People like him voting BNP

Arguments have raged over the decision by local newspapers in London to accept an advertisement from the British National Party last week. Searchlight is more interested in the “wholesome” white family that featured in the ad alongside the slogan “People Like You Voting BNP”.

For a start the adults of the family will certainly not be voting BNP in the London elections on 1 May. That’s not because they don’t support the BNP – they do. This is the family of Nick Cass, a longstanding BNP organiser and local election candidate, from that well known London suburb of … West Yorkshire! In this year’s elections he is standing for Kirklees Council as the BNP candidate in Mirfield.

In the newspaper ad, Cass is wearing a dark jacket. When he appeared in the Sky TV programme BNP Wives in January, he was having a massage, which gave us the chance to find out whether his nazism was more than skin deep. For prominent on his right arm, between shoulder and elbow, is a “tree of life” tattoo.

This symbol, also known as the life rune, is a favourite among nazi groups worldwide, several of which have adopted it as their logo. Under Hitler it was the symbol of the SS Lebensborn project, which encouraged SS troopers to have children out of wedlock with “Aryan” mothers and kidnapped children of Aryan appearance from the countries of occupied Europe to raise as Germans. To white supremacists today the tree of life signifies the future of the “white race”.

The BNP’s slogan also is not quite what it seems. In fact it was copied from the Front National in France, the leader of which, Jean-Marie Le Pen, has convictions for hate crime and Holocaust denial. Like Cass, Le Pen is not a man Londoners will readily identify with.

Many people have condemned the editors of the various newspapers that ran the BNP ad. Searchlight has discovered that in many cases the decision was imposed on the editors by the papers’ owner, Archant, which describes itself as “the UK’s largest independently-owned regional media business”. Its portfolio includes many London titles including the Hampstead and Highgate Express, the Hackney Gazette, the Barking and Dagenham Post and the Recorder group of papers in East London.

But Archant is unlikely to be to blame for the strange appearance of the BNP ad. The Cass family photo is strangely elongated, as if the designer was unclear how to resize a picture to fit the space. Now the BNP’s chief designer is one Mark Collett of Leeds, a man widely derided in the BNP as incompetent. We see what they mean.

The BNP are definitely not people like us.

Searchlight