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?”

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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!

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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.

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.

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.

Tory slump continues: civic nationalists still struggling for relevance

Yesterday’s parliamentary by-elections showed Rishi Sunak’s Conservative government heading for a 1997-style landslide defeat. Despite this Tory collapse, civic nationalist parties are nowhere near the level of support that they enjoyed in the pre-Brexit era.

Each of the by-elections was in a very White constituency, so Labour’s victories owed nothing to ethnic minority support. Mid Bedfordshire is a very affluent collection of villages and small towns, and has never previously elected a Labour MP. Tamworth is more mixed socially (though not racially), with far more working-class voters, and was strongly pro-Brexit. Under its earlier name SE Staffordshire, but with similar boundaries, it fell to Labour at a by-election in 1996 and in the Blair landslide a year later, but at other times has been solidly Tory.

Apart from the Tories, the biggest losers were the United Kingdom Independence Party. UKIP polled 18.5% in Tamworth at the pre-Brexit general election in 2015, but yesterday UKIP candidate Robert Bilcliff managed only 1.7%.

The Heritage Party – a UKIP splinter group that in recent years has specialised in peddling conspiracy theories and anti-vaccination campaigns – had an even more embarrassing result in Mid Bedfordshire, where Heritage candidate Alberto Thomas polled only 0.2%. Just slightly ahead of Mr Thomas with 0.3% was Antonio Vitiello for the English Democrats (a party that has just reached an electoral pact with UKIP).

After these results there are bound to be serious questions as to whether UKIP, the Heritage Party or the English Democrats have any future in electoral politics. The EDs do at least have a rationale for continued existence, as they have the distinctive policy of campaigning for an English Parliament.

The much better-funded Reform UK again proved itself to be (by far) the strongest of the civic nationalist parties, and in Tamworth their candidate Ian Cooper managed to save his deposit, the first Reform UK candidate to achieve this since party leader Richard Tice almost two years ago in Old Bexley & Sidcup.

Mr Cooper polled 5.4% and finished in third place, at last breaking his party’s miserable run of twelve lost deposits.

But it’s important to recognise the following factors:

• Tamworth was a very strongly pro-Brexit constituency;
• The circumstances of this by-election, caused by the resignation of a Tory MP who was found to have made repeated homosexual assaults while drunk, were obviously ideal for a right-of-centre, ‘protest vote’ party.
• The Conservative vote collapsed, but lifelong Tories chose to stay at home and were not inspired by Reform UK’s lukewarm civic nationalism.
• A significant number of voters would have been confused by the Reform UK candidate having the same surname as the Tory candidate – previous research has shown that this type of confusion is always a factor (though only a minor one) when there are two candidates on the ballot paper with the same surname.

It’s not unduly cynical to point out that in each of yesterday’s by-elections, Reform UK just happened to select candidates who had the same name as one of the rival candidates from a major party. In Mid Bedfordshire, Reform UK’s Dave Holland lost his deposit but managed 3.6%, no doubt helped slightly by the non-coincidence that the Liberal Democrat candidate was named Emma Holland-Lindsay.

It’s a shame that Reform UK is so bereft of serious policies and serious ideological inspiration that it resorts to these shabby tricks, but even with the benefit of such ploys it’s becoming obvious that Richard Tice’s party is on the road to nowhere. Reform UK is at most a minor irritant costing the Tories a few hundred votes and will perhaps hand a few extra seats to Labour as Keir Starmer heads for Downing Street next year, but the party has nothing more to offer.

One much smaller party will be reasonably satisfied with their result. Britain First took a big gamble in choosing to stand in Tamworth where their candidate – deputy party leader Ashlea Simon – has no local connections. However, Ms Simon and party leader Paul Golding perceived that Tamworth is strongly pro-Brexit and felt that especially the White working-class section of its electorate might prove receptive to Britain First’s message.

After carrying out a serious and energetic campaign in Tamworth, Ms Simon polled 2.3% and finished in fourth place (ahead of the Greens and Liberal Democrats).

H&D is not especially sympathetic to Britain First’s brand of civic nationalism, with its intense focus on hostility to Islam and its insistence on multi-racialism. But we can see that while this is far from an outstanding result, it is much better than the three previous large scale BF campaigns, at the Rochester & Strood and Wakefield by-elections, and the 2016 London mayoral election.

In short, this was not a great result for Ms Simon, but certainly not a disaster – bearing in mind that the party has far less resources than Reform UK and does not enjoy the regular hype on GB News that is still given to Tice’s party.

With the BNP moribund, the NF barely functioning as an electoral party, neither PA nor the Homeland Party yet being registered, and the British Democrats yet to take off as a significant force at the ballot box, Mr Golding and Ms Simon will be regarded by some H&D readers as the next best thing to having a real racial nationalist party.

However, for some of us the lesson of this week’s by-elections is that all forms of civic nationalism are failing – not only failing to offer principled opposition to the zeitgeist, but also failing in their own terms at even the shabbiest and most ‘pragmatic’ level of politics.

The 4.6% polled at yesterday’s Mid Bedfordshire by-election by a local parish councillor standing as an independent parliamentary candidate – and the low turnouts in both constituencies (especially Tamworth) – show the extent of public disillusionment with the mainstream parties. Some form of nationalist party ought to be capable of getting its act together and mobilising this disillusionment, even with only a fraction of the funds that have been wasted on UKIP, Reform UK and various pro-Brexit splinter parties.

Will Labour save the Union?!?

A few minutes ago Labour won a huge victory in the Rutherglen & Hamilton West parliamentary by-election, caused by a successful recall petition against the disgraced SNP MP Margaret Ferrier, who had breached pandemic regulations.

This is a constituency on the outskirts of Glasgow, and was one of many that swung heavily to the SNP in 2015. Labour briefly took it back with a tiny majority in 2017, before losing again to the SNP in 2019.

Given the circumstances of the previous MP’s departure, no-one was surprised by Labour’s win, but what was remarkable was its scale: a swing of more than 20%, with Labour taking 58.6% of the vote (up from 34.5% four years ago).

With the collapse in the Conservative Party’s vote – losing their deposit on only 3.9% after polling 15% here in 2019 – it’s perhaps surprising that Reform UK made no impact at all, taking only 1.3% (almost identical to the UKIP vote in 2019). This was the second bad result in 24 hours for Reform UK: they managed only 6.3% in a local council by-election in Tamworth, where their candidate is also standing in the forthcoming Tamworth parliamentary by-election and there has been intense activity in recent weeks promoting him. UKIP also fielded their parliamentary candidate in this local Tamworth by-election and polled only 1.6%.

Back in Rutherglen, Niall Fraser from the Scottish Family Party fought an energetic campaign, opposing the absurd wokeness of the SNP and Labour on gender issues, but took only 319 votes (1.0%).

Perhaps the most significant aspect of this by-election result is that it is yet another signal of the end of SNP hegemony. Until the last year or two, many H&D readers might have been excused for being pessimistic about the future of the Union. But the SNP’s many crises look as though they might prove terminal for the cause of Scottish ‘independence’.

Another hopeful sign this week was a statement by Labour’s leader Sir Keir Starmer that he could not envisage circumstances where he would call a referendum in Northern Ireland on the future of the Union.

Of course H&D will continue to oppose Starmer and his party on almost all of their policies, and we can expect that (like the Tories) Labour will pursue policies that betray Ulster by stealth.

But that doesn’t stop us welcoming the total defeat of Jeremy Corbyn and his gang of IRA sympathisers, who had they somehow entered Downing Street would have betrayed Ulster to the IRA as well as abandoning our fellow Europeans to Vladimir Putin’s horde of barbarians.

The SNP are a less gruesome band of traitors, but their total defeat is again something to celebrate. One small step towards the renewal of the United Kingdom, which will of course also require the defeat of the other old gang parties!

Adam Walker stays on as BNP Chairman for four more years

Those with copies of the British National Party constitution will know that there is meant to be an election for Party Chairman every four years. The last “election” – which Adam Walker won by default (as nobody else stood) – was in July 2019.

So you might have thought there would have been another election this month, as their constitution states that nominations have to be open and be prominently published on the BNP website for one week from the last Monday in June. However, those who regularly check the BNP’s dormant website will note that this did not happen.

The constitution then goes on to say that nominations close on the first Monday of July. Well we are at the end of July now, and that did not happen either!

The BNP’s website is very rarely – once a month at best – updated now, since their former webmaster quit a few years ago to file a legal suit (which failed) against Adam Walker through the civil courts. The front page is still offering BNP members (are there any left now?) support during the Covid 19 pandemic of 2020-2021. It also wishes them a “Happy St George’s Day” – from back in April, and of course asks them to donate and leave money to them in their wills!

The BNP has long since given up on political campaigning and the only point in its continued existence is to wait for two more (that we know of) legacies from elderly supporters who made their wills back in the days when the BNP was still a credible party. One member has bequeathed them their house in Greater London, which will now be worth well over one million pounds, and another in the North East of England has left them half a million from their bank account.

UKIP has now reached the BNP stage where the party only continues to exist in the expectation of legacies. But at least UKIP (unlike the BNP) are honest enough to make some sort of political effort rather than sitting waiting for the cash to roll in. The last time the BNP fought a Parliamentary election was back in December 2019.

Hindu tribal vote saves Tories in Uxbridge: civic nationalists fail again

On a generally disastrous night for Rishi Sunak’s Conservative Party, the Prime Minister was saved by his fellow Hindus from what would otherwise have been a historic hat-trick of defeats.

Two safe Tory seats were lost on massive swings – the rural West Country constituency Somerton & Frome falling to the Liberal Democrats, and the previously ultra-Tory North Yorkshire constituency of Selby & Ainsty electing a Labour MP.

But Uxbridge & South Ruislip in North West London – which should have been a much easier target for Labour – narrowly stayed Tory with a wafer-thin majority of 495 votes.

With good reason, most of the media will focus on the London Mayor’s unpopular ‘Ulez’ policy – the extension of the Ultra Low Emission Zone that imposes a fee on drivers of the most polluting vehicles. The Conservative campaign in Uxbridge focused almost entirely on this issue, even though in principle Ulez was first agreed by the Conservative London Mayor Boris Johnson in 2015. No doubt the Tories were also helped by their candidate being a local, middle-aged family man; whereas Labour brought in a young homosexual candidate from Camden (a very different part of London). However we should also note that another young homosexual candidate won a historic victory for Labour on the same day in Selby & Ainsty.

But the media will ignore another vital factor. Uxbridge & South Ruislip is 8.6% Hindu (almost five times the national average of 1.8%). Evidence from local elections since Sunak became leader has shown that Hindus have swung heavily to the Tories (evidently for tribal reasons), and many Tories have close ties to the Hindu fundamentalist government of Indian prime minister Narendra Modi. The problem for Sunak and his party is that there are not that many constituencies in the UK where Hindus are a significant electoral force. England is 6.7% Muslim but only 1.8% Hindu.

This week’s by-elections were yet another predictable disaster for civic nationalism. UKIP (now a moribund shadow of the party that won 24 European parliamentary seats and forced David Cameron to promise a Brexit referendum) fought two of the three, and polled joke votes even by their standards. UKIP deputy leader Rebecca Jane took only 61 votes (0.2%) in Uxbridge, and might be wishing she was back in one of her old roles as ‘reality TV’ contestant and Marilyn Monroe impersonator. Peter Richardson in Somerton & Frome fared only slightly better with 0.7%.

By far the biggest name in civic nationalism, actor Laurence Fox, stood in Uxbridge for his Reclaim party which is little more than a one-man band, but well-financed. His 714 votes (2.3%) were an improvement on the 1% taken by his former deputy Martin Daubney in Reclaim’s previous by-election effort (North Shropshire in December 2021), but Fox’s donors must be starting to wonder whether this is the best use of their cash.

The anti-vaccination campaigner Piers Corbyn (brother of former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn) also stood in Uxbridge but polled only 101 votes (0.3%): perhaps even his strongest supporters will now wake up to the fact that there is absolutely no electoral potential in peddling conspiracy theories about the pandemic.

In Somerton & Frome, Reform UK (which is clearly the largest successor party to UKIP on the civic nationalist scene, but equally clearly is failing to make any serious headway) lost yet another deposit, polling 1,303 votes (3.4%).

Similarly in Selby & Ainsty, Reform UK took only 1,332 votes (3.7%), beaten not only by the Greens but by the regionalist Yorkshire Party. Another ex-UKIP splinter party, the Heritage Party (founded by half-Jamaican anti-vaccination campaigner David Kurten) managed just 162 votes (0.5%).

These were the ninth and tenth successive Reform UK lost deposits in parliamentary by-elections: a stark contrast to some national opinion polls and the regular hyping of the party by Nigel Farage and his friends at GB News.

The truth is that the ‘free market’ capitalist ideology that underpins both Reform UK and the Tories offers no solution to the UK’s immigration crisis and related crises in housing and transport policy.

The challenge for any racial nationalist party that gets its act together to fill the UK’s political vacuum will be to link London’s chronic overcrowding to the transport issue. Crude populist gestures against the ‘Ulez’ policy won’t suffice. Nationalists have to reclaim the green agenda as our own, not reject it – but we need to explain that a green agenda means ending the mass immigration, multiculti madness.

July by-elections confirm civic nationalist chaos

Three parliamentary by-elections being held on 20th July confirm the chaotic state of civic nationalism in the post-Brexit era, but also reflect the absence of racial nationalism from the electoral arena.

Selby & Ainsty has thirteen candidates, including two parties that emerged from the wreck of UKIP (Reform UK and Heritage) and the SDP (who nowadays are a pro-Brexit, socially conservative, but economically left-wing party). There are also two independents and two ‘no description’.

Unusually the environmentalist vote is also split, with a Green Party candidate but also someone from the Climate Party, which was founded last year as a conservative green party.  They are ‘right-wing’ in the sense of being pro-business and focused on the single issue of fighting climate change, rather than all the other trendy leftist policies that the Green Party now stand for.

But of course neither the Climate Party nor the Green Party recognises that mass immigration and unchecked population growth in the Third World is part of the threat to our planet’s future. Neither of these parties recognises that ecological politics, the organic food movement etc. were pioneered by German national socialists such as the Third Reich’s Minister of Food and Agriculture, Walther Darré, and British fascists such as Henry Williamson and Rolf Gardiner.

(The latter’s son – eminent Bach scholar and conductor Sir John Eliot Gardiner, who as a personal friend of King Charles III conducted some of the music at the recent Coronation – inherited his father’s interest in organic farming but not other aspects of his fascism.)

The Climate Party are also fighting the Uxbridge by-election, where their candidate is the party leader Ed Gemmell who is also a councillor in Buckinghamshire.

In Uxbridge & South Ruislip there are seventeen candidates. The interesting thing is that Reform UK are not contesting this one, and have presumably done a deal with Reclaim’s Laurence Fox – his party’s second parliamentary candidate after a disastrous debut by Fox’s then deputy Martin Daubney, who polled less than 1% at North Shropshire in 2021.

As well as Fox, the Uxbridge ballot paper includes the anti-vaxxer Piers Corbyn (brother of the former Labour leader), and UKIP’s deputy leader Rebecca Jane (aka Rebecca Jane Sutton) who has an eccentric background even by her party’s standards. She was born in Barrowford (near Pendle, Lancashire) and used to live in Burnley, where her jobs included working as a Marilyn Monroe lookalike and running a private detective agency. She has also ‘starred’ in a couple of reality TV series including Big Brother.

There are four independents, two of whom are single-issue campaigners who have changed their names to include the words ‘Anti-Ulez’ and ‘No-Ulez’ (referring to the controversial ‘Ultra Low Emission Zone’ that imposes charges on the most polluting vehicles. This was originally a Boris Johnson policy, approved in theory when he was Mayor, but Sadiq Khan was Mayor by the time it was implemented.
Others on the Uxbridge ballot paper include the SDP, Christian Peoples Alliance (whose candidate is, as usual, an African) and Rejoin EU, as well as the Climate Party mentioned above.

By comparison to the other two 20th July by-elections, Somerton & Frome has a conventional ballot paper with just eight candidates, including Reform UK and UKIP. This is the only one of the three by-elections where Nigel Farage’s new party and his old party are fighting each other.

The Mid Bedfordshire by-election date hasn’t yet been set, but I’d guess will be September or October.
And it seems possible there will be a by-election in Tamworth, because there’s a report due to be published on the homosexual Tory Chris Pincher who had to resign as deputy chief whip after a scandal that helped bring down Boris.  Pincher lost the Tory whip in July last year but has remained as an independent MP for the last 12 months while the investigation continued.

The bad news for failing Prime Minister Rishi Sunk is that both Mid Bedfordshire and Tamworth are very safe Tory seats. If his party loses either or both of these, in addition to the pretty certain defeat at Uxbridge, and the fairly likely defeats at Selby & Ainsty and Somerton & Frome, then it’s not impossible the Tories might seek another very late change of leader before next year’s General Election.

And the bad news for H&D readers is that despite the Tory collapse, Reform UK’s continuing failure, and widespread distrust of Labour – there is no sign whatsoever of even a vaguely credible movement party. In 1972 the Uxbridge by-election proved that the National Front was a serious party, and ignited that party’s most successful period during the mid-1970s. More than half a century later, this year’s Uxbridge contest is likely to prove both that civic nationalism and single issue obsessions are electorally bankrupt, and that there is a political vacuum waiting to be filled by any racial nationalist party that can get its act together on a national scale.

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

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