New faces on the right of British politics, the English Democrats, stood in elections for the first time in our region yesterday. Alan Bennett-Spencer got 5.2% of the votes in the Long Buckby ward, coming in in last place; his wife Gaynor Bennett-Spencer achieved a notable 20% in Ravensthorpe, beating the Libdems into third place.

It’s still unclear how exactly the English Democrats will fit in to the crowded landscape of the right wing; they are, as we have argued before, by no means a fully-fledged fascist party, having more in common, at the moment, with UKIP than the BNP, BFP or NF.  However, there are a large number of former BNP members in the English Democrats (Alan Bennett-Spencer recently supported ex-BNP big cheese Eddy “Rights for Whites” Butler’s defection to the party, for example), making the English Democrats likely to lurch even further to the right, and this is something anti-fascists should keep an eye on.  As an obvious political home for lots of ex-BNP anti-Griffin malcontents, the party, small though it currently is, needs watching, and we’ll be monitoring the Bennett-Spencers and their fellow-travellers in our region.