Of crap sharks, DoSsers, deserts and life

Well well, good news for a change. Great White Records is back. There, I knew that'd make you happy. The downside is that the master of incompetence Dave Hannam, Mark Collett's schoolgirl-hunting mate, has got the boot. A real pity, as Hannam is almost as good a target for utter stupidity as the idiotic Dicky Barnbrook.

There are consolations though because the manager of the new and squeaky-clean GWR is the young and squeaky-voiced Joey Smith, who is such a moron that he might prove to be even more amusing than Hannam. Let's hope that he can better Hannam's stupendous record, at least. Great White Records was formed in 2005, submitted its only set of accounts in 2006 and finally dissolved as a company because of almost non-existent takings in June of this year.

The 'nationalist' music scene isn't exactly setting the world on fire, is it.

Was it a 'DoS' attack or just a disgruntled schoolboy taking his ball home in a sulk? The latter, it seems. Simon Bennett, the 'webmaster' and James Bond-wannabe who took the BNP's simple but usable website and changed it into the terminally slow and gaudy rubbish that it is today, was apparently sacked by Nick Griffin just before the Red, White and Blue boozefest.

Bennett promptly locked the party out, being the petulant child that he is, but was persuaded to hand back the keys by South African white supremacist Arthur Kemp and it's intended that control of the website will pass back into the hands of one of the other South Africans in the party, school-bomber and former BNP webmaster Lambertus Nieuwhof.

There was, according to all the information we can gather, NO DoS attack. But then, we never thought there had been.

The Red, White and Blue was a failure. Attended by something between five and seven hundred people (including kids), the whole thing was a washout from beginning to end, surprisingly, for this was the tenth anniversary of the RWB.

If you take a look at the images (link provided by the ever-vigilant irishtony) you can see precisely what the RWB was - a car boot sale set up in tents on a very big field. All that was on sale was tat from the BNP's rubbishy Excalibur scam. Of course, if you got bored, you could always go and take a look at the mock-graveyard. A fine way to entertain the kids over the weekend.

Remember those old cowboy films with the sagebrush being blown across the desert at the edge of the town? The soundtrack always featured a dog howling off in the distance and someone blowing listlessly on a harmonica, as the camera focused on on the distant figure of the stranger as he rode wearily into the outskirts, not entirely sure of what to expect, only certain that none of it would be good. That was last weekend's RWB.

And so we come to Nick Griffin's ever-more desperate attempts to make money while carefully avoiding giving away even a penny of his own - or not to the BNP at least. Yes, the gullible and long-suffering members of the BNP are being asked to cough-up some more cash but this time there's something of a twist that might prove to be of interest a year or two down the line.

A paid membership of any organisation, particularly something as long-term and stable as a political party, provides a regular and guaranteed income, within limits of course. Core membership will, after several years, become apparent, and the money from those members can be used as the basic budget for the party. There are plenty of people who will join for a year and never be seen again but the core money is always there and always reliable.

The new Life Membership scheme, in which the member pays a lump sum (£395 at the moment but rumoured to be going up to £800) looks, on the face of it, like a good idea for those who wish to show some commitment to this party of thieves, but is it just a typically short-sighted attempt to grab money now at the expense of not having it tomorrow? Well, yes. The BNP, as we all know, is teetering on the edge of bankruptcy. The Euro elections - fought solely so that Nick Griffin could get a well-paid sinecure before the party collapsed altogether - were rumoured to have cost the BNP around £400,000, leaving absolutely nothing in the piggy bank for the General Election, which will probably have to take place in May next year.

Donation fatigue is setting in with a vengeance. The constant stream of begging letters from Welshpool is annoying even the long-term loyalists within the party, who see no return for their cash and continuously find themselves having to ignore that fact that they are being conned all along the line. Hence the life membership gamble - and it IS a gamble. With a reasonable take-up, the party might survive and get over the present financial hump but I can't imagine many people have £400 to throw away and those who do are not going to be paying their regular £30 membership fee for years, possibly decades.

The life membership scheme smacks of a last gasp - a game of Russian Roulette, where the risk is huge but the rewards could possibly be enough to get through the current mess. But what about the next mess, and the one after that? Because with the BNP, you can always guarantee that there will be a financial disaster just around the corner.