled 20% of the vote in Millwall ward in 1992, most BNP activists were ecstatic, since the party had never polled so well in a council election till then. Eddy was not ecstatic. He wanted so much more and told Richard that the ward might have been won, had the campaign team found a way to work around the inaccessibility of many blocks of flats in the ward to canvassers by reason of the elaborate entry phone security systems by then already in place. The work around, by the way, was to canvass when the entry phone security system is disabled to allow the postman et al. to get in. Cracked it!
Richard listened, agreed and worked with Eddy to encourage the party’s London activist base to concentrate on a breakthrough on the Isle of Dogs, even if it meant temporarily scaling down activities in other areas of London. Eddy described this strategy as becoming a big party in a small area, on the premise that a localised breakthrough will win massive publicity, raise morale and boost recruitment, so that a geometrical not a merely arithmetical multiplier effect is produced. Reader, bear this tactic well in mind!
Unfortunately, the slightly late start meant that Eddy could not conclude his analysis by explaining what went wrong after the victory, and in particular, the troubles caused by the influence of Combat 18 in Tower Hamlets, culminating in death threats against Eddy and Steve Smith, amongst others. I hope that he will publish that analysis online in due course.
Our last speaker was Laura Towler, who had travelled all the way from Yorkshire with her husband Sam Melia. Laura said that she’d been surprised at being invited to speak, since she was literally a babe in arms in 1993 and was a Yorkshire lass to boot, asked to speak to Londoners about an election campaign in the East End when she’d been in her cradle.
For her, the significance of the Millwall campaign was that it taught a younger generation of nationalists to honour what those who had gone before them had achieved, and reminded her that we all stand in a tradition handed down by such men as Sir Oswald Mosley, John Tyndall and Jonathan Bowden to a new generation of activists. We will, she said, fail that tradition if we do not learn to work together or at least towards common goals. We can disagree about the best way to promote those goals, some will prefer community engagement, others the vehicle of a political party, but we should work towards the same ends, in that manner attainting nationalist unity, without which nothing can be achieved. Laura’s speech was very well received and concluded proceedings on a high note. On a personal note, I was very pleased to meet her and Sam, with whom I’ve corresponded but never met before.
Toasts were proposed to Derek (naturally) and to Gordon “Tom” Callow, a sadly departed veteran of the movement in the East End, who was one of Derek’s running mates in Millwall ward in the all-out election of 1994, after which we wended our ways home, making the wise (or lucky) decision to take the shiny new Elizabeth line back into town and avoid the worst of the transport chaos.
THE LADDER TO POWER – THE ONLY NATIONALIST STRATEGY THAT HAS EVER WORKED IN BRITAIN
Introduction – the View from Today:
The “Ladder Strategy”, a practical blueprint for how the Nationalist Movement could advance to its ultimate objective of national government, evolved on the ground in the 1960s and ’70s in branches of the John Bean iteration of the British National Party and the mid-1970s National Party breakaway from the National Front.
It was first articulated in a coherent form, as expounded here, by leading 1970s and ‘80s Nationalist activist Steve Brady, who had himself been involved in its implementation by the Blackburn and Lewisham and Southwark Branches of the National Party in the mid-’70s. An implementation rewarded by the unprecedented election of two Nationalist councillors in Blackburn in May 1976 and a 26% vote in a council election in Deptford, South London, for the NP later that year. In the latter case, the National Front, despite being much bigger and better known, but wedded to a strategy aimed at winning national media publicity rather than the NP alternative sinking local roots and sustained campaigning in the community, was easily beaten by the NP, gaining only 18%. Had the NF stood aside in the wider interests of the Movement, the combined vote would have seen the NP candidate elected.
Steve shared his experiences, and the strategy they embodied, at NF political training weekends at Liss House, in rural Hampshire, in the early 1980s. Young activists trained at these camps went on to apply the strategy in the latest iteration of the BNP in the 1990s and 2000s, with resounding success, culminating in the election of over fifty councillors across the country, including four at County Council level, and two Members of the European Parliament.
Meanwhile, Steve Brady, by now a member of the National Directorate of the Flag section of the National Front after Nick Griffin split the party in early 1986, documented the strategy in these two articles published in the Flag NF ideological magazine Vanguard in late 1987.
In the first article, Steve explains why the previous Nationalist strategy of trying to win support and grow itself by attracting national media publicity through marches and demonstrations was fatally flawed, because the national media “central nexus” is irreconcilably hostile to our Movement and, understandably from its point of view, refused to allow itself to be used in this way. So the coverage thus obtained in TV and newspapers, what would now be termed the Mainstream Media, MSM, was relentlessly hostile and negative. As Steve once put it, we were “giving our worst enemy a vital message to give to our best friends”. Therefore this strategy had failed and, he argued and events were to prove, would continue to fail.
Instead he argued that we should communicate with our target audience, the White British public, directly and in person, via the so called local nexus, via knocking on their doors and campaigning on local issues in their communities, aided by carefully produced national and local printed media, a Party newspaper and local leaflets and newsletters. In the second of his articles, Steve explained that this would build the first, foundation, rung on the Ladder to Power. Which in turn would enable the building of the second, and so on.
That ladder was based on the simple idea that if, as the Movement does, you face a high barrier, a political wall, keeping you from your target, national power, you do not persist with futile attempts to jump it in one leap, hoping, inevitably in vain, for a boost over from a hostile MSM. Instead you build a ladder, where constructing each rung of itself endows you with the resources in terms of membership and public support to aspire realistically to build the next rung, and so on all the way to Government.
This was scoffed at by our enemies at the time, given that the Movement then struggled to achieve even the lowest rung anywhere, despite earlier success, rendered ineffectual by the factionalism, disunity and selfish egotism that have been the persisting bane of our Movement. However, when seriously implemented, locally in Tower Hamlets in the early 1990s and then nationally from 2000 on, the strategy demonstrably worked. By 2010, with dozens of Nationalist councillors and two MEPs, our enemies were not laughing at all. Under better and broader leadership, the BNP would by then have been poised realistically to hope to attain its first national MPs by the 2015 General Election. Instead Nick Griffin destroyed his second Nationalist party.
But the strategy here reproduced is still valid and would still work. Even on a local scale with a tiny organisation, H&D Editor Mark Cotterill was able to use it to win election to Blackburn council, so even small, local groups can, and should, start to climb the ladder now. This actually probably shows that even the credit Steve gave to using the Central Nexus to get the organisation’s name across to the public is misplaced – the public at large had never heard of Mark’s party from the central nexus, but using the local nexus effectively won him the seat anyway. Future movements may well be able to ignore the central nexus, the MSM, pretty much, as long as they use the local nexus and follow the Ladder Strategy based on it. Unlike any alternatives put forward and in some cases tried again and again for the best part of a century, it actually works.
Therefore we reproduce it here, unedited. It does show its age and its origin, but we believe that in no way undermines its essential validity and usefulness.
However, obviously given the articles are nearly 40 years old, and written by a senior member of his particular Nationalist group, the details are occasionally dated and slanted to boost the author’s faction at the time and reflect its own particular ideological position on some issues, a position not necessarily required for the strategy described to work. The resources of the Flag NF in late 1987 are, notably, not understated! Although it is true, for example, that the group’s Birmingham Branch did begin to implement the Ladder Strategy, their organisation collapsed before they got very far with it.
It collapsed because, as the author himself later admitted, whilst it was true, and probably still is, that most of the British public are sympathetic to a broad British Nationalist programme of social conservatism, economic radicalism, and maintaining the essential ethnic identity of our homeland, by 1987 few of that public would have taken the National Front seriously as a potential vehicle for such a programme.
Its earlier futile national media/central nexus-oriented strategy, leading to a self-defeating reliance on marches which our opponents were able to make ever more violent, repelling much of the public, had already discredited it beyond repair.
In hindsight, the NF should have switched from a central nexus strategy to and exclusively local nexus oriented one after its last march not portrayed as “NF MARCH SPARKS RIOT”, Red Lion Square in June 1974. Our opponents discovered then, and know now, that violent opposition to our, originally peaceful, demos is used by the MSM to blame us for the violence and put people off. This may not be true, however, for local community protests, e.g. against “asylum seeker” hostels, where our opponents will be dealt with by the local community.
However the NF had persisted with a central nexus strategy based on marches long after its political sell-by date and had become linked in the public mind with the skinheads and football hooligans who were needed to make the marches physically viable, and whose presence the MSM central nexus was delighted to publicise. After they had seen off the Griffin faction, most of the Flag leadership realised the NF had poisoned its own PR water by 1992, and walked away. It is possible that, if they had persisted long enough in a community/local nexus communication strategy, they might have detoxified their brand directly with the public, eventually. We will never know.
More notably, this was all written many years before the rise of the Internet and social media. However, I am sure the author of said articles would argue that this new technology is less of a radical alternative way of taking our message to the public than it seems, being essentially more a part of the old central nexus than the local one or some new nexus connecting us and the public..
It is true that unlike when using the MSM itself, Nationalists can control the content of their own messages on these media. This is certainly most useful, especially, it could be argued, for communicating ideological and political education to other Nationalists rather than the general public. Nonetheless as far as taking our message to the public goes it lacks the direct personal contact with Nationalists which is the key strength of the local nexus approach in overcoming MSM smear propaganda.
Also, and most importantly, a communications strategy based on the Internet and social media is fatally vulnerable to the fact that this medium, like the old TV/newspaper MSM central nexus, is totally and absolutely controlled by our irreconcilable enemies, Zuckerberg and his ilk, who can, often have and always if we look like getting anywhere using those media will, simply pull the plug and shut us down. They still control the medium and can silence the message.
This is not true of, and only of, the local nexus on which, and only on which the Ladder Strategy is based. That Strategy can proceed perfectly well in the face of unrelented MSM bile and the total exclusion of Nationalists from the Internet and social media, which may well happen. “New Technology”, while certainly worth using while we still can, is not a quick fix or an easy way around the enemy control of our media.
There is no substitute for the hard graft of talking to our people direct themselves, campaigning on issues which of themselves may be of little direct relevance to our Nationalist ideology but which matter to the communities involved, and building, step by step, the ladder which will, as trying it has shown, bring us ultimately to power, and thus save our Race and Nation. There is no other, easier way or simple short-cut to do that. Here is the way to win that we know works.
Click here to read The Road to Power, Part 1 (first published in Vanguard, October 1987).
Adam Walker stays on as BNP Chairman for four more years
Those with copies of the British National Party constitution will know that there is meant to be an election for Party Chairman every four years. The last “election” – which Adam Walker won by default (as nobody else stood) – was in July 2019.
So you might have thought there would have been another election this month, as their constitution states that nominations have to be open and be prominently published on the BNP website for one week from the last Monday in June. However, those who regularly check the BNP’s dormant website will note that this did not happen.
The constitution then goes on to say that nominations close on the first Monday of July. Well we are at the end of July now, and that did not happen either!
The BNP’s website is very rarely – once a month at best – updated now, since their former webmaster quit a few years ago to file a legal suit (which failed) against Adam Walker through the civil courts. The front page is still offering BNP members (are there any left now?) support during the Covid 19 pandemic of 2020-2021. It also wishes them a “Happy St George’s Day” – from back in April, and of course asks them to donate and leave money to them in their wills!
The BNP has long since given up on political campaigning and the only point in its continued existence is to wait for two more (that we know of) legacies from elderly supporters who made their wills back in the days when the BNP was still a credible party. One member has bequeathed them their house in Greater London, which will now be worth well over one million pounds, and another in the North East of England has left them half a million from their bank account.
UKIP has now reached the BNP stage where the party only continues to exist in the expectation of legacies. But at least UKIP (unlike the BNP) are honest enough to make some sort of political effort rather than sitting waiting for the cash to roll in. The last time the BNP fought a Parliamentary election was back in December 2019.
THE ROAD TO POWER 2 – THE LADDER STRATEGY
In the first article in this series, I outlined the broad strategic direction in which the National Front is pointing – towards the “local information nexus”, towards direct contact with the people, and away from the “central nexus”, the mass media, as a means of putting across our message. Now I want to get down to brass tacks, and outline the first steps each Branch must take on the long road to victory.
The first step is to select a “target ward”, the ward in which the NF will build its first mass support base in each area. These wards should be selected for, obviously, good NF potential, where our policies on e.g. immigration, unemployment or whatever will be seen as directly relevant to the local people, but where the situation, especially the racial one, is not so hopeless in the foreseeable future that local Whites have despaired, fled, or stayed because they like the way things are now.
They should also be surrounded by other wards in the same Parliamentary constituency which are mostly, if not as good as the selected target ward, at least of reasonable potential. For ultimately the constituency will itself be targeted. Finally, obviously, the target ward should be reasonably accessible to local Branch activists.
The next step is to survey the target ward in depth. This is done in two sweeps. Sweep one consists of activists, over a period of weeks, knocking on every door in the ward selling NF literature. To make this easier, The Flag in particular has been carefully designed to appeal to ordinary people who may never have seen an NF publication before.
On a copy of the electoral roll for the ward, each house’s response is noted. Sympathisers will form the basis of a permanent monthly paper round, and will be invited to buy extra Flags etc. to pass on to their friends; eventually some will be politically educated and recruited. “Don’t knows” will be leafletted and intermittently visited again. Hostiles will also be noted and ignored/avoided in future..
Sweep two, at more or less the same time but with different personnel (especially older or more reticent activists) will also go through the ward, not identifying themselves as NF but conducting an “opinion poll”, aimed at identifying the main local issues in the ward, for later local propaganda targeting. Birmingham Branch, who have successfully done this, will be pleased to explain the details to other Branches.
POTENTIAL RECRUITS
In the succeeding months, some activists simply service the existing doorstep paper buyers every month (here again, the older or more reticent come into their own.) These potential recruits should gradually be introduced to more in-depth Party literature, so that by the time they are ready to join the Party, if they ever are, they will understand at least basic ideology. Again, in the NF Statement of Policy and 100 Questions and Answers, the Party national centre has provided the Branches with the resource they need.
Meanwhile, the Branch begins production of a regular ward leaflet, homing in on local issues identified by the “poll”. This is distributed to every door not known to be inhabited by hostiles (or Immigrants!). Those whose appearance or manner is less effective on the doorstep can do this.
Later another paper sale attempt will be made to those “don’t knows”. The effectiveness of these leaflets can be gauged both by follow-ups coming from them and by getting feedback from the regular paper-buyers.
Feedback from these people on national literature, especially The Flag, should also be asked for “What did you think of last month’s paper? What did you especially agree with/not like?”) This feedback on every paper/magazine and leaflet issue from every Branch is needed by national centre so we can “fine-tune” our output to make it even more effective for Branches to use.
After a while, potential recruits among the regular paper round can be invited to aspecial Branch meeting. This should to an extent be “stage-managed”, with a carefully designed decoration (flags, banners etc.), literature table (no fringe irrelevance!), audience and the best speakers briefed on local issues.
The aim is to push them into making the final step and signing up, or if they have already to reinforce their enthusiasm and commitment. Boring and divisive meetings should be confined to committed activists. Also special meetings aimed at youth should be held.
“WARD COMMITTEE”
After some months of this, perhaps a year, the Branch should have attained Rung Two on the local ‘ladder to power’. By this stage, there should be enough locally-recruited activists (only a few are required) to form a “Ward Committee”. This is responsible initially for servicing and slowly extending the door-to-door paper round, and putting out local leaflets. Later, it will produce these itself, after training from the Branch.
The Branch itself will thus be freed to commence Rung One in an adjacent ward. In the initial target ward, someone, ideally a local, should be adopted as a local candidate – NOT a few weeks before polling day, but well in advance. This candidate’s main role will be to get him or herself well known, liked and respected in the local ward community. Practical help with local peoples’ problems, e.g. with the Council, should be made available.
Here the aim isn’t to boost the NF directly but to actually help people, thus earning gratitude and respect. So in, for example, letters on behalf of people the NF name (hated and feared by many, especially Communist, “Labour” Councils) should not in general be used.
The measure of actual attainment will be provided by a local candidate’s poll in the target ward – and it is to obtain such a concrete measure, not at this stage to win, that such a seat should be contested. Bv the time Rung Two has been reached, the NF vote should have risen from under 1 to 5 per cent. As has been achieved in their target ward by the “pilot project” Branch, Birmingham, in about 12 months.
INTERNAL POWER
The aim now is for the Branch to bring ward after ward in the target constituency up to Rung Two, so that ward after ward begins to run under its own internal power, freeing Branch activists (who of course may come from another constituency entirely) to move on to the next one.
Rung Three has been reached when most wards in the target seat have their own ward committees and can poll 5-10% in local elections. At this stage the ward committees can set up between them a Constituency Committee, and indeed may as well now apply for admission to the NF Confederacy as a Branch in their own right, since the ultimate NF aim is one Branch per parliamentary seat.
During the Rung Two to Three transition, the best ward candidate should be being built up, years in advance of an election if possible, as a locally known Parliamentary candidate. With an average NF local poll of over 5% and indeed with many of these voters personally known to ward activists as regular paper buyers, a Parliamentary election, General or By, can now be contested with a reasonable prospect of reaching 5% and saving our deposit, boosting credibility locally and nationally. (In fact, it’s pointless to fight seats otherwise, usually five saved deposits are worth 50 1% polls).
The aim now is Rung Four, in which, with credibility enhanced by a saved deposit and good local candidates in place in most wards, the local vote reaches the 25 – 35% mark. At this stage, the NF is a serious local political force. The local media will take us seriously. On previous experience in Blackburn and S.E. London, where this strategy was applied in the mid-70s and worked, some local media, aware that NF voters buy papers, will moderate or even cease their hostility.
Others will not do so, but will resort to careful probing to find our weaknesses.
As pointed out in my last article, given intimate local contact between the Party and the people, the obviously untrue “Nazi” smear will fail. But we must be sure our candidates, in particular, are persons of good, or at least locally acceptable, character without skeletons in cupboards. A local NF HQ advice centre should now be attainable, as well as a local Flag-style paper (perhaps initially simply a 2-page local insert in the Flag).
NF COUNCILLORS
Rung Five sees NF Councillors elected on around 40% of the vote. These must behave themselves, as the eyes of the nation, and a hostile mass media, will be on them. Actual local power may be attainable here too. Again, the first NF Council must be very careful, a showpiece to the country at large. The media will now nationally take the NF seriously, though only as a local phenomenon – areas we do well in will be “Britain’s Alabamas”.
The Race Issue will begin to be moved, by the NF’s rise and Immigrant-Red counter-(and probably over-) reaction toward the centre of the political stage, to our advantage. There will be another Anti-Nazi League, but a party dug in locally and not dependent on the national media to communicate with the public should withstand the challenge this time. Votes in target Parliamentary seats are 25-35%.
At Rung Six, the first NF MPs are elected. The Party is now at the stage reached by the Front National in France, with maybe one million voters. Beyond this point, the NF itself so transforms the nature of British politics that further prediction now is pointless, due to insufficient data. But by the time we reach Rung Six, Rungs Seven, Eight and so on will have been mapped out. And so on to power.
This, as can hopefully be seen, is a concrete plan. Locally, Rung Five has been reached and can be again. What has changed since the 1970s isn’t the British public, which after the race riots is as racialist as ever. It’s the NF, and the way it is perceived by the public. These things are up to us to change.
The mass support of the Seventies is still there. We need to turn towards it, and tap into it in a coherent, planned way, which will avoid the “swamp-and-split” cycle of the 1970s. The NF, like a comet, has spent a long time in the cold and the dark after its first blazing passage near the real world. We have used that time to equip ourselves ideologically, to remove Hitlerites and bourgeois student poseurs, and to evolve a clear plan for power.
Now we have reached the far point of our orbit and we are headed back inward toward the sunlight and the people. Once more we shall blaze forth in the political firmament – but this time we will stay there. If we put the work in.
All this strategy needs for success is a lot of hard, sometimes boring, effort, week after week, month after month, year after year. There may well be no sudden breakthroughs, there may well be some setbacks. But if we stick through it in the coming years, in the end, by our own efforts, we will win:- “Victory or defeat lie in our hands alone” – Let us make sure that our hands forge Victory.
Ex-BNP official suspended by Tories
A former senior official in Nick Griffin’s BNP has been exposed in Rishi Sunak’s Conservative Party. The Tories have suspended Andy McBride from party membership, but he remains a Conservative candidate on the ballot paper for Bracknell Town Council in Berkshire.
During the late 2000s McBride became notorious as an especially factional and obstreperous BNP official. As regional organiser for South East England, he was a bitter enemy of H&D and sought to obstruct or even purge Griffin’s enemies from BNP ranks. His targets included well known supporters of former BNP leader John Tyndall, including the late Richard Edmonds and Warren Glass.
Now it is McBride himself who is being purged from his new party. He is accused not only of past roles in the BNP and Britain First, but of allegedly ‘racist’ posts on social media.
In 2011 McBride and his close ally, Ulster businessman Jim Dowson, resigned from the BNP and formed Britain First, together with former BNP official Paul Golding. Three years later, Dowson and McBride quit Britain First after a dispute with Golding. McBride made his way into the Conservative Party, while Dowson operates a series of Ulster-based fundraising enterprises alongside Nick Griffin.
McBride has written several garbled, ideologically incoherent replies to recent exposés by local newspapers. In his way, McBride is probably a sincere Christian whose politics are fundamentally reactionary and anti-Muslim rather than racial nationalist, but who ventures into colourful language and politically incorrect metaphors on social media.
The sad end to his political career shows that old-fashioned reactionaries have no future in today’s ‘woke’ Conservative Party. But equally, the fact that someone as ideologically vacuous as McBride ever became a BNP regional organiser is a damning indictment of the Griffin era.
In Memoriam: Ralph Hebden – a Real Political Soldier
It’s been almost ten years now since the funeral – on 24th April 2013 – of our comrade Ralph Hebden. While others played at it, Ralph was a real Political Soldier, in every sense of the words. We will remember Ralph – along with other former comrades at this year’s H&D meeting in Preston, on Saturday September 9th.
Ralph died only a couple of months before another brave servicemen, Drummer Lee Rigby, who was murdered by two African immigrants in South London on May 22nd 2013. Lee of course is much better known (to the general public anyway) then Ralph, and there will be a number of commemorations in May to mark the tenth anniversary of his death – and rightly so.
The loss of our comrade Ralph was very difficult to take in and even now I find it hard to believe he has really gone. Peter Rushton knew Ralph for fifteen years so it was fitting that he wrote the obituary in the July-August 2013 issue #55 of H&D magazine (see below).
I only had the honour of knowing Ralph for just over three years, but in that time we got to know each other we became good friends – as well as racial comrades. Ralph was a longstanding subscriber to H&D magazine and attended three of our annual John Tyndall Memorial Meetings in Preston, as well as many other activities and events in and around Lancashire.
Ralph Hebden like Lee Rigby was an active serviceman from the North-West England – he had proudly served his country for almost ten years in the Royal Marines and for fifteen years in the racial-nationalist movement. Both were excellent examples of the type of proud young Englishmen we are going to need on our side if we are ever going to take our country back from the Westminster traitors, who have sold our country away. Both are still solely missed by their families, friends and comrades, but were welcomed by past heroes when they took their seats in the great hall of Valhalla.
Mark Cotterill
Editor/Publisher – Heritage and Destiny
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Ralph Hebden 1980-2013
Ralph Hebden – brave patriot, nationalist activist, Heritage and Destiny contributor and Royal Marine Commando – has died near his base in Arbroath at the tragically young age of 32.
Last seen alive early on the morning of 11th March, Ralph had been heading out for his regular morning run near the Arbroath cliffs. His body was recovered from the sea three weeks later, a few miles further up the coast at Carlingheugh Bay.
Extensive land, air and sea searches had taken place in recent weeks, and several nationalist activists in Scotland had been interrogated by police, who seemed to be under the impression that Ralph’s disappearance had something to do with his politics.
Ralph married fellow Liverpudlian Sarah last year, and was looking forward to becoming a father for the first time. His daughter Evie was born four days after his disappearance.
Joining as a Royal Marine reservist based in Liverpool, he became a regular in 2005 and served in a mortar unit of the elite 45 Commando, based at RM Condor near Arbroath. After one of the last Royal Marine tours in Ulster, and one tour in Iraq, Ralph completed several tours of duty in Afghanistan and was drafted in to assist with anti-terrorist security operations for the London Olympics last year.
Ralph’s unit were long-term specialists in Arctic and mountain warfare, but found themselves deployed in very different mountain operations against the Taliban, as well as peacekeeping in Helmand province.
As a lifelong nationalist activist, Ralph was very well aware of the political abuse of our armed forces in operations that have nothing to do with protecting Britain. Nevertheless he did his duty and had an outstanding military record.
The same spirit of loyalty was evident in Ralph’s relations with fellow nationalist comrades, and he remained immune from the factional backbiting that characterises so much of our movement. Even when he was targeted for abuse by a former Nick Griffin bodyguard, Ralph refused to respond in kind.
I knew Ralph since the late 1990s, when he attended BNP meetings across Lancashire, including one event in Todmorden that was attacked by “anti-fascists.” Ralph became a regular at the monthly meetings I addressed in central Manchester until 2002, and in 1999 he accompanied Nick Griffin and myself as personal security inside the European election count at St George’s Hall, Liverpool.
After I split from Griffin in 2002, Ralph became an important contact for Heritage and Destiny inside the North West BNP, building bridges between various factions and regularly attending H&D events, including all three John Tyndall Memorial meetings in Preston, Lancashire.
Frequently travelling through Preston on his way between the Arbroath base and his family home in Liverpool, Ralph would stop off for a drink with the H&D team, and last year he and his future wife Sarah were our hosts in Liverpool – even though my team Oldham were playing against their team Liverpool at Anfield!
Following the death last year of his comrade and mentor John Fearns, ex-organiser of Liverpool BNP, Ralph was the author of an obituary published in H&D. (At the time of course, as a serving Royal Marine, Ralph had to use a pseudonym.)
When Ralph told me last October that he was about to become a father as well as a stepfather, I could see how happy he was to be starting a family. Heritage and Destiny sends deepest sympathy to Sarah, her new born daughter, and all of Ralph’s family at this tragic time.
Ralph Hebden’s funeral took place in St Nicholas Church, Liverpool on 24th April, which was packed with friends and comrades from both the military and politics, followed by burial at Allerton Cemetery. Comrades from several nationalist parties gathered to pay tribute, including fellow veteran and former Liverpool BNP organiser Steve Greenhalgh, current BNP organiser Mike Whitby, North West B&H organiser Ade Brooks, representatives of the National Front, English Democrats and UKIP, and Heritage and Destiny editor Mark Cotterill.
We then gathered at a central Liverpool pub for a wake in memory of a true comrade who will never be forgotten. Despite pressure from senior military officers who wanted to suppress nationalist political connections, Ralph’s widow Sarah bravely attended the wake to thank comrades for their support.
Peter Rushton, Manchester, England
CoViD and race – leaked files reveal how nationalists missed the epidemic’s true story
This morning’s edition of the Daily Telegraph, continuing its publication of leaked WhatsApp messages exchanged by senior ministers and officials during the CoViD pandemic – thoroughly vindicates H&D‘s stance published as early as the summer of 2020.
It was clear to us that these early stages of the pandemic proved the failure of our multiracial, multicultural society. Certain minority groups showed no respect for our laws and no respect for the interests of Britain’s wider community. Instead they either selfishly pursued their own profit (while risking public health) or became obsessed by primitive voodoo superstitions.
As a consequence, the government was seeking to enforce lockdown within law-abiding indigenous British communities, while unable to act against blatant flouting of pandemic regulations among minority communities.
On the basis of leaked WhatsApp messages, today’s Telegraph alleges: “Ministers feared that Covid was spreading more rapidly among non-compliant communities but were worried they would be
labelled ‘racist’ if they highlighted the issue.”
H&D first exposed this issue on 20th July 2020, adding further details on 12th August and 18th August, followed by an analysis of the broader pandemic issues by one of the very few leading British nationalists with serious scientific qualifications – our correspondent Ian Freeman – on 3rd October 2020.
Meanwhile, we now know (thanks to the Telegraph‘s revelations this morning) that the Health Secretary Matt Hancock and junior health minister Nadine Dorries were privately discussing some of the very same issues.
On 20th August (two days after H&D‘s publication of its third article on this topic) Dorries wrote to her boss Hancock that the government could not credibly “put whole towns and villages with extremely low R rates in lockdown (our voters) and deprive those people of work and family, because of the behaviour of non-compliant communities.”
Hancock expressed disbelief that local council leaders had failed to act, and Dorries emphasised that this was a matter of racial politics. Andy Burnham (Labour Mayor of the Greater Manchester region that includes Oldham) “will not agree”, wrote Dorries, “nor will any of the MPs or any of Oldham leaders. They [would] be locking down their voters and setting ours free.”
In other words, exactly as H&D wrote at the time, pandemic rates were rocketing in Asian areas of Oldham (packed with Labour voters) but much lower and in some cases negligible in White areas in and around Oldham (more likely to vote Conservative in 2019-2020 but where nationalists achieved very high votes in the early 2000s).
Dorries reminded Hancock about the 2001 race riots, before her days as an MP but when she had been working as special adviser to a Tory frontbench spokesman. She warned that such towns remained a tinderbox, and gave the Pendle area of Lancashire as an example. “The town ward of Colne, 18 pubs, white working class, would be like a tinder box if its pubs closed because of non-compliance and infection rates in Nelson, 2 pubs, Pakistani community next door.”
Dorries was correctly echoing H&D‘s arguments, but while ministers understood the facts, they ignored one important aspect. Twenty years ago nationalists in Lancashire had high quality leadership, before Nick Griffin chose to wreck his own party. Yet in the 2020s nationalist leaders totally failed to observe those political aspects of the pandemic expertly laid out for them by H&D. Once again, British nationalists were lions led by donkeys. A political open goal was missed, and many nationalist activists continued to pursue ridiculous voodoo obsessions rather than serious analysis.
The May-June edition of H&D will examine these leaked WhatsApp messages: we hope it is not too late for our movement to relearn some of the basics of political and racial reality.
A telling result in a historic Rotherham council ward
There have been some doubts as to whether Labour’s revival under Sir Keir Starmer would extend into White working class areas of the North, and tonight’s by-election gain for Labour in a working-class Rotherham council ward hasn’t quite resolved those doubts.
It now seems pretty clear that Sunak’s Tories are in big trouble in the ‘red wall’ (formerly solid Labour areas where the party declined sharply in or before 2019). But neither Reform UK, nor any of its civic nationalist rivals, nor (needless to say) any racial nationalist party, has yet even laid the foundation for a serious electoral challenge any time soon.
Tonight Labour gained Keppel ward, Rotherham, from the rebranded local branch of UKIP, the Rotherham Democratic Party,
For our readers, this is a ward that will evoke poignant memories.
The late Marlene Guest fought Keppel ward three times for the BNP, polling 16.4% in 2004, then finishing a close second to Labour in 2006 and 2007 with 27.7% and 28.5%. A few years after the collapse of Griffin’s party, UKIP were the beneficiaries, gaining the ward in 2014 and 2015, and holding on to two of its three seats in the 2016 all-out election.
Following Rotherham council’s well publicised problems and reorganisation, Labour took two of the three seats in May 2021, but the third was retained by one of the surviving UKIP councillors now rebranded as a Rotherham Democrat.
This Rotherham Democrat was thrown out for non-attendance at the end of last year and his party didn’t even field a candidate in this week’s by-election.
Neither was there a candidate from any other civic nationalist party, though an ex-Labour councillor stood as an independent and the Yorkshire Party (regionalist populists) had a candidate who took 15%. The Brexit Party polled 17.2% in the Rotherham constituency in 2019, but its successor Reform UK again showed no interest in contesting a local by-election, even in such a promising area.
Labour ended up with a majority of 300 tonight, with an Asian Liberal Democrat in a surprisingly close second. The Tories also put up an Asian candidate and slipped to fourth place with a truly appalling vote, down from 24% to 5.8%.
Lab 36.1% (+4.6)
LD 21.6% (+14.7)
Ind 18.5%
YP 15.2% (+3.5)
Con 5.8% (-18.2)
Grn 2.9%
UK census and racial replacement: H&D analysis
Demographic details were released this week from the Census taken in March 2021 in England and Wales – some of the figures for Northern Ireland had already been released a few weeks earlier, while in Scotland the Census was delayed by 12 months due to the pandemic, so Scottish results are not yet available. The Census findings should come as no surprise to H&D readers, though they seem to have shocked some civic nationalists and might yet convert some of the latter to racial realism.
Yet we should be careful not to react with excessive pessimism. The Census reveals a changing UK, but not one that has changed beyond rescue. White Britons are still a majority in most of our country and will remain so for years to come. The UK can be rescued, if racial nationalists have sufficient political will, discipline and competence.
The main headlines reflected census findings concerning both religion and the racial transformation of British cities.
For the first time the majority of the population in England and Wales no longer define themselves as Christian. This is only the third Census which has asked about religion, so no pre-2001 comparisons can be made, but it can safely be assumed from other data that the vast majority of Britons would have defined themselves as some sort of Christian until the 1960s when the younger generation began to abandon their parents’ faith and non-Christian immigrants began to arrive in significant numbers.
It is the abandonment of faith by White Britons that has contributed most to this aspect of the transformation of England and Wales: no doubt we shall find similar patterns in Scotland when the figures are eventually published. (The religious Census question is voluntary, and 6% of respondents in England and Wales chose not to answer it.)
37.2% of respondents answered ‘no religion’ (up from 25.2% a decade ago); 6.5% answered Muslim (up from 4.9%); and 46.2% answered Christian (down from 59.3%).
The other minority faiths remained at almost the same level as in 2021, including Hindu (1.7%), Sikh (0.9%), Buddhist (0.5%) and Jewish (0.5%). It should be noted that many Jews define themselves in racial/cultural terms and are not religiously ‘observant’, so would probably have replied to this Census question by ticking ‘no religion’ or refusing to answer, but even so it’s doubtful whether Jews of any description amount to more than 1% of the UK population.
In Northern Ireland far fewer answered ‘no religion’: 17.4%, a substantial increase from 10.1% in 2011 but less than half the figure for England and Wales. It seems likely that people from a Catholic background in Northern Ireland are especially likely to answer ‘Catholic’ for political/cultural reasons, even if they are no longer religious believers.
In reality, the surprise is that 27.5 million people in England and Wales still define themselves as ‘Christian’: anecdotal evidence suggests that these are heavily concentrated among older White Britons, Eastern European immigrants; and blacks. The churches can partly blame themselves for this decline. There has been no robust equivalent to the ‘Counter-Reformation’ of past centuries, little defence of traditional values, merely a meek surrender to political correctness and a wish to be ‘nice’ to those who promote an alien culture.
In short, while H&D readers will themselves be divided on religious questions, we can probably all agree that the religious transformation of our nation is not necessarily equivalent to racial and cultural replacement: it’s a different and only partly connected issue.
Turning to the question of race, the main headlines concerned British cities, where in some cases White Britons are now a minority and where Whites overall only remain a majority due to Eastern European immigration.
London is only 37% White British, though non-British Whites (in London’s case including many affluent Western Europeans as well as the stereotypical Poles, Romanians, etc.) help boost the overall White total to 54%. Similarly Manchester is 57% White but only 49% White British.
There are some cities where – even including non-Britons – Whites have now become a minority. Birmingham is now only 49% White, and Leicester only 41% White.
However these Midlands hotbeds of “diversity” also illustrate the political complications caused by immigration. The non-White populations are divided between several different cultures, some of which are far more hostile to each other than they are to Whites, as seen in recent riots between Indians and Pakistanis in Leicester.
Leicester is 34% Indian and only 3% Pakistani – but many of the former are Muslims who identify with the Pakistan cricket team rather than India (the immediate trigger for the riots). Leicester is 23.5% Muslim, 18% Hindu, and 4.5% Sikh.
Birmingham is even more complex, and as in Leicester this has already begun to cause problems for the Labour Party, not only because many ethnic minorities are socially conservative and detest Labour’s surrender to trendy ideas on ‘trans’ rights etc., but also because each community increasingly believes it has the right to control the selection of councillors and MPs.
The racial kaleidoscope of Birmingham is 17% Pakistani; 6% Indian; 4% Bangladeshi; 6% African; 4% Caribbean; with a further 10% being some other variety of black or mixed race. Only 43% of Birmingham is White British.
Most of the headlines focused on English cities, but there are perceptible though less dramatic changes elsewhere in the United Kingdom. Cardiff is now less than 74% White British: of course the city has long had its ‘Tiger Bay’ population of blacks and half-castes around the old Cardiff Docks, descended from migrants from dozens of different countries. But Wales as a whole remains 93.8% White, compared to 81% of England. Northern Ireland remains 96.6% White, though 6.5% of its population was born outside either the UK or Ireland (this mainly reflects Eastern European immigration, heavily concentrated in Belfast where almost 10% were born outside the British Isles, and in one or two other Ulster cities).
Turning from these large cities to areas of northern England which saw an explosion of support for racial nationalism more than twenty years ago, but where the nationalist surge lasted for about a decade at most, the Census suggests that we should not be too pessimistic.
Or put another way, the ‘Great Replacement’ is not yet an excuse for political cowardice, apathy or fatalism.
The political reality is that the vast expansion of the UK’s non-White population is concentrated in council wards and constituencies that we already knew – ten or twenty years ago – would not vote for racial nationalists. By contrast most of the areas that were winnable then, remain winnable now.
Admittedly a big exception to this is East London, where council seats were winnable (and in one case won) by the BNP in the 1990s but have now been conquered, again with mixed benefits for Labour. The Borough of Tower Hamlets is now only 23% White British, and even the old Millwall council ward won by the BNP’s Derek Beackon in 1992 is now only about one-third White British (due to boundary changes a precise figure cannot be obtained).
The transformation is nowhere near so dramatic in those areas of northern England where nationalists polled well post-millennium.
Take for example three cities/towns that H&D knows well: Oldham, Blackburn and Preston. All three of these remain racially divided along stark geographical/political borders, which means that numerous council wards remain winnable for a racial nationalist party that got its act together.
In Oldham the two areas that make up St James’s ward (which the BNP almost won in 2002 when H&D‘s assistant editor Peter Rushton was a leading activist in Oldham BNP) remain majority White British: Moorside & Sholver (89.1%) and Derker (80.5%). A short distance away (on the other side of the former Oldham railway station) begins one of several Asian ghetto areas where the Pakistani population approaches 80%. In other parts of Oldham, Bangladeshis similarly predominate.
But in electoral terms this is only a small problem. There are council wards such as the old Alexandra (since broken up by boundary changes), where a White ghetto was outpolled by an Asian ghetto, but most wards are either no-go areas for White nationalists, or else remain overwhelmingly White and winnable. Overall, Oldham remains 65% White British, and its Asians are divided (often bitterly) between 13.5% Pakistanis and 9% Bangladeshis, with another 5% being some form of African, Caribbean or other blacks / half-castes.
Racial nationalist parties have not been defeated by demographics, but by our own failures.
Turning to Blackburn, where H&D editor Mark Cotterill won a council seat in 2006, there is a similar picture of stark racial-political division. Mark’s old ward Meadowhead remains 91% White British, and most of the old Mill Hill ward won by the BNP in 2002 is similarly 85%-90% White British, though with some Asian encroachment across the ward boundary. Looking at the entire borough, Blackburn with Darwen overall is only 57% White British, but this reflects the increasing Asian domination of their ghetto areas. As in Oldham this represents no practical political change in terms of winnable seats for racial nationalists.
And finally looking at Preston, where the H&D office is based, we can see the practical political options that still exist for our movement. These options can be complicated by racial realities but are not fatally compromised by them.
Preston’s Census figures overall are quite similar to Oldham’s: 66% White British – though Preston’s Asians define themselves as 13% Indian, 5% Pakistani, and only 0.5% Bangladeshi.
The Ribbleton ward of Preston City Council, which our editor has contested several times, is still 74.5% White British. Things got complicated (as explained at the time in H&D) during the 2021 Lancashire County Council elections, where the relevant county council division combined Ribbleton with Frenchwood & Fishwick, which is only 37% White British, and about half of which is an Asian ghetto.
So Mark achieved one of the best nationalist results in England at city council level, but the simultaneous county council result was never going to be as strong.
In these boroughs – Oldham, Blackburn with Darwen, and Preston – electoral campaigning requires local knowledge. Often leafletting literally stops at a certain point where the ethnic make-up of a street visibly changes.
But the 2021 Census doesn’t really change any of this electoral reality.
As Cassius tells Brutus in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar: The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, But in ourselves, that we are underlings.
The fault in ourselves as nationalists twenty years ago was that most of the movement placed its faith in a charlatan, Nick Griffin, who destroyed any hope that the BNP had of building effective branches in the racial battlegrounds of northern England.
In the 2020s nationalists ought to be recovering from the self-inflicted damage of the Griffin era, but instead much of the movement has succumbed to a cult mentality that induces pessimism, and divides us from the vast majority of potential sympathisers.
A fatal attraction to crank conspiracy theories – and latterly adherence to the Moscow despot Putin and the Asiatic mysticism of Aleksandr Dugin – risks discrediting UK nationalism for a generation.
The UK Census results ought to sober up our deluded movement. It’s not too late, but within the next decade or two we must build a credible resistance and a White political renaissance. Scrap the cultism, build a serious movement, and start to win.
Will the real Nick Griffin please stand up?
You might think that someone from Labour, the Tories or Lib Dems would win the title “grossest hypocritical crook in British politics” – yet this week’s winner is yet again Nick Griffin, former chairman of the BNP.
Less than four months ago, Griffin was taking every opportunity to sneer at the 96-year-old Queen Elizabeth II and her family.
While there is room for a serious debate as to how far the Royal Family shares responsibility for the disastrous trajectory of British politics during the 20th century – especially during the reigns of Elizabeth II and her father George VI – Griffin was characteristically avoiding serious debate and engaging in cheap shots, with implications of weird conspiracy theory.
That’s either because he believes this sort of crass conspiracism, or because he believes that most ‘nationalist’ readers and potential donors have given up on serious politics and are now part of an easily exploited, defeatist cult.
On May 31st Griffin tweeted images of the then Queen and her son (now King Charles III) with two notorious paedophiles – Rolf Harris and Jimmy Savile. Outside the ranks of paranoid loons, no-one believes that the Queen or the future King were aware of or party to these crimes. But Griffin doesn’t care about historical or political truth, he only cares about impressing credulous donors, and he believes (rightly or wrongly) that many of his readers are dupes who can easily be sold this sort of tale.
In another tweet on May 28th, Griffin made a fairer point about the deleterious transformation of Britain during the Queen’s reign, though again with a slight implication that this was part of some weird establishment conspiracy to which the Queen was herself party.
So now that the Queen’s death is the main news headline worldwide, does Griffin take the opportunity to repeat his earlier slurs? Does he even – for once in his life – make a serious point about British politics and the monarchy’s present and historical role?
No, Nick being Nick, he can’t resist the opportunity for yet another hypocritical somersault. He can see a bandwagon, and he attempts to jump on it. Less than four months ago Griffin attacked the Queen as “Elizabeth the Disastrous” and a friend of paedophiles – implicitly part of sinister establishment conspiracies.
Now in Griffin’s latest tweet she is “the rock on which modern Britain was built”. And the privately atheist Nick also indulges in the pseudo-Christian flummery that he has recently embraced as part of his ‘Templar’ scam. The man truly has no shame.
The nauseating hypocrite Nick Griffin was a disaster for British nationalism. Our movement is only now beginning to escape from the wreck he created.
