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The Brexit Party comfortably won the European Elections in May, setting off a huge political earthquake. They have dropped off the news agenda since the elevation of Boris Johnson to Prime Minister, but the Brexit Party surge in the polls shows no sign of being a flash in the pan. Their role could be significant in a looming General Election, and it is possible that the party could have MPs in the next parliament.
But who are the Brexit party, and how worried should we be?
The threat from this party is very real. Nigel Farage is dangerous, and has used racism and Islamophobia to stir up division.
Farage’s far-right connections across Europe and the United States are absolutely toxic. He has cosied up to extreme figures across the world. Nigel Farage has more in common with Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin than with the common sense values of British people.
While Farage is, by far, the most high profile figure in the Brexit Party, he is backed by a party that is rife with bad actors.
The party’s first leader, Catherine Blaiklock resigned abruptly after being exposed by HOPE not hate as having an extensive history of social media racism and had frequently retweeted neo-Nazi content. The party’s Treasurer was sacked after being exposed over antisemitism social media posts. A Brexit Party campaign coordinator was sacked after a newspaper highlighted his previous BNP membership.
These people are not isolated cases:
Even after attacking UKIP for being taken over by the far right, Nigel Farage said that “there is no difference” between UKIP and the Brexit Party. Nigel Farage and the Brexit Party want to present a mainstream image but time and time again, people with extreme views have found their political home in this movement.
The threat of the Brexit party is partly electoral: they played a major role in the Peterborough byelection, and are likely to be a major factor in a looming General Election. We can expect that most, if not all of their candidates will hold rightwing populist views, at best. Needless to say, the presence of these people in the next Parliament poses a serious threat to our vision of a hopeful, tolerant country.
But the threat is not only electoral. By becoming a serious electoral threat, the Brexit Party is already moving the political debate. We need to provide our own pushback against their politics of division, and to help shape the pushback of other progressive forces. HOPE not hate and its supporters will play our part in that pushback.
A new analysis of polling commissioned by HOPE not hate provides valuable insight into the views of Brexit Party supporters, where they stand on the key issues, and how they feel about the key personalities in British politics today:
Brexit
Britain leaving the EU is, unsurprisingly, the most important issue for Brexit party supporters (60%), followed by immigration and asylum (35%), health (32%) and crime (30%).
84% of Brexit party voters want Britain to leave the EU without a deal. 13% want to leave on the terms negotiated by the Government, just 2% want to leave the EU but stay inside the customs union and single market.
However, Brexit party supporters are incredibly optimistic about what Brexit will bring:
This is worrying given the predicted impacts of the hard Brexit these same people are seeking. A devastating impact on the economy that does not match up with their false hopes will see a rise in frustration, anger and anti-politics sentiment.
The majority are already very angry about the delay to Britain’s departure from the EU (89% compared to 35% nationally):
Islam, immigration and multiculturalism
The great majority of Brexit Party supporters are extremely opposed to multiculturalism and immigration:
They see multiculturalism as having a more negative than positive effect on both British culture (72% say negative, 12% say positive) and, to a slightly lesser extent the British economy (44% say negative, 30% say positive).
They are extremely negative about the state of Britain today. When asked if they think that, overall, things now are better or worse than they were ten years ago, 76% say that things are worse for Britain as a whole. Just 22% think things are better for themselves and their families.
78% think that new immigrants are given priority ahead over established residents when it comes to benefits or using public services.
Just 11% think that a sharp reduction in immigration after the UK leaves the EU will have an adverse effect on the British economy; 67% refute this.
42% feel very strongly that immigration has on balance made this country worse.
A large share of Brexit party supporters hold strong anti-Muslim views:
At the same time, slightly more think discrimination is a serious problem for Muslims in Britain today (32%) as deny this (31%).
Brexit party supporters share an assimilationist view of integration which reflects their anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant views. The most popular intervention to improve community relations in Britain are banning religious clothing that covers the face, like the burqa (56%), controlling and reducing new immigration (47%) and compulsory English classes for all new immigrants (44%).
Values and identity
Brexit Party supporters think that British values are in decline (42% strongly agree that they are).
Brexit party supporters are slightly more likely to identify as English (49%) than British (48%). The population as a whole is much more likely to see themselves as British (59%) than English (26%).
Brexit party supporters are more optimistic about the future than the majority population: 49% are optimistic, 51% are pessimistic. 75% are happy with their lives so far.
Party affiliation
The majority of Brexit party supporters hold a very high level of support- on a scale of 1-100, where 0 means you absolutely would never vote for the party and 100 means you feel politically very warm towards the party, 75% place themselves between 90-100, 23% at 81- 90 and 2% between 71-80.
Most have a broken relationship with the Conservative party, feeling let down by delays to Britain’s exit from the EU. A third (33%) feel strongly that they would absolutely never vote Conservative, while 14% say they still feel very warm towards the party.
Most also have a broken relationship with UKIP: just 24% of Brexit party supporters fell very warm towards UKIP, with 29% saying that they would definitely never vote for the party.
Personalities
They do not think much of Theresa May – just 6% see her very favourably
They have a very positive view of Nigel Farage. 64% see him very favourably
But they dislike Gerard Batten. Just 5% see him very favourably
The majority also oppose Tommy Robinson. 37% see him very unfavourably, while 11% see him very favourably- though this is over 5 times greater than the proportion of the population as a whole, among whom 2% see him very positively
Anti-politics
Brexit party supporters share a strong anti-politics and anti-establishment view:
Despite their support for ‘strongman’ politician Farage, just 6% feel strongly that politicians should lead the way, and not be swayed too easily by public opinion
87% think that you cannot be proud of your national identity these days without being called racist, with only 11% agreeing that Brexit has enabled and legitimised prejudice towards migrants and ethnic minorities.
44% feel very strongly that discrimination against white people has become as big a problem as discrimination against non-white people. Just 8% feel very strongly that discrimination against non-white people continues to be far more significant than any discrimination against white people.
This article contains an analysis of those who said they hold a favourable view of the Brexit party (n=934 weighted) in our Fear & HOPE polling. All figures, unless otherwise stated, are from YouGov Plc. Total sample size was 6,118 adults. Fieldwork was undertaken between 26th April – 1st May 2019. The survey was carried out online. The figures have been weighted and are representative of all GB adults (aged 18+).
This article was first published in March 2019.
The Brexit Party, registered in February by UKIP’s former Economics spokesperson Catherine Blaiklock, has the dubious honour of being the new political vehicle of former UKIP leader Nigel Farage. Blaiklock’s party has attracted numerous ex-UKIP figures after a mass exit in December, ostensibly over the far-right and anti-Muslim focus of the party under current leader Gerard Batten, and the increasing influence of the extremist Stephen Yaxley-Lennon (AKA ‘Tommy Robinson’).
However, Blaiklock has been forced to resign after HOPE not hate revealed that she has made numerous anti-Muslim statements on her now-removed Twitter account, including claiming that Islam is “incompatible with liberal democracy” and that “Islam = submission – mostly to raping men it seems”.
She has also – on dozens of occasions – retweeted or quote-tweeted posts made by former leading British National Party (BNP) figure and neo-Nazi Mark Collett, including his claims that there is a “white genocide” taking place in Britain. Blaiklock has also reposted content from numerous other far-right figures. The revelations are the latest in a series exposing Blaiklock’s preoccupation with the religion.
Farage stated last month that The Brexit Party “has my absolute full support”, and that he would represent it if the UK participates in the May European Parliamentary elections due to any Brexit delay. Seven other former UKIP MEPs have also joined the new organisation, giving it more MEPs than UKIP.
Among the many statements made on Blaiklock’s account about Islam is a 27 May 2017 post, which states: “Islam is a non democracy ideology that is incompatible with liberal democracy”. A 3 June 2017 post reads: “Islam = submission – mostly to raping men it seems. #ukip” (in response to a post by David Vance, founder of the far-right website AltNewsMedia), and in a post the following day she claims that: “Islam = submission, slavery, Western thought = critical thinking freedom”.
A post on 11 December 2017, accompanied by a Breitbart article, reads: “I want my country back. I want seaside donkeys on the beach and little village churches, not acid attacks, mobs and mosques”, and a 2 December 2017 post says:
“Islam – Threat to women, gays, whites, non Muslims, Blacks, Indians, Chinese – aggression to everyone but themselves. The great multicultural threat –their very own socialist parents are importing And [sic] this multiculturalism is all imported with good, albeit misguided, intentions.”
On 1 December 2017, she wrote:
“Got of [sic] at Mornington Crescent yessterday [sic] afternoon. 8 people waiting for lift, 5 Muslim girls, 1 black, 1 other Asian Chinese, 1 white. Immediately outside saw a drug deal take place. Looked like Turkey.”
In yet another post on 1 December 2017, replying to tweet that read “Muslims live their lives according to their religion. Leave them be!”, Blaiklock wrote:
“Wonderful so long as: 1. They obey the laws of the land they live in. No FGM honour killings, child brides. 2. They do not rape young girls 3. They do not murder and kill infidels ie other non Muslim natives. 4. One law for all.”
Perhaps most worryingly, Blaiklock also retweeted 19 posts and quote tweeted 26 posts from Mark Collett – most recently on 10 January 2019. Collett is a former BNP figure who has attempted to reinvent himself as a commentator for the white nationalist alt-right. Collett has regularly collaborated with David Duke, a former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan and a dedicated Holocaust denier. Collett himself has described the Holocaust as “the alleged extermination of six million Jews”.
Posts promoted by Blaiklock include Collett alleging that a photo of a school class with a high proportion of non-white students was evidence of a “white genocide”. White genocide is a term long-used in racist circles to refer to a deliberate campaign of mass immigration, integration and miscegenation conducted by sinister (and often Jewish) elites, and is a phrase used in the manifesto of the gunman who killed 50 worshippers at a mosque in New Zealand on Friday.
Another of his posts retweeted by Blaiklock contains the phrase “Diversity is a code word for anti-white”, a white nationalist slogan, and another retweet contains his claim that “The end result of multiculturalism is clear, it is the replacement of the indigenous European people”.
Collett has long extolled the virtues of Nazism, writing in his book that “National Socialism is an ideology of discipline and order that seeks to establish a perfect homogenous society that is centred on national unity”, and that “Discipline, order and excellence made National Socialism one of the few true threats to the enemies of the West”.
Other figures retweeted by Blaiklock include the Traditional Britain Group (TBG), a far-right organisation that has hosted white nationalist Richard Spencer as a speaker. The head of the TBG, Gregory Lauder-Frost, has called for the “assisted voluntary repatriation” of those “not of European stock” from the UK to their “natural” homeland.
She has also retweeted five posts, and quote tweeted two posts, from Lennon, the influence of whom on UKIP was stated by Farage as a major reason for his defection. She also retweeted 13 posts and quote tweeted eight posts from far-right conspiracy theorist Peter Sweden, and retweeted 44 posts and quote tweeted 29 posts from Paul Joseph Watson, editor-at-large of the conspiracy theory website InfoWars. Amongst numerous instances of fake news, Media Matters have reported Watson’s claims that liberals are anti-science for not accepting that African and Middle Eastern people are more aggressive because they have lower IQs.
She also retweeted the following 6 December 2017 tweet from the account @sendumback: “Well in our country you don’t rape kids! So go do one back to your 3rd world cesspool & rape your own women & girls!”
Prior to founding The Brexit Party, Blaiklock was best known for taking a photo of her black husband to a hustings in 2017, reportedly telling VICE that “I sleep with somebody who is black, who is, you know, of Jamaican origin! So I am 100 percent not racist”.
Last month BuzzFeed reported that Blaiklock had made other anti-Muslim statements. She has also argued that young black men are more prone to violence due to high testosterone levels, in a since-deleted article entitled “Baby mamas, gangs and testosterone”.
Farage has previously claimed that the party was “Catherine’s idea entirely – but she has done this with my full knowledge and my full support. If the government goes back on its word and betrays the millions of people who voted for Brexit then we need a party prepared to stand up and fight for it”.
Blaiklock said in a comment to The Guardian:
“The out of character comments that I made on social media some time ago were unacceptable in tone and content. After speaking to Nigel Farage, I realise that my comments fall well short of what is expected in any walk of life.
I have accordingly tendered my resignation as party leader.”
HOPE not hate can reveal that two Brexit Party MEPs and a prospective parliamentary candidate (PPC) have appeared on the Richie Allen Show, a David Icke-affiliated radio broadcast that serves as an online platform for antisemitic conspiracy theorists and Holocaust deniers.
Ann Widdecombe MEP appeared on the show three times between August 2017 and April 2019, David Bull MEP appeared on the show as recently as 30 April 2019, and Stuart Waiton, PPC for Dundee West and an unsuccessful MEP candidate in Scotland, made five appearances between 27 June 2018 and 9 May 2019.
Allen has also hosted numerous antisemites and Holocaust deniers on his show, and has himself questioned the numbers of Jews that died in the Holocaust. Brexit Party figures have appeared on the same episodes as racist and antisemitic guests, such as alt-right white nationalist Lana Lokteff, and antisemitic 9/11 “Truther” Kevin Barrett.
Allen is the Manchester-based protégé of conspiracy theorist David Icke, who has frequently engaged in extreme antisemitism. The Richie Allen Show emerged from Icke’s short-lived broadcast The People’s Voice, and was for a time hosted on Icke’s website. As actor and writer Marlon Solomon writes, while Allen insists his guests are on to “debate”, they are often given an easy ride if they hold conspiratorial beliefs, and whilst presenting his show as a “free speech” platform, Allen often praises his guests despite their extreme positions.
For example, Allen hosted infamous Holocaust denier Nick Kollerstrom, a regular on the show, on Holocaust Memorial Day 2016, calling him an “old friend” and describing his 7/7 conspiracy theory work as “vital” and “essential”. Kollerstrom proceeded to deny the existence of gas chambers, to claim that the Jewish death toll was 200,000 in the camps, and to claim that there is “no trace of any extermination policy” and “no trace of any scorn or contempt” towards Jews in the camps. Whilst Allen lightly challenges Kollerstrom on some of his assertions, Allen also states that “I believe something is very wrong with the story, otherwise I wouldn’t be having you on”, and that “I believe they were killing people […] I believe they [the Nazis] were maniacal. However, there’s a big lie there somewhere, I don’t believe the numbers are anywhere near as great as they’re saying, you know”, going on to tell Kollerstrom “I’m with you with respect to the numbers and the way that it’s been exploited ever since”.
Allen is also a cheerleader for Holocaust denier Alison Chabloz, known for her prosecution for uploading to YouTube footage of her Jew-hating musical performance at the fascist London Forum in 2016. Allen has hosted Chabloz on his show, calling her a “remarkable woman, extraordinary woman”, and calling her songs “satirical, they’re very funny, they’re very good I think”. The songs for which Chabloz was convicted include the vile “(((Survivors)))”, in which she mocks Anne Frank and Holocaust survivors Irene Zysblat and Elie Wiesel (the triple parentheses in the title are a common antisemitic symbol in the contemporary online far right). There are many further examples of antisemitism on Allen’s show.
Widdecombe, described by Allen as an “an old friend of the programme”, most recently appeared on Allen’s show on 10 April this year, an episode which Allen kicked off by describing antisemite and frequent guest Gilad Atzmon as a “great jazz saxophonist and writer”.
However, Widdecombe’s first appearance came on 15 August 2017, while the show was still broadcast on Icke’s website. The following guest on that episode was Kevin Barrett, a regular on both Allen’s show and on the Iranian state network PressTV, and a contributor to the antisemitic conspiracy theory magazine American Free Press, founded by the nazi WIllis Carto. Barrett, who believes that Israeli plotters were behind 9/11, has also questioned the Holocaust. Allen introduced him as “a terrific journalist, [and] a renowned academic”, later stating that he “can’t recommend him highly enough”. During this episode Barrett and Allen agree that the violence at the alt-right Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, which resulted in the death of an anti-racist after a nazi drove a car into a crowd, was likely “partially staged or scripted” in order to enable a government clampdown on populism.
Bull appeared on the show on 30 April 2019, tweeting that the experience was a “pleasure” and linking to his interview via the website Conspiracy Daily Update (a site which contains numerous links to the show of former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke and nazi Mark Collett).
Their conversation focussed on his Brexit Party candidacy, although Allen also questioned Bull, a medical doctor, about his thoughts on vaccinations. The following guest on the episode was Lana Lokteff, the American white nationalist and co-host of Red Ice Radio, the premier media outlet of the alt-right.
Allen and Lokteff debated the conspiracy theory of “white genocide”, the notion that sinister elites are plotting to reduce the white European population. Whilst disagreeing with Lokteff on her views on racial identity and belief in a “Jewish conspiracy”, during the course of their discussion Allen repeatedly praises her for her intelligence, repeatedly states he does not consider her to be racist, and praises her programme as “very important […] long may it continue”.
Episodes featuring PPC Waiton, a Senior Lecturer at Abertay University, have also been marked by antisemitism. During the 27 June 2018 episode in which Waiton appears, Allen also talks to Barrett, with Allen claiming that the predominantly Muslim countries identified in Trump’s travel ban policy were “destabilised by the neo-con Zionist puppet masters that control Trump now”. Allen also agrees with Barrett that the 7/7 bombings were a “totally proven obvious false flag”.
On 6 March 2019, Allen’s talk with Waiton was preceded by a conversation with the economist and conspiracy theorist Paul Craig Roberts, who in May this year wrote in support of Holocaust denier David Irving on his website. Roberts was introduced by Allen as a “brilliant man”, and during their conversation Roberts claims that the “Israel lobby” “completely control” the media, later stating that Israel has power “over the United States, you know, it’s the media, it’s the Congress, it entertainment, it’s the financial system, Wall Street, the big banks, it’s just amazing. They control the foreign policy in the Middle East”.
Allen kicked off the 21 November 2018 show on which Waiton appeared with a lengthy solo rant, in which he reads the introductory paragraphs of a Guardian article, which describes the experiences of students visiting Auschwitz, in a mocking tone backed by emotional music.
Allen went on to state:
If you listen to Paul Craig Roberts talk to me last night about the presence, you know, Jews make up about 1.5, is it, or 1.8 percent of the demographic in the United States of America, something like that. And yet the influence of Zionist Jews in that country. Jews are a thousand times more likely to make it to an Ivy League University in the United States, a thousand times more likely than your typical average white guy or white girl. Why is that?
And [Norman] Finkelstein has said over the years, you know, with the success of the identity group that is Jews, why harp on and cry and whinge about antisemitism, which doesn’t really exist anyway – well there’s a political end to it […] It is outrageous to be spending government money! Sending students to go to Auschwitz, so that they can come back to combat Jew hatred, which does not exist in this country on any level. It does not. It is lunacy.
The revelation that Brexit Party figures have repeatedly appeared on Allen’s show despite his track records displays the willingness to party figures to rub shoulders with fringe figures and to exploit conspiratorial thinking. HOPE not hate has exposed multiple links between Brexit Party figures and conspiracy theorists:
Farage has recently faced questions over his six appearances on the notorious American conspiracy theory show InfoWars, hosted by Alex Jones, who has been described as “the most prolific conspiracy theorist in contemporary America” by the Southern Poverty Law Centre (SPLC).
However, links between the Brexit Party and InfoWars run much deeper. Michael Heaver, Farage’s former press aide and Brexit Party MEP, and Farage’s current press aide Dan Jukes, are close associates of Jones’ protégé and InfoWars Editor-at-Large Paul Joseph Watson, who has a history of racism.
Heaver and Jukes appear to be personal friends of Watson, and have been photographed socialising with him on numerous occasions. Watson provided Heaver a rare lengthy interview for his website Westmonster in 2017, Heaver returning the favour and appearing on InfoWars in 2018, jokingly introduced by Watson as “the future Prime Minister of Britain”. Watson has even written an article for InfoWars that consists almost entirely of simply repeating Heaver’s quotes.
HOPE not hate analysis shows that Heaver has retweeted Watson a staggering 695 times, and Jukes 151 times. Farage himself has retweeted Watson 31 times, including a post claiming “The “refugee crisis” is now almost entirely a giant, criminal, illegal immigration racket. Those involved need to be prosecuted”, and posted links to Watson’s InfoWars articles. Heaver has since deleted hundreds of these retweets.
This is all the more concerning as, despite recent attempts to remake his image, Watson has long made his living spreading fringe conspiracy theories. Admitting that “it was David Icke who woke me up”, Watson has claimed that the US government was behind 9/11 and various mass shootings, that British government was behind the 7/7 bombings, suggested that far-right Norwegian mass murderer Anders Breivik was “a patsy” and authored YouTube videos with titles such as the 2012 video “How The Illuminati Controls The Music Industry”.
The 37-year old Watson recently stated “I hate conspiracy theories”, admitting that he believed them when he was “a kid, like fifteen years ago”. However, he has continued to spread dangerous untruths into his 30s, writing in 2013 of the “involvement of the Royal Family in the murder of Princess Diana”, describing the 7/7 bombings as a “false flag event”, and filming a ludicrous series of videos outside the annual Bilderberg conference in Watford the same year.
Watson also has a history of racism and Islamophobia. Media Matters have uncovered Watson’s 2017 claims that liberals are anti-science for rejecting the notion that African and Middle Eastern people are more aggressive because they have lower IQs, stating “You can’t deny that there are differences between races when it comes to IQ”. Among his numerous instances of Islamophobia is his 2015 claim that “there’s no such thing as moderate Islam. Islam is a violent, intolerant religion which, in its current form, has no place in liberal western democracies.” Watson has also posted images of golliwogs online.
Watson has also praised Bilderberg conspiracy theorist Jim Tucker, claiming that he “met and travelled” with Tucker in 2011 and “found him to be humble, charming and incredibly funny”, remarking that “the truth movement has lost a legend” upon his death in 2013. Tucker published his Bilderberg theories through The Spotlight, a notorious antisemitic magazine published by the quasi-nazi Liberty Lobby. Tucker also worked for The Spotlight’s successor magazine, American Free Press (AFP), which, like The Spotlight, was founded by veteran far-right Holocaust denier Willis Carto. Watson wrote in 2010 that “American Free Press muckraker Tucker has proven routinely accurate with the information he obtains from sources inside Bilderberg”.
Farage and Jukes have also been photographed with American far-right conspiracy theorist Jack Posobiec. A former host for the Canadian far-right platform Rebel Media who has been linked to white supremacists, Posobiec was a key promoter of the “Pizzagate” conspiracy theory, which alleged that a Washington DC pizzeria was a front for a paedophile ring that stretched to the top of the Democratic Party.
Farage has retweeted content from Posobiec, as has Jukes and MEPs Heaver, Nathan Gill and Martin Daubney. Heaver has currently purged his account of 29 of these 30 retweets.
HOPE not hate has exposed multiple links between Brexit Party officials and extreme figures and conspiracy theorists. See also:
Despite insisting that he has “never been a conspiracy theorist”, Brexit Party leader Nigel Farage has appeared in the online documentary Bilderberg: The Movie (2014) alongside a number of conspiracy theorists from the notorious LaRouche movement.
The spurious film, written and presented by Daniel Estulin, focuses on the Bilderberg conference, an annual meeting of politicians and leaders in industry, finance, academia and the media, which conspiracy theorists have long alleged to be secretly directing the course of world events.
The documentary makes a number of wild claims about the conference, including alleging that it is part of a conspiracy to abolish nation states, instill a New World Order, and drastically depopulate the globe.
Farage himself claims in the film that EU officials “actually want to destroy the nation state as a unit.” As we detail, Farage has long showed a willingness to associate with fringe conspiracy theorists, for example being photographed with American “Pizzagate” conspiracy theorist Jack Posobiec last year.
Farage, who was the leader of UKIP at the time of the documentary’s release, is one of ten credited as “cast” in the film, alongside Estulin himself and Lyndon LaRouche, LaRouche’s wife Helga Zepp-LaRouche, and three editors of the LaRouche movement magazine, Intelligence Executive Review (IER).
LaRouche, who died at the age of 96 last year, was a convicted fraudster and antisemitic conspiracy theorist, his ideology described by journalist and researcher Chip Berlet as “fascism wrapped in an American flag”, and his conspiracy theories “laced with racial and cultural bigotry and a large dose of anti-Jewish hysteria”. The Anti-Defamation League has written that LaRouche had “a long record of advancing conspiracy theories linking the AIDS crisis, the drug epidemic and international financial crisis to prominent Jews and Jewish organizations”, and The New York Times reports that LaRouche had described Native Americans as “lower beasts”, and claimed that Jews had covertly founded the Ku Klux Klan.
The Guardian has reported that, following the 2003 death of Jeremiah Duggan, a British Jewish student who, after becoming involved with LaRouche supporters, died in mysterious circumstances in Germany, a Scotland Yard report claimed the organisation seems to be “a political cult with sinister and dangerous connections”. Duggan’s death was ruled a suicide by German authorities, but members of Duggan’s family are pushing to have the case reopened.
Unsurprisingly, Bilderberg: The Movie is rife with LaRouche-style conjecture and paranoia. For example, Estulin claims that the Bilderberg group, which was founded in 1954, existed in 1200-1204 in the form of the “Venetian Black Nobility”.
Estulin speaks of “secret spinoff organisations, similar to the Bilderberg group, who play a vital role in the New World Order scheme” to “exert world control”, as an esoteric pyramid diagram appears on screen, bearing categories such as “Original Bavarian Illuminati w/ 13°”, and “Master Witch (3° Summons demons has coven leadership)”. Estulin concludes that conspirators are aiming to abolish nation states and create a “subjugated, culled and dehumanized crop of slaves”.
The documentary also features Mario Borghezio of the Italian far-right party Lega, telling filmmakers that Europe is controlled by “occult powers”. Farage expelled Borghezio from his Europe of Freedom and Democracy group in the European Parliament for racism in 2013. Borghezio had previously been convicted of arson for setting ablaze pallets belonging to immigrants who were living under a bridge in Turin.
In the documentary Farage himself plays into conspiratorial notions, telling the filmmakers:
I’ve tried very hard not to believe in conspiracy theories, but I’ve been here [the European parliament] now for over 15 years, and I can see there is a move towards supranationalism […] I’ve got to know over the years the van Rumpuys, the Schultzs, you know, the Barrosos, even the Junkers, the Timmermans, and it’s completely clear, they actually want to destroy the nation state as a unit.
A few years ago, the Greek Prime Minister said “I’ll give you a referendum”. He was removed and replaced by a former Goldman Sachs director. And whenever the project goes wrong, whether the Euro has a crisis, or the asylum crisis with the borders, every single time there is for these guys an opportunity. It’s known as the “beneficial crisis”.
Soon after the documentary cuts to a sequence during which footage of people living in poverty are juxtaposed with images of Hungarian-American Jewish billionaire philanthropist George Soros, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Mexican economist Agustin Carstens, American Jewish politician Henry Kissinger, and former British Prime Minister Tony Blair at various meetings of the World Economic Forum.
Farage later states:
It is about the building of an Empire. And the paradox of this project, of this supranational European project, is the least popular it becomes with the people, the bigger mess it creates, the more power they get at the centre.
Farage has long shown a willingness to rub shoulders with conspiracy theorists and to engage in conspiratorial rhetoric.
Farage and his press aide Dan Jukes have been photographed with American conspiracy theorist Jack Posobiec, a key figure in spreading the “Pizzagate” conspiracy theory, which alleged that a Washington DC pizzeria was a front for a paedophile ring that stretched to the top of the Democratic Party. Brexit Party figures including Farage, Jukes, and MEPs Michael Heaver, Martin Daubney and Nathan Gill have all retweeted Posobiec’s content.
The Guardian has detailed the ways in which Farage has tailored his language on his multiple appearances on the American fake news channel InfoWars, writing that “what becomes evident is that Farage has conspiracy theories of his own: primarily that the EU is part of a wider plot to usher in world government”.
HOPE not hate has also exposed extensive links of figures close to Farage to InfoWars Editor-at-Large Paul Joseph Watson, who is a close associate of Farage’s press aide Dan Jukes, and MEP Michael Heaver. Heaver, Jukes and Farage have retweeted Watson a staggering combined total of 877 times (695 of them Heaver).
We have also exposed that Brexit Party MEPs have also appeared on the antisemitic, David Icke-affiliated radio broadcast The Richie Allen Show, a key online platform for Holocaust deniers and conspiratorial antisemites.
See also:
HOPE not hate can reveal that Martin Daubney, Brexit Party MEP for the West Midlands and prospective parliamentary candidate for Ashfield, spoke at the 2016 International Conference on Men’s Issues (ICMI). The ICMI was founded by A Voice For Men, an organisation run by notorious men’s rights activist (MRA) Paul Elam (AKA “The Happy Misogynist”).
The manosphere is a loose collection of websites, forums, blogs and vlogs concerned with men’s issues and masculinity, oriented around an opposition to feminism and, within parts, an embrace of extreme misogyny and wider hatred.
Elam, who has repeatedly used violent language towards women, also spoke at the conference. Daubney defended Elam in 2015 as having “long been smeared” as one of “the internet’s biggest anti-feminist bogeyman”.
Prior to joining the Brexit Party, Daubney had an eight-year spell as editor of lads mag Loaded, describing himself as “a skilled defender of the indefensible”, and organising a “straight pride” march in London in 2007.
He has since sought to remake himself as “the UK’s go-to voice on masculinity & men’s issues”, writing nine articles for the far-right, anti-feminist Breitbart News in the process, and penning an article for The Telegraph in which he bemoans that “lads” have become more hated than “jihadists, child rapists or even politicians”.
Daubney’s forays into the men’s rights activism (MRA) community led him into unsavoury company, speaking at the International Conference on Men’s Issues (ICMI) in 2016 in London, on the subject of “Pornography and the demonisation of young men”.
The ICMI is a key international meetup for MRAs, and was founded by the American MRA organisation A Voice for Men (AVFM). The 2016 conference was run in association with AVFM, and featured speeches from key AVFM figures, including founder Elam, who concluded the conference with a talk titled “Gynocentrism: the Root of Feminism” (“gynocentrism” referring to the notion that society favours women, at the expense of men).
Elam, who has claimed that men are “indentured servants to a malicious matriarchy”, has repeatedly used violent language against women, notoriously calling for the month of October to renamed “Bash a Violent Bitch Month” (before claiming this was “satire”).
He has elsewhere written that:
all the PC demands to get huffy and point out how nothing justifies or excuses rape won’t change the fact that there are a lot of women who get pummeled or pumped because they are stupid (and often arrogant) enough to walk [through] life with the equivalent of I’M A STUPID, CONNIVING BITCH – PLEASE RAPE ME neon sign glowing above their empty little narcissistic heads.
As a BuzzFeed profile of Elam has detailed, AVFM also ran the now-deleted website Register Her, which posted personal details of women who were believed to have falsely accused men of rape, or were otherwise regarded as anti-men.
In 2011 the site published the personal details of The Guardian journalist Jessica Valenti, claiming that she had been put “among her morally bankrupt contemporaries, where she righteously deserves to be”. Elam stated on his radio show “We’re gonna be all over her like [male porn star] Ron Jeremy on a drug-addled bimbo”. Valenti contacted the FBI and was forced to relocate for a period after receiving numerous threats.
The Guardian reports that, in defence of such tactics, Elam attacked a female critic by stating “I find you, as a feminist, to be a loathsome, vile piece of human garbage. I find you so pernicious and repugnant that the idea of fucking your shit up gives me an erection”.
Despite this, Daubney defended Elam in the pages of The Telegraph, writing in 2015 that he and early MRA Warren Farrell have “long been smeared as some of the internet’s biggest anti-feminist bogeyman”.
Other speakers at the 2016 ICMI included Conservative MP Philip Davies, who has his own scandals, including filibustering for more than an hour in order to prevent the passage of an anti-domestic violence bill. Davies is also the Parliamentary spokesman for the Campaign Against Political Correctness, writing to the Equalities and Human Rights Commission to ask chairman Trevor Phillips “Why is it so offensive to black up your face, as I have never understood this”.
Davies is speaking at the 2019 ICMI, taking place this weekend in Chicago, which also features Carl Benjamin (AKA Sargon of Akkad), the UKIP anti-feminist who has made rape “jokes” about MP Jess Philips and produced a disgusting racial slur-ridden video in 2015.
Daubney has praised Davies as an MP who “deeply cares about men and boys’ issues”. Daubney has also retweeted content from Benjamin.
HOPE not hate has exposed multiple links between Brexit Party officials and extreme figures and conspiracy theorists. See also:
We have detailed the links between the Brexit Party and InfoWars conspiracy theorist Paul Joseph Watson, who has been retweeted by Nigel Farage, Farage’s press aide Dan Jukes, and Michael Heaver MEP a staggering combined total of 877 times (695 of them Heaver).
HOPE not hate can now reveal numerous further instances of top Brexit Party officials retweeting extremists, conspiracy theorists and racists, many of which have since been deleted. This includes:
The revelations are just the latest in a series of social media racism scandals to hit the Brexit Party, most significantly when founder and leader Catherine Blaiklock resigned after HOPE not hate uncovered instances of racism in March.
For example, MEPs Martin Daubney and Lance Forman have retweeted Mark Collett, a former British National Party (BNP) figure and neo-Nazi who has frequently collaborated with former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke. The post retweeted by Forman features a picture of protestors following the Grenfell Tower tragedy, reading “Funny how the people who insist candles & peace vigils are the answer to Islamic terrorism are now ready to riot over a tragic accident.”
Farage, Daubney, Heaver, Jukes, head of press Gawain Towler and MEP candidate George Farmer have also retweeted Stefan Molyneux, a racist Canadian social media personality who, as the Southern Poverty Law Centre writes, “amplifies “scientific racism,” eugenics and white supremacism to a massive new audience”. Over the past year Molyneux has increasingly flirted with open white nationalism and antisemitism. Farage retweeted a Molyneux post in 2017 advertising his upcoming speech in support of disgraced Senate candidate and homophobe Roy Moore (since deleted).
Farage, Jukes, Heaver and Nathan Gill MEP have also retweeted posts by Faith Goldy, a Canadian alt-right figure who was fired from her role at far-right media outlet Rebel Media in 2017 after appearing on a neo-Nazi podcast, reciting the nazi “14 words” slogan on the channel of Scottish white nationalist Colin Robertson (AKA Millennial Woes) later that year.
Farage, Gill, Jukes and Welsh Assembly Member Mark Reckless have retweeted Peter Immanuelsen (AKA Peter Sweden), a far-right social media personality who has previously denied the Holocaust (although has since backtracked) and claimed that “Hitler had some good points”, and provided favourable media coverage to the far-right project Defend Europe. Farage’s (now deleted) retweet claimed “There’s been 3 bombings in Sweden now in just 5 days. And you heard nothing about it in mainstream media. Trump was right about Sweden.”
In addition, Jukes and Towler have retweeted posts from Laura Towler of the white nationalist site Defend Europa, and the virulent misogynist and homophobe Daryush Valizadeh (AKA Roosh V) (Towler has since deleted his retweets). Gill and Jukes have also retweeted Brittany Sellner (née Pettibone), an American YouTuber involved in the European far-right organisation Generation Identity, which advocates for a form of racial separatism.
Gill has also retweeted Tara McCarthy, formerly a prominent figure in the British alt-right, and Malcolm Jones, Brexit Party organiser for Hampshire, has retweeted the American white nationalist Angelo John Gage.
Jukes has also retweeted several posts from English Defence League (EDL) founder Stephen Yaxley-Lennon (AKA Tommy Robinson), the anti-Muslim extremist and serial criminal. The influence of Lennon on UKIP was stated by Farage as a major reason for his defection and the subsequent creation of the Brexit Party.
Farage, Jukes, Heaver, Daubney and Gill have also all retweeted posts from conspiracy theorists Mike Cernovich and Jack Posobiec. Cernovich first gained attention through promoting anti-feminism and misogynist pick-up artistry, and Posobiec is a former host for the Canadian far-right platform Rebel Media, and has been linked to white supremacists. Both Cernovich and Posobiec became key promoters of the “Pizzagate” conspiracy theory, which alleged that a Washington DC pizzeria was a front for a paedophile ring that stretched to the top of the Democratic Party.
Whilst the Brexit Party is striving to achieve mainstream acceptability and shake off the toxic baggage of UKIP, the party is rooted in dangerous and divisive populism, and has repeatedly been shown to harbour extreme and discriminatory tendencies. The prolific retweeting of extremists and conspiracy theorists by Brexit Party officials risks normalising the hatred spread by these fringe figures.
HOPE not hate has exposed further links between Brexit Party officials and extreme figures. See also:
From his infamous Breaking Point poster to his claims about migrants with HIV, Nigel Farage has historically courted the racist vote. Despite attempting to remake his image with the launch of the Brexit Party, he has recently returned to exploiting anxieties around immigration, for example implying that immigration is the cause of knife and drug crime in Watford ahead of his rally in October.
It may be unsurprising, then, that a long line of racism scandals have plagued Farage’s new party throughout its short history, not least when its founder and then-leader Catherine Blaiklock resigned after HOPE not hate uncovered numerous instances of racism and repeated promotion of neo-Nazi content online.
Despite Farage’s desire to distance himself from UKIP’s toxic baggage, it is clear that nasty and extreme tendencies are being drawn towards his new vehicle. We have previously revealed links between far-right conspiracy theorists and several key Brexit Party figures. Regional organisers have been outed as former members of the fascist British National Party (BNP) – indeed, BuzzFeed has reported that the Brexit Party adopted its unusual structure, which only allows voters to become registered supporters rather than members, due to fears of an influx of former BNP and English Defence League (EDL) activists.
In the first instalment of a new series, we give a rundown of some of the far-right figures who have attended events or thrown their lot in with the Brexit Party.
The extreme anti-Muslim street movement Britain First (BF) has given Farage’s party its dubious endorsement. In a statement uncovered by Scram News, the group claimed on Monday that “The Brexit Party are the only ones fighting for a proper Brexit, we’re right behind them”.
BF became notorious for promoting and carrying out actions designed to igite violent responses from Muslim communities, for example carrying out “mosque invasions” across the UK. Paul Golding, BF’s unhinged leader and a former rising star in the British National Party (BNP), has had several stints behind bars, including a spell for religiously-aggravated harassment.
In 2017, fresh out of prison for breaching a court order not to enter a mosque, Golding issued a chilling threat to MPs and journalists, stating:
All the politicians, all the journalists who have spent their careers undermining our nation, you WILL succumb to this movement eventually, and endure a day of reckoning for your crimes against our nation. Every lie, every act of treachery will be revisted upon you tenfold, and when your day of justice arrives, you are going to wish you never raised a hand against this nation.
For some reason Golding’s vengeful promise does not seem to apply to Nigel Farage.
Now dedicating his enthusiastic support for the Brexit Party is Jordan Diamond, the Liverpudlian co-founder and former leader of the UK branch of Generation Identity (GI), a Europe-wide far-right movement that advocates for a form of racial separatism, and whose French and Austrian activists received funding from the Christchurch terrorist.
Diamond has attended several Brexit Party events, including the rally in Westminster last Friday, and spends his time loudly cheerleading for Farage’s party online.
Despite being leader, shortly after its launch Diamond distanced himself from GI UK following an undercover expose by ITV, with the help of HOPE not hate, which embarrassed the UK branch in the eyes of the international network. Prior to his involvement with GI Diamond had attended events by Britain First.
He also expressed support for the alt-right during the disastrous Charlottesville “Unite the Right” rally in 2017, during which anti-fascist activist Heather Heyer was killed after a nazi drove a car into a crowd. He retweeted a post on the day of the rally reading: “There’s absolutely nothing wrong with us Whites loving, supporting, & helping our own race. #UniteTheRight #Charlottesville”.
Diamond has also attended meetings of the far-right Traditional Britain Group (TBG), including the annual conference last weekend which was addressed by Catherine Blaiklock, the founder and former leader of the Brexit Party, who resigned after HOPE not hate uncovered numerous instances of racism.
Also throwing his lot in with the Brexit Party is Brian Silvester, a disgraced former UKIP councillor in Cheshire, who until recently held a key role in the For Britain Movement, the far-right party headed by anti-Muslim activist Anne Marie Waters. Silvester is best known for his 44k Twitter following.
In 2012 Silvester was spared jail but fined £70,000 for life-endangering fire safety regulations breaches at his rented Crewe property. He also received national news coverage after tweeting, following a November 2016 High Court ruling on Brexit proceedings, that the public should know the home addresses of the judges involved.
Silvester joined For Britain at its founding in 2017. HOPE not hate has exposed For Britain for incidents of extreme racism from candidates (including standing a former member of the now-banned nazi terror group National Action), for hosting a Holocaust denier at their conference last September (which was also addressed by Silvester), for the pernicious influence of former British National Party (BNP) figures at the top of the party, for the prevalence of “white genocide” conspiracy theory within the party, and for their numerous links to the racial separatist group Generation Identity.
Silvester, despite sitting on the For Britain Committee as its Local Government Officer and being one of its most important online supporters, defected to support the Brexit Party this summer, and has been pushing propaganda for Farage’s party ever since. He can nowadays be found making anti-Muslim posts in Brexit Party Facebook groups.
Costello, a former UKIP Parliamentary candidate, left the party in May of this year, claiming that he saw the Brexit Party as the “only feasible solution to unite all Brexiteers”, and that Farage was the reason he got into politics. He boasted of serving as a Brexit Party Counting Agent in Swindon in the European Elections later that month, and was out campaigning with the Brexit Party’s prospective parliamentary candidate for Swindon South, Justin Stares, in September.
Costello is the former second-in-command of the oddball Trump-supporting group Make Britain Great Again (MBGA). During his time there he could be found ranting the UK is facing “a full on invasion” of immigrants and screaming “round up all illegal immigrants and get them out of here” at rallies organised by the group.
Costello is best known, however, for being part of an idiotic incident in August 2018 in which he and eleven others entered the left-wing bookshop Bookmarks in London, instructed by MBGA leader Luke Nash-Jones to “make a right nuisance”. In the ensuing debacle, shop staff were abused and a sign was ripped up. Facing intense backlash, Nash-Jones condemned the actions of “third parties” at the bookstore. He and Costello subsequently had their UKIP memberships suspended, although Costello was reinstated later that month.
Since leaving MBGA Costello has also been active in the Yellow Vests UK, a group whose members took part in the appalling harassment of Anna Soubry and journalist Owen Jones outside Parliament last winter.
He has also promoted the Kalergi Plan conspiracy theory, a twist on the “white genocide” theory which alleges that there is a deliberate plan to undermine white European society through mass immigration, integration and miscegenation conducted by sinister (and often Jewish) elites. The Guardian reported in March that Costello was then running UKIP’s main Facebook page, which we revealed to have shared material from a fascist YouTube account also promoted by the New Zealand killer.
Also throwing his lot in with the Brexit Party is London-based far-right activist Michael Brooks, who attended a party rally in Birmingham, and in April bragged about drinking with a senior party official.
Despite his open support for the Brexit Party, Brooks is best known for helping to run Carl Benjamin’s (AKA Sargon of Akkad) disastrous UKIP candidacy in the 2019 European Elections, during which Benjamin repeated his rape jokes about Labour MP Jess Phillips, among numerous other controversies.
We have previously exposed Brooks as a moderator of a now-defunct secret Facebook group (run by a Breitbart writer) riven with Holocaust jokes, antisemitic conspiracies, nazi posts and sick comments aimed at Jo Cox. Brooks described himself as “14 and 88” (an infamous nazi slogan), claimed that the group’s banner should be changed to nazi propaganda, and posted a graph showing a supposed increase in the population of sub-Saharan Africa with the caption “Planet of the Apes isn’t science fiction, it’s a warning”, among numerous other disgusting posts.
In 2018 Brooks also attended the Traditional Britain Group (TBG) conference (more on the TBG below), and the farcical conference of the UK branch of Generation Identity (GI), a group that advocates for a form of racial separatism. Brooks recently attended the wedding of the Austrian head of GI, Martin Sellner, and alt-right vlogger Brittany Sellner (née Pettibone). The identitarian ideology of GI was a major influence on the Christchurch killer, and who was found to have donated money and had email correspondence with Sellner. Through his connection to Benjamin, Brooks was also photographed posing with far-right organiser and Farage’s longtime ally, Steve Bannon, last October.
In attendance at the Brexit Party’s conference in Watford last Thursday was Sam Swerling, a veteran far-right activist, former member of the BNP and current Vice President of the Traditional Britain Group (TBG).
The TBG is a London-based discussion group that hosts far-right gatherings, dinners and conferences, and has previously hosted white nationalists and fascists such as Richard Spencer, Tomislav Sunic and Alex Kurtagic, as well as, infamously, Tory MP Jacob Rees-Mogg. The TBG’s head Gregory Lauder-Frost has claimed that non-white Britons such as Doreen Lawrence should be repatriated back to “their natural homelands”.
In February Reece Haynes told a meeting of the Bruges Group that, if Brexit was delayed, he would “have no choice but to stand for the Brexit Party” in order to “defend his country”, being praised by Brexiteer MP Kate Hoey for his youth and sentiment. During the referendum Haynes was a “messenger” for Leave.EU, the ugly, anti-immigrant unofficial Brexit campaign co-founded by Brexit Party chairman Richard Tice.
Haynes has attended and advertised TBG events, and in 2017 also attended an event by the fascist London Forum, which has hosted a wide range of nazis and far right figures from across the globe. He is also fond of writing social media posts about racial differences, as well as posting passages from nazi fanatic Savitri Devi.
Jill Hughes, the Brexit Party candidate for Batley and Spen, lists some impressive accomplishments on her LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook accounts. After 23 years of working in banking in London and New York, she left to become a “No 1 Bestselling author” and “one of the UK’s leading Wealth Mentors”. But with a bit of examination, both of those claims seem to be highly questionable.
First, let’s look at her claims of being a bestselling author. In the ‘About The Author’ section of her Amazon account, she claims to have “co-authored a No 1 Best Selling Spiritual self help book called ‘Inspired by the Passion Test’”. It’s true that Hughes contributed a section to this book – along with 15 other writers and the two main authors. But was it ever a ‘No 1 Bestseller’? We can find no evidence of this. The book itself has just a single customer review on Amazon and we cannot find it described as a ‘bestseller’ anywhere outside of Jill Hughes’ own descriptions.
It is similarly difficult to find any evidence that Hughes is ‘one of the UK’s leading Wealth Mentors’. While this claim might be somewhat vague and difficult to disprove, there’s very little evidence of her activity in this area. Her website is ‘under maintenance’, her Twitter account for this purpose has just five followers, and she only registered ‘MoneyMagnet.Global Limited’ with Companies House on October 10th of this year. This is despite her having listed herself as the ‘CEO’ of Money Magnet on her LinkedIn since November 2017, and having self-published her book, ‘Spirit of Prophecy’ under that name in March 2018. Though not illegal, it is odd to describe yourself as ‘CEO’ if you’re actually a sole trader.
A cautious investor might be slightly concerned by this philosophy of wealth from a Wealth Mentor:
Outside of the professional sphere, Hughes has made some other odd statements. In 2016, she claimed to be a spiritual guide from Sirius, a star 8.6 light years away from earth:
And in the acknowledgements to her book Spirit of Prophecy, she promotes the idea that extraterrestrials are living amongst us and cooperating with world governments:
“the E.T’s, some of them less than Apple Pie wholesome or Positive pumpkins, are already here working with our world Governments, but that’s all hush-hush for now.”
The ‘About the author’ section on her Amazon listing also declares some other interesting beliefs:
“To this day J.J.Hughes believes in elves/fairies/mermaids/unicorns and all things Elemental and Other Worldly…She has had numerous prophetic premonitions – usually about death, which so far despite a few close shaves she has escaped. She came to believe in reincarnation in her mid-twenties when her old horse Red made a re-appearance, this time as a palomino called Hooray Henry”
Hughes has already received some pushback from local pro-Brexit activists, who claim they have no idea who she is:
But she wasn’t impressed with the idea that where candidates have lived should matter to local voters:
“What is the obsession with the PPC must live in [sic] … Batley… or where ever? …We live in a Global-Digital world now-geographical locations are less and less relevant”.
This is probably unsurprising given that Jill Hughes grew up in nearby Bradford, and doesn’t seem to have lived in Yorkshire since attending university. Her Twitter bio describes her as ‘Bingley born Bradford schooled’, but her Facebook page says she is “Honoured to be PPC for Batley and Spen, West York’s where she comes from.”
We’re happy to correct the record on any of these points if Jill Hughes or the Brexit Party would like to provide supporting information, but we think the voters of Batley and Spen deserve to hear a lot more about this candidate’s qualifications and beliefs.
You can find out more about the Brexit Party – and how to beat them – by reading our factsheet here.
South Thanet Brexit Party candidate outlines bizarre EU conspiracy theories involving Zeus, temples, Guy Verhofstadt and gay marriage.
Just two days after we exposed bizarre claims from Brexit Party’s Batley & Spen candidate – who appears to believe that extraterrestrials are working with “world Governments” – Nigel Farage’s candidate in South Thanet, Timothy Vince, has had an extraordinary car-crash interview on BBC’s Sunday Politics South East.
Watch as Vince outlines his outlandish theory that the EU is founded on the exploitation of women as proven by a staue of Zeus, before outlining EU conspiracy theories involving the temple of Jupiter, MEP Guy Verhofstadt and gay marriage – eventually descending into a very testy exchange with the show’s presenter.
Watch the full interview below.
When Nigel Farage joined the Brexit Party in January, it seemed clear that he was hoping to leave some of the baggage of his UKIP days behind, not least the constant stream of councillors, candidates and activists that were exposed for posting racist and bigoted material on social media.
The Brexit Party, he claimed, would be “intolerant of all intolerance” and there was a “vast difference” between UKIP and the Brexit Party in terms of personnel – despite a large number of former UKIP candidates and activists defecting with him. But since then we have seen a number of Brexit Party candidates posting Islamophobic and racist material on social media, with many seeming to face no consequences at all.
This week we’ve been looking into the Brexit Party in Staffordshire, and what we’ve found is alarming. Extreme views are being openly promoted at every level of the local party, from the parliamentary candidates down to local activists.
Most of the Brexit Party candidates in the upcoming General Election appear to have deleted their old Twitter accounts and created new ones, presumably to avoid the risk of unsavoury old tweets coming to light. Yet despite only having his current account since August, Daniel Rudd, the parliamentary candidate for Stoke North, has already filled his timeline with deeply worrying tweets about migrants, Muslims and the slave trade.
He refers to migrants as “gimme-grunts” who “just take what they can”:
He retweets posts that state that the building of Islamic schools means “we’re fucked”, and refer to Muslims as “Labour’s imported voter base RoP” [Religion of Peace, used sarcastically].
And while he “doesn’t agree with” slavery, he does think that black people should remember that they were “essentially a commodity for sale by their own kind”:
It would be bad enough if Rudd were just a solitary bad apple in the Staffordshire Brexit Party, but unfortunately not. Here he thanks ‘Mike’, a local party activist who claims to be a former UKIP member, for his energetic campaigning on behalf of the party:
Mike, who uses the handle @mikelonerider, seems to share Rudd’s hostility to Muslims, saying that “Muslims don’t like anybody” and even calling for ‘limiting Muslims freedom”:
We can only hope that the Brexit Party was unaware of these tweets from Rudd and Mike, and will now take action. Unfortunately, given that Andrew Garcarz is still in place as the County Organiser for Staffordshire, this seems unlikely. Back in August, Andrew was revealed as having written Facebook posts that called EU citizens “worthless parasites, crooks and criminals”, as well as endorsing the racist “Coudenhove-Kalergi plan” conspiracy theory, a twist on the “white genocide” theory.
Andrew was the UKIP candidate for Birmingham Erdington South in the 2015 General Election, where his wife Wendy Garcarz is now standing for the Brexit Party. Wendy has also been revealed as posting Islamophobia on Facebook.
Adding to the picture, a closed, unofficial Facebook group for Brexit Party supporters in North Staffordshire also contains numerous extreme messages, including more white genocide conspiracy theories and claims that “Islam is taking over”. One user, underneath a post about the conversion of a former chappel into a mosque, writes “Bulldoze it down so they can’t have it. Then fill the ground with landmines to keep the f***ERS out”.
Posts include calls for Jean-Claude Juncker to be “hung upside down and slaughtered like the pig he is”. Another member uses the Confederate flag as his profile picture.
So it seems that despite Farage’s promises in April, neither the Brexit Party’s personnel nor their tolerance of intolerance are much different from that of the UKIP he left behind. Despite their best efforts to present a polished and moderate image, the dangerous and divisive views of their leadership, candidates and activists are inevitably seeping through.
Over the summer, a number of Brexit Party candidates were sacked or forced to resign after their deeply unpleasant views were unearthed on social media. There was Prabjhit Dhillon, who resigned after posts emerged that showed he supported a ban on Muslim immigration. Then there was Mark Nash, who was dropped by the party for saying Islam was a ‘cancer’ that should be ‘crushed out of existence’.
But there are other candidates who have expressed similar views who remain in place and will be representing the Brexit Party in the upcoming election. Wendy Garcarz, the PPC for Birmingham Erdington, was revealed as having shared an alarmist post about Islam, one that compared British Muslims to the Germans in 1930s, and promoted the discredited conspiracy theory of Muslim ‘no-go zones’:
“In the UK, the Muslim communities refuse to integrate and there are now dozens of no-go zones within major cities across the country that the police force dare not intrude upon”
Garcarz has since claimed that she was sharing this to “draw attention to the bile of some who have no understanding of what Islam is about”, but it’s hard to take her story seriously given that she has previously shared a post from ‘BNN News’, a far-right fake news page:
BNN News’ campaign against Halal food is just part of a far wider far-right agenda, which includes the promotion of antisemitic tropes and the ‘White Genocide’ conspiracy theory:
Garcarz’s denial of holding extreme views is even less plausible given that her husband Andrew, the Brexit Party Organiser for Staffordshire, has posted similarly extreme content on Facebook, including this post that denigrated EU migrants and promoted White Genocide myths:
“A large proportion of [EU citizens] are penniless ignorant ill-educated thieves…worthless parasites, crooks and criminals”
It’s time for the Brexit Party to take decisive action against all of the bigots who have made the party their home.
Could home-made videos spell disaster for the Brexit Party’s slick image?
It’s been quite a week for the Brexit Party. On Friday, their candidate for Batley and Spen resigned after HOPE Not Hate revealed that she had fabricated parts of her CV and claimed to be a spirit guide from a distant star. Then on Sunday, their candidate for South Thanet had a car-crash interview in which he was interrogated about his belief that the EU was founded on the ‘subjugation of women’ and signed treaties on the ruins of ancient temples.
With such a questionable vetting process, it’s no surprise that the Brexit Party has demanded that their candidates stop producing their own campaign materials. Unfortunately for them – and lucky for us – the Brexit Party candidate for Brentwood and Ongar has already been busy making some downright strange campaign videos with his friend Tom Begley. You know you’re in for a treat when the candidate misspells the name in the first few seconds of a video:
This was just a soft-launch, however, and by the time they uploaded their second video they’d nailed the spelling of Brexit. This time around it was the candidate’s own name that let them down:
But then a few weeks later they went back to Bexit:
The dream team were ready to tackle a new approach for their third video, with extensive use of green screen and sound effects – the air-raid sirens at the start of the video really gives a good feel for the strangeness to come:
Among the many highlights of the video is an electoral graph that pays no heed to the established colour-coding of political parties, and a map that appears to show the landmass of the UK itself being shifted into the North Atlantic:
But as funny as these these videos are, Moses Etienne has very serious questions to answer about his relationship with Tom Begley. Their extensive and exclusive recording history – seven videos in total – suggests they know each other well. But Mr Begley has a number of extreme and offensive posts on his Facebook profile, including shares of antisemitic posts about ‘Rothschild Zionist Israel’ and Islamophobic memes about a ‘Muslim invasion of Europe’:
Is Mr Begley assisting this campaign in an official capacity, or just as a friend? The voters of Brentwood & Ongar deserve to know the truth about Mr Etienne’s views – and the people he chooses to associate with – before they place their votes.
You can find out more about the Brexit Party – and how to beat them – by reading our factsheet here.
Former UKIP candidate and ex-soldier Cushway, who goes by the alias “Graham Lord Pyre”, is the bassist in the band Stuka Squadron, which performs from the perspective of a troupe of vampiric Nazis (“Stuka” refers to the Junkers Ju 87 dive bomber planes used in World War II). The band has performed in Gestapo-style outfits, and Cushway has been photographed wearing the SS Totenkopf insignia on his tie.
The band’s page on Encyclopedia Metallum states “Stuka Squadron is not an “NS” [National Socialist] band and shares no affiliation or beliefs with the white supremacy movement”. However, the band has engaged in a deeply inappropriate fetishization of the Third Reich.
For example, the fictional biography for Cushway’s character on the band’s website claims he met another band member in the Thule Society in 1935, an extreme racist, proto-Nazi occultist group which counted Rudolf Hess as a member.
The title track of the album “Tales of the Ost”, named in apparent reference to the Eastern Front, contains the lyrics “Flying high above them all, the saviours of the Reich, the Stuka Squadron vampires head into the fight […] An Iron Cross on every chest, the Squadron dwindled fast”. The track One Eyed God King, written from the perspective of the Norse god Odin, contains the lyrics “Hear my words that I implant, of blood crusade and racial war, the heathens you invented, the wolves inside the door, you rinse in blood the party’s name, fly your banners high”.
The “Our Legend” section of their website outlines the band’s fictional history as a troupe of immortal vampires, claiming that “The name celebrates our most recent wartime incarnation, but our bloody bootprints echo through the pages of history”, and includes the rallying cry “SQUADRONEERS, LEGIONNAIRES, DENIZENS OF THE SUBTERRANEAN REICH. ARISE!” The section also makes reference to “the renegade vampire and our greatest adversary ZABULON”, a name also referred to in the band’s song “Zabulon’s Inferno”. Zabulon is the name of a biblical founder of an Israelite tribe.
Despite being founded over a decade ago, just days ago the band posted a long message on Facebook, claiming that it was “not intended to convey any political message”, and that the project was “intended to be shocking and un-PC at the outset”. Despite admitting that their “intention was to portray Luftwaffe pilots”, the band also claims that “Any appearance of genuine World War II-era symbols on accessories […] is purely accidental”.
Cushway, who describes himself as an “intelligence professional”, claims he signed up for Brexit Party candidacy after the party’s success in the European Elections. He attended the party’s candidate launch party on Monday.
You can find out more about the Brexit Party – and how to beat them – by reading our factsheet here.
However, there is an enormous gulf between his self-presentation and reality. Farage has used racism, xenophobia, sexism and Islamophobia to stir up division, has toxic connections to extreme and far-right figures across the world, and Thatcherite beliefs that he has tried to hide from communities in former industrial towns.
Below we round up Farage’s attempts to exploit prejudice, his divisive and dishonest statements, his elite background and his toxic overseas associates.
“I am a Thatcherite. First and foremost, she was a leader and leaders have ideas and vision and chart a course […] If you look at TV footage of Mrs Thatcher being interviewed in the Eighties it actually takes your breath away. She had conviction, passion, belief. She was forthright. She spoke in a language that ordinary people could understand. Today’s so-called leaders don’t speak the same language that ordinary working families in Britain understand. They are wimps in comparison to her”.
Victor Orbán:
Nigel Farage MEP, leader of the Brexit Party and former leader of UKIP, has long attempted to present himself as a straight-talking, honest, “common sense” politician.
However, there is an enormous gulf between his self-presentation and reality. Farage has used racism, xenophobia, sexism and Islamophobia to stir up division, has toxic connections to extreme and far-right figures across the world, and Thatcherite beliefs that he has tried to hide from communities in former industrial towns.
Below we round up Farage’s attempts to exploit prejudice, his divisive and dishonest statements, his elite background and his toxic overseas associates.
“I am a Thatcherite. First and foremost, she was a leader and leaders have ideas and vision and chart a course […] If you look at TV footage of Mrs Thatcher being interviewed in the Eighties it actually takes your breath away. She had conviction, passion, belief. She was forthright. She spoke in a language that ordinary people could understand. Today’s so-called leaders don’t speak the same language that ordinary working families in Britain understand. They are wimps in comparison to her”.
Donald Trump:
Steve Bannon:
Roy Moore:
Marine Le Pen:
Alternative for Germany (AfD):
Victor Orbán:
Alex Jones:
Despite remaking her image in recent years through her appearances on reality TV shows, Widdecombe has a long history of homophobic and sexist remarks that jar with Farage’s claims that his party is “intolerant of intolerance”. Indeed, embracing the dangerous and divisive politics of her new vehicle, in the first Brexit Party speech in the European Parliament Widdecombe made a risible comparison of Britain’s departure from the EU to the emancipation of slaves.
Below we run down Widdecombe’s track record.
“The wild decade which was the sixties had fizzled out and taken with it much of its optimism, while its legacy of permissiveness had yet to turn into moral anarchy in what remained largely a socially conservative country. Divorce was easier but still not lightly sought, abortion available but widely frowned upon, homosexual acts legal but in the closet, pre-marital sex widespread but without the wholesale promsicuity which was to come. The family unit was still regarded as the bedrock of society but children were less shielded from adult strife, class divisions were loosening but still observable […] the F word, ten years after the Lady Chatterley trial, was not yet encountered on a daily basis. Nor any longer was the N word, now largely abandoned despite growing alarm at growing racial diversity.”
“I have never understood why supposedly intelligent interviewers express surprise that I have gay male friends. As I point out, if I chose my friends on the basis that I must first agree with all their views and choices then I would have to exclude not only homosexuals but all those who are divorced, living in sin, having children out of wedlock, having abortions (that one is quite difficult), known to have taken drugs, hilding strong left-wing views and certainly unbelievers […] Yes, I do oppose gay marriage but so do plenty of gays because it will give not one extra right to homosexuals which they do not have with civil partnerships but will take away from heterosexuals the right in law to be called husband and wife.”
“That leaves the law, which alone can bring back the concept of shame […] If the police carried out the occasional big blitz in the city centres on a Friday night, drafting in extra manpower and pursuing every single person who was drunk in A&E or incapable on the streets, then people going out specifically to get drunk would risk finding themselves in court on the Monday with their names and photographs in the papers. That might be a deterrent to the wilder stages of excess.”
“I left the Church of England because there was a huge bundle of straw. The ordination of women was the last straw, but it was only one of many. For years I had been disillusioned by the Church of England’s compromising on everything. The Catholic Church doesn’t care if something is unpopular. As far as the Catholic Church is concerned if it’s true it’s true, and if it’s false it’s false. The issue over women priests was not only that I think it’s theologically impossible to ordain women, it was the nature of the debate that was the damaging thing, because instead of the debate being “is this theologically possible?” the debate was “If we don’t do this we don’t be acceptable to the outside world”. To me, that was an abdication of the Church’s role, which is to lead, not to follow.”
“The wild decade which was the sixties had fizzled out and taken with it much of its optimism, while its legacy of permissiveness had yet to turn into moral anarchy in what remained largely a socially conservative country. Divorce was easier but still not lightly sought, abortion available but widely frowned upon, homosexual acts legal but in the closet, pre-marital sex widespread but without the wholesale promsicuity which was to come. The family unit was still regarded as the bedrock of society but children were less shielded from adult strife, class divisions were loosening but still observable […] the F word, ten years after the Lady Chatterley trial, was not yet encountered on a daily basis. Nor any longer was the N word, now largely abandoned despite growing alarm at growing racial diversity.”
“I have never understood why supposedly intelligent interviewers express surprise that I have gay male friends. As I point out, if I chose my friends on the basis that I must first agree with all their views and choices then I would have to exclude not only homosexuals but all those who are divorced, living in sin, having children out of wedlock, having abortions (that one is quite difficult), known to have taken drugs, hilding strong left-wing views and certainly unbelievers […] Yes, I do oppose gay marriage but so do plenty of gays because it will give not one extra right to homosexuals which they do not have with civil partnerships but will take away from heterosexuals the right in law to be called husband and wife.”
“That leaves the law, which alone can bring back the concept of shame […] If the police carried out the occasional big blitz in the city centres on a Friday night, drafting in extra manpower and pursuing every single person who was drunk in A&E or incapable on the streets, then people going out specifically to get drunk would risk finding themselves in court on the Monday with their names and photographs in the papers. That might be a deterrent to the wilder stages of excess.”
“I left the Church of England because there was a huge bundle of straw. The ordination of women was the last straw, but it was only one of many. For years I had been disillusioned by the Church of England’s compromising on everything. The Catholic Church doesn’t care if something is unpopular. As far as the Catholic Church is concerned if it’s true it’s true, and if it’s false it’s false. The issue over women priests was not only that I think it’s theologically impossible to ordain women, it was the nature of the debate that was the damaging thing, because instead of the debate being “is this theologically possible?” the debate was “If we don’t do this we don’t be acceptable to the outside world”. To me, that was an abdication of the Church’s role, which is to lead, not to follow.”
The multi-millionaire property tycoon, who serves as the Brexit Party’s MEP for the East of England, has been parachuted in to replace the original Brexit Party candidate in the Labour-held seat of Hartlepool, County Durham, a post-industrial town recovering from years of austerity.
But what do we know about Richard Tice?
The multi-millionaire property tycoon, who serves as the Brexit Party’s MEP for the East of England, has been parachuted in to replace the original Brexit Party candidate in the Labour-held seat of Hartlepool, County Durham, a post-industrial town recovering from years of austerity.
But what do we know about Richard Tice?
Dionne Cocozza, Brexit Party candidate for Glasgow North, has frequently shared Islamophobic posts portraying Muslims as violent, as well as disturbing conspiracy theories suggesting that Muslims could “takeover” the UK. *
Cocozza continued to share anti-Muslim content up until early November on Twitter, and has just today deleted her account.
Judging for her Twitter feed, Cocozza is an avid follower of far-right website Politicalite, including its conspiracy theorist writers. Just two weeks ago, on 6 November, she retweeted a post by the Politicalite writer “Angela Eagleheart”, saying “I heard a Muslim say, we get elected then slowly we takeover. Happened in Belgium, Sweden and Germany”. Cocozza has also appeared in two interviews on Politicalite, and shared or replied to 19 tweets by Eagleheart.
Much of Cocozza’s Twitter is dedicated to painting a negative picture of Muslims and immigration into the UK and Europe. She frequently posts images and articles to suggest minorities are inherently violent and a threat to the rest of the population. For example, in April she tweeted “Pakistani Muslim refugee murdered his daughter as an act of honor [sic] for having a boyfriend without his permission”, a quote from trump-train.com, a small anti-Muslim website that has now gone offline. Cocozza has also retweeted British far-right conspiracist Paul Joseph Watson about alleged Islamic extremism in France.
In October 2018 Cocozza shared a tweet suggesting that “Germany will become African and Islamic if mass migration isn’t stopped” from Voice of Europe, a large virulently Islamophobic website and Twitter account which often publishes well-known far-right activists. Cocozza has shared content from Voice of Europe at least twice.
Another common far-right trope that Cocozza spreads is that white people are discriminated against in the UK, instead of ethnic minorities. On 2 October she replied to a tweet by Labour MP David Lammy about a Conservative MP Desmond Swayne, who had been photographed in blackface, saying that Lammy was “enticing hate on the whites of today that were not born when this happened. You keep the racism fuelled with [sic] your gobby big mouth & anti-white tweets” for criticising the MP.
There are several variations of the claim that white people are oppressed or victims of racism on Cocozza’s Twitter, indicating that this is a strong belief of hers. For example,when Cocozza tweeted saying “there’s mosk [sic] schools underground in UK”, she ended up in what appears as a debate with a now-deleted Twitter account. After having backtracked on her first statement, she ends her last tweet saying “You can’t say anything if your [sic] white 2019”.
Cocozza is just the latest Brexit Party candidate to be outed for spreading racism, conspiracy theories and Islamophobia, in what is becoming a worrying trend in the party. Fears of a Muslims taking over the UK and suggestions that it’s already happened in Sweden, Belgium and Germany is a far-right conspiracy theory with lack of basis in reality. Her belief and spread of these ideas, as well as racist and conspiracist far-right Twitter accounts such as Voice of Europe, has should have no place in British politics.
* Since putting up this blog we have been contacted by the Glasgow University student paper, The Glasgow Guardian, who advised us they had had already published a story on Dionne Cocozza’s social media history on 20th November. Our research was independent and we weren’t aware of the Glasgow Guardian story, but we are more than happy to acknowledge this and congratulate them on the scoop. The Glasgow Guardian’s story can be read here: https://glasgowguardian.co.uk/2019/11/20/glasgow-norths-brexit-party-candidate-has-history-of-islamophobic-tweets/
Despite Nigel Farage’s long history of dangerous and divisive statements, it was nevertheless surprising to find that he had given a long interview to the evangelical channel Revelation TV in February of this year. By the time Farage appeared on the channel it had already been reprimanded by Ofcom for both homophobia and Islamophobia.
In an apparently unguarded moment, he expressed some bizarre and extreme views that are a far cry from the more sanitised performances that he has given since joining the Brexit Party. While he has long talked about immigration and promoted the widely criticised ‘Breaking Point’ poster during the Referendum campaign, he went further in this interview:
I’ve been one of the most hardline voices for the last four or five years saying we’ve got to stop the flow [of migrants] across the Mediterranean and if we allow it to continue we will actually […] imperil the future of our civilization.
The Brexit Party has, until recently, shied away from the immigration debate, perhaps attempting to avoid being tarnished with the toxic legacy of UKIP on that topic. Yet in this interview, Farage is proud to describe himself as a ‘hardliner’ and to promulgate the poisonous fallacy that European civilisation itself is under threat from migration, which is a rallying cry of far-right groups across the world. He also admits that the root of his hostility to migration is a belief in the incompatibility of different religions and cultures, rather than economic or practical concerns:
There are different communities from different parts of the world, with different religions and for those religions to coexist peacefully doesn’t always happen overnight […] I think if you look at what’s happened in cities in Sweden, in cities in Germany, you realise there’s actually a huge rift in society, with completely different cultural values towards the role of women in society or whatever else.
But it was only a matter of time before Farage led the Brexit Party Ltd towards nasty, dog-whistle rhetoric around immigration – it has long been a key plank of his politics, something that appeals to the extreme figures who have taken key positions in the party.
The Brexit Party’s former candidate for Stoke North, Daniel Rudd, was dismissed for a number of hateful posts about migrants, calling them “gimme-grunts” who “take what they can”. Andrew Garcarz, the Brexit Party candidate for Birmingham Ladywood and county organiser for Staffordshire, was revealed in August for having endorsed the “Coudenhove-Kalergi plan” myth, a variant on the racist “White Genocide” conspiracy theory. He also described European migrants as “Penniless, ill-educated thieves and opportunists […] worthless parasites, crooks and criminals”.
Before attempting to rebrand himself, Farage himself frequently used alarmist and discriminatory language about immigration. He told LBC that he would be “concerned” at the idea of living next door to Romanian people – but not German people, for reasons he did not explain. When asked which kind of immigrants he would like to come to the UK, he replied “people who don’t have HIV”. And he has a life-long admiration of Enoch Powell, infamous for his “Rivers of Blood” speech, sections of which Farage has recited from memory.
During his Revelation TV interview, Farage also makes some statements that flirt with conspiracy theories about an impending World Government, even using the common antisemitic dog-whistle phrase “New World Order” and citing the two most prominent Jewish-founded banks to illustrate his point:
These firms like Goldman Sachs & JP Morgan who actually see the European Union as basically the forerunner of global government […] it’s pretty clear who the enemy is as far as I’m concerned – the enemy are these giant multinational businesses are prepared to basically take down our democratic systems […] If you really look at it: what percentage of the UK actually believe in the United States of Europe, actually believe in this New World Order?
Despite insisting that he has “never been a conspiracy theorist”, this is by no means the first time he has proved otherwise. HOPE not hate recently revealed that Farage has peddled similar conspiracies, including in the online documentary Bilderberg: The Movie, alongside a number of conspiracy theorists from the notorious LaRouche movement. He has also appeared six times on the American far-right conspiracy theory show InfoWars, an organisation to which several prominent Brexit Party figures have links. We have also previously exposed two Brexit Party MEPs and its Dundee West candidate for having appeared on an antisemitic conspiracy radio show.
Farage may have felt confident to let his mask slip a little when talking on Revelation TV, perhaps encouraged by the small audience size and hugely complimentary hosts. For all his jollity and his highly stage-managed PR operation, Farage continues to peddle deeply regressive and dangerous views.
Tomorrow Nigel Farage and his Brexit Party arrive in Barnsley, South Yorkshire, as they continue their flagging and crisis-stricken campaign.
We take a look at the candidates set to be sharing a stage with Farage, from a Crimestoppers UK board member whose own company was slapped with a conviction, to a known Islamophobe, to a councillor from an oddball political party that appears to have formed an alliance of sorts with the Brexit Party.
Initially announced as candidate for Inverness, Nairn, Badenoch and Strathspey, Jim Ferguson has been shuttled across to contest Barnsley East, despite having boasted in September that “all [Brexiteers] are local to the areas we are standing in”.
Ferguson is far from the only Brexit Party candidate to be parachuted into a constituency. For example, the nomination papers of Stephen Cavell, who describes himself as a “senior private equity executive” and is also due to address the Brexit Party event tomorrow, state that his home address is in the constituency of Chelsea and Fulham, London, some 180 miles away from Wentworth and Dearne, South Yorkshire, where he is standing.
However, Ferguson appears to be a particularly shameless carpetbagger. Just two months ago he was describing himself as a “great big Scottish highlander” who “love[d] being Scots”, but recently proclaimed himself “a Yorkshire man by heart” on Twitter.
Most ironic, however, is that Ferguson sits on the advisory board of anti-crime charity Crimestoppers UK as its Scotland Regional Representative. However, in 2014 Ferguson, who was director of the security firm Castle Security Group Northern Ltd, plead guilty on behalf of the company to placing unlicensed security guards in licensable security roles. The company received a fine for these activities.
Booker, a former UKIP councillor, was outed in August by the Twitter account @MatesJacob for having written a long post on social media claiming that the US was “cutting its own throat” by “not fighting back” against the spread of Islam. Booker had also liked a Facebook comment alleging that Muslims had a plan to “takeover” the world, another seeming to call for violent action against Islam/Muslims, and another stating complaining that Magid Magid, former Mayor of Sheffield, had Somalian heritage.
Despite the revelations being picked up by the press months before nominations closed, Farage ignored calls to sack Booker, making him just one of a shamefully long list of candidates the Brexit Party is yet to disavow.
This year Victoria Felton was elected as a Barnsley councillor for the oddball Democrats & Veterans (D&V) party. Her husband, former UKIP candidate Gavin Felton, is D&V chairman.
D&V is led by John Rees-Evans, a former UKIP leadership candidate best known for his extraordinary claim that a “homosexual donkey” tried to rape his horse, and for a profile in VICE magazine in which the ex-soldier detailed the fortified underground bunker he had built in Bulgaria. VICE also reported that Rees-Evans took a gun to a branch of IKEA, in case terrorists attacked the shop (Rees-Evans has since denied that he had taken his gun for that reason).
As others have pointed out, the party’s use of a donkey as its logo is perhaps unwise, given Rees-Evans’ history. The party also claimed that the association of its initials with “diarrhoea and vomiting” was deliberate, as politics was “making them that sick”.
There is, however, a more troubling side to D&V. Rees-Evans was slammed by his colleagues for suggesting, during his 2017 UKIP leadership run, that dual nationals could be paid up to £9,000 to leave the UK. The below passage from D&V’s manifesto makes reference to the discredited conspiracy theory of “no-go zones”:
Political correctness and moral cowardice on the part of our government has been responsible for the creation of ‘no-go areas’ throughout Britain, with the police being told by their superiors to avoid certain areas of the capital when in uniform, for fear of their lives […] Our police are required to waste much of their time on diversity training and pointless bureaucracy, when they should be focussed on preventing and detecting crime, and protecting people and property.
The manifesto goes on to say of the practice of female genital mutilation (FGM):
Laws that have been on our statute books for 30 years and which protect innocent young girls from cruel mutilation by those entering our country with no desire to respect our laws, customs and culture, are not being enforced […] The reason for this neglect is clear: FGM is the preserve of ethnic minorities and the government fears provoking ‘racial tensions’.
There are several controversies surrounding the party. A candidate for D&V in the local elections claimed he would “apply for the job as executioner” if Donald Trump began killing immigrants. In October of this year ExaminerLive reported that a row involving D&V councillor James Dalton could cost Kirklees taxpayers as much as £60k, due to a judicial review into the handling of complaints against his offensive tweets.
In light of this, it is somewhat concerning to see claims of an alliance between Farage’s party and D&V:
Nigel Farage has strenuously tried to distance the Brexit Party from UKIP, his former vehicle, which was long plagued by racism, sexism and homophobia scandals, and had developed into a fully-fledged far-right party by the time he abandoned ship last December.
Whilst UKIP has now spiralled into obscurity, standing a dismal 44 candidates nationally, the Brexit Party has increasingly come to resemble the UKIP of old as the campaign has progressed. Take, for example, the near-daily exposure of bigotry from its candidates, and its adoption of the former UKIP policy of a 50,000-a-year immigration cap. Just yesterday Farage told The Guardian that he intended to focussing more on immigration for the remainder of the campaign, the issue on which UKIP centred its 2015 General Election campaign. This is partly because large chunks of UKIP’s personnel – activists, candidates, organisers and advisors – have simply been carried over into Farage’s new party.
Few places is this more true than in Rotherham. Brexit Party candidates Paul Hague (Rotherham) and Alan Cowles (Rother Valley) were among a cohort of 12 UKIP councillors who defected to the Brexit Party in July, despite having stuck with UKIP throughout the entirety of the period led by veteran anti-Muslim activist Gerard Batten, which Farage condemned as “obsessed with Islam” and in danger of becoming the “new BNP”. The Brexit Party candidates in the neighbouring constituencies of Penistone and Stocksbridge and Sheffield South East are also both ex-UKIP, have scandals of their own.
Alan Cowles, who leads the Brexit Party councillors, was recently described by Brexit Party chairman Richard Tice as “clearly committed to the values of the Brexit Party”. Cowles is perhaps best known for a 2015 interview with Sky News, in which he admitted that he did not know how much immigration there was into the area despite his lengthy complaints on the topic, for example claiming that “old people in this town are intimidated and afraid to come into the town centre, because of immigrants”.
Cowles also came to the defence of Brian Cutts, also now a Rotherham Brexit Party councillor, who was removed from the South Yorkshire Police and Crime panel in 2018 after he was recorded asking “Why are we allowing lesbians and gay men to foster children?”, stating that he “knew right from wrong” and “knew which side of the road to drive on and which way to go – straight”. The Rotherham Advertiser reports that he later repeated his views at a “bizarre” meeting at Rotherham Town Hall, stating “I can’t see how anybody can father a child to two men.”
Cowles claimed that Cutts’ comments were not improper, vowing in July to write to the Home Secretary after Labour councillors refused to reinstate Cutts to the panel. Council leader Chris Read claimed that he had “approached members of the LGBT community about Cllr Cutts. Out of the 350 we asked, they all said he was the wrong person to do this job”.
More recently Cllr. Nigel Simpson, who also joined the Brexit Party from UKIP in July, was exposed by The Times in August as having warned that failure to implement a “complete Brexit” would lead to “an experimental merge of [the] EU and [for example] the continent of Africa” and “tribal leaders may take over”. He appears to have been quietly ejected from the Brexit Party, and is now listed on the Rotherham Council website as “non-aligned”.
Rotherham Brexit Party councillor Sandra Marriott has also reposted inflammatory content on social media. Whilst a UKIP councillor Marriott shared a post which dramatically exaggerates the ways in which illegal immigrants are treated in this country, which is then compared to draconian penalties in other countries, such as hard labour and execution.
Another prominent Brexit Party figure in the region is Jane Collins, UKIP’s former candidate in Rotherham and a former member of the European Parliament, where she held the dubious achievement of being the 689th most active MEP in the rankings. Collins became the Brexit Party organiser for Yorkshire and North Lincolnshire after quitting UKIP in April.
Collins is best known for almost bankrupting UKIP after she lost a libel case against three Labour MPs, having claimed at UKIP’s 2014 conference that the MPs were aware of many of the details of child grooming in Rotherham but had not intervened to stop it. Ironically, in 2016 she appealed to the EU, claiming that she has “immunity” from the legal action due to her position as an MEP. Collins incurred hundreds of thousands of pounds in damages, and UKIP miraculously avoided bankruptcy after the party was ordered to pay a large chunk of the costs in 2018. Collins was also threatened with a lawsuit after she falsely suggested that the head of a Christian charity was a paedophile.
More worryingly, Collins is also prone to extreme and offensive statements, for example claiming in 2014 that “indigenous” children in contact with the Roma Slovak community should receive vaccines. She has also retweeted (and since deleted) a post by American anti-Muslim extremist Pamela Geller, who is barred from entering the UK.
The Brexit Party is bringing dangerous and divisive politics to communities across the UK.
In July, UKIP’s five councillors in Derby defected en masse to the Brexit Party, despite having remained active in UKIP throughout the entirety of the Gerard Batten period, which Farage condemned as “obsessed with Islam” and in danger of turning into the “new BNP”. The Derby defectors included Alan Graves Sr., his son, Alan Graves Jr., and Kirk Kus, who are now hoping to win seats for the Brexit Party in Derby North, High Peak and Sheffield South East respectively.
However, HOPE not hate can reveal that just months ago the Graves’ were trashing Farage and their new party online, supporting misogynistic YouTuber Carl Benjamin (AKA Sargon of Akkad), and Graves Sr. was making appearances with disgraced far-right “journalist” Katie Hopkins during UKIP’s disastrous European Election campaign.
We can also reveal that in 2015 Kus posted far-right propaganda that described the “systematic obliteration of Europe” at the hands of “so-called refugees” who are “nothing more than invaders from the underdeveloped world”, and urged support of extreme European far-right parties.
Embarrassingly, HOPE not hate have uncovered numerous comments made by Graves Sr. and Jr. railing against Farage and his party just months prior to their defection, some of which were covered by the Sunday Mirror.
In now-deleted tweets Graves Jr. labelled the Brexit Party “Farages [sic] ego trip” and his “vanity project”, calling him a “slippery man”, a “Tory shill”, and “only in it for the money/fame”. In April Graves Jr. tweeted “Privately educated multi millionaires speaking for the common man? I think not”. He also called the party a “dictatorship” and in June retweeted a post reading: “Nigel Farage wants American-style Insurance based Health Care in the UK. The Brexit Party is NOT the party of the Working Class”. Graves Sr. himself retweeted a series of anti-Brexit Party posts, including one that called the Brexit Party “a one man band that makes bad decisions”.
More concerning, however, is the willingness of the Brexit Party – which has presented itself as breaking away from UKIP’s toxic baggage – to embrace the Derby defectors, given their track record.
Graves Sr., who became a UKIP councillor since 2014, rose to prominence in the 2018 local elections, being one of just three UKIP wins nationally. He became increasingly important to the party as it drifted towards the far right under veteran anti-Muslim activist Gerard Batten, who is notorious for describing Islam as a “death cult” and for his infatuatation with far-right thug Stephen Yaxley-Lennon (AKA Tommy Robinson).
Graves Sr. addressed UKIP’s 2018 conference, claiming during his speech that the party’s manifesto, which included references to the far-right conspiracy theory of “cultural Marxism”, scrapping the category of hate crime and repealing equality laws, was the most “common sense” of any party.
Graves Sr. became one of UKIP’s two campaign managers in the May 2019 local elections and European Parliament elections, in which he also stood as an MEP candidate. During the campaign he travelled on the UKIP campaign bus with Batten and Katie Hopkins, the disgraced far-right “journalist” infamous for labelling migrants “cockroaches” and a “plague of feral humans”.
The UKIP European Elections campaign was notoriously dominated by the candidacy of YouTuber Carl Benjamin (AKA Sargon of Akkad), who repeated his disgusting rape “jokes” about Labour MP Jess Phillips, and was exposed by HOPE not hate for having made an appalling racial slur-ridden video. In April Graves Sr. posted Benjamin’s content online, and Graves Jr. described Benjamin as a “good guy”, also writing supportively of Mark Meechan (AKA Count Dankula), the UKIP candidate known for teaching his pug to perform a Nazi salute.
Kirk Kus, a Brexit Party candidate in Sheffield and also an ex-UKIP councillor in Derby, has also expressed support for UKIP’s extreme Youtubers Benjamin, Meechan, and far-right conspiracy theorist Paul Joseph Watson, the latter of whom he retweeted over 50 times. Kus recently deactivated his account after offensive posts resurfaced.
HOPE not hate can also reveal that Kus posted an article titled “The Migrant Crisis Is a Radical Islamic Invasion” in a pro-Brexit Facebook group. The 2015 article from the now-defunct website Political Scrapbook, which Kus himself wrote for several times, claims that “Europe is at a crossroads between survival and annihilation”, and railed against “so-called ‘refugees’, who are nothing more than invaders from the underdeveloped world [who had] viciously attacked innocent women in the streets of Switzerland”.
The article urges support of a number of far-right European parties, including Vlaams Belang, Alternative for Germany, Lega Nord and Sweden Democrats, concluding:
Britain will not survive if the continent of Europe falls to radical Islam. If you do not care about this, or you are resigned to your belief that we shall fail in preventing the islamization of Europe, by the Wahhabi and Salafi elements who are already amongst us, then I suggest you head to Australia or New Zealand, if you can afford to do so. This is a war for the survival of our civilization. Now is the time to rise up as one […] You must stand united together to prevent what our adversaries seek-our systematic annihilation.
You can find out more about the Brexit Party – and how to beat them – by reading our factsheet here.
UPDATE:
In his interview with Andrew Neil on Thursday 5th Dec, Nigel Farage was asked about the allegations outlined below. Watch the full video here.
WATCH: Nigel Farage squirms as he’s confronted with extreme comments made by his candidates. Andrew Garcarz extremism was uncovered by HOPE not hate. Read more about him here: https://t.co/tygiKSRDSA pic.twitter.com/E02nxmGEM9
— HOPE not hate (@hopenothate) December 6, 2019
Antisemitic conspiracy theories and calls to “destroy” Islam – when will Nigel Farage finally take action against his racist candidate in Birmingham?
On 5th August, it was revealed that the candidate for Birmingham Erdington, Wendy Garcarz, had shared Islamophobic posts. It also emerged that her husband, Andrew Garcarz, a former UKIP candidate who described himself as the ‘Brexit Party County Organiser for Staffordshire’, had called EU migrants “worthless parasites, crooks and criminals”, and endorsed the racist and antisemitic ‘Coudenhove Kalergi plan’ conspiracy theory, a variant on the ‘white genocide’ conspiracy.
On 4th November HOPE not hate reported on Mr Garcarz again, as part of an expose of racism and intolerance in the Brexit Party Staffordshire as a whole, but no action was taken, despite the other representative involved in the article (Daniel Rudd, PPC for Stoke North) being forced to step down by the party. Worse still, it then emerged that Mr Garcarz had been put forward as the Brexit Party candidate for Birmingham Ladywood.
Now HOPE not hate can reveal the full extent of Mr Garcarz’s racist and hateful views.
Garcarz’s Facebook profile is littered with extreme posts, racist jokes and far-right conspiracy theories. The most alarming aspect of his ideology is his hatred for Muslims, whom he has claimed must be ‘destroyed’:
“Catholicism, whilst a brainwashing cult, does not advocate extermination of non-Catholics. Islam is the problem here. And until we destroy them, the world will never be a safe place. ”
Again and again, Mr Garcarz endorses the conspiracy theory that Europe is being deliberately ‘flooded’ with Muslim migrants, as part of an attempt to destroy national culture:
“The EU has a mission to regionalise Europe and destroy the nation state. Flooding Europe with a million migrants will start the destabilisation process by undermining national sovereignty, diluting national culture, tradition and changing custom and practice“
This conspiracy theory is a thinly disguised antisemitic trope. The full version of it holds that a secret Jewish conspiracy wishes for the destruction of the ‘white race’ with mass immigration as its tool, as is made clear in a copy-pasted tract he shared in 2016:
“The man of the future will be of mixed race […] The Eurasian-negroid race of the future, similar in appearance to the Ancient Egyptians, will replace the diversity of peoples and the diversity of individuals
Instead of destroying European Judaism, Europe, against her will, refined and educated this people […] It’s not surprising that the people that escaped from the Ghetto-Prison, became the spiritual nobility of Europe“
It is perhaps unsurprising to find such claims from a man who is now a Brexit Party candidate. Farage has himself a long history of making alarmist and divisive claims about immigration, even claiming it could “imperil the future of our civilisation”.
Garcarz never misses an opportunity to display his bigotry – even announcing a trip to an Indian restaurant is accompanied by a racist cartoon:
He also used photos of Jeremy Corbyn’s visit to a Gurdwara as an opportunity to mock the religious attire of Sikhs, presumably because he believed they were Muslims:
Back in his UKIP days, Garcarz even endorsed Anne Marie Waters for leader, an Islamophobe who has called Islam “evil” and is now leading the fringe far-right party For Britain:
Early this year, Farage claimed that the Brexit Party would be “deeply intolerant of intolerance”, and that there would be a “vast difference [of] personnel” from UKIP, which he said was “tarnished [by] the far right”. So why is he continuing to endorse this far-right, ex-UKIP candidate in Birmingham?
Garcarz on “White Pride”:
Garcarz Islamophobia:
Garcarz on “The Coudenhove-Kalergi plan – The genocide of the Peoples of Europe”:
Yesterday, the Brexit Party took action against one of its MEPs, expelling him from the party for his offensive words. His crime? Criticising the Brexit Party’s electoral strategy.
One might imagine a self-proclaimed free speech enthusiast like Farage might have a slightly thicker skin, but apparently not. It seems that the party DOES have some kind of internal procedure for kicking out undesirable individuals, and that it can move quite decisively against those they believe is bringing the party in to disrepute.
All of which begs the question: why haven’t they taken action against these apparently racist, Islamophobic, antisemitic or otherwise unsuitable candidates?
Andrew Garcarz.
Standing in Birmingham Ladywood, this candidate declared that “Islam is the problem here. And until we destroy them, the world will never be a safe place”. He remains a candidate.
Wendy Garcarz
Andrew Garcarz’s wife Wendy, standing in neighbouring Birmingham Erdington, has also shared Islamophobic material on Facebook. She remains a candidate.
Marc Stanton
The Brexit Party candidate for
West Lancashire was revealed as having openly admitted “I sure as hell am antisemitic”. He remains a candidate.
Rosamund Beattie
The Brexit Party candidate for Ealing Southall was revealed as having called for a ban on Muslim migration as well as the repatriation of Muslims. No action appears to have been taken.
David Ballantine
The Brexit Party candidate in Edinburgh SW, called Islam a “child rapist death cult” and made supportive comments about far-right thug Stephen Lennon. He’s still a candidate.
Graham Cushway
The candidate for Brighton Kemptown is a founding member of “Stuka Squadron”, a Luftwaffe-vampire themed band that have dressed in Nazi-style outfits.
John Booker
The candidate for Penistone & Stocksbridge shared and liked Islamophobic posts, including a claim that America was “cutting its own throat” by not “fighting back” against Islam. No action was taken.
Kirk Kus
The candidate for Sheffield Southeast shared far-right propaganda that described the “systematic obliteration of Europe” at the hands of “so-called refugees” who are “nothing more than invaders from the underdeveloped world”.
Stuart Waiton
The Dundee West candidate tweeted that players who experienced racism were overreacting and should “man up”. He has also appeared five times on an antisemitic conspiracy theory show. He remains a candidate.
Dionne Cocozza
Brexit Party candidate for Glasgow North, was revealed to have shared Islamophobic posts, including a conspiracy theory suggesting that Muslims could “takeover” the UK.
Racism, antisemitism and Islamophobia appear to go unpunished in the Brexit Party, but criticising Farage’s election strategy is intolerable.
Update: Following our exposé, the group has been deleted from Facebook.
HOPE not hate can reveal that three Brexit Party candidates in Doncaster are active members of the private Facebook group “Doncaster Brexit Party Supporters Group”, in which racist and conspiracy theorist posts, including claims of an Islamic “invasion” and racist abuse aimed at Labour MP Diane Abbott, are prevalent.
In particular Andrew Stewart, candidate for Doncaster North, is a regular poster in the group. Seemingly undeterred by the disturbing content within it, and has even been awarded a “badge” for his input. Brexit Party candidates Surjit Duhre (Doncaster Central) and Paul Whitehurst (Don Valley) have also posted in the group.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, as two out of three administrators of the group are former UKIP candidates, the group has, like the Brexit Party itself, turned increasingly anti-immigration. Content in the group regularly refers to Islamophobic conspiracy theories, or frames immigrants as inherently violent.
Group members have posted bizarre rants against immigration and references to a supposed “invasion” by Muslims, a common far-right conspiracy theory. On a post by current UKIP parish councillor Paul Bisett, a user commented saying that as a consequence of the immigration policy by the Tories, there’s a need “get troops together for the invasion of Islam they let in.!” Another comment claims that “the once Great Britain is Great no more thanks to the EU, mass migration, a Muslim invasion being fought from within and an ungrateful, spoilt and lost generation we’ve created just now!”
Another incoherent comment claims that “It was said that in the year 21 a terrorist sympathiser and a bunch of idiots run England into the grgroe [sic] with mass immigration disease pestilence starvation and homelessness”, and that “hordes of Fireigners [sic] were put upon the once English who lived and fought and died till the white faces were no more”.
Shadow Home Secretary Diane Abbott is the target of almost obsessive attacks in the group. Many of these posts are directly abusive, some of them by the group’s administrators. One comment under a post about Abbott potentially gaining power reads “Monkey in charge of the zoo springs to mind”, and another describes black Labour MP David Lammy “the male Equivalent of Diane Abbott”.
Other comments in the group state that “Civil War is inevitable”, and a claim that Labour Yvette Cooper is “going to be as popular as a foreskin at a Jewish wedding”. Another post contains a video of a group of men attacking a white woman in Bethnal Green in London, with the caption “NOTHING IN OUR MEDIA ABOUT WHITE GIRL KNOCKED OUT IN BETHNAL GREEN.”.
Demonstrably false claims about Muslims as well as the Labour party are also spread regularly in the group. One user claimed that Muslims do not need to pay council tax for part of their home used as prayer rooms, while another claimed that the Grenfell Tower was built in 2007/2008 “when Sadiq Khan was housing minister”. Khan has never been a minister and the tower was built in 1972. Occasionally comments suggest that a user thinks these fake claims are jokes, and dispute the fact. Overwhelmingly, however, commenters express anger and asks if they can share it onwards, suggesting they believe in its veracity.
Despite being a pro-Brexit Party group, a former UKIP candidate and current parish councillor, Mick Andrews and Paul Bissett, are two of the group’s three moderators. Both contribute activley and posts several times per week, while not taking action against the Islamophobic or demonstrably false claims made in the group.
Andrews ran as a candidate for UKIP in 2015, while Bissett remains a parish councillor of Edenthorpe Parish Council. Bissett is one of the most active members of the group, and has another saying “Anything I can do to help?” over a picture of a man resembling Guy Fawkes holding a match and a fuse.
Roger Tattersall (AKA Rog Tallbloke), Campaign Manager for the Brexit Party in Yorkshire & Humber, is also a member of the group. Tattersall officiated opening the Brexit Party Doncaster campaign office in Bennetthorpe last month dressed as Guy Fawkes.
We can also reveal that Tattersall has, on multiple occasions, shared far-right propaganda on his Twitter account, including a post from British nazi Mark Collett, as well as numerous posts from InfoWars conspiracy theorist Paul Joseph Watson and Canadian racist Stephan Molyneux, who is an avid promoter of differences in IQ between races. He has also shared the now suspended Theodore Beale (AKA Vox Day), an American misogynist and well known far-right activist.
Tattersall also runs a blog on which he promotes his scepticism towards mainstream scientific research on climate change. On the blog he publishes articles with titles such as “It’s about time to review the evidence for man-made global warming” and “Discovery of massive volcanic CO2 emissions puts damper on global warming theory” in which he often ascribes global warming to natural causes, and discredits the role of humanity in causing climate change.
Both Tattersall’s social media activity, and the Doncaster candidates’ membership of the Facebook group outlined above, is further evidence of the apparent tolerance of the Brexit Party towards conspiracy theories and incidents of racism within it. As active members of the Facebook group, it is questionable whether candidates such as Andrew Stewart can have avoided to take note of the abusive and conspiratorial rhetoric against Muslims and political opponents within it. The such gutter content has not been met with opposition by either administrators or candidates, which begs the question of what kind of politics the Brexit Party would bring to Doncaster.
You can find out more about the Brexit Party – and how to beat them – by reading our factsheet here.
HOPE not hate can reveal that Farage has appeared at least five times on TruNews, an American far-right broadcast headed by the apocalypse-obsessed pastor Rick Wiles, during which the Brexit Party leader indulged conspiracy theories about plots for “global government” and found common cause with Wiles against the “globalists“.
Wiles, a Christian fundamentalist who has repeatedly called Farage “our good friend”, last month labelled the impeachment of Donald Trump a “Jew coup”, calling Jews “deceivers, they plot, they lie, they do whatever the have to do to accomplish their political agenda”.
Farage’s known appearances on the show came between 2011 and 2016, although the descriptions of two further episodes (for which audio cannot be accessed) indicate he was also a guest in 2008 and 2009. Wiles has stated that he has been interviewing Farage since “around 2006, maybe 2005”, and has claimed that TruNews was “the first American radio programme, and/or television programme, to introduce Nigel Farage to the American people.”
This is of particular concern as Wiles is a longstanding and extreme homophobe, Islamophobe and conspiracy theorist, and his platform should be considered far beyond the pale for any public figure. For example, Wiles claimed in December 2014 that “Islam must be eliminated from the face of the earth. It must be stomped out like cockroaches”.
As we detail below, in what is now a worrying trend, Farage himself indulges right-wing conspiracy theories in his conversations with Wiles, some of which have antisemitic associations. This includes the notion that internationalist elites in the European Union and Bilderberg Group are covertly spreading a form of communism and plotting to establish a global government, and could enforce a dictatorship across Europe.
Founded in 1999, TruNews serves as a soapbox for Wiles’ unhinged delusions, including, as the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) write, his increasingly extreme antisemitism. For example, this year Wiles told listeners “It’s not Muslims that are going to kill us. It’s the Jews”, and claimed that “Israel took out John Kennedy”. He and his co-hosts have ranted about “old evil wicked kabbalah wizard rabbis”, and have claimed that Jesus was killed by Jews in order to build a “Zionist empire”. He has also claimed that a Jewish lobby “controls the [US]”, and stated “Who ties the President’s hands? Yes, Jewish Mafia”.
Wiles has a well-documented history of extreme bigotry beyond antisemitism. Amongst numerous instances documented by anti-hate watchdog Right Wing Watch are Wiles’ 2014 claims that Hitler and the Nazis were aiming to create “a race of super gay male soldiers”, and that Christians “will be slaughtered” in the present day US as a result of Hitler’s plans. The same year Wiles also claimed that an outbreak of the deadly Ebola virus in the US could constitute an “attitude adjustment […] Ebola could solve America’s problems with atheism, homosexuality, sexual promiscuity, pornography and abortion”. In early 2015 Wiles claimed that Muslim immigration is “part of the judgment” for abortion rights, stating “It’s like the Muslims are the avengers who are being sent in to avenge for the deaths of innocent babies”.
By repeatedly appearing on TruNews, Farage has risked introducing a new audience to Wiles’ poisonous viewpoints, especially as his appearances have been sandwiched by Wiles’ bigoted outpourings. For example, one episode begins with a rant in which Wiles claims that by legalising same sex marriage, “these reprobates in government” are going to “bring down the wrath of God on the whole nation”.
Another episode on which Farage appears begins with Wiles speculating that a “communist revolution” headed by then-President Barack Obama is underway, aiming to establish a “Gestapo” and “eliminate our own military and replace them with a foreign army […] they are getting ready to start shooting us”. After Farage exits the episode, Wiles takes aim at “rodents such as billionaire George Soros,” who he calls a “big rat” and a “socialist financier”, suggesting he is selling shares and “scoop[ing] up lots of gold”, due to inside knowledge of an oncoming financial catastrophe. Soros is a frequent target of thinly-veiled antisemitic attacks.
Whilst Wiles does not openly discuss his most extreme viewpoints with Farage, given his known bigotry, it is alarming to see Farage himself repeatedly feeding conspiracy theories during his conversations with Wiles. This includes theories that are often are employed with antisemitic inflections. In particular, Farage entertains notions of internationalist elites bent on global governance and/or spreading communism, touching on the Bilderberg Group, an annual meeting of politicians and leaders in industry, finance, academia and the media, which conspiracy theorists have long alleged to be secretly directing world events.
For example, in the August 2012 episode, Wiles asks Farage if he still feared that “a dictatorship could be installed across the European continent”, to which Farage replies “Oh very much so”, continuing that elites in the European Union:
“are prepared to carry on with their vision of a United States of Europe, they couldn’t care less if tens of millions of people are driven into poverty and hunger, as long as they maintain their dream. So we really are up against something truly horrible in Europe today”.
Farage later claims that:
“all these projects of supranationalism that are pushed by the EU, and now the IMF [International Monetary Fund], and as you mentioned yourself, the Bilderberg Group and others, these ideas, frankly are all nothing more than a modern form of communism. They are flawed in their origins, they fail in practice, and the sooner we break them down, the safer the world will be”.
In an August 2016 episode, Farage claims:
“I look at Brussels […] as just an updated form of what the Russian Revolution was all about in 1917. It’s statism, it’s communism, it’s micromanagement and control of people’s lives, it is the eradication of genuine liberty, freedom and democracy”.
Wiles says “Nigel, the European leaders orchestrated this mass migration of Middle-Eastern, Islamic refugees” into Europe, Farage replying that “what Mrs Merkel did last year, in saying as many of you who want to come can come, effectively she hung up a welcome sign for ISIS”.
At the end of their conversation, Wiles tells Farage: “We’re all in this together. We’re fighting the globalists, regardless of what country we’re in. We’re all fighting the same bunch of globalists. Nigel Farage thank you so much, appreciate you being here”, to which Farage replies “Thank you, and it’s good to be back on TruNews”. Following Farage’s exit, Wiles tells his listeners that Farage has been:
“a thorn in the side of the Brussels bureaucrats, the global elite, the international banksters, the big corporations that are working to bring about this global, socialistic, fascist, corporate government that they want to impose on the entire planet”.
During his February 2012 appearance, Farage claimed that he would welcome a “global movement” that would:
“fight back against these people, who seem to want to entrap us in a form of global government, where we lose all the things that those who went before us were actually prepared to fight and die for”.
When asked by Wiles whether “some day the central bankers of the world” could “install the Prime Minister of Great Britain” or “a future president of the United States”, Farage answered that, in the wake of the installation of a “puppet Prime Minister in Greece and even a country the size of Italy […] frankly anything now is possible”.
In a 2011 episode, Wiles introduces Farage by telling him “You’ve been fighting the superstate globalist scheme for decades in your country. Your warnings are now coming true […] the entire EU scheme is collapsing under its own weight”, to which Farage answers “Well it is […] what they thought they’d do in Europe is build a United States of Europe”, continuing that “they kept their imperialist globalist dreams from us”.
During their conversation about the Greek Financial Crisis, Wiles tells Farage “We’re seeing how the globalists operate. They get these nations entrapped in debt, they loan ‘em the money, and then they collapse them, then they say now here’s the terms of your bailout”, to which Farage answers:
“The whole dictatorial nature of the way the European institutions are treating Greece is, I agree with you, a warning against supranational government, against global government”.
Wiles goes on to predict that the world will “go into a new dark ages”, predicting “one, two, three decades” of chaos.
In the same episode, Wiles asks Farage “Nigel, what do you think the Bilderberg boys are thinking through all this? I mean, the EU is their little baby”, to which Farage answers:
“Oh very much so, I mean of course the Bilderberg Group and the EU have been very close from the start”
Farage then goes on to speak supportively of his “colleague” Mario Borghezio MEP, who was arrested attempting to infiltrate the 2011 Bilderberg gathering in St. Moritz. Borghezio is a far-right Italian MEP, whom Farage later expelled from his group in the Euopean Parliament after he racially abused an Italian minister.
Farage’s enthusiastic engagement with Wiles is just the latest revelation of his association with extreme conspiracy theorists. We have recently revealed Farage using terms closely linked to coded antisemitism, such as the “New World Order” and “one world government” and calling Goldman Sachs “the enemy”, during his February 2019 appearance on the evangelical channel Revelation TV, which has been reprimanded by Ofcom for homophobia and Islamophobia. During his appearance he also claimed that immigration would “imperil the future of our civilisation”, chiming with far-right conspiracy theories.
We have also previously exposed Farage claiming that EU officials “actually want to destroy the nation state as a unit” on the conspiracy theory documentary Bilderberg: The Movie (2014), on which he appeared alongside Borghezio and numerous members of the notorious LaRouche movement, a bizarre political cult founded by the antisemite Lyndon LaRouche. Farage has additionally been criticised by Community Security Trust for labelling Soros “the biggest danger to the entire western world”, also claiming that he sought “to undermine democracy and to fundamentally change the makeup, demographically, of the whole European continent”. In more quotes uncovered by The Guardian, Farage has also claimed that the EU was funded and influenced “by the Goldman Sachs, the JP Morgans, and a particular Hungarian called Mr Soros”.
Farage has also appeared six times on the American far-right conspiracy theory show InfoWars, and as The Guardian has reported, made reference to the New World Order and claimed that members of the Bilderberg group are plotting to establish a global government. HOPE not hate and revealed a 2018 photograph of Farage posing with far-right conspiracy theorist Jack Posobiec, known for his role in spreading the “Pizzagate” conspiracy theory. Farage has promoted both Posobiec’s and InfoWars’ content online.
The association of Brexit Party officials with antisemites and far-right conspiracy theorists stretches further than just Farage. We have also previously exposed the extensive links between top Brexit Party officials and InfoWars, and exposed two Brexit Party MEPs and its Dundee West candidate for having appeared on The Richie Allen Show, an antisemitic conspiracy theory broadcast that serves as a key online platform for Holocaust deniers in the UK.
You can find out more about the Brexit Party – and how to beat them – by visiting our dedicated hub here.
Buckley, also known as Jim Edward, has attended a number of far-right events and rallies over the past two years, including meetings of the anti-Muslim street gang Britain First.
Buckley has also called the British interwar fascist leader Oswald Mosley a “Great man”, claimed that Jews “promote miscegenation”, and written that
“If we had followed [Mosley] I truly believe there would have been no ww2 and we would have kept our form of nationalism just like Italy, German and Spain […] Instead we sided with the Communists and Zionist bankers against Europe”.
The candidacy of Buckley, who has claimed the Brexit Party asked him to represent them in the constituency, is cause for real concern. Throughout the campaign Farage’s party has been exposed again and again for failing to properly vet candidates, meaning that a number of known racists, homophobes and antisemites are set to appear on the ballot this Thursday under the Brexit Party name.
Buckley first emerged onto the far-right scene in early 2018, after being inspired by far-right extremist Stephen Yaxley-Lennon (AKA Tommy Robinson). He has gone on to attend meetings of Britain First (BF), an extreme anti-Muslim street movement that has performed “mosque invasions” in the UK. Buckley has been pictured alongside Paul Golding, BF’s unhinged leader, who has served jail time for racially-aggravated harassment.
Buckley has also collaborated with James Goddard, a racist best known for harassing politician Anna Soubry and the journalist Owen Jones near Parliament last winter. The Brexit Party candidate has also been photographed alongside Ezra Levant, head of Rebel Media, a far-right Canadian media outlet and former employer of Yaxley-Lennon, and appeared in a Rebel video filmed at a pro-Yaxley-Lennon event during the May European Election campaign, labelling then-Prime Minister Theresa May a “traitor”.
In 2018 Buckley launched his own group, The Manchester Collective, which he has described as “focused on opposing leftism only”, and “aiming to unite the British right”, although the group remains an irrelevance.
A search through Buckley’s social media quickly unearths numerous instances of racism and sympathy for the historical extreme right.
For example Buckley, now posting under the name “Man Chester” (formerly “Jim Edward”), has described Oswald Mosley, leader of the British Union of Fascists, as a “Great man” who “Nearly stopped WW2”. In August, he shared a video of Mosley outlining his attitudes towards race overlaid with far-right imagery, writing “If this doesn’t capture your heart and lift your spirits… I’m sorry but you have no soul”. He also wrote “those “AntiFA [sic] clowns” at their core hate white people. The Nazis, at their core loved white people. Oswald Mosley crossed the floor too you know”.
In other comments, Buckley wrote:
“If we had followed [Mosley] I truly believe there would have been no ww2 and we would have kept our form of nationalism just like Italy, Germany and Spain (and the French would have come on board too.) Think about it, all those young lads lives saved. Instead we sided with the Communists and Zionists bankers against Europe. Doesn’t seem right to me”.
Several of Buckley’s comments outline conspiracy theories about Jewish plots to undermine white European society. Amongst numerous antisemitic claims is a post that reads
“If 2% of the population and 40% of US billionaires and similarly represented in our banks, movie/music/publishing/news industry, education systems etc, as well as Communist revolutionaries and Leftists in general (80% according to Ben Shapiro) that’s something to be concerned about.”
He goes on to claim that:
“Zionist Jews have admitted inspiring/manipulating us to go to war with Europe in the 30’s. Saying they’re not a problem is naive. A people so influential and so worried about us trying to wipe them out is a problem for us. The less ethnocentric we are the safer they are so they promote miscegenation because they want to avoid us trying to wipe them out because they want to avoid another rise of antisemitism/fascism”.
Buckley has also suggested that Jews view “the White male/Indo-European gentile” to be their “ultimate competitors”, and elsewhere interjected a racist rant about “blacks and muslims” to claim:
“Don’t forget the ‘you know who’s’ though, they have their own little PC term that gets thrown about a lot to shut down debate. Criticise their bias in media? Nazi. Complain about Hollywood Loxism? Nazi. Bias in academia? Nazi. Over representation in banks? Nazi. We need to grow thicker skins.”
“Loxism” is a far-right term for the supposed hatred of non-Jewish white people by Jews. When asked whether he was “sharing anti-Semitic news”, he replied “I share Islamophobic news too. Good job I don’t care about political correctness and name calling”.
There are many further such comments, screencaps of which are included at the end of this blog.
Throughout the campaign HOPE not hate has exposed numerous Brexit Party candidates for bigotry and links to the far right. Whilst the Brexit Party may seek to portray itself as fit for mainstream acceptability, it remains dangerous and divisive, and undeserving of your vote tomorrow.
You can find out more about the Brexit Party – and how to beat them – by reading our factsheet here.
Below are some assorted examples of the racism and antisemitism promulgated by the Brexit Party’s James Edward Buckley.
A Reform Party candidate fantasised about deporting “millions” of British citizens to “rid itself of the foreign plague we have been diseased with”. UPDATE: Reform…
