One Flew Over The Pig Farm: the BNP and us in 2008 - March

Observing the convention that it really is very cruel to mock the afflicted, Lancaster Unity had rarely paid more than passing attention to the ravings of the BNP's most prominent case of spittle-flecked derangement, one Lee John Barnes, the party's foul-mouthed legal advisor, UFO-spotter, scientific researcher, cosmologist, philosopher, composer of E.J. Thribb-style poetry and possible future winner of the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest.

Barnes had long ground and gnashed his teeth in angry tirades against this little outpost of anti-fascism, and probably would have bitten his own tail too, if he had one. All winter Lee smouldered and fumed but what seemed to push him over the edge was the surprise of the Decembrist revolt, which he attacked in interminable screeds of mis-spelled prose so maniacal that we wondered if he wouldn't soon find himself in the guest book of some nearby Happy House.

As Nick Griffin felt that Lee Barnes was sane enough to hold a leading position within the BNP, we forsook convention and opened March 2008 with a post devoted to the antics of the loopy legal advisor, highlighting some of his incisive takes on well-known personalities and even a government ministry:

Jeremy Paxman: "Jeremy Paxman, BBC journalist on a million quid a year and hypocritical liberal arsehole... Paxman your a fucking arsehole mate."

The RMT's Bob Crow: "...retarded Marxist thug... The RMT is run by a clique of political dinosaurs around their own little tin pot Stalin, Comrade Bob."

BBC producer Nasreen Suleaman: "Stupid lieing Taqqiya bitch."

The Home Office: "(for members of the press / government / police reading this I have copyrighted the words THE MYSTERONS to describe the non-Muslim Islamist terrorists who are not motived by Islam/ Islamism. Therefore if any overpaid fifthwit in the Home Office uses my copyrighted phrase to describe Al Qaeda / THE MYSTERONS then I will sue your ass )."

Among other Barnesian treasures we recorded his libelling of journalist (and, apparently, "liberal wanker") Fergal Keane, and noticed the first of his empty threats to take legal action against this site.

One person on the extreme-Right not impressed by Barnes was former BNP member and barrister Adrian Davies, characterised by Barnes as "The Mekon - sad, inadequate dwarf".

This same Adrian Davies, posting on the Nazi Stormfront under a nom-de-plume, had an interesting tale to tell about "an incompetent saddo wannabe lawyer" (Barnes) who took on the case of a BNP member expelled by rail union ASLEF. Davies wrote:

Wannabe had the use of the train driver’s computer to help him to prepare the case. He used it to post grossly libellous attacks on several ASLEF officials on a website called trueaslef.com. These libels were complete inventions of Wannabe’s, but he used the train driver's name when posting, because after all, Wannabe is in his own estimation (though no-one else’s) a very important person indeed, and working class nobodies such as train drivers are expendable.

Barnes had, apparently, posted that the ASLEF officials had stolen union funds and used them to finance five-star Cuban holidays in the company of prostitutes. Davies again:

When the case came to Court, Wannabe went on holiday to Cornwall because he is a coward and a liar, and was afraid to give evidence. The train driver went down for a huge amount despite his barrister's best efforts. The trouble was, the jury wanted to know why Wannabe wasn't there to 'fess up and dig the train driver out of the hole into which he had dropped him.

Another likely candidate for the funny farm was millionaire businessman Paul Cromie, a councillor and then recently appointed Bradford BNP organiser. According to the BNP website, Cromie "is not only a man who talks the talk, but also walks the walk". What this means in BNP terms is anybody's guess, since Cromie had come to the notice of the Standards Board on a number of occasions, notably over allegations of vote-buying and that he had sent pornographic emails via his council email address.

Bradford BNP had been falling apart through 2007, its members openly feuding in a snake-pit atmosphere that brought it to the edge of collapse by the end of the year. In particular there was entrenched hatred between Paul Cromie and former councillor James Lewthwaite, who Cromie wanted expelled from the BNP.

Lewthwaite's siding with the December rebels effectively achieved Cromie's dearest wish, but Cromie was so beside himself with glee that he couldn't resist misusing an internal BNP email list to send out a large number of mails containing a scanned newspaper report of a driving ban earned by Lewthwaite, together with the message that "everything Lewthwaite touches turns to" guano.

Later in the year the BNP would be screaming to the rafters about the Data Protection Act and its leaked membership list, but was curiously silent on the matter of rich donor Cromie's alleged abuse of the same Act. We said:

It's hard to believe that a cretin like Cromie is a retired (and wealthy) businessman and currently a Bradford councillor, and it's difficult to work out why Cromie would apparently breach the Data Protection laws just to cock a snook at Lewthwaite. Perhaps he's just over-excited at having recently been appointed to the organiser role at Bradford, much to the disgust of the rest of Bradford's BNP except for the also-recently-appointed Yorkshire Regional Organiser, ex-Combat 18 thug Adrian Marsden. Marsden and Cromie are friends from way back.

The BBC began its "White" season, a series of programmes allegedly focussing on white working class attitudes. Condemned as "patronising" by some, and as pandering to racism by others, "White" satisfied few and settled nothing. It did, however, provide the flagship Newsnight with an opportunity to invite BNP leader Nick Griffin into the studio and - despite later unconvincing dissembling on the part of the BBC - gave him a perfect and entirely predictable opportunity to vilify Muslims as being responsible for the drug trade in Britain.

The harshest criticism for allowing Griffin on to Newsnight came from the unlikely figure of right-wing former Sun columnist and broadcaster Jon Gaunt, who was appearing on the same programme:

Putting on somebody like that knuckle-dragger. I don't really understand the point. He doesn't represent me and doesn't represent most working class people. He's not a working class guy himself, and the foul things he was coming out with there about the drugs and Islam and the rest if it, and the nonsense about coffee culture just makes me want to puke.

Gaunt, previously idolised by the racist Right, shot to the top of the BNP's hate list in a trice.

With the BNP's campaign for the May local elections well underway the last thing the party of people "just like you" needed was proof positive of "just how unlike you" it really is.

It came with the conviction of would-be London policeman Ellis Hammond, who had lied about his BNP membership on his application to become a Police Community Support Officer. Hammond was convicted of possessing a Tazer gun and CS spray, but according to Searchlight a search of his home turned up the following interesting items:

* 1 CS tear gas canister.
* 1 police-style ASP retractable baton.
* 1 pair of Metropolitan Police issue Handcuffs.
* 1 knuckle duster.
* 8 combat knives.
* DVDs containing hate material.
* Various items of British National Party literature.
* Some obscene material.
* 25-30 mainly imported T-shirts from the USA bearing nazi and white power group symbols and hardline racist and nazi slogans.
* 4 BB guns.
* 1 replica AK47 assault rifle.
* 1 copy of The Turner Diaries, the US publication that has served as a blueprint for nazi terrorism in the USA, written by the late William Pearce, a close friend of the BNP who has played host to them at his National Alliance HQ in the USA and was guest of honour at a BNP annual meeting in east London some years ago.
* And finally, to top it off, a BNP membership card.

Searchlight had deep suspicions about Hammond, who appeared to be doing a stint as a PCSO as a means of easing his way into the Metropolitan Police proper:

It would appear that he was not active in any of the three local BNP branches in Greenwich, Bexley or Croydon, although members of Croydon branch had hinted for several years that they had connections with people serving in the emergency services and possibly the police.

We think that Hammond had been talent spotted by one or more senior BNP officers who were either ex-police or military and groomed to join up and play the long game, acting in spy parlance as a sleeper or deep mole.

In May 2000, 21 year-old Rachel Whitear overdosed on heroin and died in a kneeling position, which, as part of their duties, police photographers at the scene recorded. Later, Rachel's parents bravely authorised the use of one of the distressing police photographs of their dead daughter to be used as part of a nationwide anti-drugs campaign.

The racist BNP, desperate to "prove" Britain's drug problems to be the fault of the Moslem community, shamelessly hi-jacked the photograph to use in its own odious leaflets while never troubling to ask the permission of Rachel's parents, and raining venom down on them when they had the effrontery to object. Rachel's mother, Mrs Pauline Holcroft, branded the BNP's actions "an insult" to her daughter's memory.

This irked the BNP no end, and chief idiot Lee Barnes was quickly on the case with this pop-eyed tirade:

She [Rachel Whitear] was not an angel, she was an accomplice to genocide, terrorism and a funder of the most vicious criminal gangs on the planet as she funded the terrorists and gangsters that cause such misery across the planet. The idea that she should be regarded as a victim is repulsive. Every junkie is a criminal, not a victim. The body of every dead junkie should be photographed and hung on a wall of shame in every community so that young kids can see the real price of heroin. Their lives should be regarded as a disgrace not as victims.

I bet Rachels parents either funded her addiction directly through giving her money for smack (to stop her becoming a prostitue or a dealer) or indirectly when she stole off them. If she didnt steal off of them then she was even worse than a junkie, she was a pathetic heroin tourist who used heroin as a bit of a laugh, a middle class drug culture tourist idiot scumbag. The sort of people who say to other people ' hey man you can dabble a bit with smack and you will be alright' - a facilitator of addicition, a seducer of others into becoming addicts.

The idea we should treat with reverence the image of their dead junkie daughter is repulsive...the idea we should ask your permission to use the image of your dead junkie daughter is not something we need to do.

"The BNP's Lee Barnes: just an arrogant idiot or seriously disturbed?" we asked in our post title on the matter, and our readers were minded that Barnes was seriously "mental".

For the record, the BNP failed to distance itself from Barnes's disgraceful comments, nor did it discipline him or offer any apology to Rachel Whitear's parents.

Lee Barnes's derangement reached new heights shortly after the Whitear debacle, when the Medway Madman began publicly naming fellow Nazi Stormfront posters found guilty of harbouring less than positive thoughts of BNP chairman and friend Nick Griffin. "If you attack us - then we will respond and we will post your name on this site so that the public can see who you really are," Barnes raved about the "gutless cowards", "cockroaches", "red trolls, searchlight spies, scumbags and sectarian filth" he saw under every Stormfront stone.

This was the cue, shortly after, for a night of metaphorical blood-letting on Stormfront Britain, ended only by the intervention of foreign moderators. The upshot was the banning of several Griffinites, and their losing control of SFB's moderation.

Months later the hysterical Barnes would be bleating about the leaking of BNP members' names and addresses, apparently oblivious to his own very similar sins.

A North Wales town councillor who defected to the BNP after swallowing their "we're not racist" lies soon found out differently when an Asian family asked for help in a dispute with their local council. Councillors are, of course, expected to help and represent all their constituents, regardless of political loyalties. The BNP saw things differently and criticised Llysfaen councillor Pat Pattison's actions. Pattison (left, with Griffin) thereupon decided to "dump" the BNP, but the party became aware of his intentions and disowned Pattison first. "The man is a liability," grumbled Simon Darby, "and when you have someone like that carrying your name you have to act."

"Someone like that carrying your name"? This is the party of Lee Barnes!

Shortly afterwards Cllr Pattison contacted Lancaster Unity, saying:

My mistake was joining the BNP. They assured me that they were a non racist party. Well, I can assure you they are racist. They refer to anybody who is non white as 'Pakis'. This shows their ignorance.

At first when racial remarks were made at meetings, I put this down to sheer ignorance and bigotry but in the short time I was a member the situation became intolerable and the last straw came when I tried to help a Pakistani family who are also Muslims.

Now, the BNP hate all Muslims with a vengeance. They don't think that there is good and bad in everyone.

...

The only standards you need in the BNP is to be a racist but people should not under estimate them. They have friends in high places, they are known within the party as 'friendlies'. They are a highly dangerous and misleading organisation and I can assure your readers that I will do my utmost to let everybody I come in contact with, know just what they are up to.

Unwelcome news came when the BNP held Havering Gooshays ward in a self-inflicted by-election. Even the BNP's own pundits, uncertain that the party could retain a seat it thoroughly deserved to lose, tempered their predictions. The BNP had poured resources into Gooshays, and the other parties fought a fierce campaign. In the event, the BNP increased its percentage share of the vote at the expense of the UKIP and (possibly) the Conservative candidate, who stupidly went on holiday when the campaign was underway, allowing the BNP to keep their seat. The turnout was very low at just 22.6%, down from 31% the previous May, indicating that the real winner in Gooshays was apathy, always the BNP's best friend.

The BNP's hatred of Muslims was given an airing in Solihull when the Solihull Muslim Community Association (SMCA) sought planning permission to open a cultural centre. This brought out the worst in the local Nazis, who got up a campaign against the "Islamification" of Solihull and issued dire warnings of "conflict" and "discontentment" to come.

The BNP's pot-stirring fell on deaf ears. A local mother told the Birmingham Mail that BNP leaflets distributed in Solihull could provoke racism. Though objecting to SMCA's plans for perfectly legitimate reasons, she said she was "sickened" by the BNP's leaflet, adding "... for the BNP to seize on these objections and attack the plan on the grounds of race and religion is disgusting. Since that leaflet appeared I've heard people saying property prices will go down, which is ridiculous and dangerous. We all get on really well around here but I'm worried this might stir things up."

The BNP attempted to "stir things up" on Facebook, where they established a page in support of their racist cause, which quickly filled with the usual obscene comments from the party's keyboard army. Hollow man Simon Darby, also as usual, denied that the BNP was racist and fell back on empty threats: "The law stipulates there is a difference between religion and race. If we are accused of incitement by a named person we will sue for libel."

They never have yet. And as if to underline disgust with the BNP, their vote share would tumble yet again all across Birmingham in the close-by local elections.

The Decembrist revolt had by now become all but a memory, but Nick Griffin kicked some life back into their cause when he began a High Court action in Manchester against core rebels Steve Blake, Ian Dawson, Cllr. Sadie Graham, Matt Single, and Kenny and Nichola Smith.

Initial injunctions were granted preventing the six using equipment owned by the BNP, which included its membership list. Of the list, Simon Darby said: "There are thousands of names on the list. They have been using it since December. It upset a lot of people."

This is the very same list that would be leaked in November, when the BNP would hold the rebels responsible for the leaking, then the Labour Party and Searchlight - then deny it was a membership list at all.

A further hearing was scheduled for April, the rebels vowing to contest the injunctions.

Undeserved publicity came the way of dole-scrounger, possible state agent and slug look-a-like Peter "Sid" Williamson (above, with Jill Jerome) when he exhorted the racist legions of Stormfront to join him in opposing a Muslim "march against Easter" in Redhill, Surrey on Easter Sunday. Apart from Williamson himself, only three others turned up - all, like Williamson, associated with the Nutzi British People's Party.

The "march" was in fact a Mawlid procession celebrating the birth of Muhammad, which happened to fall at Easter last year.

Lancaster Unity only noticed Williamson's Redhill adventure as an amusing side-dish to complement our usual fare, Williamson being one of the far-Right's pre-eminent idiots. This Is Surrey Today, online version of local papers Surrey Mirror and The Post, gave rather more credence to the ridiculous Williamson and his three acolytes than they deserved, saying that the 450-strong Muslim procession was "confronted by Union flags".

As always, Williamson's "confronting" took place at a safe distance and on the right side of police lines. Afterwards he raced back to Stormfront to crow about his victory, which the processing Muslims failed even to notice. While Williamson tapped out his words of hate, the procession's organiser, a bemused Mr Mohammed Khalid of Redhill Islamic Centre, said: "I wish a happy Easter to all my Christian fellows."

As the local elections loomed closer and the prospect of losing seats became very real, the BNP attempted to overturn democracy in Kirklees and went to court to have postal voting stopped. The attempt failed, and the BNP member cajoled into making it fell liable to costs. Kirklees council leader Councillor Robert Light said:

"This was simply a gimmick by the BNP to get cheap publicity. Postal voting is part of electoral law that all councils follow. All the BNP has done is waste the time of council officers by going through the process of addressing what was always going to be a futile action by the perpetrators of this bogus case. The judge clearly considered that the application was ill-conceived by not only rejecting the application but also in awarding the council its costs against the BNP. It is an absolute waste of time to challenge statute in this way.”

Also in Kirklees, prominent BNP man Nick Cass spelled out exactly what lies in store for the BNP's opponents should the party ever come to power. In an email to Labour councillor David Sheard Cass fulminated:

This country is falling apart because of the likes of you, but its not finished yet, and let me assure you that like the rest of the people who have sold our people and way of life down the drain for a few shekels, in time when we take control, you and the rest will be facing trial for treason and ultimately the rope.

Not the best advised of messages with important local elections coming up, but nobody ever accused Nick Cass of saying anything intelligent in his whole life.

To be continued...