Another Reform UK lost deposit: when will the Farage-Tice party achieve anything?

Within the past hour the result of yesterday’s parliamentary by-election in West Lancashire was declared.

Predictably it was an easy victory for Labour, and the swing between the two main parties was broadly in line with trends in other recent by-elections and national opinion polls, confirming that Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and his Conservative Party are on a path to defeat at the next General Election, which must be held within the next two years.

But for H&D readers a lot of attention will have focused on Reform UK, the rebranded version of Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party, led by Farage’s close ally Richard Tice.

A party in permament decline? Reform UK leader Richard Tice (above right) with his mentor Nigel Farage

Reform UK’s candidate Jonathan Kay polled 994 votes (4.4%): the party’s seventh successive lost deposit in parliamentary by-elections, despite months of hype from their allies at GB News and from academics such as Dr Matthew Goodwin, who continue to insist that the party’s brand of post-Thatcherite populism will achieve significant support from British voters.

On this occasion (unlike many of those earlier by-elections) Reform UK had no competition from any other candidate to the ‘right’ of the Tories. There was no candidate from UKIP or any of its many splinters, other than Reform UK.

This West Lancashire constituency is very divided socially, including some very poor areas in Skelmersdale but also some affluent and traditionally Tory-voting villages. In 2015 UKIP candidate Jack Sen (who became a very controversial figure within nationalism and has since disappeared from politics) polled 12.2% here (6,058 votes), despite having been expelled and denounced by his own party before polling day for ‘anti-semitism’!

Yet this week UKIP’s successor party Reform UK polled only 994 votes (4.4%), despite the Tory vote having collapsed to a record low for this area. Most of the previous Tory voters (and pro-Brexit voters) stayed at home rather than backing Reform UK, even at a by-election. This suggests that the party needs a fundamental rethink if it is to pose any significant challenge at the next general election.

Controversial Anglo-Indian candidate Jack Sen polled more than 6,000 votes for UKIP in West Lancashire less than eight years ago despite having been expelled for ‘anti-semitism’. UKIP’s successor Reform UK can only dream about such a result.

The truth is that Farage, Tice and Reform UK have little of any relevance or interest to offer to the voters of West Lancashire, or to other Britons (especially those in impoverished areas).

The Farage-Tice agenda of a US-style largely privatised economy, with ‘free markets’ (i.e. global capitalism) very much dominant, is a recipe for internationalism, mass immigration and continued impoverishment for the White British working class.

Farage and his fellow City spivs always intended Brexit to turn London into Singapore-on-Thames, with other British towns and cities as its satellites in a small-state, low tax, low spending, ultra-capitalist, Disunited Kingdom.

The only serious challenge to that vision will come when racial nationalists abandon their recent cranky obsessions and factionalism, and unite with a clear and credible vision for national and racial renaissance. There are some signs that such a renaissance will not be too long delayed, and H&D looks forward to reporting more positive news later this year.

Conservative Future?

England’s most racially divided borough might soon see the first niqab-wearing Conservative councillor.

Fajila Patel is contesting the Bastwell & Daisyfield ward of Blackburn with Darwen borough council in North West England. In 2011’s census the equivalent ward was 85.3% Muslim. Its inhabitants are from varying backgrounds in the Indian sub-continent, some originating in Pakistan but others in India.

According to that 2011 Census, 7.1% of households in the borough had no-one who spoke English “as a main language” – and in Bastwell ward this figure was 26.1%. The main languages spoken in Bastwell other than English are Gujarati, Punjabi and Urdu.

Last year Mrs Patel’s husband – taxi driver ‘Tiger’ Patel – won the neighbouring and similarly Asian-dominated Audley ward, after the campaign video below. These two wards form the core of Blackburn’s Asian population which has expanded into numerous other areas of the town during the decades since Asians first arrived in the borough in the 1960s.

As with many other old industrial towns in the region, including Oldham and Preston, Asians first arrived to work in the declining cotton mills and other manufacturing industry, whose owners liked these immigrants because they would work for low wages and were happy with unpopular shifts such as night work.

When most of this industry disappeared, the Asian communities typically moved into taxi-driving and the retail and food industries, but also experienced high unemployment and crime.

Politically they were exploited by the Labour Party, who treated them as clients who were dependent on the state’s largesse and would therefore have to accept Labour’s ultra-liberal ideas on social issues, many of which are anathema to conservative Muslims.

Typically Labour chose to promote very Westernised, ‘feminist’ Asian women who were in no way representative of their communities, and this led to a backlash. ‘Tiger’ Patel defeated one such very ‘modern’ Muslim Labour woman in Audley ward last year.

The Conservative Party has cynically struck a deal with hardline Muslims in these areas. There could be two defeats for Labour in their former Asian heartland: Mrs Patel stands a good chance of repeating her husband’s victory, while in Audley ward there could be a second shock. Incumbent councillor Yusuf-Jan Virmani is standing for re-election as an independent, after being expelled from Labour last year for alleged ‘anti-semitism’.

What’s certain is that neither Labour nor the Conservatives will speak for Blackburn’s indigenous British. H&D‘s editor Mark Cotterill was elected as a councillor in the mainly White Meadowhead ward of Blackburn in 2006, but since he left the area and moved to Preston, no racial nationalist candidate has come close to being elected.

The Conservative Party’s adoption of an extreme Muslim agenda in Blackburn highlights the desperate need for a party that will address the concerns of the indigenous British. Across the whole of England this year there are very few such candidates. H&D will report on their campaigns, on the results achieved, and on the prospects for a long-overdue realignment of pro-British politics.

County council updates

Mark Cotterill (above right) at the Lancashire County Council declaration with winning Labour candidate Jenny Mein

Following his 16% vote in yesterday’s Preston City Council election, H&D editor Mark Cotterill today polled 8.8% in the Lancashire County Council for Preston South-East division.

Due to redrawing of council boundaries, this was always going to be a lower vote for a racial nationalist independent. Preston SE includes a very large Asian community which tends to vote as a block for Labour candidates – even Jewish ones! (Jenny Mein has held the seat for Labour for many years, and was part of an unusual tradition of Jewish female leaders of Lancashire county council, following Louise Ellman and Ruth Henig.)

Many of the White voters in Preston SE are in a very depressed council estate, where turnout is traditionally low (exacerbated by Covid restrictions on polling stations and campaigning).

In the circumstances 8.8% was a respectable result, especially as once again (in line with a nationwide trend this year) pro-Brexit voters leaned towards Boris Johnson’s Conservatives.

We await further results during the day from nationalist candidates nationwide including Dr Jim Lewthwaite of the British Democratic Party, contesting Wyke ward, Bradford.

And of course there will be a full analysis and results service on this site and in the forthcoming May-June edition of H&D.

full result – Preston SE division, Lancashire County Council

Mein (Labour) 67.9%

Walmsley (Conservative) 18.3%

Cotterill (Independent) 8.8%

Duke (Liberal Democrat) 4.9%

Labour councillor resigns after porn charges

Former Labour councillor Martin Judd

A Labour councillor for the Hollinwood ward of Oldham Council has resigned and last week appeared in court facing charges of downloading child pornography.

Martin Judd, 25, entered not guilty pleas at Manchester Minshull Street Crown Court to three charges that between February 2018 and Febriary 2020 he had downloaded fifteen Category A (the most serious) images of children, twenty-three Category B, and 48 Category C.

Judd was committed for trial in Manchester next January.

Born in New Zealand, Judd was elected as a Hollinwood ward councillor in 2018. A year earlier he had been elected in Manchester as the youngest every President of a Rotary Club. (He worked for Waitrose in Manchester city centre.)

Some H&D readers will remember Hollinwood ward from the early 2000s: Oldham BNP organiser Mick Treacy polled 24% in the ward at the 2002 elections.

Since those days of curse Oldham BNP has ceased to exist, and in any case there can be no by-elections for the time being due to Covid-19.

Lib Dems drop mayoral candidate in ‘anti-semitism scandal’

Geeta Sidhu-Robb, Liberal Democrat candidate suspended over ‘anti-semitism’

The Liberal Democrats, struggling to hold on to their status as the UK’s third largest political party, have run into a storm over ‘anti-semitism’ as they attempt to select a candidate for next May’s London mayoral election to take on Labour’s Sadiq Khan, arguably the most powerful Muslim politician in the Western world.

London Lib Dem members were set to choose between two potential candidates in a postal ballot this month, but one of those candidates has today been suspended after discovery of a video from more than twenty years ago where she made an ‘anti-semitic’ attack on senior Labour politician Jack Straw.

Straw is an Anglican Christian of partly Jewish ancestry, who served in several prominent roles under Labour Prime Ministers Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, most famously as Foreign Secretary during the Iraq war.

At the 1997 general election Geeta Sidhu-Robb was the Conservative candidate against Straw in his Blackburn constituency. Malawi-born Ms Sidhu-Robb tried to stir up Pakistani voters in Blackburn’s Asian ghetto, telling them via megaphone: “Don’t vote for a Jew, Jack Straw is a Jew. If you vote for him, you’re voting for a Jew. Jews are the enemies of Muslims.”

As a committed Europhile, former corporate lawyer Sidhu-Robb later defected from the Tories to the anti-Brexit Lib Dems, and ended up on the shortlist to become London mayoral candidate, until her ‘anti-semitic’ record was discovered this week.

Watch Tory candidate (now Lib Dem) Geeta Sidhu-Robb making an ‘anti-semitic’ attack on Labour’s Jack Straw. (The relevant section of the video begins after a few seconds.)

What surprises H&D is that alarm bells hadn’t rung sooner among the Lib Dem leadership. It was reasonably well known during the Straw years that several Blackburn Tories encouraged antisemitic anti-Labour campaigns in Asian areas of Blackburn, and Ms Sidhu-Robb’s remarks were actually broadcast in a Channel 5 documentary more than 20 years ago!

Perhaps the Lib Dems were so pleased to tick three political boxes with Ms Sidhu-Robb – ex-Tory defector, non-White, and female – that they didn’t engage their brains. Moreover some concerned activists, including former mayoral candidate Siobhan Benita, have alleged that Ms Sidhu-Robb was being courted by the party because of her wealthy connections and her role in the anti-Brexit pressure group Open Britain and its new campaign ‘Democracy Unleashed’, formerly known as the ‘People’s Vote’ campaign.

Today Ms Sidhu-Robb issued a grovelling apology in an effort to save her rapidly sinking political career:
“I am deeply ashamed of the ignorant and abusive language I used on one occasion in the 1997 General Election campaign. As shown in the footage, I instantly regretted my appalling behaviour, which I continue to do.
“Those words are entirely inconsistent with my views and values, and though there are no excuses for my actions, there is some context; that is, that I was under a great deal of strain and retaliated to the racial abuse I was receiving in Blackburn ‘like for like’.”

Councils obfuscate Covid-19 statistics

Last week H&D reported detailed statistics behind the headlines about Covid-19 in Oldham, the Lancashire town that is on the brink of lockdown following a renewed surge in cases of the pandemic virus.

It is now clear that as we suggested last week, Oldham council deputy leader Arooj Shah was being disingenuous in suggesting that the virus had spread “in all areas, in all age groups, and in all communities”. (Paradoxically, as we reported last week, Cllr Shah is not on good terms with local Muslim ‘community leaders’ and is a an example of the way the Labour Party is in many areas at war with conservative Islam.)

While it is true that there has been a scattering of Covid-19 in different parts of Oldham, there is a very marked concentration in certain parts of the town with an especially high Asian population. (There is also some slight evidence to suggest that Pakistani areas are seeing more Covid than Bangladeshi areas, but the jury is still out on that.)

For the period 7th-13th August (the most recent detailed statistics) the main Covid hotspot was the Alexandra Park census area with 48 cases (having had 55 the previous week). Local reports suggest that as many as 30 of these cases are from just one extended family and their immediate neighbours. The Manchester Evening News reports this but is too cowardly to state that Alexandra Park is a predominantly Pakistani area, containing the Glodwick ghetto that was at the centre of riots in 2001.

The other main Covid area in Oldham is Werneth, with 34 cases this week and 42 last week. At least 15 cases are understood to involve workers at the Park Cakes factory, a major local employer situated on the main road that separates Werneth and Alexandra Park. There is no suggestion that Park Cakes has been at fault in any respect.

The Salem area which borders Alexandra Park and also contains part of the extended Glodwick ghetto is the third-highest Oldham Covid area with 25 cases this week and 12 last week; while the original Bangladeshi area known as Busk, on the edge of the town centre and close to Oldham Athletic’s football stadium Boundary Park, had 15 cases this week and 12 last week.

While politically correct media have highlighted poverty as a contributory factor, the equally poor or in many cases poorer White areas of central Oldham have seen smaller (and in some cases negligible) rates of Covid. These include Alt with 12 cases; Lime Side & Garden Suburb with 11 cases; Derker with only 3 cases; and Moorside & Sholver with no registered cases at all.

The relatively affluent and White villages comprising Saddleworth to the east of Oldham are divided into four different census areas. Three of these reported three Covid cases each this week, while a fourth had none.

Mossley, a former cotton town turned commuter village on the borders of Oldham and Saddleworth, similarly had no Covid cases; neither did the adjacent Micklehurst & Carrbrook census area.

A smaller-scale version of a similar pattern can be seen in Blackburn (where H&D‘s editor used to be a borough councillor).

In Blackburn the highest incidences of Covid this week were again in the mainly Asian areas: 29 in Little Harwood; 22 in Central Blackburn; 19 in Bastwell; 14 in Roe Lee, Brownhill & Sunnybower; and 13 in Audley.

By contrast the mainly White area Meadowhead, where our editor was elected to Blackburn-with-Darwen Council in 2006, had no reported cases.

Oldham heads for lockdown – are councils hiding the truth about Covid spikes?

This week Oldham is facing full lockdown “within days” due to a surge in Covid-19 cases. Two weeks ago residents were told that they must not meet with others in their homes. The latest statistics show that Oldham’s infection rate has almost doubled in the past week, from 57.8 per 100,000 inhabitants to 107.5.

What we don’t yet know is a precise breakdown of which Oldham areas have seen especially serious outbreaks of the pandemic.

During July it was evident that the virus was rampaging in Pakistani and Bangladeshi areas of the town, as H&D reported at the time, and as Oldham Council’s deputy leader Arooj Shah then admitted.

However Cllr Shah argued today that during the past few weeks the virus has spread “in all areas, in all age groups, and in all communities”.

We shall know on Friday this week to what extent her statement is true. Detailed statistics last week showed that while there was some incidence of the virus in White areas of the town, it remained far more prevalent in Pakistani and Bangladeshi areas.

Official statistics published on Friday each week show a breakdown of that week’s new Covid cases in each ‘Middle Super Output Area’, a census area roughly similar to local council wards.

Last week the worst area of Oldham was Alexandra Park with 55 new cases: this is the longstanding Asian ghetto area known as Glodwick. The second-worst area was Werneth with 42 new cases: decades ago this was mainly White but in recent years it has become another Asian ghetto.

Another area with significant infection registering 12 new cases was Busk, part of the original Bangladeshi area of Oldham near Oldham Athletic’s football ground at Boundary Park.

Salem – a partly White area bordering Glodwick – also had 12 cases.

Judging from last week’s figures, it was true that there had been a scattering of cases in some Whiter areas of Oldham: eight on the working class Alt estate; three in the more middle-class Springhead & Grasscroft. However other very White areas of Oldham – ranging from the working-class Moorside & Sholver and Derker areas, to the three affluent census areas that make up Saddleworth, registered no cases at all. (Technically this could mean that they had zero, one or two new cases that week, as only census areas with three or more new cases are listed.)

Is Cllr Arooj Shah being disingenuous in pretending that the virus is spreading equally in White and Asian areas of Oldham? We await this week’s detailed statistics with interest and shall inform H&D readers accordingly.

Arooj Shah (above left) with Oldham East & Saddleworth MP Debbie Abrahams after her defeat by a Pakistani taxi driver at the 2016 election. Oldham Labour Party found Ms Shah a new ward in a more racially mixed part of Oldham.

Cllr Shah is in other respects an interesting example of how the Labour Party interacts with Muslim communities. Contrary to the fantasies of some in our movement, the Labour Party is not in the grip of Muslim community leaders, still less is it influenced by ‘radical’ Islam.

What is much more common in 2020 is to see Labour councillors (including senior ones such as Arooj Shah) who are of Muslim origin but who are so ‘modern’ and ‘liberal’ that community leaders and imams would scarcely recognise them as Muslim at all. The Labour Party is just as much at war with traditional Islam as it is with traditional Christianity.

Arooj Shah was first elected as a very young woman in St Mary’s ward, Oldham, in 2012. This ward is in the Glodwick area and at the 2011 census was 49.1% Pakistani and 8.6% Bangladeshi.

Cllr Shah soon came into conflict with more socially conservative Pakistanis, and in 2016 she was defeated by local taxi driver Aftab Hussain standing as an independent. The Labour Party rallied behind the ousted councillor and in a deliberate gesture of contempt for conservative Muslims and ‘community leaders’ they found her a new ward in the more racially diverse Chadderton South ward, which she has represented since 2018.

A similar racial and cultural conflict affected Labour in another Lancashire town earlier this year. The first two Asian women to be elected as Blackburn councillors were both deselected in February. In this case Labour bosses intervened and ordered the selections to be rerun. One of the women won the re-run and remains a councillor, but the other chose to give up the fight.

Whatever the truth of Covid’s viral/racial profile, it seems clear that the Labour Party will continue to confront traditional Muslims, and that such conflicts will be a feature of local politics for at least another decade.

Farage candidate quits after IRA link revealed

IRA apologist Claire Fox (above left) with Brexit Party leader Nigel Farage

In response to the developing scandal over the Brexit Party’s number one candidate in North West England, a fellow candidate today resigned from the party’s slate for this month’s European Parliamentary elections.

As detailed yesterday by H&D, Claire Fox is a lifelong Marxist who was a senior activist in the Revolutionary Communist Party for many years. Together with her sister Fiona she contributed regularly to the bulletin of a pro-IRA front group called the Irish Freedom Movement: see yesterday’s article for details.

In response to these revelations, Claire Fox spoke on the telephone yesterday to Colin Parry, whose 12-year-old son Tim Parry was murdered alongside 3-year-old Johnathan Ball by the IRA in their infamous 1993 bombing of Warrington.

Yet again Claire Fox refused to dissociate herself from her previous statements supporting IRA terrorism: Mr Parry wrote – “the fact that she repeatedly refused to disavow her comments supporting the IRA bombing which took Tim’s and Johnathan’s young lives proves she hasn’t changed her original views.”

Johnathan Ball and Tim Parry, victims of the IRA bomb in Warrington, 1993

Now Ms Fox’s Brexit Party colleague Sally Bate, who was seventh on the Brexit Party’s European Parliamentary slate in the region, has resigned. She technically remains on the ballot paper as it is too late for this to be altered before polling day on May 23rd.

The Claire Fox scandal raises a serious question mark over Nigel Farage’s judgment in selecting an apologist for IRA terrorism to stand for the European Parliament representing his new party. It remains to be seen whether North West voters will desert the Brexit Party over this issue – if so the beneficiaries could be the English Democrats, UKIP, or independent candidate Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, alias Tommy Robinson.

However ‘Robinson’ is himself an apologist for terrorism, in his case supporting the US and Canadian based Zionist terrorist group Jewish Defense League – see H&D‘s exposé here.


Anti-fascist gangster pervert jailed

Dominic Noonan after his release in 2014. Several cases against the "anti-fascist" gang boss collapsed, but he is now back behind bars.

Dominic Noonan after his release in 2014. Several cases against the “anti-fascist” gang boss collapsed, but he is now back behind bars.

One of Britain’s most notorious gangsters, who was in the vanguard of violent “anti-fascism”, is beginning an 11-year prison sentence for a series of crimes linked to his organised crime empire.  Dominic Noonan (who now spells his name “Domenyk”) presided over a reign of terror in the Manchester and Salford area. He was also convicted of “attempting to pervert the course of justice” after paying the parents of a young boy so that he would not give evidence about Noonan’s alleged sexual offences.

Noonan and his late brother – gangland assassin Dessie Noonan – had close ties to Irish republican terrorists and related “anti-fascist” activity in North West England which was at its peak in the 1990s. Dessie Noonan was killed by a black drug dealer in 2005.

Dominic Noonan – a well-known homosexual – surrounded himself with a coterie of teenage boys, and organised them in an orgy of rioting across Manchester following the death of Dessie’s nephew, black gangster Mark Duggan, in a controversial shooting by London police in 2011.

Heritage and Destiny readers will be familiar with the entire Noonan saga. We are only now able to report Dominic Noonan’s prison sentence – though he was jailed in September last year – because of a contempt of court order restricting reporting until a related case had concluded. Last year Dominic Noonan came to attention after the murder of another local gang boss Paul Massey, who shortly before his death had posted allegations online against Noonan. Massey had also been on the far left, but in the last year of his life had been a UKIP supporter.

Dominic Noonan leading mourners at the 2005 funeral of his brother, gangland assassin Dessie Noonan

Last week Noonan received a further two year sentence for perverting the course of justice, though he was acquitted of “engaging in a sex act in front of a minor”. Last September he was given a nine-year sentence for offences including blackmail and arson.

In 2004 Dominic Noonan was jailed for 9½ years for possession of a firearm: he was released in 2010 but briefly recalled to prison in 2011 for his role in that year’s riots.

While highlighting cases of hooliganism among their opponents (less among genuine nationalists than among the Islam-obsessed EDL and allied groups) “anti-fascists” are not keen to highlight their own close connections with notorious figures in Greater Manchester organised crime.  Coincidentally (or perhaps not) while the EDL gangsters and hooligans tend to support Manchester City (despite the club’s ownership by the Muslim ruling family of Abu Dhabi!), their “anti-fascist” opponents tend to be linked to the rival club Manchester United, and even produced an “anti-fascist” football fanzine, Red Attitude.

tn-Noonan1

An interview with Salford gangland assassin Dessie Noonan published in the “anti-fascist” magazine Red Attitude in 1997.
Click on the images to download a larger version.

tn-Noonan2

The most notorious “anti-fascist” gangsters in Greater Manchester were Salford’s Dessie Noonan, responsible for more than twenty gangland killings before his own murder in March 2005, and Manchester’s Paddy Logan, who like Noonan was involved with both Anti-Fascist Action and various Irish republican terrorist gangs before falling victim to an internal criminal feud, shot dead in his own bedroom in July 1999.

noonan-tilzey

Key players in Manchester’s alliance between gangsters, IRA activists and “anti-fascists”. “DC” is Denis Clifford, activist in Red Action and Anti-Fascist Action, whose own brother was a member of the nationalist British Movement jailed for murder; “DN” is Dessie Noonan, the North West’s most feared gangland assassin; “ST” is Steve Tilzey, the most active Searchlight and AFA operative in the north of England, once jailed for kidnapping. This photo was taken in Manchester at the pro-IRA Manchester Martyrs march, also featuring local gangster and IRA supporter Paddy Logan.

Sadly however nationalists must admit that criminality and perversion are not unknown in our own ranks. Ironically in the same week as the latest Noonan case, former BNP activist Ian Hindle was convicted of a second sexual offence in the past few years.

Ian Hindle’s first conviction for sex offences was in 2008, when he was given a three-year sentence for offences involving 14-year-old girls.  Also sentenced in this 2008 case was Hindle’s fellow BNP activist Andrew Wells, who was then a well-known organised crime figure in the Blackburn area. Perhaps the most serious aspect of this case is that Wells was also involved in recruiting (among both nationalists and criminals) for a security company employed by NATO forces in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Labour’s easy win in Oldham despite UKIP hype

Farage

A crushing defeat for UKIP in the Oldham West & Royton parliamentary by-election today raised serious questions about the credibility of Nigel Farage’s party in northern working-class areas.

There had been great media hype in recent days about a possible shock win for UKIP – or at least a desperately close result.

In fact – and no surprise to us at H&D – Labour held the seat fairly easily, though on a reduced turnout of 40.3% (down from 59.6% at the general election in May).

The full result was as follows:

Lab           17,322  (62.3%; +7.5)
UKIP          6,487  (23.3%; +2.7)
Con             2,596   (9.3%; -9.7)
LibDem      1,024   (3.7%; nc)
Green             249    (0.9%; -1.0)
Loony             141     (0.5%; +0.5)

On slightly different boundaries in 2001, the BNP polled 6,552 votes here – 65 more than UKIP managed in this by-election. (If anything the boundary changes should have made things better for UKIP by bringing in Hollinwood, once a strong BNP ward.)

So despite the collapse in the Tory vote, the absence of other nationalist contenders, the disgracefully poor conduct of Labour’s leader Jeremy Corbyn, and the terrorist atrocity in Paris having taken place at the start of the by-election campaign – despite all this, UKIP’s performance was appreciably worse than at the previous north-west by-election in Heywood & Middleton.

Instead of a close contest, there was actually a swing to Labour!

Perhaps the crisis of morale and bitter personal divisions at UKIP’s national headquarters infected the campaign; perhaps the party paid the price for not being able to find a credible local candidate. That credibility was not enhanced by UKIP’s typical whingeing after the result about alleged postal vote fraud.

One problem in Oldham is of course the disproportionately high turnout of Asian voters, who now vote again as a block for Labour having abandoned their flirtation with the Lib Dems a few years ago. In 2001 and 2002 there was serious electoral fraud within the Asian community during campaigns against the BNP.  Despite Farageiste whingeing, we understand there is no evidence of such large scale fraud today.

More seriously there is a systemic problem for UKIP of failing to maximise their potential vote in white working class areas, especially in the north of England.  Quite frankly many UKIP “activists” are out of their comfort zone when they have to leave the golf course or the Rotary Club and venture onto council estates.

It doesn’t help that UKIP have a blanket ban on ex-BNP members, many of whom have considerable experience of campaigning in places like Oldham.

The party has a fundamental identity problem.  Even in this week’s vote over Syria, this was manifested in the sole UKIP MP Douglas Carswell (perhaps the most pro-Israel MP in Parliament) voting in favour of bombing, while his party leader Nigel Farage said he was against.

On the ground in Oldham the party failed to shed its image of neo-Thatcherism, and some voters who once backed the BNP here might have seen through the hype and recognised that despite its talk about immigration, UKIP’s liberal market ideology is “colour blind” and likely to lead to further entrenchment of the multicultural chaos that has caused such turmoil in Oldham.

We always knew that UKIP – whatever benefits it brought in driving an electoral wedge into the Labour and Tory parties – would have a limited shelf life. This by-election result in Oldham suggests that nationalists should be preparing already for an imminent post-UKIP era.

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