Griffin and Co: Asset-strippers and Dictators

A pro-BNP blog that started up recently as a response to attacks on the financial probity of the party from the NNP and various others (including us) has printed an article that begins 'Why do stories about alleged 'corruption' within the BNP surface with such monotonous regularity on the Internet?' Well, there's a very simple answer to that - but let's take a look at what the article says.

The point of the article is to establish that the BNP is not corrupt and it attempts to do this by making a number of statements which need examining.

Nick Griffin has a Cambridge Law degree, has run rings around the best barristers that the Crown Prosecution Service have thrown at him in three free speech trials, and has demolished every Establishment 'big gun' radio and TV interviewer he has ever faced. If the man was in it for the money, he certainly wouldn't be in the BNP!

Nick Griffin actually has a 2.2, which is okay but hardly earth-shattering - in Jurisprudence, which is nowhere near as exciting as some weird people might think. As far as the trials go, the writer seems to have forgotten that in 1998 Griffin was given a two-year suspended sentence for distributing material likely to incite racial hatred. The more recent so-called 'free speech' trials of last year were both inadvisable and unnecessary, and there can't be an anti-fascist commentator anywhere who thought Griffin would actually be convicted though we would all have liked to have seen it. In any case, he hardly ran rings around the prosecution, nor has he ever demolished any radio or TV interviewer he has faced. Far from it in fact - he tends to come across as inept and stumbling to anyone with even rudimentary critical ability.

Land Registry records confirm that Nick's wife brought their home in Wales on a mortgage for £25,000 in the early 1990s. Obviously prices have gone up since then, but it's hardly the price of a palace.

Who cares, though wasn't Griffin declared bankrupt with debts of £70,000 on June 16th 1994 at Welshpool and Newtown County Court? Wonder where he got the money to buy the farm? And where he got the money to do the barn conversion which would have added considerably to the value of the place? Oh yes, that was paid for by the membership wasn't it. Presumably, Griffin is paying the money back at some point?

Interesting to note that it was Griffin's wife who bought the farm. Presumably that's something to do with either his bankruptcy or it's a tax dodge.

When travelling on speaking tours, Mr. Griffin invariably stays at the homes of BNP members. All other political leaders use plush hotels...

Bullshit. Where does he stay when he's over in America, France, Sweden or Croatia (where it's rumoured he has bought another property - no doubt for the planned BNP Holiday Hotel from Hell)?

The finances and financial records of the BNP, which the Electoral Commission classifies as a 'major party', are therefore by law closely monitored not only by internal staff but also by an independent auditor who is bound by his professional code to ensure that everything is handled properly...

We have never heard the BNP described as a 'major' party simply because it isn't. Roughly the same amount of members as the Monster Raving Loony Party does not make it a major party by anyone's standards.

...His complete audit is in turn gone through with a fine toothed comb by officials from the Electoral Commission...

And it was pointed out by the auditor that because no bank wanted to handle the accounts of the fascist BNP, most transactions were carried out in cash, making it extremely difficult to keep tabs on expenditure.

...The chances of money being illictly raised, spent or stolen under such a system are effectively zero. The finances of the modern BNP are the most open and transparent of any party in the history of British nationalism.

The second statement of that sentence might well be true but we're still wondering where the real accounts are, where the accounts of the Trafalgar Club are, where the income from the numerous business ventures appears in the accounts, how much everyone who is employed by the BNP actually gets paid, where the real foreign donations are listed and so on ad nauseum...

Let's face it: Far from being a passport to luxury, high living and privilege, running the BNP - in a country with Islamic terror cells, endemic violence among certain immigrant communities, left-wing thugs and a Politically Correct legal system operated by a totalitarian government - is a dangerous as well as a thankless task.

Strange, I thought Griffin's farm was set in its own land and came complete with a sauna and jacuzzi and so on. I could be wrong but that sounds pretty luxurious to me.

I've yet to see any evidence of a physical attack on Nick Griffin - ever - from anybody except Tony Lecomber, and he was actually attacking Eddie Butler and Griffin just got in the way. The only other mention of an attack was when the BNP tried to claim at attempt on Griffin's life over in Sweden on one of his many trips abroad. The bomb was unprimed and would never have gone off and it eventually emerged that the liar Griffin hadn't even been on the train that had been under threat.

The BNP is the only household name party in the UK which is 'in the black'. All the others are mired in massive debt, because running a political party's central machine is a very costly exercise.

That's odd because the BNP is the only party which the auditor pointed out was close to bankruptcy. The BNP could only survive by stealing branch money.

Any head of any organisation will at times have to discipline individuals within that organisation, and to defend the interests of the organisation against rivals. Both the punished guilty and jealous rivals have clear motives for lying about the man who has put them in their place, or the successful organisation that blocks their own personal or group ambitions.

Ah yes, the people Griffin has sacked. Like one of two former treasurers Griffin's sacked, Mike Newland, who protested at the plainly unacceptable blurring of the boundaries between the chairman's private business concerns as a secondhand car dealer (Affordable Cars) on the one hand, and party finances on the other, not to mention the making of wholly illegal payments (£1500 is mentioned at one point) to Tony Lecomber, who was claiming benefits at the time. In September 2000, Newland wrote;

'Griffin was elected on a clear pledge to have full financial accountability and fell at the first hurdle when reasonable questions were asked. He and Lecomber have shown themselves incapable of running the organisation as a legitimate affair. I thought that Griffin had matured sufficiently enough to behave sensibly and I was wrong...I misjudged him and that was my terrible mistake for which I eat humble pie.'

Griffin has sacked numerous people from the BNP mostly for questioning the accounts - the Edwards' are another example. But our favourite was the Sharon Ebanks scam that caused so much harm to the BNP.

Ebanks, you'll recall, was elected as the councillor for Kingstanding in Birmingham by a miscount of the votes. Though the mistake was noticed on the night of the count, the winner had already been announced and nothing could be done unless there was a High Court challenge from the party that should have taken the seat. Labour duly made the challenge and Ebanks, on advice from the BNP's legal wizards (Lee Barnes and Nick Griffin) fought it and lost.

Losing in the High Court is an expensive business and Ebanks' costs were, as far as we can gather, around £5000. The BNP promptly started asking for donations and raised, we're reliably informed, around £7000.

For some bizarre reason, everything then went pear-shaped for the BNP. They'd lost the seat but were sitting on top of a propaganda goldmine - small party having to raise big funds for cock-up that wasn't its fault, successful fundraising saves reputation of ousted councillor etc etc. Okay, no councillor but the loss could easily have been turned to a victory played the right way.

But the BNP decided not to do this. In fact, despite the membership forking out £7000 of its own money to pay Ebanks' High Court costs, the party decided to keep it. At one point (when she was threatened with bankruptcy) Ebanks was advised by the party to get a credit card to pay off the debt to the court.

The uproar from the far-right was predictably bad and the BNP came in, justifiably, for a hell of a lot of criticism from people it would consider supporters - the nazi forum Stormfront, for example. It got so bad that Stormfront members called a collection together and raised the money Ebanks needed and the debt was duly paid, no thanks at all to the BNP.

Ebanks was promptly sacked from the BNP and, in a fit of pique, formed her own party, the NNP, with a bunch of other BNP rejects.

The point of all this waffle - and there is a point, you'll be pleased to read - is that Griffin and his chums will use you up and spit you out. If you're stupid enough to question any disrepancy in the accounts, you're out. If you disagree with the leadership, you're out. If you don't do as you're told, you're out. And we've now seen this dictatorship spread to the external organisations of the BNP, with Solidarity being a fine case in point.

Clive Potter and Tim Hawke question the Solidarity accounts and suddenly they're untrustworthy, probably reds and certainly traitors. It's pretty clear from all we've been able to read that Potter and Hawke will be kicked out and Harrington reinstated as President, complete with full backing from Griffin and an unbeatable majority on the union's Executive - which will be the kiss of death to any hope of it providing any real alternative to any of the genuine unions and their shortcomings as perceived by the BNP. In short, Solidarity will become a cash cow for Griffin and co until it collapses completely.

Griffin and the BNP are asset-strippers and the only people they can strip assets from are those poor deluded sods who have joined the party/union.

There is a hell of a lot more to write about Griffin's BNP - the rip-offs and general thievery would fully occupy this blog for the next two years - but for the moment we'll leave this issue (though we'll return to it at greater length) with a quote from Nick Griffin himself;

'In increasingly hard economic times, a group of people the size of the BNP and its support base can provide a significant assured market for a variety of small businesses.'

Which says it all really.