Plaid Cymru leader Leanne Wood - I agree with Nigel. On HnH's website!

In a 'guest blog' on Hope not Hate's website, Plaid Cymru leader Leanne Wood desperately tries to

PC leader Leanne Wood - a surprising convert to UKIP's
point of view!

save her party from electoral oblivion in Wales by making statements which would see her branded racist if she was a UKIP candidate. Normally we wouldn't link to HnH's website, but we feel the article to be so remarkable an admission of defeat that we will make an exception in this case - you can find it here. It's not every day that Nick Lowles blog contains a guest post which essentially says 'I agree with Nigel'.

Wood - who just a couple of months ago said of UKIP that "your politics have no place in our country, not now, not ever" - appears an unlikely convert to UKIP's point of view. In her Hope not Hate article, she argues:

"Not enough has been done to clamp down on gang-masters who exploit migrant workers by paying below the minimum wage and in doing so pricing out local – often low-skilled workers - from the labour market with devastating consequences for both parties...

A borderless trading bloc... was not meant to include narrowing the economic options of the people in its poorest regions to westward migration.

The principle of EU wealth redistribution... should and must result in enhanced living standards and prospects for all EU citizens in their home communities so that moving to another state is seen as an option rather than a necessity."

In other words, that UKIP are right - unlimited immigration does drive down wages, create wage compression, and reduced employment for British workers, while the EU's disastrous economic policies have made the UK the country of choice for people whose home nations have been devastated by the Euro.

Wood now belatedly supports all the things Hope not Hate have been denouncing as lies for the past year in their campaign against UKIP. Still, a consistent argument was never one of Hope not Hate's strong points as their 'head of intelligence', former BNP thug Matthew Collins trawls UKIP member's social media desperately seeking past links to, er, the BNP.

What is interesting is that this is published not just on Hope not Hate's website, but on HnH director Nick Lowles own blog. It is difficult to see this as anything other than an admission by Hope not Hate that UKIP are correct in their assessment of the problems facing the working class, and also a tacit admission that Hope not Hate's aim is not to fight racism, but to fight UKIP on behalf of what it defines as 'the left' - which includes Plaid Cymru and the watermelon Greens just as much as Labour.

HuffPo calls for racial discrimination, while HnH's leaflet campaign goes off with a whimper

An interesting article on today's Huffington Post website, where they condemn UKIP for employing a leaflet distribution company which in turn hires Eastern Europeans to deliver the leaflets.

The gist of the rather weak argument is that HuffPo thinks UKIP should only have British leafletters, in other words that it should break the law by discriminating on the basis of their nationality against people who are in the UK legally, which is really a rather racist position for what is supposed to be a reputable website to take.

***Hope not Hate's 'Simon Cressy' has just chipped in with a blog post, asking 'whatever happened to British Jobs for British workers, it used to be a UKIP and BNP battlecry', forgetting that it was a Labour battlecry as well, straight from the mouth of Gordon Brown. Cressy (aka Carl Morphett) is also suggesting that UKIP practise racial discrimination, although that's not entirely surprising given his casual racism against an Anglo-Albanian UKIP candidate a couple of days ago. ***

While we're on the subject of leaflets, it is worth mentioning that Hope not Hate had their 'weekend of action' over the May Day bank holiday weekend just gone.

Interesting photographs were tweeted by Hope not Hate, who are pushing their 'votehope' campaign for all it's worth regardless of the net positive effect such leafleting has had in the past for those targeted by it. UKIP thanks them for their efforts in calling the 77% of people in the UK who are concerned about immigration 'racist', and looks forward to another boost in the polls.

Hope not Hate very helpfully posted images on their blog showing how many of their leaflets and newspapers they intend to deliver in each of their target areas - it is reproduced at the bottom of this article. We congratulate them on their ambition, but wonder given the size of their campaign teams whether this will prove possible.

In Brighton, for example. Their plan is for 40,000 leaflets to be delivered, and yet the morning's

VoteHope Brighton - with 40,000 leaflets to deliver, they'd
do better to get cracking rather than standing around taking pics!

campaign team photograph is of 4 people. Allowing for the photographer, that's 5 of them, or 8,000 leaflets each. If they really run and deliver 100 leaflets an hour, they'll be finished in a mere 80 hours, assuming they have no breaks for food, drink or the toilet. We should not forget that police are still hunting for the Hope not Hate activists who assaulted two policewomen at a UAF demonstration there last weekend, so it is possible that the campaign team will be further reduced. You will notice as well that all the ethnic groups in Brighton are represented in this show of solidarity for minorities, who have demonstrated their support by, erm, staying at home and leaving it to the achingly right-on middle class to stand up for them.

HnH's Ruth Smeeth takes the pictures, others do the delivering.
Will they deliver the 25,000 each, or just chuck them in a skip?

Meanwhile, in Halesowen, Ruth Smeeth popped by to tweet a photograph before going home and leaving the delivery work to the peons. Again, the minorities put in a strong show of concern by staying at home and having a lie in. Or maybe they've just heard of the institutional racism in the Labour Party in Harrow and want no part of these smears. Not entirely surprising perhaps, as the entire campaign team appears to consist of Labour Party candidates and activists taking a break from their day jobs which involve protecting the incomes of the richest by supporting an unending flow of cheap labour.  No surprises there from the party which used to stand up for the working man.

three of the four HnH activists complaining about something
different this time.

With 100,000 leaflets to deliver across the West Midlands, the Labour campaign team needs to get cracking with the mere 25,000 each they have to get rid of. At 100/hour, it'll only take 2,500 hours or a little over 14 days of 24 hour working to get them all delivered. As most working class people have to do those hours to pay for their families, it may well educate them on how the other half live: being Labour, they'll use that knowledge to hire poor people to do the deliveries next time. You will note the picture of the local Labour Party from earlier this year protesting against a tax they have no intention of scrapping features three of the four Hope not Hate activists. The fourth is also a Labour Party member, but there's not enough space to fit in pictures of them all.



Warrington Labour Party reduced to scaremongering as they
have nothing positive to say ahead of this month's elections

Labour were heavily involved with all this - they want to get their money's worth out of Hope not Hate, after all. In Warrington, the Labour Party gave up on campaigning for the European and local elections and instead spent the day handing out Hope not Hate leaflets in the town centre and then tweeting about it. Quite how that is supposed to persuade people to vote Labour we're not certain, but then they don't really have anything to say about the EU that voters want to hear. Better to scaremonger with HnH leaflets than tell people how you want to give their country away.

Whitehaven Labour Party resign themselves to being out of
touch and so deliver negative propaganda instead.

In Whitehaven the local Labour team had also given up telling people what they were planning to do if elected, preferring to hand out HnH leaflets as they ramped up their negative campaign. As there are three Cumbrian activists pictured and 20,000 leaflets are planned for delivery, they'd do better making a start pushing them through letterboxes rather than standing around taking selfies as they've each got just under 7,000 to deliver.

And so on to Manchester, where the 8 ethnically diverse Labour Party members are planning to deliver almost 250,000 leaflets across the Metropolitan area. Good luck with that then.

HnH's Manchester team taking pictures rather than delivering
the 31,000 leaflets each needed to reach HnH's target

Given the increase in the vote they will deliver for UKIP, we're almost tempted to put out a call for UKIP members to go and help them. Then again, most UKIP members have jobs and responsibilities other than signing on, so they can't devote the time necessary. HnH's supporters are of course largely unemployed, which may explain the low turnout - it's only lunchtime and it's not giro day, so most haven't got up yet. To be serious, what is sad is how Hope not Hate target the poorest in society and attempt to persuade them that having lower wages is good for them: as polling figures show, it takes a special kind of stupid to believe that, which is why UKIP's argument is soaring. But with HnH's 'officer class' comprised entirely of middle class kids who have never had a proper job, it's in their best interests to protect the richest in the land at the expense of the poor. Donkeys lead by donkeys.

 Elsewhere in the North West, the much vaunted 'major leafleting exercise' was not spotted by activists carrying our own leaflets in the centre of either Manchester or Liverpool, and UKIP activists had as of today received no reports of HnH leaflets being delivered through doors.

If you see a Hope not Hate campaign team out delivering leaflets, please take a photograph. We don't want it, but it is such a rare sight, it may prove a collector's item one day. Alternatively, you could print off a few of our leaflets available on the blog here and hand them out - perhaps their campaigners don't know the racist, criminal, tax evading company they are unwittingly keeping.

To be called a 'disgrace' by Karl Turner is an honour indeed. Another Labour MP who's forgotten the working class.

Labour MP Karl Turner, who represents East Hull, thinks responsible politics consists of sending
housebricks to your opponent's freepost address.

Such stupidity is hardly surprising from a man who is currently facing a standards investigation for breaking House of Commons rules by using apolitical facilities to send out invitations to a Labour Party fundraiser at £45/head. I suppose he set the price that high to ensure that none of those irritating working class people turned up, just as he defended the claiming of 1st class train tickets on parliamentary expenses.  It wouldn't do to rub shoulders with the poor when you're as high and mighty as he is, would it? He was previously in trouble for stealing a newspaper from a train - like he couldn't just have bought one and charged it to the rest of us!

It wouldn't be fair though to say he doesn't stand up against misused privilege. He was after all the MP who reported Baroness Warsi to police over her expenses claims, which is pretty rich as he was subsequently caught misusing his own. But as he said at the time in an interview with James Whale on LBC, had it been a Labour minister who'd been misusing expenses, he wouldn't have spoken up and reported them. If ever there was a clearer case of 'one law for them, one for us', we can't imagine what it would be.

I suppose we should no longer be surprised when a Labour MP proves himself a hypocrite. If he can't be trusted with a couple of hundred quid's worth of stationary, one can only guess what his sanitised expenses conceal. Given his family's close association with his predecessor as East Hull MP John Prescott, he clearly had a good teacher and knows a thing or two about getting his nose in the trough. Having been a barrister previously, I'm sure it'll all be 'within the rules', as if you can only tell the difference between right and wrong with a rule book.

Still, it's good to know he views us as a disgrace for daring to question his childish antics. As a group of working class men and women, we quite understand why it is official Labour policy to drive down wages so the richest 1% can benefit. Sadly, we didn't learn how to screw the system as well as he did. It's just a shame that a lad who started off as working class like him should so quickly forget his roots when he sees riches within his grasp.

If you fancy dropping him a line, his address is 1181 Holderness Road, Hull, HU9 3DW. I'm sure he'll see the joke if you write 'Postage will be paid by addressee' on the envelope. The money he tried to misuse for the Labour fund-raiser should just about cover it.

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.

Casual racism from HnH's Carl Morphett, whose geography isn't so hot

A little bit of casual racism from Hope not Hate's Carl Morphett (writing under the utterly pointless (as everybody knows who it really is) pseudonym of Simon Cressy) yesterday evening in a post entitled 'A quick question for UKIP Barnsley'.

Rather neatly summing up exactly why Hope not Hate don't grasp the problems of immigration or
UKIP's policy, he writes:

"It is well documented that UKIP have a problem with East European immigrants coming to the UK.
So I was rather interested to see that UKIP in Barnsley are fielding an Albanian immigrant, Anisa Kola as a candidate in the Dodworth ward.
How very interesting"

(i) UKIP does not have a problem with Eastern European immigrants coming here, we'd just like a say in how many.
(ii) Most Eastern European immigration comes from within the EU. Albania, the last time we checked, was not a member of the European Union, and therefore immigrants from there have to qualify for a visa to enter the UK. This visa is issued under the points system we'd like to apply to EU immigrants as well.
(iii) Why would her country of origin make any difference if she is a suitable candidate?
(iv) Why would a legal immigrant to the UK not realise that allowing 200,000 people a year into the country will put further strain on public services and greater pressure on housing, which is already in short supply?

In order to avoid them mistaking Albania for an EU country the next time they want to attack a UKIP candidate based on their ethnicity, we have prepared a handy 'cut out and keep' guide for them to check.

Good to see that it hasn't got in the way of Hope not Hate's casual sexism either. Alongside comments about how good looking or not Anisa is is the following gem, suggesting that because she's pretty, she is therefore too stupid to make up her own mind. 

Lowles bends the truth as he tries to fight of 'establishment' claims

Lowles fights 'establishment' label

It was interesting to read Hope not Hate director Nick Lowles self-congratulatory puff piece in the Huffington Post yesterday, not least because of the levels of distortion it contained.

In the article, Lowles says,

"In fact, the UKIP leader sounds worried. This morning he attacked me personally, and HOPE not hate, on BBC radio and in national newspapers, claiming I was a Communist and linked to the Socialist Workers Party (I am neither), or that we were linked to another organisation Unite Against Fascism (we are not) and that because our charitable (non-campaigning) arm accepted government funding in the past (now ceased) we are part of the 'Establishment' trying to stop them. I guess he must be feeling riled."

To deal with these distortions in turn:
..claiming I was a Communist and linked to the Socialist Workers Party (I am neither)...

Lowles originally worked for Searchlight before engineering his own well paid political career by breaking Hope not Hate out of its founding organisation after an internal power struggle. Searchlight was founded and run by members of the Communist Party of Great Britain. Some of his Hope not Hate staff members - including website contributor Carl Morphett and his pseudonyms - remain associated with hard left, communist groups.

As for the SWP, it is true that the SWP and HnH had a falling out, although close links remain between them. HnH staff regularly attend far-right demonstrations, often disguised as serious journalists, and their detailed tweets giving the specific locations of far-right activists are eagerly used by UAF/SWP to target them for violence. Meanwhile, SWP front organisation Love Music Hate Racism - headed by rapist Martin Smith, former SWP leader - regularly has its events publicised by Hope not Hate. A quick internet search shows Norfolk Hope not Hate advertising an LMHR event at the Mulberry Tree, Ipswich in October last year.

Verdict: False. While Lowles' assertion that he is formally linked to neither the Communist Party or the SWP may be true in the narrow sense that he is a member of neither, there are clear, ongoing links between all of these groups.

... that we were linked to another organisation Unite Against Fascism (we are not)...

If his denial of involvement with the SWP is false, his denial of links to UAF must also be false, since the UAF is merely an SWP front organisation, as is LMHR. HnH is more than happy to use the street violence of the UAF (see above) as a part of its tool set, while not being stupid enough to permit more direct links. Notwithstanding that, at last years failed 'Stand up for HOPE' meetings which were designed to produce an anti-UKIP consensus within the Hope not Hate membership (they didn't, and few people turned up, as we reported at the time), UAF members were conspicuous attendees advocating a harder line against UKIP and were welcomed because of it.

Verdict: False. As above, Lowles denial is disingenuous at best as clear links between UAF and HnH exist and are well documented.

.....because our charitable (non-campaigning) arm accepted government funding in the past (now ceased) we are part of the 'Establishment' trying to stop them....

Lowles closeness to the Labour Party is no secret, and that of his deputy, Ruth Smeeth could hardly be clearer - she is an open Labour supporter who has just been selected to fight a safe Labour seat. Their own accounts with the Charity Commission and Companies House show them receiving government funding - 2013's accounts have yet to be filed, so it remains to be seen whether his assertion that such funding has ceased is true. In a week in which we have seen the Corporation of London donating money to oppose UKIP politically, it is difficult to escape the notion that Lowles is indeed a part of the establishment. After all, unlimited cheap foreign labour undercutting the British workforce - whatever their race - is only good for the richest in society.

Verdict: False. Hope not Hate attempts to present itself as a grassroots organisation, but in fact has solid links with bankers, big business, the Labour Party and the media, as evidenced in its sponsorship by the Daily Mirror. It doesn't get much more establishment than that.

Far from UKIP's Farage feeling riled, it would appear that Lowles is concerned that the general public is seeing through his propaganda to the point that he feels obliged to write a HuffPo article patting himself on the back. How nice it would have been to have seen some honesty in it, but that would be a step too far for Hope not Hate.

Dan Hodges - an apology for underestimating his venality

A few weeks ago we published an article criticising Dan Hodges, son of Labour MP Glenda Jackson, for coining it by taking money from two paymasters - Hope not Hate and the Daily Telegraph - to attack UKIP: Dan Hodges: 1 cheque from the Telegraph, 1 cheque from Hope not Hate

We would wish to apologise to our readers for inadvertently missing out other cheques Hodges receives for the same articles, not least from the Migration Matters Trust, which also employs him to point his finger at UKIP and scream 'racism' loudly.

We apologise sincerely that we may have mislead readers into believing that Hodges had more principles than might have first been surmised from our original article, but in our defence we did not know at that time that he was being paid by merchant bankers and the largest corporates in the UK to defend their right to drive down prices in the labour market while simultaneously cashing in on the housing shortage caused by 200,000 people a year arriving in the UK.

We wish to make clear that at the time we were not fully aware of the extent to which Hodges derived his income from the richest 1% of the UK population, nor that he was in receipt of taxpayer's funds from the Corporation of London in addition to the cheques from the Daily Telegraph and Hope not Hate.

We accept absolutely that until the demise of his multi-millionaire mother, Hodges must do everything he can to protect migrant labour which is pushing up profits for Britain's richest companies and pushing down wages and the general standard of living for the poorest in society. We accept that Hodges, like his mother, sees immigrants as 'potato diggers and strawberry pickers', and now wholly accept that he has never had any experience of the working class except when they are doing low paid jobs for him or the companies which fund him. Kerchiiing.

As for the Migration Matters Trust (which Hodges today describes as 'his' in the Telegraph) a true reflection of its aims can be seen by reading this interview with its notional leader Barbara Roche taken from an interview with the New Statesman in 2000 -

"So just what is Barbara Roche proposing? She shies away from giving even a vague figure on the numbers of immigrants she is envisaging. But it is clear that she has in mind not only ... highly qualified, well-educated migrants.....So, who is to decide who comes in and who does not? Roche's idea is to let business, the trade unions, academics, the general public (Not UKIP - Ed.) have their say. She is aware of pressure from business for more immigration"

Peter Mandelson would be proud of the art form Labour have made of protecting the richest in society while driving down incomes. And all while pretending they still care about the working class.