13/05/2022
The network Hope Not Hate, which monitors the activities of the various fractious groups that make up Britain’s far right wing political movement, reports satisfaction that extremist parties put in a desultory performance at recent Council and Greater London Assembly elections. The gaggle of parties that hate each other more than they do the left, were described by Hope Not Hate to have “endured bruising results”, frequently finishing with no more than four or five per cent of the vote at most. The populist right UK Independence Party was said by monitors to be “entering into its death throes” whilst the once mighty National Front, which was a serious electoral force in the late seventies, achieved only just over one hundred votes in the two wards it contested. However, Hope Not Hate warned that complacency was misplaced, saying “it is important to remember that while the results mark a defeat for the electoral far right, the same is not necessarily true for the views they espouse. Far-right ideas continue to influence more mainstream political and media narratives”.
