BNP leader Nick Griffin hit with legal claim in website picture row

BNP leader Nick Griffin was served with a legal claim yesterday for an £8,000 debt as he launched the far-right party's Euro election campaign. It follows the continued unauthorised use of a picture of UKIP leader Nigel Farage on the party's website.

The BNP has refused to remove the shot by freelancer Mark Croucher, despite being warned of court action in January.

A party spokesman said: "We'll probably challenge the judgment." Bailiffs handed over the documents as the party gathered in Grays, Essex. Mr Griffin is standing as a candidate in the North West where the party needs less than 10 per cent of the overall vote to gain a foothold in Europe. A seat in Brussels would allow them to claim tens of thousands of pounds in taxpayer-funded aid.

But a YouGov poll showed four per cent support for the BNP which, according to a leaked memo, has abandoned a national campaign to concentrate on targeted areas.

Anti-fascist group Searchlight said: "Its support appears to be fading."

Mirror

UKIP egg on Griffin's face

It's an odd state of affairs when the BNP feels driven to go sneaking through the back door of the UKIP to make Britain's main anti-EU party an offer it can refuse - especially as the BNP has long held that the UKIP is a state-run "false flag" operation brought into existence with the specific intention of taking away the BNP's support.

Something of a storm in a thimble, news that UKIP's Nigel Farage humiliatingly rebuffed the BNP's offer of an electoral pact that would see each party stand down in electoral regions where the other had the better chance was not likely to play well to a BNP audience poring over an almost uniformly gloomy sequence of recent by-election results, and hardly set the tone for this year's looming BNP annual conference.

It simply wouldn't do for Nick Griffin to be seen with the UKIP's egg on his face, and so a quick and dirty rescue operation has been mounted to turn public indignity into apparent success.

We have no reason at all to doubt an angered Nigel Farage's version of events: namely that Buster Mottram (ex-National Front, failed Great White Hope of British lawn tennis) "gatecrashed" a meeting of UKIP's National Executive Council, relayed Nick Griffin's proposals to the bemused party leadership, was cold-shouldered and ordered to leave, which he eventually did with police assistance.

Farage wasted no time in making the matter public, causing much wailing and gnashing of teeth in BNP-land, since the racist party had been unceremoniously rejected by the one organisation it loathes more than Al-Qaida.

That it was the BNP which approached the UKIP, and not members of UKIP who approached the BNP, is amply confirmed by deputy-leader and budding rubber magnate Simon Darby, who told the Press Association:

"It was with a view to ending this ridiculous situation of splitting the anti-Euro federalist vote and it hasn't paid off, frankly. We are aware there are people very highly placed in Ukip who are very sympathetic to the logic that the vote could be split - that was where we were coming from. Someone has to take a lead on this if we are not to continue to be propelled into this federalist monster."

There is nothing in Darby's statement which indicates that anybody at all in UKIP made the first move, as the BNP now claims.

Rather, because the BNP proposal involved allowing the BNP free rein in the north and abandoning the south to UKIP, it seems that the proposal was deadly serious - because we all know who has parachuted himself in as the BNP's top Euro-candidate in the North-western region (its best hope); we all know who is most desperate to leave behind his toy pig farm for the riches of an MEP; and we all know who must demonstrate some clear electoral success for the BNP in the Euros or face internal revolt.

This proposal can only have come from Nick Griffin, with a gimlet eye fixed on the main chance. He'll make more from his utterly pointless membership of the European Parliament than he ever will from his BNP-bankrupting redundancy deal.

Given the lamentable condition of UKIP, I am quite convinced that Nick Griffin sent along his offer to Nigel Farage in good faith and in the belief that UKIP would take it seriously. I also believe that he did not expect Mottram the messenger to lay the plan before the UKIP in the unorthodox manner that he did, and nor did he expect the subsequent demeaning publicity.

Attempting to pull things around in one of his most hypocritical postings to date on the BNP website, Griffin affects to have known all along that there was little possibility of UKIP jumping into bed with the BNP, and the BNP itself is working overtime to give the impression that - somehow - it has tricked the UKIP, which, as a result of BNP cunning, will now fall into complete disarray.

This is so much whistling in the dark, but the BNP sheeple have taken up the tune, mostly because they have little choice if they are to drive from their minds the fact that the hated "false flag" UKIP has inflicted upon them a resounding humiliation - and the fact that it was given the opportunity to do so by Nick Griffin himself.

In his posting, Griffin - forgetting that wise politicians do not count their chickens before they are hatched - talks of "four virtually guaranteed BNP seats", a sign either of the contempt in which he holds the electorate or that in which we know he holds a BNP membership gullible enough to believe the prediction. It's probably the latter, as he attacks Nigel Farage for putting "his chances of securing his personal ambition ... above those of his party activists", which we imagine will strike only the sourest of notes in the BNP's North-west region, undemocratically hi-jacked by Griffin to secure his candidacy in a constituency in which he believes the rag-tag-and-bobtail vote will provide him with enough of a percentage to send him on his way to Brussels.

The man who plotted John Tyndall's overthrow and has ever since been engaged himself in the removal of his internal BNP enemies then has the effrontery to accuse Nigel Farage of "low cunning" in the expulsion of Buster Mottram and others, spluttering indignantly: "That’s democracy, Farage-style - sack those who might express dissent and then claim unanimous support!"

Now where have we seen "democracy" of that kind in operation lately? And who else do we know is most urgently desirous of gaining what he himself describes as "five years of well-pensioned, feather-bedded, spanking luxury"?

A trick has indeed been worked by the BNP, but the victim was not Nigel Farage and the UKIP. It is the gullible mass of BNP sheeple, who have willingly convinced themselves that a self-inflicted public relations disaster is in fact a great victory for the infallible Griffin.

Will they ever learn?

Ukip sackings as party rejects BNP offer of pact in Euro-elections

The UK Independence Party (Ukip) claims it has rejected the offer of an electoral pact from the far-Right British National Party (BNP).

Former tennis player Christopher "Buster" Mottram made the approach on behalf of BNP chairman Nick Griffin, a Ukip spokesman said yesterday. Mr Mottram had been a member of Ukip – which calls for British withdrawal from the EU – but has now been expelled, the party spokesman added.

He had apparently suggested that in elections to the European Parliament next June the BNP would not stand against Ukip in the South in return for a "free run" in the North. In a related development three members of Ukip's national executive – one described by the party as "ex-officio" – were sacked yesterday.

Mr Mottram's offer came during a Ukip meeting in Westminster, which the party claimed the BNP had "gatecrashed". Ukip leader Nigel Farage said: "There are no circumstances, no possible situations, in which we would even consider doing any type of deal with the BNP whatsoever. I'm simply amazed that the BNP thought we would even consider such a thing, given that we are a non-racist, non-sectarian party."

BNP spokesman Simon Darby confirmed that his party had made an approach to Ukip.

"It was with a view to ending this ridiculous situation of splitting the anti-Euro federalist vote and it hasn't paid off, frankly," he said. "We are aware there are people very highly placed in Ukip who are very sympathetic to the logic that the vote could be split – that was where we were coming from. Someone has to take a lead on this if we are not to continue to be propelled into this federalist monster."

London Labour Euro-MP Claude Moraes said the approach to Ukip suggested some "common extreme ground" between the two parties, even if it was rebuffed.

"It is of great concern that these talks could have taken place under any circumstances," he said. "They tend to reveal some common extreme ground, even though Ukip publicly distanced themselves from the BNP."

Mr Moraes added: "This should be a wake-up call not only for our core Labour support but for anyone who is tempted to vote for Ukip in the next European elections."

Yorkshire Post

UKIP rejects BNP electoral offer

Nigel Farage says his party will not work with the BNP

UKIP says it has "unanimously rejected" an offer from the British National Party for an electoral pact at next year's European elections.

It says ex-tennis star Buster Mottram, a UKIP member who claimed to represent the BNP, made the "astonishing offer" at a meeting in London on Monday.

Under the deal the BNP would fight seats in the north while UKIP would focus on the south in the elections.

The BNP said a deal made sense. UKIP says it would not work with the BNP.

BNP leader Nick Griffin told the BBC it made electoral sense for the two parties to avoid standing against each other at the euro elections in June 2009.

He said he had spoken to a number of UKIP party members about the deal.

The UK Independence Party, which campaigns for Britain to withdraw from the European Union, says Mr Mottram has since been expelled from the party.

Although he was a party member, he was not on the national executive committee which met in Whitehall on Monday.

But a spokesman said that as a high-profile, well known member, nobody had challenged him about why he was at the NEC meeting.

They say he claimed to represent Nick Griffin. The party says he refused to leave the meeting after the offer was rejected and they called the police, after which he left.

UKIP leader Nigel Farage said: "There are no circumstances, no possible situations, in which we would even consider doing any type of deal with the BNP whatsoever.

"I'm simply amazed that the BNP thought we would even consider such a thing, given that we are a non-racist, non-sectarian party."

Original Story

UKIP can stop BNP says Nigel Farage

The UK Independence Party last night claimed it was the only party that could stop the BNP from securing a North West seat in next year’s European elections.

Speaking at a reception in Liverpool, Nigel Farage, leader of UKIP, said the party would expose the “hypocrisy” of the three main European parties in their dealings with the European Union. He said the party was intending to make the next election a proxy referendum on the Lisbon treaty, which the government has steadfastly refused to allow the general public to vote on.

Mr Farage was in Liverpool to launch the campaign of Bootle’s Paul Nuttall, who has been selected by UKIP as their top North West candidate in next June’s poll. He will replace Lancaster University academic John Whittaker, who will stand down as UKIP’s North West Euro MP in June.

Mr Nuttall, 31, was recently made chairman of the party and formed UKIP’s south Sefton branch. He is a political adviser to the Ind/Dem Group in the European Parliament. He was formerly a history lecturer.

Although Mr Farage said the party would do a “very good job” of exposing the hypocrisy of the three main parties, he admitted there was a threat from the BNP.

“We are the only party that can stop them [from getting a seat].”

Liverpool Daily Post