BNP Fight Club

BNP members (and the wider public ) finally got to see the much sought after footage of the BNP's fractured leadership rounding on each other angrily, after the footage was finally put on the net last night.

The bitter confrontation happened in Brussels a couple of weeks ago when a group of BNP members on a trip to the European Parliament at the tax payers expense, were being treated to a Q&A session by Yorks & Humberside MEP Andrew Brons, when in popped the uninvited Nick Griffin to launch a quite extraordinary attack on the people there.

Most of his vitriol was directed at Michael Barnbrook, the BNP's self seeking "sleaze buster" who never quite seemed capable of turning his attentions onto his own party leader, until recently. Described as a "show pony", Barnbrook was given the full "hairdryer" treatment by Griffin, while last year's beaten leadership challenger, Eddy Butler, was accused of being a liar. For his own efforts, Griffin even accused Brons of publishing a website "full of lies".

News of Griffin's decision to hold his EGM on June 26th (as exclusively revealed here), also came as somewhat as a shock to Brons, as he was initialy scheduled to speak to party rebels in the North East on that day, on the very subject of a need to call and EGM...

Thanks to Nick Lowles at HOPE not Hate / Searchlight

The videos - part one and part two

Far-Right Talkboards: A Whole Other World Out There...

I wouldn't make a very good spy. In 1985, I thought it would be a good idea to pop along to a pub in Ilkeston and melt into the background during a National Front meeting.

I'd have got away with it, too, if I didn't have long hair, flares and an Afghan coat. If nothing else, the smell would've given me away.

A couple of weeks ago I registered on of the Far-Right Talkboards. Under my own name (I've never really seen the point of pseudonyms), with no hidden agenda, and no motive other than wanting to understand why people think the things they do (and this particular Board seemed to have a few Members who might be able to actually argue the toss, rather than just go for name-calling and dark, sinister – if seemingly never acted upon – threats).

When the World History of Pointless Exercises is written (presumably by Giles Brandreth, with an hilarious forward by Richard Stilgoe), there might be room for a tiny sidebar sandwiched somewhere between a chocolate manufacturer changing the pronunciation of their name from “Nessuls” to “Ness-Lay” and the entire acting career of David Bowie. That's where you'll find My Heroic Foray Into The Alternative Universe Of The Ultra Right.

Ultra Right, I found for starters, isn't so much a political delineation as a philosophical stance: Most people are willing to accept that they've got it wrong occasionally. It's not very nice, but it goes with the whole “Being Human” territory. Not these people, though. On any subject, no matter how trivial. They aren't just “right” they're very, very, very right. All the time. About everything. Loudly. In their own imaginations.

Call me naïve, but I actually believed it may be possible to engage in some debate: A sensible exchange of views, coolly yet cogently expressed, based around a central theme. But waiting for a suitable juncture to drop my two penn'orth in was like hanging around outside a phone booth for a tramp to stop having a dump inside it: The waiting around was unpleasant enough, and I wouldn't have fancied going in afterwards, anyway.

The nature of the “debate” on the Forum often follows a pattern:

A) This is my point of view.

B) Frankly, I disagree with your point of view.

A) Sorry to disappoint you, but I still hold to my original point of view.

B) As do I.

C) Neither of you are True Nationalists, unlike myself, and I have it on good authority that you both enjoy the practise of ____________ , which you are wont to pursue in the company of _________, who likes to ___________ while you both insert ___________ into one another's ___________.

From this point onwards, things tend to go downhill rapidly.

The Lunar Society it ain't.

One of the few interesting things about the Board is the insight it gives into the various splits and factions among the Far-Right. There's the...

BNP Loyalists (“Griffinites”). These are the people, most of whom have joined the Boards only recently, who see their job as being to derail any debate that may be going on as soon as it becomes uncomfortable to their stance. Which is all the time. Their typical tactic, to this end, is to either use distraction, by sending things off on an entirely unrelated (but harmless) tangent (“Has anyone seen any good movies lately?”), or to just take the straightforward “I seen your Mum _________ with a __________!” approach.

There are the BNP Reformers (“Butlerites”). These are still Members, but detest Griffin and genuinely believe that they will somehow be able to wrest control of the dying enterprise from his tightly grasped claw.

Michael Barnbrook (“of the Yard” - I always expect him to end his posts with “Mind how you go” or “Keep 'em peeled”...) is a Reformer (and of the minority on the Board who actually seems to understand the concept of “debate”). He's also someone with form (to dig into my own vast experience of Met' argot: years of watching The Sweeney finally paying off there...) within his Party. Whatever the role he actually played in the Expenses Scandal (which will be debated for years to come), being on the side of the Taxpayer isn't something to be knocked, whatever your politics. He does, however, display a touchingly childlike innocence in his fond belief that, should he become Leader (he intends to stand), there might actually be something to inherit other than a pile of unpayable iou's and a brand name slightly less respected than Enron.

As a sidenote: The Griffinites routinely refer to Butler as “Brothel” Butler, or just “Buttler”. Waggish sophisticates that they are.

Then there are the Unaligned Nationalists. They aren't members of any faction, but they've done more for “Nationalism” over the years than anyone else and they're more patriotic than You. Fact. End Of. Got It?

Unaligned (now, at any rate) is one Jim Dowson, who recently posted (as “The Bruce”) a series of incoherent, grotesque rants and taunts. Aside from their entertainment value (“Griffo is the mighty king and I am his prince!”), they show his mental state to the World better than a team of burly men chasing him with a straitjacket and a butterfly net.

A recent showing on the Board is the BFP. Indeed, the Board is about the only place they exist (yesterday's “Launch” doesn't seem to have happened) and, as their “raft of policies” are distinguishable from the BNP's only with DNA analysis and a Hadron Collider, they've got their work cut out for themselves in making any kind of impact whatsoever.

And then there's (ex-BNP Webmaster) Simon Bennett. To describe him as “a bit of a strange one” is like saying Howard Hughes had the odd "funny little way" about him. In the days and weeks following his defection from the Party (a result of the Marmite fiasco), he was a Very Angry Man. But this was the kind of anger that soon turns into a Crusade For Justice. I have a friend who got a parking ticket in 2003 and has since compiled a dossier on that particular parking space that could rival the Collected Papers and Investigations of the Royal Society for exactitude, detail and pedantry. On the one hand, his Crusade against the Parking Enforcement Department of Nottingham City Council has paid off – no warden will ever mess with him again. On the other hand, he doesn't get invited to many parties anymore.

So with Bennett. At first, he seemed to be an interesting character; knowing where the bodies were buried, and always (it seemed) on the brink of marking them on a big map. But little more has come of it, and he's become yet another “Nationalist”: Albeit the self-proclaimed Guru of the Boards, who will shout down any perceived opponent and endlessly defend his own stance with an obsession (at times he seems to be on there 24/7) bordering on the unwell, and a (self-proclaimed) taste for violence and threats that doesn't so much “border” as “take up residence at the centre of” psychotic (a recent missive to someone who seems to have irked the touchy fellow ran: “Post one more time and my bat will connect with your f*****ng head you c***. I know your IP and your address you f*****g c**t”). As an asset to any emergent party (he's closely associated with the pre-doomed BFP) he can be ranked alongside Lee Barnes (whose rantings have already led to the resignation – after just over a week – of their much-trumpeted, straight-arrow Treasurer, John Savage).

If anything, the Boards demonstrate that the Far-Right are just as good (if not even better) at falling out and fragmenting as the Far-Left ever were. Once upon a time, there were three of us would (attempt to) flog the Socialist Worker (pronounced “Sooooo-Shlist Work-Ah!”) in Derby. If we'd only devoted a fraction of the energy to plotting against Thatcher that we spent planning one another's downfall, the Old Bag would've been finished by 1986.

The Boards will continue to be a useful resource for us. It's on there that the splits, the bickering, the petty squabbles and the (very) occasional useful lead are laid bare.

I think I'll rather just watch from the sidelines from now on, though...

Barnbrook announces a new leadership challenge.

No, not Little Dicky, the other one.

The BNP's very own super dooper sleazebuster Michael Barnbrook has announced his intention to run for the BNP leadership next year in this statement published on another forum:-

Leadership Challenge

I am very concerned at all this talk of starting up a new political party. It will not work. Eddy Butler would be the first person to tell you that. The British National Party is a brand name and with the right leader, who knows what might happen. There are hundreds of thousands of voters out there who would vote for the British National Party if it had a leader who carried no baggage. In just over one year I will be able to put myself forward as a leadership challenger. I carry no baggage and with the support of commited nationalists such as Nick Cass and Eddy Butler I am prepared to put myself forward as a leadership challenger. I urge you all to hang on in there. I am no spring chicken but totally committed saving the British National Party.

Michael Barnbrook
BNP Sleazebuster


Now my first impressions of the statement are that he isn't aware of the BNP's current rules about their leadership challenges as "In just over one year I will be able to put myself forward as a leadership challenger" really means he won't be able to challenge Griffin until the summer of 2012. Unless of cause it's a cock up on his part and that really won't inspire confidence in his campaign.
After looking closely at how Eddy Butler has operated in his leadership challenge over these last few months there is no way that post went anywhere near Butler unless he was pissed up in a brothel.

Blundering Jefferson is a Butler asset

Nick Griffin's characteristically underhanded attempts to forestall a challenge to his leadership suffered another blow at the weekend when BNP "sleazebuster" Michael Barnbrook (the man who single-handedly exposed the parliamentary expenses scandal, according to himself) declared in favour of Butler and his attempt to force a leadership election.

With founding members Richard Edmonds and Valerie Tyndall (widow of previous BNP leader John Tyndall) also supporting Butler and the challenge, it is clear that support for Butler (or, at least, for change at the top) is cross-factional and gaining in momentum.

The Griffin camp is deeply worried that Eddy Butler appears to be capable of gaining the 20% voting member nominations he needs and is looking afresh at the self-defeating tactics so far deployed to halt Butler. This may be part of the reason the disgraceful Eddy Butler Exposed and BNP Truth Chronicles websites have been suspended (but not, we note, taken down).

The online equivalent of the infantile factional tactics employed by Griffin in his unending internal National Front disputes of the 1980s were backfiring badly on the BNP leader, and were taken seriously only by fully paid up idiots of the Paul Morris stamp. The majority of those who pass for "moderate" in the BNP were appalled by the existence of the websites, which probably did as much to shake the scales from the eyes of many in regard to Nick Griffin's probity and state of mind as anything said by Eddy Butler.

Suspending two counter-productive websites only when what had been blindingly obvious to everybody else finally blinded Griffin and his shrinking band of supporters is unlikely to be the end of the Griffinite dirty tricks campaign. If anything there will be a stepping-up of the all out effort to prevent the Butler challenge coming to fruition.

The favoured course at the moment seems to be the invention of a clearly unconstitutional "official" nominations process that will be entirely in the hands of Griffin henchman, bully and state education failure Clive Jefferson. Jefferson instructs that he will issue nomination forms (Butler, operating within the terms of the BNP constitution, is issuing his own), which must be returned to the central party.

This is a naked attempt to intimidate the membership at a one-to-one level. Any individual signing and returning an "official" nomination paper is directly telling Griffin and his agents that he or she does not support Griffin (polite fictions to the contrary notwithstanding). The obvious suspicion must be that those returning individual nomination papers will be "worked on", smeared, find their lives within and beyond the BNP suddenly made difficult, and, of course, there is every chance of the nominations being "lost in the post".

To circumvent this, Eddy Butler insists that his supporters use only his nominations form, to be returned to him, presumably so that a thorough witnessed auditing can be performed prior to submission - but of course, this will only work if Griffin accepts the legitimacy of the "unofficial" forms. If he does not, and reneges on a constitution that is largely his own self-serving handiwork, then an acrimonious, costly, damaging and highly public court case beckons.

Michael Barnbrook (no relation to Richard) appears to be miffed that the BNP has not accorded him the fame of which he believes himself deserving as "the individual responsible for starting the Parliamentary Expenses Scandal". In an egocentric statement posted on Eddy Butler's BNP Leadership Challenge 2010 website, Barnbrook expends rather more words whining about his lack of recognition and its supposedly deleterious effect on the BNP vote than he does in explaining his vague reasons for supporting Butler. Perhaps if Nick had tickled his ego more often..?

Barnbrook claims that he has been "inundated with telephone calls" asking him not to sign Eddy Butler’s nomination form, and repeats the widespread rumours of challenge supporters being refused admission to meetings - "rumours" that have been established to be facts.

Newly appointed party number three Clive Jefferson is conducting the Griffinite defence with all the delicacy of a crazed elephant wearing badly fitting hob-nailed boots in a room full of mice. By many accounts a man whose boundless ego dwarfs a barely detectable intellect, there may be some truth in the rumour that Jefferson possesses any brain matter at all only as a handy method of preventing his skull from caving in. His heavy-handed blundering approach to the BNP's volunteers (the ones who pay his wages), especially across the north-west, has been unnecessarily divisive.

Jefferson's typically blunt warning that he will sack any north-western BNP official who helps facilitate the gathering of nominations for Butler's challenge is inept and short-sighted, since it will force officials to keep their own counsel and disguise the extent of Butler's support in the region. The authoritarian language and contemptuous tone used cannot fail to produce a negative reaction - the poor bloody infantry in any organisation have an aversion to being treated and spoken to as if they were dogs, especially when the person barking out the orders and issuing the threats is already widely disliked, can be seen to have been promoted far beyond his abilities, and in comparison to themselves is a relative newcomer (one with a questionable past, at that).

If Eddy Butler ever wanted for a good recruiting sergeant he could not have wished for better than the lumpen Jefferson, whose hate for Butler is all too obviously personal and which clouds what little judgement he has.

But Nick Griffin has been so good as to provide Butler with several recruiting sergeants. The two suspended websites were arguably the most efficient in this respect, closely followed by the hysterical outpourings of meddler Paul Morris, and lately the blatant interference of serial failure Patrick Harrington, terrified that a Butler win will be the end of his fake Solidarity "union", forcing him to rely on the state handouts he has been drawing for some years.

Recently we pointed out that in setting such a high aiming point as the 20% voting member nominations qualification (and other dissuasive little fixes), Nick Griffin was ensuring that a challenger must be better connected and network far harder and more professionally than any real or putative challenger of the past, and that such a challenger would be deadly serious for being left no other choice but to be deadly serious in the campaign to raise those 20% nominations.

Griffin is now reaping the rewards of his own overweening hubris, and deservedly so. He shiftily made the constitutional changes he believed would make him leader for life (without protest from Eddy Butler, it must be said), but lacked the foresight to consider the consequences.

If - and it is a more than usually conjectural if - Eddy Butler obtains his 20%, or something close to it, Griffin's authority over large swathes of what remains of the BNP membership will be finished. Should the challenge go ahead Butler should be able to rely on at least twice, and almost certainly greater than that proportion of votes in the election proper. Butler can do it, just.

In the event that Butler does depose Griffin there arises the question of what happens next? The party's income has fallen to a trickle; currently it is broke, almost certainly insolvent, and cannot even afford to pay its own staff. Come October, when Butler would assume the leadership, the BNP will be in an even more wretched financial condition, exacerbated by a shrinking membership and teased by a querulous and vengeful Griffin. Butler and his team will be left asking themselves if the game really was worth the candle.

There is also the question of how Griffin and the BNP will be teased apart; on a Butler-supporting forum a poster points out that Griffin and the BNP are like Siamese twins, and that an operation to separate them may prove fatal to both.

We can but hope.

BNP say right to use force

Two Havering BNP candidates have backed the forced ejection of a national newspaper's reporter from a meeting in Elm Park.

General Election candidate, Michael Barnbrook, who is standing for Dagenham and Rainham, and Robert Bailey, a Romford candidate in the local elections, have both condoned the treatment of The Times' reporter Dominic Kennedy at the hands of their security guards at a pub on February 14.

Mr Barnbrook said: "The whole thing was stage managed by the reporter because he was asked to leave the premises and refused. The law states that you can remove a trespasser from the premises using as much force as necessary."

Mr Kennedy was invited to the meeting, but was forced out when the party's London Assembly member, Richard Barnbrook, became angry over an article in The Times. Security guards shoved Mr Kennedy out of the pub, with one even grabbing his nose.

Michael Barnbrook, a retired police inspector, said: "He was struggling violently and that is why he had a number of security officers around him. He was not assaulted, he was legally removed from the premises. He had the option to walk out unaided but chose not to."

Mr Bailey said: "A lot of people that work for The Times are very ugly and nasty. They have a distinct agenda and he was told to leave and we should have the right to evict anyone if it is a private meeting."

The extraordinary general meeting was held following the BNP's vote to allow black and Asian people into the party. The party was forced to change its rules after it was threatened with an injunction by the Equality and Human Rights Commission.

But Gooshays ward BNP Cllr Mark Logan, who was not allowed into the meeting because his membership had expired, condemned the violence. He said: "The reporter should not have been man handled but should have been ushered out in a dignified manner and I was upset about what had happened because I do not believe in violence."

Barking, Dagenham and Havering Together has been set up in the wake of the meeting to fight the BNP. It is concerned about the party's rise in Barking and Dagenham and its encroachment into Havering. For further information, call 07973 421463.

Romford and Havering Post