Griffin stuffed

Enough to put ANYONE off their Christmas dinner...

Nick Griffin has today taken a right old stuffing after a judge ruled against him for the unfair dismissal of four former BNP employees. The BNP leader has been ordered to pay £45,000 in court costs within 28 days and pay another £40,000 in compensation to Steve Blake, Kenny Smith, Ian Dawson, and Nichola Smith. Some commentators believe his own legal fees could reach as much as £30,000.

It is also worth remembering that the BNP has still not paid the compensation for unfair dismissal to Michaela McKenzie, despite being ordered to do so last June. The compensation and legal fees is believed to have run into the tens of thousands.

All in all, it's turning out to be a pretty awful Christmas for Griffin.

Hope not hate

Note: The full judgement is here for those who wish to read it. Thanks to all who sent in the link.

North Bedfordshire BNP Meeting – Wednesday 12th December

North Bedfordshire British National Party are to hold a secret meeting next Wednesday in an unsuspecting pub in Tempsford. The group, led by Bedford mature student Phyllis Carter, have created controversy by booking the pub under the false name of "English Heritage," the government body responsible for protecting historic buildings.

Background

Phyllis Carter is the BNP's group organiser for North Bedfordshire, living in the mid-Bedfordshire village of Lower Stondon. She is the person to whom the local BNP PO Box 32 is registered. Mother-of-two Carter is a final year journalism student on the Polhill, Bedford site of the University of Bedfordshire.

She stood as BNP candidate in the May elections for Stratton ward in Biggleswade, coming bottom of the poll with 224 votes. She can be seen alongside BNP leader Nick Griffin in the following web link: http://www.bnp.org.uk/freedom/Vof82-14.pdf.

Previous Meeting

Left to right : Group Organiser Phill Carter, guest speaker Councillor
Richard Barnbrook and Eastern Region BNP organiser, Eddy Butler.

The North Beds group is very small with a handful of active members. They can, however, give the appearance of considerable size when they bus members in from across the 3 Counties. They did just this when they held an October meeting – their first - at the Anchor Pub in Tempsford, nr. Sandy in Bedfordshire. This was - an event captured on BNP TV with footage placed on their website http://www.bnptv.org.uk/archive1.php. The footage shows the distinctive decor of The Anchor – again shown in the photograph above.

Upcoming Meeting

For their follow-up Christmas meeting, Carter has issued an email indicating that the venue will be the same as before with Steve Blake as speaker. Blake, an IT consultant, of Bury St Edmunds, runs the BNP website. In the 1980s, his company, Aurora Promotions, imported Nazi propaganda from the US.

Carter has told members that she has had considerable difficulty booking meeting venues in the past. Perhaps this is why she has booked The Anchor under the false name of "English Heritage," the government body responsible for the upkeep of historic buildings. When rung, pub staff have twice confirmed that the booking is not in the name of the BNP.

Comment

"We find it extraordinary that Phill Carter should have to resort to these tactics in order to hold a simple branch meeting. It makes you wonder what they have to hide. All this goes to show that the BNP is very far from being a normal mainstream political party. We feel sure that English Heritage will take a very dim view of their name being abused in this way."

Contact Details

The Anchor, Great North Road, Tempsford Sandy, Beds. Phone 01767 640233.

English Heritage Press Enquiries Phone 020 7973 3250

E Mail From: "North Beds BNP"

Date: Thu, 29 Nov 2007 21:59:37
To:
Subject: Christmas Meeting

Dear member

I would like to inform you of our North Bedfordshire Group Christmas meeting. The meeting will take place on Wednesday 12th December at the same venue as last time. If you did not attend the last meeting, please contact me for directions. We aim to open the meeting at 8:00pm, so please arrive by 7:30pm to ensure that you get a seat. The guest speaker at this month's meeting will be Steven Blake – BNP Web Editor. If you haven't heard Steven speak before, please let me assure you that he is a truly excellent speaker.

There will be a small selection of BNP merchandise available for purchase on the night…an excellent opportunity to stock up on stocking-fillers! Whilst this is only our second meeting it is also the last this year and it promises to be a brilliant night. If you wish to attend please let me know if you can to give me a rough idea of numbers. Feel free to bring a friend/relative along who perhaps sympathises with our policies…the more the merrier!

Best Regards,
Phill Carter - Group Organiser

BNP's Advisory Council to be shut down - the disasters continue...

The BNP's Advisory Council, which is in place ostensibly to oversee Griffin and the running of the party, is to be completely dismantled to make way for the new membership tier known as the 'Voting Membership'. As we reported here, Griffin regards the new VMs as an 'activist elite', by which he presumably means they do as they're told and they would support him whenever he embarks on yet another one of his lunatic schemes.

According to information we've received, the unelected VMs will include organisers and active councillors at branch level as a matter of course, regional organisers, those officers of the party that remain after the coming reshuffle (or bloodbath, as one of our correspondents put it) but curiously (or perhaps not) not fundholders/treasurers - or certainly not those at branch level.

Considering that Griffin made a point in his blog post of August 11th of specifically mentioning 'effective powers of scrutiny over all central party finances', we're surprised that he intends to keep local financial managers out of the loop - but maybe we shouldn't be all that surprised at all. BNP branches from all over the country have been griping for the last couple of years that money gushes eternally into the black hole that is BNP HQ, and is rarely returned in any way, even, it is frequently said, in the form of election leaflets that have been bought and paid for. The last thing Griffin would want is someone demanding financial accountability all the time, which is why he will effectively keep the financial side of things directly under the control of the party's treasurer (currently John Walker though not, we suspect, for very much longer).

One sign that clearly indicates the diminishing role of the Advisory Council is that though it is intended that it should meet 'no less than three times each year' according to the BNP's website, it has in fact not met since last September - very nearly a year. And this is the body currently charged with a number of crucial tasks:

'The purpose of the Advisory Council is to inspect the party's accounts, ensuring proper conduct of the party's finances, and to act as a forum for the party's leadership to discuss vital issues and carve out the party's agenda, without hindering the Chairman's ability to make the final decision on all matters.'

The lack of Advisory Council meetings might then go some way towards explaining why the party accounts are so late.

Problems seem to be rife for the BNP's Advisory Council at the moment, despite the usually politically-somnolent summer period. Jonathan Bowden left both the Advisory Council and the BNP itself in a fury after Griffin's attack-dogs at Covert were set on him at the end of July, Scott McLean has resigned the Advisory Council and his post as Deputy Chairman over the Andrew Spence debacle and Steve Blake now appears to be directly in the firing line over a constant stream of criticism of the BNP website, which is about as bland as a political site can possibly get without anasthetic, and far worse, having signed Chris Jackson's nomination papers in the recent leadership election. It looks like he's a strong candidate for the bloodbath, probably alongside his pal Eddie Butler, the former BNP election guru (attacked by fruitcake Tony Lecomber a while back) who, after the lacklustre results for the party in the May elections is now apparently frequently described by Griffin as a twat (and worse). We confidently expect to be waving goodbye to both Butler and Blake in the very near future.

Thus the Advisory Council dissolves around Griffin's ears, ready to rise again in the form of a loose body of activists, the Voting Membership, and Griffin will only have to suffer the ignominy of answering to it once a year at the party's annual conference. This will effectively hand dictatorial powers to the leader of this already far from democratic party, giving him carte blanche to do as he pleases when he pleases with nobody to answer to except his unelected hardcore activists who he has himself placed into their positions of authority. Who in their right minds would give any party leader that kind of complete power over his party - especially someone as notoriously untrustworthy as Nick Griffin? And who would want to be a member of a party where the ordinary membership is regarded as of no value at all except for the price of their membership card?

We hear Jackie Griffin is swanning around showing off her nice new Peugeot sports car - a snip at around six and a half grand. The election results for the BNP might be crap, the executive of the party might be collapsing, the fake businesses dying off as fast as they are formed and the membership figures stagnating but the money still appears to be fast-flowing into the Griffin household. If I were a party member, I'd be worrying about that.

BNP faces inquiry over US fundraising

The British National party is being investigated by the Electoral Commission after the Guardian revealed senior figures in the far right group had set up a front organisation in an attempt to raise money from sympathisers in the United States.

Officers from Scotland Yard's domestic extremism desk took up the case after a series of links between the BNP and fundraising group Civil Liberty were revealed last month. A spokeswoman for the police confirmed that a file had been passed to the Electoral Commission, which is now taking the lead in the inquiry. Evidence of any offences would be referred to the Met's special prosecutions unit and the Crown Prosecution Service.

Since 2001 it has been illegal for a political party to accept overseas donations of more than £200, and party officials breaking the law face a year's imprisonment or a £5,000 fine. The Guardian found that Civil Liberty is run by senior BNP activists with all the money donated through its website going to the BNP's regional headquarters in the north-east.

It also uncovered an audio tape of the BNP chairman, Nick Griffin, speaking at a US conference organised by a former member of the Ku Klux Klan, in which he calls on sympathisers to support BNP members by giving money to Civil Liberty.

"Please throw money at the BNP, actually don't throw money at the BNP. Quite seriously it's against the law, but you can as my colleague will be telling you tomorrow, throw money at a group called Civil Liberty which helps members of the BNP and that is within the law."

The investigation also discovered that:

· Civil Liberty was set up and is run by Kevin Scott, who until September was the BNP's north-east regional organiser.

· The site's domain name is registered at the home in Stirling of Steve Blake, the BNP's website editor.

It is not clear how much money Civil Liberty has raised as its accounts are secret, but the American Friends of the British National party was estimated to have raised £80,000 to £100,000 for the BNP between 1998 and 2001 when it folded - money Mr Griffin said made a "significant contribution to the BNP's [2001] general election campaign".

The BNP and Civil Liberty insist they are completely separate organisations. Last night John Walker, national treasurer of the BNP, said: "I am at a loss, because we see major financial scandals involving millions of pounds involving the major parties, and here we have the powers-that-be looking for any angle to swat down the British National party over financial impropriety. I am completely and utterly confident that there has been no cross-pollination of funds from Civil Liberty and the BNP. They are entirely separate from ourselves. But we accept that because we are starting to become a threat to the political establishment, we will come under greater scrutiny."

However, Nick Lowles of anti-fascist organisation Searchlight welcomed the move. "The evidence suggests there may be some breach of the rules and it is good that the authorities are looking into this, " he said.

The Commission for Racial Equality has also written to the Electoral Commission calling for a full investigation into the links between the BNP and Civil Liberty following the Guardian article.

Last night the commission confirmed inquiries were underway and that it had contacted both Civil Liberty and the British National party.

Guardian