Atzmon Quotes From BNP Website To Attack Hope Not Hate

Gilad Atzmon is a campaigning antisemite and a supporter and promulgator of Holocaust denial material. For this reason, Hope not Hate and Bradford TUC have said:

'We believe that Atzmon should be shunned by all decent people – just as we would shun David Irving and Nick Griffin.'

Atzmon is incensed.

He has penned a lying, self serving attack on Hope not Hate and Bradford TUC:

'This weekend, Bradford TUC (Trade Union Council) joined the Israeli lobby’s attempt to silence me. This sort of thing is no surprise since my book ‘The Wandering Who’ exposes the devastating continuum between Israel, Diaspora Sayanim, Anti-Zionist Zionists (AZZ) and the influential and varied communities of Shabbos Goyim(1). So, is it a coincidence that last Shabbos (Sabbath) eve Paul Meszaros Bradford TUC’s secretary and some of his fellow unionists got very busy indeed doing the Zionists’ bidding?'

Here’s part of Atzmon’s attack on Hope not Hate’s Nick Lowles:

Here is an extract from a recent expose of Nick Lowles:

“Until recently, as editor of Searchlight, Nick Lowles was very camera shy. Over the years, he also attempted to generate various false trails with regards to his true identity posing, at various times, as a member of the Union of Jewish Students, a trotskyite activist for a Workers’ Revolutionary Party splinter group keen on infiltrating the Labour Party and a supporter of the violent anarchist Anti-Fascist Action, whose members later planted bombs for the IRA in London. For those reasons, and his close association with the mainstream media, Lowles is distrusted amongst anarchist and other far-left activists who regard him as a tout.”

The inaccurate “expose” to which Gilad Atzmon links is that of an organisation called Civil Liberty:

'The civil rights organisation Liberty refused to represent the British National Party in 2003 when Barclays Bank closed down their bank accounts. As a result of this failure to defend the right of the BNP as a democratic and lawful political party to hold bank accounts in Britain and to operate as a lawful political party and abide by the accounting rules of the Electoral Commission, other bank accounts of Palestinian charities supporting victims of the conflict in Israel were also closed down. From this we learn that a failure by the civil rights organisation Liberty to defend the principle of a right to a bank account for the BNP and all other lawful political and charitable organisations with bank accounts in Britain resulted in the denial of that right to a bank account not just to the BNP, but other organisations the banks wanted to close down as well.'

If that sounds like the sort of thing a BNP front organisation would write: that’s because it is. From The Guardian:

'An investigation by the Guardian has revealed that the fundraising group Civil Liberty, which claims to be independent of any political party, is run by key BNP activists with all the money donated through its website going to the BNP’s regional headquarters in the north-east.

It has raised concerns that the party appears to be attempting to profit from anti-Islamic sentiment in the United States since the attacks of September 11 2001, by presenting itself as being at the forefront of a campaign to save the UK from being “overwhelmed” by Muslims.

Since 2001 it has been illegal for any political party to accept overseas donations of more than £200, and party officials breaking the law face a year’s imprisonment or a £5,000 fine. Both Civil Liberty and the BNP deny they are trying to bypass UK election law, insisting they are entirely separate organisations .

However, the Guardian has established a series of links, including an audio tape of the BNP chairman, Nick Griffin, speaking at a US conference organised by a former member of the Ku Klux Klan, in which he calls on sympathisers to support BNP members by giving money to Civil Liberty.

“Please throw money at the BNP, actually don’t throw money at the BNP. Quite seriously it’s against the law, but you can as my colleague will be telling you tomorrow, throw money at a group called Civil Liberty which helps members of the BNP and that is within the law.”'

The Guardian also found that:

· Civil Liberty was set up and is run by Kevin Scott, who until September was the BNP’s north-east regional organiser.

· Its PO box address is registered to Tyneside BNP at the home of Jonathan Keys, a former party candidate.

· The site’s domain name is registered at the home in Stirling of Steve Blake, the BNP’s website editor.

· The BNP’s head of administration, Kenny Smith, is named on the BNP website as the national treasurer of Civil Liberty and responds to emails sent to CL.

It is not clear how much money Civil Liberty has raised as its accounts are secret, but the American Friends of the British National party was estimated to have raised £80,000 to £100,000 for the BNP between 1998 and 2001 when it folded – money Mr Griffin said made a “significant contribution to the BNP’s [2001] general election campaign”.

Yesterday the BNP and Civil Liberty strenuously denied the allegations.

“Civil Liberty is completely independent of the party,” said BNP spokesman Phil Edwards. “The BNP receives absolutely no money at all from Civil Liberty and any allegation that [money is being diverted] to the BNP in order to circumvent election laws will be met by a libel writ.”

…

Civil Liberty regularly advertises in BNP publications and has appealed for funds on the BNP website. Mark Collett, who was last year acquitted with Mr Griffin on charges of inciting racial hatred, is alleged to have handed out Civil Liberty flyers at a far right event in the US. And at the BNP’s annual conference in November, senior BNP figures accused the leadership of using Civil Liberty to build a fighting fund they said was not declared to the Electoral Commission or the wider membership.

Mr Edwards said: “Civil Liberty is an organisation which was set up to assist nationalists fight legal cases and employment tribunals and other civil cases … The fact that it is Kevin Scott [who set up Civil Liberty] … why shouldn’t it be?”

Atzmon is coated, head to toe, in fascist mire.

UPDATE

Oh dear. Stupid Gilad Atzmon is now trying to hide the fact that he takes his information on anti-fascist campaigners from the British National Party, by rewriting the paragraph and removing the link.

Unfortunately for Atzmon, his fascist fanboys have already republished his article, with the BNP quote and link intact.

Here it is on the “Truthseeker“.

Here it is on the Nazi website, “Shoah“.

Here it is on the Pacific Free Press website.

Too late, you thick Nazi.

PS – I see Atzmon is now being carried by David Icke. Just about his level, I reckon.

Harry's Place

Thanks to NewsHound for the heads-up

Far-Right party offers only return to a hate-filled past

Northern Ireland must reject the BNP's politics of division, says Matthew Collins

The British National Party (BNP) has announced that it is going to put forward candidates in the May 5 elections in Northern Ireland. As a registered political party, it is entitled to take part in the democratic process like any other party.
After 10 days of stark reminders for the people of Northern Ireland of the return of dark histories, the BNP is itself another unwelcome throwback to conflict and hatred.

From the very top of the party right down to the shallow bowels of its diminishing membership, the BNP represents ideals of hatred, division and conflict.

Sadly, for Northern Ireland, the hate party has taken it upon itself to offer its own brand of poison to the electorate at a time when it is being driven out of its home in England by mounting debts, internal division and allegations of corruption.

The BNP ran its fundraising in Belfast for three years, while making an element of political headway in England. Now the party is on the brink of extinction in England, decimated by infighting and financial scandal, while its Belfast operation has ended in acrimony.

The BNP wants to put itself forward to voters in spite of owing people here thousands of pounds in unpaid bills and salaries, having taken advantage of local people's goodwill and Northern Ireland's low-wage economy.

When the BNP did a vanishing act from its premises in Dundonald just before Christmas, it left behind its local workforce facing the festive season without money.

One exasperated printer from Belfast, owed money by the BNP, is reported to have travelled to Wales last month in the desperate hope that they could receive payment for the work carried out in good faith for the BNP.

In spite of this, the BNP now wants to cash in again on the local economic climate. This time the party is hoping it can gain from the misdemeanours of the global banking industry and lay the blame for cuts in services and jobs on the heads of Northern Ireland's migrant community.

The BNP is likely to try to position itself in the unionist community and play on difficulties and competition over the allocation of services, like housing and schools, while further dividing and splitting the unionist vote.

Can we really trust a party that does not even pay the local printer who produced its previous divisive and hateful promises?

We've seen the likes of the BNP before in Northern Ireland. When its leader, Nick Griffin, was the leader of the National Front in the 1980s, his Ulster organiser was imprisoned for his part in firebombing the homes of RUC officers and was lauded as a 'prisoner of war' by Griffin's party.

Later, Griffin turned up in Libya and was photographed posing under a portrait of his then political hero, Colonel Gaddafi, again in a search for money.

He and his party were shown the revulsion they deserved by the community here which they believed held their electoral hopes.

Of course, that was all a long time ago. Yet two months ago, the BNP's civil rights group, Civil Liberty, praised the views of Gerard Mc Geough, the former IRA man who had just been convicted for the attempted murder of an off-duty UDR man in 1981.

It seems that, wherever there is hatred and wherever there is darkness, people like the BNP will try and make gains from it.

On May 5, they'll be trying to do it at the expense of people who have come to Northern Ireland for new lives to work in hospitals, drive taxis, work the land and live as our friends and neighbours.

They come in search of a new start and - like the overwhelming majority of people in Northern Ireland - they want to live in peace.

No amount of flag-waving, expediency and IOUs from the BNP can disguise the fact that they are a step back into the darkness and have only come here to hate.

Belfast Telegraph

"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.

BNP's Wacky Provo Support

Far right nutters are going to war with each other after we revealed the BNP were supporting convicted Provo Gerry McGeough.

Civil Liberty - which is a BNP front group - sympathised with IRA gunman McGeough who was convicted recently of the attempted murder of former UDR soldier Sammy Brush. The group is fronted by a BNP activist called Kevin Scott from the north east of England.But it's also supported by former NF mouthpiece and BNP employee Patrick Harrington

Civil Liberty were attracted to Gerry McGeough's ultra Catholic views of anti-immigration and anti-gay - which obviously sit well with the far right. However the group scored a huge own goal by offering support for McGeough just weeks before the the party puts candidates up for election for the first time. They will be hoping to win votes from disgruntled hard line loyalist areas but giving support to a dedicated IRA member and former Sinn Fein committee man has not gone down well in those areas.

After our story broke a "far-right" war of words broke out on the internet with many BNP members and supporters horrified by the revelations. They even turned on BNP leader Nick Griffin and former National Front buddy Patrick Harrington.

Afraid

One contributor to the British Democracy Forum wrote: "this is absolutely scandalous !!!!!!!!!!!!" while another added: "This is absolutely sickening, Griffin is a ****bag!" And on Facebook on former BNP supporter wrote " I'm afraid Harrington and Griffin are taking the party back in time. I bet they have purchased a derelict lighthouse on Craggy Island".

Last night the white power group the National Front slammed the BNP for sympathising with the republican's plight. In a statement to the Sunday World they said " So a convicted terrorist (in his own words) is being backed by the British National Party! Well fellow British Nationalists now is the time to say enough is enough and cut that membership card in two! Over 3000 British citizens where bombed and shot at got over 30 years by these Marxist Terrorists, there were over 500 British soldiers killed during the "troubles" and it is in my opinion a slur and an insult to those killed and their families and friends too. How could any "British" political party show any support for him?"

Two weeks ago Gerry McGeough was convicted of the attempted murder of off-duty UDR soldier Sammy Brush in 1981. Brush was shot and wounded but still managed to shoot McGeough and last week the DUP councillor described it as both his "best and worst" shot in his life.

Sunday World and Searchlight

The BNP's Irish problem

When Patrick Harrington and Nick Griffin ran the 1980s National Front there were quite a few immediate and striking anomalies. The old “Butcher’s Apron”, the Union Jack, was one of the first things to go as their revolutionary zeal took an uncontrollable hold over the shrinking organisation. The national flag was left to the “reactionaries” who broke away from them – the likes of Martin Wingfield, who now works for the Griffin’s BNP, and Andrew Brons, who represents the party as an MEP. Griffin and Harrington referred to their brand of the NF as the “radicals”.

What replaced the Union Jack on the front of their monthly bore sheet, National Front News, was pictures of black folk they liked, Muslims even. They even began quoting from and selling copies of Colonel Gaddafi’s Green Book, not long after the Libyans had fired shots from the window of their People’s Bureau and killed a British police woman.

And the more people complained, the more extreme the NF seemed to become. This was their new party: the mysticism of Catholic fascism, the adulation of bizarre ranting eastern European fascists, and a Pol Pot like obsession with taking the party back to year zero.

Ireland, however, was their main problem. While the NF’s Ulster organiser was jailed for his part in the firebombing of the homes of Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) officers in protests over the Anglo Irish agreement, the inner circle of the party was toying with Catholicism at the same time as vying for the affections of the major benefactor of the IRA, Colonel Gaddafi.

Harrington was always Griffin’s younger, more “radical” offsider. Despite being part of a “collective leadership” it was Griffin and Harrington who took the reins and led the party into ideological wilderness and oblivion. It was Harrington who obligingly photographed Griffin standing adoringly under a huge portrait of Colonel Gaddafi on their visit to Tripoli. It was Harrington, who often made much of his Irish roots, who shocked the traditionally loyalist NF by refusing to condemn the IRA in a television exposé of the NF’s activities in 1988. Not only did it anger the NF’s already fractured membership, it led the Ulster Defence Association (UDA), Ireland’s largest paramilitary group, to demand that the party leave Northern Ireland and later to write in its monthly publication Ulster, “The NF are wankers”.

Harrington and Griffin parted company in early 1990. Their NF “Political Soldiers” group gave up marching on an empty stomach. It had been bled dry of members and cash for some time.

After taking control of the BNP in 1999, Griffin never mentioned Ireland. The party was growing; it and its membership were firmly, if not violently, loyalist. Evidence of this was apparent when its Liverpool branch put an Irish tricolour on its banner in 2007 and a near riot ensued. By 2008 Griffin was the leader of a rapidly expanding party capable of sending shockwaves through the political establishment. He even engaged a hardline Protestant to set up and run a party call centre in Northern Ireland staffed only by Protestants.

The party has occasionally made noises at election times about inviting the Republic of Ireland to step back into union with Britain if the BNP came to power, but that is not a very likely or realistic scenario, given that Griffin’s daughter was in a loyalist “Kick the Pope” band until she fled Northern Ireland last year when her father fell out with the “super-Prod” fan of loyalist paramilitaries, Jim Dowson.

As the BNP entered a steep decline following last year’s general election, out of the shadows stepped Harrington again, not quite as fresh-faced as when he last took centre stage in the 1980s, but still not as bloated as Griffin has become since taking over the BNP. Harrington had been running his own minor organisation, Third Way, and a political party, the National Liberal Party, which is supposedly a rival party to the BNP.

One of Harrington’s first acts was to stage a bitter fallout with the officers of the BNP’s fake trade union Solidarity, where with Griffin’s approval Harrington ousted its founder and installed himself as General Secretary.

His next major falling out was with – you guessed it – Dowson. It seems that Harrington has been representing the Belfast call centre staff against Dowson while simultaneously representing the party in negotiations with the same staff, some of whom have still not been paid monies owed since before Christmas.

Harrington’s other area of interest is the BNP’s faux civil rights organisation, “Civil Liberty”. It sounds like a legitimate civil rights organisation – and preposterously describes the well known human rights organisation Liberty as its sister group – but it tends to crawl out from under its stone only when there is a white person (usually a racist) in trouble with the law. So we hardly fell off our seats when last week “Civil Liberty” offered its support to the former IRA man Gerry McGeough who was jailed for the attempted murder of a part-time Ulster Defence Regiment (UDR) soldier and full-time postman in 1981.

While on the run from British and Irish authorities (which included a daring escape from custody), McGeough went to America where he arranged for arms, missiles and ammunition to be sent to the IRA in Northern Ireland. He also attempted to claim political asylum in Sweden and served eight years in Germany awaiting trial for an attack on a British Army barracks there.

McGeough sat on the executive of the IRA’s political wing until 2003 when he attempted a takeover of the Ancient Order of Hibernians (AOH), the largely moribund marching organisation (seen as the Catholic equivalent of the Orange Order), airing his extreme anti-gay and right wing views.

With the advent of peace talks and cease-fires, McGeough decided he would rather “save Ireland from sodomy” and launched a monthly magazine called The Hibernian, dedicated to “Faith, Family and Country”. Traditionally, the AOH was seen as a rival cultural organisation to Sinn Fein.

In an interview published in Searchlight in 2006, McGeough said: “Sinn Fein has been heavily infiltrated by homosexual activists and British double agents in recent years. A lot of republicans can’t fathom the liberal values of the leadership. They do not understand why they are pursuing a liberal British agenda. Immigration is a massive concern and there are a lot of people who are not happy with the level of immigration.”

Having fallen foul of Sinn Fein, McGeough was considered persona non grata by the Republican movement, even being labelled as a “fascist” on a web forum used by supporters of the Irish Republican Socialist Party (IRSP), the political wing of the rival Irish National Liberation Army. But as the British far right has often found, there remain rather extreme pits of “traditional” Catholicism in the republic, where people with like-minded fears and hatreds can come together on mutual issues. Even the hardline loyalist Dowson, who as good as owned the BNP for a couple of relatively lucrative years, has found tapping into the Republic’s Catholic conservatism financially beneficial.

McGeough might have been an outcast, but he was by no means alone in his religious extremism.

In March 2007 McGeough stood for election against a Sinn Fein candidate as an Independent Republican in Fermanagh. He was arrested for the attempted murder, some 30 years after event, while leaving the polling station and had since then been living under various forms of incarceration and house arrest.

Last month McGeough was convicted for that attempted murder. For loyalists and Unionists, the community in Northern Ireland in which the BNP puts so much faith, the now-disbanded UDR was a much revered local almost totally Protestant regiment. To Irish nationalists and republicans, it was an imperialist and sectarian force that colluded with loyalist murder squads.

Although McGeough attracted some sympathy from the Republican movement for his actions at the height of the IRA’s campaign in Britain, Northern Ireland and mainland Europe, few have much time for his views on Ireland today or his extreme (“traditionalist”) Catholicism. He is likely to serve only two years under the terms of the Good Friday Agreement.

Last week “Civil Liberty” broke its recent silence to pay homage to McGeough. Lauding McGeough and The Hibernian for covering issues and themes “long abandoned by Sinn Fein and other leftist Irish Republican organisations such as opposition to abortion and homosexuality, scepticism about multiculturalism and mass immigration into Ireland”, it went on to praise McGeough for “criticism of the international banking system” (this normally refers to Jews) and articles about “English Catholic writers, GK Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc, who helped develop and make popular distributist ideas in the first half of the twentieth century across the British Isles”.

Yes, it seems as if McGeough had a reading list in later years not too dissimilar to the one the Griffin-Harrington NF recommended to supporters, and indeed that Harrington himself recommends to this day. According to “Civil Liberty”, McGeough’s case has been “followed by radical nationalists across the British Isles with varying degrees of sympathy”.

This sort of language has set the BNP ablaze with innuendo and accusation. Just who are these “radical nationalists” who have such varying degrees of sympathy with McGeough? Many point the finger at Harrington, who has launched a myriad of legal letters and challenges in recent months to stop publication of a “private” photograph of himself proudly posing in front of a commemoration to the fallen members of “D Company, 2nd Battalion of the Belfast Brigade of the IRA”.

BNP members and supporters are furious and the BNP section of the “British Democracy Forum” is alight with accusations, recriminations and the airing of old suspicions and hatreds directed at Harrington and the IRA in general. It seems that the memories and the hatreds of the NF’s past leader remain as current and virile as ever. Some are even threatening to picket any meeting that he addresses or attends.

Following a newspaper report in Ireland about the BNP’s sympathy for McGeough, the BNP’s Ulster organiser has gone to hysterical lengths to laugh it off. Describing the story as “desperation”, Steven Moore realises that the BNP could be treading on some very sensitive toes if Griffin and Harrington decide to take the revolutionary garden path once more. Having helped organise a BNP “cultural event” in the loyalist heartland of East Belfast for Griffin last week, the last thing Moore wants is for what is left of the disillusioned paramilitaries in the area to turn their benign interest into a burning dislike for the party.

It is understood that the rival NF’s current leaders in Northern Ireland have photocopies of the article in the Irish press and are avidly distributing it to shocked BNP members there as they prepare to step up their activities.

To date neither the BNP nor Harrington has responded publicly, though we understand certain old enemies of Harrington high up in the BNP have been taking very long and deep breaths. Last night Harrington was asking for details of the moderator of the British Democracy Forum, no doubt so he could send him a legal letter to stop the appearance of further pictures of Harrington’s escapades in Belfast.

Civil liberty ended its article on McGeough by expressing its support for the “ethnic identity of the respective nations of the British Isles submerged for far too long under the dead hand of the British state”.

And one senior BNP official even turned up to a meeting of Irish Republicans in London last month to commemorate the Hunger Strikers.

No wonder the “loyalist” BNP is wriggling in silence.

Thanks to Matthew Collins at HOPE not hate / Searchlight

Anti fascist campaigners plan counter demonstrations against the BNP

Anti-rascism campaigners are planning counter demonstrations after learning the British National Party are to hold a series of protests in Birmingham.

The campaigners, political figures and trade unionists will get orange-clad toxic waste disposal workers to stuff an effigy of BNP leader Nick Griffin in a dustbin in Victoria Square.

The group have expressed horror that the BNP and two other organisations have threatened to hold three days of protests in Central Birmingham in support of fellow member Adam Walker, who will appear in front of the General Teaching Council in the city, accused of posting racially and religiously intolerant material on the internet from his school during working hours.

Birmingham Unity say they want to stop the BNP from using schools as a platform. A statement, signed by a number of Birmingham MPs and other figures, said: “We believe our schools should be places of tolerance and learning not ignorance and hatred.

“In the recent elections the BNP were soundly rejected in nearly every seat they previously held or threatened to take. That’s why we want to make it clear to the BNP that we are the majority. We are from all communities, from trade unions, from all faiths and none. We love our city, we love our diversity and they are not welcome here.”

The campaigners will gather for their peaceful rally in front of the GTC Council building in Victoria Square on Monday from 8pm.

James Whittall, spokesman for the BNP, confirmed their protests were still going ahead and labelled the case against Mr Walker a “witch hunt”.

Birmingham Mail

Shooting Walker in the foot?

Graham Williamson's Accentuate PR "company" has hardly set the world on fire in the long, dreary months of its almost pointless existence.

The only place we ever encounter Accentuate's press releases is as republishings on the inter-linked websites of the far-Right's front groups, or the free (and largely disregarded) PR-Inside public relations website.

Accentuate's website has not been updated since June, and continues to carry an exhortation to donate to the fake National Liberal Party's "moneybomb" appeal - which, as we reported at the time, "bombed" spectacularly.

It also continues to carry three endorsements for its "work", from, inter alia, the Adamsgate Action Group (leading member, Graham Williamson), the National Liberal Party (leading member - there are only 20 - Graham Williamson), and the bogus Solidarity "trade union" (General Secretary, long-standing friend of Williamson, Patrick Harrington).

The praise for Accentuate's work is as extravagant as it is spurious.

"We could not have handled the launch of our website without Accentuate's help. They not only promoted the launch but helped focus our message to maximum effect," claims NLP secretary David Durant of a launch notable only for the fact that it went entirely unnoticed, while Harrington gushes: "Graham Williamson has helped to bring our independent Nationalist Union to the attention of a wider public... Graham and Accentuate are doing a great job on behalf of ordinary working people in this country who want their views represented and communicated."

Fortunately, nobody very much seems desirous of having their views "represented and communicated" by the miniscule Solidarity, and so "great" is the job Williamson's PR company is doing that few outside the far-Right have ever heard of it. The bogus "union" even has trouble recruiting BNP members, its target prey, they being suspicious that the entire exercise is no more than a money-making scheme from which they would derive little or no benefit.

And they would be quite right.

BNP member Mark Walker, brother of Solidarity's president and fellow BNP member Adam Walker, could not save his own teaching job, even with the dubious help of the fighting union's egotistical general secretary. Mark Walker was suspended for accessing the BNP website during school hours, and eventually sacked on the grounds of his sickness record.

Were it not for the BNP connection, any half-way decent shop steward would have made a meal of the case. Mark Walker was stuck with Patrick Harrington.

Adam Walker resigned from Houghton Kepier Sports College in Houghton-le-Spring following allegations that he posted critical comments about asylum seekers, Islam, immigrants and the promotion of homosexuality on a chat forum during a lesson. Walker has since been re-employed as a supply teacher, but faces a General Teaching Council (GTC) disciplinary hearing which could ban him from teaching for holding views suggestive of racial and religious intolerance.

Despite the best efforts of Patrick Harrington, Solidarity, and Accentuate, the case of Adam Walker has failed to become a cause celebre, and even in the enclosed world of the far-Right such passions as it has raised have been noticeably muted.

Perhaps that is why another BNP front group, the jokingly named Civil Liberty has been roped in to prod things along by organising a picket of the GTC on the day of Walker's hearing in Birmingham on November 17th. Calling upon the various fascists and racists who will attend to "Make a noise for freedom" by banging drums, blowing whistles and ringing bells (which we're sure will impress the GTC), Civil Liberty claims that the GTC wants to introduce the "political vetting of teachers".

Of course, this is very far from the truth, as is the disgraceful allegation that Walker faces a "kangaroo court".

The allegations against Adam Walker are extremely serious, and the truth about them (on which the GTC will decide fairly, Civil Liberty intimidation or no) will impinge directly on his fitness to teach.

Patrick Harrington gives a distinct impression of believing that Walker's case will eventually be lost, and has been demanding the removal of former NUT president Judy Moorhouse from the GTC (for which purpose he set up yet another online petition) and has threatened to go to the High Court should Adam Walker be banned from teaching - though where the money will be raised to finance such a move is anybody's guess.

Coming back to the feeble Accentuate, it has posted yet again on the PR-Inside website that "A Liberal Party backs Civil Liberty campaign" - the "liberal party" in question being the 20 member bogus National Liberal Party, better known as the Third Way, the political habitat mostly of ex-National Front members like Harrington, Williamson and David Durant - men who, with their friend Nick Griffin, took the once mighty National Front into oblivion and who have ever since lived in a fantasy world in which they seem to have insulated themselves from the fact that nobody at all takes the least notice of their magisterial pronouncements.

"NATIONAL LIBERALS BACK CIVIL LIBERTY DEMO!" shouts Accentuate on PR-Inside, where Williamson apparently spoke to himself (a not uncommon occurrence in the Third Way) to tell himself: "There are serious implications if Mr Walker were banned from teaching (which seems the intention). It will open the door to persecution and harassment of teachers on grounds of belief."

A gross distortion, of course, but what is striking is how seriously these micro-groups (or corpusclets if you prefer) take themselves and expect others to take them.

Accentuate is an ineffective one-man band, the NLP is a fantasy, Civil Liberty exists largely as a website, Solidarity neither impresses nor scares anyone, and we're pretty sure that none of them, the BNP included, is in the least likely to sway the GTC in coming to a fair decision on Adam Walker, just as we're sure that the GTC will ignore the noisy assemblage of racists, anti-Islam fanatics and homophobes, mostly from the BNP, who will turn up to support Walker - appearing before the GTC on a charge of holding views suggestive of racial and religious intolerance, let us not forget!

Of course, we could be wrong. Accentuate, the NLP, Civil Liberty and Solidarity may well have shot their man in the foot by organising this parade of extremist misfits that can only reinforce the case against Adam Walker.

The watchdog that did not bark

Sonia Gable reveals more about the BNP’s dodgy financial dealings and the Electoral Commission’s failure to respond

“No party financial records were shredded. They are held in electronic format, and cannot be shredded,” proclaimed the British National Party after Jon Cruddas MP exposed the party’s dodgy financial dealings in the House of Commons on 18 December.

By 13 February, following the broadcast of the BBC’s File on 4 investigation into the BNP’s finances, the BNP had changed its tune. Said John Walker, the BNP treasurer: “The bag of shredded items produced in the studio to me which the listeners were expected to believe the BBC’s claims, appeared to be in the main, working copies of the print outs of the book keeping software and draft accounts. To suggest I shredded cheques and invoices is ridiculous, why would I destroy invoices, as I would not have paperwork to cover the expenditure as required by the auditor.”

The BNP works on the principle that if one lie is exposed, try another, and hope no one notices the contradiction. Apart from the fact that Walker now admits that the BNP does have non-electronic records, Searchlight’s perusal of the shreds has revealed numerous pieces of original receipts and cheques, clearly identifiable by their various colours, typestyles and handwritten details.

They include numerous references to various family members of Nick Griffin, the BNP leader, which may bolster the allegations from across the political spectrum that Griffin treats the party as his “cash cow”.

Another name that appears on several of the bits of paper is Vanguard Promotions. This is the private printing business in Leeds owned by Mark Collett, the party’s unpopular and incompetent graphic designer and star of the Channel 4 television documentary Young, Nazi and Proud. His imprint appears on many BNP leaflets and many people have questioned the relationship.

Walker was also rather coy about the BNP’s failure to include a donation of £5,315 from Steve Johnson on its return to the Electoral Commission for July to September 2007. “Only one donation for the 3rd quarter of 2007 … was missed,” glossing over the fact that this was 50% of the total number of donations. “It was not reported to my regional treasurer at the time,” he continued, protecting another seriously incompetent BNP officer David Hannam, “and as soon as the Electoral Commission brought this matter to my attention it was duly reported to the satisfaction of the commission”.

Walker does not explain how the Electoral Commission knew about the donation to bring it to his attention before he reported it. Perhaps he does not want to admit that he found out about the omission from Searchlight’s Stop the BNP website.

Reporting a donation late is not the unique preserve of the BNP. The Electoral Commission publishes a list of donations reported in the fourth quarter of 2007 that should have been reported previously. Donations to all three main parties and others are on it, but not Johnson’s, which has simply been added to the BNP’s quarterly list as if it had been reported on time. It is unclear why the BNP receives such apparently preferential treatment from the Electoral Commission.

The BNP reported three donations received in the final three months of 2007, from Sheila Butler, Charles Wentworth and Adam Champneys. Each gave precisely £5,000. Champneys, who has made large donations to the party before, appeared on the BNP’s list of candidates for the South East in the 2004 European election. Butler is new to the donors’ list. It is not known whether she is the same Sheila Butler who made donations to the UK Independence Party in the South West in 2003 and 2004.

The shredded financial records had originated from John Brayshaw, Walker’s predecessor as BNP treasurer. Before resigning he refused to sign off the party accounts because he had not been given access to all the records he wanted to see. He told the Electoral Commission that he had resigned as BNP treasurer “as a number of irregularities had come to light”. Explaining that he had seen Walker and Hannam shredding the documents and been told to burn them, he declared: “I have not seen what the party sent to the commission but do not believe it is a full and accurate set of accounts for the BNP”.

But the Electoral Commission was unconcerned. It took just two weeks to dismiss the matter, without even asking to see his evidence. Its response to him was blunt: “with regard to a breach of the Political Parties, Elections and Referendums Act, we currently have no reason to believe that such a breach has taken place”.

Jon Cruddas MP was similarly unable to persuade the Electoral Commission to take complaints against the BNP seriously. In a letter dated 28 January 2008 the Commission pointed out that the BNP had paid the “appropriate fine of £1,000” for the late submission of its 2006 accounts, in other words end of story. As for the BNP’s attempt to solicit donations from overseas via its front group Civil Liberty, the Commission dismissed the concerns stating that there was not “sufficient evidence to establish that ‘Civil Liberty’ was an organisation of any significant scale, that it raised any substantial funds from any source, or that it passed funds to the British National Party”.

Civil Liberty is not a limited company and has no obligation to make its accounts public. How exactly did the Electoral Commission investigate what funds it had raised? Did the Commission do any more than ask the BNP and/or the BNP officers who ran Civil Liberty, Kenny Smith and Kevin Scott? On this the letter is silent.

“The Commission does however monitor the activities of political parties and associationed [sic] organisations and individuals, and keeps matters under review,” the letter concludes. We are not reassured.

Searchlight

File on Four on the BNP's dodgy finances: transcript now available for download

For those who missed it, Radio Four's File on Four programme, broadcast on February 12th was well worth a listen, producing such delights as

• Possible donation fraud via the BNP-run Civil Liberty
• Potential PAYE fraud with Sadie Graham, Kenny Smith et al
• Dodgy unreceipted transactions
• Lies from the BNP's treasurer John Walker
• Shredded documents

If you never got the opportunity to listen to the programme there is now a transcript available here (as a 57KB pdf file). Our report on the programme is here.

Fraud, incompetence and lies - the truth about the BNP's finances

Those who read this blog and other anti-fascist sites regularly will know that one of the outstanding traits of the British National Party is its propensity to become embroiled in an almost perpetual series of financial disasters. File on Four last night pointed out some of those that we have already encountered but a couple of things emerged that look likely, if the organisations concerned take action now rather than waiting and allowing the party to cover up its misdeeds, to lead to criminal charges.

One of the problems that the BBC faces when conducting an investigation of this kind is that of evidence, or rather the lack of hard evidence. Where MPs can get away with using Parliamentary privilege to make accusations without the risk of comeback and we, to a certain extent, can get away with a lot (largely due to the fact that any action taken against us would be financially untenable) the BBC has to conform to libel laws in every respect, making sure it has the evidence to back up its claims before it makes them. While this limits the BBC in what it can say, every claim it makes is more valid because it has the solid evidence, or at least clear testimony, to back it up.

Last night's File on Four brought us a whole swathe of information, some of which we already know, but also some new and interesting tidbits.

• Possible donation fraud
• Potential PAYE fraud
• Dodgy unreceipted transactions
• Lies from the BNP's treasurer
• Shredded documents

Possible donation fraud

The programme began with a mention of the party's involvement with the American Friends of the BNP (AFBNP). To introduce the AFBNP section there was a snippet of a speech given by Nick Griffin on a fund-raising tour in the States where, referring to white rule in South Africa, he stated, '...it was wrong and immoral and it was short-sighted but...at least it was white.' This is apropos of nothing except to remind us that the BNP is a racist organisation and should be treated as such.

Run by Mark Cotterill, AFBNP was purely a fund-raising operation, deliberately based on the American fund-raising arm of Sinn Fein. AFBNP was extremely successful though it has been claimed that a lot of the money raised went adrift and never ended up in the party coffers.

It was while Cotterill was fund-raising in the States that the then new rule came into force that limited foreign donations to £200. Though this was the case, Cotterill stated, there was nothing to say how many times such donations could be made - the implication being that this was how the BNP crept around the letter of the law. The legislation is and was clear however, such behaviour is criminal - not that we expect the BNP to care overmuch about breaking the law.

Back in February 2006, Griffin was speaking at an AmRen conference in the States (organised by a former prominent member of the Ku Klux Klan). During his speech, he asked his audience to donate to the BNP via Civil Liberty, a BNP front-group. Civil Liberty, according to its website, is an organisation set up by the BNP 'solely in order to assist the thousands of British citizens who have been denied justice on the grounds of their race, skin colour, ethnicity or political opinion'. Curiously, the only people it has ever tried to do anything for since it was set up back in January 2006 around the time of the Griffin/Collett trial at Leeds Crown Court are, as is clear from its website, two BNP members who it claims were unfairly dismissed from their jobs.

Civil Liberty, which according to the British National Party is an 'independent organisation', is headed up by BNP North-East organiser Kevin Scott, whose personal history includes a conviction for assault (1987), a conviction for using threatening words and behaviour (1993) and who wrote an article in the International Third Position newspaper, 'The Final Conflict' in 2001. That the BNP's Civil Liberty is racist is patently obvious. When contacted to see if he would stand by the vow, featured on the Civil Liberty website, to represent absolutely anyone, Scott admitted: 'If a black Muslim approached us for help I would suggest they go to Liberty where they will get a sympathetic ear.'

Civil Liberty's former treasurer was the BNP's recent Head of Admin Kenny Smith, now one of the dissident Voice of Change group. Its contact address is the PO Box that belongs to the BNP's North-East Region.

The BNP's Civil Liberty, by the way, has absolutely no connection to Liberty, the extremely active and much-respected human rights and civil liberties organisation.

The problem with Civil Liberty and its alleged role as a suspected money-laundering operation for the BNP is that it's next to impossible to check its finances without a proper legal investigation taking place. It's not a charity and it's not a registered company. It's not anything really except the non-operating group it claims to be on its website - or that's how it appears. Adrian Davies, barrister and former Griffin-supporter, stated on the programme that he attended the AmRen conference with Griffin and witnessed people queuing up to hand over large sums of cash to the BNP leader, ostensibly (nudge-nudge) for Civil Liberty but who can say where it has really ended up?

The invisible rubber cheque

While we're on the subject of donations, regular readers may recall Nick Griffin boasting on being cleared of race hate charges back in February 2006 that the party had been swamped with donations, including a single cheque for £20,000. This was apparently raised thanks to the omnipresent Sharon Ebanks, who owned up to spamming forums and blogs with pleas for money for the BNP. Fair enough - she was the party's fundraiser at the time and that's how they do business.

File on Four pointed out to John Walker that this £20,000 didn't seem to have appeared in the accounts that were submitted to the Electoral Commission for the appropriate period. Walker's response was a little odd, to say the least, for he seemed to find the incident 'slightly amusing'. The cheque, he claimed, bounced.

Were Lancaster Unity lucky enough to be given a cheque for £20,000 (hint-hint) that subsequently bounced, we wouldn't laugh much at all.

This rubber cheque appears to be a lot more important than it first appeared, to the extent that the BNP website has an explanation entitled 'Third Rate Marxist Lies from the Reds at the BBC' on the front page of its website. This explanation includes an image that purports to be part of a bank statement which shows the cheque being paid in on Jan 30th and rejected on Feb 2nd.

According to Walker; 'The cheque was duly deposited into the BNP bank account but was returned a few days later by the bank as refer to drawer. The cheque had bounced and attempts to contact the donor proved unsuccessful.'

He also claimed that he could produce the cheque but when asked was unable to, claiming that his deputy treasurer was away 'and he is the only one with access to the filing system'. Hmm...

Potential PAYE fraud

Around late October 2006, Sadie Graham, the BNP's former Head of Group Development, was asked to come off the payroll and go self-employed because, it was stated, the party was having trouble paying its PAYE bill. Kenny Smith, the former Head of Administration, was asked to do the same thing shortly after her and for the same reason.

As far as I can gather, where someone is employed for set hours for a set wage, the employer must handle the tax (PAYE). What happens in responsible companies is that the company puts the money away each wage cycle and at the end of the tax year pays up. This obviously doesn't work for the BNP, for it found itself several thousand pounds short when it received the tax bill. To get around this problem in future, it asked Graham and Smith to go self-employed and thus to sort out their own tax.

Two things arise from this. One is the astonishing financial incompetence of a political group that claims it is on the way to government (where presumably BNP treasurer John Walker would end up as Chancellor) and the other is the illegality of demanding that an employee should do any such thing.

Sadie Graham at least has consulted a solicitor over this issue so we'll leave it for now but we can see this popping up again - particularly as the reporter from File on Four stated clearly that charges could follow. Sub judice and all that.

Shredded documents

There was a lot of information in the programme and it's certainly too much to put in a single article that has to be up on the blog today, but one of the more intriguing snippets concerned the infamous bag of shredded documents.

Former treasurer John Brayshaw refused to sign off the accounts because he hadn't been allowed access to all the relevant documents and because he was aware that serious offences had been committed. He claimed that Walker and his deputy Dave Hannam visited his house 'for a week' to look at the accounts and make them balance. During the course of that week, a number of documents were shredded and Brayshaw was eventually ordered to burn these when Walker and Hannam left. Brayshaw chose not to do this but instead wrote to the Electoral Commission stating his concerns at the accounts and alleging a number of offenses. The Electoral Commission, for reasons known only to itself, chose to largely ignore him.

The shredded documents eventually found their way to File on Four, where they were examined closely and, in some cases, stuck back together. Walker claims on the BNP website that the documents 'appeared to be in the main, working copies of the print outs of the book keeping software and draft accounts...these drafts and working copies were quite properly shredded for the very reason that the BBC has a habit of scuttling around in the night raiding peoples bin bags. If the BBC is not guilty of theft, they are clearly in the possession of stolen property and I will be considering reporting the BBC to the police for this offence'.

Where there's no defence, attack is the only option.

The shredded documents are not as innocent as Walker would have us believe, even though he denied their existence until confronted with them. Some that are easily identifiable proved to be cheques, petrol receipts, Trafalgar Club and Excalibur documents, financial records (NOT, it should be noted, print-outs) and documents that referred directly to Nick Griffin and his parents, Edgar and Jean. Walker denied knowing who had shredded any cheques, of course.

The shredding of documents is not, in and of itself, illegal. But the BNP operates as a political party and/or a company and has to submit accounts, deal with tax and so on. As a legal entity, it is forced to conform to the law and one of the laws regarding such organisations is that things such as cheques, petrol receipts and financial documents have to be kept for six years after the end of the relevant tax year. Not to do so, is a criminal offence.

All in all, an intriguing programme that was only able to touch the surface of the corruption that is endemic within and around the British National Party. The feeling I got from it is that there is a lot more information to be dug out - but that's the feeling we all get when the words 'corruption' and 'BNP' are mentioned in the same sentence.

One result of the programme could have interesting repercussions yet. Jon Cruddas, MP for Dagenham, stated that he was going to approach the Electoral Commission to ask if it had ever asked to see brayshaw's evidence for his claims of allegedly dodgy accounts and if not, why they ignored his claims.

This story looks set to run and run...

Antifascist

Call for full investigation into BNP finances

Investigations into the British National Party’s finances by the BBC and Searchlight have revealed the sheer incompetence of the Electoral Commission. The Commission, which oversees political party finances, has repeatedly failed to investigate properly a series of allegations of BNP wrongdoing.

In 2005 the BNP’s former treasurer, John Brayshaw, wrote to the Commission pointing out that he had refused to sign off the BNP’s accounts because he had not been given access to all the records he needed to see and had resigned after a number of irregularities had come to light. Yet the Electoral Commission said it had no reason to believe a breach of the party funding law had taken place.

It is illegal for political parties to accept any donations of more than £200 from individuals who are not registered to vote in the UK. In June 2005 Searchlight wrote to the Electoral Commission drawing attention to a blatant attempt by Nick Griffin, the leader of the BNP, to solicit large US donations to the BNP by channelling them through a BNP front group called Civil Liberty. Again the Electoral Commission did not consider that any breach had occurred.

Searchlight wrote again to the Electoral Commission in May 2006 about another attempt to channel overseas donations of more than £200 through Civil Liberty. Although the Electoral Commission told us that our complaint would be investigated, we heard nothing more.

Searchlight demands that the Electoral Commission mounts a proper investigation into the BNP taking account of the evidence uncovered by Searchlight and the BBC Radio 4’s File on 4 programme broadcast on 12 February, as well as the matters raised by Jon Cruddas, MP for Dagenham, in an adjournment debate in the House of Commons on 18 December 2007, which he subsequently reported to the Electoral Commission and the Metropolitan Police. They include:

• John Brayshaw’s statement about irregularities while he was BNP treasurer and the shredding of BNP financial documents.
• The BNP’s attempts on more than one occasion to solicit overseas donations via Civil Liberty.
• The fact that the only two officers of Civil Liberty were both BNP officers, Civil Liberty’s PO Box address is the same as that of the BNP’s North East region and there is no evidence that Civil Liberty has given legal support to anyone who is not a member of the BNP.
• The statement to File on 4 by Adrian Davies, a barrister who has often represented the BNP, that he saw people queuing up to give cash to Griffin at a rightwing conference in the USA.
• The unusual pattern of large donations that the BNP has reported to the Electoral Commission.
• The verdict of Chris Makin, a forensic accountant engaged by File on 4, on the BNP’s accounts.
• The fact that the BNP never submitted any accounts to the Electoral Commission for the last three months of 2001.

If the Electoral Commission fails once again to investigate the BNP fully, it rests with Parliament to initiate a thorough review of how the Electoral Commission exercises its role.

Searchlight

A date for your diary - the BNP's finances investigated by File on 4 tonight

Party funding findings: Tuesday 12 February 2008, 2000 GMT, repeated Sunday 17 February 2008, 1700 GMT.

New concerns over BNP finances

At first glance the Trafalgar Club - with its annual dinner commemorating the famous sea battle - sounds like a heritage society wanting to honour one of Britain's national heroes.

For just £15 a month minimum donation, members receive a newsletter and a free ticket to its annual dinner. Men get a tie with "England Expects" - the first two words of Nelson's rallying signal at the battle - emblazoned on it while women receive a personal organiser.

The club could be a gathering of naval historical enthusiasts - the reality is different. Those who attend the annual dinner are addressed by Nick Griffin, chairman and leading light of the British National Party.

Billed on the party's website as its "elite fund raising group", the club is a channel for well-heeled BNP supporters to give financial aid to the party without having to be listed as an official donor.

The website tells would-be members: "You do not need to be a member of the British National Party to join the Trafalgar Club. The government currently bans many civil servants from joining the BNP so the Trafalgar Club is a great way of demonstrating your patriotism and making sure you keep your job."

It adds: "After many years of running on shoe-string budgets, the BNP has learned how to stretch a pound as far as it will go!"

However, a BBC File On 4 investigation has heard other claims about the party's finances.

Former party treasurer John Brayshaw refused to sign off the party's accounts because he claims he was not given the access to all the records he needed to see. In 2005 he wrote to the Electoral Commission, the body which oversees political party finances, saying that he resigned as BNP treasurer. He alleged a number of irregularities had come to light including missing invoices and receipts from the Trafalgar Club.

In his letter, Mr Brayshaw said current party treasurer John Walker and his deputy David Hannam visited his home for a week to complete the accounts. He said he did not help them but claimed he witnessed some unusual activities, namely the shredding of a large number of documents and invoices. Mr Brayshaw said he was told to burn the shredded documents, but kept them because he felt something improper had taken place.

A black bin bag containing the documents has been handed to File On 4. It contains fragments of cheques, train tickets, receipts and invoices. Some of the fragments carry the names of Nick Griffin, his parents and even the Trafalgar Club. One unshredded item is a petrol receipt with the name Excalibur - the title of the party's merchandising arm.

Under tax regulations all financial records should be kept for six years.

The Electoral Commission said it had no reason to believe a breach of the party funding law had taken place.

Current BNP treasurer John Walker dismissed Mr Brayshaw's allegations as pure fantasy. He said Mr Brayshaw had failed to make the books balance and had left the party's accounts in a mess. Mr Walker said the shredded material included material such as "draft accounts that may have errors in dates and things like that. Because you are trying to reconcile the accounts, of course you shred documents."

Confronted by the BBC with some of the shredded material, Mr Walker said they contained working copies of printouts of the BNP accounts and bounced cheques.

He added: "What you've got in front of me here is clearly very weak evidence and the BBC is clutching at straws."

Among other questions raised by File On 4 are whether the BNP breached party funding rules by not declaring the name of a donor who gave £20,000 to the party. The rules say all donors who give more than £5,000 should be identified. When leader Nick Griffin was cleared of race hate charges in November 2006, he claimed the party had just received its largest ever donation.

[Former] BNP member Sharon Ebanks told the BBC she was personally thanked by a party official for collecting the £20,000 donation via her internet fund-raising. Ms Ebanks told File On 4 that the party informed her the donor's cheque was genuine and he should be made an honorary life member.

The BNP strenuously denies that it has broken any rules. It claims that the cheque in fact bounced and therefore did not need to be declared.

Labour MP for Dagenham Jon Cruddas has already raised the issue of BNP finances in Parliament, and presented the Electoral Commission with a 20-page dossier just before Christmas.

He said: "What this investigation for File On 4 is identifying is much more significant than any of the charges I was laying before the parliament - namely a systematic series of financial irregularities. And this cannot be laid to rest without the most thorough of investigations by the Electoral Commission."

Hear the full story on BBC Radio 4: File On 4 Tuesday 12 February at 2000 GMT, repeated Sunday 17 February at 1700 GMT or online at File on 4 website.

BNP supporters disrupt school with demo and picket at gates

Monday morning saw the disruption of the first school day of the new year as the British National Party and two of its many front groups, Civil Liberty and Solidarity, gathered together outside Sunnydale Community College in County Durham to protest at the suspension of teacher Mark Walker.

Walker, BNP election candidate and agent for the former BNP's Andrew Spence in the recent Sedgefield by-election, was suspended from Sunnydale for 'misuse of school computer equipment', rumoured to be related to his visiting far-right websites during lessons while the children were getting on with their work.

The idiotic Phil Edwards, ever available to distort the facts on behalf of the BNP, was quoted in news reports as stating; 'The reason he's had this action against him was because he allegedly looked at the BNP website on the school's computer. It is disgraceful that anyone should be suspended for looking at the website of a perfectly legal political party. We are certain this action would not have been taken against someone who had looked at the websites of the Commission for Racial Equality or the Green Party.'

Well no, but neither the Commission for Racial Equality nor the Green Party attack Muslims using any pretext (or lie if a pretext isn't available), despise our multicultural society, seek the 'repatriation' of people with different skin colours who could be third or fourth generation UK born, oppose sexual diversity, demand the return of both corporal and capital punishment, have a Hitlerite background, a record of anti-semitism, an astonishing collection of criminals, liars and thieves in its ranks nor constantly steal money from its supporters.

Although both Edwards and the General Secretary of the hijacked Solidarity trades union both claimed that Walker's suspension was because of his political views, the school's head teacher, Sue Byrnes, said the claims of political persecution were untrue.

'We are happy to state categorically that Mr Walker has not been suspended because of any political affiliations he may hold. Any suggestion that this is the case is wholly false. Beyond that we cannot comment because of our respect for Mr Walker's rights to confidentiality with regard to the terms of his employment.'

The demonstration and picket only managed to attract 'up to 50 people', according to the BBC, even though it was heavily advertised on the BNP, Solidarity and Civil Liberty websites, and the extreme nazi forums Stormfront and Vanguard News Network (VNN).

BNP's Civil Liberty calls for demonstration and picket at school gates

Last March, Mark Walker, a teacher at the Sunnydale Community College for Maths and Computing in County Durham, was suspended from his job on full pay after it was found that he accessed the website of the BNP during a lesson. At the time, his candidature had been announced for the BNP in the local elections and he was also acting as election agent for the Sedgefield ex-BNP candidate Andrew Spence. His suspension was for 'misuse of school computer equipment'.

Sunnydale is a pretty standard school, a mixed comprehensive for 11-16 year olds, and certainly doesn't deserve a teacher who sees fit to wander around a fascist website whenever the fancy takes him, happy in the knowledge that one of the pupils could see what he's looking at any time they get too close to his screen.

Curiously, just a month before this incident, Walker's brother Adam did exactly the same thing but upon being suspended, resigned, to shouts of 'coward' and general abuse from the Stormfront nazi forum.

Attempting to play on the heartstrings of its audience, the press release from BNP front-group Civil Liberty (duplicated word for word on the Solidarity and BNP's own websites, on the Stormfront nazi forum and the even more hardcore nazi Vanguard forum) points out that much of the 'harrowing' period of Mark Walker's suspension coincided with his wife being pregnant. So did his own election in May and that of Andrew Spence in July but there's no mention of either of those as in any way contributing to his stress levels.

Now, rather than let this be a matter to be dealt with solely through the school's disciplinary procedure, all these BNP-related groups have combined to call for a demonstration and picket of the school on the first day of the new term, next Monday and, just to make sure they disrupt the pupils as much as possible, they're calling for the picket to begin at 8am. They also call for supporters to swamp the mail, email, fax and phone lines - let's hope none of the kids has an accident while the BNP and the other scumbags are taking up the lines with unnecessary calls.

Schoolteacher or not, to involve children in any way in this kind of action is despicable. There can be nothing wrong with Walker being present at his hearing with his union representative - even if it is just some buffoon from the fake union Solidarity - but a demo and a picket at the school gates is going too far. If for nothing else, Walker should be sacked just for encouraging this shameful demonstration to take place.

The latest Ebanks tirade against the BNP - revelations or rubbish?

As we all know (to our cost) Sharon Ebanks, former BNP activist and Griffin-favourite until a major fall-out last October has been posting on our comments sections in increasingly strident tones for the past week or two, claiming to have revelations that will be guaranteed to bring down her Nemesis, Nick Griffin.

Despite offers of space to air her accusations against him, Ebanks refused to pass on the information about Griffin, choosing instead to keep her information to herself until she decides the moment is right. She now seems to have made that decision, having posted a series of badly-written and completely unreferenced statements and accusations against Griffin, the BNP and other BNP-linked operations in the comments section of a 'nationalist' blog. Assuming these to be the revelations, we'll take a quick look at them.

'Griffin certainly has become untouchable since Darby became Deputy Leader and Griffin spoke with Barbara Amiel.'

Strangely, Scott McLean is still listed on the BNP's website as the Deputy-Chairman of the party, despite the fact that everyone knows he's gone and precisely why he's gone. As far as we know, Darby has never been Deputy Leader, though Griffin did designate him as de facto leader should he have been jailed during the trials in 2005/6.

The reference to Barbara Amiel, former director at The Spectator and wife of Conrad Black is presumably a nod towards a Martin Webster allegation of April 2006 that Griffin had been in telephone contact with the Jewish Amiel, this conversation rapidly being followed by a major shift in the public stance of the BNP indicated by a much-criticised article ostensibly written by the party's legal head Lee Barnes (August 2006) in which he stated, 'As a Nationalist I can say that I support Israel 100% in their dispute with Hezbollah. In fact, I hope they wipe Hezbollah off the Lebanese map and bomb them until they leave large greasy craters in the cities where their Islamic extremist cantons of terror once stood.'

Whether the conversation between Amiel and Griffin happened or not is, as far as we're concerned, irrelevant. The shift away from anti-semitism (at least publicly) to anti-Islam has been going on over a number of years and is simply one of Griffin's weak attempts to make his party more appealing to the general public, who he clearly regards as being more likely to fall for his line on Muslims than they are that on Jews. Griffin is a populist, prepared to change his public image in a moment if he feels a change will gain him some power.

The fact that he has apparently shifted his viewpoint has not made him untouchable, or at least more or less untouchable than before. He was done for inciting racial hatred nearly a decade ago and the government tried (twice) to have him done again last year. The fact that he wasn't convicted was due to the jury in the case, not to the allegation that he is 'untouchable'. Presumably, Ebanks is trying to suggest that Griffin's new pro-Israel stance allows him to say or do anything without fear of retaliation but the evidence, such as it is, doesn't really support that statement.

'Why indeed did the press not print Simon Smiths resignation when under any other circumstances they would have leapt at the opportunity for blasting across their front page "BNP COUNCILLOR ACCUSES BNP OF FINANCIAL IMPROPRIETY". Why did the press remain silent on Websters accusations and why has the press, the police and the Electoral Commission and Silvers and Co not done anything about my complaints regarding BNP money?'

There are a lot of questions in that small paragraph but we'll take a look at them one at a time. Regarding Simon Smith's purging from the party, which was turned into yet another resignation, the Birmingham Post reported the party line on the resignation with a report including quotes from Simon Darby but obviously didn't want to drag the story on with Smith's own version of events that appeared in his letter which we reprinted here. Nevertheless, we do agree that the press missed out on an opportunity to generate discussion of Croatia, Solidarity and the BNP's lucrative Trafalgar Club, which were all mentioned in Smith's letter and could have reaped large rewards. Being charitable, we can assume that the potential was either missed by a busy sub-editor or that the general embargo on BNP-related rubbish forced it to hit the bin. In either case, it was an excellent opportunity for good copy that was missed.

The answer to the complex question 'Why did the press remain silent on Websters accusations and why has the press, the police and the Electoral Commission and Silvers and Co not done anything about my complaints regarding BNP money?' is that while many people suspect and there is mounting evidence to support the ever-growing claims of financial impropriety, there is little hard evidence - patently not enough to generate a police enquiry or an enquiry by the Electoral Commission, for the moment at least. Once the BNP's accounts have been submitted, we may find the evidence we already have suddenly becoming far more valuable.

If Ebanks felt she had enough evidence to take to the EC, the BNP's auditors and the police, there must have been something relatively substantial to present to them. If so, Ebanks needs to put this information where it can do some good. At the moment, her only options appear to be to place the evidence before the public via her own New Nationalist Party, which one suspects doesn't want to get involved, to post on a forum like Stormfront, where the BNP-allied moderators will probably delete it instantly or to take us up on our offer to publish it - though that offer has a limited life-span and it's rapidly running out.

'Why does Griffin allow idiots at the top when he claims from a platform on a daily basis that he wants some semblance of Britain back? Why are thieves and cranks promoted through the ranks and decent honest people ignored? These are not the actions of a political party and certainly not the actions of those wishing a winning one.'

We couldn't agree more and we suspect, like Ebanks and many others, that we know why the scum rises to the top in the BNP - simply because they will assist Nick Griffin to achieve what he aims to achieve (the personal enrichment of Nick Griffin) and/or they have something on him. The more we and other observers look into the BNP and the more that is exposed about the internal workings of it, the more we tend to regard it as less a bona fide political party and more of an undernourished Mafia - a low-grade criminal organisation with pretensions of grandeur and less murders (though probably not if Tony Lecomber had his way).

'Why is Griffin ditching local politics in favour of Europe, a place where nothing can be achieved for British people at grassroots level?'

Because Griffin and his pals at the top of the BNP have absolutely no interest in doing anything for anybody except themselves. The European elections are where Griffin sees his opportunity to sneak a seat and rake in the money, incidentally making lots of connections all over Europe via the group of far-right MEPs, which should be handy for Griffin when we wants to buy more land abroad with his ill-gotten gains.

'Where are the BNP accounts? Why is GWR trading without filing accounts for 2yrs when it has made thousands of pounds?'

We've no more idea than Ebanks why the BNP's accounts are so late in being submitted to the Electoral Commission though we suspect it has a lot to do with cooking the books and concealing the drop in membership in some way that it won't cost Griffin and co any money. Regarding Great White Records, the BNP's musical wing - we're told that the idiotic Dave Hannam has less than six months to get it making a profit or he's out on his ear. The lack of accounts simply indicates that financial disaster is pending but being concealed - for now. Griffin is juggling all the BNP's financial cock-ups in the air at the moment but he's rapidly losing control and we firmly expect the whole lot to collapse in the very near future.

'Why does the BNP PayPal line empty into several different numbered accounts instead of remaining static and traceable?'

We have to wonder how Ebanks could possibly know that this is the case? We'd welcome some evidence...

'Why has Griffin hijacked the money and members of Solidarity?'

Presumably because he sees it as yet another potential scam, where he can rip off members of his own party ad nauseum. It's always worth remembering Griffin's own quote from way back in Spring 1999's edition of Patriot magazine; 'In increasingly hard economic times, a group of people the size of the BNP and its support base can provide a significant assured market for a variety of small businesses.' Oh boy, has he taken that to heart.

'Why is Civil Liberty allowed to commit fraud and nothing is done?'

We reported that the Electoral Commission had launched an investigation into Civil Liberty after the Guardian had provided information to Scotland Yard last April. Since then, no-one has heard anything about either the possible investigation or indeed, Civil Liberty itself.

'Why are decent people resigning only to be rubbished by morons after their personal sacrifices?'

One assumes Ebanks is referring to herself here though one would expect her to be aware that it's an old trick of the far-right to attack those who have left acrimoniously, just to discredit anything they might say about the party before they say it.

'Why is the BNP swiping money from peoples credit cards without them knowing? Once again this is fraud perpetrated against those who have joined online and entrusted them with their details and trusted them full stop.'

If this is the case and if Ebanks has any evidence to support this statement, she should see it as her duty to go straight to the police. Credit card fraud is criminal and if the BNP can be shown to have committed it, heads will roll. This is probably the one line that really means anything in her post. If she has the proof, she has the party by the throat.

'A party cannot exist without intellect and activism but the heads of the BNP do everything in their power to repel such people.'

This is probably a reference to Jonathan Bowden, who seems to be much admired by Ebanks. We don't really care but we'd assume that the last thing Griffin wants around him is someone with intelligence who might see through him and tell the rest of the BNP what a fraud he actually is.

'And last but not least, why was one of Britains most dangerous criminals contacting me 2 weeks ago with the police claiming to know nothing and do nothing but Simon Darby knew everything even the bogus name that the man was using? If the police couldn't figure it out how the hell could he?'

Unless she's referring to Tony Lecomber, Nick Griffin's favourite terrorist, we have absolutely no idea what Ebanks is going on about here. We'd like to know more though so if anyone has more information, feel free to provide.

So there you have it. Sharon Ebanks' most recent attack on the BNP - revelations that could damage the party beyond repair or rubbish that can be shrugged off as the ravings of an embittered former favourite?