As we've stated before, we receive countless emails from enormous numbers of people both pro and anti-fascist. These emails give us much of the material we use on the blog especially, surprisingly, the emails from fascists who tend to go into intricate and fascinating detail.
Since the announcement of Chris Jackson's leadership challenge, those emails have stepped up dramatically, with those who oppose Nick Griffin and his pathological lust for money providing us with a pile of information on dodgy-dealings, mismanagement and sexual shenanigans that we could never hope to prove and that would find us in court for libel within minutes. But if we move the money stuff to one side for a moment (though not entirely because wherever there is Griffin, there is always money) there is another theme that emerges and is emerging more each day, presumably as rumour and conjecture spreads itself rapidly through the BNP's ranks - Croatia.
Croatia-related rumours have been buzzing around the BNP like recalcitrant flies for quite a while now, each one providing us and our anti-fascist colleagues with a little more information and a yearning for a lot more. In fact, recent emails have given so much information (thank you to the senders) that we're able to extrapolate a good deal more for ourselves. So here's the Croatia stuff. Bear in mind that much of this is rumour, hint, suggestion and conjecture - though many of our readers, particularly those who are in the British National Party itself, will recognise the truth contained in the article and we would hope that they would have the good sense to demand some answers from the party's clearly corrupt leadership.
From what we can gather, there are four investment partners involved in the Croatia deal - Griffin himself, Simon Darby, Andrew McKillop and a fourth who hasn't yet been identified but certainly will be soon. All we know about him at the moment is that he's young and had (past tense) a substantial amount of money (from a death in his family) that Griffin got to hear about.
Griffin we already know but for the benefit of those who have never heard of the other two, Darby is an ex-member of the National Democrats/National Front who attended an American Friends of the BNP meeting in the States wearing a National Alliance T-shirt (the anti-semitic and white supremacist National Alliance is America's most hardline nazi group: founded by William Pierce, author of The Turner Diaries, the book that inspired Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh and London nail bomber David Copeland). Darby continues to be one of the leading figures within the BNP, to the extent that Griffin designated him as stand-in leader were he to be imprisoned during his 2005/6 trials.
Andrew McKillop is a writer and consultant on oil and energy economics and is the co-editor of The Fuel Energy Crisis (Pluto Press, 2006), which explores the crisis in fossil fuels. He has also written about the 'Peak Oil' crisis and lives in France. McKillop, we are reliably informed by
Searchlight is a member of the BNP's 'inner-circle' and is Griffin's 'Peak Oil' inspiration.
And here's the crunch. Griffin and Co are said have purchased a chunk of land over in Croatia, down South and close to the border, roughly thirty kilometres from Knin. The area of the land is approximately 26 hectares (around 65 acres) and at the moment has a couple of derelict buildings on it, probably old barns or other farm buildings. The cost of the land was about £30,000. There are plans afoot apparently though, if that is indeed the case, Griffin and his little consortium don't seem in any mad dash to get on with it - as far as we can ascertain no-one has been back to the site since March.
Whether they are acted upon or not, the plans seem to be to move a few of the BNP's operations over to Croatia - ones we've heard repeatedly include a CD/DVD-pressing facility, recording studio and Freedom newspaper - plus the long-awaited BNP radio station seems to be on the cards again if the investment cash becomes available. There is a further and much more elaborate plan to create a bizarre eco-friendly holiday camp (our information indicates that McKillop is to design eco-friendly cabins) powered by solar panels and wind turbines, and to grow organic veg, keep goats and cattle for the milk, free-range chickens for their eggs and so on. A tributary to the River Krka runs through the land so fresh water is abundant. Pretty much what most of us would like to do really, except for the BNP being involved.
The idea - at least as presented to the outside world - seems innocent enough. It's a plan for a nationalist holiday camp - all spot-on as far as energy consumption goes but like a giant perpetual Red, White and Blue Festival only made available to nationalists from all over Europe. In fact our understanding is that the Front National was going to fund the whole project but with Le Pen facing a leadership challenge and the modernisers, who have no high regard for Griffin or the BNP, moving in to change the party, this idea fell flat along with the attempts to get funding from other groups like Belgium's fascist Vlaams Bok.
Generalising outrageously, the BNP would seem to have picked a good location for Butlitz. Following the conflict in the nineties, Croatia was left largely Catholic and in the words of one writer 'fiercely nationalistic, anti-Semitic and anti-Muslim', all of which, if true, would be perfect for Griffin.
We would regard all this as simply another of Griffin's more elaborate get rich quick schemes if it were not for a few comments that have been made in some of our emails that seem to tie in neatly with an article that appeared in
Searchlight in April of this year. In this article, the writer speculated on what precisely the BNP was planning for the future:
'Since those days [the Oldham, Burnley and Bradford riots of 2001] there has been a growing belief that the BNP was working to a secret agenda as well as its public one. Even party members are concerned at the build-up of the BNP’s private army of security guards and the large sums of money spent on their training. After the European elections in 2004 when the BNP got 800,000 votes but no MEPs, Nick Griffin said that the party might have to consider alternatives to the ballot box. At the time this attracted no more than a ripple of interest. Clearly the BNP leader was harking back to his days running the National Front Political Soldiers faction, when he was happy to rub shoulders with extremists including terrorists of many political hues. More recent developments add to the evidence about where the BNP might be heading if it fails to make any real breakthrough at the ballot box. Last autumn the BNP organised its first clay pigeon shoot in Yorkshire, attended by Griffin and BNP councillor Richard Barnbrook as a fundraising and social event but also to build up a core of party members who know how to handle guns. Then Matthew Single, a regular BNP election candidate in Essex, boasted to the local press that he had been promoted to third in Griffin’s personal security detail and claimed that he had undergone “intensive training”. He has also started training BNP activists in “anti-hijack evasive driving”. Single has twice escaped justice in the courts and was in hot water over a false entry on his election papers last May. And last month Griffin made an interesting remark as an aside in his blog about his speaking tour of East Anglia, writing: “During the English Civil War (in due course, it will of course have to be called the First English Civil War, in order to differentiate it from the one to come)…”. Was it Griffin who inspired Robert Cottage to stockpile explosives for what he told Manchester Crown Court in February were preparation for the coming race war? Finally, why has the BNP stated that it is especially keen to recruit serving and recently retired police and army officers?'One of our correspondents from within the BNP added to this speculation when he referred to Butlitz, stating that it 'is planned to be a bolt hole for key BNP leaders and publicity people when [as they believe may well happen] the BNP is driven underground'.
We really should state that here at Lancaster UAF we don't believe the party is going to have to go underground at any point in the foreseeable future unless, of course, it is planning some radical changes to how it is perceived by the public. If it was going to be proscribed, it would have happened when Tony Lecomber was toting for killers to assassinate key politicians and public figures or when the BNP reprinted the prophet pictures to deliberately provoke conflict with the Muslim community or when one of the many attacks provoked and encouraged by the party was committed but at the moment, no chance.
Nevertheless, it seems that the BNP hierarchy believes that might be the case (one wonders why) and this, tied in with the information in the Searchlight article quoted above and some of the comments made by Griffin in our article '
The BNP's secret agenda: just making money or civil/race war?' leads one to speculate on whether, instead of an eco-friendly Butlitz, we're going to see a BNP-organised paramilitary training camp set up.
Wherever there is talk about the BNP and Croatia, there is speculation (often widely differing) about its objective. The simple answer is that it's yet another way to fleece BNP members out of their hard-earned cash, effectively being an investment for Nick Griffin's retirement fund. The complicated answer is the move towards the paramilitary which, as Searchlight suggests, may not be quite as bizarre as it appeared to be when the idea first gained some traction.
Either way, the membership should know what the leadership is up to, where its money is being invested and what the plans are for the future. Typically, the membership are the last to hear of anything happening in the BNP. If Griffin truly believes that he and his cronies may need a bolt hole in the near future, it's safe to assume that there is some plan afoot which will alienate the BNP completely from the public and, rather more dramatically, the government. Griffin and co will then tootle off to their safe house in Croatia leaving the membership to take the flak. Does this sound likely? Well, from all we've read of Griffin and the bunch of wasters at the top of the BNP, yes it does.
Just a couple of weeks ago, we reported on the BNP's most recent idea for money-making - the
mortgage brokers. We pointed out that Avocado the mortgage broker appeared to be a spin-off from a page that hinted at the existence of yet another BNP potential earner, Avocado Finance, presumably another brokerage where loans could be obtained via the BNP from a third-party. Although we know the BNP is virtually bankrupt all these appendages to the party simply seem to have the effect of draining off cash - someone has to design the web page, someone has to pay for the server space and the domain name and so on, and no income - or virtually none - derives from any of these ventures, no matter how elaborate they are. In fact, the profligate company start-up habit that the BNP seems to have developed only seems to point in one direction - desperation.
It's true that the BNP is desperate for cash - we all know that. But now Griffin is flailing around for finance for his potential Croatian bolt-hole. As we mentioned earlier, there are just a couple of derelict buildings on the site in Croatia, meaning that development has to be funded, and the figure we've heard (from a couple of different sources, which doesn't make it correct but gives it some validity) is £40,000. Yes, you read that right. Forty thousand smackers or Nick Griffin doesn't get his bolt-hole, his refuge in the event of everything, as he clearly believes it will, going pear-shaped.
And where will he get the money? Where else but the gullible, manipulable and ever-exploitable BNP membership?
All this speculation ties in rather neatly with a post that has just appeared (yesterday) at the Britain Forward website (reprinted at
Voice of Reason) which poses the following questions:
'Perhaps the problem is that Nick Griffin and those close to him have taken their eyes off the ball and have their minds on a speculative property purchase in Croatia and setting up offshore bank accounts. Where is all the money coming from? Is it part of Nick Griffin’s personal fortune or is it the members’ money? And is Nick Griffin using senior members as a conduit to ship money abroad?'
That last question is particularly interesting - and should be gripping BNP members like a vice - especially when we consider a throwaway sentence in one of our correspondent's emails;
'An investment company registered by one of the BNP's wealthy accountants in the Isle of Man is the end of the trail...'
There might well be a Butlitz, a paramilitary training camp or a bolt-hole for Griffin and his gang over in Croatia but it's pretty clear that there's still a hell of a lot more of this story yet to come out.
The BNP's apparent mania for creating new organisations between which it can spread its diminishing resources in a vain attempt to screw money out of as many people as possible continues with the official launch a few days ago of ABEX, the Association of British Ex-Services Personnel.
