Review of the Year 2009: The BNP

The British National Party did not create the political earthquake its devotees yearned for in 2009. But there is no doubt that it sent tremors through the political establishment during the most successful year in its relatively short history. The far-right party won two seats in the European Parliament to add to its toehold on the London Assembly and on councils across England.

Nick Griffin enjoyed unprecedented visibility after he appeared on BBC1's Question Time – an invitation that supporters and detractors alike said conferred respectability on the BNP leader. Above all, his party received more column inches of newspaper coverage, and more minutes of television bulletin time, than at any time since its creation in 1982.

The BNP picked up 6.2 per cent of the vote in June's elections, a modest rise from 4.9 per cent five years earlier.

But it was enough under the proportional electoral system to win seats in North West England and Yorkshire and the Humber for Mr Griffin and the former National Front activist Andrew Brons.

It also demonstrated its ability to target potentially fertile territory, such as Swanley in Kent, where the party pulled off a surprise council by-election victory in February. Four months later, it gained its first three county council seats – in Lancashire, Leicestershire and Hertfordshire.

The BNP can rely on a hard core of support – polls put it at just 2 per cent of the vote – but it tends to prosper when the turn-out is low and support for mainstream parties evenly divided.

Next year, its hopes will rest on its east London heartland of Barking, where Mr Griffin will need a formidable 15.5 per cent swing to oust Labour's Margaret Hodge.

The BNP leader will have the advantage of being better known than ever. The frenzy of publicity accompanying his Question Time appearance has seen to that.

The moot point is whether the exposure benefited Mr Griffin, who was nervous and rambling in the face of an onslaught from panellists and the studio audience. Although there were mutterings on the far-right blogosphere about his performance, the BNP insists many will have seen him as a victim, with Mr Griffin protesting he was subjected to a "lynch mob".

In the meantime, he faces two tricky problems. Following a House of Lords ruling, he needs to win approval from his membership next month for a rule change that would allow non-whites to join the party. The BNP, which spent nearly £600,000 during the European contests, also faces a considerable challenge in raising cash for the general election. In August, Mr Griffin appealed to members: "We need £150,000 to keep the wolves at bay and to ensure our survival!"

The question now is whether the party peaked in 2009 after riding the wave of public hostility to politicians, or whether it has the groundswell of popular support – and resources – to repeat its success in election year.

The Independent

Of eggs, invisible bricks and call centres...

Griffin, tearful and overeggcited (and that's all the egg gags you're getting)

Just a few days ago, the BNP's Lancaster representative, Chris Hill, reported on the result of the new Poulton Ward parish council election in Morecambe. The candidate was one Julie Victoria Blain, who nobody had ever heard of, variously known as either Julie or Vicky. The title of his report was pretty clear;

'First time candidate gets 13% support in Morecambe.'

Pretty clear, but completely untrue. According to the results on the Lancaster City Council website, Blain took 172 votes out of the 4832 cast. I'm no great shakes at maths but even I can work out that her share of the vote is about 3.5%. While 172 votes for the BNP is 172 votes too many, 3.5% is still a damn sight better than 13%, which is presumably why Hill feels the need to lie.

Of course, Hill needs to bullshit all he can in an attempt to weasel his way back into the good books of the party. During 2007's December rebellion, he managed to announce that he was supporting the rebels, promptly backtracked when told off, then decided to stick to his priciples and support them anyway then, when the rebellion failed dismally, placed himself back in the loyalist camp. Clearly, never a man to be trusted.

Which brings us (rather neatly, in my opinion) to Nick Griffin.

Over the past couple of days, the media has been full of the egg incident, where the BNP's crowing 'press conference', called by the fraudster-in-chief Nick Griffin, was ruined by a sudden rain of eggs, one of which hit him in the back of the neck. I'm not too sure of the efficacy of using eggs on recalcitrant politicians, even vermin like Nick Griffin, and I'd be interested in hearing the views of our readers. Personally though, I thought it was bloody funny and it didn't do him any harm so what the hell.

Far from doing him harm in fact, Griffin has been given the opportunity to spout a few more lies to the media - many of which were reported verbatim without any qualification. Take this little gem, from yesterday's Scotsman;

'I think it's very sad that a hostile mob which is partly paid for by taxpayers and backed by Labour and the Conservatives is allowed to get away with mob violence on the streets of Britain in 2009'

Hostile mob? Mob violence? There were forty of them, vastly outnumbered by the media and Nick Griffin's Kray twin-lookalike security team and they threw a sodding egg, for crying out loud. It's hardly the collapse of civilisation as we know it. And paid for by taxpayers? Er, how?

'The police need to get a grip on these people and stop them throwing eggs and bricks.'

Bricks? What bricks? Who threw a brick? This is a particularly stupid thing to say and could have exposed this idiot as a compulsive liar had the statement been questioned. It wasn't, sadly.

'Like us or not we are a democratic party'

No, you're not. You're the least democratic party in the country, run by megalomaniacs and liars for racists and fools. But, like the long-established and well-practised liar that he is, Griffin saves what is arguably the best for last.

'He claimed the party has seen a growth in membership applications and said its call centre received 20,000 phone calls in the first 15 minutes after a BNP party political broadcast was shown on television.'

I watched a tedious puff-piece on the BNP website a week or two ago in which it was claimed that fifteen people were employed in the party's 'call centre' answering the zillions of calls that were pouring in daily. Let's be generous and up the number of call centre staff to twenty. According to my trusty calculator, 20,000 calls in fifteen minutes is 1333 calls per minute. Divide that by twenty call centre staff and they have to field approximately 67 calls each per minute. If there are only fifteen staff, that number goes up to 89 per minute. Each.

Obviously someone is talking bollocks - and that someone would be Nick Griffin. And, it turns out, Tina Wingfield, the BNP's membership secretary, who was also quoted in the Scotsman's unusually fact-free article, claiming that 2,000 people have joined the party in the last six weeks, increasing overall membership by about 25%.

Well, she should know - though this doesn't really tie in with the released BNP membership list, which showed a total of 12724 members, allegedly for 2007 and which was, so the party claimed at the time, inaccurate in that membership was considerably higher when the list became public than it was in 2007. Fair enough, but if that is true, party membership has in fact gone down considerably. A hell of a lot, in fact, because Wingfield's statement indicates that BNP membership just six weeks ago was around 8,000 and now stands at 10,000. Hmm...

The problem with telling porkies is remembering which ones have been told, who they've been told to and precisely what was said. The BNP, while it's happy to lie on any occasion, doesn't seem quite so capable at keeping track of the lies it's told.

The big problem the media has is itself keeping track of these lies and then challenging them at every opportunity - but the lies have to be challenged repeatedly and incessantly and should then be used to embarrass and humiliate the BNP whenever and wherever possible. In just a single article we were given an opportunity to challenge a half-dozen outrageous lies, none of which were questioned at the time. If the BNP is to be shown up for what it truly is, the media - and I include non-traditional media like us, must be ever-alert and ever-ready to demand truth rather than bullshit and bluster.

EU elections: BNP's Nick Griffin wins seat in European parliament

Furious scenes at Manchester town hall when Tory MEP describes BNP as 'aberration' and condemns Griffin's success as sad day for British politics

Protesters prevent BNP leader Nick Griffin from entering Manchester
town hall for the European parliament election results for the
North West tonight. Photograph: Manchester Evening News

Nick Griffin, the leader of the BNP, was today elected to the European parliament.

The far-right leader won a seat in the North West region. Earlier Andrew Brons, another British National party politician won in the Yorkshire and Humber area. It is the first time the party has had an MEP elected.

Griffin's victory was only confirmed shortly before 2am after a two-hour cliffhanger over the last of the North West's eight seats saw the Greens fall narrowly behind the BNP and Ukip just failed to pull ahead enough to win a third seat.

There were furious scenes at the declaration when the highest polling candidate, Sir Robert Atkins, described the BNP as "an aberration" and condemned Griffin's success as sad day for British politics. He was followed by Labour's Arlene McCarthy, who came second in votes cast and told the crowd at Manchester town hall that the BNP was "a party whose members include convicted rapists".

Both won loud applause – but also jeers from BNP supporters in the Banqueting Hall who shouted "Get back to the trough!" and "It's democracy – you're already insulting the voters again."

When Griffin's turn came to speak, all the other candidates took the unprecedented step of walking off the platform in protest. The BNP leader laid into a "liberal elite which has built a dam, a wall of lies which has grown ever taller and ever thicker over the years to stop ordinary people protesting about the removal of their freedom."

He added: "Well tonight that wall has been broken down in the North West and Yorkshire by hundreds of thousands of voters."

Brons's victory in Yorkshire saw the highest BNP poll, 9.8%, with Griffin getting 8%. The party polled 8.9% in the North East and 8.6% in both the West and East Midlands, but the share was not enough to win a place in those regions.

They polled 6.1% in the Eastern region, 5.5% in London, 5.4% in Wales, 4.4% in the South East and 3.9% in the South West.

Brons took a seat that was previously Labour's second in Yorkshire, as the expenses debacle and internecine warfare in Labour turned traditional supporters away in droves. The Labour vote crashed from 45% to 25% in Barnsley, where the BNP share climbed from 8% to 17%.

Griffin welcomed the victory as a vindication of the party's claim that "we're here to look after our people because no one else is". He said that feelings were particularly strong in Yorkshire, where former pit communities felt "at the bottom of the heap".

Pointing to other big rises in the BNP vote to 15% in Rotherham and nearly 12% in Doncaster, Griffin said: "This is ordinary decent people in Yorkshire kicking back against racism, because racism in this country is now directed overwhelmingly against people who look like me."

Griffin, who had to reach Manchester town hall for his own count in a police van after anti-fascist demonstrators blocked his convoy and hurled eggs, said immigration had become harmful to Britain, particularly with the spread of radical Islam. "Take Bradford – it isn't immigration that's happening there, it's colonialism," he said.

His own evening was one long lurch between advances and retreats for the BNP as declarations came in from the North West's 39 counting areas. In a reverse effect to Yorkshire's, support fell in areas where the party had done well in the past. In Burnley, where they won one of their first English county council seats on Thursday, it dropped from 17% to 15%.

But the slump in Labour's vote was common to the North West and Yorkshire, leaving the battle for the last of the region's eight seats open until the very end. After the Conservatives had won two, and Labour, Ukip and the Liberal Democrats one each, the BNP and the Greens were at level pegging for the final two hours of counting.

Brons said after the Yorkshire count in Leeds: "The onslaught against us has been more than against any other party in recent times, but somehow we've overcome it. Despite the lies, despite the money, despite the misrepresentation, we've been able to win through."

A dapper, besuited figure who adopts the low-key approach encouraged by Griffin, Brons retired last year as a politics and government teacher at Harrogate College. He then re-entered active politics for the first time since standing five times for the National Front in the 1970s after a brief spell as its leader, which ended in internal quarrels. He joined the British National Socialist party as a teenager.

Guardian

Euro election results and live blogging

UK Nazi rats now in Europe. Graphic courtesy of Destroy Fascism

Euro election result: Nick Griffin and Andrew Brons elected as BNP MEPs.

As everyone seems to love it when we go 'live blogging', including us, we're doing it again tonight for the Euro election results.

Although no-one seems to have any clear idea of which way the vote will go, there is a very real chance that the BNP could pick up a seat. We want to know if that happens as soon as it happens (though we'd much rather hear that Griffin and his nazi chums had failed miserably, of course), so any news re' the Euro's can go in the comments section to this post.

It's unlikely that any results will come through until 10pm at the earliest (though it'll probably be much later), so we'll be on and letting comments through as they arrive from then. See you later, folks. :-)

----------------

If you can't see all the comments under this post, click on the "Comment" link, then on "Newer" in the comments section.

Protest Against Nazi Nick Griffin at the European Election Count

Protest Against Nazi Nick Griffin at the European Election Count
Sunday 7th June 7pm
Manchester Town Hall

The hated leader of the British Nazi Party Nick Griffin will be at Manchester Town Hall on Sunday evening. This will be the evening of the European election count when all of the votes from across the North West will be announced.

Join the protest against the BNP. Bring friends, family, workmates, union and community banners. We will be in Albert Square from 7pm.

BNP and far right 2009 elections

Local elections

The British National Party put forward around 450 candidates in the county council and unitary authority elections but came away with just three seats. One was in Burnley, Lancashire, where the BNP has had borough councillors ever since 2002. Another was in North West Leicestershire, where the BNP has had two district councillors since 2007.

In both Burnley and NW Leicestershire the newly elected councillors were already BNP borough/district councillors, and in particular they were among the handful of BNP councillors who actively carry out their role and are known in their communities.

The third BNP win was in South Oxhey, a far-right stronghold for very many years.

In most counties the BNP polled abysmally, coming bottom or next to bottom of the list of candidates. There were moderately good percentages for the BNP in pockets of the East Midlands, but poor results pretty much across the board in Yorkshire and The Humber, the South West and the South East. In Essex, the only county where the BNP contested every division, it topped 20% only in one Basildon and one Epping Forest division.

One must, however, remember in comparing these results with previous years that many areas that have in the past returned a strong BNP vote, such as Stoke-on-Trent and Bradford, did not have local elections this year.

Most of the divisions were electing one councillor. In those where two, three or even four were elected, and voters had as many votes as the seats to be filled, we have calculated percentages based on a total consisting of the sum of the highest vote received by each party plus all independent votes. This makes the percentages more comparable with those achieved in single-member divisions.

European election

The British National Party presented a full slate of 69 European election candidates in the 11 mainland Britain regions. There were none in Northern Ireland. Its main target regions were the North West, where the lead candidate was Nick Griffin, the party leader, and the West Midlands, where Simon Darby, the deputy leader, headed the list.

Secondary BNP target regions were Yorkshire and The Humber (Andrew Brons), the East of England (Eddy Butler) and the East Midlands (“Reverend” Robert West).

The election uses the d’Hondt system of proportional representation, under which each voter casts one vote for a party list or independent individual. The percentage vote the BNP needs to get elected varies from region to region, depending on the number of MEP seats available. It cannot be determined precisely because it depends on how the other parties poll in comparison, but in the North West, Griffin could get elected if the BNP takes 8.5% of the regional vote.

This has been the BNP’s biggest election effort ever. The party has poured money into the campaign, sensing a chance of victory in the European election and all the funding that would bring. Against the fascist party was the biggest and most professional HOPE not hate campaign we have ever staged. Throughout the campaign we have worked with the media to inform the public about the real face behind the BNP’s lies and racism. We have worked with Blue State Digital to reach hundreds of thousands of people in the biggest online political campaign in British history. And above all, thousands of people, many who have never campaigned politically before, have distributed newspapers and leaflets, held events, told their friends and got involved. There has been a huge determination to hold the BNP back and celebrate our Britain, our diverse and free Britain. In the wait between polling day and the announcement of the European election results, we hope we have succeeded in keeping the BNP out of Europe and the respectability and funding European seats would bring it.

HOPE not hate

65 years on from D-Day a new generation must stand against fascism

Each of us has the responsibility to stop the BNP. The best way we can do that is to not only to vote ourselves but to encourage everyone we know to go out and do the same. Every person you get to the polls to vote for any other party makes it harder for the BNP to win a seat.

Email or phone your friends now and remind them to vote today.

Hope not hate

Wirral Council seeks someone to prosecute over BNP flyposters

Wirral Council has pledged to prosecute those responsible for putting up BNP flyposters which have appeared on a number of lampposts across the borough.

Councillors say they have received calls of complaint about the posters which say “vote BNP.” Many of the posters are in Leasowe and Moreton including around the Leasowe Road and Fender Road area.

Bidston Cllr Harry Smith said: “My constituents contacted me to complain and I contacted Tech Services. This instigated the removal of the illegal posting from Hoylake Road Bidston and outside Bidston Tesco’s. All posters were on Wirral Borough Council lampposts.”

Leasowe councillor Ian Lewis added: “The taxpayers of Wirral have been forced to pay for the removal of this illegal flyposting and that cost should be recovered by slapping a fine on the BNP agent.”

A Wirral Council spokeswoman said: “We are aware of the fly posting. We are currently in the process of removing any of the posters from street furniture on the highway. The council’s enforcement team will always attempt to recover the costs incurred in the removal of fly posting and take action against the people responsible.”

Liverpool Daily Post

Getting the Excuses in Early

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

Those of us who follow the electoral efforts of the BNP know one thing is certain. The BNP never loses an election. No, elections are never lost - they are stolen by the LibLabCon conspiracy! (With the help of ZOG, world jewry, Lancaster Unity, and possibly shape-shifting lizards!)

With the landmark Euro elections only hours away they are quickly getting their excuses into the public domain in case the great breakthrough, the silent revolution, proves elusive. Again.

In the past they have aimed primarily at the failings of the relaxed postal voting system. There is some anecdotal evidence that the operation of the rules has been tightened up this year, with a higher proportion of ballots submitted being rejected. You might expect the BNP to welcome this robust defence of our democratic process - but no, they are of course convinced that it is nothing to do with protecting the security of the ballot. It's bent returning officers deliberately rejecting BNP ballots!

There is just one problem with this interpretation, which will be very obvious to anyone who has ever attended the processing of postal ballots. The acceptance (or rejection) of postal ballots takes place before the opening of the envelopes containing the actual ballot paper. So it would be impossible for any Returning Officer to single out BNP-supporting postal votes for rejection!

But this is merely a byway before we consider the BNP's new conspiracy theory. This is how the 2009 ballot will be rigged (copyright BNP 2009). Presiding Officers (the staff at the actual polling stations) will do the dirty deed. According to the BNP's own official website these people are "town hall bureaucrats who 'work' in parasite jobs created by the Labour government in order to provide their own people with well-paid easy lives at taxpayers' expense" (makes you wonder who on earth manned all those polling stations before 1997!). And at 9.30 on Thursday evening they will start tearing off dozens of ballot papers, cross off a corresponding number of names at random from the electoral register, insert votes in the appropriate (Labour) box and "stuff" the ballot box.

In theory it could be done (on a small scale). In reality this is a very serious, and deeply offensive, slur against local government staff across the nation. Because the idea that presiding officers would seek to act in this way flies in the face of sense, and any knowledge of their ethical standards. Because of the risks of crossing off someone who is dead, or away on holiday, or working away - all of which might then come to light. Because a sudden spike in turnout in a particular area would look suspicious. Because for such practice to be carried out to a degree which could affect the out-turn across an entire region would require a conspiracy on a massive and unsustainable scale.

In 2004 if Labour had somehow persuaded the Presiding Officers in 1,000 polling stations in the North West (that's a minimum of 2,000 corrupt staff) to stuff 150 extra ballot papers into each of those boxes it would have represented 150,000 fraudulent votes - over a quarter of their entire regional vote! And what impact would removing those 'fraudulent' votes have had on the result? None whatsoever! Labour would still have secured three MEPs in the region, and the BNP zero.

In other words - it's typical BNP nonsense, which is surely designed to provide the get-out clause if their performance once again fails to meet their aspirations.

BNP targets advertisers over paper's exposé

Advertisers with one of the UK's biggest-selling regional dailies have been targeted by the British National Party after it ran a major investigation into the far-right group.

Commercial clients of the Manchester Evening News have been directly contacted by the far-right political party following the paper's decision to run a series of stories under the banner 'BNP – The Truth' (see left). The title is taking a firm editorial stance against the party, covering topics such as how it has used resources to mask its origins and its policies on repatriating non-white Britons.

But the BNP is now urging its supporters to complain to the MEN's advertisers in the hope that, if enough of its supporters complain, advertisers will in turn request that the MEN changes it editorial policy.

Editor Paul Horrocks told HTFP: "I've not had any complaints but there are a small number of advertisers who have let us know they received correspondence via email from the BNP. I've sent a response to these advertisers apologising for the fact they've been emailed. We will be continuing our campaign 'The Truth' which we started last Tuesday with a front page using a lot of information that is available about the BNP and its leader Nick Griffin."

The MEN has said it will continue its series of articles up to Thursday's vote. This latest developments comes in the wake of an angry letter by Chris Morley, northern organiser with the National Union of Journalist, to his hometown paper over its acceptance of BNP advertising.

Nick Griffin is standing in Thursday's European Election in the North West in a bid to win one of eight seats in Brussels. Research has suggested he only needs around 8pc of the vote to be elected.

A spokesman for the BNP said: "Our attitude to the Manchester Evening News is that we won't deal with them anymore. They are particularly bad. We don't take these things lying down and we're lobbying to put pressure on these people to deal with us fairly."

Hold the Front Page

BNP bigots are racist AND sexist

The European Election on Thursday could change British politics for the next 50 years. For the first time, the farright BNP has a real chance of electing its candidates - including leader Nick Griffin - to power in Europe. This worries me in many ways.

As a human being, believing that people of all races and backgrounds are equal. As a Briton, enjoying our rich and diverse country. As a mother, wondering what future my children will grow up in. And as a woman, because the BNP isn't just a racist, homophobic, xenophobic party, it's a sexist party too. Whatever they pretend, they just aren't a normal party.

So, where other parties and politicians might have some mildly suspect views on women, their attitude is straight out of the dark ages. As politicians of all parties seek difficult solutions to the current economic crisis, Richard Barnbrook, BNP member on the London Assembly and the [creepy and fake] Rev. Robert West, the BNP lead candidate in the East Midlands for the European Elections, said on BBC1 in February, that the answer to the recession was for women to work at home.

London BNP organiser Nick Eriksen was even more blatant: "For a woman to consider a job or career more important than having children is, quite literally, unnatural," he wrote. "Instead of complaining that nature prevents women from having successful careers women should embrace the career nature has ascribed to them - motherhood." Meanwhile, his views on rape, aired on his blog, are utterly abhorrent.

Eriksen actually believes that rape is like force-feeding women chocolate. He wrote: 'Rape is simply sex. Women enjoy sex, so rape cannot be such a terrible physical ordeal. To suggest that rape, when conducted without violence, is a serious crime is like suggesting that force feeding a woman chocolate cake is a heinous offence."

When his comments were exposed, the BNP was forced to withdraw Eriksen as a candidate for the London Mayoral elections. You barely have to scratch the surface of the BNP's own website to find examples of the way they feel as a party about women. And it's not just the men in the party.

On a recent documentary about BNP wives, Suzy Cass, the wife of the party's former manager Nick Cass, told how she was instructed by her husband to insist on a White European midwife when giving birth to their children.

As a mother, I found this perhaps the saddest statement of all. The BNP is now targeting women worried about feeding their families in the economic crisis, and that's why I believe it's time to air some of their views on women as well as their better known views on race. I urge women and men, black and white, to reject this party at the next - and every - election. We need to send the message that however worried or desperate we feel about the recession, we won't turn on our neighbours. As proud British people, we are so much greater than that.They are from the dark ages.

Fiona Phillips: Mirror

BNP pickets Manchester Cathedral

The Dean of Manchester Cathedral has condemned the British National Party after the extremists picketed a service at Manchester Cathedral on Sunday.

Members of the far right wing group - whose followers have been branded 'Nazi thugs' by political leaders - gathered outside the cathedral on Sunday with loudhailers, playing tunes like 'Rule Britannia' and handing out leaflets that said: 'Judas Archbishops Betray Ordinary People', in response to Church of England warnings that the party is divisive in the run-up to the European Parliament elections.

Shocked worshippers were met by the protesters as they filed out of the church, forcing the Dean of the Cathedral, the Very Revd Rogers Govender, to come out and confront them.

The BNP leaflet described the bishops as 'cowardly yes men, functionaries and time servers'. The leaflet quotes from the bible, adding 'archbishops may betray us, but God will not', and calls for a BNP 'day of prayer'.

Speaking afterwards Dean Govender, said; "Manchester Cathedral is a place of tolerance with an inclusive Christian community. It seems odd that the BNP, feeling threatened by these values, decided to picket an act of Christian worship with loudspeakers and offensive leaflets.

"We are proud to be part of the Hope Not Hate campaign; we reject the teachings of the BNP and believe Jesus would reject the BNP as well. We hope this incident will remind good people what little respect the BNP has for Greater Manchester and its communities."

A spokesman for anti-fascist campaigners Searchlight said: "This shows the sheer desperation gripping Nick Griffin's campaign. He clearly sees his hopes of a European seat slipping through his fingers. What kind of person would subject churchgoers attending a peaceful Sunday service this diatribe of prejudice and hate".

Manchester Evening News

Billy Brit, The Racist Shit

This vid was done by one of the users of the godlike B3ta called Manic.
Please use the tag #theBNParetwats if you use Twitter. I'm an old decaying sod but it may mean something to younger users


Thanks to Manic and the original thread can be found here.

Let's not hand a victory to the fanatics of the BNP

European and local elections traditionally have much lower turn-outs than national polls.

They do matter. Councils spend a lot of our money, and provide essential public services. And the European Parliament, for better or worse, influences much of the legislation that is eventually enacted in the UK.

It is able to amend directives from the European Commission, which are eventually enforceable in member states such as Britain. But the effect of European and local elections on our public services and standards of living is indirect and often unclear. So turnout this week is likely to be relatively low. And it could be even lower than usual, given the current scepticism about the political process.

The steady stream of revelations from Westminster about MPs’ expenses has understandably encouraged a view that they’re all as bad as each other.

If few of us vote, the real winners will be parties such as the BNP which make any politician from the mainstream parties look like Mother Theresa. There is a danger in raising fears about the rise of the British National Party. Not only does it give them publicity, but it risks painting a false picture.

The people of Britain are not about to embrace a bunch of fascists, and major parties are sometimes guilty of talking up the BNP’s prospects in an effort to motivate their own supporters.

But one thing you can guarantee is that the fanatics will make their way to the ballot box. If the rest of us don’t bother, their small number of votes suddenly counts for a lot. The BNP is running a campaign based on disappointment in the traditional parties, and opposition to increased immigration.

What it doesn’t boast about – although the facts are freely available on its website, with just a little digging – is that it is a racist party which believes Britain belongs to its “indigenous peoples” such as Celts, Anglo-Saxons, Danes, the Norse and their descendants, but not black or Asian people.

It wishes to encourage “those of foreign descent” to leave, and to ensure whites are put first in queues for public services, are reserved places in the best schools and are offered employment before their black or Asian neighbours.

The BNP calls this nonsense “racial nationalism”. But it does look vaguely possible that they could win a European seat in the West Midlands next week.

Failure to vote next week could lead to the region electing something far worse than anything we have seen so far.

Birmingham Post

BNP election hopes marred by dodgy fascist pals of leader Nick Griffin

Convicted criminals, Nazi skinheads, violent thugs... not exactly the type of people you'd want to be pals with. But this motley crew of racists and fascists are Nick Griffin's closest European buddies.

The BNP leader is trying his best to project the image of a respectable, well dressed politician in the run-up to the European elections on Thursday. And he knows that, if people find out who he likes to hang out with, his chances will be ruined.

Here we expose the truth about the BNP's European friends...

AUSTRIA

Andreas Molzer - once booted out of Austria's far-right Freedom Party (FPO) for being too extreme - is one of Griffin's closest European allies.

The Austrian MEP runs a newspaper, renowned for spouting racist, xenophonic and anti-Semitic views. The rag - Zur Zeit - has even questioned accepted accounts of the Holocaust and recently featured a fawning interview with Griffin.

Molzer, 57, who is married with five children, was expelled from the FPO in 2005 after he accused it of being too soft on immigration. He was only let back in last year when fellow hard-liner Heinz-Christian Strache, 50, took over the leadership. Strache, 50, has demanded the repeal of Austrian laws banning the swastika and once branded women wearing Islamic dress as "female ninjas".

ITALY

Italian MEP Roberto Fiore is leader of the neo-fascist Forza Nuova party, which has campaigned for the expulsion of an estimated 150,000 Roma gipsies from Italy.

He has been a political mentor, financial supporter and close friend of BNP leader Griffin since 1980, when he moved to Britain in the wake of the fascist Bologna railway station bombing which killed 85 people, including two British tourists.

While here, he helped Griffin - who hadn't yet joined the BNP - set up his Political Soldiers group after it split from the National Front.

Fiore was convicted in Italy in his absence in 1985 as a result of his involvement in the terrorist Armed Revolutionary Nuclei, whose members had taken part in the Bologna terrorist outrage. His nine year prison sentence was later reduced to five and a half on appeal.

HUNGARY

Zoltan Fuzessy is vice president of Hungary's ultra right-wing Jobbik party - but lives in the UK and has fostered close links with the BNP. The father-of-two ran an anti-Jewish hate website until last year and has spoken at BNP meetings.

Jobbik - Movement for a Better Hungary - uses Nazi insignia and has been linked to a deadly series of grenade, petrol bomb and gun attacks on Hungarian gipsies. But all that did not stop Griffin speaking in front of 5,000 Jobbik supporters last year at a rally in Budapest, where he shared a stage with notorious Hungarian racist Gyorgy Budahazy.

When a bunch of fascist yobs were arrested after going on the rampage Griffin toured the police stations where they were being held. The BNP leader insisted he was trying to ensure they were given "due process" and decent treatment.

Last year Budahazy showed his true colours when issuing a joint communique with another fascist leader, Laszlo Toroczkai, calling on Hungarian racists to disrupt the annual Budapest gay parade.

"We will not permit aberrant foreigners of this or that colour to force their alien and sick world on Hungary," it said.

GERMANY

Nick Griffin's BNP aligns itself with the pro-Nazi National Democratic Party (NPD) in Germany whose chairman, Udo Voigt, praises Hitler as a "great statesman".

In August 2002 Griffin attended a festival put on by the NPD's newspaper Deutsche Stimme (German Voice), where he was photographed with Voigt and the former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke. That month he took part in an NPD summer school with Mahler and Voigt.

Another German ally of BNP is Nazi skinhead leader Jens Puhse, who was recently acquitted of producing and distributing racist CDs. A member of the National Front until it was banned in 1997, he is now leader of the German National Democratic Party and a leading figure in the European National Front (ENF), an umbrella group for some of Europe's most extreme and openly facist organisations.

They include groups that deny the Holocaust, worship Adolf Hitler and other wartime fascist leaders, and have been linked to terrorism.

FRANCE

The BNP admires the National Front and has modelled much of its own modernisation on the resurgent French fascist party. Its leader, Jean Marie Le Pen, served in Algeria in the 1950s and has been accused of torturing prisoners there.

A convicted Holocaust denier, Penn - who is divorced with three daughters - has also been convicted of racism or inciting racial hatred at least six times. In June 1999 he was fined for stating that the Holocaust was "just a detail in the history of the Second World War" and in April 2000 he was fined again and suspended from the European Parliament for assaulting a female candidate from a rival party during an election campaign.

Le Pen was Griffin's star guest during the BNP's European campaign in April 2004. After he claimed that Britain was being "invaded" by the Third World at a press conference in Manchester, protesters hurled rocks and eggs at his car.

Griffin's attention has now turned to Bruno Gollnisch, Le Pen's deputy, who is challenging Le Pen's daughter for leadership of the FN. Gollnisch, who is married with three children, has also been convicted for denying the Holocaust, for which he spent three months in prison in 2007.

Griffin brought Gollnisch over to Britain in April last year, where he addressed a private gathering of BNP supporters in London.

SWEDEN

The leader of Sweden's fascist National Democrats (ND) party was sentenced to 18 months in prison in 2003 for assault and rioting after he and a fascist mob attacked a Gay Pride festival in Stockholm.

Marc Abramsson also runs the socalled Action Group (AKG), which provides security for Swedish fascist meetings and visiting fascists such as Griffin. This heavy mob is largely composed of members of the nazi Blood and Honour network.

Griffin has forged a close relationship with the ND leader, helping the party in European election campaigns. Abramsson was ND candidate in the 2004 European election.

BELGIUM

Filip Dewinter leads Belgium's far-right nationalist party Vlaams Belang (Flemmish Interest), which took over from the Vlaams Blok party after it was found in contempt of the law on racism and xenophobia and banned.

At a meeting of Vlaams Blok in 1991, former journalist Dewinter proclaimed: "Our own people first! And yes, Vlaams Blok chooses a Flemish Flanders. And yes, Vlaams Blok chooses a white Europe!" Griffin's most recent public contact with VB was in December 2006 when he went to Belgium to attend the "Euro-Rus Congress", a pan-European event organised by VB's Kris Romain.

CZECH

Republic Leader of the far-right National Party (Narodni Strana), which has its own paramilitary squad, Petra Edelmannova was the brains behind a racist TV ad aired in the Czech Republic last month which called for a "final solution" to the issue of gipsies in her country.

In the broadcast, accompanied by the slogan "Stop Favouring Gipsies", she stresses the case for "repatriating the Czech Republic's entire Roma community to India".

An avid racist, she was arrested in October 2006 following a demonstration in Prague's Wenceslas Square under a banner reading "Let's incinerate Muslim hatred". She had handed out leaflets illustrated with caricatures of Muslim figures and the caption "Let's Burn Hatred".

Last August Edelmannova, who is married with a daughter, gave a speech at the BNP's Red, White and Blue festival in Codnor, Derbys. Two months later, Griffin repaid the favour by addressing a National Party rally where he railed against the accession of Turkey to the EU, saying that the introduction of millions of Muslims into the EU would "drive down wages, living standards and increase taxes".

Daily Mirror

BNP boss Nick Griffin's racist rant against boxer Amir Khan

Nick Griffin believes people like boxing star like Amir Khan should be encouraged to leave Britain.

His BNP party wants to create firm incentives for non-white Britons to leave their homeland, but he dismissed claims that Britain would lose talent. He said of Khan: "Perhaps we will lose one good boxer, but there are more important things."

Griffin spoke out at the launch of the party's manifesto in Manchester where he is their top candidate for a seat in the region for the European elections.

Yesterday the people of Oldham flocked to support the Mirror's Hope Not Hate bus. In 2001, race riots in Oldham shocked the country and the BNP see it as a fertile ground to spread hate and garner support.

Student Stephen Kennedy, 18, from Springhead, Oldham, remembers the race riots. He said: "There were burnt out cars in streets and it was a scary place to be. The BNP would just drag us back to those dark days."

Today the Daily Mirror bus is backstage at Stoke's Love Music Hate Racism Festival from 10am.

Mirror

BNP puppets are not the real threat

Underground art and music are far more effective recruitment tools for the far right

A few days ago the youth BNP's charmless Billy Brit appeared in my Facebook feed. There was something both bizarre and inept about the clip: a pale cream sub-Sesame Street puppet speaks in a castrato voice in front of a backdrop that looks like it's been set-dressed by the guy who does beheading videos. The puppet reads an old-fashioned tum-tee-tum rhyme, name-checking a canon of white heroes, the kind of stirring stuff a nostalgic middle-aged BNP activist might remember learning by rote at school. It's both awkward and hectoring; Edward I is catchily described as "a tall articulate giver of law", a garbled phrase that sounds like it was cribbed from a prewar textbook. "Physics and maths" are glossed as the "essential stuff" which made racial hero Isaac Newton such an upstanding chap.

As an effective recruitment tool for Britain's under-13s, Billy Brit must rank about as high as BNP-branded conkers or a chance to sit on Nick Griffin's knee. The injunction to vote at the end suggests that it's not really aimed at kids at all, but is a viral come-on to the highly ironised stoner constituency who surf YouTube looking for the next Peer Pressure or Numa Numa Boy. Inevitably, Billy has already been parodied on the internet and the threat he represents to the nation's youth is surely slight. Despite the hand-wringing, I also find it hard to get exercised by the recent "revelation" that BNP activists are trawling social networking sites such as Bebo and Facebook. Everyone's online these days, from amputee fetishists to coffee-coloured burka-wearing Francophile miscegenaters like myself. The young generation of "internet natives" has grown up wandering through the digital forest, exposed to the shadows to a degree their parents don't yet comprehend.

This isn't to say I'm complacent about fascists sniffing round the fringes of youth culture. Like paedophiles and science fiction fans, the far right were quick to wise up to the internet, and since the early 1990s I've occasionally surfed my way through their offerings, intrigued by the constantly mutating subculture of white nationalism. Worried liberals usually invoke the image of the skinhead thug, but there's always been a second strand to fascism, a culture that's less big boots and more socks and sandals, a cranky, vegetarian, pagan, back-to-the-land folksiness that in its current incarnation has real potential appeal to environmentally conscious, anti-globalist young people.

You get hints of it even in mainstream BNP material. The party has done a good job of getting its members out of acid-wash and into Austin Reed, and anyone near a camera has hair of a reasonable length, but they can't quite stamp out the runes. Griffin, their leader, has released an album of folk songs, whose cover is like something from a Norwegian blood metal band, complete with runic title and an image of the black sun, a pagan occult symbol much beloved of neo-Nazis. It's hard to say exactly what it represents to this reasonable middle-of-the-road politician, but his party maintains links with racist neopagan groups around Europe, many of which profess a version of Odinism or Icelandic Asatru where the black sun features as a religious symbol. More Odinist than most are the Tempelhof gesellschaft, an Austrian outfit which believes that the Aryan race is of extraterrestrial origin (Aldebaran, since you ask), destined to dominate the other races, due to the "vril" energy pumped out by the black sun. If Griffin's actually from Aldebaran, wouldn't that technically make him an asylum seeker?

Taking the mick out of fringe Nazi occultism is like shooting fish in a barrel, but in the US, racist Odinism has become a major force in the prison system, compelling authorities there to recognise it as a legitimate religion. The glamour of Nordic myths has long been an influence on the overlapping youth cultures of heavy metal, fantasy, and role-playing. As an obsessive teenage Dungeons and Dragons player I drew sigils on my exercise books and invented characters with horned helmets and multisyllabic names. Though (self-evidently) I was a giant nerd, I never became a metal fan. I did go through a Tolkien phase, during which it never occurred to me there was a racial dimension to his borrowings from Norse and Anglo-Saxon. So I felt a little soiled to discover that since the release of the movies, a huge white nationalist Tolkien fanbase has developed.

Only a fraction of the users of Nordic imagery are racists, but this culture is a much more credible recruiting tool for disaffected white kids than a sock puppet. There are strands within industrial music, goth, neofolk and emo which flirt with fascist imagery. This is nothing new (as any Joy Division fan can attest) and doesn't necessarily amount to anything more sinister than a wish to shock, shared by teenagers since the dawn of time. A tiny minority of bands are overtly "political", but it's not hard to detect a certain, um, tendency in the aesthetic of labels such as Slaughter in Art, whose blurb for the album Blut Unter Den Fahnen describes it as "apocalyptic war music ... a homage to the victims of allied bombardments, and in particular to the town of Dresden. Martial post-industrial, orchestral, neoclassical with dark ambient. Heroic imagery with some German historical excerpts."

There are more mainstream tendrils to socks-and-sandals fascism, which should concern voters considering the BNP as a protest vote in Thursday's EU elections. Next to Billy Brit, the youth BNP site offers a video in which a young man explains that "nationalism is not only an idea for the conscious mind but for the subconscious mind, what is more commonly known as the heart, the soul, or the folk soul." The idea of a racial soul, operating at a preconscious "blood" level, will be familiar to students of Germany's Völkisch movement - which provided much of the ideological impetus for national socialism. This was a huge cultural tendency, which also gave rise to such things as Steiner schools and biodynamic farming, and many neo-Völkisch sects survive today across Europe, united in little but their hatred of modernity, immigration and multiculturalism. The BNP describes itself as "Britain's only real Green party", and claims that overpopulation, driven by immigration, is the main cause of our ecological woes. These "green" policies are really the tip of a Völkisch iceberg, and around Europe a Völkisch paganism is being refurbished to appeal to young people who crave some kind of rebirth or revolution, and often look for it in the anti-globalisation movement. The idea that the destruction of the environment is linked to the repression of ethnic identity is particularly insidious. When accompanied by the notion, common to certain strands of fascism and environmentalism, that through technology, modernity has not only destroyed nature, but also the spiritual dimension of life, you get the beginnings of a politics that could really speak to the next generation, brought up within the current pale green orthodoxy. Personally I'm far more bothered about that than a stupid puppet.

Guardian

Holocaust survivor warns Britain not to give power to BNP

A Holocaust survivor and Second World War veteran last night begged Britain: "Don't give power to the Nazis."

Gisela Feldman, 84, and Ken Reilly, 83, joined the Daily Mirror Hope Not Hate bus in Manchester to ask people to vote against the BNP in next week's European elections. Jewish Gisela was 15 when she fled Germany in 1938 as the Nazis killed her father.

She said: "We cannot allow the fascist BNP into our politics no matter what they promise. "I lived through the Nazi regime and remember the Brown Shirts marching through Berlin. We didn't know of the hatred flourishing beneath."

Ken fought in the Royal Armoured Corps during D-Day and the Battle of Arnhem. He said: "We must look through the BNP's false brandishments. Hatred is an abomination and we must vote for hope not hate."

Comic Eddie Izzard, who joined us at the Imperial War Museum North, said: "Meeting Gisela and Ken reminds us of the sacrifices their generation made so we can live in a hate-free society. But now, 60 years on, we've got the BNP dragging us back in time. Voting against the BNP is to vote for hope against hate."

Mirror

Can the BNP ever lose its racist reputation?

A vandalised British National Party billboard in John Street, Carlisle

Splattered with paint and daubed with the words “Nazi scum”. . . an attack on a British National Party billboard in Carlisle shows emotions are running high ahead of European Parliament and county council elections.

Yet the far-right party, which has condemned the vandalism, insists it has received a positive response from voters across Cumbria as it canvasses for next Thursday’s ballots.

Some remain less enthusiastically inclined towards the BNP though. They are concerned a low turnout or an anti-establishment voting trend – in fury at the Westminster expenses scandal – could play right into the party’s hands and deliver the mass protest vote it has been hoping for. Those worries have triggered a campaign to limit any BNP gains.

Opinions about the BNP have rarely hit the middle ground since its formation in the early 1980s by John Tyndall, a former chairman of the National Front. He was a man photographed in Nazi uniform – without attending fancy dress parties – and who described Adolf Hitler’s book Mein Kampf as his bible.

Other members have also been reported making extreme pro-Nazi, racist or homophobic comments over the years. Mark Collett, the BNP’s director of publicity, was made infamous by the 2002 television documentary Young, Nazi and Proud.

Former deputy leader Tony Lecomber was jailed for possessing explosives in 1985 and again in 1991 for assaulting a Jewish teacher.

Party chairman Nick Griffin, who visited Whitehaven on Saturday, has tried with limited success to rid the party of its racist image. But controversy continues to follow him. He denied the Holocaust ever happened in a party publication in 1996 and received a suspended jail sentence two years later for inciting racial hatred.

Mr Griffin – his party’s lead Euro election candidate for the north west – this week claimed the ‘controlled media’ had resorted to rehashing comments made a decade and a half ago to throw the BNP into a poor light.

“I have gone on record repeatedly as saying such things [Holocaust rejection] were immature politics and all of us have moved on,” he said.

Yet his insistence on having turned a corner has done little to wipe the slate clean of suspicions which still stalk the party. There was outrage last week at the prospect of Mr Griffin attending a garden party at Buckingham Palace. Yesterday he announced he would not be attending the garden party, in order not to embarrass the Queen.

And leading clergymen – including University of Cumbria chancellor Dr John Sentamu – have pleaded with the public not to let the Westminster expenses scandal convert into BNP votes, in protest against the three major parties.

Carlisle Against Racism has been a prominent campaign group against the BNP, which is standing in 42 of the 84 council seats. By the end of this week, it will have distributed 30,000 copies of its anti-BNP leaflets to homes including those in Carlisle, Longtown, Brampton, Penrith, Wigton, Silloth and Alston. Chairman Brent Kennedy believes the newly glossed image of the party – activists wearing suits proffering slick campaign leaflets – could lure many towards an alternative.

“They don’t know about the truth,” he said. “People just see the glossy leaflets – the false image they are physically putting out.”

He and other campaigners have been working to gather support for their work in Carlisle city centre. Mr Kennedy said: “We have had people saying they are going to vote BNP because they are racist. Some are people who are not racist but desperate because of the economic crisis and angry about MPs enriching themselves. On the other hand, a big majority were really supportive. They were thanking us for campaigning against the BNP, which the political parties are not doing.”

The anti-racism activist, who claims he has been attacked and intimidated while carrying out his work, has clear fears should the BNP taste electoral success.

“I’m worried there will be an increase of racist abuse and attacks on people and political opponents of theirs if they get a Euro MP elected. I have already contacted the police about that,” he revealed.

The church has also been drawn into the electioneering arena with Dr Sentamu, the Archbishop of York, and Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams urging people to use “great vigilance” when deciding who to vote for. They claimed some parties would exploit the current political situation if elected and said the BNP fostered “fear and division within communities, especially between people of different faiths or racial background”.

“This is not a moment for voting in favour of any political party whose core ideology is about sowing division in our communities and hostility on grounds of race, creed or colour,” they added. “It is an opportunity for renewing the vision of a community united by mutual respect, high ethical standards and the pursuit of justice and peace.”

BNP supporters in Cumbria are undoubtedly in a minority. But in the European elections – where a proportional representation voting system is used to ensure the number of MPs from each political party reflects the share of votes they received regionally – that could be enough to secure a seat. That is a factor which has mobilised trade unions. The Public and Commercial Services Union has launched a Make Your Vote Count campaign, backed by the Northern TUC, and will be in Carlisle on Saturday. May 30.

Regional co-ordinator Gordon Rowntree said: “Because the European elections use proportional representation there is a fear there. In the north west Nick Griffin could be elected. That’s why we’re working to get turnout higher because that would help the other political parties.”

Clive Jefferson, the BNP’s Cumbrian organiser, maintains his party has moved on and away from the racism linked to it in its early days. He said: “All of the opposition or people who would tar us with the same brush are using things from decades ago. It’s not relevant to the party today.”

The activist, who said his chairman did not encounter any aggression in Whitehaven on Saturday and criticised senior churchmen for their comments, vehemently denied his party was racist.

“It’s not racist, fascist or Nazi, as left-wing extremists dub us. I don’t think the majority of people think that now. What we’ve got are left-wing extremists, as I would call them, peddling this kind of rubbish,” he added.

Mr Jefferson also denied activists used any intimidation and said: “If anyone is telling you that, I would like them to tell me. It should be reported to police. This will not be tolerated. That’s not how we go about things. We are a political party.”

He described the vandal attacks on the poster in Caldewgate, Carlisle, as “nasty”.

Polling stations will be open between 7am and 10pm on Thursday, June 4. Cumbria County Council ballot papers will be counted the following day. The European count will be delayed until other countries have voted on June 6 and 7.

News and Star

Anti-BNP alliance now in final push

The groups battling to prevent the British National Party gaining a seat in the European elections on June 4 will launch their final offensive this week.

The Board of Deputies-backed Your Voice Not Theirs initiative, the Hope Not Hate campaign and the anti-fascist magazine Searchlight will be putting all their efforts into getting voters out to polling stations.

European elections are decided by proportional representation. The BNP needs as little as eight per cent of the vote to win a seat and that could be enough in the North West, if voters stay at home, to send BNP leader Nick Griffin to Brussels.

If the BNP wins a seat, it will give them an income of around £250,000 plus expenses. It will also give Griffin the opportunity to forge stronger links with other far-right parties in Europe, such as the National Party in the Czech Republic, which has just run a broadcast calling for a “final solution” for the Roma, provoking echoes of the Nazis’ Final Solution for the Jewish people.

The anti-BNP alliance has realised that their task has been made harder by the revelations of the Westminster expenses scandal and the effect this has had on the electorate. However, they believe they can still keep the BNP out of Europe.

Searchlight founder Gerry Gable said: “There will be a moment of danger if people don’t come out to vote. We hope everyone thinks it’s worthwhile to do so. There has been considerable coverage in the daily papers and television and the BNP has been roundly criticised. In the North West area, about one million pieces of anti-BNP material have been distributed. In other areas, we have asked postmen to exercise the conscience clause not to give out their material”.

Ruth Smeeth of Your Voice Not Theirs said: “The message to everyone is simple: get out and vote. We must do everything to stop the BNP being given legitimacy as a political party”.

Jewish Chronicle