Stretford & Urmston by-election: another episode in the slow death of Faragism
The result of the Stretford & Urmston parliamentary by-election was declared a few minutes ago. Predictably it resulted in a massive majority for Labour, but for H&D readers the more interesting aspect was another shockingly poor result for Reform UK, the latest vehicle for the political ideas of Nigel Farage, who was once among Europe’s most successful populist leaders.
Farage was most famous for his decade as leader of UKIP. He had a year out of office from 2009-2010, but was otherwise leader from 2006 until the Brexit referendum victory of 2016. Having made a huge contribution to the UK voting to leave the EU, Farage returned to electoral politics from 2019-2021 as leader of the Brexit Party, so as to ensure that the political establishment was unable to frustrate the referendum result.
In 2021 the Brexit Party was rebranded as Reform UK and Farage retired in favour of his close political ally Richard Tice, but he has remained a powerful voice in support of the party and has hinted that he might return to the arena at the next general election.
The problem is that Reform UK (despite being hyped recently by academics and journalists) seems to have very little public support and little ideological coherence.
At yesterday’s by-election in Stretford & Urmston (a socially and racially divided constituency west of Manchester), Reform UK’s candidate Paul Swansborough polled only 3.5% (650 votes), an equivalent percentage but far lower numerical vote than the Brexit Party achieved in the same constituency in 2019: 3.5% (1,768 votes).
At its peak in 2015, UKIP polled 5,068 votes (10.9%) here.
This is the sixth successive parliamentary by-election at which Reform UK have lost their deposit, despite in this instance spending lavishly on their campaign and busing in activists from elsewhere in the region.
What makes it far worse is that the Tory vote predictably collapsed at this by-election, but disillusioned Tories stayed at home, unpersuaded by Reform UK even as a protest vote option.
One insuperable problem is that UKIP and the Brexit Party had a clear message that attracted large numbers of otherwise politically diverse voters: i.e. leaving the European Union.
That battle has been won – not even the most diehard pro-European nor the most paranoid Brexiteer believes that the UK will re-enter the EU in the foreseeable future. The issue is now settled, and the issues on which Reform UK is choosing to fight are mostly ones that cannot possibly enthuse the White working class who delivered the Brexit victory.
Reform UK are essentially a post-Thatcherite, right-wing version of the Tories – tax cuts, shrink the state, free market capitalism, ‘Singapore on Thames’.
They talk a good fight about immigration, but their devotion to international capitalism means that at root their ideological commitment is to the very force that drives migration and ‘One Worldism’.
In short, they have nothing to offer to White working-class voters, and unlike the Brexit Party are unable to disguise that fact. Moreover many voters are waking up to the reality that Brexit is failing to deliver the changes that were once expected, especially regarding immigration.
Civic nationalism, Brexitism, Faragism – all these populist forces are now dead or dying. It remains to be seen whether racial nationalism, which unlike Faragism is a coherent programme for national renewal, can revive and unite behind a serious political party. The British Democrats are on the way to achieving that, just as Patriotic Alternative are on the way to creating a broader challenge outside electoral politics, but there is a very long way to go before we can say that racial nationalism in the UK is back on its feet.
Tory party’s ‘coronation’ of a Goldman Sachs Prime Minister
Less than three years after winning a landslide general election majority – gaining many previously safe Labour constituencies in the so-called ‘Red Wall’ of the post-industrial North and Midlands – the Conservative Party is engaged in a wholesale surrender to the globalist greed machine.
This will have dire consequences for the many White working class families who trusted the Tories, and who back in 2016 had voted for Brexit in the naive belief that this would lead to Britain being ruled by and in the interests of the British.
Former Chancellor of the Exchequer Rishi Sunak, an alumnus of Goldman Sachs whose blatant ambition and plotting were primarily responsible for the fall of Boris Johnson earlier this year, is to be ‘crowned’ as Prime Minister in the manner of a Byzantine usurper, without even a vote of Conservative Party members, let alone any mandate from the broader UK electorate.
Sunak – himself of Indian origin and now becoming the UK’s first non-White Prime Minister – is one of the wealthiest MPs in Parliament, married to the daughter of an Indian billionaire. Yet he will soon be lecturing Britons on the need to “tighten our belts”, and imposing cuts to basic services on which British families rely.
This Prime Minister is a man whose wife has “non-domiciled” status – avoiding around £20 million in UK taxes – and who himself for years held permanent resident status in the USA.
H&D readers have known for decades that our country was secretly ruled by alien interests – though as an article soon to be reprinted on this website will argue, these alien interests are not conscious individual minds, but the blind workings of an impersonal global greed machine.
The difference in 2022 is that even the front man for this global greed machine is visibly alien.
Unfit for office: not just Truss but the entire Tory Party
This afternoon – to no one’s surprise – Liz Truss resigned as leader of the Conservative Party. Provided the Tories are able to organise a leadership election within a week (which is what has been promised but might not be delivered) we shall have a new Prime Minister by next Friday.
In our November edition H&D will report on the shambles that has overtaken the Disunited Kingdom and destroyed the Conservative (but no longer Unionist) Party.
What can be said today as an instant verdict on the Truss era?
The simple answer is that the Conservative Party now represents entirely the wrong sort of ‘right-wing’ ideology, and has long since ceased to be ‘conservative’.
Truss was the candidate of the super-rich; the “citizens of nowhere”, as her predecessor Theresa May once put it. While wrapping themselves in the flag and making bold statements about immigration, the truth is that today’s Tories worship only the global capitalist ‘free’ market. It is a supreme irony that Truss and her first choice as Chancellor, Kwasi Kwarteng, were destroyed by the very market forces that they venerate.
Truss’s Tories abandoned traditional conservative values of fiscal rectitude or ‘balancing the books’. Instead they tried to throw money at the already affluent, even at a time when (partly for reasons beyond the government’s control) working families are facing a winter of hardship.
Truss and Kwarteng comprehensively betrayed the White working class voters who backed Brexit in 2016 and elected Tory MPs even in many traditionally Labour ‘Red Wall’ seats in 2019. Truss sacrificed Kwarteng despite his having been her closest political ally, but no amount of dishonourable blame-shifting could save her premiership. Not only Truss but the Tory Party as a whole deserves electoral annihilation, and whoever is elected as her successor, nemesis surely awaits the party at the next general election.
A credible nationalist electoral alternative is badly needed, but H&D readers will understand that we are still some way from having such an alternative. The British Democratic Party is making steady progress, but even its leaders recognise that rebuilding British nationalism will be a slow process and we shall be nowhere near having a credible challenge from the Brit Dems or anyone else if there is a general election within the next few months.
The good news is that progress is being made towards nationalist unity. There is light at the end of the tunnel, and while the Tory implosion is almost certain to produce a Labour government in the near future, only racial nationalists have the answer to Britain’s long-term crisis. There is a long hard road ahead, but there is no reason for defeatism. Our people’s voice will be heard – as Chesterton put it: “we are the people of England; and we have not spoken yet.”
Thursday night update: The Conservative Party has decided this time to impose a requirement of 100 nominations for any candidate even to get onto the first ballot among MPs next week. This has probably destroyed the chances of Suella Braverman and other hopefuls from the so-called Tory ‘right-wing’. If these ‘right-wingers’ are serious about preventing a Rishi Sunak premiership, they will probably have to rally behind former Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who might be in line for a more rapid comeback than even he could have expected.
Tugendhat’s fundraising “blew rivals out of the water”: is he Britain’s next Foreign Secretary?
In recent weeks H&D has been looking closely at Tom Tugendhat, who finished fifth in the contest for leadership of the Conservative Party but is now tipped to be Foreign Secretary or Defence Secretary when Liz Truss becomes Prime Minister next month.
And official records published this morning show that Tugendhat raised more than £123,000 in donations – vastly more than his leadership rivals. (These donations contributed to the rapid rise in his profile, meaning that a man who has never been even a junior minister is now in line for one of the top three posts in the next cabinet.)
Almost as soon as his campaign began, Tugendhat received £25,000 from a company controlled by Sir Mick Davis, a South African born Jewish businessman who for eight years chaired the Jewish Leadership Council, described as “responsible for the strategic imperatives of UK Jewry”. He was knighted in 2015 for “services to Holocaust commemoration and education”.
Together with a fellow tycoon, Sir Mick Davis paid the legal expenses of a Tory MP who made false allegations against the anti-Zionist former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn.
Another £42,000 donation came from a company jointly controlled by Sir Christian Sweeting, a property developer who was charged with a firearms offence in 2001. The firearms charge was later dropped with Mr Sweeting awarded costs, but his bad luck with unfounded suspicions continued later the same year when his premises were searched by Devon & Cornwall police fraud squad.
And hedge fund tycoon Ian Mukherjee (a generous donor to the pro-Remain campaign before the 2016 Brexit referendum) gave Tugendhat £50,000. Mukherjee was a partner and managing director of Goldman Sachs for fifteen years.
Tugendhat’s donations dwarfed those to rival campaigns. For example Rishi Sunak has so far declared only £3,195 in donations (in the form of free office space). Though admittedly Sunak’s personal and family wealth means that he scarcely needs donors.
It’s not yet clear why Tugendhat needed quite such a vast campaign war chest, bearing in mind that his campaign was in theory targeting only 357 fellow MPs, many of whom he would already know personally.
His reported £123,000 in donations worked out at almost £4,000 per vote, but if Britain ends up with its most pro-Zionist Foreign Secretary ever, some of the donors might think their money well spent.
Tugendhat seals Truss victory: will his reward be Defence or Foreign Office?
In this morning’s Times, former Tory leadership candidate Tom Tugendhat delivered the final killer blow to Rishi Sunak’s chances of becoming Prime Minister.
Tugendhat has endorsed Liz Truss – who was already favourite and now seems a virtual certainty to win the support of Conservative Party members. The winner will be announced on September 5th.
The question now being asked around Westminster is whether Truss has promised Tugendhat a top job in exchange for his support. Most educated guesses are that Ben Wallace (presently Defence Secretary) will be promoted to Foreign Secretary, and that Tugendhat (a former military intelligence officer) will succeed Wallace at the Ministry of Defence.
But there remains an outside chance that Tugendhat will be made Foreign Secretary. (This possibility is highlighted by Sky News – see video above.)
Either way, it’s extraordinary progress for a man whose grandfather – as H&D assistant editor Peter Rushton reveals in a detailed exposé at the Real History blog – was repeatedly investigated by MI5 and was a business partner of Israel’s first president and the founder of Israel’s nuclear weapons programme.
Another defeat for London Holocaust Memorial plan – is it time to scrap the scheme?
Vastly expensive plans for a huge Holocaust memorial in London, next to the Houses of Parliament and Westminster Abbey, have suffered another defeat after the Court of Appeal refused to hear the case.
In April this year the High Court blocked the plans, and this week an appeal by the UK Holocaust Memorial Foundation fell at the first hurdle.
Former prime minister David Cameron launched the plan in 2014 by appointing a Holocaust Commission which reported the following year, recommending a prominent new memorial with attached “learning centre”. The plan soon acquired cross-party support and in July 2016 Victoria Tower Gardens – a park adjacent to Parliament – was chosen as the site.
Architects David Adjaye and Ron Arad were chosen for the project. Their initial budget of £50 million has since risen to a current estimate of £102.9 million.
In 2019 Westminster City Council’s planning authority rejected the proposal. The two leading politicians who co-chaired the project – Conservative Lord Pickles and Labour’s Ed Balls – wrote to the council complaining that planning officers were “giving excessive weight to the number of objections lodged on the planning portal”.
These objections lodged with the council included a detailed report by H&D‘s assistant editor Peter Rushton (who now also writes the Real History Blog). His report to Westminster City Council was based on detailed research into the planning history of the original London Holocaust memorial in the 1980s – click here to read.
The late Richard Edmonds recorded a film with Lady Michèle Renouf on the site of the proposed memorial. Click here to view this film.
Government ministers sought to override Westminster Council by appointing a Whitehall inspector who recommended acceptance of the plan. Housing minister Chris Pincher officially approved the scheme in July 2021. (Pincher has since been disgraced after a series of alcohol-fuelled sexual assaults on young men; his downfall led to the recent resignation of Prime Minister Boris Johnson.)
In April this year Mrs Justice Thornton in the High Court ruled that Pincher had acted unlawfully, because Victoria Tower Gardens is protected by a statute dating back to 1900 which specifically prevents it being used as anything other than a garden open to the public.
This week the Court of Appeal ruled that there was no realistic prospect of the High Court judgment being overturned, so it would not hear the case. “There is no real prospect of successfully arguing that the judge’s construction of the 1900 Act was wrong… On the contrary, it was plainly correct.”
The Appeal Court judges rebuked the Holocaust Memorial Foundation for arguing that objectors to the proposal should not have been allowed to raise one of their successful legal points: “It is extremely unattractive for the losing party to argue that his opponent should not have been allowed to introduce a legal argument that turned out to be correct.”
In a typically shameless and arrogant gesture, government minister Paul Scully and Holocaust Educational Trust chief executive Karen Pollock insisted this week that they still support the project, despite it now having been rejected three times – by city council planners, the High Court, and the Court of Appeal.
H&D understands that the only realistic possibility of forcing through the project now would be for the government to introduce legislation (which would have to be passed by both Houses of Parliament) repealing the 1900 law and allowing Victoria Tower Gardens to be used for something other than a park.
If such a law is proposed, we shall use this as an opportunity for a long-overdue debate on the whole principle of whether London should be forced to have a vastly expensive Holocaust memorial. Such a debate must ask the central questions:
What was the ‘Holocaust’?
What did British intelligence and British ministers know (or think they knew) about the ‘Holocaust’ during the 1940s, and what was the factual basis for their knowledge?
What was the relationship between international Jewish organisations and the British war effort, including propaganda and subversive warfare organisations?
If the British taxpayer is expected to pay more than £100 million, and sacrifice a large chunk of the nation’s capital city, to memorialise the ‘Holocaust’, then we have a right to expect answers to these questions.
Tories battle to captain sinking ship
Today the semi-comic, semi-tragic contest for leadership of the once mighty Conservative & Unionist Party was reduced to two candidates, who will make their pitch to Tory members during the coming weeks.
This is the party that has been in government for 47 of the 77 years since the Second World War, but viewers cringed at the poor quality of televised “debates” between the contenders – in an election that is only happening because the present Prime Minister Boris Johnson was forced to take responsibility for the sexual incontinence of his Deputy Chief Whip.
Party members must now choose between:
Rishi Sunak, son of wealthy Indian immigrants who left East Africa in the 1960s; entered politics after working for investment bank Goldman Sachs and a couple of “hedge funds”; married to the daughter of an Indian billionaire – Mrs Sunak has non-domiciled tax status allowing her to avoid around £20 million in UK taxes;
and
Liz Truss, a former president of Oxford University Liberal Democrats who saw that the Conservatives offered more chance of a parliamentary career; supported the ultra-woke Tory leader David Cameron who saved her career after a scandal in her private life; supported the “Remain” cause in the Brexit referendum, until Cameron was defeated and Truss reinvented herself as a Brexiteer and “right-winger”.
Sunak was Chancellor of the Exchequer until resigning this month to launch his campaign to replace Johnson. Truss has been Foreign Secretary since last September.
Both Sunak and Truss are courting their former leadership rival Tom Tugendhat, who is likely to be offered a senior post in the next Cabinet, probably as Foreign Secretary or Defence Secretary.
Today H&D‘s assistant editor Peter Rushton published an investigation of Tugendhat’s strange family history in an article for the Real History blog: his grandfather Dr Georg Tugendhat was investigated for decades by MI5. Georg Tugendhat had close connections to international financial criminals and suspected spies, and his business partners included the first President of Israel and the founder of Israel’s nuclear weapons programme.
One very odd aspect of the leadership election was that when Tugendhat was eliminated, his votes did not transfer wholesale to Penny Mordaunt, who on most issues was closer to Tugendhat than any of the other remaining contenders.
A clue as to why Tugendhat’s transfers split as they did – and why Mordaunt’s campaign was eventually derailed – is Monday’s Daily Mail front page, which dug up an old story that Mordaunt had dared to meet with representatives of the Muslim Council of Britain.
This meeting enraged the Zionist lobby. Tugendhat was the most pro-Israel of the leadership candidates, and Mordaunt’s MCB meeting implied that she was not a slavish follower of the Zionist agenda. So because of this one issue (and despite agreeing with Mordaunt on most other key issues) the Tugendhat vote mainly went elsewhere, guaranteeing a Truss v Sunak contest.
Multi-coloured Tory leadership 2022: ethnic alibis for anti–”wokeness”
The political circus of modern Conservatism has pitched its tent in the full glare of media attention. Racial nationalists and (more broadly) traditional patriots are looking on in despair.
On 7th July Boris Johnson – despite having won a landslide majority in December 2019 to deliver Brexit (and for better or worse, having largely succeeded in doing so) was forced to resign. His departure will be delayed until election of a successor.
Until this afternoon there were no fewer than twelve candidates either declared or on the point of declaring. (Within the last hour this was reduced to eight nominated candidates for tomorrow’s first ballot.)
And the most striking aspect is that the most traditionalist, anti-“woke” candidates are from ethnic minorities.
Suella Braverman, whose parents were ethnic Indians (partly Goan) arriving in the UK from Africa in the 1960s, is presently Attorney General. Three years ago she attracted criticism from left-wing and Jewish lobbies after daring to state that her party was committed to “a battle against cultural Marxism”, though nothing she has said or written suggests that she has any advanced understanding of what this term means.
When announcing her leadership bid a few days ago, Braverman told an interviewer: “We need to get rid of all this woke rubbish.”
Meanwhile Kemi Badenoch, who until last week was “Equalities Minister” in Johnson’s government, launched her campaign with an article in The Times that focused heavily on anti-“woke” arguments.
Badenoch, daughter of Nigerian immigrants, wrote: ”Our country is falsely criticised as oppressive to minorities and immoral, because it enforces its own borders. We cannot maintain a cohesive nation state with the zero-sum identity politics we see today.
“Exemplified by coercive control, the imposition of views, the shutting down of debate, the end of due process, identity politics is not about tolerance or individual rights but the very opposite of our crucial and enduring British values.”
What is truly pathetic about this leadership contest so far is that so-called “right-wing” conservatives are hiding behind the skirts of black women, apparently in the belief that in 2022 any opinions that might remotely be described as “racist” can only be expressed via a non-White spokeswoman.
Thus the Conservative Party leadership contest has become almost like the multiracial dystopian vision of London depicted in the series Gangs of London.
Ethnic backgrounds of the initial twelve declared or likely contenders included:
a Nigerian (Kemi Badenoch); a Goanese Buddhist (Suella Braverman); a Pakistani Muslim (Rehman Chishti – dropped out) and an Pakistani apostate Muslim (Sajid Javid – dropped out); two Indian Hindus (Rishi Sunak – present favourite – and Priti Patel – dropped out); an Iraqi Kurd and apparently apostate Muslim (Nadhim Zahawi); a Jew (Grant Shapps – dropped out); and a semi-Jew (Tom Tugendhat).
Only three of the eight nominated or initial twelve potential candidates are of straightforwardly British or Irish background going back three generations or more: Jeremy Hunt, Liz Truss and Penny Mordaunt.
Some readers might be surprised that of the nine ‘ethnic’ candidates, only one was a practising Muslim, and he dropped out having come nowhere close to securing sufficient nominations. This is Gillingham MP and imam’s son Rehman Chishti, recently appointed to a junior post at the Foreign Office. Chishti took his oath of allegiance as an MP on the Koran, but also had copies of the Torah and the King James Bible placed on the despatch box during his swearing-in. Even such conspicuous devotion to multi-faith liberalism got him nowhere.
British Expat Says: “No Matter Bad the U.S. Immigration Disaster, the U.K. Is Worse”
We just got numbers for illegal aliens apprehended on our southern border last month: a tad short of 240,000 . That’s the highest number of migrant encounters recorded in one month ever. It brings total encounters in Fiscal Year 2022 to more than one and a half million.
That’s “encounter,” mind. The actual encounter being tallied there is one between an invader and a Border Patrol officer. Either the invader presents himself to Border Patrol with some plausible claim for entry, or he tried to sneak in avoiding the Patrol but got caught by chance. Some large but unknown number of sneak-ins did not get caught.
The good news is that 42 percent of these encounters were deported—or at any rate, “processed for deportation”—under Title 42, the Trump-era protocol allowing deportation on health grounds that Joe Biden tried to end until he was thwarted by a judge.
The other 58 percent are being processed under Title 8 of current immigration law. That will result in some number of them being deported. How many: fifty percent? a hundred percent? ten percent? I don’t know.
For a clue I have this from Washington Examiner:
“More than 2 million migrants were stopped while attempting to enter the U.S. from Mexico illegally in the calendar year 2021 [not to be confused with fiscal year] … Of the 2 million, roughly 1.1 million were immediately expelled back to Mexico or flown to other countries. Some attempted crossing multiple times, inflating the numbers. But nearly 800,000 were released into the U.S.”
(‘Two million stopped while illegally entering US from Mexico in 2021’, by Anna Giaritelli, January 24, 2022)
As dumb and treasonous as our current immigration policies are, they fairly glow with integrity, efficiency, and patriotism by comparison with Britain’s. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say—and I say it in all earnestness—that Britain’s clueless, brainless, worthless government is currently perpetrating the greatest immigration fiasco since Chinese General Wu Sangui opened the gates of China to the Manchus in 1644.
I’ve been reporting to you, most recently on June 3rd, about the swelling numbers of illegal aliens crossing the English Channel from France—more than ten thousand so far this year.
This is the fourth year it’s been happening. The numbers for these four years, to the nearest thousand: 2019—two, 2020—eight, 2021—twenty-nine. Estimates for this year’s total start at fifty; and once again, these are thousands, so that’s fifty thousand.
Essentially none of these invaders get expelled. They plead asylum or refugee status, although that is a priori preposterous: they’re coming most recently from France, where they could also have claimed asylum. They destroy their identity documents so they can’t be deported. The British authorities conscientiously process their bogus asylum claims anyway, putting them up in good hotels while the processing is under way.
For three of those four years the invasion went on with the British government doing nothing at all about it. This, incredible to report, is a government of the Conservative Party; but these are metropolitan progressives led by a Prime Minister who has, all through his political career, been well-known as an enthusiast for multiculturalism.
Then, earlier this year, pressure from voters became too strong to ignore. The government grudgingly agreed to do something about the invasion.
What did they do? They cut an agreement with the black African country of Rwanda to take in some of the illegals while their obviously-fake asylum applications were processed. We first heard that 700 illegals would be shipped to Rwanda, to be accommodated in that country’s hotels.
Britain, however, is choc-a-bloc with well-funded groups who favor mass illegal immigration. They got busy lawyering. That 700 was quickly whittled down to 130—which is still a good plane-load.
By the time the first flight to Rwanda was scheduled for Tuesday last week, the 130 had been further whittled down to seven. The pro-illegal activists swung into action on Tuesday, blocking exit routes from the airport detention center and lawyering up a frenzy. By late Tuesday it seemed there was just one illegal left on the plane.
Then some outfit called the European Court of Human Rights issued an injunction to prevent that one illegal being deported. So the flight was cancelled. Number of illegals deported: zero.
Wait: Didn’t the Brits unshackle themselves from Europe? How come they have to obey this ruling by a bunch of Frogs, Krauts, Dagos, and Wops? I have no idea. Nobody in Britain seems to have any idea, either.
While all this was going on, of course several hundred new scofflaws landed in Britain and were escorted to nice hotels.
Did I say “fiasco”? This makes our own Border Tsar—or “Tsarina,” I guess—this makes Kamala Harris look like a strategic mastermind.
As an ex-Brit, in a spirit of nostalgic affection for the old place, I hereby offer my advice to the British government free of charge.
- Arrest everyone who lands in your country illegally. Confine them in special secure camps, with the right to self-deport at any time. (What, you don’t have those kinds of facilities? Then build them, dammit. When COVID came up the ChiComs built a 1,500-room hospital in five days.)
- Children should be placed in care facilities with adequate nutrition and basic education. If I remember my Charles Dickens correctly, Britain used to excel at this.
- You are welcome to my suggestion that you restore the excellent former system of hulks: surplus ships fitted out with secure cells, like those used to handle the overflow from Britain’s prisons in the 18th and 19th centuries. Hulks have the advantage that they can be moored well offshore, so they don’t cause offense to the pleasant British landscape the way on-shore camps would. They also spare the hassle of getting land rights and so on. Hulks: what’s not to like?
- The tens of thousands of illegal aliens already in Britain as a result of these past four years of inaction need to be rounded up and incarcerated as above.
The easy way to do this is to rescind any rights they have been given to work in your country. To avoid them working illegally, establish an E-verify system based on National Insurance Number (that’s the British equivalent of a Social Security Number), with brutal penalties for employers who hire without checking.
That should take care of the problem.
No, no, no need to thank me. You’re welcome!
—–
John Derbyshire writes an incredible amount on all sorts of subjects for all kinds of outlets. (This no longer includes National Review, whose editors had some kind of tantrum and fired him.) He is the author of We Are Doomed: Reclaiming Conservative Pessimism and several other books. He has had two books published by VDARE.com com: FROM THE DISSIDENT RIGHT (also available in Kindle) and FROM THE DISSIDENT RIGHT II: ESSAYS 2013.
For years he’s been podcasting at Radio Derb, now available at VDARE.com for no charge. His writings are archived at JohnDerbyshire.com.
Full acknowledgements to VDARE and John Derbyshire for letting us reprint the article:
VDARE.com news – America’s Immigration Voice.
The VDARE Foundation, PO Box 211, Litchfield, CT 06759, USA
Editor’s note:
John Derbyshire was born in Northampton, in the south Midlands, in June 1945. He attended the Northampton School for Boys and graduated from University College London, where he studied mathematics. He emigrated to the USA in the 1960s. Before turning to writing full-time, he worked on Wall Street as a computer programmer. John worked as a writer at National Review until he was terminated in 2012 because of an alleged “racist” article published in Taki’s Magazine.
He then moved on to work for Vdare, where he could write more freely.
In 1996 he wrote the novel Seeing Calvin Coolidge in a Dream which was a New York Times “Notable Book of the Year”. His 2004 non-fiction book Prime Obsession won the Mathematical Association of America’s inaugural Euler Book Prize. A political book, We Are Doomed: Reclaiming Conservative Pessimism, was released in September 2009.
I met John over 25 years ago at an American Renaissance Conference in Northern Virginia, and recently sent sent him a copy of Heritage and Destiny magazine.
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.
