Shooting Walker in the foot?

Graham Williamson's Accentuate PR "company" has hardly set the world on fire in the long, dreary months of its almost pointless existence.

The only place we ever encounter Accentuate's press releases is as republishings on the inter-linked websites of the far-Right's front groups, or the free (and largely disregarded) PR-Inside public relations website.

Accentuate's website has not been updated since June, and continues to carry an exhortation to donate to the fake National Liberal Party's "moneybomb" appeal - which, as we reported at the time, "bombed" spectacularly.

It also continues to carry three endorsements for its "work", from, inter alia, the Adamsgate Action Group (leading member, Graham Williamson), the National Liberal Party (leading member - there are only 20 - Graham Williamson), and the bogus Solidarity "trade union" (General Secretary, long-standing friend of Williamson, Patrick Harrington).

The praise for Accentuate's work is as extravagant as it is spurious.

"We could not have handled the launch of our website without Accentuate's help. They not only promoted the launch but helped focus our message to maximum effect," claims NLP secretary David Durant of a launch notable only for the fact that it went entirely unnoticed, while Harrington gushes: "Graham Williamson has helped to bring our independent Nationalist Union to the attention of a wider public... Graham and Accentuate are doing a great job on behalf of ordinary working people in this country who want their views represented and communicated."

Fortunately, nobody very much seems desirous of having their views "represented and communicated" by the miniscule Solidarity, and so "great" is the job Williamson's PR company is doing that few outside the far-Right have ever heard of it. The bogus "union" even has trouble recruiting BNP members, its target prey, they being suspicious that the entire exercise is no more than a money-making scheme from which they would derive little or no benefit.

And they would be quite right.

BNP member Mark Walker, brother of Solidarity's president and fellow BNP member Adam Walker, could not save his own teaching job, even with the dubious help of the fighting union's egotistical general secretary. Mark Walker was suspended for accessing the BNP website during school hours, and eventually sacked on the grounds of his sickness record.

Were it not for the BNP connection, any half-way decent shop steward would have made a meal of the case. Mark Walker was stuck with Patrick Harrington.

Adam Walker resigned from Houghton Kepier Sports College in Houghton-le-Spring following allegations that he posted critical comments about asylum seekers, Islam, immigrants and the promotion of homosexuality on a chat forum during a lesson. Walker has since been re-employed as a supply teacher, but faces a General Teaching Council (GTC) disciplinary hearing which could ban him from teaching for holding views suggestive of racial and religious intolerance.

Despite the best efforts of Patrick Harrington, Solidarity, and Accentuate, the case of Adam Walker has failed to become a cause celebre, and even in the enclosed world of the far-Right such passions as it has raised have been noticeably muted.

Perhaps that is why another BNP front group, the jokingly named Civil Liberty has been roped in to prod things along by organising a picket of the GTC on the day of Walker's hearing in Birmingham on November 17th. Calling upon the various fascists and racists who will attend to "Make a noise for freedom" by banging drums, blowing whistles and ringing bells (which we're sure will impress the GTC), Civil Liberty claims that the GTC wants to introduce the "political vetting of teachers".

Of course, this is very far from the truth, as is the disgraceful allegation that Walker faces a "kangaroo court".

The allegations against Adam Walker are extremely serious, and the truth about them (on which the GTC will decide fairly, Civil Liberty intimidation or no) will impinge directly on his fitness to teach.

Patrick Harrington gives a distinct impression of believing that Walker's case will eventually be lost, and has been demanding the removal of former NUT president Judy Moorhouse from the GTC (for which purpose he set up yet another online petition) and has threatened to go to the High Court should Adam Walker be banned from teaching - though where the money will be raised to finance such a move is anybody's guess.

Coming back to the feeble Accentuate, it has posted yet again on the PR-Inside website that "A Liberal Party backs Civil Liberty campaign" - the "liberal party" in question being the 20 member bogus National Liberal Party, better known as the Third Way, the political habitat mostly of ex-National Front members like Harrington, Williamson and David Durant - men who, with their friend Nick Griffin, took the once mighty National Front into oblivion and who have ever since lived in a fantasy world in which they seem to have insulated themselves from the fact that nobody at all takes the least notice of their magisterial pronouncements.

"NATIONAL LIBERALS BACK CIVIL LIBERTY DEMO!" shouts Accentuate on PR-Inside, where Williamson apparently spoke to himself (a not uncommon occurrence in the Third Way) to tell himself: "There are serious implications if Mr Walker were banned from teaching (which seems the intention). It will open the door to persecution and harassment of teachers on grounds of belief."

A gross distortion, of course, but what is striking is how seriously these micro-groups (or corpusclets if you prefer) take themselves and expect others to take them.

Accentuate is an ineffective one-man band, the NLP is a fantasy, Civil Liberty exists largely as a website, Solidarity neither impresses nor scares anyone, and we're pretty sure that none of them, the BNP included, is in the least likely to sway the GTC in coming to a fair decision on Adam Walker, just as we're sure that the GTC will ignore the noisy assemblage of racists, anti-Islam fanatics and homophobes, mostly from the BNP, who will turn up to support Walker - appearing before the GTC on a charge of holding views suggestive of racial and religious intolerance, let us not forget!

Of course, we could be wrong. Accentuate, the NLP, Civil Liberty and Solidarity may well have shot their man in the foot by organising this parade of extremist misfits that can only reinforce the case against Adam Walker.

Councillor met with BNP leader

An Independent Havering councillor is facing fresh accusations of right-wing links after it emerged he recently entertained the leader of the British National Party at his business in Rainham.

Local Residents' Association leader, Cllr Jeffrey Tucker, met leader of the BNP Nick Griffin last Wednesday at his jewellery business - Tucker's Goldmine - in Upminster Road South. Refusing to reveal any details of the meeting, Cllr Tucker maintained he is still a left-wing politician and will work with anyone interested in helping the community he represents.

He said: "If someone wants to see me I do not care who they are. If they can help with assisting the residents of this area my door is open to them - and they'll get a cup of tea too. As an independent politician I can listen to anybody, as long as it is for the good of the community."

The meeting came only weeks after Cllr Tucker was condemned by other councillors for his affiliations with the right-wing National Liberal Party (NLP) - which has its roots in the National Front.

Leader of Havering Council, Cllr Michael White, previously dubbed Cllr Tucker "a dangerous person" for his work with the NLP. He said: "What he is actually doing is conning the public. He's pretending to be something he isn't.

Romford Recorder

A is for Appeal

Mention the names of certain personalities on the far-Right and one word is certain to follow on directly after.

Money.

A certain Mr Nick Griffin's tortuous relationship with money (usually not his own) has been an on-going source of anguish for his followers and friends and a first-class entertainment for us since ever we can remember the name "Griffin" first falling into our ears. And as Mr Griffin and his long-standing love affair with money has something of the flavour and scale of a Tolstoy epic, each chapter of it being lovingly recited here, among other places, we feel no great need to recapitulate the infamously convoluted plot.

Suffice it to say that the rendering of "Griffin" as "Gri££in" on the part of his most fervent admirers did not arise as the result of a keyboard typo, nor did the phrase "I gave two Griffins and a Darby" (£25), when recounting how much one placed in one's BNP branch kitty, first surface as a slip of the tongue.

Mr Griffin, of course, has a certain friend, a Mr Patrick Harrington. Mr Harrington, as we all know, is a legend in his own unfathomable mind: pretend general secretary of a pretend "fighting union", a "Director" - no less - of the pretend Third Way "think-tank", Mr Harrington is the man who apparently "orders" anti-anti-fascist websites into existence. A man for whom the word "failure" might have been tailor-made, Mr Harrington's relationship with the national currency has, like that of his good friend Mr Griffin, been questioned on a number of occasions.

Both gentlemen appear to have been supplied with the same reading primer when in their infancy, a strange primer in which A is not for Apple, but for Appeal, of the financial variety; and both gentlemen have ever since repeated the word at regular intervals, thus demonstrating how a notion, early taught, may be fully and profitably deployed in later life.

Mr Griffin and Mr Harrington have between them made so many appeals for money so often that to detail them all would keep us here long into the night, and so we shall settle for a brief telling of the latest in the endless line of appeals made by Mr Griffin and Mr Harrington's respective organisations, the British National Party and the Third Way/National Liberal Party.

The BNP has decided that it requires another means of putting its obnoxious message across to a stubbornly non-BNP voting public, and has hit upon the wheeze of ripping off the concept of the Hope Not Hate tour bus by purchasing what it is pleased to call its "Truth Truck" (Mr Griffin's ideas are always stupendously original).

This 7.5 ton Lie Lorry, as it has been christened on an underwhelmed Stormfront Britain, is to have a state-of-the-art PA system together with light display features, and will set the BNP membership back a mere £39,000, for which the inevitable appeal has been launched.

At that price this seems to us to be not so much a Lie Lorry as a Scam Van, since we have (Friday) priced up a bespoke truck sporting all the features specified by the BNP at just short of £26,000 (including delivery to any part of the UK mainland).

The Scam Van appeal has jerked the memories of some unnecessarily awkward BNP people regarding the "Boudicca Bus", a not dissimilar past BNP venture, they posing the divisive and treacherous question - "Whatever happened to it?" in the somewhat pious hope of receiving an honest answer, or any at all.

Knowing Mr Griffin, however, the simple purchase of a Scam Van, for whatever amount, is unlikely to be the end of the matter financially. Mr Griffin, it will be remembered, many years ago declared that "The BNP is a business", and we forecast tears to come as BNP branches having the services of the vehicle foisted upon them are invoiced lavishly for the pleasure, just as the BNP is invoiced whenever the home extension built at BNP expense on a certain Welsh pig-farm is deemed to have been used for BNP business.

Compared to Mr Griffin, Mr Patrick Harrington cuts a most pathetic figure. Failing to find fame other than as an object of ridicule, Mr Harrington is obliged to pass his days maintaining his own grandiloquent Wiki page (we have seen the excised edits), scouring the Web for mentions of himself, and using his expansive imagination to invent news stories and press releases for the Solidarity website.

In April we posted on the matter of Mr Harrington's National Liberal Party intending to use its wholly bogus name to stand in ten Liberal Democrat marginal seats at the next general election, and highlighted the exceedingly curious substance of the Third Way/NLP accounts as submitted to the Electoral Commission:

And of the Third Way - what does one say about a "party" of 20 members that bores the Electoral Commission to tears with its windy account of its local election performances (successes = 0), admits to having only £88.17 in the kitty (2006), but which allegedly raised £1400 from membership subs (yet £15 x 20 = £300! - go figure), somehow managing to spend £560 of that on vague "internet services"...

According to a hastily cobbled-together explanation given by Mr Harrington on the websites "ordered" into existence by him, sometimes Third Way members give more than £15 per year in membership fees. Perhaps they do - in fact each of the 20 would need to give £70 per year to arrive at the strangely exact figure of £1400, and that is something we simply do not believe.

Exactly what the Third Way/NLP is intended to achieve - aside from cushioning Patrick Harrington from the truth of his own abject irrelevance - is unclear. For an organisation (if so large a word may be employed to describe something so insubstantial) to find itself with only twenty members after eighteen years of existence is the clearest of proofs that its only achievement has been utter failure.

However, even in the fantastically unreal world of Third Way/NLP there persists a belief that there is money to be made from the gullible and the deceived, and Mr Harrington and his colleagues have fixed themselves to make it through the mechanism of an appeal warped into the guise of a "mass donation" for "Liberty" aimed at putting £100,000 into the Third Way/NLP purse.

To this dubious end Mr Harrington has seized upon the inglorious idea of hi-jacking the 793rd anniversary of the signing of the original Magna Carta on June 15th to dupe 10,000 people into pledging £10 each on that day, and a website has existed for several days where those who wish to throw good money at this most bogus of causes are afforded the opportunity to do so.

The scheme is so sweeping, so grandiose, so magnificently divorced from any ordinary notion of reality that it can only have come from the mind of the master of unreality himself.

Calling for what he terms a "Magna Carta Moneybomb" on the Third Way website, Patrick Harrington writes:

MASS DONATION FOR LIBERTY ON JUNE 15TH!

It’s time we had a new Magna Carta to protect our rights! Once upon a time an ‘Englishman’s home was his castle’. Today it seems his door is wide open! Help us fight back by donating to liberty on Magna Carta Day on JUNE 15TH. We have produced a Liberty Video explaining how the liberties we take for granted are under attack. Please get as many people as possible to see the video. Help the National Liberal Party to campaign against a ‘Big-Brother’ state by exposing its growth and making LIBERTY an issue at future elections. Make this the largest mass donation for a political cause in the UK. Let’s make history!

Would-be donors are then directed to the tacky 15thjunemagnacarta website, with its stolen Big Brother graphic, painful "Liberty video" and "Pledge today to ensure your liberty tomorrow!" exhortation - which perhaps better translates as "ensuring" something not too far removed from the servicing of regular expenses claims on the part of certain Third Way/NLP individuals.

As he has throughout his indistinguished career on the far-Right, Mr Harrington has undoubtedly concocted for himself yet another stratagem by which he will be seen to fail, and fail badly, largely because the man seems to be incapable of connecting with the real world - the one in which most people would not expect 10,000 people to visit a crude website rushed up by an unknown and bogus think-tank-cum-political party, all of them to do it on a single day and to pledge £10 in return for some vague and meaningless statement about "liberty".

Given the sheep-like mentality so wincingly exhibited by the BNP membership-at-large, it is highly probable that they will dig deep to provide Mr Griffin with his £39,000 Scam Van, and we confidently predict that the vehicle will not be seen outside of the North-west of England for the duration of the Euro-elections next year - which may well be the only real reason for having one in the first place.

For Mr Harrington, of vaulting aspiration fueled by an unchained imagination, there awaits only an unpleasant encounter with reality on Sunday, June 15th. Like Mr Harrington, we'll be watching his graphs with great interest as they rise towards the 10,000 pledges, £100,000 mark.

Or not.

Fascist party aims to con LibDem voters

Nobody ever accused Patrick Harrington of hiding his light under a bushel.

His towering self-regard and assessment of his own importance have long been a source of mirth to anti-fascists used to dealing with the inflated egos predominating on the extreme right.

Nobody does more to maintain his own Wiki page than Harrington (he prefers to be called "Pat"), the mystery being why he, Wiki, or anybody else should imagine the serial failure to be worth 2,571 words, and why Harrington thinks anybody could care enough about him and his obscure doings to read the self-penned personal bio he seems to paste at the drop of a hat in various places on the web.

As we've often noted, to read anything penned by Harrington is to step outside hard reality. His personal bio gives the impression of a man of political substance and achievement; his writings on the fake union Solidarity's website are of what you might charitably term the overblown variety; and over on the Third Way website we could be forgiven for believing that this fifth-rate National Front successor organisation, of which Harrington accounts himself a "Director", really is some vital think-tank throwing up ideas essential to the good of the nation.

The truth is rather more mundane.

"Success" and "Harrington" are words rarely found in close proximity. The "militant fighting union" Solidarity is largely reduced to issuing General Secretary Harrington's pompous and unremarked press statements and making appeals for funds (a telephone "hotline" - with answering machine - being the latest Must Have for the One Big Union and its 211 members).

And of the Third Way - what does one say about a "party" of 20 members that bores the Electoral Commission to tears with its windy account of its local election performances (successes = 0), admits to having only £88.17 in the kitty (2006), but which allegedly raised £1400 from membership subs (yet £15 x 20 = £300! - go figure), somehow managing to spend £560 of that on vague "internet services" (we thought Wordpress and the Masterplan theme - the very same as used by the BNP - were free).

Harrington is very much a man who rose without trace to lead organisations that campaign without trace.

The Third Way, of course, goes by the dishonest name of "National Liberal Party".

Many entirely honourable and respectable political parties use the word "Liberal" in their titles - most obviously, the Liberal Democrats and the rump Liberal Party. Quite why the Electoral Commission ever came to allow Harrington's "National Liberal Party" to contest elections under that name is a mystery, since the EC normally refuses to allow sound-alike parties to campaign when they believe a title has been adopted with the intention of confusing or misleading voters.

The name game may soon be up, however, for the "National Liberal Party".

On Stormfront Harrington uses the moniker "Doublethink", and - we believe - that of "Completely Blank". On the Green Bigot's forum the poster "Completely Blank" denies being Harrington, despite "Completely Blank" managing to sound in every way like Harrington, even down to the evasions and inflated claims regarding the bogus union Solidarity. At any rate, when Norfolk Unity insisted that Harrington was "Completely Blank", the great man took the matter no further and contented himself with trying to force Blogger to remove a picture from their website.

Giving Harrington the benefit of considerable doubt, we'll say no more on the provenance of "Completely Blank", but go on to highlight a declaration recently made by that entity on the Nazi Stormfront website:

The National Liberal Party intends to contest ten marginal Lib Dem seats at the next general election. In some of these the Lib Dems have a majority of only some hundreds.

There was a National Liberal Party in the early part of the last century so the Third Way's claim to the title could be said to have some historic basis. There is a Liberal Party and a Liberal Democratic party so why not a revived National Liberal Party. After all, in Ulster there is an Ulster Unionist Party, a Democratic Unionist Party, a UK Unionist Party a Progressive Unionist Party and until recently a Northern Ireland Unionist Party. As the EC allows all these varieties of unionism I can see no reason to prevent a liberal nationalist party from using 'Liberal' in its title.

Ignoring the feeble attempt at self-justification as to why a fascist party lays claim to the title "Liberal", the first paragraph of Completely Blank's posting leaves no doubt whatsoever that the National Liberal Party intends to go into the next general election purposed on conning votes away from the Liberal Democrats by confusing itself with the mainstream party, and - they hope - losing the sitting Liberal Democrats their seats.

There can be, and is, no other reason for the NLP to target itself so specifically - only against Liberal Democrats, and only in marginals where a small number of votes will decide the sitting MPs' fates.

No other no-hope party, to the best of our knowledge, has ever gone into a general election fixed purely on unseating MPs by use of deceit and obsfucation.

In our opinion this amounts to a clear intention to mislead voters and to abuse the democratic process on the part of a nasty little organisation made up of no-hopers and fantasists closely connected with the BNP and complicit in the running of the racist party's bogus front groups.

It is also reason enough for the Electoral Commission to strip Third Way of the right to campaign under the spurious "National Liberal Party" title.

We have already alerted the Liberal Democrats to the underhand intentions of the squalid NLP, but visitors (of all political persuasions) to this website can help by complaining to the Electoral Commission, and by bringing this post to the attention of Liberal Democrat MPs and LibDem organisations.

Follow this link to the Electoral Commission's contact web-page, where complaints can be made to each national EC outpost in writing, by email, or by telephone.

Harrington and company may well have over-stepped the mark with their premature blustering. Let's ensure it comes back to haunt them.