"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.

Fascist fund raiser quits broke party

Nasty right-wing thug Jim Dowson has quit the BNP forcing the party to pull its fundraising wing out of Ulster.

And last night he had the bare-faced cheek to tell the Sunday World he would have ended it sooner if we hadn’t written so much about him!

In a bizarre conference call involving party chief Nick Griffin, he confirmed he was finished with the BNP.

He then added: “I would have ended it sooner if you hadn’t kept writing stories about me.

“What are you gonna write about now that I’ve gone?”

But we can confirm part of the reason Dowson has quit is that his nose was put out of joint by a former National Front leader called Pat Harrington – who was once forced out of Ulster by the UDA for backing the IRA.

Harrington has been interfering in the call centre and is a close pal of Griffin from the old days in the National Front.

Dowson did confirm that the Belfast BNP fundraising operation would be closing and all party fundraising would be carried out on the mainland.

MASSIVE

It’s a massive blow for the BNP and Dowson personally who fought to bring the fundraising wing to the quiet suburbs of Belfast but found it impossible to get local staff to work in the office.

“Most BNP members are glad to see the back of him,” said anti-fascist campaigner Matthew Collins last night.

“The party looks like it’s facing bankruptcy and members are just walking away in disgust.”

Last night Dowson complained that we had been unfair to him as all he ever was, was a contractor for a political party of which he remains adamant he was never a member.

However when we put it to him that his rousing speech at a BNP fundraiser in Blackburn, where he summons up an image of Britain facing destruction due to immigration, showed he was more than a mere contractor – he said he couldn’t remember what he had said!

Instead he did concede: “I am a very strong British patriot who’s sympathetic to the party.

“But I have left the party in a better state than when I joined – certainly administratively – where they now have all the tools at their disposal.”

When we asked Jim about the dire financial situation which had put the future of the BNP in jeopardy he added: “Financially the party is not in a fantastic state.” But controversial leader Nick Griffin chipped in: “At least we’re not in £20m debt like the Labour Party!”

The beleaguered British National Party has been rocked by Dowson’s walk-out amid a bitter split which has ripped the party in two.

Dowson walked away from the party on Friday and has blamed outside interference for his resignation.

SORROW

In a brief statement to a right wing internet blog Dowson announced: “It is with deep sorrow and regret I have to inform you that I’m off when my contract ends.

“This will cost me tens of thousands but my love for my people, this country and the party is worth far more to me.

“I did my level best and remain 100% loyal but I don’t tolerate outside fools. PERIOD!”

The “outside fool” he mentions here is Pat Harrington.

When we asked if this statement was accurate he said to take it “with a pinch of salt”.

But Dowson has form for making drunken phonecalls late at night and the Sunday World understands the statement, made to former BNP man Eddie Butler, is true.

The 45-year-old self-proclaimed ‘Reverend’ – who used to campaign against abortion and gay marriage – had the fundraising contract for the far right party until the end of this year.

He was regarded as a close personal ally of BNP leader Nick Griffin who thanked him personally and publicly for his efforts in getting two BNP members into the European Parliament.

On Monday staff at the BNP’s Belfast bunker – where fundraising and membership are coordinated for the whole of the UK – were left stunned when they couldn’t get into the office.

Locks had been changed at the inconspicuous Dundonald industrial unit which was rented, staffed and organised by Dowson.

The Sunday World understands that the BNP took over the rent of the unit after Dowson had made them aware he was quitting but they then failed to pay the bill to the landlord.

The situation was resolved and it was business as usual by the next day.

The news it will be closing will be music to the ears of BNP members in England who hated Dowson and were disillusioned with the Belfast office.

The Belfast office came under heavy criticism for a string of cock-ups in the run up to the General Election which saw the BNP fail miserably.

Dowson himself came under increasing pressure because of a number of blunders – not least the gaffe with Marmite.

Dowson came up with the idea to use the spread with the famous slogan ‘you either love us or you hate us’ to promote the party in election adverts.

But Unilever, who make Marmite, protested and when Dowson refused to remove the slogan they sued – leaving the BNP no choice but to settle out of court at great cost – although Dowson said last night that all they had paid to Unilever was a “token amount”.



RIGHT WING NUTTER

THIS is the right-wing nutter who forced right wing nutter Jim Dowson out of right wing nutter party, the BNP.

He’s former National Front leader, and IRA fan, Pat Harrington.

Posing in front of an IRA memorial on the Falls Road is not what is usually expected from a right-wing fascist.

The 46-year-old Londoner has been offering support to the staff at Dowson’s Belfast call centre amid rumours, now confirmed, that Dowson was quitting and the office here will soon shut.

There have also been claims that Dowson and Harrington have come to blows about the running of the office.

This week Dowson confirmed he was leaving and blamed “outside fools” for interfering in the call centre he set up last year in Dundonald.

On his Facebook page recently Harrington openly criticised plans to close Belfast saying: “Patrick Antony Harrington is concerned by reckless threats made by Eddy Butler to the jobs of members working for the BNP in Belfast. The rights of our members will be defended.”

But Harrington’s close, and long term, friendship with BNP leader Nick Griffin appears to have won out and on Wednesday night Dowson and Griffin met over a bottle of port to sort out the details of his leaving.

Harrington and Shankill fascist David Kerr are rumoured to want to run the BNP in Ulster.

Harrington’s story is a bizarre one.

Despite being a prominent NF leader 30 years ago he was one of three fascists who made a controversial trip to Libya to meet Colonel Gadaffi.

In a Channel Four documentary, Disciples of Chaos, Harrington refused to condemn the IRA as terrorists.

His support for Irish Republicanism didn’t sit too well with the loyalists of Ulster – especially at a time when the Provos were at their most active – and he was ordered out by the UDA.

In 1984 Harrington, who cuts an extremely camp figure, caused mayhem at the Polytechnic of North London where he was studying philosophy.

Students picketed his lectures to protest that he was allowed to study while being a prominent member of the National Front.

Harrington left the National Front during a bitter split at the end of the 1980s but continued his strange mix of right wing and prorepublican politics.

Several years ago Harrington had hot coffee thrown in his face when he was serving drinks on the London-Edinburgh train after he was identified by an anti-fascist.

Harrington and Shankill fascist David Kerr have been pals for years as they become prominent in the Third Way – although in 2004 the party only had 20 members according to the Electoral Commission.

Thanks to Hope not Hate and Steven Moore at Sunday World

I have edited the article slightly from the original
John P

One Flew Over The Pig Farm: the BNP and us in 2008 - June

Sexuality and Aids and the concept of a relationship, how does a man and a woman relate, going through history, between Captains Scott and Oates, between Christ and John the Baptist and the Mother Earth walking through carrying the flag...it's almost like a still-born child, how does people relate to each other...it was dealing with the bigotry of attitudes towards people.

Before you conclude that Barnes had been at the funny fags again, the quote was actually Richard Barnbrook speaking to the Independent, as posted by a bemused Antifascist.

Even by the standards of the extreme Right Barnbrook is an exotic oddity. Antifascist noted:

There are certain snippets in the interview that reveal rather more about Barnbrook than the general membership of the BNP might care to know. He presents himself for the interview in a sand-coloured linen suit (with matching socks) and a gold tie. His ex-council house home, we are told, has cream carpets and visitors have to remove their shoes before entering. His television is covered by a cream throw and his mobile ringtone features a chorister singing Jerusalem.

But the oddest thing about Barnbrook (to that date) concerned his claim to have had a relationship with the actress Tilda Swinton, which Ms Swinton - not unnaturally - vehemently denied. Barnbrook's response was: "I've got DNA proof that I went out with her."

What the nature of this proof was, Barnbrook didn't tell - or if he did, the Independent thought it too disgusting the publish. Perhaps future girlfriends should be advised to back off at some speed if approached by a Barnbrook armed with a cotton bud?

Barnbrook's lucky elevation to the Greater London Assembly also elevated him above the BNP's small number of common or garden district and borough councillors, and made him, after Nick Griffin, the BNP's best known personality.

Things like that make Griffin twitchy, and sensing future danger to his position the BNP leader immediately saddled Barnbrook with deputy-leader and toady-in-chief Simon Darby as one of Barnbrook's "researchers". Acting, we believe, more as his Nickship's eyes and ears than as a researcher for Barnbrook, this at least gave former the rubber magnate something approaching real work to do, though we imagine Barnbrook would soon tire of Darby exclaiming "Yes, Nick, superb Nick, marvellous Nick" at least thirty times a day on one of his extensive collection of mobile phones.

Antifascist commented:

Barnbrook has become the BNP's most high profile member - of far more interest to the membership and the media than its leader Nick Griffin. Which really should make Barnbrook nervous. The last time someone became unaccountably more popular than Griffin - the BNP's then 'Cultural Officer' Jonathan Bowden - the attack dogs were set on him and he was forced into resignation. Griffin has never liked competition and will destroy anyone who looks set to usurp his position.

Barnbrook is clearly setting out his stall for both the assault on Parliament and leadership of the BNP. My guess is that if the former doesn't work out in two years time, he'll go full pelt for the latter.

Barnbrook's keen interest in the preservation of DNA is shared by the police, who used it in evidence against BNP supporter Kevin David, of Leytonstone. David was convicted for sending a hate letter to local councillor Maria Pye, who is disabled. DNA from David was found on the envelope. In language not a million miles removed from that found on many BNP blogs, David wildly emoted:

I see you talk a lot about the regeneration of Leytonstone and how there are going to be new shops and businesses. But the whole world can see how these scumbags are pushing the British people out. There are five million of these scumbags wanting to live here and open shops here.

Leytonstone has become a cesspit and ghetto for these scum. I see you walking around with a walking stick. Why don't you f**k **f you f** c**? Now there are 50 million scumbags in the UK. BNP for ever. Don't look for the real cockneys because they have already left. Asians out. Africans out. Europeans out.

Later David, with an existing conviction for ABH, was given an 18-month supervision order, and ordered to attend a six-month rehabilitation course. He was also ordered to pay £100 in compensation to Maria Pye and £70 in court costs.

We had cause to revisit the world of fantasy and fiction inhabited by Patrick Harrington and his tiny band of Third Way/National Liberal Party supporters when this strange confection of old National Front failures and tall-story tellers lighted upon the (stolen, of course) idea of bringing down upon their greying heads the proceeds of a "Money Bomb" for "liberty".

Patrick Harrington (or PA Sharp as he prefers to be known when conducting certain financial transactions) apparently being blessed with the ability to "order" a website into existence at a time of his choosing, a tacky website duly appeared calling upon 10,000 of the internet's most credulous dimwits to donate £10 each in return for a vague promise that "Everything given will go towards promoting a Liberty Party in the UK".

We said:

Exactly what the Third Way/NLP is intended to achieve - aside from cushioning Patrick Harrington from the truth of his own abject irrelevance - is unclear. For an organisation (if so large a word may be employed to describe something so insubstantial) to find itself with only twenty members after eighteen years of existence is the clearest of proofs that its only achievement has been utter failure.

However, even in the fantastically unreal world of Third Way/NLP there persists a belief that there is money to be made from the gullible and the deceived, and Mr Harrington and his colleagues have fixed themselves to make it through the mechanism of an appeal warped into the guise of a "mass donation" for "Liberty" aimed at putting £100,000 into the Third Way/NLP purse.

Or more specifically putting it into the pockets of certain Third Way/NLP individuals via the servicing of regular expenses claims.

After our story went up, something wonderful happened on the hitherto lifeless Third Way/NLP scam website - people began donating. Allegedly.

At the end of play the bogus appeal had supposedly raised £3,510, 10,000 credulous dimwits not being to hand. This was a mere £96,490 short of the extravagant £100,000 target, but we're sure that Mr "PA Sharp" ("it's my married name") and his little troop of fellow fantasists will account for every penny when they file the Third Way/NLP's returns with the Electoral Commission this year.

Also on the scrounge was Mr Sharp's friend Nick Griffin, who also prefers to deal in large sums of money but has a better chance of obtaining it. Nick thought that the British people needed to be told "the truth", and decided that the best way to do it was to haul a terrifying picture of Nick Cass up and down the by-ways of the country on the back of a 7.5 ton lorry. To this end he needed £39,000 sharpish and the begging letters went out. The "Truth Truck", as Nick christened it, would be brand new and would incorporate a state-of-the-art PA system together with light display features. Stormfront cynics with healthier bank-balances than the average appeal-prone BNP member were quick to label Griffin's latest wheeze the "Lie Lorry". As the truck eventually purchased was not new and incorporated neither a state-of-the-art PA system or light display features, the cynics were proved right, and the name "Lie Lorry" has ever since stuck as fast as Nick Cass's grinning face to the mobile propaganda project.

As the campaign to stop the BNP holding its annual Red White and Blue festival at Denby in Derbyshire continued, the one BNP member in the world who had no intention of going got into a strop when the police objected to the festival on public order grounds. This was Paul Morris, better known as the Green Arrow, who - perhaps with an empty whisky bottle rolling around his feet - angrily typed out the following into his blog:

Denby Police, sh*t eaters, who will one day have their pensions stripped from them by a vengeful British Public [read: fascist BNP] who never forget.

The UAF, pathetic sad losers who must blush with shame when they take their pieces of silver from their government pay masters. Rest assured we will not forget them.

The BNP learns the lessons of history and never forgets and will use the same tools against those who assist in the betrayal of the British People. Think about that Plod if you are capable of thought. We are watching you watching us.

Morris illustrated his point with a large picture obtained from a pornographic website catering to those with a deep interest in "scat" activities. This was removed by Blogger following complaints, followed by the entire post when the idiotic Morris realised that the BNP candidate in the Henley by-election was due to hold his press conference, and might be asked awkward questions about his fellow BNP member's blog. A chastened Morris replaced the post with one using an image of a beheaded young Muslim girl, and with his heroic friends resumed a campaign of intimidation and abuse against a young woman of Pakistani extraction who - it was the most curious thing - found herself unable to heap praise on the BNP or to show respect for its members in their ancient online mission to connect their feet with their mouths at every available opportunity.

Financial probity and the BNP having much the same relationship as ships that pass in the night (a very dark night, and at a very great distance), it was never going to be very long before yet another tale of BNP economic woe arrived to fill our pages. This came with the news that treasurer John Walker (left, a suspect in the later membership list leak scandal) had been removed from his post and shifted sideways into the gloriously titled position of National Dispatch and Logistics Manager.

Opening a well-written piece on some strange goings-on, Antifascist reported:

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

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

It's a measure of the distrust endemic within the BNP that many of the party's officials place more confidence in their enemies here at Lancaster Unity than they do in their own organisation, and are prepared to rely upon us getting out truths that would otherwise be buried beneath Griffinite spin and bluster.

In respect of the unpopular raid on BNP branch funds, Antifascist wrote:

Incompetence in the BNP is endemic but nowhere is it more evident than in the treasury. The File on Four programme, broadcast by Radio Four back in February, produced a whole raft of accusations of mismanagement, skullduggery and incompetence against Walker and his merry band of idiots, including the revelation that the BNP is behind with its PAYE payments (that is, the tax it takes from employee's wage packets that it is then supposed to pass on to HM Revenue and Customs). Naturally, the party still hasn't paid the bill and part of the reason for the sudden attack on branch funds was that Her Majesty was getting a tad ratty about the lack of revenue coming from the BNP. Not that the raid helped all that much - last month alone, the party paid out nearly forty thousand pounds on wages, expenses and part of the debt to the Revenue plus a further part-debt to Royal Mail.

Just how rocky the BNP's finances were was revealed in internal documents that fell in our way later in the year.

Walker's sideways shuffle into the post of National Dispatch and Logistics Manager, based at the then secret Deeside Excalibur merchandising operation, attracted the attention of disaffected BNP councillor Colin Auty, whose leadership challenge was clearly failing as Griffinite intimidation deterred members from signing his nomination papers. Antifascist believed that John Walker had been moved rather than sacked to buy his silence. Auty was more forthright:

He has been privy to a great deal of the shady and downright deceitful dealings of Mr Griffin over the last couple of years, so much so in fact that Griffin has been, for sometime, completely perplexed on how he is going to get rid of him without risking John doing the honourable thing and exposing the corruption and pressure that he has himself been compliant with for so long.

Auty wasn't backwards in coming forwards in the matter of Griffin's purging tendencies, either:

'He would merely isolate the victim by concocting lies about them concerning financial ‘irregularities’ (somewhat ironically), aimed carefully at his victim before unleashing his attack-dogs to finish the job with personal attacks and slanderous gossip. Occasionally the victim would then be pulled apart at an Advisory Council meeting in their absence complete with the customary ‘such a shame’ crocodile tears. Without being afforded the opportunity to defend themselves, the victim would be cast out as a leper from the Party. Those sat around the AC table, however shocked or confused that the ‘evidence’ spewed out regarding one of their comrades is entirely unsubstantiated, would very often sit in silence though fear of becoming the next victim. This is a standard Griffin modus operandi, as many of his decent and hardworking victims have been only too happy to confirm and share with us.'

Auty threw in the towel a few days later

With Richard Barnbrook hauling his exalted carcass about the corridors of City Hall, the leadership of the BNP group on Barking and Dagenham Council fell to f-word specialist and megaphone expert Bob Bailey, who was not best pleased with Barking College for hosting a Love Music Hate Racism event. Confronting principal Ted Parker, Bailey darkly warned of "trouble" if the college continued to host such events. Mr Parker told the Barking and Dagenham Recorder:

He was perfectly civil but he was obviously agitated. He seemed to be saying our students were in danger. As he left he said 'you have been warned', which sort of stuck it my mind. I thought it was a little strange. We have been involved with LMHR for a couple of years now. We oppose racism and promote harmony between people of all backgrounds, that's our ethos.

Bailey told the Recorder that "people should be able to speak freely without fear", just as he did when yelling obscenities at the paper's staff.

"Speaking freely without fear" is not a concept readily encouraged within the BNP, where "fear to speak freely" are the usual watchwords to heed unless you are possessed of a pressing urge to attract accusations that you are State, a Searchlight mole, in the pay of Lancaster Unity, Red, Nazi, mad, bad or any permutation thereof.

The scales fell from the eyes of the party's Scottish webmaster Paul Johnson after less than a year of membership. Johnson was shocked when an inquiry he made on behalf of another member was answered with a mixture of contempt and paranoia by Simon Darby. All Johnson's friend had wanted was a copy of the BNP constitution, an item always available to members of other political parties, but in BNP-land wanting to see the much revised and Griffinised constitution is akin to an act of treason.

Johnson said: "His [Darby's] words on the subject were why do you want it? Just tell him to "F*$k Off!" He is only a 'red' trying to wind you up!"

Johnson's resignation statement began:

What have I learned about the BNP in almost a year of being a paid member and as a BNP Scotland official, that a lot of the rumours are true and the party is corrupt, and is not democratic in any shape or form. Infact one might go as far to say that its not necessarily British but more of lets follow Griffin and blow smoke up his arse!

The party is full of a lot of lemmings that think Nick Griffin/ Mark Collett are some sort of 'Gods' in the making. I suppose when you surround yourself with lemmings it is easy to fall into the trap of thinking that you are the greatest person who walked the earth.

Before jumping to the conclusion that Johnson is a fundamentally decent man, he came to notice again on The Croft blog at the time of the membership list leak:

Paul also has a nice sideline in making cheerful wee button badges extolling such wonderful sentiments as:

England: Love it or leave it!
There Is No Black In The Union Jack!
White Power!

…as well as some fetching SS badges, Enoch Powell Was Right! badges and the ubuiqitous No To Immigration!

Lovely stuff!

Surely Mr J isn’t a white settler himself? Coming over here, taking all our racist badgemaking jobs…

Quite.

To be continued...

Who exactly is Nick Griffin working for - the BNP or Patrick Harrington's NLP?

• Why does BNP webmaster Simon Bennett run the BNP, NLP and Third Way's websites?
• Why are the Accentuate and Solidarity websites served up by BNP insider Lambertus Nieuwhof?
• Why did Nick Griffin ask Graham Williamson - not a BNP member - to chair the BNP's last conference?
• Why did Harrington's NLP stand against the BNP in South Hornchurch?

The recent history of the BNP and its connection with Patrick Harrington makes interesting reading. Harrington, you'll recall, engineered a hostile and possibly illegal takeover of the BNP's fake union Solidarity with Nick Griffin's blessing last summer, leaving the union split in two and in a state of chaos from which it has yet to emerge. The latest situation is that it is currently under investigation by the Trades Union Certification Officer.

One of Harrington's first tasks on grabbing the union was to hand a job to his Third Way colleague Graham Williamson, who despite having no experience (or indeed, talent) in public relations, decided to start running a web-based (meaning it doesn't exist anywhere except on the internet) public relations company, the utterly pointless Accentuate. Harrington, the leader of an utterly pointless union, aptly took Williamson on to run the PR for Solidarity. And has Solidarity been a PR success? Well, hardly, despite Williamson's third-rate PR company putting its best efforts into it.

Williamson, former treasurer of the National Front and old chum of both Griffin and Harrington, has popped up in an odd context recently over on the North West Nationalist blog, where it was suggested that he was one of the people who was asked to chair last year's BNP conference in Blackpool. Assuming that this is indeed the case, why would he be asked to chair the conference of a party to which he doesn't even belong?

In fact, the connections between the BNP and Harrington's version of Solidarity, his National Liberal Party and Third Way, and Accentuate are manifest mostly, like Accentuate itself, through the internet.

• The National Liberal Party website is run by Simon Bennett, the BNP's very own webmaster, as is the Third Way website.
• The Solidarity website is served up by Lambertus Nieuwhof's company Noisy Dinosaur, as is Accentuate.

Lambertus Nieuwhof, for those who don't recognise the name, was one of a trio of men who planted a home-made bomb at the Calvary Church School (in South Africa) in protest against the school's decision to become racially mixed. When the bomb failed to go off, one of them lost his nerve, gave himself up to the police and turned in his two associates, one of which was Nieuwhof. At the end of the resulting court case he received what Searchlight rightly stated was a derisory twelve-month suspended prison sentence. Leaving South Africa Nieuwhof set off for Britain, where he came into contact with the appalling Arthur Kemp, another South African extremist exile, who had been arrested for the murder of Chris Hani, a close colleague of Nelson Mandela, in April 1993 but was released without charge. Kemp had been named by Clive Derby-Lewis, a far-right South African MP who is now serving life imprisonment for setting up Hani's murder, as the author of a hit list of prominent anti-apartheid leaders. Both Nieuwhof and Kemp are in the BNP's inner-circle and both are close to Nick Griffin.

Back to the childish Simon Bennett (who has set up numerous sites imitating and attempting, though failing, to undermine Lancaster Unity) and we have a big question to ask. Why would the BNP's webmaster run a site for a rival party too? In fact, we asked this question of one of the ex-BNP members who are regularly in touch with us, who responded by stating that 'the NLP isn't really a rival to the BNP'. If that's the case, why did it support Michael Burton (an Independent) in the recent South Hornchurch by-election when there was a BNP candidate (Anthony Steff) who it could have supported? Clearly, the NLP IS a political rival to the BNP. Would the Labour Party trust its webmaster with running the Conservative Party's website too?

I'm aware that this article is more questions than answers but they all need to be asked in order to make sense of what is going on in the peculiar mind of Nick Griffin, who oversees all this nonsense. He has worked closely with Harrington for years and particularly closely during the Solidarity fiasco. Even Williamson, who is an idiot by anyone's standards, gets an important role in this comedy. We heard recently that he was asked by Griffin to watch over Richard Barnbrook at the London Assembly, to make sure he stays out of trouble. So why choose someone who isn't even a party member to do that next to impossible job (though if he keeps Barnbrook away from the booze, bananas and rugby players he should be okay)? Is he paid for it and if so, how much is he paid? Isn't there anybody in the BNP capable of doing the job? The questions are endless and they're not only coming from our side - people in the BNP itself are asking the same questions.

Answers on a postcard please...

A is for Appeal

Mention the names of certain personalities on the far-Right and one word is certain to follow on directly after.

Money.

A certain Mr Nick Griffin's tortuous relationship with money (usually not his own) has been an on-going source of anguish for his followers and friends and a first-class entertainment for us since ever we can remember the name "Griffin" first falling into our ears. And as Mr Griffin and his long-standing love affair with money has something of the flavour and scale of a Tolstoy epic, each chapter of it being lovingly recited here, among other places, we feel no great need to recapitulate the infamously convoluted plot.

Suffice it to say that the rendering of "Griffin" as "Gri££in" on the part of his most fervent admirers did not arise as the result of a keyboard typo, nor did the phrase "I gave two Griffins and a Darby" (£25), when recounting how much one placed in one's BNP branch kitty, first surface as a slip of the tongue.

Mr Griffin, of course, has a certain friend, a Mr Patrick Harrington. Mr Harrington, as we all know, is a legend in his own unfathomable mind: pretend general secretary of a pretend "fighting union", a "Director" - no less - of the pretend Third Way "think-tank", Mr Harrington is the man who apparently "orders" anti-anti-fascist websites into existence. A man for whom the word "failure" might have been tailor-made, Mr Harrington's relationship with the national currency has, like that of his good friend Mr Griffin, been questioned on a number of occasions.

Both gentlemen appear to have been supplied with the same reading primer when in their infancy, a strange primer in which A is not for Apple, but for Appeal, of the financial variety; and both gentlemen have ever since repeated the word at regular intervals, thus demonstrating how a notion, early taught, may be fully and profitably deployed in later life.

Mr Griffin and Mr Harrington have between them made so many appeals for money so often that to detail them all would keep us here long into the night, and so we shall settle for a brief telling of the latest in the endless line of appeals made by Mr Griffin and Mr Harrington's respective organisations, the British National Party and the Third Way/National Liberal Party.

The BNP has decided that it requires another means of putting its obnoxious message across to a stubbornly non-BNP voting public, and has hit upon the wheeze of ripping off the concept of the Hope Not Hate tour bus by purchasing what it is pleased to call its "Truth Truck" (Mr Griffin's ideas are always stupendously original).

This 7.5 ton Lie Lorry, as it has been christened on an underwhelmed Stormfront Britain, is to have a state-of-the-art PA system together with light display features, and will set the BNP membership back a mere £39,000, for which the inevitable appeal has been launched.

At that price this seems to us to be not so much a Lie Lorry as a Scam Van, since we have (Friday) priced up a bespoke truck sporting all the features specified by the BNP at just short of £26,000 (including delivery to any part of the UK mainland).

The Scam Van appeal has jerked the memories of some unnecessarily awkward BNP people regarding the "Boudicca Bus", a not dissimilar past BNP venture, they posing the divisive and treacherous question - "Whatever happened to it?" in the somewhat pious hope of receiving an honest answer, or any at all.

Knowing Mr Griffin, however, the simple purchase of a Scam Van, for whatever amount, is unlikely to be the end of the matter financially. Mr Griffin, it will be remembered, many years ago declared that "The BNP is a business", and we forecast tears to come as BNP branches having the services of the vehicle foisted upon them are invoiced lavishly for the pleasure, just as the BNP is invoiced whenever the home extension built at BNP expense on a certain Welsh pig-farm is deemed to have been used for BNP business.

Compared to Mr Griffin, Mr Patrick Harrington cuts a most pathetic figure. Failing to find fame other than as an object of ridicule, Mr Harrington is obliged to pass his days maintaining his own grandiloquent Wiki page (we have seen the excised edits), scouring the Web for mentions of himself, and using his expansive imagination to invent news stories and press releases for the Solidarity website.

In April we posted on the matter of Mr Harrington's National Liberal Party intending to use its wholly bogus name to stand in ten Liberal Democrat marginal seats at the next general election, and highlighted the exceedingly curious substance of the Third Way/NLP accounts as submitted to the Electoral Commission:

And of the Third Way - what does one say about a "party" of 20 members that bores the Electoral Commission to tears with its windy account of its local election performances (successes = 0), admits to having only £88.17 in the kitty (2006), but which allegedly raised £1400 from membership subs (yet £15 x 20 = £300! - go figure), somehow managing to spend £560 of that on vague "internet services"...

According to a hastily cobbled-together explanation given by Mr Harrington on the websites "ordered" into existence by him, sometimes Third Way members give more than £15 per year in membership fees. Perhaps they do - in fact each of the 20 would need to give £70 per year to arrive at the strangely exact figure of £1400, and that is something we simply do not believe.

Exactly what the Third Way/NLP is intended to achieve - aside from cushioning Patrick Harrington from the truth of his own abject irrelevance - is unclear. For an organisation (if so large a word may be employed to describe something so insubstantial) to find itself with only twenty members after eighteen years of existence is the clearest of proofs that its only achievement has been utter failure.

However, even in the fantastically unreal world of Third Way/NLP there persists a belief that there is money to be made from the gullible and the deceived, and Mr Harrington and his colleagues have fixed themselves to make it through the mechanism of an appeal warped into the guise of a "mass donation" for "Liberty" aimed at putting £100,000 into the Third Way/NLP purse.

To this dubious end Mr Harrington has seized upon the inglorious idea of hi-jacking the 793rd anniversary of the signing of the original Magna Carta on June 15th to dupe 10,000 people into pledging £10 each on that day, and a website has existed for several days where those who wish to throw good money at this most bogus of causes are afforded the opportunity to do so.

The scheme is so sweeping, so grandiose, so magnificently divorced from any ordinary notion of reality that it can only have come from the mind of the master of unreality himself.

Calling for what he terms a "Magna Carta Moneybomb" on the Third Way website, Patrick Harrington writes:

MASS DONATION FOR LIBERTY ON JUNE 15TH!

It’s time we had a new Magna Carta to protect our rights! Once upon a time an ‘Englishman’s home was his castle’. Today it seems his door is wide open! Help us fight back by donating to liberty on Magna Carta Day on JUNE 15TH. We have produced a Liberty Video explaining how the liberties we take for granted are under attack. Please get as many people as possible to see the video. Help the National Liberal Party to campaign against a ‘Big-Brother’ state by exposing its growth and making LIBERTY an issue at future elections. Make this the largest mass donation for a political cause in the UK. Let’s make history!

Would-be donors are then directed to the tacky 15thjunemagnacarta website, with its stolen Big Brother graphic, painful "Liberty video" and "Pledge today to ensure your liberty tomorrow!" exhortation - which perhaps better translates as "ensuring" something not too far removed from the servicing of regular expenses claims on the part of certain Third Way/NLP individuals.

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".

Given the sheep-like mentality so wincingly exhibited by the BNP membership-at-large, it is highly probable that they will dig deep to provide Mr Griffin with his £39,000 Scam Van, and we confidently predict that the vehicle will not be seen outside of the North-west of England for the duration of the Euro-elections next year - which may well be the only real reason for having one in the first place.

For Mr Harrington, of vaulting aspiration fueled by an unchained imagination, there awaits only an unpleasant encounter with reality on Sunday, June 15th. Like Mr Harrington, we'll be watching his graphs with great interest as they rise towards the 10,000 pledges, £100,000 mark.

Or not.

Fascist party aims to con LibDem voters

Nobody ever accused Patrick Harrington of hiding his light under a bushel.

His towering self-regard and assessment of his own importance have long been a source of mirth to anti-fascists used to dealing with the inflated egos predominating on the extreme right.

Nobody does more to maintain his own Wiki page than Harrington (he prefers to be called "Pat"), the mystery being why he, Wiki, or anybody else should imagine the serial failure to be worth 2,571 words, and why Harrington thinks anybody could care enough about him and his obscure doings to read the self-penned personal bio he seems to paste at the drop of a hat in various places on the web.

As we've often noted, to read anything penned by Harrington is to step outside hard reality. His personal bio gives the impression of a man of political substance and achievement; his writings on the fake union Solidarity's website are of what you might charitably term the overblown variety; and over on the Third Way website we could be forgiven for believing that this fifth-rate National Front successor organisation, of which Harrington accounts himself a "Director", really is some vital think-tank throwing up ideas essential to the good of the nation.

The truth is rather more mundane.

"Success" and "Harrington" are words rarely found in close proximity. The "militant fighting union" Solidarity is largely reduced to issuing General Secretary Harrington's pompous and unremarked press statements and making appeals for funds (a telephone "hotline" - with answering machine - being the latest Must Have for the One Big Union and its 211 members).

And of the Third Way - what does one say about a "party" of 20 members that bores the Electoral Commission to tears with its windy account of its local election performances (successes = 0), admits to having only £88.17 in the kitty (2006), but which allegedly raised £1400 from membership subs (yet £15 x 20 = £300! - go figure), somehow managing to spend £560 of that on vague "internet services" (we thought Wordpress and the Masterplan theme - the very same as used by the BNP - were free).

Harrington is very much a man who rose without trace to lead organisations that campaign without trace.

The Third Way, of course, goes by the dishonest name of "National Liberal Party".

Many entirely honourable and respectable political parties use the word "Liberal" in their titles - most obviously, the Liberal Democrats and the rump Liberal Party. Quite why the Electoral Commission ever came to allow Harrington's "National Liberal Party" to contest elections under that name is a mystery, since the EC normally refuses to allow sound-alike parties to campaign when they believe a title has been adopted with the intention of confusing or misleading voters.

The name game may soon be up, however, for the "National Liberal Party".

On Stormfront Harrington uses the moniker "Doublethink", and - we believe - that of "Completely Blank". On the Green Bigot's forum the poster "Completely Blank" denies being Harrington, despite "Completely Blank" managing to sound in every way like Harrington, even down to the evasions and inflated claims regarding the bogus union Solidarity. At any rate, when Norfolk Unity insisted that Harrington was "Completely Blank", the great man took the matter no further and contented himself with trying to force Blogger to remove a picture from their website.

Giving Harrington the benefit of considerable doubt, we'll say no more on the provenance of "Completely Blank", but go on to highlight a declaration recently made by that entity on the Nazi Stormfront website:

The National Liberal Party intends to contest ten marginal Lib Dem seats at the next general election. In some of these the Lib Dems have a majority of only some hundreds.

There was a National Liberal Party in the early part of the last century so the Third Way's claim to the title could be said to have some historic basis. There is a Liberal Party and a Liberal Democratic party so why not a revived National Liberal Party. After all, in Ulster there is an Ulster Unionist Party, a Democratic Unionist Party, a UK Unionist Party a Progressive Unionist Party and until recently a Northern Ireland Unionist Party. As the EC allows all these varieties of unionism I can see no reason to prevent a liberal nationalist party from using 'Liberal' in its title.

Ignoring the feeble attempt at self-justification as to why a fascist party lays claim to the title "Liberal", the first paragraph of Completely Blank's posting leaves no doubt whatsoever that the National Liberal Party intends to go into the next general election purposed on conning votes away from the Liberal Democrats by confusing itself with the mainstream party, and - they hope - losing the sitting Liberal Democrats their seats.

There can be, and is, no other reason for the NLP to target itself so specifically - only against Liberal Democrats, and only in marginals where a small number of votes will decide the sitting MPs' fates.

No other no-hope party, to the best of our knowledge, has ever gone into a general election fixed purely on unseating MPs by use of deceit and obsfucation.

In our opinion this amounts to a clear intention to mislead voters and to abuse the democratic process on the part of a nasty little organisation made up of no-hopers and fantasists closely connected with the BNP and complicit in the running of the racist party's bogus front groups.

It is also reason enough for the Electoral Commission to strip Third Way of the right to campaign under the spurious "National Liberal Party" title.

We have already alerted the Liberal Democrats to the underhand intentions of the squalid NLP, but visitors (of all political persuasions) to this website can help by complaining to the Electoral Commission, and by bringing this post to the attention of Liberal Democrat MPs and LibDem organisations.

Follow this link to the Electoral Commission's contact web-page, where complaints can be made to each national EC outpost in writing, by email, or by telephone.

Harrington and company may well have over-stepped the mark with their premature blustering. Let's ensure it comes back to haunt them.

Phone calls to Solidarity AGM hotel needed

The BNP tradition of lying about itself seems to have filtered down to its front groups. Even when pretending to operate as a trades union, the party seems unable to be honest about what it is and what it stands for. Today is supposed to be the AGM of the BNP's fake union Solidarity (to begin at 2pm) and a conference room has been booked for it at the Apollo Hotel at Hagley Road, Birmingham - under the name of Accentuate, a fake PR company that is the sinecure of former National Front treasurer Graham Williamson.

We need to ring the hotel to let them know that Accentuate is simply a front group for Solidarity, itself a front group for the BNP and Patrick Harrington's Third Way grouplet. Harrington is yet another old Griffin comrade from his days in the National Front.

The Apollo Hotel can be called on 0121 455 5291. Remember to stay polite and persistent.

Solidarity - police called in

News has reached us that the Executive Committee of the BNP’s fake Solidarity trade union has called in the police to investigate the affairs of the strife-torn organisation. EC members Clive Potter and Tim Hawke have also involved the trade union Certification Officer and sought the help of Leicester MP Peter Soulsby. This confirms comments made on the Nazi Stormfront forum.

This comes in the same week that Solidarity’s 2006 annual return became available, showing that at the beginning of 2007 the union had only 42 members. In May Vice-President Tim Hawke emailed one of our correspondents claiming that the union had around 100 members.

We don’t intend to repeat the entire Solidarity saga here (links to the relevant LUAF articles are provided below), save to reiterate that the farce began at a quorate meeting of Solidarity’s Executive Committee, where allegations of irregular behaviour regarding the union’s funds were put to General Secretary Patrick Harrington, and which at a later Special Executive Meeting resulted in his suspension pending an investigation.

Harrington, an old friend of BNP leader Nick Griffin, refused to accept his suspension and sought Griffin’s support. This seems to have caught the BNP leadership off-balance, as the “rescue plan” they put into operation was badly thought out - completely disregarding Solidarity’s legally agreed constitution - and enacted with typical BNP heavy-handedness.

Any pretence that Solidarity was ever anything other than yet another BNP front was shattered when the union’s host provider, owned by failed South African school-bomber and BNP member Lambertus Nieuwhof, hijacked its website which remains in the control of Harrington’s version of Solidarity. An unconsitutional EGM was quickly called, it being agreed beforehand to expand the number of Executive Committee posts and to carve them up between the BNP and Third Way (the tiny organisation represented by Harrington), which the non-EGM duly ratified.

The BNP’s internal affairs may be conducted in this hole and corner manner, but the affairs of what is a legally constituted trade union are quite a different matter.

Any unbiased perusal of Solidarity’s constitution will show that the Special Executive Meeting which suspended Patrick Harrington was a legal gathering within the scope of that constitution. Whether Harrington was guilty or not of the charges made against him has no bearing on that inescapable fact.

Consequently, we believe that the actions of Harrington and his supporters since that time have been entirely beyond Solidarity’s constitution, that his and the BNP’s version of the union has no real legal existence, and, therefore, no right to utilise the official union’s financial and other resources, including its membership lists - hence the involvement of the police.

Solidarity update - BNP’s Nick Griffin heavily criticised for interference
Where next for the BNP’s amoeba-like Solidarity union?
Solidarity disaster goes critical as criminal investigation is threatened
BNP discards democracy completely to force takeover of 'independent' Solidarity
Solidarity - an email update from the Vice-President Tim Hawke
BNP's Solidarity situation worsens - fake union under threat
BNP's fake union Solidarity already up against the ropes
Related articles

BNP's Solidarity situation worsens - fake union under threat

The BNP's fake-union Solidarity appears close to collapse after the apparent suspension of the General Secretary Patrick Harrington.

Harrington, formerly involved with the National Front, was allegedly suspended from his duties as General Secretary of the BNP-allied union pending an investigation into accusations of financial irregularities.

Information supplied to Lancaster UAF suggests that Harrington has refused to cooperate with the investigation by refusing to disclose details of the Solidarity accounts. Indeed, he appears to have gone a few steps further, blocking access to the union's Paypal account which we're told, has all the membership money tucked away in it - prompting threats of legal action unless the money is forthcoming.

The Executive Committee of Solidarity, which now appears to consist only of Clive Potter (President) and Tim Hawke (Vice-President), have taken action after Hawke refused to sign the first year accounts (required by the Certification Authority before, we gather, making Solidarity a bona fide union) after becoming aware of the 'irregularities', prompting the BNP to go into automatic blame the reds mode, claiming that Solidarity had been the subject of a far-left sabotage bid. Rubbish of course, but pretty much what you'd expect from the corrupt and single-minded BNP.

We were supplied with a further communication allegedly sent to all members from the Executive Committee. This communication, while interesting in itself, had other interesting information contained within it.

'In a last ditch attempt to prevent the investigation from coming to light, Mr Harrington contacted the Host Provider of the website (a past friend of his) and has replaced the website with his own. He is currently misleading members into the believe [sic] that he is the Leader of the union, however this is not the case and we ask members to be patient with us.'

This presumably is a reference to Calvary Church School bomber Lambertus Neiuwhof, who apparently now runs most of the BNP's web-based operations now through his company Vidronic Online. There's more about the truly despicable Neiuwhof and his connections with the BNP and its subsidiaries here and here.

Accusations and counter-accusations are flying about in all directions. Harrington (assuming that the note we have received really is from Harrington) has responded to his suspension by claiming breach of the Data Protection Act (though he then breaches the Act himself by giving some personal details of one of his accusers which must have come straight off the membership list), complaining about his 'unconstitutional' removal from office and making another call for an Extraordinary General Meeting to increase the Executive Committee of the union to seven members, mostly BNP-nominated, thus giving control over completely to the party. He then takes on the tried and tested 'sabotage' defence but rather than us having to dissect it all, here it is for you to read and nod off to;

'A malicious email is being circulated which I understand you have been sent a copy of. First, let me apologise to you that personal information that you supplied to our Union is being misused in this way. I will be making every effort to ascertain who has supplied this information and whether they have committed offences under the Data Protection Act.

An unconstitutional attempt is unfortunately being made by two members of our Executive, Clive Potter and Tim Hawke, to remove me as General Secretary of our Union. A secret meeting was held in which they appointed a William McLinden both a 'Special Investigator' and 'Acting General Secretary'. Our Constitution is available on our Website. You will see that for Executive meeting to be quorate all three members must be present (strangely, I was not invited!). As I was not present any purported decisions are unconstitutional. Additionally our Constitution states that the General Secretary will remain in post so long as he satisfies the majority of members. Mr McLinden has been a member of our Union for little more than a few weeks. When he joined he provided a Liverpool Street address but a North Cheshire telephone number. His actions since joining have been factional and disruptive. Investigations regarding Mr McLinden are ongoing.

I am supporting calls for an Emergency General Meeting on 14 July so that our members can decide themselves who has acted wrongly and who should lead our Union forward.

The principal political backers of our Union - Third Way and the British National Party - have published statements on their website backing me and calling for an EGM. So determined are they that the Union should be secured that they are mounting an email recruitment campaign this week which has already resulted in a surge of new memberships.

Reference is made in the email to allegations made against me. I have requested details of any allegations but these have yet to be provided. Our first year accounts were prepared by a professional firm of accountants. They were audited by a Barrister and Kenny Smith (head of BNP admin) as lay auditors. They were shown all bank statements and receipts. Once submitted to the Certification Officer these will be published on our website and circulated to members. The second year accounts are currently being prepared and will then go through the same process. As Union finances are subject to many legal checks there should be no room for such unfounded allegations.

I am acting in my role as Treasurer of the Union. I am concerned that the financial information of our members is kept confidential. As I bear legal responsibility (currently) under our Constitution I intend to ensure that everything is done properly. I have no intention of handing over control whilst remaining legally liable.

Anyone who uses PayPal will know how it works. All transaction details are automatically recorded. These will form part of our accounts. Membership payments come in, a PayPal fee is deducted and money transferred (once it reaches a reasonable level) to our main Union bank account.

I have suggested, however, that due to my heavy workload in other areas the Executive should be expanded to seven and that a specific post of Treasurer should be created. This would allow me to concentrate on writing and representing our members at grievances, disciplinaries and tribunals. I have pointed out that under the current constitution the responsibilities of the GS are onerous (particularly for a voluntary worker). I look forward to handing over my financial responsibilities to the new Treasurer!

I believe a deliberate attempt is being made to disrupt our Union on a large-scale. This is aimed at preventing a major recruitment campaign that was planned and sabotaging the submission of our first year accounts (a legal requirement). The wreckers have even threatened to call for our Union to be de-registered. I am determined that this will fail. I will take all necessary steps to safeguard our Union pending the decisions of our membership at the EGM. Our website has been secured and I will move to secure other vital areas in co-operation with the wide team of members who have rallied to defend our Union.

When the EGM is held the members alone will decide who has acted wrongly and who has been true. I urge you to continue your support.

If you receive any further malicious communications please copy them to me as I will be looking actively at how those responsible can best be called to account.'

We draw your attention to the line we have highlighted in bold above: 'The wreckers have even threatened to call for our Union to be de-registered.' So have we and we will continue to ask trades unionists to investigate the process of any such move and take action through their unions immediately.

NICK GRIFFIN: profile of a fascist

As we approach the beginning of the Hope not Hate Anti-Fascist Fortnight, we thought we'd pinch the odd useful article from the website to help spread the word. Here's the first, starting at the top with Nick Griffin, fascist and Holocaust-denier.

The British National Party (BNP) leader, Nick Griffin, presents himself as a modern, respectable politician but he is nothing of the sort. For over 30 years he has been a hardline fascist. He denies the Holocaust happened, believes that Jews are conspiring against white British people and even today cavorts with some of the world's most hardline Nazis.

Born in 1959 Nick Griffin comes from a wealthy right-wing family. His father, Edgar was a Conservative party member, involved in Iain Duncan Smith's campaign for election as party leader until he was discovered answering a BNP hotline in the absence of Griffin's mother who had also stood as a BNP candidate against Duncan Smith in during the 2001 general election.

Influenced by British Union of Fascists literature on the "Jewish Question" Griffin attended his first National Front aged 15, though did not officially join the party until he was a student at Downing College, Cambridge, where he studied law gaining a lower second-class degree. He rose quickly through the ranks, becoming the national student organiser in 1978.

In 1980, Griffin launched Nationalism Today, a font of "Third Positionist" fascism, which claimed to transcend the evils of both capitalism and communism. Both ideologies, Griffin claimed, were identical as both concentrated private ownership in very few hands, infringing on the right of independence of nation states and, most fundamentally, being Zionist (that is, Jewish) controlled.

Strange bedfellows

During this period Griffin became influenced by Italian fascist Roberto Fiore, a member of the Italian Third Position who introduced Griffin to the blood and soil philosophy of Italian nazi theorist Julius Evola. Under Griffin the NF embraced Third Position politics. Becoming known as "political soldiers" NF representatives met with Colonel Gaddafi's regime through the Libyan People's Bureau in London, and expressed support for Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini. Griffin and other leading NF figures then took an all-expenses-paid fundraising trip to Libya as guests of the Gaddafi regime.

Expressing his support for Muslim fundamentalism (which the BNP now paradoxically deplores) Griffin wrote in National Front News that "common interest must be turned into practical cooperation" and that he and his colleagues were not afraid "to be seen standing side by side with Third Way nations such as Libya and Iran." Griffin also backed black separatist Louis Farrakhan who likewise called for racial apartheid.

In 1989 Griffin left the NF to form the International Third Position, a small reactionary fascist sect, which campaigned against Coca Cola, McDonald's, urbanisation and "Zionism" (the Jews). Griffin's involvement was not to last.

In 1990 he lost an eye in an accident. In 1991, after a failed business venture, which cost another member several thousand pounds, Griffin went his own way.
Political chameleon

In 1995, Griffin joined the BNP. His personal journal The Rune, an antisemitic quarterly produced by Croydon BNP served as a platform for opposing the "modernisation" of the BNP, accusing those who wanted change of "rainbow Conservatism". He also announced that the BNP should prioritise denying the Holocaust to schoolchildren.

Griffin became editor of Spearhead, the flagship BNP journal in 1996 and set out to take over the party, initially seeking a merger with the National Front. In the process Griffin jettisoned many of his core beliefs - at least publicly. Recognising that the BNP was unelectable with some of its policies, Griffin dropped its commitment to compulsory repatriation - though the small print allows for the option to be considered if not enough people accept their financial offer to return home.

In 1998 Griffin was found guilty of distributing material likely to incite racial hatred and was given a two year suspended sentence.

In 1999 he ousted BNP founder John Tyndall to become BNP chairman. In a bid to emulate the success of groups like the French National Front, with which the BNP has close links, Griffin has deliberately toned down the hardline rhetoric of the "old" BNP in exchange for limited electoral success.

Puzzled by Griffin's apparent conversion to the ballot box his former ITP comrades asked pointedly: "He has been a conservative, a revolutionary nationalist, a radical national Socialist, a Third Positionist, a friend of the 'boot boys' and the skinhead scene, a man committed to respectable politics and electioneering, a 'moderniser'. Which is he in reality?"

Replying to criticism within the far right, Griffin told a private meeting of American nazis and racists that while the BNP needed to change to get elected, his core beliefs - that of the superiority of the white race - remained his driving force.

Out of the glare of the British media Griffin maintains close links with white supremacists and racial scientists who promote spurious racial science. Griffin denied being a racist but is only too happy to consort with leading American extremists including former KKK leaders David Duke and Don Black through forums such as American Renaissance, which seeks to promote the "clear conception of the United States as a nation ruled by and for whites".

Griffin speaks of the need for community-based politics to build respectability for the BNP in the eyes of voters. Yet this is the same Nick Griffin who only a few years before wrote in The Rune that the only "well-directed boots and fists" could back up BNP policies "not of rational debate."

Griffin stood in Oldham in the hope of exploiting race riots during the 2001 general election. He gained 16%. During the 2005 general election Griffin stood in Keighley, West Yorkshire, again trying to exploit racial tensions. He polled 4,240 votes (9.16%).

In 2006 he was charged again with inciting racial hatred after calling Islam "a wicked, vicious faith" and that Muslims were guilty of turning Britain into "a multi-racial hell hole." He was acquitted of all charges, subsequently basking in unheralded publicity, which helped raise the profile of the BNP ahead of the May 2006 local elections.

Griffin is a typical fascist - a man for all people. He is also an outrageous opportunist. There is not a bandwagon or campaign he would not exploit or a political belief he would not jettison if he thought he could benefit.

Griffin the Holocaust denier

Despite Griffin's new moderate image, he remains a Holocaust Denier. He has attacked Holocaust denier David Irving for being too moderate (!) for admitting that some Jews did indeed die during the Holocaust claiming the "True Revisionists will not be fooled by this new twist to the sorry tale of the Hoax of the Twentieth Century." His views on the Holocaust led in 1998 to a conviction for distributing material likely to incite racial hatred. He received a two-year suspended jail sentence.

Griffin remains an ardent Holocaust denier. Even today, he still refuses to accept the Holocaust happened. In 2006 he was quoted in the Mail on Sunday as saying: "It's well known that the chimneys from the gas chambers at Auschwitz are fake, built after the war ended."

On his farm in Wales Griffin has, according to Wales on Sunday, two pigs one called "Anne" and another called "Frank" - a crude anti-Semitic parody of Anne Frank, the young Jewish girl whose wartime diary, written whilst she was in hiding in Amsterdam is a world famous indictment of Nazi persecution of the Jews. Anne Frank was later betrayed and died in a concentration camp. Apparently Griffin thinks this is funny.

Griffin admitted to the Mail on Sunday that the legacy of Hitler gave British Nationalism a bad name, but in the same interview he traces the roots of the BNP back to the 1930s - to the British Union of Fascists who were praised in Griffin's own magazine The Rune during the 1990s.

Griffin the anti-Semite

In 1997 Nick Griffin produced Who are the Mindbenders? Adapted from a US Nazi publication of the same name, it claims to prove that the minds of British people are brainwashed through Jewish control of the media. The booklet includes a list of all known Jews working in the media as though they are working together for a joint cause. He proves Jewish control of the BBC by naming a mere 19 Jews who work for the corporation. He has never repudiated this work.

Griffin in quotes

On the Holocaust

I am well aware that the orthodox opinion is that 6 million Jews were gassed and cremated or turned into lampshades. Orthodox opinion also once held that the earth is flat… I have reached the conclusion that the 'extermination' tale is a mixture of Allied wartime propaganda, extremely profitable lie, and latter-day witch-hysteria."

On Race

Without the White race, nothing matters. [Other right-wing parties] believe that the answer to the race question is integration and a futile attempt to create 'Black Britons', while we affirm that non-Whites have no place here at all and will not rest until every last one has left our land."

On power

When the crunch comes, power is the product of force and will, not of rational debate. We have to have a body of trained young men capable of defending our organisation. If people come to crack our heads we will break theirs."

On Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf

The chapter I most enjoyed was the one on propaganda and organisation - there were some really useful ideas there."

Hope not Hate Anti-Fascist Fortnight