H&D Video Podcast #1
H&D has posted our first video podcast, recorded on 13th July.
Assistant editor Peter Rushton reflects on the extraordinary elections in the UK and France. Were these turning points for ‘nationalism’? In what ways can Farage’s and Le Pen’s parties be termed ‘nationalist’?
And where does our movement go from here?
H&D is of course primarily a print magazine and will remain so: we don’t intend to become frequent video streamers.
But we shall occasionally post video podcasts, in addition to articles on our website and social media posts – as part of our contribution to the essential reassessment and rebuilding of racial nationalist politics.
The new video podcast is also now available with Spanish subtitles.
Farage shows his true colours: a spiv and a traitor
During the past 48 hours Nigel Farage has shown why no true nationalist should support Reform UK.
Regular readers will know that we were already disgusted by Farage’s blatant betrayal of Traditional Unionist Voice, the party with which Farage’s Reform UK struck an electoral pact at the start of this year’s General Election campaign, only to see Farage unilaterally tear up the deal within weeks.
Reform UK went on to betray one candidate after another, throwing them under a bus at the slightest hint of anti-woke opinions, and in effect kneeling – BLM-style – in obeisance to ‘anti-racist’ lobby groups.
Yesterday one of the party’s major donors addressed Reform UK’s largest rally of the campaign. Zia Yusuf – a former executive director of Goldman Sachs, whose parents came to the UK from Sri Lanka in the 1980s – is the most public face of Farage’s multiracialism.
Another facet of Farage’s City spiv values – revealing that Reform UK is a true Goldman Sachs party, not a nationalist party – was his response this morning to the success of Marine Le Pen’s National Rally (Rassemblement National – RN).
Now, let’s be absolutely clear. Le Pen’s movement is not racial nationalist. Even in its previous incarnation as the Front National, under Marine’s father Jean-Marie Le Pen, this was a multiracialist party. I twice attended the FN’s main rally in Paris, where Jean-Marie Le Pen was introduced by a half-African singer.
The entire tradition of French nationalism has always contained a stronger element of multiracialism than our equivalent traditions in the UK. The FN (and to a lesser extent the RN) were always ‘broad church’ parties: they combined Pétainists and Gaullists; racial nationalists and non-Whites; Catholics and pagans. That looks strange to a British nationalist, but that’s how they have always been.
Whereas many H&D readers would criticise Le Pen for not being sufficiently pro-White, Farage criticises her from the opposite angle! He showed his true colours long ago when he said that Le Pen’s movement’s “roots were deep in Vichy” and that “anti-semitism was embedded in its DNA”.
This morning he went further, choosing this moment to denounce Le Pen’s party and proclaim that he preferred the approach of her ‘centrist’ rival Emmanuel Macron.
Farage went so far as to say that a victory for Le Pen’s party would be a “disaster” for France. In effect Farage’s Goldman Sachs party is a natural ally of Macron’s Rothschild party.
The one difference is that Farage wobbles all over the place when he is asked about Ukraine and Russia.
As we have previously exposed, Farage has a long history of making some token reference to Putin being a dictator, but then effectively spreading softcore Putinist propaganda, before flipping back to ‘cover’ himself by making some meaningless anti-Putin statement.
He has continued this policy during the past fortnight. It’s difficult to say whether this reflects Farage’s lack of formal education – he went straight from school to become a City spiv – or whether there is a more sinister agenda at work.
The one certainty is that Farage’s response to Le Pen does not reflect any ‘responsible’ attitude on his part to fiscal matters. Reform UK’s manifesto is by far the most irresponsible document of the entire election campaign, making a string of impossible, uncosted pledges.
Farage’s underlying values, however, remain those of a City spiv. He has absolutely no interest in working people. While we can criticise Marine Le Pen for many things – multiracialism, Zionism, abandonment of some French nationalist traditions, betrayal of her comrades – we must admit that she has aligned the RN strongly with the interests of French workers who have consistently been betrayed by the political and financial ‘elite’.
Farage and Reform UK are the opposite. They stand for crony capitalism, not British workers – and this is the main reason why their immigration policy would simply continue the Great Replacement, which serves the interests of global capitalism.
H&D readers should avoid Reform UK like the plague.
This week’s election will signal the death of the Conservative Party, but Reform UK represents no improvement, and if anything serves to discredit the broader nationalist cause.
We are in a time of transition, but the positive development is that a small number of genuine patriots are fighting for a real anti-immigration policy. These are the candidates of the British Democrats and English Democrats, plus independent candidates in some constituencies such as Dr Andrew Emerson in Chichester and Joe Owens in Liverpool Wavertree.
Of course these are only ripples of resistance compared to the tidal wave that is crashing down on the French political establishment. But we have something to build on, in the new political era that will dawn on Friday.
The message is simple: reject Farage, and start building a radical alternative above the ruins of the old order.
Casino politics and lack of honour – Sunak’s Tories and Farage’s Reform UK show they are unfit for office
Rishi Sunak’s Conservatives and their main challenger on the ‘right’ – Reform UK leader Nigel Farage – have dragged UK politics to a new low: a level of dishonour that combines farce and tragedy.
First the farce. Every day now brings a fresh story of senior Tory officials, MPs, or others in close contact with the Prime Minister, having placed bets on the election date. Now of course all this could be pure coincidence and they might not have been acting on inside information! Police investigations must eventually establish the truth.
What we already know for certain, is that had these people been professional footballers or involved in the management of a football club, and had placed bets on football, they would automatically face a lengthy ban, regardless of whether it could be ‘proven’ that they had cheated in any way.
The reason should be obvious. But for those close to Rishi Sunak, their first thought as the election approached wasn’t “how can I apologise to the British people for the mistakes of the past five years, and promise to do better if re-elected?” No – their first thought was: “how can I line my pockets for one more time, before being turfed out of office?”
With the Tories in total collapse, it’s understandable that many lifelong Tory voters are turning to Nigel Farage and his apparently radical ‘right-wing’ party, Reform UK.
But the truth is that Farage himself is dishonourable on a level that dwarfs the petty cheating and incompetence of Sunak’s team.
During and immediately after the Second World War, a new stereotype entered British culture and was often portrayed in comedy shows of that era. The “spiv” was a man who sought to make a fast profit out of others’ misfortunes, in an age of rationing and shortages. In real life, a disproportionate number of “spivs” were Jews – as was well known to the public at the time and has been established by modern historical research.
Following the so-called “big bang” liberalisation of the City of London in the mid-1980s, a new generation of spivs entered British life. While most of these operated within the law, they also operated with absolutely no regard for the UK’s national interest. The young Rishi Sunak profited from hedge fund speculations against UK banks during the financial crisis of the 2000s. And long before that, Nigel Farage’s first career was in the London Metals Exchange: his career was only modestly successful compared to Sunak’s, and eventually his commodities brokerage Farage Limited went bankrupt.
Farage’s blatantly dishonest spivvery has been in the political rather than the financial world.
His biggest con is his pretence of being anti-immigration. The slavishly pro-Farage channel GB News and much of the press have collaborated in this deception – but the truth is that Farage has always “welcomed immigration”, as he once told the European Parliament. Farage’s team promoted the idea of Brexit to UK-based Indians (including restaurant owners) on the basis that leaving the EU would mean that the UK could replace European workers with Indian, Bangladeshi and Pakistani workers.
And so it has turned out: with an extra helping of Africans added on top.
Farage and Reform UK now promise not to end immigration, still less to reverse the tide of immigration, but only to have a “one in, one out” policy: which of course would mean for the most part replacing White Britons and Europeans with non-White immigrants. Last year, for example, this Reform UK policy would have meant admitting 600,000 migrants.
None of this should come as any surprise. Farage is fundamentally committed to the toxic ideology of “free market” capitalism, which is essentially anti-nationalist, pro-immigration, and anti-White.
Those who are serious about ending immigration have two parties who fortunately are not standing against each other, and who in a small number of constituencies are offering voters a genuine patriotic alternative – the British Democrats and the English Democrats. Each of these parties is run by honest leaders who are genuinely committed on the immigration issue. Unfortunately they are standing in fewer than twenty constituencies, but they are sending a clear signal of the direction that UK politics could and should take in the post-Conservative era.
Could Farage and Reform UK be at least a step in the right direction?
No: because they are basically crooked.
Even aside from the immigration issue, Farage has shown himself to be untrustworthy on two other central issues of 2024.
Just a few weeks ago, Reform UK entered a pact with Traditional Unionist Voice, the party led by Jim Allister KC which promises to take Northern Ireland along with the rest of the UK into a genuine Brexit, rather than allowing a border in the Irish Sea – a trade barrier separating one part of the UK from the rest.
This sea border has come about because of a treacherous deal negotiated by Rishi Sunak’s government with the misnamed ‘Democratic Unionist Party’ earlier this year. At first it seemed that Reform UK agreed with TUV on a common platform of a real Brexit and no sea border. A pact was publicly announced on this basis.
But no sooner had the campaign begun than Nigel Farage unilaterally tore up this pact. In two constituencies – including the one being contested by TUV leader Jim Allister – Farage instead endorsed DUP candidates and betrayed his supposed TUV allies.
Quite incredibly, Farage was thus endorsing two of the very people who sold out Brexit and sold out the people of Northern Ireland.
He was able to do this because Reform UK has no genuine existence as a political party. It is a business rather than a constitutional party, and as the owner of that business, Farage can do whatever he likes.
He can issue a manifesto whose tax promises are the most dishonest and innumerate of any party; he can recruit or expel candidates on a whim; and he can make up policy as he goes along, to impress his gullible target audience of ageing reactionaries.
And now Farage has committed his foulest betrayal. Not content with betraying White Britons over immigration, and not content with betraying his erstwhile allies in Ulster, Farage now betrays those who are fighting at Europe’s frontier, those who are paying the ultimate price to defend their nation from Kremlin aggression.
Again, this came as no surprise to long-term Farage-watchers. He has for more than a decade been the most dangerous type of Putinist propagandist.
As serious historical students of propaganda know, the most insidious propagandists are not those who blatantly endorse every aspect of those whose interests they (deliberately or otherwise) serve.
Whether in the Second World War or the Cold War, the greatest success for a professional propaganda agency was to get someone to parrot treachery without it being obvious treachery. Thus, communist dupes in the West didn’t openly call for surrendering to Stalin, Khrushchev or Brezhnev – they called for “peace”. Moscow’s front organisations often had names such as “World Peace Council”.
Moreover, it’s been a longstanding practice of invaders and their proxies to call for “peace”, once their initial advances have ground to a halt. “Peace” of this sort rewards the invader and allows his forces to become firmly entrenched.
Those propagandising for an aggressor will do anything to avoid the central issue. They will point fingers in every direction, sometimes contradicting themselves, but always seeking to undermine firm action against the invader. And they will ignore basic historical and political facts.
So it has been with Farage. During 2010-14 (at a time when he was a relatively minor figure in UK politics) the then UKIP leader appeared seventeen times on Putin’s propaganda channel Russia Today.
RT itself was proud to claim that Farage “has been known far longer to the RT audience than to most of the British electorate”.
And he swiftly rewarded his Moscow friends. During an earlier Ukraine crisis in 2014, when Putin grabbed Crimea, Farage typically maintained that the Kremlin despot had been “provoked” and absurdly insisted that the European Union had “blood on its hands in Ukraine”.
The reality was (and is) that NATO and the EU had been far too weak, and it was their unwillingness to risk “provoking” Putin a few years earlier, when they failed to respond to appeals from Ukrainian nationalists for an alliance against Moscow, that encouraged Putin’s imperialism.
Ever since then, Farage’s cynical tactic has been to utter a few words distancing himself from Putin’s dictatorial behaviour, but then going on to endorse his foreign policy.
In 2014, asked which world leader he most admired, Farage replied: “as an operator”, Putin.
His short-lived successor as UKIP leader, Diane James, went further, describing Putin as one of her political “heroes”. Yet another UKIP leader, Paul Nuttall, agreed that Putin was “generally getting it right in many areas”.
In 2017 Farage again made token comments distancing himself from Putin’s imprisonment of journalists, etc., before saying that Putin was “a strong national leader”.
In 2018 speaking to an interviewer from Newsweek magazine, Farage was even more explicit in his policy of surrender to the Kremlin: “We would have done better to recognize that there are some big issues on which we have a shared interest with Russia. Instead, our foreign policy approach to Russia has been very confrontational.”
Following Putin’s notorious interview with Tucker Carlson earlier this year, Farage argued that the West should have discussed a “deal” with Putin immediately after the invasion. In other words, right from day one, Farage’s policy was not to resist the invader. His policy instead was one of craven surrender: a “deal”.
Absurdly, Farage’s argument was (and remains) that “our foreign policy approach to Russia has been very confrontational.” Not that the Kremlin was being “confrontational” by invading its neighbour, but that others had been “confrontational” in not bowing to Putin’s expansionist agenda.
Last week during his interview with the BBC’s Nick Robinson, Farage expanded on this theory.
We must remember that Farage is a man of limited formal education. He has never studied Russian or Ukrainian history; he has no personal experience of the region; and he has absolutely no academic training in military history, intelligence history, or strategic studies.
Yet like golf club reactionaries everywhere, as they prop up the bar and regale their fellow Rotarians, Farage is an instant expert and never admits that he might ever have been wrong about anything important.
Once again (as he has repeated since that interview) Farage made token, insincere, and weak comments distancing himself from Putin’s invasion. But he then went on to claim that the invasion had somehow been “provoked” by the West.
Essentially, therefore, Farage’s message can be paraphrased as – yes, the war is unfortunate and wrong, but the basic fault lies not with Putin but with the West: we should have given Putin most of what he wanted without war, and then the invasion wouldn’t have been necessary!
True strategic genius from the man who went straight from school to the London Metals Exchange without pausing to obtain an education.
When faced by an aggressor, says Nigel, don’t “provoke” him; don’t stand up him; instead – surrender in advance!
What Farage has never understood (or in his contrarian pursuit of American-style conspiracy theory, simply doesn’t want to understand) is that Putin was responding to a perception of Western weakness, not Western ‘provocation’.
The Kremlin misread signals and misread the determination of Ukrainian patriots.
Putin was correct that the Western response to his invasion would be slow. What he didn’t realise was that Ukrainian resistance would be so effective that his troops would grind to a halt, far short of their objective, and that an alliance of his neighbours, stretching from the Baltic to the Black Sea, would put some backbone into the cowardly ‘West’.
Farage – the ultimate political spiv – will never understand true patriotism. His ‘free market’, quick-profit mentality is fundamentally anti-nationalist and anti-White. He betrays his own political allies without a second thought.
To Farage, all this is ‘clever’ politics. To the rest of us, it is rank treachery which confirms that he is unfit for office.
Nigel Farage and Reform UK will doubtless play their part in destroying the Conservative Party – but if he and even a tiny group of Reform UK MPs are elected to Parliament, they will rapidly self-destruct.
Farage and his ilk are not and never will be part of a ‘transition’ to a better, patriotic politics. They are part of the problem: wholly unfit for office.
The exhausted volcanoes – Diane Abbott, Nigel Farage, and campaign u-turns
The General Election has already seen its first U-turns, as two headlines from the campaign’s first week were reversed.
But far from indicating genuine potential for change, these U-turns revealed the weakness of both the mainstream left and the mainstream civic nationalist ‘right’, which have long exhausted whatever radicalism they once possessed.
U-turn number one involved Diane Abbott, the first black woman elected to Parliament in 1987, who (as we discussed a few days ago) got herself suspended from the Labour Party for trying to claim a higher victim status for blacks – thus committing sacrilege against the ‘Holocaust’, liberal Europe’s only religious faith.
Supposedly the question was whether Abbott had done sufficient penance for this sin against the Holy Holocaust. But the real question was whether the Labour leadership’s Jewish friends felt they could risk offending both the black lobby and the feminist lobby.
One big risk was that Abbott might stand as an independent and make common cause with her old comrade Jeremy Corbyn.
So, on balance, Labour decided that an ageing and sick negress wasn’t a real danger to an imminent Labour government with a likely majority of more than 150.
Or to use a vulgar political cliché, that she was better “inside the tent p*****g out, than outside the tent p*****g in”.
So after briefing the press that Abbott would be prevented from standing as a Labour candidate, party bosses suddenly decided she remained a good comrade after all.
Naturally, the Tory press have argued that this long drawn out Abbott fiasco proves the strength and danger of the Labour ‘left’. In fact it proves the opposite.
Abbott’s type of ‘left’ is now toothless. Most of its once-‘radical’ demands are today’s woke orthodoxy. Palestine is pretty much the only exception, and Starmer’s party is confident that its Zionist policy will easily survive whatever rhetorical challenges the likes of Abbott can launch from the backbenches.
This week’s second U-turn was Nigel Farage’s decision that he would, after all, be a parliamentary candidate for Reform UK, a party he already effectively owned, and where he has now openly taken over as leader.
Just over a week after announcing that six weeks wasn’t long enough to fight a credible election campaign from scratch, Farage decided that in fact four and a half weeks was more than enough. The lucky voters are in one of England’s most deprived but Whitest constituencies, the Essex seaside resort of Clacton.
Perhaps Clacton’s residents will be gullible enough to believe Farage offers a genuine alternative to the Westminster gang politicians. Perhaps they will decide he is the best of a grim bunch.
But as with Abbott, the Farage u-turn actually demonstrates the weakness of Reform UK, not its strength.
It’s unlikely that many Britons could name another Reform UK politician apart from Farage. And apart from Brexit (now yesterday’s issue) and immigration (where Farage continues to speak with forked tongue) few voters would be able to name a Reform UK policy. Since the party lacks any serious branch structure around the country, it’s unlikely that anyone will enlighten them.
The Farage campaign will be an extended con-trick, as Reform UK’s new/old leader pretends that a colour-blind policy can restrict immigration in any meaningful way, or that it can improve the many immigration-related crises of modern Britain.
Brexit resulted in increased rather then reduced immigration – and far more importantly it replaced European immigrants with African and Asian immigrants, the very opposite of what most pro-Brexit voters dreamed of.
This should have been no surprise to Farage.
Time and again in the European Parliament and elsewhere, sincere anti-immigration politicians such as Andrew Brons put Farage on the spot, eliciting confirmation that the former UKIP, former Brexit Party, and now Reform UK leader was not genuinely anti-immigration.
Farage and Reform UK are slavish devotees of ‘free market’ globalism. And it is global capitalism itself (not wokeism or some bogeyman like Klaus Schwab or George Soros) that is the engine of mass migration.
That’s why what Britain and Europe needs is not the moribund Marxism of Abbott and Corbyn, nor the fake ‘patriotism’ of Farage and Tice. These are what Disraeli (when speaking of the Victorian Liberal Party and his rival Gladstone) famously called: “a range of exhausted volcanoes. Not a flame flickers on a single pallid crest. But the situation is still dangerous. There are occasional earthquakes, and ever and anon the dark rumbling of the sea.“
For Disraeli’s co-racialists today, the civic nationalist ‘right’ and the anti-Zionist ‘left’ are similarly capable of just the occasional rumble, and at most a minor earthquake.
Those of us looking for a revolutionary earthquake must instead build a movement that offers a true socialist nationalism that unites all true Europeans.
That’s our movement’s task for the next five years, whether or not the likes of Abbott and Farage are in Parliament playing their futile games for the television cameras.
Civic nationalism falls at first hurdle in 2024 local elections
This afternoon local councils across England published their lists of confirmed candidates for next month’s local elections. There are more than 2,600 council seats up for election across England on 2nd May, as well as eleven Mayoral elections (including London), the Greater London Assembly, and 37 Police & Crime Commissioners. Apart from the latter, there are no elections in Wales this year, and there are no elections in Scotland or Northern Ireland.
Given the scale of public concern about the failure of mainstream political parties, and the continuing crises over immigration, crime, and other race-related issues, readers might have expected a significant challenge to the political establishment at these elections.
In fact, the anti-establishment challenge – whether from civic nationalists, racial nationalists, or even from the far left – is feeble.
H&D readers know that there are many reasons for the weak state of racial nationalism in the UK. Our movement has yet to recover from catastrophic damage caused by the collapse of the BNP more than a decade ago, a collapse that was mainly self-inflicted by former BNP leader Nick Griffin.
The best we can say is that there are good people in our movement presently engaged in the long task of rebuilding racial nationalism from that wreckage.
Within the racial nationalist political spectrum, there are four candidates from the British Democrats (including former councillors Julian Leppert in Epping Forest, Jim Lewthwaite in Bradford, and Lawrence Rustem in Maidstone).
The newly registered Homeland Party has one candidate, Roger Robertson in Hart, Hampshire (who is already a parish councillor).
Patriotic Alternative has not yet registered as a political party, so its name cannot appear on ballot papers, but PA activist Callum Hewitt is standing as an Independent candidate in Halton, Cheshire.
Another well-known nationalist standing as an independent is former NF and BNP candidate Gary Butler in Maidstone.
The anti-Islam but multiracialist party Britain First is contesting the London Mayoral and GLA elections, where their candidate in each case is former Generation Identity activist Nick Scanlon. But elsewhere in England Britain First has only two candidates, far fewer than expected.
A more radical but still multiracialist anti-Islamic party, the National Housing Party, has one candidate in Oldham.
The English Democrats, whose campaign for an English Parliament is supported by many racial nationalists even though the party itself is multiracialist, have five council candidates as well as three Police and Crime Commissioner candidates, including party leader Robin Tilbrook.
But the real shock is at the civic nationalist end of the spectrum.
Reform UK, which has dismayed many of its supporters in recent weeks but which is easily the largest and best funded party operating to the ‘right’ of the Conservatives, will have just 328 council candidates this year, well down on last year’s total of 480.
This failure even to get onto the ballot paper in the vast majority of elections makes a mockery of Reform UK’s opinion poll ratings, and of Nigel Farage’s efforts to portray himself as a serious political figure.
Some Reform UK supporters are urging Farage to step back into the front line and take back official leadership of the party from his stooge, Richard Tice. But with the party having so obviously failed to put down substantial roots at local level, what could Farage seriously hope to achieve?
Farage’s old party UKIP confirmed it is close to death, with only seventeen candidates nationwide this year.
A rival UKIP splinter group – the Heritage Party – is also declining but shows slightly more vigour than UKIP, with 34 candidates nationwide including a slate of seven in Southend where it looks to have taken over most of the old UKIP branch.
But yet another UKIP breakaway – the Alliance for Democracy and Freedom – seems to have disappeared from ballot papers this year. The ADF under its Malaysian leader Dr Teck Khong recently signed a grandiose ‘alliance’ with the remnants of the anti-vaxx party Freedom Alliance (which has only five candidates across the whole of England this year, after suffering multiple splits and defections). They will probably pick up the crankier, Covid-obsessed defectors from Reform UK, but as H&D has repeatedly explained, this is not a basis for serious election campaigns.
The one thing that is abundantly clear from these local elections – even before a single vote has been cast – is that there remains a vacuum in British politics which a real nationalist party ought to fill.
H&D will publish lists of nationalist candidates standing at the May elections, and will have full reports and analysis both on this website and in forthcoming editions of our magazine.
Reform UK dances to ‘anti-fascist’ tune
Reform UK leader Richard Tice today surrendered to the demands of the far-left, ‘anti-fascist’ lobby. In doing so, he exposed his own cowardice, and his party’s lack of ideological substance.
After ‘anti-fascists’ criticised Reform UK’s parliamentary candidate for Swindon South – the historian and prolific YouTuber Beau Dade – it took only hours for the party to abandon him.
This isn’t one of those typical cases where someone’s obscure tweets or Facebook posts are dredged up to discredit them. Beau Dade was very well known for his controversial views on history and politics when he was first selected as a Reform UK candidate. Tice’s cowardice in abandoning him – at the first hint of predictable leftist criticism – is a disgrace.
The problem here is that Reform UK is a neo-Thatcherite, globalist, economic liberal party which pretends to be a nationalist party.
It does this because its leaders know that apart from a handful of wealthy donors and a phalanx of City spivs and failed spads, there is no significant audience for US-style libertarianism in the UK. The party’s core voters do not share Reform UK’s core ideology. Its leaders want London to be Singapore-on-Thames, while its voters want Britain for the British.
Therefore Tice and Farage disguise their commitment to turbo-capitalism by blowing frequent dog-whistles on immigration and related socially conservative issues. Their strategy is an updated version of Thatcher’s notorious television interview in January 1978, when she pretended to share the concerns of voters about our country being “swamped” by immigration.
All of this is bound to end in tears. Reform UK’s leaders believe in globalist capitalism; most of its voters (and potential voters) believe in social nationalism. In the medium to long term, there is an obvious opportunity in British politics for a party that can combine racial nationalism with an effective socialist strategy to rebuild our crumbling society and economy.
Reform UK will never be that party.
Galloway victory exposes the fake left’s crisis over ‘multiracialism’
A few minutes ago the former Labour MP George Galloway won the Rochdale by-election, in a stunning exposé of Muslim voters‘ disillusionment with Labour Party leader Sir Keir Starmer. Galloway polled 39.7% of the vote, and won a majority of 5,697, ahead of local independent David Tully, who surprised the media by taking 21.3%.
Though I reject many of Galloway’s views (especially his Putinism and his support for the terrorist IRA’s political front Sinn Fein), I welcome his election to Westminster where he will be an eloquent (if unprincipled) voice in support of Palestine, against the lavishly financed Zionist lobby that dominates all the major UK parties.
Labour thought they had chosen a perfect careerist candidate: Azhar Ali, an Asian councillor in nearby Nelson who led the Labour group on Lancashire County Council. Ali had made all the right noises to obtain promotion in Labour’s ranks – regarded as a reliable ‘moderate’ and endorsed by leading Jewish activists in Starmer’s party.
But as should have been obvious, careerism involves saying different things to different audiences. At the start of the campaign, a secretly recorded tape was leaked of Ali speaking to Asian community leaders in Accrington (less than 20 miles from Rochdale). As anyone outside Starmer’s circle of deluded wokeists might have predicted, Ali’s words to this audience were very different from when he was speaking to liberals and Jews!
The leak quickly led to Labour disowning Ali, and because he has always depended on careerist grovelling rather than principle, he completely failed to maintain any sort of campaign on his own. Ali remained on the ballot paper as Labour candidate, because the relevant deadlines had passed, and his feeble 7.7% vote came from that section of the electorate who would vote for a donkey if it had a Labour label.
The Rochdale campaign was absolutely made for George Galloway. Though he will be 70 later this year, Galloway has lost none of his ability to play populist political cards. In this case most of his pitch was to Rochdale’s Asians (who amount to around 30% of the constituency, according to the 2021 census). The Gaza issue has highlighted a broader perception among such people that they have been let down by their ‘community leaders’ in a series of cynical deals with the Labour Party. A reckoning was overdue, irrespective of the Azhar Ali fiasco.
Galloway also made a pitch to disillusioned White voters, but a large number of these opted for local independent David Tully, whose energetic campaign received little attention from mainstream journalists until ballot boxes were opened.
Mr Tully is not a racial nationalist, but his commendable campaign and focus on local concerns (including the threatened bankruptcy of Rochdale Football Club, where he is a season ticket holder) will have won him a lot of support from our type of voters.
And that brings us to the elephant in the room: the total absence of any credible nationalist party from this campaign.
Reform UK, just two weeks after an excellent result in Wellingborough, suffered a well-deserved embarrassment in Rochdale after their inexplicable selection of Simon Danczuk as their candidate. Mr Danczuk is another shallow careerist who was Labour MP for Rochdale until he was disgraced after sending inappropriate sexual messages to a teenager.
Danzuk and his party leader Richard Tice tried to distract from their poor result (only 6.3% and sixth place) by whining about “racism”, “intimidation” and “anti-semitism”. Their desperation in playing the victim card merely reflected the utter bankruptcy of “civic nationalism”. Galloway himself has now revealed that a short while ago Tice asked him to be a Reform UK candidate: that’s how shallow and unprincipled Reform UK’s leader is.
In the 1990s I repeatedly experienced political violence in Rochdale, including being pelted with half-bricks by “anti-fascists” outside Rochdale Town Hall after an election count. But anyone who is serious about nationalist politics doesn’t whine about such things, they just get on with the task, however long and arduous.
Britain First raised funds from their supporters with the promise that they would fight this by-election, even after the close of nominations showed that they did not in fact have a candidate. The sad truth is that Britain First is just another con aimed at gullible nationalist donors – just like the BNP became in later years, and just like the various enterprises run by Nick Griffin.
Billy Howarth, a local campaigner against the scandal of Rochdale Pakistanis “grooming” teenage girls, stood as an independent candidate but failed to make any impact, polling only 1.7%. It needs to be recognised that there are some people like Mr Howarth who are honest and have sound instincts on some issues, but who come nowhere near the calibre required of a parliamentary election candidate or spokesman for the broader nationalist cause.
Considering the unusual circumstances, the 39.7% turnout was high – and was likely to have been especially high in Asian areas.
But many White voters will have abstained in despair. Rochdale again shows the political vacuum in the UK, especially in northern towns that have experienced the worst effects of multiracialism.
A credible challenge is long overdue – whether it comes from the British Democrats, the newly registered Homeland Party, organisations not yet registered such as Patriotic Alternative, or some united front of racial nationalists.
H&D will continue to report on a non-partisan basis, and we shall give support to any and every genuine nationalist campaign.
Tory collapse continues: has Reform UK’s chance finally arrived? Or is there still a vacuum in patriotic politics?
Regular H&D readers will know that we have been very critical of Reform UK’s ideological and organisational failures. Their results in actual elections have consistently failed to match their opinion poll ratings. Lacking a serious activist base in most of the country, they have relied on hype from Nigel Farage and his friends on certain newspapers (and at the GB News channel).
Today’s parliamentary by-elections in Kingswood (near Bristol), and Wellingborough (in Northamptonshire), seem to have shown that Reform UK has at last started to attract real votes in real ballot boxes.
Whatever our differences with Reform UK on a wide range of issues, their Wellingborough candidate Ben Habib deserves considerable credit for his earlier activism in Ulster, where together with Baroness Hoey, TUV leader Jim Allister and others he showed genuine commitment and intelligence in exposing the true nature of Sunak’s treacherous border deal. The Conservative Party – and even some so-called Ulster Unionists – have shamefully betrayed the Union, whereas Ben Habib has striven genuinely to uphold it.
Though it might seem paradoxical, many H&D readers will therefore have welcomed the fact that Mr Habib this week polled the highest ever Reform UK vote – 13%.
Just two hours earlier in Kingswood, Reform UK’s candidate Rupert Lowe polled 10.8%, which at that point was itself easily the best vote ever achieved by the party since it emerged from the former Brexit Party.
While congratulating Reform UK on these much-improved results, we should bear in mind that if their opinion poll scores were anywhere near accurate, they ought to be polling at least 15% in Kingswood and closer to 20% in Wellingborough, in by-election circumstances that tend to favour “protest votes”, and with so many “right-wing” voters having deserted the Tories.
The old UKIP polled 14.8% in Kingswood in 2015. Of course, UKIP is now a joke fringe party. In this latest by-election they managed only 0.5%.
It was also a very disappointing night for the anti-Muslim party Britain First, whose candidate in Wellingborough, Alex Merola, finished 8th with only 1.6%.
Britain First and their supporters now have to ask themselves two questions.
Most fundamentally, they should question whether there is political space for another non-racial, civic nationalist party competing with the much more professional Reform UK. It’s certainly necessary to expose the fact that Reform UK is essentially a system party, committed to neo-Thatcherite “free market” capitalism, and with no serious solution to the catastrophe of multiracialism.
But that serious solution – that serious challenge – needs to go beyond civic nationalism, and cannot consist merely of Britain First’s Islam-obsession.
And secondly, even if one adopts a more cynical and limited view of political struggle, one has to question the basic competence of an avowedly anti-Muslim party which wasted its time and its donors’ money in Wellingborough, while failing to field a candidate in Rochdale, a constituency which would seem to offer a perfect audience for Britain First’s message.
Yet again, the remnants of the post-BNP British nationalist movement have shown themselves to be devoid of both political principle and strategic awareness.
We can and must do better. The present situation is a shameful betrayal of our heritage and our people’s future. Within the next year, there will almost certainly be a Labour government with Keir Starmer as Prime Minister. It is vital that there is a serious racial nationalist challenge to that government.
The mystery of the disappearing candidate
On Saturday the anti-Muslim party Britain First shared a “Huge Announcement” with their members and supporters on social media, even sending out a special fundraising email.
Party chairman Ashlea Simon was to be the party’s candidate at the forthcoming Rochdale parliamentary by-election, following the death of Labour MP Sir Tony Lloyd. Her leader Paul Golding rightly pointed out that Rochdale is notorious for the “grooming” scandal, involving the abuse of young girls by men of mainly Pakistani origin.
As recently as 15th January, yet another official report documented the failure of Greater Manchester Police, social services and Rochdale Council – all of whom betrayed these girls and their families.
Golding told his followers that Ashlea Simon would be an ideal candidate who would prove “a staunch voice for the victims in the town”. He predicted there was a “strong chance” that she could defeat the established parties and be elected MP for Rochdale.
Britain First’s leader confirmed that he and other party officials were already “organising behind the scenes to get the campaign launched, including designing the banners, leaflets, placards, postal voter letters etc.”
When we read this announcement at H&D, it’s fair to say we were surprised – because the official list of candidates for this by-election had already been published the previous day, and Ms Simon was not among them.
In other words Paul Golding was soliciting donations for a non-existent campaign. Meanwhile he was sitting down with the notorious grifter ‘Tommy Robinson’ to make yet another video for his gullible followers.
We don’t know how Mr Golding intends to spend the money raised by these fundraising emails and social media posts, but one thing’s for sure. It can’t be spent on a parliamentary election campaign in Rochdale – because Britain First and Ashlea Simon are not contesting this Rochdale by-election!
Raising money for a non-existent campaign is tragic enough, but at this same Rochdale by-election Britain First’s rivals in the civic nationalist party Reform UK have dragged politics into the realms of farce.
Reform UK’s candidate in this by-election (where allegations of “grooming” are bound to become a central campaign issue) is Simon Danczuk, who was Labour MP for Rochdale from 2010 to 2017.
Mr Danczuk was suspended from the Labour Party in 2015 for sending “inappropriate” texts to a teenage girl. He shamelessly contested Rochdale as an independent in 2017 but lost his deposit with a mere 1.8% of the vote.
The ex-MP has recently married an African beauty therapist whom he met on a “business trip” to Rwanda: the happy couple plan to adopt a Rwandan baby, and doubtless if he returns to Parliament they will be able to adopt an entire houseful of happy African infants.
In other words, while the Tory government is trying (but dismally failing) to export illegal immigrants and asylum seekers to Rwanda, Reform UK’s latest parliamentary candidate is eagerly importing Rwandans to England.
You really couldn’t make it up: but this is entirely consistent with the “civic nationalism” espoused by Richard Tice, Nigel Farage and the fake patriots of Reform UK.
Rochdale voters deserve better. Whether the racial nationalist alternative comes from the British Democrats, the recently launched Homeland Party, from Patriotic Alternative (once they are registered as a political party), or from some electoral alliance between them, it has never been more obvious that the UK needs a movement prepared to defend our islands and our people.
Rishi Sunak’s ‘Conservative’ Party in crisis facing two new by-election tests
This week senior members of Rishi Sunak’s Conservative Party – which now seems unable to conserve anything worthwhile – are openly plotting his removal, desperate to avoid electoral annihilation.
A general election is certain at some point within the next 12 months: the latest legal date is 28th January 2025, but few observers think it will be delayed beyond mid-November.
More immediately the ruling party has to defend by-elections on 15th February in two traditionally ‘safe’ Tory seats: Kingswood (near Bristol), and Wellingborough (a market town and surrounding towns and villages in Northamptonshire).
In each case the candidates will include two from parties to the ‘right’ of the Conservatives. Wellingborough in particular will be seen as a big test for Reform UK, the party effectively owned by former UKIP and Brexit Party leader Nigel Farage, but for the time being led by Farage’s close associate Richard Tice.
Pakistani-born Ben Habib (the party’s deputy leader) is Reform UK’s candidate in Wellingborough.
The anti-Islamist party Britain First also has a candidate in Wellingborough – Alex Merola, who will be well known to some H&D readers as a longstanding patriotic activist.
Meanwhile in Kingswood, Reform UK’s candidate is another of their stable of millionaires, making us wonder whether it is compulsory to be a City trader or property tycoon to have a senior role with Tice and Farage?
This time it’s the peripatetic property developer Rupert Lowe, most famous to sports fans for his time as chairman of Southampton FC. Mr Lowe was a Brexit Party MEP for the West Midlands from 2019-20, and as far back as 1997 was a parliamentary candidate for Sir James Goldsmith’s Referendum Party.
Also on the ballot paper in Kingswood is another civic nationalist candidate, Nicholas Wood of UKIP, who is a former Surrey County Council candidate. UKIP is now a feeble shadow of its former self, and the party’s remaining activists are probably less interested in the Kingswood campaign than in the internal contest to be the party’s new leader following Neil Hamilton’s imminent retirement. The most likely bet seems to be that Anne Marie Waters, former leader of the defunct For Britain Movement, will complete her political comeback and succeed Hamilton, having only last year rejoined UKIP.
Once these two by-elections are over, attention will shift to the next parliamentary contest in Rochdale (following the recent death of Labour MP Tony Lloyd), where the most interesting battle will be for the Labour nomination, with several Asian candidates seeking to become the town’s first ethnic minority MP.
