Hope not Hate's response to us - play the man, not the ball

We have noticed a fresh line of attack developing on our work to expose Hope not Hate. Never ones
to push the envelope on originality, Hope not Hate's minions have hit on the entirely unoriginal idea of condemning what we write because Dave Briggs - me! - has as Facebook friends people it claims are from the far-right.

Playing the man and not the ball is an old established favourite of Hope not Hate, so we'd like to be perfectly clear about a few things.

• We support UKIP, a democratic, non-racist, non-fascist party.
• We do not support the EDL, the BNP, the NF or any of the other splinter groups from them or any other far-right groups. 
• We do not support or endorse violence in politics whether from the right or the left.
• We accept all friend requests on Facebook without endorsing the views held by those making the request. Hope not Hate has no shortage of Facebook 'likes' from far-right activists.
• We sometimes highlight inaccuracies in Hope not Hate reports on EDL and BNP activities. This does not imply support. The truth is always the truth, and a lie is always a lie no matter who tells it or for what cause.

We endeavour to be accurate in all of our postings. Although we like to have a bit of fun at Hope not Hate's expense - they take themselves ever so seriously - we are not in the business of spreading lies or disinformation. We do speculate on events and their causes, but we attempt to do so honestly. Where reports of Hope not Hate meetings are published, they are reports which we believe to be accurate from people whom we believe were actually present. 'We' are a small team of like minded individuals who work hard to expose the machinations of the far-left - the groups like Hope not Hate and UAF of which Labour MP Simon Danczuk said "The hard right threatens social cohesion and sows ugly seeds of division. The politics of the hard Left does much of the same.”

We accept as true the following:

• Not everybody who supports the EDL is a football hooligan or fascist thug
• When someone aligned with the far-right says something, it is not necessarily untrue
• When someone aligned with Hope not Hate says something, it is not necessarily true

Finally, if you believe something we have published is incorrect, please draw it to our attention and if you can prove it wrong, we will correct it. Unlike Hope not Hate, we will not block you from our site and remove the posting as we believe in democratic debate.

We must be doing something right. 21,000 page views in 6 weeks, and a daily reach of between 3,000 and 11,000 people on Facebook. Not bad.

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.