BNP membership 'higher where people live in overcrowded and private rented housing'

Membership of the British National Party (BNP) is higher where whites and non-whites live separately in segregated areas, research has found.

Oxford University academics used the BNP database posted on WikiLeaks that contained 12,000 members' details and then matched them with census data on more than 200,000 neighbourhoods in Britain to make the findings.

Whites are more likely to belong to the BNP in a highly-segregated city like Bradford where just under a quarter (22%) of the population is non-white, compared to a well-integrated area like Brent in London where over half (55%) of the population is non-white, they found.

The research discovered that whites are less likely to belong to the BNP where they had a substantial proportion of non-white neighbours. When the non-white category was divided into ethnic groups, BNP support was higher in towns and cities where British Asians lived rather than Black British. When religion was analysed, BNP membership responded primarily to Muslim communities.

BNP membership was found to be higher in areas with lower education levels and with more self-employed people and small business owners. Membership was also higher where people live in overcrowded housing and rented from private landlords, rather than owning their own properties or living in council houses. White people were also more likely to belong to the BNP in Labour constituencies, the research claimed.

Whites might perceive a political threat from concentrated non-white communities, with Labour being perceived as favouring minorities, the researchers said.

Dr Michael Biggs, a sociologist at the University of Oxford, carried out the research with a graduate student, Steve Knauss. Dr Biggs suggested that some white people felt threatened by segregated minority communities. Close contact among neighbours, however, broke down racial prejudice. The research, surprisingly, found that higher unemployment actually reduced the probability of BNP membership. This finding suggested that economic competition is less of a threat than cultural difference when people decided to join the party.

"The BNP thrives where the non-white, particularly South Asian or Muslim, population is large, but only if this population is also highly segregated," Dr Biggs explained. "Segregation means that white British people are less likely to have contact with non-whites beyond the immediate neighbourhood. It also creates a greater sense of cultural or even political threat."

Within Britain, the BNP's heartlands were the Pennines, Leicestershire and Essex, the data found.

The researchers noted that BNP voters were not always concentrated in the same areas as its members. The membership database revealed significant levels of support for the party in Wales and even in Scotland, which was not apparent in voting figures. Therefore, membership would not necessarily translate into electoral success.

Support for the BNP has grown ten-fold in the past decade. In 2001, it won 47,000 votes at the general election, the paper said. In 2010, it won over half a million (563,000) votes.

The researchers' paper, called Explaining Membership In The British National Party: A Multilevel Analysis Of Contact And Threat, will be presented at the British Sociological Association conference in London today, and will be published online this month by the European Sociological Review.

24dash

Secret neo-Nazi documents published

Everything but Nick Griffin's letter to Santa is about to hit the net

11 membership lists about to go online

Wikileaks is in the process of making a cache of documents and files from eleven different neo-Nazi organisations readable, and readily available, online. The membership records and private messages are currently being formatted to make them easy for non-techies to read and will be released on the Wikileaks site shortly.

The organisation got massive publicity last year when it published a BNP membership list handed over by a disgruntled ex-member.

The raw data is already available but needs formatting so: "your grandmother can read them and google can find them... Journalists won't write about it otherwise." The site is asking for volunteers with enough database skills to be able to expand fields and dumping to text. The compressed data is about 54MB.

The internal documents include more than just membership lists. There are what seem to be private internal messages, forum posts and email addresses. Groups who have lost data, or had it stolen, include Aryan Nations, Blood and Honour, White Revolution, Volks Front and the Hammerskin Nation.

The data should be available online from the usual sources shortly.

The Register

Revealed! David Irving Can Be a Jerk

So secretive is Holocaust denier David Irving that he often doesn’t reveal the locations of his lectures until hours before they’re scheduled to begin — and even then, he only tells vetted guests. It must have been a blow, therefore, when his private E-mails appeared on the Internet, courtesy of self-described anti-fascist hackers.

The E-mails, along with the username and password for Irving’s website and AOL E-mail account, were posted last week on WikiLeaks, a website that publishes leaked documents. The messages reveal that it’s not only anti-racists who clash with the long-winded Hitler apologist: Irving’s own assistant, a young blonde woman named Jaenelle Antas, berated him repeatedly for his churlishness.

In a Nov. 7 E-mail, for instance, Antas wrote that Irving recently had been “snotty, rude, and disrespectful toward me.” She also said she was thinking about quitting. “I don’t care if you are frustrated, angry, stressed out, tired, or whatever — treating anybody like the way you have been treating me is unacceptable,” she wrote. “I bend over backwards to help you out on this tour, doing jobs that last year you would have done yourself, and not just making bookings, but also doing things like driving, helping you secure funds to reprint books and locating second-hand books. The only thanks I usually get are long whines about how something isn’t exactly perfect. Why would anyone in the world want to work with or even be friends with someone who is acting the way you have been acting lately? You like to say you treat me better than anyone else does, but the truth is, lately you have treated me worse than anyone else ever has. It hurts my feelings, it makes me angry and resentful, and it makes me question whether or not I should be doing this job anymore.”

Antas was responding to earlier E-mails from Irving in which he accused her of neglecting her responsibilities and “knee-jerk retorting.” “As for your more unhelpful and hostile messages: ‘Get over it,’” Irving wrote on Nov. 7. “I have been working since 6 a.m. this morning trying to catch up and plug holes you have left, e.g., by not bothering to inform me the Sala Thai no longer exists.”

But Irving appears to have gotten over this negligence. In subsequent E-mails, he tries to make it up to Antas with some not-so-subtle sweet talk. “Darling J, you are so efficient and beautiful,” he wrote on Nov. 13. “Please work your magic on (a) attached list [of prospective attendees at his New Jersey talk] and (b) me.”

According to her Myspace page, Antas is a 24-year-old college graduate from Minnesota with a passion for singing. She also appears to have a passion for posting on Stormfront, the leading white supremacist forum. As Stephen Lemons of the Phoenix New Times noted on his blog, Antas likely comments there under the name “Tristania.” The photos Tristania posts are of Antas, and in September, Tristania posted the schedule for Irving’s U.S. speaking tour this fall. Tristania has posted more than 4,000 times since joining Stormfront in 2005.

Also published on WikiLeaks are lists of people who ordered tickets to Irving’s talks in Philadelphia, New York City and New Jersey, along with their addresses, phone numbers, and E-mails. People who might not be friendly to Irving, including those believed to be Jewish, are flagged with the German word “Achtung” (attention). “ACHTUNG is quarter-Jewish” appears below one listing.

Despite their recent E-mail spat, Antas has remained sufficiently loyal to Irving to forward a statement from him to Wired.com. In it, Irving downplayed the leak and suggested that the hackers invented some of the posted material, though he did not respond to a follow-up question from Wired.com asking for specifics. “We shall be apologizing to the many people who may find themselves inconvenienced by these juvenile cyber-nasties,” Irving wrote. “We are puzzled that they are so frightened by historical debate.”

In 2000, Irving lost a lawsuit filed in Britain that alleged that American historian Deborah Lipstadt had libeled him by calling him a Holocaust denier. In 2005, he was sentenced to three years in an Austrian prison after pleading guilty to telling audiences that there were no gas chambers in the Nazi concentration camp of Auschwitz. (Unlike in the United States, Holocaust denial is a crime in many European countries.) Irving was most recently in the news when a knife fight erupted between two white supremacists at his talk last month in Palm Beach County. The leaked E-mails show that Irving wrote the next day to one of the attendees, John Browne, banning him from future events. “Among your guests, it appears, were some who caused a serious affray and damage to hotel property,” he wrote.

In his response to Irving, Browne denied associating with anyone who illegally possesses weapons or resorts to violence. He also said he stepped into the hall where the fight was taking place and took the knife from one of the men. “I think some self examination on your part is warranted, but you can’t ask yourself not to attend future events,” wrote Browne, who runs a white nationalist consulting business. “It seems the questionable association was a Trojan horse within your own house.”

HateWatch

Keighley BNP membership down

Nearly half the Keighley members of the British National Party have left the organisation since the end of 2007, according to information leaked on the Internet. It is the second list to reveal the names of BNP members in a year, with this one, released on Wikileaks, claiming to be taken from April 2009 records.

The information, which has been analysed by the Guardian newspaper, shows that the BNP has 11,811 members, including doctors and military personnel, and has benefited from a surge in female recruits — with one in eight women now signed up as members. While support for the party has grown in Leicester, Lancashire, Derbyshire and Lincolnshire, overall it has reduced in Bradford and significantly so in Keighley.

In a comparison of the leaked figures from last autumn’s list of names from the end of 2007 to the latest list, BNP membership in Keighley has shrunk from 52 to 29 people, overall a decrease of around 44 per cent.

It is the highest decrease in all the Bradford constituencies, with Bradford West losing eight members at a decrease of 38 per cent, Shipley losing eight members at a reduction of 25 per cent and Bradford South losing four members at an overall reduction of 10 per cent. Bradford North has increased by one member.

BNP leader Nick Griffin claimed that the leaked list was a forgery.

Keighley News

Hypocrisy, lies and Lee 'Bonkers' Barnes

Two extremely bad poets, neither of which is a qualified lawyer

If there's ever been a better anti-fascist asset within the British National Party who consistently does more good for our side by his sheer stupidity and apparent insanity than the party's legal beagle Lee Barnes, I've yet to hear of it. There are very few days that go by without Barnes' lunacy running wild, his hypocrisy reaching ever-dizzier heights or his furious arrogance leaving him foaming at the mouth because the world doesn't quite see him as the undoubted genius that he is. Even on the days when his medication is stopping the raving, he still manages to irritate fascists and anti-fascists alike by talking crap about psychology or writing extremely bad poetry. Anyone remember Prostetnic Vogon Jeltz? Barnes' poetry is worse.

Despite the fact that, like Mark Collett, Barnes is almost universally despised inside the BNP, he seems to have a curious hold over Nick Griffin. Barnes' insane rantings over the Rachel Whitear disaster had complaints coming in from all directions, even from hardened BNP supporters and nazis, who found his violent verbal attacks on the tragic Rachel far beyond the pale. His email attack on the Auty leadership campaign also earned him a good deal of angry and well-deserved criticism, though he deflected some of that anger by claiming (as they all do when in a corner) that the email was a forgery.

However, redemption has come in the form of the release of the BNP membership list (don't bother asking - everyone knows it's on WikiLeaks) and Bonkers Barnes is suddenly seen by the myopic Nick Griffin as the source of all legal wisdom, despite the fact that he has never actually got around to acquiring any kind of legal qualification. Still, lack of competence has never stopped anyone in the BNP reaching the top - look at Dave Hannam.

Barnes has (allegedly) been slinging legal-looking letters around the universe at large since the list hit the public domain, each of them containing numerous threatening-sounding phrases that appear to put the leak on a equivalent footing with terrorism, clearly invoking the Terrorism Act in one of his emails to Indymedia. He claims that bandying member's addresses and other details around the internet puts them at risk of attack - though nearly three weeks after the leak there are yet to be any verified attacks at all.

Barnes really seems to have a blind spot when it comes to hypocrisy. This from Indymedia:

'Most incredibly Mr Barnes then explains, “I will also be issuing a request to our internal investigations team to initiate actions to collect your home addresses, contact details and financial details relating to you personally as persons running or hosting the Indymedia website”. Internal Investigations? Once the BNP has this information, it “will be used to initiate legal actions upon yourselves, to initiate financial sanctions against your company and also will be publicised on various websites so that people may contact you and address any legal issues they may have”. Pot, kettle, black?'

Yes, while threatening people for showing sections of the list with personal details, Barnes threatens to publish their personal details. Clearly, the man is an idiot - though Indymedia seems to have him pretty well tagged:

'Mr Barnes’s threat to post personal information about Indymedia participants may in itself be illegal – it certainly would cause a registered legal practitioner to lose his credentials. Perhaps then, it comes as no surprise that the Law Society confirms that Barnes is NOT a qualified lawyer at all. In fact, Mr Lee John Barnes LLB (hons) is an incoherent, buffoonish windbag who could well be charged with incitement himself.'

But anti-fascists are not the only target of Barnes' list-making lunacy. Last night, he rounded on his chums at the Stormfront nazi forum and the anti-Griffin North West Nationalist blog. Why is he complaining about Stormfront? Because;

'...rather than having a rule that the activists and posters on the site have to use a real name and a real identity, so we can all see who they are, what organisations they represent and find out what their real pasts are - the site allowed anyone to post on the site using a fake name. This has allowed Reds, agent provocateurs and the State to take advantage of the internet and use it against the interests of nationalism itself. It has allowed the flamers, the malcontents and the red scum to hide behind fake names and denigrate not just those that they have some sort of issue with, but to attack and undermine the entire cause of nationalism itself. This ability to hide behind a fake name and post rubbish online has allowed nationalist internet sites to be taken advantage of by the most loathsome creatures to ever infect and infest the Nationalist movement - the Key Board Warriors...The Key Board warrior that hides behind a fake name is a coward. They do nothing but talk rubbish'

Funny he should mention keyboard warriors - because he's largely regarded as one of the worst. Frequently in tandem with the creepiest young nazi ever, who lavishes praise on Barnes at every opportunity (using the fake name Jacob Cobain though he's generally assumed to be Barnes' partner), he wanders the rapidly-emptying corridors of the Stormfront forum attacking people at random like some demented drink-addled tramp. Anyone who dares to criticise the BNP or Nick Griffin is fair game and will be 'outed' by Lee Barnes. And he somehow sees this as different from BNP members being outed? How exactly?

He is prepared to make the rare exception though, as he states here:

'To his credit Jack Black [who Barnes outed on his blog a few months back] has gone from being just a presence on the internet and on stormfront to becoming an nationalist activist for the BPP [British People's Party]. That means I can now respect the real man himself as a true nationalist who is working for the nationalist movement and standing up for what he believes in, and not just see him as another key board warrior.'

Fine, so a keyboard warrior who has now joined a party led by a well-known police informer who runs the Redwatch site - which specifically exists to encourage attacks on anti-fascists - is okay now because he's an activist? He belongs to a party well known for its flirtations with hardcore nazis and Holocaust-deniers and that is famed for its terrorist links, but that's okay because he's now an activist? And this is the BNP's so-called legal director saying this? Do we assume that, because these statements were made in the public arena, they are acceptable to the BNP and Nick Griffin? If not, then isn't the BNP being hypocritical allowing Barnes to come out with this rubbish in public - particularly his threats to print personal details on the net while the party screams about breaches of its member's human rights?

Barnes generally gets an easy ride from the moderators at Stormfront, particularly from Jock Oldham (John 'Jock' Shearer, one of Griffin's former heavies and BNP-loyalist) who is frequently described as 'an illiterate drug dealing arsehole' on the North West Nationalist blog. It's interesting that Barnes should be cosy with Shearer but at the same moment so distant from another Stormfront moderator who closed down all the Barnes-related threads last night with this terse statement:

'I have closed down all threads on the subjects of NWN, Covert or any blog in which Lee Barnes posts his deranged ramblings.'

Oh, that one could shut him up so easily.