North Bedfordshire BNP Meeting – Wednesday 12th December

North Bedfordshire British National Party are to hold a secret meeting next Wednesday in an unsuspecting pub in Tempsford. The group, led by Bedford mature student Phyllis Carter, have created controversy by booking the pub under the false name of "English Heritage," the government body responsible for protecting historic buildings.

Background

Phyllis Carter is the BNP's group organiser for North Bedfordshire, living in the mid-Bedfordshire village of Lower Stondon. She is the person to whom the local BNP PO Box 32 is registered. Mother-of-two Carter is a final year journalism student on the Polhill, Bedford site of the University of Bedfordshire.

She stood as BNP candidate in the May elections for Stratton ward in Biggleswade, coming bottom of the poll with 224 votes. She can be seen alongside BNP leader Nick Griffin in the following web link: http://www.bnp.org.uk/freedom/Vof82-14.pdf.

Previous Meeting

Left to right : Group Organiser Phill Carter, guest speaker Councillor
Richard Barnbrook and Eastern Region BNP organiser, Eddy Butler.

The North Beds group is very small with a handful of active members. They can, however, give the appearance of considerable size when they bus members in from across the 3 Counties. They did just this when they held an October meeting – their first - at the Anchor Pub in Tempsford, nr. Sandy in Bedfordshire. This was - an event captured on BNP TV with footage placed on their website http://www.bnptv.org.uk/archive1.php. The footage shows the distinctive decor of The Anchor – again shown in the photograph above.

Upcoming Meeting

For their follow-up Christmas meeting, Carter has issued an email indicating that the venue will be the same as before with Steve Blake as speaker. Blake, an IT consultant, of Bury St Edmunds, runs the BNP website. In the 1980s, his company, Aurora Promotions, imported Nazi propaganda from the US.

Carter has told members that she has had considerable difficulty booking meeting venues in the past. Perhaps this is why she has booked The Anchor under the false name of "English Heritage," the government body responsible for the upkeep of historic buildings. When rung, pub staff have twice confirmed that the booking is not in the name of the BNP.

Comment

"We find it extraordinary that Phill Carter should have to resort to these tactics in order to hold a simple branch meeting. It makes you wonder what they have to hide. All this goes to show that the BNP is very far from being a normal mainstream political party. We feel sure that English Heritage will take a very dim view of their name being abused in this way."

Contact Details

The Anchor, Great North Road, Tempsford Sandy, Beds. Phone 01767 640233.

English Heritage Press Enquiries Phone 020 7973 3250

E Mail From: "North Beds BNP"

Date: Thu, 29 Nov 2007 21:59:37
To:
Subject: Christmas Meeting

Dear member

I would like to inform you of our North Bedfordshire Group Christmas meeting. The meeting will take place on Wednesday 12th December at the same venue as last time. If you did not attend the last meeting, please contact me for directions. We aim to open the meeting at 8:00pm, so please arrive by 7:30pm to ensure that you get a seat. The guest speaker at this month's meeting will be Steven Blake – BNP Web Editor. If you haven't heard Steven speak before, please let me assure you that he is a truly excellent speaker.

There will be a small selection of BNP merchandise available for purchase on the night…an excellent opportunity to stock up on stocking-fillers! Whilst this is only our second meeting it is also the last this year and it promises to be a brilliant night. If you wish to attend please let me know if you can to give me a rough idea of numbers. Feel free to bring a friend/relative along who perhaps sympathises with our policies…the more the merrier!

Best Regards,
Phill Carter - Group Organiser

Grade-1 listing for Britain's first truly Jewish synagogue

When it opened, nearly 130 years ago, the New West End Synagogue proved that London's Jewish community had arrived.

Yesterday, the magnificent Bayswater building officially joined the top three per cent of the country's historic buildings when it was given a Grade I listing.

Older 19th-century synagogues had been built to look like Christian churches, or the buildings that surrounded them, as if their designers were reluctant to draw attention to them.

But by the late 1870s, leaders of the Jewish community in London's West End felt more secure. Most official forms of anti-Jewish discrimination had been lifted. There were about 46,000 Jews in the UK, before the huge influx started by the anti-Semitic riots in Russia in the 1880s. It was 20 years since the law began allowing practising Jews to become MPs, an anglicised Jew, Benjamin Disraeli, was Prime Minister, and most of London's congregations were joined under the United Synagogue.

The United Synagogue hired George Audsley, a Scottish born architect, and the younger of two brothers who ran one of Liverpool's leading firms of architects. Audsley's speciality was Christian churches, but a few years earlier he had won a contract to design an impressive synagogue in the Toxteth area of Liverpool, which is now a Grade II* listed building. The New West End synagogue, in Bayswater, was also given Grade II* listing in 1998, but was upgraded yesterday by the Department of Culture to a Grade I.

It is large enough to seat a congregation of 800 people, and cost a princely £24,980 to build. The money was raised by private subscription. Leopold de Rothschild, one of the main financial backers, laid the foundation stone in 1877. It opened in 1879.

Designed in what the architect called a Graeco-Byzantine style, it is the second synagogue in the UK to receive Grade 1 listing. The other is the UK's oldest synagogue, the Bevis Marks, opened in 1701 in Bishopsgate, London. "The New West End Synagogue is the architectural high-water mark of Anglo-Jewish architecture," Simon Thurley, Chief Executive of English Heritage said.

Hannah Parham, English Heritage's protection adviser, added: "A lot of early 19th-century synagogues tried to follow the styles of their Christian counterparts, but the New West End Synagogue celebrated the cultural heritage of the people it served."

The upgrading is a tribute not just to Audsley but also to Sharman Kadish, a Manchester-based lecturer and author who has campaigned for years to protect Jewish sites in the UK. Her book Jewish Heritage in England, published last year, said many synagogues and other Jewish sites in the UK had disappeared or were under threat.

Independent