Galloway victory exposes the fake left’s crisis over ‘multiracialism’
A few minutes ago the former Labour MP George Galloway won the Rochdale by-election, in a stunning exposé of Muslim voters‘ disillusionment with Labour Party leader Sir Keir Starmer. Galloway polled 39.7% of the vote, and won a majority of 5,697, ahead of local independent David Tully, who surprised the media by taking 21.3%.
Though I reject many of Galloway’s views (especially his Putinism and his support for the terrorist IRA’s political front Sinn Fein), I welcome his election to Westminster where he will be an eloquent (if unprincipled) voice in support of Palestine, against the lavishly financed Zionist lobby that dominates all the major UK parties.
Labour thought they had chosen a perfect careerist candidate: Azhar Ali, an Asian councillor in nearby Nelson who led the Labour group on Lancashire County Council. Ali had made all the right noises to obtain promotion in Labour’s ranks – regarded as a reliable ‘moderate’ and endorsed by leading Jewish activists in Starmer’s party.
But as should have been obvious, careerism involves saying different things to different audiences. At the start of the campaign, a secretly recorded tape was leaked of Ali speaking to Asian community leaders in Accrington (less than 20 miles from Rochdale). As anyone outside Starmer’s circle of deluded wokeists might have predicted, Ali’s words to this audience were very different from when he was speaking to liberals and Jews!
The leak quickly led to Labour disowning Ali, and because he has always depended on careerist grovelling rather than principle, he completely failed to maintain any sort of campaign on his own. Ali remained on the ballot paper as Labour candidate, because the relevant deadlines had passed, and his feeble 7.7% vote came from that section of the electorate who would vote for a donkey if it had a Labour label.
The Rochdale campaign was absolutely made for George Galloway. Though he will be 70 later this year, Galloway has lost none of his ability to play populist political cards. In this case most of his pitch was to Rochdale’s Asians (who amount to around 30% of the constituency, according to the 2021 census). The Gaza issue has highlighted a broader perception among such people that they have been let down by their ‘community leaders’ in a series of cynical deals with the Labour Party. A reckoning was overdue, irrespective of the Azhar Ali fiasco.
Galloway also made a pitch to disillusioned White voters, but a large number of these opted for local independent David Tully, whose energetic campaign received little attention from mainstream journalists until ballot boxes were opened.
Mr Tully is not a racial nationalist, but his commendable campaign and focus on local concerns (including the threatened bankruptcy of Rochdale Football Club, where he is a season ticket holder) will have won him a lot of support from our type of voters.
And that brings us to the elephant in the room: the total absence of any credible nationalist party from this campaign.
Reform UK, just two weeks after an excellent result in Wellingborough, suffered a well-deserved embarrassment in Rochdale after their inexplicable selection of Simon Danczuk as their candidate. Mr Danczuk is another shallow careerist who was Labour MP for Rochdale until he was disgraced after sending inappropriate sexual messages to a teenager.
Danzuk and his party leader Richard Tice tried to distract from their poor result (only 6.3% and sixth place) by whining about “racism”, “intimidation” and “anti-semitism”. Their desperation in playing the victim card merely reflected the utter bankruptcy of “civic nationalism”. Galloway himself has now revealed that a short while ago Tice asked him to be a Reform UK candidate: that’s how shallow and unprincipled Reform UK’s leader is.
In the 1990s I repeatedly experienced political violence in Rochdale, including being pelted with half-bricks by “anti-fascists” outside Rochdale Town Hall after an election count. But anyone who is serious about nationalist politics doesn’t whine about such things, they just get on with the task, however long and arduous.
Britain First raised funds from their supporters with the promise that they would fight this by-election, even after the close of nominations showed that they did not in fact have a candidate. The sad truth is that Britain First is just another con aimed at gullible nationalist donors – just like the BNP became in later years, and just like the various enterprises run by Nick Griffin.
Billy Howarth, a local campaigner against the scandal of Rochdale Pakistanis “grooming” teenage girls, stood as an independent candidate but failed to make any impact, polling only 1.7%. It needs to be recognised that there are some people like Mr Howarth who are honest and have sound instincts on some issues, but who come nowhere near the calibre required of a parliamentary election candidate or spokesman for the broader nationalist cause.
Considering the unusual circumstances, the 39.7% turnout was high – and was likely to have been especially high in Asian areas.
But many White voters will have abstained in despair. Rochdale again shows the political vacuum in the UK, especially in northern towns that have experienced the worst effects of multiracialism.
A credible challenge is long overdue – whether it comes from the British Democrats, the newly registered Homeland Party, organisations not yet registered such as Patriotic Alternative, or some united front of racial nationalists.
H&D will continue to report on a non-partisan basis, and we shall give support to any and every genuine nationalist campaign.
Is Keir Starmer prepared to write off Muslim voters?
Labour Party officials seem bewildered by the extent of “anti-semitism” in their party, following revelations last Sunday that eventually forced Sir Keir Starmer to abandon his candidate at the Rochdale parliamentary by-election.
In normal circumstances, political observers would be relentlessly examining the collapse of Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s Conservative Party, especially after their catastrophic results in yesterday’s by-elections at Wellingborough and Kingswood.
And if Starmer were being opposed only by hard-left supporters of his predecessor Jeremy Corbyn, he wouldn’t be too concerned.
Yet the reality is slowly coming home to Labour leaders that even “moderate” Muslims are disgusted by Starmer’s fanatical Zionism – and that a large part of mainstream opinion among indigenous Britons is also hostile to Israel’s never-ending brutality.
Azhar Ali was regarded as one of the most “moderate” Muslims in the Labour Party, until secret recordings were published last Sunday, in which Ali expressed implicitly “anti-semitic” conspiracy theories.
Then another Lancashire Labour candidate – former Hyndburn MP Graham Jones – was suspended for similar anti-Israeli remarks secretly recorded at the same event.
Numerous Labour councillors, including Labour’s council leader in Burnley, had already quit the party in protest at Starmer’s craven pro-Israel policy, and this week two more quit, in the West Yorkshire borough of Kirklees, where there had already been earlier resignations and suspensions.
Several of these anti-Zionists (whether resigning on principle or suspended after being caught out expressing their private views) are indigenous Britons, though many are Muslims.
The really crucial point is that a certain block of voters (likely to be mainly Muslim) views the Gaza issue as such an important one that they could change their vote and desert Labour, even if this runs the risk of allowing Conservative candidates to win.
Very few Muslims support the Conservative Party, though this week’s strangest political story was the expulsion of the Conservative Mayor of Salisbury.
Cllr Atiqul Hoque was expelled with immediate effect, after allegations of posting “offensive” messages on WhatsApp and social media. Salisbury is an ancient cathedral city with a very White population: not the sort of place where one expects to find an Asian mayor, still less a Conservative one, still less one who posts “offensive” material online.
It all goes to show what a strange country the UK has become!
Mainstream politicians have combined slavish support for the Zionist state, with obedience to a multiracial and multicultural transformation of our country. The potentially incendiary consequences should have been obvious.
The main question now is whether Muslim “community leaders” allow careerism and vested interests to outweigh principle. It would not be surprising to see them mostly fall back into line with Starmer, just as they did with earlier pro-Zionist Tory leaders such as Tony Blair and Gordon Brown.
But right now, there’s still the potential for Labour to haemorrhage Muslim votes. I suspect most H&D readers would quite enjoy that spectacle!
Although as with the parallel collapse of the Conservative Party, what we really need is a coherent, united and focused racial nationalist challenge to the establishment parties.
Tory collapse continues: has Reform UK’s chance finally arrived? Or is there still a vacuum in patriotic politics?
Regular H&D readers will know that we have been very critical of Reform UK’s ideological and organisational failures. Their results in actual elections have consistently failed to match their opinion poll ratings. Lacking a serious activist base in most of the country, they have relied on hype from Nigel Farage and his friends on certain newspapers (and at the GB News channel).
Today’s parliamentary by-elections in Kingswood (near Bristol), and Wellingborough (in Northamptonshire), seem to have shown that Reform UK has at last started to attract real votes in real ballot boxes.
Whatever our differences with Reform UK on a wide range of issues, their Wellingborough candidate Ben Habib deserves considerable credit for his earlier activism in Ulster, where together with Baroness Hoey, TUV leader Jim Allister and others he showed genuine commitment and intelligence in exposing the true nature of Sunak’s treacherous border deal. The Conservative Party – and even some so-called Ulster Unionists – have shamefully betrayed the Union, whereas Ben Habib has striven genuinely to uphold it.
Though it might seem paradoxical, many H&D readers will therefore have welcomed the fact that Mr Habib this week polled the highest ever Reform UK vote – 13%.
Just two hours earlier in Kingswood, Reform UK’s candidate Rupert Lowe polled 10.8%, which at that point was itself easily the best vote ever achieved by the party since it emerged from the former Brexit Party.
While congratulating Reform UK on these much-improved results, we should bear in mind that if their opinion poll scores were anywhere near accurate, they ought to be polling at least 15% in Kingswood and closer to 20% in Wellingborough, in by-election circumstances that tend to favour “protest votes”, and with so many “right-wing” voters having deserted the Tories.
The old UKIP polled 14.8% in Kingswood in 2015. Of course, UKIP is now a joke fringe party. In this latest by-election they managed only 0.5%.
It was also a very disappointing night for the anti-Muslim party Britain First, whose candidate in Wellingborough, Alex Merola, finished 8th with only 1.6%.
Britain First and their supporters now have to ask themselves two questions.
Most fundamentally, they should question whether there is political space for another non-racial, civic nationalist party competing with the much more professional Reform UK. It’s certainly necessary to expose the fact that Reform UK is essentially a system party, committed to neo-Thatcherite “free market” capitalism, and with no serious solution to the catastrophe of multiracialism.
But that serious solution – that serious challenge – needs to go beyond civic nationalism, and cannot consist merely of Britain First’s Islam-obsession.
And secondly, even if one adopts a more cynical and limited view of political struggle, one has to question the basic competence of an avowedly anti-Muslim party which wasted its time and its donors’ money in Wellingborough, while failing to field a candidate in Rochdale, a constituency which would seem to offer a perfect audience for Britain First’s message.
Yet again, the remnants of the post-BNP British nationalist movement have shown themselves to be devoid of both political principle and strategic awareness.
We can and must do better. The present situation is a shameful betrayal of our heritage and our people’s future. Within the next year, there will almost certainly be a Labour government with Keir Starmer as Prime Minister. It is vital that there is a serious racial nationalist challenge to that government.
Labour’s Muslim problem revealed as Rochdale candidate dropped
Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour Party (which seems almost certain to return to government at a general election some time within the next twelve months) is yet again caught in a ‘scandal’ over ‘anti-semitism’. The party’s candidate at the forthcoming parliamentary by-election in Rochdale, Azhar Ali, has been disowned by the party after recordings were leaked of Ali expressing conspiracy theories about last year’s Hamas attack on Israel.
Azhar Ali – a 55-year-old businessman of Pakistani origin – has been leader of the Labour group on Lancashire County Council since 2021. Having failed several times to obtain selection as a parliamentary candidate, he was chosen to contest this by-election after the death of long-serving MP Sir Tony Lloyd.
Nominations have already closed, which means that Labour cannot replace Ali and cannot prevent him appearing on ballot papers as the Labour candidate. If Ali wins then he is expected to sit in the House of Commons as an independent.
Labour hoped that by opting for a very swift contest after Lloyd’s death – the by-election will be held on 29th February – they would stop any rival party building momentum. They were especially concerned that either a “right-wing” party would gain traction among White working-class voters, or the populist left-winger George Galloway would exploit anti-Zionist views among Rochdale’s large Muslim population.
2021 census figures show that Rochdale’s population is 29.6% Asian (predominantly Pakistani – 22% – and Bangladeshi – 4.2%).
Asians are far more likely than White working class voters to turn out at elections, and have traditionally been solidly Labour, but this loyalty has been tested by Starmer’s transformation of the party since he replaced Jeremy Corbyn in 2020.
Starmer (whose wife is Jewish) seems to be obsessed with wiping out any trace of his predecessor’s anti-Zionist views. Even after Israel’s exceptionally brutal response to the Hamas incursion, Starmer has resisted suggestions by many Labour colleagues that he should join calls for a ceasefire in Gaza.
His stance led to the resignation of many Labour councillors across the country, with Lancashire being especially badly hit. Several of Azhar Ali’s colleagues quit, including the leader of Burnley borough council and two county councillors who represent areas of Burnley and had been part of Ali’s Lancashire team.
It was in this context that Azhar Ali spoke at what he thought was a private meeting of Lancashire Labour activists last October. What he didn’t know was that someone (presumably a factional opponent within the party) was recording his comments. The tape was passed to the Mail on Sunday and reported yesterday.
Though Ali didn’t express explicitly anti-semitic views, he endorsed one of the many conspiracy theories that are widely believed within the UK’s Asian community. He told the meeting:
“The Egyptians are saying that they warned Israel ten days earlier… Americans warned them a day before [that] there’s something happening… They deliberately took the security off, they allowed… that massacre that gives them the green light to do whatever they bloody want.”
For 36 hours after the story broke, Labour tried to defend Ali, but leading figures in the Jewish community demanded he must be dropped, and Labour has now complied.
It’s too early to say whether Ali will be capable of fighting an independent campaign. If not, it seems likely that the beneficiary will be George Galloway who, although he opposes almost everything H&D readers stand for, is undoubtedly an able campaigner.
The tragedy is that no racial nationalist party is presently capable of fighting a serious parliamentary election campaign. Indigenous Britons in Rochdale have been thoroughly betrayed by all mainstream political parties and by the consequences of the multiracial society. They were never consulted about the demographic transformation of our country, which is more visible in Rochdale than in almost any other town in Britain.
Rochdale was the scene of one of the most infamous cases of the “grooming” of White teenage girls by men of mainly Pakistani origin. In 2016 eight such men (together with a White heroin addict who committed similar bestial crimes as part of a “grooming” ring) were sentenced to a total of 125 years in prison for offences that took place between 2004 and 2008.
(A few days before the Ali scandal, the Green Party’s candidate in the Rochdale by-election, Guy Otten, was also forced to withdraw from the campaign due to anti-Islamic posts on Twitter several years ago. Though Otten would have polled a negligible vote in any case, his case is another example of the perils of politics in the internet age, especially in the treacherous political waters of a constituency which is one-third non-White. It seems that candidates can be disqualified nowadays for being either anti-Israel or anti-Muslim, when what we would ideally like to see are candidates who are pro-British!)
What can H&D readers learn from the events of the past two days that have rocked British politics, both in Rochdale and nationwide?
(1) Ali’s swift defenestration shows which racial/religious minority has real influence in UK politics, and it’s not UK Muslims. Although there are hardly any Jews in Rochdale, the Labour Party decided to obey the demands of the Jewish community, while continuing to ignore the views of UK Muslims.
(2) Although this is the situation at national level (and certainly where foreign policy is concerned), Labour at local level in many parts of the UK is disproportionately influenced by Asians, who are now likely to split, with one group (often local businessman) pragmatically unconcerned by the fate of their co-religionists in Gaza, while others will break away and support independent candidates.
(3) Gaza is just the latest (though the most serious) of the issues that split Muslim voters. Where Labour is concerned there are also longstanding factional divisions between Pakistanis and Bangladeshis (especially serious in Oldham); bitter personal rivalries; and splits between traditional “community leaders” and younger activists on social issues such as feminism and gay/lesbian/trans questions. Many of those who are most radical on Gaza are also opposed to their own community leaders on issues involving the role of women. For example, one of the Lancashire county councillors who quit Labour over Gaza is a Westernised Pakistani woman.
(4) While some H&D readers will strongly agree with criticisms of Labour policy on Gaza, the sad thing is that the Palestinian cause has been tainted by childish conspiracy theories. Events have shown that Jews do indeed have disproportionate power in UK politics, including within the Labour Party. But it is frankly ludicrous to argue that Israel allowed the Hamas attack to happen, or that Hamas is in some sense part of a Zionist conspiracy. On a wide range of issues, real conspiracies are allowed to happen because political dissidents (both within the Muslim community and among White racial nationalists) are too paranoid and quick to jump on online bandwagons without thinking seriously about the issues involved.
(5) One consequence of this is that the anti-Zionist cause is represented by charlatans such as George Galloway. If he wins the by-election on 29th February and becomes MP for Rochdale, the loudest pro-Palestinian voice in Parliament will also be an ultra-leftist and an ally of Vladimir Putin, further discrediting the Palestinian cause in the eyes of most White Britons.
(6) Yet again, the cause of truth and justice – whether for the Palestinians or (more relevantly) for the victims of Rochdale grooming gangs and other crimes in our dysfunctional multiracial society – is ill-served by the choices available to voters at the ballot box. As racial nationalist activists, we all bear a heavy share of responsibility for the collapse of our movement during the first quarter of the 21st century. Do we have the courage and determination to change course?
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.
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!
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.