Tag Archives: BNP

Flogging a dead horse : far right election candidates

This is a really bad time for the electoral ambitions of the far right.  In the run-up to the most unpredictable General Election for many years, the far right are nowhere.  With their own little parties in disarray, and most of their thunder stolen by the rise of UKIP (more on that later), only three candidates in the East Midlands are stepping up to lose their deposits on Thursday.  In Lincolnshire, the ludicrous pretend vicar Robert West is standing for the BNP in Boston & Skegness, whilst Cathy Duffy is the BNP candidate for Charnwood in Leicestershire.  The English Democrat’s one candidate in the region is the party’s National Secretary Derek Hilling, standing in Kettering, Northants; the ED were hoping to contest at least three seats in the county, but have decided not to spread their meagre resources too thinly, and are going all out behind Derek.  Hmm….

Rabbit in the headlights….Derek Hilling

 

There are more far-right candidates in the local council elections, also to be held on Thursday.

The BNP have Cathy Duffy (again) standing in Charnwood.  Duffy is an endangered species, being one of only two BNP councillors in the whole country, and the only one in the East Midlands.  We’ll see if she manages political survival on Thursday.  Meanwhile, the Derbyshire Blackshirt Paul Hilliard is standing, as usual, in Derby; and Marc Whitestone is standing in East Northamptonshire.

The English Democrats have two candidates, Oliver Healey and David Haslett, in Leicester.

The British Democratic Party, an Andrew Brons-inspired BNP breakaway, are standing five candidates in Leicestershire, which they regard as their stronghold – Kevan Stafford, Chris Canham, Julia Green and Paul Newman in Charnwood, and virulent muslim-hater Graham Partner in North-West Leics.


Euro election results

Last week’s elections for the European parliament were a significant national success story for UKIP, and the East Midlands echoed this unwelcome trend.  UKIP polled first in our region with 32.9% of the vote – one of the highest proportions returned from any region.  There are now two UKIP, two tory and one labour MEPs in the East Midlands.

The results for the small far-right parties were, happily, very poor.  Mirroring their national decline, the BNP polled only 1.64% of the East Midlands vote (down from 8.7% in 2009, the largest percentage downswing of any party).  They got even less votes here than the new and obscure AIFE eurosceptic party, and their disastrous electoral meltdown continues.  Ex-MEP Nick Griffin is vowing to continue as party leader – welcome news for anti-fascists, who applaud the greedy incompetent as he drags the BNP further into the political wilderness.  Keep up the good work, Nick!

The English Democrats polled just over 1%, down from 2.3% in 2009.


East Midlands local election results

 

Derbyshire BNP freefall continues

As predicted, the BNP’s four candidates in the region polled very poorly in Thursday’s local council elections.

In Amber Valley, Derbyshire, Ken Cooper came in fourth place in Ripley Ward with 80 votes – 3.2% of the poll.  In Codnor & Waingroves ward, Alan Edwards also came fourth with 39 votes, 2.8% of the poll.  However, both BNP candidates narrowly beat the LibDems into fifth place.  These results are even poorer than the 2010 elections, when the BNP polled 7.5% in Ripley and 4.2% in Codnor & Waingroves.

In Derby, Paul Hilliard came last in Chaddesden ward with 4% of the poll (136 votes), whilst Carol Tucker also came last in Derwent ward, with 3.1% (84 votes).  This is a significant drop from their performance in similar elections in 2012, when Hilliard polled 14.7% in Chaddesden and Julie Fuller polled 11.9% in Derwent.  That performance was itself a disappointment for the BNP in 2012 – how much lower can they go?

We have been enjoying Derbyshire BNP’s downhill trajectory for a few years now, and it’s good to see it continue.

 

New UKIP councillors

The most significant feature of the local elections was the dramatic rise in fortunes of UKIP.  They now have increased representation on several local councils in the region, with 8 councillors in North-East Lincolnshire, 3 in Daventry, and 2 in Derby.

Whilst enjoying the increased electoral irrelevance of the BNP and their ilk, the entry into the mainstream of a new brand right-wing nationalism in the guise of UKIP poses significant fresh challenges for antifascists.  We will be monitoring UKIP in the region closely.  This piece from the IWCA, written a year ago, is an interesting contribution to this vital issue.


Far-right election candidates in the region

There are a number of fascist candidates standing in this week’s Euro Parliament and local council elections :

European parliament

BNP : Cathy Duffy, Robert West, Bob Brindley, Geoffrey Dickens, Paul Hillard.

English Democrats : Kevin Sills, Dave Wickham, John Dowle, Oliver Healey, Terry Spencer.

 

Cathy Duffy...she's not going to be an MEP...

Cathy Duffy…she’s not going to be an MEP

Cathy Duffy from Charnwood is the obvious choice for head of the BNP list, being a rare animal – one of the party’s two local councillors in the whole country.  The inclusion of Paul ‘Aloe Vera’ Hilliard as the last candidate on the list shows how his stock has fallen in the party, with outright fruitcake and twitter twat Bob Brindley selected above him.

 

Kevin Sills - nor is he...

Kevin Sills – nor is he…

The English Democrats are the usual mix of ex-members of other far-right parties, and people who find UKIP a bit liberal.  Veteran party-swopper Kevin Sills is their lead candidate.

 

Councils

Amber Valley : Alan Edward (Codnor & Waingroves), Ken Cooper (Ripley).

Derby : Paul Hilliard (Chaddesden), Carol Tucker (Derwent).

The most interesting feature of the local candidate list is how sparse it is, with only four candidates from the BNP standing in our region, all in Derbyshire.  This reflects the general decline of the party, who are fielding 114 candidates nationwide, compared to 739 in the equivalent elections in 2010.  The party seems extremely unlikely to add to its pitiful national tally of two councillors.

 

Although these elections promise very lean pickings for the BNP and their ilk, it’s likely – and alarming – that UKIP will do well (taking votes from all parties, including the BNP).  They are standing numerous candidates in both Euro and council elections, have a huge campaign budget, and have a high national profile.  Although their politics are vague and vacuous, they are undoubtedly pushing the political discourse to the right and need to be opposed.  The results of Thursday’s elections will make interesting reading.

 


2013 Fascist Roundup

The fascists are starting 2014 in a grim place. Tommy Robinson’s desertion of the EDL has left the organisation in a shambles which barely managed to get 200 members to the organisation’s latest national demo in Exeter. EDL members are now outnumbered many times over by antifascists at their demos. As if this woeful state of affairs wasn’t enough, 32 EDL activists were recently jailed for a total of more than 55 years for their involvement in violent disorder at the EDL’s Walsall demonstration. Among those sentenced were Kirk Jones (33 months), Mick Thomas (28 months) and Christopher Boyall (24 months) from Leicestershire and Kirk Reeves from Derbyshire (18 months). They will join the vast majority of the North West Infidels who are already serving time for violent disorder and former EDL leader, Guramit Singh, who will be serving 6 1/2 years for the attempted robbery of a Hucknall garden centre.

Kirk Jones of Hinkley EDL: three years inside

Kirk Jones of Hinkley EDL: three years inside

The BNP has lost almost all of its seats and looks likely to lose the rest this year. Amusingly, Nick Griffin was declared (financially) bankrupt this month and has resorted to filming a white supremacist version of Ready, Steady, Cook! to make ends meet. He is not predicted to hold onto his MEP seat in the North West. The BNP has lost out badly to UKIP’s somewhat less amateurish political campaigning on issues such as immigration.

Various half-witted attempts to Unite the (extreme) Right have been made and all of them have failed badly. Derbyshire ex-EDL has-been, Tony “Tone the Moan” Curtis, joined up with the EVF, South East something-or-other, Casuals Divided and some other even less significant names in the English National Resistance but it all fell apart after only a matter of months when it became clear that there were only 12 of them. Curtis masterminded a demonstration at the University of Nottingham but the 6 men and a dog didn’t even make it onto the campus before surrendering and going to the pub instead.

Meanwhile, Derby BNP organiser Paul Hilliard’s attempts at unity descended into farce when all the different Nazi sects fell out with one another and he gave up in despair. Hilliard, once a BNP superactivist, may now have left the party.

Some important victories were made by anti-fascists on the streets. When the combined shambles of Casuals United, the EVF and other far right hangers-on returned to Brighton for their “March for England” they were literally kicked out of town by a large and militant anti-fascist mobilisation. Likewise, the fading EDL were massively outnumbered by anti-fascists when they returned to Tower Hamlets in September. Militant anti-fascists led a breakaway march which got to the EDL’s route before being kettled by hundreds of police. These mobilisations were the results of considerable hard work by local anti-fascist groups and the Anti-Fascist Network.

It wasn’t all good news though. The murder of serving soldier Lee Rigby by two Islamists in the summer led to an irruption of support for the EDL who exploited the event mercilessly. Large “memorial” events were held by Leicester and Nottingham EDL which were not countered effectively by anti-fascists who had been caught off-guard. Then came the Strong movement, giving racist extremists a soft patriotic veneer to cloak their organising. Mansfield Strong, for example, turned out to be run by long-time EDL activist, Stan Green. Racist abuse against people perceived to be Muslims soared in the aftermath of the Rigby murder, which showed what a reserve of reactionary and racist sentiment exists throughout the country. It is only thanks to the utter incompetence of fascist organisations in the UK that not more damage has been done.

The anti-Islam backlash that the Rigby murder generated culminated in the actions of Pavlo Lapshyn, a racist terrorist who carried out a number of unsuccessful bomb attacks on mosques in the West Midlands as well as murdering an elderly Muslim man. His campaign highlighted once again the growing rise of far-right terrorism in the UK, a phenomenon which is very real, even if reporting on it does not sell papers. In illustration, the year also saw the trial of a “neo-Nazi” Loughborough teenager who plotted massacres and stockpiled home made explosives and weapons.

Another parallel manifestation of the growing reactionary sentiment in the UK was the rise in popularity of UKIP. The party, which panders to racism and xenophobia, did extremely well in local elections winning 16 seats on Lincolnshire County Council alone. Many of these new councillors turned out, unsurprisingly, to have far right views on race and immigration as well as former membership of the BNP and EDL. At present, UKIP poses a much greater threat to values of tolerance and working class solidarity than any of the insignificant openly far right organisations, and is much harder to mobilise against due to the party’s “cleaner” image, supported by extremists and soft patriots alike.

So whilst the “traditional” franchises of far right and fascist politics are in terminal decline, reactionary sentiment, cooked up by a political and media establishment to divide and rule the working class, is alive and well. A growing number of racists are acting alone, to plot bombings and murders at one end of the spectrum, or to perpetrate racially and religiously abusive online attacks at the other. Meanwhile, UKIP provides the possibility of political respectability and a chance of power for people who hate foreignness. The fascists haven’t gone away – they’ve just changed their clothing.

In response anti-fascists need to reassess their strategies. Simply continuing to follow the increasingly demoralised EDL and BNP around the country might make us feel good, but it is not going to stop fascism. The anti-fascist movement is going to have to look for new tactics and new arenas of activity if it wants to remain relevant and effective.


BNP scraping the barrel for Euros

East Midlands BNP have announced their candidates for the 2014 Euro elections. The list is as interesting for who’s not on it as who is:

1. Cllr. Cathy Duffy.
2. Revd. Robert West.
3. Bob Brindley.
4. Steve Brammer.
5. To be decided.

The first two are obvious choices for the party as the most prominent BNPers in Leicestershire and Lincolnshire even though both did poorly in May’s local elections (West only managed to get 88 votes). Nottingham’s Bob Brindley, however, is anything but a “safe” choice. Brindley uses his Nottingham BNP twitter feed to launch increasingly barmy diatribes against Jews, homosexuality, Asians and just about everyone who isn’t a signed up white supremacist (although he has made an exception for serial paedophile Jimmy Savile).

Bob Brindley: Holocaust denial

Bob Brindley: Holocaust denial

HagueHomosexual 120913Frankfurt 120913270713Twit 200713

After Brindley comes Steve Brammer from Ranskill, North Nottinghamshire. Brammer is almost unknown to fascists in the Midlands, probably because he lives only a few miles from South Yorkshire. He has never stood in an election before.

"Fresh" blood: First time candidate Steve Brammer

“Fresh” blood: First time candidate Steve Brammer

And next in line after Brammer is… well it looks like they couldn’t find anyone else to stand for them! There are no candidates from Derbyshire or from Northamptonshire, no sign of “super activist” Paul Hilliard from Derby and no sign of “Heanor Patriot” Cliff Roper either. Have they jumped ship as well? We will see. Certainly Roper showed signs of a swing to a more extreme right wing position after losing his Amber Valley seat, headlining his blog with the notorious 14 word phrase beloved of neo-Nazis. Perhaps the BNP isn’t extreme enough for him any more?

The release of this list is a further sign of decline for the fascist party. Only a few years ago, the East Midlands were seen as one of the BNP’s strongholds. Now they are struggling even to find 5 people across the entire region to stand for them. Good riddance!


Election nightmare for BNP

The BNP’s election campaign turned out to be a disaster yesterday as their share of the vote was seriously cut down across the East Midlands and the country as a whole. Newcomers, the British Democrats, failed to make any impact and the English Democrats did very badly as well. UKIP’s populist right wing politics seems to have eclipsed the far right, perhaps for good.

Here’s how the BNP share of the vote looked in the wards in which they stood at the last elections in 2009 compared with the current results.

  • Derbyshire:                 2009: 19.2%    2013: 5.5%
  • Leicestershire:            2009: 14.3%   2013: 8.4%
  • Lincolnshire:              2009: 11.1%    2013: 4.3%
  • Northamptonshire:   2009: 13.2%   2013: 4.7%
  • Nottinghamshire:      2009: 10.9%   2013: 2.4%

In other words the BNP has done extremely badly, a view shared by their last remaining councillor, Cathy Duffy, who flounced out of the count in Leicestershire before her (poor) result was even announced.

Another welcome result at these elections was the booting out of Graham Partner, elected as BNP Councillor for Coalville in 2009 and being rejected by the electorate as a British Democrats candidate this year. We won’t be sad to see him go.

Whilst the further collapse of the BNP is to be welcomed, the rise of UKIP poses new questions and challenges for those who oppose anti-migrant racism and right wing populism. This analysis by the Independent Working Class Association is not a bad place to start in understanding the relationship between UKIP and the BNP and stating the challenges facing those who seek to oppose their right wing populism with a genuine working class politics.

 


Bad day continues for BNP

The bad news keeps coming for the BNP who have seen their vote collapse across the East Midlands, even in previously strong areas such as Charnwood and Amber Valley. The results are now in from Derbyshire, Leicestershire and Nottinghamshire and they’re not good for the BNP.

The Fuhrer gets the news

The Fuhrer gets the news

In Amber Valley, the Invisible Councillor’s stay in the wilderness looks set to continue. Cliff Roper blogged excitedly about UKIP not standing in his Greater Heanor ward a month ago but it didn’t help him out. He managed to get 336 votes (12.5%) but that was nowhere near winning. Adrian Hickman failed in Heanor Central only managing 5.5% in a ward that the BNP got 12.5% in in 2009. In Ripley the party’s results were even worse with Alan Edwards getting a pathetic 2.6% in Ripley East & Codnor and Ken Cooper only scraping 63 votes (1.5%) in Ripley West & Heage. There have been some boundary changes in the area but the BNP got 7.2% in Ripley and 6.3% in Heage last time around so this is a significant drop in their share of the vote.

The BNP were  standing 6 candidates in Charnwood and 1 in the nearby ward of Glenfields, an area of north Leicestershire they have previously done well in. It was not to be this time around though. Peter Cheeseman’s share of the vote in Glenfields slumped from 16% in 2009 to 3% and the party’s share of the vote was halved across Charnwood. The best results came from Cathy Duffy in Syston Fosse (11.4% compared with 25.6% in 2009) and Robin Derrick in Thurmaston (10.5% compared to 19.6% in 2009) although in both wards their share of the vote had dropped dramatically.

Things weren’t looking much better for the newly formed (and probably soon to demise) British Democrats either. Kevan Stafford, a former BNP candidate got 7.4% of the vote in Loughborough South (the BNP did better with 12.4% in 2009) and we are very happy to announce that nasty islamophobe and former BNP councillor Graham Partner lost his seat thanks to a massive desertion by his voters. Partner won the Coalville ward with 27.7% of the vote in 2009 but only managed to get 7.4%, less than a third of his previous share, this time. Good riddance!

In Nottinghamshire the re-emergence of Broxtowe BNP seems to have been dealt a fatal hammer blow. Broxtowe organiser David Wright only got 78 votes (2.6%) in Beauvale and fellow activist Alex McConnell did even worse in Eastwood, only managing to attract 57 votes (2.1%). The BNP got 19.7% in Beauvale in 2009 so this is shockingly bad.

With only Northamptonshire left to declare, the news is grim for the far right who have seen voters desert them. No doubt this is in part due to a surge in popularity of the slightly more moderate UKIP but also undoubtedly because the BNP has failed to offer anything to voters in times of austerity except a racism that is increasingly out of touch with the public. Infighting in the far right has meant that many of the party’s activists have given up in despair or left for other pointless groups, leaving the BNP unable to contest elections effectively. We will doubtless see many more desert following these appalling election results and hopefully the knives will be out for Griffin again.


BNP losses in Lincolnshire

The first East Midlands county election has declared and the BNP have done rather badly in Lincolnshire. The “Reverend” Robert West got a measly 88 votes in Holbeach, 4% of the vote and a massive collapse since 2009 when the BNP came second with 418 votes (16.5%). In Louth Wolds, John Hattersley’s 318 votes (10.8%) in 2009 slumped to 176 (7.9%) this time. In Spalding East & Moulton where the BNP polled 573 votes (20.5%) in 2009, Anthony Williams only managed 94 votes (3.9%) – the BNP’s share of the vote is only a quarter of what it was.

Robert West - God is not on his side!

Robert West – God is not on his side!

It seems that all their leafleting in Skegness around the halal slaughterhouse has come to nothing as well. Robert Ashton, Lincoln Coastal Branch organiser stood for the BNP in Skegness South, a seat the party has not contested previously, and managed a very poor 77 votes (4.3%).

In the run up to these elections anti-fascists were pleased at the low number of candidates the BNP were standing, suggesting that the party was collapsing. The BNP claimed they were concentrating on areas where they thought they would do well. That is not turning out to be the case.


Derbyshire fascist candidates

Derbyshire BNP have only mustered 4 candidates for the County Council elections next month. The same tired old faces are:

  • Greater Heanor – Cliff Roper
  • Heanor Central – Adrian Barry Hickman
  • Ripley East & Codnor – Alan Edwards
  • Ripley West & Heage – Ken Cooper

In 2009 they fielded 17 candidates and the NF fielded one. It’s another poor showing for the fascists.

Now that they are all announced we can see just how badly the BNP are doing in terms of putting up candidates compared to their campaign in 2009. Back then they fielded 115 candidates in the 5 East Midlands counties. This time they’ve only managed to find 27 willing to stand – less than a quarter of the 2009 figure. It can’t be money for deposits that’s the problem because the party has been trumpeting about the generous bequests it’s been receiving from its elderly supporters in recent months. The fact is that members have left the party in droves so the remaining organisers are scrabbling around desperate to find someone, anyone, who will stand for them.