Category Archives: Derbyshire

2012/07/09

EDL rush to “defend” Derby Pride

By East Midlands Anti-Fascists

Derbyshire Pride was due to be held in Derby city centre on Saturday. Unfortunately, due to the torrential rain the organisers had to call it off. This year, Derbyshire’s rain sodden LGBT community were joined by some unlikely punters – members of the various East Midlands divisions of the English Defence League.

The EDL were there, they said, to valiantly defend the Pride marchers against a threatened protest by a sad little group of homophobic Muslims, rather pompously named the Derby Muslim Action Force. A previous protest at Pride in 2010 managed to draw a grand total of 14 homophobes compared with the hundreds of participants in the event itself. It is not clear whether any of those involved in Pride were asked whether they wanted the EDL to attend or why the EDL thought they would be unable to protect themselves.

Now excuse me for being a little cynical but I suspect that the EDL, an organisation not known for its deep understanding of and sympathy towards LGBT issues, might have an ulterior motive here. Perhaps an opportunity to fight some Muslims and not look bad for a change? Perhaps an opportunity to fake some pro-LGBT credentials in the run up to their Bristol march (on the same day as Bristol Pride) next Saturday?

I say fake them because the EDL has a long history of homophobia and transphobia within its ranks, something that is condoned by the leadership of the organisation, although they never fail to use it as a stick to beat Muslims with. For example whilst Tommy Robinson has said “We have preachers of hate flying into this country regularly – week in, week out – promoting homophobia, homophobic views, anti-democratic views, just promoting hatred”, he himself invited the virulently homophobic Christian preacher, Terry Jones to the UK to speak.  Jones has opposed the election of a homosexual mayor with the slogan “No Homo Mayor” and has joined in homophobic campaigns with other extremist churches. Robinson, along with far right bedfellow, Paul Weston, leader of the British Freedom Party, has teamed up with the US-based Christian Action Network, granting them interviews on a number of occasions. CAN campaigns against gays and abortion as well as being anti-Muslim. When Ellen Degeneres came out CAN founder Martin Mawyer said that she was “dumping her filthy lesbian lifestyle right in the center of your living room” and that “If we allow the tidal wave of gay and lesbian smut to continue to pour into our homes, it will utterly consume us in no time at all!” The truth is that the EDL will cosy up to any islamophobes, regardless of their stance on homosexuality.

It’s no surprise, given this opportunistic approach to LGBT rights, that the most virulent homophobia and transphobia by the EDL’s footsoldiers is tolerated. For example, when the EDL Angels had a demo in London, the overwhelmingly male attendees heckled female counter-demonstrators with chants of “lesbian scum” and “back to the kitchen”. This is just the tip of the iceberg though, and EDL News have collected an archive of just some of the many homophobic and transphobic views expressed by EDL members, including the fabled LGBT division itself! From calling people faggots to accusing all homosexuals of being paedophiles, saying that sodomy is perverted and that gays kissing in public are sick, openly homophobic views seem to be quite acceptable within the EDL.

All of which has, unsurprisingly, led many LGBT rights campaigners to see the EDL as an enemy. Alan Shore writes “it sickens me when the Far Right and the EDL in particular jump on this bandwagon when they are clearly as bad if not worse than the other scum that gay people have to deal with everyday”. Prominent gay rights campaigner Peter Tatchell has simultaneously campaigned against the racism of the EDL and the homophobia of Islamists and has an interesting account of his experiences. Members of the EDL have since said he should be killed.

The East Midlands Infidels’ sudden interest in LGBT issues isn’t part of any consistent promotion of human rights or freedom. More than anything, it appears to be a smokescreen for setting up a fight with some of Derby’s most reactionary Muslims. As anti-fascists we must oppose both groups but given their relative strength, the EDL are the more important homophobes to target.

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2012/06/27

Racism an issue in Derbyshire Schools

By East Midlands Anti-Fascists

A recent report illustrates that racist abuse is occurring in kids as young as eight in Derbyshire schools.  Racist ideas (whether coming from political groupings,  socially conservative interests, media stereotypes, or other sources) have a pernicious habit of spreading – also to the very young – if unchallenged. Such ideas all too often surface as abusive language or behaviour, and it’s not too large a leap to make the link between playground racism and the intimidation which is the stock-in-trade of fascist gangs.  Counteracting racist and socially regressive ideas in society is as important a part of anti-fascism as actually opposing the fascists who are the manifestation of such ideas.

1 comment | posted in Derbyshire

2012/05/07

Derbyshire BNP’s “Blackshirt Buggy”

By East Midlands Anti-Fascists

Derbyshire BNP have launched their own local version of the national party’s “Truth Truck” (or “Lie Lorry”, as anti-fascists prefer to call it).  The Derbyshire van is a beauty, as you can see; surprising to see it’s a foreign-made vehicle, though….

The local party has yet to find a suitably pompous name for their new vehicle; in light of  “Grand Dictator of Derbyshire” Paul Hilliard’s affection for Mussolini’s paramilitary followers, we’d like to suggest they call it the “Blackshirt Buggy”.

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2012/05/04

Bye bye BNP!

By East Midlands Anti-Fascists

Fascists had a bad night in local elections across the country. The BNP has, at the time of writing, lost all of the seats it was defending and failed to win any new seats. None of the smaller fascist groupuscles has fared any better.

In the East Midlands, the BNP lost their two seats in Heanor where their share of the vote was considerably reduced. Cliff Roper’s term as “the invisible councillor” obviously didn’t go down well with the electorate and his share of the vote has fallen to 19.1% from the 36.5% he won with in 2008. Beaten into third place, Councillor Roper has become simply another nationalist chancer, the Heanor Patriot. Lewis Allsebrook’s replacement, Adrian Hickman, also failed to impress and came last. In Heanor & Loscoe the BNP’s share of the vote was halved and in Ripley & Marehay it was reduced to a third of the 2008 result. Emma Roper did particularly badly, getting only 59 votes (4.2%) in Codnor & Waingroves. This is about a quarter of the share won by fascist farmer Alan Warner in 2008.

The National Front’s Amber Valley candidate, Timothy Knowles, only got 99 votes in Langley Mill, coming in last place.

Over in Lincoln, disgraced Nazi sympathiser and BNP candidate, Dean Lowther, got a pathetic 49 votes (2.8%) coming in last place. This is less than a quarter of the 12.2% he got last time around.

In Derby, the BNP did slightly less badly but their vote was still down on the 2008 results. Paul Hilliard’s black shirt campaign won him 14.7% of the vote in Chaddesden, but this was down from the 17.9% he got in 2008. The only good news for the party was that candidates in Derwent and Spondon beat the Lib Dems into last place, gaining 11.9% and 8.1% of the vote respectively.

Hope Not Hate are collecting the far right’s results on their website and you can compare them with the results from 2008 here.

It seems that electoral support for the fascists is well down from its peak. Nick Griffin’s troubled leadership of the BNP looks decidedly shaky and party activists and voters are leaving in droves. The new fluffier British Freedom Party, who are backed by the EDL, haven’t got off to a good start either. Their candidate in Basildon only managed to get 4% of the vote and none of the 4 candidates currently declared in Liverpool got more than 3%.

These are good results for anti-fascists but we should never be complacent. The BNP was still voted for by a little under 1 in 5 people in Heanor and they are consistently winning over 10% in parts of Derby. There is always the danger that the far right will rearrange itself around a new pole in the wake of the BNP’s plunge into obscurity and start building on these foundations. Their current failure is a cause for celebration. Let’s make sure they don’t come back from the dead.

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2012/05/04

BNP fail in Derby

By East Midlands Anti-Fascists

It looks like the BNP have had a really bad election. Locally their loss of two seats in Amber Valley has been compounded by their failure to make a breakthrough in Derby.

Admirer of Mussolini’s Blackshirts and “Grand Dictator of Derbyshire” Paul Hilliard was the most successful of the three  candidates they stood in the city, but even he only managed to get 459 votes (14.7%) and come third, although this put him ahead of the LibDems. Vanessa Griffin also beat the LibDems, taking 270 votes (8.1%) while Julie Fuller beat the tories into fourth, securing 302 votes (11.9%).

Chaddesden

  • Care Ian (Lib Dem) 134
  • Hassall Steve (Con) 836
  • Hilliard Paul (BNP) 459
  • MacDonald Anne (Lab) 1,689

Derwent

  • Fuller Julie (BNP) 302
  • Hudson Richard (Lib Dem) 689
  • Redfern Margaret (Lab) 1,314
  • Roulstone Nicola (Con) 239

Spondon

  • Froggatt Steve (Lab) 1,305
  • Griffin Vanessa (BNP) 270
  • King Simon (Lib Dem) 153
  • Williams Evonne (Con) 1,587

(Results taken from This is Derbyshire.)

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2012/05/04

NF trounced in Langley Mill

By East Midlands Anti-Fascists

Tim Knowles standing for the National Front (NF) in the Amber Valley ward of Langley Mill and Aldercar came third, in a contest which saw labour take the seat from the Tories, receiving a paltry 99 votes.

Knowles was the only NF candidate standing in the East Midlands in yesterday’s local elections. However, across the country the NF was contesting more seats than it had in any election since 1982.

Knowles had previously managed to get himself elected unopposed  (i.e. no one else bothered to stand, so he won by default) to Langley Mill Parish Council last year, but was booted off the council after only a few months having failed to fill in the declaration of acceptance or to attend a single meeting.

While 99 votes and third place will be disappointing for Knowles (and heartening for anti-fascists), on a turnout of 1,137 (27.7% of those registered to vote) it actually amounts to 8.7% of the vote. In a General Election that would be enough to get back his deposit (although Parliamentary constituencies are obviously larger than borough council wards).

That he achieved even this much and the apparent disinterest of much of the electorate underlines the extent to which the mainstream parties have ignored areas like Langley Mill. Anti-fascists cannot afford to make the same mistake.

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2012/05/04

BNP lose two seats in Amber Valley

By East Midlands Anti-Fascists

Yesterday’s local elections have not gone well for the BNP in Amber Valley. They have lost the two seats they took in 2008, with a massive slump in the percentage of the vote:

  • Heanor East: 19.1% (2012) 36.5% (2008)
  • Heanor West: 18.2% (2012) 29.5% (2008)

There were 16 seats up for election (one third of the total) with the BNP standing five candidates. Although none won, the votes they were able to achieve varied widely:

  • Heanor East: Cliff Roper, 284 votes, 19.1%
  • Heanor West: Adrian Hickman, 272 votes, 18.2%
  • Heanor and Loscoe: Ken Cooper,  245 votes, 17.8%
  • Codnor and Waingroves: Emma Roper, 59 votes, 4.2%
  • Ripley and Marehay: Alan Edwards, 130 votes, 7.5%

Former councillor Cliff Roper has described the results as “disappointing.”

Roper, commenting on his Heanor Patriot blog, would have supporters believe that the party’s loses “mirror those of smaller parties throughout the country as we were swept aside in a national backlash against the coalition government, which resulted in a massive vote for Labour by an electorate eager to punish the coalition parties.” The reality is more complicated with many “smaller parties” actually doing quite well. There was an unprecedented vote for UKIP and steady progress by the Green Party, while Respect ousted the Labour leader in Bradford.

There does not appear to have been a great deal of anti-fascist activity in the area, although Hope Not Hate report having organised a couple of leafleting sessions. Whether this had an effect is impossible to gauge.

Internal squabbling amongst the local BNP can’t have helped. Roper resigned the whip last year and was even accused of being a “secret red”, only to return to the fold. Fellow councillor Lewis Allsebrook also jumped ship earlier this year amidst accusations of backstabbing and incompetence. Hopefully their latest failures will only fuel the infighting.

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2012/04/24

Infidels or imbeciles?

By East Midlands Anti-Fascists

The recent arrests of members of EDL splinter group, the Infidels, have raised the profile of this tiny far right protest group. Anti-fascists might be wondering whether the Infidels have a local presence and what kind of threat they pose. We did the dirty job of scouring their websites so you don’t have to. Here’s the deal:

Derbyshire Infidels

These guys go for an old school white supremacist vibe, devoid of punctuation or grammar: “The futures bright the futures white ktf ns!”, “Unite the right to be white”, “white white white is right kick them and fight fight fight”, etc. As with many of their fellow on the far right, the urge to write bloody awful racist songs and ‘poetry’ cannot be suppressed:

They say they are “sometimes violent” and use fascist imagery of fighting for the white race, etc. So are they a threat?

Erm… don’t think so.

Leicester Infidels

These fellas are more happy to show their links to Nazism, littering their posts  with “14w” (reference to a 14 word phrase codified by David Lane, leader of white separatist organisation, The Order) and “88” (8th word of the alphabet is H, HH stands for Heil Hitler). They think that “jew scum took control of the uk/world media” and are obsessed with anti-semitic conspiracy theories and holocaust denial. Fortunately they seem like too paranoid a bunch of lunatics for most people to show the slightest bit of interest in them and have to resort to liking their own posts.

Nottinghamshire Infidels

A relatively new Facebook group that seems to have aroused very minimal support. Set up by Phil Murfet, a Notts County fan whose speciality is rape jokes, race hate jokes and jokes about Tommy Robinson involving race hate. ” ‘Sex with someone who doesn’t want to is rape’ … I call it marriage” the little charmer wrote in a recent status update. Another recent ‘joke’ called black people at KFC “native, wild black members in their home tribe” an “uncivilized group” who “sloppily munched into their food”. Little Miss Murfet refers to Tommy Robinson as a “fenian” funded by “jew boy” Alan Lake. A nasty piece of work to be sure, but without any support.

What is noticeable about all of these tiny Facebook fan pages is that they have very little local support and seem capable of very little independent action.  They are full of links to the North West Infidels, British People’s Party and National Front and their members occasionally report going to fairly small demonstrations in the north. In short, although they love to think of themselves as the hardcore street army who have had enough of what they see as the multicultural, Zionist, Irish-led EDL, they will always be in its much larger shadow.

The threat of more militant, hardline fascist groups like these is not that they might have any mass influence, but that they might give rise to future ‘lone wolves’ – radicalised individuals who resort to violent atrocities in order to ‘fight back’ against ‘the Jewish conspiracy’, ‘multiculturalism’, ‘cultural Marxism’, ‘Islamic takeover’ or whatever their current bogeyman is. We have had homegrown Breiviks in the past – David Copeland, Martyn Gilleard and Robert Cottage spring to mind.

Fortunately the Infidels phenomenon does not seem to have taken off in the Midlands and the police raids on several of the leaders of the movement in the north and London will hopefully dampen their spirits. However, we should not be complacent. These fascists need to be stamped out.

Update 30/04/12: Origin of the 14 word phrase corrected.

2 comments   |  tags: , , | posted in Derbyshire, Leicestershire, Nottinghamshire

2012/04/20

Local elections round up

By East Midlands Anti-Fascists

With a little under 2 weeks to go until polling day, 3rd May, East Midlands Anti-fascists bring you a round up of local fascist attempts to jockey for power.

BNP

Having finally concluded the messy power struggle within Amber Valley (Lewis Allsebrook jumped ship before he was pushed), the blackshirts of Derbyshire BNP have put up 8 candidates in Derby and Amber Valley.

The “invisible councillor” Cliff Roper is fighting to retain his seat in Heanor East, which should be a struggle if reports that he barely opens his mouth in public are to be believed. Not so long ago Roper was having a strop and resigned the party whip in order to get his way in the local party, and there have  been plenty of accusations of backstabbing and being a “red” flung his way. Aging bonehead, Adrian Hickman, will stand in Allsebrook’s former constituency of Heanor West. “Inept” Emma Roper will hope to get slightly more than the 2.4% she polled last time in the Codnor and Waingroves ward. Ken Cooper (Heanor & Loscoe) and Alan Edwards (Ripley & Marehay) are also standing.

Cliff Roper: actively working for his Heanor constituents again

Admirer of Mussolini’s blackshirts and “Grand Dictator of Derbyshire”, Paul Hilliard is standing in the Chaddesden ward in Derby and is joined by Julie Fuller (Derwent) and Vanessa Griffin (Spondon). Let’s just say you wouldn’t buy a second-hand car from the man.

Paul Hilliard: Would you trust this chump with your vote?

The BNP’s only candidate in Lincolnshire is neo-Nazi Dean Lowther, whose campaign is in a bit of a pickle after his openly racist posts on Facebook became the subject of a police investigation and front-page news in the local paper. His posts included cartoons portraying the Obamas as monkeys and the insignia of violent and openly Nazi groups, the Racial Volunteer Force, the British People’s Party, Blood and Honour and Combat 18.  Lowther is standing in the Bracebridge ward of Lincoln.

 

English Democrats

The entire North-West Leicestershire BNP branch has recently defected to the English Democrats in the hope that they can do away with secret meetings and redirection points and gain a bit of respectability, something which seems unlikely given that about half of the English Democrats’ candidates across the UK are recent defectors from the BNP. Alan and Gaynor Bennett Spencer are standing for the half-fascist party in Daventry.

National Front

Fascist failure, Tim Knowles, who was so dim he managed to fuck up being elected unopposed is trying for a second crack of the whip in Langley Mill, Amber Valley. Last time round he failed to fill in the acceptance form or turn up to any meetings so was booted out. We hope the Front will sink further into irrelevance during these elections.

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2012/04/19

Black Shirts in Derbyshire

By East Midlands Anti-Fascists

Sometimes when compiling this blog, the jokes just write themselves – especially when Derbyshire BNP are involved.  In February we mentioned plans to get BNP-branded garments for the Derbyshire footsoldiers, and joked that they’d probably be in black.  Well, they are.

 

So far, so easy laugh…let’s not read too much into their choice of colour, eh?  Until we notice that Derbyshire head honcho Paul Hilliard has, on his facebook page, “liked” the original, fascist Italian paramilitary blackshirts, which he lists as one of his “activities” (!)

Glad we now know where Derbyshire BNP get their inspiration from, Paul.

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