Reclaiming May Day for European workers!
May Day was a traditional European festival long before it was hijacked by American Marxists in 1889.
Linked to the ancient celebration of Beltane (marking the midpoint between Spring Equinox and Summer Solstice), May Day is marked in Germany by Walpurgis Night and in England by traditional dances.
One of the most colourful celebrations of Beltane is in Edinburgh, which for H&D readers had a special significance this year because our comrade Vincent Reynouard has been in Edinburgh prison for more than five months. (An interview with Vincent will appear soon on this website and in the July-August edition of H&D.)
Racial nationalists have rightly begun to reclaim May Day as a European festival, and to assert the reality that we are the true champions of European workers.
The so-called ‘left’ has long since surrendered to the demands of global capitalism. Mass immigration is championed both in the name of ‘wokeness’ and to provide cheap labour, directly undermining the wages and working conditions of Europeans.
Meanwhile the so-called ‘right’ sometimes talks about resisting mass immigration, but in reality its reactionary ideology is in many ways worse than the ‘left’, and is even more devoted to the exploitative values of global capitalism: anti-nature, anti-worker, anti-White, anti-European.
On May Day 2023 H&D‘s comrades around the world asserted the eternal values of racial nationalism – the true interests of European workers.
Labour’s ‘multicultural’ project digs its own grave
Critics of ‘wokeism’ have been entertained in recent weeks by the collapse of Nicola Sturgeon’s attempt to build a new Scottish nation that allows men (including convicted rapists) to redefine themselves as women.
Today another aspect of political correctness has fallen foul of inconvenient reality: this time in the Labour Party at Westminster.
Preet Gill is MP for Birmingham Edgbaston and a member of Sir Keir Starmer’s front bench, as “shadow International Development Secretary” (i.e. opposing the minister for overseas aid).
She is also one of two practising Sikhs among Labour MPs. (Another was recently appointed as a Labour peer, joining two other Sikhs in the Lords, and several more Sikhs have recently been selected to stand for Labour in winnable constituencies at the next general election.)
This has had predictable consequences – in that (yet again) there is a conflict of loyalties involving a politician from an ethnic minority.
Liberals and feminists in the Sikh community have for some time been raising concerns about sexual abuse inside Sikh temples (known as ‘gurdwaras’ or ‘guru ghars’). This is related to the broader problem of domestic violence within the Sikh community, which is believed to be related to traditionally high levels of alcoholism among Sikhs.
Perhaps surprisingly, despite her position in the Labour shadow cabinet, Preet Gill has chosen to ally herself with conservative Sikhs against their liberal / feminist critics. Writing on the WhatsApp group ‘Sikhs in Labour’, Ms Gill has repeatedly called such criticisms of Sikh temples “outrageous” and “dangerous”.
Adding to the controversy, Gill is now accused of embarrassing Labour leader Starmer because of her hardline Sikh connections. The Home Office has been handed a dossier including photographs of Gill’s visit with Starmer to her local gurdwara, where they posed in front of a display of photographs of Sikh extremists including Labh Singh, a Sikh paramilitary leader who was once accused of masterminding India’s biggest ever bank robbery in order to raise funds for his group.
While far more attention has focused on Muslim political activism, the much smaller Sikh community has attained political influence disproportionate to its size, not just in the UK but in other Western countries. Nikki Haley (born into a Sikh family and originally named Namrata Randhawa) recently announced her candidature for the Republican nomination for US President. In Canada, the junior party in the governing coalition is led by a Sikh, Jagmeet Singh, and a deputy leader of the opposition Conservative Party is also a Sikh, Tim Uppal.
The most recent census showed that Sikhs represent 0.9% of the population in England and Wales (due to CoViD we do not yet have complete UK statistics): the fourth largest religious group – behind Christians (46.2%), Muslims (6.5%), and Hindus (1.7%).
In Canada, Sikhs are 2.1% of the population, and in the USA 0.2%.
Winter Solstice 2022
Greetings from H&D to all readers celebrating the Winter Solstice this evening.
Our ancestors across Europe marked this as the day with fewest hours of sunlight: the darkest point of the year.
And so they celebrated the fact that from now on the sun becomes stronger, with the promise of renewed life and the certainty of next year’s crops.
Recently European peoples have been reminded that food doesn’t simply come from the supermarket, and many of our fellow citizens are facing an especially hard winter.
As racial nationalists these continue to be hard times in ways that transcend such daily material questions. The recent UK census provided further evidence that our very existence is under threat from mass immigration.
Yet the message of the Solstice is that even at the darkest hour, hope remains.
Political progress from the darkness of ignorance and barbarism to the renewed light of European civilization and racial identity will be slow, but here at H&D we believe that this recovery will happen and will be relentless, whatever methods our enemies use to prevent a White British and White European renaissance.
Whether you celebrate the Solstice as a religious festival or as a political allegory, H&D wishes you all a Happy Yuletide.
UK census and racial replacement: H&D analysis
Demographic details were released this week from the Census taken in March 2021 in England and Wales – some of the figures for Northern Ireland had already been released a few weeks earlier, while in Scotland the Census was delayed by 12 months due to the pandemic, so Scottish results are not yet available. The Census findings should come as no surprise to H&D readers, though they seem to have shocked some civic nationalists and might yet convert some of the latter to racial realism.
Yet we should be careful not to react with excessive pessimism. The Census reveals a changing UK, but not one that has changed beyond rescue. White Britons are still a majority in most of our country and will remain so for years to come. The UK can be rescued, if racial nationalists have sufficient political will, discipline and competence.
The main headlines reflected census findings concerning both religion and the racial transformation of British cities.
For the first time the majority of the population in England and Wales no longer define themselves as Christian. This is only the third Census which has asked about religion, so no pre-2001 comparisons can be made, but it can safely be assumed from other data that the vast majority of Britons would have defined themselves as some sort of Christian until the 1960s when the younger generation began to abandon their parents’ faith and non-Christian immigrants began to arrive in significant numbers.
It is the abandonment of faith by White Britons that has contributed most to this aspect of the transformation of England and Wales: no doubt we shall find similar patterns in Scotland when the figures are eventually published. (The religious Census question is voluntary, and 6% of respondents in England and Wales chose not to answer it.)
37.2% of respondents answered ‘no religion’ (up from 25.2% a decade ago); 6.5% answered Muslim (up from 4.9%); and 46.2% answered Christian (down from 59.3%).
The other minority faiths remained at almost the same level as in 2021, including Hindu (1.7%), Sikh (0.9%), Buddhist (0.5%) and Jewish (0.5%). It should be noted that many Jews define themselves in racial/cultural terms and are not religiously ‘observant’, so would probably have replied to this Census question by ticking ‘no religion’ or refusing to answer, but even so it’s doubtful whether Jews of any description amount to more than 1% of the UK population.
In Northern Ireland far fewer answered ‘no religion’: 17.4%, a substantial increase from 10.1% in 2011 but less than half the figure for England and Wales. It seems likely that people from a Catholic background in Northern Ireland are especially likely to answer ‘Catholic’ for political/cultural reasons, even if they are no longer religious believers.
In reality, the surprise is that 27.5 million people in England and Wales still define themselves as ‘Christian’: anecdotal evidence suggests that these are heavily concentrated among older White Britons, Eastern European immigrants; and blacks. The churches can partly blame themselves for this decline. There has been no robust equivalent to the ‘Counter-Reformation’ of past centuries, little defence of traditional values, merely a meek surrender to political correctness and a wish to be ‘nice’ to those who promote an alien culture.
In short, while H&D readers will themselves be divided on religious questions, we can probably all agree that the religious transformation of our nation is not necessarily equivalent to racial and cultural replacement: it’s a different and only partly connected issue.
Turning to the question of race, the main headlines concerned British cities, where in some cases White Britons are now a minority and where Whites overall only remain a majority due to Eastern European immigration.
London is only 37% White British, though non-British Whites (in London’s case including many affluent Western Europeans as well as the stereotypical Poles, Romanians, etc.) help boost the overall White total to 54%. Similarly Manchester is 57% White but only 49% White British.
There are some cities where – even including non-Britons – Whites have now become a minority. Birmingham is now only 49% White, and Leicester only 41% White.
However these Midlands hotbeds of “diversity” also illustrate the political complications caused by immigration. The non-White populations are divided between several different cultures, some of which are far more hostile to each other than they are to Whites, as seen in recent riots between Indians and Pakistanis in Leicester.
Leicester is 34% Indian and only 3% Pakistani – but many of the former are Muslims who identify with the Pakistan cricket team rather than India (the immediate trigger for the riots). Leicester is 23.5% Muslim, 18% Hindu, and 4.5% Sikh.
Birmingham is even more complex, and as in Leicester this has already begun to cause problems for the Labour Party, not only because many ethnic minorities are socially conservative and detest Labour’s surrender to trendy ideas on ‘trans’ rights etc., but also because each community increasingly believes it has the right to control the selection of councillors and MPs.
The racial kaleidoscope of Birmingham is 17% Pakistani; 6% Indian; 4% Bangladeshi; 6% African; 4% Caribbean; with a further 10% being some other variety of black or mixed race. Only 43% of Birmingham is White British.
Most of the headlines focused on English cities, but there are perceptible though less dramatic changes elsewhere in the United Kingdom. Cardiff is now less than 74% White British: of course the city has long had its ‘Tiger Bay’ population of blacks and half-castes around the old Cardiff Docks, descended from migrants from dozens of different countries. But Wales as a whole remains 93.8% White, compared to 81% of England. Northern Ireland remains 96.6% White, though 6.5% of its population was born outside either the UK or Ireland (this mainly reflects Eastern European immigration, heavily concentrated in Belfast where almost 10% were born outside the British Isles, and in one or two other Ulster cities).
Turning from these large cities to areas of northern England which saw an explosion of support for racial nationalism more than twenty years ago, but where the nationalist surge lasted for about a decade at most, the Census suggests that we should not be too pessimistic.
Or put another way, the ‘Great Replacement’ is not yet an excuse for political cowardice, apathy or fatalism.
The political reality is that the vast expansion of the UK’s non-White population is concentrated in council wards and constituencies that we already knew – ten or twenty years ago – would not vote for racial nationalists. By contrast most of the areas that were winnable then, remain winnable now.
Admittedly a big exception to this is East London, where council seats were winnable (and in one case won) by the BNP in the 1990s but have now been conquered, again with mixed benefits for Labour. The Borough of Tower Hamlets is now only 23% White British, and even the old Millwall council ward won by the BNP’s Derek Beackon in 1992 is now only about one-third White British (due to boundary changes a precise figure cannot be obtained).
The transformation is nowhere near so dramatic in those areas of northern England where nationalists polled well post-millennium.
Take for example three cities/towns that H&D knows well: Oldham, Blackburn and Preston. All three of these remain racially divided along stark geographical/political borders, which means that numerous council wards remain winnable for a racial nationalist party that got its act together.
In Oldham the two areas that make up St James’s ward (which the BNP almost won in 2002 when H&D‘s assistant editor Peter Rushton was a leading activist in Oldham BNP) remain majority White British: Moorside & Sholver (89.1%) and Derker (80.5%). A short distance away (on the other side of the former Oldham railway station) begins one of several Asian ghetto areas where the Pakistani population approaches 80%. In other parts of Oldham, Bangladeshis similarly predominate.
But in electoral terms this is only a small problem. There are council wards such as the old Alexandra (since broken up by boundary changes), where a White ghetto was outpolled by an Asian ghetto, but most wards are either no-go areas for White nationalists, or else remain overwhelmingly White and winnable. Overall, Oldham remains 65% White British, and its Asians are divided (often bitterly) between 13.5% Pakistanis and 9% Bangladeshis, with another 5% being some form of African, Caribbean or other blacks / half-castes.
Racial nationalist parties have not been defeated by demographics, but by our own failures.
Turning to Blackburn, where H&D editor Mark Cotterill won a council seat in 2006, there is a similar picture of stark racial-political division. Mark’s old ward Meadowhead remains 91% White British, and most of the old Mill Hill ward won by the BNP in 2002 is similarly 85%-90% White British, though with some Asian encroachment across the ward boundary. Looking at the entire borough, Blackburn with Darwen overall is only 57% White British, but this reflects the increasing Asian domination of their ghetto areas. As in Oldham this represents no practical political change in terms of winnable seats for racial nationalists.
And finally looking at Preston, where the H&D office is based, we can see the practical political options that still exist for our movement. These options can be complicated by racial realities but are not fatally compromised by them.
Preston’s Census figures overall are quite similar to Oldham’s: 66% White British – though Preston’s Asians define themselves as 13% Indian, 5% Pakistani, and only 0.5% Bangladeshi.
The Ribbleton ward of Preston City Council, which our editor has contested several times, is still 74.5% White British. Things got complicated (as explained at the time in H&D) during the 2021 Lancashire County Council elections, where the relevant county council division combined Ribbleton with Frenchwood & Fishwick, which is only 37% White British, and about half of which is an Asian ghetto.
So Mark achieved one of the best nationalist results in England at city council level, but the simultaneous county council result was never going to be as strong.
In these boroughs – Oldham, Blackburn with Darwen, and Preston – electoral campaigning requires local knowledge. Often leafletting literally stops at a certain point where the ethnic make-up of a street visibly changes.
But the 2021 Census doesn’t really change any of this electoral reality.
As Cassius tells Brutus in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar: The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, But in ourselves, that we are underlings.
The fault in ourselves as nationalists twenty years ago was that most of the movement placed its faith in a charlatan, Nick Griffin, who destroyed any hope that the BNP had of building effective branches in the racial battlegrounds of northern England.
In the 2020s nationalists ought to be recovering from the self-inflicted damage of the Griffin era, but instead much of the movement has succumbed to a cult mentality that induces pessimism, and divides us from the vast majority of potential sympathisers.
A fatal attraction to crank conspiracy theories – and latterly adherence to the Moscow despot Putin and the Asiatic mysticism of Aleksandr Dugin – risks discrediting UK nationalism for a generation.
The UK Census results ought to sober up our deluded movement. It’s not too late, but within the next decade or two we must build a credible resistance and a White political renaissance. Scrap the cultism, build a serious movement, and start to win.
Happy St Andrew’s Day
H&D wishes all our Scottish and Ulster-Scots readers, a very happy St Andrew’s Day.
William Macleod, a former BNP member, writes from Newry, County Down:
In case you don’t know, St Andrew’s Day is held every 30th November, and is celebrated not just in Scotland, but by Scottish and Ulster-Scots folk all around the world.
In the early 1600s, Sir James Hamilton instituted a two-day Fair celebrating the occasion at Killyleagh, where he had his seat; the Belfast Benevolent Society of St Andrew has been providing philanthropic help to those in need for over 150 years; and St Andrew’s Parish Church in Glencairn, the historic seat of the Cunningham family in Belfast, was opened on St Andrew’s Day in 1971.
The historical Andrew was one of Jesus’ Apostles and was the brother of Peter. They were fishermen in Galilee (now part of northern Israel) and when Jesus approached them on the shore he said, “Come with me and I will make you fishers of men”.
After the Crucifixion of Jesus, Andrew continued to spread the Gospel message, but eventually he too was arrested, tried, found guilty and crucified, in the Greek city of Patras, around AD60.
St Andrew is traditionally held to have been martyred on a large X-shaped cross – which he asked his captors for – because he felt he was unworthy to be crucified on a “normal” cross in the same manner as Jesus was 27 years earlier.
So how did it come about that one of the Apostles, who lived and died in the Near East and never travelled anywhere near to Britain, became Patron Saint of Scotland.
According to Scottish tradition, the answer lies in a battle fought close by the East Lothian village of Athelstaneford in the Dark Ages.
An army of Picts under King Angus, with support from a contingent of Scots from Dalriada (the kingdom encompassing north-east Ulster and western Scotland), was invading Lothian (at that time still Northumbrian territory) and found themselves surrounded by a large force of Saxons led by Athelstan.
Fearing imminent defeat, Angus led prayers for deliverance and was rewarded by seeing a cloud formation of a white saltire (the diagonal cross on which St Andrew was martyred) against the blue sky.
King Angus vowed that if, with the saint’s help, he gained victory then Andrew would thereafter be the patron saint of Scotland. The Scots won and Andrew became Scotland’s saint, while his cross, white on a blue background became Scotland’s new flag.
The Saltire, as it is known, is believed to be the oldest national flag in Europe.
The story of the Battle of Athelstaneford and its legendary link to St Andrew and Scotland’s flag is told at the Parish Kirk in the East Lothian village. A monument telling the story of the Saltire flag was erected there in 1965.
It includes a battle scene, carved in granite, showing the two armies facing each other between the St Andrew’s Cross in the sky. A Saltire is permanently flown from the flagstaff beside the monument.
In 1996, a doocot (Scots for dovecote) behind the kirk, first built in 1583, was restored and converted into the Flag Heritage Centre, where visitors can enjoy a short audio-visual presentation of the traditional origins of Scotland’s flag. An adjacent viewpoint affords views over the reputed battlefield. If you enjoy history and are ever in the area, it is well worth a visit.
When I was living in Glasgow during the 1980s and ’90s, I attended a number of St Andrew’s Day Rallies organised by the British National Party (BNP) and heard both John Tyndall and Richard Edmonds speak a couple of times. They were good days and hope it’s not too long in the future before nationalists (and I mean true racial-nationalists not the phoney nationalists of the SNP, who are a really sad and pathetic bunch) can again reclaim St Andrew’s Day, and the Saltire flag for the real Scots.
Alan James (Osred) 1952-2022
We were saddened to learn of the death of our friend and comrade Alan James (known to many by his pen-name Osred) on Monday 4th April, after an extended illness, aged 69.
Born in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Osred had a long and distinguished career in Nationalist politics and the furtherance of the Odinist Faith in his native England and in his permanent home in Melbourne, Australia.
He was a supporter of and contributor to Heritage and Destiny. He was a skilled scholar, writer and poet. Our sympathies are with his widow Margaret, his three sons, grandson and their families. A full obituary will appear in a forthcoming issue of Heritage and Destiny.
Latest woke insanity sees Shakespeare’s theatre issue ‘anti-semitism’ warning
In the latest pathetic display of woke ‘sensitivity’, Shakespeare’s Globe has issued a warning to theatre-goers that The Merchant of Venice – currently being staged by candlelight at the Globe’s Sam Wanamaker Playhouse – “contains antisemitism, colourism, and racism”.
We aren’t quite sure what “colourism” means, but we can be sure it isn’t an apology for the Globe having cast two black men and one Asian women among characters meant to portray 16th century Venetians.
As for “anti-semitism” – can anyone planning to see The Merchant of Venice really be unaware that its central character – the moneylender Shylock – is perhaps the most archetypal Jewish villain in literary history?
If the Globe were really concerned about whether the Shylock image is fair or not, then instead of this pathetic cringe perhaps they would care to sponsor a conference or study day to accompany the production? H&D would be very happy to provide a speaker.
For example we could discuss two statements by one of the greatest figures in British political history, Ernest Bevin, who founded Britain’s largest trade union, took charge of labour relations in Churchill’s government during the Second World War, and was Foreign Secretary for almost six years after the war, when he was the co-architect of NATO.
Bevin told the Trade Union Congress during the 1931 economic crisis: “It is a game of Shylock versus the people, with Shylock getting the pound of flesh every time.”
And at an emergency Cabinet meeting soon after the Second World War, by which time war debt had tightened Shylock’s grip. Bevin said in Cabinet (!) that “we [the British government and by extension the British people] are in Shylock’s hands”. This observation was so incendiary that it was not typed into the official Cabinet minutes, but appears in the handwritten notes of that meeting taken by a senior civil servant.
This was at a time when British soldiers and police were fighting Jewish terrorists in Palestine, and although it took almost three years, ‘American’ pressure eventually forced the British government into acquiescence in the creation of Israel in 1948.
So if the Globe really wants to discuss the question of ‘anti-semitism’ and Shylock in a British context, let’s start with Ernest Bevin and discuss whether his views reflected ‘racism’ or reality.
Or is the Globe interested only in woke posturing rather than scholarship?
Solsticial Greetings
Today is the Winter Solstice – one of the most important days in the calendar for our European ancestors.
While few H&D readers today practise the pagan faith of our ancestors, we are all – by virtue of our race – part of their tradition to some degree.
Even from an entirely non-religious perspective, in Darwinian scientific terms, our evolution as Europeans was shaped by our ancestors’ struggle against the harsh elements of a European winter.
The Solstice was central to that struggle. From now on, our ancestors knew that the darkest days were over – that however bleak some days might seem, life-giving sun was returning.
Almost exactly one year ago – on December 23rd 2020 – racial nationalism experienced a very bleak day, with the death of our comrade Richard Edmonds. This year has seen further losses for our movement: Mrs Margaret Ballard, our oldest subscriber aged over 100; John Bean and Tom Callow, both in their 90s; Wolfgang Fröhlich at 70; but also two far younger comrades – Ian Carser (53) and Henry Hafenmayer (48).
Just as the Solstice literally represents the death of the old year and the birth of the new, so it symbolises renewal and hope in the face of adversity. We lost old comrades during the last 12 months, but we gained new ones, and have good reason to be confident in the future of our race and civilisation.
At this time of year the Romans celebrated the festival of Sol Invictus, the “Unconquered Sun”. Whatever our religion – even if we have no religion in the usual sense – we celebrate today’s Solstice in the confidence that just as that Unconquerable Sun will return, so our Unconquerable Race and Civilisation will prevail over darkness and despair.
WAHHABIST KNIFE ATTACK IN AUCKLAND –LIBERAL CANT UNABATED
Kerry Bolton reports from New Zealand
The Auckland mall knife attack at Countdown, New Lynn, on 3 September that felled seven people, three in a critical condition, has been undertaken by a Muslim from Sri Lanka. He is said to have been a known supporter of ISIS, which adheres to Wahhabism.
The jihadists are a minority within Sunni Islam– Wahhabists backed by the USA’s Saudi and Emirate allies. Shi’a and certain Sunni Imam and scholars are friends and allies of the Right (see: Arash Najaf-Zadeh, The European New Right – A Shi’a Response, London, 2019) and some seminal Rightist thinkers, such as Claudio Mutti, are Muslim converts. Iran is the citadel of Shi’a, yet the primary target for elimination by the USA.
Islamophobia is instigated by influential and wealthy pro-Israeli neocons; they fund those such as Geert Wilders and Tommy Robinson who oppose Islam because it is in conflict with Western Enlightenment Liberalism. But is the defence of the latter the Right’s cause? Hardly. Traditional Islam and the Dissident-Right are in accord on that.
But the Right serves as a red-herring. You will not get Patrick Gower or Paul Spoonley exposing the actual promoters of Islamophobia. (See: Kerry Bolton, ‘Islamophobia: Trojan Horse Amidst the Right’, Arktos Journal; and Kerry Bolton, Zionism, Islam & the West, London, 2018 – reviewed in H&D Issue 92).
What we have is the utter cant and hypocrisy that have been the instant response from Prime Minister Ardern. She states with emphasis that this individual (‘S’) is not representative of a faith or an ethnic community, and that ‘nobody supports his ideas’.
Ardern cries of Islam in regard to the attack: ‘it is not them; it is not them’. Imams will follow: ‘it is not us’.
Nonetheless, what has been the ongoing response of Ardern, the Left, media, Gower, Spoonley, police, SIS, ‘experts’, the Islamic Federation, and politicians in the aftermath of Tarrant? – To vilify the entirety of the so-called ‘far right’; to describe the Right per se as intrinsically ‘white supremacist’ and violent. To seek to criminalise and demonise the ‘Right’.
Yet the fact remains that despite extensive searching by Gower, Spoonley, SIS, police, and antifa groups, the only terrorist training network ever found in New Zealand has been that of the psycho-left ‘peace activists’ practising throwing Molotov cocktails with Maori in the Ureweras.
It is not widely realised that just a year prior to the Tarrant lunacy, a terrorist action was narrowly averted – a Muslim youth had planned to take a car and randomly drive into infidels in Christchurch, then proceed with a knifing spree. He was given a jolly good wrist-slapping and put into the care of the Linwood Mosque. A media report stated at the time:
“A Kiwi teenager radicalised online planned to ram a car into a group of people in Christchurch and then stab them
“The teenager wrote a goodbye note to his mother, then started a violent incident, but has since told a psychologist when it began he ‘decided not to hurt anybody because he did not have the means to kill enough people’, Crown prosecutor Chris Lange told the Christchurch District Court at sentencing on Thursday.
“‘The reason no-one was hurt was that he did not have access to knives,’ Lange said. But there was significant premeditation and hostility towards non-Muslims.
“After his arrest, the youth told police he was angry and had ‘done it for Allah’. He had left school at age 15, become socially isolated, and converted to Islam.
“The court has adopted a rehabilitative approach to the teen’s sentencing, with Judge Stephen O’Driscoll releasing him on intensive supervision with a list of conditions and a warning that if he breaches the conditions or reoffends, he will likely be sent to prison.
“Among the conditions – which will apply for two years while the judge monitors his progress – is counselling by a member of the local Muslim community.” (see ‘Kiwi teenager radicalised online planned mass killing in Christchurch “for Allah’”‘, Stuff, 16 February 2018).
Hazim Arafeh, president of the Islamic Federation, said at the time: ‘It’s easier to recruit people who are misinformed about Islam. If people wanted to know about the real Islam they could approach anyone at mosques around the country’ (Ibid.). To which it could have been said if given the opportunity somewhere amidst the cynically manipulated hysteria in the aftermath of Tarrant: ‘It’s easier to recruit people who are misinformed about the Right…’ I could go as far as to suggest that had Tarrant read my book Zionism, Islam and the West, published the year previously, and translated into Arabic, with an introduction by a Muslim scholar, he might not have proceeded to act on the Islamophobic bilge that originates from pro-Zionist neocons.
Yet this same Islamic Federation (founded by anti-Communist Albanian refugees, but now jumping aboard the same bandwagon with Communists) prattles in its submissions to parliament that the Right is synonymous with ‘terrorism’; that it is ‘white supremacist’. It even cites Zionist sources such as the Anti-Defamation League.
What irony that this attack comes just after another of Patrick Gower’s inane attempts (‘On Hate’) to show the existence of what really does not exist – a ‘white supremacist terrorist threat’. Will Gower present an ‘On Hate’ TV special in regard to Wahhabism in New Zealand? Will Spoonley warn of a lurking threat? Rather, what we will hear is nothing other than apologia that ‘this is not Islam’. Indeed it is not, but the stench of hypocrisy will rise like excreted putrescence from Ardern and the rest, lest the multiculturalism become suspect.
We are assured by Ardern that ‘S’ was a ‘lone wolf’; hence there is no further danger to the public. Yet Tarrant was a ‘lone wolf’, but two years later and the Establishment is still trying to keep the public in a state of paranoid tension in regard to mythic ‘white supremacist terror cells’.
Let the Right maintain its composure and discipline, and leave it to the Left, politicians, journalists, academics, and whatever political faction it is that seems to have taken over the Islamic Federation in recent years, to peddle their cant… This is Wahhabism; not Islam per se, any more than Tarrant was ‘the Right’. But now that ‘the shoe is on the other foot’ we will see the double-standards come quick and fast.
Civic nationalism crashes to defeat in Yorkshire by-election
Parts of the Batley & Spen constituency in West Yorkshire were among the strongest racial nationalist areas in Britain during the first decade of the 21st century. The BNP’s David Exley won the mainly White working-class Heckmondwike ward at a by-election in August 2003 – one of a series of BNP victories either side of the Pennines, triggered by the Oldham riots of May 2001. Cllr Exley retained his seat in 2004 and a second Heckmondwike councillor was gained in 2005. Even as late as 2010 when the local BNP fought its last campaign, they managed 17.6%.
Admittedly this is just one of the six wards that make up Batley & Spen, but the party also polled very well elsewhere in the constituency in the 2000s, including the Tory wards Liversedge & Gomersal and Birstall & Birkenshaw. Any parliamentary by-election in Batley & Spen should have been (and should still be) good news for any serious pro-White nationalist party.
Yet when such a by-election first occurred here, it was in dramatic circumstances that made racial nationalist campaigning appear distasteful. A week before the Brexit referendum in June 2016, Batley & Spen’s Labour MP Jo Cox was murdered by a deranged Heckmondwike resident who was quickly labelled a ‘far right terrorist’ by the media. Despite living in Heckmondwike, Thomas Mair had no connection whatever with the BNP and was totally unknown to any other British nationalists, apart from the eccentric Alan Harvey (a former NF member long resident in South Africa) to whose newsletter South African Patriot Mair subscribed.
The other mainstream parties gave Labour a clear run in the ensuing by-election held in October 2016 and Labour’s Tracy Brabin won a majority of more than 16,000, with the civic nationalist English Democrats in second place on 4.8% and a much-diminished BNP third on 2.7%.
Reaction to Jo Cox’s murder only briefly disguised an anti-Labour trend among White voters. As in neighbouring Dewsbury, many White voters have been repelled by what they see as an Asian takeover of the local Labour party and by policies of the Asian Labour-led Kirklees council. To some extent these voters (using Brexit as a proxy issue for unmentionable racial concerns) have drifted to the Tories in recent elections. Even though UKIP and the Brexit Party failed to make much progress here, a former UKIP activist formed a populist movement called the Heavy Woollen Independents (a reference to the former staple industry of this area) who polled 12.2% at the 2019 general election, leaving Labour even more dependent on the presumed loyalty of Asian voters, concentrated in the Batley part of the constituency.
So when Tracy Brabin won the inaugural mayoral election for West Yorkshire in May this year, causing a second Batley & Spen parliamentary by-election in five years, one can understand eyes lighting up across various populist and broadly nationalist movements. All the more so because of a mini-scandal that pushed Batley into nationwide headlines in March this year, when a teacher at Batley Grammar School was briefly suspended for showing his pupils a cartoon of the Prophet Mohammed.
A crowded ballot paper of sixteen candidates for the by-election – held on July 1st – included several from the spectrum of pro-Brexit, populist, Islam-obsessed or broadly civic nationalism. Perhaps the best known to H&D readers were Anne-Marie Waters – the multiracialist but Islam-obsessed leader of the For Britain Movement, whose party includes several experienced racial nationalists even though its leader and her coterie are sincerely ‘anti-racist’; and Jayda Fransen, the anti-Islam campaigner and former deputy leader of Britain First who is nominal leader of Jim Dowson’s donation-hunting enterprise that calls itself the British Freedom Party (even though it isn’t and perhaps never will be a registered political party – so Ms Fransen had to stand as an Independent).
At the start of her campaign Ms Waters publicised an endorsement from ‘Tommy Robinson’, an ultra-Zionist career criminal who founded the English Defence League. Perhaps she hoped For Britain could become the political wing of the now defunct EDL – if so it was a foolish ambition.
The results declared early on the morning of July 2nd told their own story. Ms Waters finished twelfth of sixteen candidates with 97 votes (0.3%), while Ms Fransen was fifteenth with 50 votes (0.1%). This was little short of a disaster for civic, Islam-obsessed nationalism – especially since unlike Ms Fransen and her paymaster Dowson, Ms Waters and For Britain had attempted to fight a serious campaign, with seasoned political veterans including Eddy Butler and his wife Sue travelling from Essex, and former BNP activist Gary Bergin travelling from the Wirral.
Nor can they point to any other candidate from the same spectrum having cornered the White vote, as this entire spectrum polled poorly. The English Democrats (who at least had a relatively local candidate) fared best of a bad bunch with 207 votes (0.5%), followed by UKIP on 0.4%, the anti-lockdown Freedom Alliance on 0.3%, the SDP (once a centrist party but now pro-Brexit populists) on 0.1% a fraction ahead of Ms Fransen, and the ex-UKIP splinter Heritage Party (absolutely no connection to H&D!) polling even worse than Ms Fransen with a truly microscopic 0.05%.
Unlike the May local elections covered in Issue 102, one cannot explain these results in terms of a resurgent Tory Party taking the votes of pro-Brexit, racially conscious Whites. Contrary to expectations, the Tory vote actually fell here compared to 2019, and despite maverick charlatan George Galloway taking most of the Muslim vote, Labour managed to hold the seat, confounding pundits and bookmakers’ odds. The Tory campaign in the final few days was handicapped by the scandal that forced health minister Matt Hancock to resign last weekend, but almost every observer assumed this would merely reduce the size of an expected Tory victory.
I’m writing this article within hours of the result, so this is very much an instant analysis, but these are some of the lessons I think we can draw from what was surely the most significant by-election in years for our broadly-defined movement.
- Lunatic acts of political violence are a disaster for every wing of our movement, since even the most moderate civic nationalists are tarred by association in the minds of many potentially sympathetic voters. I’ve no doubt that many racially conscious folk cast their votes for Labour’s Kim Leadbeater because she is the sister of murdered MP Jo Cox.
- Outside Northern Ireland and some Scottish islands, very few Whites in the UK now define their politics in religious terms – and they regard those who do as a bit mad. No offence to those H&D readers who are religious believers and for whom this is the centre of their lives, but we should not fool ourselves about faith’s lack of electoral impact. Even racially conscious voters do not respond well to a campaign that is ‘over the top’ in shrill references to Islam. We can imply such things in sensibly worded racial nationalist leaflets, but hysterical ‘Islamophobia’ is not a vote-winner.
- George Galloway won most of the Muslim vote in Batley by campaigning on issues related to Palestine and Kashmir; but there is no equivalent bonus to be won among White voters by wrapping oneself in the Israeli flag. Aggressive Zionism is not a vote-winner among non-Jewish Britons, neither does it serve as an alibi for ‘racism’ as some former BNP veteran campaigners seem to believe.
- While Kim Leadbeater undoubtedly lost many Muslim votes because she is a lesbian (in addition to other factors depressing the Asian Labour vote), and Anne-Marie Waters perhaps lost a few socially conservative White voters for the same reason, homosexuality is no longer an issue for the vast majority of White voters, though the ‘trans’ nonsense is another matter.
- There continues to be no electoral benefit in campaigning against the government’s handling of the pandemic. Several parties focused on anti-lockdown policies all polled very poorly, especially the one for whom Covid-scepticism is its raison d’être, the Freedom Alliance whose candidate attracted only 100 votes (0.3%).
- Brexit’s electoral relevance is at last fading, and the Tory party’s hold over sections of the White working class is a lot weaker than many pundits have assumed. It’s Hartlepool (the ultra-Brexity constituency that fell to the Tories by a big majority two months ago) that’s the exceptional ‘outlier’; there are far more constituencies broadly similar to Batley & Spen, including neighbouring Dewsbury, presently held by the Tories.
- Kim Leadbeater won mainly due to White voters retaining (or returning to) traditional Labour loyalties. She lost most of the Muslim vote to George Galloway. In the probably unlikely event that Galloway can recruit high quality Muslim candidates to his new ‘Workers Party’, Labour might have difficulties in some other seats, but it’s more likely that they will just have problems turning out their Muslim voters after Keir Starmer’s shift of Labour policy away from hardline anti-Zionism. Most especially the modern left’s obsession with issues such as ‘trans rights’ will be a handicap in Muslim areas across Britain.
- The many and various consequences of multiracialism continue to provide rich electoral potential for racial nationalists, if and when we get our own act together. Many For Britain activists logically belong in the same party as British Democrats leader Dr Jim Lewthwaite and Patriotic Alternative leaders Mark Collett and Laura Towler, as well as many other movement activists and veterans of the old BNP who are (temporarily?) in political retirement.
All of these questions and more will be the background to a discussion of nationalist strategy post-Brexit and post-Covid. We look forward to hearing readers’ views in forthcoming editions of H&D.
