Bad week for veteran Luton NF candidate

For Derek Godfrey, the 76-year old National Front district council candidate for Caddington, the week started well. His local NF branch managed to gather together a ragbag of 50 sick notes to shuffle through Hemel Hempstead on St George's Day, topped off by a "secret" social at The Packhorse pub, Markyate, known to local activists as "The Bunker".

After that ,however, it all started to go wrong. Local anti-fascists had been tracking Godfrey for the past two years, drawn by his wild letters to the local press that defended the NF, hailed the memory of Oswald Mosley and defended Prince Harry's right to wear a fancy dress swastika. It came as little surprise, therefore, to see him appear as the NF's local candidate for the May elections.

This prompted another search through the archives, revealing that Godfrey had been an active member of the nazi League of St George in the 1970s. A quick Google search shows him marching at a Diksmuide rally of European national socialists in the mid 1970s. Godfrey told the Luton News "when I saw what it was all about, I packed it in. I thought it was a bit extreme." A "bit nazi" then, ignoring the fact that membership of the League was by invitation only.

Worse still, Godfrey's own election meeting at a school in local school was cancelled when hapless local organiser Simon Deacon failed to show evidence of liability insurance by a Friday noon deadline. Local councillor and school governor Richard Stay said: "I gave them reasonable notice that we needed to have that evidence by midday today - they failed. It's my role to guarantee the protection of staff and children at the school. So, I called the meeting off."

Stop the BNP

When is an elected councillor not an elected councillor? When he's not elected.

The National Front and its supporters are currently making much of the fact that they have just acquired their very first councillor. To much praise, no doubt for all his hard work during the bitterly-fought campaign, Simon Deacon is currently being overwhelmed with congratulations from all sections of the far-right. Over on the increasingly stupid Stormfront nazi forum, cries of 'Well done' and 'Congratulations' are being shouted from the cyber equivalent of the rooftops. A tickertape parade would seem to be in order.

Just a couple of snags. Deacon was not elected to his St Alban's seat, there was no bitterly-fought campaign and there was certainly no hard work. Quite simply, Deacon walked into his parish councillor role by default because no-one stood against him.

Without a single vote being cast - which is the only way the National Front would get anywhere politically - Simon Deacon has walked into a position (from May 4th) as parish councillor for St Alban's Markyate ward.

The NF has obviously learned its electoral lessons from the British National Party. Only a couple of weeks ago the BNP was crowing over the fact that it had managed to get another six (parish) councillors, including Carol Collett, mother of the despicable Hitler-worshipper Mark Collett, 'without a single ballot paper being marked'. Democracy, huh?

As we pointed out in our article about the BNP's very quiet parish council infestation, there are a number of rules to which parish councillors are expected to adhere. One is to 'promote equality by not discriminating unlawfully against any person' while another is to 'treat others with respect'. We confidently expect the National Front's Simon Beacon to fail miserably on both fronts.

Curiously, considering the sneaky way Deacon managed to get a seat on his parish council, the National Front has a lot to say about democracy on one of its introductory pages. It even makes a veiled sideswipe at the BNP's highly undemocratic structure;

'...The policies of the party are determined by the members at Annual Conferences and unlike some other parties, such decisions are binding upon the party.'

Unfortunately it goes on;

'The National Front is a party of genuine democracy...The NF seeks to promote in Britain a genuinely democratic political system...'

One wonders then, why the NF has allowed Deacon to bypass the democratic process completely despite never having been voted in. Could it be that all this waffle about democracy is worth about as much as that espoused by the BNP - a party that has blatantly and on numerous occasions attempted to subvert the democratic process?