BNP man’s death - sub judice no bar to BNP hate campaign

The death of a Stoke-on-Trent BNP activist in what police are describing as a “dispute between neighbours” has been hyped out of all proportion by the BNP and its adherents, despite the paucity of details so far released.

Keith Brown had apparently been involved in a long-standing dispute with his Muslim neighbours, which resulted in an altercation on July 6th. During the fracas, Mr Brown was stabbed and died. A number of people were arrested and later released on police bail, and Habib Khan charged with murder. Khan appeared before North Staffordshire magistrates and was remanded to appear at Stafford Crown Court on Monday July 16.

Beyond stating that Mr Brown’s death came about as the result of a dispute between neighbours, Staffordshire police have released few other details. How the altercation arose and who instigated it is not known - these are facts that will be established at Mr Khan’s trial, and until then - quite properly - any speculation or apportioning of blame is prohibited by the rules of sub judice.

However, the fact of one of their own having allegedly been murdered, and allegedly by a Muslim, has proved more than the BNP and its fanatical following can bear, and the party set out to capitalise on the tragedy of Mr Brown’s death.

Very quickly the BNP website, ignoring the fact that nobody accused of a criminal offence may be presumed to be guilty until a jury finds them so, was talking of a “gang of Muslim thugs” and detailed a number of (unproven) allegations made by Mr Brown against his neighbours, saying:

The months of anguish continued for Keith, abuse, assaults and smashed windows until finally the inevitable but entirely avoidable happed. Last Friday afternoon witnesses saw Keith and his neighbours in yet another flare up. Keith had just returned from picking up his three youngest children from school when he was confronted by a group of Muslim men outside his house. Whilst Keith was remonstrating with these men another Muslim man crept from behind a car and plunged a large knife in his back.

Clearly, the BNP does not require anything so mundane as a trial to establish guilt - but then, fascists have a track-record of never greatly bothering themselves with such fripperies wherever they have gained power.

Whether the allegations and summation of events as given on the BNP website is true or not is neither here nor there. The fact is that they have no business being aired in public when the guilt or innocence of a man charged with murder depends upon him coming before an unbiased jury. No newspaper would dare to publish the version of events appearing on the BNP website without a heavy degree of qualification - such that the reader would be in no doubt that the newspaper was publishing allegations, and not established facts.

Even before the BNP website had published its version of events, the party’s keyboard army of bloggers and forum trolls were hard at work hyping their dead comrade into some kind of hero who had fallen in an undeclared race war - one even managing to compare his death to those of the British soldiers who fell at the Battle of the Somme. Calls for revenge came thick and fast, and for once the mask of respectability was discarded as the open racism and hatred of the average BNP member spewed on to the Internet.

We have no more idea than the average BNP member of exactly what led to the death of Keith Brown. Whether his death had anything to do with his politics, his neighbours’ religion, or really was simply a dispute between neighbours that - regardless of politics, religion or race - escalated into violence, are matters that will be established in a court, and not on the poisonous blogs of BNP members.

We hope that all right-thinking people will agree with us that anybody committing an act of murder, whatever the circumstances, deserves the appropriate punishment - as do those who wilfully ignore the long established principle that a person is presumed innocent until proved guilty, and that to presume guilt and to make public utterances to that effect is a contempt of court proceedings likewise deserving of the appropriate punishment.