A few takeaways from today’s ‘Uniting the Kingdom’ rally in London.

Without the presence of ‘Tommy Robinson’ himself, the whole thing founders. Numbers attending seem to be not much different from those who attended in July, and were largely, and predictably, middle aged and male.

They had to wait for hours, increasingly bored and restless, until the appointed march time – so restless that rival football firms from Millwall and Chelsea started to square up to each other. A tedious evangelical Christian rock band of limited musical ability did nothing to improve the mood.

By the end thousands just couldn’t be bothered staying to watch TR’s latest so-called ‘documentary’ and drifted away.

In the absence of TR, the most effective speaker was UKIP’s Nick Tenconi (pictured) who fired the crowd up and urged them to join UKIP. Searchlight has been reporting on and forecasting a link-up between UKIP and Robinson for some time, and it now seems to be happening. Today’s event organiser, Richard Inman, an old buddy of TR, was recently appointed to the UKIP National Executive Committee.

UKIP will be salivating at the prospect of profiting from TR’s fund-raising abilities (depending on how long he ends up in jail) but he will have other, very different, ideas about how the money should be spent.

Another speaker today was Stan Robinson, UKIP’s Wales spokesman, a candidate in the recent general election, and one half of the racist Voice of Wales online blog. The other half, Dan Morgan, is a convicted fraudster.

There is little love lost between the TR camp and organised fascist groups. Mark Collett from Patriotic Alternative turned up with a few followers and a ‘Free Sam Melia’ banner but was ejected from the gathering. Alek Yerbury, the leader of National Rebirth Party, openly accused TR today of being an ‘indirect government agent’. And Steve Laws, Homeland Party’s most ‘prominent’ recent recruit advised people not go as it was “a waste of time”.

One of the most imprssive aspects of the huge counter demonstration called by Stand Up To Racism, was the presence of thousands of trade unionists with their banners. The trade union movement really pulled out the stops for this, and it was a heartwarming sight.

More about the ‘Tommy Robinson’ – UKIP link-up here: https://www.searchlightmagazine.com/2024/10/tommy-robinsons-key-organiser-appointed-to-ukip-executive/

And here: https://www.searchlightmagazine.com/2024/10/yaxley-lennon-floats-tie-up-with-ukip/

Stephen Yaxley-Lennon (aka Tommy Robinson) may not have joined UKIP himself but his right hand-man, and the main organiser of tomorrow’s ‘Uniting The Kingdom’ rally in London, has just been appointed to the UKIP National Executive Committee. The tie-up bteween UKIP and his ‘cultural movement’ which Yaxley-Lennon suggested last week might happen, seems to be proceeding apace.

Richard Inman, a former soldier, has been associated with Yaxley-Lennon for years. He was the main organiser of the demonstration in Whitehall last July, where Y-L welcomed him on stage and introduced him as the man without whom the event simply would not have happened. Inman then addressed the rally (below). He was at Y-L’s side during the Remembrance Day demonstration which degenerated into violence (top picture).

Now Inman is playing a key role in tomorrow’s events. A week ago, he and other organisers were filmed and livestreamed for almost two hours as they accompanied Met Police officers planning how the rally would go off.

Then only a few days later, Inman was one of a group of individuals who were appointed to the UKIP NEC. There were only 11 candidates for the 11 NEC vacancies, so all were simply placed in post without an election.  But unlike some of those appointed, Inman was not new to UKIP. This was his second spell of membership.

He originally joined in 2018 as a supporter of then leader Gerard Batten, who had taken UKIP on a sharp rightwards turn and appointed Yaxley-Robinson as the party’s ‘Rape and Grooming Gang’ adviser”. At that time, Inman was using a County Down address. He let his membership lapse in 2020 following the expulsion of Batten and his pro-‘Tommy Robinson’ faction in 2019.

Inman, now living in Keighley, appears to have rejoined the party only recently, possibly after the annual conference held last month jointly with the English Democrats. As we reported earlier, he has a recent conviction for issuing threat against his local MP for which he got a suspended jail sentence.

Searchlight has reported a number of signs pointing to a UKIP-Yaxley-Lennon link up. One of the earliest was a warning from Lois Perry, when she resigned as party leader during the general election campaign.

She claimed that there was something “sinister” going on “at the very top of the party” where some people, “wanted to go after quite an extreme viewpoint”. Specifically, she said, they wanted a tie-up with Yaxley-Lennon.

Then only a week ago, Y-L announced in an interview that he was impressed by UKIP and its leader Nick Tenconi and was looking forward to talks with them when he was back in the UK. So, this NEC appointment could be highly significant.  To see Y-L’s right-hand organiser sitting on the NEC means that it probably won’t be long before Y-L himself is eventually welcomed into the party, although his current legal difficulties may delay and complicate the process.

Read more here: https://www.searchlightmagazine.com/2024/10/yaxley-lennon-floats-tie-up-with-ukip/

.

Never let it be said that UKIP doesn’t offer unique opportunities for speedy advancement.

After the election in May of Leader Lois Perry, who had only recently joined the party, and her replacement by Nick Tenconi, a similarly novice recruit, recently announced appointments to the National Executive Committee also boast a sprinkling of brand spanking new party members.

As we suggested in an earlier report, the fact that elections were not recently help for the many recently vacated NEC positions probably meant that the number of candidates was at most equal to the number of vacancies. That turns out to have been the case.

So, Chairman Ben ‘Rogue Builder’ Walker, has announced that 11 new NEC members have been appointed. And his announcement includes the startling new provision for NEC member with no previous NEC experience to be put on probation for 12 months, because, he says, some of them are also new members. There is no provision in the party constitution for provisonal NEC members but, hey ho, this is the new UKIP, run by a pair of convicted criminals.

It does, of course, ensures that these positions – which also mean being a Director of UKIP ltd – remain in Walker’s gift. Anyone playing up and causing difficulty can be disposed of with little fuss.

One of those put on probation is the batshit preacher, Calvin Robinson, who will doubtless be playing his full role in running a UK political party from his parish in West Michigan.

Also appointed is Richard Inman (pictured with his chums, the convicted UKIP fraudster Dan Morgan, Stephen Yaxley-Lennon and Lawrence Fox), a well known far right activist and ‘Tommy Robinson’ devotee, who comes with the sort of pedigree which guarantees he will slot right into the UKIP leadership group. Indeed, he brings a skill set which will make him an invaluable addition to Nick Tenconi and Ben Walker’s team: only last year he received a suspended prison sentence for sending threatening messages to his local MP.

Inman told the court: “I just lost the plot with everything” – another quality which will ensure his seamless integration into the party leadership.

Lots of speculation on Monday about the non-arrest of Tommy Robinson aka Stephen Yaxley-Lennon at Luton Airport when he arrived back in the UK on Sunday night.

One press report suggested that the delayed arrest warrant issued against him in August had been triggered. If so, it’s inexplicable that he would not have been detained. But the arrest warrant was issued on the basis that it would be activated on 2 October if he hadn’t indicated to the court by then that he would attend his Contempt hearing on 28 October. The most likely explanation is that this is exactly what he’s done, and he’s returned to the UK safe in the knowledge that he wouldn’t be dragged straight off to prison.

Filmed relaxed and laughing (see picture) in the passport queue at Luton he actually says at one point “I ain’t getting nicked”. And his tweeted ‘surprise’ at not being held was accompanied, of course, by an immediate appeal for money for his nasal …sorry ‘legal fund’.

Interestingly, also travelling with him back from Benidorm were Stan Robinson and the convicted fraudster Dan Morgan, two UKIP stalwarts from Llanelli, south Wales, who had been visiting Yaxley-Lennon in Spain.

Robinson (right) is UKIP’s Spokesman for Wales and a member of the party NEC. In July he was their General Election candidate in Llanelli. A trade union hater, he was a member of the right-wing Freedom Association in the 1970s and took part in their trade union busting Operation Pony Express, which helped break the (mainly) Asian women workers’ strike at Grunwicks Film Processing Laboratories. (Ironically, both UKIP and Yaxley-Lennon now make a point of claiming to speak for the working class).

Dan Morgan (left) was last year convicted of involvement in what the trial judge called “a deliberate planned fraud carefully structured and fraudulent from its inception”. Hundreds of elderly people on low incomes were swindled out of their savings. Morgan was UKIP’s candidate for election to the Welsh Senedd in 2021 and would have been a general election candidate this year were it not for the fraud conviction.

Together, Robinson and Morgan run the so-called ‘Voice of Wales’, a vurulently right-wing video blog, now banned from You Tube.

A few days before his return, Yaxley-Lennon disclosed that he wanted to establish closer links up between his so-called ‘cultural movement’ and UKIP. He said had been in touch with “the lads” (Chairman Ben Walker and Leader Nick Tenconi) and will be talking to them when he got back to the UK.

If he manages to stay out of jail…

Hiding at a village hall in Staffordshire, Mark Collett’s Patriotic Alternative today confirmed that they intend to abandon any attempt at “mainstreaming” racism.

Collett has given up electoral politics and intends instead to follow the extra-parliamentary road previously travelled by Colin Jordan’s British Movement, even though similar strategies have already led to the jailing of several senior PA activists for crimes including terrorism.

His choice of overseas guests was a clear sign of Collett’s intentions. Three weeks ago in Wirksworth Town Hall, Derbyshire, Collett’s rival Kenny Smith welcomed guest speakers from the German AfD and the Polish Konfederacja, parties which between them have well over a hundred members of national and European Parliaments.

Today, though they were meeting just a few miles away across the border in Staffordshire, at Hanbury Memorial Hall, Collett’s guests were from a different political world where activists are more likely to be found in a jail cell than a council chamber or parliament.

As Searchlight reported yesterday, one guest was Australian nazi and convicted criminal Blair Cottrell. Joining him today, in front of an audience that included veteran British nazis Mark Cotterill and notorious Holocaust revisionist Lady Michèle Renouf, was the Bavarian stormtrooper Sascha Rossmüller, from what used to be the NPD and is now (confusingly for British readers) called Heimat (Homeland).

Rossmüller has been an active nazi for over 30 years and was a leader in the “radical” faction that persuaded the NPD (for years Germany’s leading far right party) to adopt the name change. He helps edit the party magazine Deutsche Stimme and spent years as a full-time party employee. During internal faction fights within the NPD, Rossmüller spent several years as its national deputy chairman.

As with his Australian fellow speaker, Rossmüller has criminal convictions involving violence, in his case connected to the biker scene where for years he has been involved with the “Bandidos” gang.

He has also been an official of Roberto Fiore’s “Alliance for Peace and Freedom” which claims to be a pan-European nationalist alliance though many of its affiliates are only three fascists and a rottweiler.

Having Cottrell and Rossmüller on board may encourage Collett’s most thuggish members, including Cardiff football hooligan Joe Marsh, but will do little to stop the flood of defections by more politically minded extremists to the rival Homeland Party.