BNP conference to be in Blackpool again - at great expense to the membership

Once again our contacts inside the BNP have come up trumps with the information that the British National Party's 'Annual' Conference (its weak attempt to act in some way similar to a normal political party) will again be held at the ghastly New Kimberley Hotel at Blackpool.

The New Kimberley, a fast-decaying hotel at 585-589 New South Promenade, Blackpool FY4 1NQ - is run by Peter and Susie Metcalfe and can be reached at 01253 341184.

The conference is to be held on the weekend of 16th/17th/18th November and we are calling for a demonstration right in front of it at midday on Saturday November 17th.

Regular readers will recall that we got over two hundred protestors and loads of speakers up to the very successful demo last November. Maps and more details to follow as we get nearer the date.

Naturally, nothing the BNP does would be complete without an example of its startling financial ineptitude, and this conference, two months before it's even due to take place, provides us with a little classic that should have a few BNP members seething.

A number of telephone enquiries to the New Kimberley and a chat with a couple of highly-disgruntled ex-guests reveals that the current average cost of a room (B and B) for the night is £22.50 - or £27.50 if they throw in an evening meal. Given that the maximum number of guests the hotel can accomodate is 100 (it's a bit less but we're being generous to the incompetent BNP treasurer and rounding up) that means the cost of hiring the entire hotel for the two nights of the conference is either £4500 or £5500 if the attendees demand their evening meal of meat and potato pie.

Sadly for the party's membership, the treasurer, or whatever idiot was responsible for the booking, never bothered to do the maths and has forked out £7000 for the weekend, effectively giving away the nice round figure of either £1500 or £2500, a waste of 50-80 membership fees, a pretty good example of the contempt Nick Griffin and co have for the member's money.

The words 'piss-up' and 'brewery' spring to mind.

Talking of which - according to one of our correspondents who keeps tabs on this sort of thing from inside the party, the BNP managed to splash out around £10000 in the bar over that single weekend, an average of £50 per head per night assuming there were a hundred members stuffed into the bar. They'd have done better to have spent the money on booking into a better hotel.

Watch this space for more information as we get it...

Don't look now - it's London BNP!

In ancient days of yore (the 1990s to you and me) the World Wide Web was awash with garish websites created by 15 year-old boys who had little to say but who wanted to say it VERY LOUDLY, and to that end in their thousands they downloaded their free copies of Netscape Navigator, which came with an inbuilt WYSIWYG HTML editor called Composer. Not loved at all by professionals, Composer had the quirk that it never closed paragraph tags, so there was always a gap between the main body of a paragraph and its last line. But with Composer you could create frames and nested tables to your heart's delight, and fill them out with ultra-bright colours and thick blocky text - et voila! there you were on Geocities with your own glaring web atrocity sitting at the end of a long and unmemorable URL that took forever to load.

Things moved on, of course - CSS and standards such as PHP came along to revolutionise web design, and coding in HTML alone became old hat, but thousands of those early abominations remain, hanging lifeless and forgotten on the Internet, relics of a by-gone era, testaments to rotten design and over-enthusiastic coding.

Unless you're the Old Major knocking up the online village newsletter on an obsolete copy of Frontpage you really wouldn't code that way today, not unless you had a real yearning for the 1990s and were determined to achieve that so not-in-vogue retro look - tables, frames, blocky text, screaming colours and all.

Or unless you're the clueless London BNP, which has managed - despite great obstacles (taste being one of them) - to come up with a website so dreadful that it really wouldn't look out of place amongst the worst of Geocities circa 1996. And that is saying something!

Now I'll let you into a little secret. Antifascist didn't want to write this up because he's colour blind. Unfortunately, so am I! It seems, however, that the person responsible for the London BNP's website suffers the affliction to a degree so unusual that even our enfeebled eyes watered uncontrollably as his melange of gaudy colour and stone-age design rendered on our monitors like a plateful of melting Smarties. A real blast from the Internet past, we speculated at length on whether or not the author of this dog's dinner was wearing a shell-suit as he tapped out his TDs, TRs, DIVs and non-breaking spacess, bolstered by the conviction that London BNP's website would proudly take its place alongside London Conservatives, London Labour and London Liberal Democrats and blow away their amateurish efforts.

Alas, the result of all that toil is a tawdry website that is an object lesson in irredeemably bad design and execution, the anithesis of everything a political website should be, striking only for its nausea-inducing effect upon the hapless visitor. With content (a word we use loosely) presented in thick black Times New Roman and written in the BNP's proprietory brand of mangled syntax ("There was several lefty-liberal types and local Muslims present..."), London BNP has come up with a website that is an instant museum piece, definitely one for the connoisseurs of all things tacky to pore over for hours at a stretch (maybe asking themselves, Why?).

Perhaps the only good thing to say about it is that in true retro fashion it has links to non-existent items, including a video of Dickie Barnbrooke addressing the London electorate. Mercifully, you don't get to see the video (it's non-existent, remember?) but you can ring Dickie to make a donation (not so retro there, then!), or you can click a link to make a donation. Or not, because the link leads to an empty page - not quite the thing you want when you've got an urgent £200,000 campaign appeal on the go.

The kindest response to the London BNP website that we've seen so far was posted on the nazi Stormfront forum: "Oh my Lord! My eyes! My eyes!"

It's hard to have sympathy with a Nazi, but we really do feel his pain...

David Irving to speak at university near you?

David Irving is to speak in a university debate on 23 November on "free speech". However the Holocaust denial writer, who was recently barred permanently from entering Austria, was careful not to reveal which student union had been so misguided as to ask him.

Students and university staff are asked to let us know about any debates booked for 23 November, or thereabouts, that might be the one hosting Irving so that we can take steps to prevent this blatant misuse of academic freedom to promote his Nazi agenda.

Irving was released from an Austrian prison last December after serving part of a three-year term for denying the Holocaust. Since then he has been active promoting Holocaust denial in Hungary, where he addressed a far-right rally on 15 March 2007. He fared less well in Poland where he was expelled from the 52nd Warsaw International Book Fair because his writings contravened Polish law.

The reason for Irving's caution over his debating engagement was clear from his correspondence, reproduced on his website, with Andrew Mackenzie, president of the European Society at the University of St Andrews. Mackenzie had asked Irving to suggest dates on which he could come and speak about "the holocaust and Adolf Hitler", but rapidly withdrew the invitation after the university "raised concerns" about "security and use of their property".

Later this week Irving is due to speak at two public meetings - Coventry on 21 September and the following evening in Windsor, where he moved into a large house earlier this month. His subject will be "who dug the grave of the British Empire - Hitler or Churchill". Strict security is to be observed with "rights of admission strictly reserved". Those wishing to attend are warned to bring "satisfactory ID".

This is certainly a step up for Irving who has recently been seen hawking his books from a tent in a field at a Second World War re-enactment event in Kent, where middle-aged men got the opportunity to dress up as SS members. The event attracted all shades of extremist opinion including a number of members of Belgian Blood and Honour.

Stop the BNP

15 Whitehall departments named and shamed for race equality failures

Fifteen government departments and agencies, including Whitehall's biggest spenders, face the threat of legal action for failing to carry out their duties under race equality legislation, according to a final report from the Commission for Racial Equality to be published later this week.

The CRE, which is to be wound up in two weeks' time after 30 years of race equality work in Britain, has "named and shamed" the departments involved and urgently written to the Cabinet Office detailing its "deep concerns about the widespread non-compliance" around Whitehall, despite the fact that they have had more than five years to meet standards.

The CRE has asked its lawyers to start legal action against 15 government departments and agencies, including the Cabinet Office, health, education, agriculture, local government, trade and industry, defence, the Home Office and the Foreign Office. Among the few that escape censure are the Treasury, work and pensions, international development and the justice ministry. The CRE says it expects its successor, the Commission for Equality and Human Rights, to continue with legal action. The CRE's final monitoring report seen by the Guardian cites as one glaring example its own sponsoring agency, the Department of Communities and Local Government, that has not yet collected records on the ethnic background of 58% of its staff.

The CRE says good progress has been made by parts of local government and in the criminal justice agencies, including the police. But Whitehall departments, NHS trusts, further education colleges, district councils and the Olympic Delivery Authority have fallen shortd.

"Overall the findings are disappointing," concludes the monitoring report. "Small local authorities with limited budgets are meeting their legal responsibilities while some of the biggest spending Whitehall departments are failing to achieve even basic compliance."

It adds that the failure of Hazel Blears's communities and local government department to produce a race equality duty "toolkit" has "underlined the degree to which Whitehall has failed to realise the urgency of the current situation".

The CRE says it is "extremely disappointing" that ministers have failed to deliver and address inadequate policy making across Whitehall, despite repeated warnings in recent years at the highest level. The strong language from the CRE in its dying days reflects long-held frustrations within the organisation over the lack of progress within Whitehall on race equality issues. The findings of the two-year monitoring exercise by the CRE are to be published tomorrow alongside a policy paper giving a final verdict which argues that Britain, despite being the fifth largest economy in the world, is still a place of inequality, exclusion and isolation where segregation is increasing and political and religious extremism is on the rise.

The CRE's "race manifesto" sets out an agenda for the Commission for Equality and Human Rights, chaired by Trevor Phillips, which is to replace it, and calls upon the government to make an explicit commitment to building an integrated Britain in which all sections of society participate.

The widespread failure across Whitehall to comply with their duties under race relations legislation centre on measures to monitor the ethnic background of their staff and carry out formal assessments of the impact of their policies on racial equality. The duties follow legislation passed in the aftermath of the Stephen Lawrence inquiry.

"In recent months, the commission has felt it necessary to initiate enforcement action against seven different Whitehall departments and agencies in respect of non-compliance of race equality, employment duty returns and in the case of the Department of Health, the failure to systematically carry out race equality impact assessments of new and proposed policies. It is likely that this number could rise in the weeks prior to the closure of the commission," reveals the monitoring report circulated to commissioners last week.

The CRE paper contrasts the poor results from its past "softly, softly" approach to Whitehall senior managers with the tough line that was taken with tackling racism in the police, prisons and crown prosecution service. "Such formal approaches, whilst initially painful for the authorities concerned, have led to the development of detailed action plans, which sought to increase compliance across the sector."

It says anecdotal evidence shows that only since the CRE started taking "a robust approach" to non-compliance have public authorities made racial equality work a priority. It claims the role of the government's own race equality unit has been "to try to prevent us taking action and to attempt to smooth over the situation, rather address the problems we have identified".

Guardian

New Nazi spreads hate in Scotland

A Neo-Nazi mouthpiece who was behind a sickening racist propaganda campaign across Ulster is now spouting his bitter views in Scotland.

Greg Cummings, who Sunday Life exposed four years ago as being behind the distribution of race hate literature in Ulster, is now peddling his extreme views across the Irish Sea

Self-confessed racist Cummings told Sunday Life that he had been booted out of the White Nationalist Party after he attracted too much media scrutiny of members of the shadowy organisation. However, he is now fronting another race hate group. Cummings is now described as a "recruiting officer" for the so-called British People's Party.

The group - which is linked to Ayran Unity, an online cabal of extreme right-wing organisations and which has members in Northern Ireland - boasts that the "veteran nationalist" and "ex-WNP comrade" plans to "revitalise" the organisation in Scotland.

A literature campaign run by Cummings and his cronies in the WNP coincided with a string of terrifying race attacks across Northern Ireland. After we exposed him as the group's mouthpiece, he claimed he was involved in a violent bust up with other members of the WNP and given the order of the jackboot out of the organisation.

Cummings also complained that his mother, who he said was appalled at his extreme views and his involvement in "white power" organisations, had booted him out of the family home.

Belfast Telegraph

Sunderland BNP organiser resigns due to 'differences of opinions'

Ian Leadbitter, (former) Sunderland BNP organiser, has used the letters column of his local newspaper to resign from his post and also as a candidate for the BNP in local elections, citing 'differences of opinions' as his reason.

Leadbitter, regular readers will recall, achieved some small and unwelcome fame last year as the taxi driver for autistic schoolchildren who lost his school runs licence after teachers at Columbia School, Washington, accused him of playing the radio too loud and verbally abusing staff. At the time, teachers told Leadbitter's wife Sharon, who escorts the youngsters to and from the car, that one of the children was coming to school 'distressed' after listening to the radio 'blasting' on the way to school.

Despite ignoring three warnings, Leadbitter claimed to be 'stunned' when he was given the elbow.

Leadbitter appears to have stood as a candidate for the BNP on numerous occasions, losing repeatedly, and was carted off by the police outside an election count when he was standing in Redhill ward, having been arrested on suspicion of assault occasioning actual bodily harm after punching and kicking peaceful demonstrators.

Nice guy - glad he's gone!

Solidarity with anti-fascists in Russia

“International support is vital and valued” explains St Petersburg anti-fascist activist Bruno Garmson

It is not easy being an anti-fascist in Russia at the moment. We are under constant attack from racists and fascists and we receive little or no protection from the authorities. Several of our activists have been murdered in recent years and even when the attackers are caught they often walk free with suspended sentences.

The rapid decline of Russia’s fledgling democracy, marked by gross violations of human rights during the government’s Chechen campaigns, the granting by parliament of unprecedented powers to the secret service, the abolition of elected executives (governors, mayors etc), the introduction of censorship and political show-trials and murders have changed the political atmosphere. This has enabled nazis and their extreme-rightist allies to stage campaigns as well as using nationalism as an alibi to commit murders, many of which go unpunished.

Outside Russia, this is not always easy to grasp.

In the heroic stories about the Great Patriotic War of 1941-1945 against the Nazis that flicker almost nightly on Russian television screens, it is nowadays hard to find any other motives described than “defending the motherland”.

Unfortunately, there are few eyewitnesses left who can describe the genuine anti-fascist enthusiasm they felt for the Republican cause in the Spanish Civil War or spell out the common conviction, held during the Second World War, that the Nazis intended to enslave and exterminate Russian citizens as subhumans and explain how, therefore, the anti-fascist struggle was above all a battle of humanity against fascist barbarism.

Today’s Russian nazis use official nationalist myths about the war both as proof of Russia’s superiority and as an example of how the Stalin regime misled the whole Russian people, sacrificing millions of soldiers and civilians against Hitler’s anti-Bolshevik crusade to “liberate” the Russians. Ignorance about Soviet history, lack of a proper analysis of the theory and practice of fascism and the reduction of the term “anti-fascism” to mean simply a nationalistic fight against the enemies of Russia make it difficult to oppose such obvious lies.

Real anti-fascism, challenging nationalism and facing down nazism, is a risky course of action. Such “dissident” behaviour is viewed as “suspicious opposition” to the policies of President Vladimir Putin and the state. Any person displaying such behaviour is regarded as an “extremist”, like the nazis. Openly opposing fascism means being targeted by the violent gangs of nazis who patrol the streets of Russia’s cities looking for victims to attack in broad daylight.

Young anti-fascists have started to fight back. The courageous stance of young Russian anti-fascists against the growing street violence by nazi gangs is often the subject of court proceedings, which have proved inconsistent. The outcome of trials of nazi killers tends to depend on what charges are brought by the public prosecutors: almost always hooliganism (violently disrupting public order) or being involved in hooliganism.

There is no real pressure from the Kremlin or Duma (parliament) on public prosecutors to use hate crime charges and there is a widespread practice of negotiation between judges, prosecutors and defence lawyers to achieve cooperation in trials. Finally and crucially, there is a lack of pressure from anti-fascists who, because there is no deeply rooted democratic culture, rarely get involved with investigations or court proceedings.

Here in St Petersburg, anti-fascists have actively helped the public prosecutors as expert witnesses since the early 1990s and have run some successful campaigns. The nazis reacted by murdering Nikolai Girenko in 2004, then the most visible anti-fascist specialist supporting the public prosecutors in cases against fascists.

Now a younger generation of anti-fascists is emerging to oppose the nazis in the courts and on the streets. Their battles are essential – the alternative is capitulation – but expensive. It costs a great deal of money to participate in court proceedings even when the lawyers act pro bono. In the case against the murderers of Timur Kacharava, anti-fascist funding enabled his family and friends to help put away his killers.

In Russia, there are no big trade unions, labour movements or long-standing anti-racist structures with democratic anti-fascist traditions that we can turn to for help. As a result, we depend on ourselves and the anti-fascist movement internationally.

Support from our brothers, sisters, comrades and friends abroad is ever more vital and valued.

Searchlight

Updated: BNP's Press Officer resigns...

According to a post on the BNP's own website, Phil Edwards, the party's former National Press Officer has voluntarily retired to 'devote more time to his passion of playing the piano' and 'continuing to delight thousands...with his acclaimed and popular firework display business'. His own website, Doc's Diary, states that 'I resign my position of National Press Officer for the BNP', and a rather tired-sounding poster on the Stormfront nazi forum says 'The Doc gets the boot'. Take your pick.

The confusion around Edward's relinquishing of his post extends into other areas of his story. For instance, precisely how long has he been a member of the BNP? Seven years ago he told one of our colleagues he was a former Tory and that he had been in the party for around eight years, a total of fifteen years to now. But in May he was telling callers he had been in the BNP for only eight years. There are also various claims that he has a PhD, two degrees or a single degree (all usually claimed to be in chemistry or something closely allied to it) though those who have taken the time to dig have found no hard evidence of any of these.

What is beyond doubt is that he has been responsible for a couple of nice little PR disasters, not the least of which was the bizarre libel in which he accused an East Midlands GP and former Mayor of selling drugs for sex to woman patients. Whilst all the facts about the real culprit had been well covered in the press he bad-mouthed the wrong man and was forced to make a grovelling apology.

Last year it was revealed that in a recording of a conversation with a student, he stated 'When you go to work and you pay taxes, imagine paying all that tax to give money to single parents in London who have got three or four black kids. The black kids are going to grow up dysfunctional, low IQ, low-achievers that drain our welfare benefits and the prison system and probably go and mug you.'

Not content with that stupidity, he followed it up as news emerged back at the end of July that former BNP council candidate Robert Cottage had been jailed for two and a half years for stockpiling explosives at his house in Colne, with this little gem, 'We never have anyone in the party with criminal convictions'. Obviously it had escaped his notice that the leader of the BNP Nick Griffin has a criminal record of his own.

Edwards has something of a reputation with journalists. One, who met up with him once at a pub sometime before midday, said he was already mildly sloshed and had three or four mobiles which he was answering in turn. When he got sick of the calls, he called the journalist ringing him a cunt and cut him off. He also had a run in with an editor of an East Anglian newspaper. When the editor addressed him as Dr Russell (his real name's Stuart Russell) instead of his alias, he went bananas and told him 'wait until we are in power we will sort you, cunt'.

Whenever there is controversy or a dodgy 'resignation' in the BNP, there is a back-story that the party always tries desperately to conceal, knowing that its revelation would be yet another embarrassment to the party but the comments to this post may hold a clue to the real story. One of our commentors states: 'Doc Edwards left because he had enough of the endless stream of abuse from two Yorkshire based spiteful individuals towards his wife Wendy. Its got a 2 year history...the 'Doc' was a strong supporter of Griffin but even Griffin's (half hearted) intervention was not enough to quell the troublesome stirrer. Anyone getting on the wrong side of you know who and his tiny clique always end up falling on their sword or getting the chop.' Griffin's 'clique' was identified as Mark Collett, Dave Hannam, John Walker and Martin Reynolds, all of whom, it is claimed, are regular contributors to the appalling Covert blog, run by thuggish Griffin-supporter and known drug-dealer Tommy Williams. More information on this aspect of the story would certainly be appreciated.

We'll leave the last word with one of our anti-fascist colleagues, who said last night; 'I for one will miss him. He is such a real example of the BNP's extremism.'

First memorial to black victims of Nazi genocide

In the vast, agonising mosaic of the Holocaust, Mahjub bin Adam Mohamed was simply one more piece, one of millions of the Nazis' victims lost to obscurity without a funeral or a grave.

Now bin Adam is to make history in Germany by becoming the first black person to be given a memorial in his adopted country as an individual victim of the genocide of the Third Reich. A Stolperstein - a bronze 'stumbling block' - will be erected on the ground outside the house in Berlin where he lived.

The memorial will be placed so that pedestrians have to step around it, and its aim is to stop future generations from thinking of the Holocaust in terms of anonymous, faceless numbers. Until now the markers have been almost exclusively established at Jewish homes, but bin Adam's Stolperstein will serve as a reminder of other minorities, the black people, the disabled, homosexuals, gypsies, communists, political dissenters and Jehovah's Witnesses, who were also murdered under Hitler's regime.

The Stolperstein is a project conceived by Cologne-based artist Gunter Demnig. He plans to create a total of 12,000 markers outside houses, giving the name of the person or persons who lived there and the date on which they were taken to a concentration camp. Munich is the only city to have so far refused to have the markers, saying that they would encourage anti-Semitism.

Bin Adam, who was born in Tanzania, joined the then colonial German East Africa services when he was 10 years old and served with the army. He emigrated to Berlin in 1929, where he immediately got into trouble with the authorities by walking into the Foreign Ministry and demanding his outstanding service pay.

Although his request was refused, he decided to stay, working as a waiter in hotels and taking small parts in films. He had roles in more than 20 movies with stars such as Zarah Leander, Hans Albers and Willy Birgel, even after the war broke out. He also taught Swahili at the Oriental Workshop.

He married a German woman, Maria Schwander, and they had three children - Adam, Annemarie and Bodo - but his family struggled to make ends meet because of his excesses, which included numerous affairs that resulted in several illegitimate children. He was still in dispute with the authorities over money for his time in the armed forces when he was arrested in 1941, charged with the crime of 'miscegenation' - racial intermarriage - and taken to Sachsenhausen concentration camp, where he died in November 1944.

The plaque, which will stand outside his former home on Brunnenstrasse in Berlin's Mitte district, comes with the release of a book about him, Truthful Till Death, by Marianne Bechhaus-Gerst. The book focuses attention on the persecution of black people under the Third Reich, which included forced sterilisation and, ultimately, extermination.

By the start of the 20th century, Germany had extensive colonies in Africa and it is often claimed that German doctors carried out genetic experiments on East Africans. After the First World War, France occupied the German Rhineland, deploying colonial African soldiers as the occupying force. The result was hundreds of children born to German women by African soldiers who then became a target for Hitler. In Mein Kampf, he referred to them as 'Rhineland Bastards'.

By 1937, every identified mixed-race child in the Rhineland had been forcibly sterilised, often without anaesthetic. By the outbreak of war most black people had fled. The few who remained were exterminated.

Observer

Searchlight - The year ahead

Nick Lowles looks at the year ahead and stresses the need to improve our campaigning in order to keep the BNP in check.

There were few smiles as first Nick Griffin, the BNP leader, rose to speak, then Eddy Butler, the party’s national elections officer. Around the table were gathered the leaders of the British National Party, key regional organisers and those involved centrally in the election campaign. They were meeting to analyse the party’s performance in the May local elections.

A week before the polls the BNP had confidently predicted it would win 30 to 60 local council seats. In the event the party won just nine, one more than it lost. Even the BNP leadership admitted it was a poor result.

“Our opponents have now worked out how to keep us out,” the audience were told. “In key wards we were out-organised. In many cases we have a very good base vote, but to win we need a spike of support on top. As a direct result of our repeated electoral success, in particular our pioneering use of postal votes in our crushing by-election victory in Barking three years ago, the Labour Party has undergone a paradigm shift in the effectiveness of its election machine. They and their union allies are now capable of out-organising us in a limited number of places, thereby cutting off the top of our support spike.

“It was this ability, carefully targeted, that held us back from winning in several dozen wards in May.”

May seems a long time ago now. These elections are now history and the battleground has already moved on. If anyone believes the BNP has been beaten they are gravely wrong. In areas where anti-BNP groups and political parties took the BNP seriously the fascists were beaten, and beaten well. In areas where the old dogma of ignoring the BNP prevailed, principally in the East Midlands, the BNP performed very well.

Over the next 12 months there will be new challenges and an increased threat. The BNP is attempting to learn from its recent political failures in time for next year’s local elections. The London Assembly elections, contested under proportional repres-entation, will give the BNP a real chance of securing a seat, and if there is a general election the BNP is likely to field a record number of candidates in what the party is likely to treat as a dry run for the elections for the much coveted seats in the European Parliament in June 2009.

In facing these new threats there can be no room for complacency. We need to build on this year’s results, further improve our campaigning techniques and mobilise even more people to get out and vote.

Lessons

It is clear that the BNP is attempting to learn the lessons of last May. At the election analysis meeting the BNP leadership discussed quite openly the shortcomings of their own operation and discussed strategies to overcome these. If the BNP can find a way to put these ideas into action – after all it has promoted them before but the rank and file membership have been unwilling or unable to carry them out – then we will be facing a more determined BNP effort.

The BNP does not admit it overstretched itself in putting forward over 700 candidates in May though it recognises that it needs to widen the number of wards it targets intensively. It also intends to focus more directly on people with postal votes. In the first instance it wants to try to reduce the number of people using postal votes by means of a scare leaflet later this autumn which will claim that there is a high chance of one’s postal votes being stolen or manipulated. Then, during the election campaign itself, the BNP wants to ensure that local units properly target postal voters before they vote, which has not happened in the past.

There will also be a greater effort to identify BNP voters and get them out to vote, another admission that despite talk over several years stressing the importance of canvassing and Voter ID work, most branches fail to do such work. We are likely to see a bigger profile for the BNP campaign, Operation White Vote.

However, the key work being promoted by the leadership will be an extension of community politics – clearing up litter and getting involved in drug rehabilitation and youth groups, local festivals and neighbourhood watch schemes. Not only does this raise the profile of the BNP and its potential election candidates but, and probably more importantly, it gives a positive image of the party which contrasts greatly with the negative anti-BNP literature that is widely circulated.

To assist with this work Mark Collett and the BNP publicity department have committed themselves to producing a monthly leaflet with space for local community activities and feedback forms. But given that he was unable to supply many BNP branches with their targeted glossy leaflets during the election campaign – a widely held gripe that was raised at the meeting but largely brushed aside by Griffin – it is still uncertain whether the new leaflets will materialise.

In addition to a more effective BNP campaign, we will also face more difficult elections. The London Assembly elections will be contested under a form of PR and with 5% of the London-wide vote guaranteeing representation it is going to be a tall order to keep the BNP out. In 2004 the BNP was just 5,000 votes short of gaining a seat, with 90,365 votes (4.8%). The election was held on the same day as the European elections which obviously boosted the UK Independence Party, which polled 156,780 votes (8.18%), securing two seats in the London Assembly. Since 2004 the BNP has emerged as a significant political force in outer east London while the UKIP has declined, and the BNP will surely be looking to eat into the UKIP vote.

The general election, likely to be held in spring, will present advantages and disadvantages for the BNP. It is likely to field many more candidates than in 2005 and save a greater number of deposits. The free mail drop and party political broadcasts will get the BNP message into many more households than in a local election when leaflets have to be delivered through the door by activists and this will greatly increase the party’s profile ahead of the European elections.

The party’s key targets will be Barking and Dagenham in east London, all three Stoke-on-Trent seats and West Bromwich West in the West Midlands, and Dewsbury and Morley and Outwood in West Yorkshire.

There are also likely to be as many as 25 constituencies where the BNP vote will be bigger than the margin of victory. This will be a particular problem for the Conservatives who will be competing with the BNP for those people who are angry with Labour’s immigration policy.

However, the BNP is likely to be squeezed by the major political parties in many constituencies around the country and outside its key targets it will find it difficult to establish a profile. If the general election is on the same day as the local elections it will be even harder for the BNP.

Our response

The BNP will undoubtedly put in place a better election operation next year than this and we will need to continue improving to ensure that it fails to make any significant breakthrough. It is not a matter of radically altering our campaigning strategy but of expanding it. We won this year because the political parties rose to the challenge, their candidates worked harder over a longer period and re-engaged with voters. Complimenting them was Searchlight, trade unions and local anti-BNP groups which delivered targeted anti-BNP material, operated phone banks and knocked up anti-BNP voters.

One of the most successful elements of the campaign was the local specific leaflets that Searchlight produced for some candidates. Everywhere where these were produced, including 15 of the most vulnerable wards, the BNP was defeated.

Tom Watson, the MP for West Bromwich East, believes that it was this partnership that helped drive down the BNP vote in Sandwell considerably. “Searchlight worked closely with us and inspired us to work harder. The Sandwell Day of Action [when 220 people delivered 45,000 newspapers] gave us the extra push to defeat the BNP. In addition, the story about local BNP criminality, which was on the front page of the paper, really resonated with people who might have previously voted for the BNP. I’m still getting people in my constituency telling me that they liked what the BNP say on many issues but didn’t vote for them because of their sinister side.”

The role of the trade unions too was vital in many areas this year. They were more integrated into the overall anti-BNP campaign than in previous years and this paid off politically.

Hard work, engaging with voters and year-long campaigning appears a simple recipe for defeating the BNP. However, if we are honest there are still too many areas where this is not being done. Too many local political parties merely pay lip service to good campaigning and not enough local anti-BNP groups are working on the estates where the BNP gathers its support.

To keep one step ahead of the BNP we need to ensure that this strategy is followed through. To help with this Searchlight will be holding a series of seminars across the country, including an organisers’ school aimed at political activists and local anti-BNP groups.

There will be a special focus on London in the run-up to the London Assembly elections, more of which will be revealed in Searchlight over the next few months. We will also formalise our general election strategy which will recognise the limitations of anti-BNP campaigning in a general election but will focus on the core areas, not only to limit the BNP vote but to use the election as a Voter ID-gathering exercise that will be vital in subsequent local elections.

Much of our work over the coming 12 months will form a prelude to the major battle in the European election campaign. Let there be no mistake about the seriousness of these elections. If the BNP wins seats in the European Parliament, it will have made its political breakthrough. The financial and political benefits will mean that we will forever find it difficult to push the BNP back into the margins. What we do now will impact on those elections. This May the BNP vote fell in many of the party’s key areas. If we can continue this then we can prevent the BNP from achieving any success in 2009. If we let up then the BNP will get MEPs elected.

Griffin and Butler compared their struggle with the life cycle of bacteria. By defeating the BNP this year, they claimed, we would suffer as the party came back stronger “more virulent” than before.

The analogy is fitting. The BNP is a bacterium that constantly needs defeating and like bacteria the consequences of not ridding our society of the BNP could be very dangerous indeed.

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BNP election bid is an insult to Whitehaven

An MP has hit out at the British National Party’s attempt to get elected in Whitehaven, claiming it is “insulting and damaging the reputation” of the town. Copeland MP Jamie Reed slammed the far right’s efforts to secure the vacant Copeland Borough Council Harbour ward seat.

Last month 44-year-old Bill Pugh, of Melbreak Close, Mirehouse, was named as the party’s candidate in next Thursday’s by-election. Mr Pugh was born and raised in the town and was in the army for 20 years, serving in Northern Ireland, Germany, Hong Kong and Singapore. The father-of-four said he will campaign for a return to weekly refuse collection, is against any plans for a mosque and against pensioners having to sell their homes to pay for care.

But the Labour MP said the BNP campaign was an insult to both the town and the people of Harbour ward. He said: “For the BNP to assume that the people of Harbour ward share their racist views and to calculate that they have a chance of victory there is a grotesque insult. The presence of the BNP in Whitehaven unfairly damages the reputation of the town – but our reputation can be further enhanced by rejecting the BNP extremists at the ballot box. The BNP has flooded the area with campaign workers from all over the county and country because there is such little local support. The BNP cares nothing for Whitehaven or the people of Harbour ward.”

Last month the Rev John Bannister urged voters to “consider carefully and responsibly” which candidate to support. Mr Reed said: “The Rev John Bannister, like right-minded people everywhere, was entirely right to air concerns about the presence of the BNP in Whitehaven and their efforts to be elected to Copeland Borough Council. Most people in Copeland will either know someone or be related to someone who fought against the Nazis during the Second World War. Many people will have lost friends and family in that fight against fascism. For the BNP to fetch fascism to our town is an insult to those who fought, those who suffered and those who lost loved ones during that conflict.”

And Mr Reed believes on polling day people will have the chance to exercise their democratic right and stand up for the values of the town and community by rejecting the BNP. “I urge everyone to use this right, to not be complacent and to take pride in showing the BNP that its brand of prejudice isn’t welcome in Whitehaven.”

Whitehaven Rugby League Club, in partnership with Cumbria Constabulary, recently launched an anti-racism campaign at the match against Castleford. This included a list of the dozens of non-British players who have played for Whitehaven over the years.

Carlisle News and Star

Anger rises in South Africa as killers walk free

Since soon after the fall of the apartheid regime Searchlight has investigated and revealed the involvement of former South African security service officers in trying to destabilise the new South Africa and lend their support to the far right internationally. We have exposed plots by the international far right, including people and groups in Britain, to plot assassinations and economic sabotage.

South Africa’s former hardline minister of law and order in the apartheid era received only a suspended sentence at the end of his trial last month after a plea bargain. Adriaan Vlok’s ten-year sentence was suspended for five years after he pleaded guilty to the attempted murder of a leading black activist cleric in 1989 in return for the withdrawal of charges of conspiracy to murder.

Vlok oversaw the bombings of the Cosatu trade union headquarters in Johannesburg in 1987 and the headquarters of the South African Council of Churches in 1988, for both of which he was granted amnesty by the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) in 1999. He did not apply for amnesty for the attempted murder by poisoning of the Reverend Frank Chikane in 1989, hence the prosecution.

Under Vlok’s watch the state police and military apparatus carried out countless assassinations of anti-apartheid activists within South Africa and on cross-border raids, ran dirty-tricks campaigns and fitted up innocent people. They also ran the notorious Vlakplaas farm, where opponents of the regime were tortured and murdered.

Vlok is just one among many apartheid regime operatives who have gone unpunished for their crimes. One of them has now become flavour of the month in the British National Party. Arthur Kemp, a former sergeant in the South African Security Police, was suspected of organising the surveillance of Chris Hani, the leader of the South African Communist Party, in the weeks leading up to his assassination in April 1993.

In June this year Kemp, whose 586-page tome March of the Titans is highly praised by Nick Griffin, the BNP leader, was handed the BNP’s Excalibur merchandise outlet to run alongside Nicholla Ritchie. Now Griffin has put him in charge of the ideological training of the BNP’s “voting members” as part of the plan to build a new elite within the party loyal to the present leadership. This puts Kemp among a very small group of Griffin’s most trusted lieutenants.

Writing on the BNP website Griffin said: “Arthur is a highly skilled and very welcome addition to our central team. I am delighted to have been able to bring him on board and hope he will be with us throughout the years of decision ahead of us.”

Kemp’s past presents no problem for the BNP, which has long made plain its regret at the fall of the murderous apartheid regime and its hatred for Nelson Mandela. The day before a new statue to Mandela was unveiled in London last month, the BNP website described him as “the man convicted of terrorist offences”, the “offences” in question being acts committed during the brave struggle by him and other fighters against white rule. The BNP’s article included a link to what it described as an “interesting poster” – the notorious “Hang Nelson Mandela” poster produced by the rightwing Federation of Conservative Students in the early 1980s, something that must be an acute embarrassment to at least one member of the current Shadow Cabinet.

Although Kemp was arrested after the Hani murder, he was never charged and had no need to apply to the TRC for amnesty. The TRC was set up after the end of apartheid under the chairmanship of Archbishop Desmond Tutu to hear evidence from victims of apartheid. Perpetrators of politically motivated violence could also come forward to give testimony and request amnesty from prosecution, though not all were granted it and some ended up being prosecuted. It was seen as an important means of achieving reconciliation between the black and white communities. However critics point out that the failure to bring those who committed human rights abuses to justice was more likely to hinder reconciliation than help it.

Some commentators believe that there was also pressure from the West, that pursuing apartheid criminals would deter foreign investment in the new South Africa, though South Africa had its own economic clout, being rich in natural resources.

Remorse was not a prerequisite for amnesty but many who came to the TRC pleaded that they were changed men after finding religion. Last year Vlok washed the feet of Rev Chikane as a Christian gesture of atonement, something about which Rev Chikane himself felt uneasy but was pushed into agreeing by ANC government members. At the time the South African journalist Joe Qwelane, who was locked up without charge and witnessed savage beatings under apartheid, wrote that Vlok’s apology was unconvincing.

The TRC ceased operating in 2003 leaving many issues unresolved. It is now the prerogative of the national director of prosecutions to decide who to prosecute and who not to prosecute for crimes committed by both sides during the anti-apartheid struggle. Relatives of those who were unlawfully killed by the apartheid security forces and of those who died at the hands of ANC combatants both oppose this discretion, each believing that only people from their own side will be targeted.

There is a suspicion that some members of the ANC government, sitting in posts obtained through corruption, do not want to rock the boat by genuinely seeking justice for the victims of apartheid. And some ANC figures who also carried out crimes against their own people appear to have protection from powerful politicians.

On one side is AfriForm, a non-governmental organisation representing white farmers, some of whom do not seem to accept that anything has changed since apartheid. Black workers have been tortured and in some instances killed by their white masters.

Zimbabweans fleeing President Mugabe’s regime have to cross land owned by these farmers, some of whom have been taking the law into their own hands. Only a handful have been arrested and AfriForm has been busy supporting them. AfriForm is also championing the case of Dirk van Eck, an Afrikaner whose wife and children were killed by a landmine placed by ANC guerrillas at the height of the military struggle. Although van Eck agreed to a TRC amnesty for the two combatants, who are therefore legally and justly immune from prosecution, his name appeared on nearly every placard held by white demonstrators outside the court during Vlok’s trial.

Searchlight stands with all decent South Africans, black and white, who demand justice for those who died and were tortured, with proper investigations and reinvestigations and appropriate punishment for those found guilty.

Chris Hani’s name tops the list of those assassinated on state orders. Two men, Janusz Walus and Clive Derby-Lewis, are serving life sentences in South Africa for his murder, but others including Kemp have escaped justice.

The fall of the apartheid regime was greeted throughout the world with a huge amount of hope for the future. Since Thabo Mbeki succeeded Nelson Mandela as South Africa’s president, corruption has grown and much of the black population remains in severe poverty.

Last month Hugh Masakela, a musician with an international reputation as one of the world’s greatest trumpet players and as a hero of the struggle against apartheid, told the world that he and many other musicians whose music became symbols of protest against white domination are no longer welcome in the new South Africa, because the ANC is “terrified” of music as an agent of change.

In an interview with The Times, Masakela said, “I am not bitter I am disgusted”. He accused the ANC of conniving in a “business deal” to bring about the end of apartheid that had entrenched the power of the elite but left most of the population in poverty. He agreed with critics of the TRC that reconciliation had not happened. “What is amazing is how the perpetrators [of crimes under apartheid] almost reluctantly apologised – ‘I’m sorry, forgive me’ – because a deal was there. It’s the same old story. After the Allies overran Germany you couldn’t find anybody who supported Nazism. It’s the same thing in South Africa. You can’t find anyone who supported apartheid.”

But like Germany’s Nazis after the war, South Africa’s white supremacists are still there and many, like Kemp and Lambertus Nieuwhof, who received a 12-month suspended sentence for bombing a South African church school and now runs the BNP’s internet operations, are still promoting the same views around the world. One of our most urgent concerns is to have these people as well as Leonard Veenendaal, a wanted white supremacist double murderer living in Cambridgeshire whom we exposed in our July issue, sent packing as soon as possible.

Vlakplaas torturer rewarded

Not everyone who committed human rights abuses on behalf of the apartheid regime was white. Vlakplaas was a remote farm that was taken over by a combination of govern-ment agencies to wage the internal and external war against the ANC and anybody else, black or white, battling apartheid.

Dirk Coetzee, the first commander of the covert Vlakplaas police unit, set about recruiting black members of his death and torture squads. Coetzee received an amnesty from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission for his involvement in several crimes.

Many young black criminals found their way into his squads. One of the worst was Joe Mamasela. He had a streak of vicious ruthlessness that endeared him to his bosses, and enjoyed inflicting torture and killing people while he and his fellow officers enjoyed a barbecue. It is unlikely anyone will ever know how many ANC supporters died at his hands.

Sometimes he pretended to be an activist with MK, the military wing of the ANC. On one occasion he gave dodgy hand-grenades to fighters in Duduza township. Several were killed or maimed.

In 1986 he enticed ten township youth activists, promising to take them to Botswana to train with the MK. Before they crossed the border security officers ordered them off the vehicle and drugged them. Their bodies were then blown up. In 2005 the remains of the youths, who became known as the Mamelodi 10, were found and Mamasela admitted his role in the murders. He escaped prosecution in return for giving evidence about his colleagues, for which he was paid. He remains at liberty, enjoying a luxurious lifestyle, and is believed to be running a security company.

Adriaan Vlok, the police minister at the time the Mamelodi 10 were murdered, washed the feet of the victims’ mothers and widows, shortly before performing the same act on Reverend Frank Chikane. He described it as a deep spiritual experience. However he has always denied responsibility for the acts carried out by Vlakplaas and its officers.

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