Don't look now - it's London BNP!

In ancient days of yore (the 1990s to you and me) the World Wide Web was awash with garish websites created by 15 year-old boys who had little to say but who wanted to say it VERY LOUDLY, and to that end in their thousands they downloaded their free copies of Netscape Navigator, which came with an inbuilt WYSIWYG HTML editor called Composer. Not loved at all by professionals, Composer had the quirk that it never closed paragraph tags, so there was always a gap between the main body of a paragraph and its last line. But with Composer you could create frames and nested tables to your heart's delight, and fill them out with ultra-bright colours and thick blocky text - et voila! there you were on Geocities with your own glaring web atrocity sitting at the end of a long and unmemorable URL that took forever to load.

Things moved on, of course - CSS and standards such as PHP came along to revolutionise web design, and coding in HTML alone became old hat, but thousands of those early abominations remain, hanging lifeless and forgotten on the Internet, relics of a by-gone era, testaments to rotten design and over-enthusiastic coding.

Unless you're the Old Major knocking up the online village newsletter on an obsolete copy of Frontpage you really wouldn't code that way today, not unless you had a real yearning for the 1990s and were determined to achieve that so not-in-vogue retro look - tables, frames, blocky text, screaming colours and all.

Or unless you're the clueless London BNP, which has managed - despite great obstacles (taste being one of them) - to come up with a website so dreadful that it really wouldn't look out of place amongst the worst of Geocities circa 1996. And that is saying something!

Now I'll let you into a little secret. Antifascist didn't want to write this up because he's colour blind. Unfortunately, so am I! It seems, however, that the person responsible for the London BNP's website suffers the affliction to a degree so unusual that even our enfeebled eyes watered uncontrollably as his melange of gaudy colour and stone-age design rendered on our monitors like a plateful of melting Smarties. A real blast from the Internet past, we speculated at length on whether or not the author of this dog's dinner was wearing a shell-suit as he tapped out his TDs, TRs, DIVs and non-breaking spacess, bolstered by the conviction that London BNP's website would proudly take its place alongside London Conservatives, London Labour and London Liberal Democrats and blow away their amateurish efforts.

Alas, the result of all that toil is a tawdry website that is an object lesson in irredeemably bad design and execution, the anithesis of everything a political website should be, striking only for its nausea-inducing effect upon the hapless visitor. With content (a word we use loosely) presented in thick black Times New Roman and written in the BNP's proprietory brand of mangled syntax ("There was several lefty-liberal types and local Muslims present..."), London BNP has come up with a website that is an instant museum piece, definitely one for the connoisseurs of all things tacky to pore over for hours at a stretch (maybe asking themselves, Why?).

Perhaps the only good thing to say about it is that in true retro fashion it has links to non-existent items, including a video of Dickie Barnbrooke addressing the London electorate. Mercifully, you don't get to see the video (it's non-existent, remember?) but you can ring Dickie to make a donation (not so retro there, then!), or you can click a link to make a donation. Or not, because the link leads to an empty page - not quite the thing you want when you've got an urgent £200,000 campaign appeal on the go.

The kindest response to the London BNP website that we've seen so far was posted on the nazi Stormfront forum: "Oh my Lord! My eyes! My eyes!"

It's hard to have sympathy with a Nazi, but we really do feel his pain...