Of eggs, invisible bricks and call centres...

Griffin, tearful and overeggcited (and that's all the egg gags you're getting)

Just a few days ago, the BNP's Lancaster representative, Chris Hill, reported on the result of the new Poulton Ward parish council election in Morecambe. The candidate was one Julie Victoria Blain, who nobody had ever heard of, variously known as either Julie or Vicky. The title of his report was pretty clear;

'First time candidate gets 13% support in Morecambe.'

Pretty clear, but completely untrue. According to the results on the Lancaster City Council website, Blain took 172 votes out of the 4832 cast. I'm no great shakes at maths but even I can work out that her share of the vote is about 3.5%. While 172 votes for the BNP is 172 votes too many, 3.5% is still a damn sight better than 13%, which is presumably why Hill feels the need to lie.

Of course, Hill needs to bullshit all he can in an attempt to weasel his way back into the good books of the party. During 2007's December rebellion, he managed to announce that he was supporting the rebels, promptly backtracked when told off, then decided to stick to his priciples and support them anyway then, when the rebellion failed dismally, placed himself back in the loyalist camp. Clearly, never a man to be trusted.

Which brings us (rather neatly, in my opinion) to Nick Griffin.

Over the past couple of days, the media has been full of the egg incident, where the BNP's crowing 'press conference', called by the fraudster-in-chief Nick Griffin, was ruined by a sudden rain of eggs, one of which hit him in the back of the neck. I'm not too sure of the efficacy of using eggs on recalcitrant politicians, even vermin like Nick Griffin, and I'd be interested in hearing the views of our readers. Personally though, I thought it was bloody funny and it didn't do him any harm so what the hell.

Far from doing him harm in fact, Griffin has been given the opportunity to spout a few more lies to the media - many of which were reported verbatim without any qualification. Take this little gem, from yesterday's Scotsman;

'I think it's very sad that a hostile mob which is partly paid for by taxpayers and backed by Labour and the Conservatives is allowed to get away with mob violence on the streets of Britain in 2009'

Hostile mob? Mob violence? There were forty of them, vastly outnumbered by the media and Nick Griffin's Kray twin-lookalike security team and they threw a sodding egg, for crying out loud. It's hardly the collapse of civilisation as we know it. And paid for by taxpayers? Er, how?

'The police need to get a grip on these people and stop them throwing eggs and bricks.'

Bricks? What bricks? Who threw a brick? This is a particularly stupid thing to say and could have exposed this idiot as a compulsive liar had the statement been questioned. It wasn't, sadly.

'Like us or not we are a democratic party'

No, you're not. You're the least democratic party in the country, run by megalomaniacs and liars for racists and fools. But, like the long-established and well-practised liar that he is, Griffin saves what is arguably the best for last.

'He claimed the party has seen a growth in membership applications and said its call centre received 20,000 phone calls in the first 15 minutes after a BNP party political broadcast was shown on television.'

I watched a tedious puff-piece on the BNP website a week or two ago in which it was claimed that fifteen people were employed in the party's 'call centre' answering the zillions of calls that were pouring in daily. Let's be generous and up the number of call centre staff to twenty. According to my trusty calculator, 20,000 calls in fifteen minutes is 1333 calls per minute. Divide that by twenty call centre staff and they have to field approximately 67 calls each per minute. If there are only fifteen staff, that number goes up to 89 per minute. Each.

Obviously someone is talking bollocks - and that someone would be Nick Griffin. And, it turns out, Tina Wingfield, the BNP's membership secretary, who was also quoted in the Scotsman's unusually fact-free article, claiming that 2,000 people have joined the party in the last six weeks, increasing overall membership by about 25%.

Well, she should know - though this doesn't really tie in with the released BNP membership list, which showed a total of 12724 members, allegedly for 2007 and which was, so the party claimed at the time, inaccurate in that membership was considerably higher when the list became public than it was in 2007. Fair enough, but if that is true, party membership has in fact gone down considerably. A hell of a lot, in fact, because Wingfield's statement indicates that BNP membership just six weeks ago was around 8,000 and now stands at 10,000. Hmm...

The problem with telling porkies is remembering which ones have been told, who they've been told to and precisely what was said. The BNP, while it's happy to lie on any occasion, doesn't seem quite so capable at keeping track of the lies it's told.

The big problem the media has is itself keeping track of these lies and then challenging them at every opportunity - but the lies have to be challenged repeatedly and incessantly and should then be used to embarrass and humiliate the BNP whenever and wherever possible. In just a single article we were given an opportunity to challenge a half-dozen outrageous lies, none of which were questioned at the time. If the BNP is to be shown up for what it truly is, the media - and I include non-traditional media like us, must be ever-alert and ever-ready to demand truth rather than bullshit and bluster.