Democracy in action, Griffin style.

Whilst having a quick glance at twitter I noticed that Griffin has announced his plans for the future BNP leadership campaigns. The tweets were published over a period of 20 mins and were jumbled up but I think I've sorted it so it makes some sort of sense.

Great spirit in meeting. Over 40 there despite all hassle. Announced we're having an EGM asap to vote on adopting two key constitutional changes: the creation of a meritocratic democratic element to choosing the Advisory Council, and changing the leadership election system that we adopted in great haste when under attack by Cehr to one that mirrors standard British elections - no signatures hurdle, a £5OO deposit returnable at 5%, a fixed 4 or 5 year term with safeguards in hands of A.C.

First election this summer with a hustings meeting for all members and candidates in each region.

Short, sharp campaign then back to work & progress.

Meeting hugely enthusiastic esp with last announcement: Among those standing for mandate for a full term, will be me.

So after a quick read through and ponder a number of questions come to mind.

Didn't Griffin spend most of last year saying he was going to step down in a couple of years?

Do any other political parties charge candidates for the privilege of standing for office?

Do any other political parties have fixed term leadership elections over the 4 or 5 year General Election cycle?

What on earth is a meritocratic democratic element?

Griffin tries to buy time with resignation ploy

Under pressure from a series of revelations by the British National Party’s former webmaster Simon Bennett and calls for new leadership by party activists and organisers stung by their disastrous election results, Nick Griffin has announced that he will step down as leader “by the end of 2013”.

His declaration, made to a meeting of the party’s Advisory Council and key organisers on 22 May, is unlikely to satisfy those who have been contributing to Bennett’s website trying to win support for a leadership challenge this year. Many will consider that three and a half years is too long for the party to stagnate under Griffin, and will be all too well aware of Griffin’s past form at wriggling out of awkward situations and commitments.

According to a statement on the BNP website, Griffin intends to concentrate on getting re-elected to the European Parliament in 2014. He then intends “to help the other European nationalist parties to achieve the level of sophistication which the BNP has been able to build up, because a victory for any one of these parties is a victory to all of us”.

These “European nationalist parties” are likely to include some of Europe’s most hardline racist and fascist organisations. Griffin and his fellow BNP MEP Andrew Brons are members of the Alliance of European National Movements, a far-right group in the European Parliament formed in Budapest last October. Its other members are the three MEPs from Hungary’s fascist Jobbik party and the three French National Front MEPs.

The group is also supported by Italy’s Fiamma Tricolore, the Belgian National Front and the Swedish National Democrats, none of which have MEPs.

Griffin’s announcement shows that he remains more an internationalist fascist than a British nationalist, true to the politics he learned from his mentor, the convicted Italian terrorist Roberto Fiore. No doubt he has also become accustomed to the European Parliament’s generous salary and expenses regime.

Between now and 2013, Griffin intends to concentrate on “putting into place of the last ‘building blocks’ of the BNP’s administrative and political machine”. This is a more buoyant description than in his e-newsletters since the election in which he said that the party’s “underdeveloped elections department” had to be overhauled and restructured.

Griffin would then make way for “a younger person who does not have any baggage which can be used against the party,” a recognition that his presence is a liability for the party. Finding a person without “baggage”, who “will be able to drive support up to where it [the BNP] can be a serious contender for power” may be hard. Until now, any person fitting that description has left the party either in one of Griffin’s “purges” or because they have discovered that the party is not what they expected it to be.

The extended Advisory Council meeting also heard “consultant” Jim Dowson claim that “contrary to internet rumour-mongers”, the BNP owns the “Truth Truck” advertising vehicle for which Dowson raised a reported £80,000 or more in 2008. This was apparently confirmed in person by Jennie Noble, “the BNP treasurer who paid for the vehicle”.

If that is true then why did the BNP’s solicitors tell bailiffs trying to seize the vehicle to meet a debt that it was owned by an unconnected third party?

Dowson also stated that he did not take a commission on transactions through the BNP’s Belfast call centre. However he was silent on whether his call centre staff, who include friends and relations of Dowson and Griffin, were paid commission on party memberships and other sales, as evidenced by Bennett.

He did however reveal that he, under the guise of his “Midas Consultancy” business, was paid £165,000 for raising £2.6 million in donations for the party since January 2008.

Whether Dowson really has raised £2.6 million cannot be verified at present. The 2008 accounts showed an increase in donations of £662,000 over 2007, but the 2009 accounts will not be available until the end of July, provided the party manages to submit them on time. The BNP claimed to have raised over £500,000 for its European election campaign and there have been some fundraising appeals since then, such as to fight the legal action by the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) over the BNP’s “whites only” membership criterion, but central party fundraising for this year’s elections seemed to have stalled. Much of the money to pay for general election deposits and leaflets was raised locally by party branches, with no input from Dowson.

Even if Dowson has raised a seven-figure sum, BNP members might raise eyebrows at the amount paid to a consultant who is always keen to point out that he is not a party member.

The meeting was told that BNP membership now stands at “just under 14,000 … increasing by several hundred every month” and that the rate at which BNP members fail to renew has decreased from over 70% to less 20%, now doubt testament to the harassment several members have reported from Dowson’s call centre – people rejoin just to stop the constant phone calls. The BNP has past form in exaggerating its membership and we can only wait to see how these claims compare with the audited figures in the party’s 2009 and 2010 accounts.

Missing from the announcements was any response to the numerous members who are calling for greater transparency in the BNP’s finances.

Griffin concluded by claiming that the party had “emerged from the meeting re-energised and ready for the ongoing struggle to save our nation from destruction at the hands of the old parties”, which is a rather creative way of describing the widespread disillusionment following the twin blows of the party’s capitulation over admitting “non-white” members and its rout in the general and local elections.

Hope not hate

Griffin to resign. In 2013. Allegedly.

In a move clearly designed to smother any chance of a successful leadership challenge for at least three years, Nick Griffin has told a meeting of the BNP's Advisory Council that he intends to step down at the end 0f 2013.

The carefully crafted plan is designed to undermine support for any potential leadership challengers among the voting membership, large numbers of which will be satisfied that Griffin has apparently set a date for his departure and given promises that he intends to modernise the BNP's election fighting capability.

“By then I would have been leader of the BNP for 15 years and that is long enough,” said Griffin. “It will be time to make way for a younger person who does not have any baggage which can be used against the party.”

Griffin claims he needs the time to put into place the last “building blocks” of the BNP’s administrative and political machine, according to the BNP website.

“This is going to take at least 18 months to implement and after that I intend to hand the party over to someone who will be able to drive support up to where it can be a serious contender for power,” said Griffin.

Griffin's utter political ineptness has been amply demonstrated over the past few weeks of the general election, though somehow the political greenhorns and Griffin cultists among the BNP membership have been fooled (or have fooled themselves) into believing that the party's obliteration was in fact an advance, and that their millstone of a leader remains the man to take them forward.

It would certainly be difficult for Griffin to take the BNP any further backward.

In the meantime, sheltering behind the cover of his putative resignation date and the claims of needing time to put the BNP's electoral machine in order, Griffin will be free to pick off potential challengers and root out dissent within the party. Anybody even thinking about a leadership challenge can and will, on all past form, be labelled a "wrecker" unwilling to give Griffin time to complete his modernisation.

Griffin will also be banking on the virtual certainty of improved voting percentages in local elections, especially by-elections, in which low turnouts favour the party - something denied them in the high turnout general election.

Griffin had already secured his continuance at the helm of the BNP with the introduction of a Byzantine nomination system, which no challenger has any realistic chance of surmounting, and so is perfectly safe, but another danger was the prospect of a breakaway led by some of the party's better known figures. The shuffle announced to the Advisory Council is also designed to short-circuit that possibility.

We have to admit that there is a touch of genius about this manoeuvre. It will almost certainly buy Griffin the time he needs in the short term to consolidate his position, since Griffin knows better than anybody the limited reasoning power of his membership and its submissive reluctance to query his motives.

The question is, what will the internal opposition do to counter Griffin's moves, and will enough of those calling for Griffin's head over the past fortnight or so remain onside to make continued opposition worthwhile?

BNP MEPs would not serve full term

A British National Party Member of the European Parliament would have to stand down after four years of the five-year term and hand the seat to the second person on the BNP candidates’ list, the BNP has said. The requirement, revealed at a meeting of the party’s Advisory Council on 25 January as its candidate selection process was getting under way, shows that the BNP does not take the role of an MEP seriously.

It is unclear whether Nick Griffin, the party leader, would also have to comply with this rule in the event of his election in the North West, where he heads the BNP candidates’ list.

MEPs play an important role in the European legislative process, and thereby in the creation of national legislation in the 27 member states of the European Union. They have an important say on European Commission directives and regulations, international treaties and legislation on many issues, such as the free movement of workers, the internal market and consumer protection.

The European Parliament also shares equal responsibility with the Council of Ministers for the EU budget and exercises supervision over the Commission and management of EU policies.

BNP members elected to a local council commonly take months if not years to understand their function. Learning the ropes in Strasbourg and Brussels would be far harder. The party’s insistence that its MEPs should stand down just at the point they have a chance of actually doing something is bizarre.

The idea that this allows the second person on the list “to gain experience” before the next European election is nonsense. Would the originally elected MEP then not stand again or does the BNP realistically think it will get two MEPs elected in any region in five years’ time?

The truth is that the BNP has no interest in taking part in EU government. All it really wants is the salary and expenses that come with an MEP’s job and the opportunity to further its alliances with extreme-right parties in other EU states. MEPs will have to give 10% of their salary to their party region and “submit their expense claims for full Party audit” – presumably to make sure they claim enough for the party’s benefit.

The Advisory Council, which meets only every three or four months, also decided to appoint an “inner cabinet” to oversee the election campaign. Its members are most of the party’s main national officers together with “Midas Consultant” Jim Dowson, the man responsible for the party’s fundraising over the past year and providing management training for party officers in sunny Valencia.

Dowson’s contribution to the election campaign seems to consist largely of copying Searchlight’s HOPE not hate campaign, though not very well. Several recent BNP campaign initiatives, such as sending out regular campaign emails and encouraging supporters to sign up as activists, are poorly executed copies of HOPE not hate tactics.

But it would be wrong to underestimate Dowson. His fundraising campaign has brought in more money than the BNP has ever enjoyed and it expects to have a turnover of £1 million this year, according to the AC minutes.

Another member of the “inner cabinet” is Mark Collett, the head of publicity. Collett should have received a severe dressing down for wasting a large chunk of Dowson’s money when he printed 700,000 “Euro warm up leaflets” without an official imprint, which meant they could not be distributed. But “golden boy” Collett can do no wrong in the eyes of the party leadership. He apologised and offered his resignation, which naturally was refused. “You stupid boy!” as Captain Mainwaring might have said.

BNP units were offered new leaflets with the imprint or a 33% discount on the illegal one plus free “overlay stickers” containing the imprint. BNP groups around the country are no doubt busy organising “sticker parties”, probably in pubs, at which activists will take time out from campaigning and peel off thousands of small stickers to place on the leaflets. Voters will be able to spot the leaflets done later in the evening by the wonky stickers and beer stains.

Although the party leadership acted quickly when the imprint’s absence was spotted and told units not to distribute the leaflets, some may have got out. York BNP held a day of action in Ryedale in January and distributed an anti-EU leaflet, which it reproduced on its blog. Strangely the part of the leaflet where the imprint should be was cut away, making it impossible to see whether it was there or not.

HOPE not hate

Kemp is given Excalibur as Collett resigns. Just a day in the life of the BNP...

No, he's not gone yet...

The BNP's Advisory Council meeting minutes are far more interesting for what they don't say than for what they do, and January's AC minutes are a good example.

The Advisory Council meets at least three times a year and is the guiding body (it says here) of the party. And who sits on the AC? Everyone who is anyone, of course - or at least, anyone who is anyone in the fantasy world of the BNP. Thus we see the steroid-enhanced Martin Reynolds rubbing chubby shoulders with the idiotic Dave Hannam, while the emphatically lunatic Bob Bailey sits alongside the detestable Mark Collett. And who do we not see at January's meeting? Who is missing from this gathering of the BNP's glitterati, who we would usually expect to spot? Deputy Chairman and National Press Officer Simon Darby, for one. The reptilian Arthur Kemp, for another. And Richard Edmonds.

Edmonds' position of the AC was one of the consolation prizes offered as a sop to the rebellion of last year - clearly intended to pacify those on the harder right of the party who felt that Griffin was leading the party directly into the no-go area of, as it has been labelled, 'Tory nationalism'. For Edmonds is no soft nationalist - he is a fully-fledged neo-nazi, as Denise pointed out in an excellent article pondering Edmonds' placement on the AC back in October.

'A former mathematics teacher, Edmonds has a record that - anywhere beyond the shores of the fawning racist Right - is eminently unenviable. In 1987 Edmonds sustained a conviction for causing damage to a statue erected in honour of Nelson Mandela, and more seriously in 1994 he was convicted for his part in a 1993 racial attack in which a black victim was hit in the face with a glass. Sentenced to six months in gaol, Edmonds was released immediately, having already spent three months on remand.

The BNP's former National Organiser was also a long-time purveyor of Nazi and Holocaust-denial literature, notably Holocaust News, which found a wide circulation among the racist Right in the late 1980s. Edmonds told the BBC Panorama programme that Holocaust News was a "wonderful statement of the truth".

Not long after that, Edmonds told the journalist Duncan Campbell that the BNP was "100% racist". Note that he did not pettifog with the word "racialist" and the often-made inference that a "racialist" merely recognises and respects racial differences, upon which supposed differences the credo of "separate development" (apartheid) is allegedly built. He went directly for the word "racist", with its naked (and only) meaning of one who harbours an unreasoning emotional hatred against those of other races.

Nothing Edmonds has said or done in the intervening years could lead any unbiased observer to believe that the man is not now what he always was - an unrepentant anti-Semite, a racist, a Holocaust denier, and very much a standard-bearer for John Tyndall's brand of National Socialism.'

Missing from the meeting - and with no apologies for absence. Does that mean his job is done and he is no longer on the AC? If you know, let us know.

An anonymous correspondent has been in touch and has mentioned a number of points from the meeting which are worthy of note (and a big thank you to whoever you are). I've highlighted some of these below:

• Student membership accounts for only 0.01% of total membership. So much for the BNP's drive to engage young people.
• A 'properly constructed budget has been drawn up for 2009'. This is something of a surprise as the party has been going for twenty-seven years, ten of those under the authoritarian leadership of Nick Griffin. One would have expected a budget to have been an essential component of running a political party - even one like the BNP - but apparently it hasn't been until now.
• The party is investigating data protection principles – a bit late I would say. Mark Collett is now responsible for Data Collection (including date of birth and telephone number, which might be useful for him).
• All local BNP blogs must change their names and operate instead as a local community website. Use of the BNP logo must be discontinued. They report that it is impossible to control and oversee local websites centrally for legality of content and this measure protects the Party from any potentially costly legal challenges though it seems a tacit admission that the party is unable to control the lunatics in its midst.
• Members and officers whose personal e-mail addresses include ‘bnp’ should remove this reference for security reasons. Any officers who have an @aol address must switch to another service provider since AOL have blocked customers from receiving e-mails from @bnp.org. uk senders. For the first time ever, AOL gets my vote as an ISP with some moral courage.

But the two big items that are just casually mentioned in the AC report are the admission that 700,000 Euro warm up leaflets have been printed without an official imprint, prompting the moronic Collett to offer his resignation (sadly rejected), and the handing over of the tatty Excalibur 'merchandising' arm of the BNP to the ubiquitous Arthur Kemp.

Collett's cock-up will cost the party a fair amount of cash and goodwill as the party is offering branches (or units as it so kindly refers to them) free stickers to be adhered to the offending leaflets and a third of the money they paid back by way of compensation. Had an independent printer made the same mistake, he would have been expected to cover the cost of his error out of his own pocket. It'll be interesting to see whether Collett has to cough up or whether the party (and thus its members) take the financial hit. Personally, I'd've sacked the useless bastard for this, his umpteenth mistake. In any case, the party now has a 'National Proofreader and Marketing Consultant' who, along with the Chairman and National Elections Officer, will peruse all publications to ensure that Collett actually does what he's meant to do.

With regard to Kemp and Excalibur, the AC report has this to say;

'The Excalibur merchandising operation will now be run privately by Arthur Kemp under an annually renewable license from the Party. This is a saving to the Party in terms of storage costs and postage. Arthur will continue to work on the website, write the Party’s Education and Training manuals and will be overseeing Radio RWB.'

As our correspondent puts it, 'So much for all the lies in November about moving to bigger premises etc – is this the start of the end for Excalibur and Mr. Kemp?' Not too sure about the latter point but it certainly seems like the Excalibur operation is considerably smaller than party members and the outside world have been led to believe.

A number of questions immediately arise (though I'm sure our readers can think of a few more).

• Were the members ever consulted about this disposal of their assets? After all, they paid for Excalibur and have subsidised its existence up to now.
• Has Kemp paid anything for this 'licence' to run Excalibur as his private company? If so, how much?
• Why has Kemp been effectively given Excalibur anyway? Why not put it out to closed tender - restricted to party members?
• If it is now run by him as a private concern, one assumes Kemp will keep any profits that might be made - if so, how much will that cost the party/members per annum in lost revenue?
• If it is (as we suspect) loss-making, who will pick up the tab?

There's a whole host of questions that need to be answered regarding this highly dubious transaction - though the membership of the BNP will not be encouraged to ask them. They already paid for one company - Great White Records - which ended up being privately owned by the arch-twat Dave Hannam, and they pay Mark Collett for running a design company with a single client (the BNP) as a highly profitable and guaranteed business, and now it looks like they are to subsidise Kemp's own business (albeit on a annually renewable licence). None of this might actually be corrupt but it certainly stinks.

It really is time that the BNP membership woke up and realised that it's been taken for a very long and very expensive ride.

Trouble upstairs: Members leaving and newspaper ‘ineffective’, BNP officers told

Wingfield's Voice of Freedom - on its way to a rubbish bin near you

Secret minutes obtained by Searchlight reveal a party struggling with several problems. Sonia Gable reveals what is really going on at the top of the BNP.

Nick Griffin, the British National Party leader, may have been wrong-footed by this year’s attempt to mount a challenge to his position. Colin Auty, a BNP councillor in Dewsbury until he resigned from the party in July, failed narrowly to gain the 100 signatures he needed to stand against Griffin but the attempt seems to have panicked the party leadership.

An extraordinary general meeting held at the end of the party’s Red, White and Blue festival last month was supposed to make it much more difficult for anyone to challenge Griffin in future. However BNP members led by Richard Barnbrook, the party’s top man in London, threw out a proposal that the party chairman should be elected for a four-year fixed term, leaving in place the present annual right to call an election.

A change to the party constitution that did get passed was that candidates for leader will now have to obtain the backing of 5% of members with more than two years’ unbroken membership of the party instead of the present 100 signatures from members of two years’ standing, where the candidate is not a party office-holder. Those few people designated as office-holders need only 10 signatures.

Auty’s supporters condemned the decision, calculating that with the leadership claiming around 10,000 members, it meant a challenger would need up to 500 signatures to stand. Griffin therefore “did in fact walk away with the entire Party almost secured in his back pocket unnoticed by most of the membership present”, they said.

In reality it means nothing of the sort. The latest BNP accounts certainly state that the party had 9,784 members at 31 December 2007, compared to 6,281 at 31 December 2006. And Searchlight has acquired minutes of a meeting on 20 July 2008 of the BNP’s Advisory Council (AC), which brings together all the BNP’s leading officers, in which the membership at 14 July 2008 is said to be 9,175, the drop no doubt the result of the dissent in the BNP last winter.

However, Tina Wingfield, the membership secretary, expresses concern at the very low renewal rate of new members. Of the 373 and 854 new memberships processed in February and March 2007, she reported to the AC, only 32% and 39% respectively renewed the following year. And of the 9,175 members in July, 1,832 had joined between March and June 2008.

These revelations suggest that the number of people with more than two years’ party membership is at the most 2,000 and possibly no more than 1,000. A further indication appears in the report to the AC from the education and training department, which stated that the number of “voting members” was a mere 243. Members only qualify for this status if they have been in the party for at least two years, though they also have to meet activist and ideological training conditions.

It does not take much mathematical genius to calculate that 5% of a possible 2,000 qualifying members is 100, the same as the present endorsers needed to challenge Griffin. And if, as is more likely, the two-year membership figure is little more than 1,000, a challenger would have to find a mere 50 or so supporters.

A further change to the constitution introduces a new opportunity for just 20 voting members to demand a leadership challenge at the party’s autumn annual general meeting. But as voting members have to undergo ideological training by Arthur Kemp, the South African white supremacist and former apartheid regime spook who rose rapidly to a senior role in the BNP last year, Griffin is no doubt confident of their trustworthiness.

Attacking Searchlight

Kemp is editor of the BNP’s website and has until recently been acting managing director of the party’s Excalibur merchandising operation and responsible for the distribution of the party’s monthly publications, Identity and Voice of Freedom. These tasks have left him with little time to attend to BNP propaganda efforts, but the one “successful” project he was able to report to the July meeting was “an eight-page full colour booklet entitled ‘Searchlightexposed.com’”.

This, he explained, “was not for general distribution”, but “was sent directly to the editors, political journalists and senior journalists at all major mainstream newspapers around the country,” and “played a major role in the very low amount of publicity given by the mainstream media to Searchlight-propaganda during the election campaign”.

Only in Kemp’s dreams! Media coverage of the BNP in the run-up to the elections of 1 May showed no evidence that journalists and editors had done anything other than bin the BNP’s eight pages of lies and libels.

The production of this booklet, a tactic Kemp says “will be repeated at regular intervals”, proves only that our anti-BNP campaigns are effective and are hurting the BNP. Griffin’s introduction to the party’s 2007 accounts complains angrily about “third party disparagers” of the BNP in election campaigns, funded by the trade unions, and singles out the Daily Mirror, which printed “hundreds of thousands of copies of a special supplement directed against the BNP”. This of course is the supplement prepared in conjunction with Searchlight, an exercise that the Mirror successfully repeated this year alongside our Hope not Hate campaign.

AC members were not able to question Kemp about his dubious claims as he was unable to attend the meeting. One man who was present and may have helped Kemp compile the torrent of lies was Lance Stewart, the shadowy head of the BNP’s intelligence department and former high-ranking member of the South African police. Other notable BNP personalities at the AC, which has little real power in a party run as Griffin’s personal fiefdom, included Barnbrook; his Barking and Dagenham council colleague Bob Bailey; Jennie Noble, the BNP’s new treasurer; Michaela Mackenzie, the national nominating officer; Martin Reynolds who heads the BNP’s thuggish security section; the unpopular Mark Collett and David Hannam both supposedly demoted last winter to appease the BNP rebels; Peter Mullins and Mike Howson from the South West; the deputy leader Simon Darby and of course Griffin himself.

Ineffective

Also present was Martin Wingfield, editor of Voice of Freedom, the BNP’s tabloid newspaper, who must have been dismayed when Griffin said that his publication had proved ineffective as a recruitment tool and may be discontinued, although it might remain in online form.

Another suggestion discussed was to publish only bimonthly to save on the £3,258 a month it costs to have the paper printed and shipped from Lithuania. This amounts to 17p a copy, which is rather a lot considering most copies are not sold but given away. And that does not include the £600 the party pays to transport the papers to branches from the BNP warehouse in North Wales each month.

The unit cost is so high because contrary to the tens of thousands of copies the BNP has always claimed to distribute, the print run is only 19,000, according to the AC minutes. Considering how many copies are given away to members of the public, one can only conclude that most party members cannot be bothered to subscribe to the paper.

Three years ago police seized the entire print run of Voice of Freedom in Dover, on its way from Slovakia where it was then being printed. Reports at the time mentioned 60,000 copies. Has the BNP been lying or has Wingfield presided over a disastrous fall in circulation at a time when the BNP has supposedly been so successful in attracting support?

The minutes record that “a printer in the North East” has offered 100,000 copies at 3.5p per copy but clearly the only use the party would have for such a print run would be to feed the recycling bins at the BNP warehouse.

The AC also heard that support for and development of party branches and groups had been a problem area since the expulsion last December of Sadie Graham, the party’s former group development officer and one of the leaders of the party rebels. Her departure followed that of Ian Dawson as head of group support a few months earlier. Tina Wingfield reported: “Before January of this year, we had two individuals on the full-time staff dedicated to group development and group support and their departure has left a vacuum in our administrative structure that needs to be filled”.

To the rescue came the ubiquitous Kemp, who will take over group support in his time out from attacking Searchlight. One of his first tasks, it seems, will be to train the apparently large number of local party organisers who do not know how to use computers.

The AC was unable to complete its agenda through lack of time but not before discussing an approach by Ashley Mote to head the BNP candidates’ list for the South East in next year’s European elections. Mote is currently an independent MEP, having been expelled from the UK Independence Party following his conviction for housing benefit fraud.

Collett and some others felt the publicity of an ex-UKIP MEP joining the BNP would rejuvenate the party, others did not trust Mote to stay with the BNP if elected. The upshot was that the AC voted to reject Mote’s offer apparently on the grounds that his conviction would result in adverse publicity and prove detrimental to the party’s reputation, a view the party does not normally take towards its members’ convictions.

Searchlight

BNP's Advisory Council to be shut down - the disasters continue...

The BNP's Advisory Council, which is in place ostensibly to oversee Griffin and the running of the party, is to be completely dismantled to make way for the new membership tier known as the 'Voting Membership'. As we reported here, Griffin regards the new VMs as an 'activist elite', by which he presumably means they do as they're told and they would support him whenever he embarks on yet another one of his lunatic schemes.

According to information we've received, the unelected VMs will include organisers and active councillors at branch level as a matter of course, regional organisers, those officers of the party that remain after the coming reshuffle (or bloodbath, as one of our correspondents put it) but curiously (or perhaps not) not fundholders/treasurers - or certainly not those at branch level.

Considering that Griffin made a point in his blog post of August 11th of specifically mentioning 'effective powers of scrutiny over all central party finances', we're surprised that he intends to keep local financial managers out of the loop - but maybe we shouldn't be all that surprised at all. BNP branches from all over the country have been griping for the last couple of years that money gushes eternally into the black hole that is BNP HQ, and is rarely returned in any way, even, it is frequently said, in the form of election leaflets that have been bought and paid for. The last thing Griffin would want is someone demanding financial accountability all the time, which is why he will effectively keep the financial side of things directly under the control of the party's treasurer (currently John Walker though not, we suspect, for very much longer).

One sign that clearly indicates the diminishing role of the Advisory Council is that though it is intended that it should meet 'no less than three times each year' according to the BNP's website, it has in fact not met since last September - very nearly a year. And this is the body currently charged with a number of crucial tasks:

'The purpose of the Advisory Council is to inspect the party's accounts, ensuring proper conduct of the party's finances, and to act as a forum for the party's leadership to discuss vital issues and carve out the party's agenda, without hindering the Chairman's ability to make the final decision on all matters.'

The lack of Advisory Council meetings might then go some way towards explaining why the party accounts are so late.

Problems seem to be rife for the BNP's Advisory Council at the moment, despite the usually politically-somnolent summer period. Jonathan Bowden left both the Advisory Council and the BNP itself in a fury after Griffin's attack-dogs at Covert were set on him at the end of July, Scott McLean has resigned the Advisory Council and his post as Deputy Chairman over the Andrew Spence debacle and Steve Blake now appears to be directly in the firing line over a constant stream of criticism of the BNP website, which is about as bland as a political site can possibly get without anasthetic, and far worse, having signed Chris Jackson's nomination papers in the recent leadership election. It looks like he's a strong candidate for the bloodbath, probably alongside his pal Eddie Butler, the former BNP election guru (attacked by fruitcake Tony Lecomber a while back) who, after the lacklustre results for the party in the May elections is now apparently frequently described by Griffin as a twat (and worse). We confidently expect to be waving goodbye to both Butler and Blake in the very near future.

Thus the Advisory Council dissolves around Griffin's ears, ready to rise again in the form of a loose body of activists, the Voting Membership, and Griffin will only have to suffer the ignominy of answering to it once a year at the party's annual conference. This will effectively hand dictatorial powers to the leader of this already far from democratic party, giving him carte blanche to do as he pleases when he pleases with nobody to answer to except his unelected hardcore activists who he has himself placed into their positions of authority. Who in their right minds would give any party leader that kind of complete power over his party - especially someone as notoriously untrustworthy as Nick Griffin? And who would want to be a member of a party where the ordinary membership is regarded as of no value at all except for the price of their membership card?

We hear Jackie Griffin is swanning around showing off her nice new Peugeot sports car - a snip at around six and a half grand. The election results for the BNP might be crap, the executive of the party might be collapsing, the fake businesses dying off as fast as they are formed and the membership figures stagnating but the money still appears to be fast-flowing into the Griffin household. If I were a party member, I'd be worrying about that.

BNP demo at Dagenham Town Show a complete washout!

The Stormfront nazi forum is awash with recrimination this weekend after a national demonstration was called at the Dagenham Town Show by pornmeister Richard Barnbrook, the leader of the BNP's contingent on Barking and Dagenham Council, then cancelled at the last minute leaving supporters from as far afield as Kent and Oxford with nowhere to go to cheerlead for Nick Griffin and his band of not so Merry Men.

The demo was called for 10am on Saturday but we're told that only a dozen arrived (including the two supporters from outside London).

Barnbrook, rapidly gaining more notoriety for his alleged drink problems than for either his mismanagement of the BNP's Barking and Dagenham contingent or his gay-porn film, is said to have cancelled the demonstration on the morning it was due after seeing the large police contingent that had mustered in the belief that the BNP would at least manage a small crowd of demonstrators.

Though cancelling early in the day, Barnbrook didn't think to let the BNP office know, nor even to update the Barking and Dagenham BNP website with the news, leaving those arriving to wander aimlessly around enjoying the festivities, which they probably enjoyed rather more than hanging around with Barnbrook and his chums.

One angry supporter posted this on Stormfront;

'it was a complete disaster for the bnp.b+d is the bnp stronghold in london and the southeast and red ken and the reds have just marched in and run the bnp out of town.not only have they turned a family community event into a multicultural anti racist gig but the bnp the so called party of the people,defenders of the white community and culture have put up the white flag and run.what wonderful encouragement to the next lot of reds who want to disrupt a bnp event.how can the bnp expect the people of b+d to vote for them again?i have met barnbrook a few times and he seems pretty committed so maybe the order came from higher up.all in all a thuroughly pathetic turn of events...'

Difficult to see how anyone 'disrupted' any BNP event here but there you go.

Barnbrook's career seems to be in a rapidly descending spiral. Even though chosen - in a moment of apparent insanity - as the BNP's candidate for Mayor of London, he seems to be incapable of maintaining any kind of political momentum. The revelations about the porn film, his claimed relationship with Tilda Swinton (denied by her), his alleged use of an escort agency to find a partner to take to a council function, his ludicrous prancing around dressed up as St George, his laughable attempt to look like Martin Bell in his rather silly white suit, his complete inability to stop his group fragmenting in all directions and his apparent inability to string more than four words together to form a coherent sentence have all combined to make him something of a laughing stock - and this is just inside the BNP.

Despite all this, Nick Griffin, to universal amazement, chose Barnbrook to be the councillor representative on the BNP's Advisory Council last year where, it appears, he has failed again. A post on the Britain Forward (anti-Griffin but apparently pro-BNP) has this to say;

'Many party members were surprised when Cllr Richard Barnbrook was appointed as the representative of all councillors on the Advisory Council in November 2006, with his murky past and his inability, despite the largest BNP council group in the country, to achieve anything positive for local residents or for our party. He cannot even keep his own councillors in order. Only last month Cllr Jamie Jarvis embarrassed our party by getting caught up in a police drugs raid at a local pub that the local BNP group regularly uses for meetings. He should have been at a council meeting representing his ward and our party. The national representative job was obviously beyond a man who cannot even sort out his own back yard, so it was only a matter of time before someone else was appointed as the party’s “councillor liaison officer”. Nick Eriksen, our London organiser, says diplomatically that he will work “in addition to, not replacing, Richard Barnbrook”, but everyone knows he is there to make sure the job actually gets done...Most people in the party know that the choice of Richard Barnbrook to take on Red Ken in the London Mayoral election next year is a disaster in the offing but Nick Griffin doesn’t seem to care...'

The frustration and anger inside and around the BNP at the party's continuing councillor-related cock-ups, its financial disasters, its demo's that never happen and its lacklustre performance at the polls is encapsulated neatly in this final sentence to an article on yet another anti-Griffin 'nationalist' site;

'It's no wonder the media now rather like us a bit! We are run by crass incompetents!'

They are indeed.