BNP heavyweight supports Eddy Butler leadership challenge

Eddy Butler, who is challenging Nick Griffin for the BNP leadership this summer, has announced that Nick Cass, the popular former Yorkshire BNP organiser, will be his running mate to become deputy chairman of the BNP in the event of a Butler victory.

In a “BNP TV” video posted on YouTube and some BNP-supporting websites, Cass explains that Griffin does not have the time to be BNP leader because since his election to the European Parliament he is focusing his attention “across the water”. Party members feel that the leadership has become detached from them, he adds.

Cass, 36, says that Butler is asking sensible questions to which members want to know the answers, but the party leadership is ridiculing them. He has been “shocked” by the campaign against Butler. He expected the party, in which he has been an activist for 20 years, to be “straight-talking and honest”, not to come out with smears against Butler.

Cass is helping Butler in the hard task of obtaining the signatures of 20% of BNP members of two years’ standing. He says every senior BNP officer in Yorkshire wants change in the leadership. The BNP’s Liverpool branch, a centre of activity in the region in which Griffin is an MEP, also supports Butler.

It did not take long before Griffin’s supporters went onto the attack on one of the most extreme nazi web forums with a thread –withdrawn after a few hours – titled “Nick Cass Scum Traitor”, in which commenters suggested that Cass might be a Searchlight agent, state asset or, worse from a nazi viewpoint, Jewish.

The insult was ironic. Cass with his wife and three children have appeared on many BNP election leaflets as the typical wholesome white family that votes BNP.

It was also highly unlikely. Cass sports a prominent “tree of life” tattoo on his right arm, between shoulder and elbow. This symbol, also known as the life rune, is a favourite among nazi groups worldwide, several of which have adopted it as their logo. Under Hitler it was the symbol of the SS Lebensborn project, which encouraged SS troopers to have children out of wedlock with “Aryan” mothers and kidnapped children of Aryan appearance from the countries of occupied Europe to raise as Germans. To white supremacists today the tree of life signifies the future of the “white race”.

The tattoo was pictured in Sky TV’s BNP Wives documentary. The same programme revealed that Cass had instructed his wife, Suzy, to insist on a white European midwife when giving birth to their children, which reveals his attitude to women as well as his racism.

This is not the first time that Cass has fallen out with BNP colleagues. It was widely reported in 2007 that Cass was sacked from the job of BNP party manager two minutes before a meeting, after he had been given a role for which he was unsuited. Cass disputes this, saying that he resigned so that he could spend more time with his family.

The announcement of Cass’s support for Butler put paid to malicious rumours from the Griffin camp that Butler was putting forward Lawrence Rustem as deputy leader. Rustem, a former BNP councillor in Barking and Dagenham, suffers from the fatal flaw in the eyes of the BNP’s racist members that he is of part Turkish Cypriot descent.

Griffin supporters have also tried to link Butler with Sharon Ebanks, a former BNP activist who fell out with the party after Griffin reneged on a promise to meet her legal expenses for a challenge to a council election result in Birmingham that the party encouraged her to mount. She is widely derided in the BNP because of her West Indian father.

Meanwhile the anti-Butler blog run by Paul Golding, the BNP’s national communications officer, has listed reasons why Butler is unsuitable to lead the BNP. Butler is accused of being “bland and boring and grey and colourless”, “rude and arrogant”, having “no intellectual ability whatsoever”, “pure repellent”, “defeatist”, a “raging control freak” and, horror of horrors, “arranging the most disgusting food ever served at a BNP event”, a feat that takes some doing, judging by the reports we have received of typical BNP catering.

Griffin, in contrast, has “heaps of charisma”, is an “accomplished writer and intellectual”, “affable”, a “visionary” and “able to command respect and loyalty”. Unfortunately for Griffin, a growing number of BNP members are rejecting Golding’s sycophancy.

Sonia Gable at HOPE not hate