British fascists are blaming each other and sinking further into mutual mudslinging after the far right’s many factions failed to nominate candidates in most areas at the local council elections on May 2^nd. Influential neo-nazi umbrella group, Heritage and Destiny, lost no time in going online after nominations closed to describe the right wing showing as “feeble”.

The worst embarrassment was suffered by Patriotic Alternative’s führer Mark Collett. Last month he announced that three PA members would be standing as independents, but when nominations closed two of these had failed to get onto the ballot paper.

Collett can blame Jewish conspiracies for PA’s persistent failure to register as a political party, though many of his own former members suspect the real reason is that Collett and his deputy Laura Towler wish to avoid scrutiny of PA’s donors and accounts. Such suspicions are among the reasons for PA’s split last year into at least three rival groups.

But who can Collett blame for his announced candidates in Tameside, Darren McLean in Hyde and Robert Booth in Droylsden, failing to hand in their nomination papers. Were they kidnapped by Mossad on their way to the Town Hall? Did Searchlight agents burgle their homes? Did the dog eat their paperwork?

There is a deafening silence from PA’s Yorkshire bunker, although Towler’s fundraising streams highlighted the one candidate in the entire country that PA has managed to nominate, in the Cheshire borough of Halton.

Collett’s bitter rival Kenny Smith and his Homeland Party, mainly made up of former PA activists, are also putting up just one candidate, in their case able to use a party name because Homeland (unlike PA) is registered with the Electoral Commission.

Confusingly, Roger Robertson was never in PA, but jumped ship to the Homeland Party from the British Democrats. He’s a former BNP regional organiser who split from Nick Griffin more than fifteen years ago and (like Leppert) ended up in Anne Marie Waters’ For Britain Movement before moving on to the British Democrats and now to Homeland

The newly registered National Rebirth Party, created by the third ex-PA faction, Alek Yerbury’s National Support Detachment, has no candidates. The much older National Front and British National Party, which barely exist in 2024, also have no candidates.

Ageing NF and BNP veterans mostly drown their sorrows in the pub nowadays, but some can be found in the British Democrats, whose four candidates at this year’s elections include three former BNP councillors. Party chairman Jim Lewthwaite is again standing in Wyke ward, Bradford. Former BNP London mayoral candidate Julian Leppert is contesting the new Waltham Abbey North ward in Epping Forest, having represented its predecessor Waltham Abbey Paternoster as a For Britain councillor. Lawrence Rustem is fighting another revised ward, Shepway, Maidstone. And parish councillor Chris Bateman is standing in Castledon & Crouch, Basildon.

Next to Mark Collett, the most red-faced fascist in England at these elections is Paul Golding (who was Collett’s predecessor as Nick Griffin’s blue-eyed boy around the turn of the millennium but is now better known for beating up women, including his former partner Jayda Fransen).

For the past couple of years Golding’s Islamophobic party Britain First has been the best of a weak bunch of fascist election campaigns. Party chair Ashlea Simon gained 21.6% in 2022 and 18.3% last year in Walkden North, Salford. But this year Ms Simon and her party have disappeared from Salford without trace.

Britain First will contest the London mayoral and GLA elections with just one candidate, former Generation Identity militant and BNP candidate Nick Scanlon, but elsewhere in England they have only two standard bearers, David Bamber in Cokeham ward, Adur, and Amanda Peel in Bablake, Coventry.

While Anne Marie Waters has quit her campaign to lead UKIP, her fellow Islamophobes from the deregistered For Britain are scattered among several different parties. Some are now in the National Housing Party, which continues its doomed mission to turn EDL hooliganism into electoral politics and has just one candidate, John Lawrence in Hollinwood, Oldham.

More respectable right-wing parties have a greater presence than the fragmented neo-nazi and Islamophobe movements but are a lot weaker in this year’s elections than many predicted.

Reform UK has been struggling to purge its ranks of antisemites and other lunatics. They have 325 candidates at this year’s council elections, as well as contesting three by-elections, the London Mayoralty and GLA, four other mayoralties, two Police Commissioner elections, and the parliamentary by-election in Blackpool South which is also on May 2nd.

The few areas where Reform has a credible slate of candidates give us clues as to where the party might be strongest at the General Election, and where they might hope to play a serious role in any post-election reorganisation of the British right, especially if the Conservative Party collapse is catastrophic.

These are Sunderland (full slate of 25 Reform candidates), Bolton (full slate of 21), Hartlepool (full slate of 12), Sandwell (18), Plymouth (17), Walsall (15), Barnsley (10), and Lincoln (10).

The Heritage Party, led by a former UKIP GLA member David Kurten, has 33 council candidates and another in a by-election, plus a slate for the GLA. Their strongest areas are Southend, where there are seven Heritage candidates and none from Reform, and Crawley, which has three Heritage candidates and again none from Reform.

UKIP is now more concerned with its own internal struggles (and control of party funds and future legacies) than with anything resembling normal politics. They have only 15 council candidates, plus another two in local by-elections.

In Dorset two of UKIP’s candidates are standing under the label ‘Patriots Alliance – English Democrats and UKIP’. This is the first product of a recent alliance with the English Democrats, led by Essex solicitor Robin Tilbrook, have been involved in several failed pacts with other far right groups over the past twenty years. This year Tilbrook’s diminished forces amount to five council and three police commissioner candidates.

A former UKIP faction that has also sought refuge in alliances with other micro-parties, the Alliance for Democracy and Freedom, has a candidate at the Blackpool South by-election but otherwise seems to have faded away.

For now, the British far right has more YouTube streamers and ‘content creators’ than election candidates.