A Carlisle United employee has resigned following reports that Brunton Park stewards were among supporters of the man jailed for burning a copy of the Koran. United spokesman Andy Hall yesterday confirmed that a steward has now left the club.
Andrew Ryan, 32, of Summerhill, London Road, Carlisle, was sentenced to 70 days in prison for intentional religious/racial harassment on Monday. He arrived at the city magistrates’ court flanked by men waving the St George’s Cross and shouting nationalist chants.
The English Defence League Carlisle Division (EDL) had put out a call for members to support Ryan. The News & Star received reports that some of the men were stewards at Brunton Park and the club launched an investigation into their identity.
Mr Hall said: “We received the News & Star’s photographs and are very thankful for it being brought to our attention. We looked at them with our safety staff who identified [one of the men] as a steward at Carlisle United. We contacted him, and he said he understood this could be misconstrued. He said that he would like to keep supporting the EDL. He said he would like to step down.
“The club will not tolerate any form of racist behaviour and, in conjunction with the FA and Football League ‘Kick it Out’ campaign, we are working strenuously to ensure that this issue does not arise at the ground.”
Mr Hall stressed that the steward offered his resignation. It is not illegal to be a member of the EDL.
Ryan was jailed for what district judge Gerald Chalk described as “theatrical bigotry” aimed at causing the maximum amount of distress. Back in January, he had stolen a copy of the Koran from Carlisle Library and burnt it in the city centre. He was shouting abuse about Muslims as he set light to the book and admitted in police interview that he knew his actions would stir up racial hatred.
Ryan has previous convictions for violence, public order offences and racially abusive chanting at a football match. He claims he only has issue with Islamic extremists and has no ill will towards ordinary Muslims.
From 16 to 20 Ryan was a soldier, serving in Northern Ireland. He said he “lost it” after seeing internet footage of extremists burning poppies.
News and Star
Showing posts with label Carlisle. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Carlisle. Show all posts
April 24, 2011
April 18, 2011
Ex-soldier jailed for burning Koran in Carlisle
A former soldier has been sentenced to 70 days in prison for setting fire to a copy of Muslim holy book the Koran in the centre of Carlisle.
Andrew Ryan had previously admitted religiously aggravated harassment and theft of a Koran from a library. The 32-year-old, of Summerhill, said he had been "shocked" watching a Muslim burning a poppy on Remembrance Day.
Shoppers and schoolchildren witnessed the burning, outside the old Town Hall, on 19 January.
Sitting at Carlisle Magistrates' Court, District Judge Gerald Chalk described it as a case of "theatrical bigotry". He said: "It was pre-planned by you as you stole the book deliberately. You went out to cause maximum publicity and to cause distress."
Ryan struggled with security guards in court after the sentence was passed. While being handcuffed he shouted: "What about my country? What about burning poppies?"
About 10 people were in court to support Ryan, and as they left the court they shouted "do you call this justice?".
After sentencing, Insp Paul Marshall, of Cumbria Police, said: "This incident was highly unusual for Cumbria as we have such low levels of hate crime in the county."
BBC
Andrew Ryan had previously admitted religiously aggravated harassment and theft of a Koran from a library. The 32-year-old, of Summerhill, said he had been "shocked" watching a Muslim burning a poppy on Remembrance Day.
Shoppers and schoolchildren witnessed the burning, outside the old Town Hall, on 19 January.
Sitting at Carlisle Magistrates' Court, District Judge Gerald Chalk described it as a case of "theatrical bigotry". He said: "It was pre-planned by you as you stole the book deliberately. You went out to cause maximum publicity and to cause distress."
Ryan struggled with security guards in court after the sentence was passed. While being handcuffed he shouted: "What about my country? What about burning poppies?"
About 10 people were in court to support Ryan, and as they left the court they shouted "do you call this justice?".
After sentencing, Insp Paul Marshall, of Cumbria Police, said: "This incident was highly unusual for Cumbria as we have such low levels of hate crime in the county."
BBC
Labels:
book-burnings,
Carlisle,
Koran,
religiously aggravated harassment,
theft
January 20, 2011
Carlisle man arrested after 'Koran burning' in city centre
A police officer next to the burning bookOne eye witness who spoke to the News & Star described seeing the man standing in the city centre, near to the market cross, loudly making anti-Islamic pronouncements in front of a large crowd. He then set fire to the book he was holding, which said the witness was a Koran, before discarding it and hurrying away.
Police arrived at the scene a short time later and are now investigating. A spokesman for the force confirmed that a man has been arrested.
The incident came just a day before a controversial American preacher, who had threatened to burn copies of the Koran on the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks in new York, was told he would barred from visiting the UK.
A spokesman for Cumbria police said today: “Just after midday on Wednesday, January 19, police received reports that a Koran was being burned by a man in Carlisle city centre. Police have seized the remains of the book and a 32-year-old male has been arrested on suspicion of using racially aggravated threatening words or behaviour. The man remains in police custody where he is helping officers with their inquiries.”
Police confirmed that the man was arrested at his home address in Carlisle.
A woman who saw the book burning incident said: “There was a big crowd gathered in the city centre and he was basically burning the Koran in the middle of town. He was carrying the book around while it was burning and then threw it on the floor for a second and then left. He was shouting anti-Islamic comments. People were horrified. It was a bit shocking to see that in Carlisle city centre. The whole thing lasted about three or four minutes.”
Meanwhile, Pastor Jones said today that he was disappointed to be barred from the United Kingdom, describing his exclusion from the country as “unfair”. Speaking after the Home Office announced it would not allow him to enter the UK, he insisted he was not against Muslims or Islam, only the “radical element of Islam.”
News and Star
Labels:
anti-Islam,
book-burnings,
Carlisle,
Koran,
Muslims,
Terry Jones
May 24, 2009
For all the talk of change, Nick Griffin's BNP remains a single-issue party which may be coming soon to a town near you
Nick Griffin foresaw homegrown Islamic terrorists. He even predicted that the aftershock from a cataclysmic implosion of American capitalism would ripple through the world like a financial tsunami, spreading hardship into every corner of the globe. But never in the BNP leader's most fevered imaginings could he have envisaged a domestic crisis of democracy so profound that it would propel his reviled fringe party to centre stage in the forthcoming local and Euro elections.
The confluence of the war on terror, the credit crunch and the public's incandescent rage at the expenses scandal which has debased parliament has produced a perfect storm of fear and loathing that has provided fertile ground for far-right politics. The BNP will not
match Oswald Mosley's New Party, which won 16 per cent of the vote in 1931, but with 465 candidates in the English county council elections, compared with 39 five years ago, the mainstream parties fear they will make the most significant strides in the post-war era.
There's heady talk of firsts: of returning up to six MEPs, of the party winning its first county council seats. Griffin is convinced his promised land is within sight. He knows the voters are sick of the establishment and are looking for an alternative, and no party is further removed from the mainstream than the BNP.
"In terms of voter sentiments, there has probably never been a better time for the BNP," says the party's leader. "The only thing that comes close is the immediate aftermath of 7/7. This is our time."
What Griffin means is that this is his time. He's been working towards this breakthrough since he was a spotty 15-year-old public schoolboy who was taken along to a National Front meeting by a Tory father disillusioned with the country's leftward lurch.
It's interesting to see this would-be prime minister at such close quarters. Like Gordon Brown he has a glass eye, although he didn't lose his on the rugby pitch but instead when a shotgun cartridge exploded in his face 20 years ago in France in unexplained circumstances. Griffin does have a sporting pedigree of sorts, though, winning a boxing blue for Cambridge, but he isn't physically menacing and it would be a surprise if he won the bout.
He talks in a muted monotone, deliberately removing any hint of emotion from his voice; it's a bit like your teacher explaining why your essay wasn't quite up to scratch, only taking ages to do it. His academic delivery sets him apart from his predecessor at the BNP, the fiery orator John Tyndall, and you sense that self-confidence is not his strong suit. At one stage he talks about how if the party had a more Aryan leader "who's 6ft 2in and whose two eyes are blue … then they'd probably take the party further on".
His reactions are also fascinating: he expects aggression and reacts with relief when he doesn't get it, which is why he does well while canvassing. He doesn't have the presence of the genuine political superstar but his instinctive reaction is to lean in and listen respectfully, before replying in his measured estuary English. He manages to make bold predictions without sounding particularly bombastic or patronising, a rare skill.
A suspicion that those predictions may be more than self-serving hyperbole began to dawn when I accompanied him onto the streets of Carlisle last Monday. Just a few miles from the border, the Cumbrian town doesn't have a significant immigrant problem. It does, however, have a bad case of disaffection.
Where once Griffin and his party canvassers would have been chased from their stall in the town's grey, pedestrianised shopping centre, this week the reactions that confronted Griffin varied from disinterest to enthusiastic engagement. Roughly 80 per cent of people took their fliers, with a quarter of them stopping to talk. Each of the voters who engaged with Griffin said afterwards that they were actively contemplating voting for him.
"My interest stems from the fact that the indigenous people of this country are treated far worse than anyone else," said a pensioner who cheerfully gave her name as Eileen but declined to add her surname. "I don't have anything against anyone of a different colour or creed but charity begins at home. It's ridiculous that people are coming here and sponging off our social services, and getting things ahead of people who've worked hard all their lives. I think it's got to stop. I've had enough.
"The BNP are the party that will best represent me; I don't want to be European, I'm proud to be British and what it stands for. Nobody asked me if I wanted to be multicultural and I don't want to be. We're not even consulted, we're just expected to take what's given. The BNP's the only party that's going to keep us British and I know a lot of people who think that way too. I don't think they'll win here but I think it'll be close. The British people have completely lost faith in the main parties."
Even angrier was James, a married freight train driver in his thirties whose sense of dislocation from the political classes was palpable. "I'm interested in the BNP because they're upsetting people who've been upsetting me for a bloody long time and because they're outside the mainstream," he said. "I've long held views about politicians which have recently become quite fashionable; it's like the whole nation's woken up. That's why I am, for the first time, considering voting for the BNP."
Pensioner Linda Smith is another convert. "The government have really shown their true colours, I felt the same even before the expenses because they're all busy doing for themselves," she says. "This will be my first time voting for the BNP, I'm usually a Conservative voter. Lots of my friends are going to vote for them and I think they'll do very, very well."
Nor was it just the retired and the unemployed who stopped to chew the cud. My unscientific snapshot of those stopping to engage with the BNP included several conspicuously well-groomed, professional, middle-aged women. There was the odd crazy, such as a tattooed 42-year-old who looked as likely to dispense a kicking as trade in political debate, but the abiding impression was of the sheer ordinariness of those planning to vote for a party widely regarded as the National Front in its Sunday best.
Griffin's local acolytes were a surprisingly run-of-the-mill bunch too. Apart from the barrel-chested, gargantuan gym rat who dropped the Great Leader at our rendezvous and quickly disappeared, you could not wish to meet a more ordinary bunch. North-west regional organiser Clive Jefferson is a middle-aged former electrician who walks with the aid of a stick after a car crash smashed his hip five years ago, and he's with an affable chain-smoking Londoner who moved to the north-west to retire and met Jefferson in a pub. The stall in the town centre is manned by statuesque 17-year-old activist Natasha Elliman, whose quiet, respectful manner plays well with the public. Elliman has been in the party for four years and has never seen it doing so well.
Jefferson talks excitedly of the public anger: normally there would be Tory and Labour canvassers over the town like a rash, he says, but they have faced such a level of intimidation and ire from voters that the main parties have withdrawn to leave the ground to the BNP. In Carlisle alone, the BNP has 17 candidates knocking on every door, with an unprecedented 42 candidates in Cumbria. Across the north-west there are 26 "active units" of between 10 and 30 core activists, most swollen to twice that number by casual members.
Nor are they there to make up the numbers. The party believes it can make significant gains, particularly in the north-west, Midlands and East Anglia, while areas such as Merseyside and Cumbria, which five years ago returned the lowest average vote for the BNP, are now seen as hotspots. Jefferson says that nearby Whitehaven is "fizzing" and highlights the case of Kells & Sandwith, one of the safest Labour County Council seats in the country. In 2005, Labour won it with 65.8 per cent of the vote; when a by-election took place last December, on a much-reduced turnout they held it by 16 votes from the BNP, who were contesting the seat for the first time. The BNP attracted support from the overwhelmingly Conservative voters in the pretty little town of Sandwith, and in even greater numbers from the Labour stronghold of Kells, the big estate around Cumbria's last remaining pit.
This time around, the BNP believe that a schizophrenic mix of voter apathy and anger will deliver them one of Labour's prize seats. In a seat that is 97.7 per cent white, alienation from mainstream politics is as much an issue as immigration, with Griffin asserting that canvassers have seen a 25 per cent upswing in support for the BNP on Carlisle doorsteps within a fortnight as the expenses row rages.
Neither of the main political parties have yet managed to devise a means of effectively combating the rise of the BNP. Labour have demonised the BNP and the Tories have ignored them in the hope they'll go away, but neither approach seems to be working. If Griffin is to be believed, the BNP are on the cusp of making the transition from a single-issue party or protest vote to a fully fledged alternative for disillusioned voters.
"We're not just a protest vote. We may have been so once, but not now," he says. "Across large bits of the country ours is a solid vote. We've got a couple of seats – Burnley was the first one – where we've taken and then defended all three seats in a ward, which is a community vote."
Griffin, who studied law and history at Cambridge, might seem shallow but he knows his history. He says he studied how the SNP went from a disorganised, single-issue fringe party to governing Scotland. Even more instructive has been the leader of France's far-right National Front, Jean-Marie Le Pen, who "turned a bunch of crazies into a serious political force". Griffin envisages a two-stage process: drop the extreme views so that you're electable; once elected, prove that you can govern and expand slowly and sustainably.
The BNP, which plans to fight every seat on mainland Britain at the next election, now has the infrastructure to win seats. It has 14,000 members, up from 1,300 a decade ago, and Griffin claims that 200 new members a day are signing up, providing the funds to expand its operations. In 2007, the independent web monitoring company Hitwise said the BNP's website had more hits than all the other political parties combined.
Yet Griffin knows it will be a long haul. "There's no doubt we still have an image problem," he says, which is why he insists all party members wear a jacket and tie when canvassing. "The skinhead/thug stereotype puts off a lot of middle-class people, but we know if we can get them to look more closely at what we stand for then they tend to agree with us. The truth is that we have changed fundamentally. I can understand someone from our opposition thinking it's all window dressing, but no party can keep up a charade."
Griffin says his own views have changed from the days when he attended his first National Front meeting as a 15-year-old, and from his 1998 conviction for incitement to racial hatred for publishing material that denied the Holocaust. "My views were immature when I was younger, everybody's are," he says. "You mature as you grow older and you begin to see shades of grey where once there was only black and white."
Opposition to the multiculturalism which he says has been forced upon us by the "liberal elite" is still his lodestar, and he remains an unrepentant opponent of asylum and an enthusiastic advocate of repatriation, even if "we talk about resettlement grants" these days. His plan is to spend Britain's foreign aid budget of £9bn per year incentivising immigrants to return to their country of ethnic origin.
He is, he stresses, no longer a Holocaust denier. In fact, he says he supports Israel's right to flatten Gaza should it decide to, and points out that the party has a Jewish councillor in Epping Forest.
Mind you, who needs Jews to hate when you've got Muslims to hand? And Griffin really hates Muslims. The longer our interview lasts – we spent over an hour talking – the more difficult it becomes for Griffin to hide his real beliefs. Apropos of nothing, he begins to talk about Muslims in the same terms that the Nazis once talked about Jews.
"I'm not an Islamaphobe, because a phobia is an irrational fear, and my fear of Islam is not irrational at all," he says.
At which point he goes off on a vile ramble so close to an incitement to racial hatred that for legal reasons it can't be repeated here. In his mind Muslim men are targeting underage white girls with the aim of breeding white Britons into a minority in their own country. If Griffin is to be believed there's "an epidemic of grooming in every single town where there is a significant Muslim population".
I am, momentarily, stunned. Is this, I ask him, going on where I live? Is this a feature of life in Scotland?
"I have no firm evidence that this is happening in Scotland, but I know that if any young Scottish kid in Glasgow has an altercation with a Muslim he'll be warned "f*** off or you'll be Criptoed" because Criptoe was the nickname for Kriss Donald. So they're saying 'if you stand up to us we'll do to you what we did to Kriss Donald. When there's that level of racist violence directed against young Scottish lads, I would be very surprised if the flipside of that, which is sexual abuse directed against young women, wasn't there."
At least Griffin has a solution. Any Muslim "caught indulging in specific crimes" would be told "it's either go back to Pakistan or be hanged". Any of the 100,000 Muslims who "openly support the aims of the jihadists … should be booted out of the country and their assets should be handed over to Gurkha families". This would be a good thing, he says, as most of the assets would be curry houses and "the Gurkhas make far better curries". Griffin knows about curries; his favourite meal is a korma.
For all the obfuscation and talk of change, it's clear that Griffin's BNP remains essentially a single-issue party based around race and immigration. Scots will soon be able to see this at close quarters, because Griffin has plans for Caledonia.
"We've got a small and quite well-organised team of people in Scotland, but there's a mismatch between a great deal of soft public sympathy and the number of votes," says Griffin. "There was a by-election in Glasgow a few months ago, and eight or nine years ago BNP people couldn't even have canvassed around there, they'd have been chased from the streets. Now they go out and knock doors and talk to people, and everybody's polite, most people are interested, and a significant minority are sympathetic, but it's not translating into votes at present.
"That's the process we've seen elsewhere, but it's complicated by the SNP, which is still the party of protest against the liberal elite and the establishment. That will change, but for the time being we're just getting ourselves organised and all we're after is for our share of the vote, which was 2.3 per cent last time, to go up to 2.5 per cent, because that's the point at which we save our deposit.
"We've had a lot of enquiries this time from Scotland, especially in the last few days after our leaflet went out. Last time we had a handful of enquiries, six if my memory serves me right, and three of them were Englishmen living in Scotland, and one was from a lunatic. This time we've got hundreds of enquiries, and that will translate into votes. What is sure is that we will have our highest vote ever in Scotland, and will have enough Scottish organisers in place to be in a position to fight every seat in the country at the next general election.
"The Glasgow conurbation will be the springboard, and if our maths are right, it's perfectly feasible for us to be serious challengers for a Scottish parliamentary seat in the greater Glasgow constituency in the next parliamentary elections in a couple of years' time. We've got to triple our vote but from the low base we were on there, from our greater organisational sophistication and from the feel of the times, tripling our vote over four years is entirely doable."
And entirely disturbing for genuine democrats.
Scotsman
The confluence of the war on terror, the credit crunch and the public's incandescent rage at the expenses scandal which has debased parliament has produced a perfect storm of fear and loathing that has provided fertile ground for far-right politics. The BNP will not
match Oswald Mosley's New Party, which won 16 per cent of the vote in 1931, but with 465 candidates in the English county council elections, compared with 39 five years ago, the mainstream parties fear they will make the most significant strides in the post-war era.
There's heady talk of firsts: of returning up to six MEPs, of the party winning its first county council seats. Griffin is convinced his promised land is within sight. He knows the voters are sick of the establishment and are looking for an alternative, and no party is further removed from the mainstream than the BNP.
"In terms of voter sentiments, there has probably never been a better time for the BNP," says the party's leader. "The only thing that comes close is the immediate aftermath of 7/7. This is our time."
What Griffin means is that this is his time. He's been working towards this breakthrough since he was a spotty 15-year-old public schoolboy who was taken along to a National Front meeting by a Tory father disillusioned with the country's leftward lurch.
It's interesting to see this would-be prime minister at such close quarters. Like Gordon Brown he has a glass eye, although he didn't lose his on the rugby pitch but instead when a shotgun cartridge exploded in his face 20 years ago in France in unexplained circumstances. Griffin does have a sporting pedigree of sorts, though, winning a boxing blue for Cambridge, but he isn't physically menacing and it would be a surprise if he won the bout.
He talks in a muted monotone, deliberately removing any hint of emotion from his voice; it's a bit like your teacher explaining why your essay wasn't quite up to scratch, only taking ages to do it. His academic delivery sets him apart from his predecessor at the BNP, the fiery orator John Tyndall, and you sense that self-confidence is not his strong suit. At one stage he talks about how if the party had a more Aryan leader "who's 6ft 2in and whose two eyes are blue … then they'd probably take the party further on".
His reactions are also fascinating: he expects aggression and reacts with relief when he doesn't get it, which is why he does well while canvassing. He doesn't have the presence of the genuine political superstar but his instinctive reaction is to lean in and listen respectfully, before replying in his measured estuary English. He manages to make bold predictions without sounding particularly bombastic or patronising, a rare skill.
A suspicion that those predictions may be more than self-serving hyperbole began to dawn when I accompanied him onto the streets of Carlisle last Monday. Just a few miles from the border, the Cumbrian town doesn't have a significant immigrant problem. It does, however, have a bad case of disaffection.
Where once Griffin and his party canvassers would have been chased from their stall in the town's grey, pedestrianised shopping centre, this week the reactions that confronted Griffin varied from disinterest to enthusiastic engagement. Roughly 80 per cent of people took their fliers, with a quarter of them stopping to talk. Each of the voters who engaged with Griffin said afterwards that they were actively contemplating voting for him.
"My interest stems from the fact that the indigenous people of this country are treated far worse than anyone else," said a pensioner who cheerfully gave her name as Eileen but declined to add her surname. "I don't have anything against anyone of a different colour or creed but charity begins at home. It's ridiculous that people are coming here and sponging off our social services, and getting things ahead of people who've worked hard all their lives. I think it's got to stop. I've had enough.
"The BNP are the party that will best represent me; I don't want to be European, I'm proud to be British and what it stands for. Nobody asked me if I wanted to be multicultural and I don't want to be. We're not even consulted, we're just expected to take what's given. The BNP's the only party that's going to keep us British and I know a lot of people who think that way too. I don't think they'll win here but I think it'll be close. The British people have completely lost faith in the main parties."
Even angrier was James, a married freight train driver in his thirties whose sense of dislocation from the political classes was palpable. "I'm interested in the BNP because they're upsetting people who've been upsetting me for a bloody long time and because they're outside the mainstream," he said. "I've long held views about politicians which have recently become quite fashionable; it's like the whole nation's woken up. That's why I am, for the first time, considering voting for the BNP."
Pensioner Linda Smith is another convert. "The government have really shown their true colours, I felt the same even before the expenses because they're all busy doing for themselves," she says. "This will be my first time voting for the BNP, I'm usually a Conservative voter. Lots of my friends are going to vote for them and I think they'll do very, very well."
Nor was it just the retired and the unemployed who stopped to chew the cud. My unscientific snapshot of those stopping to engage with the BNP included several conspicuously well-groomed, professional, middle-aged women. There was the odd crazy, such as a tattooed 42-year-old who looked as likely to dispense a kicking as trade in political debate, but the abiding impression was of the sheer ordinariness of those planning to vote for a party widely regarded as the National Front in its Sunday best.
Griffin's local acolytes were a surprisingly run-of-the-mill bunch too. Apart from the barrel-chested, gargantuan gym rat who dropped the Great Leader at our rendezvous and quickly disappeared, you could not wish to meet a more ordinary bunch. North-west regional organiser Clive Jefferson is a middle-aged former electrician who walks with the aid of a stick after a car crash smashed his hip five years ago, and he's with an affable chain-smoking Londoner who moved to the north-west to retire and met Jefferson in a pub. The stall in the town centre is manned by statuesque 17-year-old activist Natasha Elliman, whose quiet, respectful manner plays well with the public. Elliman has been in the party for four years and has never seen it doing so well.
Jefferson talks excitedly of the public anger: normally there would be Tory and Labour canvassers over the town like a rash, he says, but they have faced such a level of intimidation and ire from voters that the main parties have withdrawn to leave the ground to the BNP. In Carlisle alone, the BNP has 17 candidates knocking on every door, with an unprecedented 42 candidates in Cumbria. Across the north-west there are 26 "active units" of between 10 and 30 core activists, most swollen to twice that number by casual members.
Nor are they there to make up the numbers. The party believes it can make significant gains, particularly in the north-west, Midlands and East Anglia, while areas such as Merseyside and Cumbria, which five years ago returned the lowest average vote for the BNP, are now seen as hotspots. Jefferson says that nearby Whitehaven is "fizzing" and highlights the case of Kells & Sandwith, one of the safest Labour County Council seats in the country. In 2005, Labour won it with 65.8 per cent of the vote; when a by-election took place last December, on a much-reduced turnout they held it by 16 votes from the BNP, who were contesting the seat for the first time. The BNP attracted support from the overwhelmingly Conservative voters in the pretty little town of Sandwith, and in even greater numbers from the Labour stronghold of Kells, the big estate around Cumbria's last remaining pit.
This time around, the BNP believe that a schizophrenic mix of voter apathy and anger will deliver them one of Labour's prize seats. In a seat that is 97.7 per cent white, alienation from mainstream politics is as much an issue as immigration, with Griffin asserting that canvassers have seen a 25 per cent upswing in support for the BNP on Carlisle doorsteps within a fortnight as the expenses row rages.
Neither of the main political parties have yet managed to devise a means of effectively combating the rise of the BNP. Labour have demonised the BNP and the Tories have ignored them in the hope they'll go away, but neither approach seems to be working. If Griffin is to be believed, the BNP are on the cusp of making the transition from a single-issue party or protest vote to a fully fledged alternative for disillusioned voters.
"We're not just a protest vote. We may have been so once, but not now," he says. "Across large bits of the country ours is a solid vote. We've got a couple of seats – Burnley was the first one – where we've taken and then defended all three seats in a ward, which is a community vote."
Griffin, who studied law and history at Cambridge, might seem shallow but he knows his history. He says he studied how the SNP went from a disorganised, single-issue fringe party to governing Scotland. Even more instructive has been the leader of France's far-right National Front, Jean-Marie Le Pen, who "turned a bunch of crazies into a serious political force". Griffin envisages a two-stage process: drop the extreme views so that you're electable; once elected, prove that you can govern and expand slowly and sustainably.
The BNP, which plans to fight every seat on mainland Britain at the next election, now has the infrastructure to win seats. It has 14,000 members, up from 1,300 a decade ago, and Griffin claims that 200 new members a day are signing up, providing the funds to expand its operations. In 2007, the independent web monitoring company Hitwise said the BNP's website had more hits than all the other political parties combined.
Yet Griffin knows it will be a long haul. "There's no doubt we still have an image problem," he says, which is why he insists all party members wear a jacket and tie when canvassing. "The skinhead/thug stereotype puts off a lot of middle-class people, but we know if we can get them to look more closely at what we stand for then they tend to agree with us. The truth is that we have changed fundamentally. I can understand someone from our opposition thinking it's all window dressing, but no party can keep up a charade."
Griffin says his own views have changed from the days when he attended his first National Front meeting as a 15-year-old, and from his 1998 conviction for incitement to racial hatred for publishing material that denied the Holocaust. "My views were immature when I was younger, everybody's are," he says. "You mature as you grow older and you begin to see shades of grey where once there was only black and white."
Opposition to the multiculturalism which he says has been forced upon us by the "liberal elite" is still his lodestar, and he remains an unrepentant opponent of asylum and an enthusiastic advocate of repatriation, even if "we talk about resettlement grants" these days. His plan is to spend Britain's foreign aid budget of £9bn per year incentivising immigrants to return to their country of ethnic origin.
He is, he stresses, no longer a Holocaust denier. In fact, he says he supports Israel's right to flatten Gaza should it decide to, and points out that the party has a Jewish councillor in Epping Forest.
Mind you, who needs Jews to hate when you've got Muslims to hand? And Griffin really hates Muslims. The longer our interview lasts – we spent over an hour talking – the more difficult it becomes for Griffin to hide his real beliefs. Apropos of nothing, he begins to talk about Muslims in the same terms that the Nazis once talked about Jews.
"I'm not an Islamaphobe, because a phobia is an irrational fear, and my fear of Islam is not irrational at all," he says.
At which point he goes off on a vile ramble so close to an incitement to racial hatred that for legal reasons it can't be repeated here. In his mind Muslim men are targeting underage white girls with the aim of breeding white Britons into a minority in their own country. If Griffin is to be believed there's "an epidemic of grooming in every single town where there is a significant Muslim population".
I am, momentarily, stunned. Is this, I ask him, going on where I live? Is this a feature of life in Scotland?
"I have no firm evidence that this is happening in Scotland, but I know that if any young Scottish kid in Glasgow has an altercation with a Muslim he'll be warned "f*** off or you'll be Criptoed" because Criptoe was the nickname for Kriss Donald. So they're saying 'if you stand up to us we'll do to you what we did to Kriss Donald. When there's that level of racist violence directed against young Scottish lads, I would be very surprised if the flipside of that, which is sexual abuse directed against young women, wasn't there."
At least Griffin has a solution. Any Muslim "caught indulging in specific crimes" would be told "it's either go back to Pakistan or be hanged". Any of the 100,000 Muslims who "openly support the aims of the jihadists … should be booted out of the country and their assets should be handed over to Gurkha families". This would be a good thing, he says, as most of the assets would be curry houses and "the Gurkhas make far better curries". Griffin knows about curries; his favourite meal is a korma.
For all the obfuscation and talk of change, it's clear that Griffin's BNP remains essentially a single-issue party based around race and immigration. Scots will soon be able to see this at close quarters, because Griffin has plans for Caledonia.
"We've got a small and quite well-organised team of people in Scotland, but there's a mismatch between a great deal of soft public sympathy and the number of votes," says Griffin. "There was a by-election in Glasgow a few months ago, and eight or nine years ago BNP people couldn't even have canvassed around there, they'd have been chased from the streets. Now they go out and knock doors and talk to people, and everybody's polite, most people are interested, and a significant minority are sympathetic, but it's not translating into votes at present.
"That's the process we've seen elsewhere, but it's complicated by the SNP, which is still the party of protest against the liberal elite and the establishment. That will change, but for the time being we're just getting ourselves organised and all we're after is for our share of the vote, which was 2.3 per cent last time, to go up to 2.5 per cent, because that's the point at which we save our deposit.
"We've had a lot of enquiries this time from Scotland, especially in the last few days after our leaflet went out. Last time we had a handful of enquiries, six if my memory serves me right, and three of them were Englishmen living in Scotland, and one was from a lunatic. This time we've got hundreds of enquiries, and that will translate into votes. What is sure is that we will have our highest vote ever in Scotland, and will have enough Scottish organisers in place to be in a position to fight every seat in the country at the next general election.
"The Glasgow conurbation will be the springboard, and if our maths are right, it's perfectly feasible for us to be serious challengers for a Scottish parliamentary seat in the greater Glasgow constituency in the next parliamentary elections in a couple of years' time. We've got to triple our vote but from the low base we were on there, from our greater organisational sophistication and from the feel of the times, tripling our vote over four years is entirely doable."
And entirely disturbing for genuine democrats.
Scotsman
Labels:
Aryan,
BNP,
Carlisle,
Clive Jefferson,
Cumbria,
far-right,
Nick Griffin,
racist
May 11, 2009
No2EU supporters confront BNP in Carlisle
No2EU:Yes to Democracy supporters clashed on saturday with members of the BNP in Carlisle as they were out campaigning for for RMT-backed left-wing coalition which is contesting seats across the UK in next months Euro elections on June 4.
Police were called after the BNP reacted with hostility to No2EU campaigners handing out leaflets in close proximity to the regular BNP street stall in Carlisle. In an hour long standoff RMT/No2EU campaigners refused to be moved on by the BNP.
Shoppers told the No2 EU campaigners that they were delighted that at last someone had had the courage to stand up to the BNP on the streets of Carlisle. ASLEF activist and No2EU candidate John Metcalfe said:
“The BNP have been leafletting Carlisle City Centre for months and obviously didn’t take kindly to being exposed for the fascists that they are by our campaign. They were openly agressive and hostile and it didn’t take long before the mask slipped and they started shouting fascist slogans.”
Craig Johnson, from the RMT Executive and another member of the No2EU slate, added:
“I have lived and worked in and loved the city of Carlisle for 45 years. No one is going to intimidate and harass me off the streets of my home town.”
Bob Crow, RMT general secretary and convenor of No2EU, said:
“RMT members and No2EU supporters will not bow to intimidation from the BNP in Carlisle or anywhere else in the country. What today’s incident proves is that the BNP are worried about the socialist message of No2EU and it’s appeal to voters who are sick of the political elite in the UK and in the EU. No2EU is the only left-wing group challenging the BNP on the streets for the votes of the angry and the disaffected on June 4th.
“We will be stepping up our campaign in the coming weeks and offering voters a socialist alternative to the poison and hatred of the far right,” he said.
Socialist Resistance
Police were called after the BNP reacted with hostility to No2EU campaigners handing out leaflets in close proximity to the regular BNP street stall in Carlisle. In an hour long standoff RMT/No2EU campaigners refused to be moved on by the BNP.
Shoppers told the No2 EU campaigners that they were delighted that at last someone had had the courage to stand up to the BNP on the streets of Carlisle. ASLEF activist and No2EU candidate John Metcalfe said:
“The BNP have been leafletting Carlisle City Centre for months and obviously didn’t take kindly to being exposed for the fascists that they are by our campaign. They were openly agressive and hostile and it didn’t take long before the mask slipped and they started shouting fascist slogans.”
Craig Johnson, from the RMT Executive and another member of the No2EU slate, added:
“I have lived and worked in and loved the city of Carlisle for 45 years. No one is going to intimidate and harass me off the streets of my home town.”
Bob Crow, RMT general secretary and convenor of No2EU, said:
“RMT members and No2EU supporters will not bow to intimidation from the BNP in Carlisle or anywhere else in the country. What today’s incident proves is that the BNP are worried about the socialist message of No2EU and it’s appeal to voters who are sick of the political elite in the UK and in the EU. No2EU is the only left-wing group challenging the BNP on the streets for the votes of the angry and the disaffected on June 4th.
“We will be stepping up our campaign in the coming weeks and offering voters a socialist alternative to the poison and hatred of the far right,” he said.
Socialist Resistance
November 22, 2007
Brawl after BNP meeting
Two Carlisle men have been given suspended prison sentences at the city’s crown court after violence flared in a pub following a meeting of the British National Party.
They were among a group of drunken local men caught in a confrontation with members of the BNP from the north east, who met in the city’s Griffin pub on the afternoon of Saturday June 9 this year.
Desmond Young, 36, of Balfour Road, was given a six-month sentence, suspended for two years, and ordered to do 150 hours unpaid community work. Alan Crilley, 27, of Shadygrove Road, who also pleaded guilty to two charges of criminal damage, got a nine month sentence, suspended for two years, with 200 hours of work. Both men had more than 50 previous convictions, including several for violence. A warrant was issued for the arrest of 34-year-old Jason Foster, of Flower Street, who was also scheduled to be sentenced for affray but did not turn up in court.
None of the people from the north-east was arrested.
Prosecuting counsel Paul Murphy told the court there were about 100 people in the pub when the “large fight” broke out, with both sides throwing chairs and glasses in what one witness described as five minutes of “absolute chaos”. At least one woman customer took refuge in a disabled toilet as the drunken men set about each other, he said.
In mitigation defence barrister Greg Hoare said that despite his bad record Crilley was “heading in the right direction”.
He said the trouble involved a group of people from Newcastle who had been using the pub for a BNP meeting.
Barrister Rod Halligan, for Young, said he had managed to stay out of trouble for six years and had only got involved in this fight after someone threw a chair at him.
Sentencing the pair, Judge Peter Hughes QC described them as “hardly the best ambassadors for this city”. He told them: “To be involved in affray right in the heart of the city centre, in broad daylight, in front of anybody passing by or coming out of the railway station, is deeply unattractive behaviour and it is the sort of behaviour residents of this city don’t feel they should tolerate.”
Carlisle News and Star
They were among a group of drunken local men caught in a confrontation with members of the BNP from the north east, who met in the city’s Griffin pub on the afternoon of Saturday June 9 this year.
Desmond Young, 36, of Balfour Road, was given a six-month sentence, suspended for two years, and ordered to do 150 hours unpaid community work. Alan Crilley, 27, of Shadygrove Road, who also pleaded guilty to two charges of criminal damage, got a nine month sentence, suspended for two years, with 200 hours of work. Both men had more than 50 previous convictions, including several for violence. A warrant was issued for the arrest of 34-year-old Jason Foster, of Flower Street, who was also scheduled to be sentenced for affray but did not turn up in court.
None of the people from the north-east was arrested.
Prosecuting counsel Paul Murphy told the court there were about 100 people in the pub when the “large fight” broke out, with both sides throwing chairs and glasses in what one witness described as five minutes of “absolute chaos”. At least one woman customer took refuge in a disabled toilet as the drunken men set about each other, he said.
In mitigation defence barrister Greg Hoare said that despite his bad record Crilley was “heading in the right direction”.
He said the trouble involved a group of people from Newcastle who had been using the pub for a BNP meeting.
Barrister Rod Halligan, for Young, said he had managed to stay out of trouble for six years and had only got involved in this fight after someone threw a chair at him.
Sentencing the pair, Judge Peter Hughes QC described them as “hardly the best ambassadors for this city”. He told them: “To be involved in affray right in the heart of the city centre, in broad daylight, in front of anybody passing by or coming out of the railway station, is deeply unattractive behaviour and it is the sort of behaviour residents of this city don’t feel they should tolerate.”
Carlisle News and Star
Labels:
British National Party,
Carlisle,
Griffin
October 31, 2007
Anti-racism group growing fast
A group formed in March to fight racism in Carlisle already has 85 supporters.
Carlisle Against Racism is holding a public meeting in the Tithebarn, West Walls, tonight in an attempt to reach an even wider audience. Since its inception, it has had stalls at events such as the Festival of Nations and continental market, and leafleted spectators at Brunton Park football ground. Its biggest event so far was “Love Music, Hate Racism!”, a gig at the Brickyard in Fisher Street earlier this month, which attracted 300 people.
Spokesman Brent Kennedy said: “We set up in March when we heard that racist candidates were standing in six wards in Carlisle for the city council elections. We answered the lies and myths they were putting out with facts and figures. We put out 18,000 leaflets, one through every door in wards where the British National Party stood.”
The group is adamant that it is here to stay and is planning an annual general meeting to elect officers and draw up a constitution.
Mr Kennedy added: “Racism is most dangerous when used for political ends. It divides people and diverts attention from the real problems. For example, racists blame immigrants for a shortage of rented housing. The real reason why there are 1.5m people on the housing waiting list is that council-house building is one per cent of its level in the 1970s. The facts are that immigrants make up seven to eight per cent of the working population but contribute 10 per cent of economic growth. Immigrant workers pay £2.5bn a year more in taxes than they claim in benefits and overseas students contribute £3bn to the British economy. Without immigrants, the NHS would collapse.”
Mr Kennedy is one of the speakers at tonight’s meeting alongside Paul Jenkins of Unite Against Fascism. The meeting begins at 7.30pm and admission is free.
Cumbria News and Star
Carlisle Against Racism is holding a public meeting in the Tithebarn, West Walls, tonight in an attempt to reach an even wider audience. Since its inception, it has had stalls at events such as the Festival of Nations and continental market, and leafleted spectators at Brunton Park football ground. Its biggest event so far was “Love Music, Hate Racism!”, a gig at the Brickyard in Fisher Street earlier this month, which attracted 300 people.
Spokesman Brent Kennedy said: “We set up in March when we heard that racist candidates were standing in six wards in Carlisle for the city council elections. We answered the lies and myths they were putting out with facts and figures. We put out 18,000 leaflets, one through every door in wards where the British National Party stood.”
The group is adamant that it is here to stay and is planning an annual general meeting to elect officers and draw up a constitution.
Mr Kennedy added: “Racism is most dangerous when used for political ends. It divides people and diverts attention from the real problems. For example, racists blame immigrants for a shortage of rented housing. The real reason why there are 1.5m people on the housing waiting list is that council-house building is one per cent of its level in the 1970s. The facts are that immigrants make up seven to eight per cent of the working population but contribute 10 per cent of economic growth. Immigrant workers pay £2.5bn a year more in taxes than they claim in benefits and overseas students contribute £3bn to the British economy. Without immigrants, the NHS would collapse.”
Mr Kennedy is one of the speakers at tonight’s meeting alongside Paul Jenkins of Unite Against Fascism. The meeting begins at 7.30pm and admission is free.
Cumbria News and Star
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