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

BNP 'wife' hits out at TV show

A British National Party Euro election candidate from South Yorkshire has been condemned by Jewish leaders for remarks made about the Holocaust in a television documentary.

Marlene Guest, of Kimberworth Park, Rotherham, claimed 'dentistry and plastic surgery' were positives to come out of the genocide, while being filmed for Sky One documentary 'BNP Wives'. Mrs Guest, standing for the far-right party as a candidate in next week's European Parliament elections, also questioned the scale of the atrocity, saying: "I've read a thing called 'Did Six Million Jews Really Die?'. If they'd have kept the crematorium going 24/7 for 50 years, they still couldn't have burnt that amount of bodies."

Afterwards she claimed her comments had been 'twisted' and said that before the offensive remarks she had told film-makers: "You can't say anything good came out of the Holocaust."

But leading Jewish figures from Sheffield, former Hallam MP Sir Irvine Patnick, vice president of the Orthodox Synagogue, and John Speyer, chair of the Reform Synagogue, said: "In a normal democratic party a candidate who quoted such material would surely be expelled. The BNP, on its website, congratulated Marlene Guest on her TV appearance. We think the electorate should understand that this party remains a fascist organisation, in the tradition of Oswald Mosley."

In a letter signed by other leading Jews from across Yorkshire, Sir Irvine and Mr Speyer added: "We believe a party which is so comfortable with neo-Nazi material and denial of the truth of the Holocaust, which decimated Jewish families and communities, is not fit to represent the people of Yorkshire. We call on everyone to go out and vote. A high turnout will ensure the BNP's message of division and hate is rejected."

Mrs Guest said: "I am not anti-semitic and never have been. I have grandfathers who fought in both World Wars and I think the Holocaust was a horrible, evil thing. I am sick of people going on about this film."

She added she had asked the makers to remove her from the documentary after she caught them looking at her correspondence but they refused to edit her out and she said she 'couldn't afford a lawyer to stop them'.

The Star

Note: The BNP Wives documentary is here. Watch it and weep - some people will vote for this moron.

Postie BNP leaflet row

Sheffield postmen say they are "disgusted" after being asked to deliver leaflets for the British National Party along with normal mail. Some posties at the Barnsley Road sorting office in Firth Park are refusing to deliver the leaflets for the far-right party.

Political parties, along with any other organisation, can pay Royal Mail to deliver flyers on their behalf as long as they meet "advertising and legal" guidelines.

But one member of staff, who did not wanted to be named, said: "We have received a load of BNP leaflets to be delivered to every house on each route. Bearing in mind large areas of S5, like Firth Park, have a large Asian and other ethnic minority population, I find it disgusting that Royal Mail would allow this to happen. I myself will be refusing to deliver the leaflets and, like other members of staff, am disgusted Royal Mail would let this happen. The people in charge should be ashamed."

The BNP said it wasn't up to postmen to decide what to deliver. Spokeswoman Marlene Guest said: "There are a lot of things that go out by mail that people could object to, but it's the postmen's job to deliver things. We are a legitimate political party. Some of these people who are objecting should come to one of our meetings and listen before they object."

Royal Mail declined to say if staff would face any disciplinary action for refusing to deliver the leaflets. But a spokesman said: "If any member of staff with a genuine concern raises it with their manager, they will be happy to discuss it with them."

Sheffield Star

CWU National Equality Officer Linda Roy says:

"The CWU have in fact taken a very proactive stance on this issue and we have negotiated an agreement with the business which effectively is a conscience clause and this allows our members the opportunity to decline to deliver material of this nature.

Given the Euro elections are coming up we actually communicated this to all our branches [including those in the Sheffield area] as it is especially important in times like these."

BNP councillor disowned - by BNP

A BNP councillor has been disowned by his own party in an extraordinary move.

Cllr John Gamble (52), who won a seat in the Brinsworth and Catcliffe ward last May, will no longer represent the BNP on Rotherham Borough Council, the Advertiser can reveal. The shock move to strip Cllr Gamble of the party whip by regional officials reduces the number of BNP councillors on the council from two to one.

A letter has been received by borough council chief Mike Cuff stating that the party whip has been withdrawn and that he is no longer a BNP councillor. The reasons for the move have not been revealed, but it is understood he could continue to sit as an independent councillor.

Labour Party leaders have now called for Cllr Gamble—one of two BNP candidates to win seats at the time—to resign and for a by-election to be held immediately. Cllr Reg Littleboy, who represents the same ward for Labour, said:"He should resign his seat immediately from the council."

Cllr Gamble was not available for comment.

BNP local organiser Marlene Guest said: "I can confirm that the whip has been removed from Cllr Gamble. Serious differences have developed between him and the party which cannot be reconciled."

Rotherham Advertiser

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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