Ham & High staff furious over BNP ad

One of the country's best-known local newspapers provoked controversy today by running an advert for the British National party.

Staff at north-west London's Hampstead & Highgate Express - known as the Ham&High - are furious at the paper's decision to take an ad for the far-right organisation, a source at the paper told MediaGuardian.co.uk. Reporters at the weekly paper, which has a liberal reputation, were not told of the decision to run the advert until after yesterday's deadline.

A number of titles owned by the Ham&High's parent company Archant have refused to take adverts from the BNP. But the source said the paper's editor, Geoff Martin, wanted the ad to appear to make the case for free speech.

"Nobody here, none of the journalists, are happy," the source said. "He [Martin] is taking advertising money from the BNP for the Ham&High. It's wrong. We wouldn't freelance for the BNP so we don't want our wages as employees of the Ham&High and Archant paid by them."

Residents of the wealthy Hampstead and Highgate areas are known for their liberal tendencies, and they are represented by the leftwing Labour MP Glenda Jackson.

The paper, with a history stretching back almost 150 years, has a large Jewish readership and today's paper runs a feature on the Jewish film festival. The BNP leader Nick Griffin has described the Holocaust as "a mixture of Allied wartime propaganda, extremely profitable lies and latter-day witch-hysteria". But recently the party has been trying to woo the Jewish vote.

The editor of BNP newspaper Freedom, Martin Wingfield, recently claimed on his blog that "there are an increasing number of Jews campaigning for the BNP and feeling very comfortable with their political choice".

Although the advert, published ahead of next month's local elections, was buried on page 26, Martin dedicated a column to the decision to publish on page four.

"To be able to tolerate those we vehemently disagree with is the hallmark of an open, egalitarian and democratic society, where freedom of speech and expression are sacrosanct," he wrote.

It is not the first time the paper has attracted controversy for featuring the BNP on its pages. In February last year, the paper became embroiled in a row with Labour councillor Theo Blackwell who criticised the Ham&High on his blog after a BNP spokesman was quoted in a front page story about parental objections to a local school's Halal meat-only policy. He accused the paper of giving the far-right organisation "the legitimacy it craves".

Martin insisted the paper was right to quote the BNP as it had been accused of organising intimidating calls to the school concerned.

Writing on his blog today, Blackwell said the paper's decision to run the advert was "a shameless pursuit of profit over principle" and called on local Camden council to "look again" at advertising and sponsorship with Archant titles.

Media Guardian