The plot thickens: BNP's Darby openly breaches data protection laws

The Smith/Graham expulsion story continues apace with drama after drama unfolding and revelations popping up all over the place.

The situation is suddenly becoming more dangerous for the BNP, which currently seems hell-bent on political suicide, as Simon Darby, the party's Press Officer - presumably with the connivance of Nick Griffin - releases private emails from the laptop stolen from Sadie Graham's home.

As this particular email is in the public domain, we don't believe we'll have a problem with the Data Protection Act but according to a friend who tends to know these things, the BNP are opening themselves up to all kinds of charges - including theft - by openly admitting that officers are trawling through private emails. How long, we wonder, before they're peeking at her credit card details or passwords to sites? It's time, we believe, that the police were brought in.

The situation is made a lot more complex by the fact that the laptop is actually owned by the BNP but we're assured that, while the hardware and software (assuming it's legal) belongs to the party, the data does not unless it directly and exclusively relates to the party's business. Yet another complication is caused by the manner in which the computer was taken. Was this theft or what?

However the email was obtained and whether or not that action was legal is probably beside the point at the moment. Graham and the others who have been expelled from the party have the right to appeal against that decision - a right that, as far as I recall, John Tyndall, the party's founder, exercised successfully and at great expense to the BNP. The right still exists in law and once they have announced (which they have) that they intend to exercise that right, the whole matter becomes sub judice and any release of new information - such as the contents of private emails - would be likely to lead to a successful judicial review as the case has clearly been contaminated.

Presumably Darby, advised as he is by the BNP's bonkers legal-beagle Lee Barnes, knows all this and simply doesn't care because what is of prime importance to the party right now is to regain some credibility in the eyes of the membership before any more of them walk out in disgust. One of these attempts to mollify the membership seems to be to ask the bomber and Griffin's right-hand man (yes, still) Tony Lecomber to post a conciliatory note on the Green Arrow blog. As Lecomber was almost as universally-despised as Mark Collett, the cause of all this fuss, it seems bizarre that he should have been used in this way.

Even odder, is that Nick Griffin hasn't appealed for calm - or indeed, for anything else. Perhaps he realises that if he was to stick his oar in, he would only make a bad situation even worse.

Without prejudice then, here is the content of Graham's email and the response she has posted on the Enough is Enough site.

Graham's email (Dec 4th) to Steve Blake as printed on Simon Darby's blog.

I think you are doing ok and the right thing. Don’t worry this stays private. We are forced to do stuff at moment. Ive been handing out wrong amended bank statements for my region to make sure that hannam gets the flak. On another note please let me have the letter asap.

Sadie Graham's response.

An email that I sent from my personal email account to Steve Blake on the 4th December can be explained perfectly legitimately and can be substantiated by any of the East Midlands officials who attended the East Midlands Regional Council Meeting on the Thursday 29th November.

I requested from Dave Hannam, as I always do before a regional meeting, a full update of statements for every unit in the region. He sent them through to me about two hours before the meeting so I printed them out and took them along to the regional meeting. There they were handed out to each of the officials. As usual at the regional meeting there was an outburst of complaints from officials who upon reading their statements realise the glaring errors within them. These errors are often ones that were highlighted previously and they have already brought to the attention of Dave Hannam via email. An example was a £200 donation banked by Broxtowe on the 20th April that was to be transferred into the Ashfield account immediatley. Yet again on the November statement it had not been done despite numerous emails from myself to Dave about this. Along with this was complaints from East Lindsey who had not had the £160 banked on the 5th September credited to their account. There were many other complaints which I later relayed to Dave Hannam in an email sometime after the meeting. Some days later I received an email back from Dave along with a few supposedly amended statements. I took a look at them and could see straight away that the errors had not been done. Rather than yet again telling Dave that the errors were still there I just sent them out to the fundholders in the hope that they themselves would take it upon themselves to complain directly to Dave. At this time I already felt that Dave was making it extremely difficult for me to work with him and was refusing to answer many of my emails. I thought that the local officials would have better luck if they contacted him directly.

This is the truth behind this email and anyone was had ever been a fundholder or local organiser will know first hand the difficulty in getting accurate accounts. All East Midlands officials will be able to back this up as they have been receiving bank statements at every regional council meeting and it is clear to see that none of them have been tampered with by me or anyone else. This is just another pathetic cover-up for blatant incompetence. I told Steve Blake this in an email because I was sick of always covering up treasury errors and I was now just letting people see them for themselves.