Is the BNP's Lee Barnes losing the plot?

Before you read on, you need to know that there's an awful lot of swearing in this article. Not from us but from Lee Barnes, the British National Party's legal beagle who seems, at the very least, to have severe anger-management issues.

Barnes' blog, entitled '21st Century British Nationalism', is illustrated with an image of the Celtic god of light, Belenus. Belenus can be identified with the Irish god Bile, and the word bile pretty much sums up a large part of the content of Barnes' blog, which seems to be one of the many vehicles the BNP is currently using to disseminate its impotent fury at well, pretty much everyone and everything really.

A recent post on the blog deals with the closure of the New Nationalist Party (NNP), the group formed around a nucleus of angry BNP ex-pats which decided to give up the ghost a couple of weeks back. This group was led by former would-be BNP councillor Sharon Ebanks who, if you feel you really need to, can be read about here.

Although Barnes isn't actually a member of the BNP, he certainly has taken to using the terminology currently in vogue on the far-right, describing the NNP variously as uniform fetishists, saps and muppets. His major burst of vitriol though, is reserved largely for Ebanks herself, who he calls a 'demented harridan' and who he takes to task several times for her apparent crime (and he should know, or so he says) of being mixed race.

'It is one of the great ironies of history that the last gasp of the old extremist far right was under the leadership of a half black female leader.'

That statement might not actually be racist but it certainly reads like it.

A few days later, he had a go at Pete Doherty of Babyshambles, drugs and Kate Moss fame. Doherty comes in for a lot of flak from the far-right because he's into drugs in a big way and looks like shit but mostly because he's outspoken on the subject of the far-right and is prepared to put his money (and his band) where his mouth is. Because of this, Lee Barnes says;

'Pete Doherty - Junkie scumbag piece of shit worshipped by scumbag UAF fuckwits and NME wankers.'

Barnes talks of nationalism as if he is simply a nationalist but it's clear that, like most of his comrades in the BNP, he is far from that. He is a racist, pure and simple. As a racist, his response to the news that the geneticist James Watson had been universally attacked by more or less the entire media for his views that black people are less intelligent than whites was entirely to be expected;

'The mewling maggot filth of the media that condition and brainwash the masses ensure that the rule of the stupids is ensured. When a man with a mind, a free thinking and visionary mind, dares reveal the stupidity of the stupids then all the stupids come together to destroy him...They are howling and barking and pissing on his footprints...Not one of the media maggots that attacked James Watson, nor the idiotic so called 'scientists' they managed to scrape up from the shallow end of the scientific brain pool to attack him, dared confront him in a free and fair public debate...Instead they all just howled when he left the country and continue pissing on his prints in the mud. What a complete bunch of gutless bastards.'

Not quite the language one would expect from the legal representative of a so-called political party, particularly if one considers that if, by some bizarre and terrible fluke, the BNP suddenly became the governing party, he would be either the Lord Chancellor, Attorney General or the Justice Secretary.

But Sharon Ebanks, Pete Doherty and the media pale into insignificance beside Barnes' hatred for, curiously, the judiciary.

We can all quote numerous cases of judges who appear to have become stuck in the 19th Century or those whose sentences are both ludicrous and insulting to the victims of crime but there is always another stage to go to - the Appeal Court, the High Court, the House of Lords and so on - and our legal system, including the judiciary, is rightly regarded as one of the best in the world - or was until the right to trial by jury was abolished for many types of case. I'm no great advocate for the law but if I was to be tried for a crime anywhere, I would rather be tried here in the UK. Mistakes are made but justice - in a very general sense - is fairly well-served. Though if you listen to Lee Barnes, you may well think again.

Injustice rightly makes us angry. Severe and blatant injustice can leave us seething with anger and, if the government of the day is watching the media, which generally follows the lead given to it by the public, can lead to changes in the law which we hope will eventually benefit all of us, not just those who have directly suffered. But even when dealing with a case of outrageous injustice, the government, in the form of its Ministers and other representatives, speaks of such things in measured tones, keeping emotion firmly to one side as it deals with whatever the problem may be in a dignified and resolute manner. Compare that to Barnes' views on some of the judiciary;

'Yet again the dumb fucking Leftist and Liberal judges that infest the legal system like lice on a dying dogs back, have let a piece of shit free...This judge is the same cunt that gave the Wonderland paedophile gang sentences that equated to 15 months in prison...this cunt needs sacking...The fucking judges put Kevin Hughes away for 2 years because he had a scuffle with an asylum seeker that led to the asylum seekers shirt being ripped...This cunt blinds an old man and he walks free - yet we all know the real reason dont we. Yep, hes from an ethnic minority.'

What Barnes deliberately forgets to mention is that the victim was from an ethnic minority too. And the reason that the attacker wasn't jailed? Because, in the words of the judge;

'[Jailing him] would do nothing to protect the public in the future and my real concern is the public. It seems to me that the best way of ensuring that he is not a risk, is in relying on various support from psychiatrists and probation officers.'

The attacker, a diagnosed paranoid schizophrenic, was sentenced to a three year supervision order which requires him to receive psychiatric treatment. A jail term would serve simply to punish the man: at least this way, he both suffers a form of punishment and receives proper supervision and treatment.

Justice is a very tricky game but it is worst served by those who put emotion before sense, a failing that suits the knee-jerk populist policies of the self-serving BNP.

One wonders about Barnes' legal training and education. Though they appear to have been enough to make him the BNP's legal whizkid, they don't seem to have been of a high enough quality to help him spell 'apointee' or 'farsical'. They do however, allow his inherent racism to show itself on any available occasion.

In an attack on sentences that he deems too lenient, it's notable that Barnes makes his appeal on emotional grounds in the first instance, using paedophile-sentencing to illustrate his perhaps fair point that sexual crimes against children should almost automatically receive the highest sentence that can be given under the law. The point is lost though by the long list of exclusively illegal immigrants, asylum-seekers and just people with non-English names who are listed for all sorts of crimes simply because they are not white and thus are natural targets for BNP ire. Any selection of criminals, whether it is based on the nature of the crime, the apparent low sentence or even the age of the accused, will show the larger proportion are white - Lee Barnes' idiosyncratic selection has proven that his legal eye has a definite list away from justice for any kind of ethnic minority, which perhaps explains why he's not actually a practising solicitor or barrister.

Normally I'd make allowances for someone who regularly sees UFOs (honest), ignoring them in much the same as I would those who regularly communicate with their spirit guide, but in Barnes' case I'll make an exception. For a man who is meant to represent the BNP's views on legal matters, in my opinion he comes across as a racist thug - no different from the shaven-headed loons who used to march with Nick Griffin in the National Front, except that he has hair.

Race-row scientist's remarks condemned by minister as fuel for far-right

A Government minister has condemned a Nobel prize-winning geneticist for claiming that black people are less intelligent than white people.

David Lammy, the skills minister, said that James Watson's comments were “deeply offensive” and would “succeed only in providing oxygen for the BNP”.

It follows comments by the US-born Dr Watson to a newspaper in which he said that he was “inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa” because “all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours — whereas all the testing says not really”.

He hoped everyone was equal, he said, but “people who have to deal with black employees find this is not true”.

Mr Lammy, a Harvard graduate whose family come from the Caribbean, said: “These comments are deeply offensive. They will succeed only in providing oxygen for the BNP. It is a shame that a man with a record of scientific distinction should see his work overshadowed by his own irrational prejudices. It is no surprise to me that the scientific community has condemned this outburst and I think people will recognise these comments for what they are.”

He added: “What is important is that this does not distract from the real business of giving people from all backgrounds the best possible chance in life.”

Dr Watson, 79, was one of three people working at Cambridge University who shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1962 for discovering the structure of DNA and now runs a School of Biological Sciences in the US. He made the controversial assertions in an interview in The Sunday Times.

Mr Lammy's comments follow the decision by the London Science Museum to ban Dr Watson from giving a lecture tomorrow after his comments were made public. The museum said that it was cancelling the American's speech. “The Science Museum feels that Nobel Prize winner James Watson's recent comments have gone beyond the point of acceptable debate and we are as a result cancelling his talk at the museum this Friday. If people want to know about the science behind genetics and race, they can book on to other events looking at this at the museum's Dana Centre over the next year.”

Dr Watson arrived in Britain yesterday to promote his latest book, Avoid Boring People: Lessons from a Life in Science. He may also be banned from appearing at other bookshops and lectures planned for its promotion.

Dr Watson has courted controversy in the past, reportedly saying that a woman should have the right to abort her unborn child if tests could determine it would be homosexual. He has also suggested a link between skin colour and sex drive, proposing a theory that black people have higher libidos, and claimed that beauty could be genetically manufactured. He has said: “People say it would be terrible if we made all girls pretty. I think it would be great.”

On the issue of obesity, Dr Watson has also been quoted as saying: “Whenever you interview fat people, you feel bad, because you know you're not going to hire them.”

Steven Rose, a professor of biological sciences at the Open University, labelled his recent comments as racist.

“This is Watson at his most scandalous. He has said similar things about women before but I have never heard him get into this racist terrain. If he knew the literature in the subject he would know he was out of his depth scientifically, quite apart from socially and politically.”

Times Online