Tories abandon the ‘Red Wall’
This week’s government reshuffle is far more important than the usual parliamentary manoeuvres. In effect it signals the end of the Conservative Party’s attempt to rebrand itself as the voice of White workers.
After British voters backed Brexit in 2016, the governing party’s first reaction was to abandon its experiment with extreme social liberalism. Under Prime Minister David Cameron (Tory leader from 2005-2016) and his right-hand man George Osborne, the Tories combined economic austerity with an unprecedented and overt friendliness towards racial and sexual minorities. They sought in effect to become the natural home of black transsexual stockbrokers, and they were surprised when in the Brexit referendum, White working class voters refused to follow their lead.
This was scrapped by Cameron’s replacement in 2016, Theresa May, who was instinctively a traditional Tory Anglican, though with much of the woolly-mindedness that this implies.
Mrs May had opposed Brexit, and she tried unsuccessfully to implement a Brexit-lite, thus losing support on both sides of the argument. Moreover, as her staff soon discovered, she had a deep-rooted personal detestation for the louche style of the Cameron-Osborne regime. She loathed their history of drug-taking, their arrogant sense of public-school entitlement, and their contempt for ordinary people.
Mrs May’s tragedy was that while many of her instincts were “right-wing”, she also had many of the hang-ups of her generation: she sought to be both traditionally English and genuinely “anti-racist”. And needless to say she is utterly devoted to Zionism (in stark contrast to an earlier generation of traditional Tories, even in the “moderate” faction, such as Lord Carrington and Sir Ian Gilmour).
These contradictions eventually destroyed Mrs May’s government, and it was under her successor Boris Johnson that the Cameron approach was utterly scrapped. Instead of economic austerity, Johnson promised that Brexit would bring a totally new Conservative policy of “levelling-up”, i.e. investment in those impoverished areas of the North and Midlands that had swung the referendum in his favour.
And combined with this policy reversal, Johnson and his allies made noises (at least) indicating a new social conservatism, especially as regards immigration and related issues such as crime and housing.
In December 2019 this transformation of the Tories into a quasi-nationalist party produced a landslide election victory. Johnson’s party made historic inroads into previously safe Labour constituencies, breaking down what journalists had dubbed the “Red Wall”.
Most importantly, where Mrs May had equivocated, Johnson delivered what seemed to most voters to be an acceptable form of Brexit (with the tragic exception of a weak and treacherous policy on the Northern Ireland border question).
Even after the various scandals that destroyed Johnson’s government, he seems to have maintained a level of popularity in these “Red Wall” areas that has eluded his successors. In 2002 the Tories lurched towards a very different “right-wing” approach on economics, adopting American-style policies that would have had a disastrous effect on working-class voters, during the short-lived Truss premiership.
And then they opted for a Prime Minister straight out of the Goldman Sachs training manual. Rishi Sunak, the son of Indian immigrants who is married to the daughter of one of India’s wealthiest men, tried unconvincingly to be the voice of both multiracial plutocrats and indigenous proletarians. He has been an electoral failure since his first day in office.
As nemesis approached (with a General Election due by January 2025 at the absolute latest) Sunak attempted the “dog whistle” politics of “culture wars” – weird though this always seemed, when three of the four most senior posts in his government have been held by non-Whites.
One of those weird non-White “nationalists” was the Home Secretary, Suella Braverman, who provoked the current crisis by taking an extreme line against pro-Palestinian demonstrators. So extreme, in fact, that it brought the Home Secretary into conflict with the Metropolitan Police.
No doubt part of Braverman’s motive for picking this fight is that (though herself the daughter of ethnic Indian immigrants) she is married to a Jewish businessman. But another motive is surely that Braverman is seeking to put herself in pole position as the “right wing” candidate for the Conservative Party leadership, after Sunak’s inevitable defeat in about a year’s time.
And how did Sunak respond to this challenge? On Monday morning he sacked Braverman, and after moving James Cleverly (another son of immigrants, in his case Africans) to the Home Office, made the extraordinary decision to bring back former Prime Minister David Cameron as Foreign Secretary.
Cameron left active politics in 2016 immediately following his defeat over Brexit. Like Wagner’s Flying Dutchman, he has returned after a seven-year absence.
This lurch into the past represents the Conservative Party’s abandonment of Johnson’s “Red Wall” strategy. Sunak’s Tories will now be openly focused on retaining their traditional affluent supporters, and regaining those who deserted them over Brexit. That will inevitably mean scrapping even a pretence of sharing the concerns of the White working-class.
A couple of careerist “right-wingers” (Esther McVey and Dame Andrea Leadsom) have returned to the lower ranks of government, in a token effort by Sunak to appease the “right”.
But the truth is that this is a recapture of the Tory Party by the Goldman Sachs brigade – the people with whom Sunak has always been most at home.
For real British nationalists, this begins a period of historic opportunity. As regular H&D readers will know, our movement is in a shambolic state. The British Democrats are the only electorally-focused representatives of traditional British nationalism, and they only function in a few areas of the country.
During the coming weeks and months, H&D will examine the strategies that British nationalists and our European counterparts are adopting in response to the present crisis.
Tory slump continues: civic nationalists still struggling for relevance
Yesterday’s parliamentary by-elections showed Rishi Sunak’s Conservative government heading for a 1997-style landslide defeat. Despite this Tory collapse, civic nationalist parties are nowhere near the level of support that they enjoyed in the pre-Brexit era.
Each of the by-elections was in a very White constituency, so Labour’s victories owed nothing to ethnic minority support. Mid Bedfordshire is a very affluent collection of villages and small towns, and has never previously elected a Labour MP. Tamworth is more mixed socially (though not racially), with far more working-class voters, and was strongly pro-Brexit. Under its earlier name SE Staffordshire, but with similar boundaries, it fell to Labour at a by-election in 1996 and in the Blair landslide a year later, but at other times has been solidly Tory.
Apart from the Tories, the biggest losers were the United Kingdom Independence Party. UKIP polled 18.5% in Tamworth at the pre-Brexit general election in 2015, but yesterday UKIP candidate Robert Bilcliff managed only 1.7%.
The Heritage Party – a UKIP splinter group that in recent years has specialised in peddling conspiracy theories and anti-vaccination campaigns – had an even more embarrassing result in Mid Bedfordshire, where Heritage candidate Alberto Thomas polled only 0.2%. Just slightly ahead of Mr Thomas with 0.3% was Antonio Vitiello for the English Democrats (a party that has just reached an electoral pact with UKIP).
After these results there are bound to be serious questions as to whether UKIP, the Heritage Party or the English Democrats have any future in electoral politics. The EDs do at least have a rationale for continued existence, as they have the distinctive policy of campaigning for an English Parliament.
The much better-funded Reform UK again proved itself to be (by far) the strongest of the civic nationalist parties, and in Tamworth their candidate Ian Cooper managed to save his deposit, the first Reform UK candidate to achieve this since party leader Richard Tice almost two years ago in Old Bexley & Sidcup.
Mr Cooper polled 5.4% and finished in third place, at last breaking his party’s miserable run of twelve lost deposits.
But it’s important to recognise the following factors:
- Tamworth was a very strongly pro-Brexit constituency;
- The circumstances of this by-election, caused by the resignation of a Tory MP who was found to have made repeated homosexual assaults while drunk, were obviously ideal for a right-of-centre, ‘protest vote’ party.
- The Conservative vote collapsed, but lifelong Tories chose to stay at home and were not inspired by Reform UK’s lukewarm civic nationalism.
- A significant number of voters would have been confused by the Reform UK candidate having the same surname as the Tory candidate – previous research has shown that this type of confusion is always a factor (though only a minor one) when there are two candidates on the ballot paper with the same surname.
It’s not unduly cynical to point out that in each of yesterday’s by-elections, Reform UK just happened to select candidates who had the same name as one of the rival candidates from a major party. In Mid Bedfordshire, Reform UK’s Dave Holland lost his deposit but managed 3.6%, no doubt helped slightly by the non-coincidence that the Liberal Democrat candidate was named Emma Holland-Lindsay.
It’s a shame that Reform UK is so bereft of serious policies and serious ideological inspiration that it resorts to these shabby tricks, but even with the benefit of such ploys it’s becoming obvious that Richard Tice’s party is on the road to nowhere. Reform UK is at most a minor irritant costing the Tories a few hundred votes and will perhaps hand a few extra seats to Labour as Keir Starmer heads for Downing Street next year, but the party has nothing more to offer.
One much smaller party will be reasonably satisfied with their result. Britain First took a big gamble in choosing to stand in Tamworth where their candidate – deputy party leader Ashlea Simon – has no local connections. However, Ms Simon and party leader Paul Golding perceived that Tamworth is strongly pro-Brexit and felt that especially the White working-class section of its electorate might prove receptive to Britain First’s message.
After carrying out a serious and energetic campaign in Tamworth, Ms Simon polled 2.3% and finished in fourth place (ahead of the Greens and Liberal Democrats).
H&D is not especially sympathetic to Britain First’s brand of civic nationalism, with its intense focus on hostility to Islam and its insistence on multi-racialism. But we can see that while this is far from an outstanding result, it is much better than the three previous large scale BF campaigns, at the Rochester & Strood and Wakefield by-elections, and the 2016 London mayoral election.
In short, this was not a great result for Ms Simon, but certainly not a disaster – bearing in mind that the party has far less resources than Reform UK and does not enjoy the regular hype on GB News that is still given to Tice’s party.
With the BNP moribund, the NF barely functioning as an electoral party, neither PA nor the Homeland Party yet being registered, and the British Democrats yet to take off as a significant force at the ballot box, Mr Golding and Ms Simon will be regarded by some H&D readers as the next best thing to having a real racial nationalist party.
However, for some of us the lesson of this week’s by-elections is that all forms of civic nationalism are failing – not only failing to offer principled opposition to the zeitgeist, but also failing in their own terms at even the shabbiest and most ‘pragmatic’ level of politics.
The 4.6% polled at yesterday’s Mid Bedfordshire by-election by a local parish councillor standing as an independent parliamentary candidate – and the low turnouts in both constituencies (especially Tamworth) – show the extent of public disillusionment with the mainstream parties. Some form of nationalist party ought to be capable of getting its act together and mobilising this disillusionment, even with only a fraction of the funds that have been wasted on UKIP, Reform UK and various pro-Brexit splinter parties.
Politicised policing in the UK
Home Secretary Suella Braverman – who was being applauded by some racial nationalists only a week ago after a speech about immigration – has wasted no time in seeking to politicise the response of UK police officers to the developing war in Palestine.
Braverman is the daughter of Indian immigrants who moved to Britain during the 1960s. She is married to a Jewish businessman, Rael Braverman.
And she has obvious ambitions to succeed her fellow Indian Rishi Sunak as the UK’s Prime Minister.
Today Braverman abandoned any pretence that her party is interested in a just and lasting Middle East peace settlement.
Writing to Chief Constables across England and Wales, Braverman reminded them that support for Hamas is a criminal offence under the Terrorism Act, which means that even wearing certain symbols can lead to a jail sentence in the UK. (See Saturday’s H&D article written within hours of Hamas breaching Israeli security.)
But she went further. In a blatant attempt to silence political debate, Braverman now seeks to criminalise one of the slogans most widely heard on pro-Palestinian demonstrations. She told Chief Constables:
“It is not just explicit pro-Hamas symbols and chants that are cause for concern. I would encourage police to consider whether chants such as ‘From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free’ should be understood as an expression of a violent desire to see Israel erased from the world, and whether its use in certain contexts may amount to a racially aggravated section 5 public order offence.”
Braverman even suggests that displaying a Palestinian flag at a demonstration should in some circumstances be regarded as a criminal offence.
Perhaps most significantly, the Home Secretary used this letter to suggest to Chief Constables that (for the first time in the UK) possession of a swastika symbol should be treated as a criminal offence, in the context of a pro-Palestinian demonstration.
In most cases, H&D readers would probably deprecate the use of swastikas at such events, as they are almost always used by leftwing anti-Zionists in the context of suggesting an equivalence between National Socialism and Zionism. Nevertheless, the Home Secretary’s suggestion – that simple possession of a swastika symbol should be a criminal offence – is a dangerous development and one which should be resisted by all legal means.
Our readers will not be surprised to see that Braverman highlighted the “close collaboration” between English and Welsh police forces and the ultra-Zionist lobby group Community Security Trust (CST).
CST grew out of the violent anti-fascist 62 Group which specialised in physical attacks on British nationalists during the 1960s. CST’s founder Gerald Ronson was in charge of finances for the 62 Group, working alongside its “field commander” Cyril Paskin and its intelligence chief Gerry Gable, who is now the editor and publisher of Searchlight. Gable and two other 62 Group operatives were convicted for an illegal entry into the home of historian David Irving, where they aimed to steal documents.
Paskin, Ronson, and Gable planned many acts of political thuggery. One of the last 62 Group operations was in November 1971, when the 62 Group attacked a conference in a Brighton Hotel organised by the Northern League, an academic racial nationalist group. Paskin and others received suspended prison sentences for affray.
Some years earlier, Gerald Ronson was convicted of a politically motivated assault on a member of Sir Oswald Mosley’s Union Movement.
During the mid-1960s, the 62 Group evolved into a more politically focused group called JACOB, which in turn evolved into CST. The development of JACOB was advised by Monica Medicks, an Israeli intelligence officer who had previously been a member of the anti-British terrorist group Irgun.
Unlike Suella Braverman and the Conservative Party, Heritage and Destiny supports the interests of Britons and Europeans rather than Israelis.
European nationalists have different views on the Middle East. But our movements – and future nationalist governments in Europe – will act in the interests of Europeans and will never prostrate ourselves as the uncritical tools of international Zionist lobbies. Especially not lobbies with a long record of anti-European, anti-nationalist violence.
Both Braverman and her political opponent Jeremy Corbyn are playing games with the issues of “racism” and “anti-semitism”. Corbyn persistently lies about the historical events of Cable Street in 1936 (where Jews and Communists fought London police in an effort to obstruct a march by Mosley’s supporters), and as we recently reported, he took the extraordinary step of writing to Braverman to pressure the Home Secretary into banning our European correspondent Isabel Peralta from entering the UK.
And now we see Braverman herself seeking to criminalise anti-Zionism and extend the UK’s criminal law into other areas of previously legitimate political debate.
H&D will of course try to stay within the law at all times. But Braverman is playing a dangerous game: her present trajectory is likely to force a confrontation in which not only British nationalists, but people of various political persuasions critical of Israel are dragged into court. If this happens, she can expect to be fought at every level, from the streets of Britain to the European Courts.
Will Labour save the Union?!?
A few minutes ago Labour won a huge victory in the Rutherglen & Hamilton West parliamentary by-election, caused by a successful recall petition against the disgraced SNP MP Margaret Ferrier, who had breached pandemic regulations.
This is a constituency on the outskirts of Glasgow, and was one of many that swung heavily to the SNP in 2015. Labour briefly took it back with a tiny majority in 2017, before losing again to the SNP in 2019.
Given the circumstances of the previous MP’s departure, no-one was surprised by Labour’s win, but what was remarkable was its scale: a swing of more than 20%, with Labour taking 58.6% of the vote (up from 34.5% four years ago).
With the collapse in the Conservative Party’s vote – losing their deposit on only 3.9% after polling 15% here in 2019 – it’s perhaps surprising that Reform UK made no impact at all, taking only 1.3% (almost identical to the UKIP vote in 2019). This was the second bad result in 24 hours for Reform UK: they managed only 6.3% in a local council by-election in Tamworth, where their candidate is also standing in the forthcoming Tamworth parliamentary by-election and there has been intense activity in recent weeks promoting him. UKIP also fielded their parliamentary candidate in this local Tamworth by-election and polled only 1.6%.
Back in Rutherglen, Niall Fraser from the Scottish Family Party fought an energetic campaign, opposing the absurd wokeness of the SNP and Labour on gender issues, but took only 319 votes (1.0%).
Perhaps the most significant aspect of this by-election result is that it is yet another signal of the end of SNP hegemony. Until the last year or two, many H&D readers might have been excused for being pessimistic about the future of the Union. But the SNP’s many crises look as though they might prove terminal for the cause of Scottish ‘independence’.
Another hopeful sign this week was a statement by Labour’s leader Sir Keir Starmer that he could not envisage circumstances where he would call a referendum in Northern Ireland on the future of the Union.
Of course H&D will continue to oppose Starmer and his party on almost all of their policies, and we can expect that (like the Tories) Labour will pursue policies that betray Ulster by stealth.
But that doesn’t stop us welcoming the total defeat of Jeremy Corbyn and his gang of IRA sympathisers, who had they somehow entered Downing Street would have betrayed Ulster to the IRA as well as abandoning our fellow Europeans to Vladimir Putin’s horde of barbarians.
The SNP are a less gruesome band of traitors, but their total defeat is again something to celebrate. One small step towards the renewal of the United Kingdom, which will of course also require the defeat of the other old gang parties!
Sam Swerling 1939-2023
H&D learned with great sadness of the death of one of our oldest regular readers, retired law lecturer and former Westminster city councillor Sam Swerling, yesterday at the age of 83.
In an era when Conservatives have been among the worst traitors in our political life, Sam Swerling was a rare example of fearless loyalty and commitment to patriotic principles: a stout defender of the Union, race and nation.
Nor was he a ‘Little Englander’: Sam had many connections to European nationalists, especially in France.
Educated at Repton and Trinity College, Dublin, Sam Swerling spent most of his career as a partner in a firm of solicitors in the City of London, and as a law lecturer and teacher at City University, London.
Sam became a Conservative Party activist in the late 1950s, and fought his first election campaign in 1959 as Conservative candidate for Newham North-West, in what was then the London County Council.
In February 1974 he was parliamentary candidate for Stalybridge & Hyde (coincidentally close to the home of H&D’s assistant editor, who was only 7 years old at the time and not yet politically active!). Sam polled 16,854 votes (32%). And in 1978 he was elected councillor for the Marylebone ward on Westminster City Council.
In 1965 Sam Swerling joined the Monday Club, which was then becoming the main vehicle for traditional patriotism inside the Conservative Party, and from 1972-1993 he was a member of the Monday Club’s Executive Council, editing several of its publications. Sam was chairman of the Monday Club from 1980-82.
After the Monday Club’s demise, Sam Swerling became an active member of three organisations which sought to carry on the fight for traditional conservatism, in both domestic and foreign policy: the Western Goals Institute, Conservative Democratic Alliance, and Traditional Britain Group.
The last of these is still flourishing, under the leadership of Gregory Lauder-Frost, and Sam was Vice-President of TBG until his death.
In 2017 he published his political memoir Sam Swerling – Nation, Tradition & Liberty, reviewed by Adrian Davies in Issue 82 of H&D.
A tribute to Sam will appear in the next edition of our magazine.
Hindu tribal vote saves Tories in Uxbridge: civic nationalists fail again
On a generally disastrous night for Rishi Sunak’s Conservative Party, the Prime Minister was saved by his fellow Hindus from what would otherwise have been a historic hat-trick of defeats.
Two safe Tory seats were lost on massive swings – the rural West Country constituency Somerton & Frome falling to the Liberal Democrats, and the previously ultra-Tory North Yorkshire constituency of Selby & Ainsty electing a Labour MP.
But Uxbridge & South Ruislip in North West London – which should have been a much easier target for Labour – narrowly stayed Tory with a wafer-thin majority of 495 votes.
With good reason, most of the media will focus on the London Mayor’s unpopular ‘Ulez’ policy – the extension of the Ultra Low Emission Zone that imposes a fee on drivers of the most polluting vehicles. The Conservative campaign in Uxbridge focused almost entirely on this issue, even though in principle Ulez was first agreed by the Conservative London Mayor Boris Johnson in 2015. No doubt the Tories were also helped by their candidate being a local, middle-aged family man; whereas Labour brought in a young homosexual candidate from Camden (a very different part of London). However we should also note that another young homosexual candidate won a historic victory for Labour on the same day in Selby & Ainsty.
But the media will ignore another vital factor. Uxbridge & South Ruislip is 8.6% Hindu (almost five times the national average of 1.8%). Evidence from local elections since Sunak became leader has shown that Hindus have swung heavily to the Tories (evidently for tribal reasons), and many Tories have close ties to the Hindu fundamentalist government of Indian prime minister Narendra Modi. The problem for Sunak and his party is that there are not that many constituencies in the UK where Hindus are a significant electoral force. England is 6.7% Muslim but only 1.8% Hindu.
This week’s by-elections were yet another predictable disaster for civic nationalism. UKIP (now a moribund shadow of the party that won 24 European parliamentary seats and forced David Cameron to promise a Brexit referendum) fought two of the three, and polled joke votes even by their standards. UKIP deputy leader Rebecca Jane took only 61 votes (0.2%) in Uxbridge, and might be wishing she was back in one of her old roles as ‘reality TV’ contestant and Marilyn Monroe impersonator. Peter Richardson in Somerton & Frome fared only slightly better with 0.7%.
By far the biggest name in civic nationalism, actor Laurence Fox, stood in Uxbridge for his Reclaim party which is little more than a one-man band, but well-financed. His 714 votes (2.3%) were an improvement on the 1% taken by his former deputy Martin Daubney in Reclaim’s previous by-election effort (North Shropshire in December 2021), but Fox’s donors must be starting to wonder whether this is the best use of their cash.
The anti-vaccination campaigner Piers Corbyn (brother of former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn) also stood in Uxbridge but polled only 101 votes (0.3%): perhaps even his strongest supporters will now wake up to the fact that there is absolutely no electoral potential in peddling conspiracy theories about the pandemic.
In Somerton & Frome, Reform UK (which is clearly the largest successor party to UKIP on the civic nationalist scene, but equally clearly is failing to make any serious headway) lost yet another deposit, polling 1,303 votes (3.4%).
Similarly in Selby & Ainsty, Reform UK took only 1,332 votes (3.7%), beaten not only by the Greens but by the regionalist Yorkshire Party. Another ex-UKIP splinter party, the Heritage Party (founded by half-Jamaican anti-vaccination campaigner David Kurten) managed just 162 votes (0.5%).
These were the ninth and tenth successive Reform UK lost deposits in parliamentary by-elections: a stark contrast to some national opinion polls and the regular hyping of the party by Nigel Farage and his friends at GB News.
The truth is that the ‘free market’ capitalist ideology that underpins both Reform UK and the Tories offers no solution to the UK’s immigration crisis and related crises in housing and transport policy.
The challenge for any racial nationalist party that gets its act together to fill the UK’s political vacuum will be to link London’s chronic overcrowding to the transport issue. Crude populist gestures against the ‘Ulez’ policy won’t suffice. Nationalists have to reclaim the green agenda as our own, not reject it – but we need to explain that a green agenda means ending the mass immigration, multiculti madness.
July by-elections confirm civic nationalist chaos
Three parliamentary by-elections being held on 20th July confirm the chaotic state of civic nationalism in the post-Brexit era, but also reflect the absence of racial nationalism from the electoral arena.
Selby & Ainsty has thirteen candidates, including two parties that emerged from the wreck of UKIP (Reform UK and Heritage) and the SDP (who nowadays are a pro-Brexit, socially conservative, but economically left-wing party). There are also two independents and two ‘no description’.
Unusually the environmentalist vote is also split, with a Green Party candidate but also someone from the Climate Party, which was founded last year as a conservative green party. They are ‘right-wing’ in the sense of being pro-business and focused on the single issue of fighting climate change, rather than all the other trendy leftist policies that the Green Party now stand for.
But of course neither the Climate Party nor the Green Party recognises that mass immigration and unchecked population growth in the Third World is part of the threat to our planet’s future. Neither of these parties recognises that ecological politics, the organic food movement etc. were pioneered by German national socialists such as the Third Reich’s Minister of Food and Agriculture, Walther Darré, and British fascists such as Henry Williamson and Rolf Gardiner.
(The latter’s son – eminent Bach scholar and conductor Sir John Eliot Gardiner, who as a personal friend of King Charles III conducted some of the music at the recent Coronation – inherited his father’s interest in organic farming but not other aspects of his fascism.)
The Climate Party are also fighting the Uxbridge by-election, where their candidate is the party leader Ed Gemmell who is also a councillor in Buckinghamshire.
In Uxbridge & South Ruislip there are seventeen candidates. The interesting thing is that Reform UK are not contesting this one, and have presumably done a deal with Reclaim’s Laurence Fox – his party’s second parliamentary candidate after a disastrous debut by Fox’s then deputy Martin Daubney, who polled less than 1% at North Shropshire in 2021.
As well as Fox, the Uxbridge ballot paper includes the anti-vaxxer Piers Corbyn (brother of the former Labour leader), and UKIP’s deputy leader Rebecca Jane (aka Rebecca Jane Sutton) who has an eccentric background even by her party’s standards. She was born in Barrowford (near Pendle, Lancashire) and used to live in Burnley, where her jobs included working as a Marilyn Monroe lookalike and running a private detective agency. She has also ‘starred’ in a couple of reality TV series including Big Brother.
There are four independents, two of whom are single-issue campaigners who have changed their names to include the words ‘Anti-Ulez’ and ‘No-Ulez’ (referring to the controversial ‘Ultra Low Emission Zone’ that imposes charges on the most polluting vehicles. This was originally a Boris Johnson policy, approved in theory when he was Mayor, but Sadiq Khan was Mayor by the time it was implemented.
Others on the Uxbridge ballot paper include the SDP, Christian Peoples Alliance (whose candidate is, as usual, an African) and Rejoin EU, as well as the Climate Party mentioned above.
By comparison to the other two 20th July by-elections, Somerton & Frome has a conventional ballot paper with just eight candidates, including Reform UK and UKIP. This is the only one of the three by-elections where Nigel Farage’s new party and his old party are fighting each other.
The Mid Bedfordshire by-election date hasn’t yet been set, but I’d guess will be September or October.
And it seems possible there will be a by-election in Tamworth, because there’s a report due to be published on the homosexual Tory Chris Pincher who had to resign as deputy chief whip after a scandal that helped bring down Boris. Pincher lost the Tory whip in July last year but has remained as an independent MP for the last 12 months while the investigation continued.
The bad news for failing Prime Minister Rishi Sunk is that both Mid Bedfordshire and Tamworth are very safe Tory seats. If his party loses either or both of these, in addition to the pretty certain defeat at Uxbridge, and the fairly likely defeats at Selby & Ainsty and Somerton & Frome, then it’s not impossible the Tories might seek another very late change of leader before next year’s General Election.
And the bad news for H&D readers is that despite the Tory collapse, Reform UK’s continuing failure, and widespread distrust of Labour – there is no sign whatsoever of even a vaguely credible movement party. In 1972 the Uxbridge by-election proved that the National Front was a serious party, and ignited that party’s most successful period during the mid-1970s. More than half a century later, this year’s Uxbridge contest is likely to prove both that civic nationalism and single issue obsessions are electorally bankrupt, and that there is a political vacuum waiting to be filled by any racial nationalist party that can get its act together on a national scale.
Vanity politics: MP defects to ‘Reclaim’ party
This morning we saw a perfect example of this, when the MP for North West Leicestershire, Andrew Bridgen, defected to the Reclaim Party.
Bridgen has been a Tory MP since 2010 but was suspended from the parliamentary Conservative Party in January this year and expelled from the party three months later, after endorsing a series of bizarre conspiracy theories about the CoViD pandemic.
Some readers whose political knowledge depends on a social media echo chamber might be tempted to regard Bridgen as an anti-establishment hero. In fact aspects of his record indicate fairly clearly why Richard Tice and Reform UK (the main civic nationalist party) chose not to welcome him, despite the fact this would have given them an MP, and why he ended up joining a tiny vanity project like Reclaim.
Last year Bridgen was found repeatedly to have broken parliamentary rules on paid lobbying, including failure to declare financial interests. This included payments of £12,000 per year from a company based in Ghana.
Among many other questionable incidents, Bridgen has been involved in a long running financial disputes with his own relatives over his family business, which resulted in a High Court judge stating that the MP had “lied under oath and behaved in an abusive, arrogant and aggressive manner”, was “an unreliable and combative witness who tried to conceal his own misconduct”, and “gave evasive and argumentative answers and tangential speeches that avoided answering the questions”.
Some might think this is the sort of behaviour one should expect from Members of Parliament – but it is tragic that one of the few MPs to have broken with the mainstream should be someone of this sort, and that the defection should have occurred on a fringe, crank issue rather than on one of the many serious issues where the political establishment has betrayed our country.
Reclaim is not even a serious political party. There were over 8,000 local council seats contested at last week’s elections, and Reclaim had precisely zero candidates. It is an online vanity project, not a serious political party. So perhaps it is ideal for Andrew Bridgen.
Reclaim was created during 2020-2021 by the actor Laurence Fox, based on a pro-Brexit party founded during 2019 by Fox’s main donor, billionaire financier Jeremy Hosking.
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.
The legacy of St Patrick – two H&D articles from our archives
H&D wishes all our Irish, Northern Irish and Ulster Scots readers a very happy Saint Patrick’s Day – whichever part of the world you are in.
Editor’s note: The first article – “Saint Patrick the Patron Saint of the USA” – was written several years ago, but the same issues are still being discussed in Loyalist circles today – now mainly on internet forums. So, it was fitting that we republished it (in hard copy in issue #77 of H&D) on St Patrick’s Day 2017.
It was America that spawned the St Patrick’s Day parade, not Ireland, and its origins are both Protestant and British…
As March 17th approaches, the annual debate has reignited on whether Unionism should embrace St Patrick and the day set aside for his commemoration. Over the last five years there has been a slow emergence of Protestant participation on the date, though that has been via the creation of new events rather than involvement in existing ones. This article examines the origin of St Patrick’s Day parades, this new emerging trend, its motivation and where it may possibly lead.
The question ‘where is the biggest St Patrick’s Day parade in Northern Ireland?’ at first glance would appear easily answered. Belfast most would say, with a few probably suggesting the Cathedral City of Armagh or even where he was allegedly laid to rest, Downpatrick. What will surprise many is that the largest parade for the last few years by sheer number of participants has been in the small County Armagh village of Killylea. It is here since 2005 the Cormeen Rising Sons of William Flute Band have held their annual band procession and competition. Last year the Cormeen parade saw 42 bands take part (in comparison to the seven that paraded at the Dublin event), amounting to approximately 1800 band members. Thousands of spectators stood along the route, despite it being a bitterly cold evening.
Cormeen Rising Sons of William chairman Mark Gibson explains that the bands original motivation for the parade came more out of necessity than anything else. “The band season is very busy, and when trying to find a date for our parade it was difficult to define one that didn’t clash with other bands locally.” Some members suggested March 17 as a solution to the problem, but the band was nervous. “We were concerned about how a St Patrick’s Day parade would go down in our community, the parade in Armagh never was very welcoming, but we made a decision to try it and it has been a success.”
From that initial year where thirteen bands took part, the parade is now among the largest in the Province. It’s not only the number of bands participating that has increased, but also the crowds attending to watch, and the event is increasingly becoming a fixture in the calendar for many Unionists. Another band, the Ulster Protestant Boys Flute Coleraine, have started a similar event on the date that too is growing. The ever increasing scale of both processions indicates clearly that there is certainly a willingness within the PUL (Protestant, Unionist, Loyalist) community to be involved in St Patrick’s Day. Where the schisms emerge are with the issues of why and how.
It is generally acknowledged that in the distant past Patrick was not a controversial figure for Protestants in Ireland or beyond. His ‘sainthood’ was never conferred by the Pope and pre-dates the reformation, so he was never seen as being the possession of ‘Rome’. St Patrick was seen as an evangelical Christian who had made personal sacrifice to spread the gospel in Ireland. The anniversary of his death was observed and commemorated by all Protestant denominations to different degrees, with the Church of Ireland in particular very active.
The shift from an anniversary of religious significance towards an ‘Irish’ event however first took place in the United States in 1737. In Boston that year the Irish Charitable Society, made up of Protestant immigrants (some of whom were British Soldiers), held their first meeting and dinner. The purpose was to both honour Patrick in the context of their Protestant faith and to reach out the hand of friendship to other Irish immigrants. The exercise obviously struck a chord and the practise spread, with the first recorded parade in New York in 1766, with again British Soldiers of Irish blood heavily involved. It was America that spawned the St Patrick’s Day parade, not Ireland, and its origins are both Protestant and British.
During that period in history the vast majority of Irish immigrants were Presbyterian, however from 1830 it was Catholic arrivals who were in the ascendancy. With that change began an emphasis towards anti-British sentiment in the demonstrations. In the aftermath of the American Revolutionary War anything portrayed as anti-colonial was well received, with even the many original Protestant immigrant descendants non-antagonistic of this motivation. Many British ‘Loyalists’ had left for Canada, and effectively the descendants of the original Protestant Irish settlers remaining saw themselves as primarily American in identity, with all that was left for their original ‘homeland’ of Ireland simply folk memory and sentimentality.
Mike Cronin, author of A History of St Patrick’s Day, states that whilst this tradition was developing, back in Ireland the first parades didn’t take place until the 1840’s and even then they were organised by Temperance societies. Mike emphasises the lack of public celebration “The only other major events in nineteenth century Ireland was a trooping of the colour ceremony and grand ball held at Dublin Castle.” So even as late as 1911 the largest St Patrick’s Day occasion in Ireland was still rooted in a joint Irish and British expression of identity. Protestant churches and some Orange Lodges throughout the island appear to have held minor functions on the date, but these were very subdued affairs, and essentially even post-partition very little changed. Catholic observance of the day continued to different degrees in different areas, as did the Protestant nod to Patrick.
Right up until the 1960s the primary theme of St Patrick’s Day in both Northern Ireland and the Republic still remained religious observance, with even from 1923 to then public houses and bars in the Republic of Ireland closed by law. A poll conducted in 1968 suggested that 20% of Northern Irish Protestants at this stage still considered themselves Irish. The onset of civil unrest in Northern Ireland coincided however with the importation of the American style to St Patrick’s events in Dublin and elsewhere. Now whilst a violent conflict was being waged in the name of all things Irish, St Patrick’s Day parades were starting to display the features that had developed in the United States. On these parades Irish identity was perceived by Northern Protestants as being defined as aggressively anti-British and anti-Protestant, with the disjointed and casual nature of the parades and the now integral alcohol element alien to PUL parading traditions and customs.
As the IRA campaign escalated, many Protestants simply could not divorce the fact that these celebrations displayed an exclusive form of Irish sentiment whilst a campaign was being waged against them in the name of Ireland. As the years progressed, in Northern Ireland in particular it became apparent that the day was being deliberately used in many instances as an extension of the Irish Republican war against Unionism.
Grand Orange Lodge Director of Services Dr David Hume reiterates the view that in the recent past it has been the nature of the parades and commemorative events that turned Protestants away. “The perception among Unionism is without doubt that Irish Republicanism and Irish Nationalism has used St Patrick’s Day parades as a weapon, effectively using the ‘shield’ of Patrick to express obvious militant anti-British and therefore anti-Unionist sentiment.” David believes that the manner and focus of these events is totally at odds with the purported motivation. “St Patrick’s Day should be used as a day of reflection on the religious significance of Patrick, something far removed from the aggressive and confrontational use of symbolism; and the huge emphasis on alcohol consumption that currently seems to be the case.” David bluntly states that the date isn’t an important one on the ‘Orange’ calendar, but recognises that it does have a place in society.
There remains one annual Orange Order parade related to St Patrick’s Day, which is held each year in Ballymena. One of the participating Lodges is The Cross of St Patrick LOL 688 which was founded in 1967. A lodge spokesperson describes the motivation behind its formation as being “to reclaim the heritage of Saint Patrick” explaining that “Brethren were concerned that Patrick’s heritage was being hijacked by Roman Catholicism and Republicanism.” The lodge’s concerns would appear to have been reflecting the growing sense of alienation the PUL community was feeling regarding St Patricks events.
There is no doubt that this alienation effectively forced many Protestants into an automatically negative position regarding St Patrick’s Day. With the advent of the IRA cessations of violence and the ongoing political process however, it has become apparent that many within Unionism have been able to reflect much more on the meaning of St Patrick’s Day for them. The ending of a violent ‘Irish’ physical campaign has given space to examine the date, with many now realising that it once was a date of relevance that they were forced into denying, and there is a willingness to make it relevant again. Nevertheless this reflection and willingness has not as yet manifested itself into significant participation in civic St Patrick’s Day parades.
With a few exceptions, such as the participation of an unashamedly Loyalist Blood and Thunder band in the 2003 Limerick St Patrick’s Band competition, Unionism still does not feel comfortable taking part in the modern version of a St Patrick’s parade. Concerns still exist regarding the involvement of militant Republicanism in such events along with the aggressive use of flags and symbols, but the problem seems to go much deeper.
Iain Carlisle of the Ulster Scots Community Network has a very straightforward and unambiguous answer regarding Unionist involvement in St Patrick’s Day events. Iain states very clearly “I don’t think there has to be ANY justification given for Protestants or Unionists marking Patrick’s day”, but goes on to say that “there is however a fundamental difference of approach to both Patrick as a person and the means of celebration within the Unionist community”. Iain’s comments would appear to reflect not just a general uncomfortable position with the overtly ‘United Ireland’ underlying St Patrick’s Day theme, but the actual motivation and method of celebration.
All historical examinations of Protestant Irish and their approach and relationship with Patrick indicates that for them he has never truly deviated from having a purely theological relevance. On St Patrick’s Day however the majority of Catholics, Irish Nationalists, Republicans, those of Irish descent and indeed anyone who wants a day out, St Patrick’s significance as a religious icon is purely tokenistic. St Patrick is merely a figurehead for overt Irish nationalism and a holiday. In turn the Unionist tradition of parading has developed from a military perspective and the American style parades are an alien concept, being perceived as being undisciplined and overtly casual.
Whilst new events have arisen, it is obvious that Unionism has no desire to abandon its central belief of Patrick’s religious relevance, and in addition is reluctant to embrace what it sees as an alien approach to parades. Even with the emergence of band parades on the date, they in themselves are a much more disciplined and subdued practise than their counterparts on the day. Whatever the future holds, it is clear that the PUL community is going through an ongoing examination of Patrick and his relevance to them. As journalist Chris Ryder recently pointed out “there will be no going back to the view that St Patrick was a Catholic, and a saint only for Catholics.”
The second article “Enoch Powell’s Suppressed Article Rediscovered”, on St Patrick, was published by us in March 2016 (in hard copy in issue 71 of H&D) it certainly added fuel to the (Loyalist) bonfire!
Enoch Powell’s Suppressed Article (on St Patrick, Ulster and the Scots Irish Identity) Rediscovered – with introduction by Peter Rushton, H&D Assistant Editor
After the Conservatives returned to government under Margaret Thatcher in 1979, Enoch Powell hoped Ulster’s status as an integral part of the United Kingdom would be reaffirmed. Some of the leading figures on Thatcher’s wing of the Conservative Party were Powellites, and until the eve of the 1979 election the Tories’ Northern Ireland spokesman had been Airey Neave – a strong and determined Unionist. Tragically Neave was murdered by a car bomb at the House of Commons in March 1979, and his successors pursued a very different policy: commitment to Ulster’s identity was progressively weakened through the 1980s.
Powell came to believe that the CIA had a hand in Airey Neave’s murder, and it is now established that MI6 and CIA operatives had been pursuing a deal with the IRA since the mid-1970s.
In January 1981 however (still believing that Thatcher’s government would defend the Union) Powell proposed that the Foreign Office should produce articles and booklets for the American public to explain Ulster’s distinct identity. It was agreed that Powell would write a brief article to be published in U.S. newspapers on St Patrick’s Day (17th March 1981) and that a 1965 booklet – Scotch-Irish and Ulster – would be reprinted, both with Foreign Office support.
Although Powell submitted the article and welcomed republication of the pamphlet, both were sidelined: the anti-Ulster faction in Whitehall and Washington triumphed. The article and related official correspondence remained classified until February 2015, and H&D now reveals the story for the first time after I obtained the documents from the National Archives.
If St Patrick has a Member to represent him in Parliament, I must surely be that man. My constituency in the House of Commons is Down South, the southern half of the county of Down, which looks across the Irish Sea beyond the Isle of Man to Cumberland and Galloway. From that southern half there projects a peninsula which the ancient geographers were already calling Dunum, or Down; and Downpatrick, the town which stands at the isthmus of that peninsula, happily combines the name of the place and that of the British missionary with a late Roman surname who we believe brought Christianity from the largest to the second largest of the British Isles.
The peninsula where he landed, baptised his first converts, built his first church and laid his bones to rest has still a palpable individuality. When I drive into it – its traditional name is Lecale – from some other part of my constituency, I am always conscious of crossing a threshold. But the same is just as true of the whole north-eastern part of Ireland to which that peninsula is attached: it is distinct and separate from the rest, as if by a decree of nature. Geographically and geologically it had its own pattern, a mountain ring enclosing an inner central plain, long before man came there at all; and its earliest inhabitants were linked by blood and intercourse with the neighbouring mainland. The passage which St Patrick made was no voyage of exploration: he took a ticket on a two-way traffic route rather like that across the English Channel between Dover and Calais (which in point of fact is somewhat longer).
This north-east part was called “Ulster” centuries before Henry VIII (no friend of St Patrick’s!) used the word to dub one of the four administrative provinces into which he divided his Irish kingdom. Whatever elements, across the centuries, came to Ulster were drawn into its distinct identity. The Norman baron who, with a handful of knights and the king’s permission, rode north from Dublin into Ulster in the 1170s founded an independent principality – the earldom of Ulster, which is today held by the Queen’s cousin, the Duke of Gloucester. Into Ulster flowed settlers from England and Wales as well as from Scotland, long before the Plantation of James I; and the separateness of the province claimed and enveloped them all.
That happened pre-eminently to those Scots who were the major element in the settlement of the forfeited lands at the beginning of the seventeenth century. Research has proved that they by no means displaced the earlier Ulstermen so comprehensively as was intended and is often believed. It is also true that they only represented one, albeit the largest, of a series of contingents earlier and later who returned across the narrow North Channel to the land from which the ancestors of many of them had originally come in remote, even prehistoric times. The great fact, however, is that, like the rest, they became part of Ulster.
The vocabulary of American history has called those people Scotch Irish. The truer name is that by which they liked, and still like, to call themselves – Ulster Scots. For they were indeed, and remain in virtue of many ties, Scots; but above all they were Ulstermen. This therefore was the Ulster, unique from its beginning, which contributed a disproportionate share – including at least ten presidents – to the foundation and to the spirit of the American nation right from the origins of its independence. It is a contribution as distinct from the rest, and as distinctive, as any other, whether Irish, English or Scots.
The modern search for national roots is, I believe, as healthy as it is popular and expanding. It has already brought many Americans, and not only those with demonstrable ancestral ties, to Ulster, to learn on the spot – the only sure way – the truth about its past and its present. Those who come are coming to the place which, of all spots on the globe, is peculiarly and forever St Patrick’s. On his day America is remembered in Ulster, as Ulster ought to be remembered in America.
Editor’s note: J. Enoch Powell (1912-1998) was Ulster Unionist MP for South Down, 1974-87, having earlier been Conservative MP for Wolverhampton South West, 1950-74. His career in Conservative politics ended when he was sacked as the party’s defence spokesman in April 1968, following his famous “Rivers of blood” speech which criticised Britain’s racial transformation, which can be read online here.
