In The News

Civic nationalism falls at first hurdle in 2024 local elections

This afternoon local councils across England published their lists of confirmed candidates for next month’s local elections. There are more than 2,600 council seats up for election across England on 2nd May, as well as eleven Mayoral elections (including London), the Greater London Assembly, and 37 Police & Crime Commissioners. Apart from the latter, there are no elections in Wales this year, and there are no elections in Scotland or Northern Ireland.

Given the scale of public concern about the failure of mainstream political parties, and the continuing crises over immigration, crime, and other race-related issues, readers might have expected a significant challenge to the political establishment at these elections.

In fact, the anti-establishment challenge – whether from civic nationalists, racial nationalists, or even from the far left – is feeble.

H&D readers know that there are many reasons for the weak state of racial nationalism in the UK. Our movement has yet to recover from catastrophic damage caused by the collapse of the BNP more than a decade ago, a collapse that was mainly self-inflicted by former BNP leader Nick Griffin.

The best we can say is that there are good people in our movement presently engaged in the long task of rebuilding racial nationalism from that wreckage.

Within the racial nationalist political spectrum, there are four candidates from the British Democrats (including former councillors Julian Leppert in Epping Forest, Jim Lewthwaite in Bradford, and Lawrence Rustem in Maidstone).

The newly registered Homeland Party has one candidate, Roger Robertson in Hart, Hampshire (who is already a parish councillor).

Patriotic Alternative has not yet registered as a political party, so its name cannot appear on ballot papers, but PA activist Callum Hewitt is standing as an Independent candidate in Halton, Cheshire.

Another well-known nationalist standing as an independent is former NF and BNP candidate Gary Butler in Maidstone.

The anti-Islam but multiracialist party Britain First is contesting the London Mayoral and GLA elections, where their candidate in each case is former Generation Identity activist Nick Scanlon. But elsewhere in England Britain First has only two candidates, far fewer than expected.

A more radical but still multiracialist anti-Islamic party, the National Housing Party, has one candidate in Oldham.

The English Democrats, whose campaign for an English Parliament is supported by many racial nationalists even though the party itself is multiracialist, have five council candidates as well as three Police and Crime Commissioner candidates, including party leader Robin Tilbrook.

But the real shock is at the civic nationalist end of the spectrum.

Reform UK, which has dismayed many of its supporters in recent weeks but which is easily the largest and best funded party operating to the ‘right’ of the Conservatives, will have just 328 council candidates this year, well down on last year’s total of 480.

This failure even to get onto the ballot paper in the vast majority of elections makes a mockery of Reform UK’s opinion poll ratings, and of Nigel Farage’s efforts to portray himself as a serious political figure.

Some Reform UK supporters are urging Farage to step back into the front line and take back official leadership of the party from his stooge, Richard Tice. But with the party having so obviously failed to put down substantial roots at local level, what could Farage seriously hope to achieve?

Farage’s old party UKIP confirmed it is close to death, with only seventeen candidates nationwide this year.

A rival UKIP splinter group – the Heritage Party – is also declining but shows slightly more vigour than UKIP, with 34 candidates nationwide including a slate of seven in Southend where it looks to have taken over most of the old UKIP branch.

But yet another UKIP breakaway – the Alliance for Democracy and Freedom – seems to have disappeared from ballot papers this year. The ADF under its Malaysian leader Dr Teck Khong recently signed a grandiose ‘alliance’ with the remnants of the anti-vaxx party Freedom Alliance (which has only five candidates across the whole of England this year, after suffering multiple splits and defections). They will probably pick up the crankier, Covid-obsessed defectors from Reform UK, but as H&D has repeatedly explained, this is not a basis for serious election campaigns.

The one thing that is abundantly clear from these local elections – even before a single vote has been cast – is that there remains a vacuum in British politics which a real nationalist party ought to fill.

H&D will publish lists of nationalist candidates standing at the May elections, and will have full reports and analysis both on this website and in forthcoming editions of our magazine.