Category Archives: anne marie walters

RIGHT WING WOES IN LEWISHAM EAST!

RIGHT WING WOES IN LEWISHAM 
It was always a bad idea for any sort of patriotic party to be standing in the Lewisham East by-election.  Let me explain why and please bear with me in being brutally honest about it.
When I was aware that the Labour MP, Heidi Alexander, was stepping down and causing a by-election in the Lewisham East constituency, I was immediately very doubtful as to whether it was worth the English Democrats standing there.  Although I should say that I would never discourage any of our members from standing even in the most unpromising areas if they really want to do so and have the necessary resources to do so.  Even in the most discouraging constituencies there may be some potential converts to the Cause of England!
Lewisham East is certainly such a seat.  Looking at the 2011 Census results Lewisham is a place where relatively few people identified as being “English” and surprisingly few even identified as being in any sense multi-cultural “British”.  
Since 2011 the misleadingly named “Conservative” Party (which actually is led by “Liberal” zealots) has continued with the unrestricted, uncontrolled mass immigration of New Labour and so every single year since then half a million or more immigrants have come to England, many of them settling in places like Lewisham.  That together with “white flight” or the continuing movement of English people out of such places, has led to a near total population displacement where the indigenous English population is largely absent. 
In an area where the indigenous populations are still there, what we see across Western Europe is that the patriotic and nationalist vote rarely exceeds 50% and is usually not more than 30%.  
Because of the way electoral politics works people should not get discouraged at that percentage because a block vote of 30% of the electorate would generally get the candidate elected.  That is of course unless the 30% is split up amongst various parties, as is the case at present in England, with the Conservative Party in particular always standing as a spoiler even in the most unpromising seats for the Conservative Party. 
The “Conservative” objective in doing so is of course to prevent any other party from breaking through, even where they do not actually want to win that constituency.  
This Tory strategem is very much like the Aesop’s Fable of ‘The dog in the Manger’!  

The top of this article is the picture of ‘The dog in the Manger’. Here is that story:-

“A Dog was lying in a Manger full of hay. 
An Ox, being hungry, came near and was going to eat of the hay. 
The Dog, getting up and snarling at him, would not let him touch it. 
“Surly creature,” said the Ox, ” you cannot eat the hay yourself, and yet you will let no one else have any.””
Sure enough in Lewisham the Conservatives and most of the parties to the Left were putting up what is now rather curiously (in such constituencies) still called ethnic minority candidates even where the real ethnic minority in such a constituency would be “White English”!
UKIP put up a black “ethnic minority” their popular London Assembly Member David Kurten.  
The new and it seems politically naive ‘Democrats and Veterans Party’ put up the splendidly named Massimo Dimambro who had 2013 votes in Lewisham Deptford for UKIP in 2015.
Anne Marie Waters who is the Leader of her own new UKIP splinter party which she has called the anodyne “For Britain” very unwisely put herself up to stand in this constituency.  She got 266 votes this time under her new flag compared with the last election where she stood in the constituency then as UKIP candidate when she got 3886 votes!  
Judging from comments on social media it would seem that some of her supporters had got sucked into thinking that she might have been able to do well in this constituency.  For the reasons that I have explained above that was always going to be difficult. 
I had predicted that UKIP, For Britain and the Democrats and Veterans Party together would not get 5%.  In the event combined they got 3.2%.  
Even adding in the Conservative spoiler Candidate’s 3,161 the total Right of center vote was only 3874 which is 12 short of just UKIP’s vote in 2015.
A point of debate was which of them would avoid being beaten by the Monster Raving Loony Party.  In the event the ones beaten by the Loonies were the Democrats and Veterans Party. Anne Marie Walters managed to avoid that fate by a margin of 173 votes. 
It would be interesting to see what the paltry results in this by-election will have on the future development of UKIP, The Democrats and Veterans Party and in particular on the For Britain Party, whose leader Anne Marie Waters had staked so much of her credibility on making a reasonable showing here.

UKIP’S AGONY

UKIP’S AGONY


So now we know! UKIP, I think rather to the surprise of all involved as well as all commentators, has elected the relatively unknown Henry Bolton with just 3,874 votes.

Mr Bolton had been UKIP’s Police Commissioner candidate in Kent, but apart from that his career track record had been in the army and the police and as a Liberal Democrat parliamentary candidate standing against Philip Hammond. He was also an EU apparatchik. His background is therefore somewhat surprising for the new Leader of UKIP!

Henry Bolton is the fourth Leader that UKIP has had in 18 months. Their chaotic leadership turbulence has undoubtedly contributed to their fragmentation from the highpoint of them being the main key to the ‘Leave’ vote in the EU referendum.

The public generally seems to think that UKIP’s job is done, judging by UKIP’s election results, but having 18 months of leadership turbulence cannot have helped. This can also be seen in the turnout levels in three leadership levels.

The turnout in the leadership election when they elected Diane James on 16th September 2016 was 17,842. The turnout on 28th November 2016 that elected Paul Nuttall was 15,370. The turnout that elected Henry Bolton on the 29th September 2017 was 12,915 votes.

Now the 2,755 members who voted for Anne Marie Walters and the 2,021 UKIP voters that voted for John Rees-Evans both look set to leave the Party along with both of their preferred leadership candidates.

This is not at all surprising given the insults which they have been subjected to by both Nigel Farage and Mr Bolton himself. If all their supporters leave it would be an exodus of 4,776 members.

I generally take it as the best possible measure of active membership within a party that every member of the party who still identifies themselves as a member of the Party and is engaged with the Party will vote in a leadership election. This is particularly so if, as in the case of UKIP, it was a postal ballot. There is little effort for the individual member in ticking a box and returning the form in the envelope provided, so almost all who care will do so.

It follows that shortly the engaged members of UKIP will be down to 8,139 which is below the 10,000 critical mass level required for maintaining a fully functional political party.

At that point UKIP’s only advantage over the English Democrats (with our 4,500 members) will be reduced to the difference in membership subscriptions and manpower and also the fact that they still have MEPs and other elected officials who are no doubt full time activists for the Party and contribute something to its running costs. Naturally most of those will go in mid-2019.

We may then be back to where we were before the UKIP surge in support in 2011/2012, when we generally beat them whenever we came across them especially where there was a reasonably level playing field. We also achieved much better results per pound than they were able to do. That was because the English Democrats were then clearly identified as the only political party standing up for England.

UKIP succeeded in initially pulling the wool over many peoples’ eyes and made them believe that they also stood up for English interests between 2012 and 2016. Now however it has become obvious, after their leadership elections in 2016 and 2017, that UKIP’s Leaders have rejected any pretence that they are interested in England, the English Nation or in English national issues.

The academic who has done most to study the rise of UKIP (and before that of the BNP) is Professor Matthew Goodwin of Kent University Canterbury. What his research shows and what he says himself is that there is space on the political spectrums for, in English politics what he would refer to, being himself of the Left, as a Radical Right party, similar to that of Marine Le Pen’s Front National.

It doesn’t appear from the remarks that Mr Bolton has made so far that he wants UKIP to be that party.

Mr Bolton has declared that he is not against immigration and, for that matter, he is not even against a transition period in the process of us leaving the European Union. He is therefore happy to not only wait to exit the European Union, but also to do so on the basis that Mrs May is currently talking about, that is continuing to make very substantial payments into the EU budget.

Mr Bolton also strongly attacked Anne Marie Walters and her followers as being racists and Nazis and of the BNP tendency.

Since Anne Marie Walters, although she is very much against Islam, does so from the militant Left/Liberal perspective of wishing to protect Gay Rights rather than as an advocate of the preservation of English traditions and traditional morality (which is not perhaps surprising given that she is of Irish origin and a Lesbian), it was clear that Mr Bolton’s intent on making those remarks wasn’t actually to describe Anne Marie Walters politics, but rather merely to smear her (given the Nazi regime’s record was of executing large numbers of homosexuals and others whom they called “degenerates”!).

If I am right and Mr Bolton’s leadership will take UKIP firmly back into the safe territory of British Establishment Politics, then I must say I really cannot see any future role or purpose for them at all.