HOW DID BRITISH NATIONALISTS DO IN THE RECENT COUNCIL ELECTIONS?

Rising star in a dark sky, Ashlea Simon

by Kevin Scott

The recent local elections across the UK saw a massive boost for "Nationalism" everywhere (except England!)

The main explicitly English Nationalist party, the English Democrats, fielded only five candidates, well down on previous efforts, none of whom managed to get over 10% of the vote in their respective wards.

Elsewhere, Irish "Nationalists" Sinn Fein topped the poll in Ulster. Ditto the SNP in Scotland. Whilst the Labour/Plaid hegemony held largely firm in Wales.

The general consensus is that the Tories performed badly, but not terribly enough to sink them or their embattled leader and prime minister Boris Johnson (aka Alexander Kemal) entirely. Labour advanced, particularly in multicultural London, but the advance was not enough to stake a claim for UK-wide government at the next general election, which is only a couple of years away. And the Liberal Democrats and Greens made significant localised gains; the former at the expense of the Tories in the English shires, the latter at the expense of Labour in the ‘woke’ suburbs.

What about the BNP and UKIP, which in their pre-Brexit heyday contested thousands of council seats across the country between them?

The BNP, once the premier political party of British Nationalism, failed to contest any seats at all. Even the rump National Front, the main parent party of the BNP back in the early eighties, managed to field two candidates.

UKIP itself, no longer the party political vehicle of Nigel Farage, fielded just over two dozen candidates, all of whom finished rock bottom last with derisory votes, bar one candidate in North Tyneside who managed to beat the far-left TUSC, albeit with another derisory vote.

As for the various offshoots of UKIP and the BNP; Reform UK, formerly the Brexit Party led by Nigel Farage post-UKIP, managed to field the most candidates, well over one hundred in total, winning two seats in Derby, but almost all of the rest polled very badly, even in Derby itself, one of the movements few remaining strongholds.

Likewise, the Heritage Party (16 candidates), Alliance for Democracy and Freedom (5 candidates) and For Britain (14 candidates) all performed badly. For Britain leader Anne Marie Waters, who has pledged to become an MP at the next general election and has attracted the support of former English Defence League leader ‘Tommy Robinson’, attracted only 203 votes (3rd of 4 candidates) in a ward in Hartlepool which had previously elected a For Britain councillor.

Since Patriotic Alternative, led by former Young BNP leader Mark Collett, failed to register as a political party in order to contest the elections, the remaining BNP offshoots, the British Democrats and Britain First, both led by former BNP councillors, continue to make their claim as the successor party to the moribund BNP.

The British Democrats did better in terms of number of candidates, but only just, with four candidates. But Britain First, with three candidates, did much better in terms of the number of votes and percentage share of the vote. In Salford, near Manchester, the Britain First candidate, Ashlea Simon, grabbed second place behind Labour with 508 votes (21.6%), one of the best performances by a potential successor party to the BNP since 2010 when the party effectively collapsed.

Despite the ongoing and deepening Tory troubles, political space, outside a handful of areas, usually associated with previous UKIP or BNP success, has yet to appear in any meaningful way that can be exploited by a post Brexit anti-Tory nationalist party.

There are glimmers of hope, but we are still years away from seeing a predominant party, either from the UKIP or BNP tradition, that can effectively fill that space.