July 26, 2008

Truth truck or lie lorry - Sonia Gable uncovers another BNP financial scandal

“After months of research, we have come up with a better way of spreading the ‘Nationalist Message’ right across this country,” says the message that the British National Party has been sending out to its supporters for several weeks.

“Our very own personal advertising lorry, a ‘Truth Truck’ – brand new and custom-built, complete with a high definition special lighting system for night-time use, and a massive audio system for addressing the public. Can you imagine it?” continues the appeal in terms designed to pull hard at the purse strings of “nationalists”.

There have been personalised letters from Nick Griffin, the party chairman, headed and “last chance to help ‘Operation Truth Truck’”, imploring in underlined type: “Just imagine how you will feel, being part owner of our very own British National Party advertising lorry …”. The party website has carried a picture and online donation form for several weeks.

But behind all the excitement lurks yet another dodgy deal by the BNP to hoodwink its own members.

One appeal letter puts a figure on the cost of buying and equipping the “truth truck” of £39,550, arrived at after Griffin personally “worked very hard researching this project”. It then suggests that “we can knock £13,000 off the amount needed” by opting for a “used lorry in first class condition”. Yet there is no indication on the website appeal that the lorry will be anything other than “brand new and custom built”.

Such a compromise could be explained away as a better use of members’ hard-earned and generously given donations, though that is no excuse for pulling the wool over potential donors’ eyes long after the decision to go for a second-hand vehicle has already been taken. But the lies go further than this.

At first the excitement rubbed off onto BNP members. Posting on the members’ internet forum, one person, who claimed to have “surprised myself by not even hesitating to donate £100 towards the campaign”, said the truck would also “counter commie smear leaflets”.

One discerning poster was more cautious. “Just one thing What happened to Bodicea [sic]?” asked “the benwell hopper”. “Boudica”, as “Captain Black” was quick to correct, was a second-hand “battle bus” and the target of an appeal in 2006 for money to put it on the road. Agreeing that “a few people will be very miffed that it has never been seen by the rank and file”, Captain Black could only plead that “the failings of the Boudica hobby horse should not detract from the ambitions of this new venture”.

Others smelt a rat. Despite Griffin’s claims to have carried out “months of research” before coming up with this “new, innovative” idea, if it comes to fruition the BNP will not be the first organisation in the UK to pin its hopes on a “truth truck”.

Two years ago the anti-abortion UK LifeLeague boldly announced the “Launch of Britain’s first ever ‘Truth Truck’”. A press release on 21 April 2006 thanked supporters who “donated generously to make this project possible” and claimed this would be: “the most innovative and what will possibly be the most effective campaign in UK Pro-life history”. “Operation Truth Truck” would: “enable the pro-life message to reach the unreached across the towns and cities of Britain. These vehicles are wholly owned and operated by LifeLeague activists,” it continued.

There was a picture. And it was no coincidence that the only difference between the LifeLeague’s “truth truck” and the BNP’s one was the particular lie on the billboard, because it was the same vehicle.

The UK LifeLeague and the BNP had milked their gullible supporters twice over for the same truck.

This is not the first time the BNP has had dealings with the UK LifeLeague, and more particularly its founder and national coordinator, James Dowson. Earlier this year many BNP members were angry when they found out that the party was sending key BNP officers on management training courses in Spain. Why could the training not be held in the UK, asked irate, xenophobic party members on a popular nazi internet forum until the site administrators pulled the discussion thread.

The courses were organised by Dowson’s Belfast-based fundraising and management training business, the Midas Consultancy, which has signed a three-year consultancy contract with the BNP. Whether it was because of the BNP’s growing financial difficulties or because Griffin was reacting to criticism of his poor administrative skills, the party has handed over key organisational functions to the self-styled vicar and militant anti-abortion campaigner.

It was Dowson who wrote the “truth truck” appeal letters in professional fundraising style. The Building to Grow appeal at the end of last year was also his work. The BNP claimed that appeal had raised £70,000, which paid for the party to move into the new Excalibur warehouse and buy “a vast array of new equipment” including “an envelope stuffing machine”, which by June had mysteriously disappeared when Simon Darby, the BNP’s deputy leader, appealed for volunteers to stuff election leaflets into envelopes by hand.

The involvement of Dowson has already upset some BNP members who do not share his extreme anti-abortion views and think he is a Catholic, which is anathema to many in the nationalist party who view the Battle of the Boyne as one of England’s greatest historical triumphs. In fact Dowson is a Protestant but has been linked to far-right Catholics in Ireland, including Justin Barrett, an anti-EU campaigner and vocal opponent of immigration, which he describes as a “genetic” problem. Back in 2001, when Searchlight first exposed Dowson, Barrett had donated £50,000 so that Dowson’s outfit could produce anti-abortion hate CDs and videos to distribute in schools and churches in Scotland and Northern Ireland.

Dowson is a former member of the Orange Lodge in Northern Ireland and has admitted involvement with hardline loyalist groups in the West of Scotland. His tattooed arms are evidence of his extremist hate connections.

The LifeLeague, which is secretive about its finances, uses highly provocative tactics, such as publishing the home addresses of abortion clinic staff. Similar actions by anti-abortion groups in the US have resulted in the murder of doctors.

Dowson’s professional “begging letters”, as one disillusioned party member described them, have not been universally welcomed in the BNP. Some see their “tone of desperation” as indicative of the BNP’s “very serious financial trouble”, according to the blogsite set up in support of Colin Auty’s failed attempt to challenge Griffin for the party leadership.

One member is quoted saying: “These bloody letters are an embarrassment, I’ll not pay another penny so he can go and waste it or lose another blimp”, in a reference to the BNP’s helium balloon that slipped its moorings in June because, Darby suggested, David Shapcote failed to secure it properly. The BNP later blamed the loss on a faulty rope.

The letters themselves may have been professional, but Dowson fell down in compiling the mailing lists. Naturally he needed to dispatch the letters to a much wider audience than the BNP’s members, who have little left to give after constant appeals at branch meetings and to support election campaigns. However Searchlight has received a stream of complaints from anti-fascist trade unionists and members of the Jewish community who have received them.

The website appeal for the “truth truck” shows it adorned with the BNP’s ubiquitous election picture of Nick Cass and his family alongside the slogan “Decent people vote British National Party”. The picture, which adorned election leaflets and newspaper advertisements all over the country in this year’s May elections and several by-elections, concealed Cass’s less than decent “tree of life” tattoo.

The symbol, also known as the life rune, is a favourite among nazi groups worldwide and, under Hitler, was used to represent a project that 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.

A lying picture for a lying appeal. How appropriate.

This article is from the August edition of Searchlight magazine

47 comments:

Anonymous said...

Another fine con by Fingers Griffin.

Anonymous said...

So let me get this right. The balloon blew away, the envelope stuffer doesn't exist, the double decker bus appears to have completely disappeared and the so-called Truth Truck is a con.

The BNP membership is being pissed on from a very great height.

Anonymous said...

Ha What a bunch of suckers.

Anonymous said...

Hang on a minute. Surely this is fraud isn;t it?

Anonymous said...

It seems like Lancaster Unity and a whole bunch of other sites come up with some other con trick by Nick Gri££in every day. Why do the members trust a man who blatently can't be trusted. It's like they're cash cows waiting to be milked.

Anonymous said...

The BNP membership is being pissed on from a very great height.

GOOD!

Anonymous said...

"So let me get this right. The balloon blew away, the envelope stuffer doesn't exist, the double decker bus appears to have completely disappeared and the so-called Truth Truck is a con."

Reading it all at once like that makes it looks just a little suspicious, and that's before you even mention Affordable Cars, fake unions, barn renovations and the like. Griffin is a thief, nothing more, nothing less.

Anonymous said...

£30k ish is about their monthly salary & hp bill?

Probably - so if it is successful then the it puts off having no money by another 30 days. Assuming no success then no funds to pay bills and no credit about another 60 days.

BTW - RWB is payment in CASH - which might get them another month.

So I might stand you all a drink in November in celebration :-)

Anonymous said...

Many more revelations about the BNP's finances and the State might actually do something about it.

Anonymous said...

IT'S TIME TO KICK GRIFFIN OUT!

Anonymous said...

So Dowson is the 'expert' who did those tatty and amatureish (sp) begging letters. He's crap.

Anonymous said...

Waht?! That nice Mr. Nick Grifin of the BNP commit petty fraud. You have gorra be joking!

Anonymous said...

Lovely. More financial disasters at the British National Bank of Nick Griffin.

Anonymous said...

Wheres the money gone that was donated????

Anonymous said...

"Wheres the money gone that was donated????"

Wages bill? New car? Croatian retirement home. Nick's fat back pocket? Who knows, except that the membership don't have it.

Anonymous said...

Following on from the revelations of the BNP's dail news hotline £1 a minute phone scam, comes the "TRUTH FUCK SCANDAL".

Wander how many gullible BNP members have been conned out of thousands by this crook?

And can someone please inform the BBC television programme Watchdog about Griffin, for Gods sake!

Anonymous said...

THE "TRUTH FUCK APPEAL".

Anonymous said...

I hope the area nearby to the Red White and Blue Festival, will lock up their daughters when Paedo Boy Collette arrives.

Anonymous said...

This is what happens when you have a high membership turnover. There are always new members to fleece who don't remember the many cons that have gone before.

Anonymous said...

"Many more revelations about the BNP's finances and the State might actually do something about it."

The state will never do anything about Nick Griffin. He's just a very small con-man who is ripping off people who virtually ask to be ripped off by trusting him. If the BNP membership is happy to keep supplying him and his friends with an income for achieving next to nothing that's their problem.

Anonymous said...

According to someone writing in the comments section in the NWN blog, the BNP is renting the truck from Dowson, meaning that Nick Griffin has not only conned the membership out of however much they donated but is also wasting their membership fees on renting this thing. A double con trick. Neat.

Anonymous said...

i suppose one could take the view that as the majority of the knuckledraggers who are members of the bnp and likely to be making these donations are probably in receipt of benefits, then its not just them Griffin is ripping off its all us bloody tax payers.

tulip

Anonymous said...

NWN is also saying that theres been another batch of resignations.

Anonymous said...

From NWN

"two Midlands organisers

I hear another resigned about 3 weeks ago

Birmingham and Notts

Two have gone in Birmingham. North and East

Yeah, the woman running the north resigned, and Mike Bell resigned this week, I saw his resignation email."

Anonymous said...

Sooo said...

Hang on a minute. Surely this is fraud isn;t it?

Too fucking right!!!

Anonymous said...

Anonymous said...
THE "TRUTH FUCK APPEAL".

12:40 AM, July 26, 2008"


Don't you mean 'FUCK THE TRUTH APPEAL'?

Anonymous said...

Chris Vanns the Burnley organiser has also resigned.

What is going on in the BNP?

Anonymous said...

Sex Pistols in another "racist" incident, hot on the heels of racially abusing Bloc Party singer it seems they sang dubious songs about arabs and towel wearers - see the Suns website.

Anonymous said...

Rotten racist?

http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/showbiz/bizarre/article1473083.ece

"Towel heads"

Anonymous said...

And where does all the money go? The far right's erratic NorthWestNationalists blog seems to have some of the answers, under "BNP Organisers and activists, are you paying attention?"

Anonymous said...

Chris Vanns does the catering at RWB - are you sure he's resigned? He always came over as a Gri££in loyalist?

Anonymous said...

"I hope the area nearby to the Red White and Blue Festival, will lock up their daughters when Paedo Boy Collette arrives."

What and put their sons at risk instead? The Peedo Boy is the one that should be locked up.

Anonymous said...

"i suppose one could take the view that as the majority of the knuckledraggers who are members of the bnp and likely to be making these donations are probably in receipt of benefits, then its not just them Griffin is ripping off its all us bloody tax payers."

No Tulip love, thats where you are wrong. The majority of the members of the BNP are not knuckledragging benefits scroungers. They are "nice" fluffly empty headed souls who are acting in knee jerk response to the tabloid media headlines scares about immigrants flooding the country, Europe taking away our freedoms and Gordon Brown planning to tax everyone to the hilt to stave of an economic catastrophe. They have families to feed, jobs to hold down and businesses to run. When you anti-fascists start realising your self-created myth is just that - a myth you might have a chance to formulate a strategy that might actually work instead of tilting at windmills.

Anonymous said...

"Chris Vanns the Burnley organiser has also resigned.

What is going on in the BNP?"

One by one the truth is dawning on these people that they have been conned and cheated.

Griffin WILL be holding the AGM in November in the phone box in Welshpool after all.

Anonymous said...

I see the BNP have switched off their "chat" feature on the Live TV part of their site - was it after I logged in as "Anon" told the nutsis there the real truth about Nic£ Gri$$in and the money pit?

Anonymous said...

If the RWB does go ahead, you can be sure there will be plenty of piss-taking videos up on YouTube featuring the One Eyed Monster being made to look stupid and Collett(e) abusing more kids.

Anonymous said...

Chris Vanns has definitely resigned as Burnley organiser,but I don't know why.
Yes you are correct Vanns does the catering at the RWB and very badly by all accounts.

Councillor Sharon Wilkinson is the new Burnley Organiser

Green Gordon said...

Seems quite a right-wing sentiment to feel that tax-payers have some right to dictate to people receiving benefits where they should spend their money... I hope it's supposed to be an ironic joke.

Anonymous said...

Now they have lost their atistic ability, the washed up Pistols are obviously thinking of signing up for "Great Shite" Records, now Colin Auty is history.

Either that, or, having snorted their profits up their collective noses, (allegedly), they see Islamophobia as a way of screwing their diehard fans out of their hard-earned cash for doing didley squat (á lá Cyclops)!!! lol

Anonymous said...

Islamophobia is now the accepted mood of the British Establishment ever since the War On Terror was launched, to keep Muslim protestors on their toes, which explains how the rebel anarchists in their senile old age have become pipe and slipper daily mail readers.

Talking of "pipes" and bongs, has the Legal Beagle been smoking any illegal class B weed this week?

Anonymous said...

The BNP "Live" chat facility is still going but the Nutsis cannot find their way in. http://www.bnp.org.uk/2008/07/more-live-tv-this-evening-at-9pm/ seems to work but no one is on there. Shame really cos no one from the BNP has told me where the battle bus is hiding!

Anonymous said...

Latest on this now is that the BNP are running scared of the truth and have dropped the Live TV function until they can "ban" us for exposing their nefarious activities and lies...

Like Collet picking up under-age girls in Blackpool and Nick running off with party funds to Croatia/Spain, etc....

And they claim to be a normal political party! A party of paedos and fraudsters more like!

"Anon" will be back to expose the BNP lies and shine the light of truth to the Nutsis!

Anonymous said...

I have filed a Terms of Use violation report with Mogulus for the race hating, violence inciting BNP Nutsi TV channel - if we cannot at least post the truth in comments to rebut their rubbish then they should not be allowed to use this system to peddle race hatred...

Please file additional reports to them about http://www.mogulus.com/bnp at http://www.mogulus.com/info/contact but check out their ToS first at: http://www.mogulus.com/info/terms

The more of us who file complaints etc the faster they will shut these Nazis out...

Ben "Anon"

Anonymous said...

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Chris Vanns has definitely resigned as Burnley organiser,but I don't know why.
Yes you are correct Vanns does the catering at the RWB and very badly by all accounts.


Probably to do with the fact that Griffin is intending on having a "European" food court as this years RWB so Vanns will not be able to make any money.
Such a shame Vanns won't be doing the catering as it means that obody will get food poisoning from his cheap and nasty burgers and refrozen chips

Anonymous said...

Believe me when I say that Vann's food is shit; and I mean real shit.

Poorly cooked economy burgers and sausages that would make a stray dog puke.

I've seen people go to their tents hungry rather that risk contracting Ebola for eating that muck.

Anonymous said...

Vanns should have resigned after not before the RWB after purposely giving the BNP members bad tummies. Seeing the Gri££in sycophants puking over each over would have been fun.

Anonymous said...

in response to green gordon...no i dont think its a right wing suggestion.

in response to exbnp organiser....i kinda like the don quitox comparison.....but while you title suggests ex i do wonder just how far you have stepped away from the bnp?

tulip