Top clubs ban Welsh BNP goods

A leading member of the BNP in Wales has been forced to withdraw ‘racist’ football merchandise following threats from top Premier League sides.

Roger Phillips, the BNP’s deputy organiser for West Wales, is the director of the online operation Patriot Products.

Launched at the BNP’s Red, White and Blue rally in August, Patriot Products, which is not currently trading, sold an extensive range of nationalistic tat and clothing, including golliwog badges with the names of clubs such as Arsenal, Liverpool, Manchester United, Manchester City, Tottenham Hotspur and Chelsea. They depicted a golliwog with a football holding a scarf aloft with club names and colours. The official BNP merchandising store, Excalibur, sells the same golliwog badge holding an England scarf.

The anti-racism football organisation Kick It Out alerted the English clubs involved in September. It said of the clubs involved: “Some have contacted the website direct, some have deferred it to the club lawyers.”

One of the Premier League clubs, Chelsea, confirmed they had prepared to take legal action against Phillips last month but found the offensive items had been removed before action was required. A spokesman for the club said: “We absolutely abhor the sale of any racist merchandise. We took the necessary steps to prevent it.”

Welsh Secretary and Chelsea supporter Peter Hain said: “This man is the true poisonous face of the BNP not the respectable one they pretend to have.”

A spokesman for the Football Association said: “There is no place for racism in football and we utterly condemn any organisation or individual that seeks to encourage or make financial gain from it. We help to fund Kick It Out and work very closely with other anti-racism organisations to do as much as we can to eliminate racism in football.”

Mr Phillips, 42, whose Facebook photos include one of a cornflakes box with an open-mouthed black minstrel and the doctored logo ‘Coon flakes’, wrote: “I have had my business contacted by the FA and Sheffield Football Club trying to bully me into removing Golly badges from my range. Here is my response – FUCK YOU.”

Businessman Mr Phillips, who did not return our calls, revealed in a documentary on the BNP broadcast on S4C earlier this year, in June, that he would flout employment laws to avoid employing Muslims.

“As far as Muslims are concerned, I wouldn’t be happy to employ them,” he said. “There is a reason for that. They would want time off in the afternoons to pray. You’d have to sort out prayer rooms for them. I’m not going to do that. It’s up to me how I run my business.”

On his Facebook page Mr Phillips fantasises about hanging Gordon Brown and repeats the recently regurgitated lie by the BNP that Mr Hain is a former bank robber.

Mr Hain, a vociferous anti-apartheid campaigner, countered: “I would expect nothing else from the racists and fascists who have attacked me for 40 years now. Everyone knows that in 1975 I was a victim of mistaken identity and acquitted of bank theft when I was almost certainly set up by the South African police in the bad old days of apartheid which the likes of the BNP supported.”

A BNP spokesman dismissed the sale of golliwogs. He said: “We sell golliwog toys on our Excalibur merchandise site. We market the golliwogs basically to stick two fingers up to the establishment”.

Wales Online

Giving the BNP air-time

The question of how best to deal with the British National Party raised its head again earlier this week with the news BNP leader Nick Griffin will be asked to appear on Question Time in October.

The arguments for and against the BBC’s decision range from giving the BNP enough rope to hang themselves and starving them and their supporters of the oxygen of publicity; the optimum solution, as always, being a combination of the two.

Groups like Searchlight, Hope Not Hate and Unite Against Fascism work tirelessly on the latter, disrupting BNP activity, squaring up to them and campaigning against them on the doorstep, street-by-street and town-by-town, often at great personal risk - some even receiving death threats from the “democratic” BNP.

Forensic analysis of their policies and line-by-line rebuttals of their lies, however, have been less prevalent, enabling the BNP’s racist propaganda to go virtually unchallenged, though steps are, belatedly, being taken to rectify this. Last month Quilliam, the counter-extremism think tank, published a report cataloguing the BNP’s raft of anti-Islamic smears and quashing them.

The third part of the strategy takes us back to the media, and how best they should cover the BNP. This is probably the most important aspect, with the press in particular conducting many in-depth investigations into the BNP. A recent example of this is News of the World’s exposé of a BNP “family festival” in August which revealed the true face of the BNP.

Among the shocking incidents which took place included gollywogs being thrown onto braziers; people throwing wet sponges at a man in a Barack Obama mask locked in stocks; BNP officers making speeches describing Jadaism and Islam as “cancers”; BNP supporters giving “Sieg Heil” salutes; BNP members threatening an anti-Fascist protester with hammers and axes; skinheads boating of how they’d driven black families out of their villages… the list goes on and on.

The media at its best, but the BBC’s invite to Nick Griffin to take a seat on their flagship news and current affairs programme will be considered by many to be totally unacceptable. The BBC have already given Griffin countless platforms to spout his bile, from Newsnight interviews to radio phone-ins, but Question Time, Question Time, in front of a live studio audience???

Inside Desi

BNP councillor defends party after members burn gollywog at festival

A BNP councillor has defended the party after members were filmed burning a gollywog and making racist comments during a festival. Paul Golding (left), British National Party councillor for the St Mary’s ward in Swanley, has condemned members who were shown performing the mock trial of the gollywog.

A News of the World reporter filmed the ritual while undercover at the party’s Red White and Blue family festival in Derbyshire last month. The group, which included a 12-year-old girl, dubbed the stuffed toy ‘Winston’ and charged him with being black before dropping him onto a fire. One member, identified as John Coombes, of Maidenhead, Berkshire, a council candidate for that area, said: “He thinks he's not black. He's charged with being black. Get on there.” The 45-year-old added: “Let's get a real one. In the town we'll find one or two.”

Police in Derbyshire have launched an investigation after seeing the video footage. A spokeswoman said: “Officers will be contacting the newspaper which alleges that an undercover reporter witnessed unlawful activity while at the event.”

Cllr Golding, who was elected in February, says the views of the people involved in the mock trial are not representative of the BNP. He said: “If you subtract these morons from our 13,000 members it is something like 0.01 per cent of the party. They are all being disciplined and it will be very severe, if not being kicked out of the party.”

The News of the World article claims members gave Nazi-style salutes and shouted Sieg Heil, and music with racist lyrics supporting Hitler was played. Cllr Golding said he was at the festival but was not aware of the racist activity, and he says the party is not racist.

Party leader MEP Nick Griffin was also at the event, which was attended by around 1,200 BNP supporters. He said the party will be organised to give non-whites no power if new legislation forces it to allow them to become members, the article alleges. Cllr Golding says the BNP is for white British people, so there would be no reason for non-whites to join other than to cause trouble within the party.

Last month News Shopper revealed that a Gravesend woman convicted of intimidating an Asian mother was a member of the BNP, after Cllr Golding made a video stating she was not. Helen Forster, aged 32, of Park Place, denied being a member in the video posted on YouTube and the BNP website, but she was registered under a different surname - Colclough. Cllr Golding says he was unaware Forster was a member of the party under a different name at the time of making the video.

News Shopper

Police investigate racism claims at BNP event

Derbyshire police has launched an investigation into allegations of racist behaviour at the BNPs Red, White and Blue Festival.

The allegations - made in a national newspaper - involved claims that a 12-year-old girl burned a golly doll at the annual event. A spokeswoman for Derbyshire police said officers will be contacting the newspaper, which alleges that an undercover reporter witnessed unlawful activity while at the event.

Red, White and Blue was held for the third consecutive year on fields off Codnor-Denby Lane, Denby, earlier this month.

An article in the News of the World said it had sent an undercover reporter to the event who saw evidence of racist behaviour.

The BNP said it had launched an investigation into the claims.

This is Derbyshire