There's unions and then there is Solidarity

Patrick Harrington (far left) looking glum after another disasterous hearing.

Patrick Harrington’s Solidarity “Union” sent out an email yesterday. “Hard Time Ahead-Get Union Protection” it told me.

I agree with the sentiment. However that is about the only advice I would ever take from the faux trade union of the BNP. Their email continues “Apparently, the reason why businesses are not taking on workers is because it is not easy enough to sack them!”

There of course speaks the voice of experience, because Solidarity and its General Secretary Patrick Harrington seem to spend most of its time in employment tribunals defending the BNP against its former employees! Oh, and not very well I might add too.

Harrington and his fake union was recently criticised by the panel at the recent General Teaching Council for England (GTCE) hearing where Harrington was defending disgraced teacher and BNP activist Mark Walker. The hearing was called to discuss the conduct of Walker who used school computers to send a vulnerable 16-year-old former pupil a sexually explicit message via email.

Walker sent the girl emails while working at Sunnydale Community College, in Shildon, County Durham, in 2007. The panel found Walker guilty of unacceptable professional conduct and banned him from teaching indefinitely.

The panel criticised Harrington after he made a statement on the Solidarity website regarding Mark Walker’s suspension and referred to a scheduled investigatory meeting, which should have remained confidential to the school, Walker and Harrington.

The GTCE panel described Harrington’s actions as “inappropriate”.

Hope not hate

Trouble in store for BNP bosses

Dowson: Left of pic (with glasses) at funeral

BNP leader Nick Griffin is trying to wriggle out of a Belfast employment tribunal because he fears for his safety.

Griffin and other leaders from the far-right group are due to attend a hearing later this month after an employee from their now defunct Belfast call centre took a case. The BNP is being represented by extreme right union Solidarity - run by his best pal and former National Front buddy - Patrick Harrington. Harrington has written to the Tribunal asking for both reporting restrictions and even for the Tribunal to be heard outside Northern Ireland - but both requests were turned down.

Meanwhile the Sunday World has learned that Griffin visited Belfast in May to support his election candidates - just days after he failed to turn up for an earlier Tribunal hearing - citing fears for his safety as the reason.

Amongst the people the BNP leaders are concerned about bumping into are irate business owners who the race hate party have refused to pay. The flailing party, which is currently in the middle of factional struggle, has been besieged by financial woes and acrimony for the last two years which led to it closing its controversial call centre in Dundonald last year, leaving its former employees penniless in the run up to Christmas.

Four call centre staff are owed monies by the party including the wife of a serving PSNI police sergeant, but all but one have shied away from pursuing their monies owed. The rest fear intimidation from both the BNP and angry businesses here.

Last month we reported how Belfast printers ROMAC went to the wall after being owed over £40,000 by the BNP.

The pursuit of monies owed by some businesses here took a sinister turn when the families of senior BNP members were allegedly visited by “Ulster heavies” in a desperate search for cash. Nine people in Belfast and two in England were arrested on suspicion of blackmail but charges were later dropped.

Local cops are now believed to be investigating an allegation of false imprisonment against some BNP members after they allegedly sent their heavies to hold one former employee against her will in a desperate bid to retrieve evidence of their spiralling out of control accounts. English police are currently also investigating claims that the BNP submitted fraudulent accounts last year after their electoral demise.

So acute and humiliating are the BNP's financial difficulties, that an English judge recently gave leave to one individual to recoup monies owed against BNP officials directly after a ruling that individual representatives' of the party could be held liable for the BNP's unpaid debts. Bailiffs even turned up at the farmhouse of BNP leader Nick Griffin to recoup one debt, taking away his beloved Skoda motor car to the delight of antiracist and antifascist campaigners.

“As a rule we do not have much time or sympathy with businesses that trade with fascists,” said Simon Cressy from the antifascist organisation Hope Not Hate. “However, in this case we would urge all local businesses that are owed monies by the BNP to try and recoup the money they are owed from local BNP officials.

“When they stood in the elections here earlier this year, the BNP claimed to be representing the interests of local people like they really cared. Perhaps they should cough up by way of an apology.”

Tomorrow night the BBC's current affairs show Panorama will air a programme that is expected to throw more light on the BNP's dodgy dealings and financial mismanagement.

Last week the party's thirty year old former treasurer died in suspicious circumstances, which the BNP tried to portray as a suicide linked to the BNP's investigation of the BNP's financial affairs. It is believed that David Hannam who used to work in the party's Belfast office, succumbed to a heart attack brought on by excessive use of anti-depressants.

Hannam's death caused a number of BNP officers to quit the party in disgust at the BNP's reaction to his passing. Describing the BNP's reaction as an “abuse”, one former official accused the BNP leadership of preparing to use the dead man as a scapegoat for their alleged corruption.

Another former treasurer is expected to shed light on up to £300,000 of missing party funds in the programme.

The party's former financial guru, Belfast based businessman Jim Dowson is expected to claim that the party owes him in excess of £160,000 for servicing the party's call centre.

Dowson claims to have severed links with the party when he became aware that they were not paying their bills. He is believed to supporting the claim by a former employee that they were unfairly dismissed without due process.

Harrington refused to comment as to whether the BNP would be attending any hearing at first telling us that the case had gone to arbitration which it had not. He then told us that any further comment would be in contempt of court.

Sunday World via Hope not hate

Anders Breivik's spider web of hate

An analysis of the Norwegian killer's manifesto reveals the online network that features in his paranoid universe

Anders Breivik's manifesto mapped

The Guardian has mapped the webpages Anders Breivik links to,
and those pages that link back to Breivik's manifesto. Image: The Guardian

Anders Breivik's manifesto reveals a subculture of nationalistic and Islamophobic websites that link the European and American far right in a paranoid alliance against Islam and is also rooted in some democratically elected parties.

The Guardian has analysed the webpages he links to, and the pages that these in turn link to, in order to expose a spider web of hatred based around three "counter-jihad" sites, two run by American rightwingers, and one by an eccentric Norwegian. All of these draw some of their inspiration from the Egyptian Jewish exile Gisele Littman, who writes under the name of Bat Ye'or, and who believes that the European elites have conspired against their people to hand the continent over to Muslims.

As well as his very long manifesto, Breivik also laid out some of his thoughts on the Norwegian nationalist site Document.no. In his postings there, Breivik referred to something he called "the Vienna school of thought", which consists of the people who had worked out the ideology that inspired him to commit mass murder. He named three people in particular: Littman; the Norwegian Peder Jensen who wrote under the pseudonym of Fjordman; and the American Robert Spencer, who maintains a site called Jihad Watch, and agitates against "the Islamisation of America".

But the name also alludes to a blog called Gates of Vienna, run by an American named Edward "Ned" May, on which Fjordman posted regularly and which claims that Europe is now as much under threat from a Muslim invasion as it was in 1683, when a Turkish army besieged Vienna.

All of these paranoid fantasists share a vision articulated by the Danish far-right activist Anders Gravers, who has links with the EDL in Britain and with Spencer and his co-conspiracist Pamela Geller in the US. Gravers told a conference in Washington last year:

"The European Union acts secretly, with the European people being deceived about its development. Democracy is being deliberately removed, and the latest example being the Lisbon Treaty. However the plan goes much further with an ultimate goal of being a Eurabian superstate, incorporating Muslim countries of north Africa and the Middle East in the European Union. This was already initiated with the signing of the Barcelona treaty in 1995 by the EU and nine north African states and Israel, which became effective on the 1st of January, 2010. It is also known as the Euro-Mediterranean co-operation. In return for some European control of oil resources, Muslim countries will have unfettered access to technology and movement of people into Europe. The price Europeans will have to pay is the introduction of sharia law and removal of democracy."

Spencer's jihadwatch.org is linked to 116 times from Breivik's manifesto; May's Gates of Vienna 86 times; and Fjordman 114 times.

Spencer and Geller were the organisers of the protest against the so-called 9/11 mosque in New York City. They also took over Stop Islamisation of America, a movement with links to the EDL and to a variety of far-right movements across Europe. Of the two, Spencer is less of a fringe figure. He has been fulsomely interviewed by the Catholic Herald in this country and praised by Douglas Murray of the Centre for Social Cohesion, who called him "a profound and subtle thinker". Damian Thompson, a leader writer on the Telegraph, once urged his readers to buy Spencer's works, especially if they believed that Islam was "a religion of peace". Last week, Spencer's blog re-ran a piece from Geller's Atlas Shrugged website claiming that Governor Rick Perry, the creationist rightwinger from Texas, is actually linked to Islamists via Grover Norquist, the far-right tax cutter whom Geller claims is "a front for the Muslim Brotherhood". Geller also once republished a blogpost speculating that President Obama is the love child of Malcolm X.

As well as the "counter-jihad" websites such as Spencer's and May's, analysis of Breivik's web reveals a dense network of 104 European nationalist sites and political parties. Some of these are represented in parliaments: Geert Wilders's Dutch Freedom party; the French National Front; the Danish People's party, the Norwegian Progress party (of which Breivik was briefly a member before he left, disgusted with its moderation); the Sweden Democrats. Others, like the EDL, are fringe groupings. Then there are those in between, such as the Hungarian far-right party Jobbik. But they range all across Europe. They are united by hostility to Muslims and to the EU.

One place where these strands intertwine is the Brussels Journal, a website run by the Belgian Catholic MEP Paul Belien, a member of the far-right Vlaams Belang party. The British Europhobic Conservative MEP Daniel Hannan appeared for three years on the Brussels Journal's masthead. Hannan has since denounced the European neo-fascist parties as not really rightwing at all.

To appear on this list is not to be complicit in Breivik's crime. Peder "Fjordman" Jensen was so shocked by it that he gave himself up to the police and gave an interview to a Norwegian paper in which he appeared genuinely bewildered that his predictions of a European civil war should have led anyone to such violence.

It is still more unfair to blame Melanie Phillips. Although she was cited by Breivik at length for an article claiming that the British elite had deliberately encouraged immigration in order to break down traditional society and she has written that "Bat Ye'or's scholarship is awesome and her analysis is as persuasive as it is terrifying", she has also argued, with nearly equal ferocity, against the "counter-jihad" belief that there is no such thing as a moderate Muslim.

The world view of the counter-jihadis echoes that of the jihadis they feel threatened by. The psychological world of the jihadis has been described by the British psychiatrist Russell Razzaque, who rejected recruitment by Hizb ut-Tahrir when he was a medical student. It is not just a matter of a black-and-white world view, he says, though that is part of it. "It's a very warm embrace. You felt a sense of self-esteem, a sense of real embrace. Then it gives you a sense of purpose, which is also something you've never had so much. The purpose is a huge one. Part of a cosmic struggle when you're on the right side: you're another generation in the huge fight that goes back to the crusades."

This clearly mirrors Breivik's self-image. What makes him particularly frightening is that he seems to have radicalised himself, just as jihadis do, before he went looking for advice and guidance on the internet. But he was able to take the last few steps into mass murder all alone, so far as we know. Jihadi groups also withdraw from the world into a cramped and paranoid universe of their own. Suicide bombers such as the 9/11 and 7/7 groups spent months psyching each other up before the crime, talking obsessively for hours every day. But Breivik, though he withdrew from society to his farm, seems to have spent his time alone with the internet. It allowed him to hear his own choir of imaginary friends, and hear inside his head their voices cheering him on to murder and martyrdom. Here they are, mapped.

Comment is free

Thanks to Zaahid and NewsHound for the heads-up

Michelle whips Harrington into shape...

This is a picture of Michelle Harrington, wife of well-known fruitloop and non-BNP member Patrick Harrington.

Michelle allegedly works for the BNP in a number of ways, most notably via the BNP's fake union Solidarity, where she apparently earns £36,000 per annum.

And what does she do there? You'll see if you click on the pic and read the text.

Yep, she's an office manager at a place that finds work for people with mental illness. How apt. Did I mention that Pat Harrington works for Solidarity, too?

"The world is divided into those who have never met Patrick Harrington and those who hate his guts"

As we noted many months ago, a large number of those characters responsible for the collapse and disappearance of the old National Front two decades ago are now on hand as the same fate befalls the British National Party, notable amongst them being Patrick Harrington - a man for whom the words "failure" and "divisive" might have been invented.

Never knowingly successful at anything to which he has turned his hand, this long time friend of Nick Griffin was until recently consigned to the fringe of the fringe, where he could pretend to be a "director" of a "think tank" while having time enough on his then unemployed hands to get up Wiki pages laudatory of himself and the paper organisations with which he is associated.

The Third Way "think tank", if it has any real existence at all, claimed (the last time we could be bothered to look) just 18 members, a figure open to considerable doubt, but while Harrington indulged his fantasies and passed his time planting his grandiloquent political biography on any webpage that would take it, nobody paid him a great deal of attention.

The Third Way is also known as the National Liberal Party, its election successes totalling zero. Despite promising to contest ten marginal Liberal Democrat seats at the 2010 General Election, it contested only one seat, Eastleigh, coming bottom of the poll with just 93 votes.

Harrington crept back on to the radar with his involvement in the Solidarity "trade union", a BNP front which quickly descended into factionalism and farce when its two founders accused Harrington of financial impropriety. Factionalism and farce have long been close associates of Patrick Harrington, and the first accusations of financial wrong-doing set against him date back to the mid-80s and his involvement in the White Noise Club.

A "Blood and Honour" biography of the infamous Nazi band Skrewdriver and lead singer Ian Stuart Donaldson makes these comments (my spacing, otherwise "as is"):

Ian's distrust of Patrick Harrington and Derek Holland would inevitably mean that he would have to leave the NF and White Noise. Simultaneously the NF leadership, in an attempt to gain more political respectability with the British public tried to water down Skrewdriver's National Socialist image by censoring lan's lyrics and telling him what to sing about.

The White Noise management of Patrick Harrington, Nick Griffin and Derek Holland dictated that there was to be no hail victory’s and no derogatory references to blacks.

Soon after this the NF split itself into two. After which it gradually emerged that the White Noise Club had not been paying royalties due to the bands, had been ripping off band supporters ordering records through their mail order service and that Rock-o-Rama in Germany was owed around £3,000 for merchandise obtained via the WNC. Quite rightly Herbert chairman of Rock-o-Rama records, refused to release any new material by the WNC bands or supply any further records to the NF until the debt was paid in full.

By the summer totally disgusted with the way Harrington, Griffin and Holland had gone about things with their gross dishonesty, Ian once again handed in his letter of resignation to White Noise magazine and the National Front, with most of the other White rock bands following him.

As one of those involved in the Solidarity imbroglio wrote to me at the time: "The world is divided into those who have never met Patrick Harrington and those who hate his guts."

That would appear to remain the case.

Griffin and Harrington recaptured Solidarity by the simple tactic of hijacking its website, its only real public outlet (which happened to be hosted by failed South African school-bomber and BNP member Lambertus Nieuwhof), then calling an EGM which carved up Solidarity as Griffin and Harrington wanted and cleverly installing then darling of the BNP Simone Clarke (the "BNP ballerina") on the executive.

We were not alone at the time in alleging that Solidarity had only two real purposes - to provide Patrick Harrington with an income and, via a political fund, to transfer money from Solidarity to the BNP and Third Way coffers. Aside from one or two questionable non-BNP characters initially used to plug the "union", the organisation was to be entirely parasitical upon the BNP membership, who would be persuaded to part with £5 per month to join what to them might seem a worthwhile venture.

Despite an intense and long running recruitment campaign, this never happened. BNP members were very wary of Solidarity. The early public in-fighting could not have helped, and anti-fascist revelations concerning the "union" and its leading personalities certainly played their part, but there was also a swathe of older BNP members well acquainted with Harrington's past record who would have nothing to do with the "union".

Solidarity claims to have had 124 members in 2007, 276 in 2008, and 400 in 2009 (the last year for which figures are available), far lower than anything Harrington could have expected, despite the internal exposure Solidarity was given by the BNP. Given the election fever, fuelled by unrealistic expectations that began to grip the BNP in the early part of 2010, and a stepping up of the Solidarity recruitment campaign on the back of it, it's very likely that the "union" had more than 400 members on its books in the first half of the year.

The mystery is, how many were still members by the end of the year, the somewhat vague cut-off point defined by the Trade Union Certification Officer?

Being parasitical to the BNP, Solidarity must have suffered as its host began to implode last May, and any hopes that there would ever be "one big" nationalist trade union dashed, along with any hopes that it would ever provide a living for anybody. Some unkind observers have suggested that one reason Harrington asked Nick Griffin for a job with the BNP last summer was because as the BNP truncated so, he knew, must his "union"; those same unkind observers have also suggested that the government's determination to re-assess those claiming various types of long-term sickness benefits might have had something to do with it.

Solidarity's 2009 accounts show a donation of £5000, an interesting affair in itself. LU readers will recall a newspaper sting whereby a £5000 "political donation" to the BNP wound up in Nick Griffin's personal bank account, where it had no business to be.

According to a deeply sceptical Times:

Mr Griffin admitted that he had paid the £5,000 donation that appeared to be from a political supporter into his own bank account and then transferred the money to a sympathetic political organisation without alerting the authorities.

He said that he did so because the donor, an elderly North London woman who is a member of the BNP, wished to remain anonymous. He said that he gave the money in February to the nationalist trade union Solidarity, which has strong BNP links, because he believed that it would have had to be declared if he had given the donation to the party. He said that there was “no need” to declare it as the donor had asked him to put the money to “best use”.

"Best use" is a fairly elastic term, but the BNP and Solidarity leaders have always tended to stretch and warp the English language into something more agreeable and self-serving to themselves. The money - reluctantly, we are sure - was handed over to Solidarity, which, for 2009 posts an annual return giving an income of £23,052 against an expenditure of £27,997, leaving a balance of £1,202.

The opening balance for that year had been £6,147.

What is curious is that Harrington and Solidarity president Adam Walker chose this year to pay themselves each £2,521, or £5,042, something they could not have done had Griffin not made over that £5,000 donation. A cynic might suggest that there exists a mental block in the minds of far-right leaders, in that money that could be put to good political or (in the case of Solidarity) quasi-trade union use must always find its way into a private bank account and never be seen again.

Despite claims - and that is all they are - by Harrington that he has travelled the country representing Solidarity members in grievance and other disputes, most of the "union's" work seems to have revolved around cases involving the Solidarity president and younger brother Mark Walker, who sits on the executive committee. And very expensive it has been, with "benefits to members" listed at £10,694 and "administrative expenses" at £17,303 - or £27,997 for not very much at all.

At a recent telephone-box gathering in Carlisle that passed for Solidarity's annual conference, Harrington glibly claimed that "many successes" could not be publicised "owing to confidentiality clauses" - an extraordinary claim. A quick email exchange with Unite's local (Norwich) industrial organiser elicits the response that no legitimate trade union representative would agree to a "confidentiality clause" unless under the most extraordinary of circumstances, and then only if it served the interests of the member involved or the union concerned - and even then the matter would be "referred up" for legal advice.

It is strange that such clauses appear to be routine affairs when Solidarity is the "union" involved. Is this, as others have noted, because the BNP is one of the few organisations which routinely demands dismissed employees sign confidentiality agreements? Are Harrington's "many successes" not quite what he would like us to believe they are, if indeed there have been any at all?

As a means of making money Solidarity has already seen its most lucrative days. The National Liberal Party/Third Way never did.

Seized with a mad idea that it could put £100,000 in its kitty, in June 2008 Harrington and his friends launched a "money bomb" appeal, hoping to con 10,000 people to donate £10 each "for liberty" - or, as we asserted, to provide the perennial losers of the NLP/TW with an effort-free living. The appeal had its own badly laid out website replete with a graph on which donations were to be tracked. Unfortunately the graph stubbornly registered zero, as it had for the best part of a fortnight, until the day we published our article, when a small squiggle appeared.

Our article said:

As he has throughout his indistinguished career on the far-Right, Mr Harrington has undoubtedly concocted for himself yet another stratagem by which he will be seen to fail, and fail badly, largely because the man seems to be incapable of connecting with the real world - the one in which most people would not expect 10,000 people to visit a crude website rushed up by an unknown and bogus think-tank-cum-political party, all of them to do it on a single day and to pledge £10 in return for some vague and meaningless statement about "liberty".

We're fairly sure the only reason the tiny squiggle failed to expand to point at a respectable figure was because Harrington and company knew very well they would have to square their claims with the accounts they must later submit to the Electoral Commission. The "money bomb" was a matter of ridicule, and of course utterly failed - but free money is free money, no matter how little, and the NLP/TW repeated the exercise in 2009 and 2010, with even less success. Its 2009 accounts list donations from all sources as a paltry £413.07 (we are naturally assuming that NLP/TW is being completely truthful about its financial affairs, just as Solidarity and the BNP always are).

From the start of what we might laughingly call his political career Harrington has regularly displayed his only known talent, being that of effortlessly making enemies. He does not seem to be able to help himself. He is variously accounted untrustworthy, conceited, a fraud and a fantasist (that last was us), while those of his closer acquaintance have, in various internet posting places, noted his "limp, damp handshake", and in one case a number of meetings with Harrington "at the termination of each of which it was necessary to find a bath or a shower and to apply a strong carbolic soap to my crawling skin".

Not exactly Mr Popular, is he?

Griffin's inclusion of Harrington and his strange new wife on the paid BNP Euro staff would ordinarily be inexplicable, given the widespread dislike of him, a fact that was always bound to exacerbate existing divisions. Prior to that, rebel leader Eddy Butler asserts that Harrington (a man with not a shred electoral talent) interfered to negative effect in the BNP's flagship Barking and Dagenham general election campaign, and had regularly intruded into BNP affairs.

As Butler's leadership challenge gathered momentum, Harrington began sending messages over the internet to BNP supporters urging them to oppose the challenge and, despicably and unethically (but what's new?), abused his allegedly independent position as Solidarity's general secretary to issue a "personal statement" to the same effect. According to Butler he manipulated London Assembly member Richard Barnbrook into mounting a "spoiler" challenge designed to scotch Butler's chances of gathering the required number of nominations, and (according to us) having achieved this threw the luckless and by now unwanted Barnbrook into the custody of the Walker brothers, who smiled tolerantly and took him to the pub.

Harrington apparently advised Nick Griffin at Michaela Mackenzie's employment tribunal. We noted:

Mr Harrington appears to have been on hand at the employment tribunal hearing the unfair dismissal case brought against Nick Griffin by Michaela Mackenzie, providing us with that rarest of spectacles, an employment tribunal at which a "trade union" general secretary is not on the team of a badly wronged employee, but that of the boss who wronged her. According to Mackenzie, Nick Griffin took the stand and began "venomously spouting the most ridiculous lies about me". We do not know if he did so consequent upon any advice Mr Harrington might have proffered.

Mackenzie won her case, of course.

In the same article we added:

A further spectacle is provided by the employment of Mr Harrington and Solidarity president Adam Walker to oversee Human Resources and Staff Management in regard to BNP employees, who are all members of Solidarity - putting BNP employees in the unique position of having as bosses their own "trade union" leaders.

Of this situation Nick Griffin wrote: "We, however, have learned from this [the Mackenzie] case, which is one reason we have now created a dedicated Human Resources/Staff Management team to ensure that from now on everything is done by the book by people who know all the ropes."

By which he means disgruntled BNP employees will find themselves up Harrington Creek without a paddle.

In his thoroughly dishonest campaign against Eddy Butler, Harrington made much of Butler's intention to close the BNP's Belfast office and transfer operations to the mainland, saying: "I think Solidarity members should be aware of his anti-union stance and threats to sack people." Sacking people is exactly what happened, but it wasn't Butler who did the sacking...

At about the same time he was taken on by the BNP, the "trade union" leader incorporated a company, grandly (what else?) titled Europa Social Political and Economic Research Establishment Limited (presumably ESPEREL), which, as ever with Harrington, skulks behind his regular maildrop address, Room 407, 12 South Bridge, Edinburgh (below).


Harrington's new venture appears to be some sort of consultancy, but we admit to having little knowledge of it. Of course, if you happen to know more...

Harrington's influence has clearly been detrimental to whatever remains of the BNP and in turn to whatever remains of Solidarity. The characters - so strangely familiar from those long ago days of the National Front's implosion - who are involved in the BNP's rapid downward spiral can see as well as anybody else what is happening and why, and since they are, as we and they know, on the make, it is very difficult to believe that they have not developed some game plan designed to protect their new-found comforts.

As I write, Nick Griffin has ordered yet another round of suspensions, this time in London and the South. He seems utterly indifferent to the effects this must have - just as he appeared indifferent to the effects of previous purges, his continual lying to the membership, his appointment of Ian Kitchen as Yorkshire regional organiser, and so much else. It's almost as if he wants the BNP to fail, and as quickly as possible, while himself remaining leader of whatever is left.

At the same time, Harrington seems less and less interested in Solidarity, which he knows has little future, while, out of the blue, the Civil Liberty front group has sprung into renewed life, carrying contentious articles on its website that seem almost calculated to offend as many BNP members as possible.

Does that give us a clue as to what might be going on?

Is it possible that Griffin, who can never cede the leadership of the BNP when it also means ceding access to the party's financial affairs during the term of his office, is deliberately running the BNP down as a political party? Could it be that in a few months, assuming anything at all remains solvent, that there will be some merger between these three organisations, and a new nationalist civil rights organisation arise - one into which Griffin can safely take the precious BNP accounts and all their secrets?

I don't know, but nor do I believe that the National Front's two main undertakers intend to repeat their old exercise without on this occasion making some provision to shield themselves financially - something they forgot to do last time around.

Finally: A Photo Emerges Of The "Solidarity" Conference...

Geddit? (Hint: There were only 13 people there, and the union's probably not long for this world.)

The BNP's Irish problem

When Patrick Harrington and Nick Griffin ran the 1980s National Front there were quite a few immediate and striking anomalies. The old “Butcher’s Apron”, the Union Jack, was one of the first things to go as their revolutionary zeal took an uncontrollable hold over the shrinking organisation. The national flag was left to the “reactionaries” who broke away from them – the likes of Martin Wingfield, who now works for the Griffin’s BNP, and Andrew Brons, who represents the party as an MEP. Griffin and Harrington referred to their brand of the NF as the “radicals”.

What replaced the Union Jack on the front of their monthly bore sheet, National Front News, was pictures of black folk they liked, Muslims even. They even began quoting from and selling copies of Colonel Gaddafi’s Green Book, not long after the Libyans had fired shots from the window of their People’s Bureau and killed a British police woman.

And the more people complained, the more extreme the NF seemed to become. This was their new party: the mysticism of Catholic fascism, the adulation of bizarre ranting eastern European fascists, and a Pol Pot like obsession with taking the party back to year zero.

Ireland, however, was their main problem. While the NF’s Ulster organiser was jailed for his part in the firebombing of the homes of Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) officers in protests over the Anglo Irish agreement, the inner circle of the party was toying with Catholicism at the same time as vying for the affections of the major benefactor of the IRA, Colonel Gaddafi.

Harrington was always Griffin’s younger, more “radical” offsider. Despite being part of a “collective leadership” it was Griffin and Harrington who took the reins and led the party into ideological wilderness and oblivion. It was Harrington who obligingly photographed Griffin standing adoringly under a huge portrait of Colonel Gaddafi on their visit to Tripoli. It was Harrington, who often made much of his Irish roots, who shocked the traditionally loyalist NF by refusing to condemn the IRA in a television exposé of the NF’s activities in 1988. Not only did it anger the NF’s already fractured membership, it led the Ulster Defence Association (UDA), Ireland’s largest paramilitary group, to demand that the party leave Northern Ireland and later to write in its monthly publication Ulster, “The NF are wankers”.

Harrington and Griffin parted company in early 1990. Their NF “Political Soldiers” group gave up marching on an empty stomach. It had been bled dry of members and cash for some time.

After taking control of the BNP in 1999, Griffin never mentioned Ireland. The party was growing; it and its membership were firmly, if not violently, loyalist. Evidence of this was apparent when its Liverpool branch put an Irish tricolour on its banner in 2007 and a near riot ensued. By 2008 Griffin was the leader of a rapidly expanding party capable of sending shockwaves through the political establishment. He even engaged a hardline Protestant to set up and run a party call centre in Northern Ireland staffed only by Protestants.

The party has occasionally made noises at election times about inviting the Republic of Ireland to step back into union with Britain if the BNP came to power, but that is not a very likely or realistic scenario, given that Griffin’s daughter was in a loyalist “Kick the Pope” band until she fled Northern Ireland last year when her father fell out with the “super-Prod” fan of loyalist paramilitaries, Jim Dowson.

As the BNP entered a steep decline following last year’s general election, out of the shadows stepped Harrington again, not quite as fresh-faced as when he last took centre stage in the 1980s, but still not as bloated as Griffin has become since taking over the BNP. Harrington had been running his own minor organisation, Third Way, and a political party, the National Liberal Party, which is supposedly a rival party to the BNP.

One of Harrington’s first acts was to stage a bitter fallout with the officers of the BNP’s fake trade union Solidarity, where with Griffin’s approval Harrington ousted its founder and installed himself as General Secretary.

His next major falling out was with – you guessed it – Dowson. It seems that Harrington has been representing the Belfast call centre staff against Dowson while simultaneously representing the party in negotiations with the same staff, some of whom have still not been paid monies owed since before Christmas.

Harrington’s other area of interest is the BNP’s faux civil rights organisation, “Civil Liberty”. It sounds like a legitimate civil rights organisation – and preposterously describes the well known human rights organisation Liberty as its sister group – but it tends to crawl out from under its stone only when there is a white person (usually a racist) in trouble with the law. So we hardly fell off our seats when last week “Civil Liberty” offered its support to the former IRA man Gerry McGeough who was jailed for the attempted murder of a part-time Ulster Defence Regiment (UDR) soldier and full-time postman in 1981.

While on the run from British and Irish authorities (which included a daring escape from custody), McGeough went to America where he arranged for arms, missiles and ammunition to be sent to the IRA in Northern Ireland. He also attempted to claim political asylum in Sweden and served eight years in Germany awaiting trial for an attack on a British Army barracks there.

McGeough sat on the executive of the IRA’s political wing until 2003 when he attempted a takeover of the Ancient Order of Hibernians (AOH), the largely moribund marching organisation (seen as the Catholic equivalent of the Orange Order), airing his extreme anti-gay and right wing views.

With the advent of peace talks and cease-fires, McGeough decided he would rather “save Ireland from sodomy” and launched a monthly magazine called The Hibernian, dedicated to “Faith, Family and Country”. Traditionally, the AOH was seen as a rival cultural organisation to Sinn Fein.

In an interview published in Searchlight in 2006, McGeough said: “Sinn Fein has been heavily infiltrated by homosexual activists and British double agents in recent years. A lot of republicans can’t fathom the liberal values of the leadership. They do not understand why they are pursuing a liberal British agenda. Immigration is a massive concern and there are a lot of people who are not happy with the level of immigration.”

Having fallen foul of Sinn Fein, McGeough was considered persona non grata by the Republican movement, even being labelled as a “fascist” on a web forum used by supporters of the Irish Republican Socialist Party (IRSP), the political wing of the rival Irish National Liberation Army. But as the British far right has often found, there remain rather extreme pits of “traditional” Catholicism in the republic, where people with like-minded fears and hatreds can come together on mutual issues. Even the hardline loyalist Dowson, who as good as owned the BNP for a couple of relatively lucrative years, has found tapping into the Republic’s Catholic conservatism financially beneficial.

McGeough might have been an outcast, but he was by no means alone in his religious extremism.

In March 2007 McGeough stood for election against a Sinn Fein candidate as an Independent Republican in Fermanagh. He was arrested for the attempted murder, some 30 years after event, while leaving the polling station and had since then been living under various forms of incarceration and house arrest.

Last month McGeough was convicted for that attempted murder. For loyalists and Unionists, the community in Northern Ireland in which the BNP puts so much faith, the now-disbanded UDR was a much revered local almost totally Protestant regiment. To Irish nationalists and republicans, it was an imperialist and sectarian force that colluded with loyalist murder squads.

Although McGeough attracted some sympathy from the Republican movement for his actions at the height of the IRA’s campaign in Britain, Northern Ireland and mainland Europe, few have much time for his views on Ireland today or his extreme (“traditionalist”) Catholicism. He is likely to serve only two years under the terms of the Good Friday Agreement.

Last week “Civil Liberty” broke its recent silence to pay homage to McGeough. Lauding McGeough and The Hibernian for covering issues and themes “long abandoned by Sinn Fein and other leftist Irish Republican organisations such as opposition to abortion and homosexuality, scepticism about multiculturalism and mass immigration into Ireland”, it went on to praise McGeough for “criticism of the international banking system” (this normally refers to Jews) and articles about “English Catholic writers, GK Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc, who helped develop and make popular distributist ideas in the first half of the twentieth century across the British Isles”.

Yes, it seems as if McGeough had a reading list in later years not too dissimilar to the one the Griffin-Harrington NF recommended to supporters, and indeed that Harrington himself recommends to this day. According to “Civil Liberty”, McGeough’s case has been “followed by radical nationalists across the British Isles with varying degrees of sympathy”.

This sort of language has set the BNP ablaze with innuendo and accusation. Just who are these “radical nationalists” who have such varying degrees of sympathy with McGeough? Many point the finger at Harrington, who has launched a myriad of legal letters and challenges in recent months to stop publication of a “private” photograph of himself proudly posing in front of a commemoration to the fallen members of “D Company, 2nd Battalion of the Belfast Brigade of the IRA”.

BNP members and supporters are furious and the BNP section of the “British Democracy Forum” is alight with accusations, recriminations and the airing of old suspicions and hatreds directed at Harrington and the IRA in general. It seems that the memories and the hatreds of the NF’s past leader remain as current and virile as ever. Some are even threatening to picket any meeting that he addresses or attends.

Following a newspaper report in Ireland about the BNP’s sympathy for McGeough, the BNP’s Ulster organiser has gone to hysterical lengths to laugh it off. Describing the story as “desperation”, Steven Moore realises that the BNP could be treading on some very sensitive toes if Griffin and Harrington decide to take the revolutionary garden path once more. Having helped organise a BNP “cultural event” in the loyalist heartland of East Belfast for Griffin last week, the last thing Moore wants is for what is left of the disillusioned paramilitaries in the area to turn their benign interest into a burning dislike for the party.

It is understood that the rival NF’s current leaders in Northern Ireland have photocopies of the article in the Irish press and are avidly distributing it to shocked BNP members there as they prepare to step up their activities.

To date neither the BNP nor Harrington has responded publicly, though we understand certain old enemies of Harrington high up in the BNP have been taking very long and deep breaths. Last night Harrington was asking for details of the moderator of the British Democracy Forum, no doubt so he could send him a legal letter to stop the appearance of further pictures of Harrington’s escapades in Belfast.

Civil liberty ended its article on McGeough by expressing its support for the “ethnic identity of the respective nations of the British Isles submerged for far too long under the dead hand of the British state”.

And one senior BNP official even turned up to a meeting of Irish Republicans in London last month to commemorate the Hunger Strikers.

No wonder the “loyalist” BNP is wriggling in silence.

Thanks to Matthew Collins at HOPE not hate / Searchlight

Solidarity - crap in SO many ways...

Click pic to enlarge

Further to our short article on the BNP's staggeringly boring (and deserted) Summer School here, one of our readers has sent us a picture of an organisation that obviously leads the way in utterly pointless, badly-attended meetings - Solidarity, the BNP's fake union.

Set up, like all organisations established by the BNP, solely to strip the party's gullible members of any disposable income Nick Griffin hasn't already begged or conned off them, Solidarity scores extra brownie points on this occasion because it not only has a meeting that is attended by just a tiny handful of idiots, but it also manages to squeeze a nice little mistake into its banner - or should I say 'it's banner'?

Well done, Solidarity.

Friends and other enemies

While most trade union leaders have of late found a good deal to occupy their minds and their time as draconian government spending and job cuts loom, the general secretary of at least one alleged "fighting union" has other concerns that he clearly feels to be far more pressing than such bothersome trivialities as protecting and promoting the employment prospects of his members in the hard times to come.

These, after all, can be quickly disposed of in a few stock cod-radical phrases posted on the website of his "one big union" and regurgitated in a press release that will (for a fee payable to his friend Graham) then be posted on a free PR website, where it will attract its customary level of feverish disinterest and disappear without trace.

Patrick Harrington/Sharp, general secretary of Solidarity, director of the Third Way "think tank", newly-coined BNP employee and fantasist par excellence has been extremely busy on Facebook just lately, patiently scanning his list of "friends" for any who link to the numerous enemies of the Very Important trade union leader and Political Thinker - a man so Important that he maintains his own Wikipedia page as a reminder to the rest of the world of just how Very Important he is.

Should Harrington discover the name "Simon Bennett" lurking amongst the friends of his Facebook friends, then the general secretary of the "fighting union" will employ some of his ample spare time to send a message warning that Bennett was responsible for "crashing" the BNP website on the eve of the general election and might use the personal details of those who link to his Facebook page in unspecified but detrimental ways. It would therefore be "unwise" to maintain a link to Bennett.

Mark Walker, also with more spare time on his hands than is healthy, performs the same service as the sneaking Harrington, but goes a little further in his "friendly" advice, warning that retaining Bennett as a Facebook friend might be "construed as disloyalty".

Things must be getting desperate when trade union general secretaries and leading Griffinites begin to act like pre-adolescent school children and are driven to scour the pages of something so shallow as Facebook looking to rubbish their enemies - but then, Harrington and Walker both possess the type of mind that eminently suits them to such infantile activities.

Having made no secret of his support for Nick Griffin, and having openly attempted to exercise a negative influence upon the nomination gathering process on which a challenge to Griffin's leadership depends, Harrington appears to have forgotten that his Third Way and National Liberal Party websites were hosted gratis by Bennett, who also owns the domain names. Not unnaturally, given the vitriol pouring down upon him from the Griffin camp, Bennett revenged himself by pointing the two domains at his YourBNP website.

Harrington, being Harrington (and sometimes being Sharp), thinks this most unfair, and so, while other trade union general secretaries devote their time planning for the difficult political and industrial struggles to come, the general secretary of the "fighting union" scrabbles about in the nether reaches of the Internet pursuing yet another of the personal vendettas that have peppered his less than illustrious career.

While Harrington gets on with what Harrington does best (which is not very much at all), the man he induced to undertake electoral spoiling duties at the behest of Nick Griffin flounders.

Richard Barnbrook, much pitied but largely abandoned to his own devices, appears to have been thrown into the laps of the Walker brothers, who are humouring him hugely. It was via Barnbrook's Facebook page that Mark Walker sent out some of his ominous "friendly advice".

Ultimately doomed by his initial association with the Butler camp, Barnbrook is the pliant prisoner of the Griffinites who captured him, painfully eager to please the guards set to watch and control his every move, cushioned from the reality of his humiliation by the carefully maintained illusion that he really is mounting a serious independent leadership challenge.

Doubtless the Walkers have difficulties in preventing a matching pair of sly smiles from stealing across their lips as they listen to the wretched Barnbrook's plans and make approving nods in all the right places. Their job as his wards includes that of keeping Barnbrook busy, and to that end the GLA member is in County Durham to help in the campaign to have Adam Walker elected to Spennymoor Town Council.

For the occasion Walker has produced a cheap word-processed leaflet in which he says that a path he helped to clear was "drastically needed", and seems, as BNP people are prone to do, to elevate the influence of the lowest and least influential tier of governance well beyond its bounds, asking: "Why do we need to produce council, benefits, medical and police documents in umpteen different languages and provide and pay for expensive professional interpreters?"

Why indeed, since this is not something likely to trouble Spennymoor Town Council?

How well Walker's campaign is progressing might be gauged from a post made on Monday evening by Richard Barnbrook on his new blog, presumably in an unguarded Walker-less moment: "I have to laugh, or I would 'Cry'.... So fare today 3 people turned out to canvas in Spennymoor!" (sic).

Not very well at all, then.

Still, while at least some microscopic BNP activity is taking place in the north-east, elsewhere

BNP activity flourishes according to the BNP website, which seems to report a fresh outbreak every other day. The trouble is that the bulk of these "activities" appear with a suspicious regularity to be concentrated in the north-west, the home turf of regional organiser, tall tale teller and Griffin goon Clive Jefferson.

These reports are invariably accompanied by photographs of a very few people who have apparently sold a very large number of BNP newspapers and delivered impossible quantities of BNP literature to an adoring public. New members are just falling out of the heavens, and talk of breakthroughs and successes to come abounds, much as it has for the past several fruitless years.

Breakthroughs and successes require money and activists, both of which are in increasingly short supply as donors are loath to throw good money after bad and members walk away in disillusionment or entrench themselves in the rival leadership camps. But no matter,

Nick Griffin has signposted the road to electoral heaven on the BNP website in a mini-manifesto entitled "What Is Going to be Done", coincidentally (and wisely) decamping to France for his holidays before anybody can ask, "Exactly How Is It Going To Be Done?".

A screed of praise to Jim Dowson intermingled with the same hopelessly unrealistic but fine-sounding plans that have been thrown at the jaded membership of every failing political movement since time began, I don't propose here to discuss at length that which Griffin and the BNP cannot possibly achieve.

"What Is Going to be Done" may sway the gullible, as it is intended to do, with its magic vote-winning computers, mobile homes that dispense iced water and suncream on hot days, and a 30-acre BNP place in the country, but all of this requires money, and huge amounts of it. But money is something the BNP does not have - in fact it does not have it to the extent that it owes ever increasing quantities of the national currency to an ever growing list of unpaid creditors.

Unless Griffin has found for the BNP a sugar daddy, one who pays the rent rather than one who screws the party and departs in the morning without leaving so much as a discreet farthing on the mantelpiece, then his plans for the BNP will need to be retitled "What Is Not Going To Be Done". As

Honest Eddy Butler points out, the needless EHRC case has so far cost the BNP £300,000 with more to come, both Michaela Mackenzie and Mark Collett are in a position to bankrupt the party, as are any one of a "frightening" number of creditors not as emotionally bound to the BNP as Mackenzie and Collett.

By way of example, according to Butler, who we have no reason to doubt, the party's Midland depot is now four months in arrears with rent and council taxes, and the telephone, gas and electricity bills have not been paid. These debts alone must already amount to something between £5,000 to £10,000, and there is no obvious way in which they can be met.

The recent spate of hysterical postal appeals, as we know from other sources, have brought in desultory returns even when backed up by emailed variants, not even enough to cover the £5,000 cost (Butler's figure) of each appeal.

So the grand plans of "What Is Going to be Done" are so much stuff and nonsense, as its author is well aware, since the BNP will be lucky to own a rubber stamp by the end of the year, let alone contemplate moving into a 30-acre complex somewhere in the Midland countryside.

Since throwing down the gauntlet, Eddy Butler has presented himself as the "honest man" candidate, one interested in financial transparency, the guy who's on the side of the members, yet his remarks at a campaign meeting held in East London on July 20th would suggest there are limits to his more agreeable traits, and there are circumstances in which he would turn a blind eye to corruption at the top.

Here we must stress, as Butler repeatedly stresses, that what follows is hearsay - though it is hearsay he frequently returns to, and it is the same hearsay which underpins his campaign to unseat Nick Griffin. Butler clearly gives far more weight to it than he is prepared to admit to in public.

The story, as told by Butler, is that in mid-March the then BNP staff manager Emma Colgate visited treasurer David Hannam at his new office. While Colgate was there Hannam received a call from Nick Griffin, which was overheard by Colgate (Butler is hazy as to how, suggesting that Hannam had the speakerphone switched on). Griffin, it is alleged, asked Hannam to pay off his personal credit card in a sum, Butler says, that amounted to six figures. Hannam apparently demurred at the idea of using party money to pay Griffin's personal debts, but Griffin "had a bit of a go" at Hannam and ordered him to pay.

Hannam then said to Colgate that there were "all kinds of bad things going on in the party, to do with the party's finances - serious stuff".

Serious stuff indeed. Serious criminal stuff, if any of this is true.

Colgate then told Eddy Butler, at that time the BNP's national organiser. Publicity director Mark Collett became aware of the allegations, and soon after Hannam forwarded a recording of a private conversation he had held with Collett to Griffin, who then sacked Colgate, Butler and Collett from their positions, and, just as the BNP election campaign opened, ran to the press and police with wild tales of death threats which were to dog the BNP until polling day.

Explaining this at his campaign meeting, Butler says: "In discussions I said, look, if this is true ... we're in the run up to a general election campaign. If we don't do well and we don't get all these seats, and we haven't got all the momentum with us - which would make up for everything, frankly, wouldn't it? - then we'll have to raise the issue..."

This seems a fairly clear indication that before his sacking, Butler was minded not to press the matter of the alleged credit card payment provided the BNP did well in the general election, and would have happily kept his inside knowledge of the alleged transaction from the membership in those circumstances.

This strange ambivalence does not sit well with the "honest man" image Butler is at great pains to project. Misuse of funds for the alleged purpose recounted by Butler is common or garden corruption. There is no sense in which corruption can be vindicated, no situation in which suppressing knowledge of it will "make up for everything".

It is noteworthy that the mental circumlocutions afflicting Eddy Butler seemed also to afflict the audience to which he recounted his squalid little tale. He had, after all, just told them that their money had allegedly been stolen, but that would have been made up for if only the BNP had performed better in the general election. Not one member of the audience took issue with him.

And finally, those of you of strong constitution who flock every Sunday morning to listen to the latest instalment of the Green Arrow's "Voice of the British Resistance" may have been alarmed to learn from the constipated-sounding Voice that the "growth of babies born to foreign women has doubled."

The Voice does not enlighten us as to the cause of this unparalleled phenomenon, but we're fairly certain it is related to the heavy ingestion of alcohol on the part of an amoebic intellect seized by a compulsion to record dotty internet podcasts in the darkness of a coal bunker situate somewhere in South Wales.

Perhaps a friend - or even an ex-friend, if, courtesy of Harrington, he has one or two to spare - should have a word?

All stitched up and nowhere to go

Some time ago a correspondent of mine described the relationship of Patrick Harrington and the BNP as being something like that of a louse to a human head, in that the louse, as nature has programmed it to do, goes about its parasitic business of sucking blood with no appreciable benefits accruing to the unfortunate head, and rather the opposite, since the itching caused as the parasite crawls about while excreting waste products on to the scalp of its host is thought to be an unhealthy state of affairs.

Mr Harrington (or Mr Sharp, as he prefers on the proper occasion to be known) is a past customer of ours, of note not for what he has achieved in the course of his political career, but for what he has failed to achieve. There are no heights to which he has ever risen, nor any depths out of which he has ever climbed - not, of course, that these impediments have ever prevented Mr Harrington from conceiving in his mind a stratospheric opinion of his own intellectual capabilities and apparently sweeping accomplishments.

Like the louse described by my correspondent, Mr Harrington is very difficult to get rid of once contracted. Immune to all known remedies, he relentlessly engages himself in the business of never having to earn his living in the workaday world, this business of never having to earn his living in the workaday world usually involving earning it, in one way or another, from the membership of the BNP - or the "plebs", as BNP councillor Paul Golding so delightfully describes those who worked so hard to bring about his election and who pay his wages.

Mr Harrington, as we know, is very much concerned that the financial rug is about to be pulled from under his feet, his toytown "trade union" being dependent on BNP cash, and he himself now being employed by the BNP in a "human resources" role. Since Eddy Butler is certain to apply a very large boot to Mr Harrington's backside should he, by some miracle, ever come to lead the BNP, Mr Harrington understandably finds his sleep much disturbed of late as support for Butler fails to subside.

He is also desperately worried that whatever the outcome of the BNP's current tribulations, the remaining membership base will be too small to pay the party's bloated wage bill, and that he may be obliged to return to a life funded by state benefits claimed in whichever of his names he represents himself to officialdom. And he is right to be worried. The BNP's income stream has all but dried up, the regular appeals for donations are known to be failing badly, and the party is believed to be close to insolvency, if it is not already insolvent in fact.

The prospects look bleak indeed for Patrick Harrington, but his best and only chance of survival as Nick Griffin's gofer in a somehow revived BNP lies in the survival of Griffin himself, which in turn depends on scotching Eddy Butler's leadership challenge by foul means or fouler means. To that end Mr Harrington has set to work with a mendacious enthusiasm, openly abusing his dubious position as general secretary of the micro-"trade union" Solidarity by using it to issue anti-Butler statements (in a "personal" capacity, you understand) and tweeting in much the same vein to whoever on this planet it is that bothers to follow his self-important musings.

His best service to date is that of successfully (a word we do not normally associate with Mr Harrington) taking the flaky Richard Barnbrook into metaphorical custody, and to turn Barnbrook's dissatisfaction with the Griffin leadership against Griffin's deadly rival Eddy Butler, thus transforming Barnbrook into an active, if unwitting, agent of Nick Griffin. Butler, somewhat subversively, sums the matter up best:

Richard has been all over the place during the last few weeks and in a state of emotional turmoil. In this circumstance he has been preyed upon by Pat Harrington and a few others. Unbelievably, he is unable to see that Harrington is exploiting him as a stooge for Nick Griffin. Richard is distraught as his partner has left him, his house is empty of furniture and basics such as cutlery and crockery. He lost again in Goresbrook ward, he has been replaced as local organiser, his filmed performances in the Greater London Assembly have gone from bad to worse, and in addition to all this his main underlying problem has become more acute. It is actually a rather distasteful spectacle to see Nick Griffin cajole Richard, while in this very vulnerable state, into standing as a leadership contender. Richard has no serious backing apart from loaned false support from Griffinites eager to derail the process.

The problem with bringing Patrick Harrington on board is that he is widely detested even among some of Griffin's closest allies, who are rather more au fait with Mr Harrington's character and history than the average BNP member, who will know him only as the much lauded leader (the Walker brothers notwithstanding) of the stunted Solidarity.

Mr Harrington appears to have been on hand at the employment tribunal hearing the unfair dismissal case brought against Nick Griffin by Michaela Mackenzie, providing us with that rarest of spectacles, an employment tribunal at which a "trade union" general secretary is not on the team of a badly wronged employee, but that of the boss who wronged her. According to Mackenzie, Nick Griffin took the stand and began "venomously spouting the most ridiculous lies about me". We do not know if he did so consequent upon any advice Mr Harrington might have proffered.

A further spectacle is provided by the employment of Mr Harrington and Solidarity president Adam Walker to oversee Human Resources and Staff Management in regard to BNP employees, who are all members of Solidarity - putting BNP employees in the unique position of having as bosses their own "trade union" leaders.

Of this situation Nick Griffin wrote: "We, however, have learned from this [the Mackenzie] case, which is one reason we have now created a dedicated Human Resources/Staff Management team to ensure that from now on everything is done by the book by people who know all the ropes."

By which he means disgruntled BNP employees will find themselves up Harrington Creek without a paddle.

Getting back to Barnbrook, while the romantically challenged GLA member dithered over his initial support for Eddy Butler, his website remained online, the domain being owned by sacked BNP webmaster Simon Bennett. When Harrington "turned" Barnbrook (possibly offering to loan him a knife and fork as a sweetener) Bennett retrieved the richardbarnbrook.com domain, pointing it at his own YourBNP website.

Outraged Griffinites, comically crying that Bennett had sabotaged Barnbrook's Griffin-inspired leadership non-challenge, immediately opened up the ever dripping tap of lies to claim that Bennett had pointed the Barnbrook domain at Eddy Butler's leadership challenge website. In fact, until the change propagated through DNS servers worldwide, those attempting to access richardbarnbrook.com got either the original site or were taken to YourBNP. At no time did the domain point to Butler's challenge website.

However that may be, Barnbrook needed a website and a blogspot was quickly provided to assure him that he was still important, still loved, and still taken seriously. The website has everything but the stricture that "this website was created on the orders of Patrick Harrington", who has rather a fondness for ordering websites into existence.

Barnbrook's self-penned articles are easy to spot - "For the first time a Minister is to scrutanised..... Bob Neil MP (Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for Communitiess and Local Government" - but others ("Richard Barnbrook: Leadership Challenge"), like "his" 150-word statement on the BNP website, are clearly the work of an individual less well-acquainted with the joys of Oddbins.

Who that individual may be, we could not possibly say - but somebody sly, treacherous, and cynically willing to manipulate a man presently in his deepest cups, obviously.

Barnbrook has been played like a violin, as it is perhaps superfluous to state, and finds himself between a rock and a hard place since burning his bridges with Butler. He has nowhere to go, and no obvious future.

He has immediate usefulness to Nick Griffin only in as much as he has allowed himself to become a stooge in the stitched-up nominations process, but he has spoken against Nick Almighty, and for that there will never be forgiveness. If there is a BNP when the current turmoil has subsided, and if that BNP is led by Nick Griffin, then Barnbrook may be tolerated until he comes up for re-election to the GLA in 2010, but his days as an insider (if he ever really was an insider) are over, and - if, as is likely, Griffin refuses to allow him to re-contest for his GLA seat - his days as a BNP member are numbered.

As Barnbrook will sooner or later realise, his "friend" Mr Harrington has interests by far closer to his heart than those of a furniture-free GLA member, and that whatever is good for Nick Griffin and his gofer Mr Harrington will prove to be decidedly toxic to himself.

Of course, we are here factoring out the likelihood - the certitude, if we are to believe Eddy Butler - that the shady antics of Nick Griffin and the symbiotic Mr Harrington are pointing the BNP directly at the High Court - an eventuality (it is my personal opinion) that will throw the BNP back by at least a decade if it survives the experience at all, whatever the outcome.

The great shame of it all for Richard Barnbrook is that he finds himself simultaneously loathed by the Butler camp for his "betrayal", and in the humiliating position of being little more than a patsy breaking on the megalomania of the man who promised him political riches but who effectively killed his political career stone dead.

Just a few weeks ago Barnbrook had it on Griffin's authority that by now he would be leader of the BNP opposition on Barking and Dagenham Council, if not leader of the council itself, but here he finds himself, an object of contempt to both sides in the bitter civil war raging within the BNP, and without so much as a pot to... well, you know. Literally.

Anti fascist campaigners plan counter demonstrations against the BNP

Anti-rascism campaigners are planning counter demonstrations after learning the British National Party are to hold a series of protests in Birmingham.

The campaigners, political figures and trade unionists will get orange-clad toxic waste disposal workers to stuff an effigy of BNP leader Nick Griffin in a dustbin in Victoria Square.

The group have expressed horror that the BNP and two other organisations have threatened to hold three days of protests in Central Birmingham in support of fellow member Adam Walker, who will appear in front of the General Teaching Council in the city, accused of posting racially and religiously intolerant material on the internet from his school during working hours.

Birmingham Unity say they want to stop the BNP from using schools as a platform. A statement, signed by a number of Birmingham MPs and other figures, said: “We believe our schools should be places of tolerance and learning not ignorance and hatred.

“In the recent elections the BNP were soundly rejected in nearly every seat they previously held or threatened to take. That’s why we want to make it clear to the BNP that we are the majority. We are from all communities, from trade unions, from all faiths and none. We love our city, we love our diversity and they are not welcome here.”

The campaigners will gather for their peaceful rally in front of the GTC Council building in Victoria Square on Monday from 8pm.

James Whittall, spokesman for the BNP, confirmed their protests were still going ahead and labelled the case against Mr Walker a “witch hunt”.

Birmingham Mail

‘Third party’ campaign is another BNP lie

A glossy anti-Labour pamphlet distributed in Barking was produced by a BNP front company not by “a loose coalition of non-BNP people” as Nick Griffin, the BNP leader, claims.

The 12-page Barking and Dagenham Sentinel is devoted to personal attacks on Margaret Hodge and Jon Cruddas, who are defending their parliamentary seats in Barking and in Dagenham and Rainham respectively. Griffin is opposing Hodge but has little chance of winning. The bigger prize for his party would be control of Barking and Dagenham council and the BNP has shown repeatedly that it will lie and cheat with impunity to achieve success.

The publication bears the imprint of Sentinel Publications Ltd. A Searchlight investigation has revealed that the company was formed on 1 April 2010 by Adam Walker, its sole officer, using a service address in Edinburgh.

Walker is one of the notorious Walker brothers, BNP officers in the North East. A former teacher, Adam Walker was suspended in 2007 following the discovery that he had used school computers to engage in far-right activity online. He is awaiting a hearing of his appeal by the General Teaching Council.

He has past form in the use of front organisations as president of Solidarity, the BNP’s pretend trade union. His brother Mark, who recently lost his case for unfair dismissal as a teacher, is also on Solidarity’s executive committee.

Since last June both Walkers have been among several BNP officers on the staff of the party’s two MEPs, paid out of European Union funds while acting as BNP activists rather than carrying out the constituency duties on which MEPs’ expenses are supposed to be spent. Both are also contesting tomorrow’s general election.

If Sentinel Publications Ltd continues to maintain it is independent of the BNP, it will be in breach of the Representation of the People Act, which imposes a limit of £500 on campaigning by third parties against a candidate in the general election.

Hope not hate

Mark Walker loses unfair dismissal case

Mark Walker - sacked at last?

A British National Party activist and former North-East teacher who was sacked for absenteeism has lost his case for unfair dismissal

A judgement against former Sunnydale Community College teacher Mark Walker was issued by an employment tribunal last month. Mr Walker, 39, was suspended from the school, in Shildon, County Durham, in March 2007, and claimed he was the subject of a political witch hunt. Twenty months later, he was officially sacked over his sickness record and took the school’s governing body to an employment tribunal.

The Newcastle tribunal, which was met in January, unanimously dismissed Mr Walker’s case, but has not yet published its reasons. Patrick Harrington, a spokesman for Mr Walker’s union, Solidarity, said there could be further action against his employers, Durham County Council. Mr Harrington said he would be studying the tribunal’s reasons with a view to a potential appeal, but an appeal was not the only option.

He said: “What we would point out is that Mr Walker’s ill health was largely contributed to by the employer and, in particular, the way they handled the disciplinary process. There may be a personal injury claim for the stress caused.”

Mr Harrington also cited an NSPCC report about Mr Walker, who is from Rievaulx, Spennymoor, County Durham, that was leaked to The Northern Echo. The report reveals the disciplinary inquiry uncovered a large number of emails indicating a sexual relationship with a 17-year-old former pupil. It makes it clear that no illegal content was found on Mr Walker’s school laptop or desktop computers.

It concludes: “There is sufficient evidence from the emails, and from previous matters concerning his professional conduct, to conclude that Mr Walker’s behaviour has resulted in his conduct being less than one would expect of a teacher placed in a position of trust.”

Mr Harrington said: “This report was very damaging to Mr Walker and there is a duty of confidentiality and a question of damages for the breach. The report was in the hands of the county council and the NSPCC and has to have been leaked by staff.”

Durham County Council declined to comment because of legal reasons.

* A tribunal into the case of Mr Walker’s brother, Adam Walker, also a BNP activist, has been adjourned until the end of May. The General Teaching Council, in Birmingham, is considering allegations he posted inappropriate comments on the internet. The former teacher at Houghton Kepier School, in Houghton-le-Spring, Wearside, was suspended in 2007.

The Northern Echo

BNP race-row teacher fails to block hearing

A teacher accused of racial and religious intolerance has lost his bid to have a disciplinary hearing scrapped

Through his representative, former Houghton Kepier technology teacher and BNP member Adam Walker submitted legal arguments to the General Teaching Council (GTC) as to why a case should be thrown out. But the body's Professional Conduct Committee, sitting in Birmingham, disagreed and ruled that swathes of evidence which Mr Walker had criticised were admissible.

The ex-soldier – who acted as a bodyguard for Nick Griffin when the BNP leader appeared on BBC TV's Question Time – resigned from Houghton Kepier in 2008 after an investigation was launched into allegations of school computer misuse. He is alleged to have used a school laptop during lessons to post critical comments about asylum seekers, Islam, immigrants and homosexuality on an Internet chat forum.

Mr Walker, who is president of Solidarity, a trade union which is closely associated with the BNP, has already been called before the GTC on three previous dates to resolve the matter. He was first brought before the teaching watchdog in November 2008, but the case was delayed when his legal representative successfully argued that the presence of Judy Moorhouse, a former president of the National Union of Teachers and a "known opponent" of the BNP, could prejudice it.

Two further hearings were also postponed, one because of police fears of rioting when tensions rose between right-wing activists and Birmingham's Muslim community. Yesterday's hearing was adjourned to May 24, but it was accompanied by a long statement from the GTC conduct committee about the legal argument it had heard.

Patrick Harrington, representing Mr Walker, had wanted to make submissions on whether the principle of whether the former teacher could get a fair trial should go before the European courts. That was rejected, as were "a number of other arguments" to "support his application that the case should not proceed on the basis that it would be unfair to do so".

These included whether Mr Walker's former employer had a right to refer him to the GTC; that the school had breached the Data Protection Act and the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act; and whether Internet logs could be used as evidence against the teacher. The committee said it had also been suggested by Mr Harrington that a referral to the GTC was "not something Mr Walker could have foreseen when he made personal use of the school laptop". This too was rejected as a reason not to hear the case.

Sunderland Echo

BNP ballerina Simone Clarke now teaching children aged three

On its website, the new dancing school prominently proclaims that its teacher is a former principal dancer with the English National Ballet.

Oddly, however, it doesn't mention her name - perhaps because she is Simone Clarke, the ballerina who found herself at the centre of controversy three years ago when her membership of the British National Party was exposed. At the time anti-fascist demonstrators disrupted a performance of Giselle at the London Coliseum in which Miss Clarke, who was dubbed the 'BNP ballerina', took the starring role. Last week she appeared, surrounded by little girls of three and four in tutus, in the community hall in the village of Shadwell, near Leeds, where she runs the Yorkshire Ballet Academy.

Miss Clarke, 39, has been a leading figure in the far-Right BNP. She has shared a stage with leader Nick Griffin and was once engaged to one of the party's councillors, Richard Barnbrook - a man who claimed mixed-race children were 'washing out the identity of the country's indigenous people'. Miss Clarke's move into teaching comes as the Government is scrutinising the BNP's role in public life. It is said to be considering a ban on BNP members working as teachers in schools.

The Yorkshire Ballet Academy is a private dance school and she does not require licensing by the local authority.

Two years ago Miss Clarke appeared with Mr Griffin during a BNP 'Free Speech Evening' in Leicester and pledged: 'I will never, ever leave the BNP because they are the only people who can turn this country around.'

Next Thursday Mr Griffin will appear on the BBC's Question Time in the BNP's biggest media opportunity to date.

Miss Clarke retired from the English National Ballet after the outcry over her membership. In 2007 she was elected to the executive of the BNP-backed Solidarity trade union for a five-year term. Last night she was unavailable for comment.

Shadwell Hall treasurer David Parker, who rents the venue to her for £10 an hour, said: 'She didn't declare her politics. We have had no complaints or negativity. Whether or not the parents know about her views is up to them. I think like most of us our politics are separate from our normal lives.'

Mail Online

Marek Edelman, Last Leader of Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, Has Died

SS officers walking through the destroyed Ghetto after the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising

Marek Edelman, the last living leader of the uprising by Jews incarcerated in the Warsaw Ghetto during World War II, has died in Warsaw. He is thought to have been 87.

Edelman was imprisoned in the Warsaw Ghetto, an area walled off by Poland’s Nazi occupiers in 1940 to separate the city’s Jews from the rest of the population. As a member of the Bund labor organization that worked underground to spirit Jews into hiding or out of the country, he was one of the masterminds of the plan to resist the Ghetto’s liquidation.

Edelman, who had suffered from ill health for many years, died in Warsaw late yesterday. His death was confirmed by a friend, Paula Sawicka, whose family he had lived with in recent years.

“He fought for his country more than anyone else,” Michael Schudrich, Poland’s chief rabbi, said in an interview. “He wasn’t fighting for himself, but to show that the Jews in the ghetto weren’t passive, that they wouldn’t go like sheep to the slaughter.”

The Ghetto uprising began on April 19, 1943, the eve of the Jewish festival of Passover and the day Nazi commanders planned to have the remaining people in the ghetto killed. With few weapons, Edelman and his colleagues forced the Germans to retreat. When the operation’s leader, Mordechai Anielewicz, died during the uprising, Edelman took his place. The fighters kept the occupiers at bay for almost a month in total.

By the end of the uprising on May 16, almost all of the Ghetto’s 50,000 to 60,000 remaining inhabitants had been killed or deported, mainly to the Treblinka extermination camp. About 350,000 people were locked into the Ghetto when it was built; only a few thousand survived its liquidation. Edelman was one of the few fighters who escaped, through underground sewers.

In contrast with many Jewish Poles who survived the war, Edelman decided to stay and settled in the central Polish city of Lodz, where he became a cardiologist. In an interview, he said his work as a doctor enabled him to save lives, which he was unable to do in the ghetto.

“The Lord already wants to blow out the candle, and I have to hide the flame quickly when his attention is distracted for a little while,” he said.

Edelman was probably born on Jan. 1, 1922, in Homel, a city located in present-day Belarus. His birth date and place of birth are disputed, and Edelman refused to confirm his age in interviews.

The family soon moved to Warsaw, where his father died when Edelman was young. He was left an orphan at about the age of 13.

In 1946, a year after the end of the war, Edelman moved to Lodz, where he remained for the rest of his life. There he married Alina Margolis, also a survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto. He finished his medical studies there and became a cardiologist, working until an anti-Jewish campaign in 1968 instigated by the communist authorities led to his dismissal.

While his wife emigrated that year to France, taking the couple’s two children with her, Edelman refused to leave Poland. He later explained his decision by saying “someone had to stay here with all those who died.”

In the 1970s, Edelman became involved in the anti-communist Solidarity movement and was interned after the imposition of martial law in 1981. He was released after a few days thanks to protests by Western intellectuals, and continued his resistance until the fall of communism in 1989.

Edelman was a leading member of the Freedom Union, the party of Poland’s first post-communist prime minister, Tadeusz Mazowiecki. He reflected on his experiences in the Warsaw Ghetto in a book-length interview by the Polish journalist Hanna Krall in the 1970s that has been translated into several languages. In 1998, Edelman was awarded the Order of the White Eagle, Poland’s highest decoration.

Praise from Czech Leader

Vaclav Havel, leader of the Czech opposition movement and the first democratically elected president of the Czech Republic after the fall of communism, wrote to Edelman after a biography by Witold Beres and Krzysztof Burnetko was published in 2008.

“I deeply respect everything that you have done in your life, your uprightness, your courage,” Havel wrote. “For me, you are an example of a true Pole, the authentic personification of all that is best in Poland.”

In April 2009, Edelman joined leading Polish filmmakers and writers in a protest to the government after a former neo-Nazi took over the running of the country’s public television network.

“People who publicly support racism and anti-Semitism shouldn’t be allowed to play a role in public life,” he wrote in an open letter to Prime Minister Donald Tusk. “Don’t forget that evil can grow bigger.”

Edelman is survived by two children, Aleksander and Anna. His wife died in 2008.

Bloomberg

Police cite riot fears to delay case against BNP teacher Adam Walker

Adam Walker shouting his mouth off as usual

The case against a teacher and British National Party member accused of religious intolerance has been postponed because police fear it will cause flare-ups in the community

The unprecedented intervention in the case of Adam Walker, a former soldier and karate expert from Durham, who was due to face the General Teaching Council (GTC) in Birmingham tomorrow, was made because of tensions between far-right activists and the Muslim community. The council will decide if Mr Walker, 39, should be struck off the register after he was alleged to have used a school computer to contribute racist and religiously intolerant views to online discussions during lessons. If found guilty he will be the first teacher to be banned for religious intolerance.

Violent clashes between the right-wing English Defence League and Muslims in Birmingham earlier this month heightened tensions in the community. Ahead of the hearing, Superintendent Matt Ward of West Midlands Police wrote to the GTC expressing “concern about the potential public order consequences of the hearing being convened in Birmingham at this time,” the council said today. Superintedent Ward requested that the hearing be postponed or relocated to prevent further outbreaks of violence.

The council and the parties involved have seven days to find an alternative date and venues to prevent further delays.

Mr Walker, who is president of Solidarity, a trade union closely associated with the BNP, has already been called before the GTC on two previous dates. Both were postponed on different grounds. He left his post as a technology teacher at Houghton Kepier Sports College in Houghton-le-Spring, near Sunderland in 2007 following the allegations.

The alleged incident, in which he is said to have criticised Muslims, homosexuals and asylum-seekers, is said to have happened between February and March 2007.

He was first brought before the teaching watchdog in November 2008 but the hearing was adjourned after Patrick Harrington, representing Mr Walker, successfully argued that the presence of Judy Moorhouse, a former president of the National Union of Teachers and a “known opponent” of the BNP, could prejudice the hearing.

Police officers, some wearing riot gear, were deployed outside that hearing after dozens of BNP supporters and anti-fascist activists gathered in Birmingham’s Victoria Square outside the offices of the GTC.

Mr Walker’s brother, Mark, lost an appeal against his sacking from Sunnydale College, Shildon, County Durham. Mark Walker, also a technology teacher, is accused of accessing the BNP’s website during school hours. Sunnydale Board of Governors upheld a decision to terminate his contract owing to ill health.

Times Online