From nowhere to 2nd with 815 votes in Manchester
LAST night, the British National Party pulled off one of its best results of 2009 when it came from nowhere to take second place in Manchester’s Moston by-election, winning a 23.3% vote share and trouncing both the Tories and the Liberal Democrats.
The 815 vote exceeded most of our expectations and certainly puts Nick Griffin on course to becoming the British National Party’s first MEP in the North West of England. Nick needs an 8% vote share to win his seat and the small but hard-hardworking team of BNP activists in North Manchester delivered THREE TIMES that level of support.
In the early hours of this morning, BNP activists were still on ‘cloud nine’. One told the BNP website:
“We designed our strategy many months ago. We decided from the outset that the number of campaigners that we had at our disposal would be insufficient to support a full canvass of the Moston ward, so we used the same carefully-planned approach which has consistently delivered strong second places in neighbouring north Manchester wards in recent years.
“We put out four high quality leaflets and a personal letter to all postal voters. Of course, we know that a full canvassing campaign is highly effective in smaller wards with large numbers of activists available, but not in areas like north Manchester with big wards and not that many activists on hand. I think we have shown that flexibility of tactics is as important as applying a prescriptive approach to every situation and expecting it always to work.
“All the opposition parties were out in force during the campaign and last Sunday an anti-BNP group had 17 activists out in Moston distributing their poisonous lies. The size of our vote shows, once again, that this third party intervention at elections by people not campaigning for a specific candidate or party, in reality helps boost our vote by motivating our supporters to come out and make their voice heard.”
And this was the parting shot before everyone went off for a well deserved night’s sleep . . .
“The abject dismay on the faces of the Tory activists as they watched Cameron’s march on the great northern cities dissolve before their very eyes made all the (considerable) hard work worthwhile.”
The Tory vote crashed by a huge 14%, while Labour’s was down 11%. The night was a disaster too for the media-puffed Green Party which saw its vote down by 6%. Yet for the BNP there was a huge 23.3% vote share in a ward that the Party had never fought before.
Congratulations to the North Manchester election team. The Moston result provides a great Easter morale boost for BNP campaigners across the UK as the countdown to June 4th begins. In The Independent newspaper this morning the Labour Party’s Deputy Leader Harriet Harman, warns that the British National Party could be on course to win “one to three seats” in the European Parliament. Many BNP supporters this morning will be thinking . . . . “and the rest!”
MANCHESTER Council
Moston ward
Thursday 9th April 2009
Rita Tavernor (Labour) 1,353
Derek Adams (British National Party) 815
Timothy Hartley (Liberal-Democrat) 696
Phil Donohue (Conservative) 558
Karl Wardlaw (Green Party) 74
BNP Percentage 23.3%
There’s more BNP news and views on Martin Wingfield’s popular personal blog which can be found here.
