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| Nick Lowles - Now lacks the smug grin after UKIPs advances in Labour heartlands |
As might be expected, his analysis is not what it quite appears to be. For a start, on UKIP he writes:
"The earthquake promised by Nigel Farage has not materialized. Yes, UKIP gained 128 seats and held on to 35 others, but at 17% of the national vote, support for the party was down from last year’s 23%."
Which may be technically true. But we reckon in England there were 4211 council seats up for election, of which UKIP contested only around 2300. As the vote share is calculated across all seats and not just the seats the party contested, that means that the 1911 seats which UKIP didn't contest count as a 0% vote share. If you take out those almost 2000 seats, UKIPs vote share in the wards it contested climbed from the 17% Lowles quotes to closer to 30%. Lowles is not so stupid that he is not aware of this, meaning his argument is somewhere between disingenuous and a downright lie. It is certainly a wilful distortion.
He then returns to the Labour fantasy that somehow it is Tories who are voting for UKIP and not Labour, dismissing as aberrations UKIPs results in Rotherham and other Labour heartlands and pointing to the 'success' of Hope not Hate's campaign in 'halting' UKIPs advance. Perhaps he should have taken a closer look at the voting figures in cities where they previously weighed the Labour vote rather than counted it. Somewhere like Bradford perhaps, where of UKIPs 16 candidates, 1 was elected, while 11 took second place, some just a handful of votes away from winning. Only 4 candidates received under 20% of the vote, while 6 scored over 30%: and this despite - or more likely because of - a sustained and concentrated effort by Hope not Hate throughout the city. A full breakdown of UKIP's results in Bradford can be found here on the local branch's blog.
Then there is some more Lowles comedy - what used to be called spin before it became so outrageous that it expects to get away with saying that white is black:
"HOPE not hate ran its largest campaign to date, with over two-and-a-half million newspapers and leaflets being distributed nationally, thousands of people involved and strong and lasting links across many local communities built. Over 3,600 of our supporters donated to our campaign over the last few months and this helped us fund an eight-page supplement in the Daily Mirror."
We have discussed their newspapers and leaflets before following the failure of their action days over the May Day bank holiday and on 'Transport Tuesday' last week. The claim that they deliverd 'over 2,500,000' leaflets and newspapers is rather strange, since on the 2nd May they announced that their
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| Only a week ago, HnH were asking for help to deliver half as many leaflets as they now claim |
The discrepancy of 1,200,000 leaflets can only be accounted for by including the circulation of the Daily Mirror, which included an 8 page insert shortly before polling day - Lowles was begging for the £10,000 needed to pay for it, despite Hope not Hate being awash with Labour Party and trade union funds simply to create the entirely false impression that HnH is somehow a grassroots campaign which relies on donations from individuals, whereas in fact the vast majority of its money in 2009 - 89% - came from the largest trade unions. As for the Daily Mirror, their efforts succeeded in turning out their readers to vote for UKIP on a scale previously unimagined.
Lowles then went on to make the laughable claim that:
"While not underestimating the size of UKIP’s advance, we believe that our efforts made a real difference."
So lets take a look at that real difference (with thanks to a poster on our Facebook page for the figures):
Party Seats before Seats after % increase/decrease
Labour 3827 4111 + 7.4%
Conservative 2927 2702 - 7.7%
Lib Dem 1168 893 - 23.0%
UKIP 17 184 +980.0%
Yep, that really put the brakes on UKIPs advance, didn't it?
As Lowles says in his closing remarks, 'We really did make a difference'. We'd agree. Without you, we couldn't have made the British public realise just how much of our country had been sold out from underneath us. We couldn't have made them feel that they were being lectured to by a bunch of middle class kids with no understanding of working class life. We couldn't have highlighted just how alien some of our largest cities have become. So thanks, Nick. We appreciate the help. Keep up the good work, and you just keep fooling yourself that you helped your side of the argument.
We believe Hope not Hate is now entering its final days as the anti-UKIP campaign of the Labour Party, a subject we will return to later.
On a point unrelated to this post, Hope not Hate deleted Nick Lowles' congratulatory posts to former BNP councillor Paul Cromie on his success in barely holding off a UKIP challenge in Bradford, and claimed later that the posts were 'a joke' and that Cromie 'hated them'. And yet earlier in the evening, Lowles and Hope not Hate seemed to be getting their information on how the count was progressing in Bradford from Cromie, as the following blog post on Lowles blog makes clear:
