BNP and other nationalist votes

An extraordinary General Election that wiped out Theresa May’s Conservative majority also saw the electoral eclipse of the BNP and the English Democrats, none of whose candidates even came close to saving their deposits.

Brian Parker – the BNP’s sole remaining borough councillor – polled only 718 votes (1.6%) in Pendle, his party’s main target seat.

BNP chairman Adam Walker managed a slightly better result in Bishop Auckland, but was bottom of the poll with 991 votes (2.3%).

Meanwhile the English Democrats’ results were even worse, collapsing from an already low base. As the SNP lost support north of the border it appears that the Union is safe, and logically ‘English’ nationalism has lost relevance.[spacer height=”20px”]

BNP results

Bexleyheath & Crayford
Peter Finch 0.6%

Bishop Auckland
Adam Walker 2.3%

Charnwood
Stephen Denham 0.6% (-0.4)

Dagenham & Rainham
Paul Sturdy 0.5% (+0.2)

Eltham
John Clarke 1.6%

Hornchurch & Upminster
David Furness 0.7% (+0.3)

Maldon [listed as ‘Fighting Unsustainable Housing’: BNP name not on ballot]
Richard Perry 0.5%

Old Bexley & Sidcup
Michael Jones 0.7% (+0.2)

Pendle
Brian Parker 1.6%

South Basildon & East Thurrock
Paul Borg 0.8%

——–

English Democrat candidates

Barnsley Central
Stephen Morris 0.5% (-0.8)

Barnsley East
Kevin Riddiough 0.7% (-0.4)

Bradford South
Thérèse Hirst 0.9%

Clacton
Robin Tilbrook 0.7%

Doncaster North
David Allen 0.9% (-0.3)

Holborn & St Pancras
Janus Polenceus 0.2%

NE Cambridgeshire
Stephen Goldspink 0.5%

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Meanwhile those racial nationalists who believed that UKIP offered us some hope must think again after the party suffered a series of crushing defeats, ending with the resignation of humiliated leader Paul Nuttall.

Notable UKIP disasters included Clacton (formerly their sole parliamentary seat until Douglas Carswell’s resignation) where UKIP’s vote fell from 44.4% to 7.6%; Thanet South (where re-elected Conservative MP Craig Mackinlay still faces criminal charges for fraudulent overspending during his defeat of Nigel Farage in 2015) – UKIP vote down from 32.4% to 6.0%; and Boston & Skegness, a key target seat contested by Nuttall himself – UKIP vote down from 33.8% to 7.7%.

The only vaguely credible UKIP result came in Thurrock, where UKIP’s Tim Aker (an MEP from a part-Turkish background) fought a vigorous campaign against pro-Remain Tory MP Jackie Doyle-Price.  However even here the UKIP vote fell from 31.7% to 20.1%. Ms Doyle-Price survived, and Labour pushed UKIP into third place.

 

Tory gamble fails

Early results have confirmed the H&D team’s suspicions that this UK general election would prove a personal disaster for Prime Minister Theresa May.

We shall tomorrow be publishing our analysis of what this means for the racial nationalist movement.  UKIP died today; the promise of “strong and stable” Tory rule has proved illusory. In fact Mrs May’s gamble has been arguably the most disastrous decision in the history of Western democracy. Only a handful of hardcore pro-Brexit constituencies in the Midlands shifted from Labour to Tory: Mansfield, NE Derbyshire, Walsall North and Stoke South (the latter a former BNP stronghold where UKIP boosted the Tories by standing aside).

This has proved a disastrous election for the multi-racial, politically correct Scottish National Party, whose former leader Alex Salmond was among several casualties: in fact the only silver lining for the Conservatives is that they will gain several seats from the SNP.  Scottish independence is as dead as UKIP after tonight’s results.  The Union is safe.

Though this might seem an excellent result for Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour, racial nationalists should not despair.

Watch this space for developing news on an extraordinary election!

Meanwhile – sadly – this election confirmed the decline of our existing racial nationalist parties. Even in Pendle the BNP’s Brian Parker – his party’s last remaining borough councillor – managed only 1.6%, though he had no UKIP opponent.

2017 has definitively killed off Prime Minister May and two moribund parties: UKIP and the BNP.

Perhaps the best news of the election for H&D readers is that the Democratic Unionist Party emerges from this election greatly strengthened, with ten MPs in a (probably) hung parliament.

 

Corbyn is right: the war on terror isn’t working – but we should also drain the swamp

Amid predictable fake outrage from his Conservative opponents, Jeremy Corbyn – no friend of H&D! – has dared to tell the truth.  As election campaigning resumed today (following several days hiatus due to the terrorist bombing of a Manchester concert hall) the Labour leader said: “We must be brave enough to admit the war on terror is simply not working. We need a smarter way to reduce the threat from countries that nurture terrorists and generate terrorism.”

It seems likely that the Manchester atrocity was carried out by a suicide bomber of Libyan origin, linked to that country’s version of Islamic State. If so, then it emanates from a truly Orwellian swamp. British governments once allied themselves with the earlier local version of IS – the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group – in terrorist and assassination plots against that country’s former dictator Col. Gaddafi.

Then under Tony Blair we changed tack, and delivered our former Islamist allies to Libyan torturers collaborating in a worldwide ‘war on terror’.  Sir Mark Allen (former MI6 counterterrorism director) might still face criminal charges over his role in the kidnapping and torture of LIFG leader Abdul Hakim Belhaj, though the relevant ministers including Jack Straw have typically dodged their responsibility.

In 2011 under David Cameron there was another policy lurch: Libya’s Islamists (or at least some of them) became our allies again in the campaign to oust Gaddafi.  And now in the resultant post-Gaddafi chaos they are back to being the enemy.

All this would be mad enough: what makes it really crazy is that among the 57 varieties of alien immigrant thronging British cities are a large community of Libyans with personal and family ties to these very characters who were sometimes our allies, while at other times consigned to the torture chamber.

Foreign and defence policy has never had much space for morality.  One response to the slaughter of British children in Manchester (the opposite of Corbyn’s policy) might be to carry out a reciprocal slaughter in Libya, targeting the extended families and support networks of IS.

But – setting moral questions entirely aside – H&D readers should recognise that such a policy (whether aiming at deterrence or merely revenge) requires precisely targeted and pitiless brutality. In their prime the likes of Gaddafi or Syria’s Hafez al-Assad were capable of that – hence their regimes survived.  Does anyone really believe that Britain has the will (let alone the local knowledge) to follow such a policy to its logical conclusion, to take whatever the terrorists throw back at us and throw back more of the same, until eventually we supposedly crush them?

It’s not going to happen.

So we are left with the logic of Corbyn’s alternative. Some form of new deal with the Islamic world. We can only hope this would be less hypocritical then the deal with an earlier generation of bombers who targeted Manchester.  Among this week’s many tragic ironies is that the bomb that devastated Manchester city centre in 1996, planted just a few yards away from the scene of this week’s carnage, was the work of IRA godfathers armed by Col. Gaddafi, the bitter enemy of this week’s suicide bomber and his family.

No one was ever charged over that 1996 Manchester bombing – except a journalist and a police officer who dared to name the main suspect, the IRA’s Declan McCann (then of Crossmaglen, Co Armagh). McCann was spared arrest for political reasons and has since moved south to Castleblayney, Co Monaghan: he owns a property empire with his brother John. His IRA commanders went on to form part of Northern Ireland’s government and shake hands with the Queen.

 

Corbyn of course has his own dishonourable record of IRA apologetics. And though his approach to today’s failed war on terror makes sense, there’s one aspect that Corbyn and his ilk will never admit. Alongside a reassessment of foreign policy must come a draining of the multi-ethnic swamp. We should return the teeming non-British masses of our towns and cities back to their countries of origin.

[spacer height=”20px”]UPDATE: On tonight’s Channel 4 News, Theresa May’s Defence Secretary Sir Michael Fallon fell into a well-laid journalistic trap when he condemned what he thought were Jeremy Corbyn’s words about the war on terror, only to find they were the words of his senior Cabinet colleague, Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson!  A more sympathetic journalist in The Spectator had earlier today offered the Tories some wise strategic advice on how to handle this issue: they failed to take it – and as another Spectator columnist Rod Liddle puts it, this is turning into the worst Tory election campaign on record.

Millwall and Blackburn fans contest election

An election that has been otherwise tedious (so far) is enlivened by two candidates representing fans of Millwall and Blackburn Rovers, contesting otherwise safe Labour constituencies.

In Lewisham East, the candidate is a 72-year-old female artist, Willow Winston: not exactly the Millwall stereotype! Her campaign is prompted by a very dodgy relationship between the local Labour establishment and an offshore company behind the ‘New Bermondsey’ regeneration scheme, which threatened Millwall’s stadium The Den. The scheme is already under scrutiny by an independent inquiry under Lord Dyson, former Master of the Rolls.

While in Blackburn candidate Duncan Miller represents the long-running ‘Stop Venkys’ movement, opposed to the Indian poultry dynasty (a sort of subcontinental KFC) who took over Blackburn Rovers in 2010. The once proud Lancashire club – Premier League champions as recently as 1995 – was recently relegated to the third tier of English football.

There are a couple of precedents for football fans engaging in electoral politics to air grievances concerning their local clubs.

At the 1999 Hamilton South by-election, Stephen Mungall saved his deposit with 1,075 votes (5.5%) on a platform Hamilton Accies Home, Watson Away. (The local club Hamilton Academicals was at the time homeless, having sold its stadium in 1994, and many fans blamed major shareholder Jim Watson.)

This campaign predated the Electoral Commission and associated legal requirements for parties to register their names and descriptions – so the Accies candidate was able to stand as an independent and put the above description on the ballot paper.

That option is not available for this year’s Millwall and Blackburn candidates, who will appear just as ‘Independent’ on the ballot paper and will have to rely on their campaign literature and publicity to make an impression on voters.

One group of fans did manage to register their own party just over a decade ago. The Seagulls Party was created by fans of Brighton & Hove Albion to campaign against their local council’s decision to refuse planning permission for a new stadium. Edward Bassford of the Seagulls Party polled 21.9% in a Lewes council by-election in August 2006. The following year the party effectively won its campaign, when central government overturned the local council’s decision and stadium development went ahead. Long since dissolved, the Seagulls Party saw its ultimate triumph with Brighton’s promotion to the Premier League this year.

P.S.:
An H&D reader reminds us that in 1987 the well-known Portsmouth football ‘firm’ 6.57 stood a general election candidate in Portsmouth South. Marty ‘Docker’ Hughes polled 455 votes (0.8%).  ‘Docker’ Hughes died in July 1992: friends have ever since sponsored a memorial race at Fontwell Park and (latterly) Goodwood.

Nominations close for General Election

[spacer height=”20px”]Nominations closed at 4 pm on Thursday for next month’s General Election.

The National Front decided some time ago not to contest this election, so the main nationalist party in contention will be the BNP.

We believe that there will be nine BNP candidates plus another standing without using the party name, and seven English Democrats.  Please note that we include the EDs here because the party absorbed a significant number of former BNP activists a few years ago, but in fact none of the candidates this year are ex-BNP.

After UKIP’s disastrous council election results, it’s no surprise to see the party contesting far fewer constituencies than in 2015: down from 624 to around 400 (the official total has yet to be confirmed). Some of these are sensible decisions not to stand against pro-Brexit MPs, but other cases seem to reflect the party’s rapid decline. For example there are no UKIP candidates in Cornwall, and the party is not standing in Rossendale & Darwen, held by a pro-Remain Tory, Jake Berry.

One beneficiary of UKIP’s decline will be Pendle BNP: the party’s last remaining councillor Brian Parker will have no UKIP opponent at the General Election – neither will party chairman Adam Walker in Bishop Auckland.

 

[spacer height=”20px”]BNP candidates

[spacer height=”20px”]Bexleyheath & Crayford
Peter Finch

[spacer height=”20px”]Bishop Auckland
Adam Walker

[spacer height=”20px”]Charnwood
Stephen Denham

[spacer height=”20px”]Dagenham & Rainham
Paul Sturdy

[spacer height=”20px”]Eltham
John Clarke

[spacer height=”20px”]Hornchurch & Upminster
David Furness

[spacer height=”20px”]Old Bexley & Sidcup
Michael Jones

[spacer height=”20px”]Pendle
Brian Parker

[spacer height=”20px”]South Basildon & East Thurrock
Paul Borg

[spacer height=”20px”]Note: Additionally Richard Perry, the BNP’s Eastern regional organiser, is standing in the Maldon constituency but will not have the BNP name on the ballot paper: his party description is ‘Fighting Unsustainable Housing Because We Care’, which is among the BNP’s registered descriptions with the Electoral Commission.

 

[spacer height=”20px”]English Democrat candidates

[spacer height=”20px”]Barnsley Central
Stephen Morris

[spacer height=”20px”]Barnsley East
Kevin Riddiough

[spacer height=”20px”]Bradford South
Therese Hirst

[spacer height=”20px”]Clacton
Robin Tilbrook

[spacer height=”20px”]Doncaster North
David Allen

[spacer height=”20px”]Holborn & St Pancras
Janus Polenceus

[spacer height=”20px”]NE Cambridgeshire
Stephen Goldspink

 

‘Liberal’ thought police crush local democracy in Bradford

Former MP David Ward has been banned by the national leadership of the Liberal Democrats from contesting his old constituency Bradford East at the General Election on June 8th.

Ward was defeated by Labour in 2015: two years earlier he had served a three-month suspension from the Lib Dems for anti-Zionist comments including calling Israel an “apartheid state”.  He had posted on Twitter in July 2013: “Am I wrong or are am I right? At long last the Zionists are losing the battle – how long can the apartheid State of Israel last?”

Responding to that suspension, Ward had been defiant: “I will not apologise for describing the state of Israel as an apartheid state. I don’t know how you can describe it as anything else. I am genuinely quite shocked at the reaction to the kind of thing many people say.”

Earlier this week the local Lib Dem branch in Bradford East selected Ward as their candidate for this year’s election, but responding to complaints from ultra-Zionist Tory rivals such as Theresa May and Sir Eric Pickles, Lib Dem leader Tim Farron said today: “I believe in a politics that is open, tolerant and united. David Ward is unfit to represent the party and I have sacked him. …I am fully aware of the comments David Ward has made in the past and I find them deeply offensive, wrong and antisemitic.”

This latest move indicates a complete Lib Dem surrender to profoundly illiberal political correctness, following their suspension of Luton Lib Dem candidate Ashuk Ahmed yesterday.  Ahmed had made a series of anti-Zionist Facebook posts in 2014, including the statement: “Zionists control half the world, we are the other half. So let’s make a lot more noise.”

Is Tim Farron blind in one eye? How else can we explain his insistence on disciplining pro-Palestinian members of his own party, but his failure to condemn a rival party leader – Theresa May – for her blatant support of Zionist terrorism during a speech in 2015.  Mrs May (then Home Secretary) praised commemoration of Yom Hazikaron, the day on which “We remember the sacrifice of those who fought to achieve and protect that independence.” This means most notably those Zionist terrorists who died fighting against British forces and Arab civilians during 1945-48, and includes those who were executed for atrocities such as the murder of Lord Moyne and his driver Lance Corporal Arthur Fuller.

 

Election politics – Pakistani style!

Regular H&D readers will be familiar with the electoral saga of Manchester Gorton, where veteran Labour MP Sir Gerald Kaufman died on February 26th causing a parliamentary by-election which was abandoned at the 11th hour when Prime Minister Theresa May called a General Election.

The local Labour Party had been bitterly divided between ethnic powerbrokers from the Pakistani and Bangladeshi communities (indigenous Mancunians don’t get much of a look-in these days).  Pakistani machine boss and solicitor Afzal Khan duly became the Labour candidate.

Today Mr Khan has been reported to police for alleged ‘treating‘ – an electoral malpractice involving provision of free food, drink or other gifts to voters.  If convicted, offenders can be disbarred from Parliament, fined or imprisoned.

According to today’s Daily Mail, Mr Khan is at the centre of “claims he bribed voters with a lavish dinner… Footage of the dinner posted online shows dozens of guests sat around tables laid with plates and folded napkins in wine glasses, as well as ‘Vote Labour’ leaflets.  A ‘Vote Afzal Khan’ banner is on display at the front of the room.”

The police complaint has been brought by the Liberal Democrats, who hope to gain the seat from Labour.  Also seeking to exploit Labour’s embarrassment is former MP George Galloway.

One irony of course is that Mr Khan is himself a solicitor, so one might expect him to be familiar with electoral law, and even assuming he did not organise the dinner himself one might imagine he would have urged supporters to stay clearly on the right side of the ‘treating’ regulations.

A Liberal Democrat activist commented: “In my (admittedly limited) experience there is such an enormous expectation that candidates from some communities will host rallies with food provided that an agent from outside that community will be looked on with astonishment if he tries to explain that this can’t be done as it is an election offence.  The problem is that because nothing is ever done there is no back up for an agent trying to stay within the law.  A high profile case would probably be helpful in clarifying matters.”

In other words some “British Asian” communities expect to break the law with impunity.

 

Arron Banks stands aside in Clacton as part of long-term plan for post-UKIP movement

Former UKIP donor Arron Banks has announced that he will not after all be standing at the General Election in the Clacton constituency.

Banks had earlier planned to stand against former UKIP MP Douglas Carswell, a bitter factional opponent of Banks and his ally Nigel Farage.

But once Carswell announced his retirement, it was only a matter of time before Banks threw in the towel.

After all, Banks no longer has any real interest in UKIP – and neither does Farage. They will have little or no involvement with the party leadership during what is likely to be a disastrous campaign, but will eschew divisive attacks on the Paul Nuttall regime until after June 8th, and will give support to various constituency-level campaigns.

Then within a day or so of the election results, the Farage faction (bankrolled by Banks) will acknowledge UKIP’s death and announce the creation of a new ‘Patriotic Movement’.

On April 25th Banks issued a Twitter message, very sensibly criticising the UKIP leadership’s anti-Islam obsession

 

Arron Banks
(@Arron_banks)

Not sure campaigning with the national party going in entirely the wrong direction is smart. I don’t approve of the war on Muslim religion https://t.co/BcKQtka2yW

April 25, 2017

Later that day UKIP’s election campaign became even more chaotic when James Carver (a West Midlands MEP) resigned as the party’s chief foreign affairs spokesman, saying that he “strongly disagreed” with the “misguided policy” of a so-called burqa ban.

Farage flies home: last chance for UKIP?

Former UKIP leader Nigel Farage is flying back to London from his Adriatic holiday, after Theresa May surprised the nation by calling a snap General Election for June 8th.

Farage’s key financial backer Arron Banks had planned to launch a long-expected new movement – the Patriotic Alliance – on May 5th, the day after what are likely to be disastrous local elections for UKIP.

He and other Faragistes were expected to conclude that UKIP was finished and it was time for a new approach.

At a stroke Mrs May has rendered these plans redundant, and just possibly UKIP has been handed a last-minute lifeline: but only if the present party leadership – headed by the hapless Paul Nuttall – has the courage and maturity to end Banks’s suspension and recall Farage for one last campaign.

The next question would be whether UKIP should contest every single constituency, presenting itself as an alternative government, or concentrate on a smaller number of seats held by pro-Remain MPs. The latter strategy would amount to accepting that UKIP is not a challenger for power across a range of policy areas, and is more of a pressure group to ensure that Brexit goes ahead unimpeded by recalcitrant Remainers.

Meanwhile it is understood that because Parliament will be prorogued the day before the scheduled Manchester Gorton by-election, that by-election will be cancelled: a successor to the late Sir Gerald Kaufman will be elected on June 8th as part of the General Election alongside every other constituency.

 

Does Theresa May believe in anything?

Prime Minister Theresa May today called a General Election to be held on Thursday 8th June. Technically this will require a two-thirds majority in the House of Commons, but we can assume that Britain will be heading to the polls for the second time in two years.

H&D will provide continuous coverage of the election campaign from a nationalist perspective, but one immediate question is unavoidable.

Does the Prime Minister really believe in anything?

In her Downing Street statement a few minutes ago, Mrs May said she was seeking a mandate to negotiate Brexit terms, and accused opposition parties of “playing games”.

Yet all the evidence shows that until last year’s referendum, Mrs May fully supported our membership of the European Union. Though she craftily kept a low profile during the referendum campaign, she assented to the scaremongering campaign of her predecessor David Cameron and his Chancellor George Osborne, who insisted that Brexit would be an unmitigated disaster.

Can voters really trust a Prime Minister who changes her mind on this central issue, purely for reasons of ambition and convenience?

After all, Mrs May has never given the slightest rationale for her change of mind: assuming she actually has a genuine view on Brexit – or on anything.