Car Trouble?

Nick Griffin doesn't have a lot of luck when it comes to motor cars does he?

We reported recently of his beloved Skoda being seized by High Court enforcement officers who were attempting to collect some of the large amounts of cash the BNP owes its creditors and former employees.

We also remember his ill fated second hand car business "Affordable Cars" a BNP funded company advertised in the BNP newspaper "Voice of Freedom" where Griffin sold rusting Japanese jalopies to the unsuspecting public and pocketed the profits despite promising BNP members a share of the loot.The Griffin get rich quick scheme was quickly dumped following complaints from very unhappy BNP officials.

And now it seems his car jinx has continued as he has allegedly had a serious car accident in France.

It appears that Griffins car was hit by a lorry,smashing the car into the central reservation and caused the car to spin and roll over and narrowly missed a large concrete block.

Only minor injuries have been reported.

Hope not hate

Nick Griffin Wins Yet Another Award!

Well Gobble Gobble! Breaking news just reaching Turkey HQ...

Nick Griffin has been voted the 'Hardest working MEP' by the Voice of Freedom Newspaper, The BNP's in house newsletter, the quality of which has been compared to that produced by a year five pupil doing a media project (but only one he rushed so he could get to play on Call of Duty before bedtime).

Andrew Brons, knowing that nobody wastes their money on the sheet of A4 propaganda, was proud to break the news on his own blog:

"We must congratulate our Chairman for having been chosen as ‘the hardest working MEP’ by the Editor of the Voice of Freedom. A crucial factor, in the Editor’s decision, seems to have been that our Chairman had not, on this occasion, used his constituency week for a family holiday. He had been working to support the Party’s candidates in the elections – something that the rest of us could do only poorly by comparison.

His award will provide his colleagues and his fellow MEPs from all parties and all countries with the inspiration to follow in his footsteps, in the hope that we might achieve even a pale shadow of his success. I am reluctant to mention my own puny efforts in the same paragraph."

Even Brons must be cringing at writing that one!

Whether or not the VoF actually considered the many other MEP's in the European Parliament, or just the two rather unproductive ones in the BNP, or even just Nick, is unknown, but we're fairly sure it came down to being between Andrew and Nick, and of course, with Nick being the boss of the gang, he got to win it!

He wins this regardless of the fact he's spent much of his time sunning himself in Cyprus (allegedly looking for a 'bolt hole' for when the paper dragon collapses), regardless of the fact the BNP is in turmoil and most importantly; regardless of the fact he hasn't achieved anything over there in Europe in over a year!

Another thing Griffo should consider, is given the BNP's poor showing in the election, maybe he should have taken that holiday after all and left them to it?

And yet, there is one more clanger hidden from the membership of the BNP: the editor of the Voice of Freedom, is one Nicholas John Griffin! Well, even we didn't see that one coming.Who does he think he is kidding?

The award up in the next issue is for 'Most hard working Chairman of the BNP who's name begins with N'.

Turkey Breath

BNP to be taken to court by creditors

The British National Party (BNP) is being taken to court by its creditors including a North- East printing firm which is owed thousands.

The far-right party’s central office owes the Newton Press, in County Durham, about £16,500 for printing its newspaper, Freedom. It is understood the firm is one of several UK firms taking the BNP to court in an action headed by an as yet unnamed solicitor. The £16,500 has been described as loose change compared to the overall figure being sought from the party, which is allegedly £500,000 in debt.

Party leader Nick Griffin is expected to meet North-East organisers in County Durham today, where he will face tough questions over the party’s finances.

As a political party the BNP is an unincorporated association which cannot technically be declared bankrupt. However, creditors could hold Mr Griffin personally liable along with party members who entered into contracts.

Freedom’s former editor, Martin Wingfield, said he enjoyed an excellent working relationship with the Newton Press for about two years until he stepped down, in July last year. But, when asked about the recent debt, he said: “I understand the case is going to court, so at present, I cannot comment further.”

The BNP’s money woes were highlighted recently when a letter purporting to be from the party’s head office offered creditors 20p for every pound of debt. It was dismissed by some members as a fake, but the BNP’s former North-East organiser, Ken Booth, said it was genuine. He said party members in the North-East were disgusted to learn of the 20p in a pound offer and he had fought for the Newton Press to be paid. In contrast to the national position, Mr Booth said the North- East office has always operated on a pay-as-you-go basis and as such had no debts.

Mr Booth, who was removed from his post by Mr Griffin when he threatened to raise the debts issue, said: “It goes against the BNP’s core principle of local jobs for local people. As far as I can see this is a decent North-East firm that has done a good job and deserves to be paid and I don’t know why it hasn’t been. Central party is £500,000 in debt but it’s on a record turnover of £2.3m. No one is accusing anyone of stealing money, it’s just mismanagement. The general consensus of the members in the North-East is that Nick Griffin should shoulder the responsibility and step down.”

The Newton Press, which publishes the community newsletter, Newton News, declined to comment.

BNP central office spokesman John Walker said: “We could not comment on matters which are internal to the party and the businesses we deal with.”

Northern Echo

British National Party required to explain ‘inadequate’ accounts

The British National Party’s former treasurer could face criminal proceedings for delivering “inadequate accounts” to the Electoral Commission

The BNP’s 2008 accounts finally emerged three weeks before the fine for their late submission to the Electoral Commission would have doubled to £2,000.

Like the 2007 accounts, the latest financial statements do not give a true and fair view of the state of the party’s affairs at 31 December 2008 and of the year’s results, in the opinion of Silver & Co, the party’s regular auditors. However this year the BNP had no easy target to blame of the likes of Kenny Smith, one of the leaders of the party’s internal rebellion in winter 2006, who was used as the excuse for failings in both the 2006 and 2007 accounts.

In 2008 the party simply could not get its act together. As Nick Griffin, the party chairman, explained in his introduction to the accounts, soon after June 2008, when Jenny Noble took over as party treasurer from John Walker, it “became apparent that the task of maintaining central office accounts had become too big for any one individual”. So the job was “outsourced” to “an independent Chartered Accountant and Accounts Technician with the aim of presenting acceptable accounts for the accounting year 2009”.

In other words the BNP gave up on the 2008 accounts, though Griffin admitted lamely: “We recognize that it is not acceptable to present inadequate accounts”.

The failure meant that the accounts not only did not give a true and fair view but also did not “comply with the requirements of the Political Parties Elections and Referendums Act 2000 as adequate records have not been made available”. In 2007 the accounts did comply with the PPERA, despite not giving a true and fair view.

A spokesperson for the Electoral Commission told Searchlight that they had “a number of concerns” about the financial statements and the inadequate records referred to in Griffin’s report and have urgently requested more detailed information about the inadequacies from the party’s auditors. The BNP has until 8 January to reply, after which the Electoral Commission will consider what further action to take.

Under the PPERA 2000 the party’s treasurer on 31 December 2008, the last day of the accounting period concerned, commits a criminal offence by not complying with the regulations governing party accounts. Although the 2008 accounts are presented by Philip Reddall, he was appointed BNP treasurer only in autumn 2009. At the end of 2008 Noble was still the treasurer, until she was shunted out in April 2009 to run the Trafalgar Club, a task she appears to have performed with similar lack of success.

Her only defence, if the Electoral Commission decides to prosecute, would be that she took all reasonable steps and exercised due diligence to ensure the accounts were adequate, or that the failures were attributable to the period before she became treasurer and she did her best to put things right.

Despite the unreliability of the accounts, the figures are very interesting as they prove that the BNP has lied repeatedly to its members and donors.

The BNP started its main fundraising drive at the tail end of 2007 and built it up throughout 2008 with a number of appeals for objectives such as the launch of its provocatively racist Racism Cuts Both Ways booklet, the May 2008 election campaign and the notorious Truth Truck appeal.

The accounts show that the party did indeed raise more money than ever before. Income from donations and fundraising activities (the distinction is unclear) amounted to £688,764 compared to £221,456 in 2007.

Nevertheless the party ended the year with a loss of £82,642, an increase of £32,000 over the previous year’s loss. It was also a far cry from the £100,000 profit claimed in June 2009 by Jim Dowson, the militant anti-abortion campaigner behind the BNP’s fundraising efforts, who controls its Belfast telesales centre and other essential party functions. It was Dowson too who supplied the “independent chartered accountant”, John Thompson, who works for Dowson’s various business interests in Belfast, now charged with getting the BNP’s books into better shape for 2009.

The loss left the BNP bankrupt to the tune of £168,233. While that may not be much compared to some political parties, it is a significant proportion of the party’s turnover of under £1 million and the latest in a trend of growing losses. To stay afloat the party continued to raid the funds of its branches and groups, stayed in arrears with its tax and VAT payments and relied on the advance payment of membership subscriptions for the following year.

Far from spending the increased income on campaigning, most of the money has gone to paying party staff and propping up the party’s lacklustre publications and its failed Excalibur merchandising operation.

The start of 2008 had seen Excalibur’s move, to great acclaim, into new premises with a “vast array of new equipment”. At the end of the year Excalibur was out on its ear after Searchlight, in conjunction with Lancaster Unity and Wales Friends of Searchlight, had tracked it down to a Deeside Industrial Estate (click here for details).

According to the accounts, Excalibur’s stock, consisting of tatty, cringe-making and overpriced goods, including white mugs reading “I’m a white mug”, may have been worth £5,000 to £6,000 at the end of the year, but “the very nature of the stock raises questions as to its realisable value”. In other words, no one wants to buy them – even the BNP doesn’t have enough white mugs to buy its white mugs.

The total cost of the BNP’s “commercial activities”, consisting of Excalibur, Identity, Voice of Freedom and unspecified other printed material, amounted to £285,341 compared to income of £130,526, a loss of £125,000.

Staff wages and “professional fees” – a term that includes staff paid without accounting for income tax and national insurance – grew by over £100,000 compared to 2007. The accounts state there were 13 staff. Management and administration costs rose by £96,000 to £263,000. Rent and associated costs of the short-lived Excalibur unit undoubtedly pushed up this total.

Campaign expenditure was a mere £74,580, of which only £41,095 was on leaflets and £14,325 was the cost of fundraising. Back in March 2008 a BNP appeal letter asked for donations towards the 2008 London and local council election campaigns, promising that the London campaign would cost at least £80,000. That now emerges as another lie.

The party did buy £29,000 of equipment, far less than it made out when it moved into the Excalibur unit. It also spent £19,550 on buying vehicles. The figure does not include the “truth truck”, an advertising vehicle and trailer better known as the lie lorry. Contrary to statements in fundraising appeals that the lorry was “bought and paid for”, Searchlight established that the party was renting it from Dowson’s Adlorries.com business. The accounts do not refer to the “Truth Truck” by name but state that the party leases one vehicle under an agreement that does not give “rights approximating to ownership”.

The accounts also reveal some interesting non-financial details. The Young BNP was “defunct” during the year, “with the failed head being removed at the end of the year and replaced by a new team”. The reference is to the summary dismissal of Danny Lake and his replacement by Mike Howson, a man in his mid-forties, after Lake raised concerns about the “psychopathic” behaviour of Mark Bulman, an erratic and alcoholic teenage YBNP member who was also treasurer of Howson’s BNP branch.

The BNP’s security department is described as responsible for running party events “correctly to ensure the health and safety of all those attending”. This is the bunch of thugs who surround Griffin wherever he goes and have scant concern for the “health and safety” of those on the receiving end of their activities.

The South African influence remained strong, with both Arthur Kemp and Lance Stewart on the party’s 15-strong Advisory Council. Kemp is the BNP’s website editor and during 2008 was also in charge of Excalibur dispatch and “developing Voting Membership educational material”. Stewart, a former high-ranking officer in the South African Police, heads the BNP’s “Intelligence Department”.

BNP members, of whom the accounts state there were 9,801 at 31 December 2008, will not understand or care about the shambolic state of the BNP’s finances revealed in these statements, the potential criminal charges faced by the former treasurer or the proof that the party’s fundraising appeals were a pack of lies. They will not doubt go on pouring money into the bottomless and unaccountable pit that is the racist BNP.

Hope not hate

Trouble upstairs: Members leaving and newspaper ‘ineffective’, BNP officers told

Wingfield's Voice of Freedom - on its way to a rubbish bin near you

Secret minutes obtained by Searchlight reveal a party struggling with several problems. Sonia Gable reveals what is really going on at the top of the BNP.

Nick Griffin, the British National Party leader, may have been wrong-footed by this year’s attempt to mount a challenge to his position. Colin Auty, a BNP councillor in Dewsbury until he resigned from the party in July, failed narrowly to gain the 100 signatures he needed to stand against Griffin but the attempt seems to have panicked the party leadership.

An extraordinary general meeting held at the end of the party’s Red, White and Blue festival last month was supposed to make it much more difficult for anyone to challenge Griffin in future. However BNP members led by Richard Barnbrook, the party’s top man in London, threw out a proposal that the party chairman should be elected for a four-year fixed term, leaving in place the present annual right to call an election.

A change to the party constitution that did get passed was that candidates for leader will now have to obtain the backing of 5% of members with more than two years’ unbroken membership of the party instead of the present 100 signatures from members of two years’ standing, where the candidate is not a party office-holder. Those few people designated as office-holders need only 10 signatures.

Auty’s supporters condemned the decision, calculating that with the leadership claiming around 10,000 members, it meant a challenger would need up to 500 signatures to stand. Griffin therefore “did in fact walk away with the entire Party almost secured in his back pocket unnoticed by most of the membership present”, they said.

In reality it means nothing of the sort. The latest BNP accounts certainly state that the party had 9,784 members at 31 December 2007, compared to 6,281 at 31 December 2006. And Searchlight has acquired minutes of a meeting on 20 July 2008 of the BNP’s Advisory Council (AC), which brings together all the BNP’s leading officers, in which the membership at 14 July 2008 is said to be 9,175, the drop no doubt the result of the dissent in the BNP last winter.

However, Tina Wingfield, the membership secretary, expresses concern at the very low renewal rate of new members. Of the 373 and 854 new memberships processed in February and March 2007, she reported to the AC, only 32% and 39% respectively renewed the following year. And of the 9,175 members in July, 1,832 had joined between March and June 2008.

These revelations suggest that the number of people with more than two years’ party membership is at the most 2,000 and possibly no more than 1,000. A further indication appears in the report to the AC from the education and training department, which stated that the number of “voting members” was a mere 243. Members only qualify for this status if they have been in the party for at least two years, though they also have to meet activist and ideological training conditions.

It does not take much mathematical genius to calculate that 5% of a possible 2,000 qualifying members is 100, the same as the present endorsers needed to challenge Griffin. And if, as is more likely, the two-year membership figure is little more than 1,000, a challenger would have to find a mere 50 or so supporters.

A further change to the constitution introduces a new opportunity for just 20 voting members to demand a leadership challenge at the party’s autumn annual general meeting. But as voting members have to undergo ideological training by Arthur Kemp, the South African white supremacist and former apartheid regime spook who rose rapidly to a senior role in the BNP last year, Griffin is no doubt confident of their trustworthiness.

Attacking Searchlight

Kemp is editor of the BNP’s website and has until recently been acting managing director of the party’s Excalibur merchandising operation and responsible for the distribution of the party’s monthly publications, Identity and Voice of Freedom. These tasks have left him with little time to attend to BNP propaganda efforts, but the one “successful” project he was able to report to the July meeting was “an eight-page full colour booklet entitled ‘Searchlightexposed.com’”.

This, he explained, “was not for general distribution”, but “was sent directly to the editors, political journalists and senior journalists at all major mainstream newspapers around the country,” and “played a major role in the very low amount of publicity given by the mainstream media to Searchlight-propaganda during the election campaign”.

Only in Kemp’s dreams! Media coverage of the BNP in the run-up to the elections of 1 May showed no evidence that journalists and editors had done anything other than bin the BNP’s eight pages of lies and libels.

The production of this booklet, a tactic Kemp says “will be repeated at regular intervals”, proves only that our anti-BNP campaigns are effective and are hurting the BNP. Griffin’s introduction to the party’s 2007 accounts complains angrily about “third party disparagers” of the BNP in election campaigns, funded by the trade unions, and singles out the Daily Mirror, which printed “hundreds of thousands of copies of a special supplement directed against the BNP”. This of course is the supplement prepared in conjunction with Searchlight, an exercise that the Mirror successfully repeated this year alongside our Hope not Hate campaign.

AC members were not able to question Kemp about his dubious claims as he was unable to attend the meeting. One man who was present and may have helped Kemp compile the torrent of lies was Lance Stewart, the shadowy head of the BNP’s intelligence department and former high-ranking member of the South African police. Other notable BNP personalities at the AC, which has little real power in a party run as Griffin’s personal fiefdom, included Barnbrook; his Barking and Dagenham council colleague Bob Bailey; Jennie Noble, the BNP’s new treasurer; Michaela Mackenzie, the national nominating officer; Martin Reynolds who heads the BNP’s thuggish security section; the unpopular Mark Collett and David Hannam both supposedly demoted last winter to appease the BNP rebels; Peter Mullins and Mike Howson from the South West; the deputy leader Simon Darby and of course Griffin himself.

Ineffective

Also present was Martin Wingfield, editor of Voice of Freedom, the BNP’s tabloid newspaper, who must have been dismayed when Griffin said that his publication had proved ineffective as a recruitment tool and may be discontinued, although it might remain in online form.

Another suggestion discussed was to publish only bimonthly to save on the £3,258 a month it costs to have the paper printed and shipped from Lithuania. This amounts to 17p a copy, which is rather a lot considering most copies are not sold but given away. And that does not include the £600 the party pays to transport the papers to branches from the BNP warehouse in North Wales each month.

The unit cost is so high because contrary to the tens of thousands of copies the BNP has always claimed to distribute, the print run is only 19,000, according to the AC minutes. Considering how many copies are given away to members of the public, one can only conclude that most party members cannot be bothered to subscribe to the paper.

Three years ago police seized the entire print run of Voice of Freedom in Dover, on its way from Slovakia where it was then being printed. Reports at the time mentioned 60,000 copies. Has the BNP been lying or has Wingfield presided over a disastrous fall in circulation at a time when the BNP has supposedly been so successful in attracting support?

The minutes record that “a printer in the North East” has offered 100,000 copies at 3.5p per copy but clearly the only use the party would have for such a print run would be to feed the recycling bins at the BNP warehouse.

The AC also heard that support for and development of party branches and groups had been a problem area since the expulsion last December of Sadie Graham, the party’s former group development officer and one of the leaders of the party rebels. Her departure followed that of Ian Dawson as head of group support a few months earlier. Tina Wingfield reported: “Before January of this year, we had two individuals on the full-time staff dedicated to group development and group support and their departure has left a vacuum in our administrative structure that needs to be filled”.

To the rescue came the ubiquitous Kemp, who will take over group support in his time out from attacking Searchlight. One of his first tasks, it seems, will be to train the apparently large number of local party organisers who do not know how to use computers.

The AC was unable to complete its agenda through lack of time but not before discussing an approach by Ashley Mote to head the BNP candidates’ list for the South East in next year’s European elections. Mote is currently an independent MEP, having been expelled from the UK Independence Party following his conviction for housing benefit fraud.

Collett and some others felt the publicity of an ex-UKIP MEP joining the BNP would rejuvenate the party, others did not trust Mote to stay with the BNP if elected. The upshot was that the AC voted to reject Mote’s offer apparently on the grounds that his conviction would result in adverse publicity and prove detrimental to the party’s reputation, a view the party does not normally take towards its members’ convictions.

Searchlight

Wingfield slams BNP's gun camp for kids

Martin Wingfield - not a happy man at all

...and he doesn't seem to be much of a fan of the Young BNP either

Martin Wingfield, the current editor of the BNP's trashy tabloid, the Voice of Freedom, has reacted badly to the article in last Wednesday's Mirror about the party's Youth Camp, where future members of the Hitl - BNP were given 'ideological training', lectures in how to argue with their 'Marxist' teachers and shown how to handle - among other things - knives and guns.

Admitting that he is no 'fan of youth organisations connected to political parties', Wingfield refers directly to the ideological training, stating that it leaves the party 'vulnerable to the brainwashing charge'. Well, yes, because that's what it is. But he is not only concerned about brainwashing. As he rightly points out;

'In nationalist politics over the years, we have only received detrimental publicity concerning our youth wings - from the leafletting at school gates charge, through to targeting football supporters and now to learning about guns and knives at a summer camp.'

He should know. Wingfield has been around the far-right for donkey's years and no doubt remembers the furore caused once when a bunch of fascists turned up to leaflet outside a West Country school's gates and were promptly reported to the police. Eventually, nearly a dozen of them were nicked.

Or perhaps he's thinking of the attempts to leaflet crowds of football fans when a good few of the BNP's supporters are violent football hooligans (like the late Luke Smith, chosen by the party - despite his extensive record of hooliganism - to become a councillor in Burnley).

Possibly he remembers back to before the days of the Red, White and Blue, when the BNP ran a youth camp at which the main attraction was weapons training using paintball guns - the BNP has always had a penchant for playing toy soldiers. On this occasion, one of the kids thought he'd quite like to keep one of the paintball guns for himself but was caught and asked in no uncertain terms if he was trying to commit suicide. Why? Because the guns belonged to former-Griffin bodyguard and gangster Joe Owens, a self-confessed thug who has been accused of a zillion crimes including a number of murders.

Whether Wingfield remembers these incidents from personal experience or not, he writes;

'...all those associated with the Young BNP [give] our youngsters an exciting time and a grounding in the values that are important to us'

Presumably those values include a grounding in using guns and knives, a pastime that earned this rebuke from Home Office Minister Tony McNulty;

'[It is] disgraceful to teach children to use weapons at a time when the scourge of knife crime among the young [is] such a problem...I have never seen anything so irresponsible. Teaching young children to use knives and guns is reprehensible but it is what you expect from such a sick and twisted party.'

Perhaps Wingfield really does believe that the BNP running kiddie gun camps is out of order - or possibly he just has a stick up his arse at the moment because Searchlight has got hold of the fact that his favourite toy - Voice of Freedom - could be about to be taken away from him (read the current issue of Searchlight for more details). Either way, he isn't any too happy as redundancy looms. Unlike his lord and master, Nick Griffin, there will be no £30,000 pay-off if he's thrown on to the scrapheap.

The Accounts (5) : "a slender merit of providing cosmetic comfort"

This article was submitted by one of our readers, Iliacus. We welcome any contributions from our supporters (as long as those contributions conform to the law and are in reasonably good taste). Please send your articles to us via email.

The previous articles by Iliacus regarding the BNP accounts are below:

The Accounts (1): First Impressions
The Accounts (2): "We wuz robbed"
The Accounts (3): Figure Skating
The Accounts (4): "and for my next trick"

I have recently been reading, as one does, a history of the Neath and Brecon Railway. This was a fairly insignificant railway company in South Wales, operating - oddly enough - between Neath and Brecon! It may not immediately seem of any relevance to the cause of anti-fascism except that its financial affairs (to which I might return in a future article) echoed those of a certain far-right political party of the present day.

In particular I was taken by the following comments by the authors, written in 2005 in respect of accounts published in the 1860s:

"The balance sheet for year end 1866...is tantalising in what it leaves unsaid and without further figures...it is only part of the picture. This statement falls short of the standards of reporting required today and its odd assortment of balances have the slender merit of providing cosmetic comfort to the casual observer."

What a splendid turn of phrase - and so appropriate to the subject of this series of articles, the 2007 BNP Accounts!

In this final article I want to concentrate on two areas - the sales of party publications (Identity and Voice of Freedom) and the Trafalgar Club. I will start with the publications, and a quick review of what they comprise. Voice of Freedom is a monthly tabloid; the front page normally carries an emotive lead story related to the evils of immigration while the other three pages are full of accounts of local meetings raising unprecedented levels of donations, adoration of the leader, and plenty of opportunities for readers to send money to the BNP for various items of tat! Identity is the party's exploration of the theoretical principles of nationalism (i.e. it's full of middle-aged white men ranting about the evils of the modern world!)

My comments are based on an interpretation of the way these items are dealt with financially. I have to make reasonable assumptions, which may be rash in the context of BNP accounting. Those assumptions are as follows:

• that intitial printing costs are met by the party nationally;
• that sales are then made either directly or via branches, and the latter therefore appear in the accounts of the RAU (Regional Accounting Unit);
• that expenditure by the RAU (in buying copies) is balanced in the income column of the National Accounts (as supplier).

Of course, being the BNP, anything is possible!

So, let's look at the performance in selling this stuff in 2007, and a comparison with 2006, starting with Identity.  In 2006 printing cost £30,000 - by 2007 it was £34,000; allowing for inflation this implies a small increase in print runs. Income in '06 was nearly £45,000 (a surplus of around £15,000 but see below); in '07 income nationally fell to £32,000 (a deficit of £2,000). A bad enough trend, but there's worse to come [worse for the BNP I emphasise; I think it's great!]. In 2006 the RAU (i.e. the branches) spent nearly £17,000 buying Identity - and raised £11,000 by selling them, wiping out a fair chunk of the National Accounts surplus. In 2007 the RAU spent over £22,000 on copies of Identity - and raised just £8,000 from selling them!

So in 2006 the branches "lost" £5,500 selling Identity - and in 2007 they "lost" over £14,000 doing so. In 2006 just over a third of copies were unloaded by the national party onto the branches - by 2007 that proportion had nearly doubled!

Let's have a look at Voice of Freedom (VoF). In 2006 the party spent £37,000 printing copies - this fell in 2007 to just over £32,000. Perhaps Mr Collett negotiated a special deal, but to this cynical observer it suggests a fall in the print run. Certainly the fall in national sales, from £66,000 to £57,000 suggests that copies weren't flying off the metaphorical shelves! And when we get to branch level, the trend identified with Identity is repeated, and then some! 

In 2006 the branches were billed for just over half of all VoF sales (£34,000 - 52% of the total). By 2007 the branches were being billed for over £52,000 of sales - an extraordinary 91% of the total! And this wasn't because they were finding it any easier to sell the damned things! Sales at RAU level fell from £26,000 in '06 to under £20,000 in '07.

So overall, in 2006 the party as a whole made a surplus of £9,217 from Identity and £20,580 from VoF.  In 2007 Identity lost £16,186 and even VoF recorded a deficit of £7,641. At branch (or RAU) level both made a loss in both years, a sign of the local membership subsidising the party centrally. But the scale of that subsidy has rocketed.

In 2006 the RAU lost £5,500 on Identity - in 2007 it was £14,215.
On VoF the RAU lost £8,698 in 2006 - in 2007 this shot up to a £32,515 loss.

In 2006 local branches, through Identity and VoF, subsidised 'HQ' to the tune of £19,715. In 2007 it was £46,730! And what will it be in 2008 at that rate of increase?

In the context of the earlier articles in this series there is a clear picture emerging of a party sliding into financial difficulties from the centre, and frantically plugging the gap by increasingly sucking money from the local organisations. The evidence for this is not just the growing subsidy through Identity and VoF sales identified in this article, but also the increasing 'loan' from the RAU to the national party set out in article number 4.

And so to a brief word on the Trafalgar Club. This is basically a dining club which, in principle, differs little from similar schemes run by other parties. In this case, in return for a substantial donation, you have the opportunity to enjoy a meal (of debatable quality) followed by a speech from Nick Griffin. Astonishingly, some people actually take up this offer!

What is strange is the way this is handled in the Accounts. It is, we are told in the Chairman's Introduction" a "body ... administered by this department [Administration] ... in order to avoid the danger of 'all eggs in one basket' the National Treasurer is not permitted to handle this body's finances" but it is subject to "full external audit".

This is a very strange arrangement, as well as being pretty offensive to a treasurer who is allowed to handle everything else but not - for some reason - the Trafalgar Club. By external audit they are presumably referring to the audit of accounts prepared by Silver and Co - but they are reporting on Accounts prepared by...the National Treasurer, who is "not permitted to handle this body's finances"! So are the Trafalgar Club's transactions contained within the BNP's Accounts or not? And if so, where? And if not, then how are they subject to "external audit"?

There are malcontents within the BNP (or recently expelled therefrom) who allege that the proceeds of this Club have too close a relationship to Nick Griffin's back pocket - there is nothing in the BNP's accounts to disprove those suggestions!

Exposing the BNP lies: part 99

What is it about the BNP, that they can never tell the truth? Reporting on the BNP's election efforts in Loughton, Essex, Martin Wingfield, editor of the BNP newspaper The Voice of Freedom writes: "Pat Richardson is defending her Loughton Broadway seat".

No she is not. She is standing in Loughton Broadway but has been a councillor for Loughton Fairmead for the past four years. She moved because she thinks she has a better chance in her husband's Broadway seat.

Wingfield continues in similar untruthful vein: "Alex Copland is standing in Loughton Fairmead and hoping to regain the seat formerly held by Pat's husband, Tom". No, Copland is filling the vacancy in the seat Pat Richardson abandoned.

Clearly, Richardson, Copland and Wingfield are banking on Loughton's BNP voters being too thick to notice.

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BNP paper delivery sparks target fears

A far-right political party delivered its newspapers to residents in East Grinstead last week, leading to fears it could be targeting the town.

The party's newspaper, The Voice of Freedom, was dropped in letterboxes along West Street, and a spokesman claimed they had been invited by residents. Mr Rick Louis, a salesman who lives in the road, said he had been annoyed by having it delivered to his home as he would be the last person to be interested.

He said: "This area has never been like that because I have been here for 10 years. They have obviously been targeting this area. My daughter goes to school here and it worried me that they are dropping this stuff through letter boxes. What they do is hide behind this sort of thing. They just come out with total bigotry."

Mr Louis added that he had spoken to other residents in the road and they had expressed similar views on the newspaper.

"I asked my neighbours if they had received it and they said it was one to just put in the bin straightaway. I know everyone has got their opinions and everything but I think it is a bit blatant to just put it through people's letterboxes"

The newspaper, which is normally sold for 60p, details party policies such as funding "generous" schemes to return immigrants to their land of ethnic origin.

Dr Phill Edwards, the party's national press officer, said: "We are a political party which responds to requests from the public so if they ask for our presence we will come."

Dr Edwards said residents should be happy they did not have to pay for the publication.

"Well, they are very lucky aren't they? They are very fortunate to get a free copy. I wish they'd give me a free newspaper. You in the media have misrepresented the BNP, so it's no surprise that people would misunderstand what we are on about. We conduct our affairs in exactly the same way as any of the other parties do. There's something deep-seated in people's minds about the BNP. It's wicked and it's shameful. We get a lot of black people voting for the BNP."

Kent and Sussex Courier