Top clubs ban Welsh BNP goods

A leading member of the BNP in Wales has been forced to withdraw ‘racist’ football merchandise following threats from top Premier League sides.

Roger Phillips, the BNP’s deputy organiser for West Wales, is the director of the online operation Patriot Products.

Launched at the BNP’s Red, White and Blue rally in August, Patriot Products, which is not currently trading, sold an extensive range of nationalistic tat and clothing, including golliwog badges with the names of clubs such as Arsenal, Liverpool, Manchester United, Manchester City, Tottenham Hotspur and Chelsea. They depicted a golliwog with a football holding a scarf aloft with club names and colours. The official BNP merchandising store, Excalibur, sells the same golliwog badge holding an England scarf.

The anti-racism football organisation Kick It Out alerted the English clubs involved in September. It said of the clubs involved: “Some have contacted the website direct, some have deferred it to the club lawyers.”

One of the Premier League clubs, Chelsea, confirmed they had prepared to take legal action against Phillips last month but found the offensive items had been removed before action was required. A spokesman for the club said: “We absolutely abhor the sale of any racist merchandise. We took the necessary steps to prevent it.”

Welsh Secretary and Chelsea supporter Peter Hain said: “This man is the true poisonous face of the BNP not the respectable one they pretend to have.”

A spokesman for the Football Association said: “There is no place for racism in football and we utterly condemn any organisation or individual that seeks to encourage or make financial gain from it. We help to fund Kick It Out and work very closely with other anti-racism organisations to do as much as we can to eliminate racism in football.”

Mr Phillips, 42, whose Facebook photos include one of a cornflakes box with an open-mouthed black minstrel and the doctored logo ‘Coon flakes’, wrote: “I have had my business contacted by the FA and Sheffield Football Club trying to bully me into removing Golly badges from my range. Here is my response – FUCK YOU.”

Businessman Mr Phillips, who did not return our calls, revealed in a documentary on the BNP broadcast on S4C earlier this year, in June, that he would flout employment laws to avoid employing Muslims.

“As far as Muslims are concerned, I wouldn’t be happy to employ them,” he said. “There is a reason for that. They would want time off in the afternoons to pray. You’d have to sort out prayer rooms for them. I’m not going to do that. It’s up to me how I run my business.”

On his Facebook page Mr Phillips fantasises about hanging Gordon Brown and repeats the recently regurgitated lie by the BNP that Mr Hain is a former bank robber.

Mr Hain, a vociferous anti-apartheid campaigner, countered: “I would expect nothing else from the racists and fascists who have attacked me for 40 years now. Everyone knows that in 1975 I was a victim of mistaken identity and acquitted of bank theft when I was almost certainly set up by the South African police in the bad old days of apartheid which the likes of the BNP supported.”

A BNP spokesman dismissed the sale of golliwogs. He said: “We sell golliwog toys on our Excalibur merchandise site. We market the golliwogs basically to stick two fingers up to the establishment”.

Wales Online