It was the best-organised far-right party in Britain. Today it collapsed.
For Britain 'will cease functioning straight away'
For Britain, one of the UK’s most prominent far-right parties, has suddenly announced it will cease operations.
Anne Marie Waters, head of the anti-immigrant For Britain party, said her support “has collapsed” and that she is quitting electoral politics immediately. “The process of closing everything down has started today,” she said in a statement to members.
It follows two years of dire election results. This May, in the council elections, the party put up fourteen members, including a Hitler-worshipping former member of the BNP. They all lost. The year before, 60 For Britain candidates ran for council seats and similarly failed.
Waters is a counter-jihadist who believes the West is existentially threatened by Islam. She has called the religion “evil” and “a killing machine” and has spoken about wanting to “reduce the birthrates” of Muslims.
Her party was once deemed one of the best-organised far-right parties in the country, boasting a handful of councillors. Tommy Robinson, who has the largest online following of any far-right activist in Britain, gave the party a boost when he joined this spring. The Smiths frontman Morrissey said that Waters was the first person in his life that he had voted for. She had also secured positive coverage from The Light, an anti-vaxx newspaper with a circulation of 200,000.
Despite their best efforts, Waters said a lack of “public support” put paid to her party, citing the campaign of “fear and propaganda by our opponents”. She added that support for extremist parties like hers was so low that even if their votes were counted together, “we still would not come close to threatening the establishment”.
Her members have been distraught to learn about the demise of For Britain. “This is bitterly, bitterly disappointing,” wrote one on Telegram. “The future is so bleak,” added another.
Waters has announced that she will focus instead on producing videos, articles and resume Sharia Watch, a dormant Islamophobic project she launched in 2016.
Rival far-right organisations, prone to hating each other as much as the foreigners they campaign against, have seen this as a victory. Sam Melia, a regional organiser for the white nationalist group Patriotic Alternative, cheered the end of her “Zio-Shill party”, inferring Waters was irrelevant because of her support for Israel. “She’s cucked on everything,” he added in a livestream.
For Britain’s most recent accounts reported an income of £150,000 in membership fees and donations. Only £1,400 of that was actually spent on campaigning, while £106,000 was spent on Waters’s salary, pension, travel and security, among other miscellaneous expenses. It had no full-time staff, relying instead on volunteers.
So why give up such a lucrative business that did so little campaigning but netted so much money? Scout wonders if running a party — which comes with a degree of financial transparency to ensure compliance with the Electoral Commission — is more of a hassle than being a far-right influencer and accruing donations directly from followers. Indeed, Waters has already started appealing for cash. “I can only do this with your support,” she says. “If you can spare just one or two pounds per month, I can spend as much time as possible on this project.”
In her statement, Waters pledged to return to electoral politics when she deemed the country ready for her. “For now my energies can be better spent,” Waters says. Perhaps she means her money can be better spent too.
She spoke at the Ukip Conference you attended, and is now not only a member of Ukip but catapulted into the poison of Justice Spokesman.
Since she doesn't have a criminal record she'll soon feel out of place there.