Row over BNP man's taxi contract

Council chiefs have admitted that they would make the parents of a black or Asian child with special needs to travel to school in a taxi driven by a firm run by BNP supporters.

In a move anti-fascist campaigners described as 'outrageous', council chiefs said they had awarded the family taxi firm run by Corsham town councillor Mick Simpkins a renewed school run contract, and said that they would not fund an alternative if a black or ethnic minority parent objected to their child being transported to school. Other white parents who have already objected to their children being transported to school by the firm were refused council funding for an alternative, and the council said it would be no different for an ethnic minority family.

Cllr Simpkins said he would treat all children transported by his firm, be they 'black, Asian or anything in between' exactly the same, and said parents who protested were attempting 'to put us out of business'.

The row blew up after the Simpkins family, who all work for the firm, stood as candidates for the British National Party in and around Corsham earlier this month. Cllr Simpkins is also standing as the party's parliamentary candidate at the next general election. The firm was awarded a council contract to ferry children with special needs to school in nearby Chippenham, often without chaperones. Some 18 months ago, one parent, Cheryl Walker, objected to her daughter, who has special needs, being taken to school by the firm.

"I was told that it was a BNP taxi or nothing, basically. I asked if they could just give me the money they would pay them but they said no to that, or to providing a different taxi firm. I'm not the only one who won't put their child in those taxis. There aren't any children from ethnic minorities that need this transport at the moment, but it could happen. I really don't think the council would say the same to a black parent as they said to me, but there's no way we'd know unless it happened," she added.

A spokesman for Wiltshire Council said there was no problem with the firm transporting children, and that their membership of the BNP was not an issue.

"We have a duty to the people of Wiltshire to get the best value services across the whole of the council. We have a rigorous process to ensure all drivers who transport children on behalf of Wiltshire council have satisfactorily completed all the relevant checks," he said. "Our strict, open tendering process allows all contracts to be carefully chosen based on a number of criteria. These criteria include value for money and quality, but take no account of race, religion, gender or political leaning. Should we have any complaints about the delivery of any of our services, we would of course investigate them fully."

Cllr Simpkins said his firm provided a valuable service to special needs children, and was a service provided regardless of ethnic background. He described the objections by Cheryl Walker and others last year as 'an attempt to put us out of business'.

"Well, mum now has to take her child to school herself while we still have our council contracts for the other school children," he said. "The fact is the council, the school and we are only concerned with getting the children to and from school safely and because they all have different special needs, each one is treated specially. There is no room for playing politics with the children. I'm surprised no one has asked the obvious. Yes, they are all white but would be treated exactly the same if they were black, Asian or anything in between."

A spokesman for Unite Against Fascism, which organised a demonstration after Cllr Simpkins was elected unopposed to Corsham Town Council two years ago, said the situation was 'outrageous'.

"This is quite shocking."

The Bath Chronicle

BNP makes rare foray into the shires to oppose black Tory candidate

Wilfred Emmanuel-Jones is no stranger to struggle. He battled his way out of inner-city Birmingham, served in the Army, carved out a career in television, set up a successful marketing agency, then became famous as Britain's only black farmer. But now he faces the fight of his life: against the British National Party.

Selected to contest the Wiltshire constituency of Chippenham for the Conservatives, Mr Emmanuel-Jones appears a model candidate. He has charisma, an astonishing story of personal triumph and strong links to the local community. That community, though, is almost exclusively white. And the candidate was born in Jamaica. That fact, it seems, has not been lost on the far-right BNP.

Chippenham is safe Tory territory – and likely to remain so. Yet the BNP's decision to make a foray into the shires threatens to bring racial politics to the English countryside. Opponents warned yesterday there was little doubt that the BNP would be making a subliminal appeal to voters' prejudices over their prospective MP's ethnicity.

Mr Emmanuel-Jones is exactly just the kind of candidate that David Cameron has championed to try to demonstrate that the Tories now reflect contemporary Britain. He came to the UK from Jamaica as a three-year-old and grew up in the Small Heath area of Birmingham as one of nine children. He left school without qualifications and joined the Army for a year.

From there he found success in television – with the BBC's Food And Drink – and through a food marketing company he then set up. Subsequently, as a farmer, he set up a scheme for inner-city children to learn about rural life.

Unsurprisingly, Mr Emmanuel-Jones was brought on to Mr Cameron's "A-list" of favoured candidates. Until a few days ago it seemed a straightforward election. But the arrival of a BNP candidate, Mick Simpkins, has added a toxic note to the contest. "Because I'm a black candidate in a high-profile seat, they have thought they ... will try and stir it up," said Mr Emmanuel-Jones. He insisted he had not picked up any "vibes" that race would be an issue. "It took a massive amount of courage for the people of Chippenham to select someone like me because Wiltshire is, in a sense, the soul of traditional rural England, a true blue area."

He also said he was not concerned by the occasional threatening email he received. "If you are black and going into public life, there are oddballs who are going to try and frighten you."

Mr Simpkins, a taxi driver, became the BNP's only councillor in the South-west last year after he was elected unopposed to the town council in Corsham, which is part of the constituency. He said: "I've met Mr Emmanuel-Jones and he's a very nice guy. The fact he is black has nothing to do with why I'm standing. I'm standing because that's my constituency and it's where I live."

Gerry Gable, of the anti-racist group Searchlight, said: "We're concerned wherever the BNP field candidates. They are a cancer within British society but ... [Mr Emmanuel-Jones] will give them a bloody good run for their money."

Independent

We must all share shame at BNP's joy

A West market town became the first to see the race war close up this week, but those involved should be ashamed of themselves, according to Wiltshire reporter Tristan Cork

On another balmy June evening in another West Country market town, you might have thought it was carnival time. Drummers, singing, people dressed up, the police stopping the traffic and flags a-waving.But there was tension in the air, abuse and vitriol, and the smiling faces barely hid the grimaces of hatred flying across Corsham High Street.

This summer marks the 20th anniversary of writing my first ever report in a local newspaper in Wiltshire, and in the decades since I have never experienced anything quite like the hours leading up to a town council meeting in Corsham this week. I have never seen, or heard, anything like it in this normally peaceful, picturesque part of the West. In Corsham? If I hadn't been there to see it, I wouldn't have believed it.

How did this happen? How did a race war you'd normally find in Bradford or Brick Lane, in London's East End, come to sleepy Corsham? And in one phrase we have the heart of the matter - 'sleepy Corsham'.

For in Corsham, like the sleepy market towns right across our region, many people who put their names forward to be councillors just walked right into the position without doing anything other than writing their name.

It's not just Corsham, it's everywhere. Let's take, purely for argument's sake, South Somerset. Of the 95 parish and town councils that held elections last month, 74 actually didn't. Now although most of them are little parish councils where things are done much like they are on the Vicar of Dibley, there were many market towns in that list of shame: The likes of Wincanton, Castle Cary and Ilchester, for instance.

All of these councils did not have enough people standing to have the need for an election. Many of them, perhaps most, still had spaces, and chairmen and clerks are now spending the summer months cajoling the local shopkeeper, WI leader or vicar to join them to make up the numbers.

It's a pretty sorry state of affairs. I'm not going to comment on the BNP, their policies, their overt discrimination - people who aren't deemed by them to be British enough can't take up full membership even if they wanted to - or their followers. But if they were just twice as organised, well supported and clued up as they are now, it isn't difficult to imagine how they could have a seat or three on town and parish councils across the West by now.

Obviously the 350 demonstrators shouting and bawling at the 25 Union Flag-waving young men in Corsham don't like the BNP, and don't think a political party like theirs should be able to be anywhere near anything approaching political power.

But none of this would have happened had any one of those chanting demonstrators had the slightest bit of interest in the town council elections that took place in their community in early May.

Corsham may be sleepy, but it appears its people, like people from Wincanton to Stow on the Wold, are sleepwalking. They may be passionate about protesting in Corsham, but where was their passion for town hall democracy when it actually mattered?

The protest is too much, too late. I would imagine almost all the people demonstrating - the ones from Corsham at least - would struggle to name any of their town councillors anyway, let alone whether any of them are from political parties they might not like.

In fact, it's not the done thing to be party political on Corsham Town Council, so the chances are Councillor Mick Simpkins will never get to spout the BNP's views on immigration at a meeting of the finance and general purposes committee, or maybe the Summer Fete working group, even if he wanted to.

I'm not sure the BNP has a policy on the imposition of unpopular parking charges by North Wiltshire District Council in market towns like Corsham. But Mick Simpkins - irrespective of his odd views on the inclusion of Islam as a world religion in the national curriculum's RE syllabus - probably has a personal view, and one that now, given that he put his name forward, he is entitled to provide.

The fact is that he stood for election in the Rudloe ward, and no one else did. Those hollering demonstrators from Corsham should actually be ashamed of themselves for their apathy, and should have quietly slunk away vowing to get involved in the community politics of their town so that there wouldn't be a next time.

They might be entitled to stand up to declare that Corsham isn't the kind of racist, intolerant town people might think it is for having a BNP councillor, but they are quite wrong to try to pressure a democratically non-elected councillor to stand down.

The campaign organiser grandly announced at the end of this week's demo that they would be holding some kind of alternative election: As if Mick Simpkins had got in sneakily, somehow unfairly, that these good demonstrators had been somehow denied the right to vote against him and as if someone else was to blame. The irony and hypocrisy of this was lost on the crowd. They had their chance and they couldn't be bothered to even realise.

People queue for days just to exercise their right to vote across Africa and Asia. People put their lives on the line from Colombia to Iraq to stand for election, and many die for it.

It was Edmund Burke, the brilliant MP for Bristol, who apparently said 230 years ago that the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing. He must be turning in his grave at our apathy.

Western Daily Press