Protests at BNP's 'victory' rally

Hundreds of anti-fascist demonstrators are expected to picket a British National Party "Victory" rally.

Extra police will be on patrol as Nick Griffin, leader of the far-right party, attends the two-day event entitled Victory 09, at the New Kimberley Hotel on the promenade in Blackpool.

About 100 BNP activists are expected at the event, which has been held in the past as a party summer school but as the party now has two MEPs in its ranks, Mr Griffin said it will be a mixture of a victory celebration and a "de-brief" about their European election campaign.

Mr Griffin, one of the party's MEPs, will speak at the event just weeks after he was targeted by protesters who attacked his car and pelted him with eggs when he arrived for the Euro election count at Manchester Town Hall. He had to be smuggled in by a back door after emerging from a police van. And he was again attacked by demonstrators on the Green outside the Houses of Parliament as the BNP tried to stage a news conference the day after his election.

A spokesman for Unite Against Fascism (UAF) said he expects "hundreds" to turn up outside the hotel to protest. The UAF said trade unionists, students and ordinary members of the public had pledged support to show their opposition to the BNP.

Lancashire Police said officers will be on patrol around the area of the venue to keep the peace. Chief Inspector Karen Simister said: "A policing operation focused on ensuring the safety of the public has been put in place to ensure that the event and associated protests pass without incident."

Southport Visitor

Of eggs, invisible bricks and call centres...

Griffin, tearful and overeggcited (and that's all the egg gags you're getting)

Just a few days ago, the BNP's Lancaster representative, Chris Hill, reported on the result of the new Poulton Ward parish council election in Morecambe. The candidate was one Julie Victoria Blain, who nobody had ever heard of, variously known as either Julie or Vicky. The title of his report was pretty clear;

'First time candidate gets 13% support in Morecambe.'

Pretty clear, but completely untrue. According to the results on the Lancaster City Council website, Blain took 172 votes out of the 4832 cast. I'm no great shakes at maths but even I can work out that her share of the vote is about 3.5%. While 172 votes for the BNP is 172 votes too many, 3.5% is still a damn sight better than 13%, which is presumably why Hill feels the need to lie.

Of course, Hill needs to bullshit all he can in an attempt to weasel his way back into the good books of the party. During 2007's December rebellion, he managed to announce that he was supporting the rebels, promptly backtracked when told off, then decided to stick to his priciples and support them anyway then, when the rebellion failed dismally, placed himself back in the loyalist camp. Clearly, never a man to be trusted.

Which brings us (rather neatly, in my opinion) to Nick Griffin.

Over the past couple of days, the media has been full of the egg incident, where the BNP's crowing 'press conference', called by the fraudster-in-chief Nick Griffin, was ruined by a sudden rain of eggs, one of which hit him in the back of the neck. I'm not too sure of the efficacy of using eggs on recalcitrant politicians, even vermin like Nick Griffin, and I'd be interested in hearing the views of our readers. Personally though, I thought it was bloody funny and it didn't do him any harm so what the hell.

Far from doing him harm in fact, Griffin has been given the opportunity to spout a few more lies to the media - many of which were reported verbatim without any qualification. Take this little gem, from yesterday's Scotsman;

'I think it's very sad that a hostile mob which is partly paid for by taxpayers and backed by Labour and the Conservatives is allowed to get away with mob violence on the streets of Britain in 2009'

Hostile mob? Mob violence? There were forty of them, vastly outnumbered by the media and Nick Griffin's Kray twin-lookalike security team and they threw a sodding egg, for crying out loud. It's hardly the collapse of civilisation as we know it. And paid for by taxpayers? Er, how?

'The police need to get a grip on these people and stop them throwing eggs and bricks.'

Bricks? What bricks? Who threw a brick? This is a particularly stupid thing to say and could have exposed this idiot as a compulsive liar had the statement been questioned. It wasn't, sadly.

'Like us or not we are a democratic party'

No, you're not. You're the least democratic party in the country, run by megalomaniacs and liars for racists and fools. But, like the long-established and well-practised liar that he is, Griffin saves what is arguably the best for last.

'He claimed the party has seen a growth in membership applications and said its call centre received 20,000 phone calls in the first 15 minutes after a BNP party political broadcast was shown on television.'

I watched a tedious puff-piece on the BNP website a week or two ago in which it was claimed that fifteen people were employed in the party's 'call centre' answering the zillions of calls that were pouring in daily. Let's be generous and up the number of call centre staff to twenty. According to my trusty calculator, 20,000 calls in fifteen minutes is 1333 calls per minute. Divide that by twenty call centre staff and they have to field approximately 67 calls each per minute. If there are only fifteen staff, that number goes up to 89 per minute. Each.

Obviously someone is talking bollocks - and that someone would be Nick Griffin. And, it turns out, Tina Wingfield, the BNP's membership secretary, who was also quoted in the Scotsman's unusually fact-free article, claiming that 2,000 people have joined the party in the last six weeks, increasing overall membership by about 25%.

Well, she should know - though this doesn't really tie in with the released BNP membership list, which showed a total of 12724 members, allegedly for 2007 and which was, so the party claimed at the time, inaccurate in that membership was considerably higher when the list became public than it was in 2007. Fair enough, but if that is true, party membership has in fact gone down considerably. A hell of a lot, in fact, because Wingfield's statement indicates that BNP membership just six weeks ago was around 8,000 and now stands at 10,000. Hmm...

The problem with telling porkies is remembering which ones have been told, who they've been told to and precisely what was said. The BNP, while it's happy to lie on any occasion, doesn't seem quite so capable at keeping track of the lies it's told.

The big problem the media has is itself keeping track of these lies and then challenging them at every opportunity - but the lies have to be challenged repeatedly and incessantly and should then be used to embarrass and humiliate the BNP whenever and wherever possible. In just a single article we were given an opportunity to challenge a half-dozen outrageous lies, none of which were questioned at the time. If the BNP is to be shown up for what it truly is, the media - and I include non-traditional media like us, must be ever-alert and ever-ready to demand truth rather than bullshit and bluster.

BNP deputy suspended for blog attack

British National Party deputy leader Simon Darby has been suspended by City Hall for attacking the Archbishop of York as "anti-British". Mr Darby now faces a disciplinary hearing and could be issued with a warning or even be dismissed by the Greater London Authority for bringing it into disrepute.

Mr Darby, whose part-time job at City Hall is funded by Londoners, came under fire last month when he hit back at criticism of his party by Archbishop Sentamu. He said in a blog that the cleric "deserved to be attacked" and then went on to suggest that Ugandans "threw spears" at enemies. A disciplinary investigation has found that there are grounds for action and Mr Darby has been suspended on full pay pending the hearing.

The BNP were today trying to stage a press conference but had to keep details secret over fears of a repeat of yesterday's ambush by anti-fascist groups, when party leader Nick Griffin had eggs thrown at him in Parliament Square.

London Evening Standard

Nick Griffin abandons BNP press conference under hail of eggs

Demonstrators shouting 'Off our streets, Nazi scum' force BNP leader to flee for the safety of his car

Griffin discovers he isn't as popular as he preciously believed

Nick Griffin was forced to abandon a press conference outside parliament today after protesters pelted him with eggs. The demonstrators shouted "Off our streets, Nazi scum" and chased him down the street to his car. Griffin, who was elected an MEP for north-west England on Sunday, was bundled into his car by his bodyguards and quickly driven off.

Having arrived for the press conference, on College Green in front of parliament, just after 2.30pm with fellow BNP MEP Andrew Brons, he began by attacking articles from today's newspapers criticising him and his party. He had been speaking for only a few minutes when the protesters appeared, chanting and waving banners reading "Stop the fascist BNP".

The moment of impact - and Darby looking suspicious behind Griffin

They threw eggs at Griffin, whose bodyguards quickly took him away through the crowd. The demonstrators kicked and hit his car with their placards before cheering as he drove off.

Weyman Bennett, the protest organiser and national secretary of Unite Against Fascism, said he believed it was important to stand up to the BNP.

"The majority of people did not vote for the BNP. They did not vote at all," he said. "The BNP was able to dupe them into saying that they had an answer to people's problems. They presented themselves as a mainstream party. The reality was, because the turnout was so low, they actually got elected."

Yum-yum. More please...

Sarah Kavanagh, the Public and Commercial Services Union's national co-ordinator for its "make your vote count" campaign, was another of the protesters. "Britain in two places has sent the far right to be with Europe. They clearly don't speak on behalf of the community and their views are abhorrent," she said.

Griffin later accused the three main parties of organising the protest to stop his party getting its message across. Griffin claims the BNP is not racist, even though it restricts membership to "indigenous British ethnic groups deriving from the class of 'Indigenous Caucasian'". Asked yesterday how he could tell who qualified as British, Griffin said: "You just look and you just know."

Brons, the MEP for the the Yorkshire and Humber region, told Sky news indigenous Britons were "the people of this country who were descended from people who were in this country, say, from the period after the second world war, when the country was relatively homogenous."

Oops...

All mainstream parties united in condemning the BNP after the party won two seats in the European parliament. David Cameron, the Conservative leader, said yesterday the result was "desperately depressing" and the main parties had to win back those who had voted for the far-right party.

"What the mainstream parties have to do is prove their worth – get on the doorstep, explain to people how we are going to take up their concerns, how we are going to respond to their issues," he said. "That is the way to beat these dreadful people."

Peter Hain, the newly appointed Welsh secretary, said: "It's a shameful stain on Britain that we now have racists and fascists representing our country. It is vital that everyone now isolates and confronts the BNP and works with United Against Fascism to defeat them."

The BNP is to hold a press conference in Manchester tomorrow.

Guardian

BNP mum Helen Forster led kids' race attack

Meet the female face of the BNP - the sneering single mum who led a mob of kids to throw eggs and fire an airgun at an Asian neighbour.

Graphic designer Helen Forster, a paid-up member who produces leaflets for the far right group, was yesterday spared jail after being convicted of intimidation. She was the lone adult urging the hate-filled kids - some only 10 - to shout abuse during the siege at the home of terrified Meherjan Miah, who had previously lodged a complaint to police about a racially-aggravated assault.

But after getting off with a 10 months suspended sentence, mum-of-three Forster, 32 - who has previous convictions for dishonesty and drug possession - failed to apologise. She just defiantly called on the authorities to "move on" Mrs Miah to stop further incidents. She had already shouted threats through Mrs Miah's letterbox and admitted that the eggs thrown in the retaliatory incident last August "may have come" from her fridge.

Maidstone crown court heard that although she had not been found guilty of criminal damage herself, she had "encouraged" the youngsters. They included a cautioned boy of 14 and airgun shooter Matthew Back, then 17, who also walked free as he had spent nine months on remand. He said he only "joined in" because he knew Forster, who lives on benefits in her council house in Gravesend, Kent. She, like Back, also got community service and supervision.

Outside court she said: "I've asked the council to move Mrs Miah on but nothing's happened. And yes, I'm still in the BNP."

Hope message to 'bomb city'

Our Hope not Hate bus yesterday hit Coventry - destroyed by Nazi bombers in WWII. And special issues showing BNP candidate Simon Darby getting Hitler salutes in Italy reminded locals of the peril of voting for racists. Councillors agreed: "We must keep fighting Fascism."

Mirror