Welcome for the BNP: Egg throwers disrupt leader Nick Griffin's victory speech

The moment Griffin's goon brushes pedestrian aside at 0.29
After his party gained its first two MEPs in last weeks European elections, BNP leader Nick Griffin obviously wanted to make his victory Press conference a statesmanlike affair.

But when the far right leader arrived to deliver his speech opposite the Houses of Parliament, he found his party's message of hate was afforded precious little respect.

Together with fellow British National Party MEP Andrew Brons, Mr Griffin tried to use yesterday's Westminster meeting to publicise his party's racist agenda. But, instead, he was pelted with eggs by anti-fascist protesters, some of the projectiles finding their target.

Perhaps anticipating trouble, Mr Griffin had come with a squad of his own burly security guards. There was also a sizeable presence of armed police.

But he was able to speak for only a few minutes before a large gathering of the campaign group Unite Against Fascism disrupted the meeting.

In scenes that are likely to be repeated as the BNP tries to establish itself as a legitimate political party, the Press conference disintegrated into violent chaos as campaigners waving placards and shouting 'Off our streets, Nazi scum' threw eggs and tried to get between the BNP and the news cameras. Heavily outnumbered, Mr Griffin and his supporters were forced into waiting cars, which then sped away.

One of the protesters vowed: 'Wherever you go, we will make sure you are welcomed by demonstrations.'

Television cameras captured disturbing images of one woman in a red jacket being aggressively shoved aside by a BNP security guard in the melee. A female tourist was also injured. Police later received an allegation of assault and reports of a collision, thought to have occurred as the BNP group drove off.

The violent scenes took place on College Green, a small patch of grass opposite the Houses of Parliament often used for interviews.

Still wearing his egg- stained suit, Mr Griffin later toured the television news studios to complain that he had been denied his democratic right to free speech. He said: 'It's a very, very sad day for British democracy. People should be entitled to hear what we have to say and to hear journalists question us robustly.'

Mr Griffin described the protesters as 'an organised mob' and alleged that the police officers had 'on orders from the Home Office' deliberately done nothing to protect him.

Unite Against Fascism is an umbrella group formed by the veteran campaign groups the Anti-Nazi League and the National Assembly Against Racism as well as various trades unions in response to the rising electoral threat of the BNP. Numerous MPs are listed as supporters, including Conservative leader David Cameron.

A BNP spokesman said that it will re-organise the Press conference for later today in Manchester, but said details of the time and place were being kept secret to prevent further trouble.

A spokesman for the Metropolitan Police said two people were taken to hospital after the protest and inquiries were continuing.

Daily Mail

Weekend briefing

Sneaking into Wigan following the multiple refusal of other venues in nearby Leigh to host its increasingly fugitive "Battle for Britain" fund-raising roadshow, the BNP is claiming an attendance of "well over one hundred people" for the event - notoriously symbolised by a stolen graphic showing a World War Two Spitfire flown by a Polish fighter ace.

Even giving the BNP the benefit of considerable doubt, "well over one hundred people" seems to us to be a very small number of activists to draw on from the populous North-west region for what was a heavily trailed showcase event, held on Friday night.

It is difficult to see how the BNP can claim the Wigan meeting the success it does, when according to the same party its ordinary branch meetings regularly attract an attendance of around one hundred. The North-west being home to a sizeable number of truculent anti-Griffin BNP dissidents is one possible reason for the derisory regional turnout.

An increasingly active and effective coalition of anti-fascists and concerned locals is very possibly another.

What is clear is that the BNP was seriously wrong-footed in the North-west. Not only was it forced to arrange a number of fall-back venues for its high profile roadshow, but the claim that there was "standing room only" at the final location is also an admission of how small and unsuitable it really was.

Prior to the roadshow a group of Liverpool BNP activists found themselves in an altercation outside the Ellesmere public house in Leigh that led to one person sustaining minor injuries and the arrest of another. There was also damage to BNP vehicles when locals objected to the presence of the BNP and its advertising trailer. We understand that the BNP members got out of their vehicles to confront the locals and had the worst of the ensuing violence.

BNP websites are now claiming that the violence was instigated by "blacks".

As I write, there is a certain amount of online speculation among far-Rightists that the Liverpool BNP contingent was ordered to the Ellesmere pub as a ruse to throw anti-fascist campaigners off the scent. Another way of putting it is that the BNP hung its Liverpool members out to dry, since the group and its advertising trailer could not fail to attract the attention of campaigners. Naturally, BNP Security was safely indoors protecting Nick Griffin from whatever threats to life and limb the party leader risks at the hands of his own members, and the Liverpool members were left to hold their own.

On Thursday, in a blatant attempt to inflame anti-Muslim passions, newly elected BNP councillor Paul Golding (of the dodgy family background) drove the BNP's Lie Lorry to Luton, the scene, earlier in the week, of a confrontation sparked when police allowed 20 Muslim religious extremists to demonstrate against the homecoming parade of the Royal Anglian Regiment.

"BNP’s Truth Truck Faces down Islamist Extremists in Luton" screams a headline on the BNP's website, for all the world as if Golding had single-handedly confronted an army of scimitar-wielding Dervishes.

The truth of Luton is that just 20 isolated lunatics failed to gain any support at all from a local Muslim population numbering 30,000 - since 99.93% of Luton's remaining Muslims managed to ignore the campaign of publicity and recruitment conducted by the extremists in the weeks preceding.

We think that says a lot for Luton's Muslim community - quite a number of whom were in the crowds cheering the Anglians along, as local news footage clearly shows.

The failure of the extremists to attract any support at all is not something you would know about from the subsequent hysterical media coverage of the affair, much of which would have been more at home on the pages of a BNP publication.

While politicians and community leaders in Luton worked hard (and largely uncredited) to repair the damage caused by the twenty extremists the opportunistic BNP worked just as hard to undo it. On the BNP website Golding brags that he took the Lie Lorry to Luton's largest mosque - an action that could only have been intended to provoke, and might well have resulted in violence.

Not being quite the British Lion he likes others to think he is, Golding "faced down" the Muslim faithful by driving off when some of them made unspecified "threatening moves" towards the Lie Lorry - which, translated, means that people were entering and leaving the Mosque as usual and a nervous Golding got cold feet.

Nick Griffin's grasping reaction to Luton was to fire off another in his interminable series of begging emails, hysterically claiming that the 20 isolated lunatics at the root of the trouble constituted a "horde of Muslim extremists". If a grouplet of just 20 can be extrapolated into a "horde" then we're left wondering if the "well over one hundred people" attending the BNP's Wigan roadshow is a product of the same imaginative thinking.

Taken together with a 2.5% vote loss in Rainhill (St. Helens) ward - in the heart of the North-west - in a by-election on Thursday, not the most glorious week in the BNP's history.

Eagleton stirs up the campus with attack on 'racist' Amis and son

If Martin Amis, who has just taken up a teaching post at the University of Manchester, should happen to bump into the Marxist literary critic Terry Eagleton on campus, it could be an uncomfortable meeting.

In the new introduction to the 2007 edition of his classic book, Ideology: An Introduction, Eagleton launches an impassioned attack on the views of "Amis and his ilk" who argue that the West needs to clamp down on Islam.

Eagleton also attacks Amis's father Kingsley as "a racist, anti-Semitic boor, a drink-sodden, self-hating reviler of women, gays and liberals". He adds that he believes that "Amis fils has clearly learnt more from him than how to turn a shapely phrase".

The spur for Eagleton's criticism is Amis's assertion that, as the Islamic population swells, "the Muslim community will have to suffer until it gets its house in order". On 10 September 2006, the day before the fifth anniversary of the bombing of the World Trade Centre in New York, Amis published a controversial essay entitled "The Age of Horrorism", in which he argued that fundamentalists had won the battle between Islam and Islamism.

Amis has suggested "strip-searching people who look like they're from the Middle East or from Pakistan", preventing Muslims from travelling, and further down the road, deportation. "Not the ramblings of a British National Party thug," writes Eagleton, "but the reflections of Martin Amis, leading luminary of the English metropolitan literary world."

He adds that 16 years ago when Ideology was first published, Amis would have recognised "the folly and ignorance of believing that authoritarianism and injustice can secure the defence of liberty". The reason for Amis's change of heart, he believes, was the "so-called War Against Terror". "It is this which has inspired a cluster of liberals and leftists in his circle ... to defend Western freedom by actively undermining it."

Instead of pitting two sets of values against one another – Westernism and Islam – Eagleton argues that the "fundamental material critique" which he has pioneered throughout his career was more relevant than ever.

Eagleton has been professor of cultural theory at Manchester University since 2001. Born in Salford in 1943, a third-generation Irish immigrant, into a Roman Catholic family, he was educated at a grammar school run by the De La Salle brotherhood, before attending Trinity College, Cambridge.

He remained a Catholic until 1970, when his religion was replaced by Marxism. He began his academic career as a Victorianist and taught for many years at Oxford University, becoming one of the pre-eminent literary theorists of the age, writing critiques of Chaucer, Shakespeare, Samuel Richardson and the Brontës among others. He has more recently become interested in comparative literature as well as the culture of Ireland. He lives in Dublin with his second wife and their son. Ideology was first published by Verso in 1991.

Amis, the author of The Rachel Papers, Money and London Fields, whose next novel, The Pregnant Widow, has an Islamic theme, last month took up the post as professor of creative writing at Manchester. Applications for the master of arts course which he is teaching were boosted from 100 to 150 by the news of his arrival. He is teaching two subjects – the novella and the works of Vladimir Nabokov and Saul Bellow, two of his favourite authors.

When his appointment was announced, Amis gave an insight into what he would be teaching students. "If all this does turn out to have a theme, it'll be, 'Don't go with the crowd, don't do anything for the crowd, don't be of the crowd or with the crowd," he said.

Independent