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.
Showing posts with label Lee Barnes. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Lee Barnes. Show all posts
Saturday, August 1
Butler attacks 'joke' leadership challenger
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
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
Property investment for fascists - the Croatia story continues
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
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
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.
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