The “fash-lite” English Democrats have announced that David Wickham will be their candidate for the parliamentary by-election for the Corby seat, to be held in November. Wickham’s main concern will be to scrap with the BNP and UKIP for votes, as the ED is attempting to carve itself a niche in the grubby world of nationalist politics. Expect a fair measure of further right-wing infighting as the election gets closer.
Tag Archives: English Democrats
More nationalist infighting
It’s not just the Leicester EDL and casuals who are splitting up this week. The English Democrats have enraged the BNP by inviting hated former BNP crook, anti-abortionist and loyalist, Jim Dowson, to do a PR campaign for them. This has involved using the BNP membership list, which it is rumoured that Dowson still legally owns, to spam existing BNP members with letters inviting them to join the EDs. Rob Walker, recent convert to the EDs from the BNP is “furious that this has happened” and Northants BNP members are none too happy either.
Anthony, posting on the Northants Patriot blog, writes:
Why on earth are the ED’s using this mans services for, this man is only interested in making cash and sees nationalists as fools to milk funds. He has repeatedly derided the ED’s in the past, im just dumfounded
Buisness is buisness says it all. Dowson … knew he could still make money from nationalists. Now [Britain First] is failing he sees the ED’s as the next cash cow … it shows that the movement is riddled with odious selfish little people with no view of the bigger picture
The criticism is not limited to Dowson. Walker’s decision to join the English Democrats also comes in for a lot of flak from disgruntled Northants fascists. For example, Anthony thinks that
I for one think the prospects of the ED,s are no better than that of the BNP. I could never join a party with that odious man Eddy Butler involved. The media woud give the ED,s the same treatment they have given to all nationalist groups that have had any hint of success… Once the media realise that ex BNP members are involved they will let rip. You will be back to square one.There are reports of many original ED members leaving because of the influx of ex BNP with many southern members quitting leaving a few former BNP branches in Yorkshire as their main areas of strength. its only a matter of time before splits and divisions occur. All that will be left is a clique of ex BNP whos sole reason for being there is because they dont like Griffin, hardly a motivation for success. ED,s, no thanks, not for me.
There are reports of groups like Britain First and the EDL starting to fragment,even the ED,s are showing signs of internal strains.
Roy Davies agrees:
Rest assured that as soon as the English Democrats are seen to present any threat to the established parties they will become the target of such attacks. As this party becomes more well known and starts to stand more candidates for election expect ever more from the “Dirty Tricks Brigade”.
Wim Wauters adds:
[Dowson’s involvement] and having Butler proves the EDL is just as rotten as the BNP. This is just another political party and that will let you down.
Anthony concludes:
[A]ll groups are the ‘property’ of various tinpot dictators who cannot work with each other. In my opinion its these so called leaders who have dragged us down… There seems to be some kind of ingrained culture of plotting and back stabbing in the nationalist movement
We couldn’t agree more. It doesn’t matter what stripes these fascists brand themselves with, they remain fascists and will be targeted for anti-fascist action. That is why ourselves and other groups are increasingly focusing our attention on the English Democrats. They may be enjoying a temporary lull whilst the general public catches up but they can rest assured that they will become as hated as the BNP before long.
English Democrats fail in Lincoln East
The English Democrats candidate and leader of the party in Lincolnshire, Elliott Fountain, has failed dismally in the Lincoln East by election. Fountain, who is already a councillor for the Fenside ward of Boston Borough Council, only got a paltry 24 votes (2.1%) despite the extremely low turnout, something that normally favours small parties.
Fountain has said that at least half of the jobs available in Lincolnshire should be guaranteed to go to “English workers”, a call which was criticised by local farmers who said it would lead to a labour shortage. A speech of his is quoted on the now defunct Boston Casuals website in which he blames the “east euros” for everything from both school closures and local children not being able to go to their selected school, Boston Borough Council’s benefits bill and drink driving. “1000 east euros get deported on euro warrants each year from UK for being criminals,” he rants, “people dont know if there living next door to rapists, murderers and paedophiles”. Unsurprisingly, he failed to mention that the vast majority of rapists, murderers and paedophiles in this country are British. He is trying to promote the same politics of fear and loathing of anything foreign that is shared by the rest of the far right. Thankfully only 24 people in Lincoln East have fallen for it.
Fountain has said that he will stand for the Lincolnshire Police Commissioner post in the Autumn. His credentials appear to be that “I am Lincolnshire born and raised – my family have been here for hundreds of years” and that he is “more in touch with the youth of today”. He campaigned to be elected as mayor of Boston last year, but had to pay people to support his bid.
If Fountain’s anti-immigrant politics of fear sounds rather familiar it might be because his stablemate, fellow English Democrats councillor for Fenside, David Owens, was a BNP member up until the 2011 local elections when he defected to the English Democrats. The English Democrats appear to be seen as a more “credible” nationalist party to join when jumping the “toxic” BNP ship but anti-fascists are not falling for it. It’s the same old xenophobic nonsense with a new label.
Another BNP organiser defects
East Northants BNP organiser and author of the Northants Patriot blog, Rob Walker, has announced his defection to the English Democrats in a bid to gain credibility. Describing being in the BNP as like “flog[ging] ourselves to death for nothing” he said “I have no faith in the leadership of the BNP and the name is toxic with the electorate.” He was damning about those remaining in the party saying “I cannot name one person now with the party that has the drive and desire and capability of leading it, and that includes Griffin.”
Walker joins the North West Leicestershire branch of the BNP who jumped ship in April and Boston councillor, David Owens, who defected before last year’s elections. As many as 43% of the English Democrat candidates in May’s local elections were former BNP members, hoping that they can avoid the “toxic” fascist label by donning a different coloured rosette.
English Democrats beat BNP in Desborough
An election was held on July 20th for the Loatland ward of Desborough town council, in Kettering borough, and was contested by two nationalist candidates; Kevin Sills of the English Democrats polled 14.2% and came third, beating the BNP’s Clive Skinner who polled 6%. Both beat the Libdems, who came last in yet another dismal local election for them.
This is an interesting result, with nationalist parties grabbing a fifth of the vote between them, and the BNP getting beaten convincingly by new-kids-on-the-right the English Democrats. This result will encourage the ED, who are attempting to establish themselves as a specifically english nationalist party, occupying political terrain somewhere between the tories and the BNP.
They do not qualify as a fascist party, although they are firmly of the right, with attacks on “political correctness” and a tough anti-immigration attitude, for instance. It is important to note that their activist base contains a large proportion of ex-BNP members, with some claiming that 43% of their candidates in May’s local elections were recent BNP defectors. The party certainly seems a comfortable home for rats who have jumped the BNP’s leaky old ship, and it seems inevitable that this fact will shape the political development of the ED.
Desborough man Kevin Sills is not a recent BNP defector; however, he is certainly no stranger to fascist parties, having previously been a member of the National Democrats and the Freedom Party (not to be confused with the EDL-linked BNP breakaway British Freedom!) and, allegedly, the National Front, all three of which are now defunct. Sills has also stood in local elections as an independent.
Kevin Sills – far-right rosette collector
Sills is a good example of the sort of candidate the English Democrats seem to attract – a veteran fascist still searching for a credible political home in which to make electoral advances. We remain very sceptical that such people have truly renounced the far-right politics where they cut their teeth, and will continue to monitor the ED, especially where they are performing strongly in parts of the region.
Coalville ex-BNP councillor’s leaflet censured
A leaflet written by former BNP councillor turned independent, Graham Partner, has been censured for an anti-Muslim leaflet he sent out to voters as a New Year message. Partner, who is now touting the English Democrats label, wrote a leaflet claiming that “victimhood comes easily” to Muslims accusing them of “terrorist atrocit[ies]” and “blood-soaked massacre[s]” “justified by reference to imagined grievances.”
Graham Partner: Bilious shitbag
A Leicestershire County Council standards committee found that Partner had undermined race relations, breached the council code of conduct by bringing the Council into disrepute and ruled that Partner should undertake equality training.
Partner’s leaflet was described as “causing harassment to people of Nigerian origin, Third World origin, Palestinian origin, Pakistani origin, any non-Christian beliefs as well as those of a liberal Christian belief” suggesting that there is almost no one in the world that Partner likes.
Standards sub-committee chair, Martin Caple, said “We have decided Coun Partner is censured in the strongest possible terms as this is a serious matter”, although it is not clear what consequences this has other than the slap on the wrist of equalities training.
Of course, Partner himself has decided that this is all a massive conspiracy claiming rather grandiosely that “it was seen as an opportunity to feign offence on [minorities’] behalf by political rivals who are incapable of defeating a single independent councillor by fair and proper means.” Partner seems to think that racism is all in the imagination of those who have to put up with over-entitled fucktards like him spouting such offensive rubbish day in and day out.
It’s a pity he didn’t get kicked out of his job.
English Democrats first election foray in Daventry
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.
Local elections round up
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.
Full English?
The defection of the entire North West Leicestershire branch of the BNP to the English Democrats is merely the the latest instance of BNPers giving up on Nick Griffin and jumping ship. So large is the shift, that some have claimed that as many as 43% of the English Democrats’ candidates in the forthcoming local elections are one-time BNP members.
Among the former BNPers standing for the English Democrats:
- Paul Rimmer is standing as the party’s candidate for mayor in Liverpool (alongside candidates for the BNP and National Front). Rimmer is a former member of the both the BNP and UKIP and, if Hope Not Hate can be believed, he has also been a member of “Militant Labour” (presumably the Trotskyist Militant Tendency, latterly the Socialist Party and the Tories.
- Eddy Butler, the BNP’s former national organiser and architect of the “Rights for Whites” campaign in the 1990s is standing in Epping Forest, Hertfordshire. Butler was expelled from the BNP by Nick Griffin in 2010, but is still listed on BNP MEPS Andrew Brons’ website as a political researcher. He is also a former member of the National Front.
- Chris Beverley, standing in Leeds, was previously a Parliamentary candidate for he BNP and, like Butler, is still listed as working for Andrew Brons as his PA.
It is interesting to note that Butler and Beverley appear to have kept a foot in both camps joining and actively campaigning for the English Democrats while maintaining their association with Brons, leader of the anti-Griffinite “BNPIdeas” faction. Is this an indication that Brons and the rest of his followers are testing the water before jumping ship themselves?
English Democrat leader Robin Tilbrook told the party’s annual conference, held in Leicester last September, that the influx of BNP members represented an opportunity for the party, claiming that “some of the people who wanted to do their honest best for our country but made the mistake of joining the BNP are now joining us and will help us become that electorally credible party.” He conceded, “We need to be sure that such people are genuine converts to a more civic or cultural nationalism and that they will be an asset to our party, but we do not need to be too defensive.”
How Tilbrook proposes to ensure they are “genuine converts” isn’t clear. With so many BNP members joining and only 60 people attending last year’s conference it is not to difficult to imagine a situation where the party is pulled ever further to the right or even taken over completely.
For the timebeing at least, the The English Democrats are not a far-right party. Instead they positioning themselves somewhere to the right of the Conservative Party, much like UKIP, but substituting constitutional questions about Europe with concerns about England’s role within the Union. They are committed to the formation of a devolved English Parliament with at least the same powers as those granted to the Scottish Parliament, but not full independence.
They like to present themselves as an English version of the Scottish Nationalist Party (SNP), however, Scottish nationalism has historically defined itself in opposition to a Tory-dominated England. This has tended to pull it to the left. (Whether this would continue after independence is open for debate, but the SNP in power has in practice been little different to the mainstream parties.) Without similar pressures pertaining in England, the English Democrats are a very different beast and weare actually formed by an ex-Tory.
The party claims that it is neither left nor right, but are hardly the first to do so. Third Positionist neo-Nazis have been insisting that they’ve transcended the left-right dichotomy for decades, convincing nobody. This isn’t to suggest that the English Democrats are actually undercover Strasserites, but the party’s key policies incorporate the usual right wing cliches: an end to “mass immigration,” withdrawal from the EU and opposition to “political correctness”.
So far the English Democrats have had little electoral success. The sole exception being in Doncaster where Peter Davies was elected as Mayor in 2009. His period in office has been characterised by attacks on “political correctness” (although his attempt to get rid of “non jobs” at the council floundered when none could be found) and incompetence, culminating in a 2010 report by the Audit Commission which concluded that the authority was “dysfunctional”.
It is hard to believe that English nationalism is going to set the electorate alight. For most people in England, the West Lothian Question is a matter of constitutional arcana of no relevance to their daily lives. Apart from its attachment to an English Parliament, the English Democrats are essentially just another Tory party and the one we’ve got is more than enough.
There is a real danger, however, that if the party is pulled to the right it might be able to fill the space occupied by the BNP, which over the last decade has demonstrated that there is considerable potential for a radical far-right political party. Recall that in the 2010 General Election, the BNP received 564,321 votes for 338 candidates. This is more than twice as many as the Green Party who secured a seat in Brighton, and almost three times as many as the National Front’s electoral highpoint in the “bad old days” of 1979. In 2009, the BNP won 2 seats in the European Parliament (with the attendant financial bonuses) on the back of 943,598 votes, 4.9% of the vote.
The BNP achieved more than any other far-right group in the UK has ever done before, but a combination of anti-fascist organising and incessant internal squabbling has prevented them from making the kind breakthrough we’ve their counterparts make elsewhere in Europe (The Front National in France, Vlaams Belang in Belgium etc.). Could the English Democrats now make that breakthrough in their stead? It certainly isn’t inevitable, but equally it isn’t inconceivable. Anti-fascists will be watching with interest.
NW Leicestershire BNP defect to English Democrats
North West Leicestershire BNP have had a rocky relationship with the party over the past few years, with former councillors Graham Partner and Ian Hammonds quitting the party to get beaten as independents last year. Now the North West Leicestershire “Community” blog has shunned the “pointless people pandering to Herr Griff.” and declared its allegiance to the English Democrats instead:
Nick Griffin turned out to be just another chancer with no real morals or conscience, happy to empty the coffers of those who have worked hard to achieve relative success in the very deceitful and corrupt sphere of politics today.
Nationalism is in a mess. Egotistical purists have gone off and formed their own various and miniscule parties with no hope of achieving anything.
Parties like the English Democrats, no? Not that we want to discourage them from wasting their efforts on a party that one of its members admits doesn’t have “the support or infrastructure in Leicestershire”.
Some supporters are pleased to be getting a glimmer of credibility praising the fact that “They do not need any redirection points, the do not need to keeps there meeting place a tip secret. There is no need to hide your intentions.” However, given that some are claiming that almost 43% of their candidates have recently been in the BNP that could all change very quickly. Indeed, it’s difficult to imagine a party wishing for a ‘cleaner’ nationalist image to embrace the likes of Graham Partner, who is currently under investigation for his virulently anti-Muslim views.