BNP still insolvent

The BNP finally published its 2006 accounts days before the fine for their late submission to the Electoral Commission would have doubled to £2,000. They make interesting reading, not only for the figures, and the failure to solve the mystery of the printing equipment, but also for the names of party activists listed in their various roles.

For a start the BNP's nominating officer and campaigns officer throughout the year was none other than Tony "Mad Bomber" Lecomber, despite his claim to have left the BNP 18 months ago after he was found out trying to hire a hit man to murder a leading politician and was sacked as the party's group development officer.

A full list of the party's Advisory Council will prove useful to those BNP members trying to establish the identity of the Searchlight mole that the BNP claims is present in that select group. It is also interesting to compare the list with the names of those who have signed up to Sadie Graham's and Kenny Smith's dissident group.

History is rewritten too. According to the chairman's introduction to the accounts Simon Darby "gave a very good account of himself in difficult circumstances" in a Channel Five studio discussion. In fact Darby was verbally slaughtered by Lord Lester QC. The account of the trial on race hate charges of Nick Griffin, the party leader, and Mark Collett, the BNP's former director of publicity, recently demoted to graphic designer, is also heavily embellished.

Seven "key permanent members of staff" are shown: Nick Griffin, Sadie Graham, John Walker, Dave Hannam, Martin Wingfield, Tina Wingfield and Steve Blake. Some have proved a good deal less than permanent and Hannam's position as assistant treasurer has recently been abolished, although it is unclear whether he has been made redundant.

Membership is stated as 6,281, down from the 6,502 shown in the 2005 accounts and a far cry from the 10,000 figure currently being bandied around by the BNP leadership. At the time of the BNP leadership election the voting figures indicated that the party had 8,604 members but this was widely thought to be an exaggeration.

The treasurer's and audit reports reveal that the party had not yet completed the task of setting up proper internal controls, which it started early in 2005, and so the auditors, Silver & Co of Cannock, had "to rely upon assurances and explanations given us by officers of the party". This is not an unusual let out for small organisations and gives the lie to the claim that the auditors would not sign the accounts until Kenny Smith was sacked for failing to provide receipts for administration expenditure. When asked about this allegation Frank Hogarth, a partner in Silver & Co, refused to comment.

Announcing the accounts on its website the BNP highlighted the increase in income and the surplus for the year. Income from donations and membership fees has indeed gone up, although income from commercial activities is down, something that will no doubt be blamed on the dissidents.

Campaign expenditure is a mere £19,016, almost all on leaflets. Even this tiny figure for a national organisation is an improvement on 2005 when nothing was spent on campaigning leaflets. Presumably party branches have to pay for everything themselves.

Staff costs are down £20,000 to £227,732 of which £145,447 is for employees and £104,764 on "professional fees" – payments outside the compulsory PAYE system of accounting for tax and national insurance contributions on employees' wages. One of the allegations Searchlight made based on the 2005 accounts is that the wages figure was impossibly low for the number of employees declared, suggesting that some employees were paid outside PAYE. The position has hardly improved. The accounts state that the total number of staff has increased from nine in 2005 to 13, which means that the average wage per staff member is still only around £11,000. Remember Ian Dawson, the former group support officer, recently stated that he worked for the party earning £14,400 and this was "probably the lowest full-time wage in the party".

Collett is not listed as a key staff member, although he clearly spends a considerable amount of his time working for the party. Either he is one of those still paid as a self employed person or his remuneration comes in another way. Perhaps some of the BNP's £30,000 of expenditure on commercial printing and reproduction goes his way, or the similar sums spent on producing The Voice of Freedom and Identity. Quite what Collett did as director of publicity is unclear seeing as the party spends so little on leaflets and only £1,410 on "promotional expenditure".

Income from tickets to the BNP's Red White Blue summer festival fell from £15,808 in 2005 to £9,242 but the cost of putting the event on also fell by £4,000. Perhaps BNP members have started getting bored with it. Trafalgar Club income and expenditure is not separately itemised, an example of the lack of transparency about which the dissidents have complained. What does the party have to hide here?

Although the BNP made a surplus of nearly £19,000 compared to a deficit of nearly £95,000 in 2005, it was not enough to take the party out of insolvency. A £35,000 surplus of liabilities over assets was financed partly by running up a debt of nearly £22,000 to the regional accounting unit (party branches and groups), although this was paid off in January 2007 out of the £46,000 cash it had in the bank at 31 December 2006. The amount owed to HM Revenue and Customs for PAYE and value added tax was half the sum at the start of the year, suggesting that HMRC became less tolerant of the BNP's attempts to borrow from the taxpayer.

The largest liability is "subscriptions in advance". This would normally cover the proportion after 31 December 2006 of annual subscriptions to publications paid in the course of the year. In this case it is probably membership subscriptions because it is way too large for subscriptions to Freedom and Identity. That this sum has doubled to £67,548 may be because the BNP made a big effort to get people to pay their 2007 membership fees at the end of 2006 rather than at the beginning of 2007. This would be consistent with the large cash balance at the end of the year, much of which was spent in January 2007 on paying off the party's debt to the branches. In other words, much of 2007's membership income has been spent in 2006.

A note to the accounts takes a swipe at Kenny Smith, though not by name, for failing to provide receipts for £14,000 of funds "transferred to the B N Publications account so as to allow the printing department to funding [sic]". The party first accused him of failing to account for "up to £17,000" and rapidly dropped the "up to". The fact that it is now £14,000 will undoubtedly get overlooked by the Griffin loyalists. And why the B N Publications account should be off balance sheet is unclear, as it would appear to be part of the party's administration.

Another note explains that the Excalibur stock held at the year end has not been included in the accounts. Its omission would depress the commercial (and therefore taxable) profit (though as in 2005 there is no sign that any corporation tax is paid). It is the reason for the omission that is interesting, namely that "the very nature of the stock raises questions as to it's [sic] realisable value". Well we certainly wouldn't buy it.

"Certain party officials are involved and hold positions with 'Great White Records'", the accounts state, revealing that the party buys CDs at commercial rates from the company, owned by Hannam, and resells them. Great White Records also supplied "sound assistance at venues" amounting to £9,618, another means of transferring money to Hannam. As we expected, the accounts do not show the rumoured investment by the party of £50,000 in Great White Records, which is therefore either a myth or another "off balance sheet" transaction.

And finally, there is no solution to the mystery of the BNP's printing equipment. In 2005 the party claimed to have spent variously £75,000 or £70,000 on printing equipment, but the 2005 accounts only showed acquisitions of equipment (of any sort) of £51,671. In June 2007 when Chris Jackson challenged Griffin for the party leadership, some people asked questions about why Collett was always late in producing leaflets for the BNP after the party had spent "£70,000" on printing equipment. The BNP's reply was that the party had bought four high quality digital duplicators, three folding machines and power guillotine for £70,000 but that after the 2005 general election they were "given to the regions" and no longer kept for head office jobs.

Yet neither the 2005 accounts nor the 2006 accounts show any disposal of equipment, which if by means of a gift would have turned the small 2006 surplus into a loss. Was the equipment ever in the accounts? Who owns it now? Was the BNP lying in 2005, in 2007 or both? We think party members have a right to know.

BNP in crisis

All the King’s men

Nick Griffin, the BNP leader, has surrounded himself with a group of trusted lieutenants, of whom all but one appear not to be party members. At the same time he has reduced the powers of the party’s Advisory Council, which now meets infrequently. BNP members should be concerned at how Griffin, fresh from seeing off the challenge to his leadership in summer, is trying to consolidate his power and change the party.

Arthur Kemp

Nick Griffin has always believed in forming a political elite. In the 1980s he called them his “political soldiers”. Now they are the BNP’s “voting members”, the only people allowed to attend the party’s annual general meeting and vote on resolutions. Activists have to meet several conditions to qualify as voting members. One is to attend ideological training to ensure members support the right policies, and it is Arthur Kemp whom Griffin charged with its delivery.

Born in what was then white-ruled Southern Rhodesia, Kemp studied and worked in South Africa, where he became a state intelligence agent and played a role in the run-up to the murder of the prominent ANC leader Chris Hani in April 1993.

Kemp regards himself as something of an expert on race and is famed in white supremacist circles internationally as the author of March of the Titans, a monumental tome which contends that civilisation collapses when “swamped” by “racial aliens”. His sources for the book, which is also vehemently antisemitic and questions the veracity of the Holocaust, include hardline nazis. He attends Holocaust denial and hardline racist conferences in the US and contributes to journals in that field.

Lee Barnes

The BNP’s “legal eagle”, though not a party member, Lee Barnes’s unpopularity in the BNP grew after Griffin put him in charge of moderating the BNP’s internal forum, to which only party members are allowed access. The row led to the forum’s temporary closure just when Griffin’s second trial on race hate charges opened in November last year. Although Barnes’s name is no longer on the BNP’s list of national officers and his column has disappeared from the party website, Griffin recently commended Barnes’s blog describing it as “an intensely argued, intellectually inventive thing”.

Inventive is right. As for intellectual, recently he described a well known musician as “Junkie scumbag piece of shit worshipped by scumbag UAF fuckwits and NME wankers”. And writing about BBC reports on education he said: “They find some ugly geeza bird with hairy legs called Miranda who then bangs on about …” and claimed schools were run by “boring left wing assholes”. When Barnes does try to be intellectual he rapidly becomes incoherent, drawing implausible conclusions from dubious evidence using ever lengthening words and sentences. Several people have described Barnes as very eccentric.

Emmanuel Brun d’Aubignosc

One of the least known of Griffin’s new clique, Emmanuel Brun d’Aubignosc runs the Altermedia “white nationalist” news network and provides web services to the BNP as well as managing several leading European hate websites, according to his own postings on the international nazi Stormfront forum. A wealthy Belgian in his thirties, he claims Jean-Marie Le Pen, leader of the French National Front, personally tasked him with creating a pan-European white nationalist web presence.

He also acts as webmaster to David Duke, the former US Ku Klux Klan leader who now plays a leading role in the international extreme right. Duke, d’Aubignosc and Griffin met in Germany in summer 2002. D’Aubignosc designs, manages and updates Duke’s official website and also does business with Chris Evans, a former unit commander of the US nazi organisation the National Alliance and marketing director for its hate-music company Resistance Records.

D’Aubignosc holds hardline antisemitic views. In May 2004 he wrote on Altermedia: “Our enemies are the vicious people who hate black people so much they have been using them to destroy us by miscegenation or ‘racial mixing’ which is a form of genocide for us. They are the people who lie, lie, lie to drive America into wars of Israeli conquest. They are the people who deny every nation the right to its own secure living space, while, at the same time, they demand that same space for their own people. They are the ones who plunder American and European taxpayers to subsidise their own terrorist state. They are the ones who poison our children’s minds with MTV. They are the people who sell our women on the meat markets of forced prostitution and pornography on the streets of Jerusalem.”

Patrick Harrington

Not only is Patrick Harrington not a BNP member, he is one of the leaders of a rival political party, Third Way, which also cavorts under the name National Liberal Party.

Harrington is also a longstanding political comrade of Griffin from their days in the National Front in the 1980s and notably accompanied Griffin to Libya in 1988 in a failed attempt to obtain financial support from Colonel Gaddafi. A year later their NF political soldiers group had split, with Griffin forming the International Third Position and Harrington setting up Third Way a few months afterwards.

Harrington reappeared at Griffin’s side in 2006 when he was brought in as general secretary of Solidarity, the BNP’s trade union front. At first it seemed he was there to maintain the fiction that Solidarity was independent of the BNP. But when a row broke out between Harrington and the two BNP members on the Solidarity executive, which quickly led to a split in the union, it quickly became clear that Harrington was the only man Griffin could trust.

Since then Harrington has brought in two more Third Way activists, Graham Williamson and David Kerr, to help run Solidarity. Third Way’s political philosophy would appear to differ considerably from that of the BNP. Its website features an equal opportunities statement and it claims to welcome “guest workers … to fill gaps in the country’s infrastructure”. It seems that Griffin’s desire to build a political elite along the lines of the political soldiers overrides any superficial ideological differences.

Alan Goodacre

The BNP’s economics guru, Alan Goodacre has come from nowhere to command a key role in the formation of BNP policy as a member of the party’s Policy Forum. His influence can readily be detected in the economics section of the party’s 2005 manifesto and several articles by him appear on the BNP’s website.

According to John Bean, editor of the BNP’s magazine Identity, Goodacre is also the editor of Jihad Watch, a BNP subscription email bulletin. Griffin has become increasingly Islamophobic and Goodacre helps fuel this obsession. In a letter to the Jewish Chronicle he claimed that the BNP had genuinely repudiated antisemitism and no longer denied the Holocaust, while appealing to British Jews to understand that the BNP “are the only party in Britain that is truly serious about fighting the Islamofascist threat”. His views received short shrift from the Jewish community.

Goodacre has also been at the forefront of a prudish demand for a return to Victorian sexual values as the only way to attain an imagined morale high ground over Islam.

Simon Darby

The only BNP member among Griffin’s new cabal, Simon Darby was recently appointed the BNP’s press officer after the abrupt departure of Stuart Russell who, rumour has it, was told to go away by Arthur Kemp. Darby was already, and remains, the BNP’s deputy leader, a fact that emerged during Griffin’s first trial on race hate charges early in 2006, when everyone assumed it would be Scott McLean, the BNP’s deputy chairman, who would take over had Griffin been convicted and imprisoned.

Darby, who has also been the BNP’s West Midlands organiser and director of information technology, demonstrated his ability at dealing with difficult questions when he took part in a studio discussion after the screening of a documentary on nazi hate music early in 2006. He was totally demolished by Lord Lester, QC and after evasion, lies and an eruption into antisemitism, he seized the opportunity of a commercial break to disappear.

Like many BNP members these days, Darby is a keen blogger. Coincidentally his blog started two days before the sudden resignation of his predecessor as BNP press officer, Stuart Russell. It is an eclectic mixture of twitcher notes, political musings and attempts at developing his technical skills with video, sound recordings and camera. One clip of a recording of a telephone conversation last month attracted several complaints from readers who were unable to play it. He has now expressed a desire to upload a recording of the deep grunt of a fallow deer at the start of the rutting season.

Tony Lecomber

Although Tony Lecomber was removed from BNP membership in summer after he assaulted Eddy Butler, the BNP elections officer, he still acts as a behind-the-scenes adviser to BNP officers and rumours continue to circulate that he remains close to Griffin.

Formerly Griffin’s number two, Lecomber was convicted and jailed on five charges under the Explosives Act after he tried to bomb the headquarters of a political organisation in the 1980s. He received another three-year prison sentence when he assaulted a Jewish teacher. Lecomber ran Griffin’s campaign for the party leadership in 1999 and has acted as his enforcer, much to the resentment of many party members.

More recently, in 2006, Lecomber tried to encourage Joe Owens, repeatedly named by Searchlight as a gangland hitman, to carry out a “hit” on a Cabinet minister. Nevertheless Griffin was reluctant to ditch him. Griffin even kept Lecomber on the party payroll while telling party members that links had been cut.

When Lecomber attacked Butler outside Loughton tube station, Griffin was only able to prevent Butler from going to the police by promising to expel Lecomber. But unlike other people removed from the BNP, Lecomber was not “proscribed”, which meant party members were allowed to associate with him socially. A very mild notice to members described Lecomber as “a long-term, devoted and very valuable key official in the BNP and a genuine nationalist” and recognised his “sterling work for the cause in the past and his selflessness in stepping away in order to avoid compromising the future”.

If Lecomber is part of Griffin’s new cabal that would leave Butler, architect of the BNP’s elections strategy, in an invidious position.

Searchlight

Griffin and Co: Asset-strippers and Dictators

A pro-BNP blog that started up recently as a response to attacks on the financial probity of the party from the NNP and various others (including us) has printed an article that begins 'Why do stories about alleged 'corruption' within the BNP surface with such monotonous regularity on the Internet?' Well, there's a very simple answer to that - but let's take a look at what the article says.

The point of the article is to establish that the BNP is not corrupt and it attempts to do this by making a number of statements which need examining.

Nick Griffin has a Cambridge Law degree, has run rings around the best barristers that the Crown Prosecution Service have thrown at him in three free speech trials, and has demolished every Establishment 'big gun' radio and TV interviewer he has ever faced. If the man was in it for the money, he certainly wouldn't be in the BNP!

Nick Griffin actually has a 2.2, which is okay but hardly earth-shattering - in Jurisprudence, which is nowhere near as exciting as some weird people might think. As far as the trials go, the writer seems to have forgotten that in 1998 Griffin was given a two-year suspended sentence for distributing material likely to incite racial hatred. The more recent so-called 'free speech' trials of last year were both inadvisable and unnecessary, and there can't be an anti-fascist commentator anywhere who thought Griffin would actually be convicted though we would all have liked to have seen it. In any case, he hardly ran rings around the prosecution, nor has he ever demolished any radio or TV interviewer he has faced. Far from it in fact - he tends to come across as inept and stumbling to anyone with even rudimentary critical ability.

Land Registry records confirm that Nick's wife brought their home in Wales on a mortgage for £25,000 in the early 1990s. Obviously prices have gone up since then, but it's hardly the price of a palace.

Who cares, though wasn't Griffin declared bankrupt with debts of £70,000 on June 16th 1994 at Welshpool and Newtown County Court? Wonder where he got the money to buy the farm? And where he got the money to do the barn conversion which would have added considerably to the value of the place? Oh yes, that was paid for by the membership wasn't it. Presumably, Griffin is paying the money back at some point?

Interesting to note that it was Griffin's wife who bought the farm. Presumably that's something to do with either his bankruptcy or it's a tax dodge.

When travelling on speaking tours, Mr. Griffin invariably stays at the homes of BNP members. All other political leaders use plush hotels...

Bullshit. Where does he stay when he's over in America, France, Sweden or Croatia (where it's rumoured he has bought another property - no doubt for the planned BNP Holiday Hotel from Hell)?

The finances and financial records of the BNP, which the Electoral Commission classifies as a 'major party', are therefore by law closely monitored not only by internal staff but also by an independent auditor who is bound by his professional code to ensure that everything is handled properly...

We have never heard the BNP described as a 'major' party simply because it isn't. Roughly the same amount of members as the Monster Raving Loony Party does not make it a major party by anyone's standards.

...His complete audit is in turn gone through with a fine toothed comb by officials from the Electoral Commission...

And it was pointed out by the auditor that because no bank wanted to handle the accounts of the fascist BNP, most transactions were carried out in cash, making it extremely difficult to keep tabs on expenditure.

...The chances of money being illictly raised, spent or stolen under such a system are effectively zero. The finances of the modern BNP are the most open and transparent of any party in the history of British nationalism.

The second statement of that sentence might well be true but we're still wondering where the real accounts are, where the accounts of the Trafalgar Club are, where the income from the numerous business ventures appears in the accounts, how much everyone who is employed by the BNP actually gets paid, where the real foreign donations are listed and so on ad nauseum...

Let's face it: Far from being a passport to luxury, high living and privilege, running the BNP - in a country with Islamic terror cells, endemic violence among certain immigrant communities, left-wing thugs and a Politically Correct legal system operated by a totalitarian government - is a dangerous as well as a thankless task.

Strange, I thought Griffin's farm was set in its own land and came complete with a sauna and jacuzzi and so on. I could be wrong but that sounds pretty luxurious to me.

I've yet to see any evidence of a physical attack on Nick Griffin - ever - from anybody except Tony Lecomber, and he was actually attacking Eddie Butler and Griffin just got in the way. The only other mention of an attack was when the BNP tried to claim at attempt on Griffin's life over in Sweden on one of his many trips abroad. The bomb was unprimed and would never have gone off and it eventually emerged that the liar Griffin hadn't even been on the train that had been under threat.

The BNP is the only household name party in the UK which is 'in the black'. All the others are mired in massive debt, because running a political party's central machine is a very costly exercise.

That's odd because the BNP is the only party which the auditor pointed out was close to bankruptcy. The BNP could only survive by stealing branch money.

Any head of any organisation will at times have to discipline individuals within that organisation, and to defend the interests of the organisation against rivals. Both the punished guilty and jealous rivals have clear motives for lying about the man who has put them in their place, or the successful organisation that blocks their own personal or group ambitions.

Ah yes, the people Griffin has sacked. Like one of two former treasurers Griffin's sacked, Mike Newland, who protested at the plainly unacceptable blurring of the boundaries between the chairman's private business concerns as a secondhand car dealer (Affordable Cars) on the one hand, and party finances on the other, not to mention the making of wholly illegal payments (£1500 is mentioned at one point) to Tony Lecomber, who was claiming benefits at the time. In September 2000, Newland wrote;

'Griffin was elected on a clear pledge to have full financial accountability and fell at the first hurdle when reasonable questions were asked. He and Lecomber have shown themselves incapable of running the organisation as a legitimate affair. I thought that Griffin had matured sufficiently enough to behave sensibly and I was wrong...I misjudged him and that was my terrible mistake for which I eat humble pie.'

Griffin has sacked numerous people from the BNP mostly for questioning the accounts - the Edwards' are another example. But our favourite was the Sharon Ebanks scam that caused so much harm to the BNP.

Ebanks, you'll recall, was elected as the councillor for Kingstanding in Birmingham by a miscount of the votes. Though the mistake was noticed on the night of the count, the winner had already been announced and nothing could be done unless there was a High Court challenge from the party that should have taken the seat. Labour duly made the challenge and Ebanks, on advice from the BNP's legal wizards (Lee Barnes and Nick Griffin) fought it and lost.

Losing in the High Court is an expensive business and Ebanks' costs were, as far as we can gather, around £5000. The BNP promptly started asking for donations and raised, we're reliably informed, around £7000.

For some bizarre reason, everything then went pear-shaped for the BNP. They'd lost the seat but were sitting on top of a propaganda goldmine - small party having to raise big funds for cock-up that wasn't its fault, successful fundraising saves reputation of ousted councillor etc etc. Okay, no councillor but the loss could easily have been turned to a victory played the right way.

But the BNP decided not to do this. In fact, despite the membership forking out £7000 of its own money to pay Ebanks' High Court costs, the party decided to keep it. At one point (when she was threatened with bankruptcy) Ebanks was advised by the party to get a credit card to pay off the debt to the court.

The uproar from the far-right was predictably bad and the BNP came in, justifiably, for a hell of a lot of criticism from people it would consider supporters - the nazi forum Stormfront, for example. It got so bad that Stormfront members called a collection together and raised the money Ebanks needed and the debt was duly paid, no thanks at all to the BNP.

Ebanks was promptly sacked from the BNP and, in a fit of pique, formed her own party, the NNP, with a bunch of other BNP rejects.

The point of all this waffle - and there is a point, you'll be pleased to read - is that Griffin and his chums will use you up and spit you out. If you're stupid enough to question any disrepancy in the accounts, you're out. If you disagree with the leadership, you're out. If you don't do as you're told, you're out. And we've now seen this dictatorship spread to the external organisations of the BNP, with Solidarity being a fine case in point.

Clive Potter and Tim Hawke question the Solidarity accounts and suddenly they're untrustworthy, probably reds and certainly traitors. It's pretty clear from all we've been able to read that Potter and Hawke will be kicked out and Harrington reinstated as President, complete with full backing from Griffin and an unbeatable majority on the union's Executive - which will be the kiss of death to any hope of it providing any real alternative to any of the genuine unions and their shortcomings as perceived by the BNP. In short, Solidarity will become a cash cow for Griffin and co until it collapses completely.

Griffin and the BNP are asset-strippers and the only people they can strip assets from are those poor deluded sods who have joined the party/union.

There is a hell of a lot more to write about Griffin's BNP - the rip-offs and general thievery would fully occupy this blog for the next two years - but for the moment we'll leave this issue (though we'll return to it at greater length) with a quote from Nick Griffin himself;

'In increasingly hard economic times, a group of people the size of the BNP and its support base can provide a significant assured market for a variety of small businesses.'

Which says it all really.

News in brief from way over on the far-right

Not much of a welcome in the hillside...

A couple of interesting rumours have come to us over the past few days, one of which is that BNP leader Nick Griffin is not allowed to have more than five non-family visitors at his Welshpool home at any one time. This must be a bugger, as the long-suffering BNP membership paid for his barn conversion into a (ho-ho) meeting/conference facility out of their donations and membership fees.

One wonders whether the reason for the ban is that there are too many member-funded leadership piss-ups on the premises or if it's just that Griffin never actually got planning permission for the conversion and the local council has finally put its foot down.

We'd (obviously) quite like to know more about this, so all information will be gratefully received via the comments or by email.

The other rumour tells of an incident where a large number of windows were broken down on t'farm - Griffin's farm, that is - presumably at one of the aforementioned piss-ups. Apparently, the incident was reported to the police but Griffin's complaint was met with complete indifference.

Griffin needs to watch out. The newly-proscribed lunatic Tony Lecomber is out there, angry at finally being booted out of the party hierarchy and still itching to assassinate someone.

Stormfront fighting Griffin challenge

Meanwhile, back at the appalling Stormfront, Griffin-supporter and financial-backer John Joy Tree/Andy Robertson is causing havoc by closing down threads and banning members who show any sign of support for Chris Jackson, the hardline nazi who is allegedly standing against Griffin in the first leadership challenge of his long dictatorship.

JJT's actions are proving so irritating to Stormfront members and erstwhile Griffin-supporters that they are writing to us to tell us how angry they are. Just yesterday we received an email from a recently-banned member that stated in no uncertain terms that if JJT's actions were what passed for democratic in Griffin's world, he could shove his vote up his butt and Chris Jackson could rely on his support instead. God knows why this person's emailing us rather than Griffin but we don't really care - we love to see dissent in the nazi ranks. :-)

The worst web page in the world?

We're going to break the habit of a lifetime and put a direct link to a nazi page, not because there's anything there that anyone in their right mind would be likely to want to read - simply because it must deserve some prize as possibly the worst web page in existence.

We're pretty sure worse ones exist and it might be a laugh to see a few so feel free to send us some links, but ohmigod, the Final Conflict page is truly ghastly, even if you ignore the content - assuming you can find it. Go take a peek before it's removed out of sheer embarrassment. If this is all the master-race can manage, we really don't have much to worry about.

On a much darker note:

Nazi Stormfront forum attacks Jordan's 'half-breed' disabled child

The Stormfront forum, owned by ex-KKK klansman Don Black (a very good friend of Nick Griffin), has hosted a particularly filthy attack on the model Jordan (Katie Price), or rather her son Harvey. Harvey, who is four years old, suffers blindness and autism (caused by septo-optic dysplasia) but is a target for the far-right not simply because he's disabled but because he's the product of a mixed-race relationship.

We'll warn you before you continue - these comments are both disgusting and deeply offensive to any normal human. It's also worth remembering that most of the BNP leadership are happy to post on Stormfront and share space with these vermin.

'I know it's a terrible thing to say about a disabled child,but that half breed child is repulsive...'

'Her niglet is utterly abhorrent, really disgusting to look at...'

'Bad genes, and yes the child is horrid...'

'Yes,the kid is repulsive.I feel a tad guilty saying that about a disabled kid,but it's partly the fact it's half black...'

'Aside from being a fat, fuck ugly niglet, I was under the impression that the only other disability it had was being blind, although I have never really paid much attention to these two overexposed idiots...'

'These whores like Jordan should have more consideration for what they are bringing into the world...'

'Price has allowed herself to be impregnated by a nig, but hypocrites like Jolie, Madonna etc have gone round the world adopting niglet kids, yet would never let a nig near them in real life...'

'The child is a mong. Half bred mong, nice. Also I find mongs just that.No mongs in my famliy.'

Pure filth.

BNP's leadership challenger loses before he even starts the challenge

News from the BNP bunker reaches us to the effect that the current BNP leadership is fighting off the proposed challenge from Chris Jackson in the only way it knows - by completely subverting the democratic process.

Curiously for a party that purports to be the only truly democratic party in the known universe, its internal structure is probably as far away from democracy as it can possibly be. It certainly has nothing remotely like one member one vote and has recently introduced voting rights at its conference - where all the really big decisions should be made - for those who donate large sums of money into Nick Griffin's pock- party coffers.

Now it has been revealed that the leadership challenger, although he fulfils all the convoluted requirements designed solely to keep Griffin in place until he dies or the membership has made him rich enough to retire, cannot use the internet, printed, electronic or recorded material to advance his case. What, one wonders, is left? Semaphore?

This denial of fair opportunity for any challenger to put their case before the membership is indicative of the corruption and anti-democratic values of the fascist British National Party. It talks democracy all the time yet can't even manage to use it for its own membership.

This lack of democracy extends beyond the party itself. The Stormfront nazi forum - an essential online meeting place for the net-savvy BNP member as the party's own forum is regarded as too strongly censored to be of any use - has been keeping talk of the challenge (and the challenger) at an absolute minimum. Now Stormfront owner, ex-Klansman Don Black (a close friend of Nick Griffin), has come in for a mountain of criticism for closing down a huge and largely supportive Chris Jackson thread. Speculation on and off the forum is that one of the senior moderators, John Joy Tree (Andy Robertson in real life), has used his influence as a substantial financial backer of Stormfront and a staunch BNP supporter, to have the thread removed, no doubt at Nick Griffin's behest. Griffin, it should be noted, is now frequently referred to as 'Crook' Griffin. Very apt.

A 'nationalist' blog, run by one 'NorthWest Nationalist', has also reported that Chris Jackson is suddenly having problems with his phone and internet connections at this most unfortunate moment. As NWN points out, conspiracy theorists, both in and out of the far-right, will be having a field day.

Jackson should be careful. The ranks are closing to protect the BNP's Fuhrer and Jackson should bear in mind that Tony Lecomber, bomber, psycho, suspected security service grass and Griffin's greatest and most lunatic supporter, is wandering around like a loose cannon, allegedly suffering bizarre mood swings and wondering who to have a go at next.

The BNP's secret agenda: just making money or civil/race war?

Back in 1999 the BNP used to produce a magazine named Patriot, then edited by Griffin-loyalist Tony Lecomber. The Spring issue carried an article by Nick Griffin entitled ‘BNP – Freedom Party!’ in which Griffin set out his plans for the ‘modernisation’ of the BNP, a process which involved the concealment of the party’s true agenda and presenting the public with an entirely fraudulent ‘image of moderate reasonableness’. The complete article can be read online here.

Though the party had managed to get a councillor elected (the execrable Derek Beacon) at Tower Hamlets in 1993, it had more or less stagnated since. This article was one of many that was to lead to Griffin’s victory over the founder and then-leader of the far-right party, John Tyndall, later in the year, resulting in him becoming the leader and allowing him to implement his proposed BNP ‘makeover’, a word that fits more aptly than you would at first think because clearly the ‘modernisation’ of the party is all cosmetic. Wipe off the make-up and you very quickly begin to see the same old fascist party underneath.

It was Griffin’s stated intention to put the boot-boy image that the BNP had behind it, presenting instead a clean image of a modern and acceptable mainstream party. The racism would still be there, just well-concealed. To a large extent, he has been successful. Certainly the fact that a voter intends to vote BNP no longer carries the social stigma that it used to just a few short years back – though this is really a consequence of changing societal attitudes rather than anything that Griffin or the party leadership has done. Nevertheless, the BNP’s makeover has made a difference to the public’s perception of it and its policies – but how much has it really changed?

Griffin’s contempt for the voters is apparent from the very first sentence, where he states: ‘The British people are incurably apathetic’. But his aim is for the party to appeal to those apathetic voters despite all the bad press it received in the past for its connections to the National Front, Combat 18, Blood and Honour and so on. The party, certainly back in 1999, was regarded as patently extreme, and this had to change. Griffin lays out the ground:

‘Let’s start with responsibility. Tony Lecomber’s review of The Failure of British Fascism in the last issue of Patriot included a frighteningly apt phrase in its description of the past efforts of British nationalism – "careless extremism". If we seriously want to be elected, the very first step is to look at the things we do, or condone, which make us unelectable, and then to strive to change them from now on, and to minimise the impact of past mistakes.’

So, he proposes that the BNP examine what puts people off about the party, with a view to changing things. But there’s also the problem of the membership. Referring to the unelectability of many members with violent and racist pasts, Griffin has this to say:

‘Of course people change and grow up, and some people who made such mistakes years ago have played, and will continue to play, very important roles in the BNP. But anyone who expects more than a marginalised minority to actually vote for such individuals is living in cloud-cuckoo land. This is not to call for a politically correct witch-hunt, or to advocate a softening of policies, but simply to point out that, if we really wish to be taken seriously, we have to offer to the public candidates for whom Mr. & Mrs. Average Briton can vote. Those people who have now bitterly regretted errors in their past can do one hundred and one things for the party, but standing as unusually vulnerable candidates in important elections should not be one of them. However much we expect our enemies in the media to try to beat us, it is only sensible and responsible to refrain from handing them sticks with which to do it.’

So the violent thugs can take a back seat while the suits can move to the front. Note the highlighted section that makes it clear that policies are not about to change. The fact that any apparent changes are only to fool the public is made very clear in this snippet:

‘As long as our own cadres understand the full implications of our struggle, then there is no need for us to do anything to give the public cause for concern. Rather, since we need their support in order to be able to turn impotent theory into practical reality, we must at all times present them with an image of moderate reasonableness.’

Thus the metamorphosis of the British National Party becomes clear. There is no metamorphosis – merely a mask that covers the old violent nazi party with a thin veneer of respectability.

‘This is so blindingly obvious that it shouldn’t even need saying, but there are still a few who confuse shouting hardline slogans with steady commitment to getting ourselves into a position in which we can put our principles into practice. Politics is always the art of the possible, so we must judge every policy by one simple criterion: Is it realistically possible that a decisive proportion of the British people will support it? If not, then to scale down our short-term ambitions to a point at which the answer becomes ‘yes’ is not a sell-out, but the only possible step closer to our eventual goal.’

What that ‘eventual goal’ is, is not made clear. Presumably, as the article was in Patriot, a magazine for BNP supporters, the reader was assumed to know. This reader however, finds the phrase extremely sinister. You don’t have to hang around BNP territory long to hear the phrases ‘civil war’, ‘race war’ and ‘revolution’ disturbingly often. At least often enough to feel that the phrase ‘final solution’ is just around the corner.

This aside, Griffin also uses this document to set out his plans for the business side of BNP activities. Much-failed businessman or not, he clearly sees the BNP membership as a source of funds – not simply via its sales of related goods but in other ways too. Thus, we read this:

‘In increasingly hard economic times, a group of people the size of the BNP and its support base can provide a significant assured market for a variety of small businesses.’

Here then we find the justification for such idiocies as Albion Life, the BNP’s disastrous life insurance arm that failed shortly after it started, the pointless skip hire and double-glazing websites, the Affordable cars fiasco, the bankrupt travel agency, the failed printing business, the internet radio station that never was, the surprisingly successful Trafalgar Club and the illegal but lucrative fund-raising Civil Liberty. In short, Griffin has found a source of funds in the BNP’s membership and he is determined to relieve it of as much cash as possible – whether to use for himself (barn conversions spring to mind), to support his pals in the BNP hierarchy or to fund the ephemeral ‘eventual goal’ is debatable but might be clearer after reading this passage:

‘Here too is a process which has already begun, but BNP teams such as the Media Monitoring Unit, the video unit, and initiatives such as the Land and People farming/environmental circle are only the start. Many, many more such semi~ autonomous BNP-linked operations will have to be created as we duplicate various functions of the old system and create the ‘state-within-a-state’ which is an essential part of the preparations for any cultural and political revolution.’

There’s that word ‘revolution’ again.

In many ways, Nick Griffin is a laughable character. He comes across as the Del Trotter of politics, always with one eye (no joke intended) on the main chance. If he wasn’t so dangerous, he’d be funny. But, unlike his peers in the mainstream parties, he has long been aware of the power of the internet and TV – though the two look likely to merge in the next couple of decades – so much so that eight years ago, he was preparing his troops to embrace this intertwining of the old and new media.

‘The way in which TV soap operas have become pseudo-families for millions of lonely TV watchers gives us a clue as to the power which could be wielded by an Internet TV station in a few years’ time.’

Indeed. A fact which seems to have been missed by all the other parties up to now and which is only just beginning to be addressed. Nevertheless, Griffin is not infallible. Far from it, in fact, as witnessed by the numerous business disasters with which he has been associated. Nor, despite the disasters, is he to be taken lightly. While he seems to find it difficult to separate the cause from the cash, hence; ‘the BNP is a holy crusade to save and rebuild all we hold dear, but it is also a business’, he also goes to great pains to make himself clear in this document. Thus we read:

‘What message and image should we be aiming to get across in those elections? For the public as a whole we must keep it simple and put things across in the least controversial way possible. Of course, we must teach the truth to the hardcore, for, like you, I do not intend to allow this movement to lose its way. But when it comes to influencing the public, forget about racial differences, genetics, Zionism, historical revisionism and so on – all ordinary people want to know is what we can do for them that the other parties can’t or won’t.’

The phrase that’s highlighted is, in my opinion, extremely disturbing and is really what this entire article is about. David Copeland, the Soho nailbomber, was heavily influenced by his time in the BNP, and his stated intention was to provoke a race war. Robert Cottage, currently awaiting retrial for possession of weapons and explosive chemicals, and a long-time BNP member and several times a candidate, claimed to be preparing for what he saw as an inevitable civil war. The disturbances that took place in Oldham, Burnley and Bradford back in 2001 were said to have been provoked and encouraged by the BNP and other extreme far-right groups. One wonders, reading this, if this is in some way allied to ‘the truth’ that Griffin insists must be taught to ‘the hardcore’. Certainly these events, and so many others, smack of Griffin’s worrying ‘holy crusade’.

It is a fact that last month Nick Griffin made an interesting remark as an aside in his blog about his speaking tour of East Anglia. Referring to the English Civil War, he said; ‘…in due course, it will of course have to be called the First English Civil War, in order to differentiate it from the one to come.’

Since the riots in 2001, there has been a growing belief that the BNP was working to a secret agenda as well as its public one. This document, written in 1999, seems to confirm that this is indeed the case.

The BNP's links with terrorism

Click on image for full size
A pdf file of the poster (42k) can be downloaded from here.

England First Party's new chairman is convicted electoral fraudster

The England First Party (EFP) chairman Mark Cotterill, has resigned and is handing over the reins to convicted electoral fraudster Steve Smith. Smith, the former organiser for the British National Party's Burnley branch, has taken over immediately, following Cotterill's announcement that he is leaving to take up a new job in Preston.

Steve Smith followed the usual path of the English nazi, first being involved in the BNP, moving away from that when he was about to be convicted for electoral fraud and into the British People's Party (a more hardcore nazi group led by alcoholic Eddie Morrison and moronic Redwatch organiser Kevin Watmough), then drifting on to the EFP when he realised that the BPP was a dead duck.

EFP have managed to con the voters into putting two third-rate councillors into office in Blackburn, Cotterill himself and pub-owner Michael Johnson, and Smith is obviously hoping the party can build on that and add him to the list.

Smith's pedigree is just about what one would expect from a veteran of the BNP, BPP and EFP. A couple of years back he resigned from the BNP, ostensibly over its treatment of his nephew Luke Smith, former Burnley BNP councillor, football hooligan and violent thug extraordinaire. Following an incident where he smashed a bottle into the face of someone with whom he was having a disagreement at the BNP's annual 'family' do, the Red, White and Blue Festival, the BNP unceremoniously dumped him, much to Uncle Steve's chagrin. The BNP seemed perfectly content with Luke Smith's record of hooliganism; it just didn't like it when he got a bit more personal. The party of law and order, huh?

The real reason Steve Smith resigned was that he was about to be convicted for electoral fraud, which led to his being sentenced to six months on January 16th, 2002. He admitted to allowing false nominations to be submitted for the 2001 elections and received the sentence plus the statutory five-year ban on standing for public office.

Mark Cotterill, the outgoing EFP Chairman, is the main former fundraiser for the BNP via the now defunct American Friends of the BNP, who went off in a huff to start his own group, the England First Party (EFP), after a major fall-out with Nick Griffin over, rumour has it, large quantities of cash disappearing. Curious how most of the more prominent ex-BNP people resigned over money issues (with the dishonourable exception of Tony Lecomber), particularly given ex-bankrupt Nick Griffin's personal financial history.

The skills that Smith displayed when he was a BNP organiser will hopefully cause chaos in the EFP. His proteges include his ghastly nephew Luke, Maureen Stowe, who eventually resigned and led a campaign against the BNP, and the truly appalling Brian Turner, a violent racist who was convicted of assaulting his wife and a police officer in September 2005, a conviction that he can add to his previous eleven and his most recent, of racially abusing a group of Asian men in May 2006.

With the supremely untalented Smith in charge, we should see the demise of the England First Party within a year or two. We look forward to it.

Note: The '14 words' message on Smith's T-shirt refers to a corruption of a statement in Volume 1, Chapter 8 of Mein Kampf, commonly given as 'We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children'. A well-used nazi phrase.