Nick Griffin last night closed another destructive day in the life of the rapidly disintegrating BNP by declaring himself London Regional Organiser in place of the recently sacked Chris Roberts, purged for supporting Eddy Butler's leadership challenge.
The move came on the heels of the news that two more BNP councillors had declared themselves "independent" and the highly dubious suspension of Griffin gofer Paul Golding came to light.
Clearly not trusting local London officials, even those he had just hand-picked, at around 10 p.m. Griffin tweeted: "Busy evening putting together a great new London management team. I'll be acting as their Reginal [sic] Organiser while they find their feet. I pass by while on the way to Europe anyway, so a bit of hands on leadership won't be too hard. Vital we organise now to maximise chances in 2012 gla election. I did the same in the North West before handing over to Clive Jefferson. It worked well."
Distrust and disaffection for Griffin is so advanced in London that imposing himself as the top regional official is more likely to entrench existing divisions and create new resentments than it is either to bring the bickering factions to heel or to initiate a period of calm in which some attempt at reconciliation can be effected.
In fact, reconciliation appears to be the last thing on Griffin's mind. London, and particularly East London, being one of the hotter spots in the BNP's fevered post-election discontent, is ripe for a thorough pruning, and it would seem that Griffin is placing himself in the best position possible to oversee it.
Griffin's careless attitude towards the BNP's dwindling number of elected assets was exemplified in his obvious contempt for the newly "independent" Richard Barnbrook, expressed via his Twitter account: "Disappointed by Richard. Have appealed to him to do decent thing and either come back to fold or . . ."
Since even Griffin might think Barnbrook's honourable suicide a step too far, he presumably means that Barnbrook should resign his GLA seat.
Griffin's contempt for Barnbrook long predates the current troubles, but Barnbrook also earned the open contempt of the Butler camp when, with the intervention of the oleaginous Patrick Harrington, he back-tracked on earlier promises to support the Butler camp and allowed himself to become a stooge candidate for Griffin. Barnbrook was quickly discarded when his usefulness ran out and has no political friends left. Even if - and it is a possibility - he were to further humiliate himself and return to the fold, his inglorious career in racist politics will end with the next GLA elections.
Shrugging off the BNP label with better grace than Barnbrook, West Hertfordshire organiser and county councillor Deirdre Gates has also resigned from the party. Three Rivers district councillor Seamus Dunne has declared himself an "independent", but remains a member of the BNP.
Gates may have sought to pre-empt her own purging, but in resigning from the party has defied the advice of her friend Eddy Butler, for whom she was a prominent campaigner. Why Gates took this course is open to speculation unless or until she makes a public statement explaining her actions. There is a suggestion that Gates's time as a county councillor may have have had a maturing influence on her, something that has happened in the past when BNP councillors have glimpsed political life beyond the BNP's inane world of Marxist plots and Muslim takeovers, but, equally likely, she may know something of Butler's plans which would render her continued membership of the BNP superfluous.
The suspension of one of Nick Griffin's chief lackeys, Paul Golding, was greeted with derision by the Butler camp, suspicious of every move made by the embattled BNP leader. Golding was apparently suspended for abusing the official BNP e-mail lists, which he used to promote the infamous "attack blogs" and for transmitting a personal attack on Eddy Butler.
According to Butler: "Obviously Paul Golding will not really be punished for these ‘transgressions’. It is sop designed to imply that the leadership will be even handed when they try to expel certain people who supported me during the recent leadership challenge. It is a blatant fig leaf."
Butler also claims to detect the hand of the sneakingly ubiquitous Patrick Harrington in the ploy, since: "Harrington knows that Paul Golding’s unwise attack e-mail gave grounds for other members of staff who were the subject of abuse, to claim constructive dismissal if no action was taken."
Griffin is clearly positioning himself to take decisive action soon. Will he pick off Butler's people piecemeal, or will there be a bloodbath?
Griffin's reckless behaviour suggests to us that he really doesn't care, and would rather see the BNP's last councillors jump ship and the membership dwindle to a few Green Arrow-type fools before he will allow those oh so well guarded account books to fall out of his control and into the hands of a deeply interested membership.
August 17, 2010
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12 comments:
didn't Griffin say recently that London was a lost cause?
I think you'll find it was London said Griffin was a lost cause.
He's a lazy sod, though! Why just London? There must be LOADS of regions he passes through on the way to the Office: Why can't he run THOSE as well?
He's a lazy sod, though! Why just London? There must be LOADS of regions he passes through on the way to the Office: Why can't he run THOSE as well?
Griffin goes to his euro meetings by car so he claim more in expenses and the fat pig farmer has the cheek to call other politicians pigs with their snouts in the troth ?
What's left in London for him to run?
It's a joke. His biggest supporter is Donna Treanor, the dimmest woman in the world.
"I'll just pop in for a quick purge on my way to Brussels."
It's a joke. Did you know the Birmingham branches have gone up in smoke. Just one branch and no activism. Nothing doing in London or the South East. The parties disappeared.
"didn't Griffin say recently that London was a lost cause?"
Yes, it was straight after his humiliation in Barking. He said London was a "foreign city", a "lost cause" as you stated, and that the BNP would need to stop functioning as a political party there and become, in his words, a "civil rights organisation".
Like so many times, he said this on the spur of the moment without engaging his brain (typical of Gri$$in) and seems to have now backtracked.
"Will he pick off Butler's people piecemeal, or will there be a bloodbath?"
He'll expel a few key people and hope the rest just leave with them.
He is welcoming the split. He calculates that this period of BNP growth is effectively over, and just a a farmer scorches the earth to promte new growth, Griffin will purge key people and essentially start afresh, just as he did with the National Front in the mid eighties. That period still governs the way Griffin thinks abd acts tactically. That's why Harringtton is so important to him now and is a key advisor (despite, like Dowson, not being a BNP member and therefore completely unaccountable). I've always viewed Griffin as having the sort of relationship with the BNP as Blair had with Labour. Blair was a man with a contempt for traditional Labour values and history who the party embraced while he brought them success. Griffin, similarly, parachuted himself into the leadership, dismissed the previous 20 years of BNP history and brought them relative success (helped enormously by the Labour government). Once that success started to wane then that discontent, that was always there, came quickly to the surface.
Nearly all the branches have folded in the north west. So much for Clive Jeffersons leadership.
thats London ucked then
Only Charlotte Lewis can save London BNP now.
"Only Charlotte Lewis can save London BNP now"
Hear she's been making overtures to the National Front but even they won't take her!
Seems to me that the bnp are being collapsing all over the place. We might all have to move to west and east yorkshire to finish the job. Tell Griffin that the fastest way to the eurotrough is straight off the egde of bridlington habour!
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