Weekend briefing

Sneaking into Wigan following the multiple refusal of other venues in nearby Leigh to host its increasingly fugitive "Battle for Britain" fund-raising roadshow, the BNP is claiming an attendance of "well over one hundred people" for the event - notoriously symbolised by a stolen graphic showing a World War Two Spitfire flown by a Polish fighter ace.

Even giving the BNP the benefit of considerable doubt, "well over one hundred people" seems to us to be a very small number of activists to draw on from the populous North-west region for what was a heavily trailed showcase event, held on Friday night.

It is difficult to see how the BNP can claim the Wigan meeting the success it does, when according to the same party its ordinary branch meetings regularly attract an attendance of around one hundred. The North-west being home to a sizeable number of truculent anti-Griffin BNP dissidents is one possible reason for the derisory regional turnout.

An increasingly active and effective coalition of anti-fascists and concerned locals is very possibly another.

What is clear is that the BNP was seriously wrong-footed in the North-west. Not only was it forced to arrange a number of fall-back venues for its high profile roadshow, but the claim that there was "standing room only" at the final location is also an admission of how small and unsuitable it really was.

Prior to the roadshow a group of Liverpool BNP activists found themselves in an altercation outside the Ellesmere public house in Leigh that led to one person sustaining minor injuries and the arrest of another. There was also damage to BNP vehicles when locals objected to the presence of the BNP and its advertising trailer. We understand that the BNP members got out of their vehicles to confront the locals and had the worst of the ensuing violence.

BNP websites are now claiming that the violence was instigated by "blacks".

As I write, there is a certain amount of online speculation among far-Rightists that the Liverpool BNP contingent was ordered to the Ellesmere pub as a ruse to throw anti-fascist campaigners off the scent. Another way of putting it is that the BNP hung its Liverpool members out to dry, since the group and its advertising trailer could not fail to attract the attention of campaigners. Naturally, BNP Security was safely indoors protecting Nick Griffin from whatever threats to life and limb the party leader risks at the hands of his own members, and the Liverpool members were left to hold their own.

On Thursday, in a blatant attempt to inflame anti-Muslim passions, newly elected BNP councillor Paul Golding (of the dodgy family background) drove the BNP's Lie Lorry to Luton, the scene, earlier in the week, of a confrontation sparked when police allowed 20 Muslim religious extremists to demonstrate against the homecoming parade of the Royal Anglian Regiment.

"BNP’s Truth Truck Faces down Islamist Extremists in Luton" screams a headline on the BNP's website, for all the world as if Golding had single-handedly confronted an army of scimitar-wielding Dervishes.

The truth of Luton is that just 20 isolated lunatics failed to gain any support at all from a local Muslim population numbering 30,000 - since 99.93% of Luton's remaining Muslims managed to ignore the campaign of publicity and recruitment conducted by the extremists in the weeks preceding.

We think that says a lot for Luton's Muslim community - quite a number of whom were in the crowds cheering the Anglians along, as local news footage clearly shows.

The failure of the extremists to attract any support at all is not something you would know about from the subsequent hysterical media coverage of the affair, much of which would have been more at home on the pages of a BNP publication.

While politicians and community leaders in Luton worked hard (and largely uncredited) to repair the damage caused by the twenty extremists the opportunistic BNP worked just as hard to undo it. On the BNP website Golding brags that he took the Lie Lorry to Luton's largest mosque - an action that could only have been intended to provoke, and might well have resulted in violence.

Not being quite the British Lion he likes others to think he is, Golding "faced down" the Muslim faithful by driving off when some of them made unspecified "threatening moves" towards the Lie Lorry - which, translated, means that people were entering and leaving the Mosque as usual and a nervous Golding got cold feet.

Nick Griffin's grasping reaction to Luton was to fire off another in his interminable series of begging emails, hysterically claiming that the 20 isolated lunatics at the root of the trouble constituted a "horde of Muslim extremists". If a grouplet of just 20 can be extrapolated into a "horde" then we're left wondering if the "well over one hundred people" attending the BNP's Wigan roadshow is a product of the same imaginative thinking.

Taken together with a 2.5% vote loss in Rainhill (St. Helens) ward - in the heart of the North-west - in a by-election on Thursday, not the most glorious week in the BNP's history.