2000 posts and a treat - Young Nazi and Proud, starring naziboy Mark Collett

As it's the 2000th post on the current incarnation of the blog, we thought it was time to remind you of what a dickhead Mark Collett can be. Therefore, we have a treat for you, in the form of a repeat of the video Young, Nazi and Proud, followed by the Searchlight review.

Young Nazi and Stupid!

The man tipped to become the next leader of the British National Party has admitted he is a nazi sympathiser and is inspired by images of German nazis "sieg heiling" in the streets.

Mark Collett, leader of the Young BNP and a member of the party's ruling Advisory Council, made the admission to Channel Four last month. In a revealing documentary, he boasted of his support for Hitler's Germany, said he would prefer to live in 1930s Germany than in many cities of northern England today and declared that he could not understand why people should find images of German soldiers giving nazi salutes upsetting.

The BNP leadership moved swiftly to limit the fallout by publicly sacking Collett as leader of the Young BNP and announcing a tribunal to consider his very membership of the party. However, Searchlight has learnt that this is a scam to reduce political damage to the party. On Sunday 10 November, less than a week after the programme was broadcast, Collett shared a platform with Nick Griffin, the BNP leader, at a party meeting in Bradford.

Young, Nazi and Proud was an hour-long documentary that examined the new, respectable face of the BNP. For eight months, programme maker David Modell chronicled Collett's political and personal life. What emerged was an intriguing insight into the mind of a man who hopes one day to lead the party.

Collett was shown squaring up to Anti Nazi League protesters at Leeds town hall, confidently canvassing voters in Bradford and giving articulate interviews to television stations. Yet we also witnessed the real Mark Collett: insecure, vain and a social misfit.

"Collett was a case study in artless, idiotic arrogance. Pumping iron semi-naked in his basement and getting a little too animated about watching 'a brain-dead white slag' snogging a black man suggested there was something a little repressed about the boy," noted Gareth McLean in his review of the programme for The Guardian.

"We saw a swaggering young man high on self-delusion," wrote Andrew Anthony in The Observer. "A shot of him strutting manfully in front of Anti Nazi League demonstrators seemed to capture his almost pathological vanity ... What I found most shocking, though, were not Collett's views - as predictable as they were reprehensible - but the knowledge that he was a fan of Alan Partridge. How could he appreciate the absurdity of Partridge, you wondered, without recognising his own?"

In one of the most revealing insights into his character, Collett discussed with much bitterness the break-up of a relationship. After attacking his former girlfriend, he told Modell: "I like to break people. When you've broken them and sucked that last bit of life out of them. That's it.

"When people say that I am evil, yeah I am. But it all depends. I'm either the sweetest angel or the most evil being you've ever encountered. It just depends which side you push me. Never kill people. Push them to the point of despair where they do it themselves because that's when you've really won."

In another scene, the arrogant Collett told the reporter: "Hitler will live on forever and maybe I will too".

Searchlight had long known that Collett was a hardline nazi. He began his political life in the National Front and became its student organiser before switching his allegiance to the BNP. For the past two years he has been a regular on the nazi Blood and Honour music scene and, during a personal dispute with the former Yorkshire NF organiser, Tony White, boasted of a close connection with Whitelaw, a band linked to the British Movement. At the BNP's Red, White and Blue festival last year, Collett made a hardline speech in favour of "white power".

Despite his obvious nazi credentials, Collett became leader of the Young BNP after engineering the removal of its previous leader, Paul Golding. In the local elections last May, Collett coordinated the BNP campaign in Bradford and in June, as he finished his studies at Leeds University, he became a full-timer for the party.

Last spring he was approached by Channel Four with the idea of the programme. Despite the historical antipathy of previous programmes on Channel Four to the BNP and only six months after the damaging Panorama documentary, Collett needed little persuading to co-operate. A man whose ego is probably matched only by that of his leader, Collett believed it was an opportunity to become a household name. Unfortunately for the little Hitler, his eagerness to impress was his own downfall.

Among his more illuminating quotes were:

"National Socialism was the best solution for the German people in the 1930s."

"I honestly can't understand how a man who's seen the inner city hell of Britain today can't look back on that era [Hitler's Germany] with a certain nostalgia and think yeah, those people marching through the streets and all those happy people out in the streets, you know, saluting and everything, was a bad thing."

"Honestly now, would you prefer your kid growing up in Oldham and Burnley or 1930s Germany? It would be better for your child to grow up there."

"I'm going to level with you. I'd never say this on camera, yeah, and you can say this to whoever you want, 'cos it's true. The Jews have been thrown out of every country, including England. There's not a single European country the Jews have not been thrown out of. And let's face it, David, when it happens so many times it's not just persecution. There's no smoke without fire."

The BNP's decision to sack Collett as leader of the Young BNP and consider his future membership has been presented as an example of the new BNP discarding its nazi past.

"To journalists who have alleged over the past couple of years that 'the BNP hasn't really changed', this action provides the proof that it really has," Nick Griffin announced the day after the programme. "Because extremist sentiments which would once have been commonplace and accepted - even flaunted - within the BNP have now led us to sack one of our best, most capable and organisationally most useful young assets."

In reality Griffin has no intention of losing someone who he sees as a possible replacement. Collett has had to stand down, but this is probably temporary or only for public consumption. Indeed, Collett and Griffin are believed to have watched the programme together.

Only days after the programme, when Collett was allegedly facing an internal tribunal, the two shared a platform at a BNP meeting in South Bradford. Collett apologised for the political damage he might have caused the party but heaped the blame on a disreputable programme maker.

Griffin has taken a similar line. In a statement on the BNP website he declared: "Despite its dismay at some of his comments and determination not take tough action over them, the party leadership does recognise and value the self-restraint Mr Collett showed when an individual he had somewhat naively come to regard as a friend revealed the extent to which he had betrayed both his personal confidence and his professional word about how he would conduct the filming for the programme.

"Then again, it would have been a thousand times better if Mark had not put himself - and hence the party - in such a position in the first place."

In behaviour now typical of him, Griffin absolves himself of any responsibility for this debacle. Being leader he should have had some control over the entire project but he overlooks that in his attack on the programme makers.

Collett's admissions reveal the true nazi beliefs of many in the BNP leadership. Griffin's public repudiation of him while privately backing him exposes the lizard-type nature of the leader himself. The reality is, as many BNP members privately concede, Young, Nazi and Proud will return to haunt the party in the future.

Searchlight

Some people think you should resign for failing to protect this data, Nick

The question was simple.

"Are you apologising to your members, whose details you failed to protect?" asked Channel 4 News anchor Krishnan Guru-Murthy.

Taken by surprise, and being unused to making apologies to BNP members on any account, Nick Griffin blinked and quickly uttered "Yah" as if the word was something indigestible sticking at the top of his gullet, and he couldn't get it down fast enough.

Recovering in another blink, he cleverly shifted the unwelcome but all too pertinent focus on his own culpability in the leaking of the BNP membership list: " - We're - we're very sorry for people who may have problems as a result of this," he said in barely suppressed agitation, going on to notice that most BNP members would not have any problems, and that if anybody came to be sacked from their jobs on account of their political beliefs then they would be entitled to "massive compensation".

With his personal apology reduced to a rapid and grudging "Yah", his own responsibility subsumed into a corporate "we're", and questions answered that were never asked, Griffin was fixed to continue in his evasiveness, but an unimpressed Guru-Murthy was having none of it.

"Some people think you should resign for failing to protect this data," he interjected. "Are you considering that?"

Following some self-serving waffle that "we" have done all "we" can to prevent this leak and that "we" have changed the "policies" which led to it and sacked the people responsible for it, Griffin's predictable answer was, "I won't resign" - which is more than a little curious when we recall the number of occasions, some very recent, on which Griffin and his spokesmen have called for ministerial heads to roll when lowly departmental minions in the pay of the government have lost similar data in far less dubious circumstances.

Clearly, the buck doesn't stop with Griffin, the man who directly appointed those he now blames for the BNP's predicament, and who therefore bears the heaviest responsibility of all.

Nothing daunted, Griffin continued: "If my members wish to vote me out - we're a very democratic party - we have an election available every year, and if they want to elect someone else in my place that's fine."

Except, of course, that it's anything but fine, as our readers are well aware and those sidelined and expelled members of the BNP who have attempted to unseat Griffin know to their cost. Krishnan Guru-Murthy, more usually concerned with higher matters than the internal affairs of a squalid collection of racists and fascists, cannot be expected to know that Griffin's comment stands the facts on their heads, and so made no intervention as an increasingly confident BNP leader talked of "an appalling witch-hunt by a liberal-left media and by rival political parties", mostly for the benefit of his own watching members and in the cause of further distancing himself from any personal culpability.

To that end Griffin switched his focus to the recent BNP gain on the obscure Boston Borough Council, a tactic mirrored on the main BNP website, knowing that until news of the leak broke on Lancaster Unity the membership continued to bask in the warm after-glow of the Boston result, in which a grand total of 279 people voted BNP.

At the end of the five minute interview Griffin executed a perfect about-turn in the matter of who leaked the BNP membership list. Having begun by saying that he had sacked those responsible (the Decembrist rebels), he now claimed: "This was leaked by our political opponents, this is a big campaign by supporters of the Labour Party to try to damage and intimidate the British National Party because they know that we're creeping up on them in election terms."

Ever since the leaked membership list entered into the public domain the BNP membership has switched smoothly into familiar victim mode, loudly protesting about their rights being infringed, of the danger they are in, and making frequently preposterous claims to have received death threats.

On our side of the fence we naturally take a rather jaundiced view of this unedifying self-pity, knowing, as we all do, that for years the normal method of transmitting the names, addresses and photographs of the BNP's opponents to the Redwatch hate site is through the BNP's active membership.

Nor do we have great sympathies with their shrill wails that Muslim organisations and websites have come into possession of the list. This community has for so long been vilified, lied about and insulted by the BNP and its army of bloggers and keyboard warriors that there is a certain sense of justice being done at last if the BNP hate brigade spend so much as one sleepless night kept awake by stray noises in the dark as penance for the vituperation and indignity to which they have subjected this community.

The police are now investigating the matter of the leak. The leak came from within the BNP, despite Nick Griffin's contradictory claims. It wasn't leaked by Lancaster Unity, it wasn't leaked by the Labour Party, it wasn't leaked by Searchlight, and it wasn't leaked by the fairies at the bottom of the garden.

It came from within the BNP and nowhere else - and it will be the BNP itself which is subjected to police investigation. What subsequently happened to the list is another matter entirely.

If the membership of the BNP had but a fraction of the backbone they claim to possess, they would not be crying like little girls who have had their pig-tails pulled by the school bully. They would be demanding the immediate resignation of the man ultimately responsible for their predicament, the man whose incompetence was responsible for putting in place the "policies" which led to the worst debacle - bar none - yet to have befallen the BNP.

They would tell him to go, to do it now, and to rid himself of any thoughts of severance pay.

Do they have the guts? Do they even have the wits to see that their own worst enemy is the man who, when given the chance to apologise to his members on Channel 4 News, gobbled down his feeble "Yah" as if it would make him sick?

The enemy within? Fear of Islam: Britain's new disease

Suspicion of the Muslim community has found its way into mainstream society – and nobody seems to care

Three years ago, four young suicide bombers caused carnage in London. Their aim was not just to kill and maim. There was also a long-term strategic purpose: to sow suspicion and divide Britain between Muslims and the rest. They are succeeding.

In Britain today, there is a deepening distrust between mainstream society and ever more isolated Muslim communities. A culture of contempt and violence is emerging on our streets.

Sarfraz Sarwar is a pillar of the Muslim community in Basildon, Essex. He is constantly abused and attacked, and the prayer centre he used has been burnt to the ground. Mr Sarwar, who has six children and whose wife is matron of an old people's home, is a patently decent man. His only crime is his religious faith. He and his fellow worshippers now meet in secret to evade detection, and the attacks that would follow.

The first abuse that Mr Sarwar's family suffered was in October 2001 – just after the 9/11 attacks – when pigs' trotters were left outside their door, the walls of their house were covered with graffiti and two front windows were broken.

Since then, the family has suffered many attacks, including a failed fire-bombing. In February, the tyres of Mr Sarwar's new car were slashed; in March his windows were broken again. He has now installed CCTV cameras, replaced his wooden back door with one made of steel and erected higher fences.

An investigation for Channel 4's Dispatches programme discovered many violent episodes and attacks on Muslims, with very few reported; those that do get almost no publicity.

Last week, Martyn Gilleard, a Nazi sympathiser in East Yorkshire, was jailed for 16 years. Police found four nail bombs, bullets, swords, axes and knives in his flat. Gilleard had been preparing for a war against Muslims. In a note at his flat he had written, "I am sick and tired of hearing nationalists talking of killing Muslims, blowing up mosques and fighting back only to see these acts of resistance fail. The time has come to stop the talking and start to act."

The Gilleard case went all but unreported. Had a Muslim been found with an arsenal of weapons and planning violent assaults, it would have been a far bigger story.

There is a reason for this blindness in the media. The systematic demonisation of Muslims has become an important part of the central narrative of the British political and media class; it is so entrenched, so much part of normal discussion, that almost nobody notices. Protests go unheard and unnoticed.

Why? Britain's Muslim immigrants are mainly poor, isolated and alienated from mainstream society. Many are a different colour. As a community, British Muslims are relatively powerless. There are few Muslim MPs, there has never been a Muslim cabinet minister, no mainstream newspaper is owned by a Muslim and, as far as we are aware, only one national newspaper has a regular Muslim columnist on its comment pages, Yasmin Alibhai-Brown of The Independent.

Surveys show Muslims have the highest rate of unemployment, the poorest health, the most disability and fewest educational qualifications of any faith group in the country. This means they are vulnerable, rendering them open to ignorant and hostile commentary from mainstream figures.

Islamophobia – defined in 1997 by the landmark report from the Runnymede Trust as "an outlook or world-view involving an unfounded dread and dislike of Muslims, which results in practices of exclusion and discrimination" – can be encountered in the best circles: among our most famous novelists, among newspaper columnists, and in the Church of England.

Its appeal is wide-ranging. "I am an Islamophobe," the Guardian columnist Polly Toynbee wrote in The Independent nearly 10 years ago. "Islamophobia?" the Sunday Times columnist Rod Liddle asks rhetorically in the title of a recent speech, "Count me in". Imagine Liddle declaring: "Anti-Semitism? Count me in", or Toynbee claiming she was "an anti-Semite and proud of it".

Anti-Semitism is recognised as an evil, noxious creed, and its adherents are barred from mainstream society and respectable organs of opinion. Not so Islamophobia.

Its practitioners say Islamophobia cannot be regarded as the same as anti-Semitism because the former is hatred of an ideology or a religion, not Muslims themselves. This means there is no social, political or cultural protection for Muslims: as far as the British political, media and literary establishment is concerned the normal rules of engagement are suspended.

"There is a definite urge; don't you have it?", the author Martin Amis told Ginny Dougary of The Times: "The Muslim community will have to suffer until it gets its house in order. Not letting them travel. Deportation; further down the road. Curtailing of freedoms. Strip-searching people who look like they're from the Middle East or Pakistan. Discriminatory stuff, until it hurts the whole community and they start getting tough with their children." Here, Amis is doing much more than insulting Muslims. He is using the foul and barbarous language of fascism. Yet his books continue to sell, and his work continues to be celebrated.

And we found the language of Islamophobic columnists such as Toynbee, Liddle, or novelists such as Amis, duplicated by the British National Party and its growing band of supporters.

All over Europe, parties of the far right have been dropping their traditional hostility to minorities such as Jews and homosexuals; in Britain, the BNP has come to realise that anti-Semitism and anti-black campaigning won't work if they are serious about electoral success.

To move to mainstream respectability, they need an issue that allows them to exploit people's fears about immigrants and Britain's ethnic minority communities without being branded racist extremists.

They have found it. Since 9/11, and particularly 7/7, the BNP has gone all out to tap a rich vein of anti-Muslim sentiment. The party's leader, Nick Griffin, has described Islam as a "wicked, vicious faith" and has tried to distance himself and the party from its anti-Semitic past. Party members are now rebuked for discussing the Holocaust and told to focus on terrorism, the evils of Islam, and scare stories of Britain becoming an Islamic state.

Griffin's strategy has been inspired by the press. He said: "We bang on about Islam. Why? Because to the ordinary public out there it's the thing they can understand. It's the thing the newspaper editors sell newspapers with."

Last month, we visited Stoke-on-Trent, a BNP heartland with nine BNP councillors, a council second only to Barking and Dagenham in far-right representation. The party has made this progress in large part by mounting a vicious anti-Muslim campaign. Stoke has one of the lowest employment rates in the country since the pottery industry collapsed. The BNP has tried to link this decline to Muslim immigration.

Other campaigns have focused on planning issues over mosques, a flashpoint elsewhere too. The BNP accuses the Labour council of cutting special deals with Muslim groups in exchange for support. Wherever we explored tension between Muslims and the local community we tended to discover the BNP was present, fanning discontent.

Many categories of immigrants and foreigners have been singled out for hatred and opprobrium by mainstream society because they were felt to be threats to British identity. At times, these despised categories have included Catholics, Jews, French and Germans; gays were held to subvert decency and normality until the 1980s, blacks until the 1970s, and Jews for centuries. Now this outcast role has fallen to Muslims. And it is the perception that Muslims receive special treatment that fuels the most resentment. When we investigated clashes at a Muslim dairy in Windsor, we found the perception that police had failed to investigate what seemed to be a racist attack by Asian youths on a local woman played a powerful role in fanning resentments.

But by the same token we believe that Muslims should be given the same protection as other minority groups from insults or ignorant abuse. This protection is not available. Ordinary Muslim families are virtually a silenced minority.

We should all feel ashamed about the way we treat Muslims, in the media, in our politics, and on our streets. We do not treat Muslims with the tolerance, decency and fairness that we often like to boast is the British way. We urgently need to change our public culture.

Peter Oborne's Dispatches film, "It Shouldn't Happen to a Muslim", will be screened on Channel 4 at 8pm on Monday. The pamphlet Muslims Under Siege, by Peter Oborne and James Jones, is published next week by Democratic Audit

Independent

Nazi Pop Twins - Tonight on Channel Four 10.30pm

Nazi Pop Twins

Thursday 19 July
10:30pm - 11:35pm
Channel Four

This is the kind of programme Louis Theroux should have fronted, dealing as it does with a family of American nutcases. Lynx and Lamb Gaede are 14-year-old twins from California who have stirred up controversy with their band Prussian Blue by singing white nationalist songs and wearing T-shirts with Hitler moustaches.

In fact, their behaviour did lead Theroux to include them in a 2003 documentary, but here James Quinn finds out how they've fared since becoming a cause célèbre. Quinn's theory is that their mother is using them as a mouthpiece for her extreme beliefs - beliefs the twins have come to question. He never quite proves this, but he does capture extraordinary moments.

Most startling is the sunlit scene at the family corral, where men in stetsons brand their cattle - with swastikas.

VIDEO Plus+: 2655451

Nice T-shirts, girls.

BNP links up with Channel 4 to unearth new political talent

Channel 4 chiefs have commissioned a new show aimed at putting young adults back in touch with politics.

The show, Big Brother, which went on air last week, places as many dysfunctional people as they can find in a domestic environment. The programme makers have teamed up with the British National Party, one of the countries' most outspoken political groups, who have promised to put the winners forward as MPs at the next General election.

The show has already been hailed as a success by chiefs, after contestant Emily Parr was wheeled away in the early hours of this morning after allegedly making offensive and racist remarks towards another housemate.

A BNP spokesman said, "We are encouraged by the fact that, even at this early stage of the competition, potential political candidates are emerging. Miss Parr has demonstrated a practical understanding of our ideology, and we would hope she accepts our offer to make her a prospective MP."

The spokesman continued, "Placing hand-picked dysfunctional contestants into an unnatural situation clearly brings out the unsavoury aspects of human behaviour we as a Party are looking for. We motion that all new affordable and social housing built by the government is made in the same way as the Big Brother house. This should increase racial, sexual and nationalist hostility, and decrease moral and social understanding, leading to more votes for the BNP."

Some sections of the media and public have expressed concerns that Big Brother may not be a fair reflection of UK society. However, a spokesman for Channel 4 vehemently defended the show.

"If we put normal people into the Big Brother house, and didn't subject them to psychological torture, then UK society would be perceived as tolerant and nice. This makes for dull viewing, which means less money for us."

Nevertheless, previous contestants are now distancing themselves from the show. Jade Goody, winner of the pilot show Celebrity Big Brother commented, "I'm not racist, I'm just an attention grabbing whore. I thought an MPs salary was bigger than what I thought it was. Now I know better, I'm distancing myself from politics, and going into the more lucrative field of selling my kidney live on five."

The Spoof

New race row hits Big Brother (yawn)

Big Brother contestant Emily Parr was removed from the show early this morning after calling fellow housemate Charley Uchea a "nigger".

Parr was told to leave the Big Brother house at around 3.30am today after using the racially offensive word. The incident happened after she was dancing with Uchea and Nicky Maxwell in the living room at approximately 8.30pm last night. The 19-year-old student was heard to say "Are you pushing it out, you nigger?" to Uchea.

In the early hours of this morning, Parr was called to the diary room and producers told her to leave the house immediately.

Uchea and Maxwell were shocked at the language, though Parr insisted it had been a joke.

Angela Jain, who heads the Big Brother commissioning team at Channel 4, said: "In the wake of Celebrity Big Brother, we must consider the potential offence to viewers regardless of Emily's intentions and her housemates' response. The word 'nigger' is clearly racially offensive and there was no justification for its use. We have removed Emily from the house to once again make it clear to all housemates and the viewers at home that such behaviour won't be tolerated."

Parr was one of the two housemates nominated for eviction on Friday.

The incident was not screened as part of the "as live" streaming on E4 but it will be shown tonight on Channel 4 in the Big Brother highlights show at 10pm.

In the wake of the race row in Celebrity Big Brother, show producer Brighter Pictures and Channel 4 moved quickly to act on Parr's comments last night. The comments were immediately reported to senior production staff at Brighter Pictures, the Endemol UK subsidiary that produces the show. Endemol consulted with senior executives at Channel 4 and the decision was taken to remove Parr from the house on the grounds that she "had broken the rules governing contestant behaviour".

Rules given to all contestants state:

"Big Brother will intervene and take appropriate action if housemates behave in a way that Big Brother considers is unacceptable.

"Unacceptable behaviour includes: behaving in a way that could cause serious offence to either their fellow housemates or members of the viewing public including serious offence based on the grounds of race.

"Housemates who act in a way that is seriously unacceptable will be evicted."

At the start of Big Brother 8, Channel 4 and Brighter Pictures put in place new measures to ensure any potentially offensive material was reported.

This followed the landmark ruling by regulator Ofcom last month that forced Channel 4 to make three on-screen apologies over failings in procedure during Celebrity Big Brother in January.

An Endemol spokesman said today: "This vindicates the procedures we have got in place and we have acted accordingly."

Channel 4 is discussing whether there will an eviction show tomorrow night and whether to frame tonight's show with a discussion about Parr's comments.

Media Guardian

Rise in racism in the playground

A threefold increase in reports of racist incidents in Derby's schools over seven years has been put down to better reporting. Children are now not so afraid to tell others, and a mentoring scheme also helps them, officials say.

Figures revealed by Channel 4 News showed that 151 reports of playground racism in 2000/1 rose to 451 last year.

Graham Falgate from the city council said there was now a much better awareness of how to report incidents. He said typical racist incidents included name-calling, ridicule, religious intolerance and other forms of bullying.

Alan Vaughan, a teacher at Derby Moor Community Sports College in Littleover, said they had operated a mentoring scheme for the past four years, which had proved successful.

"The children work with each other to solve the problems," he said. "There is always going to be an element of racism," he said. "We accept it exists and work together to conquer it."

BBC