New BNP? Same old nazis and thugs

The BNP claims it has changed. A quick review of its election candidates shows that they are the same old nazis, thugs and racists that they always were

Tom Gower
Coventry North East

Gower works full-time as the BNP enquiries officer. He is also the Coventry contact for the racist and pagan Woden’s Folk and was involved in the English Heathen Front (EHF), ‘a racist group espousing “blood and soil” ideology. The EHF was the English “chapter” of the Allgermanische Heidnische Front (AHF), an international network of “tribes” that evolved out of the Norsk Hedensk Front, a group founded in 1993 by Varg Vikernes, the Norwegian black metal musician and murderer whose own brand of heathenism included a heavy dose of national socialism, antisemitism, eugenics and racism.

Shelley Rose
Luton North

A rising star in the BNP, Rose is part of a social group of BNP activists in the East Midlands and an antisemite who wrote on her Facebook page, “I would rather put myself out and pay a bit more at a smaller local shop, than line the pockets of the kikes that run Tesco”. She attended the National Front Remembrance Day parade in 2009 with Chris Hurst, the BNP PPC ‘for Twickenham.

Robin Evans
Blackburn

Evans was once a Blackburn BNP councillor but found the council budget too much to cope with. “It’s all mumbo jumbo, I don’t understand a word of it,” he stated. He resigned from the BNP in 2003 after an internal dispute and joined the openly fascist British National Socialist Party, returning to the BNP.

Ken Booth
Newcastle upon Tyne Central

Booth is the former North East National Front organiser who caused widespread disgust in 2007 when he compared the Nazi death camp at Auschwitz to Disneyland. He refused to believe the “official figures” of those who died in the Holocaust and did not recognise the “authenticity” of the buildings at Auschwitz.

Lynne Mozar
Buckingham

Mozar, who runs the BNP’s Trafalgar Club fundraising group, is notorious for her appearance on the Sky TV documentary BNP Wives in which “in private sometimes” she admitted calling black people “niggers”. ‘She also claimed that “Pakis” was the ‘“legal term for them [Asians]”. While manning a stall opposite a mosque in Fareham, Mozar shouted “fat slag” at a passerby who questioned her views.

Mathew Tait
Milton Keynes South

Tait, the Buckinghamshire BNP organiser, travelled to the cancelled 2010 American Renaissance conference, where he moaned to those who turned up that the Equality and Human Rights Commission court case had forced the BNP to accept “people who we would wish to not have in our country really to be members of our party”.

Mike Shore
Broxtowe

Until 2003 Shore was the National Front’s East Midlands organiser and treasurer. He was also Midlands convener of a British incarnation of the Ku Klux Klan. His conversion to the BNP came as a surprise to former colleagues.

Richard Hamilton
Milton Keynes North

A former soldier, Hamilton took part in the mock trial and execution of a gollywog at the 2009 BNP Red, White and Blue festival. The News of the World noted that before the trial, “Hamilton’s ghettoblaster blared out songs supporting Hitler and attacking ‘niggers’”. The BNP claimed his membership had been “suspended” as a result of the affair, though evidently not for very long.

Chris Beverley
Morley and Outwood

Beverley is a leading figure in Yorkshire BNP and a key link with the National Democratic Party (NPD) in Germany whose leader believes that Hitler was a “great statesman”. Beverley works as PA and constituency office manager for Andrew Brons, the BNP MEP for Yorkshire and the Humber, and recently refused to condemn Hitler in a radio broadcast saying that he did not hate him.

Ian Meller
Leicestershire North West

Meller, a BNP councillor in North West Leicestershire, is a former National Front activist who took part in a demonstration against a Gay Pride march in Leicester in August 2000. Meller, then 35, was fined £400 and £55 costs for carrying an offensive weapon, believed to have been a chair leg.

Charlotte Lewis
Carshalton and Wallington

Lewis was jailed for six months in 2001 for sending a series of “chilling” death threats to employees of Huntingdon Life Sciences (HLS) animal research laboratory in Cambridgeshire. She posts racist comments on social networking sites but claims she is ‘not a racist but a “racial survivalist”. ‘In 2009 Croydon Council considered taking action against her after she boasted of participating in a racist hate campaign against her neighbours.

Barry Bennett
Gosport

Bennett was, until recently, a regular user of the American-based nazi Stormfront website, despite being half Jewish, “from ancestry not religion” he is keen to stress. “I believe in National Socialism, WW2 style, it was best, no other power had anything like it,” ‘he wrote. “The ideology was fantastic. The culture, nothing like it. If it was here now, I’d defect to Germany.”

Eddy Butler
Harlow

Butler has been involved with the far right since the early 1980s when he was the Tower Hamlets organiser for the National Front. After he joined the BNP he and a team of thugs laid into a group of anti-fascists with hammers and other weapons in east London in 1992. In 1993 he organised the “Rights for whites” campaign that won the BNP its first councillor, Derek Beackon, in a Tower Hamlets by-election, though he only held the seat for seven months. Until his sudden demotion Butler was the BNP’s national organiser and elections officer. He is also standing for Barking and Dagenham council, despite still living in Loughton.

Chris Forster
Hayes and Harlington

A National Front supporter in the 1970s and a former treasurer of the Conservative Monday Club, Forster, who is also standing for Barking and Dagenham council, works as a psychic but failed to foresee Searchlight’s exposé of him in the Evening Standard in 2009. Forster helped compile the BNP’s 2009/10 Barking and Dagenham council budget, which attracted great opprobrium. Hypocritically, he is married to a Chinese woman with whom he has a child.

Tess Culnane
Orpington

Tess Culnane was a BNP member until a row with the party after which she stormed off to join the National Front for which she stood in the 2008 London Assembly election. She also addressed meetings of the openly Nazi British People’s Party. The BNP denounced the NF as “neo-fascist” but this has not proved an impediment to Culnane rejoining the BNP and working for Richard Barnbrook, the BNP’s London Assembly member.

Edward Sheppard
Coventry North West

Sheppard stood for the BNP in the 2001 general election in Coventry North East, but could not stand in 2005 as he was jailed for three years in 2002 for shooting a man at point blank range. Mold Crown Court heard how Christopher Willans had mistakenly knocked on Sheppard’s window, believing it to be part of a property owned by a close friend. ‘On discovering his mistake, Willans apologised to Sheppard and left the area. While walking home Willans was confronted by Sheppard who shot him at close range with a .22 calibre pistol through his car window.

Marlene Guest
Rotherham

Guest is the Rotherham BNP organiser. Like Mozar she appeared on the Sky TV BNP Wives documentary in which she claimed that the number of deaths in the Holocaust had been exaggerated and that the Jews were putting Germany on a guilt trip. ‘Asked if any good had come out of ‘the Holocaust, she replied: “Well, apparently, didn’t they get a lot of dentistry and plastic surgery”, referring to the Nazis’ barbaric “medical experiments”.

Jeffrey Marshall
Eastbury ward, Barking and Dagenham Council

Marshall, the central London BNP organiser, displayed the poisonous side of the BNP in February 2009 following the death of the six-year-old son of David Cameron, the Conservative Party leader. In a cruel and warped outburst against those who had expressed their condolences at the death of Ivan, who suffered from cerebral palsy and epilepsy, Marshall wrote in an internet politics group: “We live in a country today which is unhealthily dominated by an excess of sentimentality towards the weak and unproductive. No good will come of it.”

Marshall continued his sick tirade, stating that although it would be “a kindness” to kill children with disabilities, this was not the same as advocating such a measure as compulsory state policy. “But so what if it is,” he declared. “At least we would all know where we stand. There is actually not a great deal of point in keeping these sort of people alive, after all.”

Sharif Abdel Gawad
Bolton and Undercliffe ward, Bradford Council

Abdel Gawad of Bowling, Bradford, was convicted for possession of heroin by Bradford magistrates in December 2007. He first stood for the BNP in Bradford in May 2006, when his candidacy caused uproar in the party because of his less than Aryan credentials. The party insisted that he was of Armenian descent and most certainly “Christian” not a Muslim. Interviewed by The Independent he said he was “concerned about law and order, particularly the drugs epidemic in Bradford”.

Hope not hate