Strong third-place for Marine Le Pen’s party in French by-election
Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National did well in Sunday’s by-election for one of the two seats in the National Assembly allocated to the department de l’Ariège, which is a very beautiful but rather poor and traditionally left-wing area of southern France, famous in history as the centre of the Cathar or Albigensian heresy.
The by-election was caused by irregularities in the conduct of the general election in this constituency. The far-left candidate Bénédicte Taurine was elected at last year’s general election but has been forced to recontest the seat after the poll was quashed by the Constitutional Court. Ms Taurine represents a broad alliance of ultra-left groups which calls itself La France Insoumise (‘France Unbowed’), a title which reflects the oddly patriotic stance of French socialists who argue that economic liberalism (promoted by President Emmanuel Macron) is a betrayal of French traditions.
The RN’s vote went up by a quarter from 20% to 25% but that was not quite good enough to take RN candidate Jean-Marc Garnier into next Sunday’s second round, where the far-left’s Ms Taurine (whose first round vote slipped slightly from 33.1% to 31.2%) will run-off against a Socialist Party dissident, Martine Froger (whose vote rose from 20.0% to 26.4%, no doubt partly thanks to having her party’s name on the ballot paper this time).
The strange situation is that last year the Le Pen candidate only missed out on the run-off by eight votes, but in this week’s by-election they were 155 votes short despite a substantial increase in their own backing. Rival nationalist party Reconquête (led by Éric Zemmour) polled 2.8% (down from 3.3% last year), but while in theory this means that a combined nationalist vote would have taken second rather than third place, no-one can be sure that the RN could have relied on Reconquête voters’ backing.
Reconquête continues to be an annoyance to Marine Le Pen. It would however be simplistic to think that the two parties’ electorates are simply interchangeable. It is noteworthy that MLP’s niece Marion Maréchal (whose credibility has been badly damaged by Reconquête‘s electoral failure, but who is still seen as the eventual successor to Zemmour and perhaps as the eventual leader of French nationalism) has severely criticised the RN for not taking steps against a RN deputy who opened a mega-mosque in his constituency funded by the Turkish government. (Le Pen did eventually condemn the deputy concerned for this ‘personal initiative’.)
At the same time Maréchal and Zemmour have more or less endorsed President Macron’s view that raising the retirement age is inevitable given the burden of pension payments on the public purse.
So, rather in contrast to the way things have usually been in the UK’s nationalist movement (broad and narrow), the French movement’s middle class supporters take a harder line on race than its working class base (as well as forming a much larger proportion of the movement’s electoral base than they do here).
Macron’s candidate polled only 10.7% (down from 20.0% last year, reflecting the challenge to the president’s authority during the pensions crisis), and as in last year’s election there was no ‘centre-right’ candidate.
The split in the nationalist vote was unfortunate, but hatred between the Socialists and the far-left will be much increased by the bitter run-off on April 2nd, regardless of who wins!
Disillusionment with the entire French political system no doubt contributed to a very low turnout of only 39.6% in the by-election’s first round, down from 56.4% last year, despite a very wide range of candidates to choose from, comprising two rival nationalists, a Trotskyist who polled 2%, plus a local independent with 2.2%, and a Macronist, as well as the two rival left-wingers who will contest the run-off.
Iraq Invasion – Twenty Years On
The twentieth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq sees the discredited but still shameless Tony Blair continuing to regard himself as an international statesman.
But for British patriots and campaigners for historical truth worldwide, Blair’s criminal record is clear.
A positive aspect of the entire disgusting charade – whereby ‘evidence’ of ‘weapons of mass destruction’ was massaged to create a case for war – is that it added to public disenchantment with the political elite. Arguably the rise of UKIP, Brexit, and even the election of Donald Trump (for better and worse) could never have happened without this mass disillusionment caused by the WMD lie.
The fact that we failed to capitalise on that is partly because, here in the UK, the BNP leadership under Nick Griffin was fatally weak and confused in its response to Blair’s lies. Griffin was never able to decide whether he wanted to exploit the war (and 9/11) merely to attack Islam, or whether he was prepared to ask more serious questions.
Some of those important questions are asked in the video below by the barrister and anti-war campaigner Dr Abdul-Haq Al-Ani, speaking late last year at a meeting of the Four Virtues Club, hosted by Lady Michèle Renouf and Dr James Thring.
Forthright condemnation of the way intelligence was used to justify the war is no longer restricted to political dissidents. For example, to mark the anniversary the CBS News podcast Intelligence Matters has produced a special edition on the Iraq War which pointed out the way that conclusions were distorted to fit a political agenda:
“Instead of asking, ‘Is it possible that we’re not seeing more because we are wrong?’ the analysts explained the lack of information by saying Saddam was practicing ‘vigorous denial and deception efforts.'”
Michael Morell, former acting Director of the CIA, states on the podcast:
“We were wrong on the chemical weapons judgment, we were wrong on the biological weapons judgment, and we were wrong on the nuclear weapons judgment. Saddam no longer had these programs. He had stopped them. He had disarmed.”
Yet Tony Blair and his apologists are still unable to face these facts.
Happy St Patrick’s Day 2023!
The H&D team would like to wish all our readers on the island of Ireland, and in Great Britain, in fact everywhere in the world, whether you are Irish, Northern Irish or Ulster-Scots/Scots-Irish, a very happy Saint Patrick’s Day.
St Patrick was not Catholic or Protestant, or even Irish but a Christian convert, from maybe Cumbria, or even North Wales, depending on what story you believe.
Sadly, Marxist Republicans have hijacked the saint’s day, and now mockingly refer to it as “St. Paddy’s Day.”
In Dublin and Belfast, and many other city centres all over the British Isles it’s just one big “piss up” now.
In fact, as one of the articles that follows explains, St Patrick’s Day was turned into a massive party day of celebrations and parades in the USA, not the island of Ireland, which only followed suit years later. First by the Boston-Irish (both Catholic and Protestant), then by their kinfolk in New York City, and then in San Francisco, Chicago, Richmond and many other American cities, with Irish or Scots-Irish communities.
Of course this St Patrick’s Day, comes at a crucial time for Loyalists in Ulster and the rest of the United Kingdom. The post-Brexit Northern Ireland Protocol, which included the Irish sea border, is now up for debate amongst the main Unionist parties – the DUP, the UUP, as well as some on the Conservative Party backbenches. The smaller (more hard-line) TUV party have already rejected Rishi Sunak’s proposals out of hand.
For those of you who have not read it, here is the Editorial from the most recent issue of Heritage and Destiny magazine (#113).
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So the Supreme Court (which is made up of five law lords presiding in the highest court in the UK) has now finally slammed the door shut on any hope that the Northern Ireland Protocol could be overturned through legal means. The courts have however agreed that the Protocol contravenes the 1800 Act of Union, article VI of which states: “The subjects of Great Britain and Ireland shall be on the same footing in respect of trade and navigation… all prohibitions and bounties on the export of articles the produce or manufacture of either country to the other shall cease.”
But although the Protocol is contrary to the Act of Union, the courts say it is lawful because Parliament voted for it. This is obviously true: Parliament is supreme, and can make any decision it wants, and whatever it decides is the law. The Act of Union has, as the judges say, been “subjugated” by the Protocol – just as our treacherous government has allowed the UK to be subjugated by the EU both pre- and post-Brexit.
The legal challenge to the Protocol – in two separate cases – was made by a group of unionist and loyalist leaders and activists that included the pro-Union peer and former Labour MP Kate Hoey, the Traditional Unionist Voice leader Jim Allister, two former Ulster Unionist party leaders Steve Aiken and the late David Trimble, former Democratic Unionist Party leader Arlene Foster, former Brexit party MEP Benyamin Naeem Habib, and the former LVF POW, Clifford Peeples, who is now a Pentecostalist pastor.
The group also argued that it had breached the principle of consent at the core of the 1998 Belfast Good Friday agreement, which most of them supported at the time, although probably regret doing so now. Jim Allister suggested those who had opposed the Belfast Agreement from the outset – as he did – had been vindicated by recent events, particularly the “constitutional change” that followed Brexit, and after, the Protocol hearing, he rightly pointed out that the ruling “confirmed the protocol is dismantling the Union”.
However, what I find almost as shocking as the Protocol itself is the lack of support for our fellow citizens in Ulster from our little movement in Great Britain. Apart from a handful of individuals, British nationalists seem to have all but given up on supporting “Loyal Ulster” – which has always been one of our key policies since the formation of the National Front in 1967.
These days most nationalist street and online activity seems to be concentrated on opposing LGBT+ groups, Muslim grooming gangs and hotels housing fake refugees and asylum seekers – all modish causes that nationalists are right to oppose. However, should we really leave it to people such as former Labour MP Kate Hoey, and Pakistani-born former Brexit Party MEP Benyamin Naeem Habib to oppose the Protocol? Surely not?
British Nationalists in Great Britain should be out on the streets opposing the Protocol and the Irish Sea border and demanding that Northern Ireland stays “British Forever” – just like we always did.
Of course, the only realistic long term solution to what our enemies call “the Irish problem,” would be a “United Ireland.” Not one where Northern Ireland’s six counties join the Irish Republic but where the twenty-six counties of the Irish Republic would abandon their separate existence and re-join the UK. Just like London, anybody walking around Dublin these days will see what the horror of mass Third World immigration has done to that city. We need to be united once again and stand together if we are to win our nations back, because if we don’t it’s all over for the British and the Irish, in fact for all White people on these islands.”
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The H&D editor will no doubt be out in his local tomorrow evening to raise a glass or two to Saint Patrick, as will the assistant editor – who is not known for turning down a pint of Guinness – while proudly wearing a red and white St. Patrick’s cross pin badge!
Click here to read more from H&D about St Patrick’s Day.
The legacy of St Patrick – two H&D articles from our archives
H&D wishes all our Irish, Northern Irish and Ulster Scots readers a very happy Saint Patrick’s Day – whichever part of the world you are in.
Editor’s note: The first article – “Saint Patrick the Patron Saint of the USA” – was written several years ago, but the same issues are still being discussed in Loyalist circles today – now mainly on internet forums. So, it was fitting that we republished it (in hard copy in issue #77 of H&D) on St Patrick’s Day 2017.
It was America that spawned the St Patrick’s Day parade, not Ireland, and its origins are both Protestant and British…
As March 17th approaches, the annual debate has reignited on whether Unionism should embrace St Patrick and the day set aside for his commemoration. Over the last five years there has been a slow emergence of Protestant participation on the date, though that has been via the creation of new events rather than involvement in existing ones. This article examines the origin of St Patrick’s Day parades, this new emerging trend, its motivation and where it may possibly lead.
The question ‘where is the biggest St Patrick’s Day parade in Northern Ireland?’ at first glance would appear easily answered. Belfast most would say, with a few probably suggesting the Cathedral City of Armagh or even where he was allegedly laid to rest, Downpatrick. What will surprise many is that the largest parade for the last few years by sheer number of participants has been in the small County Armagh village of Killylea. It is here since 2005 the Cormeen Rising Sons of William Flute Band have held their annual band procession and competition. Last year the Cormeen parade saw 42 bands take part (in comparison to the seven that paraded at the Dublin event), amounting to approximately 1800 band members. Thousands of spectators stood along the route, despite it being a bitterly cold evening.
Cormeen Rising Sons of William chairman Mark Gibson explains that the bands original motivation for the parade came more out of necessity than anything else. “The band season is very busy, and when trying to find a date for our parade it was difficult to define one that didn’t clash with other bands locally.” Some members suggested March 17 as a solution to the problem, but the band was nervous. “We were concerned about how a St Patrick’s Day parade would go down in our community, the parade in Armagh never was very welcoming, but we made a decision to try it and it has been a success.”
From that initial year where thirteen bands took part, the parade is now among the largest in the Province. It’s not only the number of bands participating that has increased, but also the crowds attending to watch, and the event is increasingly becoming a fixture in the calendar for many Unionists. Another band, the Ulster Protestant Boys Flute Coleraine, have started a similar event on the date that too is growing. The ever increasing scale of both processions indicates clearly that there is certainly a willingness within the PUL (Protestant, Unionist, Loyalist) community to be involved in St Patrick’s Day. Where the schisms emerge are with the issues of why and how.
It is generally acknowledged that in the distant past Patrick was not a controversial figure for Protestants in Ireland or beyond. His ‘sainthood’ was never conferred by the Pope and pre-dates the reformation, so he was never seen as being the possession of ‘Rome’. St Patrick was seen as an evangelical Christian who had made personal sacrifice to spread the gospel in Ireland. The anniversary of his death was observed and commemorated by all Protestant denominations to different degrees, with the Church of Ireland in particular very active.
The shift from an anniversary of religious significance towards an ‘Irish’ event however first took place in the United States in 1737. In Boston that year the Irish Charitable Society, made up of Protestant immigrants (some of whom were British Soldiers), held their first meeting and dinner. The purpose was to both honour Patrick in the context of their Protestant faith and to reach out the hand of friendship to other Irish immigrants. The exercise obviously struck a chord and the practise spread, with the first recorded parade in New York in 1766, with again British Soldiers of Irish blood heavily involved. It was America that spawned the St Patrick’s Day parade, not Ireland, and its origins are both Protestant and British.
During that period in history the vast majority of Irish immigrants were Presbyterian, however from 1830 it was Catholic arrivals who were in the ascendancy. With that change began an emphasis towards anti-British sentiment in the demonstrations. In the aftermath of the American Revolutionary War anything portrayed as anti-colonial was well received, with even the many original Protestant immigrant descendants non-antagonistic of this motivation. Many British ‘Loyalists’ had left for Canada, and effectively the descendants of the original Protestant Irish settlers remaining saw themselves as primarily American in identity, with all that was left for their original ‘homeland’ of Ireland simply folk memory and sentimentality.
Mike Cronin, author of A History of St Patrick’s Day, states that whilst this tradition was developing, back in Ireland the first parades didn’t take place until the 1840’s and even then they were organised by Temperance societies. Mike emphasises the lack of public celebration “The only other major events in nineteenth century Ireland was a trooping of the colour ceremony and grand ball held at Dublin Castle.” So even as late as 1911 the largest St Patrick’s Day occasion in Ireland was still rooted in a joint Irish and British expression of identity. Protestant churches and some Orange Lodges throughout the island appear to have held minor functions on the date, but these were very subdued affairs, and essentially even post-partition very little changed. Catholic observance of the day continued to different degrees in different areas, as did the Protestant nod to Patrick.
Right up until the 1960s the primary theme of St Patrick’s Day in both Northern Ireland and the Republic still remained religious observance, with even from 1923 to then public houses and bars in the Republic of Ireland closed by law. A poll conducted in 1968 suggested that 20% of Northern Irish Protestants at this stage still considered themselves Irish. The onset of civil unrest in Northern Ireland coincided however with the importation of the American style to St Patrick’s events in Dublin and elsewhere. Now whilst a violent conflict was being waged in the name of all things Irish, St Patrick’s Day parades were starting to display the features that had developed in the United States. On these parades Irish identity was perceived by Northern Protestants as being defined as aggressively anti-British and anti-Protestant, with the disjointed and casual nature of the parades and the now integral alcohol element alien to PUL parading traditions and customs.
As the IRA campaign escalated, many Protestants simply could not divorce the fact that these celebrations displayed an exclusive form of Irish sentiment whilst a campaign was being waged against them in the name of Ireland. As the years progressed, in Northern Ireland in particular it became apparent that the day was being deliberately used in many instances as an extension of the Irish Republican war against Unionism.
Grand Orange Lodge Director of Services Dr David Hume reiterates the view that in the recent past it has been the nature of the parades and commemorative events that turned Protestants away. “The perception among Unionism is without doubt that Irish Republicanism and Irish Nationalism has used St Patrick’s Day parades as a weapon, effectively using the ‘shield’ of Patrick to express obvious militant anti-British and therefore anti-Unionist sentiment.” David believes that the manner and focus of these events is totally at odds with the purported motivation. “St Patrick’s Day should be used as a day of reflection on the religious significance of Patrick, something far removed from the aggressive and confrontational use of symbolism; and the huge emphasis on alcohol consumption that currently seems to be the case.” David bluntly states that the date isn’t an important one on the ‘Orange’ calendar, but recognises that it does have a place in society.
There remains one annual Orange Order parade related to St Patrick’s Day, which is held each year in Ballymena. One of the participating Lodges is The Cross of St Patrick LOL 688 which was founded in 1967. A lodge spokesperson describes the motivation behind its formation as being “to reclaim the heritage of Saint Patrick” explaining that “Brethren were concerned that Patrick’s heritage was being hijacked by Roman Catholicism and Republicanism.” The lodge’s concerns would appear to have been reflecting the growing sense of alienation the PUL community was feeling regarding St Patricks events.
There is no doubt that this alienation effectively forced many Protestants into an automatically negative position regarding St Patrick’s Day. With the advent of the IRA cessations of violence and the ongoing political process however, it has become apparent that many within Unionism have been able to reflect much more on the meaning of St Patrick’s Day for them. The ending of a violent ‘Irish’ physical campaign has given space to examine the date, with many now realising that it once was a date of relevance that they were forced into denying, and there is a willingness to make it relevant again. Nevertheless this reflection and willingness has not as yet manifested itself into significant participation in civic St Patrick’s Day parades.
With a few exceptions, such as the participation of an unashamedly Loyalist Blood and Thunder band in the 2003 Limerick St Patrick’s Band competition, Unionism still does not feel comfortable taking part in the modern version of a St Patrick’s parade. Concerns still exist regarding the involvement of militant Republicanism in such events along with the aggressive use of flags and symbols, but the problem seems to go much deeper.
Iain Carlisle of the Ulster Scots Community Network has a very straightforward and unambiguous answer regarding Unionist involvement in St Patrick’s Day events. Iain states very clearly “I don’t think there has to be ANY justification given for Protestants or Unionists marking Patrick’s day”, but goes on to say that “there is however a fundamental difference of approach to both Patrick as a person and the means of celebration within the Unionist community”. Iain’s comments would appear to reflect not just a general uncomfortable position with the overtly ‘United Ireland’ underlying St Patrick’s Day theme, but the actual motivation and method of celebration.
All historical examinations of Protestant Irish and their approach and relationship with Patrick indicates that for them he has never truly deviated from having a purely theological relevance. On St Patrick’s Day however the majority of Catholics, Irish Nationalists, Republicans, those of Irish descent and indeed anyone who wants a day out, St Patrick’s significance as a religious icon is purely tokenistic. St Patrick is merely a figurehead for overt Irish nationalism and a holiday. In turn the Unionist tradition of parading has developed from a military perspective and the American style parades are an alien concept, being perceived as being undisciplined and overtly casual.
Whilst new events have arisen, it is obvious that Unionism has no desire to abandon its central belief of Patrick’s religious relevance, and in addition is reluctant to embrace what it sees as an alien approach to parades. Even with the emergence of band parades on the date, they in themselves are a much more disciplined and subdued practise than their counterparts on the day. Whatever the future holds, it is clear that the PUL community is going through an ongoing examination of Patrick and his relevance to them. As journalist Chris Ryder recently pointed out “there will be no going back to the view that St Patrick was a Catholic, and a saint only for Catholics.”
The second article “Enoch Powell’s Suppressed Article Rediscovered”, on St Patrick, was published by us in March 2016 (in hard copy in issue 71 of H&D) it certainly added fuel to the (Loyalist) bonfire!
Enoch Powell’s Suppressed Article (on St Patrick, Ulster and the Scots Irish Identity) Rediscovered – with introduction by Peter Rushton, H&D Assistant Editor
After the Conservatives returned to government under Margaret Thatcher in 1979, Enoch Powell hoped Ulster’s status as an integral part of the United Kingdom would be reaffirmed. Some of the leading figures on Thatcher’s wing of the Conservative Party were Powellites, and until the eve of the 1979 election the Tories’ Northern Ireland spokesman had been Airey Neave – a strong and determined Unionist. Tragically Neave was murdered by a car bomb at the House of Commons in March 1979, and his successors pursued a very different policy: commitment to Ulster’s identity was progressively weakened through the 1980s.
Powell came to believe that the CIA had a hand in Airey Neave’s murder, and it is now established that MI6 and CIA operatives had been pursuing a deal with the IRA since the mid-1970s.
In January 1981 however (still believing that Thatcher’s government would defend the Union) Powell proposed that the Foreign Office should produce articles and booklets for the American public to explain Ulster’s distinct identity. It was agreed that Powell would write a brief article to be published in U.S. newspapers on St Patrick’s Day (17th March 1981) and that a 1965 booklet – Scotch-Irish and Ulster – would be reprinted, both with Foreign Office support.
Although Powell submitted the article and welcomed republication of the pamphlet, both were sidelined: the anti-Ulster faction in Whitehall and Washington triumphed. The article and related official correspondence remained classified until February 2015, and H&D now reveals the story for the first time after I obtained the documents from the National Archives.
If St Patrick has a Member to represent him in Parliament, I must surely be that man. My constituency in the House of Commons is Down South, the southern half of the county of Down, which looks across the Irish Sea beyond the Isle of Man to Cumberland and Galloway. From that southern half there projects a peninsula which the ancient geographers were already calling Dunum, or Down; and Downpatrick, the town which stands at the isthmus of that peninsula, happily combines the name of the place and that of the British missionary with a late Roman surname who we believe brought Christianity from the largest to the second largest of the British Isles.
The peninsula where he landed, baptised his first converts, built his first church and laid his bones to rest has still a palpable individuality. When I drive into it – its traditional name is Lecale – from some other part of my constituency, I am always conscious of crossing a threshold. But the same is just as true of the whole north-eastern part of Ireland to which that peninsula is attached: it is distinct and separate from the rest, as if by a decree of nature. Geographically and geologically it had its own pattern, a mountain ring enclosing an inner central plain, long before man came there at all; and its earliest inhabitants were linked by blood and intercourse with the neighbouring mainland. The passage which St Patrick made was no voyage of exploration: he took a ticket on a two-way traffic route rather like that across the English Channel between Dover and Calais (which in point of fact is somewhat longer).
This north-east part was called “Ulster” centuries before Henry VIII (no friend of St Patrick’s!) used the word to dub one of the four administrative provinces into which he divided his Irish kingdom. Whatever elements, across the centuries, came to Ulster were drawn into its distinct identity. The Norman baron who, with a handful of knights and the king’s permission, rode north from Dublin into Ulster in the 1170s founded an independent principality – the earldom of Ulster, which is today held by the Queen’s cousin, the Duke of Gloucester. Into Ulster flowed settlers from England and Wales as well as from Scotland, long before the Plantation of James I; and the separateness of the province claimed and enveloped them all.
That happened pre-eminently to those Scots who were the major element in the settlement of the forfeited lands at the beginning of the seventeenth century. Research has proved that they by no means displaced the earlier Ulstermen so comprehensively as was intended and is often believed. It is also true that they only represented one, albeit the largest, of a series of contingents earlier and later who returned across the narrow North Channel to the land from which the ancestors of many of them had originally come in remote, even prehistoric times. The great fact, however, is that, like the rest, they became part of Ulster.
The vocabulary of American history has called those people Scotch Irish. The truer name is that by which they liked, and still like, to call themselves – Ulster Scots. For they were indeed, and remain in virtue of many ties, Scots; but above all they were Ulstermen. This therefore was the Ulster, unique from its beginning, which contributed a disproportionate share – including at least ten presidents – to the foundation and to the spirit of the American nation right from the origins of its independence. It is a contribution as distinct from the rest, and as distinctive, as any other, whether Irish, English or Scots.
The modern search for national roots is, I believe, as healthy as it is popular and expanding. It has already brought many Americans, and not only those with demonstrable ancestral ties, to Ulster, to learn on the spot – the only sure way – the truth about its past and its present. Those who come are coming to the place which, of all spots on the globe, is peculiarly and forever St Patrick’s. On his day America is remembered in Ulster, as Ulster ought to be remembered in America.
Editor’s note: J. Enoch Powell (1912-1998) was Ulster Unionist MP for South Down, 1974-87, having earlier been Conservative MP for Wolverhampton South West, 1950-74. His career in Conservative politics ended when he was sacked as the party’s defence spokesman in April 1968, following his famous “Rivers of blood” speech which criticised Britain’s racial transformation, which can be read online here.
Political change in Britain: 40 years after Bermondsey
Political journalists have been looking back forty years on the anniversary of the Bermondsey by-election, a famous gain on 24th February 1983 for the Liberal / SDP ‘Alliance’, whose candidate Simon Hughes achieved what is still the largest swing in by-election history: 44.2%, turning a Labour majority of 11,756 into an Alliance majority of almost 10,000.
Most of the publicity (including several interviews with the defeated Labour candidate Peter Tatchell) has focused on the question of ‘gay rights’, an agenda that has moved on considerably in the intervening decades. Tatchell made no secret of his homosexuality, though at the time he was not so closely identified with the ‘gay rights’ cause as he later became.
Tatchell was vilified by the tabloid press, who gleefully picked up the ‘homophobic’ abuse that was thrown at him, mainly by his rivals on the decaying and often corrupt old ‘right-wing’ of the Labour Party. These included retiring MP Bob Mellish and his ally John O’Grady, long-serving leader (1968-82) of the local Southwark Council.
O’Grady had been ousted as Labour candidate for the Dockyard ward that he had represented since Southwark council’s creation in 1964, while Mellish decided to retire as an MP so as to take a well-paid position as vice-chairman of the London Dockyard Development Corporation. (He eventually became Lord Mellish of Bermondsey.)
Looking back on the by-election, Tatchell’s views don’t seem especially ‘far left’ even by the standards of the time, let alone by today’s standards. The real issues affecting Londoners (then as now) included housing. Tatchell and the Labour left had (justifiably) campaigned against the record of their own party, who took local voters for granted and did far too little for council tenants.
Totally ignored by all of the mainstream parties was the ethnic transformation of London which had already begun: parts of the Southwark and Bermondsey area now regularly see gun and knife crime that would once have been rare. And today’s viewers of the 1983 by-election coverage will be astonished to see that forty years ago White working-class voters were still a very large percentage of the electorate.
Sadly the racial nationalist challenge in these areas had already declined by 1983. There were at least four rival candidates from our broad movement. Jim Sneath from the National Front polled 426 votes (1.4%) and finished fifth of what was then a record sixteen candidates. Anti-immigration campaigner Lady Birdwood (standing as an ‘Independent Patriot’) polled 69 votes (0.2%), slightly ahead of Michael Keulemans from the New Britain Party with 62 votes (0.2%), while Ann King of the National Labour Party (a tiny splinter from the NF, formed in 1981) took just 25 votes (0.1%).
This was the sad outcome from several years of decline for the NF in this area. Less than six years earlier at the Greater London Council elections, Sneath had polled 1,515 votes (8.8%) in this constituency, despite the rival National Party even then splitting the nationalist vote and taking 239 votes (1.4%). In other words a combined nationalist vote of 10.2% in 1977 had fallen to 1.9% in 1983.
It’s understandable that voters were confused and disillusioned by the factionalism that had overtaken the NF during those six years.
Many White working-class voters in 1983 backed ousted council leader O’Grady, who stood as ‘Real Bermondsey Labour’ (even though in many ways he represented the worst of the ‘Old Labour’ establishment partly responsible for the area’s decline). He took third place in the by-election with 2,243 votes (7.6%). John O’Grady died in April 2009, having witnessed the total extinction (for better and worse) of the ‘Old Labour Party’ that he knew.
But the main beneficiary of local voters’ disgust with Labour (both left and right), was the Liberal-SDP Alliance candidate Simon Hughes. Despite his own (secret) bisexuality, Hughes also benefited from the ‘homophobic’ reaction against Tatchell.
(There is still controversy over the extent to which some Alliance activists, though not Hughes himself, deliberately encouraged this ‘homophobia’.)
It’s ironic that two of the three mainstream politicians on the panel in the ITV by-election programme (see video link above) had their own ‘scandals’ in their private lives. Liberal MP Sir Clement Freud was later accused of predatory abuse of underage girls, while Tory chairman Cecil Parkinson had to resign at the end of 1983 after fathering a child with his secretary. Robert Hughes (the Tory candidate at this by-election) also had to resign as a minister twelve years later after admitting an affair with a constituent.
On most issues today Tatchell would probably fit into the mainstream of Labour, while Mellish and O’Grady would be a London version of ‘Red Wall’ Tories. The Southwark and Bermondsey area is now unrecognisable, with most of the White working-class having left, and replaced by an assortment of ethnic minorities (including many Africans) and trendy young middle-class Whites.
Yet the local Labour party remains mired in controversy. Neil Coyle – the Labour MP who eventually ousted Hughes in 2015 – has been suspended from Labour for more than a year and was recently suspended by the parliamentary standards commissioner after an incident of alcohol-fuelled ‘racist’ abuse against a journalist.
Coyle seems likely to be replaced at the next election, but sadly the days when racial nationalists could expect strong votes in Bermondsey are long gone. There are many parts of the UK where a reunited and reinvigorated racial nationalist movement has great potential, but Bermondsey is not among them. The proud history of its White working-class has long since ebbed away with the tide of the River Thames, and is now history.
Historic RAF site to be demolished for ‘refugee centre’: will Gary Lineker intervene?
During the past week, BBC presenter Gary Lineker has deployed wartime rhetoric to condemn government policy on immigration. He suggests that ‘asylum seekers’ are similar to refugees from 1930s Europe. As with so many liberal arguments in favour of immigrants, all the usual ‘anti-Nazi’ rhetoric is mobilised. Lineker suggests that Britain’s ‘heroic’ wartime record implies that we must roll out the welcome mat for those disembarking on our coast daily in small boats.
Yet a story has since emerged that might give even Lineker pause for thought.
RAF Scampton is one of Britain’s most historic wartime sites. In May 1943 Wing Commander Guy Gibson and his 617 Squadron led the famous ‘Dambusters raid’ from this airfield. In recent years it has been used as a base for the Red Arrows, the RAF’s aerobatic team.
A £300m deal had been agreed with the local council earlier this year that would preserve a museum at Scampton, restore the Officers’ Mess into a hotel, and provide 1,000 jobs to local residents.
Home Secretary Suella Braverman is keen to make propaganda about immigration, hoping that the Conservative Party can again deceive British voters. Yet it is her department that is committing this vandalism at Scampton, destroying listed buildings and riding roughshod over British heritage.
Can we expect any word on Twitter from Gary Lineker about this issue?
RAF Scampton was of course also the home of Wing Commander Guy Gibson’s famous dog ‘Nigger’, whose name has been removed by censors from all recent broadcasts of The Dambusters film. Even YouTube now restricts a video featuring this famous dog!
Nigger featured in the film partly because of the coincidence that the dog (a much loved mascot of 617 Squadron) was killed in a car accident on the very night of the Dambusters raid: he was buried at midnight as his owner was en route to Germany. Nigger is buried at RAF Scampton, but in 2021 following ‘Black Lives Matter’ protests, his original gravestone was destroyed. Paying tribute to the black American criminal George Floyd was judged more important than Britain’s own wartime history.
Gary Lineker and immigration hypocrisy
This weekend the British government, our national broadcaster, and our national sport have been caught up in a hypocritical circus over immigration. Television’s best known sports programme – Match of the Day – and many other football programmes have been severely disrupted.
Gary Lineker, the former England international who has presented Match of the Day since 1999, has been increasingly vocal in his left-liberal political views during recent years, especially regarding ‘racism’ and immigration.
In effect, Lineker is only taking to its logical conclusion an obsession with ‘anti-racism’ that has been forced on football. Ever since the start of the ‘Black Lives Matter’ campaigns, paying tribute to the black American criminal George Floyd, Premiership football teams (and especially the England team) have religiously ‘taken the knee’.
So it probably seemed to Lineker that he was merely being consistent when he criticised the British government’s new, supposedly ‘tough’, immigration policy. In doing so he made an obligatory reference to ‘1930s Germany’. (No one imagines that Lineker, who left school at 16 and has shown no sign of being especially studious since then, has any advanced knowledge of Third Reich history! He was merely parroting the usual left-liberal slogans.)
What Lineker didn’t realise is that the UK’s Tory government under Rishi Sunak – son of immigrants and married to the daughter of an Indian billionaire – aims to play its usual hypocritical games over immigration. These games have been typical of the Conservative Party ever since its then leader Margaret Thatcher played a con trick on British voters in January 1978, hinting that she shared their concerns about our nation being “swamped” by immigrants.
Today’s Tories aim to be ‘anti-racist’ in practice – presiding over an increasingly emasculated police force, housing illegal immigrants in hotels across the UK at public expense, and extending the definition of ‘harmful extremism’ and even ‘terrorism’ so as to harass active patriots – but also seek to deploy ‘dog whistle’ tactics by sending signals to racially concerned voters that really they are on their side (or at any rate are more pro-White than the Labour Party).
It seems odd to describe Lineker – one of the country’s best paid broadcasters – as a victim: but to an extent he has at least tried to be consistent, and as a man of limited education he is probably genuinely mystified by the hypocrisy of his employers and the governing party.
Most H&D readers are likely to agree that Lineker is entitled to his own opinions. We would not object to people with whom we happen to disagree politically, being allowed to present sports programmes – provided that this latitude is applied consistently. If someone with strong, publicly-expressed, pro-immigration views is allowed to present Match of the Day, then the same should apply to those who express strong anti-immigration views.
Sadly this is not the case. Anyone of even mildly nationalist views faces a witchhunt to remove them from public life. This weekend The Times – once the world’s most respected newspaper – harassed a prominent businessman because of views expressed by his son, not even by the businessman himself! To be vocally anti-immigration is to risk not only demonisation and marginalisation, but even criminalisation.
Polling evidence on racial questions is very difficult to analyse, because much depends on how the questions are phrased, and the general public are sometimes unwilling to associate publicly with any position that is deemed ‘extreme’.
But there is increasing evidence that large numbers of voters have had enough. If and when racial nationalists can get their act together, it seems clear that there is huge potential support for a movement of national resistance, whether at the ballot box or on the streets. H&D looks forward to reporting on the growth of this national resistance in the coming weeks and months.
CoViD and race – leaked files reveal how nationalists missed the epidemic’s true story
This morning’s edition of the Daily Telegraph, continuing its publication of leaked WhatsApp messages exchanged by senior ministers and officials during the CoViD pandemic – thoroughly vindicates H&D‘s stance published as early as the summer of 2020.
It was clear to us that these early stages of the pandemic proved the failure of our multiracial, multicultural society. Certain minority groups showed no respect for our laws and no respect for the interests of Britain’s wider community. Instead they either selfishly pursued their own profit (while risking public health) or became obsessed by primitive voodoo superstitions.
As a consequence, the government was seeking to enforce lockdown within law-abiding indigenous British communities, while unable to act against blatant flouting of pandemic regulations among minority communities.
On the basis of leaked WhatsApp messages, today’s Telegraph alleges: “Ministers feared that Covid was spreading more rapidly among non-compliant communities but were worried they would be
labelled ‘racist’ if they highlighted the issue.”
H&D first exposed this issue on 20th July 2020, adding further details on 12th August and 18th August, followed by an analysis of the broader pandemic issues by one of the very few leading British nationalists with serious scientific qualifications – our correspondent Ian Freeman – on 3rd October 2020.
Meanwhile, we now know (thanks to the Telegraph‘s revelations this morning) that the Health Secretary Matt Hancock and junior health minister Nadine Dorries were privately discussing some of the very same issues.
On 20th August (two days after H&D‘s publication of its third article on this topic) Dorries wrote to her boss Hancock that the government could not credibly “put whole towns and villages with extremely low R rates in lockdown (our voters) and deprive those people of work and family, because of the behaviour of non-compliant communities.”
Hancock expressed disbelief that local council leaders had failed to act, and Dorries emphasised that this was a matter of racial politics. Andy Burnham (Labour Mayor of the Greater Manchester region that includes Oldham) “will not agree”, wrote Dorries, “nor will any of the MPs or any of Oldham leaders. They [would] be locking down their voters and setting ours free.”
In other words, exactly as H&D wrote at the time, pandemic rates were rocketing in Asian areas of Oldham (packed with Labour voters) but much lower and in some cases negligible in White areas in and around Oldham (more likely to vote Conservative in 2019-2020 but where nationalists achieved very high votes in the early 2000s).
Dorries reminded Hancock about the 2001 race riots, before her days as an MP but when she had been working as special adviser to a Tory frontbench spokesman. She warned that such towns remained a tinderbox, and gave the Pendle area of Lancashire as an example. “The town ward of Colne, 18 pubs, white working class, would be like a tinder box if its pubs closed because of non-compliance and infection rates in Nelson, 2 pubs, Pakistani community next door.”
Dorries was correctly echoing H&D‘s arguments, but while ministers understood the facts, they ignored one important aspect. Twenty years ago nationalists in Lancashire had high quality leadership, before Nick Griffin chose to wreck his own party. Yet in the 2020s nationalist leaders totally failed to observe those political aspects of the pandemic expertly laid out for them by H&D. Once again, British nationalists were lions led by donkeys. A political open goal was missed, and many nationalist activists continued to pursue ridiculous voodoo obsessions rather than serious analysis.
The May-June edition of H&D will examine these leaked WhatsApp messages: we hope it is not too late for our movement to relearn some of the basics of political and racial reality.
Vincent Reynouard case latest: new warrant, delayed extradition hearing
French revisionist scholar Vincent Reynouard – who has been jailed in Edinburgh for almost four months despite not being accused of any crime under Scottish or English law – was handed further charges today while in the dock at Edinburgh Sheriff Court.
As with the previous charges, these have been issued by French prosecutors who are seeking Vincent’s extradition to be tried under the ‘Gayssot Law’, introduced in 1990 by a French Communist MP.
This bans the expression of sceptical historical views about the ‘crimes against humanity’ defined at the Nuremberg Trial and in the 1945 ‘London Charter’ that established that trial.
Most obviously, the Gayssot Law prohibits sceptical research into ‘Holocaust’ history, which is banned in several European countries, though perfectly legal in the UK.
Vincent Reynouard has previously been convicted several times of such ‘crimes’, and is best known for his investigation into the ‘Oradour massacre’ of June 1944. His published work about Oradour dates back to the 1990s, and he recently wrote a comprehensive investigation of this topic, now available (in French) from his website.
The latest warrant seems to reflect an admission by French prosecutors that they made an error in their initial warrant, under which Vincent Reynouard was arrested in Anstruther, Scotland, on 10th November last year. He has been held in Edinburgh Prison ever since his arrest.
An interview with Vincent Reynouard, by H&D‘s assistant editor Peter Rushton, will appear in the May-June edition of Heritage and Destiny. Vincent will next appear in court for a pre-trial hearing on 20th April, and the full extradition trial is presently scheduled for 8th June, again in Edinburgh.
Updates on the Vincent Reynouard case will appear here soon.
Home Secretary plays the ‘Holocaust’ card in migrant row
Home Secretary Suella Braverman has been the first to play the victim card in an ongoing row with the BBC over the UK government’s immigration policy.
Speaking to Nick Robinson’s podcast Political Thinking this morning, Braverman (who is herself a Buddhist of Goanese ancestry) said that she had been “personally offended” by the comments of Gary Lineker, the former England footballer who has been presenter of Match of the Day for more than twenty years.
Braverman added:
“My husband is Jewish, my children are therefore directly descendant from people who were murdered in gas chambers during the Holocaust. And my husband’s family is very – feels very – keenly the impact of the Holocaust, actually.”
Lineker, one of the highest-paid broadcasters in Britain, has repeatedly expressed politically-correct views on Twitter and recently criticised the government’s immigration policies. Replying to an opponent this week, Lineker tweeted:
“There is no huge influx. We take far fewer refugees than other major European countries.
“This is just an immeasurably cruel policy directed at the most vulnerable people in language that is not dissimilar to that used by Germany in the 30s, and I’m out of order?”
Predictably the row has degenerated into both sides playing the ‘nazi’ card, and Braverman clearly feels that her tangential connection to the ‘Holocaust’ gives her some advantage in the victim stakes.
Lineker’s comments were stupid and should be criticised for their foolishness, not because they might offend someone married to a Jew.
The underlying point of course is that St Gary is another symptom of the crude political correctness that can be expected from the football industry after several decades of relentless ‘anti-racist’ indoctrination.
In earlier generations, ‘racism’ when expressed by people within football was inevitably crudified, and so is ‘anti-racism’. No big deal either way, and not grounds for sacking – provided that (within reason) football commentators are also allowed to express anti-immigration sentiments. Provided it is not obligatory to kneel in memory of black criminal George Floyd, and provided it is permissible for BBC broadcasters to assert that White Lives Matter, none of us should be too worried about Lineker and his ilk expressing their opinions.
The problem is that only one side of the political fence is considered acceptable.
Perhaps the case should be put to Mr Lineker in those terms, and that would I think silence him rather more effectively than attempts at straightforward censorship!
