Civic nationalism’s last stand fails in Bexley by-election
Posted by admin978 on December 3, 2021 · Leave a Comment
The United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) changed British politics under Nigel Farage’s leadership. Despite the British electoral system preventing Farage from ever winning a Westminster seat, electoral pressure from UKIP forced Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron to hold the 2016 Brexit referendum, and Farage’s campaign skills played a large part in the narrow victory for ‘Leave’ at that referendum.
Yet UKIP never built anything like a proper infrastructure of branches and activists. Its members (indeed almost all of its councillors) were a ragbag of contrarians and cranks, without a coherent ideology beyond Euroscepticism.
Eventually UKIP split in several directions: its most anti-immigration faction (containing a few good racial nationalists but unfortunately at leadership level obsessed by Islam) created the For Britain Movement, led by Anne-Marie Waters. Multiple other splinters ensued, and as in every party split the majority of members simply gave up.
The main successor party to UKIP was the Brexit Party, what remains of that becoming Reform UK, launched by Nigel Farage (who has since given up party politics in favour of broadcasting) and now led by Farage’s ally Richard Tice.
The leader himself was Reform UK’s candidate at a parliamentary by-election yesterday in Old Bexley & Sidcup, on the outer borders of South East London. Richard Tice and his party spent a fortune on their campaign, mobilising their entire London activist base.
Moreover they were up against a weak Tory candidate and a (temporarily at least) weakened Tory Prime Minister. The constituency was strongly pro-Brexit, and the election took place right at the moment when the government’s Covid strategy, until now seen by the vast majority of voters as broadly successful, seemed to be wobbling.
Yet Reform UK’s last stand fizzled out. At least they avoided the sort of joke vote that their handful of local candidates have polled. Tice saved his deposit and finished in third place: but it was a very distant third place indeed, 6.6% (1,432 votes). The seat stayed fairly safe for the Conservatives, though their majority over Labour was slashed from 18,952 to 4,478.
To put this in perspective, this constituency was never especially strong for the BNP even in that party’s glory days, but even the BNP – with a mere fraction of Tice’s financial resources – polled seven hundred votes more, though a lower percentage, 4.7% (2,132 votes) here at the 2010 general election.
Needless to say, Tice’s various rivals for the civic nationalist vote fared even worse yesterday: Elaine Cheeseman for the English Democrats polled 1.3% (271 votes); John Poynton for the rump UKIP 0.9% (184 votes); and the mixed-race. ex-UKIP, ex-GLA member David Kurten – leader of the Heritage Party – just 0.5% (116 votes).
Of the eleven by-election candidates, Kurten was the most outspokenly anti-vaccination, anti-lockdown, Covid-sceptic. His joke vote should be a sobering influence on those in the broader nationalist movement who believe that Covid conspiracy theories can be politically fruitful.
More seriously, Tice’s Reform UK campaign – despite spending a fortune for a pretty miserable return – just about avoided disaster and might keep his donors interested for a while longer. Racial nationalists have long known that the UKIP legacy would have to fade away before our own movement could have any realistic chance of renewing its electoral impact at the level of the 1990s and 2000s, let alone anything more ambitious than that.
Tice’s failure was a step in that direction, and we can safely predict an even worse result for the assorted candidates of civic nationalism in a fortnight’s time at the next parliamentary by-election in North Shropshire.
For us the message should be: get our own ideological and organisational house in order. We no longer have the excuse of an unbeatable civic nationalist obstacle on UK ballot papers – and there is no insuperable anti-White conspiracy. Both in electoral politics and in the broader cultural struggle, our future and the future of White Britons is in our own hands.
