The Ipswich English Community Group: defending East Anglia from orcs!

I've posted before about the Steadfast Trust ("the only charity for the ethnic English") and its calls for English Community Groups to be established around the country. Unsurprisingly, the few groups that have been set up along these lines have turned out to be magnets for cranks and bigots. Any claim to represent the needs and wishes of ordinary English folk will ring hollow when we consider the English Community Group track record:

The Leicester English Community Group was originally chaired by Clive Potter, a man who thinks that a species of grey aliens are warning us about interracial marriage. It later spun off a nationwide group called English Advocates, which has linked to neo-Nazi material on its official Facebook page.

The Essex English Community Group spent most of its time ranting about "wogs" and "the yellow peril" over Facebook.

The short-lived Dorset English Community Group was quickly absorbed into the English Volunteer Force, an EDL splinter group.

The Northants English Welfare Society is fronted by Walter Greenway, a neo-Nazi.

With this in mind, I think that I can be forgiven for not being particularly enthusiastic about the establishment of an Ipswich English Community Group:

This organisation is clearly influenced by the Leicester ECG, right down to using a modification of that group's logo:

To be honest, I'm not entirely sure why either group has the futhorc rune equivalent to "T" as their logo. My only guess is that the Leicester group confused it with the somewhat similar rune for "L", and the Ipswich group followed suit. The newly-established and barely active Portsmouth ECG also has a variation on the same logo.

In this posting, the IECG reveals its core membership, complete with amusing insistence on using Old English terms for job titles (a website administrator is a "webb pegn" - who knew?)

Chairman Tim Hawke is a familiar face, as he is a Steadfast trustee. He also has a history of involvement in the nationalist trade union Solidarity (founded by the utterly bizarre Clive Potter) and is an occasional poster at the racist Anglo-Saxon Foundation.

Secretary Darren Clarke will need a little more introduction. He sometimes crops up in the local papers; this Suffolk Free Press story from 2011 announced his plans to hold a Saxon feast on 19 November. We can find more information about this event on the Steadfast Trust website:

'To celebrate the memory of St Edmund the English Shieldwall group is hosting a "St Edmunds Day Evening". 

The venue will be at the ‘Olde Bull Hotel’ in Church Street, Sudbury, Suffolk on the 19th November (Saturday closest to St Edmunds Day – 20th November) at 7pm. 

[...] 

Already over half the places have been taken up without any advertising so if you would like to be one of the forty guests please contact the organiser Darren on... 

Mobile : [number removed] 

Email : edmundy1271@******.net'

And if we head on over to the aforementioned Anglo-Saxon Foundation, we can find that Darren has an account there under the screenname "edmundy":

In fact, he appears to be personal friends with the forum's owner, Seaxan:

As an aside, it would appear that the chap who designed the group's logo is also an ASF member:

Like many members of the Anglo-Saxon Foundation, Darren "Edmundy" Clarke likes to refer to non-white people as "orcs":

He was also involved with the blatantly racist Essex English Community Group:

Here's what the Ipswich ECG has been up to:

Once again we have the line of reasoning that, because there are charitable organisations which exist to help ethnic minority groups, then it is only fair that there are equivalent organisations to help the ethnic majority. One wonders if they also object to the fact that there are charities for children, but none specifically for the adults - along with charities for the disabled, but none specifically for the able-bodied.

The idea that the English might not actually need a charity to support us as an ethnic group, because we do not face as much prejudice as the minority groups, does not appear to have entered these people's heads. Nor, indeed, has the related question of how many English people actually want these "English Community Groups" to represent them. Given that the Steadfast Trust has resorted to aligning itself with a bizarre cult of Hitler-worshippers, I'd wager that the charity has given up on appealing to the mainstream public.

Notice, also, Darren Clarke's snide comment about "fairies at the bottom of the garden" towards the bottom. Seems a bit rich coming from a man who claims to have seen gangs of orcs in Great Yarmouth.

So, what does the IECG hope to achieve? Well...

Here, the IECG posts about the Ipswich Hindu Samaj receiving a £10,000 grant. Because there are 60 times as many English people as there are Indians in Ipswich, then - so the IECG argument goes - a grant sixty times as large should be given to benefit English people in the city, otherwise the English are "surely being discriminated against". It does not specify exactly who will receive this £600,000 grant, so we are left to assume that the Ipswich English Community Group will be the one cashing this hefty cheque.

Alas, the IECG is being just a tiny bit selective with the facts here. It refers to the Ipswich Hindu Samaj as the "Ipswich Indian community group", clearly trying to imply that the two groups have equivalent aims. However, as its real name suggests, the Hindu Samaj is a religious-based charity, not an ethnicity-based one. "Ipswich Indian community group" turns up no hits on Google, so it would appear to be a name invented by the Ipswich English Community Group.

The IECG quotes the Hindu Samaj as being registered to serve "people of a particular ethnic or racial origin". This is true, but what the IECG neglect to mention is the full context behind this statement:

The Ipswich Hindu Samaj provides services to:

• Elderly/old people

• Children/young people

• People of a particular ethnic or racial origin

• The general public/mankind

• Other charities or voluntary bodies

• People with disabilities

The IECG is trying to paint the Hindu Samaj as an ethnicity-specific organisation - but based on this information, the Hindu Samaj could just as easily be painted as a charity specifically for the disabled, for children, for the elderly, or for mankind as a whole.

I'm not entirely sure how it works, but I notice that a number of charities are registered to benefit "people of a particular ethnic or racial origin" without actually being ethnicity-specific. These include Shetland Women's Aid, Cambridge United Youth and Community Trust, Reflection Path, the Platelet Charity and the Pennygate Foundation. In short, the IECG is using some twisted data in what seems to be an attempt to bag itself over half a million pounds.

According to the IECG, the main aim of the Hindu Samaj is to establish a place of worship for Hindus. If the Ipswich English Community Group truly aims to be an equivalent group for English people, then presumably its main aim will be to establish Anglican churches throughout Ipswich. However, considering its ties to the heavily anti-Christian Anglo-Saxon Foundation, I doubt that it has this plan in mind...

The group considers Folk Against Fascism to be racist:

The Ipswich ECG applied for membership of the Ipswich and Suffolk Council for Racial Equality, but was rejected:

I, too, would be interested to hear the exact criteria for membership of the ISCRE, but at the same time I can't say I'm surprised that the Ipswich English Community Group was rejected. Its most prominent members belong to a racist Internet forum run by a man who thinks that Jews should be deported from England, after all.

The main members of the Leicester ECG - Lee Ingram, Gary Thompson and Paul Brant - took a break from ranting about chemtrails to offer their thoughts on the matter:

Searching around the IECG Facebook page, we find this:

What a surprise. The group's foundation text is Tony Linsell's An English Nationalism, a book which claims that English people are descended from the Aesir and Vanir. As I've asked before in relation to similar groups - is the Ipswich English Community Group really representing the views and wishes of ordinary English people, or is it simply representing the views and wishes of Tony Linsell?

To its credit, the Steadfast Trust is making an effort to rein in the undesirable elements of its ECG satellites by issuing a set of guidelines which must be followed to win the official Steadfast Trust Seal of Approval:

It's the T rune again. Perhaps in this context it stands for "trust"?

These guidelines forbid rudeness and swearing, which I guess will do away with the Essex ECG's ramblings about "wogs", and ECGs will no longer be allowed to support or condemn a particular political party. So, looks as though the Leicester ECG won't be dressing up as Labour Zombies again next Halloween:

The guidelines also state that ECG leaders "must meet on a minimum bi-monthly basis, with an annual review listing activities and achievements. These should be published on their website." Should be fun seeing the Ipswich ECG's annual reviews of activities and achievements getting shorter and shorter as time goes on...