BNP: Give Gibraltar back

Wave goodbye to Gibraltar if Nick Griffin gets his way

The BNP would hand the key outpost of Gibraltar to Spain in an astonishing betrayal of its 30,000 British citizens. The move would also deprive the UK of a naval base - defended bitterly for more than 300 years - of huge strategic importance.

Party leader Nick Griffin, elected as an MEP in June, made the offer at a fascist rally in Madrid last week to suck up to European extremists. His bizarre reasoning is that it would help the Spanish combat radicals in nearby northern Africa.

Deceitful Griffin told fellow fanatics: "Taking into account the geographical situation of Gibraltar and the Muslim threat on its door, I would prefer to see a Spanish flag fly in Gibraltar before an Islamic one." He added: "It would be much easier to sort it out if we had nationalist governments in Britain and Spain because it would then be an agreement between equals."

The gaffe was exposed by James Bethell, founder of anti-BNP pressure group Nothing British. Mr Bethell - favourite to be selected by the Tories to fight for the seat of Gosport, Hants - said: "Nick Griffin talks about protecting our national interest but he would surrender our sovereignty to Spanish fascists in a heartbeat. The only flag that should be flying over the Rock is the Union Jack."

A recent referendum on the island, off the southern tip of Spain, saw 99.64 per cent vote to remain British.

The Sun

Truth truck or lie lorry - Sonia Gable uncovers another BNP financial scandal

“After months of research, we have come up with a better way of spreading the ‘Nationalist Message’ right across this country,” says the message that the British National Party has been sending out to its supporters for several weeks.

“Our very own personal advertising lorry, a ‘Truth Truck’ – brand new and custom-built, complete with a high definition special lighting system for night-time use, and a massive audio system for addressing the public. Can you imagine it?” continues the appeal in terms designed to pull hard at the purse strings of “nationalists”.

There have been personalised letters from Nick Griffin, the party chairman, headed and “last chance to help ‘Operation Truth Truck’”, imploring in underlined type: “Just imagine how you will feel, being part owner of our very own British National Party advertising lorry …”. The party website has carried a picture and online donation form for several weeks.

But behind all the excitement lurks yet another dodgy deal by the BNP to hoodwink its own members.

One appeal letter puts a figure on the cost of buying and equipping the “truth truck” of £39,550, arrived at after Griffin personally “worked very hard researching this project”. It then suggests that “we can knock £13,000 off the amount needed” by opting for a “used lorry in first class condition”. Yet there is no indication on the website appeal that the lorry will be anything other than “brand new and custom built”.

Such a compromise could be explained away as a better use of members’ hard-earned and generously given donations, though that is no excuse for pulling the wool over potential donors’ eyes long after the decision to go for a second-hand vehicle has already been taken. But the lies go further than this.

At first the excitement rubbed off onto BNP members. Posting on the members’ internet forum, one person, who claimed to have “surprised myself by not even hesitating to donate £100 towards the campaign”, said the truck would also “counter commie smear leaflets”.

One discerning poster was more cautious. “Just one thing What happened to Bodicea [sic]?” asked “the benwell hopper”. “Boudica”, as “Captain Black” was quick to correct, was a second-hand “battle bus” and the target of an appeal in 2006 for money to put it on the road. Agreeing that “a few people will be very miffed that it has never been seen by the rank and file”, Captain Black could only plead that “the failings of the Boudica hobby horse should not detract from the ambitions of this new venture”.

Others smelt a rat. Despite Griffin’s claims to have carried out “months of research” before coming up with this “new, innovative” idea, if it comes to fruition the BNP will not be the first organisation in the UK to pin its hopes on a “truth truck”.

Two years ago the anti-abortion UK LifeLeague boldly announced the “Launch of Britain’s first ever ‘Truth Truck’”. A press release on 21 April 2006 thanked supporters who “donated generously to make this project possible” and claimed this would be: “the most innovative and what will possibly be the most effective campaign in UK Pro-life history”. “Operation Truth Truck” would: “enable the pro-life message to reach the unreached across the towns and cities of Britain. These vehicles are wholly owned and operated by LifeLeague activists,” it continued.

There was a picture. And it was no coincidence that the only difference between the LifeLeague’s “truth truck” and the BNP’s one was the particular lie on the billboard, because it was the same vehicle.

The UK LifeLeague and the BNP had milked their gullible supporters twice over for the same truck.

This is not the first time the BNP has had dealings with the UK LifeLeague, and more particularly its founder and national coordinator, James Dowson. Earlier this year many BNP members were angry when they found out that the party was sending key BNP officers on management training courses in Spain. Why could the training not be held in the UK, asked irate, xenophobic party members on a popular nazi internet forum until the site administrators pulled the discussion thread.

The courses were organised by Dowson’s Belfast-based fundraising and management training business, the Midas Consultancy, which has signed a three-year consultancy contract with the BNP. Whether it was because of the BNP’s growing financial difficulties or because Griffin was reacting to criticism of his poor administrative skills, the party has handed over key organisational functions to the self-styled vicar and militant anti-abortion campaigner.

It was Dowson who wrote the “truth truck” appeal letters in professional fundraising style. The Building to Grow appeal at the end of last year was also his work. The BNP claimed that appeal had raised £70,000, which paid for the party to move into the new Excalibur warehouse and buy “a vast array of new equipment” including “an envelope stuffing machine”, which by June had mysteriously disappeared when Simon Darby, the BNP’s deputy leader, appealed for volunteers to stuff election leaflets into envelopes by hand.

The involvement of Dowson has already upset some BNP members who do not share his extreme anti-abortion views and think he is a Catholic, which is anathema to many in the nationalist party who view the Battle of the Boyne as one of England’s greatest historical triumphs. In fact Dowson is a Protestant but has been linked to far-right Catholics in Ireland, including Justin Barrett, an anti-EU campaigner and vocal opponent of immigration, which he describes as a “genetic” problem. Back in 2001, when Searchlight first exposed Dowson, Barrett had donated £50,000 so that Dowson’s outfit could produce anti-abortion hate CDs and videos to distribute in schools and churches in Scotland and Northern Ireland.

Dowson is a former member of the Orange Lodge in Northern Ireland and has admitted involvement with hardline loyalist groups in the West of Scotland. His tattooed arms are evidence of his extremist hate connections.

The LifeLeague, which is secretive about its finances, uses highly provocative tactics, such as publishing the home addresses of abortion clinic staff. Similar actions by anti-abortion groups in the US have resulted in the murder of doctors.

Dowson’s professional “begging letters”, as one disillusioned party member described them, have not been universally welcomed in the BNP. Some see their “tone of desperation” as indicative of the BNP’s “very serious financial trouble”, according to the blogsite set up in support of Colin Auty’s failed attempt to challenge Griffin for the party leadership.

One member is quoted saying: “These bloody letters are an embarrassment, I’ll not pay another penny so he can go and waste it or lose another blimp”, in a reference to the BNP’s helium balloon that slipped its moorings in June because, Darby suggested, David Shapcote failed to secure it properly. The BNP later blamed the loss on a faulty rope.

The letters themselves may have been professional, but Dowson fell down in compiling the mailing lists. Naturally he needed to dispatch the letters to a much wider audience than the BNP’s members, who have little left to give after constant appeals at branch meetings and to support election campaigns. However Searchlight has received a stream of complaints from anti-fascist trade unionists and members of the Jewish community who have received them.

The website appeal for the “truth truck” shows it adorned with the BNP’s ubiquitous election picture of Nick Cass and his family alongside the slogan “Decent people vote British National Party”. The picture, which adorned election leaflets and newspaper advertisements all over the country in this year’s May elections and several by-elections, concealed Cass’s less than decent “tree of life” tattoo.

The symbol, also known as the life rune, is a favourite among nazi groups worldwide and, under Hitler, was used to represent a project that encouraged SS troopers to have children out of wedlock with “Aryan” mothers and kidnapped children of Aryan appearance from the countries of occupied Europe to raise as Germans.

A lying picture for a lying appeal. How appropriate.

This article is from the August edition of Searchlight magazine

Griffin seeks the Midas touch

Far-right activists posting on a popular nazi forum recently got hot under the collar about whether it was right for the British National Party to put on a management training course in Spain rather than in Britain, until the site administrators pulled the discussion thread. But as usual they did not even get close to the heart of the story.

On 19 February Michaela Mackenzie, who styles herself “BNP Administration Support” and works full-time for the party, emailed several key BNP officers to invite them to “the next wave of high level management training”. This would be arranged by “a professional management consultancy and training company”, which “uses a property in Spain as its main training base”.

Knowing this would raise questions among the xenophobic party’s members, Mackenzie, a former employee of the BBC in Bristol, explained it was cheaper to send people there than to hire suitable facilities in Britain. “It also gives us the chance to say ‘tahnk you’ [sic] to our key officials for all the hard work you put into pushing the party forwards.”

The course would run from 1 to 4 April, but those who could not make those dates might find places on an earlier course from 26 to 29 March.

The height of the council and Greater London Authority election campaign is a strange time to be taking activists away to say “thank you”, when the party is constantly appealing to members to help with canvassing and leaflet distribution. One of those on the course was Nick Eriksen, the BNP’s London organiser, whose name was removed from the list of Assembly candidates while he was abroad, after the Evening Standard exposed his despicable views on rape. He appears still to be the London organiser.

Some BNP supporters wondered why the course could not have been held in the barn on Nick Griffin’s farm, which he converted with the help of a loan of several thousands pounds from the party shortly after he became its leader. The party quickly wrote off the loan on the grounds that the building would be available for party functions free of charge.

It is a good point, but Searchlight was more interested in the company that was running the course. It certainly seemed professional, judging by a report in the BNP’s new quarterly fundraising magazine, Hope and Glory, which featured a picture of the first batch of participants, clutching their course certificates, who were dispatched to Spain in the second week of February.

“Some of the lessons are so simple that they’re blindingly obvious,” one of them declared, “but until you’re taught by an expert you just don’t see them. I was already working hard for the party, but now I know how to ‘work smart’ as well.”

It did not take long for Searchlight to establish that the organiser was a Belfast-based business called the Midas Consultancy, not to be confused with a number of other training and consultancy businesses using similar names, and that the training base was in Valencia on the Costa Blanca.

Last October Arthur Kemp, who in summer 2007 was entrusted with the ideological training of party activists, went to Belfast to meet James Dowson, a businessman, self-styled vicar and militant anti-abortion campaigner.

Kemp, who is also in charge of the party’s internet operations, had been preceded that spring by Griffin and Collett, who claimed they were trying to increase the BNP’s appeal among Catholics by highlighting their opposition to abortion. Searchlight ensured that their meeting with Dowson, the founder of the controversial LifeLeague, made the press, prompting condemnation from other anti-abortion campaigners.

The true purpose of these meetings was to develop a business relationship and enable the BNP to benefit from Dowson’s skills in fundraising and management, which he markets through the Midas Consultancy. Kenny Smith, then the BNP’s administration officer, accompanied Griffin and Collett to Belfast and claims that he set up the arrangement. Smith was expelled during the major internal crisis in the BNP in December and the party is now taking legal action against him and others for alleged misuse of party membership lists.

The first outcome was the professionalisation of the BNP’s fundraising efforts in the form of the Building to Grow appeal at the end of last year, which the BNP claimed had raised £70,000. It was this fund that, the BNP said, paid for the new Excalibur warehouse to house and distribute party merchandise and publications. Sending the glossy Hope and Glory as a thank you to donors and encouragement to potential donors follows the example of the many charities that send out free magazines to supporters.

The second outcome was the management training courses on which, according to Hope and Glory, regional organisers would “join central staff as we implement a policy of ‘cascading’ management skills down through the party”. Revealing that the training was closely linked to the BNP’s election strategy, it continued: “The aim of these initial steps is to ensure that the people running the BNP’s national and regional structures will be ready to cope with the big increase in popular support, new members and potential that will follow if we can break though in style in the May elections. This progress will in turn set us up for an even bigger push for seats in the European Elections next year.”

The first course took in Griffin, Simon Darby (deputy leader and press officer), Mark Collett (graphic designer), Dave Hannan (former deputy treasurer), Mark Clutterbuck (head of the Central Management Team), Jackie Griffin (the leader’s wife) and Mackenzie herself. The presence of the unpopular Collett and Hannam showed that the two, whose incompetence and arrogance provoked the December’s internal crisis, are still at the heart of the party leadership despite their ostensible demotions. Whether Dowson’s training has helped them remains to be seen.

Dowson is a former member of the Orange Lodge in Northern Ireland and has admitted involvement with hardline loyalist groups in the West of Scotland. He was reported to have been the organiser of a flute band in Cumbernauld which recorded a tape in honour of Michael Stone, a member of the terrorist Ulster Freedom Fighters.

Stone was jailed for attacking a Republican funeral in west Belfast, throwing hand grenades and firing at the mourners, including women and children. Three people were killed.

The LifeLeague, which is secretive about its finances, uses highly provocative tactics, such as publishing the home addresses of abortion clinic staff. Similar actions by anti-abortion groups in the US have resulted in the murder of doctors.

Police have described LifeLeague’s tactics as “akin to those of animal rights extremists” and the group has been investigated by the National Extremism Tactical Coordination Unit.

Dowson has denied that he is a far-right sympathiser, claiming to be a Christian Socialist. In October, he told The Observer: “I find the whole of the right-wing utterly ridiculous”. That was around the same time he was meeting Kemp to set up his relationship with the BNP.

Hope not Hate

Property investment for fascists - the Croatia story continues

An article in a national newspaper last Sunday (22 July), and reproduced all over the internet, claimed to reveal how BNP leaders were setting up a self-sufficient rural bolthole in Croatia in preparation for when the oil runs out.

In fact the story, which was full of errors, was the result of an attempt by the BNP to build a smokescreen around some plain old-fashioned property speculation.

Last October Nick Griffin, the BNP leader, was a guest speaker at a well attended meeting of the party's Leeds branch. He normally turns up in a suit, but on this occasion he made his excuses for wearing jeans, saying that he had just returned from a visit to Croatia. He then regaled his audience about the ethnic problems following the break-up of the former Yugoslavia.

What Griffin did not mention was that much of the "ethnic cleansing" in Croatia at the start of the 1990s, consisting of torture, rape, murder and mutilation of bodies, was carried out by the reborn Ustasha movement. Some 50 years earlier the Ustashi had carried out their first attempt at genocide, in conjunction with the Nazis, against Serbs, Jews and Roma. More than a million Serbs of all ages were butchered in their homes, in forests and in concentration camps. Another 250,000 were forcibly converted to Catholicism, and around a further 300,000 were driven out of Croatia into the remote mountain areas of Serbia.

Hero worship of the wartime butchers of the Ustashi remains widespread in Croatia and it is one of the areas of eastern Europe in which Roberto Fiore, the Italian third-positionist fascist and long-term friend of Griffin, has taken an interest in recent years.

Griffin's visit to Croatia inevitably gave rise to speculation in the BNP, especially when news started to leak out about at least one other senior BNP officer visiting the country, about a property purchase there and even offshore bank accounts to shift BNP funds into the new project.

Older BNP members recalled with dismay two earlier overseas property ventures involving Fiore. The first was a ruined hamlet in northern France in the days when Griffin led the National Front Political Soldiers. A member of Fiore's family had their name on the title deeds and volunteers were shipped out to try to turn it into a political commune. The project was eventually abandoned, money raised from British supporters poured down the drain.

A decade later Fiore bought an abandoned village in Spain. Again work on making it habitable was carried out by volunteers, now from the successor group to the Political Soldiers, the International Third Position.

Yet again it flopped and Fiore had to rush in a lawyer to bail out a leading member of the ITP who had been thrown into jail for attacking the local mayor's property. Back in England the man was given a job in Fiore's extensive UK property empire. The project vanished.

And one must not forget how Griffin got Young NF members to work free of charge to convert a barn at his parents' property in Suffolk in the mid 1980s and later got the BNP to pay for renovation of a barn on his farm in Wales.

BNP members are not keen to see the party's hard-earned funds squandered on yet another potentially disastrous property venture. The BNP is not a party where people can freely ask awkward questions of their leader and get honest answers, so instead disgruntled members started leaking bits of interesting information about the Croatian plans to the anti-fascist Lancaster UAF blogsite.

This could not have come at a worse time for Griffin, who is currently facing a leadership election in the BNP. A huge amount of dirty linen has been paraded before the public in the past six weeks, including talk about property in Croatia.

Knowing that the story was likely to break beyond the anti-fascist movement, Griffin engaged in a classic manoeuvre to control the situation by orchestrating the delivery of a "scoop" to a national newspaper. Anti-fascist blogs and others immediately reproduced it, though Kirklees Unity soon removed it after realising that the story was riddled with errors and half truths and was just an attempt to divert attention from Griffin's property venture.

The story claimed that Andrew McKillop, an expert on "peak oil" – the theory that the world's oil reserves are about to run out – briefed the BNP leadership last September at a secret weekend meeting at a hotel in Hampshire. Those present were so concerned about this that they decided to buy 1,100 hectares of land in Croatia as a bolthole for when civilisation breaks down, the story continued.

But there were many errors.

The story quotes McKillop saying that he had only been contacted via the internet to give the presentation in the New Forest, giving the impression he has had little to do with the BNP. In fact Griffin has reproduced and promoted McKillop's articles on the BNP website and they have been published in the BNP's monthly magazine, Identity.

McKillop was also invited to join the BNP's shadowy think tank, which Searchlight exposed in March. The story says McKillop lives in the USA. When we spoke to him earlier this year he was living in Paris.

Another man named in the story is the BNP's economics expert Alan Goodacre. The writer seemed to think he uses the name Ian Fletcher when visiting the USA. In fact Ian Fletcher is a well known US rightwinger who lobbies against migrant workers. They are not the same person. For one thing an expert analysis of their articles show that Goodacre writes in British English whereas Fletcher is very definitely a North American.

One of the story's most obvious errors is the description of Lee Barnes as the BNP's second-in-command. Far from it: although Barnes acts as the director of the BNP's legal department, he is not actually a party member. This enables him to front up various money raising schemes for the BNP from which the party prefers to distance itself.

Griffin's deputy is Simon Darby and the party's vice-chair is Scott McLean.

The story claims the land is owned by a BNP sympathiser whose late father "is understood to have made a fortune in the pizza business". No name is given and the story sounds a bit like it is based on the pizza billionaire who funds a community in the USA.

The article ends with an obvious bit of padding, with a rapid trawl through the bombers Tim McVeigh and David Copeland and William Pierce's The Turner Diaries.

It is interesting that the BNP chose to dump this story on a journalist who does not have a track record of writing about the far right but works for a newspaper that is very keen on ecology.

The very worthwhile team at Lancaster UAF are to be congratulated on opening up a can of worms which the BNP leader will have great difficulty closing.

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