HnH Leicester meeting - a correction

Because we like to be accurate in our reporting, we felt we should correct an earlier report of Hope not Hate's meeting in Leicester in early June. In our report, we incorrectly stated that it had been attended by 76 people including the organisers. From Leicester's population of 441,213, this represented a 0.017% turnout. Our attention has now been drawn to an article written by a Mr George Gay who attended the meeting. In his report, he states that the meeting was attended by 'around two dozen people, mostly Leicester University students'.


He stated that the options on offer to the meeting were as follows:

1. Ignore them.
2. Monitor and expose racism within UKIP but don’t explicitly campaign against the party as such.
3. Do campaign against the party as such.
4. Recognising that much of attraction of UKIP is cultural, offer positive alternatives to communities.
5. Some form of combination from the above four.

And then goes on to say that:

Although there were a few supporters of position 3 above, there was overwhelming support, including from myself, for a combination of 2 and 4 ( an actual vote was taken ).

Finally, the “other” Owen Jones told us that there had also been overwhelming support for 2 and 4 from the meetings which had already taken place, and asked us to consider the best ways of campaigning in the circumstances of Leicester and Leicestershire.

In other words, the outcome of the meeting - despite it being heavily attended by those with a vested interest in campaigning against UKIP - was that it monitor racism in UKIP, and offer a positive alternative.

Nick Lowles must be seething with rage, as his Hope not Hate organisation has already begun acting on its preferred option - to campaign against UKIP - and he was expecting his carefully selected audiences to deliver the correct democratic response to rubber-stamp his decision. This may well account for his decision to further restrict attendances at HnH's 'Stand up for HOPE' and 'Let's talk about UKIP' meetings - it is far easier to obtain the correct democratic result if you hand select those allowed to vote. In this, he appears to have taken lessons from his Unite funders as demonstrated by them in Falkirk, which his organisation has nothing to say about.

Meanwhile, we apologise for our error which lead people to believe that 0.017% of Leicester's population had attended the Hope not Hate meeting when in fact the figure was 0.005%. In actual fact, the meeting ran true to form, and organisers were left speaking to mainly empty seats.