Corbyn and the uses of ‘anti-fascism’

Since the days of Cable Street in 1936 mainstream British journalists and historians have lionised militant (i.e. violent) ‘anti-fascism’. The true story of Cable Street was that an alliance of Jews and Communists fought police on the streets of East London to disrupt a lawful march by Sir Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists. The fighting was not between ‘anti-fascists’ and the BUF, but between the Judeo-Marxist alliance and the London police.

Half a century after Cable Street the increasingly terrorist tactics of ‘Anti-Fascist Action’ were largely ignored by the media, who preferred to conjure fables of supposed ‘neo-nazi’ terrorism by largely mythical groups such as ‘Combat 18’. The real C18 (as H&D knows only too well) contained several enthusiastic though misguided patriots, but was run for the benefit of the British secret state.

And on into the 21st century the new ‘Antifa’ street gangs (admittedly immature and far less effective than their 1990s counterparts) are given a free pass by journalists on both sides of the Atlantic, who prefer to focus on a new generation of mythical ‘far right terrorists’.

So H&D readers will have been surprised to see an article yesterday by the Sunday Times‘ star reporter Andrew Gilligan, belatedly drawing attention to the real terrorists of ‘Anti-Fascist Action’ and its core group ‘Red Action’.

None of the information will be news to our readers, since we have reported aspects of this story several times over the years. The best mainstream investigation remains a BBC programme broadcast almost five years ago.

Jeremy Corbyn was a particularly close friend of IRA / Sinn Fein during the 1980s, as was his then-ally Ken Livingstone. As we reported, Livingstone’s ties to the IRA almost led to his assassination by London-based Ulster Loyalists in 1993.

Red Action publications made no secret of the fact that they often met at Corbyn’s constituency office in Islington, and Corbyn himself (as Gilligan reports) addressed at least three Red Action meetings between 1985 and 1992, acting as an official of the Red Action dominated group Anti-Fascist Action.

A leader of AFA / Red Action – Patrick Hayes – and another member, Jan Taylor, were later given 30-year jail sentences for IRA terrorism: they had bombed the Harrods store in Central London and planned at least two other abortive bombings in the heart of the capital, targeting British civilians. Their ‘anti-fascist’ colleague Liam Heffernan was given 23 years for stealing explosives on behalf of an even more militant Irish terrorist group, the INLA, which for several years had particularly close ties to AFA / Red Action. (In 2013 The Times and other newspapers scurried to catch up with our exposé of INLA and ‘anti-fascist’ connections to a bizarre Marxist cult whose leaders were convicted for keeping women as ‘slaves’.)

A senior police officer told Gilligan that Corbyn’s connections to the group were investigated, and that although insufficient evidence was found for prosecution: “He knew they [Red Action] were open supporters of terrorism and he supported them. We had no evidence that he knew they were actually involved in terrorism themselves.”

All this dates back more than 25 years – and the British state itself is now in alliance with the very same IRA godfathers once linked to Corbyn! So why are veteran police officers and eminent journalists now dusting down files on cases and stories they failed to pursue in the 1990s?

The answer of course is that in Orwellian fashion there are ‘good’ anti-fascist terrorists and ‘bad’ ones. Broadly speaking, Jewish militancy on the streets of London is to be welcomed by the Murdoch press and their tame policemen. Irish republican violence on those same streets (while now mostly ignored as these “ex”-terrorists are fêted by government ministers and even royalty), remains a useful instrument for discrediting the real enemy.

And of course for British politicians and newspaper owners, the ‘real enemy’ means the enemy of their paymasters.

Make no mistake – Jeremy Corbyn is an enemy of British nationalists and a dedicated multiracialist. His arrival in Downing Street would be bad news for H&D readers. But it would be even worse news for the State of Israel and its proxies in London. Hence militant ‘anti-fascists’, having been foot-soldiers in the war against the ‘far right’, are now cast aside as collateral damage, just a few more insignificant casualties as the Zionist lobby concentrates its fire on the Labour leader.

Lewisham East parliamentary by-election: the end of civic nationalism?

Yesterday’s parliamentary by-election in the SE London constituency of Lewisham East was another tragi-comic episode in the slow death of the United Kingdom Independence Party.

Under the leadership of Nigel Farage, UKIP won more votes and seats than any other party at the 2014 European Parliamentary elections, ending up with 24 MEPs, though never gaining more than two MPs in the House of Commons. The party was primarily responsible for forcing then Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron to concede a referendum on Britain’s membership of the European Union, resulting in the historic Brexit vote of 2016.

But that was the beginning of the end for UKIP. Structural problems and ideological confusion (already analysed in several issues of H&D well before 2016) were never properly addressed even under Farage’s leadership, and since his departure immediately after the referendum the party has been scarred by factional infighting and incompetent leadership.

Yesterday was merely the latest demonstration of UKIP’s desperate state. Their by-election candidate was one of their highest profile and most experienced performers, half-caste London Assembly member David Kurten, but he finished a poor sixth with only 380 votes (1.7%), behind not only the big three parties and the Greens, but also behind the Women’s Equality Party!

To put this into context, H&D readers should remember that in 2002 BNP local election candidates Barry Roberts and Tess Culnane polled more votes in a single ward of Lewisham East than Mr Kurten managed yesterday across the entire constituency (which contains seven wards)!

The only good news for UKIP is that Kurten finished ahead of his former colleague Anne Marie Waters. She had been UKIP candidate for this constituency at the 2015 General Election, polling a very creditable 3,886 votes (9.1%) in what were admittedly far better times nationwide for the party. After an acrimonious leadership election last year, Ms Waters quit and with the help of former BNP and EDL activists created a breakaway party called the For Britain Movement.

Yesterday Ms Waters finished a poor seventh, with only 266 votes (1.2%). Her only excuse is that Labour called the by-election very quickly after the resignation of the previous MP, so Ms Waters and her campaign team (which included former East London BNP election guru Eddy Butler) had very little time. Yet it must be admitted that the Liberal Democrats also had very little time, yet they succeeded in building a serious bandwagon and advancing to second place: having lost their deposit twelve months ago with only 4.4%, the Lib Dems polled 24.6% yesterday.

The inescapable conclusion is that the Lib Dem message (almost entirely focused on pro-Remain voters) resonated strongly with a certain section of the Lewisham electorate. We know that there is a different section of the Lewisham electorate who respond to nationalist issues, including immigration and law and order, but the Islam-obsessed campaigns of Kurten and Waters failed to resonate similarly among those voters. This was despite Ms Waters’ ally ‘Tommy Robinson’, founder of the EDL, getting himself jailed during the campaign and creating worldwide publicity. Proof yet again that there is a big difference between Facebook likes, or turning out screaming mobs in Whitehall, and the serious grown-up politics of winning votes.

It probably didn’t help that Lewisham is an odd place to bang on about Muslims: the area has many immigration-related problems, but relatively few of the large non-White population here are Muslims.

The third civic nationalist candidate, Massimo DiMambro of the new Democrats & Veterans party, was always going to be overshadowed by the far higher profile and better financed campaigns of Kurten and Walters: he managed only 67 votes (0.3%).

However the Democrats & Veterans party, which is much less Islam-obsessed than either UKIP or For Britain, but takes a strong line on immigration and other nationalist issues, seems to be having more success than Ms Waters’ party in building a network of branches nationwide.

The best bet is that UKIP-style civic nationalism is dying, but when the dust settles Democrats & Veterans might be the one viable civic nationalist party still capable of making a challenge (at least for local council seats).

 

Do we now have a Holocaust Denial law? Confusion reigns after Chabloz ruling

Reaction to Friday’s conviction of Alison Chabloz for posting “grossly offensive” videos to YouTube has left great confusion as to whether England now has a de facto law against ‘Holocaust denial’, and if not whether such a law is likely to be enacted. The confusion has been heightened by contradictory messages from two prosecution witnesses, Gideon Falter and Stephen Silverman of the hardline Zionist pressure group Campaign Against Antisemitism.  It was CAA that first brought a private prosecution against Ms Chabloz, after the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) had decided not to bring charges.  The CPS later obediently came into line, taking over this private prosecution at public expense.

District Judge John Zani convicted Ms Chabloz of three offences against the Communications Act 2003, but his ill-argued judgment has done nothing to clarify matters.

For H&D the main interest of this case involved one of the three songs for which Ms Chabloz was prosecuted – namely (((Survivors))), which mocked the lies and fantasies propagated by three supposed ‘Holocaust survivors’, Elie Wiesel, Irene Zisblatt and Otto Frank.  H&D‘s assistant editor Peter Rushton gave defence evidence, based on research at the British Library, which established that these three ‘survivors’, especially Wiesel and Zisblatt, had been subjected to pungent abuse from mainstream academics and commentators.  As defence barrister Adrian Davies asked the court: can it be “grossly offensive” to call someone a liar if that person demonstrably is a liar?

Yet in his 24-page judgment, a copy of which has been made available to H&D, Judge Zani completely ignores this challenge, leaving it still an open question – even after Ms Chabloz’s conviction – whether one can be guilty of “grossly offensive” communications regardless of truth or falsehood.  Is the communication liable to be judged “grossly offensive”, and therefore criminal, whether or not it is truthful?

In para 56 of his judgment, Zani states: “This court is not required to decide whether, for example, the Holocaust actually occurred, or whether records maintained in respect thereof are accurate.” At issue was whether the material was “grossly offensive”, and “the relevant test is the standards to be applied of an open and just multicultural society”. Zani relied on an earlier ruling by the House of Lords that “if a member of a relevant ethnic minority who heard the messages would have found them grossly offensive, it is not easy to escape the conclusion that the messages would be regarded as grossly offensive by reasonable persons in general, judged by the standards of an open and multi-racial society.”

In other words, if a Jew is grossly offended by something, the rest of “reasonable” society is required also to regard it as “grossly offensive”.

In para 111 of his judgment, Zani appears to contradict his earlier claim that he would not be taking a view on the truth or falsehood of ‘Holocaust history’. He writes: “It is this court’s opinion that certain historical events affecting members of the Jewish community as well as comments made of certain selected Jewish individuals (the defendant has here focused on Elie Wiesel, Otto Frank and Irene Zisblatt) have been deliberately portrayed in a way that members of an open and multi-cultural society would find particularly insulting, upsetting and disrespectful.”

Does Judge Zani believe that the Communications Act forces Britons to hold a ‘respectful’ view of liars and fantasists?

The learned Judge simply fails to answer the points made in Mr Rushton’s defence evidence concerning (for example) Elie Wiesel and Irene Zisblatt.  Fifteen years before he attracted Alison Chabloz’s attention, Elie Wiesel was subjected to deliberately offensive criticism in a widely read column by one of the world’s leading journalists, the late Christopher Hitchens. In a column printed under the headline ‘Wiesel Words’ in the American left-liberal magazine The Nation on 19th February 2001, Mr Hitchens wrote: “Is there a more contemptible poseur and windbag than Elie Wiesel?” The saintly Wiesel is subjected to further pungent abuse at the hands of his fellow Jew, Prof. Norman Finkelstein, in the latter’s book, The Holocaust Industry, where he is accused of acting as “official interpreter of The Holocaust… By conferring total blamelessness on Jews, the Holocaust dogma immunizes Israel and American Jewry from legitimate censure.”

Finkelstein goes to the heart of the matter in the following paragraph: “Apart from the frailties of memory, some Holocaust survivor testimony may be suspect for additional reasons. Because survivors are now revered as secular saints, one doesn’t dare question them. Preposterous statements pass without comment. Elie Wiesel reminisces in his acclaimed memoir that, recently liberated and only 18 years old, ‘I read The Critique of Pure Reason – don’t laugh! – in Yiddish.’ Leaving aside Wiesel’s acknowledgment that at the time ‘I was wholly ignorant of Yiddish grammar,’ The Critique of Pure Reason was never translated into Yiddish. …And to a New York Times reporter, he recalls that he was once hit by a taxi in Times Square. ‘I flew an entire block. I was hit at 45th Street and Broadway, and the ambulance picked me up at 44th.’ ‘The truth I present is unvarnished,’ Wiesel sighs, ‘I cannot do otherwise.’”

An even more ludicrous fantasist than Wiesel is another Chabloz target, Irene Zisblatt, who has best been exposed by a Polish Jewish scholar, Dr Joachim Neander. (Again Dr Neander’s work was submitted in Mr Rushton’s defence evidence.) He writes: “Mrs Zisblatt has gone public with a dubious story, and in a free society, she and her followers must stand scholarly criticism of it, even if it hurts. …What if the kids, who were deeply impressed by Mrs Zisblatt’s story, some day reach for a scholarly book about the Holocaust or a memoir vetted by experts and find out that things could not have happened as told by her? …Teaching falsehood, even with the best intentions, is always dangerous and counterproductive.”

Dr Neander details many obvious falsehoods and inconsistencies in Mrs Zisblatt’s story. For example, she claimed that when she was in the Birkenau camp, the crematorium chimneys were “spewing ashes” and that these hot ashes fell like rain around her. Most infamously, Mrs Zisblatt claimed that throughout her captivity she concealed four diamonds given her by her mother, repeatedly swallowing the diamonds and recovering them from among her faeces in the camp latrine.

Other absurd tales peddled by Zisblatt include her miraculous escape from a gas chamber, and her return visit to Birkenau in the 1990s when she claimed to have visited a “gas chamber” – “When I got to the entrance I grabbed onto the door, and dug my fingernails into the blue wall that was still blue from the cyclone B gas [sic]; I could smell the gas that was still very strong.”  As Dr Neander points out, there are no such blue stains and no such gas smell – moreover the only remaining “gas chamber” is admitted to be a postwar reconstruction, in fact better described as a falsification (as discovered by Prof Robert Faurisson as long ago as 1976.)

Dr Neander concludes:”It was shown that Mrs Zisblatt’s Holocaust memoir does not stand scholarly scrutiny.  As a whole, the story she tells about her camp experience leaves the impression that it was spiced up with ubiquitous Holocaust legends and enriched with fragments from other survivors’ memoirs.  It is so full of implausibilities that one can understand some of those who – in a ‘worst case scenario’ – begin to doubt everything she tells.”

Yet according to Judge Zani it is “grossly offensive” and therefore illegal to mock the absurd fantasist / liar Irene Zisblatt, at any rate if such mockery is posted online, thus falling within the provisions of the Communications Act.

Does this mean that ‘Holocaust denial’ has been criminalised by the Chabloz case?  In his first reaction after the verdict, Gideon Falter (chairman of the Campaign Against Antisemitism who had brought the original prosecution) delightedly asserted: “This verdict sends a strong message that in Britain Holocaust denial and antisemitic conspiracy theories will not be tolerated.”

Yet Falter’s CAA colleague Steve Silverman quickly contradicted his chairman, writing: “There is a misconception that the trial of Alison Chabloz was about the criminalisation of Holocaust denial.  This is a failure to understand the depth of her offending and the danger it presents to British Jews.”  Silverman insisted: “This woman has been responsible for the vilest outpouring of antisemitic hatred I have ever encountered.” He gave various examples of her anti-Jewish rhetoric (strictly unrelated to ‘Holocaust’ revisionism) then concluded: “This is not Holocaust denial; it is the use of Holocaust denial to give people reasons to fear and hate Jews.  Alison Chabloz did this for years, obsessively and with increasing malevolence.”

One interpretation of Judge Zani’s ruling is that – entirely regardless of historical truth or falsehood – Ms Chabloz’s crime was to have been deliberately and callously offensive, as a form of online revenge for having lost a job on a cruise ship a few years ago.  Having failed to respond in any way to Mr Rushton’s defence evidence, Judge Zani writes in para 106: “In the court’s view none of the songs complained of can reasonably be considered to be an acceptable or legitimate attempt by Ms Chabloz to provoke reasoned debate on important topics, rather each of these songs appears to have been designed to spitefully offend others in as grotesque and unpleasant a manner as she felt able to achieve.”

In paras 113-114 Judge Zani concludes: “The defendant has failed, by some considerable margin, to persuade this court that her right to Freedom of Speech, as provided by Article 10, under the guise of her work as an artist, can properly provide her with immunity from prosecution in relation to each of the songs complained of.  Having had the opportunity to assess the Defendant’s live evidence during the course of these proceedings, I am entirely satisfied that she will have intended to insult those to whom the material relates or, at least, that she must have recognised that there was a risk of so doing.”

A few hours after the judgment, the government’s chief pro-Zionist toady Sir Eric Pickles (newly ennobled as Lord Pickles), former Conservative Party chairman, still chairman of Conservative Friends of Israel and official government “envoy for post-Holocaust issues”, called for a new law specifically criminalising ‘Holocaust denial’.

Pickles, honorary patron of the CAA, told the BBC’s Martin Bashir that although he had previously opposed such a law, the Chabloz case had convinced him that there should be longer sentences for ‘Holocaust denial’.

This exposes the cynical ploy behind the entire Chabloz case charade.  A far longer sentence (up to seven years) would have been available had Ms Chabloz (like Jez Turner) been prosecuted under the Public Order Act, but this would require proving that her songs were likely in all the circumstances to stir up racial hatred.

The Communications Act allowed a far lower standard of proof.  Once the court had found that songs posted to YouTube fell within the legal definitions of this particular Act, all the prosecution had to prove was “gross offensiveness”.  The weasel words of the prosecution and their witnesses, endorsed by Judge Zani, allowed the court to evade the question of whether particular ‘Holocaust’ fables are true or false. We are thus in a very dangerous situation.

The only clearing of this judicial fog will have to come from a new, British based, thoroughly researched challenge to aspects of ‘Holocaust’ history: a challenge that is indubitably grounded in reasoned argument rather than anything that can be easily dismissed as spiteful abuse.

Watch this space…

‘Anti-racist’ councillor in fraud probe

It’s been a tough summer for Britain’s anti-racists.  First Searchlight had its website sabotaged; then its editor’s former partner in crime Manny Carpel was jailed for drug trafficking; then Hope not Hate‘s funding from George Soros foundations was exposed in a massive data leak.

Now another disaster for ‘anti-fascism’.  Transport union official Sam Tarry was campaign organiser for Hope not Hate in Barking & Dagenham, once the BNP’s flagship borough, where Tarry no doubt believes he played an important role in turning back the fascist tide.

In fact that had already been achieved by the BNP leader himself, scuttling his own party, but at least Sam Tarry managed to get a seat for himself as a Labour councillor in Barking, where he has received £20,000 in council allowances.

Sadly this meteoric political rise might be about to end in yet another crash and burn.  The main headline in today’s Sunday Times exposes an “electoral fraud row” involving Cllr Tarry.

In order to stand for Barking & Dagenham council, he had to be registered as living at an address in the borough (or work there).  Yet according to the Sunday Times he actually lives 70 miles away in Brighton.

Tarry is presently director of Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership campaign.

As the Sunday Times points out:

Councillors are required by law to live or work in the borough they represent and must sign an official declaration to that effect.  Making a false declaration is punishable by up to six months in prison.  Making a false registration to vote carries a penalty of up to 51 weeks in jail.

Richard Smalley, formerly a Tory member of Derby city council, was last week sentenced to two months in jail for claiming he lived in Derby while living outside the city.

Note: The original story is behind a Times paywall so the full report can only be seen by subscribers.  However a later version of the story can also be seen on the Telegraph website.

Tarry has denied the allegations, and his lawyers suggest that “any suggestion of criminality or breach of election law is defamatory and inaccurate”.

Is this the end for the English Democrats?

During the crumbling of Nick Griffin’s BNP after the 2010 general election, several of the party’s best activists opted to join the English Democrats. The main advocate of this move was Eddy Butler, the BNP’s East London election guru who had relocated to Epping Forest, where he masterminded several local council election victories but became a factional opponent of Griffin. Those who accepted Mr Butler’s advice included former Leeds city councillor Chris Beverley and Barnsley branch organiser Ian Sutton.

One undoubted advantage of the EDs is that the party’s founder and leader – Essex solicitor Robin Tilbrook – is a thoroughly decent and honest man.  Unlike Nick Griffin or his successors in the BNP, Mr Tilbrook puts money into his party rather than taking it out. But this year’s election nominations suggest that he might be running out of patience and optimism. (Most of the party’s recruits from the BNP have already dropped out.)

The EDs had announced that controversial former UKIP activist Winston McKenzie would be their candidate for Mayor of London, but at the close of nominations his was found to be invalid, due to one signatory having also nominated another candidate. Perhaps this was a straightforward if foolish error, but suspicious minds speculated that the EDs might have decided not to waste their £10,000 deposit (plus a further £10,000 to appear in the booklet and additional costs of a credible campaign).

Such suspicions were heightened when instead of the advertised fourteen or fifteen candidates in the Police and Crime Commissioner elections, the EDs in fact nominated only four.  At the previous PCC elections ED candidates had saved several deposits, but the party leadership will be well aware that this time the turnout of major party voters will be much higher, since polling day coincides with local council elections. Consequently ED candidates are this time unlikely to save their £5,000 deposits in the PCC contests.

If the previously high-spending EDs have decided to cut costs, this might indicate the beginning of the end for the party.  Regrettably there is little political space for the English Democrats, unless and until UKIP’s challenge falls apart.

 

Nationalist candidates nominated in London

Despite his party’s well-documented problems, the BNP’s David Furness will contest the London Mayoral election on May 5th. His nomination was officially confirmed this morning, as was the rival mayoral candidature of former BNP official Paul Golding, who now leads the anti-Islamic party Britain First.

Messrs Furness and Golding (and their campaign teams) are to be congratulated on completing the UK’s most arduous nomination process, which involved collecting signatures from each of London’s boroughs as well as the City of London.

This task proved beyond the financially secure but organisationally weak English Democrats, a civic nationalist party which recruited a few of the BNP’s best former activists in 2011 but seems now to be in decline.  ED mayoral candidate Winston McKenzie failed to submit valid nomination papers and has been disqualified from the election. (Similarly the National Liberal Party – co-founded by Patrick Harrington who now acts as the brains behind the BNP leadership – failed to nominate a mayoral candidate after previously announcing Upkar Singh Raj as their standard bearer.)

The BNP and Britain First will also have slates of candidates for the London-wide list section of the Greater London Assembly, headed by David Furness for the BNP and Jayda Franzen for Britain First. It is this list section which gives smaller parties (including nationalists) a realistic chance of winning a GLA seat: in practice the target is 5%, and with more than 6% there is a good chance of gaining a second seat.

The BNP’s Richard Barnbrook was elected in 2008 with 5.3%, the party’s best ever GLA vote, while Jason Douglas only just missed out in 2004 when the BNP polled 4.7%. In 2014 the BNP vote fell to 2.1%, its worst ever London result, and realistically the target this year will not be to win, but merely to increase that vote.

The BNP list includes East London sub-regional organiser Paul Sturdy, and organisers from three of the few remaining BNP branches in the capital: Croydon’s John Clarke, Bexley’s Michael Jones and next door Bromley’s Roger Tonks. Also from the Bexley branch are Peter and Nicola Finch and Philip Dalton.

At GLA constituency level, it is likely that the only nationalist candidate will be the National Front’s Richard Edmonds, in the Croydon & Sutton constituency – where to underline the state of our capital city, both the Liberal Democrat and Labour candidates are named Ahmad!

For the first time there will be no nationalist candidate in the City & East constituency, which includes the old and more recent BNP strongholds of Tower Hamlets and Barking & Dagenham. The BNP saved their deposit in City & East eight years ago with 9.8%, and even in 2012 managed a respectable 4.1% but will not be on that ballot paper this year.

In most of the rest of England, local council election candidates are still being nominated and final lists will not be confirmed until the end of next week: the same applies for the Welsh Assembly, and Police and Crime Commisioner elections which are taking place everywhere in England and Wales (except London and Greater Manchester).

Scottish Parliament nominations closed this afternoon, with the NF chairman Dave MacDonald expected to be the only racial nationalist candidate.

Nominations for the Northern Ireland Assembly have only just opened, and will not close until April 12th.

Nationalist parties prepare for London elections

Not so long ago, British nationalists could look forward to elections in London – eagerly anticipating results that would disturb the liberal establishment.

In 2008 for example, Richard Barnbrook was elected as the BNP’s first (and so far only) member of the Greater London Assembly.  Two years earlier the party had gained twelve council seats in one London borough, becoming the official opposition to Labour in Barking & Dagenham.

Though neither the BNP nor any other nationalist candidate has so managed the 5% needed to save their deposit in the main mayoral election, the BNP’s candidates did manage respectable results in the first three of these contests. Mike Newland in 2000 polled 2.0%; Julian Leppert in 2004 increased this to 3.1%; and Richard Barnbrook in 2008 scored the party’s highest ever London mayoral vote of 3.2%. Unsurprisingly this slipped way back to 1.3% in 2012 for the party’s most recent mayoral candidate Carlos Cortiglia.

We shall not know the official list of mayoral candidates this year until nominations close on March 31st, but the BNP has already announced that Dave Furness will be their mayoral candidate, while ex-BNP official Paul Golding is standing for the anti-Islamic party Britain First.

Some former BNP activists are now in the English Democrats, whose mayoral candidate this year is former boxer and ex-UKIP candidate Winston McKenzie. A few former NF activists from the 1980s are now in the National Liberal Party, which was co-founded by Patrick Harrington, the brains behind the current BNP leadership.  The NLP’s mayoral candidate this year is Upkar Singh Raj, a Sikh IT consultant and Uber driver.

In addition to the high-profile mayoral election, there are elections to the Greater London Assembly, both on a London-wide list and in constituencies (which each include two or three London boroughs).

Nationalist veteran Richard Edmonds has already begun his campaign for the GLA’s Croydon & Sutton constituency, and has posted a video broadcast (see below). H&D will report on the progress of nationalist campaigns across the capital, both here on this website and in our May 2016 edition.

Militant anti-fascist selected for GLA seat

Militant anti-fascist Unmesh Desai will be Labour candidate for the Greater London Assembly this year in the City & East constituency, which includes former BNP strongholds of Barking & Dagenham, Newham, and Tower Hamlets as well as the City of London.

He replaces John Biggs, who has represented the constituency since the GLA was created but was last year elected Mayor of Tower Hamlets following a bitter struggle with independent Muslim powerbroker Lutfur Rahman.

In recent years Unmesh Desai has been a classic Labour Party careerist, and has strongly endorsed the British establishment’s ‘Prevent’ strategy against Islamist extremism.

But nationalists will remember his younger days as a notoriously hardline anti-fascist.  He was part of a faction known as the ‘squaddists’ who were expelled from the Trotskyite Socialist Workers Party for advocating violence against the NF, BNP and other nationalists.

During the 1980s he worked with fellow ‘squaddists’ in Red Action and Anti-Fascist Action, then co-founded the Newham Monitoring Project, a group of Asian ‘anti-racist’ activists who for years were closely associated with Searchlight.

(Several H&D features over the years have detailed the violent history of these organisations.)

Eventually Desai became a Labour councillor in Newham and is now very much part of the mainstream Labour establishment.

It remains to be seen what the many devout Muslim voters in Tower Hamlets will make of Desai, who is from a Hindu Indian background and once stated: “Searchlight is my bible”.

 

George Galloway assault: Britain First Facebook ‘friend’ charged

Controversial MP and anti-Zionist campaigner George Galloway was attacked in the street near Notting Hill’s Portobello Road market on Friday night.  Galloway was taken to hospital suffering from suspected broken ribs and a broken jaw.

His assailant was reported to have been shouting about the “Holocaust” shortly before the attack.

According to the BBC, police have arrested 39-year-old Neil Masterson and charged him with “religiously aggravated assault”.  What the BBC has not reported is that Masterson appears to be a fanatical Zionist (and as it happens a Manchester City fan).

His Facebook “friends” include a host of Jewish and Christian Zionist individuals and groups, as well as Britain First, the militant anti-Islamic group run by former BNP official Paul Golding, until recently under the auspices of Nick Griffin’s former right hand man Jim Dowson.

On August 12th, two weeks before the assault, Masterson posted on a Facebook page ‘United with Israel’:
“No other military in the world comes close to the IDF, in terms of operational, legislative brakes on its command structure… Israel bows to no one in maintaing the highest standards of human rights.”

We understand that Mr Masterson is a Roman Catholic and was originally from the Preston area, but is now living in North London.

 

Latest twist in Maoist cult tale

The Daily Telegraph has revealed that one of the three alleged “slaves” freed from a Maoist political cult is the daughter of a famous wartime codebreaker at Bletchley Park.

Belfast-born Josephine Herivel, now 59, is said to have contacted the Freedom Charity last month stating that she and two other women – 30 year old Rosie Davies and 69 year old Aishah Wahab – were being held against their will.  The charity contacted the police, who raided a house in Peckford Place, south London.

On Sunday evening Heritage and Destiny revealed that the two cult leaders arrested in the case are Aravinda Balakrishnan and his wife Chanda: we detailed Balakrishnan’s former role in the Communist Party of England (Marxist-Leninist), a violent Maoist group with links to the terrorist Irish National Liberation Army. In 1974 ‘Comrade Bala’, as he was known to his fellow Marxists, broke away from the CPE (M-L) and established the Workers’ Institute of Marxism-Leninism-Mao Tse-Tung Thought, based at a commune on Acre Lane, Brixton which he styled the Mao Memorial Centre.

London newspapers later confirmed our identification, and the H&D office has been contacted by several journalists seeking additional information.

Many years ago conspiracy theories circulated on the political fringe about Balakrishnan, speculating as to why the British authorities had taken such a close interest in his tiny sect.  In December 1981 his former comrade Cornelius Cardew was killed in a hit and run accident, which fuelled further conspiracy theories. Cardew had remained loyal to the CPE (M-L), which changed its name to the Revolutionary Communist Party of Britain (Marxist-Leninist) in 1979.

On Christmas Eve 1996 one of Comrade Bala’s followers, Sian Davies, fell from a first floor window at another of the commune’s South London properties in Herne Hill. She died of her injuries a few months later, and her then-teenage daughter Rosie (now 30) is one of the three alleged “slaves” freed last month.

We can now be sure that MI5 and Scotland Yard’s Special Branch had been keeping a particularly close eye on Comrade Bala’s group since the 1970s, not only because of its involvement in “anti-fascist” violence and ties to INLA terrorists, but because cult member Josephine Herivel (who accompanied Balakrishnan to the 1997 inquest into Sian Davies’s death) was the daughter of John Herivel, one of the legends of British secret intelligence history.

John Herivel died in 2011 aged 92. He had been recuited from Cambridge in January 1940 to join the top secret codebreakers based at Bletchley Park where he was part of the team at ‘Hut 6’, tasked with decyphering versions of the Enigma code used by the German Army and Air Force.

Herivel’s decisive contribution in May 1940 – later known as the ‘Herivel tip’ – enabled the codebreakers to discover each day’s key to the Luftwaffe’s Enigma messages. Later in the war he worked as assistant to the Cambridge mathematician Max Newman, who was in charge of Bletchley’s unit on mechanised codebreaking which developed Colossus – the world’s first programmable computer.

When his daughter Josephine joined Balakrishnan’s cult in the mid-1970s, almost everything related to Bletchley remained top secret – so the security and intelligence services would have been intensely concerned. If and when the “slavery” case comes to trial next year, Whitehall’s files on the group might come under an unwelcome spotlight. Coincidentally Lord Harris of Haringey, chairman of trustees at the Freedom Charity which instigated last month’s police raid, is the Home Office representative on the Metropolitan Police Authority responsible for oversight of security matters and counterterrorism at the Met.

Video footage of Josephine Herivel from the time of the 1997 Sian Davies inquest can be seen at ITN’s website. A full analysis of the Balakrishnan saga will appear in the January edition of Heritage and Destiny, available from late December.

 

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