A-Z of the BNP: Great White Records

Great White Records (GWR) is the BNP's in-house record label, which Griffin once saw as both a lucrative cash cow and a stepping-stone to creating the sort of fascist "counter power" movement he had been harping on about since the 1980s.

Its founding statement was explicit that "the chief benefactors/recipients of money raised by GWR will be the British National Party". The party boasted it would release upwards of 13 albums, which would raise around £100,000 for the party.

It is highly doubtful that GWR has even paid back the initial outlay lavished upon it, however. GWR, which was incorporated in December 2005, has hardly released any records of its own and those it has have been underwhelming to say the least. To put it politely they are unlikely to chart any time soon. The company has only produced one set of accounts, which showed its total net assets at £8, and is currently on notice that it will be struck off. In 2008 its business was merged with the BNP's Excalibur merchandising operation.

It is not only about the money though. As one senior BNP figure observed in an interview about GWR: "People will listen to a song over and over again and take all the words in, in a way that you would be very lucky to get one in 100 of them to listen to a speech. Music is a very effective way of getting our views across." Ian Stuart Donaldson, lead singer of the infamous "white power" band Skrewdriver, said exactly the same thing. The music might have changed but the tune has not.

Despite the initial hopes placed upon it, not least by Griffin himself, GWR has stalled. Its lacklustre performance is largely down to the man placed in charge, Dave Hannam (pictured), the BNP deputy treasurer who was jailed for three months in 2000 for handing out antisemitic leaflets in Hull. Hannam was temporarily demoted in early 2008 to appease irate BNP organisers and activists after a former colleague accused him of being "crassly incompetent". GWR's other director, Nick Cass, who in 2007 was sacked as party manager, appears to be a silent partner.

Ironically Griffin's decision to back Hannam (and Mark Collett) during a damaging split in the BNP precipitated a minor disaster for GWR. Those who sided with the "rebels" included its two leading artists, one of whom was Colin Auty. Despite ridiculing Auty the BNP continues to sell his album Truth Hurts, presumably because GWR has so little else to justify its existence. GWR's next release was by Joey Barber, a BNP activist who records under the name Joey Smith. His "pop" album Not Just About the Music was truly execrable. Griffin loved it. BNP members did not.

GWR once tried to take the rise out of anti-fascists by altering the lyrics of a socialist anthem by the late great Woody Guthrie to reflect the BNP's racist prejudices. It would appear that the joke was on them. Guthrie once penned a song entitled "All You Fascists (Bound To Lose)".

If the performance of GWR is anything to go by they already have.

Hope not hate

Searchlight uncovers BNP hate factory

After a six-month investigation in conjunction with Lancaster Unity and Wales Friends of Searchlight, we can now reveal the secret location of the BNP’s new premises. Gerry Gable takes us there.

On 23 January the British National Party triumphantly announced that Excalibur, its merchandising operation, had re-opened for business in a “brand new ground floor warehouse”.

Not only did it house the dispatch operation for Excalibur’s range of tatty, cringe-making and overpriced goods, there was also a “vast array of new equipment” including a folding machine, plastic-bagging machine and “two heavy duty commercial printers”.

The BNP also claimed there was “office space, meeting rooms and a BNPtv studio” and space for the distribution of the party’s regular publications and members’ bulletins. It was the first fruit of the BNP’s huge “Building to Grow” fundraising effort and the first time the party could centralise key operations in a modern operation.

Arthur Kemp, head of the BNP’s education and training department, was placed in charge as the temporary managing director of Excalibur, assisted by Dave Joines as dispatch manager and administrator. Kemp was a logical choice because he could exercise control over Excalibur’s book list, containing a range of classic Nazi and racial eugenics books and of course Kemp’s own white supremacist tome March of the Titans – A History of the White Race.

Dave Joines, now in charge of Excalibur, Arthur Kemp and John Walker

The BNP was keeping very tight-lipped about the location of the building. Even most members did not know precisely where it was. But the involvement of Kemp, who lives in Deeside, and Joines, who lives in Ellesmere Port, meant it had to be in North Wales or the Wirral. That Excalibur had started using the BNP’s Deeside post office box address was another indication.

We were quickly on the case. Months of putting together every clue and chasing up every lead eventually led us to the Evans Business Centre, a recently built development of workshops and offices on Deeside Industrial Estate.

There the BNP occupies unit B2, an office/workshop of 115 sq m (1240 sq ft) off the A550 and 5km away from the M56, for which Evans Easyspace Ltd charges rent of £850 a month plus VAT. With rates it is setting the party back by nearly £15,000 a year plus electricity and staffing costs.

The BNP has ensured its name does not appear on the door, or on the sign at the entrance to the business park, but neighbouring tenants were aware of Excalibur’s presence and recognised the name of John Walker, who worked there in his role as the BNP’s lacklustre treasurer. The only indication that the unit is occupied is a note on the door giving three mobile phone numbers for deliveries: 07761 492616, 07815 146712 and 07855 323589. We have traced these numbers to Joines, Walker and Kemp respectively.

The vehicle in which the BNP carries out its monthly “literature run” to its units all over the country can often be seen parked outside. The second-hand light blue long wheel base van formerly belonged to Omega Security, whose livery remains visible under the respray.

Whether the claimed TV studio is much use to Rod Gordon, who heads BNPtv, is doubtful. Deeside is a long way from his Westminster home.

Racist books and merchandise inside the Deeside warehouse

More recently the administration and distribution for the BNP’s music business, Great White Records, has merged with Excalibur, although its recording studio remains at the Market Weighton home of Dave Hannam, the BNP’s useless regional treasurer and owner of GWR. Dealing with GWR’s sales cannot have added much to Joines’s workload, as it still only offers four albums plus a few tatty t-shirts and other bits and pieces.

In June, Walker, who lives just around the corner from Kemp in Mancot, was relieved of his treasurer role and became the full-time national dispatch and logistics manager at the warehouse. Joines was promoted to the managing director’s position, freeing Kemp to attend to his other party duties, which include touring BNP branch meetings as the party’s best public speaker.

The BNP claims the move to Deeside enabled Excalibur to generate sales of £20,893.89 in the first six months of the new operation, while spending £7,273 on acquiring stock. Although Excalibur is responsible for 25% of the warehouse rent and rates, the BNP estimates it will make a net profit of £20,000 a year before staffing and other overhead costs, according to an internal report to the BNP’s Advisory Council.

Searchlight gives a leg-up to a BNP reluctant to advertise its presence

That Excalibur sells so much is hard to believe. Most of its books are available more cheaply from main-stream online businesses. No doubt a white mug sporting the words “Another white mug” is a popular line with party members but each one brings in only £4.50. Its “household goods” range is centred on Union Jack bedspreads, there are Enoch Powell t-shirts with a long extract from his “Rivers of Blood” speech, and of course the replica Victoria Crosses that recently caused so much furore.

Joines may have ideas for adding to the range. Active in the BNP for several years, he first came to public attention in 2003 when he stood in a council by-election in Ellesmere Port and has stood for the council several times since then, generally polling abysmally. He was in fifth position on the BNP list for the 2004 European election in the North West.

Within the BNP he has been the North West regional organiser and secretary and last year stood down as the Wirral group organiser.

Although Kemp is no longer running Excalibur, he remains in charge of marketing and unsurprisingly of its book selections. He will also oversee the planned introduction of Excalibur’s book publishing arm. No doubt his own works will be high on its list.

Searchlight

Treasurer shifted and more financial chaos as cash disappears into BNP black hole

• Main bank account down to rock-bottom
• Local accounts plundered to make up shortfall
• Continuing anger over Spanish jaunts
• Treasurer sidelined to BNP post office job
• Begging letters get more hysterical
• Panic over £30,000 gamble

There's more chaos in the British National Party this weekend as branches reel from the news that once again their accounts have been rifled to prop up an incompetent and extravagant party management.

Furious fundholders have been in touch with us to complain that their local accounts have been raided again because head office has disastrously overspent and can no longer manage to balance the books without thieving from the branches. Another fundholder with a direct line to the treasury has revealed that the main BNP account has hit rock-bottom and stood at less than £3000 a few days ago - not a great deal for a so-called 'major' political party.

BNP head office has often rightly been accused of mismanagement and worse, and the party's former treasurer John Walker (replaced yesterday by former Solihull organiser Jenny Noble) has been rumoured to have hit the bottle heavily as the party's financial situation continues to worsen. Having the incompetent moron Dave Hannam as his second in command can't have been a lot of help either.

Perhaps Walker can relax a little now as he seems to have been put in charge of the equivalent of the BNP post office, becoming the party's National Dispatch and Logistics Manager, a sinecure that looks more like a job that's been created in a hurry to keep him quiet and amenable rather than a job that could be done by any office staff who happen to be on duty.

Oddly, in the article on the BNP website explaining Walker's new job, this little gem appears:

'After months of growth and part way into a major restocking, it has become clear that the Excalibur and Great White Records merchandising operations (now under the same roof), together with the huge mail outs of BNP bulletins and publications, has become such an undertaking that a full-time National Dispatch and Logistics Manager is needed at our Deeside industrial unit.'

As neither Excalibur (the BNP's increasingly tatty merchandise arm) nor Great White Records (GWR) produce accounts that can be perused by the public (presumably because any such accounts would show the excrutiatingly low turnover of each operation) it's hard to know how busy Walker will actually be. Certainly he won't be run off his feet by Great White Records - we're told that sales rarely hit ten a week. But what makes the paragraph above more than usually interesting is the mention of Great White Records being part of the BNP's merchandising operation, when it was our belief that GWR was wholely and solely owned by Dopey Dave Hannam, though the BNP membership forked out £50,000 for the creation of the company. Do we assume that GWR makes a payment to the BNP for the use of its premises and/or its newly-installed National Dispatch and Logistics Manager? After all, the last accounts that were submitted to the Electoral Commission showed £9,618 paid to GWR by the BNP for 'sound assistance at venues'. Is this reciprocal or does the money flow just the one way? We suspect the latter.

Incompetence in the BNP is endemic but nowhere is it more evident than in the treasury. The File on Four programme, broadcast by Radio Four back in February, produced a whole raft of accusations of mismanagement, skullduggery and incompetence against Walker and his merry band of idiots, including the revelation that the BNP is behind with its PAYE payments (that is, the tax it takes from employee's wage packets that it is then supposed to pass on to HM Revenue and Customs). Naturally, the party still hasn't paid the bill and part of the reason for the sudden attack on branch funds was that Her Majesty was getting a tad ratty about the lack of revenue coming from the BNP. Not that the raid helped all that much - last month alone, the party paid out nearly forty thousand pounds on wages, expenses and part of the debt to the Revenue plus a further part-debt to Royal Mail. There's also a big question mark over exactly how much was taken from one place and how much actually made it to its rightful location. The current rumour is that £36,000 was lifted from the branches but only £24,000 made it into the appropriate account. We have no idea how true this is but all further information would be welcome.

Three further financial matters seem to be exciting our fundholders at the moment - the peculiar case of the RentSmart computers, the management jaunt to Spain and the £30,000 gamble. The RentSmart deal is small but peculiar (a bit like Dave Hannam) so we'll tackle that first.

It seems that the BNP signed up to a deal with a company named RentSmart a while back to purchase a number of computers and allied goodies for its operations (including no doubt the ones it claimed were pinched by Sadie Graham and Kenny Smith). Apparently whatever deal the party got eventually cost it around £1,000 per month, an astonishing amount considering that RentSmart examples a Toshiba laptop from only £3 per week on its web page! The RentSmart deal includes a brokerage fee and a commission on the insurance that the rentee (?) takes out as part of the agreement, and if we consider the claims we've heard in the past that all key personnel were issued with laptops and that the new operational base in Wales has been fully equipped with PC World's finest, the £1,000 a month doesn't seem quite so unlikely after all.

Nevertheless, a thousand pounds a month is a lot of dosh and questions are being asked about the intelligence of a three-year rental contract that costs more than it would to pop along to the average computer store and buy something off the shelf, incurs brokerage charges and is for something that most party members consider extravagant to say the least. As one of our correspondents pointed out to us; 'If you haven't already got a computer of your own, you probably don't need one. And if you have, you've already got one and you don't need another one'.

Bad feeling seems to be rife in the BNP at the moment and a lot of it is still revolving around the management jaunts to Spain back in March and April, in that crucial period just before the elections. It was noted that it was Griffin's chums and favourites who went off for their holiday in the sun, and the weak explanation that it was 'cheaper to send people there than to hire suitable facilities in Britain' continues to rankle with a membership that feels it is constantly being harassed with increasingly bizarre and amateurish begging letters (see the tatty Truth Truck begging letter on the left) that are less effective each time a new one is sent out amid continuing claims that the members need to provide just a little more cash for that one big push that just never seems to happen. We've received a number of emails referring to the Spanish management training trip over the past few weeks, a few of which make the perfectly valid point that Griffin's barn was renovated at enormous expense out of BNP funds for precisely this purpose but never actually seems to be used by anyone.

Perhaps the greatest concern of our correspondents is the £30,000 bill that the party could be lumbered with for taking Sadie Graham and co to court - a huge gamble of Nick Griffins which even his closest allies find hard to explain away. It's clear to everyone in the party who knows anything at all about Sadie Graham that she has no money of her own and even if the party wins its High Court case against her, the bill it will still be liable for is going to be enormous - the estimated £30,000, which Griffin told the judge is what it had cost to bring the case against the so-called rebels. Gilbert Davies, a firm of lawyers at Welshpool used by Griffin for this action, are in a rather better position to sue than the average creditor but what seems to really be worrying our correspondents is whether the costs are for Griffin to pay or for the party itself. If the latter is the case, it could well be that the end is nigh - unless some mystery benefactor suddenly shows up with a large wodge of cash.

It has been suggested that Griffin is going to go all out to win the North West seat in next year's Euro election in the hope of bailing the party out of its financial mess but this will require some serious fund-raising beforehand which the branches are not likely to welcome, and a couple of additional problems are emerging that might complicate things next May. The England First Party is busily raising money to stand against Griffin, as is former BNP rebel Bev Jones/Scott, who is planning to stand against him as an Independent.

Things are not looking good for the BNP - again. And once again, it looks like financial incompetence is at the bottom of all the party's woes. But then that's what often happens when you give a former bankrupt and chancer the keys to the safe.

Dave Hannam and Mark Collett - the Little and Large of the BNP

In his latest and possibly dreariest-ever blog posting, Nick Griffin mentions the BNP's dream team, Mark Collett and Dave Hannam, peering out of one of the windows of the New Kimberley Hotel at Blackpool during the demonstration we had there while the party's 'annual conference' was taking place.

Despite being ordered not to by the police and the party itself, these two morons chose to stare out at the demonstrators, laughing inanely, rather in the manner of a couple of small children being naughty. According to Griffin, this infantile behaviour earned them 'a verbal wigging', which I presume to mean a pat on the head and a mild demand for them to behave themselves in future or they wouldn't get any pocket money.

In fact, Griffin goes to great lengths to defend their behaviour, claiming that they are both 'very valuable members of our central team', which may come as something of a surprise to the vast number of BNP members who have watched their careers with a growing sense of unreality. The implication is, of course, that they are so essential to the BNP that their misdemeanours can be largely ignored - which should be little comfort to the likes of Geoffrey Wallace.

Mark Collett is in a class of his own, even in a party packed to the rafters with incompetent buffoons, so we'll leave him for a moment and just take a quick look at Dave Hannam.

Hannam runs the disastrous Great White Records (GWR), the alleged musical wing of the BNP, which features such timeless classics as Paul Cromie on the mandolin (comparable, so we've been told, to George Formby on the banjo), and Colin Auty singing rubbishy racist songs about how much he likes to annoy MPs. Most of the songs on GWR's mercifully short list seem to have been penned by Griffin himself, who would do better to stop writing talentless crap and start hassling the party's treasurer to get the accounts in to the Electoral Commission, which has been waiting for them for over six months beyond the due date.

Rumour has it that GWR cost around £50,000 to set up and consumes around £1000/1200 per month in running costs. As it produces hardly any recordings, we can only assume that most of those costs cover rent and wages - something of a sinecure for Hannam at the expense of the membership.

It will come as no surprise to regular readers of this blog that the accounts for Great White Records are long overdue - in fact as far as we can see from a quick search of records at Companies House, no accounts have ever been submitted (in two years). Hannam is also deputy-treasurer of the BNP, so no real surprise there. For a party that purports to want to run the country, it doesn't seem to be doing a good job of managing itself at the moment.

Dave Hannam is regarded as something of a joke to fascists and anti-fascists alike but it should be remembered that he was convicted a few years back of 'publishing or distributing racially inflammatory material'.

Our low opinion of Hannam is reflected by those members of the BNP who have had to work with him, particularly Ian Dawson, former head of group support. Dawson, in his resignation letter, was scathing about Hannam, describing him variously as completely incompetent and a liar.

Dawson was even more scathing about Collett, who he describes as deceitful, devious, arrogant, spiteful, greedy and a moron. According to the Dawson letter, Collett was directly guilty of causing the resignation of Andrew Spence, which itself led to the resignation of Scott McLean, Griffin's Deputy Chairman. Even without these two high-profile resignations, Collett has caused havoc, repeatedly upsetting Sadie Graham at Advisory Council meetings, deliberately sabotaging Chris Beverley's Excalibur business (which sells overpriced tat to gullible BNP members) and calling Kenny Smith a liar on several occasions.

Collett leads a charmed life - or he has so far. The appalling film Young, Nazi and Proud should have seen him kicked out of the BNP, which has spent the past decade attempting to hide its Nazi leanings. If that didn't do it, his anti-gay comments in Russell Brand's Naziboy (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3) should have done it, but sadly didn't.

Not even Ian Dawson's revelation that Collett has said on several occasions and in front of witnesses that 'if I don't get my way I will go Queen's evidence on Nick' has had the desired effect of having this idiot booted out of the party.

Now, however, things might be changing.

Yesterday saw the opening of a new blog entitled 'Enough is enough'. According to its statement, 'it's time to eject Collett and Hannam from the BNP before their arrogance, lies and incompetence brings [sic] us all down. So come on Nick, enough is enough!'

Clearly, there are some members of the party who have reached the end of their tether. A fuller statement on the site says;

'This site is not meant as attack on the BNP. It has come about because of the widespread damage being inflicted by this due on the Party and the shocking lack of action taken by the BNP (or more accurately Nick Griffin) to sort the problem out.

Morale is at an all-time low despite an all-time high number of members and councillors.

EIE believes it is time to start publicly exposing the pair in the hope that action will finally be taken to rid the BNP of these sleazy, lying, incompetent scumbags.

The BNP has lost enough good people already and we don't want to lose any more. It's time they went instead!'

Hannam and Collett have avoided censure for a long time though word has it that they both received written warnings after the 2006 conference when it was alleged by an awful lot of people both inside and out of the BNP that they got a couple of schoolgirls (variously claimed to be between thirteen and fifteen) into the hotel. Since this event, there has been a campaign by disgruntled BNP members to get rid of them, though it has been slow to grind into action.

Whether this event actually happened in the way it is suggested, is debatable. Certainly Hannam and Collett were in a hotel room with a couple of young females - that much is clear from a snippet of film we were sent a few weeks ago, though it's probably best if we say nothing more about that for the moment just in case any criminal charges are in the offing.

Suffice to say that Hannam and Collett, the would-be Little and Large of the BNP, are in for a rough ride over the next few weeks. We look forward to any future revelations about their behaviour with eager anticipation.

Great White bites off more than it can chew?

Yet another BNP business venture hits hard times - and far worse are coming.

The terrible Great White Records that the British National Party started up to exploit what Nick Griffin perceived as a largely untapped market for 'patriotic' music, appears to be floundering.

Nick Griffin, as you'll have read here before, has had an interest in the far-right music scene for years, formerly being involved in the Rock Against Communism (RAC) events back in the 80s. Indeed one RAC open air festival, starring the notorious nazi band Skrewdriver led by the even more notorious Ian Donaldson, took place at Griffin's father's farm.

Griffin always saw massive potential in so-called White Noise music, forming the White Noise Club, which back in those heady days was steered by, among others, the National Front's Patrick Harrington (now the BNP's fake union Solidarity's General Secretary - or possibly ex-General Secretary), Derek Holland and Nick Griffin, who can reliably be found wherever there is a personal profit to be made.

After a split in the amoeba-like National Front it emerged that the White Noise Club had not been paying royalties due to the bands, had been ripping off supporters of the bands ordering records through their mail order service and that Rock-o-Rama in Germany was owed around £3000 for merchandise obtained via the WNC. Totally disgusted with the way Harrington, Griffin and Holland had gone about things with their 'gross dishonesty', Donaldson handed in his letter of resignation to White Noise and the National Front, with most of the other White Noise bands following him. This heralded the end of the White Noise Club, with Donaldson going off to start and star in the extremely profitable Blood and Honour music scene.

There's a quote from Griffin that we use frequently, mainly to remind the members of his own party who are looking in that they are there simply to be exploited; 'In increasingly hard economic times, a group of people the size of the BNP and its support base can provide a significant assured market for a variety of small businesses.'

With that attitude, Griffin's eternal and never-satisfied greed and his past interest in the financial possibilities that arise out of the music scene, particularly where there is an enormous and largely unexploited user-base, it was inevitable that Griffin would eventually have another go and this he did with the formation of Great White Records back in February of 2006.

The whole point of GWR was to make money for the BNP and it tries to achive this via 'the cause of spreading positive patriotism', which we can assume means a load of racist tosh wrapped up in music and the Union Jack. This is confirmed by a statement from GWR itself; 'GWR is determined to create the musical revolution amongst our people, especially the young that will educate our people to the issues of concern, most namely the thinly-disguised genocide of the indigenous natives of the British Isles perpetrated by the policy of present government pushing mass immigration and multi-culturalism on the British native population.'

And so on.

What the membership of the party doesn't generally know is that the GWR studios in Leeds (shared with the BNP's Excalibur books scam) cost over £1000 a month to run - roughly £12000 per year which is equivalent to the annual membership fees of 400 members. And what precisely does the BNP get for that large investment? A few third-rate songs penned by the Leonard Cohen of the far-right Nick Griffin, BNP councillor Colin Auty singing a racist song about how many Asians there are in Dewsbury and Lee Haggan droning another Griffin song 'about the domination by foreign cultures of many of our cities and how one day we will reclaim them for the native people'. For God's sake.

All that rubbish aside, we'll repeat the question we asked - what does the membership get for the party's investment of £12000 (400 membership fees) in Great White Records per year? The answer is, very little.

Even those tone-deaf people who actually buy the crap GWR sells are rarely getting to listen to it. We hear rumours from all directions that credit card payments are being made and cheques are being cashed but the products ordered rarely arrive. This problem (for the customers) seems to be getting worse if all the reports we've heard are correct - and they're going to get even worse still in the very near future as Excalibur stops sharing the space (and the rent) with GWR and moves off to Wrexham, leaving GWR boss Dave Hannam to either cover the whole rent from fast-dwindling orders or move everything into his garden shed (if he has one) and run the whole thing from there.

Great White Records looks to be yet another one of the BNP's subsidiary businesses/organisations that's well on it's way out. The ridiculous Christian Council of Britain looks like it's dead or very close, Solidarity has hit bad account and organisational problems and now Great White seems to be rapidly sinking for the third time.

Strangely, whenever one thinks of former bankrupt Nick Griffin and his business abilities, the words 'organise', piss-up' and 'brewery' immediately come to mind.