Nationalist parties prepare for London elections
Posted by admin978 on March 23, 2016 · Leave a Comment
Richard Barnbrook (then of the BNP) gives his victory speech after election to the GLA in 2008.
Not so long ago, British nationalists could look forward to elections in London – eagerly anticipating results that would disturb the liberal establishment.
In 2008 for example, Richard Barnbrook was elected as the BNP’s first (and so far only) member of the Greater London Assembly. Two years earlier the party had gained twelve council seats in one London borough, becoming the official opposition to Labour in Barking & Dagenham.
Though neither the BNP nor any other nationalist candidate has so managed the 5% needed to save their deposit in the main mayoral election, the BNP’s candidates did manage respectable results in the first three of these contests. Mike Newland in 2000 polled 2.0%; Julian Leppert in 2004 increased this to 3.1%; and Richard Barnbrook in 2008 scored the party’s highest ever London mayoral vote of 3.2%. Unsurprisingly this slipped way back to 1.3% in 2012 for the party’s most recent mayoral candidate Carlos Cortiglia.
We shall not know the official list of mayoral candidates this year until nominations close on March 31st, but the BNP has already announced that Dave Furness will be their mayoral candidate, while ex-BNP official Paul Golding is standing for the anti-Islamic party Britain First.
Some former BNP activists are now in the English Democrats, whose mayoral candidate this year is former boxer and ex-UKIP candidate Winston McKenzie. A few former NF activists from the 1980s are now in the National Liberal Party, which was co-founded by Patrick Harrington, the brains behind the current BNP leadership. The NLP’s mayoral candidate this year is Upkar Singh Raj, a Sikh IT consultant and Uber driver.
Croydon burns in 2011: is this the London indigenous Brits really want?
In addition to the high-profile mayoral election, there are elections to the Greater London Assembly, both on a London-wide list and in constituencies (which each include two or three London boroughs).
Nationalist veteran Richard Edmonds has already begun his campaign for the GLA’s Croydon & Sutton constituency, and has posted a video broadcast (see below). H&D will report on the progress of nationalist campaigns across the capital, both here on this website and in our May 2016 edition.
