Britain First are banging the begging bowl rather loudly ahead of their 1 March jamboree in Nuneaton. One might almost get the impression that they are beginning to fret that there aren’t enough funds in the party’s accounts to mount this kind of exercise.
Troop leader Paul Golding has been handing out some stick to people on the BF email list. “Dear Uther,” he messaged last week (our Britain Last watcher likes to blend into the race warrior wallpaper), “I must admit I am a bit disappointed at the response to my email last night.
“I explained how the upcoming ‘March for Remigration’ is the ‘chance of a lifetime’ for Britain First. With this in mind, and after checking our records, could I ask you to read the email below and then take action?”
The requisite action is, of course, to get out your debit card and slosh some dosh in the party’s direction. And the implication is that Goldfinger has been cross-referencing the email list with donations received and has noticed that Uther has had the temerity to dawdle for an incredible 24 hours without flashing any cash.
This must, you might think, be an extraordinarily arduous task for the Leader – to reconcile BF’s claimed 25,000 membership with a few thousand donations and work out which short-armed sluggards haven’t stumped up. Sceptics might suggest that all he actually had to do was note the half-dozen suckers who had pitched in with a fiver and then blanket mail the rest – but we at Searchlight try not to be quite that cynical.
So what exactly was contained in Golding’s email of the night before? Well, there’s quite a lot of it, but here’s the meat…
“The cost of hiring a huge stage, a loud sound system, an army of security officers, hundreds of feet of metal fencing, a dozen portaloos, 1,000 flags with poles, a contingent of photographers and cameramen with drones, and much, much more, is going to cost around £10,000.”
Hmm. Not sure why they are getting so panicky. Those 25,000 members will only need to chip in 40p per head to cover ten grand. It’s not much to ask, is it?
Of course, no one is expecting the entire membership to show up. Least of all Britain Last. Just a couple of days later Golding popped up to boast that there were “6 x coaches coming from around the country”.
Even if we assume that these are coaches in the sense of comfy buses (and not men in joggers who say things like “I’m over the moon, Brian… I fort the boy done good… it was a game of two halves”) and even if the coaches are full, that’s – what – 300 to 360 people. So they are going to have to carry about three of those 1,000 flags each.
And a dozen toilets? It sounds like a lot for the probable crowd. Though one disillusioned member has suggested to us that this will be four toilets for BF and eight outside the cordon for the expected counter-demo. “When they see our team’s turnout,” he said resignedly, “the antifa are going to piss themselves laughing.”
As for the drones, surely BF has plenty of those already? Chief among them, Paul Golding himself.
Another few days later Goldenballs was back on the email trail, this time with a rather odd invoice for stage, fencing, toilets etc. The ‘package’ was specced at more like £6,300 than £10,000, but even this seemed beyond BF’s means. In fact, Golding was suggesting that just laying down an advance might present a problem. “We have to start chipping away at this invoice immediately,” he whined. “We have to pay a large deposit to secure the booking without delay.”
Why BF is so strapped is unclear. The immediate suspicion might be that the leaders are lavishing all of the party’s income on salaries for themselves, but the accounts for 2022 claimed that a comparatively modest £110,000 was going on staff costs. Split eight ways, this does not suggest they are living particularly high on the hog.
We are intrigued, though, by the rapid expansion in ‘office costs’ over just a few years. In 2015 the accounts put these at £15,000 or so. By 2022 this had rocketed to a staggering £203,000. And this balance sheet heading does not include office rent or the cost of running campaigns. So where is it all going?
It would, of course, be quite wrong of Searchlight to suggest that there is anything untoward about these figures, but if we were being bombarded day in, day out with begging emails, we think we’d be asking ourselves if things like internet access, printer ink and paperclips can really have gone up by 13,500% over just seven years
If you are wondering why the shindig is taking place in Nuneaton – not the most obvious place to hold a St David’s Day rally – we’re not sure. One fairly sensible informant suggested that it’s one of those ‘bellwether’ towns where the voters are ever ready to swing from one party to another.
A more larrikin-like source told us it was a misunderstanding based on comments some have made about the BF pack’s anointed Akela, Ashlea Simon, being perhaps overdue for some calorie-counting. We rather doubt the latter explanation. It sounds to us like the resurrection of a long-dormant joke about the helpline for IRA hunger strikers being Nuneaton eight zero eight zero.
More seriously, another of our contacts messages us: “I have noticed there is a suspicious lack of connection between Britain First’s top-tier management and their supposed senior leadership team on X / Twitter. Merola and Scanlon seem adrift. Scanlon posts nothing about BF activity since the Channel 4 report, and has been a notable absentee from hauntings in his region. Merola has deleted all his tweets and neither are now being followed by BF mgt.”
National organiser Alex ‘Meloni’ Merola was the party’s candidate in last year’s Wellingborough by-election, where his 477 votes (1.6%) didn’t exactly set the world on fire. He is working hard to cover his babyish chops with a beard, to the point where one of his colleagues describes him as “Looking like a man who won seventh prize in a pub’s Brian Blessed lookalike competition.” All we can say is that if he did, we would not be surprised to learn that Conchita Wurst came fifth and the pub’s Scottish terrier sixth.
South East Region organiser Nick Scanlon was BF’s candidate in the 2024 London mayoral election, where his 0.8% of the vote earned him the humiliation of finishing behind spoof candidate Count Binface. In October Channel 4 broadcast footage, captured by Hope Not Hate, of Scanlon spouting racial poison about ‘n****rs and c**ns’. His future value as a candidate feels negligible.
‘Hauntings’ refers to BF’s campaign, if that’s not too big a word, of making a nuisance of themselves outside of accommodation (usually small hotels) believed to be in use by the authorities for housing asylum seekers.
We hesitate to describe the Beefies as turning up ‘mob-handed’ at these affairs. We’re pushed to recall the last BF photo op that had more than seven people in the picture. But even a small number of knuckle-draggers can be very intimidating to a skinny Somalian refugee approached in the street while isolated. If Scanlon is failing to turn up for such easy ‘victories’ in the region he is supposedly organising, something is surely amiss.
Says one of our analysts: “Merola and Scanlon have been in loads of groups, so a flit from Britain First to Homeland or similar would come as no great surprise.” And, we suspect, no great loss.