Pic: Wikimedia Commons

Extreme right party the National Front has announced they will be putting forward notorious party veteran Richard Edmonds to run in the up coming Croydon North by-election.

Edmonds has previously campaigned against the construction of a mosque and expressed his support of Emma West, the woman filmed making a racist rant on a Croydon tram in 2011.

He stood for the National Front in Deptford in the 1974 general election and won 4.5 per cent of local votes.

Edmonds later left the party to become a founding member of the British National Party, but re-joined in 2011.

In 1993, he was arrested and spent three months in custody for racially aggravated assault.

He was at the centre of further press scrutiny in the same year when he described the BNP as ‘100 per cent racist’, defining racism as ‘racism means long live the white race, long live the British race’.

The November by-election was called following the death of Labour MP Malcolm Wicks and has attracted candidates from the three major parties as well as Respect and UKIP.

The National Front has been a visible fascist and ethnic nationalist party for over 50 years, though its success has never exceeded the 0.6 per cent of the popular vote won in the 1979 general election.

In the 2010 local and general elections, they presented 17 general candidates and 18 local. None were successful.

The party desires for “Britain to remain a white country” and would expel all immigrants from the country if elected.

According to Greater London Authority statistics from 2009, 40 percent of Croydon’s population belong to black and minority ethnic groups.