Anti-fascist Network

Treasurer shifted and more financial chaos as cash disappears into BNP black hole

2009-08-01T21:28:00.000Z

Main bank account down to rock-bottom
Local accounts plundered to make up shortfall
Continuing anger over Spanish jaunts
Treasurer sidelined to BNP post office job
Begging letters get more hysterical
Panic over £30,000 gamble

There's more chaos in the British National Party this weekend as branches reel from the news that once again their accounts have been rifled to prop up an incompetent and extravagant party management.

Furious fundholders have been in touch with us to complain that their local accounts have been raided again because head office has disastrously overspent and can no longer manage to balance the books without thieving from the branches. Another fundholder with a direct line to the treasury has revealed that the main BNP account has hit rock-bottom and stood at less than £3000 a few days ago - not a great deal for a so-called 'major' political party.

BNP head office has often rightly been accused of mismanagement and worse, and the party's former treasurer John Walker (replaced yesterday by former Solihull organiser Jenny Noble) has been rumoured to have hit the bottle heavily as the party's financial situation continues to worsen. Having the incompetent moron Dave Hannam as his second in command can't have been a lot of help either.

Perhaps Walker can relax a little now as he seems to have been put in charge of the equivalent of the BNP post office, becoming the party's National Dispatch and Logistics Manager, a sinecure that looks more like a job that's been created in a hurry to keep him quiet and amenable rather than a job that could be done by any office staff who happen to be on duty.

Oddly, in the article on the BNP website explaining Walker's new job, this little gem appears:

'After months of growth and part way into a major restocking, it has become clear that the Excalibur and Great White Records merchandising operations (now under the same roof), together with the huge mail outs of BNP bulletins and publications, has become such an undertaking that a full-time National Dispatch and Logistics Manager is needed at our Deeside industrial unit.'

As neither Excalibur (the BNP's increasingly tatty merchandise arm) nor Great White Records (GWR) produce accounts that can be perused by the public (presumably because any such accounts would show the excrutiatingly low turnover of each operation) it's hard to know how busy Walker will actually be. Certainly he won't be run off his feet by Great White Records - we're told that sales rarely hit ten a week. But what makes the paragraph above more than usually interesting is the mention of Great White Records being part of the BNP's merchandising operation, when it was our belief that GWR was wholely and solely owned by Dopey Dave Hannam, though the BNP membership forked out £50,000 for the creation of the company. Do we assume that GWR makes a payment to the BNP for the use of its premises and/or its newly-installed National Dispatch and Logistics Manager? After all, the last accounts that were submitted to the Electoral Commission showed £9,618 paid to GWR by the BNP for 'sound assistance at venues'. Is this reciprocal or does the money flow just the one way? We suspect the latter.

Incompetence in the BNP is endemic but nowhere is it more evident than in the treasury. The File on Four programme, broadcast by Radio Four back in February, produced a whole raft of accusations of mismanagement, skullduggery and incompetence against Walker and his merry band of idiots, including the revelation that the BNP is behind with its PAYE payments (that is, the tax it takes from employee's wage packets that it is then supposed to pass on to HM Revenue and Customs). Naturally, the party still hasn't paid the bill and part of the reason for the sudden attack on branch funds was that Her Majesty was getting a tad ratty about the lack of revenue coming from the BNP. Not that the raid helped all that much - last month alone, the party paid out nearly forty thousand pounds on wages, expenses and part of the debt to the Revenue plus a further part-debt to Royal Mail. There's also a big question mark over exactly how much was taken from one place and how much actually made it to its rightful location. The current rumour is that £36,000 was lifted from the branches but only £24,000 made it into the appropriate account. We have no idea how true this is but all further information would be welcome.

Three further financial matters seem to be exciting our fundholders at the moment - the peculiar case of the RentSmart computers, the management jaunt to Spain and the £30,000 gamble. The RentSmart deal is small but peculiar (a bit like Dave Hannam) so we'll tackle that first.

It seems that the BNP signed up to a deal with a company named RentSmart a while back to purchase a number of computers and allied goodies for its operations (including no doubt the ones it claimed were pinched by Sadie Graham and Kenny Smith). Apparently whatever deal the party got eventually cost it around £1,000 per month, an astonishing amount considering that RentSmart examples a Toshiba laptop from only £3 per week on its web page! The RentSmart deal includes a brokerage fee and a commission on the insurance that the rentee (?) takes out as part of the agreement, and if we consider the claims we've heard in the past that all key personnel were issued with laptops and that the new operational base in Wales has been fully equipped with PC World's finest, the £1,000 a month doesn't seem quite so unlikely after all.

Nevertheless, a thousand pounds a month is a lot of dosh and questions are being asked about the intelligence of a three-year rental contract that costs more than it would to pop along to the average computer store and buy something off the shelf, incurs brokerage charges and is for something that most party members consider extravagant to say the least. As one of our correspondents pointed out to us; 'If you haven't already got a computer of your own, you probably don't need one. And if you have, you've already got one and you don't need another one'.

Bad feeling seems to be rife in the BNP at the moment and a lot of it is still revolving around the management jaunts to Spain back in March and April, in that crucial period just before the elections. It was noted that it was Griffin's chums and favourites who went off for their holiday in the sun, and the weak explanation that it was 'cheaper to send people there than to hire suitable facilities in Britain' continues to rankle with a membership that feels it is constantly being harassed with increasingly bizarre and amateurish begging letters (see the tatty Truth Truck begging letter on the left) that are less effective each time a new one is sent out amid continuing claims that the members need to provide just a little more cash for that one big push that just never seems to happen. We've received a number of emails referring to the Spanish management training trip over the past few weeks, a few of which make the perfectly valid point that Griffin's barn was renovated at enormous expense out of BNP funds for precisely this purpose but never actually seems to be used by anyone.

Perhaps the greatest concern of our correspondents is the £30,000 bill that the party could be lumbered with for taking Sadie Graham and co to court - a huge gamble of Nick Griffins which even his closest allies find hard to explain away. It's clear to everyone in the party who knows anything at all about Sadie Graham that she has no money of her own and even if the party wins its High Court case against her, the bill it will still be liable for is going to be enormous - the estimated £30,000, which Griffin told the judge is what it had cost to bring the case against the so-called rebels. Gilbert Davies, a firm of lawyers at Welshpool used by Griffin for this action, are in a rather better position to sue than the average creditor but what seems to really be worrying our correspondents is whether the costs are for Griffin to pay or for the party itself. If the latter is the case, it could well be that the end is nigh - unless some mystery benefactor suddenly shows up with a large wodge of cash.

It has been suggested that Griffin is going to go all out to win the North West seat in next year's Euro election in the hope of bailing the party out of its financial mess but this will require some serious fund-raising beforehand which the branches are not likely to welcome, and a couple of additional problems are emerging that might complicate things next May. The England First Party is busily raising money to stand against Griffin, as is former BNP rebel Bev Jones/Scott, who is planning to stand against him as an Independent.

Things are not looking good for the BNP - again. And once again, it looks like financial incompetence is at the bottom of all the party's woes. But then that's what often happens when you give a former bankrupt and chancer the keys to the safe.

Statement from BNP leadership challenger and supporters

2009-08-01T21:01:00.000Z

Though doomed to failure due to Nick Griffin's habit of surrounding himself with yes-men and hangers-on (like the worryingly stupid Mark Collett), the much talked about leadership challenge from Chris Jackson does seem to be quietly gaining pace. Far from fading speedily into the background, which is what most commentators expected when the challenge became common knowledge, Jackson appears to have garnered the support of some big names, among them BNP founder members Richard Edmonds and Mike Easter.

Jackson's statement is unequivocal, as can be seen below:

'A proper Party structure and Constitution.'

This challenge to NG’s leadership is made as a start to the process in which the Party gets a recognisable normal Constitution for a corporate body under English law. As a talking point, the current leader has, and the founder leader had, enormous talent in some directions and, it seems, none in others. This has meant the Party has not been developed in a balanced manner.

Currently, the Party is effectively run as a dictatorship. There are no ‘checks and balances’. NG appoints all Party officials and consequently, many are ‘yes’ men. Opinions, other than those of NG, lead to dismissal from Party positions and even dismissal from the Party. Over the years NG has held widely varying political views. This means, in our opinion, that his political judgement is very poor. He has made some serious errors in his appointment of personnel, most particularly the appointment of the unstable character, Tony Lecomber, as his chief regulating officer. Further it should be noted that NG has had a poor history concerning money. No prudent organisation would allow someone with his history to be responsible for Party funds.

In our view, the Party must have a proper structure. It must have a number of the key officials directly elected by the members, in particular, the offices of Vice Chairman and Party Treasurer must be directly elected. The Party Chairman would be bound to discuss and agree with the majority of the other elected officials, matters of policy and discipline.

The Party must adopt a set of basic principles; for example, the Party is a party of the whole United Kingdom. It is not just a party of England, or any other part of the United Kingdom. Again, only the original peoples of the United Kingdom would be eligible for membership of the BNP and eventually citizenship of the UK. (An exception would be for people currently living in the UK of closely related European stock.) No Asians, Africans and so on, including half-castes could be members, or expect to live permanently in the UK. It would be understood that all foreigners would be sent back to their homelands, however gently.

The Party would make an effort to unite genuine nationalists into one party. NG is unable to do this. He is an ex-chairman of the National Front and is now persona non-grata in that direction. Similarly, he is unacceptable to the Freedom Party and the BPP. He is also the ex-leader of the International Third Position.

[snip...]

I pledge myself to see the reform of the Party on the above lines.

Chris Jackson: Challenger
Richard Edmonds: Proposer and BNP founder member
Mike Easter: Seconder and BNP founder member

Surprisingly, the statement is pretty explicit. The reference to the party being run as a dictatorship is frequently mentioned - but generally under the safety blanket of a pseudonym on the Stormfront nazi forum (one wonders why a bunch of nazis see anything wrong in a dictatorship, but there you go). What the party tends to keep to itself though, is Griffin's appalling judgement when it comes to selecting personnel (Tony Lecomber, Mark Collett, Lee Barnes, Warren Bennett, Martin Reynolds et al) and Griffin's doubtful (!) history when it comes to financial matters.

This challenge might also prove to be galvanic to the lost or bewildered hardcore of the party and/or older members, as Jackson promises to haul it back a lot closer to its more extreme roots. A very clear part of the statement reads;

'...only the original peoples of the United Kingdom would be eligible for membership of the BNP and eventually citizenship of the UK. (An exception would be for people currently living in the UK of closely related European stock.) No Asians, Africans and so on, including half-castes could be members, or expect to live permanently in the UK. It would be understood that all foreigners would be sent back to their homelands, however gently.'

So the party would see a clear end to the so-called 'modernisation', where Griffin has allowed a token Jew and a half-Turk not only to join but to become councillors, and would be barred to all but whites - which surely must be a breach of some law or other. Not that the modernisation has ever been regarded as anything except a con-trick by anyone with an ounce of sense.

That final sentence bears re-reading too; 'It would be understood that all foreigners would be sent back to their homelands, however gently.' Forced repatriation appears to be back on the agenda then.

If this is not Jackson's genuine statement, we'll assume it's Tony Lecomber up to his misinformation tricks again but if this really is Chris Jackson's statement of intent, it looks like the BNP is set for interesting times in the near future. The party has always been at internal war between the old hardcore and the new(ish)modernisers (who are much the same as the hardcore but believe the public have to be conned into seeing the BNP as more moderate than in the past), and this statement should polarise some opinions nicely.

We will watch developments with a great deal of interest...

Lancaster UAF

Bring back the Doc - all is forgiven

2009-08-01T20:51:00.000Z

Just prior to the most recent local government elections back in May, Nick Griffin issued a royal decree that those blogs that were not directly approved by the party should cease posting, presumably in case somebody (probablyGreen Arrow) said something particularly stupid that could harm the party's chances.

This temporary proscription was, of course, never placed on Tommy Williams' appalling blog because Griffin makes use of it to attack his enemies, as we have seen here and here.

Once the election was over and the stagnation of the BNP had become apparent, Griffin lifted his decree, thus allowing the current free for all where any BNP member with internet access can set up a blog and talk utter rubbish in the name of the party. This has led to an explosion in pro-BNP blogs, most of which are toe-curlingly bad. Far worse though, are the blogs that have been started - some very recently - by those the party regards as the elite, and the most elite of that bunch is, depressingly, the party's deputy-leader and National Press Officer Simon Darby.

Darby, a well-known twitcher (or birdwatcher, to us mere mortals) has the habit of filling his blog posts with a mixture of drivel about how wonderful the BNP is, which birds are popping their heads up at any given moment, sport, his household chores and, bizarrely, big cat crap.

Yes, you read that correctly.

Yesterday, those of us stupid enough to bother ventured over to his blog page only to be confronted with a post about redwings, rugby, Jean-Marie LePen, some tosh about Gordon Brown and an enormous picture of some 'possible' big cat droppings found 'not more than half an hours drive from [his] doorstep'. You'd think the deputy-leader of what he would like us to believe is the fastest-growing political party ever would have better things to do than show us pictures of cat crap from about thirty miles past his front door.

Strangely, this apparently random meandering through Darby's brain seems not to have endeared him to the BNP membership. Quite the opposite in fact. We're informed that several BNP members are pleading with anyone who will listen for the return of the former Press Officer Dr. Phil Edwards (or Stuart Russell, his real name). Even though he was frequently sloshed shortly after opening time and was often extremely rude to those newspapers who he felt had angered or misrepresented him, he did at least blog about the party and its politics occasionally. With him, we got an awful lot of bullshit but, thankfully, no cat crap.

The NNP collapses: Sharon Ebanks announces her retirement from politics

2009-08-01T20:26:00.000Z

One of the contributors to Vanguard, one of the more overtly nazi forums out there, posted the following in the early hours of this morning:

'Announcement by the New Nationalist Party

The leader of the NNP makes the following statement:

On the 11th December 2006 after much discussion with close friends, we decided to form the ‘New Nationalist Party’. It was ostensibly to be an umbrella for decent British patriots to be able to stand in local elections and in May 2007 we did just that.

Nearly 12 months on we have decided to shut down the party to pursue what we feel has been neglected for far too long, our own lives.The NNP was run openly and democratically and I hope that the NNP members and onlookers were pleased with our approach to financial transparency and honesty.

I’d like to wish Keith Axon well in his retirement and I thank him for standing by me in what turned out to be some pretty grim moments, David Williams who has kept up the site and has always been on hand to help and offer support and to those who stood for the NNP last year, you were brave and I sincerely thank you.

For my own part I am physically and emotionally exhausted and bitterly regret that I ever joined the BNP, I have made mistakes in my life like all people but the British National Party was my biggest. I and many others fearful of the dark forces at work in this country risked life, name and reputation only to have it confirmed by the very party we supported that it was all for nothing.

The BNP does contain some decent people and of those I am proud to call them my friends and to the person I will always refer to as ‘Sir’ I shall always cherish your generosity and kindness, were it not for you the Kingstanding court fees would never have been settled.

The monies left in the NNP bank account will be fairly shared out to those members who donated it. I now consider myself retired and a full time mother and grandmother.

Kind Regards
Sharon Ebanks'

It was claimed that this had been posted on the New Nationalist Party (NNP) website, then swiftly removed. Now however, the notice is back and in a prominent position.

Ebanks, who was for a (short) while, the BNP's national fundraiser, came to prominence when she seemed to have won a seat for the BNP in Birmingham's Kingstanding ward. After a High Court ruling, the seat was eventually handed to Labour and that would have been the end of the story but for the BNP's extraordinary behaviour over the next couple of weeks.

Following the BNP's advice, Ebanks chose to defend the case, clearly believing that the party would cover her costs in the event of a loss. In fact, the party made an internal appeal for the money, claiming that £5000 was needed The appeal was successful but, for some bizarre reason of its own, the party chose not to hand it over to Ebanks. This produced an outcry on the hugely supportive nazi forum Stormfront and another collection which was eventually used to pay the bill for her but all this came at the cost of her acrimonious sacking from the BNP.

Since then she has been a constant thorn in the BNP's corporate side, launching a constant series accusations of financial incompetence, corruption and impropriety at the party leadership.

That she has chosen to retire now illustrates, we believe, that she has run out of supportable accusations to make. Though asked numerous times to provide evidence for her claims that the BNP leadership is corrupt, she has chosen to keep her own counsel, leading many to claim that she really has nothing to offer.

No doubt we'll come back to Ebanks at some point but for the moment we'll leave you with the report that appeared on the Covert site. Covert is, you'll recall, run by one Tommy Williams, hardcore racist and known drug-dealer who is widely perceived to be Nick Griffin's attack dog. If nothing else, he's certainly close to the modern, 'we're-not-racist' BNP leadership. You might like to bear that in mind while reading the following.

'Monkey Business: Sharon Ebanks Gives Up The NNP

Sambo is shamed into submission

Half Jamaican mental case Sharon Ebanks has finally sussed out that being half Jamaican and trying to pass herself of as white doesn't work. After a recent confession in her own words that her father was non-other than negro immigrunt Radwell Ebanks the fat ape realised that even she couldn't lie her way out of this one thus decided to call it a day as her whole world collapsed around her. There is more news that she was even collaborating with the police as well as with Gerry Gable. Now what will happen to those members and supporters of the NNP? Lets wait and see as more things come to light. Stooooopid coon.'

Is the BNP's Lee Barnes losing the plot?

2009-08-01T20:15:00.000Z

Before you read on, you need to know that there's an awful lot of swearing in this article. Not from us but from Lee Barnes, the British National Party's legal beagle who seems, at the very least, to have severe anger-management issues.

Barnes' blog, entitled '21st Century British Nationalism', is illustrated with an image of the Celtic god of light, Belenus. Belenus can be identified with the Irish god Bile, and the word bile pretty much sums up a large part of the content of Barnes' blog, which seems to be one of the many vehicles the BNP is currently using to disseminate its impotent fury at well, pretty much everyone and everything really.

A recent post on the blog deals with the closure of the New Nationalist Party (NNP), the group formed around a nucleus of angry BNP ex-pats which decided to give up the ghost a couple of weeks back. This group was led by former would-be BNP councillor Sharon Ebanks who, if you feel you really need to, can be read about here.

Although Barnes isn't actually a member of the BNP, he certainly has taken to using the terminology currently in vogue on the far-right, describing the NNP variously as uniform fetishists, saps and muppets. His major burst of vitriol though, is reserved largely for Ebanks herself, who he calls a 'demented harridan' and who he takes to task several times for her apparent crime (and he should know, or so he says) of being mixed race.

'It is one of the great ironies of history that the last gasp of the old extremist far right was under the leadership of a half black female leader.'

That statement might not actually be racist but it certainly reads like it.

A few days later, he had a go at Pete Doherty of Babyshambles, drugs and Kate Moss fame. Doherty comes in for a lot of flak from the far-right because he's into drugs in a big way and looks like shit but mostly because he's outspoken on the subject of the far-right and is prepared to put his money (and his band) where his mouth is. Because of this, Lee Barnes says;

'Pete Doherty - Junkie scumbag piece of shit worshipped by scumbag UAF fuckwits and NME wankers.'

Barnes talks of nationalism as if he is simply a nationalist but it's clear that, like most of his comrades in the BNP, he is far from that. He is a racist, pure and simple. As a racist, his response to the news that the geneticist James Watson had been universally attacked by more or less the entire media for his views that black people are less intelligent than whites was entirely to be expected;

'The mewling maggot filth of the media that condition and brainwash the masses ensure that the rule of the stupids is ensured. When a man with a mind, a free thinking and visionary mind, dares reveal the stupidity of the stupids then all the stupids come together to destroy him...They are howling and barking and pissing on his footprints...Not one of the media maggots that attacked James Watson, nor the idiotic so called 'scientists' they managed to scrape up from the shallow end of the scientific brain pool to attack him, dared confront him in a free and fair public debate...Instead they all just howled when he left the country and continue pissing on his prints in the mud. What a complete bunch of gutless bastards.'

Not quite the language one would expect from the legal representative of a so-called political party, particularly if one considers that if, by some bizarre and terrible fluke, the BNP suddenly became the governing party, he would be either the Lord Chancellor, Attorney General or the Justice Secretary.

But Sharon Ebanks, Pete Doherty and the media pale into insignificance beside Barnes' hatred for, curiously, the judiciary.

We can all quote numerous cases of judges who appear to have become stuck in the 19th Century or those whose sentences are both ludicrous and insulting to the victims of crime but there is always another stage to go to - the Appeal Court, the High Court, the House of Lords and so on - and our legal system, including the judiciary, is rightly regarded as one of the best in the world - or was until the right to trial by jury was abolished for many types of case. I'm no great advocate for the law but if I was to be tried for a crime anywhere, I would rather be tried here in the UK. Mistakes are made but justice - in a very general sense - is fairly well-served. Though if you listen to Lee Barnes, you may well think again.

Injustice rightly makes us angry. Severe and blatant injustice can leave us seething with anger and, if the government of the day is watching the media, which generally follows the lead given to it by the public, can lead to changes in the law which we hope will eventually benefit all of us, not just those who have directly suffered. But even when dealing with a case of outrageous injustice, the government, in the form of its Ministers and other representatives, speaks of such things in measured tones, keeping emotion firmly to one side as it deals with whatever the problem may be in a dignified and resolute manner. Compare that to Barnes' views on some of the judiciary;

'Yet again the dumb fucking Leftist and Liberal judges that infest the legal system like lice on a dying dogs back, have let a piece of shit free...This judge is the same cunt that gave the Wonderland paedophile gang sentences that equated to 15 months in prison...this cunt needs sacking...The fucking judges put Kevin Hughes away for 2 years because he had a scuffle with an asylum seeker that led to the asylum seekers shirt being ripped...This cunt blinds an old man and he walks free - yet we all know the real reason dont we. Yep, hes from an ethnic minority.'

What Barnes deliberately forgets to mention is that the victim was from an ethnic minority too. And the reason that the attacker wasn't jailed? Because, in the words of the judge;

'[Jailing him] would do nothing to protect the public in the future and my real concern is the public. It seems to me that the best way of ensuring that he is not a risk, is in relying on various support from psychiatrists and probation officers.'

The attacker, a diagnosed paranoid schizophrenic, was sentenced to a three year supervision order which requires him to receive psychiatric treatment. A jail term would serve simply to punish the man: at least this way, he both suffers a form of punishment and receives proper supervision and treatment.

Justice is a very tricky game but it is worst served by those who put emotion before sense, a failing that suits the knee-jerk populist policies of the self-serving BNP.

One wonders about Barnes' legal training and education. Though they appear to have been enough to make him the BNP's legal whizkid, they don't seem to have been of a high enough quality to help him spell 'apointee' or 'farsical'. They do however, allow his inherent racism to show itself on any available occasion.

In an attack on sentences that he deems too lenient, it's notable that Barnes makes his appeal on emotional grounds in the first instance, using paedophile-sentencing to illustrate his perhaps fair point that sexual crimes against children should almost automatically receive the highest sentence that can be given under the law. The point is lost though by the long list of exclusively illegal immigrants, asylum-seekers and just people with non-English names who are listed for all sorts of crimes simply because they are not white and thus are natural targets for BNP ire. Any selection of criminals, whether it is based on the nature of the crime, the apparent low sentence or even the age of the accused, will show the larger proportion are white - Lee Barnes' idiosyncratic selection has proven that his legal eye has a definite list away from justice for any kind of ethnic minority, which perhaps explains why he's not actually a practising solicitor or barrister.

Normally I'd make allowances for someone who regularly sees UFOs (honest), ignoring them in much the same as I would those who regularly communicate with their spirit guide, but in Barnes' case I'll make an exception. For a man who is meant to represent the BNP's views on legal matters, in my opinion he comes across as a racist thug - no different from the shaven-headed loons who used to march with Nick Griffin in the National Front, except that he has hair.

The BNP purge continues: Griffin to discipline/expel Mike Easter?

2009-08-01T18:13:00.000Z

In a move that is so full of irony that the BNP had better check it for rust, news is emerging that Mike Easter, election agent to leadership-challenger Chris Jackson, is to be disciplined for late submission of the challenger's election expenses to the party treasurer.

One would expect a party that is a couple of months late with its own accounts submission to the Electoral Commission to have had more sense that to make itself a target for ridicule in this way but Nick Griffin is presumably so anxious to punish those who assisted the challenger that he is prepared to ignore the laughs to get his revenge.

Regular readers will no doubt recall his description of Chris Jackson's supporters as cranks, Hollywood Nazis, congenital losers, thieves and vermin - and all this in a single blog post - despite the fact that they included five founder-members, two advisory council members, three councillors, eight branch organisers and 20 election candidates. Not a great deal of respect there then.

The response from other 'nationalists' is predictably angry though as usual the nazi Stormfront forum (run by Griffin's friend, ex-Klansman Don Black and ably assisted by the forum's pro-Griffin UK moderators) is keeping a lid on any discussion by disabling the accounts of anyone who shows any sign of having a go at the BNP leader under any pretext. A couple of other sites are displaying their anger though, one of them with this classic comment posted to it;

'...this comes from a party of THEIVING BASTARDS and INEBRIATE LOSERS who can't even get their accounts IN ON TIME. WHERE ARE THE BNP ACCOUNTS AND WHY ARE BNP MEMBERS SUCH A BUNCH OF BRAIN-DEAD IDIOTS? WHAT THE HELL ARE THEY SCARED OF, EH? Surely they cannot be scared of the one eyed wonder of a sheep farmer and his pervert security chief?'

along with the omnipresent Sharon Ebanks, a former supporter of Griffin, sticking it to him thus;

'Do you think it ok to allow a jumped up twat with a 3rd rate degree and an insecurity complex larger than Snowdonia national park to just go around chopping people willy nilly? When you cease kissing Griffins arse you'll be next. The very idea that such a man even dreams of running this country makes me want to take up shooting practice.'

One angry contributor asks the same two questions that many others have asked;

'What I can't get my head around is why the BNP election process (that's to say the terms imposed by Griffin, etc) weren't challenged legally. It still can be. Likewise all the trumped up expulsions.'

These are reasonable questions though the first one is really only answerable by Mike Easter himself and the challenger Chris Jackson. When Nick Griffin dictated the terms of the election, it was suggested that a legal challenge to the terms was likely. Sadly this never materialised (though it certainly should have). To have completely ignored the ludicrous restrictions placed on campaigning was tantamount to agreeing to lose, and lose Jackson subsequently did.

The second part of the question is far more dangerous to Griffin - that those expelled from the party could legally question their expulsions. This is not only true but has happened a couple of times before, following Griffin's repeated expulsions of the late founder of the British National Party John Tyndall for being a 'disruptive influence'. Tyndall was reinstated by the courts, the embarrassment caused to Griffin was profound and it cost the party a small fortune, also having the distinct advantage of showing Nick Griffin up as the pompous buffoon that he is.

Of course, disciplinary action isn't necessarily the same thing as expulsion and it may be that Easter will just take what's coming and carry on doing whatever he does but judging by Griffin's words above, he's determined to force all of his opposition out of the party by using any means that are available to him. Simon Smith and Jonathan Bowden have already been forced out, Easter's turn has come and we confidentally expect Jackson-supporter Richard Edmonds (another one to have been expelled then reinstated) to be in the firing line before long. One only wonders how long it will take for Griffin to expel all 337 party members who supported Chris Jackson.

Fraud, incompetence and lies - the truth about the BNP's finances

2009-08-01T17:49:00.000Z

Those who read this blog and other anti-fascist sites regularly will know that one of the outstanding traits of the British National Party is its propensity to become embroiled in an almost perpetual series of financial disasters. File on Four last night pointed out some of those that we have already encountered but a couple of things emerged that look likely, if the organisations concerned take action now rather than waiting and allowing the party to cover up its misdeeds, to lead to criminal charges.

One of the problems that the BBC faces when conducting an investigation of this kind is that of evidence, or rather the lack of hard evidence. Where MPs can get away with using Parliamentary privilege to make accusations without the risk of comeback and we, to a certain extent, can get away with a lot (largely due to the fact that any action taken against us would be financially untenable) the BBC has to conform to libel laws in every respect, making sure it has the evidence to back up its claims before it makes them. While this limits the BBC in what it can say, every claim it makes is more valid because it has the solid evidence, or at least clear testimony, to back it up.

Last night's File on Four brought us a whole swathe of information, some of which we already know, but also some new and interesting tidbits.

Possible donation fraud
Potential PAYE fraud
Dodgy unreceipted transactions
Lies from the BNP's treasurer
Shredded documents

Possible donation fraud

The programme began with a mention of the party's involvement with the American Friends of the BNP (AFBNP). To introduce the AFBNP section there was a snippet of a speech given by Nick Griffin on a fund-raising tour in the States where, referring to white rule in South Africa, he stated, '...it was wrong and immoral and it was short-sighted but...at least it was white.' This is apropos of nothing except to remind us that the BNP is a racist organisation and should be treated as such.

Run by Mark Cotterill, AFBNP was purely a fund-raising operation, deliberately based on the American fund-raising arm of Sinn Fein. AFBNP was extremely successful though it has been claimed that a lot of the money raised went adrift and never ended up in the party coffers.

It was while Cotterill was fund-raising in the States that the then new rule came into force that limited foreign donations to £200. Though this was the case, Cotterill stated, there was nothing to say how many times such donations could be made - the implication being that this was how the BNP crept around the letter of the law. The legislation is and was clear however, such behaviour is criminal - not that we expect the BNP to care overmuch about breaking the law.

Back in February 2006, Griffin was speaking at an AmRen conference in the States (organised by a former prominent member of the Ku Klux Klan). During his speech, he asked his audience to donate to the BNP via Civil Liberty, a BNP front-group. Civil Liberty, according to its website, is an organisation set up by the BNP 'solely in order to assist the thousands of British citizens who have been denied justice on the grounds of their race, skin colour, ethnicity or political opinion'. Curiously, the only people it has ever tried to do anything for since it was set up back in January 2006 around the time of the Griffin/Collett trial at Leeds Crown Court are, as is clear from its website, two BNP members who it claims were unfairly dismissed from their jobs.

Civil Liberty, which according to the British National Party is an 'independent organisation', is headed up by BNP North-East organiser Kevin Scott, whose personal history includes a conviction for assault (1987), a conviction for using threatening words and behaviour (1993) and who wrote an article in the International Third Position newspaper, 'The Final Conflict' in 2001. That the BNP's Civil Liberty is racist is patently obvious. When contacted to see if he would stand by the vow, featured on the Civil Liberty website, to represent absolutely anyone, Scott admitted: 'If a black Muslim approached us for help I would suggest they go to Liberty where they will get a sympathetic ear.'

Civil Liberty's former treasurer was the BNP's recent Head of Admin Kenny Smith, now one of the dissident Voice of Change group. Its contact address is the PO Box that belongs to the BNP's North-East Region.

The BNP's Civil Liberty, by the way, has absolutely no connection to Liberty, the extremely active and much-respected human rights and civil liberties organisation.

The problem with Civil Liberty and its alleged role as a suspected money-laundering operation for the BNP is that it's next to impossible to check its finances without a proper legal investigation taking place. It's not a charity and it's not a registered company. It's not anything really except the non-operating group it claims to be on its website - or that's how it appears. Adrian Davies, barrister and former Griffin-supporter, stated on the programme that he attended the AmRen conference with Griffin and witnessed people queuing up to hand over large sums of cash to the BNP leader, ostensibly (nudge-nudge) for Civil Liberty but who can say where it has really ended up?

The invisible rubber cheque

While we're on the subject of donations, regular readers may recall Nick Griffin boasting on being cleared of race hate charges back in February 2006 that the party had been swamped with donations, including a single cheque for £20,000. This was apparently raised thanks to the omnipresent Sharon Ebanks, who owned up to spamming forums and blogs with pleas for money for the BNP. Fair enough - she was the party's fundraiser at the time and that's how they do business.

File on Four pointed out to John Walker that this £20,000 didn't seem to have appeared in the accounts that were submitted to the Electoral Commission for the appropriate period. Walker's response was a little odd, to say the least, for he seemed to find the incident 'slightly amusing'. The cheque, he claimed, bounced.

Were Lancaster Unity lucky enough to be given a cheque for £20,000 (hint-hint) that subsequently bounced, we wouldn't laugh much at all.

This rubber cheque appears to be a lot more important than it first appeared, to the extent that the BNP website has an explanation entitled 'Third Rate Marxist Lies from the Reds at the BBC' on the front page of its website. This explanation includes an image that purports to be part of a bank statement which shows the cheque being paid in on Jan 30th and rejected on Feb 2nd.

According to Walker; 'The cheque was duly deposited into the BNP bank account but was returned a few days later by the bank as refer to drawer. The cheque had bounced and attempts to contact the donor proved unsuccessful.'

He also claimed that he could produce the cheque but when asked was unable to, claiming that his deputy treasurer was away 'and he is the only one with access to the filing system'. Hmm...

Potential PAYE fraud

Around late October 2006, Sadie Graham, the BNP's former Head of Group Development, was asked to come off the payroll and go self-employed because, it was stated, the party was having trouble paying its PAYE bill. Kenny Smith, the former Head of Administration, was asked to do the same thing shortly after her and for the same reason.

As far as I can gather, where someone is employed for set hours for a set wage, the employer must handle the tax (PAYE). What happens in responsible companies is that the company puts the money away each wage cycle and at the end of the tax year pays up. This obviously doesn't work for the BNP, for it found itself several thousand pounds short when it received the tax bill. To get around this problem in future, it asked Graham and Smith to go self-employed and thus to sort out their own tax.

Two things arise from this. One is the astonishing financial incompetence of a political group that claims it is on the way to government (where presumably BNP treasurer John Walker would end up as Chancellor) and the other is the illegality of demanding that an employee should do any such thing.

Sadie Graham at least has consulted a solicitor over this issue so we'll leave it for now but we can see this popping up again - particularly as the reporter from File on Four stated clearly that charges could follow. Sub judice and all that.

Shredded documents

There was a lot of information in the programme and it's certainly too much to put in a single article that has to be up on the blog today, but one of the more intriguing snippets concerned the infamous bag of shredded documents.

Former treasurer John Brayshaw refused to sign off the accounts because he hadn't been allowed access to all the relevant documents and because he was aware that serious offences had been committed. He claimed that Walker and his deputy Dave Hannam visited his house 'for a week' to look at the accounts and make them balance. During the course of that week, a number of documents were shredded and Brayshaw was eventually ordered to burn these when Walker and Hannam left. Brayshaw chose not to do this but instead wrote to the Electoral Commission stating his concerns at the accounts and alleging a number of offenses. The Electoral Commission, for reasons known only to itself, chose to largely ignore him.

The shredded documents eventually found their way to File on Four, where they were examined closely and, in some cases, stuck back together. Walker claims on the BNP website that the documents 'appeared to be in the main, working copies of the print outs of the book keeping software and draft accounts...these drafts and working copies were quite properly shredded for the very reason that the BBC has a habit of scuttling around in the night raiding peoples bin bags. If the BBC is not guilty of theft, they are clearly in the possession of stolen property and I will be considering reporting the BBC to the police for this offence'.

Where there's no defence, attack is the only option.

The shredded documents are not as innocent as Walker would have us believe, even though he denied their existence until confronted with them. Some that are easily identifiable proved to be cheques, petrol receipts, Trafalgar Club and Excalibur documents, financial records (NOT, it should be noted, print-outs) and documents that referred directly to Nick Griffin and his parents, Edgar and Jean. Walker denied knowing who had shredded any cheques, of course.

The shredding of documents is not, in and of itself, illegal. But the BNP operates as a political party and/or a company and has to submit accounts, deal with tax and so on. As a legal entity, it is forced to conform to the law and one of the laws regarding such organisations is that things such as cheques, petrol receipts and financial documents have to be kept for six years after the end of the relevant tax year. Not to do so, is a criminal offence.

All in all, an intriguing programme that was only able to touch the surface of the corruption that is endemic within and around the British National Party. The feeling I got from it is that there is a lot more information to be dug out - but that's the feeling we all get when the words 'corruption' and 'BNP' are mentioned in the same sentence.

One result of the programme could have interesting repercussions yet. Jon Cruddas, MP for Dagenham, stated that he was going to approach the Electoral Commission to ask if it had ever asked to see brayshaw's evidence for his claims of allegedly dodgy accounts and if not, why they ignored his claims.

This story looks set to run and run...

Antifascist

Call for full investigation into BNP finances

Investigations into the British National Party’s finances by the BBC and Searchlight have revealed the sheer incompetence of the Electoral Commission. The Commission, which oversees political party finances, has repeatedly failed to investigate properly a series of allegations of BNP wrongdoing.

In 2005 the BNP’s former treasurer, John Brayshaw, wrote to the Commission pointing out that he had refused to sign off the BNP’s accounts because he had not been given access to all the records he needed to see and had resigned after a number of irregularities had come to light. Yet the Electoral Commission said it had no reason to believe a breach of the party funding law had taken place.

It is illegal for political parties to accept any donations of more than £200 from individuals who are not registered to vote in the UK. In June 2005 Searchlight wrote to the Electoral Commission drawing attention to a blatant attempt by Nick Griffin, the leader of the BNP, to solicit large US donations to the BNP by channelling them through a BNP front group called Civil Liberty. Again the Electoral Commission did not consider that any breach had occurred.

Searchlight wrote again to the Electoral Commission in May 2006 about another attempt to channel overseas donations of more than £200 through Civil Liberty. Although the Electoral Commission told us that our complaint would be investigated, we heard nothing more.

Searchlight demands that the Electoral Commission mounts a proper investigation into the BNP taking account of the evidence uncovered by Searchlight and the BBC Radio 4’s File on 4 programme broadcast on 12 February, as well as the matters raised by Jon Cruddas, MP for Dagenham, in an adjournment debate in the House of Commons on 18 December 2007, which he subsequently reported to the Electoral Commission and the Metropolitan Police. They include:

John Brayshaw’s statement about irregularities while he was BNP treasurer and the shredding of BNP financial documents.
The BNP’s attempts on more than one occasion to solicit overseas donations via Civil Liberty.
The fact that the only two officers of Civil Liberty were both BNP officers, Civil Liberty’s PO Box address is the same as that of the BNP’s North East region and there is no evidence that Civil Liberty has given legal support to anyone who is not a member of the BNP.
The statement to File on 4 by Adrian Davies, a barrister who has often represented the BNP, that he saw people queuing up to give cash to Griffin at a rightwing conference in the USA.
The unusual pattern of large donations that the BNP has reported to the Electoral Commission.
The verdict of Chris Makin, a forensic accountant engaged by File on 4, on the BNP’s accounts.
The fact that the BNP never submitted any accounts to the Electoral Commission for the last three months of 2001.

If the Electoral Commission fails once again to investigate the BNP fully, it rests with Parliament to initiate a thorough review of how the Electoral Commission exercises its role.

Searchlight

Legal challenge to make BNP leadership election democratic?

2009-08-01T16:00:00.000Z

Rumour has it that Chris Jackson, the challenger for Nick Griffin's leadership of the British National Party and the party's former North-West regional organiser, is about to make a legal challenge against the election rules as set by Griffin himself. These rules, though played down by the Griffin camp as standard, are intended to make it almost impossible for any challenger to win.

Since the modern BNP was formed back in 1982 there has been just one leadership challenge, when Nick Griffin took over from the party's founder John Tyndall after a campaign of lies and distortion in 1999. Tyndall was far from being an angel but Griffin knew how to manipulate the truth far better than he and, with the help of many of his friends who had moved with him from the old National Front, he was able to oust Tyndall and take the party off in a new direction.

Sadly, the direction Griffin chose was as far from democracy as could be imagined, with Griffin ruling the party as a dictator. This is clear from the contortions that the BNP is going through to ensure that Jackson is denied a voice during the pre-election period.

Griffin laid out the rules in a list that appeared on the main BNP website:

'Each candidate shall send via email an official statement not exceeding 200 words, together with a photograph of himself, to the editor of the British Nationalist BNP members’ bulletin, Kenny Smith (administration@bnp.org.uk), by noon on Thursday 5th July at the latest.

Additionally, each candidate shall send via email to Mr. Smith a longer and complimentary official statement not exceeding 800 words which will be published with the photographs side-by-side on a section of the main BNP website which will be open to members only with a URL which will be published in the July issue of British Nationalist [which we would appreciate taking a look at, if someone would like to let us know where it is]. The candidates’ statements and photographs will then appear in the July issue of British Nationalist, which will be sent to all members.

A single sheet ballot paper, designed to be as proof against forgery as is reasonably possible, will be mailed out together with July’s British Nationalist bulletin. The statements for the website will be published simultaneously online by our web editor Steve Blake on Wednesday 11th July.

Ballot papers must be returned by post to PO Box 87, Ossett, Wakefield, WF5 8WN to arrive by Thursday 26th July at the latest. All ballots received before that date will be safely stored unopened. The opening of the ballot papers will commence at 3pm that afternoon. You will be notified of precise directions in good time in due course. Each candidate and agent may attend and may bring an additional two telling agents with them should they so wish.

The whole proceedings will be under the control of the Returning Officer, party manager Nick Cass. The opening and counting of the papers will be carried out by four currently paid up members of the party, two nominated by each candidate. Any spoilt or unclear ballots will be adjudicated upon by the standard method used in UK elections, with the decision of the Returning Officer being final. The result will be announced immediately after the count and the winner will be the leader of the party from that moment.

From now until the close of polls, both candidates and their supporters are at liberty to appear and speak at any party meetings to which they are invited by local officials, and to organise campaign meetings of their own. In order to avoid giving an unfair advantage to the incumbent, or encouraging the illicit collection of membership data, neither candidate nor their agents or supporters shall distribute any information, in any form, by post, phone or email, except in response to a direct request from an individual member for information for him or herself.'

So Chris Jackson has around three weeks to prepare and present his manifesto, travel to speak to all of the numerous BNP branches in the country (at his own expense) to state his case, is not allowed to send a mailout to all party members or even telephone party members who may be sympathetic to his challenge but need the personal touch to clinch the deal and has no chance of checking the returned ballot papers as they come in and are 'safely stored' by Griffin's old chum Nick Cass.

One wonders how easy it would be for the Griffin team to pack a few thousand envelopes with Griffin votes and put them in the post. Not too difficult, I'd imagine. Quick, someone call the United Nations.

Apart from being the incumbent, Griffin has another few advantages. He has plenty of money and no doubt will be zooming all over the place kissing babies and shaking hands wherever he is invited to do so. Also, while denying Jackson the opportunity of getting his message out to the members, he has an excellent and continuing opportunity in the form of the nazi Stormfront forum. In spite of being proscribed to BNP members, Stormfront is packed with them and has shown a very clear bias over the last couple of months since news of the challenge became known by closing any anti-Griffin/pro-Jackson threads and, over the past couple of weeks at least, closing any thread that dared to highlight or discuss the epidemic of corruption at the top of the BNP.

Jackson frankly doesn't stand much of a chance though a legal challenge to the Griffin-dictated election rules might push a lot of votes his way. Even so, we would expect Griffin to win fairly resoundingly. The BNP membership is conservative by nature and dramatic change is not something it generally wishes to see, still less participate in. Nevertheless, we may be surpised. A membership sick to death of the numerous get rich quick schemes that inevitably go wrong, a membership that remembers that not a single seat was gained in May's council elections or a membership that has realised that the party hasn't had a single by-election win for years might actually get it together to vote for change and let's face it, if he's not kicked out, Griffin will stay leader of the BNP until he considers he has enough money to retire on or he manages to bankrupt the party.

Lancaster UAF

Far-right loses the plot on gay equality

2009-08-01T14:14:00.000Z

Nick Griffin and the British National Party, ever attempting to make themselves more popular, have come out (if you'll excuse the expression) against homosexuality, albeit in a fairly half-hearted way. Not averse to stating that homosexuality is, in its opinion, wrong, the BNP's monumental hypocrisy also allows it to take the line of least resistance and ignore the fact that it exists as long as any homosexual activity takes place behind closed doors and doesn't frighten the horses.

Griffin, famously embroiled in a homosexual relationship with Martin Webster back in his old National Front days, has recently taken a hypocritically firm stance against gays both in and out of the party but has taken great care to ignore what goes on immediately around him, that it suits him to ignore. Richard 'Dickie' Barnbrook, leader of the BNP contingent at Barking and Dagenham, must have caused him a few problems then with the extensive publicity over his ghastly gay porn film HMS Discovery.

Griffin isn't the only one who is ready to jump on any available perceived anti-gay bandwagon. Unsteady Eddy Morrison, 'National Political Advisor' to the miniscule British People's Party, has also taken a public stance against homosexuality, though in Morrison's case, he is at least prepared to state where the party stands unequivocally;

'The British People’s Party opposes homosexuality as a perversion of nature. We do not allow homosexual and lesbians into membership. If the BPP find any have joined they will expelled immediately!'

Eddy Morrison would be pretty funny if he wasn't a nazi. The most recent Nationalist Week, an online magazine that he writes when he's only half-pissed, has this to say about the perceived modern misuse of the word 'gay';

'The BPP does not use the word "gay" to describe these obnoxious people. Gay is an old English word that means "to be happy and contented". True to form, the politically correct Pink Mafia has hijacked the word. To us in the BPP, they are queers...'

As indeed, they often are to other queers, many of whom have discarded the word 'gay' and happily (indeed gaily) reclaimed the word 'queer'. Many of us will remember the same drivel about the word 'gay' being said thirty or forty years ago, showing that Morrison really hasn't moved with the times at all. Poor old Eddy can be discarded as a simple and narrow-minded buffoon, especially after one digests the following line from Nationalist Week;

'You can find members of the Pink Mafia everywhere, like maggots infesting a rotting piece of wood.'

Do maggots infest rotting wood? Not that I go around checking dead wood on every possible occasion, but I rather thought one would be more likely to find woodlice.

Griffin and Morrison's respective political parties (if either of them have a right to the description) are both trying desperately to popularise themselves - the BNP rather more than the BPP - and Griffin in particular believes that a public expression of disgust and contempt for homosexuals is going to earn him kudos with the voting public. He may however, find his attacks backfiring on him because a very recent YouGov poll for Stonewall finds 90% of the British population support the ban on discrimination against gays and lesbians.

Nor is Griffin's attempted hijack of Christianity likely to help him. Despite the protestations of some church leaders, as many as 85% specifically back the sexual orientation regulations, which make discrimination against gays and lesbians in the provision of goods and services an offence. The survey shows that 'people of faith' were as likely to support gay equality as members of the wider population. In fact the poll depicts a society predominantly at ease with one of the key social changes of the past twenty years.

One of the BNP's anti-gay themes revolves around gay members of staff in schools but even here the party has got it wrong because three out of four said they would be comfortable if their child's teacher was gay. Even more said they would happily be treated by a gay doctor.

Football, the great leveller which has done so much to oppose racism simply by having great players of all colours working together on the same team, won't help Griffin out over this issue either. 92% said they would have no complaints if it emerged that a footballer in a team they supported was gay, while 80% said a gay member of the royal family would not cause a problem either. Even nearer to Griffin's particular knuckle, 89% said they would back laws making it illegal to incite hatred on the grounds of sexual orientation, thus giving the anti-Semitic, anti-Muslim and now anti-gay Griffin even more opportunities to appear in court.

'I'm delighted we now have hard evidence that people don't want to live in a society that allows prejudice against any group of people, including lesbians and gay men, to fester,' said Ben Summerskill, Stonewall's chief executive. 'Britain is a tolerant country with a widespread acceptance that prejudice has no proper place in civil society'.

Nick Griffin may have a late-developing problem with homosexuality but it's pretty obvious that hardly anybody else has.

Lancaster UAF

BNP candidate in anti-Catholic claims: the indefatigable Alan Girvan strikes again!

2009-08-01T14:07:00.000Z

This article was submitted by one of our readers, Hexapla. We welcome any contributions from our supporters (as long as those contributions conform to the law and are in reasonably good taste). Please send your articles to us via email.

Anti-Catholicism?

One of our favourite BNP Walter Mitty characters, the erudite BNP candidate Alan Girvan from Dewsbury has made some very strange legal claims: that Catholic emancipation in Britain is illegal and it is also illegal for all non-Protestants to hold public office!

If it wasn’t for the sheer and utter strangeness of Alan Girvan’s somewhat nuanced legal pronouncement (God knows what provoked it), under ordinary conditions one would normally be filled with admiration for a chap who attempts to single handily overturn roughly 330 years of continuous law through the medium of a solitary internet posting.

On the Archbishop Cranmer blog, Alan Girvan, posting as ‘cromwell316’, makes the following anti-emancipation argument:

“The Bill of Rights 1689 was not an ordinary act of Parliament it was an act of settlement which actually sets up the legality for the present state and give Parliament its power in the first place. It also clearly states that changes to it, were themselves illegal. The Catholic Relief Act implied (not explicit) repeal of the Bill of Rights so my point being that the Bill of Rights was superceded by an unlawful bill, which emancipated Catholics as long as they swore an Oath (even that Act has been repealed since) so all these individuals who are now determined to break what is by LAW a Protestant Kingdom whether they be Catholic, Muslim, Atheist or even Marxists' are not even lawfully in office”.

Now for those of you who were asleep during GSCE History class, the Catholic Relief Act 1778 (culminating in the Catholic Relief Act 1829) initiated a process in Britain and Ireland in the late 18th century and early 19th century which involved reducing and removing many of the discriminatory restrictions on Catholics which had been introduced by the Act of Uniformity, the Test Acts and the Penal Laws. However, Alan Girvan argues that the Catholic Relief Acts are illegal and by extension so is the resultant emancipation of Catholics. Seemingly, Alan Girvan wants to turn the clock back and re-inaugurate discriminatory measures that once made Catholics second-class citizens in their own country. Not only this, but from his subterranean perspective, any British person who is a non-Protestant i.e. a Catholic, Orthodox (Christian), Atheist, Jew, Muslim, Buddhist, etc. is wilfully breaking the law by holding public office in the United Kingdom! Beat that for logic!

BNP’s tainted image amongst Catholics

In the past, the BNP’s appeal to Ulster Catholics has been undermined by its open association with anti-Catholic and anti-Irish Loyalist terrorist groups. Nor will it help that, for example, John Oddy, when he was the BNP’s north-west Wales organiser, allegedly boasted of killing innocent civilians in northern Ireland whilst as a serving soldier, or that its northern Ireland organiser, Andy McLorie (who recently joined a breakaway BNP faction dedicated to removing the current BNP leader Nick Griffin), was jailed for his participation in a Loyalist bomb attack on a Belfast home. When interviewed by the police over the bomb attack, Andy McLorie allegedly made use of the term ‘Taig’, a racist term used to denigrate Catholics. If it weren’t for the lack of space we would list more incidences of anti-Catholic sectarianism and anti-Irish racism committed by BNP members (perhaps to be covered in a separate article).

One can’t help but feel that Alan Girvan is motivated by an antiquated sectarian apathy towards especially Catholics. After all, why the need to specifically doubt the legal freedoms of Catholics, freedoms that are benignly enjoyed by the rest of us? I thought that the BNP was supposed to be concentrating on attacking Muslims (codeword for ‘Asians’) as its current choice of hapless victim. Alan Girvan’s views on Catholic emancipation can only embarrass and impede the BNP’s efforts to cultivate support amongst Catholics in northern Ireland (as well as damage its image amongst Catholics on the mainland).

The strange world of Alan Girvan

Alan Girvan is one of many BNP members who, despite their opposition to the anti-fascist movement, periodically takes to posting on anti-fascist sites. Quite recently Alan Girvan indulged us with a posting on the anti-fascist blog, Kirklees Unity, attacking the pro-Nick Griffin wing of the BNP as “malevolent”. This was Alan Girvan expressing this support for Colin Auty, the BNP councillor from Kirklees, in his attempt to displace Nick Griffin as leader of the BNP. But, what was most strange was Alan Girvan’s claim in his posting that his is an “ex-BNP member since Jan 2008”. Seizing on this, Kirklees Unity pointed out the following to Alan Girvan: “Please explain why you still felt the need to stand as a BNP candidate in a winnable seat if you had quit the party back in January?”

Kirklees Unity is 100% correct. In the recent May 2008 local council elections Alan Girvan stood as the BNP’s candidate in the Dewsbury East ward. Strange. Even stranger was Alan Girvan’s claim several years ago, when he stood as an independent candidate in Dewsbury, that he was being manipulated by larger forces as part of some grand anti-BNP conspiracy!

But, what was perhaps Alan Girvan’s finest Walter Mitty moment was his claims to the Yorkshire Post newspaper that he was a “former advisor to American president George W Bush”! How the mighty have fallen, going from having the ear of the world’s most powerful man to being a lowly BNP underling in Dewsbury.

Nor has Alan Girvan had much luck of late in either of his BNP or romantic endeavours! Earlier on in May 2008, Alan Girvan was caught out breaching copyright laws when he used images from the TV show Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? in his BNP literature. At the time, 2waytraffic, the company that owns the copyright to the Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? images threatened Alan Girvan with legal action unless the BNP leaflets were withdrawn from circulation.

Shortly before that, Alan Girvan failed in his BNP legal bid to have postal voting banned in Kirklees. Naturally, the court resisted the BNP’s anti-democratic bid and awarded costs against Alan Girvan (if Alan Girvan truly cares about democracy, then he should launch a court case trying to ban BNP candidates registered at fake addresses from standing for election or to have the BNP’s ban on its members joining certain political parties lifted).

Though we understand from rumours that Alan Girvan is currently dating a stripper, we hope that this means Alan Girvan is no longer posting ‘adult’ adverts on various internet dating sites or on popular sites such as FaceParty (quite popular with certain senior BNP officials and their swinger sex parties). We feel that despite his divorce and his dating a stripper, Alan Girvan very much exemplifies the BNP’s much touted family values.

Lastly, we’re contemplating holding a whip-round for hapless old Alan - it seems he’s having difficulty paying his TV licence. I recently came across Alan Girvan complaining on a yahoo forum about having to purchase a TV license and asking fellow contributors on ways he could get round having to buy one! Sorry, Alan but we’ve all got to have one.

Anyway, below are some links for those of you who are interested in learning more about BNP candidate Alan Girvan:

http://lancasteruaf.blogspot.com/2008/05/bnp-in-hot-water-over-millionaire.html
http://norfolkunity.blogspot.com/2008/03/bnps-alan-girvan-suitable-case-for.html
http://lancasteruaf.blogspot.com/2008/03/have-you-heard-one-about.html
http://lancasteruaf.blogspot.com/2008/03/bnp-fail-in-bid-to-stop-postal-votes.html?showComment=1206816720000
http://kirkunity.blogspot.com/2007/03/only-lonely-its-alan-girvan.html
http://kirkunity.blogspot.com/2008/03/is-girvan-unhinged.html
http://kirkunity.blogspot.com/2008/03/now-here-is-good-one.html
http://kirkunity.blogspot.com/2008/04/its-quiz-time.html

¡No Pasarán!

Butler attacks 'joke' leadership challenger

2009-08-01T13:25:00.000Z

A copy of an email from Eddy Butler, the BNP's National Elections Officer, has been forwarded to us as an example of all that is undemocratic within the British National Party

It refers to the coming leadership challenge from Colin Auty, BNP councillor for Dewsbury East since 2006. Auty announced his challenge immediately after the recent elections, and is receiving growing support in the party for his call for openness, accountability and a more democratic internal structure to the party, despite a barrage of verbal attacks on him from the existing hierarchy on both the BNP's own forum and the Stormfront nazi forum, where many of the BNP's officers hang out.

Despite what is said in public, the news we get from inside the party indicates that the officers (and Nick Griffin himself) are none too pleased with the election results of a fortnight ago. They expected to get a lot more than an additional ten councillors (pushing the current total up to fifty-three) and had also hoped for three Assembly seats, ending up with just the one presently occupied by the embarrassing and frequently incoherent Richard Barnbrook. Given that this poor result reflects badly on the leadership of the party, such as it is, the last thing Griffin needs at the moment is a leadership challenge. He is, we are told, already putting himself about in London, to ensure that BNP activists are aware that HE is the chairman of the party, and not Barnbrook. Bless him, he must be feeling vulnerable.

Butler appears to be writing to the BNP's election team - the people at Head Office and the various organisers dotted around the country (though as the party refuses to make its internal structure clear, it's impossible to know if the team also includes local chairpersons, fundholders, et al). Nevertheless, whatever Butler sends to organisers will eventually filter its way down the BNP food chain to the more active membership - though unofficially, thus ensuring that he is not tainted by the criticism that was aimed at Lee Barnes, the 'Director' of the BNP's Legal Department and all-round freak, who was seen to be sharing his opinions rather too freely for a supposedly unbiased officer of the party.

Even so, Butler's email is uncompromising in his contempt for a) the challenger Colin Auty, and b) democracy. Curious really, as Butler makes the point in his email that the right of members to challenge the leadership is 'a declaration of our Parties openness and commitment to democracy' then goes on to spoil it by stating that the party expects anyone who has the 'temerity' to challenge the leadership only if they seriously consider they have the possibility of winning and they are able to perform the duties expected of them as leader should they do so.

Very interesting use of the word 'temerity' there. For those who don't know, 'temerity' means audacity, nerve, cheek, effrontery (or, as we Jews sometimes say, chutzpah). Quite why a challenger should be accused of audacity for challenging is beyond me, though as Nick Griffin's leadership is generally treated as some kind of divine right held by the pig farmer from Welshpool, that might explain it.

The point of Butler's email seems to be to attempt to persuade the more influential members not to sign Auty's nomination papers because he is a 'joke candidate' and a 'no-hoper' and that his frivolous challenge may give the Griffinites within the party enough ammunition to limit possible challenges in future. Thus he says;

'There will be pressure, perhaps unstoppable pressure, to change the rules so that leadership challenges can only take place every four years.'

Whether we take this to mean that he is trying to put off potentially hopeless challengers to avoid Griffin becoming even more entrenched than he already is or is just attempting to divert support from Auty is debatable, though we generally lean to the former. It's pretty well known that Butler doesn't want Griffin around forever and perhaps this really is an attempt, by subverting the BNP's peculiar internal version of democracy, to bring a more substantial and overt democracy to the party in future. However, we would welcome your views. Here is the emai from Butler - let us know what you think of it.

From: Edward. Butler.
To: ###
Sent: ###
Subject: Statement on the so-called Leadership challenge

Anyone in the Party who has more than five years continuous membership has the Right to stand for the leadership of the Party. The only limit to the exercising of this Right is that in the case of officers ten nomination signatures of members of two years standing must be obtained and for non officers a hundred signatures are required. This is to ensure that frivolous candidates do not stand.

As I said this is a Right that members have. And it is an important Right – it is a declaration of our Parties openness and commitment to democracy. However with Rights come responsibilities and duties. A Right without a duty is an abomination in any society. It is a recipe for chaos. Indeed in our modern society it is the incessant claiming of Rights by groups that shown no sense of duty or responsibility that is one of the key components of the undermining of the civic order of our country.

So in the instance of standing for leadership of the Party, the Party as a whole should expect anyone who has the temerity to wish to stand for leadership only to uphold their Right to do so after that person had carefully weighed their duty to the cause and the Party and their fellow members. We as members should expect that a candidate would only put themselves forward if they were of sufficient stature and ability to potentially be able to lead the Party if they were to win. Otherwise why would someone wish to challenge for the leadership? It is a duty of other members not to sign the nomination papers of any potential candidate unless they seriously think that that person is a viable and serious leadership contender. That is the whole point of the requirement for signatories.

A leadership challenge is not an excuse to air grievances. It is not there for disgruntled people to act out their personal bitterness about things – no matter how ‘justified’ they may think their grievances are. It is an abuse of the process to misuse it in that way. It is an abuse of their Constitutional Right.

And that is precisely what we are seeing this year. We are seeing a candidate pushed forward by people who themselves admit, has absolutely no chance of winning, and admit would never be up to the job of chairman anyway and they admit that the sole reason they are doing it is to air their own personal grievances. In other words their sole aim is to raise issues which have already been fully aired and which could be raised at a variety of different forums such as the Summer School (where there is always a session for all participants where they can bring up matters they are unhappy about) or the Annual Conference.

What is the likely outcome of this leadership challenge? The challengers (there may in fact be two!) will be comprehensively defeated. The leadership challenge process as it currently stands in the Constitution will be brought into disrepute. There will be pressure, perhaps unstoppable pressure, to change the rules so that leadership challenges can only take place every four years.

I would not normally comment on a leadership election. It should normally be up to the membership to make their own minds up without non-participants trying to influence the process.

But the backers of this ridiculous bid should reconsider their aimless tactic. People should refuse to sign the nomination papers. It is a distraction and a waste of time and effort and it will end up almost certainly with the constitution changed in a way that destroys the important Right of the possibility of a yearly election. Standing a no-hoper is stupid, mindless and fatally undermines our Constitution. It is a pitiful and moronic – a bankrupt tactic by people who can only be described as having gone giddy to the extent that they are now without the imagination to think how they can raise issues in a legitimate way.

This election, if it goes ahead, should be carried out in the most rapid manner possible with zero publicity allowed for the joke candidate (who may in lother circumstances be described as a decent and 'nice' bloke etc) and the least disruption to our continued efforts. That is the best way to minimise the harmful effects.

Eddy Butler
National Elections Officer

The 'ever-widening hellhole, from the sound of Bow Bells eastwards, all the way to Essex'

2009-08-01T12:26:00.000Z

Margaret Hodge, MP for Barking, having migrated from Islington to this east London constituency, has for some time now trained her fire on immigrants. Barking is a Labour stronghold, even though the racist British National Party won some seats there in last year's council elections.

I am unable to offer any answer to the question as to why Hodge made an anti-immigrant outburst in a recent article of hers for the Observer, entitled "A message to my fellow immigrants". She attempts to place us on the defensive in her first paragraph. "In our open, tolerant country," she writes, "there are, thankfully, few issues that remain taboo. But, motivated by the fear of both legitimising racism and encouraging the extreme right, migration is one."

This is absolute nonsense. Not a week passes in which immigration is not central to the news and current affairs agenda. Statistics and opinions abound. Predictions of numbers that will arrive in the UK are plastered across the pages of the press, adorned by commentators who, in large measure, tempt white people to vent their collective spleen against immigrants.

Hodge is the latest in a long line to encourage this tendency. With one sweep of the pen, she suggests that only white families in her constituency, and others nearby, "have lived in the area for three generations". She is wrong. Over three generations, black people have settled in the East End of London, in Tiger Bay in Cardiff, and in Bristol and Liverpool, too. As long as we have been here we have been the target of white racism, pointing fingers of blame at us for the misfortunes to which others are prey.

Thousands of seafaring men signed off at these English ports to settle and raise three generations. Ramadhan Hassan was one of them. He arrived from Zanzibar, married into one of the largest clans in Canning Town - the Watsons - and begat one Leila Ramadhan Hassan, who happens to be my wife.

Racism, as we know, is a disease that has deformed political thinking and social behaviour in the East End and beyond. Leila's mother talked until the last hours of her life about how badly she had been treated at Whitechapel Hospital, where she gave birth to her beautiful, bouncing baby girl. She was treated like the shit that was smeared on the blanket given to her when she and Leila were discharged.

She talked bitterly about the abuse thrown at her and her newborn daughter on public transport, in shops and along the East End streets. It was not the idea that we were taking "their" housing, Margaret, but "their" women. "They came to defile our women," is the cry that Margaret invites us to repeat. Racial assaults added to the misery heaped on black men, their women and their offspring. "Half-caste" was a term of racial abuse first coined in the East End of London.

Then Enoch Powell issued the clarion call for the repatriation of all immigrants. Workers at the East End docks where every male member of the Watson clan was employed took to the streets under the slogan "Send them back".

And there is more, much more, Margaret. The term "Paki-bashing" - describing the favourite sport of white, male workers - was invented in your constituency and its surrounds. The game was played after pub closing time, with the heads of Asians used as footballs. Next door to Barking, where the Ford production plant flowered, white workers managed to rename part of the plant "South Africa" because they kept the blacks and Asians confined to the assembly line.

That racist stench of decay that plagued so many white workers drove Mrs Howe and others to leave the East End for ever. We go back for funerals and family celebrations, though aware at all times that we are entering and leaving an ever-widening hellhole, from the sound of Bow Bells eastwards, all the way to Essex.

The housing issue has returned with a bang as whites move further east as a sign of upward mobility, and Asians follow in the same direction. Stories abound of whites getting together to prevent their kith and kin from selling to Asians.

Margaret Hodge avoids these proven examples, opting instead for the fables spread by the BNP. She is supping from a poisoned chalice.

New Statesman

Thanks to Lancaster UAF

BNP plans to seek safety in Croatian idyll

2009-08-01T11:41:00.000Z

When the fossil fuels run out, leaders of Britain's far right hope to survive on a farm in the Balkans

A few miles from the historic southern Croatian town of Knin lie 1,100 hectares of farmland and a couple of abandoned buildings. A tributary from the river Krka runs through the lush countryside nestled close to the sun-drenched Adriatic coast.

It is a tranquil place, one that would make an ideal spot for a campsite or a clutch of holiday homes. But instead the land is destined for a rather more bizarre sort of retreat. It is here that a small cabal, comprising senior members of the British National Party, plans to hole up once, as they expect, the world's supply of oil runs out, triggering anarchy.

The land is owned by an anonymous BNP sympathiser from south-east England whose late father is understood to have made a fortune in the pizza business. At the moment it lies unused, but the BNP chairman, Nick Griffin, has visited the site several times. One day some in the party hope it will become a sustainable community, one that is not reliant on fossil fuels or outside power of any kind but instead is capable of harnessing solar energy and tapping into local streams for fresh water.

A spokesman for the BNP said this scenario was 'totally without foundation'. But The Observer has established the plans were discussed extensively during a three-day secret BNP meeting last September at a Hampshire hotel. Griffin and several senior members of the BNP, including Lee Barnes, the party's ponytailed second-in-command, had invited an energy expert, Andrew McKillop, to speak about his pet theory, the end of oil and gas supply, a subject about which he lectures widely on the conference circuit.

Also at the meeting was the BNP's economics adviser, a man called Alan Goodacre when residing in Britain but who, when in the US on business, apparently uses the name Ian Fletcher, according to party sources. Throughout the meeting Fletcher carried a large briefcase stuffed with thousands of pounds in cash which he used to pay the hotel and restaurant bills.

'It was like something out of a film,' a member of the hotel staff said. 'He just kept dipping into the briefcase and doling out the money.'

For McKillop, who lives in the US, the meeting was equally surreal. He had been told he would be picked up from Heathrow airport by two BNP stalwarts, only to be instructed at the last minute to make his own way to Portsmouth. From there a car took him to a hotel. 'It was all a bit Monty Python,' McKillop recalled. 'They seemed extremely paranoid.'

As soon as he arrived, Griffin ushered McKillop, who previously had links to the French far right and the late billionaire James Goldsmith, into a room to address eight of his colleagues. Over the next two days McKillop, who says he was not paid for his presentation and had been contacted by the BNP via the internet, talked widely about his belief that global oil and gas supplies are peaking and that this would have profound repercussions for mankind. As he talked his audience became more excited.

'They didn't want to know what I was talking about,' said McKillop. 'They just wanted to know how to use it to their advantage. They grabbed it as a ball to play with. They developed a completely exaggerated idea of when the world's oil supply will be turned off. They were asking, "How can we exploit this, how can we use it to build an election platform?"'

McKillop was told a BNP supporter owned a large amount of land in Croatia that the party's senior figures had high hopes for. Initially he thought the BNP intended to use it simply for eco-tourism. But as the conversation developed there was talk of turning the land into a community for the BNP and its supporters.

'In the end I formed the impression they saw it as a bolthole for when the world blows up,' McKillop said. Claims that the BNP senior hierarchy have discussed developing the Croatian site have been corroborated by several disgruntled party members who have supplied detailed information to Lancaster Unite Against Fascism (UAF), a body that campaigns against the BNP.

The revelation that the BNP senior hierarchy anticipate a doomsday scenario has parallels with millenarianism - the view that the world is on the brink of an apocalypse. The links between such views and the far right are well known. The Oklahoma bomber, Timothy McVeigh, harboured suspicions that the UN was trying to take over the world and that a global war was an inevitability.

McVeigh and the London nail bomber David Copeland, jailed for an explosion at a gay pub in Soho, London, which killed three people and left 70 injured, were heavily influenced by William Pierce, the founder of the white supremacist National Alliance in the US. Pierce was also the author of The Turner Diaries which predict a series of racial wars that develop into global genocide. Several BNP members have attended National Alliance meetings.

Lancaster UAF

BNP keeps a brave face as disappointments keep on coming

2009-08-01T10:42:00.000Z

This last few days must have been terribly disappointing for the BNP.

Not that we care, but we'd imagine Nick Griffin would have liked something to cheer up the troops after the ructions of the past couple of months and after the resignations of Alans Warner and Bailey from their positions of, respectively, town and real councillor.

Happily, the situation has gone from bad to worse. Despite putting everything into a major fight to win a mere parish seat (so desperate are they for a win of any kind) for dismal Donna Bailey at Upper Beeding, the far-right party was pipped at the post by twenty votes.

Joyce Shaw (Ind): 297
Donna Bailey (BNP): 277
Becky Davoubi (Ind): 196

Bailey, variously described by the creepier than usual BNP as the British National Party Blond Bombshell and brave (why brave?), received an astonishing amount of support for her campaign and cost the local council tax payer a few thousand quid just to prove the party could lose even where it had its own version of Julie Andrews standing for it. Even when the Dail Mail had assisted by printing a two-page puff-piece about her.

James Clayton (see pic), though no blond bombshell, deserved more support from his wretched party than he actually got. No mass leaflettings for him, no double-page spreads in the Mail and no commiserating posts on the BNP website either.

Despite standing for a real council seat (on Wyre Borough Council) and probably being its youngest candidate, the BNP chose to ignore young Master Clayton, which might explain why he bombed at the polls.

Con 769
Lab 339
BNP 222
UKIP 151

So nice to see the BNP failing its young up and comers.

But these results pale almost into insignificance at the latest news - that the High Court has awarded the disputed (see here and here) Burnley seat of Rosegrove and Lowerhouse to the Labour candidate, Paul Reynolds, leaving the BNP's John Rowe with egg on his face and a bill estimated at around £30,000.

Given the BNP's treatment of Sharon Ebanks (and she was only stuck for £5000 after following the party's advice and taking her disputed vote to the High Court), we'd advise Rowe to grab the money NOW before the party changes its mercurial mind and tells him to get lost, or to save time and declare himself bankrupt now.

If the BNP really intends to cover the costs of this wasted case, we wonder how the funds will be found - a raid on Nick Griffin's legendarily deep pockets, a dig into the hidden donations from Civil Liberty or the Trafalgar Club or yet another begging letter to the members. Or maybe it'll just come out of the membership fees paid for this year - a juicy thousand of them.

Antifascist

BNP's "Blonde Bombshell" misfires

Elevating an obscure and unimportant parish council by-election into a matter of national importance, the BNP somehow got itself to believe that the election of Donna Bailey to Upper Beeding Parish Council was a forgone conclusion.

Carried away with the idea that a pretty face and a much discussed article in the Daily Mail (which BNP members linked to on almost every forum they infest) would secure Donna's victory, they seemed to forget that the BNP was also contesting a real election for a real council with real power on the same night in Lancashire.

Having demanded co-option on to Upper Beeding Parish Council (Sussex), Donna Bailey and her vociferous band of supporters forced the council into the needless expense of a by-election when she was refused.

Bailey stood as an "independent", as did the two other candidates opposing her, but it was very clear from the beginning that the BNP regarded her as anything but "independent" - and it seems that the voters of Upper Beeding were of the same mind.

Proving beyond any doubt that Upper Beeding Parish Council were right not to cave in to her demands for co-option, Bailey came second, rejected by nearly two-thirds of local voters:

Joyce Shaw (Ind): 297
Donna Bailey ("Ind"): 277
Becky Davoubi (Ind): 196

A twenty vote shortfall, but, given the hype and the media coverage Donna Bailey and this by-election have received, a real embarrassment for the BNP and its golden goddess, who expected to win this contest by a wide margin.

We await the stock BNP excuses that Donna wuz nobbled.

Back in the real world of real politics that matter, BNP candidate James Clayton took part in a four-cornered contest in Victoria ward (Cleveleys) for a seat on Wyre Borough Council. Last May Victoria ward returned as follows:

UKIP 353
Lab 474
Lab 472
Con 1351 Elected
Con 1150 Elected
Con 1165 Elected

In May 2007 Clayton fought Cleveleys Park ward, coming seventh of eight candidates, with 19.6% (after vote averaging). Last night in staunchly Conservative Park ward, Clayton managed a so-so 14.99%:

Con 769 (51.92)
Lab 339 (22.89)
UKIP 151 (10.20)
BNP 222 (14.99)

Total 1481

The BNP did nibble into the UKIP vote, but UKIP's surviving 10.2% gives lie to the BNP fantasy that UKIP voters are always interchangeable with its own. Disappointed BNP supporters not getting the message that to be anti-Europe is not to be pro-fascist were this morning sourly condemning the UKIP as "ludicrous" and "pointless".

Just like that costly by-election one of their supporters forced on Upper Beeding Parish Council.

Denise G

Usborne children's books and the BNP

2009-08-01T09:54:00.000Z

Usborne is a major independent UK publishing company that publishes almost every type of children's book for every age from baby to teenager. As such, it has a well-deserved reputation for delivering top-quality books and it is rare to find a home or nursery that doesn't have several well-thumbed Usborne books tucked away somewhere.

One of the innovative ways that Usborne goes about its business is via what the company refers to as Usborne organisers: that is, somebody home-based who sells the books for a commission. Nursery organisers frequently do this as it enables them to obtain discount books and to make a little money on the side by selling direct to parents. Generally, the profits made - and they can be substantial - are put back into the nursery/playgroup. Commission varies but starts at around 25%.

So what does Usborne have to do with the BNP?

Not a great deal as far as we know, but as we are all aware, the BNP is full of money-making scams and schemes and one of its current schemes is, we have found, selling Usborne books.

The BNP's childen's books section - sold via Excalibur, its cheap-tat-flogging arm - is a tad limited. For instance, while it sells Usborne's books on Nelson, Florence Nightingale and Saint George and the Dragon (no surprise there), it manages to avoid offering some of Usbornes other history books on subjects such as the Holocaust, Anne Frank or Martin Luther King.

All Usborne organisers have to sign an Organiser Agreement before they are allowed to sign up and start selling. Some of the terms and conditions are listed below:

(3.1) You will conduct your business as an Usborne Organiser in an ethical and honest manner, and do nothing which may harm or damage the reputation of that business or the Company, or bring the Company into disrepute.

Clearly, whoever the organiser is, has not conducted their business in an ethical or honest manner, being in breach of section (3.3). Also, we believe an assumed relationship with the BNP would be damaging to the reputation of Usborne and would certainly bring it into disrepute.

(3.3) You will not sell the company’s products through or to any retail outlet, including on-line outlets, whether hosted by yourself or a third party. The only exception is if you have an official Usborne templated website, and you are compliant with all Usborne copyright requirements in all areas of your Usborne business.

The Usborne books on the Excalibur website can only be reached via the BNP's own website. Both are retail outlets and neither have an official Usborne template. As the BNP constantly disregards copyright, we doubt that it is compliant with Usborne's copyright requirements at all.

(14) This Agreement may be terminated immediately by either party if either party commits a material breach of its obligations to the other or if you do
anything which in the opinion of the Company is prejudicial to the Company's interests. Either party may otherwise terminate this Agreement by giving to the other not less than 14 days written notice.

It seems to us that the BNP - or the person who has taken on the role of an Usborne organiser and is selling via the BNP's Excalibur site - has breached these terms and has almost certainly acted in a way that 'is prejudicial to the Company's interests'. We feel sure that Usborne will want this association with the BNP broken - but they need to be informed in no uncertain terms that the association is there and that people are not happy about it. Thus, we would like you to get in touch with Usborne, to let them know your views on this matter. Please report back via the comments to this article.

Like a lot of other companies, Usborne does not display an email address, but it does have an online form to fill in here. If you prefer to write or phone, the details are below.

Usborne Books at Home
Unit 8, Oasis Park
Eynsham
Oxon OX29 4TU
United Kingdom

Telephone:
+44 (0) 1865 883731

Fax:
+44 (0) 1865 883759

Solidarity: an update. Theft is theft, even when it's intellectual property theft.

2009-08-01T07:38:00.000Z

The appalling story of the BNP's disastrous move into the trades union movement continues with the September bulletin from the original union started by the BNP (which we shall refer to as Solidarity 1) having a go at 'untrustworthy' Nick Griffin and the union's Certification Officer.

In response to a question referring to the extremely confusing double-union situation that asks what the future holds for Solidarity, Vice-President Tim Hawkes responds thus:

'Which one? As far as the EC [Executive Committee] of Solidarity is concerned, the idea of a union run and controlled by the BNP leadership (and Third Way sidekicks) is a joke. The Union must be focused on worker issues not political point scoring. It is clear that the support structure of Solidarity with regards to promotion and recruitment has been seriously harmed and our association with Nick Griffin – who publicly and privately declared to me that he view (sic) Solidarity as ‘independent’ – who I now consider to be highly untrustworthy, has harmed us considerably. Well, with regards to the BNP-Solidarity version, we understand that it is fundamentally just a political union and by its actions have rejected any true sense of independence and therefore it is unlikely to go anywhere other than as a smoke screen in loosely supporting working class concerns. However, I for one would not be prepared to willingly betray the British workers by allowing the BNP leadership to dictate the actions of Solidarity. It is one of the prime reasons that I have continued my work with the Union. The future of Solidarity is in question, and in truth I would personally consider a dead union to be better than a corrupt thieving union, after all there are plenty of TUC unions who fill that role. My greatest concern is that BNP-Solidarity will succeed due to the Certification Office unwillingness to do their job, and the EC’s lack of legal resources means that genuine non-political people will join up with the BNP version, not knowing that it simply funds a lifestyle for individuals of questionable moral integrity who have no concerns for the workers of this country and frequently don’t even work themselves. At this stage we should just wait to see if the Certification Office do anything, and apply pressure where we can.'

Hawke is being disingenuous. Solidarity 1 was started by and for the BNP and was, from its birth, run and controlled by the BNP leadership and its Third Way sidekicks. Though the party and the detestable Patrick Harrington (former General Secretary of Solidarity 1, currently General Secretary of Solidarity 2 and long-time pal of BNP leader Nick Griffin) attempted to deny the BNP front-group status of Solidarity (and continually edit Wikipedia entries to that effect) the actions taken by the party immediately following the suspension of Harrington from Solidarity 1 made it perfectly obvious that Griffin always intended to control the union completely and wasn't about to let that control pass into the hands of others who may not have his best interests at heart.

Hawke's ludicrous statement that 'we understand that [Solidarity 2] is fundamentally just a political union' displays either a convenient disregard of Solidarity's entire very short history or a truly incredible naivety that makes one wonder whether he should just give up politics now before he does himself a mischief, though he almost redeems himself with his criticism of the Certification Office, which seems to have ignored the turmoil completely, and his comment 'that genuine non-political people will join up with the BNP version, not knowing that it simply funds a lifestyle for individuals of questionable moral integrity', presumably a reference to Harrington and/or Griffin.

Solidarity 1 has, let's face it, had it. It's time for Hawke and co to bite the bullet and accept that Griffin and Harrington have, despite acting in a manner that almost everyone with a conscience would consider both immoral and illegal (the theft of the union funds, the website and the account details immediately following Harrington's suspension), outflanked the original union leadership and appear to be getting away with it. If it's any consolation, our estimate is that the union will collapse within a year or two anyway, through lack of interest. Nobody would want to be a part of an unrecognised union with no negotiating power and in any case, once Nick Griffin sees that it isn't a money-spinner, he'll lose interest and stop supporting it.

Hawke is right about one thing though and that is that the Certification Office should have jumped on this right from the start. Both versions of Solidarity should have been suspended until a proper investigation (including a police investigation) had taken place.

The story (thus far) can be followed via the links below:

BNP's fake union Solidarity already up against the ropes
BNP's Solidarity situation worsens - fake union under threat
Solidarity - an email update from the Vice-President Tim Hawke
BNP discards democracy completely to force takeover of 'independent' Solidarity
Solidarity disaster goes critical as criminal investigation is threatened
Where next for the BNP’s amoeba-like Solidarity union?
Solidarity update - BNP’s Nick Griffin heavily criticised for interference
Solidarity - police called in

One interesting though relatively trivial spin-off from all this is that Solidarity 2 has applied to have the logo (top) registered as a trade mark, with all the intellectual property rights that this would give them. However, as many of our correspondents have pointed out, the design of the Solidarity logo (and indeed, the name itself) is a blatant rip-off of the logo (above) of the real Solidarity union which itself owns the copyright on the original image. Objections to the fake union stealing the logo and name of the original and far more worthy Solidarity can be made via email to the Intellectual Property Office here: law.section@ipo.gov.uk

How many lies can you tell in a week? The BNP aims for the world record...

2009-08-01T05:41:00.000Z

Well over a week after the non-aligned Independent councillor for Longton North (Stoke) Mark Leat decided he no longer wanted to represent the British National Party, the party issued a statement to The Sentinel, his local paper, to the effect that Leat had been thrown out for being idle.

As much as we hate to defend anyone with any connection to the BNP, this is simply not true. Not even BNP supporters believe the statement - the usually supportive Stormfront nazi forum has several wry comments about this poor attempt to save face, including this one; 'Ah, the usual botched "cover story" from the Griffinites. They can't even get that out in good time, Leat has been listed as "non-aligned" on the council website for the best part of two weeks already!'

The BNP's idiotic Young BNP leader Danny Lake then tried to bullshit the world with a bizarre report on Nick Griffin's visit to Bath.

You may recall that Lake tried to get Griffin in as an official speaker at the university but the Holocaust-denying leader of the party was denied permission to speak following protests from numerous anti-fascist individuals and organisations. Lake, in desperation, booked him into a local pub - misleading the landlord as to who the meeting was for and what it was about. Searchlight rang and told the landlord and he promptly cancelled the meeting, saying; 'A young man visited me the night before and asked if he could book a room. It was a very casual arrangement. The moment Searchlight rang to tell me who was behind it, I opted to stop it. I feel that I have been hoodwinked into holding this talk.'

Lake's version is different. He claimed in his report on the BNP's web page; 'They then, true to form, proceeded to scare the proprietor into cancelling the event' though confusingly he then went on to say; 'I was promptly told by the proprietor that the event would not be going ahead as he has a largely student and multi-ethnic clientele and was not prepared for his business to suffer as a result of allowing us to continue.'

Lake fits right into the BNP mould - a liar through and through. He should do well in the party. Griffin was eventually reduced to talking to four students for ten minutes while twenty protestors made themselves heard nearby.

In one last blast of confusion, Lake drones on about free speech and democracy in his piece on the BNP's page, ending with; 'At the start of the next academic year... I will be hoping to force the university into allowing Nick to speak to a proper audience on the Bath University campus itself. So much for democracy then.

The latest little lie-fest from the BNP appears as a result of a neat little expose by the Bath Chronicle, which revealed that Mike Howson, the BNP's regional organiser for the mid-west and former council candidate for the party, who is one of the people responsible for the BNP's ludicrous vigilante group (sorry, 'community patrol') in Corsham and who is also an apparently highly-regarded air cadet youth leader, has a web site littered with 'white pride' and 'white nationalist' videos, some of which have swastikas prominently placed on them.

One of the films added by Howson included text promoting white nationalists as 'ordinary white people who want to protect themselves from being mugged by multi-culturalism and raped by multi-racialism'. Another depicted a police officer being attacked on a public highway, images of the Israeli flag pierced by a dagger, American President George Bush taking a bite out of the neck of the Statue of Liberty and messages saying 'wake up, white people'. Howson's site is also linked to information about a group known as Unite Against Anti-White Racism.

Howson, remaining pretty casual about the whole thing, told the Chronicle that his Bebo [similar to MySpace] site was an information portal and if internet users did not like the content they did not have to watch it. 'My Bebo site is a private site and people on that site are friends and it is their choice to be so.'

The BNP though, obviously seeing yet another public relations disaster looming, quickly made up a story about how Howson hadn't known these items were on his site and how he zoomed into action to delete them. Then the party propaganda machine went into overdrive.

Suddenly and for no discernible reason taking it as fact that Howson's site was hacked and the information placed there completely unnoticed by him, the BNP attempts to give the story its own nasty little spin by implication, saying; 'We should say that we don’t believe that anyone on the Bath Chronicle was actually party to the hacking...' and 'This hacking follows on from a similar case from last year when a northern England BNP councillor [the King of the Standards Board, Paul Cromie] had his email account hacked into and 'adult images' emailed from it to the 'World and his Dog'.' Not content with claiming this little piece of over-exposure on a random hacker, the BNP decides to point the finger more clearly but still without any evidence at all, at a 'Left hacking scam'. Yes, of course.

For some reason, the BNP hierarchy can't get it into its thick communal head that to hand a website to a member of the BNP is almost certain to end in disaster. Despite numerous examples of BNP-related stupidity, such as Martin Reynold's Facebook lustings for a threesome with a couple of large women and Karl Newman's weird penchant for dressing up in nazi uniforms, the BNP still asserts 'that no-one...would be daft enough to post such obviously unacceptable material on such a public website'. Well apparently they do and all the BNP's lies, misleading hints and snidey comments are unlikely to stop that.

Even if they continue to churn them out at the rate they have over the last week.

The Madness of King Nick - the infamous Identity article examined at last

2009-08-01T05:38:00.000Z

Head of Propaganda for Adolf Hitler, Joseph Goebbels, once stated; 'If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.' Nick Griffin takes Goebbels dictum to heart in his fascinating article from September's Identity magazine.

Before we take a belated look at Nick Griffin's bizarre article in September's Identity (the BNPs glossy in-house magazine), we have a couple of comments to make. First of all, thank you to the person who sent the magazine to us here at LUAF Towers - we really appreciate getting a chance to see the kind of nonsense the leadership throws at the membership. Second, an apology to the people we know have been waiting to read our take on the article; we've been busy but you can stop emailing now, thank you. :-)

The first thing that strikes the eye about the article is the use of the rat tipping over a drum of toxic waste to illustrate it. This motif is repeatedly used, presumably as a visual reference to the 'vermin' within the party and the stories they (and we) spread about in an attempt to show the public and BNP members exactly what is going on inside the BNP itself, thus keeping the membership au fait with what Nick Griffin and co would conceal from them. What worries us most about this article is not that Griffin uses it as a vehicle for his lies but that he clearly believes them himself.

Given the BNP's propensity for gimmicky stunts like litter-picking (when what the party should actually be doing is reporting litter to relevant local authorities and demanding they should clear it instead) and the party's stance on graffiti artists (hanging's too good for 'em), one wonders why Griffin chose to illustrate his article with illustrations stolen and cropped (one assumes without permission) from the most famous graffiti artist in this country, Banksy. The complete image used can be seen here.

The whole point of the piece in Identity, entitled 'A tidal wave of anti-BNP propaganda', seems to be to whine about the fact that the BNP is opposed on various levels by several organisations for a number of perfectly valid reasons. Naturally enough, Searchlight comes in for particular criticism (though we don't, which is irritating but just means we'll have to step our work up a bit) with a good deal of waffle about a BNP election candidate and activist (who stood for the party as recently as May 2007) who, according to Griffin, turned out to be a 'paid informer' for Searchlight. This was allegedly discovered after what Griffin describes as an 'internal intelligence review', which appears to have largely consisted of illegally checking through his BNP email account.

Right from the start of this article, Griffin's paranoia and control-freakery are both evident and disturbing but it is his clear ability to treat his own blatant lies as fact that should most concern any BNP member who is able to view the BNP leader and his party objectively. One of the more startling examples of this is Griffin's brief mention of the continuing Solidarity fiasco:

'As in the earlier instance where a Searchlight agent effectively tool over Bradford BNP and then provided 'cover' for BBC mole Jason Gwynne and his 'Secret Agent' stunt and as appears to have happened in the recent failed coup attempt to derail the nationalist trade union Solidarity...'

Regular readers will know full well that there was no 'coup attempt' within Solidarity until the former General Secretary Pat Harrington, long-time friend of Griffins, was suspended for, among other things, accounting irregularities. Following his suspension, the BNP-supported Harrington, with the direct collusion of Nick Griffin, himself engineered a coup, taking Solidarity's PayPal account, website and money with him. This is fact - we know it and Griffin knows it, yet without a qualm, lies and tells the membership that this is not the case.

There's no real need to get into a deep discussion about Solidarity in this article except to offer Griffin's comment as an indication of his determination not to let the truth get in the way of a good story.

One little fantasy which seems to be engrossing Griffin is the one that suggests his party is riddled with hugely influential 'Searchlight moles' who seem capable of persuading anyone they fancy to slip into a pair of jackboots and start seig-heiling all over the place at the drop of a hat. According to him, Searchlight (the anti-fascist magazine) does everything it can to turn 'modern democratic nationalists into old-fashioned Nazis' and if he's surprised at all, it is only that his entire party isn't seig-heiling its way down Whitehall as he types. Pure paranoia of course. He does however, accept that not everyone within the party who is advocating a harder political line is a Searchlight agent, though those that aren't there thanks to Searchlight, he firmly labels 'cranks and losers'.

Regular readers will know that we are fed information from various sources both inside and outside the British National Party that helps us to disseminate the truth to everyone who cares to read it. Many of our correspondents not only send us information but also documentary evidence for their statements. The only reason we don't print such evidence is that it could lead directly back to the person who supplied it to us. As we've stated on a number of occasions, we never print anything accusatory unless we have corroboration from two or three sources, including at least one that we know and trust. These rules have worked extremely well over the past couple of years and have enabled us to produce some excellent reports on the shenanigans within the BNP - particularly when it comes to the financial chicanery that we long ago came to expect from Nick Griffin and the rest of the crooks at the top of the party.

This has obviously been noted by Griffin, who has reserved a special bit of venom for 'several mutually supporting Lie Factories', which we can assume refers to Searchlight and we happy souls at Lancaster UAF, Voice of Reason and Kirklees Unity. He writes:

'In large part there is no point even trying to refute them...'

Well, no. Because we tell the truth. Any refutation would only have the knock-on effect of exposing more lies and cover-ups.

Griffin's delusions extend to embrace the performance of his own party. At one point he suggests that the BNP's 'relentless advance' is coincident with the collapse of the far-left. Assuming his phrase 'far-left' to mean anyone who opposes the BNP, there is obviously no collapse. Nor is the BNP seeing any kind of relentless advance - unless complete stagnation for the past year counts.

At this point - madness firmly set in overdrive - he segues into one of the most bizarre diversions we've ever set eyes on, claiming that Nick Lowles of Searchlight and Peter Rushton of the 'nationalist' magazine Heritage and Destiny are one and the same person. Rushton, who reminds everyone who sees him for the first time of an aging Mr Bean, is not Nick Lowles and Nick Griffin knows perfectly well he isn't. So why tell such an obvious lie?

Griffin is anxious at the moment to promote the appalling Arthur Kemp, the author of the truly dreadful 'March of the Titans' and a former member of the South African Intelligence Services. Out of nowhere, Kemp, a hardcore racist and white supremacist, seems to have become the representative of the Ideological Training Department of the BNP - so much so that it will soon be impossible to attend a BNP conference or indeed to be an 'Voting Member' with limited voting rights unless one has received ideological training from Kemp, a man who, it is rumoured, is not even a member of the party himself.

Rushton is overtly more hardcore far-right than Griffin and appears to be getting something of a following consisting largely of those on the right who are sick of Griffin's increasingly futile attempts to break into mainstream politics by shoving his nazi past to one side and firmly concealing it from the gaze of a disapproving public. Griffin's hatred of anyone who shows up the BNP as any more than very slightly to the right of Genghis Khan is legendary and Rushton constantly badgering about the BNP's loss of its ideological way hasn't exactly endeared him to the Führer at Welshpool.

Quite why he picked on Nick Lowles to be Rushton's alter ego, only Griffin himself knows - but he also knows that it's a lie that many in the membership are unlikely to concern themselves with. His ridiculous claim that Rushton is another Searchlight 'agent' might well be believed by those who wish to remain loyal to the current incarnation of the BNP and newer members who have been taken in by the Griffinites, while those who consider the claim to be so stupid it's beneath contempt are those who are simply more likely to fall away from the party. These tend to be the longer-term nationalists - members who have been around for a few years and who are starting to take a closer look at Griffin, the constant accusations of misuse of party funds and the lies he spins, and who are beginning to ask the questions that they should have been asking for the past five years. These are the people who in any case, Griffin is desperate to get rid of.

The recent leadership challenge has allowed Nick Griffin to identify many of the dissentors in the ranks. Despite the fact that ballots are meant to be secret, Griffin seems to have all the supporters of Chris Jackson on a list and ready to throw out at a moment's notice and on the slightest pretext. We've already reported on the purging of a number of these people and have no doubt that we'll be reporting on a few more over the next few months. Griffin's fake identification of Peter Rushton as Nick Lowles will help him to falsely identify further dissentors who are sympathetic to Rushton as faux Searchlight 'agents'. This may also serve to undermine Rushton's credibility with the newer members of the party and will enable Kemp to revenge himself for the abiding antipathy that Rushton and he have been nurturing for the past fifteen years or so. The claim that Rushon and Lowles are the same person is certainly fraudulent but if it serves to cause problems for he and his comrade's enemies, Griffin will tell any lie that has the appropriate result.

Nick Griffin is playing a long game but he's playing it with people who have been around the far-right for a very long time and the feeling we have (which we share with a lot of our correspondents) is that he's riding for a fall by playing any game at all based on such an easily disprovable premise.

Griffin's lies will always show up more readily when he is referring to money - particularly when he is on the defensive, which he clearly is in this article. He picks on two examples to use as illustrations of the lengths we will go to in our attempts to destabilise him and the BNP.

The first example is that of the peculiar BNP accounts. Rather than explain satisfactorily why the accounts for last year are so shockingly late at great financial cost to the party, he chooses to dwell on the accusation that he and his colleagues in the leadership of the party are living in luxury thanks to misappropriation of party funds. Curiously, he chooses not to state clearly what happens to the enormous amount of money that is filtered into the party via the Trafalgar Club, stays well away from the question of how much money comes to the party from the States via the BNP-front Civil Liberty and doesn't venture into the cost/benefit ratio of establishing Great White Records, a financial disaster that anyone (except apparently the BNP) could see coming from a mile off.

Griffin then claims that the 'newest' story is the one that revolves around Croatia. Not so. The Croatia story is known to so many people in the party now that it's hardly worth reporting on except when someone sends us a new snippet of information that we can use. Griffin gives us nothing except the usual lies to be getting on with. He claims to have been approached by a supporter who had inherited a chunk of land in Croatia - not true. He makes it sound like a throwaway idea that was of no consequence - not true. And he claims to have approached the MEPs of the BNP's European 'sister parties' for help on the mystery inheritor's behalf. Again, not true. The BNP did approach the MEPs and were promptly and unceremoniously rebuffed. If all the claims of financial shenanigans in the BNP are truly false and can be proven to be false, why has Griffin never even so much as threatened to take Searchlight (or indeed us) to court for libel?

This whole article, four solid pages of Identity, is packed with lies that even the most gullible of BNP members could surely see through or at least expose with a minimal amount of research. Griffin refers to former Stoke BNP councillor Mark Leat, who you may remember stood down as a councillor for the BNP and moved across the chamber to become a 'non-aligned Independent' back in May (just a week after the local government elections). Three days after his move, the BNP group announced that it had withdrawn the whip (thrown him out) stating that he didn't work hard enough. Griffin now claims that he was got rid of because he was plotting to stand as an Independent against BNP 'loyalist' Mike Coleman and that he made all kinds of demands of the BNP group before the election. Not only that, but Griffin claims he is also working with a 'Searchlight-run phoney nationalist party to split the BNP vote in Stoke'.

In an interview with Simon Darby just a couple of days ago, Griffin stated that the best thing to do about the sites like ours that print the truth about the BNP and himself is not to look at them. He repeats that advice in this article, saying '...all you need to do is ignore it. If you hear someone doing Searchlight's dirty work, pull them up over it. And if they won't stop, don't have any misplaced sympathy for them when we boot them out'. Curiously, his next sentence is 'This is not about stopping free speech'. Oh yeah?

'Lively, even ferocious, internal debate about policies, tactics and how to make the party ever more accountable to its activist hardcore are both needed and welcome. But such debates must be conducted through the proper channels, and the overwhelming majority of our officials and key activists have already decreed are Voting Member's discussion groups, meetings and conference motions.'

Not much room there for the ordinary membership to be able to discuss anything at all. Referring back to the leadership challenge and those who voted against him, Griffin goes on;

'Over the rest of this year, the members of this Negative Tendency will systematically be quietly approached and given one last chance to accept common sense and exercise self-restraint - or go.'

So much for secret ballots and so much for the future of the 337 members who voted against Griffin, and possibly the 4904 who chose not to vote at all. Griffin's almost insane hatred of those who dared to vote against him has been demonstrated numerous times by his liberal use of the words 'vermin', 'cranks', 'losers', 'Hollywood Nazis' and 'negative fools', but he has another phrase for them.

'When the rubbish has been binned we'll be a happier party, more united and more effective than ever.'

It'll also be a party that's nearly 10% smaller than it is at present. Or possibly a good deal more. Griffin reserves his most vicious attack though for the end of the article.

'We are cutting out the last of the poison-mongers. It doesn't matter if they are councillors or donors or minor party heroes or otherwise good activists - none of these pluses outweighs the damage done by individuals who spread lies. Whether plants, dupes or negative losers, they will be tolerated no longer...'

Do you reckon his screen was covered in spit after he wrote that?

The fact is that the whole article is an attempt to paint everyone who opposes Griffin with a similar brush - they are all Searchlight agents, liars, fruitcakes, losers and/or jackboot-fetishists. It's pretty clear though that what they all share is that they oppose Nick Griffin himself either, like the hardcore right-wing, because they consider he's gone soft, or because they believe he's feathering his own nest at the constant expense of the membership or possibly simply because he's patently losing it and striking out at random to destroy his mostly imaginary enemies. It looks like the BNP's Night of the Long Knives is set to be a good deal longer yet.

BNP loses three after less than a week

2009-08-01T05:35:00.000Z

Following last week's elections the BNP bragged as loudly as it could at the fact that it had 'won' a further six new councillors in North Wales, putting the total up to nine (all of whom are, incidentally, town councillors, the equivalent of parish, and all of whom walked into office completely unopposed).

According to Bill Murray, the BNP's Welsh Regional Secretary:

'After the hard work of all our activists we will be taking a week break then it will be back to business as usual.'

Indeed it is because three of the new intake have resigned from the BNP.

Colwyn Bay town councillors Paul Harley, Sue Harley and John Oddy formally resigned as BNP councillors yesterday at their very first council meeting, where all three were represented by Oddy who stated in a post on the icWales forum;

'I attended the meeting to inform the Council that yesterday afternoon all three Councillors had resigned from the BNP and that we were prepared to remain on the Council as Independents, if the Council required it all three of us were prepared to also resign from the Council and allow our seats to be put forward to a by-election that we would not contest.'

When asked why they'd left the BNP, he responded thus;

'My reason for leaving the BNP was my own personal choice, the other two Councillors choose to leave with me. I have always been regarded as a moderate within the party and, as I’ve always maintained, I have never been a racist...'

Quite apart from the question of why the Harleys left when Oddy had resigned for 'personal' reasons, there is a question mark over the latter's statement that he has never been a racist. According to Pat Pattison, who resigned from the party after discovering its 'intolerable' racism, Oddy verbally attacked him for having the temerity to help an Asian family as part of his own duties as a town councillor, stating that the party wasn't happy with him because he'd been 'helping fucking Pakis' and that 'they're Muslim scum anyway'. Oddy might not think those remarks are racist but they definitely look like they are from where I'm sitting.

Just a few days ago, I wrote;

'Given the usual disasters the BNP is prone to, we should lose half of the new input of BNP councillors within a year or so.'

At this rate, they won't last the month.

The BNP on a roll: two more down and another two yet to be confirmed

2009-08-01T05:22:00.000Z

A few weeks back, a comment was made to one of our posts to the effect that Nick Cass had been sacked as Party Manager and Ian Dawson, the BNP's former Head of Group Support Officer and well-known photographer for Redwatch, had resigned.

Since then, it has been confirmed that party management has been handed over to a three-person team - Tony Brewer, Martin Clutterbuck and Michaela MacKenzie - though the party has stayed remarkably tight-lipped about Cass and has avoided mentioning Dawson at all. The apparent reason the BNP has said nothing openly about the resignation of Ian Dawson might well have something to do with his resignation letter which we're assured is a real shocker, ripping into the much-despised Mark Collett and Great White Record's disastrous director, Dave Hannam, both of whom he accuses of undermining morale, incompetence and just about everything else.

Since the comment was made, very little has leaked out from the party (unusually) except for the unconfirmed news that Chris Beverley had 'resigned from the BNP's Advisory Council and been thrown out of his job heading up the money-spinning Excalibur (which sells overpriced tat to gullible BNP members), to be replaced by Nick Griffin's new blue-eyed boy Arthur Kemp, who you can read about here.

Now we hear that Sadie Graham has also resigned (before she was sacked) as the party's Director of Group Development, a post formerly held by the violent bomber Tony Lecomber, who apparently is still hanging around in the BNP doing odd jobs for Nick Griffin, despite having been sacked back in January 2006 and proscribed in April of this year.

The chaos within the BNP seems, at the moment, to be profound. While sackings and resignations seem to be occurring with startling regularity and Griffin seems to be surrounding himself with an informal coterie of close advisors (former South African police spy Arthur Kemp, the BNP's very own terrorist Tony Lecomber, the BNP's universally-derided and rubbishy legal 'expert' Lee Barnes, the new Press Officer Simon Darby and the General Secretary of the BNP-hijacked fake-union Solidarity, Patrick Harrington) members are being expected to just shut up and do the bidding of the party, most of which seems to be handing over vast amounts of money for various lost causes - the current biggie being the staggering £200,000 the party seems to want to throw away on the pointless attempt to replace Ken Livingstone with pornmeister Dicky Barnbrook as London's Mayor.

You'll note that out of the little gang of five that Griffin keeps close, the only actual party member appears to be Simon Darby unless Kemp has joined up in the past few weeks. One wonders what the membership feels about that.

In the last month or two we've seen some pretty high-profile sackings/resignations from the party - Andrew Spence, Jonathan Bowden, former Deputy Chairman of the party Scott McLean and former Press Officer Phil Edwards. Now, if the rumours are all true - and we suspect they are - another four have bitten the dust virtually unnoticed by the membership. Chaos seems to be reigning supreme in the BNP, particularly since the recent leadership challenge which seems to have been designed solely to weed out the dissenters from the ranks. Unfortunately (though not for us) an awful lot of the BNP's more valuable officers and members seem to be getting caught up in the action and are getting the heave-ho along with the 'vermin' that Griffin swore to get rid of.

Party members who take the time to watch the soap opera that the BNP has become must be cringing as every new disaster emerges and wondering why the hell they wasted thirty quid on joining a party that seems determined to implode despite the help offered to it by idiots like Labour's Margaret Hodge and the Conservative's Sayeeda Warsi.

Did we say soap opera? We meant to say farce.

Time to step up the campaign against the BNP conference in Blackpool

2009-08-01T04:28:00.000Z

For years the British National Party has tried to convince the public that it has changed, that it is no longer racist, that it is a legitimate political party that simply wishes to take part in the democratic process - only to be shown up time and time again as a thoroughly racist group that has absolutely no interest in democracy except where it furthers the BNP's own agenda.

One of the innovations its leader Nick Griffin has brought in to try to convince the electorate that racism in the party is all in the past is to allow a clearly limited number of idiotic non-whites and Jews to join - much to the annoyance of the more hardline members - but that this is all a smokescreen becomes apparent when we read the comments of Griffin's supporters like Graham Williamson, former treasurer of the National Front and old chum of Nick Griffin and boss of the one-man PR company Accentuate, which now seems to be working for the BNP-front Solidarity, who suggested a stunt to deflect any accusations that the fake union was racist:

'The first ‘stunt’ should be a Press Conference launching the Union in Essex unveiling our first Sikh member Pramjit Sadra. This of course helps to counter the racist...accusations.'

That the racism and thuggery of the BNP is now largely covert rather than overt is demonstrated again and again as BNP members and allies, ignoring their leader's pleas to hide their hatred from the public, allow themselves to display their true hatreds either by attacking Iraqi asylum-seekers (Kevin Hughes, who earned himself two and a half years inside) or appearing and lauding Nazi Germany in programmes like the Channel Four documentary Young, Nazi and Proud (Mark Collett who, just a week later, was again sharing a platform with Nick Griffin).

Racism aside (though there is a mountain of evidence that proves the racism of the BNP beyond any shadow of doubt) there is continual thuggery and violence in the party. In just the past few weeks, we've seen David Enderby, the BNP councillor from Redditch, lose an appeal against his conviction for attacking his former wife, her mother and a fourteen-year-old girl at a party. Enderby, who claims he's ex-SAS, is not only still in the BNP but the party's recently-appointed Press Officer Simon Darby has made his views clear about the conviction:

'...the latest attempt to poison the electorate against the BNP involves our Redditch councillor David Enderby. Just a couple of weeks ago I attended David's appeal hearing concerning his ridiculous conviction for assault at Worcester Crown Court.'

The party welcomed the violent thug Kevin Hughes back too.

Another fine example of type of person the BNP wants in its ranks is former candidate Dominic Bugler, who was recently given an ASBO after subjecting his neighbours to 18 months of abuse at his family's hands.

BNP Parliamentary candidate for Hull Brian Wainwright was guilty of a campaign of hate mail against the local mosque, a Muslim councillor and a local anti-fascist activist. A letter in which he claimed, 'Muslim blood will be spilt' included 'SS' and skull and cross bones imagery. Another letter was sent to a local anti-fascist activist threatening that Combat 18 (the Nazi terrorist organisation who take there name from Hitler’s initials) would visit.

Swindon BNP activist Mark Bulman (who has used the pseudonym Bullock) was sentenced to five years after attempting to firebomb a local mosque using a BNP leaflet as a fuse. He also daubed swastikas and racist graffiti on local shops and businesses that he believed to be ‘ethnic’.

In June 2006 BNP councillor Brian Turner was found guilty of a racially aggravated public order offence. He escaped a jail sentence and was instead ordered to carry out 300 hours of unpaid work in the community. Turner has previous convictions of common assault and police assault after he was convicted of beating up his wife Melanie Turner.Again, just a few of many, many examples.

Part of the process of pretending to be a legitimate political party is for the BNP to act as though it is one and this, in the past couple of years, has including establishing an 'annual' conference. Anyone who has ever been to an annual conference of one of the real political parties or a trades union will know that they are generally an example of democracy in action. Leadership battles are fought, rules are made or amended and proposals are made, seconded, discussed and voted upon by the delegates who are there representing the wishes of their branch of the party/union. Not so with the BNP. After the last leadership challenge, Griffin wrote this:

'It was a pathetic, pitiful, desperate attempt to cause trouble for the most modernised and most successful nationalist party in British history by a handful of cranks left over from the BNP’s most sterile past, aided and abetted by a gaggle of Hollywood Nazis, congenital losers and thieves.'

Griffin then went on to describe the challenger's supporters as 'vermin' and has spent a good deal of time since the challenge vigorously purging them from the party.

The BNP drones on about 'democracy' on every available occasion yet never, in a million years, will Nick Griffin allow a democracy in the BNP. One of his recent blog posts had this to say on the issue of those party members who have unsuccessfully attempted to push through a truly-democratic 'one man, one vote' system:

'This group must now accept that their scheme to put the destiny of the BNP in the hands of anyone who deigns to pay their membership has been comprehensively and permanently rejected, in favour of a system that gives power only to those who have earned it, and who continue to earn it. The argument is over, and anyone trying to raise it again against the repeatedly expressed will of the vast majority of the party will mark themselves out as a would-be saboteur and a candidate for expulsion.'

The BNP always has difficulty finding a venue for any event - even a pub in which to hold a small meeting. To find somewhere that was big enough to pass off as a venue for anything as large as a 'conference' must have been a real problem for them. However, according to one of our correspondents writing in the comments section of a recent post, the BNP's former Blackpool organiser Roy Goodwin is friends with the owners of the New Kimberley Hotel, a run-down dive on New South Promenade, a pretty hefty walk from Blackpool Tower. This hotel, managed by Peter and Susie Metcalfe, was not only happy to host the conference for the BNP last year but was also happy to ignore the anger of the neighboring hotel owners, local trades unions, the local newspaper and many local people at bringing such notoriety to the area.

Far from considering such a community relations disaster something that should be avoided this year, the New Kimberley is once again allowing the BNP to infest its premises to the detriment of the immediate area and of course Blackpool itself.

The local TUC, Blackpool and Fylde College Student's Union, the newspapers, the NUS, the local MPs and numerous local councillors have all condemned the hotel for hosting the conference and the BNP for having the audacity to believe that Blackpool would welcome its presence but all to no avail.

That the BNP ignores local opinion is no great surprise. After all, it has no real interest in people or their opinions. The New Kimberley however, is an entirely different matter.

Blackpool has, of late, lost some of the edge it had over its competition as a holiday and nightlife resort. With super-cheap flights available, stag and hen parties (long a staple of the Blackpool scene) are increasingly choosing to jet off to Malaga or somesuch place instead. The astonishing decision not to use Blackpool as the site for a so-called 'super casino' has also hit the town hard, leaving depression and anger in its wake. If nothing else, the super casino would have generated a massive business boom for the area. Blackpool hoteliers and tradespeople are working hard to get Blackpool back to the hugely-successful resort it was until a very short time ago and the very last thing the townspeople want is for it to be tarnished by association with the racists and thugs in the British National Party.

One would have expected the party and the BNP-supporting New Kimberley to have realised that the BNP wasn't wanted in Blackpool when all its seven candidates were rejected by the electorate at last May's local government elections - but racists have never been noted for their intelligence.

It's up to us then to drum some sense into the hoteliers who want to pollute Blackpool with this filth. It's up to us to let the New Kimberley know that the BNP is not wanted in Blackpool and that the hotel is wrong both to invite them to the town and to expect us to sit back complacently and let them get on with it.

Almost all of the senior members of the BNP have strong connections with more overtly racist or nazi groups. Nick Griffin himself is former National Front and has lost none of his hatreds over the years, even if they have been tempered in public thanks to the law.

We've seen the effects that the BNP has when it moves into any town - racist attacks increase, racist stickers appear and other racist groups move in to take any scraps that are left and stir up more hatred wherever they can. The British People's Party, a virulently Nazi group that also pretends to be a political party, has been plastering highly offensive stickers all over Blackpool recently and the National Front stickered the town pretty comprehensively just after the last BNP 'conference'.

This is what the New Kimberley has invited to Blackpool and this is why we all need to make the effort to let the New Kimberley know precisely how we feel about this. It's no good telling the hotel owners that the BNP is a racist party - they already know that after inviting them last year and if what our correspondent said its true and they are indeed friends of the former Blackpool BNP organiser Roy Goodwin, they will know precisely what the party is all about and they will approve of its disgusting views.

One of our friends called the hotel and was informed that a) the BNP conference had been cancelled, and b) that the owner of the hotel was a Mohammed Abdul - presumably the New Kimberley's idea of a joke because neither of these statements is true. We're working on finding out who the owner is (and we will) but we need to you ring the hotel and attempt to speak to the managers (Peter and Susie Metcalfe) to put them right on why they should not be holding the conference there at all and we need this done as soon as possible (particularly over the weekend though that's not essential).

If you've rung before, ring again. You can't email them because they don't appear to have moved into the 20th century yet, let alone the 21st.

We will have the demonstration outside the hotel on November 17th at midday and it will be a large demonstration that will show those inside the hotel that plenty of us are prepared to take a stand against the BNP wherever it sticks its ugly shaven head. In the meantime, the hotel needs to know that its invitation to the BNP is intolerable and that under no circumstances will we allow the conference to go ahead without continual and loud protest.

We're working on checking out suppliers to the New Kimberley, the coach companies who bring many of its guests and the trade organisations who work with the hotel and once we have the information we are seeking, we'll pass that along to you. In the meantime, let's get calling and making our voices heard.

The New Kimberley, 585-589 New South Promenade, Blackpool FY4 1NQ, is run by Peter and Susie Metcalfe and can be reached at 01253 341184.

Curiously, the New Kimberley Hotel is registered at Companies House as the address for a company called Goldprime Properties UK Ltd (Company No. 05357988) whose accounts (in a neatly ironic twist) similarly to the BNP's own, are long overdue, its last return having been required but not forthcoming on 9.3.2006. There is a proposal lodged with Companies House to strike Goldprime from the register of trading companies.

Perhaps the BNP chose the New Kimberley because the hotel's financial position so closely mirrored that of its own, both being apparently close to going under. Or perhaps it's simply the moral bankruptcy that the party and the hotel share that the BNP finds so appealing. Either way, the parallels are beginning to seem uncanny.

It's not surprising that the New Kimberley isn't doing too well. We've been checking through the reviews from guests who have stayed there. One, a person calling himself Jacks2607, wrote this back in June 2006:

'The new Kimberly hotel Blackpool, its an utter disgrace, the food was absolutely disgusting, the manager was a complete waste of time. Our rooms had holes in the walls and during our stay the rooms were NEVER hoovered, it was damn right filthy. The portable appliance tests were over a year out of date and some even 2 years!. Everyone else on the holiday with us agreed. I reccommend this hotel to NO ONE. We would have been better off in a shanty town.'

A tatty third-rate hotel hosting a fake conference for a tatty third-rate party.

It's time to start pushing this protest forward and to let the New Kimberley know that it is doing the people of Blackpool and the region around it an immense disservice by allowing this bunch of thugs, thieves, racists and trainee-terrorists to infest it.

BNP's fake union Solidarity already up against the ropes

2009-08-01T03:32:00.000Z

Thanks to Lancaster UAF

A report that has appeared on the BNP website reveals that the fake union set up by the party is already in trouble and seems likely to go the same way as all the other ventures the BNP has ever been involved in, like Nick Griffin's washout of a money-spinner Affordable Cars and the Albion Life insurance scam.

The source of the problem is that, according to the BNP, 'an unconstitutional attempt has been made to remove General Secretary Pat Harrington from his position'. Harrington has something of a fine union pedigree - he was expelled from the RMT. He was also one of the National Front's 'political soldiers' in the late 1980s alongside Nick Griffin. Other BNP activists involved in the project include Jay Lee, who was recently booted out of Aslef, and John Walker, the BNP's national treasurer, who has had his own troubles with the T&G. Clive Potter, the possible President of Solidarity is a long-time BNP activist from Leicester, who was expelled from Unison for improper conduct. Potter is still listed as President on Solidarity's homepage though it was our understanding that he had been ousted months ago. More info on this point would be appreciated.

The BNP produces its usual kneejerk response to problems in the ranks, blaming any difficulties on somebody else, usually 'reds'. In this case, the party goes into overdrive, claiming that 'Solidarity has been the subject of a far-left sabotage bid, involving several individuals working as a team' and that the bid to boot the useless Harrington out of office 'and to replace him with an unknown individual from Merseyside whose involvement in the BNP has extended to just a few weeks...the local organiser and activists concluded from his behaviour that he could well be a Marxist agent provocateur'.

However, the real problem is made apparent in the next section of the article - and regular readers of this blog will recognise it straight away as a problem that seems to exist wherever the BNP sticks its corporate nose in.

'...Tim Hawke [Solidarity Vice-President] continues to refuse to sign first year accounts so that these can be submitted to the Certification Officer in time. This is despite the fact that the accounts were prepared by an accountant and have been independently and professionally audited by a Barrister and Kenny Smith (head of BNP admin).'

Yes indeed. The BNP - or rather one of its many subsidiaries, is in financial trouble (again). There is really only one reason for not signing accounts off and that is that you do not believe that they are a true statement of the financial affairs of the stated organisation. Clearly, Tim Hawke has doubts about either their accuracy or possibly their legality, and it wouldn't be the first time that a treasurer or someone connected with the financial side of a BNP venture has balked at leaving themselves open to litigation by signing off on a load of rubbish - at least a couple of treasurers have been booted out after doing the same thing.

One of the 'purposes' listed for the formation of Solidarity was to avoid what the BNP interpreted as union corruption. Its statement on formation clearly says; 'We want independent unions that are fully accountable to its members whose finances are transparent...' by which one assumes it to mean the organisation's finances are transparent and not the member's finances, although that's certainly open to doubt.

To get around the problem of awkward people inconveniently refusing to sign dodgy accounts, the BNP proposes to call an Emergency General Meeting to completely subvert the democracy it claims to uphold and increase the size of the Executive from the current three, presumably Harrington, Potter and Hawke, to seven, the additional four being one from Third Way (Harrington's current political affiliation) and a vote-winning three from the BNP. This would ensure that, no matter what dubious transactions take place and no matter what goes on that the members are kept unaware of, all decisions will be made by the patently corrupt BNP and the very co-operative Pat Harrington, Nick Griffin's buddy from the old days.

Under Item 14(a) of the present constitution of the fake union, 'The Executive Committee may suspend or dismiss any Solidarity officer in cases of misconduct. It has the power to remove any incompetent or insubordinate Branch or Regional Officer.'

It looks like Tim Hawke has had it then.

It also looks like the BNP is attempting to retain complete control over the union - which is certainly not the impression the party was trying to make when it first set the whole thing up - presumably because if it ever takes off (which it never will) it'll make pots of money, most of which will be siphoned off to the nearest handy pockets. These accounts, along with membership numbers, should make interesting reading - if they're ever allowed to appear and, of course, if they're accurate.

The BNP and the BNP's union - democracy and accountability in action. Well, not quite.

Property investment for fascists - the Croatia story continues

2009-08-01T03:20:00.000Z

An article in a national newspaper last Sunday (22 July), and reproduced all over the internet, claimed to reveal how BNP leaders were setting up a self-sufficient rural bolthole in Croatia in preparation for when the oil runs out.

In fact the story, which was full of errors, was the result of an attempt by the BNP to build a smokescreen around some plain old-fashioned property speculation.

Last October Nick Griffin, the BNP leader, was a guest speaker at a well attended meeting of the party's Leeds branch. He normally turns up in a suit, but on this occasion he made his excuses for wearing jeans, saying that he had just returned from a visit to Croatia. He then regaled his audience about the ethnic problems following the break-up of the former Yugoslavia.

What Griffin did not mention was that much of the "ethnic cleansing" in Croatia at the start of the 1990s, consisting of torture, rape, murder and mutilation of bodies, was carried out by the reborn Ustasha movement. Some 50 years earlier the Ustashi had carried out their first attempt at genocide, in conjunction with the Nazis, against Serbs, Jews and Roma. More than a million Serbs of all ages were butchered in their homes, in forests and in concentration camps. Another 250,000 were forcibly converted to Catholicism, and around a further 300,000 were driven out of Croatia into the remote mountain areas of Serbia.

Hero worship of the wartime butchers of the Ustashi remains widespread in Croatia and it is one of the areas of eastern Europe in which Roberto Fiore, the Italian third-positionist fascist and long-term friend of Griffin, has taken an interest in recent years.

Griffin's visit to Croatia inevitably gave rise to speculation in the BNP, especially when news started to leak out about at least one other senior BNP officer visiting the country, about a property purchase there and even offshore bank accounts to shift BNP funds into the new project.

Older BNP members recalled with dismay two earlier overseas property ventures involving Fiore. The first was a ruined hamlet in northern France in the days when Griffin led the National Front Political Soldiers. A member of Fiore's family had their name on the title deeds and volunteers were shipped out to try to turn it into a political commune. The project was eventually abandoned, money raised from British supporters poured down the drain.

A decade later Fiore bought an abandoned village in Spain. Again work on making it habitable was carried out by volunteers, now from the successor group to the Political Soldiers, the International Third Position.

Yet again it flopped and Fiore had to rush in a lawyer to bail out a leading member of the ITP who had been thrown into jail for attacking the local mayor's property. Back in England the man was given a job in Fiore's extensive UK property empire. The project vanished.

And one must not forget how Griffin got Young NF members to work free of charge to convert a barn at his parents' property in Suffolk in the mid 1980s and later got the BNP to pay for renovation of a barn on his farm in Wales.

BNP members are not keen to see the party's hard-earned funds squandered on yet another potentially disastrous property venture. The BNP is not a party where people can freely ask awkward questions of their leader and get honest answers, so instead disgruntled members started leaking bits of interesting information about the Croatian plans to the anti-fascist Lancaster UAF blogsite.

This could not have come at a worse time for Griffin, who is currently facing a leadership election in the BNP. A huge amount of dirty linen has been paraded before the public in the past six weeks, including talk about property in Croatia.

Knowing that the story was likely to break beyond the anti-fascist movement, Griffin engaged in a classic manoeuvre to control the situation by orchestrating the delivery of a "scoop" to a national newspaper. Anti-fascist blogs and others immediately reproduced it, though Kirklees Unity soon removed it after realising that the story was riddled with errors and half truths and was just an attempt to divert attention from Griffin's property venture.

The story claimed that Andrew McKillop, an expert on "peak oil" – the theory that the world's oil reserves are about to run out – briefed the BNP leadership last September at a secret weekend meeting at a hotel in Hampshire. Those present were so concerned about this that they decided to buy 1,100 hectares of land in Croatia as a bolthole for when civilisation breaks down, the story continued.

But there were many errors.

The story quotes McKillop saying that he had only been contacted via the internet to give the presentation in the New Forest, giving the impression he has had little to do with the BNP. In fact Griffin has reproduced and promoted McKillop's articles on the BNP website and they have been published in the BNP's monthly magazine, Identity.

McKillop was also invited to join the BNP's shadowy think tank, which Searchlight exposed in March. The story says McKillop lives in the USA. When we spoke to him earlier this year he was living in Paris.

Another man named in the story is the BNP's economics expert Alan Goodacre. The writer seemed to think he uses the name Ian Fletcher when visiting the USA. In fact Ian Fletcher is a well known US rightwinger who lobbies against migrant workers. They are not the same person. For one thing an expert analysis of their articles show that Goodacre writes in British English whereas Fletcher is very definitely a North American.

One of the story's most obvious errors is the description of Lee Barnes as the BNP's second-in-command. Far from it: although Barnes acts as the director of the BNP's legal department, he is not actually a party member. This enables him to front up various money raising schemes for the BNP from which the party prefers to distance itself.

Griffin's deputy is Simon Darby and the party's vice-chair is Scott McLean.

The story claims the land is owned by a BNP sympathiser whose late father "is understood to have made a fortune in the pizza business". No name is given and the story sounds a bit like it is based on the pizza billionaire who funds a community in the USA.

The article ends with an obvious bit of padding, with a rapid trawl through the bombers Tim McVeigh and David Copeland and William Pierce's The Turner Diaries.

It is interesting that the BNP chose to dump this story on a journalist who does not have a track record of writing about the far right but works for a newspaper that is very keen on ecology.

The very worthwhile team at Lancaster UAF are to be congratulated on opening up a can of worms which the BNP leader will have great difficulty closing.

Stop the BNP

Auty leadership campaign in rapid decline

2009-08-01T01:04:00.000Z

Making a bid for the leadership of the British National Party is no easy matter. An ordinary member is required to have five years uninterrupted membership, has to obtain one hundred signatures from supporters (as opposed to a present officer who only needs ten signatures), is banned (or at least discouraged) from attending meetings to proselytize for him/her self and faces a barrage of criticism, accusation and misinformation, while the current leader Nick Griffin attends all the meetings he can and lays the propaganda on with a trowel himself and via his minions.

Not altogether surprising then, that the Colin Auty leadership challenge is in trouble. The major purge of members that took place after last year's leadership challenge is clearly making the membership wary of signing for Auty - a tacit admission that they are unhappy with the current leader. There have also been strong hints that if this challenge goes ahead, Nick Griffin will make it his business (with the help of an impotent and pointless Advisory Council) to change the system so that a challenge can only be made once every four or five years - a rumour that horrifies the dissidents within the party who have managed to persuade Auty to make the challenge in a doubtless vain attempt to see the former rebels reinstated and a few of the older members returning to the fold.

Although the result of the challenge last year was lauded as a mandate for Nick Griffin to continue his role as party dictator, it was clear that only 39% of the party membership had voted for him. Spin that as you will, 39% does not make a mandate. Nevertheless, Griffin's leadership was made more secure, and despite continually mediocre election results (just ten new councillors at the recent elections as opposed to the BNP predictions of forty) and with conditions as near-perfect as the BNP could hope, his position remains internally unassailable.

And unassailable it will remain, if Griffin and his acolytes have anything to do with it. Since rumours of Auty's challenge have emerged, the dirty tricks department of the BNP has been on overtime. Lee Barnes, the party's insane legal beagle, dashed out a letter to the membership as soon as the news became public, attacking Auty as being a 'puupet' for the machinations of the December rebel's group (or Voice of Change, as they call themselves). Certainly, they have openly given their backing to Auty though, as time passes, rumours of fragmentation reach us. Indeed, it was announced only yesterday that Steve Blake, one of the key rebels, has decided not to support Auty's challenge after all. Others, it seems, are following his example. Chris Beverly, former Griffin blue-eyed boy, has also backed off following pressure from above.

Barnes' letter was swiftly followed by another, this time from the party's National Elections Officer, Eddy Butler. Butler, like Barnes, made no bones about his contempt for the challenger:

'But the backers of this ridiculous bid should reconsider their aimless tactic. People should refuse to sign the nomination papers. It is a distraction and a waste of time and effort and it will end up almost certainly with the constitution changed in a way that destroys the important Right of the possibility of a yearly election. Standing a no-hoper is stupid, mindless and fatally undermines our Constitution. It is a pitiful and moronic – a bankrupt tactic by people who can only be described as having gone giddy to the extent that they are now without the imagination to think how they can raise issues in a legitimate way.

This election, if it goes ahead, should be carried out in the most rapid manner possible with zero publicity allowed for the joke candidate...'

We're told that the party has banned ALL discussion on the Auty challenge on its own forum, thus stifling the possibility of dissent and avoiding giving Auty the opportunity of presenting the reasons for his opposition to Griffin. Stormfront, the playground of the many nazis within the BNP, has been awash with anti-Auty propaganda - much of it instigated by a character calling himself 'Walk towards the light' (Lee Barnes), and other far-right forums are being flooded with anti-Auty propaganda.

Rumour also reaches us that branches have been warned via regional organisers that Auty is not to be allowed a platform under any circumstances. Apart from stopping him speaking on his own behalf (while Nick Griffin zooms up and down the country attending meetings with his entourage at the expense of the membership) this is putting a severe dent in Auty's musical career, such as it is. Auty, the BNP's answer to Keith Richards, was apparently booked to play his rubbishy songs at several branches over the coming few weeks. These have now, we're told, put him on hold. Whether this is because he is challenging Griffin or simply because he's crap, we don't know.

Insults aside, it has been reported that when Auty loses (as he certainly will if the challenge goes ahead) he will be kicked out of the party, as will his supporters. His campaign manager, Roger Robertson, the BNP's former South-East Regional Organiser, has already been told that he faces a disciplinary tribunal on July 6th.

Furthermore, there is another aspect of this leadership challenge that needs to be watched. Griffin has let slip that he is sick of being challenged - using the pretext that it interferes with election planning and electioneering - and that he intends to begin the process to have challenges limited to four or five-yearly as soon as humanly possible. Even less democracy in the BNP - that least democratic of political parties.

Auty's career is in decline and will end with his failure to become party leader. Like Chris Jackson last year, Auty will, if the challenge is allowed to go ahead and he manages to get enough signatures, only have three weeks to campaign. But to whom will he campaign? Griffin, we are told, is refusing to allow Auty access to the membership list on the dubious grounds that such access would breach the Data Protection Act. This effectively kills Auty's ability to reach out to the members who might possibly give him their vote if they know of his existence. A devious and surprisingly clever move by Griffin though the Data Protection Act doesn't seem to have stopped the Barnes and Butler letters being sent out to the entire membership. Interesting how rules can be bent, isn't it.

There is one further complication for Auty that will do him no good at all; the rumour that Chris Jackson intends to stand again. If this is true, the opposition to Griffin will have two people on which to pin their single vote, thus ensuring that neither of them get any respectable numbers in the ballot. This second attempt by Jackson will do nothing for anyone except Nick Griffin, and it has become clear that Jackson is generally regarded as a stalking horse, used last year to flush out the malcontents within the party so that they could be entertainingly purged and used this year to split the vote, thus ensuring Auty's failure, and to prop up Griffin's position in the party.

Open support for Auty is, to say the least, sparse. Just twenty-three members appear on his site under the banner 'We're proudly (and openly) backing the challenge!'. Of these, seven are suspended members, one has had his membership renewal rejected, two are about to be kicked out and Auty's position is itself looking increasingly precarious. If Griffin has his way, this leadership challenge will collapse before it properly gets started. Even if he doesn't, Auty will lose and Griffin will get the security of four or five-yearly terms in office. Either way, Auty's career with the Britsh National Party is over because he had, in Eddy Butler's curious phrase, the 'temerity' to wish to stand for the leadership of the BNP.

Updated: BNP leadership election result - no surprises

2009-08-01T00:59:00.000Z

The British National Party leadership election results are in at last and, according to a post on the nazi Stormfront forum (and eventually the BNP web site), the results are as follows:

Griffin: 3363 (91%)
Jackson: 337 (9%)
Turnout: 43%

No great surprise there except that a large number of people chose to deliberately abstain.

The numbers are all important in this contest. The BNP has (it claims) a total voting membership of 8604, which means 4904 chose not to vote, leaving 3700 who did. 337 BNP members voted for Chris Jackson - substantially more than the 100 signatures he had to gather simply to be allowed to stand in this patently rigged contest.

For a virtual unknown - or at least unknown outside the North-West of England - Jackson did remarkably well, particularly when one considers the short period between announcement and election and the many limitations placed on him regarding anything to do with having direct access to the membership. Had it been a fair fight, we would have expected Jackson to easily double his votes. In fact, in our opinion he could have done a lot better had he actively campaiged. We wonder why he didn't.

Griffin is now in the peculiar and uncomfortable position that has affected every real party leader for decades - he's a minority leader, chosen to lead the BNP by a minority of the available votes in his party. In fact, working on the percentages alone, he only has a mandate from 39% of the party - hardly 'a resounding mandate', as one idiotic Stormfronter put it.

It's pretty clear from the immediate reactions to the result that we can expect something of an old-fashioned purge in the BNP in the near future - a clear-out of those undesirables who don't seem to appreciate either Nick Griffin's dictatorial style of leadership, the numerous dodgy deals he has on the go at any given time or the energetic expansion of the BNP into an apparently limitless number of bizarre and disparate business ventures. The Night of the Long Knives beckons and the supporters of Chris Jackson had better watch the shadows for a few months. Despite having absolutely no loyalty to the BNP membership himself, Griffin demands absolute loyalty from his subordinates and the leadership challenge has already been labelled an act of treachery a number of times.

Griffin staggers into a new year as leader with none of the spring in his step that he should be feeling after a failed leadership challenge. The result - or rather, the turnout - was lacklustre, reflecting the party's performance at the council elections back in May. The troops are demoralised, the income, we are assured by people who certainly know, is drying up and the membership is stagnating as it waits for triumphs that never arrive and holiday camps that will never materialise.

In fact this leadership challenge seems only to have left bitterness and recrimination behind it. Possibly the next one will be better - it's rumoured that pornmeister Dickie Barnbrook has his eye on Griffin's seat (so to speak), which might explain why he's recently been pushed out to challenge the unbeatable Ken Livingstone for Mayor of London. A challenge from Barnbrook might just be a challenge worth watching.

Lancaster UAF

No place for fascism on Glasgows streets

2008-04-09T11:27:00.000Z

Buchanan Street in Glasgow has long been a place where political groups of various flavours set up stalls and sell newspapers and political propaganda. Walking down the street on a Saturday afternoon you will find groups such as Glasgow Anarchists, Fight Racism – Fight Imperialism, Socialist Workers Party, Palestinian Solidarity and the Communist Party all distributing political material. The usual place to find these groups is at the junction of Buchanan Street and Gordon Street.

This Saturday, April 5th, however a different political group arrived to hawk their particular message. This group however were not welcome on Buchanan street, or any street for that matter. They are the British National Party, the BNP.

Three of these racist scumbags had decided that they were going to sell the “Voice of Freedom”, the vile hate rag of their party. Word quickly went around the different stalls and a group of ten assorted leftists moved down to surround them and stop them from selling their filth.

The three who were selling papers quickly departed to a slow hand clap from the people of Glasgow. However one particular goon who was talking to them and shaking hands decided to hang around at the junction of Gordon Street and Buchanan Street talking into his mobile phone as if calling for back up, after about ten minutes of glowering at the Anarchist stall and attempting to act menacing he departed to get backup to face the evil lefties. Disappearing into Borders bookstore he shortly returned with backup – his mum.

His mother proceeded to fulfil all the stereotypes of the far right with her ignorance, arrogance, homophobia and blustering. She attempted to pick a fight at the Anarchist stall by tossing leaflets and pamphlets to the floor and calling those on the stall a “bunch of anarchist arse bangers” and other such delightful names. Declaring that her son was not a hooligan and that she was the hooligan. In a show of solidarity people from all the other political stalls quickly came over and proceeded to argue with the woman who claimed that her son was not in the BNP (despite him later saying that he would be putting various peoples pictures on redwatch) and then went on to hit a comrade from the SWP . After about ten minutes of arguing people decided to ignore the scum and get on with the day.

The duo of dimmness hung around for maybe half an hour, threatening to call their lawyer (on a Saturday? Yeah right!) and report the stalls for some undetermined reason that probably made sense to her if not everyone else.

Not long after the gruesome twosome departed news arrived that the three BNP paper sellers had started selling their rags at the junction of Buchanan Street and St. Vincent Street. This time an even larger group of the various left organizations, Anonymous and assorted anti-fascists marched up Buchanan Street and surrounded them.

Chants of “BNP off our streets!” began as various people argued with them and called the BNP out for the scum they are. Having already been moved on once though, they dug their heels in and refused to move, even when the crowd around them swelled with people angered at seeing Nazis on our streets.

Eventually they had their papers taken off them and distributed into the bins. Having no hate rags to sell they then buggered off to a great cheer from all on the street.

We cannot allow these pedlars of hate and bigotry to organize or spread their disease, they must be confronted wherever they rear their ugly, pockmarked heads.

Indymedia (Scotland)