The dramatic demise of UKIP continues unabated: another long serving, senior party loyalist has cut and run for the hills in the wake of the party’s disastrous election campaign and the fallout from it.
Pat Mountain, UKIP’s Party Director, has over the last few days been airbrushed out of all leadership positions recorded on the party website. Three weeks ago she was taken off the party’s Policy Team where she specialised in immigration, and over the last few days has also been quietly removed from the NEC list, from the list of party spokespersons (she spoke for them on Immigration and Housing) and from the leadership list where she was Party Director. She has not yet been removed as a director of UKIP Ltd, the company which controls the party, but that may now only be a matter of time.
Of all the recent departures, this is one of the most significant. Mountain has been a member of UKIP for more than a decade. She was interim leader during the 2019 general election and deputy leader for a period after that, and has been a party candidate in local council, parliamentary and European elections on numerous occasions. She was one of the group of ‘plotters’ who delivered the chairmanship to Ben ‘rogue builder’ Walker in 2020.
Her spell as leader, however, was not without its difficulties. During the 2019 election she appeared in an interview with Adam Boulton on Sky TV in which her, let us say, fragile grasp of basic facts became a topic of much derision within the party. You can watch it here.
It was this car crash interview which led to the sobriquet ‘Catherine Tate’s Nan’ being conferred upon her.
Mountain has not officially announced her resignation from any of these posts so there is no clear reason why she has gone. There are, however, unconfirmed rumours that it may be to do with her concerns over the manner in which a Reform candidate withdrew his nomination at the very last minute in the Wyreley and Penkridge constituency, leaving a clear run for UKIP candidate, Janice MacKay.
As the dust settles on an election campaign which for them was universally catastrophic, the UK’s extreme right is licking its wounds and eyeing up potential targets for blame.
The main factor behind their dire performance, of course, was the involvement of Reform UK especially after Farage announced his candidacy in Clacton in mid-campaign. Reform, itself stuffed with racists and extremists, will be the main force on the far right for the foreseeable future, but its success in hoovering up right wing votes which might otherwise have gone elsewhere, is leading to a period of instability and feuding amongst other groups further to the right.
UKIP, which fielded 24 candidates of its own and a couple under the banner of Patriots Alliance, its electoral coalition with the English Democrats, is watching its membership shrivel by the day. This trend is not new but was seriously exacerbated by the total fiasco of Lois Perry’s election as leader in May to be followed in short order by her endorsing Farage and Reform in the general election and then quitting, citing health reasons.
Her departure, throwing the UKIP campaign into chaos, was the subject of dark mutterings about a Farage-inspired plot to bring UKIP down (a suggestion, we hasten to add, for which no evidence has been offered).
She was replaced by her deputy Nick Tenconi, a spiteful specimen drafted in from Turning Point UK. But now members are asking how they found themselves with two leaders in quick succession who had each only been a member of the party for a few weeks before taking it over.
Perry did at least have some claim to the post having, on the face of it, won a leadership election. But even this is being looked at with increasing scepticism. Her election rival, UKIP veteran and ex-MEP Bill Etheridge, resigned during the general election campaign pouring doubt and scorn on the integrity of the party’s internal election process. He was followed by NEC member and Defence & Veterans spokesman, Ret’d Squadron Leader Peter Richardson.
None of this was helped by former Deputy Leader Rebecca Jane’s incendiary open letter to members, published in Searchlight. It prompted a wave of resignations from a rapidly depleting membership.
Their general election performance was a total fiasco, with only two of their candidates getting more than 1%. One was the the odious, smirking bigot from south Wales, Stan Robinson who polled 1.47%. The other was NEC member and National Campaign Manager, Janice MacKay, who in very odd circumstances was parachuted into the Great Wyrley and Penkridge constituency in Staffordshire, which lies some 270 miles from her Scottish address and where the Reform UK candidate withdrew his candidacy only minutes before nominations closed. This happy sequence of events meant that she was in the fortunate position of not having a Reform opponent and so managed to harvest the (still not very) handsome total of 6.17% of the vote. She, alone of UKIP candidates, saved her deposit though the other forfeits will not impact on the party’s finances – candidates had to find the £500 out of their own pockets anyway. And, three days after the election, the UKIP website has still not been updated to include its election results.
Another question that the NEC will now have to answer – if they can – is how UKIP came, via a three-party alliance, to be involved with the openly neo-Nazi Patriotic Alternative who, like UKIP, forged an electoral alliance with the English Democrats. Members of a more conservative than fascist hue, who were taken aback at the NEC’s decision to admit former members of neo-Nazi groups as UKIP members, believe their worst fears have been realised and are very unhappy.
And there remain the unresolved questions about the mysterious trust which now appears to completely own UKIP and which is in turn controlled by Chairman Ben Walker. As the party’s Returning Officer it is Walker who is also facing questions about the process through which Perry became leader.
For Patriotic Alternative the electoral alliance with the EDs was a thoroughly opportunist arrangement with a party with whom they have little in common. The principal motive for it was PA leader Mark Collett’s panic that if he didn’t have some presence in the election, it would redouble the accusations already flying around that he is more interested in online grifting than real politics. And, with a pile of cash raised on the back of Sam Melia’s imprisonment, he could hardly claim they couldn’t afford it. However, having failed to register as a political party his options were limited – till the EDs leader Robin Tilbrook came to his rescue.
But it has all backfired. The performance of the ED candidates, and especially the PA cuckoos in the nest, was derisory and, like UKIP, PA’s public face – its Telegram channel – is totally silent on its election performance; since the election it has posted only an item about its Summer camp, complete with a cosy picture (below) of Mark Collett with jailed ‘race martyr’ Sam Melia’s wife, Laura Towler.
Collett is now being targeted by National Rebirth Party leader Alek Yerbury as the main architect of failure. Yerbury argued for complete abstention from the election, saying that given their pathetic resources, it was simply a waste of time and effort at this stage.
There is a growing feeling on the right that he was correct, and the others got it wrong. Now, challenged to a debate on future strategy by Yerbury, Collett has had little choice but to agree, though he knows he is on a hiding to nothing. Yerbury is rubbing his hands in anticipation. He is targeting PA’s membership as vulnerable to a raid from a party which positions itself as more serious, with a clear sense of strategic direction. The debate will be held online in a few weeks’ time.
The British Democrats ran only four candidates, and their votes were pitiful though you wouldn’t know that from their website because, yes, you’ve guessed it, three days after the election they feature a long article listing how many leaflets they delivered and how many doors they knocked on, but not one word about how many votes they won.
Ssshhh…don’t mention the results
They, like Homeland Party who didn’t run in the election but told members to vote Reform, are likely to be targeted next by Yerbury who is already deriding the ‘ladder strategy’ which they have both adopted. This posits years of campaigning at, for instance, parish council level to establish credibility before seriously contesting national elections in a particular local area. According to Yerbury:
“There is a line of thinking that by doing thankless tasks for your local community, at a low level, it will set you up for success in elections.
“In theory, that sounds good, but in practice what will actually happen is that you will become a local dogsbody who is well liked, but also viewed as someone whose function is to clean up problems that other people make, and people will get resentful the moment you stop doing it in order to move on and do things like working in parliament etc.”
That argument is likely to resonate with young activists in Homeland and the BDs who want something a little more positive and exciting to do than collect litter and pick up dog poo in the local park.
It may not be long before the (long) knives are out…
Top pictures, left to right: UKIP’s musical chairs leadership, Lois Perry and Nick Tenconi; PA activist Craig Buckley stands as ED candidate in Leigh; NRP leader Alek Yerbury
It’s understandable for Labour Party members to be euphoric this morning. And anti-fascists outside Keir Starmer’s party might also be tempted to join in the celebrations and avoid looking too closely at the overnight results. That would be a mistake.
After years of deliberate pandering to culture war rhetoric (in other words, “respectable” racism and homophobia) the Conservative Party has suffered a landslide defeat.
Nigel Farage’s dog-whistle racism and despicable recycling of Putin’s propaganda lines has left Reform UK with five seats, about the same as the Greens and Plaid Cymru. It’s five too many, but far short of what he hoped for and some polls were projecting.
George Galloway’s attempt to create a Strasserite movement by combining concerns over Gaza with “culture wars” proved a dismal failure, and gave us one of the best moments of election night television when Neil Kinnock, a longstanding anti-fascist campaigner, was rightly able to celebrate the defeat of the arch-opportunist Galloway.
UKIP, whose stunning collapse during the six-week election campaign, involving the resignation of several officials including their own newly elected leader, has been exposed in detail by Searchlight, had almost uniformly pathetic votes. The one exception was the Staffordshire constituency of Stone, Great Wyrley and Penkridge, where UKIP saved their deposit with 6.2% thanks to the absence of Reform UK.
David Kurten in happier times with Nigel Farage
Conspiracy theorist and culture warrior David Kurten, once of UKIP and now leader of the Heritage Party, finished bottom of the poll in Bognor Regis and Littlehampton with 1.5%, while the other forty candidates for his party polled between 0.1% and 0.7%.
The perennial Islamophobe and ex-Tory Brian Silvester, once part of Anne Marie Waters’ For Britain Movement and now standing for his own “Putting Crewe First” party, took only 1.2% in Crewe and Nantwich. An assortment of far-right independents were equally dismal failures. Former Griffin bodyguard and notorious Merseyside gangland enforcer Joe Owens polled 0.3% in Liverpool Wavertree, ex-BNP organiser Andrew Emerson fared only slightly better with 0.4% in the latest of his many candidatures in Chichester, David Durant (a relic of Patrick Harrington’s faction in the 1980s’ NF splits, who has now reinvented himself as a community activist) polled 0.8% in Hornchurch and Upminster, and former Tory MP Andrew Bridgen (whose conspiracy theorising led him into short-lived alliance with Laurence Fox) made a fool of himself by losing his deposit with 3.2% as an independent in his old constituency, NW Leicestershire.
And every single candidate from the various conspiracist and extremist parties to the right of Farage – including the four candidates from Mark Collett’s nazi gang Patriotic Alternative, standing under the sickeningly misnamed ‘English Democrats’ label – lost their deposit. As with UKIP and Heritage, most of these borderline or blatant fascists polled not just below 5% but below 1%.
Craig Buckley (above, second left) the PA nazi standing under two different labels yesterday, polled 6.8% as independent candidate for the Leigh South ward of Wigan Council, but only 0.9% as English Democrat candidate for the Leigh and Atherton parliamentary seat. The difference was mainly due to Buckley having Reform UK opposition in the parliamentary election, but not in the council by-election.
The best outright fascist General Election result was 3.7% for ‘British Democrat’ Frank Calladine (below) in Doncaster North, who had no Reform opposition. His campaign team included former BNP councillor Jim Lewthwaite as well as British Democrat president Andrew Brons, a veteran of the nazi scene dating back to Colin Jordan’s National Socialist Movement. Despite grandly advertising their status as “parish councillors”, two of the Brit Dems’ NEC members – former BNP activists Chris Bateman and Lawrence Rustem – managed only 0.9% and 0.4% in their Essex and Kent constituencies, while the party’s newest recruit Gary Butler took only 0.3% in Maidstone.
Labour strategists may be tempted to sit back and enjoy divisions on the right, especially as contenders for the Tory leadership debate whether they should move further in Farage’s direction.
The cynical short-term response would be for Labour to avoid talking about issues, and not risk offending Reform supporters.
But the lesson of the Blair years is that this is a very dangerous game. In 1997 the New Labour landslide disguised long-term problems in some traditional Labour areas, where the Tyndall-era BNP was already starting to rebuild the far right’s electoral strength from its rock bottom years in the 1980s.
In Lancashire and Yorkshire mill towns especially, the BNP was starting to sink roots by the late ‘90s. Soon after Nick Griffin’s takeover of the party, it was able to profit from racial tensions, beginning to save parliamentary deposits and win council seats. Despite many internal problems (many due to Griffin’s own corruption) the BNP ended up with dozens of councillors and two Members of the European Parliament.
It was only thanks to a combination of determined anti-fascist campaigning, investigation by Searchlight and internal BNP factionalism that the party eventually collapsed.
In 2024 some of Reform UK’s strong votes are in the same areas where the BNP once had councillors, or strong branches that briefly became the main challengers to Labour.
Though not coming near to defeating Labour, yesterday Reform polled 19.3% in Oldham East & Saddleworth, 19.5% in West Bromwich, 22.5% in Bradford South, 24.4% in Stoke North, 26.1% in North Warwickshire & Bedworth, 26.4% in Dudley, 28.7% in Amber Valley, 30.3% in Rotherham.
One of the old BNP’s few intellectuals, Kevin Scott, pointed out on X/Twitter that Reform UK has become the main opposition to Labour across a large part of North East England, including Scott’s home city Sunderland.
It’s not good enough for anti-fascists to rely on the electoral system to keep out fascists. First-past-the post can under certain circumstances allow the far right to win, if their opponents’ votes split in a particular way.
More likely though is that for other reasons there will be pressure for electoral reform.
In that case, the only sure way to keep the far right out of power is to take them on directly, not to avoid issues of principle in the 1990s Clinton-Blair approach of “triangulation”.
Not pandering to Reform voters, nor empty sloganising but by patiently and consistently explaining how they have been exploited by Farage’s dog-whistles.
There’s some evidence that during the last week of the campaign, Farage started to lose support to both the Tories and Labour, because of his own mistake in repeating Russian propaganda arguments, and the cumulative effect of repeated revelations about vile racism among his candidates.
In the new Parliament, the Reform leader and his handful of fellow MPs should be relentlessly exposed for what they are. Looking for entertaining television during a sometimes drab election campaign, broadcasters have sometimes seen Farage as a ratings boost, as Trump was seen in the US.
What’s needed now is more of the serious scrutiny that the BBC’s Nick Robinson gave to Farage during his interview late in this year’s campaign.
And while the media and Westminster politicians hold Farage up to scrutiny, campaigners up and down the country should prepare to take on either Reform UK, or any revived fascist party that tries to play the same tunes in local elections during the next few years.
At least four rival factions of old-school fascists and nazis are trying to build up credible parties. Searchlight is aware of several debates, training seminars, and backroom negotiations planned for the next few weeks and months. We can’t assume that the pattern of vicious factional splits will continue. Reform UK’s votes yesterday – even if they could be seen as “protest votes” – will be seen by the rest of the far right as evidence that a modern version of the BNP or NF could take off rapidly.
After all the flags of convenience, dog-whistles and evasions of this election campaign, how does the British far right look on polling day, and what are its plans for the new Parliament?
We can start by looking at one constituency that British fascists have been heavily publicising this week. Leigh and Atherton is the new version of a seat once held by Greater Manchester’s Metro Mayor, Andy Burnham. It’s very likely to be a Labour gain today, with Reform UK competing for second place with the Tories.
Voters in Leigh & Atherton have every right to be confused. In May 2019, when Theresa May’s Tories were in disarray and distrusted in strongly pro-Brexit areas like Leigh, Craig Buckley (above, second left) was a UKIP candidate, finishing runner-up in the once safe Pemberton ward of Wigan Borough Council with 28%.
By the next local elections two years later, Buckley had quit UKIP and he soon turned up among the former BNP and National Action nazis recruited by Mark Collett into Patriotic Alternative.
A few weeks ago, two new versions of Craig Buckley were presented to voters. The UKIP Buckley was long gone, and the PA nazi Buckley remained in the shadows. For the General Election there was a brand new “English Democrat” Craig Buckley, but in a simultaneous local council by-election for Leigh South the same day there is an independent Craig Buckley.
All these are the same man. But how does he expect the voters of Leigh and Atherton to see him as an “English Democrat”, when his real political leader is not Robin Tilbrook of the EDs, but Mark Collett, star of Young, Nazi and Proud?
Despite his protestations to the contrary, which were given the soft soap treatment in the local press (above), Buckley’s true allegiance is to a party whose leader has Adolf Hitler and the former Belfast terrorist leader Johnny Adair among his political heroes, and whose deputy leader idolises Sir Oswald Mosley.
In case anyone was in any doubt, Peter Rushton, the assistant editor of Britain leading nazi publication Heritage and Destiny was part of Buckley’s canvassing team on the last weekend of the campaign.
So what are the objectives of these nazis, since they must know that the votes for their handful of candidates (whether standing as independents, British Democrats, or English Democrats) will be minuscule?
On their many social media accounts, Collett and his main rival Kenny Smith (leader of the Homeland Party that broke away from PA last year) have both endorsed Nigel Farage’s Reform UK in the vast majority of constituencies, where there will be no BDP or ED candidate.
Their reason is not just that Farage’s dog-whistle racism is the closest thing to the old National Front or BNP available on most ballot papers.
Collett, Smith and others genuinely believe that the terms of political debate in the UK are shifting in their direction, and that mainstream political leaders and journalists are so blinkered and pusillanimous that this trend will be allowed to continue.
They expect an explosion of anger among Reform voters after results are declared on Friday, and they expect that Nigel Farage will continue to stoke that rage for his own cynical purposes, without building any genuine political party that will give it a voice.
PA and Homeland are themselves a long way from having any serious infrastructure of branches and local candidates, but if the Conservative Party is reduced to a rump of fewer than 150 MPs, Collett and Smith believe that the main obstacle to British far-right growth will have gone.
All the more so if the new Parliament seems to represent such a distorted picture of the nationwide vote that there is unstoppable pressure for electoral reform.
A lot will then depend on what type of new electoral system is proposed, and then on whether the far right is able to mobilise and unify around a 2020s version of the 1970s NF or the 2000s BNP.
But the responsibility of anti-fascists and mainstream politicians will be to avoid obsession over process, and lift our vision above petty parliamentary point-scoring.
Farage has made an impact at this election because the major parties avoided talking about issues. Until the last few days of the campaign, Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer avoided labelling Farage as an extremist because they didn’t want to alienate a certain section of the electorate.
But many voters saw through this. The only way to respect Farage’s electorate is to level with them. To expose Farage’s poisonous agenda (as has happened only at the very end of this campaign since he dropped the mask and repeated his pro-Putin views). And to explain immigration policies rather than pander to knee-jerk hatred and scapegoating.
Britain’s fascists, even though for now they have had to hide their swastikas and their Mosley worship, their terrorist connections and their poisonous racism, will hit the ground running within days of the election.
They will be planning exactly how to take advantage of the new political landscape. And anti-fascists will need to be prepared for an uncompromising response.
Alek Yerbury, founder and leader of the National Rebirth Party, and the chap with a penchant for pencil moustaches and military-style great coats, has again put pen to paper to offer a comment for the Searchlight website.
Now, it has to be said that Mr Yerbury is, by a considerable distance, the most courteous nazi we have had contact with, not dealing (thus far at least) in gratuitous abuse. So, we have informed him, equally courteously, that he can write all the comments he likes but we won’t be publishing them. It’s been our policy for almost 50 years not to offer a platform to those of his ilk, and we have no intention of changing it now.
However, we do feel we had to share a bit of his offering, given the light it sheds on the divides increasingly opening up between himself and others on the far right with whom he was not so long ago associated.
Yerbury is responding to our story about a recent, rather unsavoury, guest on Patriotic Alternative leader Mark Collett’s online talk show. The guest in question was Jeremy MacKenzie, a far-right activist, ex-military veteran and gun-nut who, on his own podcast, had publicly discussed raping the wife of the Canadian Conservative Party leader.
According to Yerbury: “This is what happens when people live in echo chambers. The worst aspects of their personality just get inflamed and reinforced”.
Note that rather pointed dig: “…the worst aspects of their personalities…” According to Yerbury, what he calls “enclave groups” tend to produce “extremely asocial mentalities”. Altogether, a not very flattering appraisal of the Mark Collett psyche, it has to be said.
Virtually alone on the extreme right, Yerbury is advocating complete abstention from the general election: don’t vote, don’t even waste your time spoiling you ballot paper. “The NRP” he says, “will go on the offensive when it is organised and equipped to do so, and therefore when it is organised and equipped to succeed, and not before”.
Yerbury is obsessive about the far right starting to talk about strategy rather than what divides it ideologically. And whilst he has nothing but total contempt for Farage and Reform, he also has little time for some of his even further right rivals. So now, like some Prussian aristo dusting off his duelling pistols, he has been using David Clews’s Unity News Network to challenge leaders of other nationalist parties to public debate where he intends to attack their record of strategic failure (it has to be said, he has a bit of a point in this respect…) and offer his own 20-point master plan for Britain’s future greatness.
Although the challenge is general, the person he has in his sights and whom he was trying to strong arm into a public showdown is Collett, whose PA represents the most immediately winnable pool of potential recruits to the National Rebirth Party. Collett, backed into a corner, has reluctantly agreed but is very unhappy, feeling he has no option but to pick up Yerbury’s glove or lose considerable face.
The PA man is not relishing it, though. He knows he has walked into a trap set specifically with him in mind.
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