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.