EU hands out holidays paid for by taxpayer

Tens of thousands of political activists, including hundreds from the BNP, have been given free or subsidised holidays by British and European taxpayers.

Even as it grapples with the financial crisis, the European Union is paying almost £25 million this year to subsidise the trips, arranged through MEPs.

The BNP, which has two Euro-MPs, has made heavy use of the scheme to thank some of its most prominent members at taxpayers’ expense. One BNP official boasted that it was “a good way of rewarding our activists” that “didn’t cost the party a penny”. The trips are ostensibly “study visits” to the European Parliament buildings in Brussels or Strasbourg, but the holidaymakers need spend only a fraction of their time at the parliament to claim the full subsidy, which can be collected in cash without the need for receipts.

One subsidised trip to Strasbourg last week, promoted by the Labour MEP Peter Skinner, lasted six days, with only a few hours spent at the parliament. The rest of the visit, according to a programme seen by The Sunday Telegraph, included a river cruise, a tour of the cathedral, a visit to the city’s Christmas market, champagne tasting, a battlefield tour in Ypres and sightseeing in Reims. Like most MEPs, Mr Skinner did not join the party, but hosted a free dinner for the participants.

Just under 30 people went on the tour, according to Mr Skinner’s office, staying in £100-a-night hotels in Ypres, Reims and the German spa town of Baden-Baden, near Strasbourg.

“After a buffet breakfast in the sunny Great Room, take your coffee on to the terrace to enjoy views of the picturesque Black Forest,” the Baden-Baden hotel’s website says. "Stroll beside the meandering River Oos and admire the Belle-Epoque mansions on Lichtentaler Allee. Play for high stakes at the glamorous Spielbank casino, and unwind in the soothing waters of Caracalla Spa.”

The cost of the six-day trip, including some meals, all accommodation, tours, coach and ferry, was £272. If booked directly, the hotels alone would have cost about £500 at this time of year.

One of those who went on the trip, Juan Leahy, who works for Mr Skinner, declined to comment when asked if it was mostly a “holiday”.

A spokesman for the European Parliamentary Labour Party said: “We believe the public should have the opportunity to see their elected officials at work, and we do not want this opportunity restricted to the rich who can afford travel.”

Stephen Booth, of the reform group Open Europe, said: “Spending taxpayers’ money on what are effectively subsidised holidays can only further erode public trust in the EU institutions. The European Parliament seems to exist in a parallel universe, completely ignorant of economic realities.”

Politicians of all parties help to arrange the trips. Hornchurch and Upminster Conservative Association advertised a break to Brussels, including return travel by Eurostar and a night in a city centre hotel, for £80.

“We have almost a whole day to sight-see, wander around the Christmas market and pick up inspiration for gifts,” said the association’s website.

Bill Newton-Dunn, the Liberal Democrat MEP, promoted a three-day weekend break in Brussels this month for £205, advertising it on his website as a “Christmas shopping” trip. The visit to the European Parliament lasted two hours on the Monday morning, just before the guests left for home.

The BNP has made extensive use of the subsidies to reward donors to its Trafalgar Club, who last year were hosted on a three-day visit to Bruges at EU expense by Nick Griffin, the party’s leader and an MEP. Ninety-two Trafalgar Club and life members took part.

Mr Griffin said: “Everyone really enjoyed the opportunity to meet and socialise with like-minded people who care about our country.”

Other BNP outings include trips to the First World War battlefields and Waterloo. Pictures on the website of Eddy Butler, a BNP staff member, show the party enjoying their “second breakfast of the day” at a Brussels café. In the evening, the group enjoyed a taxpayer-subsidised dinner, at what another participant, Chris Beverley, called “the wonderfully atmospheric Bivouac de l’Empereur restaurant”.

“Everyone knew they could let their hair down and relax, safe in the knowledge that they were among good nationalists, men and women of honour,” he added.

One BNP trip, in March last year, cost taxpayers €10,791 (£9,775) for 44 participants, an average of £220 a head. It was free for those who took part, according to the organiser, Mr Butler, and even made the BNP a profit.

“The subsidy is for a set amount,” said Mr Butler. “There is no provision to pay back what you don’t use. The organiser of the trip can use any residue for whatever he sees fit: this is quite legitimate.”

Mr Butler said he had donated the profits to the BNP.

In a report last month, the Court of Auditors, Europe’s spending watchdog, criticised this aspect of the scheme, warning that “the procedures in place do not require groups to provide evidence of travel costs, resulting in a risk of overpayment as most groups use cheaper collective transport”.

The subsidy for the journey from London to Brussels amounts to £85 a head, but Eurostar offers a return ticket for £69, and travelling in a privately hired coach can cost as little as £25. From Edinburgh to Brussels the travel subsidy would be £225, but a return flight with Ryanair costs as little as £49. The meal subsidy is set at £30 a person, but since no receipts are required visitors can buy cheaper meals and pocket the difference.

According to the Court of Auditors, 78 per cent of the payments to trip organisers last year were made in cash. This “limited the possibility of applying internal control procedures”, the watchdog warned.

Mr Butler defended the visits, saying: “Everyone had fun and it didn’t cost the party a penny. The trips are a good way of rewarding our activists for their hard work and dedication. Should we feel guilty for the Euro taxpayer? Certainly not.”

Each of the 736 MEPs is allowed to sponsor up to 110 visitors a year, although not all use their full quota. The visitors must travel in groups of at least 10. The trips are promoted to supporters on email lists and websites. Some are advertised on the MEPs’ websites and are not confined to sympathisers, although in practice most of the holidaymakers are political activists.

The European Parliament declined to give the number of British participants in the trips, but figures for the last available year, 2007, show that British visitors claimed €938,000 (£600,000) in subsidies.

The cost of the schemes for all 27 EU nations this year is €29.7 million (£24.9 million), a 40 per cent rise since 2007. As Britain’s share of the EU budget this year is 12 per cent, taxpayers are contributing £3 million to the programme.

A spokesman for the European Parliament said: “It is essential to the exercise of democratic rights within the European Union for members of the public to be granted access to the parliament’s proceedings and premises.”

The parliament said that better controls on the payments would be too “complex and time-consuming”.

Telegraph

Andrew Brons - Non-Attached Member

On Monday afternoon I received a message from one of oldest and dearest mates saying that there is a BNP billboard at Heeley Bridge/Bottom a few minutes walk from where I live.
Now my mate is an old political hand and pretty sharp and somebody who I trust implicitly. Somebody who knows the difference between a poster and a big fuck off advertising billboard. I decided to have a wander down and take some pics. I might also have decided to have a few pints in the Sheaf View and Shakespeare on the way home.

The pics are not the best due to the location and my ineptitude with a camera but you should get the general gist.




Now there are several things that are puzzling about the above images and their content.

1 - Brons says he is a Non-Attatched MEP which suggests he has resigned the whip which I've not noticed before.
2 - The incredibly small BNP logo. It may be in the upper centre of the image but it's hardly noticeable (which may be the point)
3 - Ex NF leader with some utterly revolting views using what can only be considered concentration camp imagery.

Anyway, on the way back from a pub in Woodseats I got off the bus and saw this :-

BNP MEPs granted free access to House of Lords

BNP members of the European Parliament, including leader Nick Griffin, will be given free access to part of the Palace of Westminster despite the attempt of MPs to bar them, it was revealed [yesterday].

The Commons last year decided to remove the right of MEPs to hold photo access passes to Parliament in a bid to keep out Mr Griffin and fellow party MEP Andrew Brons. But peers objected to the decision and tonight head of the administration in the Lords, Lord Brabazon of Tara, said MEPs would now be given special passes which would allow them into only the parts of Parliament controlled by the Upper House.

Debating the move last year, peers described the measure as a 'messy, shoddy little administrative proposal' but were told that, as both Houses issue passes, the decision of MPs could not take proper effect unless agreed to by the Lords. Peers unanimously demanded further consideration of the matter by MPs, but Lord Brabazon said tonight in a written statement that the then chairman of the House of Commons administration committee, Frank Doran, had replied that it was not 'appropriate to revisit the issue'.

Lord Brabazon said: 'It was clear, not least for administrative and security reasons, that it would be preferable for the two Houses to operate identical rules in respect of Parliamentary passes for UK MEPs.'

But he told peers that the House committee in the Lords had nonetheless agreed to continue issuing Parliamentary passes to UK MEPs. He added: 'However, because of the decision taken by the House of Commons, it will be necessary to alter the appearance of UK MEPs' Parliamentary passes to make clear that they only grant access to the House of Lords' areas of the Parliamentary estate. In addition, the new passes will only operate the pass readers in the Lords' area.

'The work is already under way and the new style of pass will soon be issued to UK MEPs who have requested one. In the meantime, the officials of both Houses are working together closely to ensure that the new arrangements bed in as smoothly and effectively as possible.'

At the time peers rejected the approach taken by the Commons, Labour's Lord Tomlinson said MEPs had enjoyed the right to passes 'for the last 29 years without, as far as I'm aware, having produced any problems'.

He said the issue threatened to be 'a very serious irritant between ourselves and the European Parliament'.

Daily Mail

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

BNP faces cash probe over EU fund

The British National Party faces a new probe after its chief fundraiser secured more than £111,000 of European Union cash

James Dowson, who raised money for the party’s general election campaign, received the funds in 2006 under an EU programme to promote peace and reconciliation in Northern Ireland. His organisation Solas NI claimed to be a “victim support group”, but it is now dormant, its offices shuttered and its phone lines closed.

A Dowson spokesman said: “As far as Jim Dowson is aware, Solas NI complied with all its legal, regulatory, funding and public disclosure obligations and requirements in full during the time he was a trustee.”

Dowson is also the mastermind behind a BNP fundraising and call centre on an industrial estate in Dundonald, Belfast. Since spring 2009, the BNP has carried out almost all its telephone fundraising and recruitment from the office, known as “The Bunker”.

The revelation about the EU donation follows the admission by BNP boss Nick Griffin that he is claiming more than £200,000 in European Parliamentary expenses. A spokesman for anti- fascist group Searchlight said: “Not a day goes by without the BNP attacking so-called EU waste, but they have their noses buried deeper in the trough of EU grants and expenses than just about any other party.”

Searchlight is writing to the EU anti-fraud office to call for a probe into the Dowson grant.

NotW

BNP chief Nick Griffin claims £200,000 Euro expenses

BNP leader Nick Griffin was accused of joining “the expenses gravy train” today after it emerged that he has claimed hundreds of thousands of pounds.

The British National Party chief, who was elected last year as Euro MP for the North West of England, has submitted claims for more than £200,000 for his work in Brussels. The costs, which come on top of his £82,000 MEP salary, include some £18,000 in “consultancy fees” and £10,000 in “agent fees”.

The BNP leader won his party's first seats in Strasbourg after attacking MPs for having their “snouts in the trough”. After being accused of failing to be more open about his expenses, he has now published a version of his claims on his personal website.

Mr Griffin claimed £175,000 in “staff costs” for eight employees with titles ranging from “European researcher” to “campaigns co-ordinator”. A further £31,000 was for “office management costs”, including an office in his home. His “office costs” included £2,800 on “furnishings” and over £4,000 on “repair, maintenance and security”. Mr Griffin made a pre-election pledge to be transparent about his expenses. But he is yet to reveal how much he has claimed of his £270-a-day MEP's subsistence allowance, worth £40,000 tax-free every year, or how much he has claimed for travel.

Fellow BNP MEP Andrew Brons has not published any details of his expenses. He and Mr Griffin are jointly entitled to expenses of up to £530,000 a year. As well as staff allowances, both receive a “general expenditure allowance” worth more than £44,000 annually.

A spokesman for campaign group Searchlight said: “Griffin talked a good game on expenses before the election, but as soon as he got to Brussels he couldn't wait to jump aboard the euro expenses gravy train.”

London Evening Standard

BNP fails to publish European expenses details

Porky Griffin - sleazy, racist and damned ugly, too

Nick Griffin, the British National Party leader and MEP, has not published details of his own expenses despite campaigning on an anti-sleaze platform during European elections

Nine months after accusing mainstream Westminster MPs and Brussels MEPs of having "their snouts in the trough", neither Mr Griffin, nor his BNP colleague Andrew Brons, have given any details of how they spend allowances worth a combined £530,000 every year. According to Mr Griffin's website: "All accounts and expenses will be published on this page for complete transparency as soon as they become available." The "accounts and expenses" website section for Mr Brons, a Yorkshire MEP, has remained blank since last July.

Other Labour, Conservative and Liberal Democrat MEPs have all given detailed breakdowns of how allowances are spent since the European elections last June. Most British MEPs give salary band details of employees and justify travel, subsistence and other expenses.

The most recent parliamentary "declarations of financial interest" for both MEPs date back to June 16 2009, just days after they were both elected. Neither declaration gives any details of annual expenses, worth over £280,000 for each man. Mr Griffin has used parliament assistant allowances, worth over £190,000, to employ three staff members, according to his website, but has given no details of their salary bands. Mr Brons employs four people but, also, gives no details of their wages.

One staffer, Martin Wingfield, is employed twice by both MEPs as a communications officer. Mr Wingfield's wife, Tina, also works for Mr Griffin.

European Parliament officials have told The Daily Telegraph that Mr Griffin and Mr Brons do not have any staffers accredited to work in the Brussels or Strasbourg seats of the EU assembly. The Daily Telegraph has also learnt that the Electoral Commission has opened an investigation into the BNP's accounts after the party's auditor refused to sign off accounts for 2008. The "case under review" concerns a suspected breach of the Political Parties, Elections and Referendums Act, which requires all party treasurers to file full and accurate accounts each year.

"There are reasonable grounds to believe there has been a breach of reporting requirements," said a spokesman.

The BNP, Mr Griffin and Mr Brons yesterday declined to comment or answer questions about the use of their allowances. Chris Davies, a Liberal Democrat MEP for the North West, said: "The BNP's MEPs are shown to be less than open and transparent about their own financial affairs."

As well as staff allowances, both BNP MEPs, who earn a salary of £84,000 a year, receive a "general expenditure allowance" worth over £44,000 annually. While working in Brussels or Strasbourg, the two places where the parliament sits, MEPs pocket a £265 daily cash subsistence payment, worth over £40,000 tax-free every year.

Telegraph

The odd couple - The BNP and Hizb ut-Tahrir

The white far-right and the Islamist fringe fight for their survival

Born of a National Front splinter-group in 1982, the far-right British National Party has never had an easy relationship with anti-racism laws. Nick Griffin, the BNP’s Cambridge-educated leader, was temporarily banned from standing in local elections after a 1998 conviction for inciting racial hatred. (The offence doesn’t stop him from holding a seat in the European Parliament, however.) On February 14th the party suffered its latest legal indignity, when it reluctantly agreed to drop its longstanding whites-only membership policy, following a court order. If its new constitution is approved by the judges, blacks and Asians will at last be able to join a party that campaigns for their “voluntary repatriation”. A stampede is not expected.

In another shadowy corner of Britain’s political landscape, a different extremist group is preparing for battle with the law. Hizb ut-Tahrir, an international Islamist outfit that wants to establish a caliphate in what it calls the Muslim world, is facing calls from the opposition Conservatives for its proscription. The party, which is banned in much of the Middle East and restricted in Germany, was targeted in 2005 by the Labour government but managed to save its skin. The Tories are determined that it will not escape again.

The two parties are more alike than they might think. The surly young men who lurk at the back of their meetings are more or less identical but for the hairstyles. Both parties officially denounce violence and are occasionally let down on this front by their members. And both have won a higher profile of late, which now threatens to come back to hurt them.

The BNP’s electoral gains in the European Parliament and London Assembly last year won its leader a place on the BBC’s main current-affairs debate programme, “Question Time”. But they also caught the eye of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, the official watchdog that brought the case against the BNP, which Mr Griffin says has cost the party over £100,000 ($157,200). Now the government is supposedly mulling a ban on BNP members working in schools. (They are already barred from the police and the prison service.)

The party also faces discontent in its ranks. Mr Griffin has already upset the hard core by dragging the party fractionally closer to the centre ground. Following the BNP’s retreat over its whites-only policy, he e-mailed members to reassure them that the party was not “going soft”, citing the roughing-up of a Times journalist by BNP security staff as evidence of the party’s commitment to its old values.

Hizb ut-Tahrir faces a similar balancing act between its party faithful and the real world. Britain’s laws against glorifying terrorism force it to watch its language: suicide bombers may no longer be described as “martyrs”, for instance, to the dismay of some hotter-headed members. And not everyone has approved of the party’s strategy of engagement, which once saw it providing advice to the government and inviting the media to public debates.

Those tactics now seem to be changing. Since the noisy departure of some of its more moderate members and the ramping up of the Tory campaign against it, Hizb ut-Tahrir has gone on the offensive. Maajid Nawaz, a former senior member who cut his ties with the party in 2007 and is now co-director of the Quilliam Foundation, a counter-extremism think-tank, says hardliners within the party have been able to argue that the softer approach didn’t work. The rhetoric has certainly heated up: Hizb ut-Tahrir’s rare press conferences are now cross little affairs in which its enemies are robotically condemned as “neocons”.

The party may yet survive the Conservatives’ plans, just as the BNP seems to have got the courts off its back for the time being. But both parties have learned that a higher profile has its drawbacks.

Economist

BNP MEP questions Taliban place on terror group list

Andrew Brons (left) August 1981 in Fulham, campaigning
with the National Front and BNP leader Nick Griffin

British National Party MEP Andrew Brons today questioned whether the Taliban should be on an EU list of banned terror groups which includes al-Qaida

Organisations and individuals on the list are subject to sanctions and travel restrictions in Europe, but Mr Brons told fellow MEPs in Strasbourg that whilst the Taliban was an “appalling, repressive and anti-democratic organisation” it was not in the league of global terrorism alongside Osama Bin Laden and al-Qaida and had no known cross-border ambitions.

The leader of Britain’s Labour MEPs Gelis Willmott said Mr Brons was “confused”, adding: “The Taliban are purposefully killing and maiming innocent women and children: of course they are terrorists.”

Mr Brons, referring to the current terrorist list of proscribed organisations, said: “What is the justification for placing the Taliban in the same category as Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida? Osama bin Laden and al Qaida are terrorists who have already committed terrorist acts worldwide and intend to commit more in the future. We must pursue those people to the ends of the earth and restrict them as much as possible.”

But he went on: “Whilst the Taliban are an appalling, repressive and anti-democratic organisation, the world is full of unpleasant regimes and the Taliban are not even in government. They are also killing and maiming our troops in Afghanistan, for which they are quite rightly hated. However, they would not be killing and maiming our troops if our troops were not deployed there. The Taliban, as far as I know, have no ambitions beyond their borders.”

He suggested that placing the Taliban and al-Qaida in the same category could provide ammunition for “the warmongers in the US and British Governments to pursue a pointless, murderous and unwinnable war in Afghanistan for years ahead”. He added: “Furthermore, wars against Muslim countries only provoke terrorist outrages.”

On al-Qaida, Mr Brons said there was “considerable doubt” about its existence “as an organisational entity, as distinct from an ideological one.” That meant there was no possibility of drawing up a definitive and inclusive list of its operatives: “The only strategy is to be watchful of those communities from which it recruits, regrettably including innocent people as well as the guilty.”

Ms Willmott commented: “Does Andrew Brons actually want to use this legislation to victimise innocent people in Muslim communities in the UK? The BNP are a party based on fuelling hatred. Their populist policies simply don’t work. I am very proud of the efforts of British troops in Afghanistan, often paying the ultimate price for everyone else’s freedom. And every British MEP should say they are too.”

This afternoon the European Parliament approved a resolution urging the EU to improve respect of human rights in the fight against terrorism.

“People suspected of terrorism or of links with Osama bin Laden, al-Qaida or the Taliban can end up on a UN ’black list of terrorists’ without knowing it.” said Dutch MEP Emine Bozkurt. “As a result, they cannot travel freely and their bank accounts and assets are immediately frozen without any possibility for them to claim their innocence and appeal against such measures. Once a name is on that list, it is almost impossible to delete it as no revision mechanisms are foreseen.”

Labour MEP and civil liberties spokesman Claude Moraes said the grounds for placing individuals and organisations on the terror list should be “defined by law, in a transparent and democratic manner”.

He added: “Recently, the European Court of Justice called on the EU for a revision of this procedure. A stronger role for the European Parliament is of significant importance to guarantee transparent procedures.”

Irish Examiner

Copenhagen climate conference: Nick Griffin calls world leaders mass murderers

BNP leader Nick Griffin at the Bella centre

The leader of the British National Party and MEP is at the international summit as a representative of the European Parliament. But he said global warming was a “hoax” designed to impose tax increases on the citizens of the world through putting up the price of energy.

He said world leaders and advocates of action on climate change such as Al Gore are “mass murderers” by supporting biofuels. He said land for growing food is being taken to grow fuels for crops and it will cause starvation greater than the famines caused by Russian dictator Stalin during the 1930s and Chairman Mao in the 1950s.

"It is a crime against humanity which in future will be seen as an enormous man-made famine. Under Stalin 20 million people died, under Chairman Mao 30 million died. This will be the third and the greatest famine of the modern era and I regard that as a crime.”

However Mr Griffin’s own party would not give more money to the third world.

“Britain is bankrupt. We cannot afford to go giving money to the third world,” he said. Mr Griffin has no official role at the conference but will be speaking to delegates in an attempt to “stop the juggernaut”.

“My message is stop and think before imposing the most outrageous tax increase on people ever proposed by a group of nations on the basis of an unproven theory that is contradicted by an increasing number of scientists,” he added.

Ben Stewart of Greenpeace said Mr Griffin will bring nothing helpful to the talks.

“Mr Griffin’s conversion to the causes of the developing world is as surprising as it is cynical,” he said. “In reality the environmental and development groups he has been disparaging have been in the forefront of concerns about biofuels. Griffin’s claims that climate change is a hoax is one of many curious things going on between his ears.”

Daily Telegraph

Griffin ditches North West to launch parliamentary campaign

Nick Griffin has lost interest in being a Member of the European Parliament and has abandoned the people of North West England who voted for him

Speaking a few days after the British National Party leader announced he would be standing in Barking in the general election, Simon Darby, the BNP deputy leader, said: “Nick believes he should be an MP in Westminster and not in the European Parliament”.

Darby was only confirming what was already clear: that Griffin has little concern for his North West of England constituency. While the people of Cumbria were suffering the heaviest rainfall ever recorded in England and even Griffin’s own publicly funded staff were worried that the roof of their new constituency office might blow off, Griffin went on a walkabout in his east London target seat, followed by a trip to Spain.

His actions have exposed him as the same type of power-hungry politician that he always accuses MPs from the three main parties of being.

Griffin claimed he had chosen Barking because it was the party’s best chance of winning a parliamentary seat. Yet only a few days before he announced his candidacy, at the party’s annual conference in Wigan, Greater Manchester, on 15 November, he had appealed for donations to launch the party’s “run-up campaign to the general election” with the promise: “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”.

Griffin had launched his campaign on a lie, as Searchlight quickly pointed out. Perhaps he thought donors were more likely to fund a campaign where the party’s target was 27% – and would overlook the improbability that such a low percentage could win them the seat – than an attempt to oust a government minister in a safe Labour seat.

Excuses followed in an attempt to cover up the blunder. Both Griffin and Darby claimed Griffin had been lured to Barking at the request of the party’s local councillors and members. Griffin also linked his decision with the party’s attempt to take over Barking and Dagenham in the May 2010 council election, which is likely to coincide with the general election, claiming his parliamentary campaign would enhance the council campaign.

And the party quickly issued a second fundraising letter from which all references to Thurrock had been expunged.

The BNP has 12 councillors in Barking and Dagenham, the largest BNP council group in the country. They have largely been ineffective against the huge Labour majority and many of them rarely attend meetings.

According to Griffin, the council campaign will be spearheaded by Richard Barnbrook, the BNP’s London Assembly member, who is currently appealing against his suspension from Barking and Dagenham council for bringing his office into disrepute by inventing a series of murders in the borough. Robert Bailey, the BNP’s leader on Barking and Dagenham council and the party’s London organiser, appears to have been sidelined.

Barnbrook’s wider ambitions have also been swept aside. At the end of September he rented a huge billboard by the side of the A406 in Barking, at great expense, to announce that it was “Barnbrook for Barking”. On his blog he proclaimed: “I, Richard Barnbrook am going to be Barking’s next MP! I’m the candidate for the British National Party …”. Lying that he had lived in the constituency for six years, he pleaded: “Back me, Richard Barnbrook, Barking’s next MP”.

Announcing his takeover of the Barking candidacy, Griffin paid tribute to Barnbrook. Acknowledging that Barnbrook had been the BNP’s prospective candidate – in an attempt to quash a widespread rumour that Barnbrook had claimed the role unilaterally – Griffin said: “You have made a most noble gesture Richard, and on behalf of the membership of our Party I would like to thank you”.

Barnbrook has not gone away without a consolation prize: he will be leader of Barking and Dagenham council if the BNP takes control of the borough. The fact that it would be up to the BNP councillors to choose the leader is presumably no barrier. If the new councillors are anything like the present lot, they will play little part in any council business.

Bailey too will not go away empty-handed. Griffin said that Barnbrook would give up his post as a London Assembly member if the party seized control of the borough. It would pass to Bailey, who was second on the BNP’s list of candidates in the 2008 election.

Before turning up in Barking on 19 November, Griffin had spent the morning in Grays, Essex, where he announced that he was handing the candidacy for Thurrock to Emma Colgate, the BNP’s local councillor. Colgate holds the balance of power on Thurrock council, which is split between Labour and the Conservatives, and used it to keep what another councillor described as a “dysfunctional Tory group” in power.

Colgate has been the BNP’s national administration officer since June. Before that she was Barnbrook’s researcher, employed 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 faces a difficult job. 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%.

Barking too will be a hard nut for the BNP to crack, which is why Griffin has said the party will spend the maximum legally allowed – several times more than it has ever spent in a single constituency.

Griffin will not have helped his campaign with his disparaging remarks about London after his disastrous performance on the BBC’s Question Time on 22 October, when he claimed the programme should not have been filmed in London because the city was “no longer British”.

Nor will his abandonment of his MEP’s role endear him to voters, who will think Griffin will only stick around until something better comes along.

Griffin’s Spanish jaunt on 21 November was also hardly how an aspiring MP should behave. Griffin was in Madrid as a special guest speaker at a rally of the far-right National Democracy party held to commemorate the death on 20 November 1975 of the Spanish fascist dictator General Franco. Also there was Griffin’s old friend and political mentor Roberto Fiore, the convicted former leader of the terrorist Armed Revolutionary Nuclei, the Italian group involved in the 1980 Bologna bombing.

The event resulted in 28 arrests of members of a rival far-right group, the Patriotic Socialist Movement, after they attacked doormen who were trying to stop them entering the hotel where the rally was taking place.

Not only did Griffin attend the fascist rally, “he may also have made a private visit to Franco’s tomb on his trip to Spain,” according to a BNP spokesman though Griffin later denied it.

Griffin has not, however, totally ignored the flooding in Cumbria. Between his trips to Barking and Madrid he asked Martin Wingfield, his constituency communications and campaigns officer, for a briefing. Griffin wants to help, said Wingfield, who would be offered Griffin’s seat as an MEP were Griffin to get elected in Barking. Griffin would consider offering his “English Fair Fund to support any local projects helping the stricken community,” Wingfield added.

Residents, at least the “indigenous ones”, will be relieved. Griffin’s so-called English Fair Fund is the 10% of his MEP’s salary that he promised during his European election campaign to give for “local community use”. That’s around £700 a month starting from 14 July, Griffin’s first day of work as an MEP, plus the income from selling Nick Griffin MEP commemorative cards printed for the BNP’s Red, White and Blue summer festival for £4.50 each.

That will go a long way. At the same time the BNP has poured scorn on the government’s announcement of £1 million in flood aid to Cumbria and cynically exploited people’s suffering as a means of attacking the government’s foreign aid budget.

Griffin’s candidacy in Barking and the BNP’s previous success in Barking and Dagenham have put the borough in the front line in HOPE not hate’s campaign against the BNP in the coming elections. The campaign will concentrate on getting voters to know exactly who Griffin is and persuading them to come out and vote against him.

Searchlight

BNP leader Nick Griffin threatens to expose 'dodgy science' when he represents Europe at climate change summit

BNP leader Nick Griffin has sparked outrage after it emerged that he is to represent the European parliament at next week's climate change summit in Copenhagen

Mr Griffin has vowed to use his place on the delegation to expose the ‘somewhat dodgy’ science behind the climate change movement.

The far-right leader is allowed to attend the crucial summit as a representative of the parliament's environmental committee. But politicians and scientists reacted furiously to his presence at the meeting, which is hoping to forge a new global deal on cutting greenhouse emissions. Many scientists are warning that world temperatures will increase by more than 2C by the end of the century, triggering ice-cap melting, sea-level rises, widespread flooding, the spread of deserts and devastating storms.

But a spokesman for Mr Griffin claimed the summit had handed the BNP a major publicity coup. The spokesman said: ‘It is a global Marxist mantra that is going to be used to beat people around the head, tax us to the hilt, smash nations and impose a one world government.’

He added that it was a ‘big opportunity’ for the BNP because ‘people assume we are only a one trick pony only interested in race and immigration’.

Mr Griffin will be one of 15 representatives chosen to attend the summit on behalf of the EU in Copenhagen. However, Climate Change Secretary Ed Miliband described Mr Griffin's views as 'irresponsible and wrong'. He went on to dismiss the BNP's claims that Mr Griffin would have any influence in Copenhagen.

Mr Miliband said: ‘Nick Griffin's views on climate change are irresponsible and wrong. He cannot and does not represent the views of the people of the UK or of Europe. He will not be part of the formal Copenhagen negotiations and rightly he will not be listened to by anyone with any credibility who is part of these negotiations.’

Liberal Democrat home affairs spokesman Chris Huhne, a former MEP, said: ‘Nick Griffin was always going to get some role in the Parliament, because jobs are divvied up fairly. The crying shame is that he is representing Europe at a key summit for the future of humanity, when he does not even concede that man-made climate change exists.’

Green Party leader Caroline Lucas, also an MEP, told BBC1's Andrew Marr show: ‘He won't get the right to speak. The Parliament sadly doesn't even get the right to really influence the decisions at all. So this idea that somehow Nick Griffin is going to have any real influence on what happens in Copenhagen is a myth.’

Shadow climate change secretary Greg Clark also condemned the move.

‘It is utterly ridiculous that someone who doesn't even believe in climate change should be seeking to represent Europe in Copenhagen. The BNP does not command the support of the people of Britain, let alone of the rest of Europe,’ he said.

A spokesman for the Department of Energy and Climate Change said: ‘Membership of the European parliament's delegation to Copenhagen is a matter for the European parliament. Its delegates do not represent the UK government or its views. Nick Griffin will not be part of the UK delegation.’

Tim Yeo, chairman of the Commons environmental audit committee, said the decision to choose Griffin showed the ‘bizarre way’ the parliament operated. He added: ‘If the future prosperity of the human race, in the face of climate change, depends on the contributions of people like Nick Griffin, there is little hope for any of us.’

Professor Alan Thorpe, chief executive of the Natural Environment Research Council, added: ‘The intergovernmental panel on climate change draws on the views of most of the world's leading climate scientists and they have been quite clear that the evidence shows, with a high degree of certainty, that human activities are now having a substantial effect on the climate. It is simply not the case that there is a substantial number who do not accept a link.’

Mail Online

Climate change denier Nick Griffin to represent EU at Copenhagen

BNP leader who believes climate change activists are 'cranks' will be member of European parliament's delegation

Nick Griffin, the leader of the British National party, is to represent the European parliament at the UN climate change conference in Copenhagen, which opens next week. Last night politicians and scientists reacted furiously to news that the far-right politician and climate change denier should be attending the summit on behalf of the EU.

Griffin, who was elected to the European parliament in June, confirmed last night that he would attend as the representative of the parliament's environmental committee. World leaders, including Barack Obama and Gordon Brown, are hoping to forge a new global agreement to curtail greenhouse gas emissions.

Without such a deal, scientists warn that world temperatures will increase by more than 2C by the end of the century, triggering ice cap melting, sea-level rises, widespread flooding, the spread of deserts and devastating storms.

In a speech in the parliament last week, Griffin denounced those who warn of the consequences of climate change as "cranks". He said they had reached "an Orwellian consensus" that was "based not on scientific agreement, but on bullying, censorship and fraudulent statistics".

"The anti-western intellectual cranks of the left suffered a collective breakdown when communism collapsed. Climate change is their new theology… But the heretics will have a voice in Copenhagen and the truth will out. Climate change is being used to impose an anti-human utopia as deadly as anything conceived by Stalin or Mao."

Griffin will be one of 15 representatives chosen to speak on behalf of the EU in Copenhagen. The shadow climate change secretary, Greg Clark, condemned the move last night. "It is utterly ridiculous that someone who doesn't even believe in climate change should be seeking to represent Europe in Copenhagen. The BNP does not command the support of the people of Britain, let alone of the rest of Europe," he said.

A spokesman for the Department of Energy and Climate Change said: "Membership of the European parliament's delegation to Copenhagen is a matter for the European parliament. Its delegates do not represent the UK government or its views. Nick Griffin will not be part of the UK delegation."

Tim Yeo, chairman of the Commons environmental audit committee, said the decision to choose Griffin showed the "bizarre way" the parliament operated. He added: "If the future prosperity of the human race, in the face of climate change, depends on the contributions of people like Nick Griffin, there is little hope for any of us."

Professor Alan Thorpe, chief executive of the Natural Environment Research Council, said Griffin's claim that thousands of scientists dispute the existence of man-made global warming was simply not true. "The intergovernmental panel on climate change draws on the views of most of the world's leading climate scientists and they have been quite clear that the evidence shows, with a high degree of certainty, that human activities are now having a substantial effect on the climate. It is simply not the case that there is a substantial number who do not accept a link."

Bob Ward, of Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment, said: "Griffin denies the overwhelming scientific evidence on climate change. This appears to be driven by a dogmatic strand of right-wing ideology that opposes any form of environmental regulation, usually hidden behind the dishonest claim that climate change is a left-wing conspiracy."

Chris Huhne, the Liberal Democrats' home affairs spokesman and a former MEP, said the European parliament always divided up positions on such delegations according to the parliament's political balance. "Griffin was bound to get something at some stage. It is just a shame they didn't send him to Iceland instead."

Critics say Griffin addresses environmental issues when he believes he can use them to advance anti-immigration policies. His party claims that it would improve Britain's transport infrastructure and reduce carbon dioxide levels by reducing the number of immigrants in Britain using roads, cars, trains and buses.

Gerry Gable, publisher of the anti-fascist magazine Searchlight, said Griffin once tried to win over environmentalists in the 1980s. "His core beliefs – that the white race is being threatened by an invading minority – are the so-called principles that have run through his nasty career."

Observer

Five-star treat for BNP...and YOU pay

Griffin: living like a king at the taxpayer's expense

Taxpayers will foot the bill for BNP leader Nick Griffin to enjoy a week of five-star treatment at the Copenhagen climate change summit.

Griffin, elected to the European Parliament on the back of the MPs expenses scandal, is one of just three British MEPs attending in an official capacity. As an MEP he is entitled to claim business class flights for the event, as well as his hotel accommodation and a £300 daily allowance. Griffin has been given a place because he is the only member of the EU environment committee who believes global warming is a hoax.

World leaders including Gordon Brown and Barack Obama will also be attending the summit, which hopes to limit the world's carbon emissions.

The BNP said he was justified in using taxpayers' cash. A party spokesman said: "It's very much in Britain's national interests that at least one politician is willing to question and put under scrutiny what we are all being led to believe by the climate change lobby. Nick and the party believe that the whole global warming industry is a huge con."

Mirror

Nick Griffin to contest Barking seat

Barnbrook for Barking? Apparently not.

BNP leader Nick Griffin has said he is going to stand in the Westminster constituency of Barking, east London, in the next general election

In June, the party won its first two seats in the European Parliament. Mr Griffin was elected for the North West region while Andrew Brons picked up another BNP seat in Yorkshire and Humber, where it won 10% of the vote.

Margaret Hodge, Labour MP for Barking, said she was "more than ready to expose and expel the BNP from the borough". She told the BBC she was ready to face a challenge in her constituency from the BNP leader.

"I always knew I would have a BNP candidate and it has turned out to be him," she said.

Mr Griffin said the BNP was not racist, but won votes because it "spoke openly about the problem of immigration". Mr Griffin said the BNP would concentrate more money and manpower on the Barking constituency than the party had targeted on any other election campaign. He said he believed the campaign would have repercussions throughout Essex.

Mr Griffin told a news conference: "It's all phoney with the other parties. Sometimes we can be a little blunt, a little politically incorrect, but we're always honest and people know that now."

He said the country faced a second economic crisis because the money pumped into the economy had not gone to generate solid jobs, and that in the face of the ensuing crisis the BNP stood poised to "sweep aside" Labour in a number of seats.

"The chickens are going to come home to roost in a monstrous way very soon," he said.

Mr Griffin was elected to the European Parliament in June even though the BNP polled fewer votes in the north-west England region than it had in 2004 - the slump in Labour support meant its share of the vote increased. It meant that although the BNP came fifth in the popular vote for the area, it won a seat through the system of proportional representation used in the European elections.

BBC

BNP uses public money to fund party officers

The British National Party is using money it receives from Europe to support its two MEPs to bankroll the leadership of its organisation

Of the 14 people employed by the two MEPs only five actually live in the two regions they represent and most fulfil national posts for the party.

In the latest abuse of the parliamentary expenses system, the British and European people are funding the BNP. As MEPs, Nick Griffin and Andrew Brons, are entitled to claim a combined £382,000 a year to pay for their colleagues’ salaries. The two share five members of staff, who all happen to be national party officers and only one lives in either the North West or Yorkshire.

They are Simon Darby, the party’s deputy leader, Eddy Butler, the national organiser, Emma Colgate, the national administration officer, John Walker, the deputy press officer, and Martin Wingfield, who lives in the North West and until recently was the editor of the party newspaper, Voice of Freedom.

Each MEP also has some staff of his own. One of Nick Griffin’s is Martin Reynolds, a bodybuilder from Leeds who acts as his personal minder. When asked about what “specifically” he does for his EU salary, Reynolds said: “I honestly don’t know”.

Andrew Brons employs three people. One happens to be the new BNP Yorkshire organiser while the other two, Adam and Mark Walker, both live in County Durham, which is in a different region.

Searchlight has long argued that if elected the BNP would use public money to fund the party rather than helping the people they are supposed to represent. This is proving to be the case.

Who’s on the gravy train...

Shared staff

Eddy Butler Butler is the BNP national organiser, national elections officer and, until recently, eastern regional organiser. Butler joined the National Front shortly after the 1979 general election and subsequently the BNP. He was the BNP Tower Hamlets organiser and the architect of the BNP’s “Rights for Whites” campaign, which began in 1990 and culminated in the first ever BNP council election victory in Tower Hamlets in 1993. Butler headed the BNP’s European election candidates’ list in the East of England. He lives in Loughton, where his partner Sue Clapp is a district councillor.

Emma Colgate Colgate is the BNP’s national administration officer. Her appointment was announced at the BNP’s European election victory rally in Blackpool. She is also a BNP councillor in Thurrock, where she holds the balance of power and has kept the Conservatives in power. She was second on the BNP European election candidates’ list in the East of England. Before her appointment as national admin officer, she worked as Richard Barnbrook’s researcher at the Greater London Authority.

Simon Darby Darby is the BNP’s deputy leader and press spokesperson. He recently stood down as honorary treasurer. He was previously the West Midlands regional organiser and has worked full-time for the BNP for some time. He headed the West Midlands European election candidates’ list. He lives in Wales near Welshpool.

John Walker Walker has held a succession of jobs in the BNP. He was once party treasurer and then worked in logistics and dispatch roles when the BNP had its Excalibur warehouse in Deeside last year. Since the beginning of the year he has been the BNP’s deputy press officer. When Walker took over as treasurer in 2004, he and David Hannam, another BNP officer, went to the home of the former party treasurer John Brayshaw and had various BNP financial documents shredded.

Martin Wingfield Wingfield was the editor of the BNP’s monthly newspaper The Voice of Freedom until just after the European election, when he went off to work for Griffin and Brons. He was second on the European election candidates’ list for the North West (after Griffin). Wingfield received a 90-day sentence in November 1985 for failing to pay a fine imposed earlier that year for two offences under the race relations laws. He was convicted for inciting racial hatred in election literature distributed by the National Front in 1983.

Nick Griffin’s staff

Alistair Barbour Barbour is the organiser of the BNP’s Carlisle branch and has stood in local elections in the area.

Clive Jefferson Jefferson is the BNP’s North West regional organiser and a key figure in the BNP’s security team. Speaking to a local newspaper in May 2007 about Griffin’s conviction for incitement of racial hatred over a magazine that denied the Holocaust, Jefferson dismissed it saying: “He’s been convicted of having a different view of history”.

Martin Reynolds Reynolds is the head of BNP security. From Leeds, Reynolds is a bodybuilder who was caught by undercover BBC journalists selling knock-off Stone Island and other fake designer clothes.

Tina Wingfield The wife of Martin Wingfield, Tina was the BNP’s membership secretary until her appointment to Griffin’s constituency team.

Andrew Brons’s staff

Chris Beverley Beverley is a BNP councillor in Leeds and was third on the European election candidates’ list in Yorkshire and the Humber. A fluent German speaker, he liaises with the German nazi NPD on behalf of the BNP. For a period last year he managed the campaign by Colin Auty to gather enough signatures to challenge Griffin for the party leadership.

Adam Walker Adam Walker was a teacher who was suspended for accessing religiously intolerant material on the internet. He is taking his appeal to the General Teaching Council. He headed the BNP European candidates’ list for the North East. He is president of the BNP’s tame trade union, Solidarity. Although Solidarity professes independence, all its officers are from the BNP or Third Way, a party run by some of Griffin’s mates from his National Front days, and the very few cases it has ever taken up involve BNP members.

Mark Walker Mark Walker is secretary of Durham BNP and was also sacked as a teacher for allegedly downloading pornography on a school’s computer. There were also questions over a relationship with a 17-year-old former pupil.

Searchlight

Far-right alliance fails to get EU cash

The European Alliance of National Movements (AENM), the coalition of far-right parties formed last month in Budapest, has failed in its an attempt to get its hands on European Parliament cash, as the jumble of reactionary rightists did not manage to file the application on time.

The alliance, which includes the UK's BNP, France's Front National and Hungary's Jobbik, says it wants its share of the around €11 million that the parliament hands out every year to pan-European political parties, informally known as ‘europarties'. This would have amounted to around €400,000 for the group to carry out advertising, research and campaigning atop the money MEPs already receive.

"Conservatives, socialists, Greens and communists all receive European funds. It is normal that we demand the same on behalf of our electors who have expressed their hopes," Front National MEP Bruno Gollnisch told reporters in the European capital announcing the Brussels launch of the group.

While the cluster of far-righters managed to cobble together the group in Budapest on 24 October, as earlier reported by EUobserver, the cut-off for 2010 funding was 1 November and so if the chamber does ultimately recognise the formation, it will still not be able to access any money until 2011.

Conceding that the group had fumbled the deadline, Mr Gollnish said: "The money is not the main purpose. While we want to get our share back, the share that is due the people who voted for us and sympathise with our goals, the real aim here is the formation of a political alliance where we can support each other."

Europarties vs. European Parliament groups

Pan-continental europarties are structurally distinct entities from the political families of MEPs in the Strasbourg chamber, though at the same time remain linked ideologically.

A grouping in the European Parliament requires a certain number of MEPs from seven EU member states; for a europarty, the rules are more relaxed and national MPs and regional representatives may also count towards the seven-country minimum. There is also no minimum number of deputies.

In the AENM's case, the alliance has had to depend very much on a tiny rightist groupuscules without MEPs: Belgium's Front National, which has one seat in the country's Chamber of Representatives and one seat in the Senate, and Italy's neo-fascist Fiamma Tricolore and Sweden's National Democrats. The former has a single deputy in the Umbrian regional assembly, while the latter has councillors in just two municipalities south of Stockholm. But municipal representatives do not count towards the europarty threshold.

Excluding the Swedes, the group only has deputies from five EU member states.

The BNP's Nick Griffin, however, says that he hopes to soon have on board far-right parties from Spain and Portugal - which have no MEPs either - as well as from Ukraine, but this would not count towards the total, as the country is outside the EU. Nevertheless, he also said that Austria's Freedom Party, which does have substantial support - it won 12.8 percent in the June elections, giving it two MEPs - may soon join.

Whites only

Once the alliance is legally registered, the Bureau of the European Parliament - the chamber's governing body - must rule on whether it meets the europarty regulations, which also demand an observation of "the principles of liberty, democracy, respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms, and the rule of law."

"This could present a problem if certain parties are found to continue to refuse membership to certain ethnicities," Federico de Girolamo, a parliament spokesperson, told EUobserver. The BNP was ordered by a London court in October to end its internal whites-only policy.

Mr de Girolamo said however there was still a chance the alliance could eventually access EU funds if they meet all the rules.

"So long as [membership issues] are resolved, then there has to be a really good reason for them to be denied [europarty status]," he continued. "Democracy means including all opinions. We cannot be seen denying them this just because we don't agree with them."

Hungarian vs Slovak nationalisms

A major block to forming a larger group is the inability of the different far-right parties in the European Parliament and beyond, who often adhere to mutually exclusive national mythologies, to get along.

Hungarian MEP Balczo Zoltan, Jobbik's vice-president, angrily told journalists at the press conference that the alliance will never permit the inclusion of Slovak or Romanian nationalists, as their brand of nationalism was exclusionary of the wrong type of people.

"Millions of ethic Hungarians live [outside] Hungary and the Jobbik Movement for a Better Hungary will never work together with parties that are not patriotic or nationalist, but instead chauvinist. We will never work with the Slovak National Party or the Greater Romania Party. This is a declaration!"

The SNP does not restrict itself to inflammatory rhetoric about Roma, Jews and gays and lesbians, but also Hungarians. Jan Slota, the party's leader, has in the past said: "We will sit in our tanks and destroy Budapest," and: "Hungarians are a cancer in the body of the Slovak nation."

Greater Romania Party leader Corneliu Vadim Tudor, for his part, regularly rails against the alleged anti-Romania conspiracies of ethnic Hungarians.

EUObserver

Dissecting the Dowsons

The leak of the BNP membership list last month has turned the spotlight on the party's Belfast call centre, the tensions it has caused in the party, and the links between the man who runs it and a charity that has received a six-figure sum in EU funding. Matthew Collins and Simon Cressy investigate.

The posting on the internet of a British National Party membership list two days before the BNP leader's prized appearance on Question Time was a huge embarrassment to the fascist party. After the BNP lost an earlier list of members and contacts last year, the party promised to put security measures in place to ensure such a thing could never happen again. It was only because of this promise that the BNP managed to stem a walkout of members concerned about losing their jobs and friends because of the revelation of their racist adherence.

Searchlight can now reveal that the "security measures" consisted of handing over the files to Jim Dowson, a hardline anti-abortion activist with a string of criminal convictions, who runs the party's "secret" administrative lair in Northern Ireland.

In what has become known as the BNP's Belfast bunker, an office on an industrial estate in Dundonald, Dowson's private company, Adlorries.com, employs staff recruited through employment agencies, to handle BNP members' personal information. Staff are not security vetted, though East Europeans and Asians applying for work at the call centre are automatically rejected, in contravention of employment legislation.

Staff, one of whom is the wife of a police officer working at Castlereagh police station, do not even have to sign a confidentiality clause. Yet one of their roles was to persuade up to 3,000 lapsed members that their personal information and membership details would now be kept securely and encrypted in the secretive call centre.

Dowson has told the police that a former staff member leaked the membership data after leaving her job taking a laptop computer in lieu of £2,000 that she claimed she was owed in unpaid wages.

Who's who in the Belfast bunker

Jennifer Matthys (née Griffin):Newly married, Jennifer and her husband Angus moved to the village of Comber, where a number of the BNP's key Northern Ireland personnel already live. Until recently a checkout assistant at her local Co-op, the BNP leader's daughter (pictured with father) is supposedly entrusted with keeping a close eye on the activities of the Dowsons. A new car was thrown into the bargain to sweeten the move away from her long-time love interest Mark Collett, the controversial designer of BNP leaflets and newly appointed editor of the party's newspaper Voice of Freedom. It is Jennifer who has stopped James Dowson Jr getting his hands on the Young BNP after a battle of wills between them.

James Dowson Jr: Until Jennifer Griffin's arrival, James Jr, Dowson's eldest son, was cock of the north around the village of Comber and in the BNP call centre from where he ran his plumbing firm, Ultraplumb.com Ltd, set up with his father's financial help. Dowson Jr, 21, is a senior member of the Goldsprings flute band, a favourite of Protestants who want to "kick" the Pope. His planned rise in the BNP has been curbed since Ms Griffin came on the scene. His father is alleged to have bought him a Russian bride who upped and left not long after arriving in the Dowson home.

Marion Thomas: Unknown until now, Marion Thomas has emerged as the key link person to the Dowson empire. Thomas, Dowson's sister-in-law, is the administrator of Dowson's various business and campaign interests and signs various documents on Dowson's behalf. Her husband, Alex Thomas, is a business partner of Dowson and chair of Solas NI, the victim support group linked to Dowson. Allegedly no great fan of Dowson, Marion allegedly keeps a record of all the business transactions that go on in Dowson's offices.

John Thompson: Dowson's long-time accountant, Thompson was taken on last April to sort out the BNP's books and records after a succession of changes in the BNP's treasury department, which had been widely accused of incompetence at the time of the winter 2007-08 rebellion in the BNP. Although the BNP described him as a "professional chartered accountant" he appears to have been unequal to the task and the BNP's 2008 accountants, due with the Electoral Commission by 7 July 2009, are still missing. Since the election of the BNP's two MEPs, Thompson has taken on the role of "paying agent" for the MEPs' staff on the European Parliament payroll.

One of the employment agencies that supplied staff to Adlorries was Office Angels. The firm would only speak to Searchlight through a PR company but confirmed that it had supplied staff to the call centre. A statement from Office Angels said it had terminated the contractual arrangement once it learned that Adlorries was a "third party supplier to the BNP". It added: "We do not discriminate against a person's race, age or sex. It is totally against Office Angels' values to do this, not to mention against the law."

The BNP claimed that Northern Ireland was a "safe haven" away from the strong opposition the party faces on mainland Britain. Since spring this year the BNP has carried out almost all its telephone fundraising and recruitment activities from the Dundonald office and another in nearby Ballyhackamore. Staff solicit donations and send out information packs all over the UK for a wage of £6 an hour plus commission based on the amount they raise.

Since the move to Northern Ireland the party has been trying desperately to plug a succession of embarrassing leaks to the Irish press identifying key personnel in the Irish operation and exposing the gradual and almost forced takeover of the BNP by a man who claimed publicly to have "stepped down" from fundraising for the party, but who still has his hand very firmly on the BNP's purse strings.

Gradually, since Dowson first became involved with the BNP in late 2007, he has taken over more and more of the party's operations and drawn the BNP further into his web of business, campaigning and charity interests.

Until the membership list leak, BNP members were receiving an average of three telephone calls a month from the call centre, soliciting donations and encouraging people to renew their membership early or upgrade to the life or gold membership schemes.

Legal action by the Equalities and Human Rights Commission has forced the BNP to suspend recruiting members while it makes changes to its constitution. Instead, Dowson is now desperately trying to revive the near moribund Trafalgar Club, members of which contribute at least £15 a month in exchange for an annual dinner with speech by Nick Griffin, the party leader, usually in a smart country hotel, on the Saturday nearest to Trafalgar Day, 21 October.

Dowson has also put his staff onto increasing subscriptions to the party periodical Voice of Freedom as well as making begging phone calls for donations to fight the EHRC's case against the BNP. In reality the funds are being raised to pay the EHRC's costs, which are likely to be awarded against the BNP, after Griffin gave up the hopeless battle.

All these calls are made from the same telephone lines that the Dowson family use for their charity, anti-abortion work and the plumbing business run by James Dowson Jr. In overall charge of answering and dispatching calls to the correct part of the set-up is Marion Thomas, Dowson's sister-in-law.

Marion Thomas is married to Alex Thomas, who acts as chair of Solas, a Northern Ireland charity, which he runs together with Dowson. Solas NI is a victim support group set up in 2003 to help bereaved and injured victims of the Northern Ireland Troubles. It says its aim is "to ensure that those most affected by the Troubles have recourse to a non-political and non-sectarian organisation which caters specifically for their needs".

Solas operates from the same address and uses the same telephone number as another Dowson organisation, the Christian Youth Fellowship.

When Searchlight telephoned the number it was answered by a woman with a Scottish accent who gave her name as Marion. We then asked to speak to Jim [Dowson] and she proceeded to connect us.

Searchlight has discovered that up to March 2007 Solas received £111,479 of funding under a European Union programme for peace and reconciliation. The money, part of a £6.8 million allocation for projects in Northern Ireland in 2006-07, came via Proteus, an intermediate funding body.

Announcing the grants, Pat Donnelly, chief executive of Proteus, said: "There is real evidence that projects funded by PEACE II [the EU programme] have contributed to a significant change in mindset and created the necessary preconditions for genuine cooperation and improvements to take place".

Dowson's past record and current involvement with the racist BNP, which only seeks to divide communities, shows that cooperation is the last thing on his mind.

As well as controlling income coming in through the call centre, Dowson has placed his own accountant John Thompson to look after the BNP's books. Thompson, who is based in Comber, also looks after the accounts for Alex Thomas and Dowson's anti-abortion campaign, the UK LifeLeague.

Last April, Griffin announced that the "current and anticipated growth" of the BNP had necessitated the formation of a "full Treasury Department" headed by a professional chartered accountant", whom he did not name. Thompson's main achievement in that role appears to be the failure to produce the party's 2008 accounts on time, incurring a fine of at least £1,000 under electoral legislation.

Thompson was supposed to work under the oversight of the BNP's treasurer. At the time of his appointment this was one of the many party positions held by Simon Darby, the deputy leader. Thompson is believed to have clashed a number of times with Darby over the payment of bills, in particular to Romac Press Ltd in east Belfast, which now does the party's printing, including the endless begging letters the party sends out to an esoteric mailing list.

It appears that Romac Press, which also prints for Dowson's other operations, is being lined up to print Voice of Freedom. Senior party members on the mainland are said to be resisting the move, but Dowson hopes this may placate the owners who still have a large bill to be settled.

Senior BNP officers on the mainland have also voiced concern over the apparent independence of the Irish operation. They include Simon Bennett, the BNP's webmaster, Eddy Butler, the national organiser, Martin Wingfield, the Communications and Campaigns Officer for the two BNP MEPs, and even Darby. Bennett is especially aggrieved because Dowson is earning commission on the money he raises for the party. Bennett was offered commission on donations raised through the BNP website but the party appears to have reneged on the promise.

Searchlight can reveal that it was Griffin's sole decision to give Dowson free rein to run major BNP administrative functions. Perhaps it was to pacify them that the BNP announced in June the appointment of Emma Colgate as the party's administration officer in place of "consultant Jim Dowson", though in fact Dowson's role has not changed.

Dowson's remit is not limited to Northern Ireland, however. During the European election campaign the BNP announced proudly that it had acquired a number of office premises to house its growing operations, but kept the locations secret.

Searchlight has discovered that early this year the party leased three rooms in a smart building on the Salmon Springs Trading Estate in Stroud Gloucestershire for "training" at a cost of £5,000 per year. However it was not the BNP's name on the tenancy but that of Adlorries.com. The three-year lease was a waste of the BNP's money. Except for one meeting, at which the party sacked Michaela Mackenzie from her positions as administration officer and national nominating officer, the offices have remained unused and unfurnished.

West Midlands organiser Alwyn Deacon: runs a secondary BNP call centre in Nuneaton

It is different in Nuneaton, where the former pub landlord Alwyn Deacon is fronting the BNP's merchandising operation, Excalibur, complete with a mini call centre with 20 phone lines, in a property leased in his own name from the local Conservative council in Slingsby Close on the Attleborough Fields Industrial Estate. Deacon and his wife follow a series of fundraising guidelines set down by Dowson, under which former customers of Excalibur as well as all other party members and even members of the UK Independence Party are bombarded with phone calls and special offers.

How the BNP will afford these new premises is unclear. Any attempt to hide the costs in the party's expenses claims for the new MEPs would of course be fraudulent.

Partly to meet the concerns of members of the Party's national advisory council about Dowson's power in the party, Griffin's daughter Jennifer and her new husband Angus Matthys moved into a flat in Comber last month to begin work at the Dundonald call centre. Ms Griffin, a former leader of the Young BNP, once manned the tills at the same Co-op store where her father was briefly employed. Now she is allegedly forging her father's signature on the photograph of the revered leader that gold party members receive as thanks for their generosity.

Since moving to Northern Ireland, Jennifer is believed to have concurred with Arthur Kemp, the South African former apartheid intelligence agent who now edits the BNP website, that despite his father's wishes, Dowson's eldest son, James, could not be publicly anointed as the head of the BNP's youth wing. The decision has apparently caused resentment in the Dowson family as the Griffin and Dowson heirs vie for supremacy in the call centre.

However, this has not stopped Mr and Mrs Matthys joining Dowson Jr as members of the Goldsprings "kick the Pope" marching and flute band, a clear sign that despite the BNP's protestations to Anglo-Irish members on the mainland, a strict evangelical, racist and sectarian policy still runs through the very core of the BNP.

Another of Dowson's religious cohorts unpopular with senior members on the mainland is Zak McAdam. An IT specialist who has clashed with the BNP's webmaster Simon Bennett on a number of occasions, McAdam recently made a name for himself with a one-man campaign against lesbians and computer games. A number of holders of party laptops were furious to discover that they could not access pornography after McAdam blocked access to some of the party employees' favourite porn sites.

Although the latest BNP membership list leak has been overshadowed by Griffin's Question Time appearance, limiting the damage in terms of bad publicity, advisory council members are angry and are blaming Dowson for the embarrassing loss of data that were supposedly kept encrypted.

Wingfield, whose wife Tina used to be the party's membership secretary, was the first to comment shortly before midnight on the eve of the anticipated leak. Wingfield blogged: "I know the leak certainly didn't come from our end here."

Days after Griffin's disastrous performance on Question Time and the membership list loss, Jennifer and Angus Matthys attended this year's Trafalgar Club dinner alongside Dowson at a smart country house hotel near Ross-on-Wye. The tension between senior BNP officers and Dowson, and the animosity between Griffin's daughter and Dowson Jr, cannot have made for a congenial evening.

Searchlight thanks all the people in Northern Ireland and England who have helped in this investigation.

Irish TUC calls for enquiry

Searchlight’s investigation into the business activities of the BNP front man Jim Dowson has led to a call for an enquiry into whether the employment practices at the BNP call centre are in breach of Northern Ireland’s Race Relations Order of 1997, which prohibits racist employment practices.

The Northern Ireland Committee of the Irish Congress of Trade Unions (ICTU) and the Northern Ireland Council for Ethnic Minorities (NICEM) issued a joint call last month for an investigation by the Department of Employment and Learning, after Searchlight passed them evidence that employment agencies had been duped into providing staff for the BNP.

In response to Searchlight’s investigation, the employment agency Office Angels issued a statement through its London PR company admitting it had supplied a “small number of staff to a call centre called Adlorries” but withdrew them and terminated the agreement once it became apparent who the customer really was.

The statement went on to say that Office Angels “would not support any client who appeared to discriminate and would review our contract with them forthwith. Our philosophy is to not only uphold the word of the law but also our company morals, standards and policies.”

While there is no suggestion that Office Angels has contravened the law or in any way behaved improperly, Searchlight does have evidence that at least one other high profile employment agency is not only still supplying staff to Adlorries to work for the BNP but is also allegedly “cherry picking” prospective employees based on race, religion and sexuality.

Launching the joint call for an investigation, Peter Bunting, ICTU Assistant General Secretary, said: “The BNP are fascists. They misrepresent facts about public housing going to immigrants, about foreigners taking our‚ jobs, about Muslims and crime and about the Holocaust. They even deny what Britain fought during World War II. The truth is that Britain fought against fascism, and this clearly is a fight that is not over yet.

“These are tainted jobs from an evil employer, and no employment agency should have any truck with them.”

Searchlight is also calling for an inquiry and we will be handing our dossier to ICTU and NICEM to present to the authorities leading the investigation.

You may also be interested to read
• Dissecting the Dowsons Part 3 of a three part investigation Searchlight Magazine November 2009
• Dowson's empire Part 2 of a three part investigation Searchlight Magazine November 2009
• From rags to riches Part 1 of a three part investigation Searchlight Magazine November 2009
• BNP Bosses Uncovered A former employee lifts the lid on life working for 44-year-old Jim Dowson and the BNP in Belfast by Steven Moore Sunday World October 2009
• 'Cash strapped' BNP fails to deliver accounts Sonia Gable on the BNP’s current financial problems Searchlight Magazine September 2009
• The man who bought the BNP Sonia Gable untangles a BNP financial web Searchlight Magazine July 2009
• Truth truck or lie lorry? Sonia Gable uncovers another BNP financial scandal Searchlight Magazine August 2008
• BNP accounts don't add up Sonia Gable analyses the BNP’s latest figures Searchlight Magazine September 2008

Hope not Hate

Jim Dowson: How a militant anti-abortionist took over the BNP

Today we start a serialisation from the current issue of Searchlight Magazine which features a special investigation into the heart of the BNP. We highlight the organisational set-up, the secret locations and the people running the fascist party. We expose how the running of the party has been outsourced to a rabid Loyalist anti-abortionist in Belfast and we reveal that this man is receiving European Union money for peace and reconciliation.

We have also been busy working with the media. Many of the revelations and exposés we have read in the newspapers over the past few weeks have originated from Searchlight. Forty-seven years after Searchlight was first formed we are proving that we are still ahead of the game.

From rags to riches : Part I of a three part investigation - Gerry Gable

Ten years ago Jim Dowson (pictured left) was a down-at-heel anti-abortion campaigner and hardline Protestant, who had marched with a loyalist band that played songs in praise of the convicted loyalist murderer Michael Stone

His luck changed when he formed an alliance with Justin Barrett, a far-right Catholic lawyer and leader of the notorious Irish anti-abortion group Youth Defence, which had previously stormed buildings in Dublin in their crusade against a woman's right to choose.

In 2000 Barrett had attended a rally of the German nazi National Democratic Party, where he met Roberto Fiore, the Italian fascist friend and mentor of Nick Griffin, the BNP leader. The trip was arranged by Derek Holland, one of Griffin's old colleagues from the days of the National Front Political Soldiers. Barrett attracted attention as the lead spokesperson of the successful Irish campaign against the Nice Treaty in 2001 and money started to flow from far-right anti-abortionists in the United States.

In 1999 Dowson had formed Precious Life Scotland and it was through cooperation between his group and Youth Defence that he met Barrett. The link proved beneficial when Barrett pitched £50,000 into Dowson's organisation to pay for the production of anti-abortion CDs and video tapes to be distributed to schools and churches in Northern Ireland and Scotland.

Dowson was a "rent-a-cause" extremist who had been kicked out of the Orange Order. He has a list of criminal convictions including breach of the peace in 1986, possession of a weapon and breach of the peace in 1991 and criminal damage in 1992. Although a Protestant, he was happy to sell thousands of photographs of the Pope at inflated prices to Catholics in the Irish Republic.

Barrett faded from the public arena after the Nice Treaty vote was rerun and went the other way. His political demise was hastened after the publication of his book The National Way Forward, in which he described immigration as "genocidal". He also became increasingly antisemitic, influenced by the nazi leaders he had met in Germany.

In contrast, Dowson's campaigning activities grew. He turned his sights on gay people and encouraged his followers to abuse and threaten people who attended or worked in abortion clinics. This resulted in Dowson parting company with some of his Precious Life fellow activists, but he was now in a financial position to go it alone, turning his faction into the UK LifeLeague. He never looked back.

Dowson, 45, started working with the British National Party late in 2007, and he quickly revolutionised its fundraising. His first appeal, launched at the time the BNP was tearing itself apart in an internal rebellion, was carried out as a free sample to show the party what he could do, but since then he has worked on a percentage commission.

His work for the BNP grew to encompass the provision of manage-ment training in Spain and revamping the party's administration. Early in 2009 he set up the Belfast call centre, piggybacking it on his successful fundraising for the LifeLeague, thereby cutting costs and perhaps giving doubtful BNP officers the impression of a larger operation than it actually is.

Over the past two years he has clearly raised huge sums for the party, although it remains financially strapped. Partly this is the result of scams, such as the truth truck, which Griffin claimed had been bought with thousands of pounds of supporters' donations. It turned out still to belong to Dowson's private company, Adlorries.com, and, like much of the other equipment the BNP claimed to have bought, it was only leased by the party.

Today Dowson practically owns the BNP, which he briefly joined to placate his critics but left as soon as the heat was off him. He remains at loggerheads with many senior party officers and employees. One, whom he sacked in spring, is heading for an employment tribunal.

Griffin's claim that the BNP is being flooded with donations via Dowson's call centre is a lie. Income is down to a trickle and membership is a mere 8,000 or so. People are not queuing up to join after the end of the three-month moratorium on membership, they are leaving in droves, especially since the latest membership list leak from Dowson's Belfast bunker.

All this comes on top of the party's forced climbdown over its racist constitution, the non-appearance of its 2008 accounts and concern over the number of senior party officers who have been put on the European Parliament payroll as staff of the two BNP MEPs.

Tomorrow: Dowson's empire by Sonia Gable
Friday: Dissecting the Dowsons The leak of the BNP membership list last month has turned the spotlight on the party’s Belfast call centre, the tensions it has caused in the party, and the links between the man who runs it and a charity that has received a six-figure sum in EU funding. Matthew Collins and Simon Cressy investigate.

Hope not Hate