Labi Siffre - Something Inside So Strong

I've had a cracking few hours round at a mates house playing Poker and drinking a very decent Single Malt so please forgive me if the following rant has lots of swear words and spelling mistakes.

As a child growing up in the 1980s there were several songs that sort of hit me on a social, political and emotional level. After the astonishing simplicity and heartfelt emotions of the Special AKA and Free Nelson Mandela I developed an awareness of what was happening in South Africa and the Anti Apartheid movement in general. I knew about it with cricket and the Rebels tour of 82 or 83.

As I got to 15 or 16 I heard this song and it has ever since had a powerful effect on me:-


It is one of the most joyous, uplifting and life affirming songs I know of and it's message is very clear.

Now imagine my surprise when I stumble into my flat, wake up most of the neighbours, turn on the PC and see this.

So in my rather confuddled state I drank a good hot pint mug of Yorkshire Tea and re-read the screengrab just to make sure that I am right about this.

This is Bob Taylor, one of Nick Griffins leading cheerleaders and online tosspots using a song that was openly a protest song about Apartheid in South Africa on his Facebook page.

Now, Bob more than likely doesn't know much more about Labi Siffre apart from this song and possibly It Must Be Love which Madness covered back in the day so well, so I'll do a little biog for him.

• Labi was born in Hammersmith in 1945,
• His mother was from Barbados and his dad from Nigeria.
• He has been openly Gay since the early 60s and married his partner who he had been with for over 40 years after Civil Unions became legal in 2005 and he is an Atheist.

Update Hi Bob.

Far-right Austrian leader who replaced Jorg Haider reveals: 'We were gay lovers'

Austria has been rocked after the male successor to right-wing leader Jorg Haider virtually admitted to having a gay affair with him.

Haider, 58, who was pictured cuddling a man in a gay bar where he had his final drinks before the death crash which claimed his life, was long suspected of leading a double existence during his years in power.

Now Stefan Petzner, 27, who recently replaced Haider as leader of the right wing party, Alliance for the Future of Austria, effectively outed himself as the far right leader’s gay lover while being interviewed on the country’s O3 radio channel breakfast show.

Good friends: Joerg Haider, right, and his spokesman Stefan Petzner toast after a news conference in Vienna

'I had to go to him. I had to go to him,' Petzner said in his highly emotional interview as he recalled how he rushed to the hospital where the dead body of 52-year-old Haider was lying after his fatal crash in early October.

Admitting that he felt a 'magnetic attraction' for Haider, whom he met five years ago while working as a cosmetics correspondent for a newspaper, Petzner insisted: 'We had a relationship that went far beyond friendship. Jorg and I were connected by something truly special. He was the man of my life.'

He insisted that Haider’s widow, Claudia did not object to his relationship: 'She loved him as a woman. He loved her as a man. I loved him in a completely different and personal way. She understood that.'

But Petzner’s sister, Chrisitiane, 30, appeared to cast doubt on her brother’s story.

In a newspaper interview she said: 'Sometimes Claudia was jealous because Stefan would spend more time with her husband than she did.'

Clearly embarrassed by the revelations, officials at the Alliance for the Future of Austria, yesterday attempted to limit the political damage to the party by cancelling forthcoming interviews with Petzner.

However their attempts to prevent his radio interview being rebroadcast were turned down.

There was speculation that as a result of his controversial interview, Petzner might soon find himself replaced as party leader.

Haider crashed his Volkswagen limousine while drunk and driving at more than double the speed limit while on his way his mother’s birthday party in the early hours of the morning earlier this month.

Last Saturday he was given the equivalent of a state funeral in Klagenfurt, the capital of the Austrian province of Carinthia where he was governor for more than a decade. More than 25,000 people attended.

Hours before he was buried it was revealed he drank a whole bottle of vodka in a seedy gay bar with an unidentified male 'friend'.

His party more than doubled its share of the vote in Austria’s general election at the end of September i n which the far right won 30 per cent.

The result prompted speculation that Haider would once again figure in Austrian national politics.

Allegations that Haider was either gay or bi-sexual were first published in Austria nearly a decade ago.

However the far right leader, who fathered two children with his wife Claudia, refused to discuss the allegations, fearing that they would alienate thousands of his ultra conservative followers.

Until yesterday conservative Austria had preferred not to dwell on the subject and allowed Haider to portray himself at least, outwardly as a traditional family man., although his party was nicknamed the 'Haider’s Boy Party' .

Daily Mail

Last chance to apply for a job with London's BNP member

There are only two days left to get your application in for a job with the BNP's lone London Assembly member.

Richard Barnbrook won a seat in the May elections, and now the City Hall website is carrying adverts for a PA and a researcher to join his staff. The closing date for applications is Friday. The BNP presence on the Assembly sparked protests just after election day.

The jobs are advertised by the Greater London Authority. In its notes for job applicants it states:

"The GLA ensures it serves the interests of all Londoners and communities equally, regardless of their religion, race, gender, age, disability or sexuality. The GLA wants to ensure that the people who work for us are truly representative of Londoners. We have therefore set ourselves the target of having a workforce which is 52% female, 25% from black and ethnic minority communities, and 10% with a disability. We have set these targets for all levels of our workforce, and we positively encourage applications from people from within these groups."

The GLA target fails to mention the lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans communities.

The BNP is outspoken in its opposition to a multi-cultural society and to gay equality. The party, which has more than 50 councillors in England and Wales, has at times maintained that homosexual acts should be recriminalised. During his campaign for Mayor of London Mr Barnbrook, who is a Barking and Dagenham councillor, along with eleven BNP colleagues, said:

"You can be gay behind closed doors, you can be heterosexual behind closed doors, but you don't bring it onto the streets, demanding more rights for it."

He also denied the party is racist.

"It's not immigrants that are at fault here, never has been, it's the establishment, our own governing powers and their greed or their ignorance or their simple gutlessness to do anything about it," he told the BBC. "They feel if they try to look at immigration they will have the finger pointed at them - 'racist'. This is an easy get out clause - this is bullying people. We're not racist at all. We do not perceive one person's religion, identity, culture or way of life as being better or worse than our own, we are simply different."

Mr Barnbrook was ridiculed in 2006 when the Evening Standard newspaper publicised a copy of a film produced and directed by him described as "Marxist gay cinema." The film, HMS Discovery, A Love Story, contains scenes of men undressing and touching each other, coupled with nudity and sexual activities. Mr Barnbrook told the Standard:

"It was an art film, not a bloody porn film. The only nudity in it is a couple of guys running in a river. This was done when I was a student. It was part of my extra education, part of my studies and that was it. Anything to do with my past politics or my past work, I am not interested in commenting on."

The BNP has previously told PinkNews.co.uk that homosexuality should not be promoted as equal to a straight lifestyle.

"The word gay means happy, we have no problem with being happy," a spokesman said. "Some unfortunate people suffer from homosexuality so we will just have to tolerate them. If I was one I would be ashamed and would remain celibate."

Pink News

Far-right loses the plot on gay equality

Nick Griffin and the British National Party, ever attempting to make themselves more popular, have come out (if you'll excuse the expression) against homosexuality, albeit in a fairly half-hearted way. Not averse to stating that homosexuality is, in its opinion, wrong, the BNP's monumental hypocrisy also allows it to take the line of least resistance and ignore the fact that it exists as long as any homosexual activity takes place behind closed doors and doesn't frighten the horses.

Griffin, famously embroiled in a homosexual relationship with Martin Webster back in his old National Front days, has recently taken a hypocritically firm stance against gays both in and out of the party but has taken great care to ignore what goes on immediately around him, that it suits him to ignore. Richard 'Dickie' Barnbrook, leader of the BNP contingent at Barking and Dagenham, must have caused him a few problems then with the extensive publicity over his ghastly gay porn film HMS Discovery.

Griffin isn't the only one who is ready to jump on any available perceived anti-gay bandwagon. Unsteady Eddy Morrison, 'National Political Advisor' to the miniscule British People's Party, has also taken a public stance against homosexuality, though in Morrison's case, he is at least prepared to state where the party stands unequivocally;

'The British People’s Party opposes homosexuality as a perversion of nature. We do not allow homosexual and lesbians into membership. If the BPP find any have joined they will expelled immediately!'

Eddy Morrison would be pretty funny if he wasn't a nazi. The most recent Nationalist Week, an online magazine that he writes when he's only half-pissed, has this to say about the perceived modern misuse of the word 'gay';

'The BPP does not use the word "gay" to describe these obnoxious people. Gay is an old English word that means "to be happy and contented". True to form, the politically correct Pink Mafia has hijacked the word. To us in the BPP, they are queers...'

As indeed, they often are to other queers, many of whom have discarded the word 'gay' and happily (indeed gaily) reclaimed the word 'queer'. Many of us will remember the same drivel about the word 'gay' being said thirty or forty years ago, showing that Morrison really hasn't moved with the times at all. Poor old Eddy can be discarded as a simple and narrow-minded buffoon, especially after one digests the following line from Nationalist Week;

'You can find members of the Pink Mafia everywhere, like maggots infesting a rotting piece of wood.'

Do maggots infest rotting wood? Not that I go around checking dead wood on every possible occasion, but I rather thought one would be more likely to find woodlice.

Griffin and Morrison's respective political parties (if either of them have a right to the description) are both trying desperately to popularise themselves - the BNP rather more than the BPP - and Griffin in particular believes that a public expression of disgust and contempt for homosexuals is going to earn him kudos with the voting public. He may however, find his attacks backfiring on him because a very recent YouGov poll for Stonewall finds 90% of the British population support the ban on discrimination against gays and lesbians.

Nor is Griffin's attempted hijack of Christianity likely to help him. Despite the protestations of some church leaders, as many as 85% specifically back the sexual orientation regulations, which make discrimination against gays and lesbians in the provision of goods and services an offence. The survey shows that 'people of faith' were as likely to support gay equality as members of the wider population. In fact the poll depicts a society predominantly at ease with one of the key social changes of the past twenty years.

One of the BNP's anti-gay themes revolves around gay members of staff in schools but even here the party has got it wrong because three out of four said they would be comfortable if their child's teacher was gay. Even more said they would happily be treated by a gay doctor.

Football, the great leveller which has done so much to oppose racism simply by having great players of all colours working together on the same team, won't help Griffin out over this issue either. 92% said they would have no complaints if it emerged that a footballer in a team they supported was gay, while 80% said a gay member of the royal family would not cause a problem either. Even nearer to Griffin's particular knuckle, 89% said they would back laws making it illegal to incite hatred on the grounds of sexual orientation, thus giving the anti-Semitic, anti-Muslim and now anti-gay Griffin even more opportunities to appear in court.

'I'm delighted we now have hard evidence that people don't want to live in a society that allows prejudice against any group of people, including lesbians and gay men, to fester,' said Ben Summerskill, Stonewall's chief executive. 'Britain is a tolerant country with a widespread acceptance that prejudice has no proper place in civil society'.

Nick Griffin may have a late-developing problem with homosexuality but it's pretty obvious that hardly anybody else has.

BNP plans poll push

Far-right party the BNP launched its biggest election assault on Merseyside yesterday, fielding 20 candidates for the May vote. In Liverpool, they have submitted nine nominations – eight more than last year – including one in Norris Green, where they came in second in 2006.

In Sefton, five BNP candidates are standing, while Knowsley has two and St Helens four. None is being put up in Wirral.

Anti-racism campaigners last night branded the party “modern- day fascists” and urged people to vote against them on May 3. Alec McFadden said: “Even in Mosley’s era, there weren’t as many candidates as this. The views they are peddling are sickening and we are doing everything we can to stop them. In the run-up to Capital of Culture, it is a real slap in the face to the city that so many candidates have been put forward for this party.”

The BNP yesterday set out its pledges for the region if it was elected, which included stopping schools serving Halal meat and preventing mosques from being built. Its spokesman also explained the party believed Chinese people were “OK because they are hard-working” and “were not in the nefarious activities some ethnic groups are”.

Mr McFadden said “What is frightening is that they must have had 108 people backing them to get to this stage, as each nomination needs 12 signatures. The BNP has been targeting areas of deprivation and poverty across the city, picking places with problems and a lack of resources. We are urging candidates for parties that know they have got no hope of winning a seat to withdraw to ensure that they don’t split the vote in wards where the BNP is standing.

“We have also got 35,000 leaflets to send out to across the city informing people about the BNP. I would urge everyone to make sure they are registered to vote and to get out there on polling day.”

Cllr Steve Radford, Liberal group leader, said: “The BNP would have me gassed on three counts – I’m gay, I’m a Liberal and I’m a Methodist. But I would defend to the hilt their right to stand for election in a democracy and I look forward to beating them at the ballot boxes.”

icLiverpool