Reader article: Accounts for 2006 - the Style, the Style!

This article was submitted by one of our readers, Iliacus. We welcome any contributions (as long as those contributions conform to the law and are in reasonably good taste) from our supporters. Please send your articles to us at lancaster.uaf@zen.co.uk

At last the wait is over; the BNP's central accounts for 2006 are with the Electoral Commission, and we can study the wit and wisdom - or, more appropriately, the acumen and intelligence - of Griffin and Walker. Two people who, we might assume, could be Prime Minister and Chancellor in any BNP government.

This article deals with the Style of the Accounts; a further contribution will consider the Substance. But, hey - it's the festive season so let's have a laugh!

As we have come to expect the (poor) quality of their written English is matched only by the quality of the proofreading. So we enjoy such gems as:

"2006 saw the British National Party's biggest electoral and political" (no, that's it, the sentence vanishes into the next!), "out of 13 BNP candidates stood in Barking and Dagenham" and "it is far from whether her intervention made a great deal of difference".

We also have some classic Griffin abuse and mudslinging in his Chairman's report on the year. So he mentions "the multi-millionaire Labour MP ... Margaret Hodge", though the relevance of her wealth to the issue under discussion is far from clear. He's not too keen on Lord Lester (we presume he means Lord Lester of Herne Hill, Liberal Democrat peer and respected human rights lawyer). Now this may seem a little surprising as in the very week the BNP accounts were submitted Lord Lester tabled a parliamentary question relating to the prevalance of Wahhabist teaching in British mosques (a subject one might expect to be of some concern to the BNP), and earlier in the year he tabled a private member's bill to criminalise forced marriages. He is a former Human Rights Lawyer of the Year. And how is he described by Griffin? "Race Act Gauleiter Lord Lester". Charming chap, Mr Griffin. A Cambridge education really is the mark of a gent.

There are some wider targets too. The BNP's successes (2006 was their "semi-breakthrough year after all - Barking & Dagenham and all that) would have been greater still, but for the machinations of the establishment. "Postal fraud cost us at least two dozen seats". Strange that there have been no legal actions then? Oh, but there's a simple explanation for that - the "police campaign of intimidation" against the party!

"We see it here, we see it there; we see conspiracy everywhere!"

The "free speech trials" (their term not mine) get lengthy, and excessively tedious, coverage - so tedious I can find little of any interest to say. Except to pick up on Mr Griffin's triumphant assertion that coverage of the trials brought "significant surges in new membership applications" leading to "an excellent year for new memberships". Which all contributed to "an increasing membership".

Yes, OK Nick, we get the message. Membership increased. Well done - mind you, so it should. All that publicity. The trials. All those extra councillors, up from 21 to 63 according to your Annual Report.

There's just one difficulty. Your membership didn't increase. Not according to your own figures. Now in the past it's been difficult to quantify membership, with separate figures quoted in different parts of the same Annual Report! So membership in 2004 was variously quoted as 7,916 or 6,356; and 2005 as 6,008 or 6,502 (at least the gap's closing!). This year there appears to be just one figure, and on a like-for-like basis it gives the following picture:

2004 6,356
2005 6,502
2006 6,281

So, according to their own figures, BNP membership fell by 3.4% in 2006 - not catastrophic, but very disappointing (for them, not me) in the light of the year's political circumstances.

One final note on membership. The party boasts of introducing a new membership information system. And what does this new system offer?

"A new system of membership information-sharing ... to ensure absolute confidentiality".

Wonder what Sadie Graham now makes of that claim?

Iliacus