The mystery of the disappearing candidate
On Saturday the anti-Muslim party Britain First shared a “Huge Announcement” with their members and supporters on social media, even sending out a special fundraising email.
Party chairman Ashlea Simon was to be the party’s candidate at the forthcoming Rochdale parliamentary by-election, following the death of Labour MP Sir Tony Lloyd. Her leader Paul Golding rightly pointed out that Rochdale is notorious for the “grooming” scandal, involving the abuse of young girls by men of mainly Pakistani origin.
As recently as 15th January, yet another official report documented the failure of Greater Manchester Police, social services and Rochdale Council – all of whom betrayed these girls and their families.
Golding told his followers that Ashlea Simon would be an ideal candidate who would prove “a staunch voice for the victims in the town”. He predicted there was a “strong chance” that she could defeat the established parties and be elected MP for Rochdale.
Britain First’s leader confirmed that he and other party officials were already “organising behind the scenes to get the campaign launched, including designing the banners, leaflets, placards, postal voter letters etc.”
When we read this announcement at H&D, it’s fair to say we were surprised – because the official list of candidates for this by-election had already been published the previous day, and Ms Simon was not among them.
In other words Paul Golding was soliciting donations for a non-existent campaign. Meanwhile he was sitting down with the notorious grifter ‘Tommy Robinson’ to make yet another video for his gullible followers.
We don’t know how Mr Golding intends to spend the money raised by these fundraising emails and social media posts, but one thing’s for sure. It can’t be spent on a parliamentary election campaign in Rochdale – because Britain First and Ashlea Simon are not contesting this Rochdale by-election!
Raising money for a non-existent campaign is tragic enough, but at this same Rochdale by-election Britain First’s rivals in the civic nationalist party Reform UK have dragged politics into the realms of farce.
Reform UK’s candidate in this by-election (where allegations of “grooming” are bound to become a central campaign issue) is Simon Danczuk, who was Labour MP for Rochdale from 2010 to 2017.
Mr Danczuk was suspended from the Labour Party in 2015 for sending “inappropriate” texts to a teenage girl. He shamelessly contested Rochdale as an independent in 2017 but lost his deposit with a mere 1.8% of the vote.
The ex-MP has recently married an African beauty therapist whom he met on a “business trip” to Rwanda: the happy couple plan to adopt a Rwandan baby, and doubtless if he returns to Parliament they will be able to adopt an entire houseful of happy African infants.
In other words, while the Tory government is trying (but dismally failing) to export illegal immigrants and asylum seekers to Rwanda, Reform UK’s latest parliamentary candidate is eagerly importing Rwandans to England.
You really couldn’t make it up: but this is entirely consistent with the “civic nationalism” espoused by Richard Tice, Nigel Farage and the fake patriots of Reform UK.
Rochdale voters deserve better. Whether the racial nationalist alternative comes from the British Democrats, the recently launched Homeland Party, from Patriotic Alternative (once they are registered as a political party), or from some electoral alliance between them, it has never been more obvious that the UK needs a movement prepared to defend our islands and our people.
Rishi Sunak’s ‘Conservative’ Party in crisis facing two new by-election tests
This week senior members of Rishi Sunak’s Conservative Party – which now seems unable to conserve anything worthwhile – are openly plotting his removal, desperate to avoid electoral annihilation.
A general election is certain at some point within the next 12 months: the latest legal date is 28th January 2025, but few observers think it will be delayed beyond mid-November.
More immediately the ruling party has to defend by-elections on 15th February in two traditionally ‘safe’ Tory seats: Kingswood (near Bristol), and Wellingborough (a market town and surrounding towns and villages in Northamptonshire).
In each case the candidates will include two from parties to the ‘right’ of the Conservatives. Wellingborough in particular will be seen as a big test for Reform UK, the party effectively owned by former UKIP and Brexit Party leader Nigel Farage, but for the time being led by Farage’s close associate Richard Tice.
Pakistani-born Ben Habib (the party’s deputy leader) is Reform UK’s candidate in Wellingborough.
The anti-Islamist party Britain First also has a candidate in Wellingborough – Alex Merola, who will be well known to some H&D readers as a longstanding patriotic activist.
Meanwhile in Kingswood, Reform UK’s candidate is another of their stable of millionaires, making us wonder whether it is compulsory to be a City trader or property tycoon to have a senior role with Tice and Farage?
This time it’s the peripatetic property developer Rupert Lowe, most famous to sports fans for his time as chairman of Southampton FC. Mr Lowe was a Brexit Party MEP for the West Midlands from 2019-20, and as far back as 1997 was a parliamentary candidate for Sir James Goldsmith’s Referendum Party.
Also on the ballot paper in Kingswood is another civic nationalist candidate, Nicholas Wood of UKIP, who is a former Surrey County Council candidate. UKIP is now a feeble shadow of its former self, and the party’s remaining activists are probably less interested in the Kingswood campaign than in the internal contest to be the party’s new leader following Neil Hamilton’s imminent retirement. The most likely bet seems to be that Anne Marie Waters, former leader of the defunct For Britain Movement, will complete her political comeback and succeed Hamilton, having only last year rejoined UKIP.
Once these two by-elections are over, attention will shift to the next parliamentary contest in Rochdale (following the recent death of Labour MP Tony Lloyd), where the most interesting battle will be for the Labour nomination, with several Asian candidates seeking to become the town’s first ethnic minority MP.
Wilders remains an outsider despite Dutch election ‘victory’
Geert Wilders, leader of the anti-immigration and anti-Islam ‘Party for Freedom’ (PVV), is being portrayed as the ‘winner’ of this week’s Dutch general election.
And in a sense he is, though many H&D readers will be sceptical of his variety of populist ‘right-wing’ politics.
First of all, we have to understand that he has ‘won’ in a very different sense to ‘winning’ a British election, let alone an American one. While in the UK the leader of the largest party is almost 100% guaranteed to become Prime Minister, and is very likely to have a majority in Parliament without requiring support from other parties, in the Netherlands multi-party politics has been pushed to the extreme.
After these elections there are fifteen parties represented in the Dutch Parliament, even though it has only 150 seats. The smallest of them (a tiny right-wing splinter party) has one seat even though they polled just 0.7%.
Wilders ‘won’ the election with 23.6%, well ahead of his nearest rivals, but has fewer than half the seats required to obtain a parliamentary majority.
It seems almost certain that some form of coalition will be fixed that will exclude Wilders from power.
The good news is that any such coalition is likely to be unstable and short-lived. Dutch voters are shifting in large numbers towards anti-immigration positions, though even those who take this view are divided on other issues.
The mainstream conservative VVD (which has been part of coalition governments and often provided prime ministers for the past forty years) had a disastrous election, falling to third place and losing almost a third of its seats.
The VVD had thought it was a bright idea to elect a new female leader of Turkish origin who parroted some of Wilders’ anti-immigration ideas, though less convincingly. Both she and the leaders of other rival parties were easily outshone by Wilders in televised election debates.
The centrist liberal party D66 also had a disastrous election under an inept new leader. In addition to Wilders, the main winners were a new centre-right party NSC (which will almost certainly refuse to enter any coalition that includes Wilders) and a Green/Left alliance led by a former European Commissioner, Frans Timmermans, which of course is entirely anti-Wilders.
Despite his election ‘victory’ Wilders is now finding that all his years of subservience to the Zionist lobby have bought him no credit at all with the political mainstream, who continue to shun him.
Dutch politics and society remain chronically divided and it’s difficult to see any stable outcome in the near future, whether on immigration, or on environmental policy, or on more traditional issues involving taxation and the size of the welfare state.
One big advantage for Wilders is that his main rival on the anti-immigration wing of politics, Thierry Baudet’s FvD, discredited itself by pursuing crank anti-vaccination policies and extreme Putinism. The FvD lost more than half of their previous vote and now have only three seats in Parliament.
Wilders himself has toned down his Putinism, but remains essentially anti-Ukraine and pro-Israel – positions that will divide opinion sharply among H&D readers.
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.
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!
Starmer and Corbyn’s Putinist friend
Yesterday’s election in Slovakia has been reported in the mainstream press (and even by some H&D readers who should know better) as a victory for the ‘populist right’, or even for ‘nationalists’.
In fact the election winner (and given the fissiparous nature of Slovak politics it’s important to point out that he ‘won’ with less than 23% of the vote and will need to find coalition partners) was the ex-communist Robert Fico, whose social democratic party Smer remains a member of all the usual international alliances of mainstream leftwing parties.
The only reason why some on the vacuous “dissident right” have welcomed Fico’s victory, is that this Slovak leftist is a de facto supporter of the Kremlin’s anti-Ukrainian, anti-European aggression.
Fico has insisted that Putin’s invasion of Ukraine was a war started “by Ukrainian nazis and fascists”. And predictably this Stalinist rhetoric has been echoed by the Kremlin’s useful idiots, including some so-called ‘nationalists’.
Ironically, Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour Party is a longstanding partner of Fico’s party in three international socialist alliances – the Party of European Socialists, Progressive Alliance, and Progressive Alliance of Socialists and Democrats. The Slovak party is also part of an even more leftwing organisation, the Socialist International, where Starmer’s Labour now only has “observer” status.
In 2006 Smer was suspended from the Party of European Socialists because Fico accepted a ‘far right’ party into his coalition government, but this suspension ended in 2008 and Fico now seems to be accepted by the likes of Starmer and Germany’s social democratic Chancellor Olaf Scholz as a good socialist comrade!
During the coming days and weeks, Smer will look for coalition allies. The Slovak nationalist party SMS might again be one of them, but with 5.6% (10 MPs) it has less than half the support it enjoyed when it joined one of Fico’s previous coalitions in 2006.
The real kingmakers this time will be another leftwing party, Hlas, with 14.7% and 27 MPs. We shouldn’t expect much in the way of political principle in these negotiations, still less should we expect anything resembling racial nationalism, whether or not SMS ministers join the payroll.
What we can sadly continue to expect is that the ignorant and deluded ‘dissident right’ will continue to disgrace themselves by applauding Putinist victories, even when these victories are for parties of the socialist / social democratic left.
Deadlock in Spanish election as ‘right-wing’ Vox stumbles
During the past fortnight British media coverage of the Spanish general election has verged on hysteria as journalists and politicians (including former Prime Minister Gordon Brown) recycled the tired ‘anti-fascist’ rhetoric of Spain’s Civil War era. Many on the British left are eager to revive memories of that era, since they are dimly aware that unlike today’s ‘socialists’, their fathers and grandfathers actually believed in something.
The conservative Daily Mail ran a scaremongering article that associated today’s Vox party with 1930s nationalism, and even mangled nationalist history by conflating the reactionary caudillo Francisco Franco with the radical Falange.
The reason for all this hysteria was that Vox – a party that the media likes to portray as ‘far right’ – seemed likely to be the power-broker putting the conservative Partido Popular (PP) into government.
In the September issue of H&D, our correspondent Isabel Peralta will explain the true nature of Vox and the true crisis of Spanish ‘democracy’, in the context of yesterday’s election results and the inevitable post-election horse-trading.
But in this initial report we simply look at the results.
Vox polled 12.4% (down from 15.1% at the previous election in 2019) and lost 19 of its previous 52 seats in the Congress of Deputies. The conservative PP with just over 33% of the vote (up from 20.8% at the 2019 election) won 47 extra seats and now has 136. Even if the PP struck a deal with Vox‘s 33 Congressional deputies, the combined ‘right’ would be seven short of a majority.
Spanish elections are decided on a regional party list system, similar to the one used in European parliamentary elections that led to Andrew Brons and Nick Griffin being elected as MEPs in 2009. Each of the fifty provinces elects a list of Congress seats (ranging in size from Madrid with 37, to the mountainous province of Soria with two), while the autonomous Spanish cities in North Africa – Ceuta and Melilla – have one seat each.
Whereas Vox is essentially a right-wing conservative party, there were also candidates from the tiny nationalist party FE-JONS which for electoral purposes is allied to another tiny party La Falange. They paid the price for many years of ideological confusion and poor leadership. FE-JONS contested just eleven of the 52 constituencies, and in each case their vote was below 0.1%.
Vox‘s leaders, who seem to care more about personal and factional advancement than ideological principles, will be disappointed that the election result deprives them of their longed-for role as kingmakers.
The reality is that this election was a victory for the conservative PP, but its leaders will struggle to exercise any meaningful political power. Partly because conservatism is a bankrupt ideology, but also because they would need support from both Vox and at least seven votes from regionalist parties. While in other circumstances the PP might possibly be able to buy support from the Catalan populist party Junts (who have exactly the seven seats necessary) it is inconceivable that Junts would support a government that included Vox.
The electoral arithmetic just about allows for a coalition of the left, far left, and separatists, but it’s difficult to imagine that this could last for long. Such a coalition would partly depend on Sinn Fein / IRA’s friends in the Basque party EH Bildu, whose roots are in the banned party Batasuna that acted as the political wing of the terrorist ETA.
In short: Spain is set for months of instability and possibly fresh elections in the autumn. In the September edition of H&D our correspondent Isabel Peralta will report on Madrid’s ‘democratic’ circus and the media fallacy of Vox as a ‘far right’ party.
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.
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.
