BNP's fake AFA email is tribute to HOPE not hate's success

Some of our supporters have received an email today purporting to come from a group called "Real AFA" and claiming to "expose" Searchlight's HOPE not hate campaign. The language looks superficially leftwing and anti-BNP but the whole thing is a sham.

Behind it lies the BNP itself. It is full of the same lies that the BNP's chief lie-manufacturer Tony Shell has disgorged time and time again, combined with some nonsense copied from one or two pernicious "green anarchist" publications.

Most of it is not worth giving the time of day. But there is one point we would like to clarify to avoid any possible misunderstanding. The HOPE not hate campaign is not run by Searchlight Educational Trust but by Searchlight Information Services, which is not a charity. Money given to HOPE not hate is spent 100% on the campaign, that is on producing the huge quantity of leaflets, newspapers and other HOPE not hate material that our volunteers will soon be distributing around the country, the HOPE not hate bus tour in the second fortnight of May and the groundbreaking and highly effective online campaign run for us by Blue State Digital. It also includes paying decent remuneration (though no more than that) to a few additional people - trade union members - we have taken on to help our permanent staff ensure we can run the best possible campaign. This money does not benefit from any charitable concessions.

Searchlight Educational Trust is a separate organisation that carries out educational work against racism and in support of community cohesion. Its largest expense is quite properly on the people who carry out that work, just like a school's biggest expense is on its teachers. To try to attack SET because it pays its staff just shows how ignorant the writers of this nonsense are. How do they think educational work gets done?

That this email has been sent out now is proof of how hard we are hitting the BNP at the moment. The BNP' attempt to hijack Jesus came unstuck and they now have the whole of Christianity against them. We exposed a BNP organiser's despicable comments on how there was not a lot of point keeping disabled people alive. We revealed how the BNP, despite its attempt to dress in new clothes, still cultivates links with the most extreme nazis in Europe, most lately by means of the visit by the BNP's deputy leader Simon Darby to Milan, where he was greeted by Nazi salutes. And we have constantly exposed the BNP's fundraising scams.

Our exposés have hit the BNP hard. In London, where the fascist party needs only around 8.5% of the vote to get an MEP elected, the London organiser has admitted that the region has not raised enough money for a full-size leaflet for the mailout to every voter, so will have to make do with an A5 version.

Our campaign is, even at this early stage, so successful that political scientists from the London School of Economics and Trinity College Dublin recently predicted that the BNP is unlikely to win a seat in the European Parliament in June. That is, of course, not to say we can let up in our work even for a moment. The danger of the BNP getting one or more MEPs elected is still very real.

Be warned. There is no such organisation as "Real AFA". The email, while pretending to oppose the BNP, in fact is full of praise for the BNP's effectiveness and professionalism. It is no more than a rather pathetic attempt to silence the most effective anti-BNP campaign this country has seen to date.

And it will backfire on the BNP. Already HOPE not hate has received donations from people who have received the email, seen through its lies and shown what they think of it. If you want to show what you think about the BNP's barefaced lies, you can donate to the HOPE not hate campaign here.

Hope not hate