BNP councillor quits and slams leadership

A BNP councillor has quit the party with a blast at its leader, Nick Griffin.

After a lengthy absence from public appearances relating to her council duties, councillor Emma Colgate returned to Thurrock Council’s chamber on Wednesday evening. Her only contribution to the meeting was to second a motion calling for a five per cent voluntary cut in the wages of the authority’s senior officers and she didn’t make any announcement about her change of political affiliation.

However, before the meeting she circulated a letter to the press, announcing she was quitting the BNP – even though she stood by its core principles.

Her statement said: ““It is with deep sadness that I have to inform you that I have resigned my party whip with immediate effect and will be an independent councillor. I have been unhappy with the leadership of the BNP for some time and I feel the direction the current leadership are taking is not in the interest of the public.

“I still stand true to the core values of the BNP and believe it has many good members and supporters but I feel I am no longer able to represent an organisation that is falling apart due to mismanagement. If the current leadership changed hands I would be more than happy to return. I do not feel it is correct to resign my position completely as I only have five months of my term remaining and to force a by-election would be an unnecessary financial burden. I will continue to represent the same values and policies that I was elected under.”

There has been much local speculation about the political future of Miss Colgate in recent times. Earlier this year she stepped down from her position as British National Party staff manager, saying she wanted to concentrate fully on fighting the Thurrock Parliamentary seat for the party in the General Election.

At the time Mr Griffin thanked Ms Colgate for “all her hard work and loyalty. I look forward to seeing her make even more progress in her political role as an outstanding BNP councillor and beyond.” But it was widely reported that there were deep rifts between Miss Colgate and other senior members of the BNP with Mr Griffin.

Locally, since being well beaten in the general election, her profile has been low. Wednesday’s appearance in the chamber for a full council meeting was the first time since June 30 that she had turned up – and her ability to claim her allowance for council duties was in jeopardy had she not turned up for the November council meeting.

It has been reported that several months of mail from constituents are unopened at the council offices, her voicemail is full and e-mails bounce back. Concern has been expressed within her ward that she failed to turn up to the recent Tilbury remembrance service.

Though she didn’t make any announcement of her change of affiliation at the meeting, the Council’s Democratic Services department confirmed they had been informed.

The Enquirer

Breaking news - Another one goes...

The BNP has one fewer councillor this evening after Emma Colgate informed Thurrock council that she was no longer taking the BNP whip.

Colgate, once close to Griffin, is just the latest councillor to withdraw from the BNP and it is yet another sign that party is collapsing. A few days ago it was claimed that BNP membership was down 50% on 2009.

Hope not hate

Richard Barnbrook reported for 'bullying'

A former staff member for Richard Barnbrook, the BNP’s former London leader and London Assembly member, says she has reported him to the GLA’s standards watchdog for his “unreasonable” and “bullying” behaviour towards her.

Tess Culnane, the “Nazi Granny” who was the BNP candidate for mayor of Lewisham this year, tells me she has made an official complaint to the City Hall standards officer, Ed Williams, calling for Mr Barnbrook’s suspension.

She says: “Richard Barnbrook failed to respond to requests for help from members of the public. When I did tell him about people who had come forward, he very often adopted a resentful manner towards me and threatened me with dismissal.
“His continual bullying manner and threats to sack me became intolerable. He would fall into a strop. He would make faces behind our backs when we were talking. He was a total embarrassment to those of us in his office.”

Mrs Culnane also says that Mr Barnbrook took out his anger on other members of his office, including another staffer, Emma Colgate. “She was forced to resign due to Richard’s perpetual hectoring manner,” she said. “At one point he followed her into the ladies’ toilet hectoring her.” Mrs Culnane says her complaint also alleges that Mr Barnbrook has been drunk during Mayor’s Questions.

Mr Barnbrook didn’t return repeated calls and text messages today to answer these allegations. They should be seen, of course, in the context of the fact that he has been in dispute with the BNP for some time. There may be an element of revenge here.
He resigned the BNP whip on the Assembly last month after the re-election of Nick Griffin as leader. Yesterday, he was thrown out of the party. He was also sacked as the BNP’s Barking and Dagenham organiser after the racists lost all their seats – his included – on the local council in the May elections.

A spokesman for the London Assembly said the procedure with complaints was for a sub-committee to decide whether they had enough merit to be considered by the full standards committee. Until then, he said, he could not confirm or deny whether any complaint had been received.

The Telegraph

Exit of three top BNP officers confirmed

Following our report earlier today of the resignation of Emma Colgate from her post as BNP manager, the BNP has amended its national contacts spreadsheet. Absent are Colgate, Eddy Butler, the former national organiser and national elections officer, and Mark Collett, the former head of publicity.

The changes confirm the stories circulating on nazi web forums that the unpopular Collett has finally fallen out of favour. A BNP organisers’ bulletin circulated on 31 March referred to “financial irregularities and ‘scamming’ concerning the procurement of print, especially large election print run, leaflets and regular publications including Identity magazine”. It appears that Nick Griffin, the BNP leader, has finally accepted that there is substance to the long-standing accusations that Collett has been making a huge personal profit on the design and print procurement he carries out for the party.

Collett is also accused of leaking “sensitive party information” onto the internet and “feeding lies to certain anti-BNP blog sites”.

The organisers’ bulletin continues: “Earlier this week, the police were made aware of very serious allegations potentially affecting the personal safety of Party chairman Nick Griffin MEP and senior management/fundraising consultant James Dowson. Formal statements have now been made to the police, including by Mr. Griffin.”

Although the bulletin says it the party is “unable to provide any further details in order not to prejudice any resulting legal proceedings”, it goes on to announce that: “Mark Collett was conspiring with a small clique of other party officials to launch a ‘palace coup’ against our twice democratically elected party leader, Nick Griffin, and that in order to create the artificial climate of disillusionment necessary for this to stand any chance of success, lies and unfounded rumours have been spread, and were planned to be spread much further. Mr. Collett has therefore been relieved of all positions within the Party with immediate effect.”

As a result Collett’s Wikipedia entry was updated with incredible haste to state that he “was Director of Publicity for the Party before being suspended from the party in early April 2010”.

A second organisers’ bulletin calls on “regional organisers and key officials” to attend an “urgent briefing meeting” on Easter Monday, which “will cover recent events, urgent organisational matters, including a crucial update from our new National Elections Officer Clive Jefferson”. Jefferson, who only a few months ago was promoted to North West regional organiser, quietly replaces Butler in the national elections officer role. He is also one of the BNP officers fraudulently on the European Parliament payroll.

All this comes at the worst possible time for the BNP, five weeks before elections in which it hopes to win control of Barking and Dagenham council and get Griffin and Simon Darby, the party's deputy leader, elected to the House of Commons.

Collett stood trial alongside Griffin in 2006 on race hate charges and was acquitted. Although Griffin always stood by him, he knew Collett was a fool. “I constantly have to lecture Mark Collett about all sorts of things,” said Nick Griffin. “He is a pig ignorant man. Often it goes in one ear and straight out of the other.”

A few years ago Collett starred in a Channel 4 documentary called Young, Nazi and Proud, in which he said he would prefer to live in 1930s Nazi Germany than in today’s Britain. He also attacked Winston Churchill and the British Royal Family.

Hope not hate

BNP admits EU money pays for party staff

Councillor Emma Colgate has resigned as the British National Party’s staff manager to devote herself full-time to the election campaign in Thurrock, the BNP announced today

Colgate is standing for election to Parliament and also hopes to get more BNP councillors elected to Thurrock council, where she is the party’s sole representative. She told the BNP website: “We’re in with a real chance in Thurrock and I want to give it my best shot. I cannot properly work fill-time [sic] on the campaign while being paid by EU taxpayers to manage our European staff.”

Colgate is one of 11 staff paid by the European Parliament to run constituency offices for the party’s two MEPs and support them in their European roles. All of them also have major roles in the BNP party apparatus.

Searchlight has always accused the BNP of misusing taxpayers’ money to pay for party staff. Despite winning election to the European Parliament on the back of the MPs’ expenses scandal with the slogan “punish the pigs”, the BNP MEPs wasted no time in jumping onto the EU gravy train.

Colgate’s announcement that she has resigned from her party role, described on the current BNP contacts’ spreadsheet as “party manager, party staff manager, staff administration”, on the grounds that she cannot campaign while being paid by EU taxpayers, is a clear admission that the BNP is using EU money fraudulently to fund party staff.

Whether Colgate was truly motivated by a desire not to misuse EU money further is unclear. Several of the nazi web forums have reported that she and Eddy Butler, the BNP’s national organiser, were sacked. As yet the BNP has made no announcement about Butler’s role, nor about the accusations, also doing the rounds of the nazi forums, that there has been a huge falling out between Mark Collett, the BNP’s unpopular head of publicity, and Jim Dowson, its equally unpopular “consultant”, whom Searchlight describes as “owning” the BNP because of his extensive financial hold over the party.

Colgate still likes to quote a Searchlight description of her last year as a “hard-working” councillor, not appreciating that we were only noting that she attends all her council meetings, as any councillor should and in contrast to almost all the BNP’s other councillors throughout the country, who do as little as possible for their councillors’ allowances.

Nevertheless it is surprising that she repays the “compliment” by making wild accusations against Gerry Gable, publisher of Searchlight, most recently on the streets of Thurrock surrounded by a mob of BNP activists trying to prevent the distribution of an anti-BNP HOPE not hate newspaper in Thurrock as part of the democratic election process.

As for her claimed wish not to use EU money to fund her election campaign, we wait with bated breath for the nine other BNP EU-funded officers also standing for Parliament in the general election to follow her lead and resign.

Hope not hate

Pas de deux

Emma Colgate, who has stepped into the breach in Thurrock after Nick Griffin, the BNP leader, decided to switch to Barking, east London, for the general election, is one of the BNP’s most hard-working councillors.

Elected to Thurrock council in May 2008 she has a 100% attendance record at meetings of the full council and the general services committee. She is the sole BNP councillor there but holds significant power because the council is split between Labour and the Conservatives. After the former Conservative council leader, Terry Hipsey, crossed the floor to join Labour, she used her vote to keep what Hipsey described as a “dysfunctional Tory group” in power.

Only last week, Griffin appealed for donations to launch the party’s “run-up campaign to the general election”, saying: “In this next General Election I will be standing in Thurrock where the split vote between the old parties means we could win a Parliamentary seat with just 27% of the vote” – a highly improbable scenario. He had been putting his face around in Thurrock but on 15 November at the BNP’s annual conference announced that he would be standing in Barking because it was the BNP’s best chance of winning a parliamentary seat.

He is probably wrong about that. For a start he would need considerably more than 27% to oust Labour in one of its safe seats. And the increasing number of minority ethnic residents will make his task that much harder, especially after his recent attack on London as no longer British. Griffin also claimed that Richard Barnbrook, who had very publicly declared that he was going to be Barking’s next MP, had stood aside willingly and had now set his sights on becoming leader of Barking and Dagenham council.

Colgate is currently the BNP’s national administration officer, an appointment announced at the BNP’s European election victory rally in Blackpool in June. Before that she was Barnbrook’s researcher, employed by the Greater London Authority at London taxpayers’ expense. She remains on the public payroll, however, as she is one of several BNP senior officers on the EU gravy train as staff for the two MEPs.

Despite Griffin’s optimism about the party’s prospects in Thurrock, she will have a hard job to win the seat. In the 2005 general election, the BNP candidate Nick Geri came fourth with 5.8% of the vote. Colgate herself stood in Basildon in 2005, where she came fourth with 4.8%.

Hope not hate

Taxpayer foots bill for BNP minder

Nick Griffin, the BNP leader, has put his personal bodyguard on the European Union payroll as his party becomes the latest to exploit the political expenses system.

A dozen senior figures from the party make up a BNP entourage of publicly funded assistants. As MEPs, Griffin and Andrew Brons are entitled to claim a combined £382,000 a year to pay for their colleagues’ salaries.

Martin Reynolds, a 20-stone bodybuilder who is head of security and Griffin’s bodyguard, said he “honestly didn’t know” why he was justified in being paid by the taxpayer. He said of his job: “I just do the security side of it and personal assistant stuff and generally looking after him and making sure things are done for him.”

Griffin and Brons are also channelling payments to other “assistants” including Simon Darby, the BNP’s deputy leader, Eddy Butler, its national organiser, Emma Colgate, its national administration officer, and a number of regional organisers and councillors. Some have not been openly declared as working for either MEP and others have unsavoury backgrounds.

Martin Wingfield, former editor of the BNP’s monthly newspaper, Voice of Freedom, is being paid as an assistant by both Griffin and Brons. He served a three-month prison sentence in the 1980s for failing to pay a fine following convictions on two counts of inciting racial hatred with election literature.

Adam Walker, head of Solidarity, the BNP’s supposed trade union, is being paid through Brons’s funds. Walker had to resign his teaching post in 2007 after being accused of posting anti-Muslim comments on the web using a school laptop.

All the BNP hierarchy’s new salaries, which go up to £25,000 a year, are allocated out of a personal £191,000 a year “assistants’ allowance” to which every MEP is entitled. EU rules state that assistants must justify their taxpayer-funded salaries by doing work which is “directly linked to the exercise of a member’s parliamentary mandate”.

John Walker, the party’s deputy press spokesman, confirmed that he was being paid £18,000 a year in taxpayers’ money. He also receives £6,000 a year from the party.

“I am expected to do two days a week for Andrew and two days a week for Nick. And then the other day . . . is for the party,” he said. Walker added that the BNP was “sensitive” to the fact that the rules emphasise all work must relate to the MEP’s role and not the party.

When Reynolds was asked what “specifically” he does for his EU salary, he said: “I honestly don’t know.”

He added: “I never got paid before, all our security was done for no payment whatsoever. I was an electrician.” He declined to say what his pay is now. He said he was not sure if he also received a salary from the party: “I don’t know the ins and outs of my finances, my wife sorts all that out.”

John Thompson, the BNP’s accountant, said the party’s MEPs were using about half their full allowances and explained that the level of salary varied. “The top level might be £25,000 and the lowest £8,000,” he said.

Walker said: “I suppose we are going to publish the breakdown [of taxpayer-funded salaries] but whether they will go as far as individual remunerations I don't know.”

Times Online

What happened to the BNP's Great White Hope?

And about time, too!

Last month BNP London Assembly Member Richard Barnbrook failed to turn up at his Standards Hearing because of a "stress related illness"

He's due to appear again next week, but has so far failed to submit any evidence, or to confirm that he will attend. Doubts therefore remain about whether he will ever face the committee.

Since his non-apearance in Dagenham last month, he has been absent from all Assembly meetings, and all entries on his personal website have been removed. Meanwhile, his suspended assistant Simon Darby seems likely to stay with Nick Griffin in Brussels, and his other assistant Emma Colgate has already taken up another role within the BNP.

Rumours of a fallout with Griffin are doing the rounds, as many BNP members lose patience with their self-styled "Richard The Lionheart".

This is all a long way from his victory speech a year ago, where he railed against the 'corruption' of his critics and promised to sweep aside the 'nonsense of political correctness in City Hall'. So far this has involved little more that putting out three press releases (all within one ten-day period last October) and... well not much else really.

Aside from being told off for eating a banana, wearing silly outfits, and lying in a youtube video, his year has been a total non-event.

Yet if Richard Barnbrook is suspended next week, there is a danger that he could become the BNP's first ever political martyr. With the very real possibility of a six month suspension hanging above his head, Barnbrook could pose as the noble victim of a political witch hunt. Or he could just make a fool of himself as usual.

We'll all find out for ourselves next Wednesday afternoon. If he turns up.

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