News from the quiet Revolution

This article was submitted by one of our readers, Iliacus. We welcome any contributions from our supporters (as long as those contributions conform to the law and are in reasonably good taste). Please send your articles to us via email.

Having adopted the role of historian to the phenomenon of the BNP's Quiet Revolution, a concept much trumpeted by that noted naturalist and angler, Mr Simon Derby, it is perhaps time to offer a further update.

As the excitement of May 1st, and Mr Richard Barnbrook's magnificent triumph in securing a seat on the largely irrelevant GLA (by a margin of a few decimal points), recedes let us consider the BNP's performance across a broader canvas. After all, the whole basis of the Quiet Revolution is:

a) that the BNP is fielding more and more candidates, across a wider geographical and social spectrum;

b) that their electoral support is growing.

So what happened in the rest of May? Well, there were only six local authority by-elections, four of them in Somerset! No seats changed hands - there were four Conservative Holds, and two Lib Dem. The BNP fielded candidates twice, and there was one Green. Oddly, there were no independent candidates.

In a Chard ward of South Somerset District Council a BNP candidate secured 17.2%; the Lib Dem held the seat, with the Conservatives a close(ish) second. A disturbingly high percentage, but would it have been significantly lower had there been a wider range of candidates? In particular one wonders what impact the lack of a Labour candidate had on this contest.

The other BNP candidate was for a Medway Unitary Authority vacancy, in the overcrowded "multiculti" south east of England. They polled just 6.8%. A particularly poor result, especially given the withdrawal of UKIP (who polled over 9% last time) and an Independent (over 6%).

Across all six by-elections 9957 votes were cast; the BNP gleaned just 411 of them (4.1%). And no, I don't think that translates to 12.3% if they'd fought all six seats!

But if May was poor, the prospects for June look worse. On the first two Thursdays of June there are fifteen scheduled by-elections (for a total of twenty vacancies). The nominations by party are as follows:

Conservative 17 Liberal Democrat 17 Labour 17 Independents 7 Green 3 BNP 3 Plaid Cymru 3 UKIP 1 Left List 1 (there is also one "no description" candidate).

What is also interesting is the geographical spread of the BNP candidates, as all three are standing in Cumbria (one in Cockermouth - please form an orderly queue for jokes - and two in the Upperby Ward of Carlisle). So no BNP candidates in such areas as Oxfordshire, Gloucestershire, Nottinghamshire, Shropshire or Sussex. And no BNP candidates in Waltham Forest or Harlow byelections.

British National Party? Or Cumbria Party?

Oh, and no candidates in the Welsh byelections, in neither Newport nor Flintshire (home of Excalibur marketing unless I'm mistaken?) - not very good for a party led by a resident of Wales?

Signs that things are not too jolly in Chez BNP as things stand. Over the five week period just 5 candidates for 26 vacancies plus - of course - the failure to field a candidate in the Crewe & Nantwich parliamentary byelection.

And all this just as the 2007 accounts fall due for publication. Wonder what they will reveal?

BNP quick off the mark with new lies

The British National Party is claiming that 400,000 ballotpapers in the London election were officially declared “spoilt” because of “massive and organised ballot box tampering”.

According to a statement on the BNP website, this went unreported by the media “because the most likely target of said suspected vote tampering or ‘ballot box stuffing’, would be the BNP”. Overlooking the fact that “stuffing” ballot boxes with spoilt papers would be rather pointless, the reason the media did not report this is because it is simply not true.

The number of spoilt papers in the London mayoral and Assembly elections was somewhat higher than in other British elections, as it was last time round in 2004, probably because of the more complicated voting system. But the figures are far below the BNP’s claim.

Each voter had three ballot papers covering the constituency vote, the London-wide list and the election for mayor. In the constituency poll there were 47,799 spoilt papers, less than 2% of the total votes cast. The London-wide list results recorded 41,489 spoilt papers, amounting to 1.69% of the total votes. And in the mayoral election 41,032 papers (1.67%) were rejected in the count of first choice votes.

That adds up to 130,290, a long way short of 400,000.

There is, however, a figure of over 400,000 in the results tables, namely the 412,054 papers that were rejected in the count of voters’ second choice for mayor. Of these, 407,840 were not counted simply because the voter had not made a second choice.

That’s hardly sinister, though you would not expect the conspiracy nuts in the BNP to see that. Deliberate lie or wilful stupidity, it is a fitting start to Richard Barnbrook’s term of office as a London Assembly member.

Stop the BNP

Election coverage: London Assembly

The results are soon to arrive re' the London Assembly vote. Please check the comments to see the current state of play.

BNP London Elections

Another fine video from our mate IrishTonyUK!

Barnbrook does St George (so to speak)

Just a little late for St George's Day (April 23rd, like you didn't know) but this short film of the ridiculous Richard Barnbrook, dressed up as George, along with a karate-practising dragon (possibly played by Hitlerite buffoon Mark Collett) made us laugh so much we just had to share it with you.

Which reminds us that we meant to ask if anyone had a copy of the appalling HMS Discovery that we could force ourselves to watch, so we could do a proper in-depth review of it just before the elections for London Mayor. Barnbrook being the BNP's candidate, we thought we'd review his accomplishments but as he hasn't actually accomplished anything as leader of the BNP group on Barking and Dagenham, we're looking for bits and pieces about his past. Feel free to email us with anything of interest... :-)

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.

From race riots to civil war: What is the BNP preparing for?

“Welcome to Oldham, the front line of the race war,” a BNP officer told a party rally a few weeks before rioting broke out in Oldham, Burnley and Bradford in summer 2001. After the riots the cover of BNP’s magazine Identity sported a map of Britain with flames indicating towns where BNP-instigated race riots had already taken place and those where the BNP was still working on it.

Since those days there has been a growing belief that the BNP was working to a secret agenda as well as its public one. Even party members are concerned at the build-up of the BNP’s private army of security guards and the large sums of money spent on their training.

After the European elections in 2004 when the BNP got 800,000 votes but no MEPs, Nick Griffin said that the party might have to consider alternatives to the ballot box. At the time this attracted no more than a ripple of interest. Clearly the BNP leader was harking back to his days running the National Front Political Soldiers faction, when he was happy to rub shoulders with extremists including terrorists of many political hues.

More recent developments add to the evidence about where the BNP might be heading if it fails to make any real breakthrough at the ballot box.

Last autumn the BNP organised its first clay pigeon shoot in Yorkshire, attended by Griffin and BNP councillor Richard Barnbrook as a fundraising and social event but also to build up a core of party members who know how to handle guns.

Then Matthew Single, a regular BNP election candidate in Essex, boasted to the local press that he had been promoted to third in Griffin’s personal security detail and claimed that he had undergone “intensive training”. He has also started training BNP activists in “anti-hijack evasive driving”. Single has twice escaped justice in the courts and was in hot water over a false entry on his election papers last May.

And last month Griffin made an interesting remark as an aside in his blog about his speaking tour of East Anglia, writing: “During the English Civil War (in due course, it will of course have to be called the First English Civil War, in order to differentiate it from the one to come) …”. Was it Griffin who inspired Robert Cottage to stockpile explosives for what he told Manchester Crown Court in February were preparation for the coming race war?

Finally, why has the BNP stated that it is especially keen to recruit serving and recently retired police and army officers?

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