BNP boss earns £162,000 a year

The Rabid anti-abortion campaigner Jim Dowson

Rabid right-winger Jim Dowson is getting paid a staggering £162,000 by the BNP, we can reveal.

That’s £20,000 more than Prime Minister David Cameron gets paid to run the country!

The shock revelations have angered many BNP members and workers – not least because some party staff on mainland Britain have not been paid amid claims the party is in financial meltdown.

Scottish firebrand Dowson has been BNP leader Nick Griffin’s right-hand man, as well as party money-man, for the past few years now.

Dowson has been a rabid anti-abortion campaigner in the past and his list of criminal convictions include breach of the peace in 1986, possession of a weapon and breach of the peace in 1991 and criminal damage in 1992.

He hit the headlines last year when this paper revealed he was the man behind the BNP’s secret Belfast nerve centre which is situated in Dundonald.

Gangsters

From that base the far right party raise cash through membership recruitment and donations.

The office is almost exclusively run by members of Dowson’s and Griffin’s family including his daughter Jenny Matthys.

The BNP is in turmoil ever since their disastrous performance in the recent General and council elections which saw them wiped out.

But anti-fascist magazine Searchlight have uncovered a bitter feud which is threatening the future of the party itself.

Searchlight correspondent Matthew Collins says: “He gets paid more than the PM for advising a bunch of gangsters. It’s like something out of the Godfather.”

The revelations about Dowson’s inflated wages have come from a senior member of the party’s national advisory council.

Richard Edmonds, who helped found the BNP alongside John Tyndall long before Griffin joined the party, has come out in support of Eddy Butler, who is currently challenging Griffin for the leadership.

Writing on Butler’s blog on 8 July, Edmonds says a leadership challenge is a chance for members to raise matters of major importance for the party and the issue he wants to raise is the employment of “an outside businessman, Mr Jim Dowson, who acts as a ‘consultant’ to our Party at a salary of just under £2,000 per week”.

He goes on to explain that as well as receiving £7,500 a month as a “consultancy fee”, Dowson is also paid £72,000 a year for “managing a part of the internal administration” of the BNP. That comes to £162,000 a year, or £3,115 a week, an amount Edmonds describes as a “scandal”.

Edmonds, who is very influential in the BNP especially among the more hardline members, states that Dowson gave him these figures himself.

The fees paid to Dowson will stick in the craw of party staff on mainland Britain who were not paid in June according to Butler, who says the party is “insolvent” as a result of Griffin “deliberately, avoidably and recklessly” involving it in a series of legal cases.

The financial difficulties do not extend to the Belfast BNP call centre, which is run by Dowson.

The staff there received their June pay as usual, which is perhaps not surprising as they are mostly members of Dowson’s and Griffin’s families, including Griffin’s eldest daughter Jennifer.

Dowson is furious with stories which have appeared in this paper about him.

Last year he claimed in a TV interview that he hated the BNP’s politics. And he has complained to the Press Complaints Commission because we said he was a life member.

BNP Jim told the PCC in a letter on indignation: “They also allege that I am a BNP life member when I have never been a member of the party ever in my life!”

Failed

But a video passed to us shows Jim praising the racist party and urging people to join up.

And we’ve since discovered that Jim may not have paid his membership to the BNP – because according to sources he owns it!

During the seven minute video, which was taken during a fundraising event in Blackburn, Lancashire two months ago, Dowson repeatedly uses the phrases ‘we’ and ‘us’ when talking about the BNP.

The party hoped to get four MP’s elected to Westminster but failed to get a single one.

They had boasted about taking control of Barking and Dagenham council but were wiped out 51-0 by Labour.

Dowson and his Belfast operation was blamed by BNP members on the internet who said a series of cock-ups by Dowson were the cause of their election humiliation.

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