The failure of the Steadfast Trust's English Community Groups

Late last year I wrote a post with a rundown of the various English Community Groups that had been set up at the behest of the Steadfast Trust. With this organisation currently on ice, we should not be surprised that its ECGs are in pretty poor shape themselves:

The Ipswich ECG appears not have made any moves since 6 January.

The Portsmouth ECG seems to have frozen up a week before its Ipswich cousin.

The Southampton ECG - a group so obscure that I didn't even know it existed when I wrote my last rundown - let out its death rattle at the same time.

The Essex ECG,  I believe, closed its doors in late 2014.

The Dorset ECG merged into the English Volunteer Force, a not-particularly-significant EDL splinter group.

The Northants English Welfare Society is still active - but it seems unlikely to attract widespread support, given that its frontman Walter Greenway is an unabashed Nazi sympathiser. Incidentally, "Walter Greenway" is a pseudonym, and the man in question also appears to go under the name "Gamlegorm the White". I am unsure what his real name is, but a short while back I received hits from someone searching for "ragnar northants english welfare society", "gamelegorm the white walter greenway" and "walter greenway northants english welfare stephen osborne". Make of that what you will.

 A typical posting from the Northants English Welfare Society.

Recently, however, there has been one more nail in the coffin: ECGL.org, the official website of the Leicester ECG, has closed down as a result of its domain expiring on 17 September.
For a bit of background, the ECGL - the most prominent of the ECGs - was founded on 2011. In March last year it announced that it would rebrand as a nationwide group called English Advocates.

This is where things get a little fiddly. The ECGL Facebook page changed its name to English Advocates and the group's Youtube channel rebranded as "Ethnic English", but the ECGL website remained and the old group was, officially, still active. Ingram (or one of his cohorts) even restarted its Facebook presence as a separate page.

But that second ECGL Facebook page closed as well. Now, with the closure of the website, all that is left of the English Community Group Leicester is the English Advocates page - which is basically just Lee Ingram ranting:

Lee Ingram argues that living in England is as bad as living in war-torn Syria.

I took the opportunity to archive the ECGL website just before it went down. Of particular interest is the photo gallery, where I found this image...

Hmm, wonder what those papers they're distributing could be about...?

Well, it just so happens that the site offered a closer look:

Now, what does that stack of fliers on the left say...?

Ah, yes. Woden's Folk.

For those unfamiliar, Woden's Folk is a neo-Nazi cult that believes Hitler to have been an avatar of the god Woden. The cult is eagerly awaiting the return of Woden/Hitler, in the belief that he will save the Aryan race from the dark forces of Judaism. Lee Ingram and his pals, for reasons of their own, felt that this cult was worth promoting.

If you're reading this, Lee, please don't insult my intelligence by claiming that you were unaware of the cult's neo-Nazi beliefs at the time. We're talking about a group with "Woden" in its name. That alone should have been more than enough to set off alarm bells.

The Steadfast Trust's English Community Groups were meant to represent ordinary English folk. Instead, they ended up as magnets for neo-Nazis. Had anyone voiced these concerns at the beginning of the project, they would doubtless have been dismissed as Anglophobes. However, as history has shown, those concerns turned out to be entirely valid.

Of course, the failure of the English Community Groups is just one of many casualties in the short history of Englisc nationalism. My report on the impending demise of the Anglo-Saxon Foundation turned out to be overoptimistic - the forum's domain was renewed for another year - but we need only take a quick look around the movement to find numerous other groups that have bitten the dust. English Shieldwall? Dead. Englisc Resistance? Dead. Steadfast journal? Dead.

Englisc nationalism will never gain a foothold amongst the English. Simple as that.