Civic nationalism crashes to defeat in Yorkshire by-election

For Britain Movement leader Anne-Marie Waters leafleting in Batley & Spen

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.

David Exley (above centre) congratulated by his BNP colleague Nick Cass after he won the 2003 Heckmondwike by-election

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.

Former Batley & Spen MP Jo Cox, who was murdered in 2016

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.

Anne-Marie Waters outside Batley Grammar School during the campaign, where she attempted to make an issue out of the school’s suspension of one of its teachers for showing pupils a cartoon of the Prophet Mohammed

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.

The by-election result declared at 5.20 am. Candidates on stage include Anne-Marie Waters (second left); Labour winner Kim Leadbeater (with red rosette next to returning officer, centre); and George Galloway (far right). Jayda Fransen is not present, since she and Jim Dowson again fought no real campaign, in another cynical betrayal of British Freedom Party donors.

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.

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