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.
