How the far-right is exploiting the by-election of a murdered MP
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Today we’re publishing a briefing on the Southend West by-election and a digest of recent articles about the far-right. If you like it, please tell your friends and family. You can forward them this email or click the button below.
Ukip’s candidate for the Southend West by-election
After David Amess MP was murdered, the major parties announced that they would not contest the subsequent by-election in the Tory safe seat of Southend West. But two far-right contenders have now emerged.
One of them is Jayda Fransen – she’s a former leader of the Britain First party and has been sent to prison for religiously aggravated harassment. “I’m standing against the Evil Politicians who have injected Islamic Terrorism into our nation, like an unwanted vaccine,” she said by way of announcement. This will be the third election Fransen has contested in a year, having gained a derisory 46 votes in Glasgow Southside in May and 50 in Batley and Spen in July. Southend West has been Tory since 1950, so it is very unlikely that Fransen will be third-time lucky.
Steve Laws, a far-right activist who films migrants arriving on England’s south coast, is the other candidate. When Ukip announced Laws would run (the publicity section on their website reads “press offfice”), it pledged to "fight for common sense, the beliefs of the silent majority".
But Laws’s Telegram channel, where he posts furious videos of RNLI boats rescuing migrant dinghies, is more revealing of his actual beliefs. In messages to his 3,400 subscribers, he has referenced the Great Replacement. This is a popular far-right conspiracy theory that claims white people are existentially threatened by migration of Africans and Asians into Europe, and that this is being coordinated by sinister global elites (which for many in the far-right simply means Jews).
In July, Laws posted a grainy photo of a crowd of white people in Birmingham and another more recent one showing Muslims at prayer. “80 years apart,” he wrote. “But, nah, we’re not getting replaced.” A week later, he shared a clip from Russia Today and said: “He's literally encouraging the world to come to Europe and replace us live on TV.”
“Literally an invasion,” he writes under a picture of migrants. “The invaders are literally destroying everything in their path,” he says in another. He has also shared posts from Identity England, a far-right group that believes in the Great Replacement, claiming the “invasion” is “being done to us by political elites, corporate capital, leftists”.
Since the murder of Jo Cox, a precedent has been set for rival parties to not contest the following by-election out of respect to the dead MP. As the political commentator Patrick Maguire pointed out, this benefits extremists who can fill the vacuum left by mainstream opposition. Fransen and Laws, even though they are unlikely to pose any electoral threat to the Tories in Southend West, will be able to grow their audience on the campaign trail.
In a bid to discourage amateur candidates, anyone who contests an election has to pay a £500 deposit, which they lose upon failing to secure more than five percent of the vote. For Fransen and Laws, that must seem like an expensive but worthwhile bill for publicity.
Lookout
Welcome to Lookout – our digest of far-right stories that have appeared in the media over the last week.
How a British streamer got jailed for inciting racial hatred
An interesting report is out from Community Security Trust, the charity that protects British Jews from antisemitism. Their investigation of Richard Hesketh, one of Britain's most prolific antisemitic streamers, has led to him being jailed for four years for inciting racial hatred. On one of his social media profiles, Hesketh said he was “Dedicated to Exposing the Jew”, and used alternative platforms like BitChute to grow an audience of thousands. Hesketh, who posted under the alias Rick Heskey, celebrated terrorists and praised Hitler, saying he "should have killed more Jews". Since Hesketh was jailed, Scout has seen videos of his disheartened fans launching a fundraiser for him. Check out the full story on CST’s site.
Far-right hate on Spotify
Sky News has exposed Spotify as a platform for antisemitic and white supremacist podcasts. Some podcasts hid Holocaust denial and scientific racism within hours-long episodes, but many of them were open in their titles, descriptions, and promotional imagery about being white supremacist. Spotify has removed the content flagged by Sky, although a quick search reveals there are still plenty of antisemitic shows on their service. Researchers who study content banning say that the “whack-a-troll” approach is tedious – there is always another podcast hosting site that far-right streamers can turn to – but audiences do tend to shrink when they have to move from a popular platform like YouTube to a more obscure one like BitChute.
Beware the banner drop
A favourite publicity stunt of the far-right is to drop banners over motorway bridges. A little-known far-right group called the National Housing Party UK is one of the latest groups to pull this stunt, which backfired and laid bare what a garden-shed operation they are. The Times reports that members of the group unfurled a banner on a footbridge over the Blackwall Tunnel in London that read: “Exit the 1951 UN Refugee Convention now. It’s OK to preserve white nations.” Far-right activists dislike that this piece of legislation makes Britain responsible for taking care of asylum seekers.
The group is made up of former members of the BNP, Britain First, and individuals with links to National Action, a banned terrorist organisation that plotted the murder of an MP. A violent pedigree for sure, but it was not enough to stop the group from running away when the police arrived to take down the banners. A glance at Electoral Commission records show that National Housing tried to register for party status, but were rejected in late November because their application was incomplete. How professional.