Reform UK’s ballot box failure continues
Yesterday’s local by-elections offered further confirmation that Reform UK is not making any impact in real contests (as opposed to opinion polls and friendly promotion on GB News).
In Belgrave ward, Tamworth, RefUK’s Ian Cooper polled 40 votes (4.1%), finishing fourth of five candidates. The protest vote seems to have gone instead to an Independent candidate who finished a strong third with 25.8%. On a split vote, the Tory just about held on to the seat with 34.8%.
This is a ward that UKIP contested six times during 2014-2021, on three occasions polling over 20%. It has tended to be a Con-Lab marginal, and the intervention of an Independent cost Labour what would otherwise have been a probable gain in present circumstances.
Further evidence from our movement’s standpoint that there is a substantial public mood of “plague on both your houses”, and that unlike UKIP and the Brexit Party in their day, RefUK is failing to mobilise that mood.
In the Watling South division of Staffordshire, which includes Belgrave ward but is usually a safer Tory seat, RefUK’s Barry Gwilt polled 110 votes (6.0%), finishing 4th of 4. Gwilt is a borough councillor in Lichfield, elected as a Tory, who defected to RefUK last month, so you would expect him to be far better than the average RefUK candidate (his borough council ward is adjacent to this county division). Therefore, although his 6% is in line with national opinion poll scores for RefUK, it actually suggests that RefUK’s true nationwide position is considerably below 6%. (Again the Tory held on, with a sharply reduced majority over Labour.)
Meanwhile the strange case of the Mosleyite who became a Tory county councillor ended in a fairly respectable vote for ex-Cllr Andy Weatherhead in Hythe West, Kent. After being ‘exposed’ a few months ago as a former activist in New British Union (a party inspired by the legacy of Sir Oswald Mosley), Mr Weatherhead resigned from the council and contested this week’s by-election as an independent, which readers might consider either brave, principled or foolish since there was nothing to prevent him serving out his term until May 2025, even after the Tories had thrown him out.
Mr Weatherhead finished bottom of the poll, but was far from disgraced, polling 237 votes (6.6%). Voters were faced with a confusing ballot paper, because there was another Independent – a former UKIP candidate, Ian Meyers, who finished fourth with 306 votes (8.6%).
It’s interesting that Meyers had not chosen to join RefUK or any of the other UKIP splinters but has ploughed a lone furrow, and that both he and Mr Weatherhead achieved votes that RefUK might envy. Again this suggests that the RefUK brand name doesn’t really add much to a dissident/populist campaign.
The big headline in Hythe was that the Greens gained the seat from the Tories, with a 12.5% swing. This has for some years been a Con-Green marginal – the Greens won it in 2017, only for Andy Weatherhead to take it back as a Tory in 2021 – so in present circumstances the result was no great surprise, though for the Green to win it by almost 500 votes was pretty impressive.
This is part of Michael Howard’s old constituency Folkestone & Hythe, presently held by technology minister Damian Collins, and it’s difficult to imagine it being anything other than Tory at the next general election. It’s surprising that the nationalist movement (racial or civic) hasn’t made more impact in these coastal areas, given the migrant crisis. Perhaps locals dislike ‘nationalist’ protesters arriving in their area from London, even more than they dislike immigrants?
Dydd Gŵyl Dewi Hapus!
The Heritage and Destiny team – two of whom have Welsh ancestry – wish all our readers a very Happy St David’s Day!
Born on a Pembrokeshire clifftop during a fierce storm in 500 AD, St David – grandson of the King of Ceredigion – became a renowned preacher and founded several monasteries, including (by some accounts) the abbey at Glastonbury as well as the original settlement which is now St Davids Cathedral in his native Wales.
The past 12 months have seen a surge in Welsh patriotism, partly linked to the World Cup. Despite the results in that tournament (!) and despite all difficulties that Welsh patriots and our fellow Europeans face in 2023, we should take heart from the words of St David’s final sermon before his death aged 89: “Be joyful, keep the faith”!
Labour’s ‘multicultural’ project digs its own grave
Critics of ‘wokeism’ have been entertained in recent weeks by the collapse of Nicola Sturgeon’s attempt to build a new Scottish nation that allows men (including convicted rapists) to redefine themselves as women.
Today another aspect of political correctness has fallen foul of inconvenient reality: this time in the Labour Party at Westminster.
Preet Gill is MP for Birmingham Edgbaston and a member of Sir Keir Starmer’s front bench, as “shadow International Development Secretary” (i.e. opposing the minister for overseas aid).
She is also one of two practising Sikhs among Labour MPs. (Another was recently appointed as a Labour peer, joining two other Sikhs in the Lords, and several more Sikhs have recently been selected to stand for Labour in winnable constituencies at the next general election.)
This has had predictable consequences – in that (yet again) there is a conflict of loyalties involving a politician from an ethnic minority.
Liberals and feminists in the Sikh community have for some time been raising concerns about sexual abuse inside Sikh temples (known as ‘gurdwaras’ or ‘guru ghars’). This is related to the broader problem of domestic violence within the Sikh community, which is believed to be related to traditionally high levels of alcoholism among Sikhs.
Perhaps surprisingly, despite her position in the Labour shadow cabinet, Preet Gill has chosen to ally herself with conservative Sikhs against their liberal / feminist critics. Writing on the WhatsApp group ‘Sikhs in Labour’, Ms Gill has repeatedly called such criticisms of Sikh temples “outrageous” and “dangerous”.
Adding to the controversy, Gill is now accused of embarrassing Labour leader Starmer because of her hardline Sikh connections. The Home Office has been handed a dossier including photographs of Gill’s visit with Starmer to her local gurdwara, where they posed in front of a display of photographs of Sikh extremists including Labh Singh, a Sikh paramilitary leader who was once accused of masterminding India’s biggest ever bank robbery in order to raise funds for his group.
While far more attention has focused on Muslim political activism, the much smaller Sikh community has attained political influence disproportionate to its size, not just in the UK but in other Western countries. Nikki Haley (born into a Sikh family and originally named Namrata Randhawa) recently announced her candidature for the Republican nomination for US President. In Canada, the junior party in the governing coalition is led by a Sikh, Jagmeet Singh, and a deputy leader of the opposition Conservative Party is also a Sikh, Tim Uppal.
The most recent census showed that Sikhs represent 0.9% of the population in England and Wales (due to CoViD we do not yet have complete UK statistics): the fourth largest religious group – behind Christians (46.2%), Muslims (6.5%), and Hindus (1.7%).
In Canada, Sikhs are 2.1% of the population, and in the USA 0.2%.
Death of “Thatcher’s Spy”
Willie Carlin – the MI5 agent inside the IRA, whose autobiography Thatcher’s Spy was reviewed by Mark Cotterill in H&D #100 – died from CoViD complications on 6th February, though his death was only announced today. Carlin had been living under a new identity since 1985, when he was ‘exfiltrated’ from Ulster after being betrayed by a traitor within MI5, Michael Bettaney.
Coincidentally, Carlin died just a fortnight before the death of Henry McDonald, the Ulster journalist who edited Thatcher’s Spy for publication.
As Mark explained in his review, Carlin was a working-class Catholic who served in the British Army and was recruited by MI5 to infiltrate the IRA and its political wing Sinn Fein from 1974-80 then, after a short hiatus, from 1981-85. His work is credited with helping force the IRA away from terrorism towards the ballot box.
Of course, now more than ever, this can be seen as a mixed blessing. Carlin’s deployment coincided with a strategy pushed by MI5’s sister service MI6 (and carried out principally by MI6 officer Michael Oatley) which led towards the present attempts to surrender Ulster’s identity in favour of the ‘Protocol’ deal with Dublin and the European Union.
Carlin himself probably welcomed that process. We might never know (though we can guess) the extent to which senior IRA commander Martin McGuinness was also working hand in glove with sections of the secret state in London (themselves under pressure from ‘allies’ in Washington).
MI5’s intelligence successes against the IRA offered the opportunity to crush republican terrorism once and for all – an opportunity that sadly was ignored in favour of US-brokered ‘compromise’.
But recent weeks have shown that all is not lost. If the unionist and loyalist communities can unite, then the treacherous successors of those IRA terrorists who were exposed by Carlin, might yet be defeated.
Sturgeon’s ‘trans’ obsession wrecks Scottish ‘nationalist’ project
Nicola Sturgeon yesterday announced her resignation as Scottish First Minister and leader of the Scottish National Party: she will remain in post until the SNP completes election of her successor, a process that will last for six weeks.
For several years Sturgeon (who took over the SNP from Alex Salmond in 2014) was rated as the most effective party leader in the UK – so much so that the Conservative Party succeeded at the 2015 general election by portraying then Labour leader Ed Miliband as a likely puppet of Sturgeon, in the event of a coalition government at Westminster.
When her embittered predecessor Salmond launched a rival party (Alba) two years ago, it proved a flop, failing to win a single election at any level.
But in recent months Sturgeon’s core project – Scottish independence, the SNP’s raison d’être – has seemed to be floundering. Opinion polls were starting to show that Scots would reject independence if offered a second referendum, and in any case such a referendum was not going to be offered until the present Tory government loses office in another couple of years.
Meanwhile Sturgeon had become obsessed by an increasingly weird ‘woke’ agenda, typified by the ‘Gender Recognition’ law that was passed by the Scottish Parliament but vetoed by Prime Minister Rishi Sunak. (Under the present devolution arrangements, Scotland has devolved powers in some areas, but does not yet have the right to allow a man to call himself a woman and demand access to female facilities.)
This political row turned into a scandal when a convicted rapist, Adam Graham, was found to have been moved to a women’s prison having decided that he is now a ‘transgender woman’ called Isla Bryson.
Eventually Graham/Bryson was transferred back to a men’s prison, but the First Minister (usually a fluent media performer) struggled to answer interviewers who asked her whether she regarded this convicted rapist as being a man or a woman!
Polls show that the majority of Scots oppose Sturgeon’s ‘gender recognition’ law, and she had failed to win over even a majority of SNP voters on this issue.
No doubt there were other reasons contributing to Sturgeon’s decision to quit (including personal factors), but there’s little doubt that the ‘trans’ issue derailed her leadership, which depended on holding together a broad coalition in favour of independence, rather than incessantly pandering to the ‘woke’ lobby.
Sturgeon seems to have made the mistake of believing her own legend, and revelling in flattery from her acolytes in the left-liberal media.
Her own favoured candidate for the leadership is Humza Yousaf – from a Pakistani family and theoretically a Muslim, but who fully supports Sturgeon’s woke agenda and is a fellow Glasgow MSP, responsible for Health and Social Care in her cabinet. If Yousaf were to win, it would mean that Scotland’s two largest parties were both led by Pakistanis. (Anas Sarwar has been leader of the Scottish Labour Party for the past two years.) Another possible pro-Sturgeon candidate, who might have had more chance of reuniting the party, her present deputy Keith Brown, a former Royal Marine commando who served in the Falklands War, ruled himself out.
While Yousaf is fully on board with the woke agenda, another candidate who has already launched her campaign is Ash Regan, who was among the leading rebels against Sturgeon’s pro-‘trans’ policy. Regan is an Edinburgh MSP: she resigned from Sturgeon’s government in protest at the “gender recognition” plans. Regan has advocated reuniting Scottish nationalism and bringing Sturgeon’s old enemies back into the party, but has no chance of winning the leadership and is more likely to end up in the wilderness herself, possibly in some future alliance with Salmond’s Alba party.
One likely candidate not standing is the initial bookies’ favourite Angus Robertson, who led the SNP contingent in the House of Commons before losing his Westminster seat in 2017 and restarting his career in the Scottish Parliament. Robertson was disliked for years by the SNP’s left-wing because of his role a decade ago in changing the party’s defence policy to a more pro-NATO stance. It’s likely that today’s left cares more about ‘culture wars’, and after Putin’s invasion of Ukraine there is little support for anti-NATO policies outside the fringe of the fringe (whether left or right). But Robertson remains personally unpopular among many of his colleagues, and clearly found less support than expected.
It now seems that the main challenger to Yousaf is Kate Forbes, Secretary for Finance and the Economy in Sturgeon’s cabinet and presently on maternity leave. Her biggest problem is that she is a practising member of the Free Church of Scotland, which takes a conservative line on ‘culture wars’ issues such as the ‘trans’ debate. Fortunately for Forbes, she was on maternity leave during the Holyrood vote on gender recognition last December, but social liberals and the trans lobby will doubtless vote for Yousaf. Ash Regan’s candidature will allow Forbes to present herself as a relative moderate and ‘compromise’ candidate on social issues, but for now Yousaf is the bookies’ favourite.
[NB: An earlier version of this article referred incorrectly to the Free Presbyterian Church rather than the Free Church of Scotland.]
Europeans mark two contrasting anniversaries
H&D‘s friends and comrades in Europe have marked two contrasting anniversaries in recent days.
In Dresden commemorations were held for the greatest crime of the Second World War – the terror bombing that destroyed this ancient city in February 1945. As discussed in a new article by our assistant editor Peter Rushton at the Real History blog, no one knows the true death toll at Dresden, partly because the city was packed with refugees who had fled from Stalin’s Red Army as it advanced into eastern Germany. Based on his detailed archival research, the British historian David Irving has estimated 135,000 deaths.
Dresden was the culmination of a deliberate policy of terror bombing – a deliberate decision to flout pre-war agreements (and to abandon the policies of the British government at the start of the war, maintained until Churchill took office).
The most famous British military historian, J.F.C. Fuller wrote in 1948:
“It may seem a little strange, nevertheless it is a fact, that this reversion to wars of primitive savagery was made by Britain and the United States, the two great democracies… With the disappearance of the gentleman as the back-bone of the ruling class in England, political power rapidly passed into the hands of demagogues who, by playing upon the emotions and ignorance of the masses, created a permanent war-psychosis.”
Fuller went on to acknowledge that as a consequence of the seizure of power in Britain by such “demagogues”, notably Churchill, “the obliteration of cities by bombing was probably the most devastating blow ever struck at civilisation”. Fuller wrote of “the moral decline which characterised the war.”
The Spanish nationalist group Devenir Europeo carried out a campaign of leaflets and posters targeting universities and military academies in an effort to raise awareness of the events of the Second World War and how they shaped our world. Our correspondent Isabel Peralta was very much involved in this campaign: she also marked this week’s other important historic anniversary.
In February 1943, 4,000 Spanish anti-communist volunteers – the División Azul (‘Blue Division’) – successfully fought off a vastly greater force of Stalin’s Red Army at the Battle of Krasny Bor, near Leningrad, allowing their German allies to regroup and maintain the Leningrad front.
Speaking beside the División Azul memorial at the Almudena cemetery, Madrid, this week, Isabel pointed out that her compatriots won at Krasny Bor not because they had greater numbers or greater weapons, but because they had greater faith in their cause – the noble ideals of the true Europe.
Spain is now at the front line of the struggle to maintain freedom of research and freedom of speech on historical and political questions. Under their new ‘democratic memory law’ some forms of historical revisionism are now illegal, although in other respects Spanish laws on ‘incitement of racial hatred’ are less restrictive than in the UK.
Isabel herself is presently facing trial in Madrid for a speech at an anti-immigration rally outside the Spanish Embassy last year.
Vincent Reynouard extradition update
Yesterday there was another court hearing in Edinburgh on the case of Vincent Reynouard, the French revisionist scholar who despite having committed no crime under UK law, was arrested at his home in Scotland on 10th November. Since then he has been held in Edinburgh Prison.
The French authorities demanded Vincent’s extradition to face charges under their law which forbids challenges to orthodox versions of 20th century history, including the ‘Holocaust’.
Vincent Reynouard is best known for his detailed investigation of the alleged ‘massacre’ at Oradour, in west-Central France, on 10th June 1944, as well as further revisionist research and analysis that can be read at his website.
The law under which he would be tried in France (and under which he has previously been convicted and served a prison sentence there) was introduced in 1990 by the Communist MP Jean-Claude Gayssot and the Jewish Socialist former prime minister Laurent Fabius.
Its original target was the French scholar Professor Robert Faurisson who was prosecuted and heavily fined several times under the ‘Gayssot Law’, and its main target today is Vincent Reynouard.
The court in Edinburgh will have to decide whether Scottish law allows for a man to be extradited for something that is not a crime in Scotland – and the case is therefore an important test of the new extradition arrangements that replaced the European Arrest Warrant system after Brexit.
In 2008 the German authorities attempted to extradite the Australian revisionist Dr Fredrick Töben from London using a European Arrest Warrant, after he was arrested while in transit at London’s Heathrow Airport. However this extradition attempt was defeated in the London courts, and after several weeks detention at Brixton Prison, Dr Töben was freed to return home to Australia.
In Vincent’s case a further preliminary hearing is due on 9th March, with the full case presently scheduled to be heard (again in Edinburgh) on 6th April.
Further reports will appear soon, both here at the H&D site, in our magazine, and at the Real History blog.
Vincent remains in good spirits. H&D readers wishing to send him a letter of support (in English or French) should write to: Vincent REYNOUARD, Prisoner Number 160071, HMP Edinburgh, Scottish Prison Service, 33 Stenhouse Road, Edinburgh, EH11 3LN.
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.
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.
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.
MET RECRUITS ILLITERATE COPS TO BOOST “DIVERSITY”
London’s Metropolitan Police are recruiting applicants who are “functionally illiterate in English” to meet “diversity targets”, Matt Parr, one of His Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary, has revealed.
This is in response to trying to meet a demand from the then Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, the lesbian Cressida Dick, to make London’s police force 40% Black and other non-White by 2023. In fact they have not yet reached even 17% ethnic minority, and they are clearly getting desperate.
The result is, as Mr Parr found, sticking people who cannot read or write in English in Police uniforms, purely on the basis of their race. This is a practice loudly decried as “racism” unless, as in this case, native White Britons are the victims.
Despite discovering this unfortunate issue in practice, the Inspector of Constabulary was nevertheless all in favour of this anti-White racist policy in principle: “we completely support the idea that London – which will likely be a minority White city in the next decade or so – should not be policed by an overwhelmingly White police force”, he said.
Or apparently necessarily even an overwhelmingly law-abiding one – he went on to observe, as has long been known and just as long hushed up, that “young Black men tended to have a greater involvement with the criminal justice system in London than any other group. But,” he went on, “that does not mean they should be barred from the Police”.
Meanwhile native British constables, clearly regarded as surplus to requirements, are being purged from the Metropolitan Police purely for expressing Politically Incorrect opinions, such as remarking in texts sent to colleagues on the total ethnic transformation of large areas of Britain’s capital city. Thus patriotic White policemen are, it seems, being cleared out to make way in the policing of London’s streets for illiterate Black criminals…
A telling result in a historic Rotherham council ward
There have been some doubts as to whether Labour’s revival under Sir Keir Starmer would extend into White working class areas of the North, and tonight’s by-election gain for Labour in a working-class Rotherham council ward hasn’t quite resolved those doubts.
It now seems pretty clear that Sunak’s Tories are in big trouble in the ‘red wall’ (formerly solid Labour areas where the party declined sharply in or before 2019). But neither Reform UK, nor any of its civic nationalist rivals, nor (needless to say) any racial nationalist party, has yet even laid the foundation for a serious electoral challenge any time soon.
Tonight Labour gained Keppel ward, Rotherham, from the rebranded local branch of UKIP, the Rotherham Democratic Party,
For our readers, this is a ward that will evoke poignant memories.
The late Marlene Guest fought Keppel ward three times for the BNP, polling 16.4% in 2004, then finishing a close second to Labour in 2006 and 2007 with 27.7% and 28.5%. A few years after the collapse of Griffin’s party, UKIP were the beneficiaries, gaining the ward in 2014 and 2015, and holding on to two of its three seats in the 2016 all-out election.
Following Rotherham council’s well publicised problems and reorganisation, Labour took two of the three seats in May 2021, but the third was retained by one of the surviving UKIP councillors now rebranded as a Rotherham Democrat.
This Rotherham Democrat was thrown out for non-attendance at the end of last year and his party didn’t even field a candidate in this week’s by-election.
Neither was there a candidate from any other civic nationalist party, though an ex-Labour councillor stood as an independent and the Yorkshire Party (regionalist populists) had a candidate who took 15%. The Brexit Party polled 17.2% in the Rotherham constituency in 2019, but its successor Reform UK again showed no interest in contesting a local by-election, even in such a promising area.
Labour ended up with a majority of 300 tonight, with an Asian Liberal Democrat in a surprisingly close second. The Tories also put up an Asian candidate and slipped to fourth place with a truly appalling vote, down from 24% to 5.8%.
Lab 36.1% (+4.6)
LD 21.6% (+14.7)
Ind 18.5%
YP 15.2% (+3.5)
Con 5.8% (-18.2)
Grn 2.9%
