Ian Stuart Donaldson: 1957-1993. 30 years since the death of a legend

Ian Stuart Donaldson was the lead singer of the most famous White nationalist band of all time – Skrewdriver – a gifted musician, and dedicated movement activist.

In the NF he was known as Ian Stuart, a large Lancashire lad from Blackpool. He had that ‘something’ charisma about him that made him stand out from the crowd. It is very hard to believe that it is now thirty years since he died in that fateful car-crash in Derbyshire on 24th September, 1993.

Ian was born on 11th August, 1957 in the seaside town of Blackpool. His father was an engineer who ran his own toolmaker’s business and his mother was an old-fashioned northern house-wife. He went to Baines Grammar school in Poulton-le-Fylde – which is less than twenty miles from H&D’s Preston office – and was pretty wild as a teenager by all accounts!

On leaving school with a couple of O-Levels Ian did various jobs including apprenticeships, but his heart was really set on a career in music. The first band he joined was Tumbling Dice in 1976, but that soon broke up and Ian formed another and started sending out tapes to record companies. Their luck was in and Chiswick Records asked them to come to London and record a session in their studio. The band not even having a name chose Skrewdriver from a list supplied by Chiswick!

Ian and his band packed their bags, moved to London and around this time adopted the full Skinhead image. They played concerts supporting Motorhead and The Police among many others and began to build a name and a following. At that time Graham McPherson (Suggs), later the lead singer with Madness, was one of their roadies.

After the release of the band’s first album All Skrewed Up there was a showdown with both their management and record company who wanted Skrewdriver to denounce their nationalist, mainly skinhead following and change their image following pressure from the left-wing music press in general and New Musical Express in particular.

They refused to do this, so Chiswick cancelled their contract. Now, for the first time Ian began really to think politically and joined the National Front. Soon after the idea for Rock Against Communism began to take shape and the White Power EP was released. An ‘underground hit’ from the beginning, this poor sound quality first effort was to lead to a White youth revolution in the late 1970s that continues to this day.

Ian Stuart’s music is of a ‘love it or hate it’ variety and like all artistic performances is a matter of subjective individual taste. Ian understood this and combined his political beliefs with a great depth of musical knowledge and variety. So not only did he record as lead singer of Skrewdriver, and in doing so almost single-handedly create a new brand of music which we now know as White Power Rock, he recorded as The Klansmen, which was a combination of Bluegrass Country and Rockabilly; as White Diamond, for heavy metal fans; and with Stigger (Steve Calladine) singing a combination of traditional ballads such as the Green Fields of France and his own compositions such as Suddenly. This is of course, just the merest sketch of Ian Stuart’s life and activities.

Politically Ian was first active in the NF’s Blackpool branch in the late 1970s, before moving to London, where he joined Central London branch. He soon became the branch organiser, winning the NF’s branch recruitment cup two years in a row. In 1987 he resigned from the NF for political and financial reasons and formed a new nationalist organisation called Blood and Honour (commonly known as B&H or “28”).

After almost ten years of living in the last White-run hotel in King’s Cross, London, and after serving a prison sentence for defending himself, Ian gave up on our capital city and moved to Derbyshire at the end of the 1980s. From there he organised concerts, ran B&H and published his magazine of the same name.

The day after that fatal car-crash, in which his good friend Stephen Flint (Boo) was killed, Ian too died of his wounds in hospital. He was only 36 years old and yet left a lifetime of great recordings behind him. Ian Stuart is a movement legend, he will go down in nationalist folklore. Even though he is no longer with us, his music will live on forever.

THE LADDER TO POWER – THE ONLY NATIONALIST STRATEGY THAT HAS EVER WORKED IN BRITAIN

Introduction – the View from Today:

The “Ladder Strategy”, a practical blueprint for how the Nationalist Movement could advance to its ultimate objective of national government, evolved on the ground in the 1960s and ’70s in branches of the John Bean iteration of the British National Party and the mid-1970s National Party breakaway from the National Front.

It was first articulated in a coherent form, as expounded here, by leading 1970s and ‘80s Nationalist activist Steve Brady, who had himself been involved in its implementation by the Blackburn and Lewisham and Southwark Branches of the National Party in the mid-’70s. An implementation rewarded by the unprecedented election of two Nationalist councillors in Blackburn in May 1976 and a 26% vote in a council election in Deptford, South London, for the NP later that year. In the latter case, the National Front, despite being much bigger and better known, but wedded to a strategy aimed at winning national media publicity rather than the NP alternative sinking local roots and sustained campaigning in the community, was easily beaten by the NP, gaining only 18%. Had the NF stood aside in the wider interests of the Movement, the combined vote would have seen the NP candidate elected.

Steve shared his experiences, and the strategy they embodied, at NF political training weekends at Liss House, in rural Hampshire, in the early 1980s. Young activists trained at these camps went on to apply the strategy in the latest iteration of the BNP in the 1990s and 2000s, with resounding success, culminating in the election of over fifty councillors across the country, including four at County Council level, and two Members of the European Parliament.

Meanwhile, Steve Brady, by now a member of the National Directorate of the Flag section of the National Front after Nick Griffin split the party in early 1986, documented the strategy in these two articles published in the Flag NF ideological magazine Vanguard in late 1987.

In the first article, Steve explains why the previous Nationalist strategy of trying to win support and grow itself by attracting national media publicity through marches and demonstrations was fatally flawed, because the national media “central nexus” is irreconcilably hostile to our Movement and, understandably from its point of view, refused to allow itself to be used in this way. So the coverage thus obtained in TV and newspapers, what would now be termed the Mainstream Media, MSM, was relentlessly hostile and negative. As Steve once put it, we were “giving our worst enemy a vital message to give to our best friends”. Therefore this strategy had failed and, he argued and events were to prove, would continue to fail.

Instead he argued that we should communicate with our target audience, the White British public, directly and in person, via the so called local nexus, via knocking on their doors and campaigning on local issues in their communities, aided by carefully produced national and local printed media, a Party newspaper and local leaflets and newsletters. In the second of his articles, Steve explained that this would build the first, foundation, rung on the Ladder to Power. Which in turn would enable the building of the second, and so on.

That ladder was based on the simple idea that if, as the Movement does, you face a high barrier, a political wall, keeping you from your target, national power, you do not persist with futile attempts to jump it in one leap, hoping, inevitably in vain, for a boost over from a hostile MSM. Instead you build a ladder, where constructing each rung of itself endows you with the resources in terms of membership and public support to aspire realistically to build the next rung, and so on all the way to Government.

This was scoffed at by our enemies at the time, given that the Movement then struggled to achieve even the lowest rung anywhere, despite earlier success, rendered ineffectual by the factionalism, disunity and selfish egotism that have been the persisting bane of our Movement. However, when seriously implemented, locally in Tower Hamlets in the early 1990s and then nationally from 2000 on, the strategy demonstrably worked. By 2010, with dozens of Nationalist councillors and two MEPs, our enemies were not laughing at all. Under better and broader leadership, the BNP would by then have been poised realistically to hope to attain its first national MPs by the 2015 General Election. Instead Nick Griffin destroyed his second Nationalist party.

But the strategy here reproduced is still valid and would still work. Even on a local scale with a tiny organisation, H&D Editor Mark Cotterill was able to use it to win election to Blackburn council, so even small, local groups can, and should, start to climb the ladder now. This actually probably shows that even the credit Steve gave to using the Central Nexus to get the organisation’s name across to the public is misplaced – the public at large had never heard of Mark’s party from the central nexus, but using the local nexus effectively won him the seat anyway. Future movements may well be able to ignore the central nexus, the MSM, pretty much, as long as they use the local nexus and follow the Ladder Strategy based on it. Unlike any alternatives put forward and in some cases tried again and again for the best part of a century, it actually works.

Therefore we reproduce it here, unedited. It does show its age and its origin, but we believe that in no way undermines its essential validity and usefulness.

However, obviously given the articles are nearly 40 years old, and written by a senior member of his particular Nationalist group, the details are occasionally dated and slanted to boost the author’s faction at the time and reflect its own particular ideological position on some issues, a position not necessarily required for the strategy described to work. The resources of the Flag NF in late 1987 are, notably, not understated! Although it is true, for example, that the group’s Birmingham Branch did begin to implement the Ladder Strategy, their organisation collapsed before they got very far with it.

It collapsed because, as the author himself later admitted, whilst it was true, and probably still is, that most of the British public are sympathetic to a broad British Nationalist programme of social conservatism, economic radicalism, and maintaining the essential ethnic identity of our homeland, by 1987 few of that public would have taken the National Front seriously as a potential vehicle for such a programme.

Its earlier futile national media/central nexus-oriented strategy, leading to a self-defeating reliance on marches which our opponents were able to make ever more violent, repelling much of the public, had already discredited it beyond repair.

In hindsight, the NF should have switched from a central nexus strategy to and exclusively local nexus oriented one after its last march not portrayed as “NF MARCH SPARKS RIOT”, Red Lion Square in June 1974. Our opponents discovered then, and know now, that violent opposition to our, originally peaceful, demos is used by the MSM to blame us for the violence and put people off. This may not be true, however, for local community protests, e.g. against “asylum seeker” hostels, where our opponents will be dealt with by the local community.

However the NF had persisted with a central nexus strategy based on marches long after its political sell-by date and had become linked in the public mind with the skinheads and football hooligans who were needed to make the marches physically viable, and whose presence the MSM central nexus was delighted to publicise. After they had seen off the Griffin faction, most of the Flag leadership realised the NF had poisoned its own PR water by 1992, and walked away. It is possible that, if they had persisted long enough in a community/local nexus communication strategy, they might have detoxified their brand directly with the public, eventually. We will never know.

More notably, this was all written many years before the rise of the Internet and social media. However, I am sure the author of said articles would argue that this new technology is less of a radical alternative way of taking our message to the public than it seems, being essentially more a part of the old central nexus than the local one or some new nexus connecting us and the public..

It is true that unlike when using the MSM itself, Nationalists can control the content of their own messages on these media. This is certainly most useful, especially, it could be argued, for communicating ideological and political education to other Nationalists rather than the general public. Nonetheless as far as taking our message to the public goes it lacks the direct personal contact with Nationalists which is the key strength of the local nexus approach in overcoming MSM smear propaganda.

Also, and most importantly, a communications strategy based on the Internet and social media is fatally vulnerable to the fact that this medium, like the old TV/newspaper MSM central nexus, is totally and absolutely controlled by our irreconcilable enemies, Zuckerberg and his ilk, who can, often have and always if we look like getting anywhere using those media will, simply pull the plug and shut us down. They still control the medium and can silence the message.

This is not true of, and only of, the local nexus on which, and only on which the Ladder Strategy is based. That Strategy can proceed perfectly well in the face of unrelented MSM bile and the total exclusion of Nationalists from the Internet and social media, which may well happen. “New Technology”, while certainly worth using while we still can, is not a quick fix or an easy way around the enemy control of our media.

There is no substitute for the hard graft of talking to our people direct themselves, campaigning on issues which of themselves may be of little direct relevance to our Nationalist ideology but which matter to the communities involved, and building, step by step, the ladder which will, as trying it has shown, bring us ultimately to power, and thus save our Race and Nation. There is no other, easier way or simple short-cut to do that. Here is the way to win that we know works.

Click here to read The Road to Power, Part 1 (first published in Vanguard, October 1987).

THE ROAD TO POWER 2 – THE LADDER STRATEGY

In the first article in this series, I outlined the broad strategic direction in which the National Front is pointing – towards the “local information nexus”, towards direct contact with the people, and away from the “central nexus”, the mass media, as a means of putting across our message. Now I want to get down to brass tacks, and outline the first steps each Branch must take on the long road to victory.

The first step is to select a “target ward”, the ward in which the NF will build its first mass support base in each area. These wards should be selected for, obviously, good NF potential, where our policies on e.g. immigration, unemployment or whatever will be seen as directly relevant to the local people, but where the situation, especially the racial one, is not so hopeless in the foreseeable future that local Whites have despaired, fled, or stayed because they like the way things are now.

They should also be surrounded by other wards in the same Parliamentary constituency which are mostly, if not as good as the selected target ward, at least of reasonable potential. For ultimately the constituency will itself be targeted. Finally, obviously, the target ward should be reasonably accessible to local Branch activists.

The next step is to survey the target ward in depth. This is done in two sweeps. Sweep one consists of activists, over a period of weeks, knocking on every door in the ward selling NF literature. To make this easier, The Flag in particular has been carefully designed to appeal to ordinary people who may never have seen an NF publication before.

On a copy of the electoral roll for the ward, each house’s response is noted. Sympathisers will form the basis of a permanent monthly paper round, and will be invited to buy extra Flags etc. to pass on to their friends; eventually some will be politically educated and recruited. “Don’t knows” will be leafletted and intermittently visited again. Hostiles will also be noted and ignored/avoided in future..

Sweep two, at more or less the same time but with different personnel (especially older or more reticent activists) will also go through the ward, not identifying themselves as NF but conducting an “opinion poll”, aimed at identifying the main local issues in the ward, for later local propaganda targeting. Birmingham Branch, who have successfully done this, will be pleased to explain the details to other Branches.

POTENTIAL RECRUITS

In the succeeding months, some activists simply service the existing doorstep paper buyers every month (here again, the older or more reticent come into their own.) These potential recruits should gradually be introduced to more in-depth Party literature, so that by the time they are ready to join the Party, if they ever are, they will understand at least basic ideology. Again, in the NF Statement of Policy and 100 Questions and Answers, the Party national centre has provided the Branches with the resource they need.

Meanwhile, the Branch begins production of a regular ward leaflet, homing in on local issues identified by the “poll”. This is distributed to every door not known to be inhabited by hostiles (or Immigrants!). Those whose appearance or manner is less effective on the doorstep can do this.

Later another paper sale attempt will be made to those “don’t knows”. The effectiveness of these leaflets can be gauged both by follow-ups coming from them and by getting feedback from the regular paper-buyers.

Feedback from these people on national literature, especially The Flag, should also be asked for “What did you think of last month’s paper? What did you especially agree with/not like?”) This feedback on every paper/magazine and leaflet issue from every Branch is needed by national centre so we can “fine-tune” our output to make it even more effective for Branches to use.

After a while, potential recruits among the regular paper round can be invited to aspecial Branch meeting. This should to an extent be “stage-managed”, with a carefully designed decoration (flags, banners etc.), literature table (no fringe irrelevance!), audience and the best speakers briefed on local issues.

The aim is to push them into making the final step and signing up, or if they have already to reinforce their enthusiasm and commitment. Boring and divisive meetings should be confined to committed activists. Also special meetings aimed at youth should be held.

“WARD COMMITTEE”

After some months of this, perhaps a year, the Branch should have attained Rung Two on the local ‘ladder to power’. By this stage, there should be enough locally-recruited activists (only a few are required) to form a “Ward Committee”. This is responsible initially for servicing and slowly extending the door-to-door paper round, and putting out local leaflets. Later, it will produce these itself, after training from the Branch.

The Branch itself will thus be freed to commence Rung One in an adjacent ward. In the initial target ward, someone, ideally a local, should be adopted as a local candidate – NOT a few weeks before polling day, but well in advance. This candidate’s main role will be to get him or herself well known, liked and respected in the local ward community. Practical help with local peoples’ problems, e.g. with the Council, should be made available.

Here the aim isn’t to boost the NF directly but to actually help people, thus earning gratitude and respect. So in, for example, letters on behalf of people the NF name (hated and feared by many, especially Communist, “Labour” Councils) should not in general be used.

The measure of actual attainment will be provided by a local candidate’s poll in the target ward – and it is to obtain such a concrete measure, not at this stage to win, that such a seat should be contested. Bv the time Rung Two has been reached, the NF vote should have risen from under 1 to 5 per cent. As has been achieved in their target ward by the “pilot project” Branch, Birmingham, in about 12 months.

INTERNAL POWER

The aim now is for the Branch to bring ward after ward in the target constituency up to Rung Two, so that ward after ward begins to run under its own internal power, freeing Branch activists (who of course may come from another constituency entirely) to move on to the next one.

Rung Three has been reached when most wards in the target seat have their own ward committees and can poll 5-10% in local elections. At this stage the ward committees can set up between them a Constituency Committee, and indeed may as well now apply for admission to the NF Confederacy as a Branch in their own right, since the ultimate NF aim is one Branch per parliamentary seat.

During the Rung Two to Three transition, the best ward candidate should be being built up, years in advance of an election if possible, as a locally known Parliamentary candidate. With an average NF local poll of over 5% and indeed with many of these voters personally known to ward activists as regular paper buyers, a Parliamentary election, General or By, can now be contested with a reasonable prospect of reaching 5% and saving our deposit, boosting credibility locally and nationally. (In fact, it’s pointless to fight seats otherwise, usually five saved deposits are worth 50 1% polls).

The aim now is Rung Four, in which, with credibility enhanced by a saved deposit and good local candidates in place in most wards, the local vote reaches the 25 – 35% mark. At this stage, the NF is a serious local political force. The local media will take us seriously. On previous experience in Blackburn and S.E. London, where this strategy was applied in the mid-70s and worked, some local media, aware that NF voters buy papers, will moderate or even cease their hostility.

Others will not do so, but will resort to careful probing to find our weaknesses.

As pointed out in my last article, given intimate local contact between the Party and the people, the obviously untrue “Nazi” smear will fail. But we must be sure our candidates, in particular, are persons of good, or at least locally acceptable, character without skeletons in cupboards. A local NF HQ advice centre should now be attainable, as well as a local Flag-style paper (perhaps initially simply a 2-page local insert in the Flag).

NF COUNCILLORS
Rung Five sees NF Councillors elected on around 40% of the vote. These must behave themselves, as the eyes of the nation, and a hostile mass media, will be on them. Actual local power may be attainable here too. Again, the first NF Council must be very careful, a showpiece to the country at large. The media will now nationally take the NF seriously, though only as a local phenomenon – areas we do well in will be “Britain’s Alabamas”.

The Race Issue will begin to be moved, by the NF’s rise and Immigrant-Red counter-(and probably over-) reaction toward the centre of the political stage, to our advantage. There will be another Anti-Nazi League, but a party dug in locally and not dependent on the national media to communicate with the public should withstand the challenge this time. Votes in target Parliamentary seats are 25-35%.

At Rung Six, the first NF MPs are elected. The Party is now at the stage reached by the Front National in France, with maybe one million voters. Beyond this point, the NF itself so transforms the nature of British politics that further prediction now is pointless, due to insufficient data. But by the time we reach Rung Six, Rungs Seven, Eight and so on will have been mapped out. And so on to power.

This, as can hopefully be seen, is a concrete plan. Locally, Rung Five has been reached and can be again. What has changed since the 1970s isn’t the British public, which after the race riots is as racialist as ever. It’s the NF, and the way it is perceived by the public. These things are up to us to change.

The mass support of the Seventies is still there. We need to turn towards it, and tap into it in a coherent, planned way, which will avoid the “swamp-and-split” cycle of the 1970s. The NF, like a comet, has spent a long time in the cold and the dark after its first blazing passage near the real world. We have used that time to equip ourselves ideologically, to remove Hitlerites and bourgeois student poseurs, and to evolve a clear plan for power.

Now we have reached the far point of our orbit and we are headed back inward toward the sunlight and the people. Once more we shall blaze forth in the political firmament – but this time we will stay there. If we put the work in.

All this strategy needs for success is a lot of hard, sometimes boring, effort, week after week, month after month, year after year. There may well be no sudden breakthroughs, there may well be some setbacks. But if we stick through it in the coming years, in the end, by our own efforts, we will win:- “Victory or defeat lie in our hands alone” – Let us make sure that our hands forge Victory.

St George’s Day – Celebrate the Spirit of St George!

The editor and assistant editor would like to wish all H&D readers a very happy St George’s Day.

While St George’s Day – April 23rd – is mainly forgotten, ignored or even ridiculed by the liberal / left establishment, who by the way have no qualms about promoting everybody else’s national day, culture and heritage – apart from ours – we nationalists remember and celebrate it.

In past years our movement used to celebrate St George’s Day with large marches and rallies all over England, including the NF’s famous events in Bradford (Yorkshire) in 1976, Wood Green (North London) in 1977, and Leicester (East Midlands) in 1979. Sadly those days are long gone now.

As Sir Oswald Mosley said on St George’s Day 1937:

“In the lives of great nations comes the moment of decision, comes the moment of destiny – and this nation again and again in the great hours of fate has swept aside the little men of talk and delay, and has decided to follow men and movements who say we go forward to action! Let who dare follow us in this hour.”

While many English (and British) nationalists feel a fierce national pride for the St George’s cross and the patron saint’s day, England in fact shares St George with a host of other countries and places. Each has its own unusual customs surrounding his feast day, including:

Catalonia, Spain – St George (Sant Jordi) is associated with several places in Spain but one of the most colourful is Barcelona. A public holiday is held in the area and has several similarities with Valentine’s Day, with roses and books being exchanged by lovers. Barcelona’s most popular street Las Ramblas becomes awash with flower and book sellers. Catalonia has managed to export the tradition as UNESCO adopted the date as World Book Day. And FC Barcelona have the St George cross in the club’s badge. 

Albania – Albanians celebrate St George’s day by going out and lighting a large bonfire and playing around it as a sign of joy.

Bulgaria – Roasting a whole lamb is traditional on St George’s Day in Bulgaria as he is the patron saint of shepherds. It is seen as a day when evil enchantments can be broken and a blessed day when the saint blesses the crop and morning dew, so many walk in the early morning to wash their face in the fresh dew.

Croatia – Croatians also use fire to mark St George’s Day which is considered the first day of Spring. In the Slavic tradition girls are dressed as goddesses in leaves and sing for locals. 

Back in England normally many local pubs in White working class area (and even a few in the middle class suburbs) would organise events to celebrate St George’s Day, but most would be content with just putting out a few England flags (then taking them down the next day – so as not to offend!)

This year a number of H&D supporters will be taking part in the big St George’s Day parades in Nottingham in the East Midlands and Solihull in the West Midlands. Closer to H&D Towers, the Blackburn Times pub in Blackburn town centre is again organising an all-day party to celebrate St George’s Day, to the horror of the local Labour Council, who fall over backwards to promote  alien events.

Of course the Woke, politically correct, do-gooder, snowflake brigade, etc, would rather St George’s Day be forgotten, and confined to the dustbin of history, along with Empire Day, Trafalgar Day etc. 

However, St George’s Day and the spirit of St George will still be celebrated at H&D Towers (where England flags fly proudly all the year round), where the editor and webmaster will raise a glass a two to our patron saint, to England and to the English, while there’s still a few of us left! 

And finally, to quote from  William Shakespeare’s Henry V (1598):

This story shall the good man teach his son;
And Crispin Crispian shall ne’er go by,
From this day to the ending of the world,
But we in it shall be rememberèd;
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he to-day that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne’er so vile,
This day shall gentle his condition:
And gentlemen in England now a-bed
Shall think themselves accurs’d they were not here,
And hold their manhood’s cheap whiles any speaks
That fought with us upon Saint Crispin’s day.

In Memoriam: Ralph Hebden – a Real Political Soldier

It’s been almost ten years now since the funeral – on 24th April 2013 – of our comrade Ralph Hebden.  While others played at it, Ralph was a real Political Soldier, in every sense of the words. We will remember Ralph – along with other former comrades at this year’s H&D meeting in Preston, on Saturday September 9th.

Ralph died only a couple of months before another brave servicemen, Drummer Lee Rigby, who was murdered by two African immigrants in South London on May 22nd 2013. Lee of course is much better known (to the general public anyway) then Ralph, and there will be a number of commemorations in May to mark the tenth anniversary of his death – and rightly so.

The loss of our comrade Ralph was very difficult to take in and even now I find it hard to believe he has really gone. Peter Rushton knew Ralph for fifteen years so it was fitting that he wrote the obituary in the July-August 2013 issue #55 of H&D magazine (see below).

I only had the honour of knowing Ralph for just over three years, but in that time we got to know each other we became good friends – as well as racial comrades. Ralph was a longstanding subscriber to H&D magazine and attended three of our annual John Tyndall Memorial Meetings in Preston, as well as many other activities and events in and around Lancashire.

Ralph Hebden like Lee Rigby was an active serviceman from the North-West England – he had proudly served his country for almost ten years in the Royal Marines and for fifteen years in the racial-nationalist movement. Both were excellent examples of the type of proud young Englishmen we are going to need on our side if we are ever going to take our country back from the Westminster traitors, who have sold our country away.  Both are still solely missed by their families, friends and comrades, but were welcomed by past heroes when they took their seats in the great hall of Valhalla. 

Mark Cotterill
Editor/Publisher – Heritage and Destiny

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Ralph Hebden 1980-2013

Ralph Hebden – brave patriot, nationalist activist, Heritage and Destiny contributor and Royal Marine Commando – has died near his base in Arbroath at the tragically young age of 32.

Last seen alive early on the morning of 11th March, Ralph had been heading out for his regular morning run near the Arbroath cliffs.  His body was recovered from the sea three weeks later, a few miles further up the coast at Carlingheugh Bay.

Extensive land, air and sea searches had taken place in recent weeks, and several nationalist activists in Scotland had been interrogated by police, who seemed to be under the impression that Ralph’s disappearance had something to do with his politics.

Ralph married fellow Liverpudlian Sarah last year, and was looking forward to becoming a father for the first time.  His daughter Evie was born four days after his disappearance.

Joining as a Royal Marine reservist based in Liverpool, he became a regular in 2005 and served in a mortar unit of the elite 45 Commando, based at RM Condor near Arbroath. After one of the last Royal Marine tours in Ulster, and one tour in Iraq, Ralph completed several tours of duty in Afghanistan and was drafted in to assist with anti-terrorist security operations for the London Olympics last year.

Ralph’s unit were long-term specialists in Arctic and mountain warfare, but found themselves deployed in very different mountain operations against the Taliban, as well as peacekeeping in Helmand province.

As a lifelong nationalist activist, Ralph was very well aware of the political abuse of our armed forces in operations that have nothing to do with protecting Britain.  Nevertheless he did his duty and had an outstanding military record.

The same spirit of loyalty was evident in Ralph’s relations with fellow nationalist comrades, and he remained immune from the factional backbiting that characterises so much of our movement.  Even when he was targeted for abuse by a former Nick Griffin bodyguard, Ralph refused to respond in kind.

I knew Ralph since the late 1990s, when he attended BNP meetings across Lancashire, including one event in Todmorden that was attacked by “anti-fascists.”  Ralph became a regular at the monthly meetings I addressed in central Manchester until 2002, and in 1999 he accompanied Nick Griffin and myself as personal security inside the European election count at St George’s Hall, Liverpool.

After I split from Griffin in 2002, Ralph became an important contact for Heritage and Destiny inside the North West BNP, building bridges between various factions and regularly attending H&D events, including all three John Tyndall Memorial meetings in Preston, Lancashire.

Frequently travelling through Preston on his way between the Arbroath base and his family home in Liverpool, Ralph would stop off for a drink with the H&D team, and last year he and his future wife Sarah were our hosts in Liverpool – even though my team Oldham were playing against their team Liverpool at Anfield!

Following the death last year of his comrade and mentor John Fearns, ex-organiser of Liverpool BNP, Ralph was the author of an obituary published in H&D.  (At the time of course, as a serving Royal Marine, Ralph had to use a pseudonym.)

When Ralph told me last October that he was about to become a father as well as a stepfather, I could see how happy he was to be starting a family.  Heritage and Destiny sends deepest sympathy to Sarah, her new born daughter, and all of Ralph’s family at this tragic time.

Ralph Hebden’s funeral took place in St Nicholas Church, Liverpool on 24th April, which was packed with friends and comrades from both the military and politics, followed by burial at Allerton Cemetery.  Comrades from several nationalist parties gathered to pay tribute, including fellow veteran and former Liverpool BNP organiser Steve Greenhalgh, current BNP organiser Mike Whitby, North West B&H organiser Ade Brooks, representatives of the National Front, English Democrats and UKIP, and Heritage and Destiny editor Mark Cotterill.

We then gathered at a central Liverpool pub for a wake in memory of a true comrade who will never be forgotten.  Despite pressure from senior military officers who wanted to suppress nationalist political connections, Ralph’s widow Sarah bravely attended the wake to thank comrades for their support.

Peter Rushton, Manchester, England

UK Local Elections 2023

Nominations have closed for more than 8,000 contests at this year’s local elections in England and Wales. (Northern Ireland’s council elections have a slightly different timescale, and there are no elections in Scotland this year.)

The nationalist and broadly patriotic cause in the UK is still going through its post-Brexit transition, and this is reflected in the small numbers of candidates from racial nationalist parties. You can find a comprehensive list of candidates and parties by clicking this link, but these are the main headlines.

• The British Democrats are the main electorally focused racial nationalist movement, and have five candidates this year, including Julian Leppert who will be defending the seat he won four years ago in Waltham Abbey Paternoster ward, Epping Forest. Mr Leppert won that seat as a candidate of the now defunct For Britain Movement, but he joined the Brit Dems after FBM leader Anne-Marie Waters closed down her party.
• Britain First, led by former BNP official Paul Golding, is the main electoral voice of the anti-Islam movement. It is in principle a non-racial, anti-Islam party, though it includes several veteran racial nationalists. They have eight candidates this year, and their main campaign is likely to be in Walkden North, Salford, where Ashlea Simon will seek to build on the 21.6% she won last year.
• Another anti-Islamist party which has grown slightly during the past year is the National Housing Party, which has three candidates this year, including former BNP and FBM activist Gary Bergin in Claughton ward, Wirral.
• Patriotic Alternative (the country’s most active racial nationalist movement) is still not registered as a political party and therefore unable to contest elections.
• The British National Party, which during the 2000s won many council seats and elected two Members of the European Parliament, has effectively ceased to exist: once again this year there are no BNP candidates anywhere in the UK, and in all likelihood there never will be again.
• The National Front, which during the 1970s was one of Europe’s largest racial nationalist parties, still ticks over as a guardian of racial nationalist ideals, but has only one candidate this year: Tim Knowles in Codnor, Langley Mill & Aldercar ward, Amber Valley.
• Former BNP organiser Dr Andrew Emerson is again standing in his home city of Chichester for his small party Patria.
• Two nationalist independents are standing this year: former councillor Graham Partner in Coalville, NW Leicestershire, and Gary Butler in Shepway, Maidstone.
• The English Democrats, who are a non-racial party but who campaign for an English Parliament as well as immigration restrictions and other issues of interest to H&D readers, have five candidates this year, including party leader Robin Tilbrook in Shelley ward, Epping Forest, and husband and wife team Steve and Val Morris in Bury. Two former ED activists have defected to the rival English Constitution Party and will stand in Barnsley.
• Various civic nationalist parties that grew out of UKIP remain bitterly divided and ideologically confused. Reform UK (by far the largest and best funded) have 480 candidates this year, but unless they can make a serious impact this might be their last serious campaign. UKIP itself has only 48 candidates this year, while rival splinter groups include the Heritage Party with 64 (plus a mayoral candidate) and the Alliance for Freedom & Democracy with 23.

(Please note that election reports and statistics on the H&D site do not usually include parish/town council elections. We only focus on the borough/district council level and above.)

Nigel Farage’s UK Independence Party (which was the main vehicle for the pro-Brexit cause) split in 2018 with Farage founding the Brexit Party, which eventually evolved into today’s Reform UK, led by Farage’s close associate Richard Tice.

Reform UK remains by far the largest vehicle for the broadly civic nationalist cause in the UK, but it is ideologically poles apart from most H&D readers. Tice’s party is blatantly non-racist, and economically liberal. H&D has long argued that the slow death of Reform UK (and of Farageist politics in general) is necessary before the British racial nationalist tradition can revive.

After at least two years of generally dismal election results, Reform UK has (on paper) done well to field 480 candidates at this year’s council elections. But it has very few serious functioning branches. Tice’s best branch by far is in Derby, where the entire council is up for re-election, including the six seats presently held by Reform UK who have a full slate of 51 candidates for the new council.

In addition to Derby, Reform UK has three other really substantial slates of candidates: Bolton (34), Amber Valley (28), and Sunderland (24).

Who is standing where in the 2023 local elections

On this page you will find a comprehensive list of nationalist results at the 2023 elections, and also lists from various parties that grew out of the pro-Brexit movement and that some would consider broadly nationalist/patriotic despite being multiracialist.

Nationalists standing this year included –

British Democrats: 5 candidates

Wyke ward, Bradford: Dr Jim Lewthwaite 140 votes (5.1%)
Laindon Park, Basildon: Chris Bateman 89 votes (4.2%)
Waltham Abbey Paternoster, Epping Forest: Julian Leppert 187 votes (25.2%)
Saffron, Leicester: Dave Haslett 34 votes (1.9%)
Kursaal, Southend: Steve Smith 42 votes (2.6%)

Britain First: 8 candidates

Darenth, Dartford: Nick Scanlon 61 votes (10.2%)
Swanscombe, Dartford: Paul Golding 107 votes (6.9%)
Ballard, New Forest: Nick Lambert 108 votes (12.6%)
Hockley & Ashingdon, Rochford: Paul Harding 214 votes (13.1%)
Walkden North, Salford: Ashlea Simon 405 votes (18.2%)
Bideford South, Torridge: Philip Green and Anne Townsend 108 and 96 votes (15.0%)
Broadheath, Trafford: Donald Southworth 153 votes (3.6%)

National Front: 1 candidate
Codnor, Langley Mill & Aldercar, Amber Valley: Tim Knowles 40 votes (1.8%)

Patria: 1 candidate
Chichester East, Chichester: Dr Andrew Emerson 92 votes (6.4%)

National Housing Party: 3 candidates
Hollinwood, Oldham: John Lawrence 205 votes (7.6%)
Dodington, South Gloucestershire: Callum Leat 228 votes (10.3%)
Claughton, Wirral: Gary Bergin 149 votes (4.1%)

English Democrats: 5 candidates
Old Leake & Wrangle, Boston: David Dickason 75 votes (7.0%)
Besses, Bury: Steve Morris 139 votes (6.1%)
Holyrood, Bury: Val Morris 102 votes (2.9%)
Leighton Linslade North, Central Bedfordshire: Antonio Vitiello 133 votes (4.0%)
Shelley, Epping Forest: Robin Tilbrook 34 votes (10.3%)

English Constitution Party: 2 candidates
Dearne North, Barnsley: Maxine Spencer 118 votes (8.2%)
Dearne South, Barnsley: Janus Polenceusz 37 votes (2.1%)

Independents:
Cannock South, Cannock Chase: David Hyden 81 votes (5.7%)
Shepway North, Maidstone: Gary Butler 114 votes (7.0%)
Hermitage, NW Leicestershire: Graham Partner 94 votes (15.9%)

A broader analysis of the results and their significance will appear on this website during the weekend. Candidates from civic nationalist and pro-Brexit parties included:

Reform UK: 480 candidates
Amber Valley 28
Ashford 1
Barnsley 4
Basildon 1
Bedford 2
Blaby 1
Blackpool 5
Bolsover 1
Bolton 34
Boston 1
Bournemouth, Christchurch & Poole 1
Bracknell Forest 1
Bradford 3
Braintree 4
Breckland 2
Brentwood 1
Broadland 5
Bromsgrove 1
Bury 1
Canterbury 3
Castle Point 2
Central Bedfordshire 6
Charnwood 6
Cheshire East 2
Cheshire W & Chester 3
Chichester 2
Colchester 4
Coventry 1
Crawley 1
Dacorum 4
Dartford 5
Derby 51
Dover 1
Dudley 4
East Hampshire 3
East Herts 1
East Lindsey 1
East Riding of Yorks 4
East Staffs 2
Eastbourne 2
Eastleigh 1
Elmbridge 2
Epping Forest 2
Exeter 1
Fenland 1
Folkestone & Hythe 3
Fylde 1
Gateshead 1
Gravesham 3
Great Yarmouth 2
Halton 1
Harborough 1
Harlow 1
Hart 1
Hartlepool 10
Havant 1
Herefordshire 6
Hertsmere 2
High Peak 1
Hinckley & Bosworth 4
Horsham 2
Hull 1
Hyndburn 1
Ipswich 1
Kirklees 1
Leeds 3
Leicester 1
Lewes 1
Lincoln 5
Lincolnshire 1 [county council by-election]
Liverpool 1
Luton 2
Maidstone 1
Malvern Hills 2
Manchester 2
Mansfield 1
Medway 2
Mid Devon 1
Mid Suffolk 2
Milton Keynes 7
Newark & Sherwood 1
North Herts 2
North Kesteven 5
North Norfolk 2
North Tyneside 5
NW Leics 2
Peterborough 1
Plymouth 2
Portsmouth 2
Redcar & Cleveland 2
Reigate & Banstead 1
Rochford 2
Rugby 2
Runnymede 1
Rushcliffe 1
Rushmoor 1
St Albans 1
Salford 1
Sandwell 9
Sefton 1
Sevenoaks 1
Sheffield 5
South Gloucs 2
South Holland 1
South Kesteven 3
South Norfolk 1
South Oxfordshire 2
South Tyneside 1
Southampton 5
Spelthorne 2
Stafford 7
Staffs Moorlands 1
Stevenage 1
Stockport 4
Stockton-on-Tees 10
Stoke on Trent 1
Stratford on Avon 1
Sunderland 24
Surrey Heath 2
Swale 4
Tamworth 1
Teignbridge 1
Tendring 4
Thanet 2
Thurrock 3
Tonbridge & Malling 2
Trafford 2
Tunbridge Wells 1
Uttlesford 3
Vale of White Horse 1
Wakefield 2
Walsall 9
Warwick 1
Watford 5
Waverley 2
Wealden 1
Welwyn Hatfield 3
West Berkshire 2
West Devon 2
West Lindsey 6
West Suffolk 2
Wigan 3
Winchester 1
Windsor & Maidenhead 1
Wirral 5
Wolverhampton 1
Worcester 1
Worthing 1
Wychavon 2

UKIP: 48 candidates
Braintree 1
Breckland 1
Brighton & Hove 3
Cambridge 1
Chelmsford 1
East Cambridgeshire 1
Eastbourne 3
Elmbridge 1
Folkestone & Hythe 1
Hinckley & Bosworth 1
North Lincs 1
North Tyneside 4
Nottingham 2
Pendle 1
Rother 10
South Staffs 2
Surrey 1 [county council by-election]
Tamworth 2
Tendring 1
Test Valley 1
Thurrock 1
Torridge 2
Warwick 1
Wealden 2
West Berkshire 1
Wigan 2

Heritage Party: 64 council candidates + 1 Mayoral
Arun 3
Bedford – Mayoral Election
Bournemouth, Christchurch & Poole 1
Bracknell Forest 1
Braintree 1
Broadland 1
Burnley 1
Cambridge 1
Chelmsford 1
Chichester 1
Cotswold 1
Crawley 3
Dover 1
East Devon 1
East Hampshire 1
East Herts 1
East Suffolk 1
Elmbridge 3
Hart 1
Horsham 1
Ipswich 1
King’s Lynn & W Norfolk 1
Maidstone 1
Medway 1
Milton Keynes 1
North Lincs 1
N Warwicks 1
Plymouth 2
Runnymede 1
Rushmoor 1
Slough 1
South Hams 2
South Staffs 1
Southend 2
Swale 1
Tandridge 1
Teignbridge 7
Test Valley 1
Tonbridge & Malling 1
Warwick 1
Watford 1
West Berkshire 1
West Oxfordshire 2
Wigan 1
Woking 3
Wokingham 1
Worthing 1

Alliance for Democracy & Freedom: 23 candidates
Blackburn with Darwen 1
Broxtowe 1
Charnwood 1
Cheshire W & Chester 1
Coventry 1
East Riding of Yorks 1
Fenland 2
Fylde 1
Havant 1
Ipswich 1
Leicester 1
Oldham 3
Preston 1
Rochford 1
South Ribble 3
Wyre 3

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.

Sunak’s Tories start 2023 in deep trouble – but Reform UK’s challenge is weaker than it looks

Five opinion polls have been taken since Christmas, and all show Rishi Sunak’s government in deep trouble with British voters. Traditionally the Tories might expect to benefit from industrial unrest: strikes famously helped Margaret Thatcher win her first general election in 1979 and weakened Labour in the run-up to her third victory in 1987. But Sunak seems to be failing in his main (political) task of restoring the Conservative Party’s reputation for economic competence.

From H&D readers’ point of view, the big question is whether a civic nationalist party is capable of making the sort of breakthrough that Nigel Farage’s parties achieved during the 2010s: first UKIP, and then the Brexit Party – making such an impact that the Tories were forced to allow British voters a referendum on EU membership in 2016, then forced to deliver Brexit against the wishes of most Tory grandees.

For reasons we have examined repeatedly in the magazine (and which we re-examine in the January-February 2023 edition that has just gone to press) Farage’s latest (and probably last) party, Reform UK, does not seem capable of achieving similar results.

Reform UK (presently led by Farage’s right-hand man Richard Tice) has failed badly at six successive parliamentary by-elections (most recently polling 2.7% in Chester and 3.5% in Stretford & Urmston). None of these lost deposits suggest that its nationwide opinion poll scores (much hyped by some academics and by the GB News channel where Farage has a regular show) are anywhere near accurate.

The most recent polls differ widely in this respect: for example the new company People Polling (commissioned by GB News) gave Reform UK 8%, and showed Sunak’s Tories falling to just 19%, 26 points behind the Labour Party; while a rival firm Redfield Wilton gave Reform UK 5%, but again showed the Tories losing heavily, this time 20 points behind Labour. Three other polls taken during the first week of 2023 show Labour leads of 21% or 22%, with Reform UK scoring anywhere between 4% and 8%.

Part of the explanation for this disparity might be straightforward, involving: (a) prompting of voters with the name of Reform UK included in the initial question, rather than held back for a supplementary question; and (b) a different method of adjusting the raw figures, taking less account of previous voting preference. Most pollsters use this method in an attempt to tease out ‘shy Tories’; if People Polling do not, or use it less radically, it could account for their lower Tory and higher Reform and Green vote shares.

Whatever the technical reason, H&D would be very surprised to see Reform UK poll higher than 2% of the nationwide vote at a general election. For ideological and other reasons, Faragism is finished as a serious political force. If Farage himself stands, then he along with Tice and a handful of others might manage 10% or more and (most crucially) help push the Tories to defeat in a small number of marginal seats, but in most of the country Reform UK will remain an irrelevance.

Which leaves the big question – if not Farage and Reform UK, then who and what will present the badly needed challenge to the UK’s failing political mainstream.

Recent polls suggest that 20% or more of those who voted Conservative at the last general election three years ago are now answering “Don’t Know”. Even the People Polling survey that seems to exaggerate Reform UK’s strength suggests that it is taking 12% of that previous Conservative vote, and little or nothing from the other parties; while 17% of those Tory voters have switched to Labour.

Sunak might yet win back some of those ‘Don’t Knows’, but many of them ought to be persuadable by a credible racial nationalist party (if and when such a party gets off the ground).

The British Democrats presently seem to be the best organised and most realistic option for those seeking a racial nationalist challenge at the ballot box, but even they are only just getting started in most of the country. 2023 will be an important transitional year for our movement, as Faragism is finally buried and the Brit Dems gradually build up a nationwide branch structure. Meanwhile Patriotic Alternative is building a broader political challenge away from the electoral arena (PA is not yet a registered political party and shows no sign of becoming one); the British Movement continues to maintain the core ideology that exposes the roots of British and European decline since 1945; and the National Front keeps the flame alive for the first UK party to present a serious electoral challenge to multiracialism during the 1970s.

Whatever nationalist party or group you belong to, or if for the time being you are working independently for our cause, H&D wishes you an active and successful New Year!

How and why the National Front began its march to the Cenotaph

Today military veterans, politicians, religious leaders and other VIPs will lay wreaths at the Cenotaph in Whitehall, and at other war memorials throughout the United Kingdom, in memory of the men and women from Britain and her Empire who gave their lives during the wars of the 20th and 21st centuries.

More than half a century ago, in the early days of the National Front, the NF began a tradition of holding a separate march to the Cenotaph, followed by a wreath-laying ceremony. Ill-informed observers might think that this was in poor taste – an attempt by the NF to politicise an event that ought to be above politics.

In fact the opposite is the case.

The NF under its founding chairman A.K. Chesterton (who had himself been awarded the Military Cross for his actions during the Battle of Épehy in September 1918) began this tradition not in order to exploit it for partisan purposes, but as a response to the late 1960s’ Labour government’s politicisation of Remembrance Sunday.

Ever since Remembrance commemorations began in 1919, they had always been a memorial not only to servicemen and women from the British Isles, but from the whole of the British Empire.

After the Rhodesian government of Prime Minister Ian Smith declared independence in 1965, Harold Wilson’s Labour government in London employed a range of vindictive policies (including economic sanctions) aiming to force the Rhodesians into submission.

Eventually this included banning Rhodesian veterans from Remembrance Sunday events at the Cenotaph. (There had already for more than twenty years been a calculated decision to shun veterans of Britain’s 1945-48 war against Jewish terrorists. British Palestine veterans were not banned from the Cenotaph, but until very recent years they were given no official recognition and had to organise their own memorial events.)

Not only Rhodesians themselves, but their comrades from across the Empire (including the British Isles) were outraged by this insult.

H&D‘s assistant editor Peter Rushton has recently discovered letters from the 1960s which explain how pro-Rhodesian Britons (including several very well known war heroes) planned their response in defiance of the Labour Party – a response which eventually led to the NF beginning its tradition of marching to the Cenotaph.

The full story will be told in the January edition of Heritage and Destiny.

Today H&D readers will join British and Commonwealth citizens around the world in remembering the dead of 20th and 21st century wars – regardless of their political views and regardless of which part of the Empire they came from, we will remember them.

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