Stoke-on-Trent Central: BNP Target Seat Number Two

With odds of 12/1 at Paddypower.com Stoke-on-Trent Central represents, at least from the perspective of the prospective punter, the BNP’s second best prospect of winning a parliamentary seat. The candidate is Simon Darby, the fry-up loving Deputy Leader of the BNP. In recent weeks he has spent much time canvassing in Stoke and has produced a series of video messages on his blog. Unsurprisingly, the Labour Party, mainstream media and various anti-BNP groups have been fulminating against the BNP in an attempt to bolster Labour’s flagging appeal to the electorate.

Stoke-on-Trent, like many of our large towns and cities was once a hive of industry, jobs and prosperity, now reduced to a state of post-industrial marginality in which it is hard for people to find employment. It has long been a Labour Party stronghold, but at the local level Stoke Council which was once dominated by Labour has experienced a radical change in recent years with the BNP making a strong showing. At its peak, the BNP possessed 9 local councillors, but earlier this year Alby Walker and his wife left the party to become independents. Mr Walker himself is standing as an independent, and his reasons for leaving the BNP have been widely publicised by the media and anti-BNP communist campaign outfits such as Searchlight and its sister campaign Hope Not Hate.

In 2001 the census data for this seat indicated that it possessed a population of 80,996, with 4.7% of this total having been born outside of the UK. In all, it was recorded as being 93.7% white and 3.4% Muslim. Many people lived in rented accommodation, with only 59.75 of the population recorded as living in owner-occupied housing. As elsewhere, Stoke has witnessed a growth both in the Muslim population and in its vociferousness. This prompted the town to be chosen as the location of a 1500-strong EDL demonstration on 23 January 2010 which on this occasion was confronted by a little under 300 UAF-organised counter-demonstrators. The problem of Islamisation is one of those great unmentionables that the mainstream political parties will not even countenance to acknowledge exists. The BNP however is certainly not shy of highlighting this issue, and Simon Darby has drawn attention to the pittance paid to the local council by Stoke Muslims for a site on which they have been constructing a new mosque.

Simon Darby detects a degree of “panic” in the Labour camp owing to their recent appeal to Muslim voters to all vote Labour in Stoke irrespective of their party affiliation so as to “stop the BNP”. He comments that judging by the number of Liberal Democrat posters displayed in Muslim homes in the constituency, Labour are worried about much of their support deserting them and joining Nick Clegg's bandwagon. The usual anti-BNP message has been driven home by extensive leafleting in the town carried out by Searchlight, which the Guardian reports has having produced “80,000 Hope Not Hate newspapers to be distributed across the city.” Similar operations are being conducted by Searchlight elsewhere and were also characteristic of campaigning against Nick Griffin’s bid to take Keighley in 2005.



Stoke-on-Trent has its own political dynamics which stand outside of the national mainstream, not only in terms of the BNP’s relative local strength and issues connected to the recent departure of its most prominent local councillor, but also in terms of Labour Party politics. Lord Mandelson recently managed to parachute into the borough his favoured candidate – television historian Tristram Hunt, upsetting the local party and precipitating the decision of Gary Elsby, former Chairman of the Constituency Labour Party, to stand as an independent candidate. Thus, although the BNP might have its own issues with a degree of recent disunity in Stoke, Labour has been confronted with something far more serious. The question is: will Labour’s woes allow the BNP to mount a significant challenge? Could Simon Darby take the seat?

Although the BNP has a strong base in Stoke, its percentage vote share at the 2005 General Election was a modest 7.8% (2,178 votes) for its then candidate Michael Coleman. This placed it in fourth place, but ahead of UKIP which secured 3.3% of the vote (914 votes). Labour on the other hand, won with a whopping 52.9% of the vote, although this in itself was a decline of 7.7% on 2001. This time around, four independent candidates have been added to the mix as well as a ‘Trade Union and Socialist’ candidate. The other confirmed parties contesting the seat are: Conservative (Norsheen Bhatti); UKIP (Carol Lovatt) and Liberal Democrat (John Redfearn).

This General Election is shaping up to be the most unpredictable in decades following Nick Clegg’s well-received performance in last week’s televised party-leader debate. It is unlikely that this will provide the Liberal Democrats with the opportunity of winning Stoke, but it should give a fillip to their candidate’s prospects and secure additional votes. Where will these votes come from?

The Conservatives are fielding a young Pakistani woman named Norsheen Bhatti who presumably is intended to appeal to Stoke’s Muslim voters, but many ‘orthodox’ Muslims do not find this young woman a very appealing prospect, as she is also renowned for working part-time as a belly dancer and is not averse to a flirtatious flick of the hair and showing a good measure of leg. She is no ‘modest’ burqa-bound or niqab-muffled Muslim, and has been supported in her canvassing by Sayeeda Warsi. She will in all likelihood pick up a few additional votes from ‘moderate’ Muslims (i.e. those individuals who have had the misfortune to have been born into Muslim families but who do not really believe in their religion and its obnoxious teachings), but will not give the Tories an overall boost owing to the national resurgence in the fortunes of the Liberal Democrats. Bhatti may prove to be the most telegenically appealing of the Stoke candidates, but her chance of taking the seat is next to zero. The Conservative vote is likely to shrink slightly.

Norsheen demonstrates her non-political Talents

UKIP’s candidate will be overshadowed by Simon Darby, so its share is likely to fall from 3.3% to circa 2%. Similarly, although well-known locally, Alby Walker cannot be expected to pick up anything more than a percentage point or two, although unfortunately this will be at the direct expense of the BNP. Likewise with the Labour Party, it is unlikely that splinter independent candidate Gary Elsby will attract more than a couple of percentage points from disgruntled local Labour diehards.

Simon Darby will have done well if he is able to pick up 15% of the vote or above. A second place would be an outstanding achievement, but in reality, securing third place seems a more realistic although significant challenge. My finger-in-the-air predictions for the Stoke result are thus: Labour 38-40%; Liberal Democrat 25%; Conservative 16%; BNP 14-15%. Many former Labour voters are likely to shift support to the BNP and the Liberal Democrats, but as the Liberal Democrats are the primary challengers for the seat, some Tories may vote tactically in an attempt to get Labour out. If this were to occur on a significant scale, Simon Darby could take third place. Still, keep up the good work Simon, as the higher the vote you receive, the stronger the message that will be sent to Westminster.

BNP 'Top 10' General Election Targets

On 5 April it was announced that the BNP would be fielding a record 326 candidates in the forthcoming General Election. It is likely that this total would have been even higher had it not been for the financial strain placed upon the party by the recent EHRC court case which was quite clearly brought in an attempt to destroy the BNP following its electoral success in the EU elections last June. Thankfully, this attempt has failed, but it means that the BNP will be fighting to secure representation at Westminster on a very tight budget.

In 2005 certain Labour candidates used the alleged BNP ‘threat’ in a cynical attempt to mobilise disillusioned Labour voters, persuading them to vote for a party that they no longer believed in and which long ago had abandoned them. Paradoxically, many who then cast their votes for Labour will have voted against a party – the BNP – whose policies they would have benefited from and approved of had they had been properly informed of the content of the BNP manifesto. Then, as now, the mass media were united in their hostility to the BNP, but unlike in 2005 the dissemination of information this time around has been democratised. Thanks to the growth in public internet access and the burgeoning of political blogs and online social media, the stranglehold of the National Union of Journalists and its explicit guidelines enforcing distorted reporting has to a certain extent been circumvented. Nonetheless, those of us of a nationalist bent who are favourably disposed towards the BNP constitute a very modest force when pitted against the power and wealth of the mass media. It is very much a David versus Goliath scenario.

What then, are the prospects for the BNP in 2010? Can we realistically expect to see the party secure its first Westminster MPs? If so, which constituencies offer the most likely prospects, and which candidates should we be following with the keenest interest? Over the coming week I shall be writing a series of articles dealing with those constituencies in which I think the BNP will perform strongly. Whether or not this translates into elected MPs or a number of second and third places we will not know until 7 May, but if the odds at Paddypower.com are anything to go by, some seats should yield some very interesting results indeed.

In the 2005 General Election the BNP fielded 119 candidates and won a total of 192,746 votes. This represented 0.7% of the total with each candidate winning an average of 1620 votes. In last June’s EU elections the BNP won a total of 943,598 votes representing 6.26% of the vote which was a 1.3% increase on their 2004 figure of 808,200. The mass media have often deliberately lied about this most recent result, claiming that the BNP vote had fallen in numerical terms since the 2004 EU elections, but as the figures demonstrate, this was not the case.

Recent opinion polls tend to place the national level of support for the BNP at anywhere between 2 and 4%. This however masks considerable regional variations with the party scoring consistently better in England, for it barely registers in Scotland and Wales. It is probable that the reported level is lower than the actual level of support, for it has been observed that people are often reluctant to state that they are considering voting for the BNP, particularly when questioned over the telephone.

Taking into account the aforementioned figures, what might we expect in terms of a likely overall result for the BNP in May 2010? General elections are not EU elections and thus parties that appeal specifically to nationalism and anti-EU sentiment tend to do better in the latter than in the former. I will therefore start with the most conservative estimate of the BNP vote, projecting a repeat performance of 2005 with an average of 1620 votes per candidate which would yield 528,120 votes. If we assume (simply for the sake of direct comparison, for the situation will not repeat itself) that the total number of votes cast for all parties nationally came to the same sum for 2005, this would give the BNP a 1.9% share of the vote.

As the party would have achieved this result by standing in only circa half of the available Westminster seats, this would equate to a rough national share of 3.8% which would match the party’s position in many polls. Although the sum total would thus be far more impressive than 2005’s tally of 192,746, it would mean that the BNP would have been treading water. It therefore needs to achieve substantially more votes and a correspondingly higher share of the national total to indicate that it has achieved a significant breakthrough. When considering the current combination of toxic factors - mass immigration, economic crisis, Islamisation, the war in Afghanistan, the expenses scandal, multiculturalism and the loss of sovereignty to the EU - which have made large swathes of the electorate either hostile towards the mainstream political parties or apathetic about politics in general, and the lack of willingness on the part of the said parties to discuss any of these issues other than the economy, the threshold of success, I would suggest, needs to be set at a minimum of 970,000 votes. This would equate to roughly 7% of the vote. If the BNP manages to garner in the region of 1.5 million votes or above, it will truly have emerged as a political force with serious prospects.

I have no doubt that the vote received by the BNP in a number of constituencies will be in excess of 15%, but it is likely that its prospective impact in many instances will unfortunately be blunted by the presence of other candidates who are likely to dilute the nationalist vote (i.e. UKIP and the English Democrats). This will be a great pity, for it may deny the prospects of office to a number of BNP candidates. Such a situation, I hope, will not arise at future parliamentary elections, for we cannot afford for the nationalist vote to remain split any longer. Our very survival as a nation depends upon a unified British nationalist party which can fight for office against its globalist dhimmi opponents.

Over the coming week or so I will therefore be writing about my BNP ‘Top 10’ target constituencies. This is simply a personal selection, but I do believe that the best prospects for the party lie amongst their number, and I shall be avidly glued to the screen waiting for these results on election night. These are (in no particular order): Barking (Nick Griffin); Stoke-on-Trent Central (Simon Darby); Thurrock (Emma Colgate); Keighley (Andrew Brons); Salford and Eccles (Tina Wingfield); Stoke-on-Trent South (Mike Coleman); Burnley (Sharon Wilkinson); Dagenham and Rainham (Michael Barnbrook); Dewsbury (Roger Roberts); Dudley North (Ken Griffiths).