Lee Rigby – ten years gone but never forgotten
Ten years ago on 22nd May 2013 a brave young working-class Englishman – Lee Rigby, from Middleton, near Manchester – was butchered by two ‘British’ Muslim converts, the sons of Nigerian immigrants.
Lee Rigby was serving with the Royal Regiment of Fusiliers. His unit would once have been part of the Lancashire Fusiliers, a regiment with a proud history dating back centuries.
Fusilier Rigby was a drummer and machine-gunner who had served in Cyprus, Germany, and Afghanistan. At the time of his murder, he was working on recruitment and on duties at the Tower of London.
On 22nd May ten years ago, Lee Rigby was returning to his barracks after a day working at the Tower. His assailants attacked him with knives and a cleaver, attempting to behead him in the fashion of Islamist terrorists.
David Cameron, then Prime Minister, came out with the usual political banalities: “This country will be absolutely resolute in its stand against extremism and terror.”
Unfortunately the truth is that Cameron’s Conservative Party – just like its Labour opponents – has a far from resolute record of conciliating terrorists. Sinn Fein, political wing of the IRA that killed so many of Lee Rigby’s comrades over the years, is presently reaping the rewards of political cowardice in Whitehall and Westminster.
Lee Rigby put these traitors and cowards to shame. True Britons will honour his memory, on today’s anniversary and forever.
When is a party a “major party”?
Many H&D readers will recently have received a fundraising email from Britain First, stating that they have been classed as a “major party” by the Electoral Commission and consequently must find £6,000 to pay for the auditing of their accounts.
Some might (wrongly) imagine that this “major party” status has something to do with election results or with the number of candidates that a party stands.
In fact it seems to be largely a financial matter. Any party whose income or expenditure (or both) is over £250,000 must file audited accounts, which are published on the Electoral Commission’s website.
The most recent accounts of this type relate to the year ending December 2021, when nineteen parties fell into this category.
Some of these are the obvious “major parties” but there were some interesting anomalies. For example, Traditional Unionist Voice (TUV), which by normal reckoning might be thought a “major party” in Northern Ireland, where its leader Jim Allister is a member of the Stormont Assembly, was not among the nineteen parties with turnover above £250,000.
However, a tiny vanity party – the London Real Party, formed to support the London mayoral campaign of American-born podcaster Brian Rose – had income of £280,114 and expenditure of £273,540.
Even a tiny Marxist sect, the Socialist Party of Great Britain, had income of £551,810.
But the most extraordinary anomaly is that the Reclaim Party, led by actor Laurence Fox, reported income of £1,850,002 – considerably more than Sinn Fein, Northern Ireland’s largest party, the long established political wing of the supposedly dormant terrorist IRA.
Sinn Fein’s reported income was £1,532,946.
Readers can judge for themselves which party’s donors (perhaps including unwilling donors in Sinn Fein’s case) obtained better value for money. Reclaim seems to have contested just three elections during 2021: receiving 1.9% in the London mayoral election, 0.3% in the Glasgow Pollok constituency at the Scottish parliamentary election; and a fraction under 1% at the North Shropshire parliamentary by-election.
Vanity politics: MP defects to ‘Reclaim’ party
This morning we saw a perfect example of this, when the MP for North West Leicestershire, Andrew Bridgen, defected to the Reclaim Party.
Bridgen has been a Tory MP since 2010 but was suspended from the parliamentary Conservative Party in January this year and expelled from the party three months later, after endorsing a series of bizarre conspiracy theories about the CoViD pandemic.
Some readers whose political knowledge depends on a social media echo chamber might be tempted to regard Bridgen as an anti-establishment hero. In fact aspects of his record indicate fairly clearly why Richard Tice and Reform UK (the main civic nationalist party) chose not to welcome him, despite the fact this would have given them an MP, and why he ended up joining a tiny vanity project like Reclaim.
Last year Bridgen was found repeatedly to have broken parliamentary rules on paid lobbying, including failure to declare financial interests. This included payments of £12,000 per year from a company based in Ghana.
Among many other questionable incidents, Bridgen has been involved in a long running financial disputes with his own relatives over his family business, which resulted in a High Court judge stating that the MP had “lied under oath and behaved in an abusive, arrogant and aggressive manner”, was “an unreliable and combative witness who tried to conceal his own misconduct”, and “gave evasive and argumentative answers and tangential speeches that avoided answering the questions”.
Some might think this is the sort of behaviour one should expect from Members of Parliament – but it is tragic that one of the few MPs to have broken with the mainstream should be someone of this sort, and that the defection should have occurred on a fringe, crank issue rather than on one of the many serious issues where the political establishment has betrayed our country.
Reclaim is not even a serious political party. There were over 8,000 local council seats contested at last week’s elections, and Reclaim had precisely zero candidates. It is an online vanity project, not a serious political party. So perhaps it is ideal for Andrew Bridgen.
Reclaim was created during 2020-2021 by the actor Laurence Fox, based on a pro-Brexit party founded during 2019 by Fox’s main donor, billionaire financier Jeremy Hosking.
H&D pulls no punches in post-election analysis
After several days of reflection on last week’s local elections. H&D‘s assistant editor Peter Rushton has written a hard-hitting analysis of the results, seeking to draw some long overdue, hard lessons for our movement.
Peter has a long record of practical electoral activism as well as academic analysis. Click here to read his new article.
Facts and figures on the election can be found here.
Time for nationalists to decide: are we serious?
Professional politicians are notorious for ‘spinning’ even the most unfavourable election results, looking for a silver lining to the darkest clouds.
As racial nationalists, we have to be more honest than these ‘spin doctors’. Last week’s elections were appalling. They reflected years of decline, years of factional division, years of vanity, years of crank obsessions, years of tolerating substandard conduct within our ranks.
One of the most decent and intelligent men in nationalism, Jim Lewthwaite, who was elected BNP councillor for Wyke ward in Bradford with 1,583 votes in 2004, and was runner-up with 701 votes in the same ward as a British Democrat candidate in 2019, polled only 140 votes (5.1%) in Wyke this year.
To his credit, Jim finished ahead of a Reform UK candidate, but the verdict of most of his old voters was “none of the above”.
In Hollinwood ward, Oldham, National Housing Party leader John Lawrence polled 205 votes (7.6%). Though far from the worst result in 2023, this followed twenty years of nationalist decline in Hollinwood and the surrounding area. In 2002 Oldham BNP organiser Mick Treacy achieved 736 votes (23.9%) here; a year later this fell slightly to 503 votes (22.8%) and a much diminished and divided BNP never contested Hollinwood again.
UKIP eventually picked up the disillusioned White working class vote in Hollinwood, polling 37.2% in 2014, 28.9% in 2015, 30.3% in 2016, and 25.9% in 2019.
John Lawrence and NHP grew out of activity in the Hollinwood area by ‘Tommy Robinson’ (formerly of the EDL). The party is anti-immigration though non-‘racist’. In 2022 Lawrence polled 174 votes (10.1%), falling to just 59 votes (3.7%) in a misfiring by-election campaign last November, and now bouncing back slightly to 7.6% this year.
For many reasons, partly connected to allegations of local government corruption and ‘grooming’ scandals, there should be enormous potential for racial nationalism in this ward and in the rest of Oldham. Yet quite clearly that potential is not being mined. This year three Asian Conservatives were elected in Hollinwood! The new Tory councillors include Kamran Ghafoor, who was convicted and fined in 2012 for offences under the Housing Act, after failing to ensure that a property he rented out was safe to live in.
Another nationalist failure was in Swanscombe ward, Dartford, where Britain First leader Paul Golding polled a fraction under 5%. Britain First is an anti-Islam, anti-immigration, but multiracialist party that (like the NHP) has recruited both from the EDL scene and among ex-BNP activists such as Golding himself. Golding had no opposition from Reform UK, UKIP or any of its splinter parties. This was a ward where UKIP polled 16.5% in 2019 and even higher votes in earlier years, yet despite fighting only seven wards across the whole of England this year, Britain First polled less than 5% here.
Compared to past years, when many of our potential voters were seduced either by UKIP, the Brexit Party, or Boris Johnson’s Tories, nationalists ought to have been pushing at an open door this year.
Rishi Sunak’s Tories have far less appeal to White working class Britons than their counterparts had in the Boris Johnson era. Brexit is no longer an issue, immigration remains out of control, and lower income families are hard-pressed by the cost of living crisis.
Yet British nationalism has suffered such damage (partly self-inflicted) during the past decade that hardly any of our candidates made a serious impact with voters.
There were very few honourable exceptions. Julian Leppert was an excellent councillor in Epping Forest, and although he lost his seat after four years on the council, his result (25.2%) stood out from a generally dismal crowd.
Yet even here, the question must be asked: why did the British Democrats (Julian’s party for the past year since the closure of For Britain) not begin leafletting the moment he joined their party?
Given that there were no elections in London this year, why were there not more activists out on the streets of Waltham Abbey for months before the campaign formally started, introducing the Brit Dems and highlighting Julian’s excellent record of fighting for local residents? (Again there are a few honourable exceptions: several Londoners did make the effort and should be commended for continuing to fly the flag for nationalism and avoiding disillusionment.)
Why are many nationalists in 2023 happier to protest about drag queens, or go on marches to promote conspiracy theories about CoViD, while seeming to lose interest in serious racial nationalism – especially the essential hard slog of election campaigning?
To be fair, the British Democrats have made considerable progress during the last year or two, recruiting several valuable activists. The real problems date back more than a decade, to the rapid collapse of Nick Griffin’s BNP.
When Andrew Brons narrowly failed to oust Griffin as BNP chairman in the leadership election of July 2011, it was obvious that a new party would soon be needed, yet it took years to get that party off the ground. More than 2,300 BNP members voted in that leadership election: 1,157 for Griffin and 1,148 for Brons. Probably fewer than 100 of these are today active in any nationalist party.
During recent weeks there have been arguments between Patriotic Alternative leaders and some of their former colleagues, now in the Homeland Party, about whether PA has made sufficient efforts to register as a political party, and to convert its undoubted success online into “real world” activity.
I don’t intend to take sides in that argument, because I don’t know the full facts.
But questions need to be asked as to why so many nationalists are happier on social media than on doorsteps. This applies to civic nationalists in Reform UK, UKIP and its splinters, even more than to racial nationalists.
Part of the problem is defeatism, engendered by a style of politics that overemphasises conspiracies and the presumed power of our enemies.
Of course we face great obstacles – legal, financial, and political – but these are far from insuperable. Nationalist campaigns have repeatedly punched above our weight and shocked the political establishment – especially in Burnley, Oldham, Blackburn, Barking & Dagenham and many other council areas during the 2000s – but for whatever reason, we no longer seem capable of delivering at the ballot box.
Some nationalists argue that elections are a waste of time, but they have so far failed to explain an alternative strategy.
As far back as the 1980s, Steve Brady (then a member of the National Front Directorate) explained a “ladder strategy” by which nationalists could establish networks of local branches by building on local community campaigning. Elections are certainly not the only element of this strategy, but if nationalists aren’t capable of organising a serious local election campaign, how are any of us supposed to believe that they can lead a racial nationalist revolution?
As we have consistently argued in H&D, there are only two good reasons to be involved in politics. First, to present an ideologically solid solution to the problems of our race and nation, educating the best of our new recruits. Second, to build towards gaining power, locally and eventually nationally, so as to put this ideology into action.
Sometimes one of these objectives has to be prioritised over the other; sometimes they can work in parallel; sometimes different nationalists have to devote their efforts to one or the other.
Tragically what we are left with in 2023 is a movement that too often fulfils neither objective – instead abandoning serious ideology to pursue crank fads (often imported online from the USA) that are of no relevance to the racial nationalist cause, but also have no substantial appeal to the British electorate.
Three good examples are a trio of intellectually flimsy, unBritish, indeed anti-British and anti-European political cults: Trumpism, anti-vaxxism, and Putinism.
If any individual nationalist truly believes that Donald Trump presents a genuine challenge to the New World Order; or that vaccinations and even the pandemic itself were some sort of scam or conspiracy; or that the brutal anti-European dictator Vladimir Putin is in some sense a champion of traditional European values – then they are welcome to pursue these eccentric views.
But once any or all of these cults infect a nationalist party or movement, they become a toxic threat to our cause. The vast majority of British voters will never believe that CoViD vaccinations were a mass poisoning plot; they will never take Donald Trump seriously; and they will never support Putin’s semi-Asiatic hordes.
The inevitable unpopularity of these causes would not matter if any of them were essential to our core racial nationalist ideology: but they aren’t. At best they are a distraction, at worst a fatal liability.
Urgent priorities for rebuilding nationalism in 2023 should involve identifying topical issues in target wards: questions of immediate local concern that can be explained to voters in ways that make the underlying ideology of racial nationalism clearly relevant to their daily lives.
We have the great advantage that truth is on our side, and truth cannot be suppressed forever. And we should avoid the tempting excuse that the system is rigged, or that ‘they’ control everything so there’s no point in any form of practical resistance other than ranting on social media.
The political conspirator Cassius, in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, tells a comrade:
“The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars
But in ourselves, that we are underlings.“
In 2023 racial nationalists should not blame the system, or the media, or our opponents. Such obstacles will always exist. But with sufficient will and intelligence, they can be overcome.
Vivat Rex Carolus!
The UK’s racial nationalist movement – battered and bruised after a grim set of election results this week – will have had mixed feelings about today’s Coronation of King Charles III.
Amid the inevitable wokeness, welcome elements of British tradition remained visible and audible throughout the event.
The spirit of the United Kingdom, the heritage of England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, is still alive.
And the same is true of racial nationalism in these dark times.
It will very soon be time for our movement to face some hard truths. This website and forthcoming issues of our magazine will not shy away from expressing these truths in strong terms, even at the risk of offending some readers.
But for today, we wish our new King well, and hope that he and his fellow Britons can interpret the Archbishop’s words at the Enthronement in terms that ensure loyalty to the Union, Race and Nation.
Stand firm, and hold fast from henceforth this seat of royal dignity, which is yours by the authority of Almighty God.
May that same God, whose throne endures for ever, establish your throne in righteousness, that it may stand fast for evermore.
Reclaiming May Day for European workers!
May Day was a traditional European festival long before it was hijacked by American Marxists in 1889.
Linked to the ancient celebration of Beltane (marking the midpoint between Spring Equinox and Summer Solstice), May Day is marked in Germany by Walpurgis Night and in England by traditional dances.
One of the most colourful celebrations of Beltane is in Edinburgh, which for H&D readers had a special significance this year because our comrade Vincent Reynouard has been in Edinburgh prison for more than five months. (An interview with Vincent will appear soon on this website and in the July-August edition of H&D.)
Racial nationalists have rightly begun to reclaim May Day as a European festival, and to assert the reality that we are the true champions of European workers.
The so-called ‘left’ has long since surrendered to the demands of global capitalism. Mass immigration is championed both in the name of ‘wokeness’ and to provide cheap labour, directly undermining the wages and working conditions of Europeans.
Meanwhile the so-called ‘right’ sometimes talks about resisting mass immigration, but in reality its reactionary ideology is in many ways worse than the ‘left’, and is even more devoted to the exploitative values of global capitalism: anti-nature, anti-worker, anti-White, anti-European.
On May Day 2023 H&D‘s comrades around the world asserted the eternal values of racial nationalism – the true interests of European workers.
Leftists get a taste of their own ‘anti-terrorist’ medicine
Far left activists were outraged this week when a French Marxist publisher was arrested by London police under Schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act.
Ernest Moret was held for 24 hours after refusing to provide passwords for police to access his phone. He was released on bail yesterday evening.
Racial nationalists have known for many years that Schedule 7 gives UK police and border security officers extraordinary powers that would once have been seen as unconstitutional. Our own citizens as well as visitors can be detained on entering the country, and questioned for up to six hours.
Unlike any other arrest, those detained under Schedule 7 have no right to remain silent and are obliged to surrender their phones, computers and other devices, together with any relevant passwords. The authorities do not require any reason for detaining and questioning anyone under Schedule 7, and their questions can cover any subject.
Four of our H&D team have been detained under Schedule 7 in recent years. Editor Mark Cotterill has been stopped twice at Manchester Airport after returning from a non-political holiday to Mexico and a visit to H&D supporters in Australia. Assistant editor Peter Rushton was stopped at London Stansted Airport on returning from a visit to Germany. And last September our Spanish comrade and H&D writer Isabel Peralta was stopped at Manchester Airport, the night before speaking at our 2022 meeting in Preston.
Isabel’s case was especially outrageous because her computer and phone were retained for almost a week, without any justification, as part of a political ‘fishing expedition’ where UK authorities were liaising with political police and intelligence agencies in Germany and Spain.
Everyone at H&D understands that we have very limited rights under Schedule 7, but it seems that the far left is only now waking up to this reality.
In this week’s case, it seems likely that London police were cooperating with their Paris counterparts in an investigation of Ernest Moret’s involvement with protests against President Macron’s changes to French pensions.
Moret and a colleague were visiting fellow Marxists in London, associated with the well-known leftwing publishers Verso.
His fellow leftists at the Guardian and BBC, as well as the National Union of Journalists, were happy to publicise Moret’s case as some sort of outrage. Yet the same wokeists were perfectly happy when Mark, Peter and Isabel (who similarly have no connection to anything that could reasonably be called ‘terrorism’) were detained under the exact same law.
Why do Marxists assume that dictatorial laws will only be used against ‘racists’ and ‘fascists’, and that the far left is immune?
Ex-BNP official suspended by Tories
A former senior official in Nick Griffin’s BNP has been exposed in Rishi Sunak’s Conservative Party. The Tories have suspended Andy McBride from party membership, but he remains a Conservative candidate on the ballot paper for Bracknell Town Council in Berkshire.
During the late 2000s McBride became notorious as an especially factional and obstreperous BNP official. As regional organiser for South East England, he was a bitter enemy of H&D and sought to obstruct or even purge Griffin’s enemies from BNP ranks. His targets included well known supporters of former BNP leader John Tyndall, including the late Richard Edmonds and Warren Glass.
Now it is McBride himself who is being purged from his new party. He is accused not only of past roles in the BNP and Britain First, but of allegedly ‘racist’ posts on social media.
In 2011 McBride and his close ally, Ulster businessman Jim Dowson, resigned from the BNP and formed Britain First, together with former BNP official Paul Golding. Three years later, Dowson and McBride quit Britain First after a dispute with Golding. McBride made his way into the Conservative Party, while Dowson operates a series of Ulster-based fundraising enterprises alongside Nick Griffin.
McBride has written several garbled, ideologically incoherent replies to recent exposés by local newspapers. In his way, McBride is probably a sincere Christian whose politics are fundamentally reactionary and anti-Muslim rather than racial nationalist, but who ventures into colourful language and politically incorrect metaphors on social media.
The sad end to his political career shows that old-fashioned reactionaries have no future in today’s ‘woke’ Conservative Party. But equally, the fact that someone as ideologically vacuous as McBride ever became a BNP regional organiser is a damning indictment of the Griffin era.
UK Local Elections 2023
Nominations have closed for more than 8,000 contests at this year’s local elections in England and Wales. (Northern Ireland’s council elections have a slightly different timescale, and there are no elections in Scotland this year.)
The nationalist and broadly patriotic cause in the UK is still going through its post-Brexit transition, and this is reflected in the small numbers of candidates from racial nationalist parties. You can find a comprehensive list of candidates and parties by clicking this link, but these are the main headlines.
- The British Democrats are the main electorally focused racial nationalist movement, and have five candidates this year, including Julian Leppert who will be defending the seat he won four years ago in Waltham Abbey Paternoster ward, Epping Forest. Mr Leppert won that seat as a candidate of the now defunct For Britain Movement, but he joined the Brit Dems after FBM leader Anne-Marie Waters closed down her party.
- Britain First, led by former BNP official Paul Golding, is the main electoral voice of the anti-Islam movement. It is in principle a non-racial, anti-Islam party, though it includes several veteran racial nationalists. They have eight candidates this year, and their main campaign is likely to be in Walkden North, Salford, where Ashlea Simon will seek to build on the 21.6% she won last year.
- Another anti-Islamist party which has grown slightly during the past year is the National Housing Party, which has three candidates this year, including former BNP and FBM activist Gary Bergin in Claughton ward, Wirral.
- Patriotic Alternative (the country’s most active racial nationalist movement) is still not registered as a political party and therefore unable to contest elections.
- The British National Party, which during the 2000s won many council seats and elected two Members of the European Parliament, has effectively ceased to exist: once again this year there are no BNP candidates anywhere in the UK, and in all likelihood there never will be again.
- The National Front, which during the 1970s was one of Europe’s largest racial nationalist parties, still ticks over as a guardian of racial nationalist ideals, but has only one candidate this year: Tim Knowles in Codnor, Langley Mill & Aldercar ward, Amber Valley.
- Former BNP organiser Dr Andrew Emerson is again standing in his home city of Chichester for his small party Patria.
- Two nationalist independents are standing this year: former councillor Graham Partner in Coalville, NW Leicestershire, and Gary Butler in Shepway, Maidstone.
- The English Democrats, who are a non-racial party but who campaign for an English Parliament as well as immigration restrictions and other issues of interest to H&D readers, have five candidates this year, including party leader Robin Tilbrook in Shelley ward, Epping Forest, and husband and wife team Steve and Val Morris in Bury. Two former ED activists have defected to the rival English Constitution Party and will stand in Barnsley.
- Various civic nationalist parties that grew out of UKIP remain bitterly divided and ideologically confused. Reform UK (by far the largest and best funded) have 480 candidates this year, but unless they can make a serious impact this might be their last serious campaign. UKIP itself has only 48 candidates this year, while rival splinter groups include the Heritage Party with 64 (plus a mayoral candidate) and the Alliance for Freedom & Democracy with 23.
(Please note that election reports and statistics on the H&D site do not usually include parish/town council elections. We only focus on the borough/district council level and above.)
Nigel Farage’s UK Independence Party (which was the main vehicle for the pro-Brexit cause) split in 2018 with Farage founding the Brexit Party, which eventually evolved into today’s Reform UK, led by Farage’s close associate Richard Tice.
Reform UK remains by far the largest vehicle for the broadly civic nationalist cause in the UK, but it is ideologically poles apart from most H&D readers. Tice’s party is blatantly non-racist, and economically liberal. H&D has long argued that the slow death of Reform UK (and of Farageist politics in general) is necessary before the British racial nationalist tradition can revive.
After at least two years of generally dismal election results, Reform UK has (on paper) done well to field 480 candidates at this year’s council elections. But it has very few serious functioning branches. Tice’s best branch by far is in Derby, where the entire council is up for re-election, including the six seats presently held by Reform UK who have a full slate of 51 candidates for the new council.
In addition to Derby, Reform UK has three other really substantial slates of candidates: Bolton (34), Amber Valley (28), and Sunderland (24).
