The right wing may not realise what they’ve won
For the first time, it happened. No surprise, though. But there are lessons to be learnt, when we consider the repercussions of the election of members of a UK far-right party to the European parliament.
There should be little doubt about whether they are a far-right party – the British National Party (BNP) is, regardless of how it has tried to redesign itself, a party with radical racist and xenophobic views. Had this party come of age in the 1930s, their main target would have been Jews. Now a different group is being targeted: Muslims.
This follows a trend that exists all across Europe: the “new Jews” (ie, those who are now being discriminated against, as Jews were in the 1920s and 1930s) are invariably Muslims. A number of interesting studies have compared the public discourse around Jews in the 1920s with Islamophobic material in the mainstream press in Europe today – the results are not encouraging. It seems Europeans may not forget the Holocaust, but may forget what happened right before it.
What I was interested in after the elections, however, was not the similarities between how Jews were once perceived, and how Muslims are now perceived, but something else. The worry of Muslims overrunning Europe (essentially, the BNP’s fear) is shared by a growing proportion of people across the continent – to the point where one could begin to describe it as “a movement”. This movement that would be united by a fear, which they call “Eurarabia” (an amalgamation of “Europe” and “Arabia”). Many who share this fear are on the left, as well as in the centre – so, it cannot be said to be solely a “right wing” obsession. Indeed, this is something quite worrying – it is a xenophobia that can find sympathisers across many different sections of European society.
Nevertheless, the core of this group is on the right, and that raises interesting questions. Why the right? And what sort of repercussions does that imply for the future in terms of Muslim-non Muslim relations within the UK, and beyond?
In the UK, as well as across Europe, the left was the party of those who felt disenfranchised. The overwhelming majority of Muslims in the UK today are not descendants of indigenous Britons who converted to Islam, but the descendants of recent migrants to the UK who generally came from very modest backgrounds. Naturally, it was the left (particularly the Labour Party) which endeared itself to the Muslim community, from which it received overwhelming support. The right had the opposite experience – historically, rarely appealing to the disenfranchised, and more given to conservative views as to how the “nation” was constituted.
Such was the state of play in the 1970s until the 1990s. One of the ironies of this situation was that when it came to values, Muslims often shared the right’s focus on family and tradition. For more pragmatic reasons, they affiliated with the left.
The last decade has changed a lot of that. Labour went to war in Iraq – a war that turned out to be baseless, in a country that happened to be a predominantly Muslim country. Many in the Muslim community have become more enfranchised, and historically when migrant communities progress economically, they often become more interested in participation in centre or centre-right positions on the political spectrum. The left’s hold on the Muslim community has been broken.
But, coming back to the BNP’s wins, what do these political histories mean now for Muslims in the UK? While most Muslims are expressing fears about the intensifying discourse (which frankly borders on hate-speech), some are calling for their community to engage with the right wing with more seriousness. It’s a sign of maturity that rather than simply describe the BNP as being far-right extremists, some Muslims are asking: why is there support for the BNP in the first place? What have Muslims done, or not done, to create the conditions for that support to emerge?
All strata of British society are trying to analyse what has happened, and certain trends are emerging. Some want to deny any responsibility for themselves by condemning every voter for the BNP as a repentant racist, who simply cannot be helped or (worse) understood. But others are trying to understand why so many have now turned to the BNP, and where their resentment comes from, in an effort to remove those conditions for the future.
Both of these trends are also represented within the Muslim community. In their reaction to the BNP victories, Muslims have actually been shown to be more British than they might have been years ago. That’s a far cry from the common media perception of Muslims as unintegrated (and, often, incapable of being integrated) but it is borne out by the limited polling data we have on the attitudes of Muslims in the UK. More than the average non-Muslim, Muslim Britons are hopeful for the future of their country.
Matters are likely to get worse before they get better – this shift to the right has taken years and it will probably take a long time to settle in a more stable position. In the meantime, we may see Muslims joining centre-right parties, and drifting away from left wing politics.
That is surely good news for democracy in general – no part of the political spectrum should have a monopoly on a particular ethnic community. But matters will continue to deteriorate unless British and European society as a whole faces up to those who fear “Eurarabia” – not simply to shout them down, but to deconstruct their arguments with facts and examples of people who prove their fears unwarranted.
The BNP might not realise it, but they could turn out to be a good catalyst for the integration of the Muslim community: by reminding non-Muslims in Europe how ugly the far-right can get, and encouraging Muslims not to have their vote monopolised by a single part of the political spectrum.
The National (UAE)
Hisham Hellyer is a fellow at the University of Warwick in England and director of the Visionary Consultants Group
Prosecutors press for action against BNP leaflets
• Pressure mounts for end to race hate law loopholes
• CPS powerless to pursue complaints made by police
Senior prosecutors are calling for the laws on race hate crimes to be strengthened to counter the threat posed by the British National party.
The threshold for securing a conviction is so high that far-right activists are able to evade prosecution for material that many people would consider to be threatening and racist, according to sources at the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS).
Prosecutors blame the lack of convictions on the strict legal test, which requires showing an intention to “stir up racial hatred” or a likelihood that racial tension would be stirred up.
The offence, which was created under the Public Order Act, only applies to acts that take place or are witnessed in public so it does not cover leaflets that are pushed through people’s letter boxes. It also offers no protection against the publication of inaccurate or false information.
Several BNP leaflets have been referred to the CPS over the last five years – some by senior police officers and one by a judge – but no further action has been taken.
Peter Herbert, the chairman of the Society of Black Lawyers and a part-time judge, submitted a complaint last year over a leaflet called The Changing Face of London that had two pictures, one depicting an all-white street party from the 1950s, the other showing three Muslim women wearing a niqab, one of whom is making a V-sign towards the camera.
“Under the law, it has been extremely difficult to mount a prosecution against extremism and hate speech,” said Herbert. “But with the rise of the BNP, and the subsequent rise in racist attacks and the fear the party’s leaflets can provoke, it is essential we are given the tools to deal effectively with this threat.”
Herbert said the law should protect people from material that creates a fear of racist attacks as well as those that are deemed to incite racial hatred. “All the evidence suggests that it is people from minority communities and the faith communities that are put in fear of violence when racist leaflets are delivered in town centres or on estates. If someone handed out the same thing in the workplace, most employers would consider that gross misconduct; if someone does the same thing in the street, there is very little we can do.”
Another complaint was submitted to the CPS by Lancashire police who expressed concern about a BNP leaflet which blamed Muslims for the heroin trade. Four people were arrested and released on police bail last year but detectives are still waiting to hear from the CPS about whether they have grounds to prosecute for “incitement to stir up racial hatred”.
In another incident, Derbyshire police alerted the CPS about a BNP election leaflet claiming three asylum seekers had raped a woman. The police said the rape claims were “unfounded”, but the CPS said there were no grounds to prosecute under existing law. “Whilst those details in the leaflet regarding the alleged rape are factually incorrect, this in itself does not constitute a criminal offence,” said a CPS spokesman at the time.
A senior prosecutor told the Guardian: “There are numerous problems. The test to show incitement is very high and the material has to be distributed in public rather than put through people’s doors. This makes it really difficult to get convictions for material which many people consider racist.”
A CPS source confirmed that the organisation would review its policies on prosecuting race hate crimes following the election of two BNP candidates, including the party’s leader, Nick Griffin, to the European parliament.
“We will need to look again at the situation with prosecuting incidences of this material,” the source said.
Last week, the Equality and Human Rights Commission, the official watchdog on race and equality, wrote a formal letter to the BNP giving them one month to remedy three alleged breaches of the Race Relations Act, including the party’s whites-only membership policy.
That announcement increased the likelihood of legal action against the BNP in the civil courts, but critics say there have been too few criminal proceedings, despite material distributed by the party which many regard as inflammatory.
Herbert, the former chair of the Metropolitan police race hate crime forum, said a number of anti-racism and human rights bodies would back a change in the law.
“I expect a strong coalition will form around this idea and put pressure on the government to instigate a change in primary legislation as soon as possible,” he said.
Anti-racism campaigners welcomed the crackdown on inflammatory or racist leaflets but warned more was needed to effectively counter the threat posed by the BNP.
“Where the BNP has been distributing racially offensive material, it is right that they should be prosecuted with the full force of the law,” said a spokesman for the anti-fascist organisation Searchlight. “However, the way we will defeat Nick Griffin and his party is street by street and estate by estate, not lawyer by lawyer and courtroom by courtroom.”
BNP: Commission takes action over potential breach of race discrimination law
The EHRC has today written to BNP over possible breaches of anti-discrimination law.
The Equality and Human Rights Commission has today written to the British National Party over possible breaches of anti-discrimination law. The Commission has demanded that the party address potential breaches related to its constitution and membership criteria, employment practices and provision of services to the public and constituents.
The letter, sent to the party chairman Nick Griffin, outlines the Commission’s concerns about the BNP’s compliance with the Race Relations Act. The letter asks the BNP to provide written undertakings by 20th July that it will make the changes required by the Commission. Failure to do so may result in the Commission issuing an application for a legal injunction against the BNP.
The Commission has a statutory duty, under the Equality Act 2006, to enforce the provisions of the Act and to work towards the elimination of unlawful discrimination. This duty includes preventing discrimination by political parties.
The Commission thinks that the BNP’s constitution and membership criteria may discriminate on the grounds of race and colour, contrary to the Race Relations Act. The party’s membership criteria appear to restrict membership to those within what the BNP regards as particular “ethnic groups” and those whose skin colour is white. This exclusion is contrary to the Race Relations Act which the party is legally obliged to comply with. The Commission therefore thinks that the BNP may have acted, and be acting, illegally.
The Commission has required the BNP to provide a written undertaking that it will not discriminate contrary to the Race Relations Act in its employment and recruitment policies, procedures and practices.
The BNP’s website states that the party is looking to recruit people and states that any applicants should supply a membership number. The Commission thinks that this requirement is contrary to the Race Relations Act, which outlaws the refusal or deliberate omission to offer employment on the basis of non-membership of an organisation. The Commission is therefore concerned that the BNP may have acted, and be acting, illegally.
The letter asks the BNP to provide a written undertaking that it will amend its policy on recruitment accordingly so that it complies with the Race Relations Act.
The Commission is also concerned that the BNP’s elected representatives may not intend to offer or provide services on an equal basis to all their constituents and members of the public irrespective of race or colour. The Commission thinks that this contravenes the Race Relations Act and the Local Authority Model Code of Conduct and that the BNP may have acted illegally and may act illegally in the future.
The Commission’s letter asks the BNP to provide a written undertaking that its elected representatives or those working for them will not discriminate on grounds of race or colour in the provision of services to members of the public or constituents.
John Wadham, Group Director Legal at the Equality and Human Rights Commission said:
“The Commission’s statutory role includes a duty to investigate possible breaches of discrimination law and take action where appropriate. The legal advice we have received indicates that the British National Party’s constitution and membership criteria, employment practices and provision of services to constituents and the public may breach discrimination laws which all political parties are legally obliged to uphold. We await a response from the BNP to our letter before deciding what further action we may take. Litigation or enforcement action can be avoided by the BNP giving a satisfactory response to our letter.”
Ignore this vile abuse, Kelly Holmes is a true Brit
You always remember what you were doing when something wonderful happened.
Well, on the evening of August 28, 2004, I was standing on a track-side seat and screaming as a young woman drove herself through the last few strides of an Olympic final. When she crossed the line, adding the 1500metres title to her 800m victory, I apologised to an American colleague for my outburst.
‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘She’s a great lady, Kelly Holmes. You Brits should be proud of her.’
He was right, of course. Kelly’s double was a prodigious achievement. In the annals of British sport it takes its place alongside Roger Bannister’s four-minute mile, Bobby Moore’s World Cup winners of 1966 and the 2003 Rugby World Cup victory of Martin Johnson’s men. I well recall her tears of pride as she climbed to the peak of the podium and she did not cry alone.
Since that glorious Athenian evening, Kelly has continued to bring honour and credit to her sport. She was appointed National School Sports Champion and has enjoyed real success in increasing the amount of PE and active sport in our schools. She has designed and promoted programmes to support the development of gifted young sportsmen and women.
And she carries the credibility of an athlete whose own career - despite being distorted by injury and plagued by ill fortune - represented the ultimate vindication of spirit, endurance and towering talent. She was created a Dame in 2005 and more recently was elected President of Commonwealth Games England. In short, she is something more than a mere heroine; she has attained the status of national treasure.
Which makes the intervention of one Andrew Brons even more offensive.
Mr Brons is a leading light in the British National Party. He recently polled 9.8 per cent of votes in the Yorkshire and Humber region, which won him a seat in the European Parliament. He is a former member of the neo-Nazi National Socialist Movement. And this odious fellow has just expressed a view about our Kelly.
Although she was born in Pembury, Kent, and served for several years in the British Army before embarking upon her stunningly successful career in the British vest, she is not, in Brons’s considered opinion, a fully-fledged Briton. For Kelly is the daughter of an English mother and a Jamaican-born father and her mixed-race heritage means that she is ‘only partially from this country’.
Or, as he puts it: ‘I don’t accept the term Black British or Asian British. Britons are the indigenous peoples of these isles.’
Now, normally I should not dream of publicising the pitiful fantasies of Brons and his fellow inadequates. But his idiocy gives us the chance to reflect upon just how far sport has come.
Football, the national sport, has played a major part in engaging the entire community. The briefest glance at the current England team tells us how handsomely the sport has embraced diversity. Track and field has always had an admirable record in this area while rugby and cricket can point to genuine progress.
In truth, most of our major sports - with tennis a faintly depressing exception - have made intelligent efforts to broaden their talent base and British sport has benefited greatly from such enhanced inclusiveness.
It is, therefore, appropriate that the country should take collective offence when a fascist like Brons dares to question their presence in the nation’s sport by declaring: ‘They are British citizens, which is a legal concept, but not British by identity.’ It is a statement both baseless and insulting and it says more about the poisonous dullard who made it than the men and women who it seeks to belittle.
For they are considerable people who have achieved great things, people like Ugo Monye, Ravi Bopara, Emile Heskey, Theo Walcott, Monty Panesar and Rio Ferdinand, as well as the woman who brought us screaming to our feet at the Athens Olympics.
‘She’s a great lady, Kelly Holmes,’ said the American journalist. ‘You Brits should be proud of her.’
Indeed we are, because Dame Kelly is one of the finest athletes in Olympic history. And she is one of us.
Patrick Collins in the Mail on Sunday
Euro far-right rejects the BNP
The British National party’s (BNP) efforts to form a coalition with other extremist groups in Europe have ended in failure.
Party leader Nick Griffin had hoped to form a grouping with parties such as Italy’s Northern League and France’s Front National.
Parliamentary groupings require 25 MEPs from at least seven countries, which triggers up to a million euros funding for staff and office costs.
“It appears at present we are below the threshold,” Mr Griffin said after talks at the European parliament in Brussels.
“We have to see how the other political groups get on with their negotiations and if they cannot do a deal whether they will deal with us.”
The BNP grouping has only attracted 12 MEPs, despite wide gains for the far-right in the recent elections.
The far-right often struggles to work together across national boundaries.
In the last parliament the Greater Romania party broke up the far-right Identity, Tradition, Sovereignty group after a spat with Mussolini’s daughter, Alessandro, who said all Romanians were criminals.
The Northern League’s rejection of a BNP grouping will severely hinder Mr Griffin’s attempts to have a strong presence in the parliament, because they carry nine MEPs.
Geert Wilder’s Dutch Freedom party, which mostly sells itself on an extreme variant of anti-Muslim thought, also rejected the BNP, despite being sufficiently extreme to be banned from entering Britain.
Mr Wilder is understood to be attempting to appeal to mainstream Dutch voters, and is furiously avoiding associations with the likes of the BNP or the National Front.
The Danish People’s party is also avoiding Mr Griffin. It has also tried to avoid Jean Marie Le-Pen’s National Front, after he again denied the Holocaust at the parliament.
Groupings must be declared by July 14th, for the parliament’s inaugural sitting.
Hodge accused over Barking selection battle
Barking MP Margaret Hodge was accused this week of involvement in alleged dirty tricks over selections to her local council. The row threatens to tear Labour apart locally and help the British National Party take over the council in next year’s elections.
Speaking to Tribune, Labour activists, councillors and community representatives have accused Ms Hodge of being a “control freak” who has engineered the deselection of Labour members of Barking and Dagenham Council in a bid to exercise personal control over her constituency Labour party. For personal family reasons, Ms Hodge was unable to respond before Tribune went to press.
Eight Labour councillors have been struck off the candidate list since March this year, including Val Rush, cabinet member for the environment, and planning chair John Denyer. A ninth, deputy mayor Fred Barns, was also deselected but reinstated on appeal. Barking and Dagenham has 12 BNP councillors, more than any other borough in Britain.
Asked what linked the councillors together, one activist said: “They’re all people who didn’t like Margaret”. Another declared: “She is a control freak and she wants total control… I can see the BNP controlling the council”.
Barking Labour Party has been riven with factionalism since 2006, when Ms Hodge was attacked over her remark that eight out of ten white households were tempted to vote BNP in the local elections.
One deselected councillor said of the events: “I felt it gave the BNP the oxygen it needed and I wasn’t alone in speaking out. I think that I’m now paying for that”. They had suffered “bullying and intimidation” including silent phone calls, they added.
Some deselected councillors were discriminated against for their disabilities, a well-placed source said: “John Denyer can’t walk the streets, but there was always something for him to do… Fred Barnes has a disability but he would drive everybody around, pick leaflets up, but he had a hip replacement. That was given as one of the reasons.”
Various sources complained that the selection panels had been fed misleading information about councillors. At least three councillors heard of their deselection before being officially told, and one said: “The BNP seems to know a lot more about what’s going on in Barking Labour Party… They told me before I even had my interview”.
Ms Hodge is said to have announced the deselection of two councillors in Barking’s Thames ward at a coffee morning on 13 March – the same day one of them, Cllr Barnes, received the letter informing him.
The MP is also blamed for alleged misconduct at Barking CLP’s annual general meeting of 2007, branded a “shambles” by two separate sources. They say that non-Labour Party members were allowed into the meeting but other Labour members were barred and that Ms Hodge’s staff instructed delegates how to vote. Delegates complained to London Labour Party.
A London Labour Party spokesperson said its selections had been “fair” and denied any impropriety, including any contact with the BNP over deselections. It was “totally spurious” that disability had been used against councillors, they added. Laila Butt, Ms Hodge’s CLP secretary, said Ms Hodge had no involvement in selections.
Unity News is a friend of Val Rush. She fights fascism. Margaret Hodge helps it.
The shower behind the BNP throne
The henchmen behind vile BNP leader Nick Griffin have their thin veneer of acceptability stripped away today.
His minders and hangers-on wore smart suits and ties as they leaped to shield their party leader from a barrage of eggs and anti-fascist taunts this week. But the News of the World can reveal their respectable image conceals a Nazi-saluting RACIST, a depraved SWINGER and a FAILED wannabe councillor who lives with his mum.
The rotten shower were among sidekicks who jumped in to protect Griffin, 49, from furious protesters in London. Griffin and Andrew Brons, who together had just become MEPs in the Euro elections, had been trying to portray their party as a reasonable voice. But we can reveal that their minders’ views are every bit as warped as the BNP’s policies.
Take JAY SLAVEN, who was seen on camera roughly pushing a bystander aside as he escorted Griffin and Brons away. A truer picture of Slaven, 25, emerges from another photo of him giving a Nazi salute and posing with a St George’s flag draped over his shoulders.
The snap features on a Facebook photo album entitled “Forever Brave, Forever True, Forever England! St George’s Day!”
Slaven, from Doddinghurst, Essex, tried to make a name for himself by defending Jade Goody’s racist remarks to Shilpa Shetty during Celebrity Big Brother in 2007. At the time he claimed the huge row which erupted over comments made towards Indian actress Shilpa was “laughable”.
In another rant Slaven, an assistant distribution manager, declared: “I see no possible wrong in wanting to preserve this island race of ours. Racial mixing is not leading to the BNP success, the vast damage done to our nation by successive governments is.”
Pictured near Slaven at the egg demo was burly BNP minder MARTIN REYNOLDS, who is Griffin’s head of security and a regular feature at his elbow. But Reynolds - married with three kids - is also a regular on the swingers scene and lusts after “big girls”. The 41-year- old from Leeds was pictured at the London bust-up in dark glasses. But he wore far less as he watched women indulge in sex acts at a squalid orgy.
Months earlier he had gone on dating website faceparty.com with fellow BNP organisers Mark Collett and Dan Hannam. Reynolds told how he hated stuck-up people and women on diets - and listed his ideal female as “size 16 and above with a good sense of humour and a sex drive to match mine”.
Also among Griffin’s gang was TONY GLADWIN, who lives with his mum in a 1960s house with a St George’s Cross flying from a 6ft flagpole outside. The 25-year-old landscape gardener recently stood as a district councillor but failed miserably to get elected. Gladwin, from Billericay, Essex, has said: “Everyone that knows me knows I am in the BNP. I’m very proud of it. People have made out it’s like a secret society, like we should be hiding it.”
Another Griffin minder is former London mayoral candidate JULIAN LEPPERT, a postman who is happiest when he is delivering racist scare stories. He said: “We don’t want to be a minority in our city, let alone our country. That is what we are going to have by 2055 if current trends continue.”
Meanwhile new MEP Andrew Brons, 61, seeks to be the respectable face of the party but 25 years ago he was convicted of behaviour likely to cause a breach of the peace. He and another National Front member were shouting slogans including “Death to Jews” and “White Power”.
Guess what? The BNP takes white-supremacist cash from the US
Filed by Atreus in Britain, North America on June 12th, 2009
Who’d have thought it, eh? James Von Brunn, the white supremacist who shot dead a security guard, Stephen Tyrone Johns, at the Holocaust museum in Washington, attended fund-raising meetings of the American Friends of the British National Party.
Yes, I know you can’t always blame political parties for where their funding comes from. But imagine if this had happened to a mainstream political party. Suppose the Conservative Party was found to have received funds from a raving anti-semite. Not exactly a source up there with Michael Ashcroft, is it? Suppose the Labour Party had accepted a donation from Hamas?
And remember the fuss we used to make about the IRA receiving financial support from the US? Yet somehow we’re not that surprised, nor particularly alarmed apparently, that the BNP is supported by the kind of anti-semitic nutter who murders a Holocaust museum attendant, that BNP leader Nick Griffin has spoken at the AFBNP meetings that such pond-life attend and was only too happy to say that they made a “significant contribution” to the BNP’s [2001] general election campaign.
I only mention this because the BNP’s apologists have been out in force lately, after the ethnic-cleansing party won two Euro-seats, saying that I have to understand that the miseries and pressures put on communities subject to immigration push white people to vote for the BNP in protest.
I couldn’t understand that, apparently, in my cosseted home-counties existence. Which is a bit rich when it comes from tank-topped, metropolitan, neo-cons, tapping away in their stripped-pine loft conversions, with their hearts bleeding for the oppressed Aryans of inner-city Bradford. Patronising or what?
Let me spell it out, BNP apologists. This is the company you keep when you concede that BNP voters have a point: James Von Brunn. It really won’t do, saying: “I’m not a racist, but these immigrants are the problem, not the BNP.” Immigration pales into insignificance as an issue compared with a party gaining elected representatives in the European parliament, which is funded by the Von Brunns of this world.
You don’t have to be a wishy-washy, tree-hugging, airy-fairy, unpatriotic, sitting-on-the-fence liberal to rank the political danger of the BNP and its supporters above the effects of post-war immigration, serious as those are. You just have to be able to think. And to have read a book beyond one-shilling, war-hero trash mags. (Better now, thankyou, nurse).
Andrew Brons : You’ve Come A Long Way, Baby
Andrew Brons: the genteel face of neo-fascism, Duncan Campbell, The Guardian, June 8, 2009: “British National party MEP and former National Front chairman who started political life in group set up in honour of Hitler.”
There’s hope for Dr James Saleam yet!
It was on Hitler’s birthday, deliberately chosen, that the National Socialist Movement was formed in Britain in the 1960s. It was the first political organisation of the far right that Andrew Brons, the newly-elected British National party MEP for Yorkshire and Humberside, was to join – but not the last.
The group that he signed up to as a teenager had been founded in honour of Hitler by the British fascist leader, the late Colin Jordan. No mention of this early political involvement features on the BNP’s website celebrating Brons’s victory. Instead, Brons is portrayed just as a “veteran British Nationalist”…
Sonia Gable of Searchlight said that his past made him a strange choice for a BNP seeking to create a “respectable” image for itself.
“Everyone in the BNP is trying to look respectable and Brons is an odd choice because he was in the NF at its most racist,” she said.
She added that she thought Brons had been chosen as a candidate because Nick Griffin, the chairman of the BNP, believed that he would have strong links with far-right organisations in Europe.
The BNP denies being an anti-semitic organisation, and when asked about Brons’s involvement with the NSM and the NF and his calls for compulsory repatriation, a spokesman for the party said: “That was nearly 30 years ago, times have moved on … You print what you want.”
…Arnold Leese, a former vet, an anti-Semite, and admirer of Hitler, had been a founder member of the Imperial Fascist League in 1928. Released from prison in 1944 on grounds of ill-health, Leese became the [principal] star in the 1940s British fascist firmament, attracting to him all the leading national socialist players of the 1950s and 1960s, including Cambridge graduate and schoolteacher Colin Jordan. When Leese and his wife died, the house [Arnold Leese House, 46--48 Princedale Road, Holland Park] was left to Jordan who turned it into the base for his “White Defense League”, the instigators of much of the racial confrontation in Notting Hill in the late-1950s. In 1960, the WDL merged with the National Labour Party to form the Hitlerite British National Party and then the National Socialist Movement, founded by Jordan and John Tyndall on what would have been Hitler’s 73rd birthday, 20 April 1962.
The paranoid wackos of this seedy West London tenement had one thing in common — the conviction that Jews, freemasons, homosexuals, gypsies, Jesuits, anarchists and Communist Party members were all agents of subversion under the control of a ruthless global elite directing world events to their advantage…
~ Stuart Christie, Granny Made Me an Anarchist, AK Press, 2008, p.104. The book is given a very short, positive review by Bill Ayers (!) here. Ayers is a former leader of The Weathermen / Weather Underground, and the author of Fugitive Days: Memoirs of an Antiwar Activist, Beacon Press, 2009.
Bonus Jordan!
“Hmmm… knickers!”
Veteran British neo-Nazi Colin Jordan (June, 1923–April 9, 2009) is dead.
Jordan established the ‘National Socialist Movement’ and ‘World Union of National Socialists’ in the UK in 1962. He struck gold in 1963 when he married wealthy heiress Françoise Dior. In addition to being a nutzi, Jordan will most likely be remembered for his rather spectacular fall from grace.
Jordan reorganized the National Socialist Movement itself in 1968 as the British Movement, but by 1974 he has been forced to step down in favor of Michael McLaughlin. The split was far less than amicable. It was Jordan, however, who provided McLaughlin with the sword with which to do in the movement’s founder, and Jordan further obliged his enemies by taking a running start and skewering himself in a manner guaranteed to bring maximum public humiliation. It seems that, for reasons best known only to him, Jordan was arrested on charges of simple shoplifting. Worse, Jordan’s booty was comprised of lingerie — to wit, pairs of women’s panties. Why the financially secure Jordan would resort to this method of shopping was a mystery to the British movement, but soon the internal correspondence of many of the faithful had brought to Jordan the nickname of “Knickers Stealer”, and the McLaughlin faction of the British Movement had a field day with the news. The label stuck, dogging Jordan’s ill-fated campaigns in the 1970s to seize back control of the British Movement and, indeed, to reenter the British National Socialist scene that had, in truth, long since left him behind.
~ Jeffrey Kaplan, Encyclopedia of white power: a sourcebook on the radical racist right, Rowman Altamira, 2000, p.147.
Bonus Nazi!
Springfield Nazis get punked by the Jewish Community Relations Bureau, Nadia Pflaum, June 3, 2009 | FBI informant and nutzi shock jock Hal Turner finally run out of useful infos and got himself arrest: Controversial blogger and host accused of making threats: Recent posting told readers to ‘take up arms’, Mark Mueller, New Jersey Star Ledger, June 5, 2009 & Dear Hal Turner, I Just Turned Your Emails Over to the Police, Maimonides, Daily Kos, June 4, 2009 | Austrian town strives to keep alive memory of Nazi victims, AFP, June 6, 2009 | Over the border, A German State Gains Ground Against Neo-Nazi Crime, Stefan Berg and Markus Deggerich, Der Spiegel, June 6, 2009.
Bonus Weather Report!
@ndy Slackbastard
BNP’s Scots fundraiser is criminal with links to Loyalist killer
The BNP’s top fundraiser is today exposed as a militant anti-abortion campaigner with links to a Loyalist killer and a string of criminal convictions.
Jim Dowson is a former Orangeman who featured on a tape of flute band music supporting murderer Michael Stone. He was also the face of a hardline pro-life organisation who posted names and addresses of pro-choice MSPs and a family planning group boss on the internet.
Dowson, of Cumbernauld, near Glasgow, is now a key aide to BNP leader Nick Griffin. Griffin appointed Dowson as the party’s money man and campaign organiser for their attempt to win seats in tomorrow’s European Parliament election.
Dowson’s past activities fly in the face of BNP attempts to paint the group in a more moderate light and be seen as a serious political party.
In a recent blog, Griffin praised Dowson for his help in getting their party political broadcast aired on Channel Five. Griffin wrote: “This was just one of a huge number of extras that Jim Dowson threw in on top of all his other super-human efforts.”
But we can reveal Dowson, 44, as a “rent-a-cause” extremist who was kicked out of the Orange Order.
Dowson formed Precious Life Scotland, later UK LifeLeague, in 1999 after meetings with Ireland’s notorious Youth Defence, who had previously stormed buildings in Dublin in their crusade against a woman’s right to choose. He said he joined the antiabortion movement after being approached in the street by activists during a holiday in Belfast and felt disgusted by the aborted foetus images in their leaflets.
Dowson portrayed himself as a staunch Christian and even claimed to be preacher in his own church.
But Dowson has no shame over his sectarian views and violent past.
Possession
He has described himself as a “dyed-in-the-wool Protestant” and said “all options are open” in the fight against abortion. He admitted: “I have a very chequered past.”
Dowson has a list of criminal convictions including breach of the peace in 1986, possession of a weapon and breach of the peace in 1991 and criminal damage in 1992. He was forced out of his local Orange Lodge and took part in demonstrations against fellow Orangemen, attacking them as “atheists and boozers” after he was “born again”.
Dowson denied claims he constantly referred to Catholics as “Fenian scum”, but did admit to producing flute band tapes which glorified the worst Loyalist atrocities. The tape of Cumbernauld’s Abronhill flute band included a tribute to Michael Stone who murdered three Catholics at a funeral in 1988.
Neighbours in Cumbernauld told how Dowson would fly sectarian flags from the windows of his house. In 1998, he protested against Ulster Unionist leader David Trimble’s role in the Good Friday peace agreement.
But it was his role in the militant pro-life movement which gained him public exposure. Ironically, given his party’s denial of the Nazis’ hatred of Jews, Dowson held up graphic photographs of an aborted baby with the words “Hitler’s Holocaust - Scotland’s Holocaust Abortion” during Precious Life’s first protest in Edinburgh.
In an interview, he repeated the comparison, saying: “It’s like Hitler. He used fancy, flowery language to sanitise what went on in the death camps, didn’t he?”
Dowson eventually lost his job as sales manager for a catering firm over his continued publicity.
His organisation came under fire for bombarding children as young as 11 with graphic abortion images. He and wife Anne were also behind Parent Truth, an group threatened with legal action over a planned billboard campaign carrying the phrase “The morning after pill can kill”, alongside an image of a girl on a life support machine.
Brown leads fascist fight
Gordon Brown yesterday led a host of celebrities in condemning the BNP.
The PM and stars including actress Thandie Newton and Little Britain’s Matt Lucas put their names to an open letter hitting out at the “racist and fascist”party. The letter said:”We love Britain precisely because of its tolerance and diversity. “The British National Party and their allies are a threat to everything that makes us proud of this country we love. “The BNP are working hard to conceal their extremism because they know British people reject the politics of racism and hatred.”
Foreign Secretary David Miliband yesterday warned that Britain faces a “day of shame” if the BNP are elected to the European Parliament.
Miliband, whose Jewish grandparents were forced to flee the Nazis, said: “It would be a day of enormous shame if the country that led the fight against the Nazism in the 1940s ends up with the political descendants of fascism representing Britain.”
The BNP stand no real chance of winning a Scottish seat in the European election tomorrow. But nearly 20,000 Scots voted for the BNP at the last Euro poll in 2004 and the fear is they will increase that total this time.
Scottish Daily Record
BNP ready to fill Labour’s vacuum in Stoke
Filed by Denise in Britain, Commentary on June 3rd, 2009
The Potteries has battled unemployment, urban decay and immigration issues for four decades – so it is ground zero in the BNP’s bid for success in tomorrow’s election
The BNP, led by Nick Griffin, above, believes it can increase its presence in the six towns of the Potteries in elections tomorrow. Photograph: Frank Baron/Guardian
What will happen if Labour implodes politically, either in the days or weeks ahead or at the coming general election? Stoke-on-Trent is worth looking at in this context because the party that once dominated Potteries politics underwent its own gentle implosion a few years ago.
The result? A cross-party coalition trying to hold local government together, supported by Labour, the Lib Dems and the Tories – and opposed by nine councillors from the British National Party. The BNP is looking to alienated Stoke voters to boost its share of tomorrow’s poll in the West Midlands and – perhaps – elect a BNP candidate for Europe.
With its famous pottery museums, heritage trails and designated “Cultural Quarter”, Stoke looks at first glance as if it has adapted to post-industrial life as well as other British cities. But appearances on a bright spring morning, when I visited, can be deceptive.
Over the past 40 years the six-town conurbation known as the Potteries has suffered a string of misfortunes, economic and political. It lost its steel mills, coal mines – “pits and pots” – and the bulk of its pottery production. The North Staffs regeneration plan has been late in coming, and many lost jobs have been replaced with £6-an-hour call centre and warehousing work.
The city’s three MPs are still Labour, as they have been since 1945, but none has been an imposing national figure for decades. Cynthia Mosley (Sir Oswald’s wife) was once an MP here. At local level Labour hegemony has fragmented to the point where the BNP boasts nine city councillors (to Labour’s 16) and hopes Stoke voters will help elect Nick Griffin’s lieutenant and national spokesman, Simon Darby, as a West Midlands regional MEP in tomorrow’s European elections.
Bolder BNP strategists even claim they could get their first Westminster MP here in 2010 if unemployment – overall “worklessness” is above average in Stoke – stays above three million. Labour takes the BNP threat seriously, but not that seriously: BNP candidates saved their local deposits in 2005 but got a maximum 15% in all three seats, behind the main parties.
The Tory chairman, Eric Pickles, thinks the BNP may pick up one or two European seats – or may flop. As the Financial Times reported yesterday, Pickles blames Labour for neglecting core voters and giving the BNP the chance to win them over. The Dagenham MP, Jon Cruddas, who fights the BNP in its London stronghold, says much the same: it is the price of the Blair-Brown centrist strategy.
Privately, some of Gordon Brown’s lieutenants fear there could be four or five BNP MEPs, each with access to £250,000 worth of funds when the results are announced across Europe late on Sunday. “It would change the face of British politics,” warns one minister, who cites the French National Front’s rise on the back of European votes. The far right hopes to do well across the recession-hit EU.
“Stoke has a very resentful population, it’s very upset with Labour,” explains Darby. He describes how Steve Batkin, one of three BNP councillors on Bentilee ward on the Alton Towers side of the city, “walks around all day with his garden tools doing old people’s gardens. They like him. We are replacing people who treated the population with absolute contempt.”
From Kent to Cumbria this is the new “community politics” face of the BNP, one whose hostility to immigrants, asylum seekers and Europe is just below the surface but not on display. Would-be BNP voters tend to be white working class men who live in rented accommodation, have low educational achievement and read anti-immigrant tabloids, Ipsos-Mori pollsters told the FT. No surprise there, for the alienation of “white van man” from modern Britain has been well documented.
The BNP’s ambitions for Stoke are not immediately apparent on the ground either. Voters I spoke to in Hanley’s Potteries shopping centre – close to the statue of Stanley Matthews, the Hanley-born legend of English football – did not mention the BNP unless prompted.
“They frighten me, I don’t like it,” said an old lady, wrinkling her nose.
“I don’t get any trouble,” said a rare black voter (Stoke’s black and minority population is around 5%, although Polish coal miners have long been there).
Just one passerby, a retired lecturer and Tory, admitted: “I’m thinking of voting BNP because the main parties never listen.”
Anger against the council is strong and includes favourite BNP themes such as preference allegedly given to immigrants in the housing queue and the “sweetheart” land deal (officials deny it) that is allowing Muslims in Shelton to build their own mosque.
In Abbey Green ward, on the edge of 250,000-strong Stoke, the story is the same. “I think the BNP nearly got elected here last time,” said a man walking with his children in what is an overwhelmingly white estate of neat, redbrick inter-war housing, a mixture of private and council.
He’s wrong. Here and elsewhere BNP candidates took all three seats, including Alby and Ellie Walker, who Labour critics privately admit would be “pleasant and cheery people if you met them in the pub.” Some say the couple’s attitudes on race and multicultural are little different from Labour’s of yesteryear.
There are two basic answers to the BNP challenge, says Geoff Bagnall, who runs the Unity ceramics-based trade union whose membership has fallen from 31,000 to 5,000 during years of economic decline.
“The Labour party must go back to its roots and represent people properly,” he said. “And there must be long-term government regeneration, bringing new jobs and better education to the city.”
Easier said than done. Mike Wolfe, the energetic ex-Labour man who led the campaign for a directly elected mayor in Stoke in 2002 and won the post himself, says Stoke has great potential, fantastic road, rail and [nearby] air communications – “virtually a roundabout” at the heart of Britain. Other cities reinvented themselves. Why not Stoke?
But Wolfe proved too much of a loner, and Labour’s 60-seat monopoly of the council was fast collapsing into seven or eight rival groups. His Labour successor since 2005, Mark Meredith (”the least unpopular candidate for the nomination”), has alienated much of his base, not least by bringing controversial private contractor Serco to manage a disruptive reorganisation of local schools.
To add to the woes in Stoke, Meredith and the Tory group leader, Roger Ibbs, have both been arrested this year on suspicion of corrupt dealings, and police investigations continue. Officials, eager to promote overdue regeneration plans, are largely running the town hall, where paid councillors in all three main parties are now part of the mayor’s coalition.
As for the BNP, it is fielding candidates for the first time across the municipal boundary in the two most deprived wards of adjacent Newcastle-under-Lyme. The campaign is buttressed by “Punish the Pigs” leaflets – a gesture to the expenses row that has tainted Labour in Stoke, as elsewhere.
So Stoke is the place where Old Labour faltered, but many New Labour ideas have collided with harsh realities on the ground. Alarmed by the BNP, ministers in London are finally taking it seriously. The wife of the local government minister, John Healey, hails from Stoke. The message that Stoke’s introverted political culture – its talent is too often lured to Birmingham or Manchester – needs more help from outside has finally got through. Many things are getting better, but slower and later than elsewhere.
Last October, punch-drunk Stoke residents in the six Potteries towns (Arnold Bennett’s “five towns” novels deliberately ignored Fenton) voted to reverse the elected mayor experiment in favour of a cabinet-style council. Speculation persists that Whitehall may take over to fill the vacuum until fresh elections. The BNP has stepped in to fill a Labour vacuum that Lib Dems (just five councillors here) have filled elsewhere.
It amounts to a major political train crash, but Mike Wolfe says Stoke is just a more dramatic version of what is going on in other troubled northern cities. The famous name of Wedgwood has been bought from administration by a US firm. “The BNP is a symptom, not a cause” of Stoke’s problems, admits the local MP Mark Fisher.
Simon Darby knows all the regional percentages needed under the European elections’ regional voting system to elect a BNP MEP here and elsewhere. Nick Griffin, a regular visitor to Stoke, has the best chance in the nearby North West region (8.5% – just 2% more than last time) compared with an 11% hurdle in the West Midlands.
Turnout among supporters of the mainstream parties is therefore crucial tomorrow to minimize the impact of the BNP’s still-modest base (they have barely 100 party members in Stoke, according to last year’s leaked party list). But as the PM’s colleagues whisper, it does no good just to condemn the BNP, as Gordon Brown sometimes thinks (yesterday’s Guardian letter, for example).
“Be sure to vote on June 4 if you don’t want the BNP,” has become a campaign slogan endorsed by all the main parties. But what if many angry voters decide they do?
The legend of Billy Brit
The BNP’s “Billy Brit” - aimed at children but enjoyed by BNP adults everywhere - learns some home truths…
Tories blame Labour for BNP threat
The Conservatives have blamed Labour for the prospect of a historically strong performance by the British National party in Thursday’s elections, as new research suggests support for the far right is strongest in Old Labour heartlands.
The Tory intervention marks a shift in the traditional bipartisan approach to fighting the BNP. All three main party leaders are urging people to shun the far-right fringe party amid fears a low turnout could combine with protests against MPs’ expenses to give the BNP at least one seat in the European parliament.
The complex proportional representation system used in the European poll means the BNP needs only an 8.5 per cent vote share to get an MEP elected in the north-west or London – its principal targets. Recent polls show a dramatic post-expenses rise in support for “others”, putting the eurosceptic UK Independence party on 10-19 per cent and the BNP on 5-7 per cent.
The Tories, battling against the erosion into their own vote from the seemingly resurgent Ukip, accuse Labour of inadvertently creating an electoral opportunity for the BNP.
“That people are considering voting BNP is symptomatic of the neglect that the Labour party has shown in their heartlands. It is a shame Labour has simply abandoned so many of their traditional voters,” Eric Pickles, the Tory chairman, told the Financial Times.
Gordon Brown rejected this assertion. “The BNP. . . stand against everything that makes this country great,” the prime minister said on a campaign visit to Worksop in the east Midlands. “There are some people who argue that Labour has somehow abandoned the white working class. Nothing could be further from the truth . . . we are on the side of people on middle and modest incomes.”
A Labour source accused the Tories of “political point scoring”, saying it was “incumbent on all mainstream parties to push up voter turnout to lessen the chance of the BNP gaining any success”.
But new research suggests the BNP is performing best in Labour heartlands – areas of high unemployment and low education with large Pakistani and African populations. The typical BNP supporter matches the Old Labour profile of a middle-aged, working class northern male, according to research by Robert Ford and Matthew Goodwin of the University of Manchester. Their analysis of aggregated polling data on self-identified BNP supporters found that more than 90 per cent of the fringe party’s strongest constituencies have Labour MPs.
“The BNP is emerging as a significant challenger to the Labour party among social groups and in geographical areas where Labour has traditionally been dominant,” Mr Goodwin said. “Labour faces a serious threat from the large-scale defection of traditional heartland supporters to the BNP.”
Labour appears divided over how best to respond to this threat. MPs on the left of the party, such as Jon Cruddas, say Labour needs to offer more direct support to the working class to counter the threat of “class politics of the far right”.
But Denis MacShane, former Europe minister, said business had compounded the failure of the main parties to “talk about Europe intelligently” and sell its benefits. “The biggest beneficiaries of the workers who have come from Europe have been employers but the CBI, EEF and BCC are like trappist monks . . . when it comes to campaigning on this,” he said. There was an “unfortunate coincidence” between the BNP’s anti-European, anti-immigration core messages and the campaign being run by Ukip, which, he stressed, he was not accusing of being racist.
The Tories have stepped up the rhetoric against what David Cameron termed a “bunch of fascist thugs”. But the Tory leader took a softer tone with Ukip: “I know you may be thinking of voting Ukip but look what they’ve achieved over the past five years [in the European parliament] – precisely nothing.”
Far right bets on disdain for main UK parties
At the ESWA sports club in Birkenhead, north-west England, Thursday night is “race night”, with punters crowding round to place bets on virtual horses.
Down in the basement an altogether different kind of race event is taking place. The anti-immigration British National party is holding a party meeting to whip up local support for the European parliamentary elections on Thursday.
The BNP is confident it can ride a wave of popular disgust towards politicians in the wake of the parliamentary expenses scandal, and win its first seat in the European parliament. North-west England is the party’s number one target constituency, with Nick Griffin, the far right party’s leader set to win a seat if the BNP attracts more than 8.5 per cent of the vote.
The party’s confidence has worried mainstream politicians. David Cameron, leader of the opposition Conservatives, has described BNP members as “nazi thugs” in suits and Jack Straw, justice minister in the Labour government, said it would be “very damaging” for the country if they win any seats.
In a further cause for worry, Mr Griffin’s party has held talks to affiliate with other European far-right parties – such as the Freedom Party in Austria, Jean-Marie Le Pen’s Front Nationale in France and Vlaams Belang of Flanders – amid fears such groups could gain a firm foothold as voters across the continent express their disapproval of mainstream politics after the banking crisis.
Mr Griffin’s address mixes “anti-politics” rhetoric – arguing that Labour, the Conservatives and opposition Liberal Democrats are “three factions of the same establishment party”– and the theme of “charity begins at home”. Mr Griffin decries the allocation of a £7bn foreign aid budget while “British old age pensioners die of the cold”.
The speech is received rapturously by the few dozen people in the audience, made up largely of pensioners, former servicemen, some young shaven-headed men in suits and a smattering of middle aged women.
In Wallasey, a nearby town, the response among white shoppers to BNP activists ran from apathy to morbid curiosity. But one man shouted, “You’ll do well this time lads,” a view shared by several others. Another man in his 20s shouted, “Don’t listen to them; they’re all . . . nazis”. A respectable-looking middle aged woman then screwed up a leaflet and threw it back at an activist, saying: “You’re not wanted in this town; it’s totally unchristian.”
Speaking to the Financial Times, Mr Griffin conceded that the north Wirrall area was not a typical BNP heartland because it has large numbers of unemployed people, who tend to opt out of voting, rather than the disgruntled manual workers who make up the party base. Given the “perfect storm” for the BNP of disdain for the political class, rising unemployment, low voter turnout and the fact that people often use European elections to protest, one party worked admitted, however, that “if we don’t win now, we never will”.
But in spite of the party’s largely polite public demeanour and Mr Griffin’s awareness that the British public would not vote for a party that “marches in jackboots and burns down shops”, there are unpalatable views below the surface. Mr Griffin says he has “nothing against Sikhs and Hindus” – even though they cannot join the party and he will offer large sums to encourage them to voluntarily repatriate – but is avowedly “anti-Islam”.
BNP campaign comes off the rails
Filed by Denise in Britain, Commentary on June 1st, 2009
‘‘We rather it hadn’t happened! ’’ That was the conclusion of Martin Wingfield, editor of the British National Party’s Voice of Freedom monthly, on the MPs’ expenses scandal. He was writing three weeks before polling day amid growing signs that the BNP’s campaign for the European election was falling apart.
MPs’ expenses had come on top of the “economic meltdown, credit crunch, Muslim threat, the loony left, employment, and home repossessions” combined with “a hated government and a mealy-mouthed Tory party” that Griffin claimed in a fundraising appeal in March would create a “perfect political storm” that would “result in this party exploding onto the world stage by taking several seats in the European Parliament”.
Yet even after days of media focus on political sleaze the opinion polls were reporting that the BNP was still only attracting 3-4% of the vote, far short of what it needed to win even one seat in Europe. It was the eurosceptic UK Independence Party to which disillusioned voters were turning.
Wingfield put it down to the “voter volatility” that the expenses scandal had caused. “Without the expenses scandal, the BNP was quietly working towards having three MEPs elected on June 4th,” he wrote. “It would have taken a political earthquake to stop us winning in the North West, Yorkshire and the West Midlands … and now, of course, that is exactly what has happened.”
What had happened was that the BNP had attracted the attention it craved, but the media were not playing ball. Journalists, with a little help from Searchlight, were looking beyond the BNP’s carefully cultivated veneer of respectability and finding the same old fascist party it had always been.
The media did not have to dig far to find the BNP’s racism and shamefulness, which led Richard Pendlebury in the Mail on Sunday to describe it as “a marginal group with a rotten ideological core”. There was the embarrassing Activists’ and Organisers’ Handbook, which found it necessary to tell members not to look and behave like thugs and banned them from setting up local BNP websites and blogs because “they can’t write proper English” and “get carried away promoting cyberspace conspiracy theories which, even if true, strike the public as barking mad”.
Then there was the Language and Discipline Manual, which instructed members not to refer to “Black Britons” and “Asian Britons” because “such persons do not exist”. Exposure forced party bosses quickly to rewrite it.
The media revis-ited other episodes that the BNP would have prefer-red forgotten, such as the participation of its deputy leader, Simon Darby, at a fascist conference in Milan in April, where he was greeted by fascist stiff-right-arm salutes. The BNP’s claim that Private Johnson Beharry did not deserve his Victoria Cross and was only awarded it because he was black came back to haunt the party.
Darby came out with a clumsy attack on the Archbishop of York, John Sentamu, describing him as an “ambitious African” and referring to his fellow Ugandans as spear-throwers. The BNP demanded that a banned Ku Klux Klan leader should be allowed to enter Britain, but was less keen on Gurkhas, with Griffin on Radio 5 Live describing them as “mercenaries” and saying, “We don’t think the most overcrowded country in Europe can realistically say, ‘Look, you can all come and all your relatives’.”
It did not help the BNP campaign when Richard Barnbrook, the BNP’s most senior elected politician, got an airing for his admission that he had invented three murders in Barking and Dagenham to highlight knife crime, a claim for which he could be suspended from the London Assembly for up to six months.
And Bob Bailey, the BNP’s London organiser, was caught mass mailing implicitly threatening emails to anti-fascists. When challenged he said lamely: “I’m not denying I sent it but I can’t remember”.
There was worse, far worse. The BNP’s main slogan for the campaign is “British jobs for British workers”. It is illustrated ubiquitously by a picture of three white men in hard hats in front of a Union Flag. But they were no British workers.
The BNP had bought the image from a picture agency. The men were American models who posed for a general photo shoot in Portland, Oregon.
Other images on the millions of election leaflets the BNP had printed for distribution by the Royal Mail had also come from agencies. Alongside a white pensioner couple are the words: “We’ve seen how this country has declined under the present government and we’re voting BNP because they will put pensioners before asylum seekers and ensure our future.”
The couple turned out to be the Italian parents of the agency photo-grapher, who were appalled that their picture had been used to spread far-right propaganda. A doctor, a Guardsman and a mother, all quoted supporting the BNP, were no more genuine.
The former Scots Guards NCO Stuart Walker was shocked when the leaflet dropped through his letterbox with his picture and the made-up quote implying he would back the BNP because the party would stop soldiers being “abused” by Muslims. “They are scumbags and I’d never vote for them in a million years,” he told The Sun, adding that when he phoned the BNP to complain he was told to “f*** off”.
The only British voters on the leaflets were the Cass family, who in last year’s local elections appeared on BNP material all around the country pretending to be local voters – everywhere. Deceit is nothing new for the BNP.
The pictures were not the only lies. The leaflet outlined three key BNP pledges. One was to oppose “the dangerous drive … to give 80 million low-wage, Muslim Turks the right to swamp Britain”. But the population of Turkey is only just over 75 million and growing slowly, and they are by no means all low-waged.
No wonder many Royal Mail staff refused to deliver the BNP leaflets.
The British workers’ image has been plastered over the side of the BNP’s “truth truck”, better known as the lie lorry, a white Iveco advertising vehicle with Northern Irish registration plates. It toured the country during the campaign, though remarkably almost all the many pictures that appeared on BNP websites showed it cruising empty streets.
The BNP claimed to have bought the “truth truck” last year after a successful appeal to supporters to raise the £26,550 needed. In his 2009 New Year address, Griffin wrote, “your cash allowed the party to buy our very own state of the art advertising lorry and roll out the first of many nationwide Truth Truck Tours”.
It turned out to be another deception. Mark Croucher, a UKIP activist and freelance journalist, had obtained a county court judgment for several thousand pounds against the BNP for infringement of copyright for using one of his photographs without permission. When bailiffs tried to enforce the judgment by seizing the vehicle the BNP’s solicitors responded that: “the goods referred to are registered in the name of another person who … has no connection with the judgement debtors”.
The BNP’s campaign has run into other money troubles. In March the party started appealing for the £395,000 needed centrally to fight the European election. It included £210,000 to print 29 million leaflets, though this was not entirely honest as each region was also expected to raise the money itself for its own leaflets. It was because London region was unable to raise enough that it only had the A5 version of the BNP leaflet, according to Bailey.
There was also £25,000 for billboard advertising during the final two and a half weeks of the campaign and an-other £25,000 for newspaper adverts, including the online adverts that have appeared, though not for long, on local newspaper websites. All feature the stock American “British workers” picture.
A thermometer-style graphic on the BNP website showed rapid progress up to a bit over £325,000 and there it stuck. A succession of increasingly desperate campaign emails to supporters pleaded for donations to raise the final £90,000.
But the party could not leap the final hurdle. On 11 May David Hannam, the BNP deputy treasurer, passed on a letter from Griffin to branch fund-holders (the BNP term for treasurers) asking them to make all surplus funds available to Central Office “ASAP”. “Work with me on this it really is all hands on deck!” the letter ended.
On 18 May another campaign email appealed for the final £35,393, although the thermometer graphic, no longer on the BNP site’s home page, still showed a shortfall nearer to £60,000.
The BNP claims to be receiving 100 enquiries a day at its new call centre, the fruit of its “rapid expansion plan”, which Griffin claims raised £85,000 to equip four new party offices across the country. At its campaign launch in Grays the BNP proudly showed a film of its new staff hard at work in near identical surroundings. A sceptic might wonder whether was the same office filmed from different angles.
Amid all the bad publicity surrounding the BNP, the party grabbed the chance to crow after The Sun printed a story about a damaging BNP local leaflet that attacked the Gurkhas. The BNP said the leaflet was a forgery, The Sun took the story off its website and Griffin lied blatantly that he had always supported the Gurkhas. Had a maverick BNP supporter decided to set his very own Reichstag fire to kick new life into a faltering campaign?
The latest BNP begging letter implored: “It is crucial that we win a seat”. It was a far cry from the “six or seven” seats the party thought possible when Griffin appealed for funds in March. His desperation was palpable, as was his very personal interest in the outcome. “If you want to see me elected on June 4th … Help me now!” he wrote in a postscript.
The BNP has poured everything into this campaign. Griffin’s emails repeat the mantra, “We won’t get a second chance! It’s now or never”, and he is probably right. If the BNP cannot make it in the present political and economic climate, it never will.
Sonia Gable writing in Searchlight
Sick glee at racist beatings
The far-right British National Party’s true nature was exposed last night and their election hopes rightly damaged.
Prominent members were shown to be racists and Nazi-sympathisers. They have expressed hatred for David Beckham and said they “still laugh” at a video of black man Rodney King being beaten by US police.
The revelations were made by anti-fascist organisation Searchlight, which infiltrated websites, chatrooms and blogs.
Lee Barnes, the BNP’s senior legal officer, posted a video of King on his blog and described it as “brilliant”. He added: “The beating of Rodney King still makes me laugh.”
In an entry on a white supremacist forum Barry Bennett, MEP candidate for the South West, wrote: “David Beckham is not white, he’s a black man. Beckham is an insult to Britishness and I’m glad he’s not here.”
And in a spiteful reference to the disabled, Jeffrey Marshall, senior organiser for the BNP’s election campaign, wrote: “We live in a country which is unhealthily dominated by an excess of sentimentality towards the weak and unproductive.” He allegedly added: “There is not a great deal of point in keeping these people alive after all.”
A Searchlight spokesman said the comments showed the BNP’s true colours.
Bnp deputy leader Simon Darby accused Searchlight of distortion. He said: “In the context of what’s been happening at Westminster, a few alleged scribblings on Facebook hardly seem worth worrying about.”
Nazi salutes and burning crosses … now the BNP sets up Scottish youth camps
It’s a nightmare political vision: burning crosses, Nazi salutes and extremist indoctrination. This is the dark heart of the British National Party - an organisation now setting up “youth camps” in Scotland.
The controversial far-right training regime was launched last month in Wiltshire and immediately drew comparisons with the Hitler Youth and Islamic jihad boot camps Now, campaign groups fear a return of the fascist and white-supremacist symbolism seen at previous Scottish events. An outdoor event held in Scotland several years ago saw BNP activists joking about concentration camps and burning a wooden cross in an undisclosed Highland location.
Scott McLean - one of the most senior BNP figures in Scotland - was filmed giving a Nazi salute, and other BNP members were recorded shouting “one-two-three-Auschwitz” before grinning activists gave Hitler salutes to the camera. At one point a man was cheered as he threw petrol on to a burning cross towering over a group of initiates.
At the new brand of camps unveiled last month, children as young as 12 are trained in shooting air rifles and in self-defence, and they learn an alternative version of history as sanctioned by party leader Nick Griffin, who has repeatedly claimed that the Holocaust never happened.
In between shooting lessons, children are instructed in the art of making dangerous weapons from everyday objects. “Dutch Arrows” are manufactured from string and sharpened garden canes, and the BNP website reports that one 13-year-old boy was able to launch an arrow more than 150 metres. Police have confirmed that the darts, if used outside the supervised campsite setting, could constitute offensive weapons.
The BNP told the Sunday Herald that it will roll out camps across Scotland within the next year, and adult activists are using social networking sites such as Bebo to recruit youngsters to the BNP’s hardline nationalist cause.
BNP youth leader Mike Howson, a former soldier, said: “We eventually plan to have camps in all the regions. We’ve achieved our targets for youth recruitment in Scotland. We’ll be doing camps there within the next 12 months.”
The BNP has applied for government funding to pay for the camps, he added, but has so far been unsuccessful in its bid for state cash. Applications are now being made to charities.
Despite its claims to be a mainstream party, the BNP has faced censure in the past for its alignment with European fascist groups and the Nazi overtones of some of its actions.
Publicity material for the camps is designed to appeal to youths by offering a sense of inclusion and strength. An advert on the BNP’s Bebo site promotes the organisation as a “big brother” to its young target audience. It boasts: “Only the YBNP and its big brother the BNP can secure a future for the indigenous children of this land.”
Though party leaders say the youth camps are about “moral training” and education, they also aim to lure children with the promise of powerful roles within the adult wing of the party. “The youth wing can only get bigger and better, with older members already being fast-tracked into positions within the party,” a BNP statement said.
Campaign groups responded furiously to news of the party’s planned expansion among Scottish children. A spokesman for anti-fascist organisation Searchlight said: “Their attempts to politically indoctrinate Scottish youth with their messages of prejudice and division are sickening. There is no place in Scotland for these camp sites of hate.”
The recent surge in BNP youth activity has been driven by a conference of European nationalists earlier this year, which brought extremist groups together to “preserve our shared white European heritage”. Skinhead delegates from hard-right Czech and German youth groups joined their hosts from the Swedish National Democratic Youth movement.
Revelations over the training and political schooling of children will come as a blow to the BNP, which is struggling to assert itself as a legitimate political force in Thursday’s European elections.
Party leader Griffin was convicted in 1998 of inciting racial hatred. He has also referred to the Holocaust as the Holohoax’. Griffin has long sought to emulate the mainstream success of Jean-Marie Le Pen, the right-wing leader of France’s National Front. Despite his ambitions, the BNP has been thwarted in recent years by a string of high-profile scandals and exposés.
Senior officials have been caught on camera making bigoted remarks against non-Christians, non-whites and homosexuals, and the party has failed to find any success outside of a few English heartlands.
A message left on Griffin’s mobile phone asking to discuss this article elicited the one-word text message response: “Priceless!”
Exposed: ugly face of BNP’s leaders
Prominent members of the British National party are today revealed as Nazi-sympathisers and racists with abhorrent views on such diverse issues as teenage violence, David Beckham and even David Cameron’s deceased son, Ivan.
The revelations undermine the party’s attempts to paint itself in a more moderate light before the local and European elections and threaten to derail the electoral ambitions of its leader, Nick Griffin, who is standing as a prospective MEP.
At a time when BNP activists are claiming a surge in support in the polls, a reflection, they say, of mounting public outrage over MPs’ expenses, the party has been keen to portray itself as a viable alternative to mainstream political parties.
The BNP website boasts that money is flooding into its campaign headquarters. Its administration consultant, Jim Dowson, claims the party’s call centre alone received just under 12,000 calls in the first 15 minutes following the BNP’s first national television broadcast. And in emails to supporters - or “patriots” as the BNP calls them - Griffin claims almost £400,000 has been stumped up by supporters to help fund the party’s European election campaign.
It claims the apparent groundswell in support is down to the “British public waking from the long, deep sleep”. Much of the BNP’s recent success has been down to its ability to shake off the patina of far-right extremism that has alienated most voters since its inception. But this month the veneer slipped when it emerged that a Salford-based BNP candidate in the European elections had set his Facebook status to read “Wogs go home”. Eddy O’Sullivan, 49, wrote: “They are nice people - oh yeah - but can they not be nice people in the fucking Congo or… bongo land or whatever?” O’Sullivan, who also joined an internet group called “Fuck Islam”, denied that the comments were racist and insisted they were made in private conversations between individuals. “I also may have had a drink at the time,” he added.
Amid the furore, the BNP’s leaders promised an investigation into O’Sullivan’s comments. The party’s officials also circulated urgent emails urging its members that “particular care should be taken when making comments on chat forums and other sites such as Facebook. Do not make the mistake of thinking that comments posted on these sites are secret or hidden. Making inappropriate comments on these sites will be regarded as a very serious disciplinary offence. Please ensure that this message is passed quickly to all members in your area and that it is acted upon. We are entering a very critical time in our party’s history and cannot afford careless and stupid talk that can undermine the hard work of our activists.”
But the anti-fascist organisation Searchlight has spent months infiltrating the far right’s network of websites and chatrooms and found that many BNP activists share O’Sullivan’s views.
They include:
• Jeffrey Marshall, senior organiser for the BNP’s London European election campaign. Following the death of David Cameron’s disabled son Ivan, Marshall claimed in an internet forum discussion: “We live in a country today which is unhealthily dominated by an excess of sentimentality towards the weak and unproductive. No good will come of it.”
Later, in response to comments made by others on the site, Marshall is alleged to have written: “There is not a great deal of point in keeping these people alive after all.” He said the comments were private and some had been paraphrased and taken out of context. He admitted making the former comment, but said he could not recall making the latter one in an email to the forum, a copy of which is in the Observer’s possession.
• Garry Aronsson, Griffin’s running mate for the European parliament in the North West, posts an avatar on his personal web page featuring a Nazi SS death’s head alongside the statement, “Speak English Or Die!” Aronsson proclaims on the site: “Every time you change your way of life to make immigrants more comfortable you betray OUR future!” He lists his hobbies as “devising slow and terrible ways of paying back the Guardian-reading cunts who have betrayed the British people into poverty and slavery. I AM NOT JOKING.”
• Barry Bennett, MEP candidate for the South West, posted several years ago under a pseudonym in a white supremacist forum the bizarre statement that “David Beckham is not white, he’s a black man.” Bennett, who is half-Jewish according to the BNP’s deputy leader, Simon Darby, continued: “Beckham is an insult to Britishness, and I’m glad he’s not here.” He added: “I know perfectly respectable half-Jews in the BNP… even Hitler had honorary Aryans who were of Jewish descent… so whatever’s good enough for Hitler’s good enough for me. God rest his soul.”
• Russ Green, MEP candidate for the West Midlands, posted recently on Darby’s web page: “If we allowed Indians, Africans, etc to join [the BNP], we would become the ‘British multi-National party’ … and I really do hope that never happens!” Darby said he echoed Green’s sentiments.
• Dave Strickson, a BNP organiser who helps run its eastern region European election campaign, carried on his personal “Thurrock Patriots” blog a recent report of the fatal stabbing of a teenager in east London beneath the words “Another teen stabbed in Coon Town”. The site also carried a mock-up racist version of the US dollar entitled “Obama Wog Dollar”. Darby said the BNP did not endorse these comments and described them as “beyond the pale”.
When confronted in the past about the extreme views of some of its members, the BNP senior hierarchy has often tried to dismiss them as unrepresentative of the party’s core membership. But it appears that they run right to the top of the party.
Lee Barnes, the BNP’s senior legal officer and one of Griffin’s closest allies, has posted a video on his personal blog of a black suspect being beaten by police officers in the US and describes it as “brilliant”. Barnes adds: “The beating of Rodney King still makes me laugh.”
Barnes told the Observer his comments were “nothing to do with colour” but were merely a reflection of his belief that the police should have more powers to punish perpetrators of crime by “giving them a good thrashing”.
But anti-fascist groups said such comments portrayed the BNP in its true light. “This is the face of the modern BNP,” said a spokesman for Searchlight. “The comments of Nick Griffin’s candidates and officials are sickening beyond belief. They have tried to hide their agenda of racism and hate from the voters, and they have failed.”
Separately, concerns exist about the historic links between the BNP and extremist groups. Gary Pudsey, a BNP organiser running the Yorkshire and Humber campaign, was once a regular at National Front meetings. A young Pudsey was also photographed with the late Max Waegg, a Nazi second world war pilot who wrote articles for the white supremacist magazine Spearhead
Martin Page is a BNP treasurer and his wife Kim is a senior fundraiser for the party. Both have been photographed alongside Benny Bullman, the lead singer of Whitelaw, the white supremacist band whose songs include Fetch the Noose, We’re Coming for You and For White Pride.
And Dowson, the BNP’s senior administrator, who appears on the party’s website talking about the success of its call centre’s fundraising activities, has also been dogged by allegations that he has enjoyed close relationships with hardline loyalist groups in the past. The 45-year-old has also been the public face of the LifeLeague, the militant anti-abortion group that has hijacked Britain’s pro-life debate. He has regularly appeared on television to pronounce terminations a sin and has published the names of abortion clinic staff, placing many in fear for their personal safety.
That the BNP has become a magnet for extreme-right sympathisers is understandable given Griffin’s own background. The Cambridge graduate was himself a member of the NF before going on to form the International Third Position, a neo-fascist organisation with links to the Italian far right.
But aware of the party’s need to raise funds from middle England, Griffin has repeatedly attempted to portray his party as the “reasonable” face of patriotism in its bid to broaden its appeal. The approach has paid dividends, with the party having gained 55 seats on local councils, including a seat on the Greater London Authority. This June it is contesting every UK seat at the European elections and there have been predictions it could win overall control of Stoke City Council.
Darby, Griffin’s deputy and the BNP’s spokesman, accused Searchlight of “distorting the BNP’s message” in a bid to derail its political ambitions. He accused the organisation of being “merely a front for the Labour party, paid for by National Lottery funds”. Darby said: “When you put it in the context of what’s been happening at Westminster, a few scribblings on Facebook hardly seems something to get worried about.”
Previous convictions
Nick Griffin, convicted of violating section 19 of the Public Order Act 1986, relating to incitement to racial hatred. He received a nine-month prison sentence, suspended for two years.
Kevin Scott, a BNP supporter and former North East regional organiser, has convictions for assault and threatening behaviour.
Terry Collins, a party member, was jailed for five years after waging a year-long terror campaign against Asian families in Eastbourne.
Joe Owens, a former Merseyside BNP candidate and bodyguard to Nick Griffin, served eight months for sending razor blades to Jewish people and another term for carrying CS gas and knuckledusters.
Colin Smith, former BNP south-east London organiser, has 17 convictions for burglary, theft, stealing cars, possession of drugs and assaulting a police officer.
Tony Lecomber, a former BNP propaganda director, was jailed in 1985 after a nail bomb exploded as he carried it to the Workers’ Revolutionary party offices. Jailed again in 1991 for assaulting a Jewish teacher on the Underground.
A similar article appears in The News Of The World
Let’s give the BNP publicity … so we can all see what they really are
Filed by Denise in Britain, Commentary on May 31st, 2009
Here’s shameful confession. When the online list of BNP members was published illegally earlier this year I sneaked a look, then went further and performed the postal code search to see who lived near me. Unhappily several did, and there, on the screen, were their names, addresses, home and mobile phone numbers and email addresses. For a split second, only a second I promise, I was tempted to call them and ask them why they had joined. Then sanity returned to remind me that even looking at such a list, thereby breaching these people’s privacy, was a low and uncivilised thing to do. Sorry.
But the curiosity has not left me. Why do these people, living in my area of the city, part of the same community and rubbing shoulders with the same people in the street, believe in such an extreme and repugnant set of policies? What horrors are they encountering that have so riled them into hatred? On going about my business, have I somehow failed to spot Hassidic Jews drinking babies’ blood in Glasgow’s Botanic Gardens, Eastern European plumbers pimping children in the supermarket, Jihadists beheading Alan from the ironmongers for selling un-Islamic curtain hooks, all whilst stepping over the drugged bodies of black youths and publicly copulating gay men? In which parallel universe do my local BNP supporters do their shopping, and what dystopia has so ruined their lives that would make them give their money to Nick Griffin?
A great deal of academic research has helped us trace the rise of the BNP in English regions of high deprivation and racial tension, highlighting the government’s failure to address core issues that stoke a sense of grievance and imagined victimhood from the white working class. Such voters tell us, by supporting fascists, that they feel alienated and abandoned. Some of their anxieties may be justified but most of it is poppycock, since the “immigrants” they imagine are here to steal their livelihoods, culture and opportunities are fellow sufferers, feeling just as marginalised and abandoned as they do.
In these areas of tension, BNP voters are unsurprisingly poor, uneducated, frightened, and highly susceptible to coercion from Griffin’s Cambridge-educated forked tongue. What, though, is the excuse for my fellow local souls turning to the hard right, including a few whose pleasant sandstone dwellings sit peacefully amongst mature lime trees, and whose worst social assault is a BMW car alarm going off in the night because a well-fed fox has jumped on it? What forms a racist when their lives are under neither economic nor social pressure? Perhaps we are about to find out.
A few weeks ago I wrote that I believed the British are not sufficiently stupid to return a BNP candidate in the forthcoming European elections. Subsequent polling in the last few days appears to be proving me wrong.
Even more worrying is that the party’s sights have swivelled away from their tense, English heartlands of racial strife and are looking north.
The British National Party are currently campaigning hard in Scotland, openly declaring on their website and blogs that they hope to build on two things; the MPs’ expenses scandal and the rise of Scottish nationalism. The former is an easy target, but the latter marks a sinister distortion.
Last Saturday in Clydebank, a BNP candidate handed out 2000 leaflets. Many people taking them would have of course instantly binned them. Some may have taken the leaflets home to read. Some definitely stopped to speak with the candidate. A few, allegedly, joined up. No-one, however, demonstrated, or set up a stall in opposition.
Reading the subsequent forums on and linked from the party’s website makes the blood run cold, even taking into account (judging by The Scotsman’s website) that a significant proportion of people who contribute to online forums seem to be fantasists. Several threads celebrated that Scotland was better at “keeping out immigrants” and that we should be proud of the rise again of our national pride.
This was tempered in other threads by equally disquieting posts declaring that the SNP are “after the Islamic vote”, citing the contribution to the Scottish Islamic Foundation, and that former nationalists should now switch to the BNP to stop an independent Scotland ruled by sharia.
Despite being an abhorrent, hate-filled slug, Nick Griffin is a clever, highly educated man, and none of this insane warping of the independence debate is by chance. When given only short and rare opportunities to be questioned, such as during an interview on Sky news last week, Griffin comes across as a calm, professional politician. Griffin’s views on interracial marriage, enforced repatriation and homosexuality are unlikely to play well to a public looking for fairness, justice and tolerance, hence that side of the BNP is kept markedly quiet, making sure the party’s formal policy declarations remain as insubstantial as gossamer.
Hence it’s a fair bet that most of the leaflet recipients in Clydebank know virtually nothing of the hidden wish list of the BNP that leaks out in error from time to time.
This is partly because Griffin and his political thugs are given so little chance to be tested, out from under their stone. Question Time last week, focusing on the European elections, included a UKIP member on its panel, but no BNP representative. Why not? Surely even one question from a black person in the audience about not being allowed to marry who they wished, or being exiled to a country they have never visited, would have been enough to rip the paper-thin mask of civility from the BNP’s Janus face?
Griffin is sly enough to realise that our independence debate is already highly volatile and emotional, and as such has decided that we are prime targets for creating a new layer of scaremongering and anxiety-driven hate.
Watching BNP footage of Clydebank residents politely receiving leaflets has made me feel stupid for over-estimating our resistance to this vile manipulation. We are all free to vote for the party of our choice, but we must be absolutely sure we know what it stands for. They’re not out to make the trains run on time.
Muriel Gray writing in the Scottish Sunday Herald
The Way Forward
Filed by Denise in Britain, Campaigns, Comment on June 29th, 2009
With the BNP winning two seats in the European Parliament Nick Lowles looks at where the anti-BNP campaign goes from here
There are three clear facts that need to be remembered at the outset of this article. The first is that the British National Party has won two seats in the European Parliament. This provides it with the platform, financial clout and semi-respectability from which it hopes to build future success at a local and even parliamentary level over the coming year. Secondly, their election is a game changer. Debates around no platform, access to the media and political representation will change whether we like it or not and we will need to adapt accordingly. Finally, and in terms of this article probably most importantly, anti-fascism can be successful particularly if it becomes more organised. While I will argue that only by addressing the public policy issues that give rise to the BNP and challenging the racism at the core of its support can the far right be properly defeated, anti-fascism, particularly at a local level, can halt and even reverse its growth.
It is also important to dispel two widely (though separately) held assumptions. Firstly, this is not the protest vote against mainstream parties and useless locally elected representatives that many politicians would like us to believe. It is an increasingly hard and loyal vote which is based on political and economic insecurities and moulded by deep-rooted racial prejudice. This in turn is linked with a second myth, that the way to beat the BNP is simply to tack left and offer more socialistic policies. While this might peel off some BNP supporters who feel economically marginalised, it will not in itself address the strongly held racist views of many BNP voters.
As the YouGov poll (see below) clearly shows, the racism of many BNP voters goes well beyond simple opposition to current immigration and eastern European migrant workers which one might expect if their support for the BNP was prompted simply by economic insecurity. Belief in the intellectual superiority of white people over non-whites, the view of nearly half of BNP voters that black and Asian people can never be British, the almost universal dislike of even moderate Islam and the contempt and suspicion many of their voters have towards a liberal and multicultural society show how hardline much of the BNP support is and how it will take more than a more progressive economic policy to win them back fully.
More importantly, and regularly overlooked by politicians, activists and commentators alike, are issues around identity. As I have discussed before, the BNP is emerging as the voice of a forgotten working class, which increasingly feels left behind and ignored by mainstream society. As the YouGov research confirms, the majority of BNP voters feel that the Labour Party, for many their traditional political home, has moved away from them and is now dominated by a middle-class London elite who care more for Middle England and the interests of minority groups than for them.
Class politics exists but not as we once knew it. The Labour Party, in line with many other centre-left parties across western European and Scandinavia, draws the bulk of its support from the middle class, public sector workers and minority communities, especially in the big cities. The BNP, on the other hand, is the voice of a section of the white working class, particularly in those areas of traditional industry that have experienced the greatest economic and social upheaval over the past twenty years.
Most of the local authorities with the biggest BNP vote are in areas once dominated by the car, steel, coal or ceramic industries. All have gone, and those people able to leave have left. While some new jobs have replaced those lost, the work is generally lower skilled, short-term and further away from their home. In addition to economic difficulties the identity of the areas has collapsed, leaving behind a confused, resentful and alienated minority. This is the cultural war that the BNP has cleverly exploited, particularly by tapping in to people’s paranoia that outside forces are deliberately conspiring against them and giving preferential treatment to others (viewed by most BNP voters as undeserving).
However, all is not lost. While the BNP vote edged up it did not make the sweeping gains it and others predicted. The vast majority of voters still reject the BNP and many of those equally disillusioned with the political process did not vote BNP but stayed at home.
Addressing the widespread economic insecurities, solving the democratic deficit and forging new progressive identities requires public policy changes that are beyond the remit of the HOPE not hate campaign and anti-fascism generally. We can mobilise the anti-BNP vote and even sometimes suppress the pro-BNP vote but we cannot build houses and reduce waiting lists; we cannot prevent undercutting of wages and the abuse of migrant workers. Local anti-fascist movements cannot get resources into communities, often the poorest, dealing with extraordinary levels of migration.
That is the job of politicians and political parties. It is their failure currently to do so that is resulting in the increasing tribalism of local politics along racial and religious lines.
Making a difference
What we can do, however, is make a difference on the ground. And we do. Results in several local authority areas in the European elections showed the BNP vote (both actual and share of the vote) down compared to 2004. Among these areas were Burnley, Pendle and Oldham in the North West, Bradford and Kirklees in West Yorkshire, and Sandwell and Dudley in the West Midlands.
A common factor in all these areas has been the intensity of local anti-BNP campaigns, which has been all year round and not just a leaflet at an election.
And this sets the model for the year ahead. We will go into the 2010 local elections with an emboldened and financially secure BNP and we believe the number of council wards at risk is now over 150 across the country. The BNP’s main target will be Barking and Dagenham where it will be looking to take control of the council.
To fight the BNP effectively we must move away from city and town centre events to focusing on the very communities where the BNP is drawing its support. We need to return to localised leaflets and newsletters, tapping into the local identities of neighbourhoods and addressing local issues to undermine the BNP’s message of hate.
Smaller, local events are more important than one-off larger ones. The recent anti-racist carnival in Stoke-on-Trent might have been attended by 15,000 people but was it really the best use of £300,000? Even the carnival the year before, in Hackney, might have been attracted 60,000, but what impact does it have on the London hotspots such as Barking and Dagenham and Havering?
The effort required to put on and build such an event drains and diverts activism away from local campaigning, which will be the priority in 2010. Of course in the ideal world we would like both big national events and smaller local events, but where funds and activism are limited this is not possible.
A proper local strategy requires us to localise our campaigning. What works in one area will not work in another. Talking to principally Conservative voters requires a quite different leaflet to what would be put out in a traditionally Labour area. Localising our approach allows us to deal with local issues and also to target our message depending on what we are trying to achieve. And mobilising the anti-BNP vote is sometimes quite different from trying to suppress the BNP vote.
That is why the HOPE not hate campaign will be encouraging and supporting local groups to begin their own local anti-BNP newsletters. We hope that by starting this summer and focusing on the key wards for 2010 the newsletters will become a crucial tool to defeating the BNP at the ballot box.
To begin to undermine local BNP support we also have to build alliances within the community. Local anti-BNP groups need to be accepted and even respected. Every community has key movers and shakers and spending a bit of time cultivating relationships with these people will open new opportunities, allow our message to be widened considerably, potentially increase our activist base and give us a regular flow of information to rebut BNP myths and lies.
We also need to be cleverer in how we present our arguments. The YouGov survey shows the complete lack of respect BNP voters have towards authority – way beyond those of other parties. That means dogmatic or one dimensional arguments on anti-fascist leaflets are likely to fail.
We have to recognise that we might not always be the best messenger to get over an argument. One of the most successful leaflets we have ever produced was in Halifax where we got quotes from local doctors and pensioners to dismiss BNP claims that asylum seekers were forcing old people off GP lists and causing hospital operations to be cancelled. The strength of getting other people to speak up for us, particularly those respected by local people, is also evident from the survey. Local GPs, at 82%, came out as the most trusted professionals among BNP voters.
A new reality
We also have to accept that the political landscape has shifted. Searchlight comes from a proud tradition of No Platform, a belief that fascism should not be allowed to air its politics of hate publicly. We have always opposed legitimising fascism through public debate and where fascists try to incite hatred within communities through provocative marches and actions, we have backed mobilisations against them.
While I still adhere to this in principle I also believe that we have to accept a new reality. Firstly the BNP has MEPs and whether we like it or not Nick Griffin and Andrew Brons will appear more regularly on television. No platform agreements between political parties were already breaking down before the election, with only Labour holding to them, and this process is likely to quicken now.
Likewise, we also have to change our tactics on the streets. The hammer attack on a BNP activist in Leigh, Greater Manchester, in March was an unmitigated disaster. When we learnt about the BNP’s intention to hold a fundraising event in a local nightclub we got almost 5,000 people, including 400 from the local area, to sign an open letter from a local vicar calling for the event to be cancelled. Our pressure proved successful but what should have been a great media story, showing the strength of people power against the BNP, became three days of appallingly negative local headlines after an anti-fascist struck a BNP member in the head with a hammer.
Our response to any BNP activity is a tactical issue. Just as we always consider what is possible, so we have to think about the possible outcomes. With large chunks of local people supporting the BNP something that gives the party media sympathy is often counter-productive. In a 24-hour-communica-tions world every small event that in the past would have gone unreported can be headline news on television, the radio and on the internet within minutes.
With the BNP leaders far more politically savvy than in the past it is not difficult for them to spin a story to their advantage.
There is also a need for an honest debate about the use of rallies, marches and pickets. While one could argue that it is important continually to oppose the BNP gaining any legitimacy, such protests are increasingly ineffective and, probably more importantly, a distraction from the real work required in the communities.
The reality is that most people other than a few highly motivated activists will not come out on a regular basis. Continually chasing the BNP uses up their time when there is more serious but perhaps less glamorous work to be done in local communities. Again, people might say that we should do both. That may be the ideal but it is not the reality and choices have to be made. We have to prioritise our agenda rather than continually react to the BNP’s. Obviously there will be times when mobilisations are important but this cannot be a distraction from the real work at hand.
Moving forward
Over the next few months our priority is to build anti-fascist groups in every community in the country. Over 115,000 people have engaged in some activity for the HOPE not hate campaign. That’s an incredible one in 470 adults in Britain. Over 80,000 people have signed our “Not in my name” petition since the election, of which over 60,000 were completely new to us.
This shows the level of anger at the BNP success, but now we need to harness it in a positive and constructive way that helps us build the necessary networks that can defeat the BNP in the community.
Our initial job is to turn our online supporters into activists on the ground. Hopefully some will emerge as local organisers, committed to the localised strategy ahead. Old hands must be encouraged to support new organisers and we will be providing an organising and leadership programme in every region of the country.
A series of one-day training events will be held to give key activists from local groups the basics in running a local campaign group, working in a target ward and building alliances within the community.
From there a handful of the most enthusiastic local organisers will be invited to a three-day residential programme, to be held in the late autumn, where they will develop leadership and organisational skills.
Developing a pool of local organisers is the way to ensure good quality campaigns. Whatever the enthusiasm of local activists a lack of organising skills and the ability to localise campaigns effectively will result in continued reliance on national help, which in turn reduces the effectiveness of a local campaign.
To support local groups, particularly in the run-up to next year’s local and probable general election, the HOPE not hate campaign will be seeking to put trained organisers on the ground in each region of the country.
The work of local groups will be further supported by an even bigger online effort than we achieved this year. Through online telephone canvassing, supporters across the country will be able to help in our key battlegrounds from their front rooms. Matching groups and activists in one part of country where there is no BNP threat to an area where there is one can help us raise money for local material.
Remaining focused
The BNP success has led some to argue that we need to politicise anti-fascism, even to offer a political alternative to the BNP. While there are clearly public policy failings and a democratic deficit, it is not our job to fill this void. We must leave that to the political parties, old or new.
We are about defeating the BNP, both by turning out those voters totally opposed to their racist politics and by dispelling myths and challenging the assumptions and ignorance that give rise to BNP support.
We have a big job to do but it can be done. The work on anti-BNP campaigns in East Lancashire, Oldham, the Black Country and West Yorkshire is testament to that.
However, for us to defeat the BNP over the coming year requires hard work, building local broad-based coalitions, adapting to the new realities and being a little bit smarter than we have been before. Get these components right and we can hold the BNP at bay.
What do you think?
We are opening up the August issue of Searchlight to find out your views on the way forward. Please restrict articles to 500 words and get them to me nick@stopthebnp.org.uk by 10 July. (Please note that space is limited and we cannot guarantee to publish every article.)
Nick Lowles, Searchlight
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