UKIP’s annual conference, to be held in Nottingham on 4-5 October will mark a new departure for Britain’s fastest-shrinking political party. For the first time this will be a joint conference, held with Robin Tilbrook’s far-right English Democrats.
Now, that may not be altogether surprising; the two organisations are already locked into a formal election pact known as the Patriots Alliance which is officially registered with the Electoral Commission. However, only two Patriots Alliance candidates featured in the July general election, both ED members and one in a constituency where UKIP had promised not to run against Nigel Farage’s Reform UK and didn’t want to be seen to be too obviously breaching that commitment.But at the same time the EDs ran no less than four candidates (below) jointly with the neo-Nazi Patriotic Alternative. Tilbrook, who is not short of a few bob, put up the funding for this curious tie up – one organisation considerably to the right of the EDs and one which has historically been to its left.
UKIP’s membership still has a large component of more traditional anti-EU, anti-immigration members who might not take kindly to such a dramatic drift to the right, even if it was heralded last year when the party NEC lifted its long-standing ban on former members of nazi groups joining up. Chairman Ben Walker said at the time it was to open the door to more ‘like-minded’ people.
A move closer to the EDs, which the upcoming joint conference represents, is a move closer to a group which, as recently as this year’s election, was happy to jump into bed with avowed neo-Nazis.
New non-elected leader Nick Tenconi may well feel comfortable in such company, but there are quite a few members who might not see it in quite the same way.
It will also be intersting to see what role the batshit preacher Calvin Robinson plays in proceedings. Announced only recently as UKIP’s lead spokesperson on everything, he has since revealed that he will be shuffling off elsewhere – we know not where but it will be outsde the UK – leaving him in post for an even shorter period of time than the hapless Lois Perry who resigned during the election campaign only weeks after being elected leader.
Germany’s far-right are celebrating their biggest election victory since the 1930s, after Alternative for Germany (AfD) became the largest party in one eastern German state and the second-largest in another.
Yesterday’s results have strengthened the hand of the most extreme faction in AfD, the so-called Flügel or “wing”, headed by Björn Höcke (above), who leads the party’s branch in Thuringia.
Höcke has been a member of the Thuringian Landtag (state parliament) since 2014, but just three years ago the AfD leadership tried to expel him for extremism. It’s frequently been stated that Höcke wrote articles for the neo-nazi magazine Volk in Bewegung published by fellow Thuringian Thorsten Heise. While Höcke has denied this, he has refused to make a sworn statement on the matter, and Searchlight has long been aware of his close ties to Heise and other nazis.
On several occasions Höcke has made rhetorical gestures towards Holocaust denial and other hints of support for the Third Reich. He has been investigated by the German security services, and even charged and fined for using nazi slogans. In 2017 he called on Germans to cease apologising for the Holocaust, and implied in a newspaper interview that Adolf Hitler should no longer be viewed as “only bad”.
This is the man who has now led the first regional election victory for the far-right in the history of post-war Germany.
Yesterday Höcke’s AfD won 32 of the 88 seats in the Thuringian parliament and was easily the largest party with 32.8% of the vote, well ahead of the conservative CDU on 23.6%. Some right-wing CDU members are calling for coalitions between their party and AfD, but it seems certain that their leaders will try to maintain a “firewall” between mainstream parties and the far right.
One important factor is that a small group on CDU’s right-wing who favoured coalition with AfD have already broken away, and their new party WerteUnion (‘Values Union’) was trounced in both Thuringia and Saxony yesterday. This means there is no obvious bridge between the two parties.
A further complication is that Galloway-style populists and pro-Moscow elements have formed a new party, the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW), chaired by two former leaders of the Left Party that grew out of the old East German Communists.
BSW has existed for less than a year, but finished third yesterday in both Thuringia and Saxony, another former East German state. This was a personal disaster for Thuringia’s Minister-President Bodo Ramelow, who is from the Left Party and is a longstanding factional opponent of Wagenknecht.
The Left Party lost more than half of their seats in Thuringia and fell from first place in 2019 to fourth yesterday. Thuringia’s Greens (who were in coalition with the Left and the social democratic SPD) and the liberal FDP fell below the 5% threshold, so lost all their Landtag seats.
It seems likely that the CDU will try to form a minority government in Thuringia with the SPD, but the main question now is whether the supposedly left-wing BSW will cooperate with efforts to keep AfD’s crypto-nazis out of power, or will prioritise the interests of their friends in Moscow.
It would be appalling to see a man like Björn Höcke have any influence over a state comprising 2 million people. The right-wing press in Britain will make all sorts of excuses, and pretend that AfD are a legitimate voice of anti-immigration politics. They aren’t.
Höcke is a barely disguised nazi. Thorsten Heise, his ally in what was once the NPD (now Heimat) is one of the most violent Hitlerites in Europe. Heise has many British connections ranging from the skinhead music scene to Holocaust deniers. He is presently facing a range of criminal charges for his open nazism.
The results in Saxony were not much better. There the CDU retained first place with 41 seats to AfD’s 40, but again BSW with 15 seats will have considerable influence over whether a stable state government can be formed.
Superficially, it might seem that AfD’s rise has damaged the older parties of Germany’s far right. For example in Saxony, the neo-nazi NPD won Landtag seats in 2004 and 2009. In recent years NPD support declined to almost nothing, and the party rebranded as Heimat.
But below the surface Heimat officials are delighted with the trend of events. Like Höcke, they are staunch supporters of Putin’s murderous dictatorship and his allies, especially the brutal Syrian regime of the Assad family, and they hope to continue a pattern of discreet connections to AfD in various thinktanks and “cultural associations” that bring together the parliamentary right with a broader range of nationalist and “identitarian” extremists.
A small faction of Germany’s nazi scene has stood out against AfD and Heimat, and opposes Moscow’s hegemony. This element has formed Dritte Weg (Third Path or Third Way), and has built connections with anti-Putin football hooligans as well as more ‘intellectual’ Hitlerites. During the past year Dritte Weg officials have visited Spain and Britain, where they have strong connections to the hardcore nazi Devenir Europeo, and have held meetings with DE’s most famous young propagandist Isabel Peralta and her friends at Heritage & Destiny.
Two Dritte Weg activists attended the H&D conference in Preston last year where Peralta spoke, and their leader has been interviewed by H&D’s assistant editor Peter Rushton.
On September 22ndDritte Weg will be fighting the Landtag election in Brandenburg. They are certain to be trounced by AfD, but they hope to position themselves as the only active party to the right of AfD and to benefit if Germany’s divisions move away from parliaments towards street violence.
“If it’s yellow, let it mellow. if it’s brown, flush it down.” That was a water-preserving mantra from, if we remember correctly, California in the 1970s, which crossed the pond when summer droughts hit Britain later in the same decade.
We can only imagine that the United Kingdom Independence Party misheard this sound piece of advice, because their behaviour very much indicates a political lifestyle of “If it’s brown, double down.” The more crap-laden a UKIP policy, the more determined they seem to persist in pushing it – often adding more excreta with every repetition.
For example, last week we were about to yawn when we noticed that the Kippers were pushing out a slogan graphic about putting a barrier in the middle of the English Channel, to keep out the small boats. Good grief, we said to ourselves, that one has to be nearly a year old! It’s as whiskery as a dropped nubbin of Stilton that bounced under your sofa unnoticed at Christmas and you didn’t find it until spring cleaning week.
It was at the start of October 2023 that UKIP unveiled its master plan to install a floating barrier along the Channel, to almost universal derision. Apart from being simply a mad idea, when you looked at their graphic impression of the ‘barrier’, the very word seemed to be stretched to the limits of its potential definition by a line of floats barely any more imposing than the lane dividers at a swimming pool.
Some suspected that the idea had been copied from an entertaining fund-raiser by Men Behaving Dadly without the dimwit leadership of the floundering party realising that the whole thing was a spoof.
Anyway, here is the same party (though it has gone from floundering to foundering) back just 11 months later with the same daft idea. Or is it? A closer look at the latest purple pronouncement reveals that the plan has escalated to building a solid wall down the middle of the Channel. In case you might be in doubt as to their meaning, they background their silly sloganising with a photo of a stone harbour mole replete with lighthouse.
So basically the plan is, as best we can tell, to build the kind of barrier that Trump promised but couldn’t deliver, while upping the ante by proposing to build it where you would need to start with foundations on the sea bed and make the wall hundreds of feet tall just to reach the surface.
Though it seems likely that this nonsense has been resurrected at the behest of temporary UKIP leader Nick Tenconi, it doesn’t have Tinconman’s name on it in the small print but that of chairman ‘Barnacle’ Ben Walker. You might think that a man who can (and continually does) boast of six years’ experience in the Royal Navy might have thought about the impracticality of sticking a wall in the world’s busiest seaway – it is used by about 500 ships per day – but apparently not.
Walker’s actual maritime knowledge has been coming under increasing scrutiny of late, especially since Searchlight revealed that he never achieved a rank higher than leading seaman, and that his speciality was in ship’s stores. We wonder if the Barnacle’s immersion in the world of the ‘Dusty Jack’ – counting floggle-toggles and eking out the stocks of humgrummits – meant that he spent very little time familiarising himself with above-decks maritime concepts such as cross-Channel ferries finding stone walls difficult to pass through.
Looking again at that picture of a lighthouse on the mad slogan sheet, we are reminded of the bawdy old song ‘In Mobile’, which posited that the lighthouse was now a white house because of the use the seagulls made of it. Perhaps that’s why the Kippers’ lighthouse is so pale – it’s covered in the guano talked by the likes of Tenconi and Walker.
Vladimir Putin’s network of supporters among European fascists are celebrating today after the victory of the far-right party Alternative for Germany (AfD) in the eastern German state of Thuringia.
AfD’s Thuringian branch is led by the Kremlin’s main German asset, Björn Höcke. They will have 32 of their state parliament’s 88 seats. Adding to Russian glee, another Moscow asset, Sahra Wagenknecht (a more successful German version of George Galloway) saw her nominally left-wing party BSW claim third place with 15.8%.
There were similar results in Saxony, where the conservative CDU only just held on to pole position, with the two pro-Moscow parties AfD and BSW finishing second and third.
Yet Putin’s friends only have to look west and east to see the dangers of working for the Kremlin.
In Paris, the founder of Telegram – for years the app of choice for nazi terrorists, paedophiles, and Russian agents – is facing serious criminal charges. Several observers have speculated that the detention of Pavel Durov is actually a cover for his defection, and that the ‘private’ messages of both far right activists and Russian spies are now in the hands of French security services.
Just days after Durov’s arrest, a 50-year-old Russian nazi mysteriously choked to death in a Moscow restaurant.
Maxim Eremin (above, left) made his name in the 1990s as a notorious hooligan, co-founding the ‘Red-Blue Warriors’ gang at CSKA Moscow.
But for the past twenty years he was a Russian intelligence officer, reaching the rank of colonel in the FSB and participating in atrocities in Chechnya, the Middle East, and Ukraine.
By his late 40s, Eremin stepped back from frontline violence and became an important recruiter of far-right hooligans from other European countries, especially Serbia, into the ‘Moskva’ reconnaissance battalion of the 106th Airborne Division.
One of Eremin’s allies in this hooligan recruitment drive was Alexander Zaldastanov, a former nightclub bouncer who leads the Night Wolves, Russia’s largest biker gang. Another was Marko Milošević, a fugitive Serbian gangster whose father Slobodan Milošević died in his prison cell in 2006 while on trial for war crimes committed during his years as Serbian dictator during the 1990s.
Eremin had risen from hooligan streetfighter to intelligence officer and prosperous businessman. But perhaps he knew too much for the FSB’s comfort. Last week while dining in a Moscow restaurant, he supposedly got a piece of meat stuck in his throat and asphyxiated. It makes a change from falling out of windows.
Some of those recruited by Eremin from the ranks of European neo-nazis, whether as mercenaries or as spies within supposedly pro-Ukrainian far right movements, will now be feeling nervous.
In addition to the 106th associated with Eremin, and the far more famous mercenary ‘Wagner Group’, another Russian unit that has recruited nazi hooligans from around the world is the so-called Española Volunteer Brigade, led by one of Eremin’s fellow CSKA hooligans, Stanislav Orlov.
The unit’s name is due to Orlov having learned Spanish and built some Spanish connections. One of the few actual Spaniards who has fought with the Española Brigade is the mercenary Juan Manuel Soria (above, cetre), known as ‘Simon de Monfort’, who once led the Valencia branch of the neo-fascist party Alianza Nacional. AN is linked to one of Moscow’s main allies on the European far right, Roberto Fiore, who has been well-known to Searchlight readers for more than forty years.
Together with his old friends from CSKA, Orlov has recruited for his Brigade among many other hooligan firms including Spartak Moscow and Zenit St Petersburg. His propaganda was boosted when former international footballer Andrey Solomatin, and mixed martial arts fighter Mikhail Turkanov, both joined Española.
A third neo-nazi unit is Rusich, which like many other mercenary gangs had experience in Africa and Syria before being employed in Ukraine. Rusich’s leader Alexey Milchakov is a Zenit hooligan who openly describes himself as a Nazi and revels in sadism. Two weeks ago, Rusich broadcast an appeal for other Russian units to provide them with a suitable Ukrainian prisoner to be used in a ritual human sacrifice.
Milchakov’s deputy Yan Petrovsky (alias Voislav Torden) is jailed in Finland awaiting trial. He built strong connections with Scandinavian nazis, including members of the Nordic Resistance Movement, which was recently proscribed by the US authorities as a terrorist organisation.
Petrovsky and Milchakov met through the Russian Imperial Movement, which has spent years networking among the European far right. The RIM was involved in a high profile International Russian Conservative Forum, held in St Petersburg in 2015, where guests included two of the leaders of American racism, Sam Dickson and Jared Taylor.
Several social rungs below the well-heeled Dickson and Taylor is the most prominent American recruit to the Española Brigade, the rockabilly barber and social media influencer ‘Teddy Boy Greg’ (above, right).
After Eremin’s ‘accidental’ asphyxiation, his weird gang of misfits and psychopaths must now be wondering whether it’s more dangerous to be on the frontline against resurgent Ukrainian forces, or in a Moscow restaurant under the watchful eye of the FSB.
Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, aka Tommy Robinson, has been at the gear again.
In his latest online missive he rants that our rights and freedoms are being taken from us and he, fearless fighter for our futures, is “gonna scream it from the hilltops”
Now, we have to ask: which hilltops are those, Steabhán? MacGillycuddy’s Reeks? The White Towns of Malaga? The mountains where you make those five-hour sweatless treks in Greece? Or some new panic phase bolt-hole in remote yodelling country?
Because all of the hills in Ingerlund are looking conspicuously de-yaxlified at the moment. And they’re going to stay that way, aren’t they?
Because Lennon’s goodness-knows-what-fuelled paranoia has now reached a pitch where the UK authorities have escalated their persecution of him to the point where they plan on ”Putting me in jail and getting me killed!”
Of course. There’s an SAS death squad already serving time undercover in Belmarsh, just waiting for the Luton Leprechaun to turn up for his porridge. No doubt about it. Phew!
We do hope that those followers of the Boy From Ballyburberry who have put their money on his turning up for his next scheduled court appearance, in October, have managed to obtain a very long price on Betfair.
Coming soon: ”The Archons have put out a contract on me and the Aquaphibians follow my ferries in their Mechanical Fish!”
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