More comedy gold from Winston McKenzie, who even the local papers are describing as “Croydon’s political bed-hopper”, after he announced that he has joined the English Democrats and is to be their candidate for election as London Mayor.
A month after stomping out of UKIP because he’d discovered some of its members might be racists, McKenzie is now allying himself with a political party which also welcomes some with links to the English Defence League.
Ho! Ho! Ho! Winston McKenzie
The announcement this week might otherwise be characterised as an irrelevance joining an irrelevance. Winston McKenzie has never been elected, despite his regular candidacies for various parties, while the English Democrats at the 2015 General Election attracted 0.2 per cent of the total vote.
McKenzie is going in the opposite direction to Garry Bushell, the bombastic Sun columnist and to date the English Democrats’ most successful election candidate, who left to join UKIP.
McKenzie was the chairman of UKIP’s Croydon North and Lambeth branch until it was discovered he had trouble managing meetings and election donations. He quit UKIP last month after it had taken him about five years to work out that some of his party colleagues might have certain prejudices.
The English Democrats will be at least the seventh political party he has represented at elections, although McKenzie has also stood on a handful of occasions as an independent.
Robin Tilbrook, chairman of the English Democrats, claimed McKenzie’s selection for as the party’s Mayoral candidate is “a milestone in the re-emergence of England”.
Which will re-assure no one.
Robin Tilbrook signs up Winston McKenzie for the English Democrats in the same week they were joined by Toni Bugle, the founder of MARIAS and who has links to the EDL
Tilbrook said, apparently in all seriousness: “Winston is a great character and one of the most high-profile Black English political figures of our day.” He may be right about the former, in the same sense that Bobby Ball is a “character”, as well as a figure of comic fun.
The less-than-funny joke about McKenzie’s latest political switch is that it has been greeted as a “success” by English Democrats supporters at the same time that they have welcomed with open arms Toni Bugle, who is the founder of an organisation called MARIAS: Mothers Against Radical Islam And Sharia. MARIAS has been reported to be linked to the far-right English Defence League.
So just the sort of political bed-fellows with whom homophobic McKenzie should feel comfortable, as long as it gives him access to campaign funds.
He has already been enthusiastically using social media to link to dubious-looking video content which proclaims “Join the English fight back”, and that London is a “Christian city”. The implications of the video’s graphics are obvious, and unpleasant. This latest dalliance by McKenzie may well offer fewer laughs than his previous political prat-falls.
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