County council election disasters for BNP and EDs

The 2013 English county council elections on May 2nd proved a disaster for the BNP – as widely expected – but also dealt a possibly fatal blow to the English Democrats, a party which some anti-Griffin dissidents once expected to profit from the collapse of the BNP.

At the equivalent elections four years ago the BNP won three county council seats, but the catastrophic factional splits that have beset the party soon led to the resignation of two of these councillors, so the only seat remaining in BNP hands before this year’s elections was in Burnley.

Even here long-serving BNP councillor Sharon Wilkinson chose to retire from the council.  In her old division of Padiham & Burnley West, where she had polled 1,155 votes (30.7%) to win election in 2009, this year’s BNP candidate Paul Robinson finished last of four candidates with 358 votes (13.4%).

Elsewhere in the former party stronghold, other Burnley BNP candidates also suffered landslide defeat.  David Shapcott in Burnley SW managed only 7.2%, compared to John Cave’s 21.2% in 2009.

A fuller nationwide analysis of the 2013 elections will appear here in two weeks time, with complete details in the next edition of Heritage and Destiny.

Far left UKIP candidate quits as press pursues scandal

UKIP leader Nigel Farage is tonight under pressure following the dramatic withdrawal of one of his party’s candidates for Lancashire County Council.

On April 4th – endorsing his campaign at a UKIP meeting at the Stanhill Working Men’s Club, Oswaldtwistle – Mr Farage was happy to greet Ken Bell, his party’s standard bearer in the Pendle Central division of Lancashire.

The following day Mr Bell’s name duly appeared on the list of candidates published on the council’s website.  Yet by the following Tuesday his name had disappeared from the final list that will appear on the ballot paper next month, when Pendle Central’s voters will not have a UKIP candidate.

Why the hasty withdrawal?

It turns out that Mr Bell is a hard left supporter of the infamous Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin, whose regime slaughtered millions in his own country and occupied Europe before his death in 1953.

Mr Bell also has a long record of posting offensive messages online. Within hours of Margaret Thatcher’s death on April 8th he wrote:

Thatcher is dead. Sympathies go to His Satanic Majesty for having to host the old whore.

Aware that nationalists within UKIP as well as opposition parties were preparing to expose Bell, UKIP suspended him and ordered him to withdraw his election nomination. The party then began a cover-up, ordering a media blackout on the story.

Yet continuing investigations of Bell’s background indicate that UKIP were fully aware of his views well before he became a candidate.

Bell’s outrageous comment about Mrs Thatcher should have come as no surprise to UKIP’s national and regional officials.  Almost a week earlier – and two days before being publicly endorsed by Nigel Farage – Bell had written in response to a fellow UKIP member who complained about the Left calling Mrs Thatcher a “fascist”:

Yeah, well she was. UKIP has to accept that many of us hated the old slag and everything she stood for.

During the previous week Bell’s Twitter posts were filled with obscenities and references to Tories as “scum” and “lower than vermin”, as well as tasteless remarks about the new Pope and the Queen.

With UKIP aiming to be taken seriously as a threat to the political establishment, their scandalous debacle in Lancashire should be taken seriously as a microcosm of Nigel Farage’s coming political problems.

His party tries to present itself as the voice of disenfranchised White voters: in truth it is a vacuous mess, an ill assorted bunch of extremists united only by their crankery.

No doubt UKIP will poll well in many areas on May 2nd, but a serious post-Griffin movement is urgently needed.

BNP lose 80% of their candidates in four years!

A detailed analysis of the candidates standing at the county council elections on May 2nd reveals that the BNP has lost 80% of its candidates in just four years.

The initial feeble excuse deployed by the party – that it was choosing to concentrate on stronger areas this year – can also be easily exploded.  It turns out that the BNP is standing reasonable slates of candidates just in a few areas that have remained factionally loyal to Nick Griffin, while virtually disappearing in other areas that have many nationalist voters but have ceased to support the Welshpool charlatan.

Far from taking a calculated decision to back away from less winnable contests, the BNP kleptocracy has desperately tried to rally its remaining troops and persuade them to stand somewhere – in fact anywhere!

Hilariously Nick Griffin’s own daughter and son-in-law (Jenny and Angus Matthys) are fighting elections in both Cumbria and Shropshire. Angus is contesting the Currock division of Cumbria and Oswestry East, Shropshire; Jenny is seeking to convince voters in both the Cleator Moor West division of Cumbria and the Oswestry West ward of Shropshire.  Since these areas are 200 miles apart, and it takes three and a half hours to drive from one to the other, Mr and Mrs Matthys will be spending a lot of time on the road if they are to take each campaign seriously.

There are 92 BNP candidates in county council elections this year, plus another seven in unitary authorities, and one standing in a borough council by-election that falls on the same day.

This compares to 464 BNP candidates in various elections on the equivalent day in 2009.

In sixteen council areas or mayoral contests that had one or more BNP candidates in 2009, there are none at all this year.  Admittedly some of these were not nationalist strongholds.

Far more serious is the party’s collapse in what had been its real growth areas. Where there were 48 BNP candidates in Leicestershire last time, there will be only seven this year; the 75 Essex BNP candidates are down to fourteen; Cumbria BNP is down from 41 candidates to nine; while Hertfordshire BNP is almost extinct, down to just a single candidate after fielding 27 last time.

Neither of this year’s mayoral contests – in Doncaster and North Tyneside – will have a BNP candidate.

There are only two counties – Northamptonshire and Worcestershire – where the BNP has survived the last four years in reasonable shape, due to senior activists remaining (for the time being) loyal to Griffin. Yet this does not reflect serious election prospects: there are more BNP candidates here not because they have better electoral prospects, but because Griffinites have been able to scrape a slate together, where they have failed elsewhere.

Of the party’s three county councillors elected in 2009, two are retiring this year while a third – Cllr Graham Partner – has chosen to stand for the new British Democratic Party this year and will have no BNP opponent.

Here is the full breakdown of BNP council candidates:

County Councils

Cumbria: 9 candidates (down from 41)

Derbyshire: 4 candidates (down from 17)

Lancashire: 6 candidates (down from 20)

Leicestershire: 7 candidates (down from 48)

Lincolnshire: 4 candidates (down from 23)

Northamptonshire: 11 candidates (down from 12)

Nottinghamshire: 2 candidates (down from 15)

Staffordshire: 2 candidates (down from 12)

Warwickshire: 8 candidates (down from 14)

Worcestershire: 15 candidates (down from 17)

Essex: 14 candidates (down from 75)

Hampshire: 1 candidate (down from 3)

Hertfordshire: 1 candidate (down from 27)

Kent: 5 candidates (down from 8)

Surrey: 1 candidate (down from 7)

West Sussex: 1 candidate (down from 20)

Devon: 1 candidate (down from 9)

Unitary authorities

Durham: 2 candidates (no election in 2009, down from 30 in 2008)

Shropshire: 5 candidates (down from 10)

BNP wiped out (having previously stood candidates) in Bristol, Cornwall, Wiltshire, Bedford, Central Bedfordshire, Isle of Wight, Buckinghamshire, Norfolk, Suffolk, Dorset, Gloucestershire, Somerset, North Yorkshire, and East Sussex.

 

Election preview 2013

Nominations have just closed for English county council and mayoral elections.  A preview of the nationalist campaigns in these elections will appear here soon.

This year Heritage and Destiny‘s editor Mark Cotterill will not be a candidate, despite having polled 22.2% in the Lancashire County Council election for Preston East at the last contest in 2009.

While wishing all the best to nationalist candidates this year – especially to Graham Partner, who will be the British Democratic Party candidate for the Coalville division of Leicestershire, his colleague Kevan Stafford, a member of the British Democrats leadership who will be standing in Loughborough South, and Gary Topping, who is contesting Pendle Central for the Brit Dems – the H&D team recognise that our movement is in a time of transition, having been terribly damaged by the corrupt cronyism of the Griffin years.

We are beginning to rebuild a credible movement to succeed Griffinism, as the BNP will die as an electoral force this year with the loss of its three county council seats and no candidate in many of its former strongholds.  Sharon Wilkinson – the most electorally successful BNP councillor ever – is standing down from Lancashire County Council, and there will be no BNP candidate in Burnley Rural, where the party took 19.5% in 2009 and used to hold a borough council seat.  In Leicestershire the BNP’s former county councillor Graham Partner will be fighting this year’s election for the new British Democratic Party, headed by Andrew Brons MEP.  There will be no BNP candidates at all in the north-west of Leicestershire, once a party stronghold – in fact across that entire county where there were 48 BNP candidates last time, there are only seven this year.

Across Lancashire, where the BNP had twenty county council candidates in 2009, they have only six this year; similarly there are only four BNP candidates across Derbyshire compared to seventeen in 2009.  In North Yorkshire, where there were thirteen BNP candidates in 2009, there are none at all this year. There will be no BNP candidate in either of this year’s mayoral elections in North Tyneside or Doncaster. The 2009 Doncaster BNP candidate Dave Owen will be standing this year for the National Front.

In the South of England, where the BNP was never at its strongest, the party now appears to be virtually extinct, with just a single candidate in Surrey, one in West Sussex and none in Suffolk. In stronger southern counties such as Kent and Essex the BNP seems to have been decimated: final figures are yet to appear.

The post-BNP rebuilding will take time: so with regret it was decided to sit out this year’s election in most of the country rather than conduct a campaign that would not do justice to our supporters.  This website will carry updates soon on the progress of post-Griffin nationalism.  Together we can weather the storm and return as a credible nationalist alternative to the bankrupt political establishment.