Self-congratulating yourself for abject failure: HnH's self-deluding campaign 'analysis'

Nick Lowles -
Now lacks the smug grin after UKIPs
advances in Labour heartlands

After Lowles congratulatory tweet and blog posting (both now deleted) to a far-right former BNP councillor, his latest contribution is his 'analysis' of the elections so far.

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

Only a week ago, HnH were asking for
help to deliver half as many leaflets as
they now claim

'Deliver Hope' campaign 'have produced over 1.3 million leaflets and newspapers', and their ability to deliver even that many seemed suspect. In Brighton they claimed to have delivered 27,000 newspapers despite having a campaign team of only 5 people for 2 days. Our suspicion is that they did indeed deliver 27,000, except that 24,000 were delivered to one of the many recycling centres run by the Green council there in a single batch.

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:

Its not just the BNP which lines allies pockets - HnH do the same

Hope not Hate have gone on the offensive against the BNP this morning with an attack on Nick Griffin. Here at Nope, not Hope, we're not interested in the BNP, and in no way support them. But there was one comment of interest. In the HnH article posted by Matthew Collins - himself a former BNP thug - they say:

"Moving swiftly on, Walker then claimed that after years of far-right activity, Griffin has made "virtually nothing" from his time in the far-right. Some BNP ex-members may wish to remind Adam of the extension on Griffin's home paid for by the BNP and the fact that he managed to get almost his entire family on the party pay roll doing jobs that members used to do voluntarily."

Which we found interesting when compared to the invoices submitted to the Electoral Commission for the 2010 General Election by Hope not Hate. This was of course before HnH split from the Searchlight organisation - at the time, Nick Lowles was the HnH campaign director rather than its owner.

Included in the invoices was one from a company called Taxinform Ltd for £2,300.00, which covered "subediting and checking election newspapers and leaflets, General Election 2010". We were rather more surprised to discover that the company has only 2 shares issued, both to Sonia Gable, while she and her husband Gerry were the director and company secretary respectively. Taxinform is listed as a tax advisory service. We will restrain ourselves from publishing the full details of the company, which are in any case a matter of public record. Sonia and Gerry Gable were the founders of Searchlight, of which in 2010 Hope not Hate was a part, and were also its owners. We assume that checking leaflets was something which used to be done voluntarily, or at least as a part of their jobs before they found themselves awash with money from the Daily Mirror. And speaking of the Daily Mirror......

..... there was Ros Wynne-Jones, who doubled up her salary as a senior leader writer for the Daily Mirror - which funds Hope not Hate - by invoicing Hope not Hate for £6,500.00 with no details of what it was for other than 'Hope not Hate 2010'. Nice work if you can get it. Her day job paid her to write stories about Hope not Hate for the Mirror, while Hope not Hate paid her to write stories about them in the Mirror. Talk about having your cake and eating it!

So, I'm sure as a result of Nick Lowles' largesse, both the Gables and Ms Wynne-Jones could also afford substantial extensions on their houses too. It just seems that the closer you look at Hope not Hate's finances, the more similar to the BNPs they appear. Certainly it would appear that their friends benefit financially for jobs which in the case of both the Gables and Ms Wynne-Jones would seem to form a part of their job in any case. Is this like Griffin, getting friends and relatives "on the party pay roll doing jobs that members used to do voluntarily?". Why is it we are not surprised by the hypocrisy? Why attack Griffin for something which Hope not Hate regularly do themselves?

We have much more to say about HnH's finances including a major funding scandal, so please stay tuned over the next month or so!

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.

"You're not singing any more" - Hope not Hate silent on new Daily Mirror poll - UKIP only 1.2% behind Tories

After a number of articles on the Hope not Hate website pointing at a dip in UKIPs polling results in an ICM survey in June, they've been very silent on the latest results of a poll commissioned by their own funders, the Daily Mirror. That said, the Daily Mirror have been very quite on the results too: this is from their NHS Anniversary Poll which is all over their paper today, apart from the voting intentions bit, which their online coverage fails to mention!

As Hope not Hate are 'putting UKIP under a magnifying glass' with their 'Purple Rain' campaign, their failure to mention this result is nothing more than censorship, plain and simple. So much for their claims to stand for free speech and democracy - their approach is more fascist than the NF's!!

In a Survation poll released yesterday the results were as follows:

• Labour - 36%
• Conservative - 22.8%
• UKIP - 21.6%
• Lib Dem - 9.6%
• Green 4.3%
• SNP 3%
• BNP 1.1%
• PC - 0.4%
• Respect - 0.2%
• TUSC - 0.1%

This may explain the apparent panic at Hope not Hate, and the increasingly threatening behaviour of UNISON and their union allies as they attempt to shut down debate.

These figures were taken from Survation's data tables and can be found on Table 11, described as
 

"Q8 Voting Intention Tables - Special Table (After Replacing the Undecided/Refused Responses with 2010 Voters responses)

Q8.1. If there was a General Election taking place tomorrow, and there was a candidate from all political parties standing in your constituency, which party do you think you would vote for?

Base : All Respondents Would Vote and Excluding Undecided/Refused"
 These were not the most favourable figures - Table 10, which excludes undecided/refused and does not redistribute their votes, shows UKIP 0.4% ahead of the Tories!!