Of crap sharks, DoSsers, deserts and life

Well well, good news for a change. Great White Records is back. There, I knew that'd make you happy. The downside is that the master of incompetence Dave Hannam, Mark Collett's schoolgirl-hunting mate, has got the boot. A real pity, as Hannam is almost as good a target for utter stupidity as the idiotic Dicky Barnbrook.

There are consolations though because the manager of the new and squeaky-clean GWR is the young and squeaky-voiced Joey Smith, who is such a moron that he might prove to be even more amusing than Hannam. Let's hope that he can better Hannam's stupendous record, at least. Great White Records was formed in 2005, submitted its only set of accounts in 2006 and finally dissolved as a company because of almost non-existent takings in June of this year.

The 'nationalist' music scene isn't exactly setting the world on fire, is it.

Was it a 'DoS' attack or just a disgruntled schoolboy taking his ball home in a sulk? The latter, it seems. Simon Bennett, the 'webmaster' and James Bond-wannabe who took the BNP's simple but usable website and changed it into the terminally slow and gaudy rubbish that it is today, was apparently sacked by Nick Griffin just before the Red, White and Blue boozefest.

Bennett promptly locked the party out, being the petulant child that he is, but was persuaded to hand back the keys by South African white supremacist Arthur Kemp and it's intended that control of the website will pass back into the hands of one of the other South Africans in the party, school-bomber and former BNP webmaster Lambertus Nieuwhof.

There was, according to all the information we can gather, NO DoS attack. But then, we never thought there had been.

The Red, White and Blue was a failure. Attended by something between five and seven hundred people (including kids), the whole thing was a washout from beginning to end, surprisingly, for this was the tenth anniversary of the RWB.

If you take a look at the images (link provided by the ever-vigilant irishtony) you can see precisely what the RWB was - a car boot sale set up in tents on a very big field. All that was on sale was tat from the BNP's rubbishy Excalibur scam. Of course, if you got bored, you could always go and take a look at the mock-graveyard. A fine way to entertain the kids over the weekend.

Remember those old cowboy films with the sagebrush being blown across the desert at the edge of the town? The soundtrack always featured a dog howling off in the distance and someone blowing listlessly on a harmonica, as the camera focused on on the distant figure of the stranger as he rode wearily into the outskirts, not entirely sure of what to expect, only certain that none of it would be good. That was last weekend's RWB.

And so we come to Nick Griffin's ever-more desperate attempts to make money while carefully avoiding giving away even a penny of his own - or not to the BNP at least. Yes, the gullible and long-suffering members of the BNP are being asked to cough-up some more cash but this time there's something of a twist that might prove to be of interest a year or two down the line.

A paid membership of any organisation, particularly something as long-term and stable as a political party, provides a regular and guaranteed income, within limits of course. Core membership will, after several years, become apparent, and the money from those members can be used as the basic budget for the party. There are plenty of people who will join for a year and never be seen again but the core money is always there and always reliable.

The new Life Membership scheme, in which the member pays a lump sum (£395 at the moment but rumoured to be going up to £800) looks, on the face of it, like a good idea for those who wish to show some commitment to this party of thieves, but is it just a typically short-sighted attempt to grab money now at the expense of not having it tomorrow? Well, yes. The BNP, as we all know, is teetering on the edge of bankruptcy. The Euro elections - fought solely so that Nick Griffin could get a well-paid sinecure before the party collapsed altogether - were rumoured to have cost the BNP around £400,000, leaving absolutely nothing in the piggy bank for the General Election, which will probably have to take place in May next year.

Donation fatigue is setting in with a vengeance. The constant stream of begging letters from Welshpool is annoying even the long-term loyalists within the party, who see no return for their cash and continuously find themselves having to ignore that fact that they are being conned all along the line. Hence the life membership gamble - and it IS a gamble. With a reasonable take-up, the party might survive and get over the present financial hump but I can't imagine many people have £400 to throw away and those who do are not going to be paying their regular £30 membership fee for years, possibly decades.

The life membership scheme smacks of a last gasp - a game of Russian Roulette, where the risk is huge but the rewards could possibly be enough to get through the current mess. But what about the next mess, and the one after that? Because with the BNP, you can always guarantee that there will be a financial disaster just around the corner.

The strange world of Lee John Barnes

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

Those of us who fancy a laugh in the anti-fascist movement tend to look no further than the blog of Mr Barnes, who holds a first degree in law. Here is a guy who likes to blog about conspiracy theories, some bizarre belief in a Norse God, and of course his beloved nationalist cause (he seems to have fallen out with the BNP recently – he has had his BNP email addy removed).

For some time the stuff he posts kept me amused at just how batty the guy actually was. His “logic” was so hard to follow at times it really did make you wonder if it came from a sane person or not. Recently after reading several posts I decided to check on the facts he presented. Around the time of the BNP website problems, which the party and others put down to some pinko-leftie denial of service attack Barnes blogged that he had:

“On sunday morning I contacted the Counter-Terrorism Unit, Scotland Yard and MI5 to inform them that one of the largest DOS attacks in British electronic warfare history was underway against the BNP”.

So I first emailed all concerned and waited and waited. I got replies from both stating that they couldn’t answer if that was true due to freedom of information rules. Mmmm, he wasn’t getting away that easily – so I decided to phone the press offices of those organisations. CTU wouldn’t entertain giving me any kind of answer, but I got interesting replies from both M15 and the Met/Scotland Yard (I treated Scotland Yard and the CTU separately phoning both switchboards in turn). The replies were as expected until a very nice lady in the Met mentioned that she couldn’t answer my questions unless I was phoning to support an earlier report. So I decided to do just that, support Mr Barnes concern about the BNP website being down, so she checked the computer – guess what? – computer said no – there had been no contact recorded on the subject. She assured me that it would appear on the system, and in her words “even the nuttier stuff is logged”. So armed with the new method I tried Scotland Yard who repeated the process – but this time the guy some information, “oh wait he said these are complaints 'about' the BNP, not by them”. He confirmed there were no reports, as did M15, but they took a while and asked me so many questions I think they may have started a file on me now.

A short time later Barnes alleged on his blog:

“Image - members of the same coalition as the UAF demonstrating for free speech and exercising their right of protest in order to kill a police horse and murder a policeman”.

With the following photo

So again this set my non LLB refined miss-speaking alarms off. So I first contacted Getty who confirmed that the photo was taken in London at a demo in early 2009. So I phoned the Met, who couldn’t answer the question there and then, but pointed me in the direction of the inquiry form and suggested I try that. So I did, after a while I received a request for more information from the Head of the Mets Mounted Division. After supplying the information requested the Chief Inspector replied that:

“As the Head of the Metropolitan Police Mounted Branch I can confirm the following:

The leaflet '21st Century British Nationalism' dated 9th June 2009 shows a picture of a police officers and horses at a demonstration. In the picture it is Metropolitan Police officers and horses; the photograph was taken at a demonstration in London very early in 2009. The leaflet reports an officer and police horse were killed; neither horse or officer were killed. The report that both were fatally injured is completely inaccurate”.

The Chief Inspector used the term leaflet because the screen shot I had sent did appear to be a leaflet in hindsight – I have also supplied him with the URL since for his info – at his request.

So to be fair I gave Barnes the chance to reply, I asked him where he got the info from, I had several posts in threads comments section asking him to reply – but he never did – I wonder why?

Now I have only checked on two subjects from the Barnes blog to date – but both of them have proved to be false – is he just miss-speaking, to borrow Hilary Clinton's excuse or is a symptom of something more? For that I will leave you to decide.