New BNP? Same old nazis and thugs

The BNP claims it has changed. A quick review of its election candidates shows that they are the same old nazis, thugs and racists that they always were

Tom Gower
Coventry North East

Gower works full-time as the BNP enquiries officer. He is also the Coventry contact for the racist and pagan Woden’s Folk and was involved in the English Heathen Front (EHF), ‘a racist group espousing “blood and soil” ideology. The EHF was the English “chapter” of the Allgermanische Heidnische Front (AHF), an international network of “tribes” that evolved out of the Norsk Hedensk Front, a group founded in 1993 by Varg Vikernes, the Norwegian black metal musician and murderer whose own brand of heathenism included a heavy dose of national socialism, antisemitism, eugenics and racism.

Shelley Rose
Luton North

A rising star in the BNP, Rose is part of a social group of BNP activists in the East Midlands and an antisemite who wrote on her Facebook page, “I would rather put myself out and pay a bit more at a smaller local shop, than line the pockets of the kikes that run Tesco”. She attended the National Front Remembrance Day parade in 2009 with Chris Hurst, the BNP PPC ‘for Twickenham.

Robin Evans
Blackburn

Evans was once a Blackburn BNP councillor but found the council budget too much to cope with. “It’s all mumbo jumbo, I don’t understand a word of it,” he stated. He resigned from the BNP in 2003 after an internal dispute and joined the openly fascist British National Socialist Party, returning to the BNP.

Ken Booth
Newcastle upon Tyne Central

Booth is the former North East National Front organiser who caused widespread disgust in 2007 when he compared the Nazi death camp at Auschwitz to Disneyland. He refused to believe the “official figures” of those who died in the Holocaust and did not recognise the “authenticity” of the buildings at Auschwitz.

Lynne Mozar
Buckingham

Mozar, who runs the BNP’s Trafalgar Club fundraising group, is notorious for her appearance on the Sky TV documentary BNP Wives in which “in private sometimes” she admitted calling black people “niggers”. ‘She also claimed that “Pakis” was the ‘“legal term for them [Asians]”. While manning a stall opposite a mosque in Fareham, Mozar shouted “fat slag” at a passerby who questioned her views.

Mathew Tait
Milton Keynes South

Tait, the Buckinghamshire BNP organiser, travelled to the cancelled 2010 American Renaissance conference, where he moaned to those who turned up that the Equality and Human Rights Commission court case had forced the BNP to accept “people who we would wish to not have in our country really to be members of our party”.

Mike Shore
Broxtowe

Until 2003 Shore was the National Front’s East Midlands organiser and treasurer. He was also Midlands convener of a British incarnation of the Ku Klux Klan. His conversion to the BNP came as a surprise to former colleagues.

Richard Hamilton
Milton Keynes North

A former soldier, Hamilton took part in the mock trial and execution of a gollywog at the 2009 BNP Red, White and Blue festival. The News of the World noted that before the trial, “Hamilton’s ghettoblaster blared out songs supporting Hitler and attacking ‘niggers’”. The BNP claimed his membership had been “suspended” as a result of the affair, though evidently not for very long.

Chris Beverley
Morley and Outwood

Beverley is a leading figure in Yorkshire BNP and a key link with the National Democratic Party (NPD) in Germany whose leader believes that Hitler was a “great statesman”. Beverley works as PA and constituency office manager for Andrew Brons, the BNP MEP for Yorkshire and the Humber, and recently refused to condemn Hitler in a radio broadcast saying that he did not hate him.

Ian Meller
Leicestershire North West

Meller, a BNP councillor in North West Leicestershire, is a former National Front activist who took part in a demonstration against a Gay Pride march in Leicester in August 2000. Meller, then 35, was fined £400 and £55 costs for carrying an offensive weapon, believed to have been a chair leg.

Charlotte Lewis
Carshalton and Wallington

Lewis was jailed for six months in 2001 for sending a series of “chilling” death threats to employees of Huntingdon Life Sciences (HLS) animal research laboratory in Cambridgeshire. She posts racist comments on social networking sites but claims she is ‘not a racist but a “racial survivalist”. ‘In 2009 Croydon Council considered taking action against her after she boasted of participating in a racist hate campaign against her neighbours.

Barry Bennett
Gosport

Bennett was, until recently, a regular user of the American-based nazi Stormfront website, despite being half Jewish, “from ancestry not religion” he is keen to stress. “I believe in National Socialism, WW2 style, it was best, no other power had anything like it,” ‘he wrote. “The ideology was fantastic. The culture, nothing like it. If it was here now, I’d defect to Germany.”

Eddy Butler
Harlow

Butler has been involved with the far right since the early 1980s when he was the Tower Hamlets organiser for the National Front. After he joined the BNP he and a team of thugs laid into a group of anti-fascists with hammers and other weapons in east London in 1992. In 1993 he organised the “Rights for whites” campaign that won the BNP its first councillor, Derek Beackon, in a Tower Hamlets by-election, though he only held the seat for seven months. Until his sudden demotion Butler was the BNP’s national organiser and elections officer. He is also standing for Barking and Dagenham council, despite still living in Loughton.

Chris Forster
Hayes and Harlington

A National Front supporter in the 1970s and a former treasurer of the Conservative Monday Club, Forster, who is also standing for Barking and Dagenham council, works as a psychic but failed to foresee Searchlight’s exposé of him in the Evening Standard in 2009. Forster helped compile the BNP’s 2009/10 Barking and Dagenham council budget, which attracted great opprobrium. Hypocritically, he is married to a Chinese woman with whom he has a child.

Tess Culnane
Orpington

Tess Culnane was a BNP member until a row with the party after which she stormed off to join the National Front for which she stood in the 2008 London Assembly election. She also addressed meetings of the openly Nazi British People’s Party. The BNP denounced the NF as “neo-fascist” but this has not proved an impediment to Culnane rejoining the BNP and working for Richard Barnbrook, the BNP’s London Assembly member.

Edward Sheppard
Coventry North West

Sheppard stood for the BNP in the 2001 general election in Coventry North East, but could not stand in 2005 as he was jailed for three years in 2002 for shooting a man at point blank range. Mold Crown Court heard how Christopher Willans had mistakenly knocked on Sheppard’s window, believing it to be part of a property owned by a close friend. ‘On discovering his mistake, Willans apologised to Sheppard and left the area. While walking home Willans was confronted by Sheppard who shot him at close range with a .22 calibre pistol through his car window.

Marlene Guest
Rotherham

Guest is the Rotherham BNP organiser. Like Mozar she appeared on the Sky TV BNP Wives documentary in which she claimed that the number of deaths in the Holocaust had been exaggerated and that the Jews were putting Germany on a guilt trip. ‘Asked if any good had come out of ‘the Holocaust, she replied: “Well, apparently, didn’t they get a lot of dentistry and plastic surgery”, referring to the Nazis’ barbaric “medical experiments”.

Jeffrey Marshall
Eastbury ward, Barking and Dagenham Council

Marshall, the central London BNP organiser, displayed the poisonous side of the BNP in February 2009 following the death of the six-year-old son of David Cameron, the Conservative Party leader. In a cruel and warped outburst against those who had expressed their condolences at the death of Ivan, who suffered from cerebral palsy and epilepsy, Marshall wrote in an internet politics group: “We live in a country today which is unhealthily dominated by an excess of sentimentality towards the weak and unproductive. No good will come of it.”

Marshall continued his sick tirade, stating that although it would be “a kindness” to kill children with disabilities, this was not the same as advocating such a measure as compulsory state policy. “But so what if it is,” he declared. “At least we would all know where we stand. There is actually not a great deal of point in keeping these sort of people alive, after all.”

Sharif Abdel Gawad
Bolton and Undercliffe ward, Bradford Council

Abdel Gawad of Bowling, Bradford, was convicted for possession of heroin by Bradford magistrates in December 2007. He first stood for the BNP in Bradford in May 2006, when his candidacy caused uproar in the party because of his less than Aryan credentials. The party insisted that he was of Armenian descent and most certainly “Christian” not a Muslim. Interviewed by The Independent he said he was “concerned about law and order, particularly the drugs epidemic in Bradford”.

Hope not hate

One Flew Over The Pig Farm: the BNP and us in 2008 - February

Not being endowed with the greatest of political imaginations (as opposed to fevered fantasy), the BNP thought it would be a wizard prang to produce a racist leaflet entitled "The Londoner", which it hoped to confuse with the Greater London Authority's own publication of the same name.

Naturally, the political geniuses of the BNP had neglected to check on the status of the name "The Londoner", which, as they should have known, was a trademark registered to the GLA. The GLA promptly fired off a legal missive accusing the BNP of "intentionally trading on the goodwill of the GLA in the trademark of ‘The Londoner’ by using a trademark which is confusingly similar to ‘The Londoner’ and that the use of the trademark, does, or is intended to, confuse or mislead members of the public". The same missive demanded that the BNP cease and desist and remove from circulation any publication using "The Londoner" as its title.

This wasn't to be the last time in 2008 that the BNP sought to sow the seeds of confusion by conflating other, perfectly respectable causes with its own racist campaigns.

In the best piece of national press publicity to come the way of racism for many a year, the Daily Mail developed a soft spot for what it called "the BNP's blonde bombshell", and devoted a two-page spread to Upper Beeding's best known paragon of virtue, community activist, all-round good egg (and BNP member), Donna Bailey.

Donna has the kind of looks that drive normally woman-free BNP members to stock up on tissue papers, and was the perfect antidote to the recently aired derangement of Lynne Mozar. Nobody ever commented on the BNP website to the effect that "We need more like Lynne Mozar in the BNP", but the party's article showcasing the Daily Mail's Donna tribute quickly filled with comments that might have come from schoolboys drooling over a Penthouse centre-spread.

As we noted: "Donna is, as they say, a class act. It's almost as if the BNP has recruited its very own Julie Andrews who comes skipping and singing over the Sussex Downs spreading sweetness and light wherever she goes."

This Julie Andrews had selective vision, however.

Donna told the Daily Mail: "I thought probably exactly the same of the BNP as you do. I thought, if this [the BNP website] is all racist, offensive stuff then I am switching right off. But it wasn't. It was all perfectly sensible. I found myself agreeing with everything - especially the immigration stuff."

Just in case Donna missed it, we pointed out that "the immigration stuff" was very difficult to avoid on the BNP website, as was the barely disguised racism behind it, and that if you took away "the immigration stuff" you could fit the BNP's policies on the back of a postage stamp. Even more difficult to avoid was the overt racism of the BNP's keyboard army of bloggers and forum posters, but Donna must, by some mysterious means, never have come across these dubious delights.

We said:

"...we'll presume that Donna refrained from visiting the numerous websites of the BNP's Blog Battalion, where open racism and complete contempt for other peoples and cultures is all too obvious ('Turnips', 'Muzzies', 'Mudslimes' ''Groids', Donna?). Or that she has never visited a BNP-infested Internet forum where the tone is somewhere between the toilet and the sewer, and the mental ability to step back a couple of rungs on the evolutionary ladder is a prerequisite to talking on anything like equal terms with them"

and added:

We'll also assume that Donna suffers from some unspecified but mercifully unique condition that blinds her to any awareness of the after-hours activties of so many of her fellow BNP members - you know the kind of thing, trivialities like murder, solicitation to murder, bomb-making, wife-beating, GBH, fraud, attacking Eddy Butler... not to mention the latest additions to the list, such entering members' homes by deception to make off with their property, bugging their private conversations and then pasting them on the Internet.

Donna told the Daily Mail that, just like her, BNP were "quite normal" and that the party suffered from a "bad press".

Hey ho.

Back in the reality of the BNP, the Decembrist rebellion limped on. An increasingly confident Nick Griffin made the rebels a tricksy offer they could all too easily refuse, as Searchlight reported:

In exchange for giving up their ‘strike’ and taking down their insurgent website and blogs the rebel leaders were given the chance of getting their party cards back.

The only condition laid out by the ever-so-generous party leadership was that they would only return as probationary members. This would mean that their immediate future in the party would be dependent on good behaviour and, just as importantly for Nick Griffin, they would not be entitled to stand for the party leadership at least the next three years.

The move was typical of Griffin. Everybody beyond the gullible BNP membership saw a trap being loaded, especially the rebels, who knew they would be lucky to last three months, good behaviour or not, as Griffin picked them off at leisure. This was a double trap, though, since in refusing Griffin's offer the rebels gave the BNP leader the opportunity to portray himself as a man of compromise and reason, spurned by disruptive splitters. And so, as always, it was win-win for Griffin.

At the same time Griffin-inspired rumours began to surface portending yet more changes to the BNP constitution, aimed at curtailing challenges to Nick's leadership - and the BNP's ever obliging mug battalion nodded sagely that this was the right and proper thing to do.

The saga of Donna Bailey finally came to a head with the Upper Beeding Parish Council by-election in which the flaxen-haired goddess rather less than honestly stood as an independent. This stance was contradicted, rather, by the BNP, which claimed her for its own, and sat back confident in expectations of a famous victory that would propel Donna into Upper Beeding's corridors of power.

Alas, Donna badly misfired. Having failed to secure co-option by invading an Upper Beeding Parish Council meeting, she also failed to secure election, losing out to a woman "who likes poodles", as a later film, based on these events, reported.



Four Burnley BNP supporters found themselves on the thick end of a High Court ruling that landed them with £30,000 in costs after they challenged an election result in the town's Rosegrove with Lowerhouse ward. Not mincing his words, Burnley Council Chief Executive Steve Rumbelow said that the four had failed to obtain proper legal advice (we wouldn't care to guess where they did obtain it) and had been "cajoled into going on a fishing trip".

He added: "Four citizens of Burnley have been put in a position where they face substantial costs, which could have been avoided. The fact that it's four individuals means the British National Party isn't liable for any of the costs despite the fact they've been using this for party political means."

You really would have thought that Burnley BNP might have smelled a rat when advised to object to the Rosegrove with Lowerhouse result on an individual basis. Obviously somebody in the party hierarchy knew they hadn't got a hope and wasn't prepared to sacrifice party money in a lost cause - but was more than happy to encourage the unfortunate four into financial penury.

The bewildering melange of fact and fiction that are the BNP's finances came under the scrutiny of Radio 4's "File on Four" in a programme Simon Darby predictably pre-warned was an "attack" on the party.

With considerations of impartiality and legal responsibility to address, "File on Four" put itself at a disadvantage in its dealings with a party never knowingly observant of either, and the resulting programme, while still damaging, was not the killer blow it should have been.

Still, enough evidence of BNP shady dealings was presented that would in any other party have led to an internal inquiry at the very least, and should have been of deep interest to the Electoral Commission. As Nick Griffin, chief suspect in many of the allegations made, was the only person within the BNP who could order an inquiry, that was always a non-starter - not that anybody would have trusted a Griffin-instigated inquiry, - and the Electoral Commission... well, our experience of that particular "watchdog" is such that we wonder if there is any point to it at all.

Lancaster Unity listed five points of interest raised by "File on Four":

* Possible donation fraud
* Potential PAYE fraud
* Dodgy unreceipted transactions
* Lies from the BNP's treasurer
* Shredded documents

and concluded

All in all, an intriguing programme that was only able to touch the surface of the corruption that is endemic within and around the British National Party. The feeling I got from it is that there is a lot more information to be dug out - but that's the feeling we all get when the words 'corruption' and 'BNP' are mentioned in the same sentence.

News that the BNP had moved its Excalibur tat outlet to Deeside in North Wales was greeted with digust on the part of local Labour MP Mark Tami. “This is a very unwelcome development,” he told the North Wales Daily Post. “Clearly their views are abhorrent to the vast majority of the British public. Nobody would want to see this in the area and I hope that people steer clear of buying any merchandising from the BNP.”

Naturally Excalibur failed to inform landlords Evans Easyspace of its connection to the BNP, and moved heaven and earth to keep the location of its premises secret. It was so secret, apparently, that Nick Griffin told the Daily Post that even he didn't know where it was - and if you believe that...

So began the quest to discover the whereabouts of the BNP's repository of fake Victoria Crosses and cheap t-shirts, which we'll return to in a later post.

Meanwhile, local opposition gathered as the BNP announced plans to stage its annual Red White and Blue money-spinner in Denby, Derbyshire, for the second year running. Party member Alan Warner, on whose land the August event would be staged, had initially sided with the Decembrist rebels until leaned on by panicked local officials, and later resigned his Denby parish council seat claiming that other councillors didn't talk to him and that parish councils "have no power".

Denby residents objected to the BNP's presence after witnessing their loutish behaviour the previous year. Denby man John Lumsden told his local newspaper: "The people who caused the main problems were the organisers who stayed up all night having large karaoke parties." 76 year-old Brian Bentley said: "We had a lot of noise last year and a lot of people from the festival left the site and were just walking around the village drinking."

All political parties are prone to pulling some low tricks, but few do so with the resolve and tenacity of the BNP. Treating the Hastings Voluntary Association for the Blind with utter contempt, the party of truth and honesty booked the Association's premises under the name "British Heritage" so as to hold a meeting addressed by Nick Griffin.

An appalled HVAB spokesperson said: "To say we are shocked about this is an understatement. We are horrified. We would not have allowed the booking if we had known it was for this purpose."

Lancaster Unity remarked:

The BNP's current infestation of South African ex-Security Service personnel seems to be increasing the BNP's love of cloak and dagger operations. Supporters were told to meet outside a nearby Methodist Church before being directed to the venue, a five minute walk away. The password, apparently, was "buffoons".

"Buffoons", we can safely assume, tells us all we need to know about the BNP's attitude towards Hastings Voluntary Association for the Blind.

Cloak and dagger was also the order of the day in Birmingham, where a tiny band of fascists skulked around the back streets a-purposed on holding a "trade union" AGM. This wasn't just any old trade union, however, this was the "one big union", the "fighting union", the "[insert windy hyperbole here] union", Solidarity - general secretary Patrick Harrington.

Our friends at Norfolk Unity take up the story:

In Birmingham on February 23rd the BNP's bogus micro "trade union", Solidarity, held its annual conference at the Apollo Hotel, Birmingham. The booking was made in the name of "Accentuate", a vaporous one man "PR company" which seems to exist to issue press releases nobody takes any notice of.

Solidarity, taken from its founders Clive Potter and Tim Hawke in dubious circumstances in a Griffin-inspired coup and handed to failure and nonentity Patrick Harrington, is so useless that the only advice it could give Mark Walker, at the centre of its feeble cause celebre case, was to "hire a lawyer specialising in employment law".

Some union!

The reason for booking the Apollo Hotel in the name "Accentuate" was purely to con the owners and to disguise the fact that this was a BNP event in all but name.

True to paranoid form, Solidarity insisted its members meet outside a McDonalds from where they would be redirected. I understand they were also told to keep schtumm so that the Apollo's owners didn't tumble to the fact that it was playing host to a gathering of hardcore racists.

The paranoia extended even to its own small band of deluded devotees, who were subjected to bag searches and "other security measures". Photography was out, so were mobile phones and "recording equipment", and only three hours were allowed from start to finish.

After the AGM, Harrington and Solidarity began issuing grandiloquent statements on the business conducted and debates held, neglecting to mention that only 27 members of the "one big union" could be bothered to turn up out of the 211 Harrington claimed were members - itself a lie, as Solidarity's accounts were later to prove.

As February closed the Guardian broke an interesting story on the West London-based CL English Language college, which teaches hundreds of foreign language students, charging fees of up to an eyewatering £30 per hour.

What caught the Guardian's eye was that the college was controlled by old Nick Griffin friend, Roberto Fiore, leader of the neo-fascist Italian Forza Nuova, who had in the past held international fascist gatherings on the premises.

The college was a "substantial business", according to one of its accountants - and with 100 students claimed to be there at any one time paying £30 per hour we imagine that it is. Odd then, as the Guardian clearly felt, that it should produce so little apparent profit: "Despite its size ... its latest accounts show that it recorded a profit of just £2,214 during 2006, and £1,821 the year before."

Or perhaps not so surprising.

CL English Language's accountants refused to be drawn on why the profits of the "substantial business" were so small, claiming client confidentiality - but we're sure you won't fall off your chairs in astonishment to learn that the reluctant currency counters were none other than sweet old Edgar and Jean Griffin, Ma and Pa to the BNP's own Nick.

To be continued...

One Flew Over The Pig Farm: the BNP and us in 2008 - January

Never very far from some self-imposed crisis, the BNP saw in New Year 2008 as only it knows how, in division and acrimony. Still reeling in the swirl created by the Decembrist revolt it was far from certain at the time that the BNP would survive into the Spring as a unified party. Badly shaken, the Griffinites predictably resorted to the underhanded tactics of which they are grubby past masters, raining down a venomous fire on the heads of leading members who, only weeks before, were lauded as paragons of BNP virtue. For good measure, the party even invented the "engagement" of Richard "Mine's a double" Barnbrook and Simone "Formerly had prospects" Clarke.

The trouble for the Decembrists from the beginning was that not only did they underestimate their real enemy, Nick Griffin, but they completely failed to land any telling blows against him, preferring to attack Griffin by proxy, venting themselves against the unpopular Mark Collett and David Hannam in the hope of damaging Griffin.

It was never going to work.

Lurid stories of Collett (left) and Hannam being caught in what we might discreetly call "inappropriate circumstances" with two underage girls during a BNP conference had been doing the rounds for some time, but for the Decembrists not only to resurrect them but also to admit to an intimate knowledge of what had happened not unnaturally led many to the observation that those renewing the allegations were as complicit in covering up the incident as the hierarchy of the BNP, as they had firmly sat on the allegations for more than a year.

We quoted a BNP insider, posting on an anti-Griffin website, thus:

We all could tell they were underage as soon as they walked through led by Collett and many of us said as much to each other including the barman.

When the girls came back down complaining about the demands for sex it was even more obvious they were children and it was Kenny Smith who persuaded them not to go to the press with the mobile phone footage and promised them that Collett and Hannam would be disciplined by the party.

One of the girls bluetoothed the footage to Kenny and I believe he gave it to security (pos. Martin Reynolds) the next morning.

If Kenny hadn't persuaded them and their mother - who arrived later with a security guy - out of going to the press Collett and Hannam would have had to be expelled, but such a media furore would also have been very damaging for the party.'

In response we asked:

* Why didn't Kenny Smith and the other witnesses report this alleged crime when it happened?

* If Smith and co 'could tell they were underage as soon as they walked through led by Collett', why weren't they stopped immediately?

* If the barman at Blackpool's New Kimberley Hotel could tell that the two girls were underage, why didn't he report these activities to the police?

* Matt Single, formerly one of the BNP's security team, has admitted that he knew about this incident when it happened. Why didn't he report it?

* Why did Kenny Smith persuade the girls and a parent of one of them not to go to the police with the mobile phone footage of the alleged incident?

* If Kenny Smith sent the mobile phone footage to Martin Reynolds, the BNP's pervert Head of Security, who was it who then sent it both to us and the Blackpool Gazette?

* What kind of political party would rather hide alleged child abuse than cause any harm to itself?

The fuss eventually died down, but continues to smoulder barely noticed in the background and may yet return to haunt Britain's most voluble anti-paedophile party.

Underestimating and failing to attack Nick Griffin from the outset was the biggest error made by the Decembrists. Second to that came their failure to seek alliances with the surviving Tyndallite/hardline groupings within the BNP - though admittedly, it is difficult to see how softening moderates of Sadie Graham's stamp were ever going to work with Tyndallite purists. But, if the common enemy was Griffin some form of strategic alliance was vital, yet little effort was made to bring it about, and though the Tyndallites may have cheered from the sidelines they were careful to keep their distance.

Not that it did them any good, since Griffin took the opportunity to oust the elected Tyndallite Chris Jackson from his post as North West Regional Organiser and installed himself as head man in the Tyndallites' most visible area of strength.

Despite the deep damage inflicted on the BNP in the few weeks of the rebellion, as January progressed it was evident to some observers that, through a combination of lying, ruthlessness and the rebels' own incoherent strategy, Nick Griffin had already gained the upper hand. Searchlight noted: "If they [the rebels] continue to oppose the party leadership whilst falling over themselves to appear loyal to the party then they will wither away in the not too distant future."

Only when it became obvious that the rebellion had reached its point of maximum impact did the rebels finally fix their sights on Nick Griffin, but by then it was far too late. We said:

[The rebels now] implicitly acknowledge what was stark-staringly obvious from day one - that whatever the accusations against Collett and Hannam, the real problem in the BNP is Nick Griffin himself. Belatedly, the rebels have shifted the focus to Griffin, but the weeks spent in half-heartedly professing loyalty to the BNP leader have cost them dear. Griffin is a ruthless operator, as the rebels knew full well before beginning their adventure, and nothing was more certain than that he would act aggressively, decisively and without scruple. Nothing less on the part of the rebels was ever going to bring them anywhere near success.

By now operating under the name "Voice of Change", the rebels began, as we put it, to "grind into action". Long on promise and short on delivery, the rebels said: "Every single individual expelled in recent weeks is determined to have their own membership reinstated through formal grievance procedures, acknowledging that this may involve costly legal action."

Alas, this did not happen - nor did a promise to stand "independent nationalist" candidates against BNP candidates materialise. This promise was made when it became clear that "Voice of Change" could not (and would not be allowed to) operate as a dissident group within the BNP.

Providing light relief from the rigours of the BNP's internal travails at exactly the right time was the Sky TV documentary, "BNP Wives", which introduced the world to terrifying racist Lynne Mozar (above) and the dippy, deluded (not to mention deserted) Marlene Guest. While Mozar maniacally declaimed that the BNP was hers, all hers, and (while being no Kate Moss herself) called a woman objecting to a BNP anti-mosque campaign a "fat slag", Marlene found herself on the wrong end of a question about Nazi medical experiments: "Well apparently didn't they get a lot of dentistry and plastic surgery?" she sort of explained in one of many convoluted Marlene-isms.

Hailed as "fine ambassadors for the BNP" by, er, the BNP, The London Paper saw Mozar and Guest in a different light: "Marlene Guest, busy giving idiocy a bad name in Rotherham; and Lynne Mozar, the BNP's Southeast regional secretary, proving you can be a Southeast regional idiot as well as a village one – are out on their own. Just BNP Women, then."

Badly in need of a morale boost - and to prove that the membership was backing Nick Griffin - the BNP called a national mobilisation of activists for a weekend of leafleting in London, allegedly to get the party's May GLA and mayoral campaigns off the ground (in January?). Most of the BNP's big-wigs, Griffin included, turned up, but apparently the membership (even that based in London) found better things to do, and - not for the first (or last) time - the BNP lied through its teeth about how many members had actually turned out. The figure, and the number of leaflets delivered, varied depending on which BNP blog you read - anything up to 250. Even 250 is a derisory figure for a party of the alleged size of the BNP, but ever-vigilant Searchlight disputed even that.

Finally, BNP elections "guru" Eddy Butler gave a figure of around 100. Nick Lowles of Hope Not Hate and Searchlight noted: "Given that this was a national turnout then a figure of only 100 is not too impressive. I was in Sandwell earlier this year when we had 221 people (yes, that is the number who signed in), virtually all from the Black Country and Birmingham area. On that particular day we managed to deliver 45,000 newspapers. Now that was impressive."

If the BNP's flop of a "national mobilisation" had the hidden agenda of underscoring BNP members' alleged support for Nick Griffin, then part of that same agenda may have been Griffinite Richard Barnbrook's insertion of himself into a Police Federation march calling for better police pay. Of course, Barnbrook's overweening ego played its part, but the circumstance was calculated to generate BNP publicity on the back of quite another (and better) cause.

Brian Paddick told the London Evening Standard, "I felt very uncomfortable that there was someone from the BNP. I was aware of him being there and I pointed it out to federation officials but there was nothing more that I could do. I was very uncomfortable that he was anywhere near me." Searchlight's Gerry Gable said: "The police federation leaders should have told him to get lost." And so say all of us.

The name of the BNP's highly presentable answer to Julie Andrews, Donna Bailey of soon to be infamous Upper Beeding, came to greater prominence in late January when she and her supporters stormed into a meeting of Upper Beeding Parish Council, and, amid scenes described as "quite threatening" by one councillor, demanded Bailey's co-option.

Not getting her pushy way, Bailey then forced a by-election for a vacant parish council seat.

The Observer reported:

"In Upper Beeding, Donna Bailey's candidature is being opposed by Joyce Shaw, a former stalwart of the parish council, who's come out of retirement, and Becki Davoudi, who has an Iranian father, and, like the Asian family who have revived the village shop, has good reason to oppose the far right. What they're fighting is nothing as concrete as a political programme or the certainty of violence, but something vaguer: a chilling of the atmosphere, a potential for disgrace."

More in hope than expectation the Voice of Change rebels came together in Brinsley Parish Hall to discuss their next moves. As there hadn't been too many previous moves, and since Nick Griffin had had the best of them, what might just - if called earlier and under decisive leadership - have sounded Griffin's death knell instead underlined the differences between the rebels themselves and highlighted their lack of direction. The meeting served only to sound the rebel's death knell.

Searchlight's own Scarlet Pimpernel Nick Lowles, who attended the meeting, reported:

Griffin would not have been too concerned with the outcome of this meeting. It finished with the rebels being in the worst possible position. They are no longer in the party (or at least in positions of influence) in any real sense yet they have backed away from launching an alternative party at a time when they still have a degree of support around the country. Launching a new party is of course not easy and would alienate some of their key supporters who wanted to remain in the BNP but when is there ever a good time to split. The answer surely has to be when you can achieve your maximum influence and that is certainly now and not after a possible BNP London or European victory.

One day the rebels will surely look back at the meeting as being an opportunity wasted. Massed in the room were many of the BNP’s super activists and surely a nucleus of a new party and if ever they had the momentum to launch an alternative the time is now. Throughout Griffin’s career he has shown himself to be a master of factionalism and spitefulness and as night follows day it is clear that over the next few months he will drive his opponents out of the party one way or another.

The last act of January was an obscure parish-pump by-election for Calne Town Council's Lickhill ward. Ever optimistic BNP candidate Robert Baggs spoke as if the election was in the bag (sorry!), with tales of "thumbs up and toots from passing motorists" intertwined with an unlikely story concerning the arrival of "4 black gentlemen" in a J-registered car "who had obviously arrived to intimidate and harass our team".

Sadly (or not) Baggs bagged 84 votes out of 791 cast and reached for the sick-bag.

To be continued...

BNP's Mozar inflicted upon Dartford BNP

Lynne Mozar: the BNP is all hers, and don't you forget it

Desperate to get some life back into its ailing branches, the BNP is sending out anyone it considers to be more or less coherent as an official speaker, with Nick Griffin himself heading the list as, if reports on the party's website are to be believed, the greatest orator since oratory was invented.

Arthur Kemp, the former South African spook who currently oversees the BNP's 'ideological training' and is thus responsible for the party's brainwashing, is a regular speaker at the larger branches from which Nick Griffin expects great things, and next in preference seems to be Jonathan Bowden, the man who once stomped out of the party in disgust after Griffin's attack dogs at Covert suggested he was a paedophile, but who has now re-entered the party with renewed enthusiasm.

Simon Darby, the party's press officer and deputy leader, doesn't do too much public speaking because he seems to be too busy doing his nature blog and working alongside Richard Barnbrook down in London - though Barnbrook himself, despite being almost incoherent, seems an unaccountably popular branch speaker. Perhaps it's because he makes them laugh. He certainly makes us laugh.

And so it goes on. Good speakers are snaffled by larger and more active branches and the smaller, more remote or simply less worthy branches have to make do with the best they can get. Which is probably why Dartford BNP has ended up with the ghastly Lynne Mozar.

Regular readers will no doubt remember Mozar from the truly toe-curling Sky TV documentary BNP Wives, in which she was heavily featured, spouting her racist bile and pontificating at great length about her love for the party. Who can forget her lunatic babbling as the programme opened? Not us, so here it is.

'The British National Party is my baby. It's not, not necessarily my familys or my husbands or anyone elses, it's mine. All mine. My own. For me. And I love it...mine. [cackle, cackle] All mine! [more cackling]'

Indeed. Though Mozar is more than just a babbling loon - she's also, as you would expect, a racist. During the documentary, after referring to 'Paki's', she hastily added; 'That's a legal term for them', pointing out that she also 'sometimes' uses the racist term for blacks, 'and why not?'

Erm, because it's deeply offensive, perhaps?

Nevertheless, Dartford BNP looks to be saddled with this racist harridan at its next meeting on Wednesday at the Jolly Farmers pub at Thames Road, Crayford DA1 4QH. The meeting starts at 8pm though members and supporters are asked to arrive at 7.30pm - presumably so they can join the enormous queue to see the crowd-pulling Mozar.

If anyone fancies going along to join them, a map is available here (viewable in Firefox or IE), though it should be pointed out that there will be security, and you know how vigorous BNP security can be at times. The pub - for those who know the area - is on the bottom-left point of the chemical works/waste reception centre/industrial estate triangle. Such a salubrious address but somehow fitting for Mozar and the BNP.

If you'd like any more details, I feel sure that the party will be only too pleased to provide them. You can ring the Dartford contact at 07594-160118 or 05601-950167.

The BNP's very own Julie Andrews

Every so often the BNP comes by that rarity, a presentable and articulate person it believes it can use to explode the "myth" that the party is filled to the gunnels with racist bigots sporting shaven heads and unfortunate tattoos.

If that person is an attractive woman with no apparent blemishes on her character, so much the better.

Donna Bailey (left) is undeniably presentable, and, so far as we can tell, has never set a foot wrong in her life. Since moving to Upper Beeding in West Sussex she has thrown herself into community activities with some gusto and has won praise from all and sundry for her commitment and effort.

Which would be all well and good if only Donna Bailey were not simultaneously demonstrating the same commitment and effort on behalf of the racist British National Party.

Donna's fame has spread far and wide, and today we find her the subject of a two-page Daily Mail spread in an article that seems to be stuck somewhere between admiration and deep unease.

The first half of "Meet the BNP's blonde bombshell" must count as relatively good publicity for a party more usually in the headlines for its criminality and corruption. Our favourite bigot, the toad-like Green Arrow, thought the article marvellous: "An excellent article that shows the True Brits that we are them and they are us despite the reporters attempt at making it a smear."

By "a smear" the fearless keyboard warrior means that in the interests of balance the Daily Mail felt bound to report the feelings of those not so enamoured of the blonde goddess:

"One disappointing bit in the story is the reaction of her neighbour James Palmer who said he was the 'Neighbour of the Beast' and went on to say; 'I don't think there should be a place for it in a village like this.'

"A stupid man who does not care what happens to the rest of the country so long as his tiny part of it does not change. If he wants to keep his place in the Sun he should start supporting Donna and the British National Party because they are the only one's who really care."

(Aprostrophe placement/lack of (c) BNP)

Of course, in BNP-land only good things must be reported about Britain's most dishonest party. Anything else is only and ever a "smear" concocted by Gerry Gable, the SIS, UAF, the Daily Mirror, the World Jewish Conspiracy, Mao Tse-Tung and Jack the Ripper.

Donna first thought of joining the Tories: "But I had a look on the website and, you know, it just didn't talk to me. I wasn't particularly impressed by Cameron, and I really objected to the Tories' policy on Europe.

"So then I looked at the BNP website."

As you do.

"I thought probably exactly the same of the BNP as you do. I thought, if this is all racist, offensive stuff then I am switching right off. But it wasn't. It was all perfectly sensible. I found myself agreeing with everything - especially the immigration stuff."

Well, yes, Donna - "the immigration stuff" is very difficult to avoid on the BNP website. As is the BNP's overarching obsession with that one subject. Take "the immigration stuff" away and you could put the BNP's remaining policies on the back of a postage stamp (if the BNP has one left over after all the expulsion letters of late).

Presumably, as she sat wide-eyed in front of her PC's monitor, Donna never noticed the barely disguised racism festering on virtually every page, or worked out the poisonous intention behind the endless parade of stories of the "black crime" and "more immigrants - we're doomed" species that are its stock-in-trade.

And also - perhaps charitably - we'll presume that Donna refrained from visiting the numerous websites of the BNP's Blog Battalion, where open racism and complete contempt for other peoples and cultures is all too obvious ("Turnips", "Muzzies", "Mudslimes" "'Groids", Donna?). Or that she has never visited a BNP-infested Internet forum where the tone is somewhere between the toilet and the sewer, and the mental ability to step back a couple of rungs on the evolutionary ladder is a prerequisite to talking on anything like equal terms with them.

According to Donna BNP people are, like her, "quite normal too".

We'll also assume that Donna suffers from some unspecified but mercifully unique condition that blinds her to any awareness of the after-hours activties of so many of her fellow BNP members - you know the kind of thing, trivialities like murder, solicitation to murder, bomb-making, wife-beating, GBH, fraud, attacking Eddy Butler... not to mention the latest additions to the list, such entering members' homes by deception to make off with their property, bugging their private conversations and then pasting them on the Internet.

"It's just the bad press," Donna plaintively tells the Daily Mail, falling back on the stock excuse churned out by every cornered BNP member since first the party came kicking and cursing into the world.

Donna is, as they say, a class act. It's almost as if the BNP has recruited its very own Julie Andrews who comes skipping and singing over the Sussex Downs spreading sweetness and light wherever she goes.

Do we buy it?

Not many, we don't.

According to keen activist and twice BNP candidate Donna, she won't take her politics in to the parish council for which she is seeking election.

Well, she would say that, wouldn't she?

As do her supporters, who are presumably the same who made up the mob Donna led to a meeting of Upper Beeding parish council to demand co-option amid scenes one councillor described as "quite threatening".

The implication is, then, that Donna Bailey will take her seat - if or when that happens - as Donna Bailey, All Round Good Egg, with not a mention of the BNP.

Unfortunately, the BNP - delicately rehashing the Daily Mail article on its website - doesn't see it that way.

They see Donna as "theirs", as do the BNP Blog Brigade, who make no fine distinctions in these matters. She's BNP and she'll be a BNP parish councillor as far as they're concerned, period.

That goes for us too.

We're not about to swallow the idea that Donna Bailey will walk out of a BNP meeting in one frame of mind and take her place at a parish council sitting in another. Not for one minute we're not.

Perhaps over-estimating the powers of a parish councillor to a small degree, BNP website poster Maurice Oatley seems to concur: "Hello Donna, I take my hat off to you someone with bottle, it seems that you`re not prepared to stand by and do nothing while Brown and the rest of his bully boys sell this country down the river,If only there was a few more like you this country would be all the better," (Maurice likes commas).

In a party membership notably dominated by men who polarise into those with thick necks and those who give an appearance of being closely related to weasels, Donna is a striking oddity.

Our reformed friend Atreus tells us that in his day the presence of an attractive woman at BNP events was a cause of much excitement among the thick-necks and the weasel-alikes as so few of them had ever been in close proximity to a real female. It was always form, he tells us, to push such women to the fore at public events "to kid the world along as to just how 'normal' we were".

Echoing this, a poster on the BNP's website says: "I’ve been saying for years that if we could only recruit more good looking, intelligent women to the party, it would be transformed."

Awkwardly for chrisM3, who made the observation, intelligent women (whether good looking or not) are generally precluded by the very fact of their intelligence from joining the BNP.

What the BNP is more likely to end up with is this:


The frightening Lynne Mozar, of BNP Wives fame, whose demented performance brought forth as splendid a lesson in bigotry as has ever graced our television screens.

Quoth Mozar: "That's a legal term for them", in relation to the racist term for Pakistanis, adding that she "sometimes" uses the racist term for black people - "and why not?" Added to which was the far from lithe Mozar's summation of another woman as a "fat slag" who ought to wear a burqua.

We also had a female BNP friend of Mozar (talking to a woman in the street and pointing at a sign with a mosque on it): "You wouldn't like one of these around here would ya?"

Person in the street: "It doesn't bother me."

Female BNP activist (muttering): "It will do if one of them bleedin' rapes your daughter."

Normal non-racist people just like you, eh, Donna?

Updated: A Right sight

The problem with interviewing people who only half-think is that they generally only half-talk. For the BNP wives of tonight's self-titled documentary, a glaze-eyed pause comes about five ­seconds into any reply.

It follows three women – and we soon realise Sky chiefs are taking liberties with their title. It implies we're following the wives of active BNP ­members, looking at Nazi love-ins, ­indoctrinated spouses and cowering nod-a-long wifeys.

But of the three, only one (fitness instructor Susie Cass) has a husband who's a fully paid-up member of the BNP. The others – Marlene Guest, busy giving idiocy a bad name in Rotherham; and Lynne Mozar (above), the BNP's Southeast regional secretary, proving you can be a Southeast ­regional idiot as well as a ­village one – are out on their own. Just BNP Women, then.

As Marlene explains her theory of exaggerated ­Holocaust deaths ("Um, to put the Germans on a guilt trip? I never really thought about it...") and Lynne campaigns against a mosque being built, perhaps the most telling ­moment comes from Susie. Would it be that bad if we were all interbreeding, asks the ­interviewer? "Don't you think it would be?" she asks ­rhetorically. But then rhetoric is all you have when you've never thought further than it.

So, standard BNP docu-stuff then. And yet, watching women explain their race-hate feels more shocking.

We're told the BNP is using women to escape its image of boots-and-braces thuggery. But then, at least in that ­context, the BNP almost makes sense – like football hooliganism, it gives bonding and purpose to the IQ-lite and violence-happy.

Yet these women seem to use it as displacement: race hate as a "thing to do". If we had more on that, we might have had a real documentary on our hands. As it is, we've only got half of one.

The London Paper

Documentary exposes BNP nazi morons

Last night's BNP Wives TV programme showed that the BNP has learned nothing after a serious error of judgement allowed Mark Collett to star in Young, Nazi and Proud in 2002. Collett's revelation of his deeply held Nazi sympathies in the Channel 4 documentary, and Nick Griffin's insistence on standing by his close colleague, is one of the issues that prompted the current crisis in the BNP.

The Sky One programme featured three BNP women. There was Marlene Guest in Rotherham who thought the number of deaths in the Holocaust had been exaggerated and that Jews were putting Germany on a guilt trip, but felt some good had come out of it. "Well apparently didn't they get a lot of dentistry and plastic surgery", she said, referring to the Nazis' barbaric "medical experiments".

Then there was the Southeast regional secretary Lyn Moser who admitted to referring to black people as niggers "in private sometimes" and called a woman objecting to a BNP anti-mosque campaign a "fat slag".

Suzy Cass, whose husband Nick Cass was smarting from his sudden sacking as party manager, was busy adding to the "white race". The couple, who both stood as BNP local election candidates last May, had requested a white Anglo-Saxon midwife. She did not seem too upset when an Afro-Caribbean midwife turned up, indicating that it had really been the idea of her husband, who sported a Nazi SS-style "tree of life" tattoo on his right arm.

Nick Cass was also shown at the lock-up where the BNP keeps its merchandise carrying a large pile of books by the convicted Holocaust denier David Irving.

A commenter on the BNP rebels' blog summed the programme up nicely, "what a total and utter bunch of morons those people have just made us look", accusing Griffin of being "so stupid let alone so arrogant" for allowing people like Guest to talk to camera crews and walking away when he was being talked to at the BNP's Red White and Blue festival.

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