J’accuse! Chairman Griffin rails against his detractors

BNP leader Nick Griffin breaks his silence on the split that is tearing his party apart. David Williams looks at his outburst against the plotters:

Griffin’s appalling lack of judgement has precipitated an internal crisis within the BNP, the magnitude of which has already spiralled beyond his control. Having done so he proceeded to make things worse by simply maintaining a monastic silence whilst his minions scurried too and fro silencing internal debate leaving minor members and voters rather bewildered as to what on earth was going on. Griffin’s failure to provide leadership at this vital time has damaged his authority within the BNP further.

However, in yet another wonderfully ill-judged decision Griffin has now gone on the offensive against the “bitter betrayal” he evidently feels he has suffered.

Griffin lays the blame for this “unpardonable sin of running to wash dirty linen” in public on a small clique of “middle management”. This might be some comfort to his internal enemies who only on Sunday were dismissed as “junior members”. Having been sacked Griffin has now promoted them. How odd. The truth is of course that most of them were senior members of the party who sat on its twenty strong advisory committee. Still Griffin has never been one to let true get in the way of a good lie.

Off on a trip down memory lane Griffin opines how only he knows true pain of self-sacrifice for the cause having once felled trees and stacked shelves whilst leading the BNP in 2001. After Jackie Griffin told the world her husband had never done and honest days work in his life we’d had him marked down as a lazy so and so. To give him his due though, trying to promote race riots in Oldham in 2001 whilst stacking shelves must have been more demanding on his time than we had previously thought.

Ever the martyr Griffin whinges that its “tough at the top” but this ungrateful bunch of malefactors who have it easy have been well paid for doing “what was expected”. In other words, you’ve been paid so shut up. Continuing his astonish rant Griffin states categorically that paid party officials have a “soft ride” and have “no proper checks on expenses claims. No mileage forms or activity sheets to complete. No clocking in. No one holding target setting and review sessions. It was taken on trust.” In short Griffin is openly boasting that under his leadership there has been no internal audit of officials expenses. Where the money comes from and where it goes is it seems of no concern to him. With accountancy procedures such as these the BNP could find itself in dire financial trouble. Oh, wait a minute. It is! No wonder Griffin and his minions have been quick to accuse Kenny Smith of responsibility for the sum of £17,000, which appears to have gone missing. Could this explain why the BNP accounts have not been submitted yet?

And yet, and I’m trying not to laugh whilst typing this, Griffin has the chutzpah to accuse his detractors of trying orchestrate a “palace coup” against him because he was trying to bring their cushy little number to a close!

I must be missing something here. I thought that Sadie Graham and Kenny Smith not to mention Ian Dawson were expelled precisely because they had questioned the financial competence of the Treasury team and indeed the honesty of publicity director Mark Collett.

Clearly Griffin still subscribes to Goebbels’ dictum that if you’re going to tell lies tell a Big Lie. And this one, even by his standards of dishonesty is a whopper.

Griffin has the honesty at least to admit that he wasn’t “blameless” for the splits that tore the National Front apart in the 1980s. He even states that he and Martin Wingfield can “laugh” about it now. One wonders if he found it quite so funny at the time when Nick Griffin said some truly appalling things about both Wingfield and his wife. We remember Martin, do you? And if you do one has to ask, where’s your self respect? That’s your wife he was talking about!

In a final lie before returning to the theme of how bright the future looks Griffin remarks on an e-mail Sadie Graham appears to have sent to Steve Blake which he uses as evidence of a conspiracy to “prove” that Sadie is a “wrong ‘un” who sought to paint his beloved Dave Hannam in an unfair light. In truth all she did was to stop taking the flak for his mistakes by covering for his incompetence anymore. Fair enough you might think.

The emerging rival BNP faction – those that Griffin hasn’t already expelled – was appalled by their chairman’s diatribe against them. Ian Dawson responded for them stating that the “betrayal” was his not theirs. It was his utter failure to deal with the real problem i.e. the financial incompetence of the Treasury and the obnoxious wrecking ball personality of Nazi boy Mark Collett that had brought them and the BNP to this impasse.

Dawson threw Griffin’s words back at him. His claim that they were trying to stage a coup was “a fiction of your imagination” when in fact all they had done was to protest against the BNP being run as “a little boys club” for which they were hounded out by “your South African Intelligence Department” led by Lance Stewart.

Far from them giving succour to “Communist thugs” it was Griffin who had done so by allowing Collett the freedom to parade his noxious views and low mentality in front of TV audiences time and time again. He also pointed out Griffin’s hypocrisy for airing his own dirty linen in public. After all shortly after Chris Jackson’s failed leadership challenge didn’t Griffin label the 10% of the BNP that supported Jackson were “vermin”?

Hitting back at Griffin’s “pathetic” claim that his minions were all well paid for their work Dawson stated that he earned £14,000 a year from the party, a rather stingy salary by anyone’s recognisance which precluded incidentals such as mileage etc. Dawson also claimed that working 70 hours a week plus (considerably more than Griffin no doubt) was not a “soft ride”.

Dawson’s parting shot was to ask after Griffin’s henchman gained entry to Sadie Graham’s home by deceiving her friend and fellow BNP organiser Nina Brown to steal her computer “how any BNP member or Official could ever trust you again.” Given his track record of vicious sectarianism, dishonesty and dissimulation we find it hard to believe that any of them believed Griffin in the first place.

Stop the BNP