Brexit Day – is it?
H&D correspondent Peter Hollings, writes from Leeds, Yorkshire.
Tonight there will be lots of people around the country celebrating Brexit Day. 11pm this evening marks the point at which the United Kingdom will finally get rid of the EU shackles that have blighted our lives for so many decades now.
At least that’s what all those out and about later today will be thinking as they vigorously wave their Union Jack flags and vociferously belt out Rule Britannia loud and proud into the night sky.
Whilst patriots across the nation are collectively giving the two -fingered salute to Brussels I’ll be looking on from ‘afar’ and directing a wry little smile at all those who for whatever reason think we have somehow achieved a monumental and history-making victory over our globalist oppressors.
Don’t get me wrong, I always enjoy seeing we Brits come together in acts of celebration regardless of its nature. Whether we’re singing patriotic songs and waving flags at events such as The Proms (minus the LGBT flags of course) or coming together in acts of remembrance for our war heroes, or celebrating sporting victories on the world stage for example, nothing gladdens the heart more than seeing our people openly and proudly wearing their patriotism on their sleeves.
My problem is that these Brexit celebrations are being held way too early and I feel that there are going to be an awful lot of patriots who are going to be disappointed and deflated in the coming months and years.
The fact of the matter is that a true Brexit, that is to say a return to full sovereignty, will not occur for many years to come. This is because only a true Nationalist government will ever have the will to protect and maintain our full sovereignty.
Consider the following:
1) Britain will legally leave the EU and enter a ‘transition period’ which runs until December 31. During this time the UK will remain subject to EU laws and free movement of people will continue.
2) We will continue to pour billions of pounds into the EU’s coffers during that transition period. We will have all of the usual costs but none of the representation whilst we maintain our expensive financial obligations towards the EU budget.
3) There’s a very real probability that the transition period will be extended (despite Boris Johnson’s rhetoric to the contrary) for a further one or two years delaying our departure further. Who is to say that the extension period won’t be continued for even more years after that?
4) The Northern Ireland question is far from complete. The architects of our destruction want a united Ireland in an effort to further dismantle our Union just as they want to see an ‘independent Scotland and an independent Wales (and Cornwall for that matter) eventually.
Northern Ireland will continue to follow EU rules on agricultural and manufactured goods, while the rest of the UK will not.
Additionally, the whole of the UK will leave the EU’s customs union but Northern Ireland will continue to enforce the EU’s customs code at its ports.
THE EUROPEAN COURT OF JUSTICE WILL MAINTAIN PRIMACY OVER UK LAW in certain matters because of these afore-mentioned NI trading agreements. This is not regaining full sovereignty or achieving a full and hard Brexit.
5) The Tory government says that after Brexit EU citizens will no longer have priority status when it comes to the issue of entry into Britain. We will, in all likelihood, see an actual reduction in the numbers coming over from the likes of Poland and Romania etc but in my opinion it will mean an increase in those arriving from Africa, the Far East, the West Indies, India, Pakistan and the Middle East. Our enemies are not going to stop mass immigration and the Great Replacement project just because of Brexit or should I say BRINO (Brexit In Name Only).There’s no call for celebration here wouldn’t you agree?
6) Britain/USA trade deal. Does anyone seriously think that a trade deal negotiated on behalf of Britain by Tory arch-capitalist globalists and Israel ‘Firsters’ will secure a deal that is actually good for Britain, because I don’t? Trump is waiting in the wings with his fellow neo-Con hawks to stitch the UK up ‘big-time’.
Any deal concluded will without a shadow of a doubt be good for the USA and bad for America’s ‘bitch’ – because that is how they see us and it’s how they see the rest of the world also. I expect our NHS to become a casualty eventually of any future trade deal in spite of persistent denials by the Tories who say the NHS isn’t for sale.
7) Even Farage has acknowledged that we will not have our full fishing rights and waters returned to us after Brexit negotiations are concluded. If this is so I have to ask what other areas of British life we are going to have to accept compromises on?
As there is still so much uncertainty ahead of us it really does surprise me that the Leavers are so willing to prematurely indulge in celebration and triumphalism at this early stage in proceedings.
I’ll save my celebrating for when I see a complete cessation of mass immigration into Britain. I’ll crack open the bubbly when I see Islam eradicated from our shores. I’ll pat myself on the back when I see a return of an above average birthrate figure for native Brits and a reduction in the birthrates of all the various foreigner groups residing here.
ALL IS CERTAINLY NOT LOST, BUT ALL IS FAR FROM BEING WON YET.
For me the flag remains at half-mast for the time being.
The day Thatcher got it right!
One highlight of Irish National Archives releases publicised this morning involves Mrs Thatcher’s fury at Belgian PM Wilfried Martens, after the Belgians had refused to extradite the notorious IRA priest Fr Patrick Ryan.
The documents relate to events following Ryan’s arrest in 1988 by Belgian police who found a large quantity of cash and bomb-making equipment in his home.
In a repeat of events more than forty years earlier, when French and Belgian authorities took a similarly soft line with Jewish terrorists involved in anti-British atrocities, the Belgians refused to extradite the terrorist priest to London.
Mrs Thatcher was understandably furious, and the official documents released today record her reaction. Martens went on to be the elder statesman of European conservatism, and the whole affair sheds a cynical light on claims that cooperation with Europe is important on ‘security’ grounds.
It’s a sign of our times that today’s report of this in the Daily Mail omits to mention Fr Ryan’s recent gleeful confession to the BBC that Thatcher was “100%” correct to see him as a key player in atrocities such as the Brighton bomb, the IRA’s Libya connection, etc. He boasted of having been personally responsible for devising a foolproof bomb timer, based on a commercially available mini-alarm.
Brexit crisis: will Johnson and Farage bury party differences?
Today’s unanimous verdict by the Supreme Court, ruling that Prime Minister Boris Johnson acted unlawfully in obtaining the prorogation of Parliament, throws the entire Brexit process into doubt.
Johnson no longer controls the House of Commons, which at any time during the run-up to the October 31st deadline could have thrown a spanner in the works, preventing either a “no deal” Brexit or whatever new terms Johnson himself might negotiate.
Neither was he able to seek a fresh mandate at a General Election: since the Fixed Term Parliaments Act 2011 makes an early election impossible without the opposition’s consent – and there was no chance of such consent until Brexit had been delayed or frustrated. So Johnson’s team believed they could put Parliament out of action for a few weeks, leaving MPs with insufficient time for Brexit-blocking.
That cunning plan has badly misfired.
Amid the confusion one thing is clear: Brexit will be dead unless Prime Minister Johnson and Brexit Party leader Nigel Farage can work together.
Today such cooperation looks unlikely. The PM’s chief aide Dominic Cummings loathes Farage (which is the main reason why there were two rival pro-Brexit campaigns at the 2016 Referendum). That split didn’t matter during the referendum: in fact it might have been an advantage, but it would be fatal at a General Election. Farage reciprocates the loathing: his main reaction to today’s judgment was not to defend the Brexit process but to attack Dominic Cummings.
H&D readers are themselves divided on the merits of Brexit itself. But for Brexiteers the imperative is clear: Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage must not turn on each other, or the entire process will be derailed.
Brexit Party continues alliance with terror apologists
Brexit Party leader Nigel Farage has often seemed to have a blind spot when it comes to Northern Ireland, and H&D has previously highlighted the disgraceful decision to field IRA apologist Claire Fox – a lifelong Marxist – as his party’s number one candidate for North West England at the European elections in June.
Though one of her fellow candidates quit in disgust, Ms Fox is now a Brexit Party MEP, and the party’s dalliance with fanatical supporters of Republican terrorists continues.
For perhaps the first time H&D readers will have found themselves agreeing to a large extent with Observer columnist Nick Cohen this week, when he pointed out that “Farage supports the old cadres of the Revolutionary Communist party, which hugged the most extreme elements in Irish republicanism”.
In fact these RCP veterans consistently pursued a pro-IRA agenda that was even worse than that of Jeremy Corbyn, John McDonnell and Ken Livingstone. They were also conspiracy-minded apologists for Serbia during the Yugoslav civil war, apparently because the Serbs were fighting the Croats, who had been allied to the wicked Nazis during the Second World War!
One of these old Leninists, James Heartfield, will be the Brexit Party candidate for Islington North, standing against Corbyn, at the next general election. Heartfield was a Revolutionary Communist party organiser in Islington and Manchester. His wife Eve Kay-Kreizman was also an activist in the RCP and the pro-IRA Irish Freedom Network, but has since enjoyed a 20-year career as a television producer.
Other ex-RCP / Living Marxism candidates for the Brexit Party have included Alka Sehgal Cuthbert (daughter of Indian immigrants and a candidate on the Brexit Party’s London slate at the Euro elections), and Stuart Waiton (on the Scottish slate).
After the IRA murdered two schoolboys (12-year-old Tim Parry and 3-year-old Johnathan Ball) in Warrington in 1993, Heartfield’s publication wrote: “We defend the right of the Irish people to take whatever measures are necessary in their struggle for freedom.”
Nigel Farage’s struggle to free the United Kingdom from the European Union would be a lot better off without these Leninist/Fenian relics.
Titanic elects new Captain
It would once have been big news for H&D readers that both UKIP and the BNP held leadership elections this week. The fact that many readers wouldn’t even have known these elections were happening is testimony to these parties having sunk into irrelevance.
The decline of these two parties has taken two very different forms. The BNP now exists only as a means of obtaining legacies from the wills of elderly patriots, many of whom would have drawn up their wills at a time when the BNP seemed a genuine challenge to the multiracial establishment.
Cynical BNP chairman Adam Walker and his right-hand man, party treasurer Clive Jefferson, have faced two challenges this year.
One is a continuing court case seeking to reverse their abuse of the party constitution: this case is continuing and it would not be appropriate for H&D to comment further.
The other was a leadership election, in which North London activist and former mayoral candidate David Furness challenged Walker. It was obvious that Mr Furness had the backing of almost all the party’s remaining serious activists, including Brian Parker (the longest serving councillor in the party’s history); East London organiser Paul Sturdy; and Bexley activists Mike Jones and Nicola Finch.
Yet his campaign was crippled by two factors. Firstly, many who would have backed Mr Furness have already quit the BNP in despair. Secondly, it seems that Walker and Jefferson had the proxy votes of unknown numbers of life members safely tucked in their pockets.
The official result was 308 votes for Adam Walker and 161 votes for Mr Furness. This in itself indicates a significant decline in membership since the previous leadership election in 2015, when Mr Walker polled 523 votes to Paul Hilliard’s 145.
And of course if you go back to the 2011 election (only eight years ago) the BNP was unrecognisably larger: at that very close contest Nick Griffin polled 1,157 votes to 1,148 for Andrew Brons.
What now for those few true patriots in the BNP? Logically they should be seeking a new political home, perhaps in alliance with the National Front.
This week’s other leadership election was in UKIP, whose decline has been due to general crankiness and simple lack of ability, rather than the cynicism and corruption that have pervaded the BNP’s hierarchy since the Griffin years.
Under outgoing leader Gerard Batten, UKIP drove away Nigel Farage and many other former MEPs and senior activists by pursuing an extreme and obsessive form of anti-Islam campaigning, and by building alliances with eccentric YouTube ‘stars’ such as Carl Benjamin, aka ‘Sargon of Akkad’.
Batten had promised only to be a caretaker leader after the scandal that ousted his predecessor Henry Bolton, but despite disastrous local and European election results he tried to seek a new mandate by standing in this year’s leadership election.
UKIP’s national executive refused to allow the retiring leader to stand. In a circular to members issued on July 30th, they wrote:
The NEC’s decision to exclude Gerard Batten from the ballot paper was a difficult one, and one which the NEC members knew would cause controversy whichever way they voted, and I have been asked to provide this explanation to our members.
All candidates for the leadership election were required to attend a vetting interview after which any recommendations and observations may be passed onto the NEC. The NEC had hoped to receive assurances from Gerard over his engagement with Tommy Robinson, over future “personal advisors” unapproved by the party’s governing board, whether he would be willing to engage with television and radio stations to get our message across, and whether he was willing to stand for more than a single year. Gerard knew that his candidacy would be challenged, but nevertheless chose not to attend the interview. The NEC found that Gerard had brought the party into disrepute and had failed the vetting element of the candidate requirements.
Against the NEC’s advice and wishes, he associated the party with people who did the party great electoral harm, and had, in effect silenced UKIP at a time when Brexit is and was the most pressing political issue of the day. Everyone tasked with getting the party’s message out in the European elections was stifled by questions about Gerard’s appointees. It was clear that we would be further marginalised in the future while the Party’s direction was turned from Brexit and was being dominated by people like Tommy Robinson. So unequal was that relationship, that the leader did not distance himself from Tommy Robinson, even when he stood against UKIP in the European elections.
Gerard’s strategy gave others the excuse needed to found the Brexit Party. The Brexit Party has since drawn not only millions of voters away from us, but also many of our longstanding members and elected representatives. This year might have been UKIP’s year had it not been for this leadership decision made in defiance and against the advice of the NEC. The result was that UKIP, the original party of Brexit, suffered its worst ever election defeat in recent years.
Further, it was felt that the party had greatly suffered from Gerard’s refusal to engage with TV, radio and press, thereby denying us a voice.
Finally, there was no confidence that Gerard would continue to stand as leader, having since the European elections repeatedly said that he would not, having had both his deposit paid and his nomination papers completed by Tommy Robinson supporters, and having made it clear, even at the time of the vetting interview, that he was still uncertain as to whether he would withdraw his application to stand in the election.
As is manifestly clear from our constitution, the NEC has a clear duty to safeguard the long term future of UKIP. That was the NEC’s sole intention.
These are important times for us, and the political climate is changing rapidly. UKIP needs a fresh start which will begin with the leadership election.
At first Batten’s fellow anti-Islamist Alan Craig (former leader of the Christian Peoples Alliance) threatened to bring a legal action against the national executive on the former leader’s behalf. However this was soon dropped. Batten and Craig changed their strategy to endorse West London UKIP branch chairman Richard Braine.
And UKIP’s members went on to slap their own executive in the face and endorse Batten’s failed strategy! Braine was elected with more than 50% of the vote, ahead of three rival candidates. The full result was:
Richard Braine 2,935 votes (53%)
Freddy Vachha [London regional chairman] 1,184 (20%)
Ben Walker [Royal Navy veteran and former South Gloucs councillor] 753 (14%)
Mike Hookem [former deputy leader and ex-MEP for Yorkshire & Humber] 717 (13%)
The UKIP Titanic’s new captain is likely to order full steam ahead, and will probably appoint Batten as his deputy, surrounding himself with many of the same anti-Islam obsessives who courted disaster at the polls earlier this year.
No doubt the big winners from all this will be Nigel Farage and the Brexit Party, who can expect many new recruits from the anti-Batten wing of UKIP, though if the Conservative Party will accept them, many might prefer to join up with Prime Minister Boris and his new, supposedly pro-Brexit party.
Italy heads for ‘post-fascist’ coalition
Matteo Salvini – the leading anti-immigration politician in Europe – is set to realign Italian politics with a new, ‘post-fascist’ coalition.
As interior minister and deputy prime minister in the present Italian government, Salvini has already pursued radical and highly popular policies to protect Italy from tides of immigrants crossing the Mediterranean.
However – as H&D has consistently argued – the coalition between his Lega party and the anti-establishment (but essentially liberal) Five Star Movement was always incoherent and unlikely to last.
Though it is obvious that Salvini is now deliberately looking for an excuse to break up the coalition, this should be seen not as an unscrupulous bid for personal power, but as an attempt to create a more ideologically stable coalition, probably with the Fratelli d’Italia (‘Brothers of Italy’) party, one of several movements that grew out of the postwar fascist party MSI.
Fratelli and their leader Giorgia Meloni have for several years been allied to the British Conservative Party in the European Parliament, an inconvenient fact that doesn’t get mentioned in the alarmist analysis published today in the Sunday Telegraph.
Nevertheless a Lega-Fratelli alliance would be a bold challenge to the postwar European consensus, and would probably succeed in winning a solid majority for an explicitly anti-immigration, pro-White government, whenever new Italian elections are held.
The biggest short-term problem is that Italy’s constitution allows all sorts of delays which might involve the President appointing a ‘centrist’ government that could hold power for many months without elections.
Brexit Party struggling in by-elections
The Liberal Democrats have won yesterday’s parliamentary by-election in the rural Welsh constituency Brecon & Radnorshire, further worsening the parliamentary arithmetic for new Prime Minister Boris Johnson, making it less likely that he can achieve Brexit without a general election.
Brecon & Radnorshire was also bad news for Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party, whose candidate was a distant third with 10.5%. A crumb of comfort for Farage was UKIP’s embarrassment at finishing bottom of the poll with 0.7%, behind even the ‘Monster Raving Loony Party’!
Regular H&D readers will be very familiar with our long-running analyses of UKIP’s poor performance in local by-elections, which indicated a long time ago that the party was in big trouble.
Now of course UKIP is dead, and is widely seen to have been superseded by the Brexit Party, founded earlier this year by former UKIP leader Nigel Farage.
The Brexit Party achieved extraordinarily good results at this year’s European Parliamentary elections: 30.5% of the nationwide vote, electing 29 MEPs – easily the largest UK party at that election.
The jury is still out as to whether the election of self-proclaimed Hard Brexiteer Boris Johnson as Conservative Party leader and (for the time being at least) Prime Minister will end Farage’s adventure.
What does seem clear is that (like UKIP before it) the Brexit Party is struggling to turn its potential support into actual votes in local or Westminster (as opposed to European) elections.
Last week in Gloucester the Brexit Party contested two city council elections for the first time. The good news for Farage is that his party finished way ahead of UKIP. The bad news is that they finished a poor third in one and fourth in the other.
In Podsmead ward – exactly the sort of White working-class estate where the Brexit Party ought to be threatening Labour (according to many pundits) they were fourth with 16.4% (UKIP polled just 1.6%). Labour did indeed lose the seat – but to the very pro-EU Liberal Democrats, not to Farage.
In a very different part of Gloucester, Barnwood ward – equally White but far more affluent – the Brexit Party finished third with 10.5% (UKIP managed a microscopic 0.4%). Again the Liberal Democrats gained the seat, this time from the Tories.
And tonight the Brexit Party has finished a distant third in its second attempt at a parliamentary by-election. The Liberal Democrats are again the winners, but perhaps the more important story is that the Tory candidate – despite having been convicted of a criminal offence, causing this by-election in the first place – finished well ahead of the Brexit Party candidate.
It’s too early to talk about a crisis for Farage, but just a couple of months after his great Euro-election triumph, the Brexit Party is badly in need of a good result somewhere. As things stand, Boris Johnson must be tempted to call a general election – at which Farage could be sunk without trace.
Winners and losers as Europe’s populist tide ebbs and flows
While Nigel Farage’s new Brexit Party celebrated big victories in this week’s European elections, the much-advertised populist breakthrough proved to be at best a patchy affair.
Predictably the big populist winners included Italy‘s deputy prime minister Matteo Salvini, whose anti-immigration Lega party topped the polls with 34.3% and 29 seats – a huge increase on their 6.2% and five seats in 2014, when the party was known as Lega Nord (Northern League).
Also continuing to advance were the nationalist-conservative governing parties in Poland and Hungary.
Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orban and his Fidesz party are suspended from the European conservative group EPP, but Orban had the last laugh this week. While most European conservative parties are in crisis, Fidesz increased their support to 52.3%, up from 51.5% in 2014.
A very radical nationalist party polled exceptionally well in Slovakia. Marian Kotleba’s People’s Party Our Slovakia – a party that stands staunchly in the tradition of Slovakia’s wartime leader Monsignor Jozef Tiso – gained two MEPs after polling 12.1% (up from 1.8% in 2014).
By contrast some previously successful populist and anti-Islam parties suffered poor results. The once-influential Dutch Freedom Party led by Geert Wilders was wiped out, losing all four of their MEPs and polling 3.5% (down from 13.2% in 2014).
Also badly beaten was the Danish People’s Party who lost three of their four MEPs after their vote fell from 26.6% to 10.7%. Voters in Denmark showed the strongest evidence of a trend also witnessed in some other European countries: an anti-populist backlash with increased turnouts among previously apathetic voters.
Marine Le Pen, once Europe’s most successful anti-immigration politician, has been to some extent eclipsed by her Italian ally Salvini, but Le Pen’s National Rally (RN) – previously the National Front (FN) – again topped the poll in France with 23.3% (slightly down from the FN’s 24.9% in 2014). The more ‘moderate’ French eurosceptic party France Arise (DLF) led by Farage’s main French ally Nicolas Dupont-Aignan fell below the 5% threshold to obtain MEPs. DLF polled 3.5% (down from 3.8% under an earlier party name in 2014).
Le Pen’s former FN vice-president Florian Philippot broke away in September 2017 to form a splinter party called The Patriots, mainly on the European issue: unlike Le Pen he wants France to leave the European Union. Philippot’s party polled only 0.7% despite seeking to appropriate the name of the anti-establishment “yellow vest” street protestors.
Having lost one of her main European parliamentary allies with the demise of Geert Wilders’ Dutch Freedom Party, Le Pen will have been greatly cheered by the landslide gains for the Flemish nationalists Vlaams Belang. In simultaneous Belgian regional, parliamentary and European elections, VB’s young leader Tom Van Grieken (elected in 2014 as a 28-year-old) succeeded in turning round the party’s fortunes.
VB now have 18 seats in the Belgian Parliament (up from 3 in 2014) and three MEPs (up from one in 2014).
The other important Le Pen ally is the Austrian Freedom Party, who managed to hold on 18.1% (down from 19.7% in 2014) despite a financial scandal that has destroyed the career of party leader and former Vice-Chancellor Heinz-Christian Strache. In fact these European elections pale into insignificance against the background of Austria’s political crisis, which has now brought down the government and provoked a general election to be held in September.
Rather than consistent populist/nationalist success, the main event of this year’s European elections in most of the continent was a dramatic increase in turnout: up from 42.2% to 50.1% in France; from 48.1% to 61.4% in Germany; and from 43.8% to 64.3% in Spain.
The new Spanish anti-immigration party Vox elected three MEPs for the first time after polling 6.2% (up from 1.6% in 2014 but down from 10.3% at this year’s general election).
In Germany the civic nationalist and anti-immigration party AfD (Alternative for Germany) polled 4.1m votes (11.0%), up from 2.1m votes (7.1%) in 2014, increasing their tally of MEPs from seven to eleven.
One side-effect of AfD’s success was the defeat of the long-established German nationalist party NPD, who polled 101,000 votes (0.3%), down from 301,000 votes (1.0%) in 2014. The NPD’s sole MEP Udo Voigt consequently lost his seat. Two smaller German nationalist parties also contested the Euro-election. Die Rechte polled 25,000 votes for a slate headed by 90-year-old author and historical justice campaigner Ursula Haverbeck, who is presently serving a prison sentence for “holocaust denial”. The III Path (Dritte Weg) polled 13,000 votes.
Greek national socialist party Golden Dawn lost one of their three MEPs after polling 4.8%, down from 9.4% in 2014 (though in contrast to some populist parties Golden Dawn is disproportionately strong among young voters). Their Maltese counterparts Imperium Europa, a national socialist party led by Norman Lowell, polled 3.2%, up from 2.8% in 2014.
Sinn Fein struggle both sides of border
After many years of political advances Sinn Fein (political wing of the terrorist IRA) has suffered setbacks on both sides of the Irish border in this week’s European elections. Some Sinn Fein candidates are already hinting that the results threaten the position of party leader Mary Lou McDonald.
Results from the Irish Republic are still being counted, but Sinn Fein has already lost local council seats across the country and has slipped back in the three Euro-constituencies, losing votes both to the Greens and to assorted left-wing independents.
Meanwhile in Ulster, Sinn Fein has lost votes among liberal, middle-class Catholics to the cross-community Alliance Party whose leader Naomi Long has achieved her party’s best ever result.
The biggest loser in Northern Ireland was Danny Kennedy of the Ulster Unionist Party (UUP), once known as the ‘Official Unionists’. The UUP has taken a pro-Remain stance, but pro-Remain Unionists seem to have defected en masse to the Alliance Party.
The pro-Brexit Democratic Unionist Party has won its best European Parliamentary result since 2004, with Diane Dodds elected first after transfers.
The new socially conservative Catholic party Aontu didn’t field candidates in the European elections.
Big gains for Farage on mixed night for Europe’s ‘populists’
British voters decisively rejected the political establishment at the European elections. Results announced overnight showed that Nigel Farage’s new Brexit Party took 32% of the vote and 28 MEPs, while Theresa May’s Conservative Party was reduced to just three MEPs, polling just 9%.
Farage crushed his old party UKIP, whose leader Gerard Batten lost his own seat in London, where UKIP polled only 2.1% losing their deposit.
Batten wasn’t the biggest loser in these elections: that honour went to former EDL leader ‘Tommy Robinson’. Standing as an independent in North West England, ‘Robinson’ lost his deposit with only 2.2% despite a very high-profile campaign with his trademark street violence and anti-Islam rhetoric.
‘Robinson’ has been exposed as full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
By contrast Farage will now be considering how to transform the Brexit Party into a genuine political party able to contest the next general election. British politics might never be the same again.
Meanwhile across Europe there were mixed results for anti-immigration parties. The biggest winner so far seems to be Matteo Salvini’s Lega who topped the poll in Italy with 34%; while among the losers was the anti-Islamist Dutch Freedom Party headed by Geert Wilders – they lost all four of their MEPs after polling 3.5%, down from 13.2% in 2014.
H&D will publish a full analysis of the results for anti-immigration and pro-nationalist parties across Europe as full results become available later today.
There will be some confusion among staff at Hope not Hate and other recipients of largesse from George Soros. Last night Robert Rowland, who managed about $1bn of hedge fund assets while working for Soros Fund Management from 1996 to 2003, has just been elected alongside Nigel Farage as a Brexit Party MEP for South East England.
A small sign of UKIP’s terminal decline was in Burnley, one of the very few towns where the party has a viable branch and a group of elected councillors. Yet even here the party was evidently not represented at the count, where a blatant error seems to have been made by the Returning Officer. It seems obvious to H&D that a bundle of 500 votes was misallocated by Burnley counting staff to the tiny pro-Remain UKEUP rather than to UKIP: to anyone with political experience, the reported result in Burnley looks obviously wrong. This is the sort of error that potentially could have cost UKIP £5,000 – but no party representative was on hand to correct it!
