British Democrats win town council by-election
British Democrat candidate Ken Perrin won yesterday’s by-election in the Slade Lode South ward of Chatteris Town Council in Cambridgeshire. He gained 47.5% of the vote, ahead of Labour’s Richard Hirson on 27.7% and an Independent on 24.8%.
Much of the campaign focused on local housing/planning issues, which are often ones where racial nationalist ideas come into sharp focus for ordinary voters.
As Mr Perrin pointed out in an interview with his local newspaper, developers were planning “to build on land that is actually a run-off for flood water”.
In the broader context, the British Democrats have emphasised that “there isn’t a housing crisis in this country; there’s an immigration crisis causing a housing shortage!”
Town councils, sometimes called parish councils or community councils, sometimes operate in a non-partisan manner and the wards are usually much smaller than a borough ward or a county council division.
But on housing and other planning applications they can have an important role – and as several nationalist parties including the Brit Dems have pointed out, gaining experience on a parish council can be an important step in winning back credibility for our movement.
Congratulations to Ken Perrin and his campaign team on bringing H&D readers some good news! Chatteris is best known historically as the place where Boudicca and her Iceni warriors made their last stand against the invading Romans. So it’s an appropriate place to take a political stand against our 21st century invaders!
Unionists fly the flag in Bellshill
With police investigations continuing, H&D cannot comment on the arrest of Nicola Sturgeon (former First Minister of Scotland) amid the continuing collapse of the Scottish National Party which she led from 2014 until earlier this year.
This entertaining shambles has already had an impact at the ballot box. This week in Bellshill, North Lanarkshire the SNP lost a council by-election to Labour, with a swing of more than 13% (enough to wipe out almost all of SNP’s Westminster seats if repeated at next year’s general election).
Labour of course are no friends of the Union either, but the Bellshill by-election was also good news for sincere patriots. As a recent Spectator article put it, the SNP is “sleepwalking into extinction”, facing “electoral nemesis”.
The British Unionist Party, formed in 2015 by activists from the Better Together campaign who successfully fought to preserve the United Kingdom in the 2014 Scottish referendum, won its first council seat in another North Lanarkshire ward in May 2022.
This week they contested Bellshill for the first time and despite a crowded ballot paper with no fewer than ten candidates, their candidate Billy Ross polled a creditable 4.3% finishing in fourth place. Mr Ross defeated the much hyped Alba Party (led by former SNP leader Alex Salmond), and various ‘protest vote’ parties. The anti-vaccination party Freedom Alliance and the much-diminished UKIP polled only 0.3% each: microscopic votes (just seven for Freedom Alliance and five for UKIP!) confirming their irrelevance.
This latest result for the British Unionist Party – combined with a strong set of results for Traditional Unionist Voice in last month’s local elections in Northern Ireland – shows that well organised smaller parties can make an impact even if they only win small numbers of seats.
Unionists can begin to influence mainstream politics, preventing major party leaders from pursuing their subversive and cowardly agenda of breaking up the UK.
After years in which republicans and fake ‘nationalists’ appeared to have history on their side, the tide is beginning to turn.
And for H&D readers, there is some reasonably good news from the ballot box at last! Patriotic parties in England are in steep decline, but there has been good news in recent weeks from Northern Ireland, and now to a certain extent in Scotland.
Reform UK’s ballot box failure continues
Yesterday’s local by-elections offered further confirmation that Reform UK is not making any impact in real contests (as opposed to opinion polls and friendly promotion on GB News).
In Belgrave ward, Tamworth, RefUK’s Ian Cooper polled 40 votes (4.1%), finishing fourth of five candidates. The protest vote seems to have gone instead to an Independent candidate who finished a strong third with 25.8%. On a split vote, the Tory just about held on to the seat with 34.8%.
This is a ward that UKIP contested six times during 2014-2021, on three occasions polling over 20%. It has tended to be a Con-Lab marginal, and the intervention of an Independent cost Labour what would otherwise have been a probable gain in present circumstances.
Further evidence from our movement’s standpoint that there is a substantial public mood of “plague on both your houses”, and that unlike UKIP and the Brexit Party in their day, RefUK is failing to mobilise that mood.
In the Watling South division of Staffordshire, which includes Belgrave ward but is usually a safer Tory seat, RefUK’s Barry Gwilt polled 110 votes (6.0%), finishing 4th of 4. Gwilt is a borough councillor in Lichfield, elected as a Tory, who defected to RefUK last month, so you would expect him to be far better than the average RefUK candidate (his borough council ward is adjacent to this county division). Therefore, although his 6% is in line with national opinion poll scores for RefUK, it actually suggests that RefUK’s true nationwide position is considerably below 6%. (Again the Tory held on, with a sharply reduced majority over Labour.)
Meanwhile the strange case of the Mosleyite who became a Tory county councillor ended in a fairly respectable vote for ex-Cllr Andy Weatherhead in Hythe West, Kent. After being ‘exposed’ a few months ago as a former activist in New British Union (a party inspired by the legacy of Sir Oswald Mosley), Mr Weatherhead resigned from the council and contested this week’s by-election as an independent, which readers might consider either brave, principled or foolish since there was nothing to prevent him serving out his term until May 2025, even after the Tories had thrown him out.
Mr Weatherhead finished bottom of the poll, but was far from disgraced, polling 237 votes (6.6%). Voters were faced with a confusing ballot paper, because there was another Independent – a former UKIP candidate, Ian Meyers, who finished fourth with 306 votes (8.6%).
It’s interesting that Meyers had not chosen to join RefUK or any of the other UKIP splinters but has ploughed a lone furrow, and that both he and Mr Weatherhead achieved votes that RefUK might envy. Again this suggests that the RefUK brand name doesn’t really add much to a dissident/populist campaign.
The big headline in Hythe was that the Greens gained the seat from the Tories, with a 12.5% swing. This has for some years been a Con-Green marginal – the Greens won it in 2017, only for Andy Weatherhead to take it back as a Tory in 2021 – so in present circumstances the result was no great surprise, though for the Green to win it by almost 500 votes was pretty impressive.
This is part of Michael Howard’s old constituency Folkestone & Hythe, presently held by technology minister Damian Collins, and it’s difficult to imagine it being anything other than Tory at the next general election. It’s surprising that the nationalist movement (racial or civic) hasn’t made more impact in these coastal areas, given the migrant crisis. Perhaps locals dislike ‘nationalist’ protesters arriving in their area from London, even more than they dislike immigrants?
A telling result in a historic Rotherham council ward
There have been some doubts as to whether Labour’s revival under Sir Keir Starmer would extend into White working class areas of the North, and tonight’s by-election gain for Labour in a working-class Rotherham council ward hasn’t quite resolved those doubts.
It now seems pretty clear that Sunak’s Tories are in big trouble in the ‘red wall’ (formerly solid Labour areas where the party declined sharply in or before 2019). But neither Reform UK, nor any of its civic nationalist rivals, nor (needless to say) any racial nationalist party, has yet even laid the foundation for a serious electoral challenge any time soon.
Tonight Labour gained Keppel ward, Rotherham, from the rebranded local branch of UKIP, the Rotherham Democratic Party,
For our readers, this is a ward that will evoke poignant memories.
The late Marlene Guest fought Keppel ward three times for the BNP, polling 16.4% in 2004, then finishing a close second to Labour in 2006 and 2007 with 27.7% and 28.5%. A few years after the collapse of Griffin’s party, UKIP were the beneficiaries, gaining the ward in 2014 and 2015, and holding on to two of its three seats in the 2016 all-out election.
Following Rotherham council’s well publicised problems and reorganisation, Labour took two of the three seats in May 2021, but the third was retained by one of the surviving UKIP councillors now rebranded as a Rotherham Democrat.
This Rotherham Democrat was thrown out for non-attendance at the end of last year and his party didn’t even field a candidate in this week’s by-election.
Neither was there a candidate from any other civic nationalist party, though an ex-Labour councillor stood as an independent and the Yorkshire Party (regionalist populists) had a candidate who took 15%. The Brexit Party polled 17.2% in the Rotherham constituency in 2019, but its successor Reform UK again showed no interest in contesting a local by-election, even in such a promising area.
Labour ended up with a majority of 300 tonight, with an Asian Liberal Democrat in a surprisingly close second. The Tories also put up an Asian candidate and slipped to fourth place with a truly appalling vote, down from 24% to 5.8%.
Lab 36.1% (+4.6)
LD 21.6% (+14.7)
Ind 18.5%
YP 15.2% (+3.5)
Con 5.8% (-18.2)
Grn 2.9%
Two very different wings of the anti-Islam movement
This week saw bad results in court and at the ballot box for two very different wings of the anti-Islamist movement.
Stephen Yaxley-Lennon – better known under his alias ‘Tommy Robinson’ – is a chancer and petty criminal who has made a good living out of the anti-Islam movement (and an even better living from certain sections of international Zionism).
‘Tommy’ is regarded as the founder (and certainly the best known face) of the English Defence League (EDL) an avowedly ‘anti-racist’, fanatically pro-Israel, and militantly anti-Islam alliance of football hooligan gangs that briefly flourished a few years ago before breaking up into competing factions.
Since the EDL’s decline, ‘Tommy’ has fancied himself as a journalist but has continued to be mainly a self-publicist, and had a short disastrous venture into electoral politics when he contested the North West England region at the 2019 European Parliamentary elections, finishing eighth with just 2.2%.
Perhaps because of his public devotion to the Israeli cause, the mainstream media gave ‘Tommy’ soft treatment for many years, which perhaps encouraged this ageing adolescent thug (now 38) to believe he could get away with anything.
Despite his public poses, ‘Tommy’ doesn’t care a damn about the victims of (for example) ‘grooming gangs’: in order to win publicity for himself he risked derailing a trial of two such cases in Canterbury (2017) and Huddersfield (2018).
And now ‘Tommy’ has lost a libel case after he made a series of what turned out to be unsubtantiated allegations against a Syrian-born schoolboy. ‘Tommy’ has been ordered to pay £100,000 in damages and also faces a costs bill that could easily run to £500,000. Since he claims to be bankrupt (despite the vast sums he has milked from the movement), ‘Tommy’ hopes to tear up the bill and carry on regardless, but might face serious questions as to where all the donors’ money has gone.
Yesterday’s judgment ruthlessly punctures ‘Tommy”s journalistic pretensions:
“This judgment – but more importantly – the award of damages will mark clearly that the Defendant has failed to demonstrate the truth of his allegations. The Defendant took on the burden of proving his allegations to be true. He has failed. In reality, and for the reasons I have explained, his evidence fell woefully short.”
Though she has several times eagerly accepted endorsements from ‘Tommy’, and endorsed his campaigns in return, Anne Marie Waters is a very different character and the For Britain Movement she leads is very different from the EDL.
Though we might disagree with much of Ms Waters’ ideology and sometimes doubt her political choices, no one can doubt that she is a genuine, committed, and often courageous campaigner. After she broke away from UKIP to form the For Britain Movement, she bravely accepted numerous former BNP activists as members, candidates and party officials – notably the former BNP and English Democrat electoral strategist Eddy Butler, still best known for his ‘Rights for Whites’ campaigns that won the BNP their first councillor, Derek Beackon in the East End’s Isle of Dogs in 1993.
Mr Butler’s colleague – H&D subscriber and former BNP mayoral candidate Julian Leppert – is presently the only elected councillor for Ms Waters’ party, and one of very few racial nationalist councillors of any stripe anywhere in the UK in 2021 (though his party leader is very much not a racial nationalist!).
By coincidence, on the very same day that ‘Tommy Robinson’ lost his libel case, two For Britain candidates were heavily defeated in local council by-elections. Both candidates are longstanding racial nationalists of high calibre and both showed courage and commitment in putting themselves forward as candidates, at a time when our movement’s electoral fortunes are at a low ebb.
There was no reason to think that either of the wards was especially good territory for a pro-White campaign, and the nationwide political context remains one in which most racially conscious Whites tend to favour Boris Johnson’s Conservative Party, despite its recent loss of support among the socially liberal middle classes.
(Notably, the vast majority of potential voters for our types of candidate/party remain supportive of the government’s policies for dealing with the Covid pandemic: there is little or no electoral backing for the Covid-sceptic or anti-vaccination stances favoured by significant numbers of movement activists, but ignored or opposed by the vast majority of voters.)
So it was no surprise to see very modest votes for the two For Britain candidates: 26 votes (1.2%) for Gary Bergin in Liscard ward, Wirral; and 37 votes (1.6%) for Dave Haslett in Humberstone & Hamilton ward, Leicester.
Readers should note that in the Leicester ward a candidate for Reform UK (the renamed Brexit Party led by Nigel Farage’s close ally Richard Tice) also polled just 37 votes (1.6%).
There appears to be no magic recipe for electoral success within the space to the ‘right’ of the Conservative Party. Those who are looking towards some form of new racial nationalist alliance have serious thinking to do – at one time it seemed that civic nationalism with an anti-Islamist, pro-Zionist edge was the way forward, at least for those prepared to swallow their ideological objections in the interest of electoral ‘strategy’. That argument no longer holds water.