Stretford & Urmston by-election: another episode in the slow death of Faragism

The result of the Stretford & Urmston parliamentary by-election was declared a few minutes ago. Predictably it resulted in a massive majority for Labour, but for H&D readers the more interesting aspect was another shockingly poor result for Reform UK, the latest vehicle for the political ideas of Nigel Farage, who was once among Europe’s most successful populist leaders.

Farage was most famous for his decade as leader of UKIP. He had a year out of office from 2009-2010, but was otherwise leader from 2006 until the Brexit referendum victory of 2016. Having made a huge contribution to the UK voting to leave the EU, Farage returned to electoral politics from 2019-2021 as leader of the Brexit Party, so as to ensure that the political establishment was unable to frustrate the referendum result.

In 2021 the Brexit Party was rebranded as Reform UK and Farage retired in favour of his close political ally Richard Tice, but he has remained a powerful voice in support of the party and has hinted that he might return to the arena at the next general election.

The problem is that Reform UK (despite being hyped recently by academics and journalists) seems to have very little public support and little ideological coherence.

At yesterday’s by-election in Stretford & Urmston (a socially and racially divided constituency west of Manchester), Reform UK’s candidate Paul Swansborough polled only 3.5% (650 votes), an equivalent percentage but far lower numerical vote than the Brexit Party achieved in the same constituency in 2019: 3.5% (1,768 votes).

At its peak in 2015, UKIP polled 5,068 votes (10.9%) here.

This is the sixth successive parliamentary by-election at which Reform UK have lost their deposit, despite in this instance spending lavishly on their campaign and busing in activists from elsewhere in the region.

What makes it far worse is that the Tory vote predictably collapsed at this by-election, but disillusioned Tories stayed at home, unpersuaded by Reform UK even as a protest vote option.

One insuperable problem is that UKIP and the Brexit Party had a clear message that attracted large numbers of otherwise politically diverse voters: i.e. leaving the European Union.

That battle has been won – not even the most diehard pro-European nor the most paranoid Brexiteer believes that the UK will re-enter the EU in the foreseeable future. The issue is now settled, and the issues on which Reform UK is choosing to fight are mostly ones that cannot possibly enthuse the White working class who delivered the Brexit victory.

Reform UK are essentially a post-Thatcherite, right-wing version of the Tories – tax cuts, shrink the state, free market capitalism, ‘Singapore on Thames’.

They talk a good fight about immigration, but their devotion to international capitalism means that at root their ideological commitment is to the very force that drives migration and ‘One Worldism’.

In short, they have nothing to offer to White working-class voters, and unlike the Brexit Party are unable to disguise that fact. Moreover many voters are waking up to the reality that Brexit is failing to deliver the changes that were once expected, especially regarding immigration.

Civic nationalism, Brexitism, Faragism – all these populist forces are now dead or dying. It remains to be seen whether racial nationalism, which unlike Faragism is a coherent programme for national renewal, can revive and unite behind a serious political party. The British Democrats are on the way to achieving that, just as Patriotic Alternative are on the way to creating a broader challenge outside electoral politics, but there is a very long way to go before we can say that racial nationalism in the UK is back on its feet.

Labour councillor resigns after porn charges

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.

Anti-fascist gangster paedophile jailed

During the 1980s and 1990s, the Noonan family were the spearhead of an ‘anti-fascist’ reign of terror in Lancashire’s twin cities Manchester and Salford. Their power crumbled after 1999, when Noonan associate Paddy Logan (who had taken part in the gang’s brutal attack on Ulster Loyalists in the Rusholme district) was shot dead at his home in Withington.

Today the era of Noonan anti-fascism finally ended in disgrace, when the last head of the family – 54-year-old Dominic Noonan – was jailed for 11 years after being convicted of multiple paedophile offences.  One of Noonan’s victims was a ten-year-old boy.

Dominic Noonan’s brother Dessie (stabbed to death in 2005) was one of Britain’s most feared gangland assassins, responsible for more than twenty gangland murders, and was used by militant anti-fascists to threaten political opponents including BNP organisers. Believing that he was protected by his family’s notorious reputation for violence, Dominic Noonan thought none of his young victims would ever dare to testify against him.

Passing sentence today, Judge Martin Rudland told Noonan that following his first paedophile offence against a boy from a children’s home in 1981 he had “gained more confidence as your criminal lifestyle developed and your reputation and influence over others in that regard began to grow. It was in those circumstances that you abused (your second victim), aged 16 or 17, who you simply picked off the street for sexual gratification to use and discard at will and giving him a beating on the way. By then you were in your late 20s with your confidence gathering pace and not in the least fearful of brazen offending.”

“You were clearly determined to seek sexual gratification where and when you wanted it, and as a means of pursuing that end, and other objectives no doubt, you surrounded yourself with teenage boys. You gave them food, drink, drugs, occasional employment, and a sense of being part of your entourage.

“Inevitably the type of teenager who was drawn to such a life was either the criminally inclined or the vulnerable in search of stability, attention and perhaps some excitement.

“In their eyes you seemed to provide all three. The true picture is however, one of manipulation and grooming behaviour to provide you with an easy avenue for sexual misconduct.”

The truth is that organised ‘anti-fascist’ and Irish Republican terror gangs benefited from their association with Noonan and his criminal family, and undoubtedly helped draw young victims into his entourage.  H&D has reported on aspects of the Noonan scandal many times over the past fifteen years.  We salute the courage of those honest police officers and brave witnesses who helped bring this monster to justice.

See our earlier articles including:

Anti-fascist gangster and the 2011 riots

The EDL and “anti-fascists”: hypocrisy and gangsterism

Anti-fascist gangster arrested

Live by the MAC-10, die by the MAC-10

Corbyn is right: the war on terror isn’t working – but we should also drain the swamp

Amid predictable fake outrage from his Conservative opponents, Jeremy Corbyn – no friend of H&D! – has dared to tell the truth.  As election campaigning resumed today (following several days hiatus due to the terrorist bombing of a Manchester concert hall) the Labour leader said: “We must be brave enough to admit the war on terror is simply not working. We need a smarter way to reduce the threat from countries that nurture terrorists and generate terrorism.”

It seems likely that the Manchester atrocity was carried out by a suicide bomber of Libyan origin, linked to that country’s version of Islamic State. If so, then it emanates from a truly Orwellian swamp. British governments once allied themselves with the earlier local version of IS – the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group – in terrorist and assassination plots against that country’s former dictator Col. Gaddafi.

Then under Tony Blair we changed tack, and delivered our former Islamist allies to Libyan torturers collaborating in a worldwide ‘war on terror’.  Sir Mark Allen (former MI6 counterterrorism director) might still face criminal charges over his role in the kidnapping and torture of LIFG leader Abdul Hakim Belhaj, though the relevant ministers including Jack Straw have typically dodged their responsibility.

In 2011 under David Cameron there was another policy lurch: Libya’s Islamists (or at least some of them) became our allies again in the campaign to oust Gaddafi.  And now in the resultant post-Gaddafi chaos they are back to being the enemy.

All this would be mad enough: what makes it really crazy is that among the 57 varieties of alien immigrant thronging British cities are a large community of Libyans with personal and family ties to these very characters who were sometimes our allies, while at other times consigned to the torture chamber.

Foreign and defence policy has never had much space for morality.  One response to the slaughter of British children in Manchester (the opposite of Corbyn’s policy) might be to carry out a reciprocal slaughter in Libya, targeting the extended families and support networks of IS.

But – setting moral questions entirely aside – H&D readers should recognise that such a policy (whether aiming at deterrence or merely revenge) requires precisely targeted and pitiless brutality. In their prime the likes of Gaddafi or Syria’s Hafez al-Assad were capable of that – hence their regimes survived.  Does anyone really believe that Britain has the will (let alone the local knowledge) to follow such a policy to its logical conclusion, to take whatever the terrorists throw back at us and throw back more of the same, until eventually we supposedly crush them?

It’s not going to happen.

So we are left with the logic of Corbyn’s alternative. Some form of new deal with the Islamic world. We can only hope this would be less hypocritical then the deal with an earlier generation of bombers who targeted Manchester.  Among this week’s many tragic ironies is that the bomb that devastated Manchester city centre in 1996, planted just a few yards away from the scene of this week’s carnage, was the work of IRA godfathers armed by Col. Gaddafi, the bitter enemy of this week’s suicide bomber and his family.

No one was ever charged over that 1996 Manchester bombing – except a journalist and a police officer who dared to name the main suspect, the IRA’s Declan McCann (then of Crossmaglen, Co Armagh). McCann was spared arrest for political reasons and has since moved south to Castleblayney, Co Monaghan: he owns a property empire with his brother John. His IRA commanders went on to form part of Northern Ireland’s government and shake hands with the Queen.

 

Corbyn of course has his own dishonourable record of IRA apologetics. And though his approach to today’s failed war on terror makes sense, there’s one aspect that Corbyn and his ilk will never admit. Alongside a reassessment of foreign policy must come a draining of the multi-ethnic swamp. We should return the teeming non-British masses of our towns and cities back to their countries of origin.

[spacer height=”20px”]UPDATE: On tonight’s Channel 4 News, Theresa May’s Defence Secretary Sir Michael Fallon fell into a well-laid journalistic trap when he condemned what he thought were Jeremy Corbyn’s words about the war on terror, only to find they were the words of his senior Cabinet colleague, Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson!  A more sympathetic journalist in The Spectator had earlier today offered the Tories some wise strategic advice on how to handle this issue: they failed to take it – and as another Spectator columnist Rod Liddle puts it, this is turning into the worst Tory election campaign on record.

UKIP’s rabbi candidate exposed in bizarre scandal

Regular H&D readers will remember the name Shneur Odze.  He’s the rabbi from the fanatically pro-Zionist Lubavitcher sect who has long been influential in UKIP, and is contesting this week’s Greater Manchester mayoral election for Paul Nuttall’s rapidly fading party.

Previous scandals involving Rabbi Odze have included the following:[spacer height=”20px”]

1. More than a decade ago while serving as a Tory councillor in Hackney, he was censured and suspended from the council for three months for a serious ‘breach of trust’.
2. At the start of the mayoral campaign a month ago, he was targeted by Liberal Democrat opponents for his politically incorrect (and religiously motivated) refusal to shake women’s hands.
3. Just a fortnight ago, the national press reported that Rabbi Odze had burned a copy of the New Testament outside his synagogue.

Now comes what must surely be the fatal blow to Rabbi Odze’s political career.  The Mail on Sunday reports that UKIP’s rabbi has been conducting an affair with a young woman he met via a “bondage and sadomasochism website”, where the rabbi had posed as a Roman Catholic priest.

Full bizarre details of this scandal are described on the Mail on Sunday website.

Yet the most shocking aspect is that UKIP has been so desperate to acquire its own ‘Court Jew’, so keen for insurance against accusations of ‘racism’ or links to the BNP/NF, that it has tolerated any amount of disreputable behaviour from Odze, which would surely have led to the dismissal of any other candidate. In February 2014 Dr Fred McGlade resigned as UKIP’s North West regional organiser because the party leadership had refused to back his view that it was inappropriate for Odze to be a candidate.

Indeed UKIP continues to indulge the rabbi.  A party spokesman told the Mail‘s reporter: “This is a personal matter for Mr Odze. He has broken no law, and therefore we have no comment to make.”

As with other Christian Zionists and Friends of Israel, the truly masochistic aspect of this whole saga is UKIP’s persistent and degrading surrender to any and every outrage committed by even the most marginal and perverted representatives of Zionist Jewry.

Election politics – Pakistani style!

Regular H&D readers will be familiar with the electoral saga of Manchester Gorton, where veteran Labour MP Sir Gerald Kaufman died on February 26th causing a parliamentary by-election which was abandoned at the 11th hour when Prime Minister Theresa May called a General Election.

The local Labour Party had been bitterly divided between ethnic powerbrokers from the Pakistani and Bangladeshi communities (indigenous Mancunians don’t get much of a look-in these days).  Pakistani machine boss and solicitor Afzal Khan duly became the Labour candidate.

Today Mr Khan has been reported to police for alleged ‘treating‘ – an electoral malpractice involving provision of free food, drink or other gifts to voters.  If convicted, offenders can be disbarred from Parliament, fined or imprisoned.

According to today’s Daily Mail, Mr Khan is at the centre of “claims he bribed voters with a lavish dinner… Footage of the dinner posted online shows dozens of guests sat around tables laid with plates and folded napkins in wine glasses, as well as ‘Vote Labour’ leaflets.  A ‘Vote Afzal Khan’ banner is on display at the front of the room.”

The police complaint has been brought by the Liberal Democrats, who hope to gain the seat from Labour.  Also seeking to exploit Labour’s embarrassment is former MP George Galloway.

One irony of course is that Mr Khan is himself a solicitor, so one might expect him to be familiar with electoral law, and even assuming he did not organise the dinner himself one might imagine he would have urged supporters to stay clearly on the right side of the ‘treating’ regulations.

A Liberal Democrat activist commented: “In my (admittedly limited) experience there is such an enormous expectation that candidates from some communities will host rallies with food provided that an agent from outside that community will be looked on with astonishment if he tries to explain that this can’t be done as it is an election offence.  The problem is that because nothing is ever done there is no back up for an agent trying to stay within the law.  A high profile case would probably be helpful in clarifying matters.”

In other words some “British Asian” communities expect to break the law with impunity.

 

UKIP’s political correctness backfires as Jewish candidate burns bible

Shneur Odze was supposed to be UKIP’s ace card against opponents who suggested the party was “racist” or had any connection to the NF or BNP.

After all, Shneur Odze is not only a UKIP activist but a rabbi from the ultra-orthodox Jewish sect Chabad Lubavitch (which unlike some other ultra-orthodox groups is extremely pro-Zionist).

So it was no surprise to see UKIP select Rabbi Odze as the party’s candidate for the new “super-mayoral” election in Greater Manchester, covering a vast region with a population around 2.75 million.

The wheels started to come off the Odze campaign when as H&D reported last month, the Liberal Democrats played the race card by drawing attention to the Rabbi’s religious objection to shaking hands with women.

Then real disaster struck this week after Rabbi Odze publicly burned a Bible.

This incident stemmed from long-running hostility between Chabad Lubavitch and so-called “Messianic Jews”, i.e. people who were born Jews but converted to Christianity, and now seek to proselytise their new faith among Jewry.

Whatever one thinks of these tactics – placing a Hebrew-language New Testament inside a synagogue – it was no doubt unwise for Rabbi Odze to respond by publicly burning a Bible. Can one imagine UKIP tolerating a Muslim candidate who burned a Bible, or anyone of any faith who burned a Jewish text or artefact?

But of course UKIP’s leadership (like the rest of the political establishment) has long taken the view that certain groups qualify for “special treatment”.

Pakistani machine boss wins Labour selection

Afzal Khan, boss of a powerful Pakistani machine in Manchester politics, won a bitter selection contest last night to become Labour candidate in Manchester Gorton, one of the party’s safest seats.

As we reported earlier, the three main candidates were Khan, his Bangladeshi rival Luthfur Rahman, and Yasmine Dar (a local councillor backed by the far-left Momentum faction who previously supported Sam Wheeler, a young white Labour activist excluded from the all-Asian Labour shortlist).

The ethnic basis of the contest was revealed when Rahman (who had topped the first ballot with 163 votes) was eliminated at the penultimate stage.  The majority of his voters (101) made no choice between the two Pakistani candidates remaining: once the Bangladeshi candidate was eliminated, they weren’t interested.

The final vote went 235 to Khan and 203 to Rahman.

Now the big question in the by-election (which will be held on May 4th) is whether disillusioned Bangladeshis and other rivals of Khan will rally behind George Galloway, who has a long history of exploiting Labour’s ethnic conflicts (e.g. when he won the Bradford West by-election in 2012).

Far-left rebels against Labour’s all-Asian shortlist

As Britain’s Labour Party descends further into civil war, the latest paradoxical development sees the party’s far-left rebel against the imposition of an all-Asian shortlist for the selection of a successor to Manchester MP Gerald Kaufman.

We reported on March 7th that the death of Labour veteran Kaufman aged 86 has ignited a long-smouldering conflict within his Manchester Gorton constituency, where rival ethnic power-brokers have long been manoeuvring.

This infighting had led to the suspension of Labour’s local organisation, amid allegations of bullying and corruption, meaning that Labour’s national headquarters was in charge of selecting a shortlist of potential candidates, with local members having to make a final choice from this shortlist.

Subsequently we were told that Labour would have a politically correct, ethnic and gender balanced shortlist including one white male, one white female, one ethnic minority male and one ethnic minority female.

It was assumed that the white male would be locally-born, Oxford-educated leftwinger Sam Wheeler, seen as close to Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn.

Yet in a sensational development yesterday, Wheeler was excluded and Labour selected an all-Asian shortlist, the first time this has happened in British politics.

Favourite is Pakistani machine boss Afzal Khan, but also on the shortlist is his bitter rival and Bangladeshi faction leader Luthfur Rahman. Making up the shortlist of five are three Asian women who serve as Manchester city councillors: Nasrin Ali, Yasmine Dar and Amina Lone.

Former MP George Galloway, who has been putting himself about in Gorton since Kaufman’s death, has confirmed he will definitely stand in the May 4th by-election, exploiting resentment against Asian machine politics and also reflecting a perception on the far-left that Corbyn’s enemies within the party have used the device of an all-Asian shortlist to exclude Sam Wheeler.

Labour Party surrenders to identity politics

Nominations closed a few hours ago for Labour’s candidature in the forthcoming Manchester Gorton by-election. We reported a few days ago that politics in this area is dominated by infighting between ethnic power brokers – among whom the strongest is former Manchester mayor Afzal Khan, boss of a powerful Pakistani machine who is already an MEP.

Khan remains favourite – and we now learn that the entire selection process will be dominated by Labour’s politically correct obsession with ethnic and gender identity.

A panel from the party’s national executive will choose a shortlist of four, which will be put before the local membership (who until that final stage will have no say).

This shortlist of four will have to include one ethnic minority woman, one ethnic minority man, one white woman and one white man!

While this seems absurdly pious, the cynical effect is that infighting between rival Asians will become pointless: the rumoured “intimidation” and mass signing up of ethnic blocks as Labour members will not matter, since only one Asian male can make the shortlist, and its up to Labour’s national party HQ who that will be…

Corbynista hopeful Sam Wheeler (an Oxford graduate and old boy of the prestigious Manchester Grammar School) is favourite to be the token white male on the shortlist. Afzal Khan’s rivals might also include white female Julie Reid, and Asian female Yasmine Dar. The big question is whether Bangladeshi power broker Luthfur Rahman, chairman of the Gorton Labour Party, will swing his block vote behind Khan, or whether we will again see Bangladeshis preferring to back a non-Muslim rather than a hated Pakistani.

Meanwhile George Galloway remains on the trail of disaffected ex-Labour Muslims, speaking to a local audience after Friday prayers, and playing up his role as a pro-Palestinian activist alongside the late Sir Gerald Kaufman, whose death caused this by-election.

 

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