Crowded field in London elections – but no racial nationalists

On May 6th most of the UK (with the exception of Northern Ireland) will have local government elections for the first time in two years. May 2020’s polls were postponed for a year due to the pandemic, so this year is a double set of elections, the biggest of their kind in British history.

However, campaigning is still obstructed by pandemic regulations. For this and other reasons explained in recent issues of H&D, the National Front and some other racial nationalist parties are (for the most part) avoiding these elections.

We now know the lists of candidates for the Greater London Assembly and London Mayoralty, while other lists will not appear until next week.

As predicted in the March-April edition of H&D, there are (for the first time since the GLA’s creation) no racial nationalist candidates for either Assembly or Mayor this year – but there is a crazily crowded field of what we might call pro-Brexit and anti-lockdown parties.

Several of these are explicitly ‘anti-racist’ but might be backed by some H&D readers because they are also to a greater or lesser extent anti-woke.

Laurence Fox (above right) with two of the small band of comrades who back his mayoral candidature.

The highest profile is television actor Laurence Fox, whose political views have become more prominent during the past year as he has shocked the left-liberal establishment with his criticisms of the ‘woke’ and Black Lives Matter agendas. Mr Fox’s new party Reclaim has little or no membership/branch structure and seems to be really just Mr Fox and a few friends, heavily backed by a former UKIP donor, tycoon Jeremy Hosking.

Mr Fox is standing for Mayor but does not have candidates for the Assembly.

No fewer than five other parties from this pro-Brexit/anti-woke spectrum do have Assembly candidates.

  • UKIP, once a powerful force in British politics but now much diminished: controversial columnist Katie Hopkins had been announced as UKIP’s number one candidate for the Assembly, but for unexplained reasons is not in fact standing
  • Reform UK, the successor to Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party and now run by his former ally Richard Tice, now that Farage has stepped aside from party politics
  • the Heritage Party, whose leader and number one Assembly candidate is the half-Jamaican David Kurten, elected to the GLA on the UKIP slate in 2016; a year later he finished third in one of UKIP’s many leadership elections
  • the London Real Party, founded by US-born YouTube conspiracy theorist Brian Rose
  • Let London Live, an anti-lockdown and anti-vaccination party founded by Piers Corbyn, elder brother of former Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn.
David Kurten, seeking re-election to the GLA, this time for his own Heritage Party rather than UKIP

Kurten, Rose, Corbyn, and UKIP’s Peter Gammons are also among the twenty (!) candidates for London Mayor, by far the most crowded ballot paper ever for this election. To some people’s surprise, Richard Tice has avoided the mayoral election to concentrate on the Assembly. Due to the proportional electoral system in London (unlike the first-past-the-post system used for English local councils outside the capital) Tice stands a chance of being elected there, as was the BNP’s Richard Barnbrook at the 2008 election.

Other parties fielding either mayoral or assembly candidates or both include two rival anti-Brexit parties, Rejoin EU and Renew – further evidence that (in London at least) our former membership of the European Union remains a divisive issue.

Katie Hopkins – a no-show at this election despite having been announced as UKIP’s lead candidate

Then there’s a new leftist party called Londependence, a mirror image of separatist racial nationalist parties in Canada and the USA – this new party is composed of fanatical multiracialists who want the capital to break away from the ‘backward’, pro-Brexit, and presumably ‘racist’ provinces of non-metropolitan England.

Of course there are also the main four parties (Labour, Conservative, Liberal Democrat and Green) plus fringe parties including:

  • the Social Democratic Party (SDP), pro-Brexit rump of the party that set out to “break the mould of British politics” in 1981
  • Christian Peoples Alliance, a party that gets support from some conservative black churches in the capital
  • the Animal Rights Party, a more militant alternative to the Greens
  • two rival parties representing strands of the old Marxist left: the Trade Union & Socialist Coalition (TUSC), and the Communist Party of Britain
  • assorted joke parties and vanity independents
  • the Women’s Equality Party, which because of recent publicity about an especially horrific murder of a young woman in South London, is likely to achieve a more credible vote than the other minor parties.

And finally there’s the strangest curiosity of all: the National Liberal Party, which has a slate of Assembly candidates. Though this has the same name as a party that existed during the 1930s as a pro-government breakaway from the Liberals, the NLP has no connection with its predecessor other than the name. It is in fact – though a multiracial party none of whose candidates this year appear to be White Britons – a remnant of the factional splits that tore the National Front apart during the 1980s!

Patrick Harrington (above right) with his former ally, then enemy, then ally, then enemy again Nick Griffin. A party descended from Harrington’s faction in the 1980s NF splits is now the last remnant of those nationalist ‘radicals’ – but its slate of candidates in London is non-White!

After the big NF split of 1986, the so-called ‘cadre’ faction underwent a further split in 1989-90, with a faction led by Patrick Harrington and Graham Williamson forming Third Way. This then evolved into the National Liberal Party at the end of the 1990s. Apart from Williamson, the NLP’s candidates have generally been from ethnic minorities, especially Sikhs and Tamils – yet in terms of an organisational ‘family tree’ of political parties, the NLP is the only party in this year’s London elections that is descended from the NF!

Such is the weird world of London politics in 2021. Even weirder is that those racial nationalists who prioritise anti-lockdown, anti-vaccination issues might find themselves voting for Piers Corbyn’s party, whose candidates are drawn from the fringes of Trotskyism and trendy leftism.

The positive aspect of all this is that the 2021 elections will surely end an era in which the broader nationalist movement was overshadowed by Brexit. The various pro-Brexit, anti-lockdown parties will (we predict) achieve very poor results, clearing away a lot of political ‘dead wood’ and allowing some form of racial nationalist politics to re-emerge in post-pandemic Britain.

H&D will have extensive reports on the local elections (in London and nationwide) here on this website and in the next edition of the magazine.

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