Royal British Legion ban BNP meeting in Leighton - BNP fury at cancellation

Right-wing extremists have hit out at a move by Tory MP Andrew Selous to scrap a controversial meeting of the British National Party that was due to be held at Leighton's Royal British Legion Club tomorrow night. Mr Selous, MP for South West Beds, took action after being swamped by complaints from old soldiers who were horrified that their premises were to be used for a political rally.

The local branch of the BNP had hoodwinked the club's secretary Eileen Johnson by booking the West Street Hall under the name British Heritage. It wasn't until yesterday (Monday) that Mr Selous, a member of the club, discovered the real identity of the group, and stepped in to ask the charity to cancel the date.

Mrs Johnson said: "The hall was booked under a lady's name. I knew it was a political group but not that it was the BNP. As soon as I heard we cancelled them. We don't want those sort of people here. Our members wouldn't be at all happy."

In recent months the party has been actively campaigning and recruiting in Leighton-Linslade and the surrounding villages. The meeting on Wednesday night was to introduce three prospective parliamentary candidates to local people.

Mr Selous said: "The British Legion were tricked into taking the booking and I'm worried that people will still turn up thinking the meeting's on. I have had complaints from people who fought fascism in the Second World War and the British Legion isn't prepared to give fascism promotion in any way.

"I recognise that we live in a free society and we are entitled to free speech but the BNP is not a main stream party and they hold extreme views. A BNP meeting in the Royal British Legion Club is not something we want in this town."

Shelly Rose, who was organising the meeting, was furious at Mr Selous' intervention and said that a meeting would still be held. "It is absolutely outrageous. It is Andrew Selous who is acting like a fascist. He won't allow anyone else express their opinions. I'm really angry about this. Make no mistake we will have our meeting but we'll hold it elsewhere.

"This was going to be a low key meeting. There was nothing mysterious or sinister about it. We were going to be discussing the up and coming general election and have three prospective candidates address the meeting. It's Mr Selous who is being heavy-handed about this. It is perfectly fitting for us to hold a meeting in the British Legion. We are the only party opposed to the Iraqi/Afghanistan war and the only party that's patriotic and standing up for our soldiers."

A spokesman for the BNP's national headquarters, slammed the MP's intervention as "undemocratic".

He said: "We are a recognised political party with elected representatives but in some areas we are forced to book venues under an assumed name because of local reaction. In other areas we are completely open and up front about it and accepted. The reaction of certain people is not our fault. It's unfair and undemocratic to ban our meetings. Many of our members are ex-servicemen and the British Legion should be more patriotic and less political."

Leighton Buzzard Online

BNP accused of misleading public over claims troops pay for TV at Selly Oak

Birmingham hospital bosses hit back today over allegations from the BNP that injured troops were forced to pay to watch television

The claim was made by BNP leader Nick Griffin as he attempted to justify his wearing of a poppy against the wishes of the Royal British Legion during a televised debate. He said he would remove the poppy if the Legion put pressure on the Government to stop “charging young British soldiers with no legs in Selly Oak Hospital” to watch TV. But today the Royal Centre for Defence Medicine, based at Selly Oak, insisted routine TV charges which applied to the hospital’s civilian patients were not paid by troops.

Spokesman Peter Haslam said the charges were instead met by a patient welfare fund, a registered charity providing such things as Sunday lunches and trips to football matches. Mr Haslam said: “A patient welfare fund at Selly Oak purchases TV cards and military patients are given £10 credit for every three days and additionally they get a pay-as-you-go dongle for their laptop. If a patient uses up money and has to pay out of their own pocket, they are reimbursed.”

Mr Griffin’s comments were made on Channel 4 News on Tuesday. He is tonight due to be a guest on the BBC’s Question Time programme with his invitation condemned by anti-fascist activists who were staging a day-long picket of Television Centre. Michael Morris, the Legion’s county manager, said he was unable to comment on political issues but said: “It’s disappointing that anything like this will be contentious, especially so close to the launch of this year’s Poppy Appeal. Nothing should detract attention from that as it is supporting our troops serving abroad.”

The Birmingham Mail contacted BNP spokesman Simon Darby who said he believed the injured troops did have to pay for television and phone calls in the past. “If the hospital have changed their policy then that is a good thing.” He refused to comment on whether Mr Griffin would continue to wear a poppy. Birmingham’s Poppy Appeal is due to be launched by Lord Mayor Coun Michael Wilkes in Victoria Square tomorrow from 12.30pm.

Birmingham Mail

Going West

While leading members of the BNP are afforded the luxury of having themselves pelted with eggs, those lower down the ranks are only thought worthy of cheaper alternatives.

In the case of the BNP's Norwich North by-election candidate this was a jug of iced water expertly flung at pretend prelate the "Reverend" Robert West by an irate housewife in North Hykeham, Lincs, when West - sporting his trademark dog-collar - came calling on behalf of the racist party.

The incident happened in 2006, soon after West resigned from a Conservative Party about to expel him for speaking at BNP meetings and for his role in setting up the BNP's bogus "Christian Council of Britain".

The unnamed housewife later told the Lincolnshire Echo: "He was wearing a dog collar so I asked him whether he was a real reverend. He refused to enter into a debate about it. I had the jug of iced water because I was preparing for friends who were visiting that day. I refuse to apologise. I have no remorse. If he comes here again I will empty a whole jug over his head."

The matter of whether West is a "real reverend" or not has exercised quite a number of people for quite some time, not least those who take a closer interest in religious affairs than the "Rev." West finds comfortable.

In the past West has refused to discuss the validity of his orders - that is, who ordained him, into which church, when and where? Without valid orders, West has no more right to call himself "Reverend" or to pass himself off as a clergyman than you or I.

There have been unsourced reports that West was ordained as an "Elder" into something calling itself the Apostolic Church, but the only legitimate existing British church of that name denied all knowledge of him, telling a researcher for the Love @nd Rage website:

First of all may I confirm that The Apostolic Church does not support the views or the activities of the British National Party. The Church has no political association whatsoever.

On the second matter I am uncertain about who is the Mr Robert West mentioned in the article. One thing is certain: he does not speak on behalf of The Apostolic Church. If this person lives in Lincolnshire he does not attend The Apostolic Church. In fact as a denomination we have no churches in Lincolnshire.

I note that he is quoted as being ‘ordained as an elder’ within the Church. If this person has had any association with The Apostolic Church in the past the only means by which he can maintain either his membership or office is by attending one of our churches. If he were an active member of the Church his views would not be accepted by the Church and disciplinary action would be undertaken by the Church which strongly distances itself from views such as these.

West operates - if that is the word - the Grace Covenant Fellowship from his Holbeach home, the "Fellowship" strongly suspected, like the "Christian Council of Britain", of having a membership of one.

Following the European elections West appeared on BBC television's "The Big Question", in company of ex-Nazi and ex-National Front leader, Andrew Brons. At the beginning of the show West was explictly challenged by Ekklesia director Jonathan Bartley to say how many members the CCB had, and not for the first time shied away from answering. Bartley told West in no uncertain terms that it had one, namely himself, to which West could only grimace lamely.

Back in April, however, on the East Midlands version of The Politics Show, West produced what he claimed to be a diploma from the Apostolic Church Bible College, located in Pen-y-groes, south Wales. An Apostolic college certainly exists in Pen-y-groes, and is indeed run by the Apostolic Church, a Pentecostal Christian denomination founded in the early 20th century. Its title, however, is Apostolic Church School of Ministry (ACSOM), previously the Apostolic Church International Bible School.

What is immediately apparent from its website is that ACSOM and the church to which it is attached are multi-cultural, multi-racial, and inclusive. Its members do not wear dog-collars, nor do they use the title "Reverend". And the last thing they will preach about is the "sin" of race-mixing.

Little wonder, then, that the church is keen to distance itself from the claims of the "Reverend" West.

As Jonathan Bartley asks of the well-watered "cleric": "Will any church come forward to claim him? Or is this another example of BNP deception?"

Well, the voters of Norwich North and Norfolk journalists are going to have every opportunity to find out the answer to Jonathan's question when West and his cohorts of decidedly unsaintly BNP hatemongers descend upon the Fine City in the near future.

Don't forget to ask: who ordained Robert West? Into which church? When? Where? And let's see his written orders, please.

BNP GLA member admits murder claim was false - investigation finds "failure"

The British National Party's Richard Barnbrook faces a six month suspension after City Hall found he brought his office, the GLA and his council into disrepute.

The Greater London Assembly member and councillor at Barking and Redbridge admitted knowing that murder claims he made on YouTube were false.He wrongly stated on a video that three murders had taken place in the East London borough when in fact the trio were on life-support.

Breach of code - Standards Board for England?

Under section five of the code, assembly members are warned they must not conduct themselves in a manner which could reasonably be regarded as bringing their office or authority into disrepute.

As well as a suspension, being forced to apologise, and undergo training he could face the Standards Board for England who may impose tougher sanctions. Valerie Rush, executive member of Barking and Dagenham with responsibility for safer neighbourhoods and policing, lodged the complaint.

Refused to comment - expresses "regret"

Barnbrook told investigators he knew there had been no fatalities when he stated a young girl had been murdered inside an educational institute and two people had died in knife attacks in the borough in the video clip in September.

The Goresbrook ward councillor declined to comment after receiving "legal advice". He has "expressed regret" over the false claim but refused to issue an unequivocal apology.

"Came out wrong" but recoding was not live

He claimed he had meant to say the young girl was from Barking and Dagenham but murdered in Newham and that it "came out wrong" because of the "speed of delivery".But the investigation showed the video had not been a live recording and he had refused to take it down.

A GLA report on the murder claims stated:

"We find that Mr Barnbrook has failed to comply with the code of conduct of both the GLA and the London Borough of Barking and Dagenham, by bringing his office and the respective authorities into disrepute."

London Daily News

BNP campaign comes off the rails

‘‘We rather it hadn’t happened! ’’ That was the conclusion of Martin Wingfield, editor of the British National Party’s Voice of Freedom monthly, on the MPs’ expenses scandal. He was writing three weeks before polling day amid growing signs that the BNP’s campaign for the European election was falling apart.

MPs’ expenses had come on top of the “economic meltdown, credit crunch, Muslim threat, the loony left, employment, and home repossessions” combined with “a hated government and a mealy-mouthed Tory party” that Griffin claimed in a fundraising appeal in March would create a “perfect political storm” that would “result in this party exploding onto the world stage by taking several seats in the European Parliament”.

Yet even after days of media focus on political sleaze the opinion polls were reporting that the BNP was still only attracting 3-4% of the vote, far short of what it needed to win even one seat in Europe. It was the eurosceptic UK Independence Party to which disillusioned voters were turning.

Wingfield put it down to the “voter volatility” that the expenses scandal had caused. “Without the expenses scandal, the BNP was quietly working towards having three MEPs elected on June 4th,” he wrote. “It would have taken a political earthquake to stop us winning in the North West, Yorkshire and the West Midlands … and now, of course, that is exactly what has happened.”

What had happened was that the BNP had attracted the attention it craved, but the media were not playing ball. Journalists, with a little help from Searchlight, were looking beyond the BNP’s carefully cultivated veneer of respectability and finding the same old fascist party it had always been.

The media did not have to dig far to find the BNP’s racism and shamefulness, which led Richard Pendlebury in the Mail on Sunday to describe it as “a marginal group with a rotten ideological core”. There was the embarrassing Activists’ and Organisers’ Handbook, which found it necessary to tell members not to look and behave like thugs and banned them from setting up local BNP websites and blogs because “they can’t write proper English” and “get carried away promoting cyberspace conspiracy theories which, even if true, strike the public as barking mad”.

Then there was the Language and Discipline Manual, which instructed members not to refer to “Black Britons” and “Asian Britons” because “such persons do not exist”. Exposure forced party bosses quickly to rewrite it.

The media revis-ited other episodes that the BNP would have prefer-red forgotten, such as the participation of its deputy leader, Simon Darby, at a fascist conference in Milan in April, where he was greeted by fascist stiff-right-arm salutes. The BNP’s claim that Private Johnson Beharry did not deserve his Victoria Cross and was only awarded it because he was black came back to haunt the party.

Darby came out with a clumsy attack on the Archbishop of York, John Sentamu, describing him as an “ambitious African” and referring to his fellow Ugandans as spear-throwers. The BNP demanded that a banned Ku Klux Klan leader should be allowed to enter Britain, but was less keen on Gurkhas, with Griffin on Radio 5 Live describing them as “mercenaries” and saying, “We don’t think the most overcrowded country in Europe can realistically say, ‘Look, you can all come and all your relatives’.”

It did not help the BNP campaign when Richard Barnbrook, the BNP’s most senior elected politician, got an airing for his admission that he had invented three murders in Barking and Dagenham to highlight knife crime, a claim for which he could be suspended from the London Assembly for up to six months.

And Bob Bailey, the BNP’s London organiser, was caught mass mailing implicitly threatening emails to anti-fascists. When challenged he said lamely: “I’m not denying I sent it but I can’t remember”.

There was worse, far worse. The BNP’s main slogan for the campaign is “British jobs for British workers”. It is illustrated ubiquitously by a picture of three white men in hard hats in front of a Union Flag. But they were no British workers.

The BNP had bought the image from a picture agency. The men were American models who posed for a general photo shoot in Portland, Oregon.

Other images on the millions of election leaflets the BNP had printed for distribution by the Royal Mail had also come from agencies. Alongside a white pensioner couple are the words: “We’ve seen how this country has declined under the present government and we’re voting BNP because they will put pensioners before asylum seekers and ensure our future.”

The couple turned out to be the Italian parents of the agency photo-grapher, who were appalled that their picture had been used to spread far-right propaganda. A doctor, a Guardsman and a mother, all quoted supporting the BNP, were no more genuine.

The former Scots Guards NCO Stuart Walker was shocked when the leaflet dropped through his letterbox with his picture and the made-up quote implying he would back the BNP because the party would stop soldiers being “abused” by Muslims. “They are scumbags and I’d never vote for them in a million years,” he told The Sun, adding that when he phoned the BNP to complain he was told to “f*** off”.

The only British voters on the leaflets were the Cass family, who in last year’s local elections appeared on BNP material all around the country pretending to be local voters – everywhere. Deceit is nothing new for the BNP.

The pictures were not the only lies. The leaflet outlined three key BNP pledges. One was to oppose “the dangerous drive … to give 80 million low-wage, Muslim Turks the right to swamp Britain”. But the population of Turkey is only just over 75 million and growing slowly, and they are by no means all low-waged.

No wonder many Royal Mail staff refused to deliver the BNP leaflets.

The British workers’ image has been plastered over the side of the BNP’s “truth truck”, better known as the lie lorry, a white Iveco advertising vehicle with Northern Irish registration plates. It toured the country during the campaign, though remarkably almost all the many pictures that appeared on BNP websites showed it cruising empty streets.

The BNP claimed to have bought the “truth truck” last year after a successful appeal to supporters to raise the £26,550 needed. In his 2009 New Year address, Griffin wrote, “your cash allowed the party to buy our very own state of the art advertising lorry and roll out the first of many nationwide Truth Truck Tours”.

It turned out to be another deception. Mark Croucher, a UKIP activist and freelance journalist, had obtained a county court judgment for several thousand pounds against the BNP for infringement of copyright for using one of his photographs without permission. When bailiffs tried to enforce the judgment by seizing the vehicle the BNP’s solicitors responded that: “the goods referred to are registered in the name of another person who … has no connection with the judgement debtors”.

The BNP’s campaign has run into other money troubles. In March the party started appealing for the £395,000 needed centrally to fight the European election. It included £210,000 to print 29 million leaflets, though this was not entirely honest as each region was also expected to raise the money itself for its own leaflets. It was because London region was unable to raise enough that it only had the A5 version of the BNP leaflet, according to Bailey.

There was also £25,000 for billboard advertising during the final two and a half weeks of the campaign and an-other £25,000 for newspaper adverts, including the online adverts that have appeared, though not for long, on local newspaper websites. All feature the stock American “British workers” picture.

A thermometer-style graphic on the BNP website showed rapid progress up to a bit over £325,000 and there it stuck. A succession of increasingly desperate campaign emails to supporters pleaded for donations to raise the final £90,000.

But the party could not leap the final hurdle. On 11 May David Hannam, the BNP deputy treasurer, passed on a letter from Griffin to branch fund-holders (the BNP term for treasurers) asking them to make all surplus funds available to Central Office “ASAP”. “Work with me on this it really is all hands on deck!” the letter ended.

On 18 May another campaign email appealed for the final £35,393, although the thermometer graphic, no longer on the BNP site’s home page, still showed a shortfall nearer to £60,000.

The BNP claims to be receiving 100 enquiries a day at its new call centre, the fruit of its “rapid expansion plan”, which Griffin claims raised £85,000 to equip four new party offices across the country. At its campaign launch in Grays the BNP proudly showed a film of its new staff hard at work in near identical surroundings. A sceptic might wonder whether was the same office filmed from different angles.

Amid all the bad publicity surrounding the BNP, the party grabbed the chance to crow after The Sun printed a story about a damaging BNP local leaflet that attacked the Gurkhas. The BNP said the leaflet was a forgery, The Sun took the story off its website and Griffin lied blatantly that he had always supported the Gurkhas. Had a maverick BNP supporter decided to set his very own Reichstag fire to kick new life into a faltering campaign?

The latest BNP begging letter implored: “It is crucial that we win a seat”. It was a far cry from the “six or seven” seats the party thought possible when Griffin appealed for funds in March. His desperation was palpable, as was his very personal interest in the outcome. “If you want to see me elected on June 4th … Help me now!” he wrote in a postscript.

The BNP has poured everything into this campaign. Griffin’s emails repeat the mantra, “We won’t get a second chance! It’s now or never”, and he is probably right. If the BNP cannot make it in the present political and economic climate, it never will.

Sonia Gable writing in Searchlight

Whodunnit?

According to itself the BNP's website has been hit by the "biggest Denial of Service attack ever", but, as we'll see, not everybody is convinced that the party of American construction workers, Italian grandmas, Polish Spitfire squadrons and Helen Colclough is being completely upfront.

The site disappeared from the internet yesterday evening, after apparently experiencing problems the day before, leading a hysterical Simon Darby to post:

The main BNP website is currently down due to a massive Denial of Service Attack. The site was attacked last night, at one point dealing with 28 million hits, but we managed to block out the traffic which was emanating from Eastern Europe and Russia.

The size of the assault today is unparalleled and there is no doubt that whoever has organised this has had to pay out a serious amount of money to the criminal underworld.

On Friday the servers of Clear Channel, part of a huge conglomerate that provides billboard advertising, suffered a similar attack. Their IT professionals tracked the criminal activity back to a notorious "anti-fascist" organisation openly aligned to the Labour Party and supported by the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats. This organisation was protesting at the decision by Clear Channel to allow the BNP to display advertising in support of our European Election Campaign.

As a consequence of the criminal actions against Clear Channel we understand that their legal team is currently in the process of issuing writs against the perpetrators which as well as civil actions will involve the possibility of potential criminal charges including racketeering.

I'll keep you all informed about the above.

Now would-be rubber magnate Darby is supposed to be some kind of IT guru and knows as well as we do that DoS attacks don't happen because somebody paid "a serious amount of money to the criminal underworld". They usually happen when a Billy No Mates geek gets a bee in his bonnet, and they're virtually untraceable because Billy No Mates is activating armies of sleeping "zombies" which live on thousands of innocent PCs. The "zombies" flood the target server with so many requests that it can't cope and goes down. That's the simple explanation, but for more read this.

Naturally, Darby can't resist hyping the scale of the "attack". It's "the biggest... ever" and "unparalleled" - in his own mind. A simple web search finds far worse examples.

Equally naturally keyboard warrior Paul Morris, aka Green Arrow, can't wait to get in on the act and manages to out-pompous even himself:

the British National Party membership is made up of the best of the True British people. They do not whine when bombs fall around their heads, they do not flinch when their ammunition is gone and the fight is desperate, they fix bayonets and stand firm.

Somebody should tell the Welsh Windbag to get a grip. This is a DoS attack (allegedly) not Rorke's Drift, and the internet is chock-a-block with examples of the BNP membership "standing firm" by whinging and whining about how hard done to they are on almost every newspaper website and blog in the world.

Anyway, back to Darby.

Now if Clear Channel, the people who brought you the BNP billboards, was under attack on Friday then it wasn't obvious to us, since we accessed the site a number of times throughout Friday and Saturday. And we've yet to hear news of writs and legal actions against a "notorious 'anti-fascist' organisation" issued on behalf of Clear Channel.

Why is Darby so coy that he won't name the organisation "openly aligned to the Labour Party"? Could it be that he's afraid the (real) writs might start flying in the other direction?

We'd also like to hear Darby's explanation of how Clear Channel's IT professionals allegedly managed to track down the source of the attack in a few hours, when such investigations take anybody else, including the police, weeks and sometimes months of painstaking research to solve.

So whodunnit?

Out in Nutziland the theories are coming thick and fast. One nemotode thinks the outage was planned to co-incide with the Archbishop of Canterbury's attack on the BNP, while another agrees: "That is disgusting. Typical of the Reds!" The same microbrain, hearing that the "attack" originated in Russia then ventures: "Russia eh? Maybe some Labour MPs are paying some old commie friends to do some dirty work." Another casts his net more widely: "...why does Lancaster Unity, Hope Not Hate and Denise Garside, Ketlan Ossowski and others come to mind?" (because you're an idiot, A1?)

It would be nice to believe that somewhere in a Siberian bunker there's a man in a wheelchair, a scar on his face and a cat on his lap, spluttering maniacally as he switches the BNP on and off, but there might just be a simpler explanation.

Even in Nutziland several remarked that they'd heard the BNP's servers were due for an upgrade, but a friend of ours posts this:

>>>
...using IPLocator at http://www.ipaddresslocation.org/ip-address-locator.php for the ip address the www.bnp.org.uk had last night (87.117.239.66) I got the following back:

Your IP Address: 87.117.239.66
IP Address Hostname: 87.117.239.66
IP Country: United Kingdom
IP Country Code: GBR
IP Continent: Europe
IP Region: Windsor and Maidenhead
Guessed City: Maidenhead
IP Latitude: 51.5167
IP Longitude: -0.7
ISP Provider: B&P Interative Ltd

This morning however the address seems to be:

Your IP Address: 95.154.192.19
IP Address Hostname: maidenhead-1.wnm.uk.cluster.bnp.org.uk
IP Country: United Kingdom
IP Country Code: GBR
IP Continent: Europe
IP Region: Windsor and Maidenhead
Guessed City: Maidenhead
IP Latitude: 51.5167
IP Longitude: -0.7
ISP Provider: RapidSwitch Ltd

Having offered serveral un-substaniated possible reasons I wonder now whether it is simply the case that they have exceeded the throughput for their hosting package and have had to move to another provider.
...
It will take awhile for a DNS change to propergate so they could appear to be offline for awhile it will depend on how often your isp's dns is updated.

The story of DoS is I would allege a sham and the cover story for the move - and maybe, I mean hopefully their backups are crap and their expertise in re-creating the site is inadequate.
>>>

So then, are we (and the BNP membership) being treated to another hefty dose of BNP BS?

Watch this space, comrades.

By Atreus. Reposted from Norfolk Unity

Operation Lieback

On Tuesday we carried the Mirror's report of "BNP mum" Helen Forster's conviction for intimidation, earned after she and a mob of children besieged the home of terrified neighbour Mrs Meherjan Miah. Single mother and benefits claimant Forster, who has prior convictions for dishonesty and drug possession, was let off with a 10 month suspended sentence.

The Mirror reported that after her conviction Forster demanded that the local council "move on" Mrs Miah to prevent further incidents and confirmed her membership of the BNP - "And yes, I'm still in the BNP."

The BNP, stung and clearly rattled by a succession of negative press reports, immediately mobilised its farcical (and largely fictitious) "Operation Fightback" to search for holes in the Mirror's story, and was soon claiming to have found the biggest hole of all - that Helen Forster, given address XX Xxxx Place, Gravesend, Kent, was not and never had been a member of the BNP!

Very quickly the party's Operation Fightback dispatched a hysterical email entitled "Fight back against Mirror lies!", saying

BNP South East regional organiser Andy McBride has dismissed the story as nonsense saying that the person in question is NOT a BNP member, either current or in the archives. This has been confirmed by our Membership Department.

This latest smear job is a complete fabrication. We need all our online supporters to take a few minutes to lodge a formal complaint to the Press Complaints Commission...

Somebody, then, was lying. Was it the Mirror? Was it Helen Forster? Was it the BNP?

This was quickly followed by an email from Nick Griffin, who said:

Today the leftwing Mirror newspaper published an outrageous and vile smear attack on the BNP claiming that a certain Helen Forster was a "BNP mum" and that she incited youngsters into a racial attack.

Operation Fightback immediately hit back with press releases and e-bulletins holding the Mirror to account for one little inaccuracy: Helen Forster is NOT a member of the BNP and NEVER has been!

Operation Fightback has produced a video detailing the whole saga..

And indeed, in suspiciously double-quick time, the BNP had produced a video, in which an indignant Paul Golding allegedly "tracked down" and doorstepped Helen Forster. According to the BNP's website, Golding "tracked down the person named in the Mirror story, Helen Forster" - note the semantic difference made by the qualification "the person named".

That struck a number of BNP watchers as odd, as did the despatch with which Golding arrived on Miss Forster's doorstep.

A post accompanying Golding's video, both appearing ON THE SAME DAY as the Mirror's report, had this to say:

She [Helen Forster] told BNPtv that the Mirror story was a pack of lies, that her family’s safety had been endangered by the story and that she was going to take legal action against that newspaper.

Ms Foster said she was not a member of the BNP, and that the only reason why the Mirror had invented this pack of lies was to try and damage the BNP’s campaign.

Cllr Golding told BNP News that the Press Complaints Commission had been formally notified of this latest set of lies.

“We are not going to sit idly by while the controlled media lie about our party,” Cllr Golding said. “The Mirror can rest assured that we will be proceeding with all legal channels to make sure that they are punished for this outrageous fabrication. They will learn the hard way that we now have the capability to expose their lies.

“This latest story utterly discredits these media rats, and the public will now be able to soberly assess the veracity of all future anti-BNP smears against this background,” he said.

Indeed the public will "be able to soberly assess the veracity of all future anti-BNP smears against this background", since there is now little doubt that both the BNP and "Helen Forster" were lying through their teeth.

Last night an interesting post appeared on UKIP's British Democracy Forum, here reproduced in full:

Posted by Mark Croucher - Another BNP Councillor caught lying

Just thought this little illustration of the depths the BNP are prepared to sink to would be of interest in this section.

This morning, the Daily Mirror reported on a BNP activist convicted of waging a campaign of racial hatred against a neighbour in Gravesend, Kent.

The BNP promptly despatched their 'Rapid Response Unit' to interview her. The unit, headed by Councillor Golding of Sevenoaks District Council, said that the woman named, Helen Forster, had never been a BNP member and was not known to the party. They then interviewed her on her doorstep saying how disgraceful it was that the Mirror was attempting to 'set up' the BNP.

Living locally, seeing the front door rang a bell: I live in Dartford, about 7 miles from Gravesend. It just so happens that that particular front door is just around the corner from where I used to work, and I have friends who live very close. So, on the way home this evening, I took a spin down to Gravesend and, sure enough, the house was the correct one: Snipped, Gravesend. So, I popped into my friends house and asked if they knew who lived there, and imagine my surprise (not) to be told that it was a Helen Colclough, who also calls herself Helen Forster. Naturally, I was even more surprised (not) to discover that she was known locally as a BNP activist and member who - wait for it - likes to tell people that she designs leaflets for the BNP.

So, not only did Cllr Golding lie twice - once about her not being a member, and once about the Mirror story not being true - but Ms Forster/Colclough was also in on the lying act by claiming to have never been a member of the BNP.

Given the amount of copies of the BNPs membership lists which are floating around, I'm sure someone can confirm this.

Now it just so happens that the leaked BNP membership list is freely available at numerous locations which can be accessed by anybody with an internet connection - and guess what?

There, listed as living at XX Xxxx Place, Gravesend, Kent is one Helen Colclough, Activist, who gives her email address as the clearly racist nig5@msn.com.

And so we have an explanation as to how Paul Golding came to arrive on "Forster's" doorstep with such speed, and for that curious qualification "the person named... as Helen Forster".

It's because the BNP knew all along that "Helen Forster" was "Helen Colclough", but - as ever - intent on pulling the wool over the eyes of the public, the Press Complaints Commission, and its own gullible membership, the upper echelons of the BNP decided to concoct a cock-and-bull story and in so doing yet again pointed their own gun firmly at their own temple and smirkingly pulled the trigger.

By what defect of his vision Regional Organiser Andy McBride allegedly failed to notice that the much published Mirror photograph of "Helen Forster" bore an uncannily striking resemblance to his own activist, Helen Colclough, is something we'll have to get back to you on.

They’re taking our Spitfires!

The BNP have been setting out their stall for this summer’s European Election campaign. Just as they’ve systematically looted chunks of British history, symbolism and legend for their own cynical purposes before, they’re at it again. This time they’re campaigning under the slogan “Battle for Britain” and accessorising their usual ranting with Second World War RAF nostalgia and imagery.

This has already seen the threat of legal action from Dame Vera Lynn, as the BNP are marketing an album of Second World War classic songs, including “White Cliffs of Dover”. Much of the national press has covered this story, and a little more research has revealed the album also includes contributions from the once famous black singer “Hutch”, Leslie Hutchinson, plus the composer Irving Berlin, bandleaders Bert Ambrose and Joe Loss and comedian Bud Flanagan, who were all Jewish. A rather more multicultural mix than Mr Griffin and his chums might have realised.

Something a bit closer to us in R J Mitchell’s old home town is their use of a Second World War Spitfire as the main image for the campaign. I’m sure that a lot of us, even people who aren’t usually given to having a go at the BNP, might think that this was overstepping the mark, hijacking such an iconic image for party political purposes.

The Spitfire picture – “Romeo Foxtrot Delta” – is the one on the BNP website.

It’s identifiable from its “RF” marking as belonging to 303 Squadron. And guess what? 303 was a Polish squadron!

It seems that none of the “patriots” at the BNP obviously know or care enough about the history of the Battle of Britain, despite all their enthusiastic flag waving, to get this detail right. Whereas I, a female of the left-wing political tradition, spotted it as soon as I got hold of a colour version of the picture.

We even know which Polish pilot flew this plane: Squadron Leader Jan Zumbach. Here he is in 1942.


Now I don’t know about you, but that seems to be an odd choice for the party currently circulating local election materials damning the present Government for opening “the doors of Britain to the hudled (sic) masses of Eastern Europe”.

Still, it’s an easy mistake to make. After all, if they just picked a random photo of a Battle of Britain plane, they would have had about a 1 in 5 chance of picking a “non-Brit”.

During the Battle of Britain the Poles shot down 203 Luftwaffe aircraft which stood for 12% of total German losses in this battle, punching well above their weight in numbers, though credit where it’s due – the highest scoring individual “ace” was a Czech, Sgt Josef František!

According to the website of the Battle of Britain Historical society, aircrew came from the following countries:

Great Britain - 2,340, Australia - 32 , Barbados – 1, Belgium – 28, Canada – 112, Czechoslovakia – 89, France – 13, Ireland – 10, Jamaica – 1, Newfoundland – 1, New Zealand – 127, Poland – 145, Rhodesia – 3, South Africa – 25, United States – 9.

So it’s probably just as well that when the Nazis invaded their home countries, those guys from France, Belgium, Czechoslovakia and Poland didn’t take the BNP’s advice to refugees and asylum-seekers and just go to the nearest safe country, which could well have been neutral Switzerland or Sweden.

And that was just the situation in 1940 – before the end of the war “our” planes were piloted by airmen from many other nations, including India (including modern-day Pakistan and Bangladesh) and Sierra Leone.

But though we might laugh at this gaff, this is a serious matter. Let’s remember what this image is being used to promote – the BNP’s European election campaign, and specifically a series of “black tie” dinner events with BNP leader Nick Griffin as the speaker.

That’s the same Nick Griffin who in 1998 was found guilty of inciting race hatred at Harrow Crown Court for denying that the Holocaust ever took place.

Remember that, when you see the BNP daring to try and bask in the glory of “the Few”.

Plane Jane

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