Has Redwatch been closed down?

On a whim I looked to see what search strings had brought visitors here.  Sometimes this throws up interesting insights like the fact that somebody was searching for the phrase “royal bowel movements”. ((And found that very phrase on this site, I’m proud to say!))

This evening I found nothing too amusing, except somebody searching for “towns in Crawley”, which is like looking for “counties in Essex” or “countries in Algeria” really, but I did notice a lot of visitors who were searching for “redwatch” or “red watch”.

Nothing too unusual there, I do get a few hits from people searching for that, but today there were a lot more than I would have expected.  I wondered if there had been something especially newsworthy happening with the site so I did a Google search myself and found that this site is the number seven result, which was a bit of a surprise.  I also saw that redwatch.org and redwatch.org.uk (the two top results) had ISP advertising matter on them – usually a sign that a domain has gone tits up.  I tried redwatch.net and just got redirected to a page called www.gotjosh.com/suspended.page/  Even the Polish site redwatch.info has gone.

Interesting.  I then looked at the Wikipedia article about Redwatch and leearned two things I did not know:

• It was originally published on paper
• The website has been down since ‘at least’ December 6th of last year

What I have not found out after some, admittedly quick and superficial searching, is any news or information about why it closed.  There have been campaigns to get the site closed down for years.  Well-publicised campaigns, with articles about them in all the major newspapers.  You would have thought that when something that has been written about so much actually happens somebody would notice and rejoice.  Or claim credit.  The Searchlight, UAF and Stop The BNP websites do not even mention the redwatch site’s vanishing act a month after the event.

The silence about such good news is deafening.  Does anybody know what happened?  Maybe I should just claim the credit for it myself since nobody else is coming forward?

At the end of last year I wrote here ((No link.  I can’t be bothered to search for the references on my own site. Who do you think I am? Kerron?? 😉 )) about how frustrating it was that the Blogger site containing the list of BNP members was taken down after a couple of days, while redwatch – a much more deliberately provocative site – continued to operate, especially when the official line of government and law enforcement was always that they could not touch sites operating overseas.

Anyway, it seems to have gone now so I hope I can be forgiven for being a bit cheerful about it.  It wasn’t just that I was on the site with all my personal details – what I really objected to was the very old photo they had of me, wearing my now-legendary yellow jacket.