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.
