Violent Racist Runs Penrith BNP Campaign

Kevin Clark's current BNP membership card

The BNP like to tell people that they are a mainstream political party following the election in June of their leader Nick Griffin to the European Parliament.

Griffin has just recently unveiled his new office in Cumbria which is to be used as a base for the North West region that as an MEP he represents. However take a careful look at the North West region and you will find the same old violent racists within the rank and file of the BNP.

The BNP are contesting a by election to be held on October 8th in the Penrith West ward of Eden District Council. This follows the resignation last month of former council leader Colin Nineham. Of key importance to this campaign is the local Penrith organiser Kevin Clark who was recently described by Nick Griffins new European communications officer Martin Wingfield as “ A great BNP stalwart ”

Far right stalwart he maybe but Clark is also a convicted self confessed racist.

In 1996 Clark was found guilty of malicious wounding and jailed for 18 months. Clark was convicted following an unprovoked attack on a Gambian Rugby player Osman Cham during a rugby tournament being held in Penrith. Clark shouted “Sambo”, as well as making monkey noises.

When Mr Cham went over to remonstrate, Clark struck him over the head with a bottle. The wound needed five stitches and Mr Cham fainted from loss of blood. Clark showed no remorse and admitted that he was a racist bigot.

“I don’t like coloured people”, he told police.

His spell of porridge seems to have made little difference however as Clark still appears to be the virulent racist. On his Facebook page Clark likes to mock the Holocaust by making sick jokes about notorious Nazi extermination camp Auschwitz. Over one million people perished within the death camp yet Clark feels it is a subject to mock.

Clark posted "Will people stop sending me Auschwitz jokes, my poor grandfather died a horrible death at Auschwitz...he fell out the machine gun tower".

Another of Clarks racist postings says "When is the only time you should wink at a Muslim? When your (sic) taking aim at the cunt".

Clark also finds time after a hard days campaigning to take part in Facebook groups such as “FTP- Fuck The Pope” and “We are proud to call ourselves Aryan”

No doubt the BNP will try their tried and trusted trick of declaring that Clark is not a member of the party and they are unable to find his details on their databases. Well the bad news for the BNP is that Kevin Clark has posted a picture of his current membership card on his Facebook profile and it is still very much valid.

Once again we await the immediate expulsion of Kevin Clark from the BNP.

Hope not Hate

What lies beneath?

This article was submitted by one of our readers, Wes. We welcome any contributions from our supporters (as long as those contributions conform to the law and are in reasonably good taste). Please send your articles to us via email.

Last night at about 1230 I went to bed, already weary that Yorkshire had elected a BNP MEP. In some ways it didn’t hit me as hard as it could have done at this point, the fact it wasn’t the BNP leader Griffin, but in fact a leading figure within the BNP who Griffin sees as troublesome gave me some hope. Hope that if Griffin didn’t get a seat, and it was looking like he wouldn’t the BNP could be torn apart by infighting between these two. So we now had now elected one thanks to Yorkshire. But my own sweet Manchester wouldn’t, would it?

I awoke with hope, to find Nick Griffin had been elected as a North West MEP, by the skin of his teeth (about 5000 votes). The turnouts were around 35% and the percent of the BNP votes were 8 for Manchester and 9.8 for Yorkshire. Meaning on the turnout, and if you accept the voting pattern and generalise (I know it’s not a perfect science, but bear with me), around 1 in 14 people in Manchester voted BNP and 1 in 10 in Yorkshire and the Humber.

So travelling to work on the bus I looked around, who out of these seemingly normal looking people had voted BNP? The bus was full, so at least 2 or 3 by the law of averages would have done. Was it the young mum, the old couple sitting near me, or even the guy I know through friends sat near the back to whom I nodded a greeting as I got on the bus.

It is impossible to tell what lies beneath. I know there are some very obvious BNP supporters keeping the stereotype alive, we all know them; the skinheads, tattoos etc. Yet the BNP received a total of over 250,000 votes between these two regions alone – they can't all be tattooed skinheads, can they?

But were all these BNP voters actually voting for the party they supported – or was it a protest vote against the backdrop of the expenses scandal? The Lib Dems and Tory vote hardly moved, though Labour's vote fell by nearly 8%. So it is interesting when you look at the figures to see that the BNP vote fell in both regions from the numbers from the last election in 2004. So how did they win the seats on a falling vote? Well largely because of that falling Labour vote really, around 400,000 votes were lost by Labour in these two regions since the last election. Nowhere near this amount of votes were picked up by the other parties. Meaning due to the PR system used in this election, Labour's stay at home votes meant even on a falling vote count the other parties still increased their percentage share of the vote and this in turn let the BNP in.

So it is of at least a little comfort that the BNP didn’t win due to receiving a huge rise in votes despite the record amounts they had spent on this campaign, but the simple fact that the governing party couldn’t get its vote out on the day. Things could be much, much worse - imagine if the BNP vote had increased dramatically? I agree it is of little comfort, but it still leaves us with that essential ingredient, that is, in the end, all we need to continue this fight and win this battle against the fascist BNP - HOPE.

EU elections: BNP's Nick Griffin wins seat in European parliament

Furious scenes at Manchester town hall when Tory MEP describes BNP as 'aberration' and condemns Griffin's success as sad day for British politics

Protesters prevent BNP leader Nick Griffin from entering Manchester
town hall for the European parliament election results for the
North West tonight. Photograph: Manchester Evening News

Nick Griffin, the leader of the BNP, was today elected to the European parliament.

The far-right leader won a seat in the North West region. Earlier Andrew Brons, another British National party politician won in the Yorkshire and Humber area. It is the first time the party has had an MEP elected.

Griffin's victory was only confirmed shortly before 2am after a two-hour cliffhanger over the last of the North West's eight seats saw the Greens fall narrowly behind the BNP and Ukip just failed to pull ahead enough to win a third seat.

There were furious scenes at the declaration when the highest polling candidate, Sir Robert Atkins, described the BNP as "an aberration" and condemned Griffin's success as sad day for British politics. He was followed by Labour's Arlene McCarthy, who came second in votes cast and told the crowd at Manchester town hall that the BNP was "a party whose members include convicted rapists".

Both won loud applause – but also jeers from BNP supporters in the Banqueting Hall who shouted "Get back to the trough!" and "It's democracy – you're already insulting the voters again."

When Griffin's turn came to speak, all the other candidates took the unprecedented step of walking off the platform in protest. The BNP leader laid into a "liberal elite which has built a dam, a wall of lies which has grown ever taller and ever thicker over the years to stop ordinary people protesting about the removal of their freedom."

He added: "Well tonight that wall has been broken down in the North West and Yorkshire by hundreds of thousands of voters."

Brons's victory in Yorkshire saw the highest BNP poll, 9.8%, with Griffin getting 8%. The party polled 8.9% in the North East and 8.6% in both the West and East Midlands, but the share was not enough to win a place in those regions.

They polled 6.1% in the Eastern region, 5.5% in London, 5.4% in Wales, 4.4% in the South East and 3.9% in the South West.

Brons took a seat that was previously Labour's second in Yorkshire, as the expenses debacle and internecine warfare in Labour turned traditional supporters away in droves. The Labour vote crashed from 45% to 25% in Barnsley, where the BNP share climbed from 8% to 17%.

Griffin welcomed the victory as a vindication of the party's claim that "we're here to look after our people because no one else is". He said that feelings were particularly strong in Yorkshire, where former pit communities felt "at the bottom of the heap".

Pointing to other big rises in the BNP vote to 15% in Rotherham and nearly 12% in Doncaster, Griffin said: "This is ordinary decent people in Yorkshire kicking back against racism, because racism in this country is now directed overwhelmingly against people who look like me."

Griffin, who had to reach Manchester town hall for his own count in a police van after anti-fascist demonstrators blocked his convoy and hurled eggs, said immigration had become harmful to Britain, particularly with the spread of radical Islam. "Take Bradford – it isn't immigration that's happening there, it's colonialism," he said.

His own evening was one long lurch between advances and retreats for the BNP as declarations came in from the North West's 39 counting areas. In a reverse effect to Yorkshire's, support fell in areas where the party had done well in the past. In Burnley, where they won one of their first English county council seats on Thursday, it dropped from 17% to 15%.

But the slump in Labour's vote was common to the North West and Yorkshire, leaving the battle for the last of the region's eight seats open until the very end. After the Conservatives had won two, and Labour, Ukip and the Liberal Democrats one each, the BNP and the Greens were at level pegging for the final two hours of counting.

Brons said after the Yorkshire count in Leeds: "The onslaught against us has been more than against any other party in recent times, but somehow we've overcome it. Despite the lies, despite the money, despite the misrepresentation, we've been able to win through."

A dapper, besuited figure who adopts the low-key approach encouraged by Griffin, Brons retired last year as a politics and government teacher at Harrogate College. He then re-entered active politics for the first time since standing five times for the National Front in the 1970s after a brief spell as its leader, which ended in internal quarrels. He joined the British National Socialist party as a teenager.

Guardian

Right and Wrong

The British National Party is both an ideological disgrace and hopeless in practice. The main parties must do more to encourage voting in the European elections

“Britain today is a society living in fear. Our society is overcrowded, splintered and bankrupt. We stand on the brink of destruction.” Every few years the British National Party claims to have become more sophisticated. But its reliance on an apocalyptic picture of a country on the cusp of collapse is constant. The culprits leading Britain to this brink are, as usual, immigrants, welfare scroungers and an imperial European Union.

That is not to say that the BNP does not pose a genuine threat at the forthcoming European elections. In the North West, for example, where the party’s leader, Nick Griffin, is standing, the BNP only needs to go from 6.4 per cent to 8 per cent to be virtually guaranteed a seat. A single MEP could deliver the BNP as much as £250,000 a year in salaries and office costs. An only slightly bigger increase in the vote is needed in Yorkshire and The Humber and the West Midlands.

There have been false dawns before for the BNP. But there are three reasons to think that this time the danger is more real. First, a high turnout is the best antidote to extremism. The turnout in 2004 was abnormally high — more than double what it had been in 1999 — because council elections took place simultaneously in most of the West Midlands and the North and, in four regions the elections were all-postal ballots. That may not be repeated this time.

Second, the last European election was dominated by the political success of the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) which won 16 per cent of the national vote and gained 12 MEPs. UKIP has now all but imploded: some at least of that anti-European vote is back in play.

Third, recession, rising unemployment and a political class held in low public esteem provide — as government politicians regularly, and counter-productively, remind us — propitious circumstances for the politics of the far Right.

Nobody should have any doubts that these are indeed the politics of the far Right. Non-whites are, in the BNP’s own euphemism, firmly encouraged to seek voluntary repatriation. Party membership is restricted to “indigenous British ethnic groups”. One of the party’s major concerns is what it calls the Islamification of Britain. Even for that sliver of this country that shares such nonsensical views, the BNP is hopeless. Ideologically, they are a disgrace; practically, they are a joke. Like all small extremist parties, they are prone to splintering into even smaller ones. The latest internal dispute led 60 dissidents to begin referring to themselves as the “Real BNP”.

When forced to conduct real local politics the BNP is quickly revealed to be pointless. In Burnley, where three councillors were elected in 2002, the BNP contingent failed to turn up for the meeting to set the budget. In Barking, in 2005, Councillor Daniel Kelley retired after just 10 months, claiming he had been an outcast. In October 2007, James Lloyd, a BNP councillor, was disqualified from Sandwell Council for not attending a single meeting in a six-month period.

It is a good thing that a discenchanted electorate has somewhere else to cast its ballots. But there is no iron of law of politics that decrees that such sentiment needs to be turned to malign effect. In 1989 the Green party won 15 per cent of the popular vote in the European elections. Not even its most committed supporters really interpreted that vote as a sudden upsurge of environmental concern. It was, instead, the register of protest, a claim that none of the main parties had done enough to warrant their support.

To alert voters to the reality of the BNP, the main parties need to make their own case and persuade people that, no matter what they think about the state of politics in general, the BNP is worse than just useless, it is bad. A vote for the BNP is a vote for extremism and intolerance.

Times Online