Jai has tipped us to the fact that the British Freedom Party has been de-registered by the electoral commission:
The British Freedom Party, the EDL’s “political wing”, has been de-registered by the electoral commission in the UK. It means that the BFP are now defunct as a political party and the EDL leadership’s plans have therefore collapsed completely on this front.
This is very welcome and important news.
You will recall that BFP leader Paul Weston has become one of Geller & Spencer’s closest allies and, like EDL leaders Stephen Yaxley-Lennon (aka “Tommy Robinson”) and Kevin Carroll, Weston attended Geller & Spencer’s anti-Muslim conference in NY in September 2012. Jai provided more background information on Weston in an LW article about Spencer. Geller & Spencer’s efforts to spread their poison to the British political sphere via the BFP/EDL have utterly failed.
Note that Yaxley-Lennon himself is of course still incarcerated for illegally entering the US to attend Spencer & Geller’s conference alongside Kevin Carroll and BFP leader Paul Weston. Yaxley-Lennon’s court trial is pending in 2013. Potentially he will also be extradited to the US for his crime.
British Freedom surrender under a cloud of secrecy
(EDL News)
The English Defence League’s political wing, the British Freedom Party, appears to have wound up it’s operations and de-registered themselves from the electoral commission by not sending them their £25 fee. Nothing has been posted on any of their social media websites since the 12th December which is the day after they were de-registered.
This means that they will not be able to field any candidates under the parties name but could field independents.
The party, set up to catch the vote from EDL supporters failed to take off due to the fact that support of the EDL was rapidly declining and many EDL members were more interested in a drunken day out than taking their views down the political road. The EDL’s support is currently at an all time low and they have become a liability.
Their local election results last year were a shambles where they fielded five candidates and the highest vote they got for one candidate was 79. They had slightly more success putting their deputy leader, Kevin Carroll, up for the PCC elections in Bedfordshire but that was largely put down to voter apathy.
Jailed leader of the English Defence League, Tommy Robinson, was until recently deputy leader of the BFP but had to resign due to his alleged criminal activity surfacing and the imminent threat that he was to be jailed.
Their current deputy leader, Kevin Carroll, is on bail on suspicion of ‘conspiracy to cause a public nuisance’ after a furniture van full of balaclava clad EDL supporters were stopped on the motorway, suspected of being on their way to target a mosque in London. Carroll answers bail in February.
It appears the party has gone under due to the fact that they had no credibility within the far right due to their association with the English Defence League who are generally seen as a bit of a joke by other nationalist groups.