London Labour - "UKIP full of money grabbing Jews"

Updated @00:30 - Labour Press Office denies account is official Labour Party one. It is still followed by Shadow Ministers, MPs, MEPs, Cllrs and CLPs, who are this morning being treated to a series of fascists posts decrying 'white genocide'. We wonder whether the Daily Mirror will be so quick to publish the details of this account as they were to publish details of a series of fake UKIP accounts apparently set up by the same person earlier this week?

A Labour Party twitter account has accused UKIP of being 'full of money-grabbing Jews' in a
disgraceful attack on UKIP candidate Shneur Odze this evening.

Mr Odze, who earlier this week organised a 'Friends of Israel in UKIP' event attended by several MEPs and senior activists, is a longstanding member of UKIP who now resides in the North West. He is the most prominent of UKIPs many Jewish members.

the Twitter account in question - @LabourLondon - describes itself as the 'Official North London Labour presence. It is followed by Labour's Welsh Assembly Group, journalist Dan Hodges, and others including Meg Hillier MP, Jude Kirton-Darling MEP, Alison Seabeck MP, Dan Jarvis MP, Ian Lavery MP, Steve Reed MP, Sadiq Khan MP,  Cllr Tudor Evans, and Constituency Labour Parties including Barnet, Brent, Norwich, East Lothian, Redbridge, Labour Youth, Ipswich, Bedford, Aylesbury, SE Region and SW Region. Can we look forward to the howls of outrage and demands for an apology from Hope not Hate?

Update - The offending tweet was removed around 21:30 last night, and replaced with the following:

 

By 00:30, the Labour Party Press Office was denying that Labour were responsible for the account, and saying that they had nothing to do with it.



Comedy death threats from Lowles friend Ian Austin MP?

Today's Wolverhampton Express and Star carries the story "Death threat claim by Labour MP Ian Austin over challenge to UKIP's NHS policy".

In it, Mr Austin makes a number of outlandish, not to mention unsupported, claims that he was sent an anonymous death threat after criticising comments by UKIP leader Nigel Farage regarding

So terrified, he hasn't reported it to the police. Austin has form with HnH
director Nick Lowles, and there are few depths to which he wouldn't stoop.

privatisation of the NHS. Mr Austin, who is currently running a campaign to save Dudley Police Station from a program of cuts which the Labour Party is responsible for, makes no mention of his intention to report this death threat to the police, and in fact offers no evidence for its existence beyond his own tweet. Even the local newspapers hedges its bets on this one by saying he claimed it rather than that it had seen it. We presume that had it existed it would have been sent immediately to the local newspaper. The problem with doing so, we assume, is that had he done so then the police would have investigated.

UKIP Cllr Dean Perks, a previous
victim of Austin's ethics

We are currently seeing a huge number of comments and messages posted across social media and on news websites which purport to come from UKIP members. This follows on from the claims made by a Labour campaign team that their stall was overturned by 'UKIP thugs': it is worth noting that the claims that they identified themselves as UKIP was missing from the first reports of the story.

Of course, any fool can set up an account and pretend to be a UKIP supporter, voter or member. Increasingly, we are seeing these picked up as evidence of UKIP racism/sexism/homophobia/extremism etc, particularly by people like Ian Austin. How convenient! Of course, all parties have their idiots: this is not true of UKIP alone. Even as you read this, there is a village somewhere lamenting the loss of Mr Austin. There are several truths we should remember about him particularly.

Mr Austin is a friend of HnH director Nick Lowles. To quote Lowles, "Ian is a long-time friend of Searchlight, and by that I mean since he was in his mid-teens, but today he is more helpful advising us on a media strategy". What better media strategy than to use his position to lend spurious credibility to internet nonsense than by publicising dubious threats from Labour Party sockpuppet accounts?

Mr Austin also has form on the anti-UKIP front: we covered earlier this year his role in a widely publicised story regarding local UKIP chairman and councillor Dean Perks - Did Labour MP release confidential constituency mail to damage UKIP candidate in Dudley?.

Ian Austin MP. Somewhere in England, a village has lost
its idiot and is desperately searching for him.

One thing we can be quite certain of. There is a campaign underway to create false accounts of
imaginary UKIP-supporting people and to then use those accounts to blacken UKIPs name. Austin, who by Nick Lowles own admission used to hang around NF demonstrations - "Ian is a long-time friend of Searchlight, and by that I mean since he was in his mid-teens, but today he is more helpful advising us on a media strategy than hanging round National Front demonstrations gathering intelligence" - is no stranger to underhand methods and outright dishonesty. His claims should be read in that light.

On the wider point of false UKIP accounts on social media and elsewhere, we can all play a part in minimising their effect by following a few simple guidelines:

1. Be careful who you accept as a friend on Facebook. If it is brand new account with nothing but UKIP related friends, be wary of accepting any requests
2. Be careful what you say on social media. Labour and their puppets at Hope not Hate have teams of people who do nothing but trawl comments looking for something they can use against us. Bear this in mind when commenting.
3. Remember that even innocuous comments and jokes can be used against us when taken out of context.
4. Do not get suckered into arguments by trolls - they are trying to make you lose your temper and type something in the heat of the moment which you will later regret.
5. Warn your friends if you are concerned about an account, or if they say something which goes beyond the pale.

Most importantly, remember that there are no depths to which either Labour or the Tories would not stoop in order to maintain their hold on power. Councillors, MPs, MEPs - these all represent considerable influence and millions of pounds worth of financing to the people and parties which control them. We are engaged in a high stakes game against entrenched interests at the highest levels of the establishment. UKIPs 'People's Army' can win, but only if we keep our eye on the ball at all times.

And so the dirty tricks start early in Newark

With the selection of Roger Helmer MEP as UKIP's parliamentary candidate for the Newark by-election caused by the resignation of Patrick Mercer, it was only a question of time before the dirty tricks started in a desperate attempt to halt UKIP's rise.

And so it has proved.

An account supposedly belonging to UKIP Newark on Twitter posted the following just minutes after Hope not Hate started posting their own internet memes on Helmer: 

 



Interestingly, the UKIP Newark account above was set up on the 2nd June 2013. Patrick Mercer resigned the Conservative whip on the 31st May 2013 after being caught taking bribes to ask parliamentary questions.




The first tweet, on 2nd June last year

It would have been clear as the Mercer scandal broke that he would ultimately have to resign - the question was only one of how long he would hold on. It was equally clear that in the event of a by-election, UKIP would be a significant force, and several newspaper reports at the time comment on this coming as it did after UKIP's success in the Eastleigh by-election and the local elections in May. The account was used for 6 days, and then not touched again until the 29th April when Mercer announced his resignation from Parliament.

As UKIP Director of Communications Patrick O'Flynn said earlier, the account does not belong to UKIP in Newark -

Despite this, the @UKIPNewark account has continued the pretence that it is an official one, with the following tweet being posted half an hour ago:

 



Who is responsible? Who can tell? It could be the Tories - certainly they would have the most to gain from halting the UKIP insurgency, but all of the establishment parties are in more or less the same boat. And then we have Hope not Hate, who already maintain a vast array of fake accounts and who used them to great effect in the run up to last year's local elections.

Whoever it was, we can be sure that it won't go away quickly. With Roger Helmer being a former Conservative MEP for the region which includes Newark, he is well known across the area and, in a constituency with a huge Tory majority, stands to give the Tories a run for their money with the by-election coming just days after what is expected to be a huge victory for UKIP in the European elections. For the establishment parties and their paid monkeys at Hope not Hate, it is imperative that UKIP does not gain it's first by-election victory and a toe-hold at Westminster. To them, it is a case of 'après Roger, le deluge' - if he can overturn a 16,000 Tory majority, then no seat is safe next May.