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.

Former BNP councillor Barry Birks dies aged 83

Barry Birks, who has died aged 83, was among the brave band of patriots who fought back against the colonisation of their country. Barry was Burnley born and bred, he left school aged 16 in 1955 and joined the armed forces, serving in the Royal Marines.

After being demobbed he went into the building industry and was self-employed for most of his working life.

Barry was a lifelong patriot. He joined the Burnley branch of the BNP in 2001 after the general election, having seen the branch featured on BBC television news following the 11.3% vote for parliamentary candidate Steve Smith.

Barry was a keen activist despite being approaching his 63rd birthday when first joining the party, and he did more than his fair share of leafleting. Barry also got stuck in when encountering hostile lefties on his many leafleting expeditions, no doubt calling upon his experiences as a Royal Marine!

Barry was elected a BNP councillor for Whittlefield with Ightenhill ward in 2003 and served until 2006, contributing frequently in council chamber discussions and standing up for the good people of Burnley.

After the BNP Barry joined Steve Smith in the England First Party. He looked after the EFP’s printing, with a large photocopier based at his house in Cliviger.

His wife Maureen became the EFP treasurer.

Barry will be sorely missed by his many friends, as well as by his widow Maureen, children and grandchildren.

H&D thanks Steven Smith, former Burnley BNP branch organiser and former chairman EFP, for this obituary notice.

Post-Brexit civic nationalists face High Noon in Yorkshire and Devon by-elections

Nominations closed this afternoon for two parliamentary by-elections to be held on 23rd June in the West Yorkshire constituency of Wakefield and the Devon constituency of Tiverton & Honiton.

Each of these by-elections follows scandals that disgraced the previous Conservative MP. In Wakefield a homosexual Muslim Conservative – overseas readers might think we are making this up but it’s absolutely true – resigned after being convicted for sexually assaulting a teenage boy. He has since been imprisoned.

In Tiverton & Honiton, the local Conservative MP resigned after he admitted viewing pornography on his phone while at work in the chamber of the House of Commons. Readers will appreciate that parliamentary proceedings can be boring, but this was probably not the best way to relieve the tedium.

Each by-election has attracted a range of civic nationalist, populist and/or anti-Islam candidates.

In Wakefield voters can choose between:
Ashlea Simon of Britain First, an anti-Islamist party backed by former BNP official Paul Golding – as reported in the current edition of H&D, Miss Simon achieved the best nationalist vote at the recent local council elections, polling 21.6% in Walkden North, Salford;

Jayda Fransen, Mr Golding’s former partner both in Britain First and in private life, who is now based in Northern Ireland where she works for Christian businessman Jim Dowson and his political frontman Nick Griffin – they call their outfit the British Freedom Party but it is not in fact a registered political party, so Ms Fransen is listed as Independent on the ballot paper;

Chris Walsh, a Wakefield gym owner and the most local of the civic nationalist candidates, representing the Reform UK party backed by former Brexit Party and UKIP leader Nigel Farage;

Therese Hirst, a frequent candidate in Yorkshire elections for the English Democrats, a party led by Essex solicitor Robin Tilbrook which campaigns for an English Parliament – Ms Hirst (a Theology graduate of Durham University) finished runner-up at the Batley & Spen parliamentary by-election in 2016, polling 4.8%;

Jordan Gaskell, who at the age of 19 received UKIP’s best vote at the recent local government elections: 10.4% in Hindley ward, Wigan – like Ashlea Simon he has what might prove a big disadvantage of coming from the wrong side of the Pennines, though unlike Jayda Fransen he is at least based in England.

Other anti-establishment parties contesting Wakefield include the CoVID-sceptic ‘Freedom Alliance’, the Christian Peoples Alliance, the Yorkshire Party, and the left-populist Northern Independence Party.

Wakefield’s Conservatives have (perhaps surprisingly) selected another Asian candidate. There is also an Asian independent standing, as well as the ‘Monster Raving Loony Party’, and the usual Labour, Liberal Democrat and Green parties.

The by-election is almost certain to be won either by Labour or the Conservatives, but an unusually poor or good result might either finish off one of the crowded field of nationalist or semi-nationalist parties, or give one of them the boost required to raise their profile.

At present none of these parties has anything like the profile achieved by the National Front in the 1970s, the BNP in the 1990s and 2000s, or UKIP and the Brexit Party in the 2010s.

Tiverton & Honiton in contrast to Wakefield is almost certain to be a battle between the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats.

Here there is a slightly different range of civic nationalist candidates:
Frankie Rufolo is Exeter organiser of the For Britain Movement, the anti-Islamist party founded by former UKIP leadership candidate Anne-Marie Waters. Mr Rufolo has stood several times in Exeter City Council elections, most recently polling 7.7%.
Andy Foan, a former Royal Navy and RAF pilot, is standing for Reform UK.
Ben Walker, also a Royal Navy veteran, is standing for UKIP, for whom he was once a councillor in South Gloucestershire. In 2019 he was fined more than £11,000 for breaking building regulations.
Jordan Donoghue-Morgan is standing for the Heritage Party, which has absolutely no connection to H&D and is a splinter from UKIP.

Since UKIP were runners-up with 16.5% in this constituency in 2015, there is a fairly substantial civic nationalist or populist right-wing vote to share between these candidates, especially given the Conservative Party’s recent problems.

As in Wakefield, an especially good or bad result for any of the above four candidates could propel their party either into significance or into extinction.

Other candidates in Tiverton & Honiton are the usual ‘big four’: Conservative, Liberal Democrat, Labour and Green.

Neither of the two fastest-growing nationalist organisations in Britain is contesting either of these by-elections. Patriotic Alternative is not yet a registered political party so cannot yet appear on ballot papers. The British Democratic Party has decided (probably wisely) not to enter a crowded field that is likely to turn into a media circus.

Nationalist results at 2022 local elections

Votes have been counted across most of the UK in local council elections, as well as crucial contests for the Northern Ireland Assembly.

As previously explained in H&D, there were much reduced numbers of candidates this year from the UK’s various racial and civic nationalist parties. The once-mighty BNP now seems totally defunct, having no candidates anywhere in the country and no longer even a functioning website.

By far the best result so far was achieved by Ashlea Simon of Britain First, who finished runner-up in Walkden North, Salford with 508 votes (21.6%). H&D has been very critical of Britain First’s leader Paul Golding on both ideological and personal grounds, but we have to admit this is a very good result and a credit to Ms Simon and her campaign team.

The other nationalist party making progress this year is the British Democrats, and even they only had four candidates nationwide. Lawrence Rustem achieved 117 votes (13.7%) in Shepway South ward, Maidstone. Last year Mr Rustem polled 25 votes (2.6%) in the same ward as a For Britain candidate.

British Democrat leader Dr Jim Lewthwaite finished third of six candidates in Wyke ward, Bradford, with 214 votes (7.1%), slightly up from 6.2% in the same ward last year.

Among other Brit Dem candidates, Chris Bateman polled 100 votes (4.6%) in Laindon Park, Basildon. This was the first ever British Democrat campaign in Basildon. Similarly breaking new ground for the Brit Dems was former BNP candidate Michael Jones who polled 253 votes (5.7%) in East Wickham ward, Bexley.

By contrast the For Britain Movement seems to be going backwards: its leader Anne-Marie Waters was heavily defeated in De Bruce ward, Hartlepool. Click here for our analysis of that result.

What had been For Britain’s strongest branch in Epping Forest was marking time this year with token campaigns. Eddy Butler polled just 11 votes (1.3%) in Loughton Alderton, and former BNP councillor Pat Richardson 16 votes (2.0%) in Loughton Broadway.

Former BNP activist Gary Bergin polled 57 votes (1.7%) as For Britain candidate in Claughton ward, Wirral, down from 1.9% last year, while in nearby Shevington ward, Knowsley, Christine Dillon managed only 18 votes (1.0%). One of the party’s few substantial branches is Exeter, where organiser Frankie Rufolo polled 192 votes (7.7%) in Exwick ward. Mr Rufolo’s Exeter colleagues fared a lot worse: Eric Bransden polling 35 votes (1.2%) in Topsham ward, and Chris Stone 25 votes (0.9%) in St Thomas.

Among the other early results was Langley Mill & Aldercar, Amber Valley, where the National Front’s Tim Knowles polled 28 votes (2.6%), a fraction down from 2.7% in 2018. Another veteran NF candidate Chris Jackson (once North West regional organiser for the BNP) yet again contested his home ward of Todmorden, Calderdale, polling 101 votes (3.1%), up from 2.3% last year.

On the civic wing of nationalism, Reform UK – the main faction of the old UKIP, backed by Nigel Farage and led by Richard Tice – is fading badly. In Chipping Ongar, Greensted and Marden Ash ward, Epping Forest, Reform UK’s Peter Bell finished bottom of the poll with 26 votes (2.7%), behind Robin Tilbrook of the English Democrats with 72 votes (7.5%).

Other English Democrat results included 8.3% for Maxine Spencer in Dearne North, Barnsley and 5.5% for her neighbour Janus Polenceusz in Dearne South.

Reform UK seems now to have just one strong branch – Derby, where they held on to the two council seats they were defending – plus one semi-strong branch, Bolton, where as in Derby they had a full slate of candidates, three of whom managed above 10%. In the rest of the country the party barely exists.

The remaining fragment of UKIP – which was the country’s largest party at the 2014 European Parliamentary elections – had only seventeen candidates for English councils plus eleven candidates for Scottish councils. Only Jordan Gaskell in Hindley ward, Wigan with 10.4% achieved a remotely credible vote.

Two UKIP splinter groups still just about function. The Heritage Party, led by half-Jamaican former London Assembly member David Kurten, had fourteen English council candidates and one Welsh, plus one candidate for the Northern Ireland Assembly. Their best vote was 7.9% for Nick Smith in Cippenham Green ward, Slough, while most others polled tiny votes. An even smaller UKIP splinter is the Alliance for Democracy and Freedom, the best of whose five English council results was 7.3% for Phillip Moulson in South ward, NE Lincolnshire.

Gary Butler – who has contested elections during the past twelve years for the National Front, BNP and English Democrats – this year polled 49 votes (3.3%) as an Independent in Heath ward, Maidstone. His wife Melanie Butler polled 94 votes (5.8%) in Shepway North, Maidstone.

Graham Williamson – a leading activist in the National Front during the 1980s – has long since abandoned racial nationalism in favour of ‘community politics’. He was easily re-elected in South Hornchurch ward, Havering, for his ‘Rainham Independent Residents Association’.

Click here to see full breakdown of nationalist / UKIP type candidates and their results.

A party on its deathbed: no BNP candidates in this year’s elections

See also updated list of candidates

Regular H&D readers will know that our editor and assistant editor were once leading activists in the British National Party. Twenty years ago our editor raised money for Nick Griffin (then party leader) and paid for the Griffin family’s holiday in the USA.

Unfortunately Griffin betrayed us all and destroyed the party, leaving a political wreck to be steered round hopelessly by his successor Adam Walker and his crooked treasurer Clive Jefferson.

The BNP now only exists to obtain donations and legacies for the benefit of its leaders, not for any sort of serious politics: and now the slow death of the party has been confirmed by its failure to field a single candidate anywhere in the UK at this year’s local council elections.

Other nationalist parties are at least making an effort, devoting their far more modest financial resources to actual politics rather than to their leaders’ personal benefit.

The National Front has two candidates this year, Chris Jackson in Calderdale and Tim Knowles in Amber Valley.

H&D expects Dr Jim Lewthwaite, leader of the British Democrats, again to run the most effective nationalist campaign, standing again in Wyke ward, Bradford. This year he has three fellow British Democrat candidates, all in the south of England and all ex-BNP: Michael Jones in Bexley, Chris Bateman in Basildon, and former councillor Lawrence Rustem in Maidstone.

Eddy Butler who masterminded the BNP’s first ever election victory in East London in 1993, is now in the For Britain Movement, a populist anti-immigration party whose leader Anne Marie Waters (a former UKIP leadership candidate) is sincerely ‘anti-racist’ but many of whose candidates and activists are ex-BNP, including its only elected councillor Julian Leppert.

Ms Waters will make a second attempt to win De Bruce ward, Hartlepool, after her near-miss last year, while Eddy Butler and former BNP councillor Patricia Richardson are contesting wards in Epping Forest. There are a total of 14 For Britain candidates nationwide.

Paul Golding, who twenty years ago was one of Nick Griffin’s young favourites, had promised fifty candidates or more from his anti-Muslim party Britain First, newly re-registered with the Electoral Commission, but has delivered only three. One of these is Golding’s girlfriend Ashlea Simon, standing in Salford; while another is ex-BNP candidate Nicholas Scanlon in Greenwich.

Robin Tilbrook’s English Democrats, at the opposite end of the spectrum from Paul Golding in terms of respectability but very much a ‘civic nationalist’ party, have five candidates including Mr Tilbrook himself in Epping Forest and Steve Morris in Bury, each of whom have been doggedly contesting the same wards for several years.

The only remaining unresolved controversy about Brexit is how it will affect the Union with Northern Ireland. We shall be looking at Ulster politics soon in another article. On the mainland it seems that the various pro-Brexit parties are steadily declining. The largest of them is Reform UK who have 123 candidates this year, and who are contesting every seat in two council areas: Bolton and Derby.

UKIP is now almost dead but has managed to find 28 candidates, while the Heritage Party (no connection to H&D!) led by half-Jamaican former UKIP leadership candidate David Kurten has 15 candidates.

H&D will have full reports on the local election campaign and analysis of the results in Issue 108 of our magazine which will be published the week after polling day in May.

Note: The statistics in this article and the accompanying candidate list have been obtained from many hours of research on local council websites across the UK during the past two days. Inevitably there is the possibility of error either by ourselves or by council returning officers. H&D will continually update and correct all facts relating to this year’s elections and this site will continue to be the most accurate and impartial source for electoral news regarding British nationalist parties across the ideological spectrum.

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