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.

HnH reduced to publicising case of brain dead moron who once said a racist word in a pizza shop

Reece Elliott - brain-dead halfwit, but not connected
to the far-right. Why would HnH be interested?

Things are obviously very quiet over at Hope not Hate. After the failure of their series of meetings
which was designed to stir up trouble for UKIP there seems to be a large number of people with too much time on their hands.

Take yesterday's stories posted on their Facebook page. While here at Nope, not Hope we were kept busy by numerous stories about corrupt Labour councillors, Unite gerrymandering candidate selections, Tories fighting like weasels in a sack and the odd Lib Dem child molester and drink driver, Hope not Hate were reduced to scraping the barrel.

Of four news links they posted, one - the second most shared - was from the Shields Gazette and concerned internet 'troll' Reece Elliot. Elliot was sentenced to 2 years 4 months for making threats to kill after posting insulting messages on a tribute site set up for a young girl who died in a car accident: when challenged, he pretended he was going to drive to the school and go on a shooting spree.

Elliot is far from an angel. He has 15 previous convictions for robbery, burglary and assault dating back to when he was 16. In all of this, he had one conviction for 'hurling racist abuse at a pizza shop manager', and it was presumably this which lead Hope not Hate to seize on the story. There appears to be no link to any far-right organisation or group.

Labour councillor Bill Jeffrey escaped a mention despite
using the phrase 'nigger in the woodpile' in a council meeting

All of which leads us to wonder what was the point? Are Hope not Hate so underemployed that they are reduced to scouring the web for any stories which involve even the slightest hint of racism? If so, it is strange that they missed another North Eastern story involving Labour councillor Bill Jeffrey, who used the phrase 'nigger in the woodpile' during a planning debate and was hauled before the standards committee, which cleared him of racism. We did post the story on our own Facebook page a couple of weeks ago, but HnH must have missed it. Perhaps they were busy arranging empty chairs for that nights meeting? Or perhaps they felt obliged to carry the Elliot story as it featured in the Daily Mirror, which funds their increasingly idle existence?

In case you wondered, we don't think Cllr Jeffrey should have got a mention: he's a relatively elderly man who used a phrase which while common 30 years ago is now politically incorrect. Even dragging him before the standards board seemed a little pointless when a quiet word in his ear would have had the same result but at far less cost. We don't condemn Cllr Jeffrey, only mention him to show the usual double standards and hypocrisy at Hope not Hate are still there.