One of Britain’s most active nazis has been campaigning for Advance UK candidate Nick Buckley at this week’s Gorton & Denton by-election.
Steve Smith, best known as organiser of Burnley BNP during the early 2000s, was photographed out on the campaign trail for the Advance candidate last weekend, and Buckley himself happily posted this photo on Facebook.
Far-right split
As Searchlight has recently reported, sections of the British far right have given up hope of building their own party, but are split over whether to follow Ben Habib’s Advance UK, Rupert Lowe’s Restore Britain, or Nigel Farage’s Reform UK. A few deluded souls even believe that UKIP is the answer.
Steve Smith has opted for Advance UK.
Smith made his name as organiser of Burnley BNP, leading the racist party’s breakthrough at the 2002 local elections when they won three Burnley Council seats.
Although the party went on to win seven Burnley seats at the 2003 election, Smith soon fell out with BNP leader Nick Griffin. At the party’s 2003 Red, White and Blue festival these tensions came to a head when Smith’s nephew Luke (a BNP councillor) smashed a bottle into the face of one of Griffin’s bodyguards.
Election fraud
Luke Smith was a notorious football hooligan who at one point was banned from every football ground in the country.
Steve Smith himself served a six-month prison sentence in 2002 for election fraud, after admitting forging signatures on nomination papers for the previous year’s Lancashire County Council election.
He later wrote a book How It Was Done: the rise of Burnley BNP.
The book is currently being sold by the Homeland Party’s book service, but perhaps now will become a handbook for Advance UK.
After leaving the BNP, Smith drifted around several hardcore nazi organisations including Eddy Morrison’s British People’s Party and the National Front.
For a couple of years, he was chairman of the England First Party, taking over from Heritage and Destiny editor and former Blackburn councillor Mark Cotterill.
Smith seems to be campaigning for Buckley in similar style to his former BNP campaigns.
The original cover of How It Was Done shows Smith wearing a sandwich board with the slogan “Fight Back, Vote BNP This June”.
Odd tale
The photo circulated on Facebook, by Advance UK’s candidate, with a rather odd tale about giving directions to a Reform campaign bus which had lost its way, suggests that Buckley himself took the photo.
But it shows Smith again wearing a sandwich board, this time with the slogan “Vote Nick Buckley, Local Man”.
Smith’s appearance with Advance UK (a party that earlier recruited ex-EDL thug Tommy Robinson, though it’s now uncertain whether Robinson has defected again, this time to Restore) is yet another sign that supposedly respectable political parties are now prepared to associate with militant activists notorious for racism and criminality.
