UPDATE: Only 24 hours after we posted this story, our UKIP sources called in to say that the party’s ’Heritage & Noble Principles of the British People’ spokesperson, Dean Neil, was reported to have spontaneously resigned in protest over the Bean appointment. One source even specified that Neil was reacting directly to seeing the Searchlight report.
Neil, a professional goalkeeping coach and bricklayer, has certainly been whisked off the UKIP website’s list of spokespeople, with no explanation. Curiously, Mr Bean has not been added to the list, which one might have expected during the same site edit.
Are Tenconi and Walker perhaps already reconsidering associating themselves with the screwy driver? Even by far-right standards, Bean does seem unusually ’Crowthorne-and-a-cab’. (The public transport route to Broadmoor).
Original article:
“I’m gonna put a knife through your brain.” This threat, made on a live stream in 2019 by one Simon Bean MBE now takes on great significance – the Mr Bean in question has just been co-opted into the leadership of UKIP, as the party’s Veterans and Armed Forces Spokesman.
On the plus side, Bean does at least have military service on his CV. With the less than exciting Royal Corps of Transport from 1983, he served in Northern Ireland, Bosnia, and in Princess Anne’s security detail. On a rather more negative note, along the way, or as a result of his service, Bean appears to have suffered from serious mental health issues to the extent that many within the military veterans movement now give him a very wide berth.
After all, this is the man who once claimed that he, and millions of “well-trained” ex-service personnel, were going to “basically bring the fucking country to its fucking knees” in response to the threatened prosecution of a former soldier for the shooting of an unarmed civilian in Northern Ireland in 1974. He also claimed they would shutdown the operations of the port of Dover. Many other threats were also forthcoming.
Bean is the latest recruit to the leadership of UKIP who brings with him an earlier association with ‘Tommy Robinson’. Bean was on the National Committee of the the Football Lads Alliance in 2018 when it was organising joint activities with ‘Robinson’ (aka Stephen Yaxley-Lennon). Several ‘Robinson’ associates have been drafted into UKIP as NEC members or Spokespersons recently, in preparation for the likely hook-up between UKIP and Robinson when he gets out of jail.
Bean has been a member of UKIP before but now is right back in the fold and straight into the leadership group. It’s perfectly normal, of course, if you’re involved in the new UKIP, controlled by a gang of crooks, thugs and ‘Tommy Robinson’-aligned racists, to welcome a man who threatened to travel to Greece “because I’ve done my research” and kill someone he disagreed with.
And in a public place, online, for all to see, to someone else who had incurred his displeasure: “I’m coming for you Andy. I’m gonna put a knife through your fucking brain. Do you understand me you cunt? I’m coming for you and there’s nothing you can do about it.”
Any residual credibility UKIP might have had has now evaporated as it welcomes this violent, obsessive, unstable, one-man threats machine into the fold. No need to bother with politics and elections. Democracy? That’s for sissies. After all, Bean and his ilk are trained for combat, so “Cry Havoc and let slip the dogs of war…”
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.
UKIP, already sinking to new racist depths under recently appointed leader Nick Tenconi, hit a new low yesterday when they pledged to put a bounty on the heads of ‘illegal immigrants’.
They have announced that they would “offer a reward of £500 per illegal immigrant correctly identified by British citizens”.
Led by two convicted criminals – Tenconi who kicked someone in the head as they lay unconscious on the floor during a night club brawl, and Chairman Ben Walker with multiple convictions as a ‘rogue builder’ – UKIP has been moving ever rightwards in recent months and will announce a formal tie-up with ‘Tommy Robinson’ (aka Stephen Yaxley-Lennon) when he gets out of jail.
For this bunch of convicted crooks to offer rewards for informing on ‘illegal immigrants’ is possibly the ultimate in brass neck. A former UKIP member who contacted Searchlight after seeing the announcement compared it to “the informant system used by the Gestapo”.
It’s particularly ironic given that Tenconi’s grandfather fought for the Italian fascists in WW2 and was allowed to stay in this country after being released from a prisoner of war camp.
Just as we predicted, Nick Tenconi was the only nominee for party leader in the recent UKIP election, so he has been appointed, without a members’ vote, by the NEC.
None of this is a surprise. Prospective candidates had a series of hoops to go through before they could stand and even had to find a non-refundable £3000 deposit for the privilege. Interested parties may also have looked back at the shock election of Lois Perry, against all the odds, in July, and thought twice about hazarding their cash.
Tenconi’s ratification as ‘Permanent Leader’ is a little odd though, given that the UKIP constitution imposes a maximum five-year term on the post. But as we have said many times recently, this is UKIP.
The link up between UKIP and Tommy Robinson supporters rolls on. From the platform of Robinson’s ‘Stop the Isolation’ rally last Saturday, demo organiser and Robinson’s right hand man, Richard Inman, declared that “UKIP is the only party that represents the British people and is taking a stand”. And he echoed Tenconi by name, calling for mass deportations.
At the Stop Isolation rally, l to r: Richard Inman, Ricky Doolan and Dan Morgan. Photographer: Quiller
Also on the platform were Welsh UKIP activist and convicted fraudster, Dan Morgan, and NEC member and party Culture Spokesman Ricki Doolan, who was at the head of the march with Inman.
There was also an appearance from Gerard Batten, the former UKIP leader, dumped by the membership after trying to hire Tommy Robinson as a ‘rape gangs adviser’ back in 2019. But times have changed.
Other UKIP luminaries like Tenconi himself and Chairman Ben ‘Rogue Builder’ Walker were absent because they were locked in a UKIP NEC meeting that was to ratify Tenconi’s appointment. Tenconi did nip out to record a video on Westminster Bridge claiming he was “marching with tens of thousands of patriots” but then hurried back to the NEC.
Curiously, the date of the NEC meeting and the date of Saturday’s demo were both announced on 9 December. And the rallying point for the demo was outside the Union Jack Club, in Sandell St, Waterloo, where the UKIP executive was gathered. All just coincidence, of course.
Searchlight has been reporting for months on the increasing cosiness between UKIP and what Robinson calls his ‘cultural movement’. Before he was imprisoned, Robinson endorsed UKIP and rejected Nigel Farage’s Reform UK, saying Farage had betrayed them. He said he was looking forward to discussions with Tenconi and his fellow convicted criminal, Ben Walker, about working more closely together.
Only Robinson’s prison sentence interrupted the process, but in the meantime several leading Robinson activists have been co-opted onto the UKIP NEC, including Inman, Doolan, Stan Robinson and longtime Robinson associate Dean Neil. Tenconi, for his part, has said that UKIP wants to run Robinson as a candidate in the next Parliamentary election.
Well, Calvin Robinson, the batshit and increasingly self-important preacher, thought he was being so funny, and so clever, when he topped off a speech to the far-right Pro-Life Summit in Washington DC by mimicking Elon Musk’s nazi salute. He left the stage to wild applause, grinning smugly.
Unfortunately for him, there were others who didn’t find it at all amusing, including his own church, the Anglican Catholic Church (ACC), which promptly sacked him.
The ACC has been Robinson’s church since September when he decamped from the UK to take charge of an ACC parish in West Michigan, whose congregation believed he had been selected for them by God. He said if he stayed in Britain he feared being assassinated by some “some anonymous Mohammedan” or arrested by Keir Starmer’s ‘satanic’ government, and so he jetted off to a rather cosy, and lucrative, billet on the Great Lakes.
But the ACC authorities have obviously had enough of his far-right preening and self-promotion. They issued a statement which did not mince its words, revoking his license as a minister in the Church and stating unequivocally, that even if intended as a joke, such actions are unacceptable because they “…trivialise the horror of the Holocaust, and diminish the sacrifice of those who fought against its perpetrators. Such actions are harmful, divisive, and contrary to the tenets of Christian charity”.
The full statement reads:
“At approximately 3:00 pm today (1/29) members of the College of Bishops of the ACC were made aware of a post made on X showing the end of a speech made by Calvin Robinson at the National Pro-Life Summit in Washington, DC. In it, he closed his comments with a gesture that many have interpreted as a pro-Nazi salute.
“While we cannot say what was in Mr. Robinson’s heart when he did this, his action appears to have been an attempt to curry favor with certain elements of the American political right by provoking its opposition.
“Mr. Robinson had been warned that online trolling and other such actions (whether in service of the left or right) are incompatible with a priestly vocation and was told to desist. Clearly, he has not, and as such, his license in this Church has been revoked. He is no longer serving as a priest in the ACC.
“Furthermore, we understand that this is not just an administrative matter. The Holocaust was an episode of unspeakable horror, enacted by a regime of evil men. We condemn Nazi ideology and anti-Semitism in all its forms. And we believe that those who mimic the Nazi salute, even as a joke or an attempt to troll their opponents, trivialize the horror of the Holocaust and diminish the sacrifice of those who fought against its perpetrators. Such actions are harmful, divisive, and contrary to the tenets of Christian charity.
“Finally, we pray that God will give us grace to lay aside our unhappy divisions, and we commend our nation and ourselves to his Almighty protection.”
Where this leaves Robinson’s US ministry remains to be seen. Without a licence from the Church, it is difficult to see how he can remain in his West Michigan post. But we will have to await developments.
The downside, of course, if that if he loses his US parish he will almost certainly be forced to return to the UK where he is close chums with the likes of Tommy Robinson and Katy Hopkins, and remains a UKIP NEC member and the party’s ‘Lead Spokesman on Everything’.
From this prospect we can only say, Oh Lord, deliver us…
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