Far-right website offers bounty of £1000 for 'very severe beating'

Pete Barker, the administrator of the North West Nationalist blog, noted for its occasionally interesting rants against the BNP's Nick Griffin, seems to have tipped over into both lunacy and illegality by offering a £1000 bounty to anyone who will give a 'savage beating' to one Calvin Robert Johnson, who Barker believes is responsible for the death of his brother Chris, a National Front local election candidate and national steward before joining the Army.

Whichever way you read it, the story of Chris Barker's death is a tragedy. A former soldier suffering from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, he succumbed to heroin and other drugs and eventually died in June 2001 after what an inquest described as a 'drugs and booze binge' at his then partner's home. Barker's arms were covered with up to ten injection marks and traces of heroin and cocaine were found in his body.

There are a number of peculiarities about the story, one being that Barker allegedly kept £10,000 in cash at his home, this sum having been saved from his occasional work as a cabinet maker. True or not, after his death his credit card showed a debt of £4000 and there was no cash found. In addition to this, Pete Barker claims that his brother had given up hard drugs twelve years before his death.

The case is both convoluted and disturbing, and while we can be sympathetic to Pete Barker's continued campaign to seek what he perceives as justice for his brother's death, which he regards as murder (more details here and here) our sympathy rapidly evaporates when we encounter Barker's appalling racism. Johnson, who Barker accuses of his brother's murder, is 6'4", black and Rastafarian, and is the half-brother of the dead man's partner, Melonie Ellis. Barker variously describes Johnson as looking like a gorilla, 'a nigger' and 'a savage negro beast'.

His racism is not aimed at Johnson alone. Referring to the Johnson family, he states 'There is no resident father...as is typical with negro families'. Barker has also approached organisations connected to the armed forces for support but has claimed that '...because Chris was murdered by blacks, the main official [in one of the organisations he approached] who has black grandchildren, did not want to know.'

This is not the first time he has offered a bounty in exchange for violence. Back at the end of June, Barker wrote:

'The family have a £10,000 reward for info on the negro scumbags leading to an arrest.But being as the Police in Sheffield are not worthy of the name, the family will pay to have 'street justice' donated to Johnson and Ellis. Please contact this site...'

Back in May of this year, Barker printed a picture of Melonie Ellis along with her full address and date of birth and with the headline 'Wanted for murder', with the claim that she and her half-brother '...and other blacks were also involved in the murder of the manager of the Niche nightclub in Sheffield around 1999'.

Obviously Barker has an understandable obsession about his brother's death and he's made it clear that he believes the instigators to be Johnson and Ellis but the way to justice is not via publicly announcing a contract on Johnson or anyone else, nor is justice to be achieved by launching racist attacks on those he considers responsible for the alleged crime.