One Flew Over The Pig Farm: the BNP and us in 2008 - February

Not being endowed with the greatest of political imaginations (as opposed to fevered fantasy), the BNP thought it would be a wizard prang to produce a racist leaflet entitled "The Londoner", which it hoped to confuse with the Greater London Authority's own publication of the same name.

Naturally, the political geniuses of the BNP had neglected to check on the status of the name "The Londoner", which, as they should have known, was a trademark registered to the GLA. The GLA promptly fired off a legal missive accusing the BNP of "intentionally trading on the goodwill of the GLA in the trademark of ‘The Londoner’ by using a trademark which is confusingly similar to ‘The Londoner’ and that the use of the trademark, does, or is intended to, confuse or mislead members of the public". The same missive demanded that the BNP cease and desist and remove from circulation any publication using "The Londoner" as its title.

This wasn't to be the last time in 2008 that the BNP sought to sow the seeds of confusion by conflating other, perfectly respectable causes with its own racist campaigns.

In the best piece of national press publicity to come the way of racism for many a year, the Daily Mail developed a soft spot for what it called "the BNP's blonde bombshell", and devoted a two-page spread to Upper Beeding's best known paragon of virtue, community activist, all-round good egg (and BNP member), Donna Bailey.

Donna has the kind of looks that drive normally woman-free BNP members to stock up on tissue papers, and was the perfect antidote to the recently aired derangement of Lynne Mozar. Nobody ever commented on the BNP website to the effect that "We need more like Lynne Mozar in the BNP", but the party's article showcasing the Daily Mail's Donna tribute quickly filled with comments that might have come from schoolboys drooling over a Penthouse centre-spread.

As we noted: "Donna is, as they say, a class act. It's almost as if the BNP has recruited its very own Julie Andrews who comes skipping and singing over the Sussex Downs spreading sweetness and light wherever she goes."

This Julie Andrews had selective vision, however.

Donna told the Daily Mail: "I thought probably exactly the same of the BNP as you do. I thought, if this [the BNP website] is all racist, offensive stuff then I am switching right off. But it wasn't. It was all perfectly sensible. I found myself agreeing with everything - especially the immigration stuff."

Just in case Donna missed it, we pointed out that "the immigration stuff" was very difficult to avoid on the BNP website, as was the barely disguised racism behind it, and that if you took away "the immigration stuff" you could fit the BNP's policies on the back of a postage stamp. Even more difficult to avoid was the overt racism of the BNP's keyboard army of bloggers and forum posters, but Donna must, by some mysterious means, never have come across these dubious delights.

We said:

"...we'll presume that Donna refrained from visiting the numerous websites of the BNP's Blog Battalion, where open racism and complete contempt for other peoples and cultures is all too obvious ('Turnips', 'Muzzies', 'Mudslimes' ''Groids', Donna?). Or that she has never visited a BNP-infested Internet forum where the tone is somewhere between the toilet and the sewer, and the mental ability to step back a couple of rungs on the evolutionary ladder is a prerequisite to talking on anything like equal terms with them"

and added:

We'll also assume that Donna suffers from some unspecified but mercifully unique condition that blinds her to any awareness of the after-hours activties of so many of her fellow BNP members - you know the kind of thing, trivialities like murder, solicitation to murder, bomb-making, wife-beating, GBH, fraud, attacking Eddy Butler... not to mention the latest additions to the list, such entering members' homes by deception to make off with their property, bugging their private conversations and then pasting them on the Internet.

Donna told the Daily Mail that, just like her, BNP were "quite normal" and that the party suffered from a "bad press".

Hey ho.

Back in the reality of the BNP, the Decembrist rebellion limped on. An increasingly confident Nick Griffin made the rebels a tricksy offer they could all too easily refuse, as Searchlight reported:

In exchange for giving up their ‘strike’ and taking down their insurgent website and blogs the rebel leaders were given the chance of getting their party cards back.

The only condition laid out by the ever-so-generous party leadership was that they would only return as probationary members. This would mean that their immediate future in the party would be dependent on good behaviour and, just as importantly for Nick Griffin, they would not be entitled to stand for the party leadership at least the next three years.

The move was typical of Griffin. Everybody beyond the gullible BNP membership saw a trap being loaded, especially the rebels, who knew they would be lucky to last three months, good behaviour or not, as Griffin picked them off at leisure. This was a double trap, though, since in refusing Griffin's offer the rebels gave the BNP leader the opportunity to portray himself as a man of compromise and reason, spurned by disruptive splitters. And so, as always, it was win-win for Griffin.

At the same time Griffin-inspired rumours began to surface portending yet more changes to the BNP constitution, aimed at curtailing challenges to Nick's leadership - and the BNP's ever obliging mug battalion nodded sagely that this was the right and proper thing to do.

The saga of Donna Bailey finally came to a head with the Upper Beeding Parish Council by-election in which the flaxen-haired goddess rather less than honestly stood as an independent. This stance was contradicted, rather, by the BNP, which claimed her for its own, and sat back confident in expectations of a famous victory that would propel Donna into Upper Beeding's corridors of power.

Alas, Donna badly misfired. Having failed to secure co-option by invading an Upper Beeding Parish Council meeting, she also failed to secure election, losing out to a woman "who likes poodles", as a later film, based on these events, reported.



Four Burnley BNP supporters found themselves on the thick end of a High Court ruling that landed them with £30,000 in costs after they challenged an election result in the town's Rosegrove with Lowerhouse ward. Not mincing his words, Burnley Council Chief Executive Steve Rumbelow said that the four had failed to obtain proper legal advice (we wouldn't care to guess where they did obtain it) and had been "cajoled into going on a fishing trip".

He added: "Four citizens of Burnley have been put in a position where they face substantial costs, which could have been avoided. The fact that it's four individuals means the British National Party isn't liable for any of the costs despite the fact they've been using this for party political means."

You really would have thought that Burnley BNP might have smelled a rat when advised to object to the Rosegrove with Lowerhouse result on an individual basis. Obviously somebody in the party hierarchy knew they hadn't got a hope and wasn't prepared to sacrifice party money in a lost cause - but was more than happy to encourage the unfortunate four into financial penury.

The bewildering melange of fact and fiction that are the BNP's finances came under the scrutiny of Radio 4's "File on Four" in a programme Simon Darby predictably pre-warned was an "attack" on the party.

With considerations of impartiality and legal responsibility to address, "File on Four" put itself at a disadvantage in its dealings with a party never knowingly observant of either, and the resulting programme, while still damaging, was not the killer blow it should have been.

Still, enough evidence of BNP shady dealings was presented that would in any other party have led to an internal inquiry at the very least, and should have been of deep interest to the Electoral Commission. As Nick Griffin, chief suspect in many of the allegations made, was the only person within the BNP who could order an inquiry, that was always a non-starter - not that anybody would have trusted a Griffin-instigated inquiry, - and the Electoral Commission... well, our experience of that particular "watchdog" is such that we wonder if there is any point to it at all.

Lancaster Unity listed five points of interest raised by "File on Four":

* Possible donation fraud
* Potential PAYE fraud
* Dodgy unreceipted transactions
* Lies from the BNP's treasurer
* Shredded documents

and concluded

All in all, an intriguing programme that was only able to touch the surface of the corruption that is endemic within and around the British National Party. The feeling I got from it is that there is a lot more information to be dug out - but that's the feeling we all get when the words 'corruption' and 'BNP' are mentioned in the same sentence.

News that the BNP had moved its Excalibur tat outlet to Deeside in North Wales was greeted with digust on the part of local Labour MP Mark Tami. “This is a very unwelcome development,” he told the North Wales Daily Post. “Clearly their views are abhorrent to the vast majority of the British public. Nobody would want to see this in the area and I hope that people steer clear of buying any merchandising from the BNP.”

Naturally Excalibur failed to inform landlords Evans Easyspace of its connection to the BNP, and moved heaven and earth to keep the location of its premises secret. It was so secret, apparently, that Nick Griffin told the Daily Post that even he didn't know where it was - and if you believe that...

So began the quest to discover the whereabouts of the BNP's repository of fake Victoria Crosses and cheap t-shirts, which we'll return to in a later post.

Meanwhile, local opposition gathered as the BNP announced plans to stage its annual Red White and Blue money-spinner in Denby, Derbyshire, for the second year running. Party member Alan Warner, on whose land the August event would be staged, had initially sided with the Decembrist rebels until leaned on by panicked local officials, and later resigned his Denby parish council seat claiming that other councillors didn't talk to him and that parish councils "have no power".

Denby residents objected to the BNP's presence after witnessing their loutish behaviour the previous year. Denby man John Lumsden told his local newspaper: "The people who caused the main problems were the organisers who stayed up all night having large karaoke parties." 76 year-old Brian Bentley said: "We had a lot of noise last year and a lot of people from the festival left the site and were just walking around the village drinking."

All political parties are prone to pulling some low tricks, but few do so with the resolve and tenacity of the BNP. Treating the Hastings Voluntary Association for the Blind with utter contempt, the party of truth and honesty booked the Association's premises under the name "British Heritage" so as to hold a meeting addressed by Nick Griffin.

An appalled HVAB spokesperson said: "To say we are shocked about this is an understatement. We are horrified. We would not have allowed the booking if we had known it was for this purpose."

Lancaster Unity remarked:

The BNP's current infestation of South African ex-Security Service personnel seems to be increasing the BNP's love of cloak and dagger operations. Supporters were told to meet outside a nearby Methodist Church before being directed to the venue, a five minute walk away. The password, apparently, was "buffoons".

"Buffoons", we can safely assume, tells us all we need to know about the BNP's attitude towards Hastings Voluntary Association for the Blind.

Cloak and dagger was also the order of the day in Birmingham, where a tiny band of fascists skulked around the back streets a-purposed on holding a "trade union" AGM. This wasn't just any old trade union, however, this was the "one big union", the "fighting union", the "[insert windy hyperbole here] union", Solidarity - general secretary Patrick Harrington.

Our friends at Norfolk Unity take up the story:

In Birmingham on February 23rd the BNP's bogus micro "trade union", Solidarity, held its annual conference at the Apollo Hotel, Birmingham. The booking was made in the name of "Accentuate", a vaporous one man "PR company" which seems to exist to issue press releases nobody takes any notice of.

Solidarity, taken from its founders Clive Potter and Tim Hawke in dubious circumstances in a Griffin-inspired coup and handed to failure and nonentity Patrick Harrington, is so useless that the only advice it could give Mark Walker, at the centre of its feeble cause celebre case, was to "hire a lawyer specialising in employment law".

Some union!

The reason for booking the Apollo Hotel in the name "Accentuate" was purely to con the owners and to disguise the fact that this was a BNP event in all but name.

True to paranoid form, Solidarity insisted its members meet outside a McDonalds from where they would be redirected. I understand they were also told to keep schtumm so that the Apollo's owners didn't tumble to the fact that it was playing host to a gathering of hardcore racists.

The paranoia extended even to its own small band of deluded devotees, who were subjected to bag searches and "other security measures". Photography was out, so were mobile phones and "recording equipment", and only three hours were allowed from start to finish.

After the AGM, Harrington and Solidarity began issuing grandiloquent statements on the business conducted and debates held, neglecting to mention that only 27 members of the "one big union" could be bothered to turn up out of the 211 Harrington claimed were members - itself a lie, as Solidarity's accounts were later to prove.

As February closed the Guardian broke an interesting story on the West London-based CL English Language college, which teaches hundreds of foreign language students, charging fees of up to an eyewatering £30 per hour.

What caught the Guardian's eye was that the college was controlled by old Nick Griffin friend, Roberto Fiore, leader of the neo-fascist Italian Forza Nuova, who had in the past held international fascist gatherings on the premises.

The college was a "substantial business", according to one of its accountants - and with 100 students claimed to be there at any one time paying £30 per hour we imagine that it is. Odd then, as the Guardian clearly felt, that it should produce so little apparent profit: "Despite its size ... its latest accounts show that it recorded a profit of just £2,214 during 2006, and £1,821 the year before."

Or perhaps not so surprising.

CL English Language's accountants refused to be drawn on why the profits of the "substantial business" were so small, claiming client confidentiality - but we're sure you won't fall off your chairs in astonishment to learn that the reluctant currency counters were none other than sweet old Edgar and Jean Griffin, Ma and Pa to the BNP's own Nick.

To be continued...

The Upper Beeding by-election - the BNP analyses the result

Another instant classic from Zaskar. Caution - very bad language!

More Zaskar films here.

The BNP's very own Julie Andrews

Every so often the BNP comes by that rarity, a presentable and articulate person it believes it can use to explode the "myth" that the party is filled to the gunnels with racist bigots sporting shaven heads and unfortunate tattoos.

If that person is an attractive woman with no apparent blemishes on her character, so much the better.

Donna Bailey (left) is undeniably presentable, and, so far as we can tell, has never set a foot wrong in her life. Since moving to Upper Beeding in West Sussex she has thrown herself into community activities with some gusto and has won praise from all and sundry for her commitment and effort.

Which would be all well and good if only Donna Bailey were not simultaneously demonstrating the same commitment and effort on behalf of the racist British National Party.

Donna's fame has spread far and wide, and today we find her the subject of a two-page Daily Mail spread in an article that seems to be stuck somewhere between admiration and deep unease.

The first half of "Meet the BNP's blonde bombshell" must count as relatively good publicity for a party more usually in the headlines for its criminality and corruption. Our favourite bigot, the toad-like Green Arrow, thought the article marvellous: "An excellent article that shows the True Brits that we are them and they are us despite the reporters attempt at making it a smear."

By "a smear" the fearless keyboard warrior means that in the interests of balance the Daily Mail felt bound to report the feelings of those not so enamoured of the blonde goddess:

"One disappointing bit in the story is the reaction of her neighbour James Palmer who said he was the 'Neighbour of the Beast' and went on to say; 'I don't think there should be a place for it in a village like this.'

"A stupid man who does not care what happens to the rest of the country so long as his tiny part of it does not change. If he wants to keep his place in the Sun he should start supporting Donna and the British National Party because they are the only one's who really care."

(Aprostrophe placement/lack of (c) BNP)

Of course, in BNP-land only good things must be reported about Britain's most dishonest party. Anything else is only and ever a "smear" concocted by Gerry Gable, the SIS, UAF, the Daily Mirror, the World Jewish Conspiracy, Mao Tse-Tung and Jack the Ripper.

Donna first thought of joining the Tories: "But I had a look on the website and, you know, it just didn't talk to me. I wasn't particularly impressed by Cameron, and I really objected to the Tories' policy on Europe.

"So then I looked at the BNP website."

As you do.

"I thought probably exactly the same of the BNP as you do. I thought, if this is all racist, offensive stuff then I am switching right off. But it wasn't. It was all perfectly sensible. I found myself agreeing with everything - especially the immigration stuff."

Well, yes, Donna - "the immigration stuff" is very difficult to avoid on the BNP website. As is the BNP's overarching obsession with that one subject. Take "the immigration stuff" away and you could put the BNP's remaining policies on the back of a postage stamp (if the BNP has one left over after all the expulsion letters of late).

Presumably, as she sat wide-eyed in front of her PC's monitor, Donna never noticed the barely disguised racism festering on virtually every page, or worked out the poisonous intention behind the endless parade of stories of the "black crime" and "more immigrants - we're doomed" species that are its stock-in-trade.

And also - perhaps charitably - we'll presume that Donna refrained from visiting the numerous websites of the BNP's Blog Battalion, where open racism and complete contempt for other peoples and cultures is all too obvious ("Turnips", "Muzzies", "Mudslimes" "'Groids", Donna?). Or that she has never visited a BNP-infested Internet forum where the tone is somewhere between the toilet and the sewer, and the mental ability to step back a couple of rungs on the evolutionary ladder is a prerequisite to talking on anything like equal terms with them.

According to Donna BNP people are, like her, "quite normal too".

We'll also assume that Donna suffers from some unspecified but mercifully unique condition that blinds her to any awareness of the after-hours activties of so many of her fellow BNP members - you know the kind of thing, trivialities like murder, solicitation to murder, bomb-making, wife-beating, GBH, fraud, attacking Eddy Butler... not to mention the latest additions to the list, such entering members' homes by deception to make off with their property, bugging their private conversations and then pasting them on the Internet.

"It's just the bad press," Donna plaintively tells the Daily Mail, falling back on the stock excuse churned out by every cornered BNP member since first the party came kicking and cursing into the world.

Donna is, as they say, a class act. It's almost as if the BNP has recruited its very own Julie Andrews who comes skipping and singing over the Sussex Downs spreading sweetness and light wherever she goes.

Do we buy it?

Not many, we don't.

According to keen activist and twice BNP candidate Donna, she won't take her politics in to the parish council for which she is seeking election.

Well, she would say that, wouldn't she?

As do her supporters, who are presumably the same who made up the mob Donna led to a meeting of Upper Beeding parish council to demand co-option amid scenes one councillor described as "quite threatening".

The implication is, then, that Donna Bailey will take her seat - if or when that happens - as Donna Bailey, All Round Good Egg, with not a mention of the BNP.

Unfortunately, the BNP - delicately rehashing the Daily Mail article on its website - doesn't see it that way.

They see Donna as "theirs", as do the BNP Blog Brigade, who make no fine distinctions in these matters. She's BNP and she'll be a BNP parish councillor as far as they're concerned, period.

That goes for us too.

We're not about to swallow the idea that Donna Bailey will walk out of a BNP meeting in one frame of mind and take her place at a parish council sitting in another. Not for one minute we're not.

Perhaps over-estimating the powers of a parish councillor to a small degree, BNP website poster Maurice Oatley seems to concur: "Hello Donna, I take my hat off to you someone with bottle, it seems that you`re not prepared to stand by and do nothing while Brown and the rest of his bully boys sell this country down the river,If only there was a few more like you this country would be all the better," (Maurice likes commas).

In a party membership notably dominated by men who polarise into those with thick necks and those who give an appearance of being closely related to weasels, Donna is a striking oddity.

Our reformed friend Atreus tells us that in his day the presence of an attractive woman at BNP events was a cause of much excitement among the thick-necks and the weasel-alikes as so few of them had ever been in close proximity to a real female. It was always form, he tells us, to push such women to the fore at public events "to kid the world along as to just how 'normal' we were".

Echoing this, a poster on the BNP's website says: "I’ve been saying for years that if we could only recruit more good looking, intelligent women to the party, it would be transformed."

Awkwardly for chrisM3, who made the observation, intelligent women (whether good looking or not) are generally precluded by the very fact of their intelligence from joining the BNP.

What the BNP is more likely to end up with is this:


The frightening Lynne Mozar, of BNP Wives fame, whose demented performance brought forth as splendid a lesson in bigotry as has ever graced our television screens.

Quoth Mozar: "That's a legal term for them", in relation to the racist term for Pakistanis, adding that she "sometimes" uses the racist term for black people - "and why not?" Added to which was the far from lithe Mozar's summation of another woman as a "fat slag" who ought to wear a burqua.

We also had a female BNP friend of Mozar (talking to a woman in the street and pointing at a sign with a mosque on it): "You wouldn't like one of these around here would ya?"

Person in the street: "It doesn't bother me."

Female BNP activist (muttering): "It will do if one of them bleedin' rapes your daughter."

Normal non-racist people just like you, eh, Donna?

Fears over BNP candidate for Sussex council

A quaint village is in turmoil after a BNP bid to join the local parish council. Next month three candidates will battle it out at the polls for the vacant seat on Upper Beeding Parish Council after a British National Party member forced an election.

Councillors fear that Donna Bailey, an unsuccessful BNP candidate in last year's Horsham District Council elections and a contender for the Upper Beeding poll, could win the seat. Senior members tonight said they were concerned that is she was elected it would associate the village of 1200 homes, near Steyning, with an "abhorrent" party.

Parish councillor Bob Harber said: "I think someone who has the public face of the BNP is not someone that we want to represent our village community. People will lose trust in the council if she gets in. It's fair to say it will certainly split the council."

Mother of three Donna Bailey has lived in the village for four years. When a seat became available on the parish council last year she made a requests to be co-opted on but these were turned down. She reported three councillors to the standards board for the way she was treated but they were later exonerated. Mrs Bailey then turned up to a parish council meeting in December with 23 supporters requesting she be co-opted.

Coun Harber said: "I've never seen anything like that in village meetings.

"The atmosphere really soured and it was quite threatening." [Our emphasis.]

After councillors rejected her argument for being co-opted onto the council a second time, Mrs Bailey petitioned for the poll, which is likely to cost the parish's 3,700-strong electorate about £3,500.

Simon Birnstingl, the vice chairman of the council, said: "I can't speak for the council because we're not party political, which is a tradition north of the Downs. What's agreed by councillors is that party politics doesn't enter the council unless elections are coming along. But I find the BNP an abhorrent political organisation and I dislike what they stand for. If you look at their manifesto they'll jump on any band wagon to get a stronger power base and then implement their horrible racist, hate-fuelled politics. And to me this is the worry. They're about hating your neighbour, rather than loving them.

"Upper Beeding is a lovely place to live in. People smile and say hello to each other when they walk past. It's already split the village. I thought long and hard about blowing the whistle on the fact she was a member of the BNP because I recognised her from a previous election."

Mrs Bailey defended her corner and said she was not trying to infiltrate the parish council for the BNP.

She said: "I have chosen to stand because I want to make this village a better place to live in. At the end of the day people have a choice. They will look at my leaflet and put their vote in the ballot box. That's how it should be in this country."

Mrs Bailey, who runs her own beauty and holistic therapy business from home, said she felt she was being intimidated by a minority on the council because she was prepared to question their decisions.

She said: "There's a very small number of people who have grouped together and orchestrated a campaign against me going back to May last year. It has less to do with party politics and more about the fact I might try and change things. I can make a contribution and I love the work I do. I'm not racist or homophobic. I'm just a normal person with normal concerns about the environment we live in."

Mrs Bailey is a member of the village's youth council and does fundraising work at the primary school.

A poll will be held in Upper Beeding on February 7.

Brighton Argus

The dark spectre haunting West Sussex

Once the far right was confined to the inner cities. Now they turn up in the most surprising places

Nothing happens in Upper Beeding, David Coldwell, editor of the village newsletter, used to complain. The 'mooted bus shelter in the high street' had been delayed by the planning process, along with the refurbishment of the village playground. As for his proposal to put up signs pointing visitors to the shops in Hyde Square, West Sussex County Council was so shocked by their radicalism it threw them out.

Until now, the most newsworthy event was the annual boat race in which well-lubricated contestants paddled down the River Adur to Shoreham-by-Sea in adapted baths, while being pelted from the banks with flour bombs, eggs and anything else that came to hand. Although it occasionally got out of hand, the jolly competition only reinforced Upper Beeding's charming image.

'The wheels turn slowly, but they do turn!' Coldwell cried as he explained the sluggish pace of progress, but I wonder if he believed it. Upper Beeding seemed to fit a sentimental ideal of an English village where nothing changes.

Supplies of charm ran out just before Christmas when 23 villagers marched from the pub to the parish buildings to demand that a member of a neo-fascist party be put on the council.

'I never realised the speed with which neighbours can turn,' Simon Birnstingl, a gardener who sits on the council, told me. 'One minute, we were discussing how to get the swings fixed, the next a crowd burst in calling for me to be barred from the meeting. I've learnt to toughen up. I look at politicians when they're in trouble and feel sympathy now. Gordon Brown must go through the struggle I'm going through every day, so I am determined to see it through.'

However absurd it sounds to talk about an anti-fascist struggle in Upper Beeding, that is what he's facing.

It began when he was talking to his wife about villagers who wanted to be co-opted into empty seats on the parish council. She heard the name Donna Bailey and thought something was wrong. She checked and found that Bailey had run twice for the British National Party in district elections.

Birnstingl assumed that once he told the rest of the council their task was to improve Upper Beeding, not divide it on racial lines, that would be the end of Bailey. Not so or, rather, not entirely. After her friends heard what Birnstingl was saying, they stormed into the meeting. Undeterred, the council twice voted not to co-opt Bailey as a member, but only by a majority of one on both occasions.

She has now forced a byelection on 7 February and although two candidates are standing against her, she may have many supporters in the village. Townies will say that they've always known that the countryside is full of dangerous fanatics. But it's clear that not all Bailey's friends think they are fanatics. They simply can't see what is wrong with a member of BNP participating in village life.

Bailey put her case best when I tracked her down. She had helped raise funds for the local school for four years, she said. When the Round Table decided to stop supporting the Bath Tub Race because of the ubiquitous worries about health and safety legislation, she intervened to save it. The parish council didn't make political decisions, but dealt with street lights and playgrounds. Why shouldn't she be a member?

Many in Upper Beeding agree that being a member of the BNP is like being a member of the Liberal Democrats, a choice that has no effect on personal standing or moral worth. If she's a help at the school, her politics don't matter.

The same view can be found across the country, although how deeply it is held is impossible to determine. As I said a few weeks ago, the notion that the mass of people are racists, programmed by our imperial past to despise outsiders, has been shattered by the population movements of the past decade. The largest wave of immigration in British history wasn't accompanied by riots, just grumbles.

But there has been a small but palpable electoral impact. Sean Fear of the politicalbetting.com website says that the BNP won an average 14.4 per cent of the vote in the 38 council byelections it fought between May and November and polled higher than 20 per cent in 10. This was a far better performance than the National Front managed in the Seventies and way above the average vote the Greens or Ukip win today. Like most other analysts, he expects that proportional representation will bring the BNP seats on the London Assembly in May.

The far right is as crippled by sectarian hatreds as the far left. The backstabbing of its leaders and rank incompetence of its councillors would make all but the most committed neo-Nazi despair. Nevertheless, significant minorities are prepared to vote BNP, even in districts with few or no immigrants. There are those, like Donna Bailey's neighbours, who think there's nothing wrong with being a BNP activist.

Gerry Gable, of the anti-fascist magazine Searchlight, told me theirs was a hard attitude to confront. The press and BNP rivals like to seize on the criminal convictions of BNP leaders or chronicle its splits and purges. Less easy to document is what happens when far right views become normal in a pub or social club. Are there more racial attacks by whites and blacks and Asians? Do blacks and Asians attack whites? No one can say for sure.

In Upper Beeding, Donna Bailey's candidature is being opposed by Joyce Shaw, a former stalwart of the parish council, who's come out of retirement, and Becki Davoudi, who has an Iranian father, and, like the Asian family who have revived the village shop, has good reason to oppose the far right. What they're fighting is nothing as concrete as a political programme or the certainty of violence, but something vaguer: a chilling of the atmosphere, a potential for disgrace.

'When I take my children to school, there are people who used to smile and say "hello", who now give me hostile looks,' said Simon Birnstingl. 'They don't realise that we're trying to stop this village falling into disrepute.'

Observer

BNP supporter rejected by parish council

A British National Party supporter has vowed to call a local election after Upper Beeding Parish Council rejected her as a member for the second time.

Donna Bailey, 41, stood to be co-opted on to the parish council on Tuesday (November 6) after being rejected in September in what she described as an 'undemocratic' process. However, she lost out on a seat once again after a paper ballot was taken this week.

Mrs Bailey said she feels the parish councillors have been blinded by her BNP membership and will now resort to asking for a local election in the village. She said: "Politics should not influence decisions made at parish council level. How right is it that I am not allowed to be co-opted on just because I am a member of the BNP?

Chairman David Coldwell said afterwards: "The atmosphere at the meeting was emotionally charged and I am afraid that within parts of the council, Mrs Bailey does excite some passion."

At the meeting, three people were co-opted on to the council leaving just two vacancies.

[More about Donna Bailey here]

West Sussex County Times