Open Letter from Hope Not Hate for Tories to Expel Former Fascist Local Councillor

I got this email from the anti-racist, anti-religious extremist organisation Hope Not Hate asking people to sign an open letter calling for the Tories to expel a local councillor, who used to be a member of the Mosleyite fascist group, the New British Union. It runs

‘Dear David,

Last night we broke the news that we’ve discovered a Conservative Party councillor with a worrying fascist past. 

Andy Weatherhead (formerly Andrew Beadle) represents the ward of Hythe West on Kent County Council. But as recently as 2014, he was a member of the fascist group the New British Union where he’d held the positions of Business Officer and Policy Officer.

The NBU is full of nazis and violent bigots. They are fascist revivalists who proudly display pictures online of members wearing pre-war fascist uniforms and openly try to emulate Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists. One member of the group, Clive Ceronne, was even jailed for an arson attack on a mosque in Gloucester.

Tory councillor Andy Weatherhead wrote several blogs on the NBU website under a pseudonym. In them, he published deeply antisemitic passages, including criticising the government for “appeasing the British and International Jewish lobby, whilst allowing the British people to be feed [sic] lie after lie through the Jewish controlled Press and Media.”

Weatherhead’s NBU activity did not end there though. In 2013, he attended an NBU demonstration outside the Greek embassy in support of the Greek neo-nazi Golden Dawn party. Golden Dawn members were often accused of violently attacking immigrants, ethnic minorities and their political opponents. 

David, it’s simple. Andy Weatherhead is not fit to hold political office. 

And this is where you come in. Will you join other HOPE not hate members in calling for Andy Weatherhead to be permanently expelled from the Conservative Party?

EXPEL THIS TORY COUNCILLOR

This isn’t the first time that HOPE not hate has exposed elected officials with dangerous far-right beliefs. Last year, we discovered Tim Wills, a borough councillor in Worthing, West Sussex was an active supporter of the UK’s fastest-growing fascist threat, Patriotic Alternative. 

HOPE not hate supporters contacted Conservative Party Chairs asking for them to remove Wills and eventually, after immense pressure, he resigned.

Together, let’s drive out hate from our communities.

In solidarity,

Gregory – Researcher at HOPE not hate’

I’ve signed the open letter because the NBU really does seem to be exactly as they describe it – an attempt to revive Mosley’s British Union of Fascists. They even wear a uniform rather like Mosley’s Blackshirts, albeit the colour looks like very dark blue rather than black and have insignia very like Mosley’s black lightning bolt. Weatherhead also seems to be someone who really does believe all the real poisonous anti-Semitic conspiracies, which shouldn’t come as a surprise if he was a Mosleyite. Mosley denied he was ever anti-Semitic, but it was clear from his actions and general attitude that he was. He also changed the name of the BUF when he was trying to ingratiate himself with Hitler to the ‘British Union of Fascists and National Socialists’. Nazism is, by definition, anti-Semitic, and the Golden Dawn racist thugs. He’s definitely the kind of activist David Cameron made so much noise about expelling the party. And somehow, I’m not surprised that he also used to be UKIP, despite that party also stating that they would not accept former members of the far right into the party. It’s possible that Weatherhead might have changed his attitudes towards race and human rights since he left the NBU, but that’s highly debatable considering how many real islamophobes and anti-Semites were found on internet groups supporting Rees-Mogg.

Somerset Council Near Bankruptcy, Axes Children’s Services Due to Cuts

On Saturday Mike also posted a story reporting that Somerset County council, run by Tories, is cutting children’s social services, including closing two-thirds of the Sure Start centres. The council has been unable to make the necessary savings it had set itself, had overspent on children’s services, while government funding had been reduced. That meant that its finances are precarious, and the council is at risk of going bankrupt. The council has therefore called on the government to ‘fix the broken system of council funding’.

Mike makes the point that if it does go bust, it certainly won’t be the first. That was Northamptonshire. Which was then followed by Worcestershire. Mike states that it is sickening that the council is trying to solve its financial problems by cutting services to the poor and vulnerable. He asks

Is that because they are the least likely to complain – or the least able to make a complaint stick?

https://voxpoliticalonline.com/2018/05/19/yet-another-tory-council-is-facing-bankruptcy-so-it-attacks-the-poor/

I think it’s the latter. The poor don’t have as much power as the rich, and so services for the poor can be cut, because they don’t have the power to wreck the economy by taking their business elsewhere, or stop donating to party funds. Besides, Tory policy is, and always has been, to attack the poor as a drain on everyone’s else’s wealth. Mike and the commenters on his blog have compared it with the Nazis’ description of the disabled as ‘useless eaters’, and it is very much the same attitude. Of course, the cuts and benefit sanctions are dressed up with the language of help – they are incentivising people to find work, encouraging self-reliance, ending the ‘nanny state’s’ domineering control of people, and so forth – all that Thatcherite guff about ‘self-help’, but basically, it’s about cutting services for those at the bottom of the society, so that there’s more for those at the top. Like the nice, juicy tax cuts the rich have enjoyed.

It isn’t just children’s services that Somerset council is axing. A few weeks ago the BBC’s local news programme, Points West, reported that they were considering dissolving the local authorities within Somerset and taking over their functions. This was opposed by the local councils, who were afraid that it would be a blow against local democracy at their level, and that they would also lose services for their towns and communities.

It’s also ironic that it should be a Tory-run council facing these financial problems. Tory rhetoric presents them as the party of sound fiscal management and prudence against ‘high-spending’ Labour. And I wonder how many of the Tory faithful in Somerset voted for the government and its austerity programme, thinking that it would only affect Labour controlled areas. But this shows how the cuts effect everybody. A year or so ago, The Young Turks found that the poorest county in America was a community in Kentucky or somewhere, that was almost completely White. Yet these people consistently voted Republican. The Turks argued that it was because the Republicans played on their racial prejudices. They associated welfare spending with urban Blacks, and so the White inhabitants of the county voted for cuts, believing that this would only affect Black peeps and not them. And as a result, they were hit by the same cuts and poverty created by the Republicans.

I think something similar is going on in Britain’s Tory councils. The cuts are presented as being necessary, and high spending is associated with the large urban centres, held by Labour. And so they deceive some of their electorate into voting Tory in the belief that it won’t affect them, or if it does, it will only be slight. It plays on their prejudices about the urban poor, and the stories about the insane policies of the ‘loony left’.

But the Tories despise the poor and determined to deprive them of services wherever they are in the country. Even Tory-voting rural areas.