Is the BNP’s Lee Barnes losing the plot?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Pete Doherty – Junkie scumbag piece of shit worshipped by scumbag UAF fuckwits and NME wankers.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bring back the Doc – all is forgiven

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

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

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

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

Yes, you read that correctly.

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

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

The NNP collapses: Sharon Ebanks announces her retirement from politics

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

‘Announcement by the New Nationalist Party

The leader of the NNP makes the following statement:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kind Regards
Sharon Ebanks’

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Monkey Business: Sharon Ebanks Gives Up The NNP

Sambo is shamed into submission

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘In large part there is no point even trying to refute them…’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The party welcomed the violent thug Kevin Hughes back too.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

BNP’s fake union Solidarity already up against the ropes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It looks like Tim Hawke has had it then.

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

The BNP and the BNP’s union – democracy and accountability in action. Well, not quite.

Griffin: Webster dishes the dirt

The body of this post is taken from the Electronic Loose Cannon, e-bulletin of former National Front National Activities Organiser, Martin Webster. ARN republishes Webster’s missive without alteration as (yet another) instructive intervention in the BNP’s leadership race. While Mr Webster, a life-long racist, clearly has his own agenda and appears to be driven by his loathing of BNP leader Nick Griffin, there is no doubting that he is also a good “facts” man. Obviously intent on inflicting maximum damage on Griffin, Webster’s article will nevertheless make interesting and useful reading for anti-racists generally, though – naturally – we cannot vouchsafe the truth of Martin Webster’s statements. Read on…

Some ‘deep background’ on the BNP Chairman

A reader has e-mailed me as follows:

“Nick Griffins sister stood for the NF in Suffolk. What is her name? What is Griffin’s father’s REAL name? He claims it to be Edgar Vincent Griffin. He also claims to have been born in Harrow but he wasn’t, he was born in Brighton. Why would he lie about that?”

This prompted me to consider that there are so many newcomers (compared to me!) to the Nationalist scene that the time had come for a bit of “deep background” on Nick Griffin, Chairman and, to all intents and purposes, owner of the British National Party. I have no knowledge of Nick Griffin’s father, Edgar, beyond that he is a chartered accountant and that his father, Edwin, was a leading Freemason who left Nick, £300,000 in the late 1980s (which he quickly lost in stupid property deals). On the one occasion in the mid 1970s that I stayed over-night at the Griffin family home (then at Hill House, Huntingfield, near Halesworth, Suffolk) the kitchen was filled with oriental carpets, giving it the appearance of a souk. Mrs Griffin had bought a job lot of these and was proposing, somehow, to merchandise them. She asked my opinion as to their quality. I was surprised she didn’t remark: “Never mind the quality — feel the width”.

It became evident to me on that occasion that the entire Griffin family were money mad. I understand that the family lived in Barnet when Nick was a toddler. Presumably his father had made sufficient cash to translate the family to Suffolk. Perhaps Grandpa helped.

MYSTERY OF THE DISAPPEARING SISTER

I was informed last year by Daily Mail feature writer David Jones that Nick Griffin’s sister is “Susan Patricia”. Jones said he had tried to locate her via a search of the on-line Registry of Electors, but had no luck. There is a real mystery concerning why she has broken off all contact with her family and made efforts to cover her tracks.Susan Patricia was once engaged to Ipswich National Front branch organiser Tony Williams, a boyhood friend of Griffin’s. At the time (late 70s/early 80s) Williams (whose father was a wealthy businessman) was building up a very successful off-licence business in East Anglia. During the 1970s Susan Patricia stood at least once (I think in Ipswich) as an NF local council candidate. I don’t know when or why the engagement between Susan Patricia and Williams ended. It may have been something to do with the following:

NICK GRIFFIN’S FIRST SWINDLE?

In the mid/late 1980s Griffin swindled Williams of a couple of thousand pounds. Griffin told Williams that he had got news about a bargain supply of CDs somewhere on the Continent, but that he didn’t have the cash to take advantage of the offer. He implied the purchase was for his own private business enterprise and promised to repay Williams in cash “within two weeks”. As they were friends, the deal was transacted without paperwork. Weeks went by and no repayment was made.

When Williams asked for his money, he was astounded to be told by Griffin that the money was “a loan to the party” (i.e. what remained of the National Front, or one of its splinters) not a personal loan to him, or a loan guaranteed by him, and that if Williams wanted his cash, he should chase the party. But this was at the time that the remnant of the NF was splintering into little grouplets and Griffin was helping Roberto Fiore set up the International Third Position, so in effect there was no identifiable “party” to chase and any litigation against the then impecunious Griffin would be futile.

JUNK PRINTING EQUIPMENT AND A DRUNK’S LIFE-SAVINGS

You will know that Griffin was eventually forced to quit the ITP after a deal which involved the purchase of printing equipment which turned out to be only just so much scrap iron; and swindling one of its members, Colin Todd, caretaker of the Fiore-owned building Liss House at Liss Forest, Hants. Somehow Griffin persuaded Todd to “invest” his life savings in a venture. It was a scam and Todd lost the lot. When confronted with this cruel swindle Griffin shrugged it off, remarking that “Todd is a drunk”.

The two thousand pounds loss which Williams sustained as a result of Griffin’s crookedness was not the worst aspect of the sting. It was the crass and cynical dishonouring of an agreement between two long-standing friends. Williams just could not believe Griffin could be so dishonest and so brazen — and so casual about a long friendship.

THE FIRST FARM BUILDING RENOVATION SWINDLE

This made Williams loathe Griffin and, decades later, prompted him to make available to me a DVD copy of a video he had shot of a building restoration project which had taken place in 1984 on Hill House, the Griffin family home in Suffolk. Griffin told the NF that he had persuaded his parents to grant the National Front’s youth wing, the Young National Front, free use of a number of outbuildings of their farmhouse, but that restoration work would need to be done free of charge.YNF and NF members went to the farm for weekend after weekend during that year and did hard and dangerous building work for no wage. They paid their own fares to and from the site and slept on the floors of the buildings they were renovating.

A SWINDLE WITH GRATIS AD LIB LAGER FUNDED “FREE MEALS”

They were given “free” meals, but the meals were in fact paid for by means of a petty swindle. Williams had delivered to the site before work commenced a van-load of tins of continental lager which had just gone by their ‘sell-by’ date and could not be sold via the off-licence trade. Williams GAVE the lager for FREE distribution to the young idealists. The Griffins knew a business opportunity when they saw it and they set to work grinding off off the ‘sell-by’ date from the cans, which were then SOLD to the workers at £1 per can! Easily £2 in today’s values. But this was only a trivial side swindle. The worst aspect of the main swindle — the building restoration — was that the youngsters were put to work on an a major asbestos clearance.

“IF HE DOESN’T BREAK HIS NECK HE’LL DIE OF ASBESTOS POISONING”

By that time a law had been passed requiring asbestos clearances to be conducted by specially licenced asbestos clearance contractors whose staff had been specially trained and who use special protective equipment and who bagged and disposed of asbestos waste in a prescribed manner.Needless to say, the NF/YNF people were ignorant of the dangers and of the law governing such work, and they simply climbed on to the roof of “the Asbestos Barn” and hurled the asbestos sheets to the ground, sending up clouds of potentially lethal dust. This and other aspects of the work was filmed by Tony Williams on his video camera. Griffin wrote and spoke a commentary to the video. His voice is unmistakable. At one point in the film John Field, then the organiser of Hackney YNF, is shown on the roof without any protective equipment or safety harness, hammering down asbestos sheets as clouds of dust rise. Griffin remarks in his commentary: “If he doesn’t break his neck, then he die of cancer due to asbestos poisoning”.

This remark was made with cold matter-of-factness.

WHY SHOULD ALL THIS BE DRAGGED UP NOW — AFTER SO LONG A TIME?

Some may ask why such wickedness should be made an issue now…. “after all, it was a long time ago”. There are two equally important answers, as follows:Firstly, asbestosis is a terminal condition which takes decades to manifest itself. The people who as young men worked on the asbestos clearance at Hill House are now coming into the time when, if they have been unlucky, symptoms will start to present. They may have no idea what is happening to them, or why.

Secondly, anybody who in his 20s (an adult) who could perpetrate such a thing against anybody, let alone “comrades”, and who could perpetrate sundry other swindles against friends and associates, is not somebody who at any subsequent time should have any trust reposed in them. Needless to say, the property, once renovated, was never made available to the NF (nor was the video!!). The whole thing had been a trick whereby the Griffin family exploited their political connection to con young idealists to get dangerous, expensive and potentially lethal work done for free.

VIDEO MADE TO CREATE ILLUSION OF “A HISTORIC PROJECT”

Griffin had only asked Williams to make the video to give the YNF lads the illusion they were engaged in “a historic project” — and how those innocents played up to the camera! Williams says he was as much conned as to the real purpose of being asked to make the video as he was conned by the use made of his supply of lager. The work which those lads did added greatly the value of the Griffin property. When the property was sold, not a penny of the enhanced value created by the renovation work was directed to any nationalist political movement, as promised by Griffin at the outset. Fiore and other of the Italian ITP prominenti occasionally turned up to Hill House to inspect the good work, since the concept of “rural community centres” was then very much one of their ideological fads.One would have thought that the swindle they saw Griffin perpetrate against the NF would have warned them off trusting him with their financial affairs…. but Fiore and his gang were then and are now greedy for money, so perhaps they admired Griffin’s style.

THE SECOND FARM BUILDING RENOVATION SWINDLE

Griffin performed another “Barn conversion” swindle soon after he became chairman of the BNP in 1999 — in about 2001/2. The BNP put up the money for the materials and provided free skilled labour for the renovation of his barn on his ‘Y Gribbin’ farm in Wales. This barn is supposed to function as a venue for party meetings. If as and when it is used as such, the party is invoiced by Griffin for its use. Griffin did not grant the party any equity in the property in return for its “investment” so that if as and when the farm is sold, the added value created by the barn renovation go entirely to Griffin and not a penny to the BNP. For some reason Griffin never secured the video (with his commentary dubbed on it) of the Hill House outbuildings renovation of 1984. Perhaps in the hurley-burley of political splits and financial shenanigans he forgot all about it.

WILLIAMS’ HILL HOUSE VIDEO GOES WALKABOUT

Williams left the NF at about the time of its final disintegration under Griffin’s (mis)management and some time in the 1990s became head of the minuscule National Socialist Movement.The NSM became exposed by the media for one reason or another and Williams fled the country and settled in a far-off land. He took with him the video of the Hill House renovation. Eventually he made a DVD conversion of the video and made available a copy to me. The ownership of the copyright of this film is retained by Williams under contract. Information about this DVD has been given to a wide cross-section of the media. I have retained the complete file of all the negotiations which took place. In all instances there was an initial flurry of keen interest and then, in all cases, the interest suddenly evaporated without any explanation.

THE STRANGE REACTION OF THE MEDIA

Can one imagine what the reaction of the media would be in normal circumstances where a politician — of ANY party — was on record on a DVD of being involved in such a matter and of commenting sarcastically about the possible death of one of his duped helpers? To put the gravity of the current situation into some kind of perspective, one would have to recollect the kind of huge smears, based on the most trivial of pretexts, levelled at personalities in the National Front during the 1970s. In 1978, for example, the Daily Mirror concocted a double-page spread exposing the organiser of a local branch of the NF as “a Nazi” because part of the minute pattern on his tie, when hugely enlarged, could be said to resemble a “pattern of swastikas”! The NF official concerned (Paul Kavanagh) was a respectable middle-class importer of machine tools with no “Nazi” background whatsoever. Indeed, he was widely rumoured to be an MI5 informant (but that is another story!). He was co-founder with Andrew Fountaine of the “National Front Constitutional Movement”. How does that bit of nonsense about Paul Kavanagh’s tie compare with Griffin’s outrageous record?

WHO KILLED-OFF DOMINIC CARMAN’S BIOGRAPHY OF NICK GRIFFIN?

My recent experiences of the media via-a-vis Griffin seem to be very similar to that of the author Dominic Carman (son of the famous libel lawyer, the late George Carman QC). Three years ago Carman was engaged in researching Griffin prior to producing a biography. Carman subjected me to two long in-depth interviews, the first was video-taped, the second audio-taped. He took copies of a lot of documents I have on file. The questioning covered a lot of ground, including most intimate matters. In-between Carman’s first and second interview with me, he had visited the Griffin farmhouse home in Wales. I understand he spent the weekend there and took the opportunity to interview Nick’s wife Jacky separately from her husband Nick. She was very frank on delicate matters. Carman also took information from former pupils at a girls public school in Suffolk, whose sixth form Nick and one or two other lads were permitted to attend. The information which they gave chimed with that provided by Jackie and provided context for my information in the same general area of sexuality.

THE ESTABLISHMENT IS HAPPY WITH GRIFFIN AS BNP CHAIRMAN

Two years rolled by but Carman’s book did not appear. A brief article about Griffin by Carman appeared in the Daily Mail colour supplement about a year ago which was clearly based on his book researches, but since then there has been complete silence. Intrigued by this, I e-mailed Carman on 25th April this year, saying: “….. you will understand my wondering if the reason why your book on Griffin has not appeared has anything to do with my experiences of trying to get quite crucial information about Griffin’s character and background into the public arena at a time when the mainstream media profiles of him are edging towards hagiography. Any reply will be kept confidential by me if you so request…..” Carman received my e-mail but has sent no response. I quite understand. He wants to be able to continue to earn his living from the mainstream media. For want of any other explanation, I feel entitled to propose that the media was and is being orchestrated not to do anything to dislodge Griffin from his perch at the top of the BNP. It is evident that the Establishment has every reason to be happy to have creature like Griffin at the head of the premiere “nationalist” party in Britain, just as it is happy to have corrupt creatures at the head of every other political party which strives for the rewards which only Establishment patronage can bestow.

Martin Webster

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

New Statesman

Hatewatch – for the week of May 30th 2007

Skinheads Sentenced For Stomping Murder
Samuel Compton, 27, and Christopher Whitley, 25, were sentenced to more than 20 years in prison for stomping a man to death outside a Phoenix pool hall in 2002…

Child Porn Charges Against Neo-Nazi Leader Detailed
A new court filing reveals sordid details of the federal government’s child pornography case against disgraced National Vanguard leader Kevin Strom…

Idaho Shooter Was Aryan Nations Member
Jason Kenneth Hamilton, a card-carrying member of Aryan Nations, killed his wife, a church sexton and a police officer in a shooting spree that wounded three others…

KKK Group Holds Anti-Immigration Rally
More than 150 people gathered to hear a dozen robed members of the Alabama Order of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan hurl racial slurs and epithets at Mexican immigrants…

Anne Frank Memorial Vandalized
A memorial to Holocaust victim Anne Frank was toppled and damaged by vandals two months after being plastered with neo-Nazi stickers…

SPLC

Back from the dead and facing life – trial recalls horrors of the Klan

• Ex-policeman, 71, accused of 1964 race killings
• Victim’s brother traced suspect said to be dead

Thomas Moore is looking forward to finally coming face-to-face with James Ford Seale, a Ku Klux Klansman who came back from the dead. “I want to look at him,” he said. “I want to tell him about the pain he caused me and my family.”

Mr Moore, 63, a retired sergeant-major, recalled the day he found out that Mr Seale was still alive. “I was so happy. We thought he was dead – and so did everyone else.”

The trial opens here today of Mr Seale, 71, a former worker in a paper plant, crop-duster and policeman, accused of kidnapping and conspiracy in relation to the murder of two black teenagers in 1964, one of them Mr Moore’s brother. According to the indictment, the two 19-year-olds, Charles Moore and Henry Dee, were kidnapped by the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, tortured and dumped in the Mississippi, Moore tied to a jeep engine block, and, according to an FBI informant at the time, still breathing.

The killings marked the beginning of a summer of madness, as the KKK responded to the civil rights movement with the fiery crosses, church bombings and murders depicted in Alan Parker’s 1989 film Mississippi Burning.

The Seale prosecution could be among the last of the KKK trials. Although the justice department has promised to re-open cases, witnesses are dying off and files have been lost.

Now living in Colorado, Mr Moore had been brought up in Franklin County, one of the strongholds of the White Knights. He returned in 2005 with a Canadian film-maker, David Ridgen, to investigate the murders. Pulling up at a petrol station for an egg and sausage sandwich, he met by chance a distant cousin, Kenny Byrd.

Mr Moore explained why they were there and said it was a pity that Mr Seale, who had been one of the main suspects, was dead. His family had been saying so since 2000. The local Clarion-Ledger had reported it as fact: so too had the Los Angeles Times. Mr Byrd replied: “Hell no, he lives over there.”

Mr Moore traced lost files, spoke to potential witnesses, harassed former Klansmen, mobilised the African-American community and successfully campaigned to have the FBI re-open the case.

Mr Seale is expected to plead not guilty in a trial expected to last about a fortnight. If found guilty, he faces life sentences.

Mississippi is different these days, at least on the surface. It is evident to anyone arriving at the airport at Jackson, now called Jackson-Evers International in recognition of the civil rights leader, Medgar Evers, who was assassinated in 1963. It is evident, too, in the fact that the judge who will try the case is African-American, Henry Wingate.

But Heidi Beirich, deputy director of intelligence at a Jackson-based civil rights group, the Southern Poverty Law Centre, which investigates hate crimes, cautioned that although the KKK and institutionalised racism is mainly a thing of the past, Mississippi still has problems. She noted that when the state voted in 2002 to retain the Confederate flag, a symbol of hate for African-Americans, the divide was on racial grounds. African-Americans in the state continue to live in the poorest areas, with the worst schools.

“As far as the Klan is concerned, its heyday is definitely in the past. It hit its peak in the 1920s at 4 million. The number of Klansmen is way down: we estimate 5,000-6,000. It is not a cohesive organisation any longer: it is fragmented. They are no longer capable of the kind of terror they rained down on the South in the 1950s and 1960s,” Ms Beirich said.

But the sense of dread inspired by the KKK has not gone completely. Ridgen, who put together a documentary Mississippi Cold Case, said: “The psychological threat was always there. There was fear every time in Franklin County. We never took the same route. We never told anyone in advance about coming.”

At the trial, the key witness is likely to be a former Klansman, Charles Edwards, a suspect at the time, who is expected to give evidence against Mr Seale in return for immunity. Former FBI agents who carried out a fairly thorough investigation at the time are also scheduled to testify. After their investigation in 1964, they handed the case over to the local justice department who, as was not unusual at the time, quickly dropped it.

No real explanation has been given for the killings. Klansmen at the time told the FBI that Mr Dee had been peeping at one of their wives while others alleged gun smuggling into a black church. The indictment suggests otherwise: “The White Knights … targeted for violence African-Americans they believed were involved in civil rights activity in order to intimidate and retaliate against such individuals.”

Mr Dee’s sister, Thelma Collins, who now lives in Louisiana, said yesterday she could not remember him being involved in any civil rights activity. “He was quiet, never said much,” she recalled. She is saddened that the case has taken 43 years to come to court: “It is pitiful that those boys were killed and no one did anything about it.”

Like Mrs Collins, Mr Moore will be given his chance to make a victim’s statement in court. He said: “I want to tell how it is to go without a brother, my son without an uncle, how Charles never had the opportunity to make mistakes, to live his life.”

Backstory

The reopening of racist murder cases from the 1960s in the South began in 1990 when a white supremacist, Byron La Beckwith, was indicted and eventually jailed for the assassination in 1963 of Medgar Evers, then chairman in Mississippi of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. This encouraged the FBI and local justice departments to look again at unsolved cases. Since then, there have been six prosecutions in Mississippi, including Mr Seale’s today. Authorities in seven states have re-examined a total of 29 killings and made 29 arrests, leading to 22 convictions.

One of the most prominent was the trial and jailing in 2001 of Thomas Blanton and Bobby Frank Cherry for the 1963 bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, which killed four young girls. The revulsion created by the bombing helped turn public opinion behind the civil rights movement. In 2005, Edgar Ray Killen, 80, was jailed for the murder of the three civil rights activists depicted in Mississippi Burning. But the reality is that there may not be many more cases brought to court: elderly witnesses are dying off and records of crimes have been lost.

Guardian

‘Japanese Schindler’ who saved Lithuanian Jews is honoured

When Japan’s Emperor Akihito and Empress Michiko visited the monument of Chiune Sugihara in Lithuania last weekend, many television programmes back in Japan had to run stories explaining who this obscure diplomat was.

It’s obvious why the Emperor would be in London yesterday to dine with the Queen but who was Chiune Sugihara?

For years, few Japanese knew the incredible story of how the man dubbed “Japan’s Schindler” saved about 6,000 Jews from the Nazis during the Second World War despite working for an ally of Germany. Unlike Oscar Schindler, the German industrialist who turned against the Nazis and rescued almost 1,100 Jews from the Holocaust, Sugihara had to wait until just seven years ago for his bravery to be officially recognised.

Sugihara was the acting consul in Lithuania’s temporary wartime capital when he was ordered to abandon his post as the Germans advanced in 1940. A fourth of the city’s population was Jewish, mostly prosperous and well integrated, and few were ready to believe the horror stories from nearby Poland until it was too late to flee. By an accident of history the mild-mannered diplomat – one of just two left in the city – became their last hope for survival.

The crossroads in Sugihara’s life came one night in July 1940 when he woke up to find a group of desperate refugees outside his window demanding visas to the Soviet Union. He decided to help but his repeated requests to Tokyo for permission to issue the visas were denied. Despite facing disgrace or worse for his family, Sugihara decided to follow his conscience and sign as many visas as he could, in defiance of his government.

Sugihara’s courageous decision was all the more remarkable given his background. From solid middle-class stock, he graduated from Tokyo’s elite Waseda University and served under the Foreign Ministry in Japan’s puppet state of Manchuria, one of the more brutal military occupations of the war. A gifted linguist, he was once tipped for an ambassador’s post.

Yet this is the man who sat for almost a month from 31 July to 28 August 1940 painstakingly writing out 10-day transit visas by hand, even enlisting his wife, Yukiko, to help him. By the time they boarded a Berlin-bound train on 1 September 1940, still scribbling out the last visa, they had saved about 6,000 people, including hundreds of children. Sugihara’s final act in the besieged city was to hand his consular stamp to a refugee, who went on issuing passes.

Sugihara’s reward for his heroism was dismissal from the Foreign Ministry immediately after the war. Disgraced in Japan, he was forced to eke out a living as a part-time translator and ended his life working for a trading company with connections to Russia. He died in 1986 and his family had to wait until 14 years later for the then Foreign Minister Yohei Kono to formally apologise.

A year before he passed away, he was honoured for his work in rescuing the Lithuanian refugees by the Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority in Israel. The award stunned those who heard about it in Japan, where Sugihara had lived in obscurity for years.

Historians and journalists have searched through Sugihara’s background to discover what made him take his momentous decision. There were hints in his past that the man who once planned to study medicine was plagued with a conscience. While stationed in Manchuria, for example, he resigned from his post after witnessing the brutality meted out by Japanese troops to the local Chinese.

But many suspect that the key to his change of heart may have been a Jewish refugee called Zalke Jenkins, whose family had fled to Lithuania from the Russian revolution. Sugihara met the 11-year-old in a shop and gave him some money, an act of kindness rewarded with an invitation to visit Jenkins’ family. The diplomat spoke afterward at how moved he was by the strength of family bonds in Jewish life, which reminded him of home.

The Emperor’s seal of approval is for many of his family the highest honour that Japan can bestow for Sugihara’s bravery. “The visit by the imperial couple makes me feel as though his actions have again been rewarded,” one of his surviving family members told the Asahi newspaper.

Independent

BNP wastes police time with complaint about Muslim demo

(Click on image to enlarge)

A few days ago, the British National Party’s West Midlands Organiser, Simon Darby, made a formal complaint to the West Midlands Police about the posters for the planned ‘Muslims Rise Against British Oppression’ demo outside 10 Downing Street on June 15th. In his letter, Darby took particular exception to the word ‘rise’. He states:

‘To encourage members of the Muslim community to “rise” is clearly either an incitement to violence or to open rebellion.’

If he had taken a couple of seconds to go to the website which is prominently advertised on the poster, he would soon have found the following statement:

‘Insha-Allah, on Friday the 15th of June, Muslims all over the country will be gathering together united as ‘One Block’ outside 10 Downing Street. They will Rise against the British oppression and demonstrate peacefully against the government!’

Of course, the well-known BNP double-standards are ever-active. Following all the fuss about the prophet cartoons a few months back, the BNP were more than happy to use them on their next anti-Muslim election leaflets, thus deliberately encouraging, inciting and indeed hoping for, a breach of the peace that the party could exploit for its own ends.

Darby goes on:

‘I am attaching both posters, drawing your attention in particular to the colour version which, together with inflammatory wording, contains irresponsible images of violence which could easily and very dangerously be misconstrued.’

Well, no. The poster is clearly meant to advertise a demonstration against the oppression of Muslims and it only shows images of the oppression of Muslims. The fact that these images are violent in nature is simply a reflection of the fact that oppression is a violent business.

Darby again:

‘If the British National Party distributed posters encouraging the British community to “rise” against their Islamic oppressors together with graphic images of Islamic violence against non-Muslims one needs little imagination to predict what the reaction of the police would be.’

Yes, nothing at all – as we saw when the BNP attempted to exploit the July 2005 London bombings by reprinting images of the destroyed bus (along with images of the prophet with a bomb in his turban), trying desperately to make everyone believe that every Muslim was a lunatic preparing to blow up his neighbour. Funny how the BNP objects to the very things it does itself.

In fact, we wouldn’t be surprised if far more people linked to the BNP had been in court for explosives-related crimes than Muslims over the past few years – Robert Cottage, David Jackson, Mark Bulman, David Tovey, David Copeland and Tony Lecomber spring to mind without much effort – making Darby’s complaint hypocrisy of the highest order.

For the benefit of Simon Darby, we’ll reprint the information that appears on the web page for the demonstration:

‘Insha-Allah, on Friday the 15th of June, Muslims all over the country will be gathering together united as ‘One Block’ outside 10 Downing Street. They will Rise against the British oppression and demonstrate peacefully against the government!

We urge all the Muslims including families that have lost a family member to the crusaders, and the communities to take part in this demonstration. This demonstration is for YOU! You need to take part and let the people here your sufferings!

What we will achieve from the demonstration!

Put pressure on the government for the release of Muslim captives. As families and communities if we make a stand and demand for the release of Muslims held as captives, we can create public opinion to put pressure on the government for their release. It will make the oppressors think twice before they do anything!

To show a clear message to the oppressors that they will not silence the Muslim community, no matter how many terror laws they introduce and raids they do.

Fulfil our obligation to support the Muslims that have been oppressed. It is to show support to all those who have been arrested and to show support to all those families that have been left devastated because of the raids, arrests and incarcerations.

Fulfil our obligation of commanding good and forbidding evil.

Fulfil our obligation to speakout against the oppressors and the tyrants.’

Which all sounds pretty reasonable to us. In fact we rather feel that if anyone should be reported to the police, it should be the BNP – for wasting police time.