BNP 'star' quits to expose racist party

Simon Nicholson (left) with racist buffoon Nick Griffin

A rising star of the BNP has quit the party so he can expose Nick Griffin and his cronies for what they really are...incompetent racist thugs.

Ex-soldier Simon Nicholson joined the party in 2007, believing leader Griffin's claim that the party was no longer racist and would campaign on local issues. He was even praised by Griffin when Simon came within 16 votes of overturning a 1,000-vote Labour majority on Cumbria County Council.

But after growing disillusioned with the party's racism, Simon agreed to work with the Sunday Mirror just before and during this General Election campaign. For nearly three months he kept a diary exposing the sickening racist extremism of BNP members and the true face of the party's far-right views.

Simon, 37, got right to the heart of the BNP 's election machine, At one rally in the North West, he watched as Griffin branded women in burkhas "big, black crows". At a meeting in Cumbria, BNP National Organiser Clive Jefferson hit out at plans for a Muslim school in Burnley, labelling the scheme "a breeding programme". Other BNP activists criticised mixed marriages and branded an area of London which has a large black community as "Coon City".

Simon also secretly filmed senior figures admitting how Griffin had taken advantage of the generous expenses system for Euro-MPs, bragging that "we play them at their own game".

Simon told the Sunday Mirror: "What I found was a party dominated by thugs who were still obsessed by race - and Griffin was the worst of the lot. The British National Party is a shambles and Griffin is telling lies to voters when he says he has the answers to their problems."

A history Of Hatred

Fascist John Tyndall formed the British National Party in 1982 after a split in the farright National Front movement. The party quickly gained a reputation for racism, anti-semitism and intimidation of opponents but won its first council seat in 1993 in London's Tower Hamlets.

Under Nick Griffin, made leader in 1999, the party has made further gains and last year won two seats in the European Parliament. In March the BNP was forced by the courts to allow non-whites to join the party.

Revealed: their sick world

'Muslims are going to fly the black flag of Islam over Downing St ' - Nick Griffin in Blackburn

Here is a selection of entries from the diary kept by Simon Nicholson during his time in the BNP...

Saturday Feb 13

Drive overnight from Cumbria for "national day of action" in Barking, where "the boss" Nick Griffin is standing against Labour MP Margaret Hodge. Arrive at hotel and see a couple of Orthodox Jewish men in the street. Regional Organiser Clive Jefferson mutters: "Look at those fucking Yids." Three of us crammed into tiny room, Clive rants about Muslims gang-raping "our women" and mixed marriages making him sick.

Griffin puts a couple of leaflets in letterboxes but barely speaks to a single local voter. Chaperoned through a few empty streets with two security cars and his bodyguards. Later 30 members, including Griffin and other ex-National Front members, gather at The Crown pub in Epping Forest.

A party veteran tells us he used to live in Edmonton but moved out after it became "Coon City". Hates Enfield - "they're breeding like rabbits" - and didn't think much of the BNP's target area of East London today: "They'll fucking blow the place up. I couldn't wait to leave there after what I saw today."

Thursday Feb 18

At a pub in Sandwith, Cumbria. Clive Jefferson claims "teams of militant Asians and Islamics" will be trying to infiltrate the party. But makes clear new constitution allowing ethnic minority members will be phrased carefully so even those who pledge loyalty to the BNP will be outcasts.

When Sikh member Rajinder Singh's name comes up, one member shouts "black bastard". Another asks: "What are we supposed to call them when they come to meetings? Niggers? They like being called niggers, don't they?" Clive suggests putting local Muslims "under surveillance" at Friday prayers and claims Burnley has metal detectors because kids have been stabbing each other in race rows.

Has a go at plan for all-girl Muslim school there, falsely claiming it will house 5,000 Muslims. Calls it "a breeding programme".

Later communications officer Martin Wingfield admits Euro-MPs Griffin and Andrew Brons - despite slamming MPs over expenses - are gladly milking the generous EU system for all it's worth.

"We play them at their own game", he says, then reveals BNP support is dropping off a cliff ahead of General Election. He warns: "Suddenly our votes are tailing off. They're going down and we can't understand why."

Weds and Thur Mar 16-17

Just 10 card-carrying members on big trip to see Griffin at EU parliament, with another 28 of the 50 seats filled by random crowd, mostly blokes picked up around Cumbria - some necking vodka. Hellish journey. At Brussels hotel a few of our lot spot two dark-skinned men and start banging the window and making monkey noises. On way to parliament, bus stops at traffic lights near a mosque - hard-core members smash their fists against window shouting abuse.

Told that on a recent trip to Brussels a BNP official spent the night in a brothel. We give that a miss. But our group, many of them out of their minds on booze, still causes chaos - reports of naked women running from room to room at 3.30am.

Journey back hellish, drunkenness and couples copping off. One female member hands in her card in disgust a few days later.

Sunday March 28

In charge of Griffin's security at Moorclose Hotel, Workington. He's massively paranoid, but his security team love all the cloak and dagger stuff. Would usually be hundreds here but only about 20 today. Reflects what people think - they feel cheated. Griffin's abandoned them and gone down South to campaign for a Westminster seat.

Griffin's answer to the scourge of knife crime: "Most of the disaffected youths carrying out knife crime and gun crime in London aren't ours at all - they're criminals from other countries. They can go back there." He claims Muslims "14 times more productive than us" and soon UK, Ireland, France and the Netherlands "will be Islamic".

In Blackburn, Griffin claims burkhas nothing to do with religion: "It's their way of saying, 'We're here, we're outbreeding you, your Government's paying us to take over and we're going to fly the black flag of Islam over your No 10 Downing Street'." Describes women in burkhas as "like big, black crows".

Thursday April 1

Civil war among the leadership. Total chaos. Jefferson says Mark Collett, the publicity director, has been sacked, because he was "a bad influence on the party". National organiser Eddy Butler and staff manager Emma Colgate have also left their posts - Clive getting Butler's job.

Bulletin for key staff later reveals allegations that officials plotted a "palace coup" against Griffin. Then Collett arrested over alleged threats to kill Griffin. All the talk is of a catastrophic split and massive dissatisfaction with Griffin.

Friday April 23

St George's Day in Sandwith - small event in local pub. Apparently there's been a massive cock-up with election leaflets and hundreds might be useless - Jefferson can't make the event because he's been up all night trying to sort it.

He's already in trouble for failing to take part in live web debate, answering questions from local voters. Campaign up here is in disarray.

Wednesday April 28

Unbelievable. Been asked to take a job at April 28 party's North West office in Wigton as well as standing in the next council elections. Party is falling apart at the seams and unpopular Griffin struggling to keep it together. Cock-ups left, right and centre and they can't get respectable people to work for them or stand in elections.

No way I could say yes. Regret ever joining them. I want to stand against them next year because now I know how bad they will be for working class people like us.

Mirror

Decision on BNP 'whites-only' rule

The British National Party (BNP) is due to find out if the decision to scrap its whites-only membership policy was enough to meet race relations laws.

Last month the far-right party voted to approve changes to its constitution to allow black and Asian people to become members. The vote followed the threat of a possible court injunction over its whites-only membership by the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC). The BNP will be back at Central London County Court on Tuesday, where a decision is expected on the legality of the new constitution.

Following the change in the constitution, millionaire Asian businessman Mo Chaudry said he would apply to join the party to "fight them from the inside". But he was told his application would be blocked. Speaking ahead of Tuesday's hearing, Mr Chaudry, 49, from Newcastle-under-Lyme, Staffordshire, said: "I'm hoping the court will take a robust approach and question the real intent of the change in the constitution. They have no real intention of allowing people like me into the fold. It is just a camouflage to appease the system."

Pakistan-born Mr Chaudry, who is worth £60 million, runs a string of businesses around Stoke-on-Trent, which has eight BNP members on the city council.

The decision to change the BNP constitution came after the far-right party held an extraordinary general meeting in Essex on February 14. Following the meeting, BNP leader Nick Griffin said he soon expected to welcome the party's first non-white member, a Sikh called Rajinder Singh. Lawyers from the EHRC have been considering the precise wording of the new rules to decide whether they believe the constitution is still discriminatory.

Loughborough Echo

BNP in apartheid bid to keep party racist

Clive Jefferson - helping to bring apartheid to the newly 'non-racist' BNP

Two-tier system of 'founder members' and 'new members' to keep control out of the hands of ethnic minorities who join

BNP chiefs are plotting to keep ethnic minorities out of the party by introducing an apartheid-style membership system. The leadership has revealed plans to give special “founder member” status to whites who joined before the party was forced to drop its racist constitution. Earlier this month the party was threatened with legal sanctions if it refused to admit non-whites.

The move will effectively create a two-tier system with newer members, including all ethnic minorities, treated as second-class citizens. Leader Nick Griffin and his cronies will be able to exclude black and Asian members by designating meetings and decisions for “founder members” only.

Earlier this month Clive Jefferson, one of Griffin’s most trusted henchmen, spoke at a closed meeting in Cumbria and explained how party bosses plan to get around the new membership rules. Jefferson, who regularly accompanies Euro MP Griffin on trips to Brussels, told the meeting: “There will be teams of militant Asians and Islamics joining to cause disruption – and there’s no question about that.

“There’s things in the constitution about founder membership, so what we can do in the north-west is stop that happening, because we’ll be having meetings of the founder members only. It’s at the discretion of organisers – they can invite whoever they want.”

Sources told the Sunday Mirror they expected “founder member” status would be granted to members who had been with the party for two years when the new constitution was passed on February 14. Sikh Rajinder Singh, 78 – recently unveiled as the party’s first non-white member – could become a victim of the clause.

The BNP party hierarchy hopes to avoid new legal challenges, ­because the terminology involved does not mention skin colour.

Jon Cruddas, Labour MP for Dagenham, said: “This shows that changes to the BNP constitution are a hollow sham.”

Mirror

A Sikh joins the BNP – and another Sikh writes this…

Rajinder Singh, 78, has announced his support for the BNP

Following the big-girls’-blouses of the BNP being forced in law to accept members from ethnic minorities, the idiotic Sikh-born Rajinder Singh from West Punjab is up for joining the full-fatty version of the British Union of Fascists, saying that people are naturally racist.

I must have missed the turkeys voting for Christmas a couple of months ago. Anyway, my friend Hardeep Singh, who is press secretary for the Network of Sikh Organisations UK writes to me and I thought I’d offer what he has to say on Rajinder as a personal view. It’s particularly interesting, I think, that Islamophobia among Sikhs can make them sympathetic to neo-fascists in the BNP – my enemy’s enemy and all that. I haven’t tidied up Hardeep’s open letter, because I think it should be read as he wrote it; it’s a magnificent Sikh insight into racial hatred. Here it is, with many thanks to Hardeep

A Lapsed Sikh & the BNP: A Personal View by Hardeep Singh

When someone mentions the British National Party, I can’t help but construct ghastly images of frog marching skinheads with scowling faces performing the Nazi salute to all the ‘darkies.’ Albeit now just figments of my imagination – these images were on the contrary, once a stark reality for my parents & grandparents and many of their generation who moved to West London in the 1960’s, from the leafy villages of rural Panjab. They lived through the Southall riots where Sikhs along with others formed a vanguard against aggressive ‘Paki -bashers’ of the National Front, (the BNP parent movement), it was during these tumultuous events in 1979 that Blair Peach was tragically killed.

As a British Sikh, my closest encounter with a ‘skin-head’ with a swastika festooned on his forehead was on a bendy London bus. On politely paying my fare to the driver on entry (the full seventy pence worth), my detractor loudly uttered the unforgettable words “Rag heads got more of a cockney accent than I have!” Fortunately for me he was just the commentator type, not a fully fledged head-butting storm trooper.

That’s why it’s difficult to fathom the penchant Mr. Singh, a man born into the Sikh faith, has for becoming the first non Caucasian member of the BNP, if the BNP decide to change their membership requirements and acquiesce to the EHRC demands for an amended constitution.

The communications and campaigns officer Martin Wingfield has endorsed Mr. Singh and called the party to “adapt and survive and give the brave and loyal Rajinder Singh the honour of becoming the first ethnic minority member”.

Mr. Singh has inadvertently become a political pawn utilised in explicit rebranding by the sharp suited fascist brigade, he may also emerge symbolic of a seismic shift in British politics based on the fear of radical Islamism held by both white non-turban wearing and in his case strategic Panjabi turban wearing Brits. Could this be part of a pseudo-reality whereby Mr. Griffin is a likened by Mr. Singh to Bruce Willis and will for better or worse save a bedevilled Britain from Islamism, with nothing but a dirty vest? Or is it more like a fatal attraction and will Singh’s infatuation for the far right all end up in tears and symbiotic failure?

Born in West Punjab in 1931, Rajinder Singh witnessed the violence of Indian partition firsthand. Millions of Sikhs, Hindus and Muslims were killed during partition, his father among them, murdered when Singh was only 15. He lays the blame squarely with Muslims. The memories of partition (which Singh refers to) are a synapse transmission away from many who lived to tell the tale, Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs. There was butchery on all sides along with acts of great humanity shown by fellow human being to his brethren, be it Sikh, Hindu or Muslim.

Although it is understandable why someone like Rajinder Singh has such a perspective considering the loss of his father during partition, it’s not justifiable from a moral standing and equally from a Sikh perspective. The importance of this, I cannot stress enough…

My grandfather survived partition in one of the ‘death trains’, he was a commissioned officer in the British Army, a proud Sikh infantryman with what I would describe a touch of swagger. His experience of brutal massacre did not lead him to a deep-seated hatred of adherents of Islam, because this would have been inconsistent with Sikh teachings. My grandfather took the example of another Sikh who suffered immense personal tragedy at the hands of Muslims, the tenth and last human spiritual leader of the Sikhs Guru Gobind Singh, some 300 years ago.

Inspite of loosing his father at the age of nine (Guru Tegh Bahadur was executed at the behest of the Emperor Aurungzeb for standing up against the forced conversion of the Hindu Holy men in Kashmir) and his four sons, two of whom were bricked alive and two whom died in battle against Mogul aggression, Guru Gobind Singh did not use any of these examples to vilify, demonise or tarnish any of the adherents of Islam.

In fact, Guru Gobind Singh actively promoted the notion of desiring the wellbeing and happiness of the entire human race without any kind of distinction or bias regarding people’s individual religious affiliations or ethnic background for that matter. He explicitly promoted the teaching that people should “view the whole of humanity as one race”

It is in the spirit of true Sikh teachings, that stories like those of Dr. Anarkali Kaur Honaryar bring a smile to the face of many worldwide, rather than a general ambivalence to the controversial Mr. Singh. She is a 25 year old from Afghanistan and was chosen by Radio Free Europe’s Afghan chapter as their “Person of the year”. The award has made her a household name in the Afghan Capital Kabul.

Since the ‘Talibinisation’ of Afghanistan in the early 1990’s the numbers of Sikhs which was estimated to be 50,000 has dwindled to around a 3,000, Sikhs have been reported to be kidnapped and held hostage by Taliban affiliates as well as forced in some instances to pay the jizya (tax imposed on non-Muslims). Inspite of the appalling treatment of minority groups including her very own community, heroines like Dr. Anarkali Kaur Honaryar, A Sikh – continues to work for the Afghan Human Rights Commission (which she joined in 2006), fighting for amongst others the rights of Muslim women in Afghan society. Many of her relatives chose to move to avoid the hostilities and emigrate to safer part of the world such as Canada, Europe & India.

I think we should spend far more time celebrating heroes and heroines of this ilk and much less time on the strategic turban wearing Mr. Singh and his reprehensible grandstanding with Mr. Griffin’s party. Perhaps he should be reminded that it wasn’t that long ago that Mr. Griffin was talking about the voluntary repatriation of Sikhs to India so that ‘West London, wouldn’t be so crowded at rush hour’.

If he chooses to join the ranks of the far right, he will do so at the disgust of the vast majority of Sikhs across Britain. He is lapsed not only in his appearance, but more importantly in his love affair with an organisation that totally rejects Sikh teachings on the equality of all human beings.

Hardeep Singh is is a freelance journalist & broadcaster & the Press Secretary for the Network of Sikh Organisations, UK.

Telegraph

‘BNP Sikh’ faces excommunication

A Sikh who joined the British National Party now faces excommunication, after community leaders protested that he was bringing the faith into disrepute.

Rajinder Singh – who has an avowed dislike of Muslims – was allowed to join the far-right party after the BNP faced court action over a membership ban against non-white people. But the organisation Sikhs In England, say that while Rajinder Singh is free to join whichever organisation he chooses, they claim that his views do not reflect the Sikh faith and risk damaging inter-faith relations, especially in the run-up to the general election.

Harmander Singh, from Sikhs In England claim that Rajinder Singh was damaging the faith’s image, and that the BNP members’ opinions were rejected by the vast majority of practising Sikhs.

Sikhs In England (SIE) have now referred the case of Rajinder Singh to the Akal Takht, the highest governing council in the Sikh faith – who meet at the Golden Temple in Amritsar, India. The Akal Takht have the power to excommunicate Rajinder Singh, which could mean the BNP member being shunned by Sikhs, although that is an ultimate sanction.

Harmander Singh said: “Sikhs In England condemn Rajinder Singh’s public actions in allowing to be used as a political stunt by the BNP thereby bringing the turban and the faith into disrepute. Rajinder Singh’s views are against Sikh values and therefore not supported by any true Sikh. SIE will seek appropriate sanctions from the Akal Takht against Rajinder Singh at the earliest opportunity – this to include consideration of excommunication.”

OBV

BNP votes to scrap whites-only policy

BNP members vote to change constitution to allow black and Asian people to join in order to comply with equality laws

The British National Party today voted to scrap its whites-only membership policy in a move dismissed by anti-racist campaigners as "cosmetic".

At an extraordinary general meeting held in Essex, members of the far-right party voted in favour of changes to its constitution that would theoretically allow black and Asian people to join. BNP spokesman Simon Darby said that of the "300-400 people" who attended the meeting, just five voted against the motion.

The new constitution, which is not yet publicly available, will be sent to the Equality and Human Rights Commission for final approval. The BNP will give the ECHR seven days to respond, said Darby.

The meeting was hastily arranged after the Central London county court last month told the BNP to amend its constitution to comply with race relations laws or face legal action by the EHRC. After the hearing on 28 January , the BNP rushed out letters to its 14,000 members in order to allow for the 14 days needed to alert them to the proposed changes.

But there remained queries over whether the amended version would go far enough to appease lawyers from the EHRC.

Anti-racism campaigners have said the constitutional change would make no difference to the BNP's racist ideology. Weyman Bennett, national secretary of Unite Against Fascism, said: "I think that regardless of the vote, the changes are cosmetic and have only happened because the courts forced them to stop racist practices."

Asked whether the BNP is now not racist, Darby said: "Let's put it like this: If, as a result of this, a court rules that we are now a bonafide party, that's a great stamp of approval. If anyone says we are racist, we can say 'no we're not, it's been proved in court'."

As for whether the BNP would genuinely welcome members of "all colours and creeds", Darby said: "I'm not prepared to even say that until we have the court ruling. I'm not going to stray into the realms of that sort of terminology."

Earlier in the day BNP leader Nick Griffin said ethnic minority members will be accepted if they agree with the party's aims.

He told the BBC: "They'll be accepted, they'll be welcomed, providing they're there to do the things that we want to do, and providing they accept and agree with our principles, which is that multiculturalism, we believe, has been a failure. It was imposed on the British people without any consent, by the political elite. It's still going on, it's madness and it's time to shut the doors."

First in the queue to join the ostensibly more inclusive BNP is likely to be Rajinder Singh, a 78-year-old retired primary school teacher, who last week told the Guardian that the BNP was genuinely changing.

"They are trying to soften up. Shouldn't the nation welcome that?" he said. "It's a positive move if they get people like me, and if I'm sitting in a BNP meeting they won't say 'Throw all of them out' because they'll realise one of 'them' is among 'us'."

Observer

BNP to vote on allowing non-whites to join party

BNP failed to to revise constitution after legal challenge from the Equality and Human Rights Commission last year

The BNP will vote today on whether to change its constitution to allow non-whites to join the party.

Following a legal challenge by the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) last year the BNP agreed to use "all reasonable endeavours" to revise its constitution to ensure it did not fall foul of race equality legislation. But the far-right party has so far failed to follow through on that promise and last month it was ordered to amend its rules, which restrict membership to "indigenous Caucasians", or face prosecution.

After the January hearing, BNP spokesman Simon Darby said the party would have to "emasculate its constitution" and described the case as "a deadly serious attempt to put us out of business".

The BNP rushed out letters to its 14,000 members in order to allow for the 14 days needed to alert them to the proposed changes. An extraordinary general meeting, being held today at a secret location, is widely expected to agree a new constitution.

Griffin has urged party members to back the changes to its constitution but has deplored the EHRC's actions and described them as a waste of money. He told the BBC that ethnic minority members would "be welcomed, providing they're there to do the things that we want to do, and providing they accept and agree with our principles".

Rajinder Singh, a Sikh man who has written Nick Griffin letters of support, provided the BNP leader with a character reference at his 2005 trial for inciting racial hatred, and appeared on the party's online TV channel, is believed to have been lined up as the first non-white member in the event that the constitution is amended.

The party's communications and campaigns officer Martin Wingfield personally endorsed him on his blog, calling for the BNP to "give the brave and loyal Rajinder Singh the honour of becoming the first ethnic minority member".

Observer

Prey for the BNP

The Sikhs who join in the hatred of Muslims are deluded if they expect to avoid racial exclusion

Rajinder Singh, a British Sikh with an extreme dislike of Muslims, is, according to the BNP, "the kind of immigrant you want if you're going to have them". And if, as expected, the party members vote to allow ethnic minorities to join, Singh will be the first to be conferred this "honour". Sikh organisations have dismissed him – and fellow BNP wannabe "Ammo Singh" (a pseudonym) – as unrepresentative, and it is easy to write them off as self-hating lunatics or pranksters. But to do so is to obscure the larger realities of how race, religion and hate operate.

What has been lost in the storm over Nick Griffin's BBC appearance and the debate over the freedom to voice hatred in the guise of "white rights" is that modern racism survives through a parasitical alliance of vicious groups and ideologies, each of which thinks it is superior to and more entitled to preservation and growth than the others. What they share is a commitment to delusions of absolute racial or religious grandeur and purity even as they compete for victim status.

The two Sikhs' hostility to Islam is strong enough for them to overlook the contempt in which the BNP ultimately holds all racial minorities. Communities in Britain with links to the Indian subcontinent have, over time, seceded from their rich shared heritage and the assertive "Asian" banner under which they fought successfully for their rights in the 1960s and 1970s. Dispersed into the sectarian religious identities of Sikh, Hindu and Muslim, they have all but forgotten how to mobilise together against the threat of an opportunistic ethnic majoritarianism that does not, ultimately, make fine distinctions among those it perceives as outsiders.

Generalising labels like "Asian" may have their drawbacks but, as Arun Kundnani of the Institute of Race Relations notes of Sunrise Radio's bizarre decision to drop "Asian" from its banner under sustained pressure from extremist groups like the World Hindu Council, the hope underlying such disaffiliation is that "racist whites could be persuaded to exclude Hindus and Sikhs from their hatred, and focus instead solely on Muslims". A 2006 Runnymede Trust survey claims that as many as 80% of Hindus and Sikhs in Britain wished to be seen as specifically distinct from Muslims. "Don't Freak, I'm a Sikh", urged T-shirts printed after the 7 July bombings.

Griffin's assertion that "many" Hindus and Sikhs support the BNP is a wild exaggeration. But we need to face up to the messy reality of a society where ethno-religious fragmentation and tensions between minority groups work to the advantage of majority chauvinism. Kundnani points out that as early as 2002 the BNP was able to persuade a tiny Sikh faction called the Shere-e-Punjab to participate in its anti-Muslim campaign. Even if such collaborators are a tiny fringe, minority communities need to be aware of the ways in which their participation in divisive categories and separatist communal warfare only strengthens the positions of the racists who seek to subordinate them entirely.

Anti-immigrant views among migrants are not new, but what extremisms also share is an exaggerated fear that other groups are numerically overwhelming theirs. When Sikh-Muslim gang fights broke out in Slough, the language used mimicked the defensive territorial language of the BNP. "Muslims run Slough," one gang member insisted at the time. "Why are Sikhs coming from outside?"

Ammo Singh told the BBC, which has made a habit of using fringe groups as representatives of entire communities, that Islam was planning to take over Britain through "a combination of immigration, high birth rate and conversion".

Rajinder Singh, like many Hindus and Sikhs, has invoked the 1947 partition of India, in which he lost his father, as the cause of his enmity towards Muslims. This selective emphasis conveniently obscures two facts. The first is that it was the British empire and its policies of divide and rule which culminated in the partition that was its last official act. The second is that all three communities are fully responsible for the horrific butchery, bloodletting and rape that followed. Rather than mourning the tragedy of partition, men like Rajinder Singh seek to re-enact it in Britain, once again under the aegis of British racial supremacism.

The time has come for us to recognise racial and religious hatred in all its manifestations for what it is and take a stand against it – alongside right-thinking whites – not only when it is directed at us, but also when it is undertaken in our name. The colour line hasn't disappeared yet, but the real struggle is between fascist hatreds and humane solidarity.

Comment is free

BNP signs its first non-white member...

Rajinder Singh, who has appeared on the BNP's internet TV channel,
blames Muslims for the death of his father during the Partition of India in 1947

...but he's only joined because he hates Muslims

An elderly Sikh who describes Islam as a "beast" and once provided a character reference for Nick Griffin during his racial hatred trial is set to become the British National Party's first non-white member.

Rajinder Singh, an anti-Islam activist in his late seventies who blames Muslims for the death of his father during the Partition of India in 1947, has been sympathetic towards Britain's far-right party for much of the past decade even though he currently remains barred from becoming a member because of the colour of his skin. But last weekend the BNP's leadership took their first steps towards dropping its membership ban on non-whites after the Human Rights Commission threatened the party with legal action. The move will be put to a vote of members soon.

Martin Wingfield, the BNP's communications and campaigns officer, has already put forward the case for Mr Singh's membership, telling members on its website: "I say adapt and survive and give the brave and loyal Rajinder Singh the honour of becoming the first ethnic minority member of the BNP."

A BNP spokesman said last night: "He is perhaps the kind of immigrant you want if you are going to have them."

Mr Singh, a former teacher from Wellingborough, Northamptonshire, says he would be "honoured" to become a card-carrying member of the BNP. Explaining his motives, Mr Singh said: "I am a retired teacher, living a quiet life. I got in touch with the BNP on certain core policies that appeal to me. I also admire them since they are on their own patch, and do not wish to let anyone else oust them from the land of their ancestors."

Mr Singh and another Sikh from Slough who goes by the pseudonym Ammo Singh have previously co-operated with the BNP and have been used by the party's leadership to try to woo Asian supporters, particularly Hindus and Sikhs living in areas where tensions with Muslims run high. The party has had little success, however, with all mainstream Sikh and Hindu groups widely condemning the BNP.

But Rajinder Singh and Ammo Singh – who keeps his identity secret but is thought to be an accountant in his late thirties – have answered Mr Griffin's call, thanks to the BNP's staunchly anti-Islamic rhetoric since September 11. In December 2001, Ammo Singh claimed he had helped the BNP distribute thousands of anti-Islamic leaflets in Southall, west London, but recently he has kept a low profile. Rajinder Singh, on the other hand, has begun to appear in BNP literature more frequently, writing for the party's newspaper, Freedom, and appearing on the internet television channel, BNPTV.

His intense dislike of Islam appears to stem back to his father's death during the Partition of India, which led to the deaths of an estimated two million Sikhs, Muslims and Hindus. "I come from partitioned Punjab that saw a lot of bloodshed in 1947," he said. "Anyone escaping that genocide would pray to God, [say] never again and vote for BNP."

Mainstream Sikh groups said they were appalled. Dr Indarjit Singh, director of the Network of Sikh Organisations, said: "Sikhism stresses equality for all human beings. Therefore Sikhs who are true to their faith, will having nothing whatsoever to do with any party that favours any one section of the community."

Independent

Note by LU

Rajinder Singh is well known to Nick Griffin and has been dodging around the BNP for some time. It was Singh who spoke up for Griffin as a character witness when he was in court at Leeds back in 2006, bizarrely claiming that Griffin wasn't racist. On that occasion, the BNP paid for a top hotel for the night for Mr S, and treated him to lunch at a pub - a fact that was heavily criticised at the time by the Sikh community, many of whom were demonstrating AGAINST Griffin outside the courtroom.

Singh has also addressed the Kirklees branch of the BNP, speaking about his hatred of Muslims. He was also in the BNP's 2004 election broadcast. He has been roundly condemned for his long-standing connections to the BNP and Nick Griffin.

The Observer had an excellent report on Ravinder Singh back in 2001, regarding the distribution of thousands of CDs, tapes and leaflets claiming that Islam poses a threat to Britain. The article is here.

Back in 2006, there was a bit of a fuss on the Stormfront nazi forum when it was announced that Singh was to attend the Kirklees meeting as the BNP's ethnic liaison committee leader. At that time, the likes of Arthur Kemp, who then ran the BNP’s indoctrination programme for voting members, openly posted on Stormfront, but along with the change in image over the past couple of years went a withdrawal from such places (at least under names that clearly identified the poster). This meant that Kemp went through Stormfront and carefully deleted most, if not all, of his posts. Fortunately, some of them are referred to in quotes.

'Originally Posted by Arthur Kemp
Anyone who cannot see the political and propaganda advantage to be gained by having an ethnic demonstrating that the BNP is not a "race-hate" party, has absolutely no understanding of practical politics and should stick strictly to hobbyism.'

Clearly, Rajinder Singh is nothing more than a 'propaganda advantage'.