Two very different wings of the anti-Islam movement

Anne-Marie Waters and ‘Tommy Robinson’ have several times endorsed each other’s campaigns, with mixed results.

This week saw bad results in court and at the ballot box for two very different wings of the anti-Islamist movement.

Stephen Yaxley-Lennon – better known under his alias ‘Tommy Robinson’ – is a chancer and petty criminal who has made a good living out of the anti-Islam movement (and an even better living from certain sections of international Zionism).

‘Tommy’ is regarded as the founder (and certainly the best known face) of the English Defence League (EDL) an avowedly ‘anti-racist’, fanatically pro-Israel, and militantly anti-Islam alliance of football hooligan gangs that briefly flourished a few years ago before breaking up into competing factions.

Since the EDL’s decline, ‘Tommy’ has fancied himself as a journalist but has continued to be mainly a self-publicist, and had a short disastrous venture into electoral politics when he contested the North West England region at the 2019 European Parliamentary elections, finishing eighth with just 2.2%.

Perhaps because of his public devotion to the Israeli cause, the mainstream media gave ‘Tommy’ soft treatment for many years, which perhaps encouraged this ageing adolescent thug (now 38) to believe he could get away with anything.

EDL leaders Kevin Carroll and ‘Tommy Robinson’ with two of America’s most notorious Zionist promoters of the Islamo-obsessive agenda, Robert Spencer and Pamela Geller

Despite his public poses, ‘Tommy’ doesn’t care a damn about the victims of (for example) ‘grooming gangs’: in order to win publicity for himself he risked derailing a trial of two such cases in Canterbury (2017) and Huddersfield (2018).

And now ‘Tommy’ has lost a libel case after he made a series of what turned out to be unsubtantiated allegations against a Syrian-born schoolboy. ‘Tommy’ has been ordered to pay £100,000 in damages and also faces a costs bill that could easily run to £500,000. Since he claims to be bankrupt (despite the vast sums he has milked from the movement), ‘Tommy’ hopes to tear up the bill and carry on regardless, but might face serious questions as to where all the donors’ money has gone.

Yesterday’s judgment ruthlessly punctures ‘Tommy”s journalistic pretensions:
“This judgment – but more importantly – the award of damages will mark clearly that the Defendant has failed to demonstrate the truth of his allegations. The Defendant took on the burden of proving his allegations to be true. He has failed. In reality, and for the reasons I have explained, his evidence fell woefully short.”

Though she has several times eagerly accepted endorsements from ‘Tommy’, and endorsed his campaigns in return, Anne Marie Waters is a very different character and the For Britain Movement she leads is very different from the EDL.

Though we might disagree with much of Ms Waters’ ideology and sometimes doubt her political choices, no one can doubt that she is a genuine, committed, and often courageous campaigner. After she broke away from UKIP to form the For Britain Movement, she bravely accepted numerous former BNP activists as members, candidates and party officials – notably the former BNP and English Democrat electoral strategist Eddy Butler, still best known for his ‘Rights for Whites’ campaigns that won the BNP their first councillor, Derek Beackon in the East End’s Isle of Dogs in 1993.

Anne Marie Waters on an earlier by-election campaign trail with former BNP election guru Eddy Butler and now-councillor Julian Leppert (far right)

Mr Butler’s colleague – H&D subscriber and former BNP mayoral candidate Julian Leppert – is presently the only elected councillor for Ms Waters’ party, and one of very few racial nationalist councillors of any stripe anywhere in the UK in 2021 (though his party leader is very much not a racial nationalist!).

By coincidence, on the very same day that ‘Tommy Robinson’ lost his libel case, two For Britain candidates were heavily defeated in local council by-elections. Both candidates are longstanding racial nationalists of high calibre and both showed courage and commitment in putting themselves forward as candidates, at a time when our movement’s electoral fortunes are at a low ebb.

There was no reason to think that either of the wards was especially good territory for a pro-White campaign, and the nationwide political context remains one in which most racially conscious Whites tend to favour Boris Johnson’s Conservative Party, despite its recent loss of support among the socially liberal middle classes.

(Notably, the vast majority of potential voters for our types of candidate/party remain supportive of the government’s policies for dealing with the Covid pandemic: there is little or no electoral backing for the Covid-sceptic or anti-vaccination stances favoured by significant numbers of movement activists, but ignored or opposed by the vast majority of voters.)

FBM candidates Dave Haslett (above) and Gary Bergin (below)

So it was no surprise to see very modest votes for the two For Britain candidates: 26 votes (1.2%) for Gary Bergin in Liscard ward, Wirral; and 37 votes (1.6%) for Dave Haslett in Humberstone & Hamilton ward, Leicester.

Readers should note that in the Leicester ward a candidate for Reform UK (the renamed Brexit Party led by Nigel Farage’s close ally Richard Tice) also polled just 37 votes (1.6%).

There appears to be no magic recipe for electoral success within the space to the ‘right’ of the Conservative Party. Those who are looking towards some form of new racial nationalist alliance have serious thinking to do – at one time it seemed that civic nationalism with an anti-Islamist, pro-Zionist edge was the way forward, at least for those prepared to swallow their ideological objections in the interest of electoral ‘strategy’. That argument no longer holds water.

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