Shooting Walker in the foot?

Graham Williamson's Accentuate PR "company" has hardly set the world on fire in the long, dreary months of its almost pointless existence.

The only place we ever encounter Accentuate's press releases is as republishings on the inter-linked websites of the far-Right's front groups, or the free (and largely disregarded) PR-Inside public relations website.

Accentuate's website has not been updated since June, and continues to carry an exhortation to donate to the fake National Liberal Party's "moneybomb" appeal - which, as we reported at the time, "bombed" spectacularly.

It also continues to carry three endorsements for its "work", from, inter alia, the Adamsgate Action Group (leading member, Graham Williamson), the National Liberal Party (leading member - there are only 20 - Graham Williamson), and the bogus Solidarity "trade union" (General Secretary, long-standing friend of Williamson, Patrick Harrington).

The praise for Accentuate's work is as extravagant as it is spurious.

"We could not have handled the launch of our website without Accentuate's help. They not only promoted the launch but helped focus our message to maximum effect," claims NLP secretary David Durant of a launch notable only for the fact that it went entirely unnoticed, while Harrington gushes: "Graham Williamson has helped to bring our independent Nationalist Union to the attention of a wider public... Graham and Accentuate are doing a great job on behalf of ordinary working people in this country who want their views represented and communicated."

Fortunately, nobody very much seems desirous of having their views "represented and communicated" by the miniscule Solidarity, and so "great" is the job Williamson's PR company is doing that few outside the far-Right have ever heard of it. The bogus "union" even has trouble recruiting BNP members, its target prey, they being suspicious that the entire exercise is no more than a money-making scheme from which they would derive little or no benefit.

And they would be quite right.

BNP member Mark Walker, brother of Solidarity's president and fellow BNP member Adam Walker, could not save his own teaching job, even with the dubious help of the fighting union's egotistical general secretary. Mark Walker was suspended for accessing the BNP website during school hours, and eventually sacked on the grounds of his sickness record.

Were it not for the BNP connection, any half-way decent shop steward would have made a meal of the case. Mark Walker was stuck with Patrick Harrington.

Adam Walker resigned from Houghton Kepier Sports College in Houghton-le-Spring following allegations that he posted critical comments about asylum seekers, Islam, immigrants and the promotion of homosexuality on a chat forum during a lesson. Walker has since been re-employed as a supply teacher, but faces a General Teaching Council (GTC) disciplinary hearing which could ban him from teaching for holding views suggestive of racial and religious intolerance.

Despite the best efforts of Patrick Harrington, Solidarity, and Accentuate, the case of Adam Walker has failed to become a cause celebre, and even in the enclosed world of the far-Right such passions as it has raised have been noticeably muted.

Perhaps that is why another BNP front group, the jokingly named Civil Liberty has been roped in to prod things along by organising a picket of the GTC on the day of Walker's hearing in Birmingham on November 17th. Calling upon the various fascists and racists who will attend to "Make a noise for freedom" by banging drums, blowing whistles and ringing bells (which we're sure will impress the GTC), Civil Liberty claims that the GTC wants to introduce the "political vetting of teachers".

Of course, this is very far from the truth, as is the disgraceful allegation that Walker faces a "kangaroo court".

The allegations against Adam Walker are extremely serious, and the truth about them (on which the GTC will decide fairly, Civil Liberty intimidation or no) will impinge directly on his fitness to teach.

Patrick Harrington gives a distinct impression of believing that Walker's case will eventually be lost, and has been demanding the removal of former NUT president Judy Moorhouse from the GTC (for which purpose he set up yet another online petition) and has threatened to go to the High Court should Adam Walker be banned from teaching - though where the money will be raised to finance such a move is anybody's guess.

Coming back to the feeble Accentuate, it has posted yet again on the PR-Inside website that "A Liberal Party backs Civil Liberty campaign" - the "liberal party" in question being the 20 member bogus National Liberal Party, better known as the Third Way, the political habitat mostly of ex-National Front members like Harrington, Williamson and David Durant - men who, with their friend Nick Griffin, took the once mighty National Front into oblivion and who have ever since lived in a fantasy world in which they seem to have insulated themselves from the fact that nobody at all takes the least notice of their magisterial pronouncements.

"NATIONAL LIBERALS BACK CIVIL LIBERTY DEMO!" shouts Accentuate on PR-Inside, where Williamson apparently spoke to himself (a not uncommon occurrence in the Third Way) to tell himself: "There are serious implications if Mr Walker were banned from teaching (which seems the intention). It will open the door to persecution and harassment of teachers on grounds of belief."

A gross distortion, of course, but what is striking is how seriously these micro-groups (or corpusclets if you prefer) take themselves and expect others to take them.

Accentuate is an ineffective one-man band, the NLP is a fantasy, Civil Liberty exists largely as a website, Solidarity neither impresses nor scares anyone, and we're pretty sure that none of them, the BNP included, is in the least likely to sway the GTC in coming to a fair decision on Adam Walker, just as we're sure that the GTC will ignore the noisy assemblage of racists, anti-Islam fanatics and homophobes, mostly from the BNP, who will turn up to support Walker - appearing before the GTC on a charge of holding views suggestive of racial and religious intolerance, let us not forget!

Of course, we could be wrong. Accentuate, the NLP, Civil Liberty and Solidarity may well have shot their man in the foot by organising this parade of extremist misfits that can only reinforce the case against Adam Walker.