Tory Nigel Hastilow has resigned as a Parliamentary candidate after declaring that Enoch Powell was "right" when he gave his notorious "Rivers of Blood" anti-immigration speech. Mr Hastilow stepped down after being summoned to a meeting with Tory party chairwoman Caroline Spelman to explain the comments he made in a newspaper column.
He said: "I am very sorry that any remarks of mine have undermined the progress David Cameron has made on the issue of immigration, as on so many other issues."
A Conservative spokeswoman confirmed the party had accepted his resignation as the candidate for Halesowen and Rowley Regis. Mr Hastilow said it was "with regret" that he had tendered his resignation but added the party would have his support for the future.
It is the second time Mr Hastilow, a former editor of the Birmingham Post, has courted controversy while a would-be MP. In 2001 he said the Tories under William Hague were seen as a "lost cause" with an unpopular leader. In his column for the Express and Star newspaper in Wolverhampton - where Mr Powell was MP at the time of the 1968 speech - Mr Hastilow wrote: "When you ask most people in the Black Country what the single biggest problem facing the country is, most say immigration. Many insist: 'Enoch Powell was right'. Enoch, once MP for Wolverhampton South-West, was sacked from the Conservative front bench and marginalised politically for his 1968 'rivers of blood' speech, warning that uncontrolled immigration would change our country irrevocably. He was right. It has changed dramatically."
He also wrote: "They have more or less given up complaining about the way we roll out the red carpet for foreigners while leaving the locals to fend for themselves."
Cabinet minister Peter Hain said Mr Hastilow's comments had revealed the "racist underbelly" of the Tory party.
Guardian
November 05, 2007
November 04, 2007
BNP tries to hijack poppy day
The far-right BNP are trying to hijack Scotland's Poppy Appeal to win public support. The racist organisation have asked activists to volunteer to sell the emblems of remembrance for our war heroes.In a secret bulletin to Scots members, the party ask them to take advantage of a shortage of volunteers. The memo states: "We should be at the front of the queue volunteering to do our bit as we understand better than most the patriotic sacrifice made by those serving and ex-service men and women."
Last night, furious Poppy Appeal organisers said they were appalled by the BNP's sick bid to win favour. Jim Panton, chief executive of Poppyscotland, said: "I had no idea the BNP have tried to get involved in the Poppy Appeal. It's outrageous for any organisation or group to try to hijack the poppy for their own benefit or gain. It is a misuse and misrepresentation of the sentiment of the appeal and we would take a strong line against that. We are apolitical and have not asked any party to back us."
Brigadier Frank Coutts, 89, who served in the Second World War with the King's Own Scottish Borderers, added: "I used to sell poppies on the streets and I wouldn't want to be associated with any sellers from the BNP. Their beliefs are outrageous and contrary to the Royal British Legion's aims. They are disloyal to this country. The Poppy Appeal is a national institution of great importance and no one should be doing anything that might damage that."
Last year in Scotland, the Poppy Appeal raised £1.5million. This month, more than 10,000 volunteers armed with 60,000 collection cans will sell poppies.
Neil Griffiths, of the Royal British Legion Scotland, said: "We abhor any association with the BNP. I worked most of my military career with Gurkhas and feel angry by any level of racism when I encounter it. The BNP seem to have forgotten that the Indian Army in the Second World War had two million members. It was the biggest volunteer army in military history and it played a huge role in the war."
This year's appeal was launched on Wednesday by First Minister Alex Salmond and Scotland football team manager Alex McLeish.
SNP defence spokesman Angus Robertson said: "Poppy Day is a day for remembrance by all for all who have made the ultimate sacrifice in conflict and a substantial source of support for our veterans. It is appalling for the far right to try to hijack it. Their repugnant views are rejected right across Scottish society and by our brave ex-service personnel. The poppy is a symbol of our unity and Scots will always wear it with pride."
Last night, Kenny Smith, the BNP's Scottish organiser, said: "We are not a Nazi or fascist party. We are not racists. We are patriots who believe that those who laid down their lives for this country in two world wars should always be remembered. There is no way we are hijacking the poppy appeal for political purposes."
The activists
These are the BNP members who could be selling you poppies this week.
Warren Bennett was one of 58 Scots banned from the Scotland v Norway match during France 98. He was paid to protect BNP leader Nick Griffin on a visit to Glasgow after the racist murder of teenager Kriss Donald.
Scott McLean, 33, of Glasgow, was photographed giving a Nazi salute at a Blood and Honour skinhead festival.
Steve Blake, an IT consultant, of Stirling, runs the BNP website. He imported hardcore Nazi material from the US in the 80s.
Kenny Smith, of Dennistoun, Glasgow, is editor of the Scottish edition of the British Nationalist magazine.
William Hamilton, a former director of Hamilton Academical FC, stood against Mohammed Sarwar in the 2005 election.
Glasgow Sunday Mail
Labels:
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far-right,
hijack,
nazi,
Poppy Appeal,
PoppyScotland
Sophie Scholl - The Final Days
Sophie Scholl - The Final Days sneaks almost unheralded into the Channel 4 schedule on Monday night (or Tuesday morning, if you want to be pedantic). One of a sequence of important modern German films dealing with its Nazi past, Sophie Scholl - The Final Days tells the tragic but ennobling story of The White Rose, a small anti-Nazi resistance group founded in Munich at the height of the Second World War. The film premiers on Channel 4 after midnight Monday November 5th at 00:30.Synopsis:
In 1943, as Hitler continues to wage war across Europe, a group of college students mount an underground resistance movement in Munich. Dedicated expressly to the downfall of the monolithic Third Reich war machine, they call themselves the White Rose. One of its few female members, Sophie Scholl is captured during a dangerous mission to distribute pamphlets on campus with her brother Hans. Unwavering in her convictions and loyalty to the White Rose, her cross-examination by the Gestapo quickly escalates into a searing test of wills as Scholl delivers a passionate call to freedom and personal responsibility that is both haunting and timeless.
Click here to see trailer (requires Quicktime)
Click here for book
Click here to read more on the White Rose at Denise's personal blog
Labels:
anti-Nazi,
Resistance,
Sophie Scholl,
White Rose,
WWII
'Enoch was right' claim sparks Tory race row
· Cameron urged to sack key candidate
· Powell praised for immigrants speech
David Cameron was facing a row over race last night after a candidate in a high-profile seat praised Enoch Powell for his notorious 'rivers of blood' speech, which warned that Britain was 'literally mad' to allow widespread immigration.
Days after Cameron was praised by the head of the Equality Commission for tackling the issue of immigration in a non-racial way, Labour called on the Tory leader to remove Nigel Hastilow as a prospective Conservative candidate for declaring that Powell was 'right'. A spokesman said: 'It's not unreasonable to be concerned about the impact of immigration, but it is unacceptable to say Enoch Powell was right. How can David Cameron believe this is acceptable?'
Pressure is likely to increase on Cameron to act after the Tory leadership decided last night that there were no grounds to move against Hastilow. He is instead to be asked to clarify his remarks and to make clear that his views are about immigration and, unlike Powell's speech, do not stray into the area of race.
The row broke out after Hastilow, who last year accused Muslims of using terror attacks to 'issue demands' for their own bank holidays and schools, used his regular column in the Wolverhampton Express and Star newspaper to complain about how immigration has changed Britain and placed great strains on housing and public services.
He wrote that 'we [Britain] roll out the red carpet for foreigners while leaving the locals to fend for themselves'. Hastilow, a former editor of the Birmingham Post, adds: 'When you ask most people in the Black Country what the single biggest problem facing the country is, most people say immigration. Many insist: "Enoch Powell was right".
'Enoch, once MP for Wolverhampton South-West, was sacked from the Conservative front bench and marginalised politically for his 1968 "rivers of blood" speech, warning that uncontrolled immigration would change our country irrevocably. He was right. It has changed dramatically. But his speech was political suicide. Enoch's successors in parliament are desperate to avoid ever mentioning the issue.'
The remarks by Hastilow, who was selected in April to contest the marginal seat of Halesowen and Rowley Regis, which the Tories must win if they are to regain power, present Cameron with a headache. It is only days since Trevor Phillips, head of the new Equality and Human Rights Commission, praised Cameron for a speech on immigration in which the Tory leader had managed to 'deracialise' a highly-sensitive issue. Cameron showed his new approach in March this year when he sacked the shadow Homeland Security Minister, Patrick Mercer, for 'completely unacceptable' remarks suggesting that many ethnic minority soldiers used accusations of racism to cover up their idleness.
Moving against a parliamentary candidate is more difficult because local Conservative associations jealously guard their independence. Mary Docker, chairman of the Halesowen and Rowley Regis association, last night offered strong support for Hastilow. Asked by The Observer whether she would stand by him, Docker said: 'Most certainly. Yes. He was selected by our association to stand in the forthcoming election whenever that may be. He is an excellent candidate. He is a down-to-earth man who talks to people and doesn't talk at them. He is representative of the views of many Black Country people.'
Docker added that Hastilow was right to endorse Powell's view that Britain has been transformed by immigration. 'It is a feeling that is held by many Black Country people, certainly ones I speak to. There is no denying that immigration has had a great effect on the way services are run in this country.'
She insisted that this did not make her or Hastilow racists. 'The difficulty is that if people have views about immigration it is immediately deemed as being racist. That is not the situation. People are entitled to have their opinions about things that have an integral effect on their lives.' But some of Hastilow's language may be regarded as controversial. He opens his article with the story of 'a granny' who has had to house her single-parent daughter and two young children because all council housing has been taken by immigrants.
He goes on to say people are too afraid to discuss the issue after Powell's removal from the shadow cabinet by Ted Heath. 'Immigration is the issue that dare not speak its name. Yet everywhere you go, you hear the same story. There are too many people competing for houses, benefits, public services and jobs.'
Observer
· Powell praised for immigrants speech
David Cameron was facing a row over race last night after a candidate in a high-profile seat praised Enoch Powell for his notorious 'rivers of blood' speech, which warned that Britain was 'literally mad' to allow widespread immigration.
Days after Cameron was praised by the head of the Equality Commission for tackling the issue of immigration in a non-racial way, Labour called on the Tory leader to remove Nigel Hastilow as a prospective Conservative candidate for declaring that Powell was 'right'. A spokesman said: 'It's not unreasonable to be concerned about the impact of immigration, but it is unacceptable to say Enoch Powell was right. How can David Cameron believe this is acceptable?'
Pressure is likely to increase on Cameron to act after the Tory leadership decided last night that there were no grounds to move against Hastilow. He is instead to be asked to clarify his remarks and to make clear that his views are about immigration and, unlike Powell's speech, do not stray into the area of race.
The row broke out after Hastilow, who last year accused Muslims of using terror attacks to 'issue demands' for their own bank holidays and schools, used his regular column in the Wolverhampton Express and Star newspaper to complain about how immigration has changed Britain and placed great strains on housing and public services.
He wrote that 'we [Britain] roll out the red carpet for foreigners while leaving the locals to fend for themselves'. Hastilow, a former editor of the Birmingham Post, adds: 'When you ask most people in the Black Country what the single biggest problem facing the country is, most people say immigration. Many insist: "Enoch Powell was right".
'Enoch, once MP for Wolverhampton South-West, was sacked from the Conservative front bench and marginalised politically for his 1968 "rivers of blood" speech, warning that uncontrolled immigration would change our country irrevocably. He was right. It has changed dramatically. But his speech was political suicide. Enoch's successors in parliament are desperate to avoid ever mentioning the issue.'
The remarks by Hastilow, who was selected in April to contest the marginal seat of Halesowen and Rowley Regis, which the Tories must win if they are to regain power, present Cameron with a headache. It is only days since Trevor Phillips, head of the new Equality and Human Rights Commission, praised Cameron for a speech on immigration in which the Tory leader had managed to 'deracialise' a highly-sensitive issue. Cameron showed his new approach in March this year when he sacked the shadow Homeland Security Minister, Patrick Mercer, for 'completely unacceptable' remarks suggesting that many ethnic minority soldiers used accusations of racism to cover up their idleness.
Moving against a parliamentary candidate is more difficult because local Conservative associations jealously guard their independence. Mary Docker, chairman of the Halesowen and Rowley Regis association, last night offered strong support for Hastilow. Asked by The Observer whether she would stand by him, Docker said: 'Most certainly. Yes. He was selected by our association to stand in the forthcoming election whenever that may be. He is an excellent candidate. He is a down-to-earth man who talks to people and doesn't talk at them. He is representative of the views of many Black Country people.'
Docker added that Hastilow was right to endorse Powell's view that Britain has been transformed by immigration. 'It is a feeling that is held by many Black Country people, certainly ones I speak to. There is no denying that immigration has had a great effect on the way services are run in this country.'
She insisted that this did not make her or Hastilow racists. 'The difficulty is that if people have views about immigration it is immediately deemed as being racist. That is not the situation. People are entitled to have their opinions about things that have an integral effect on their lives.' But some of Hastilow's language may be regarded as controversial. He opens his article with the story of 'a granny' who has had to house her single-parent daughter and two young children because all council housing has been taken by immigrants.
He goes on to say people are too afraid to discuss the issue after Powell's removal from the shadow cabinet by Ted Heath. 'Immigration is the issue that dare not speak its name. Yet everywhere you go, you hear the same story. There are too many people competing for houses, benefits, public services and jobs.'
Observer
Labels:
David Cameron,
Enoch Powell,
Hastilow,
Nigel,
rivers of blood
Outcasts: Italy turns on its immigrants in wake of a murder
These are the first victims of a brutal Italian crackdown on immigrants. As thousands await deportation without trial, are we entering a new era of intolerance across Europe?
They sat forlornly on the banks of the Tiber yesterday while the shantytowns they had called home only hours before were demolished. Already outcasts from the mainstream of Italian life, now they have been banished from whatever impromptu shelter they had found. And the city rejoiced at their misfortune.
Three small kittens and a hungry-looking mongrel are the last remaining inhabitants of the Roma squatter camp on the northern outskirts of Rome. The camp is yards from Tor di Quinto station on a commuter line from central Rome, but, screened by trees and creepers and huddled in a narrow gully, it is invisible until you part the creeper and step inside. Then you find the first of a line of flimsy huts, put together from scrap wood and fabric and cardboard but neat and cared-for. Inside some of them have rugs on the floor, tiny gas cooking stoves, dressers with ornaments, a double bed, a broken down chair; outside is a mouldy old sofa, a moth-eaten beach umbrella shading an old coffee table: la dolce vita for Italy's poorest and most marginal residents.
The camp is empty because on Wednesday a naval captain's wife, Giovanna Reggiani, 47, returning home from a shopping trip to central Rome, was attacked and robbed near here, and dumped in the gully. Last night she died in hospital. It was a vicious crime, and fed into a mounting national mood of anger and exasperation about immigration. Suddenly Italy's political system, normally so sluggish, sprang into life.
Within hours Italy was doing what millions of people around Europe – whipped up by populist politicians and a xenophobic media – would like to see their own governments doing: taking quick, dramatic and draconian action to teach the immigrants a lesson they won't forget.
A new law on security has been creeping through parliament: one of its central provisions is that foreigners belonging to EU countries and resident in Italy can be expelled on the orders of local prefects if they are a threat to "public security". No trial is necessary. On Wednesday night, at the urging of Walter Veltroni, the Mayor of Rome and leader of a new centrist party, the Democratic Party, that provision was extracted from the law, quickly redrafted as a "decree-law", a sort of diktat, and signed by the President overnight. From being the sluggard of the EU, suddenly Italy was in the vanguard. "First 5,000 expulsions to go ahead," promised La Repubblica newspaper.
The decree law came into force yesterday, and last night the Prefect of Milan became the first in the country to apply for its implementation, demanding the expulsion of four Roma. The Roma are as ever the first minority group to be singled out and vilified when anti-immigrant sentiments are inflamed.
While the politicians and lawyers were thrusting the law through the system, the state was coming down hard on the squatters of Tor di Quinto. A line of police cars arrived at the site and police chased the Roma away from their makeshift homes. Forensic detectives went through the camp for clues to the murder, and it was expected that its shacks would be levelled by bulldozers within a few hours. Other police teams descended on camps small and large dotted across the shabby, sprawling, crime-infested and chaotic Roman outskirts, and along the squalid banks of the Tiber.
It's the sort of bold, drastic action against the tide of immigration that many have called for across much of western Europe.
The free movement of people across the continent is a cornerstone of the union of 27 member states but the linkage between immigration and crime remains explosive. In Italy, as in Britain, the Netherlands and elsewhere, the issue of foreign criminals stirs a mob mentality that can quickly remove senior politicians from office if they are caught on the wrong side of it.
Statistics do little to calm the debate. Analysis from the Metropolitan Police suggests that foreign migrants are if anything less likely to commit crimes than other groups. Figures suggested that they made up 27 per cent of the population in London but committed 20 per cent of the crimes. Danny Sriskandarajah, a respected expert on migration at the Institute of Public Policy Research, said: "Although the evidence may suggest foreigners are no more, and maybe less likely to be criminal in the UK there is a combination of fears about outsiders and mistrust of outsiders.
Yesterday the consensus on the streets of Rome was that the crackdown was long overdue. A woman on crutches at Ponte Milvio, a couple of miles from the crime scene, said baldly: "It would be better if they all went home. Here we are all scared." A middle-aged woman shopping with her husband said: "I've no objection to them being here as such. But if they don't have regular work and a steady income, if they have to rob and murder to stay alive, it would be better if they went home."
But another woman said Mr Veltroni couldn't escape blame. "He's been a good mayor in many ways but it's true that he has had no interest in dealing with this problem."
If the murder of Mrs Reggiani has plunged Italy into a moral panic, it has been a long time coming. Politicians, Mr Veltroni and the post-Fascist leader Gianfranco Fini leading the pack, have been doing everything they can to prove that they are tough on immigrant crime. Mr Fini took journalists up in a plane the other week to point out Rome's squatter camps, while Mr Veltroni flew to Bucharest to plead with the Romanian President to put a brake on emigration.
Increasingly racist coverage of muggings, rapes and murders in the press and on television has built a mood of national hysteria. In Italy there is a widespread feeling that the country is swamped by outsiders. About 700,000 immigrants have arrived – more than in any other EU country. Yet it rests on a flimsy basis of fact. In the 10 months since Romania entered the EU, Romanians have been accused of nine separate cases of murder against Italians, a number dwarfed by, for example, gang murders in Naples.
Amid the cathartic sense yesterday that at last the people's voice was being heard, murmurs of doubt arose. If only the lane leading to the station had had the benefit of a few street lamps – would the murder have happened? If Mr Veltroni had taken action against the squatter camps years ago instead of negligently allowing them to multiply – would the country be faced with this sense of crisis?
The attack on Giovanna Reggiani came to light after a Roma woman stood in the middle of the road and forced a bus to stop. Unable to speak Italian, she screamed the name of the man now accused of the murder – "Mailat!" – and mimed a man carrying a body. She led the police to the body, and to the shack where Nicolae Romolus Mailat lived with his mother. After receiving threats from people in the camp she is now under police protection.
Mr Mailat was remanded in custody charged with attempted murder, sexual violence and robbery. He has admitted only the robbery.
Independent
They sat forlornly on the banks of the Tiber yesterday while the shantytowns they had called home only hours before were demolished. Already outcasts from the mainstream of Italian life, now they have been banished from whatever impromptu shelter they had found. And the city rejoiced at their misfortune.
Three small kittens and a hungry-looking mongrel are the last remaining inhabitants of the Roma squatter camp on the northern outskirts of Rome. The camp is yards from Tor di Quinto station on a commuter line from central Rome, but, screened by trees and creepers and huddled in a narrow gully, it is invisible until you part the creeper and step inside. Then you find the first of a line of flimsy huts, put together from scrap wood and fabric and cardboard but neat and cared-for. Inside some of them have rugs on the floor, tiny gas cooking stoves, dressers with ornaments, a double bed, a broken down chair; outside is a mouldy old sofa, a moth-eaten beach umbrella shading an old coffee table: la dolce vita for Italy's poorest and most marginal residents.
The camp is empty because on Wednesday a naval captain's wife, Giovanna Reggiani, 47, returning home from a shopping trip to central Rome, was attacked and robbed near here, and dumped in the gully. Last night she died in hospital. It was a vicious crime, and fed into a mounting national mood of anger and exasperation about immigration. Suddenly Italy's political system, normally so sluggish, sprang into life.
Within hours Italy was doing what millions of people around Europe – whipped up by populist politicians and a xenophobic media – would like to see their own governments doing: taking quick, dramatic and draconian action to teach the immigrants a lesson they won't forget.
A new law on security has been creeping through parliament: one of its central provisions is that foreigners belonging to EU countries and resident in Italy can be expelled on the orders of local prefects if they are a threat to "public security". No trial is necessary. On Wednesday night, at the urging of Walter Veltroni, the Mayor of Rome and leader of a new centrist party, the Democratic Party, that provision was extracted from the law, quickly redrafted as a "decree-law", a sort of diktat, and signed by the President overnight. From being the sluggard of the EU, suddenly Italy was in the vanguard. "First 5,000 expulsions to go ahead," promised La Repubblica newspaper.
The decree law came into force yesterday, and last night the Prefect of Milan became the first in the country to apply for its implementation, demanding the expulsion of four Roma. The Roma are as ever the first minority group to be singled out and vilified when anti-immigrant sentiments are inflamed.
While the politicians and lawyers were thrusting the law through the system, the state was coming down hard on the squatters of Tor di Quinto. A line of police cars arrived at the site and police chased the Roma away from their makeshift homes. Forensic detectives went through the camp for clues to the murder, and it was expected that its shacks would be levelled by bulldozers within a few hours. Other police teams descended on camps small and large dotted across the shabby, sprawling, crime-infested and chaotic Roman outskirts, and along the squalid banks of the Tiber.
It's the sort of bold, drastic action against the tide of immigration that many have called for across much of western Europe.
The free movement of people across the continent is a cornerstone of the union of 27 member states but the linkage between immigration and crime remains explosive. In Italy, as in Britain, the Netherlands and elsewhere, the issue of foreign criminals stirs a mob mentality that can quickly remove senior politicians from office if they are caught on the wrong side of it.
Statistics do little to calm the debate. Analysis from the Metropolitan Police suggests that foreign migrants are if anything less likely to commit crimes than other groups. Figures suggested that they made up 27 per cent of the population in London but committed 20 per cent of the crimes. Danny Sriskandarajah, a respected expert on migration at the Institute of Public Policy Research, said: "Although the evidence may suggest foreigners are no more, and maybe less likely to be criminal in the UK there is a combination of fears about outsiders and mistrust of outsiders.
Yesterday the consensus on the streets of Rome was that the crackdown was long overdue. A woman on crutches at Ponte Milvio, a couple of miles from the crime scene, said baldly: "It would be better if they all went home. Here we are all scared." A middle-aged woman shopping with her husband said: "I've no objection to them being here as such. But if they don't have regular work and a steady income, if they have to rob and murder to stay alive, it would be better if they went home."
But another woman said Mr Veltroni couldn't escape blame. "He's been a good mayor in many ways but it's true that he has had no interest in dealing with this problem."
If the murder of Mrs Reggiani has plunged Italy into a moral panic, it has been a long time coming. Politicians, Mr Veltroni and the post-Fascist leader Gianfranco Fini leading the pack, have been doing everything they can to prove that they are tough on immigrant crime. Mr Fini took journalists up in a plane the other week to point out Rome's squatter camps, while Mr Veltroni flew to Bucharest to plead with the Romanian President to put a brake on emigration.
Increasingly racist coverage of muggings, rapes and murders in the press and on television has built a mood of national hysteria. In Italy there is a widespread feeling that the country is swamped by outsiders. About 700,000 immigrants have arrived – more than in any other EU country. Yet it rests on a flimsy basis of fact. In the 10 months since Romania entered the EU, Romanians have been accused of nine separate cases of murder against Italians, a number dwarfed by, for example, gang murders in Naples.
Amid the cathartic sense yesterday that at last the people's voice was being heard, murmurs of doubt arose. If only the lane leading to the station had had the benefit of a few street lamps – would the murder have happened? If Mr Veltroni had taken action against the squatter camps years ago instead of negligently allowing them to multiply – would the country be faced with this sense of crisis?
The attack on Giovanna Reggiani came to light after a Roma woman stood in the middle of the road and forced a bus to stop. Unable to speak Italian, she screamed the name of the man now accused of the murder – "Mailat!" – and mimed a man carrying a body. She led the police to the body, and to the shack where Nicolae Romolus Mailat lived with his mother. After receiving threats from people in the camp she is now under police protection.
Mr Mailat was remanded in custody charged with attempted murder, sexual violence and robbery. He has admitted only the robbery.
Independent
November 03, 2007
Download leaflet/poster for BNP Conference demonstration in Blackpool
The British National Party (BNP) has announced it is to hold a conference on 17th/18th November in Blackpool at the New Kimberley Hotel. Local people including members of the council, hotels, trade unions, students , residents and anti-fascist have condemned the BNP for holding it's conference in Blackpool for the second time.We must show our opposition to the fascist BNP and it's politics of race hate and division. We must show that there is united opposition to the BNP and ensure that Blackpool is a fascist-free zone. Unite Against Fascism calls on all those that oppose fascism to mobilise and attend this protest of unity.
HQ double-sided poster/leaflet for BNP Conference demonstration (pdf file - 2MB). Click here to download.
Please download the leaflet and poster and spread them around to your friends and colleagues.
Labels:
Blackpool,
BNP,
New Kimberley Hotel,
Unite Against Fascism
November 02, 2007
Sutton West by-election result nothing for BNP to write home about
Just one contested by-election to report on this week, in the Sutton West ward of Ashfield District Council, where a vacancy arose following the resignation of a sitting Independent for abusive conduct.
Sutton West ward is part of Sutton-in-Ashfield, which sits hard by Mansfield and is just to the north of the BNP's Sadie Graham's Broxtowe stamping ground. In May it returned three Independent candidates - though - curiously - four vied for the three available seats, all of them coming ahead of the three Labour candidates, who in turn pushed the lone Tory into last place.
The lack of equilibrium in the number of candidates taking the field (4-3-1) as against the number of seats contested for (and the not exactly united platforms of the Independents) makes vote-averaging something of a nonsense, but the bald figures for May were as follows (percentages in right column):
Independents loom large on Ashfield District Council, forming the biggest voting bloc with 12 seats (though two Independents account themselves as "Selston Area Independents Putting People First"). Labour and the Liberal Democrats follow with nine seats each, and there are just three Tories.
Though the BNP did not fight any of Sutton-in-Ashield's four wards in May, they did contest six (out of fifteen) other Ashield D.C. wards (most of them multiple vacancy), fielding a single candidate in each. Their results were mixed but far from discouraging:
Hucknall West 10.8% (8th of 8)
Jacksdale 24.3% (3rd of 3)
Kirkby Central 27.0% (4th of 5)
Kirkby East 20.7% (3rd of 7)
Kirkby West 19.0% (3rd of 7)
Underwood 16.1% (3rd of 5 - complicated by the presence of an English Democrat candidate.)
Kirkby-in-Ashield, where the BNP fought all three wards, is just to the south of Sutton, and - though we cannot be entirely certain - is perhaps the best guide to the BNP's hopes in Sutton West, where their candidate was Michael Clarke, who contested Kirkby West in May. Publicly, the BNP has been uncharacteristically mute on its Sutton West expectations, but we do know that 15% is the target figure - a nice, artificial safe-zone figure put about purely with the morale of the BNP membership in mind: something to shout about if exceeded, and easily explained away if not.
Ashfield D.C. Sutton West ward result:
The turnout was 26.5%.
The intervention of the winning Liberal Democrat was clearly catastrophic for the Independent candidate, losing badly in a ward with a history of electing non-party candidates, but was there anything here for the BNP to cheer about?
Their 13.61% puts them firmly in that nice, safe zone, and they can (and will) trumpet the fact that they bested the Independent (though his defeat came mainly at the hands of the LibDems), and particularly that they bested the Tories. But though third place is all well and good, the party still fell short of its own expectations - and in a week when immigration has been so much in the news their hopes of exceeding 15% must have been high.
If less than 14% is the best the BNP can do in Sutton West in these circumstances then it's unlikely they will ever be in a position to mount a serious challenge for the ward. Last night's BNP result suggests not so much the creation of a voting a base to build upon (which is how BNP members tend to reason away this kind of uninspiring performance), but something of a peak.
The torrid news climate of the past week should have played directly into the BNP's hands. It didn't - and it's gratifying to know that whatever concerns folk might have over immigration, they aren't prepared to be panicked into voting for the odious British National Party.
Sutton West ward is part of Sutton-in-Ashfield, which sits hard by Mansfield and is just to the north of the BNP's Sadie Graham's Broxtowe stamping ground. In May it returned three Independent candidates - though - curiously - four vied for the three available seats, all of them coming ahead of the three Labour candidates, who in turn pushed the lone Tory into last place.
The lack of equilibrium in the number of candidates taking the field (4-3-1) as against the number of seats contested for (and the not exactly united platforms of the Independents) makes vote-averaging something of a nonsense, but the bald figures for May were as follows (percentages in right column):
| Ind | 1359 | 19.18 |
| Ind | 1119 | 15.79 |
| Ind | 1006 | 14.20 |
| Ind | 845 | 11.92 |
| Lab | 748 | 10.55 |
| Lab | 747 | 10.54 |
| Lab | 644 | 9.09 |
| Con | 619 | 8.73 |
| Total | 7087 |
Independents loom large on Ashfield District Council, forming the biggest voting bloc with 12 seats (though two Independents account themselves as "Selston Area Independents Putting People First"). Labour and the Liberal Democrats follow with nine seats each, and there are just three Tories.
Though the BNP did not fight any of Sutton-in-Ashield's four wards in May, they did contest six (out of fifteen) other Ashield D.C. wards (most of them multiple vacancy), fielding a single candidate in each. Their results were mixed but far from discouraging:
Hucknall West 10.8% (8th of 8)
Jacksdale 24.3% (3rd of 3)
Kirkby Central 27.0% (4th of 5)
Kirkby East 20.7% (3rd of 7)
Kirkby West 19.0% (3rd of 7)
Underwood 16.1% (3rd of 5 - complicated by the presence of an English Democrat candidate.)
Kirkby-in-Ashield, where the BNP fought all three wards, is just to the south of Sutton, and - though we cannot be entirely certain - is perhaps the best guide to the BNP's hopes in Sutton West, where their candidate was Michael Clarke, who contested Kirkby West in May. Publicly, the BNP has been uncharacteristically mute on its Sutton West expectations, but we do know that 15% is the target figure - a nice, artificial safe-zone figure put about purely with the morale of the BNP membership in mind: something to shout about if exceeded, and easily explained away if not.
Ashfield D.C. Sutton West ward result:
| LibDem | 873 | 37.02 |
| Lab | 560 | 23.75 |
| BNP | 321 | 13.61 |
| Ind | 275 | 11.66 |
| Con | 257 | 10.90 |
| Green | 72 | 3.05 |
| Total | 2358 |
The turnout was 26.5%.
The intervention of the winning Liberal Democrat was clearly catastrophic for the Independent candidate, losing badly in a ward with a history of electing non-party candidates, but was there anything here for the BNP to cheer about?
Their 13.61% puts them firmly in that nice, safe zone, and they can (and will) trumpet the fact that they bested the Independent (though his defeat came mainly at the hands of the LibDems), and particularly that they bested the Tories. But though third place is all well and good, the party still fell short of its own expectations - and in a week when immigration has been so much in the news their hopes of exceeding 15% must have been high.
If less than 14% is the best the BNP can do in Sutton West in these circumstances then it's unlikely they will ever be in a position to mount a serious challenge for the ward. Last night's BNP result suggests not so much the creation of a voting a base to build upon (which is how BNP members tend to reason away this kind of uninspiring performance), but something of a peak.
The torrid news climate of the past week should have played directly into the BNP's hands. It didn't - and it's gratifying to know that whatever concerns folk might have over immigration, they aren't prepared to be panicked into voting for the odious British National Party.
Labels:
BNP,
by-election,
fascism,
racism,
Sutton-in-Ashfield
November 01, 2007
More embarrassment for the Barking barnstormer
Richard Barnbrook, the British National Party’s leader on Barking and Dagenham Council, seems to think that incurable and often fatal industrial diseases are a bit of a joke.Councillors at last month’s full council meeting were asked to approve a site for a permanent memorial to the many local victims of asbestos. Barking and Dagenham has one of the country’s highest incidences of asbestos-related diseases because of the former Cape Asbestos factory in the borough. Many of the people who contracted asbestosis or mesothelioma were wives of workers who washed their husbands’ overalls.
The proposal for a memorial arose from a petition from local people, led by the Barking and Dagenham Asbestosis Victims’ Support Group and the trade union Unison. Councillors had been given a report in advance of the meeting and at the meeting the council’s Corporate Director of Customer Services outlined the background explaining that it had cost £1.2 million to make the area safe and that a memorial would cost £3,500 to £5,000.
Up jumped Barnbrook, who has ambitions to become the BNP’s first London Assembly member. Admitting he had not read the report he asked, 'How much exactly has it cost to make safe the area and how much would the memorial cost?'
Being reminded that he had just been told this angered him and he continued: 'This factory was demolished in 1968. I was born in 1961 so it closed when I was nine years of age'. He went on to make some insensitive and uninformed remarks about how long the project had taken, finally adding, 'If you’re going to make it one of those dancing lady memorials, may I suggest it is in the image of Simone Clarke [his girl friend who became known as the BNP ballerina last December] as she is a dancing lady too...erm, um, er, that was a joke by the way...'.
This prompted Labour Councillor Jean Alexander, who has relatives who contracted asbestosis, to explode with rage. Her taunts that the BNP councillors were 'Johnny come latelys' in turn angered BNP Councillor Robert Bailey, which led to Labour’s Liam Smith telling him to 'sit down and shut up'. Bailey then erupted with personal insults.
Bailey and Smith, standing in as Leader of the Council, clashed again during question time after Bailey asked whether the Labour Party thought it was a good thing that 'the white indigenous British people of Barking and Dagenham' would be a minority in ten years’ time.
Pressed on the meaning of 'indigenous' Bailey eventually responded, 'White and British', at which Smith reeled off a list of famous Irish people – Lord Kitchener, Montgomery and Nelson – who 'came to defend England in her hour of need'.
Moving on to another of the BNP’s obsessions, crime, Barnbrook claimed that knife crime in his ward was up six-fold this year. 'I refer you to the stabbings at Becontree station'.
'Becontree station is not in your ward', retorted Smith. 'Oh' said Barnbrook.
With this sort of performance perhaps it is just as well that the BNP’s Barking and Dagenham councillors do not turn up very often. The best are Barnbrook and Lawrence Rustem, who attended 69% of their allocated meetings between 16 May and 27 September according to council records. Among the others, Councillor Jamie Jarvis turned up at just three of the 12 meetings he should have attended and Councillors Ronald Doncaster and Darren Tuffs went to three out of nine expected meetings.
Although Barnbrook attends more meetings than his colleague Councillor Robert Buckley, it is Buckley who puts in the most time on ward casework. There is growing acrimony between the two and many BNP members in London were surprised and annoyed when Barnbrook was selected as the BNP’s candidate in next year’s London mayoral election. They were prepared to put up with it on the basis that a BNP mayoral candidate could achieve little more than show the party’s face in the election, that is until it emerged that Barnbrook would also head the BNP’s list for the London Assembly. All he needs is 5% of the vote across London to become the BNP’s first Assembly member, a percentage that the party nearly achieved last time round in 2004.
Redwatch on BBC Yorkshire
For those who missed it - here's the Redwatch programme that was on BBC Yorkshire last night. If you are unable to view the embedded file, go here.
Labels:
BBC Yorkshire,
Kevin Watmough,
Nick Cass,
Redwatch
All the King’s men
Nick Griffin, the BNP leader, has surrounded himself with a group of trusted lieutenants, of whom all but one appear not to be party members. At the same time he has reduced the powers of the party’s Advisory Council, which now meets infrequently. BNP members should be concerned at how Griffin, fresh from seeing off the challenge to his leadership in summer, is trying to consolidate his power and change the party.
Arthur Kemp
Nick Griffin has always believed in forming a political elite. In the 1980s he called them his “political soldiers”. Now they are the BNP’s “voting members”, the only people allowed to attend the party’s annual general meeting and vote on resolutions. Activists have to meet several conditions to qualify as voting members. One is to attend ideological training to ensure members support the right policies, and it is Arthur Kemp whom Griffin charged with its delivery.
Born in what was then white-ruled Southern Rhodesia, Kemp studied and worked in South Africa, where he became a state intelligence agent and played a role in the run-up to the murder of the prominent ANC leader Chris Hani in April 1993.
Kemp regards himself as something of an expert on race and is famed in white supremacist circles internationally as the author of March of the Titans, a monumental tome which contends that civilisation collapses when “swamped” by “racial aliens”. His sources for the book, which is also vehemently antisemitic and questions the veracity of the Holocaust, include hardline nazis. He attends Holocaust denial and hardline racist conferences in the US and contributes to journals in that field.
Lee Barnes
The BNP’s “legal eagle”, though not a party member, Lee Barnes’s unpopularity in the BNP grew after Griffin put him in charge of moderating the BNP’s internal forum, to which only party members are allowed access. The row led to the forum’s temporary closure just when Griffin’s second trial on race hate charges opened in November last year. Although Barnes’s name is no longer on the BNP’s list of national officers and his column has disappeared from the party website, Griffin recently commended Barnes’s blog describing it as “an intensely argued, intellectually inventive thing”.
Inventive is right. As for intellectual, recently he described a well known musician as “Junkie scumbag piece of shit worshipped by scumbag UAF fuckwits and NME wankers”. And writing about BBC reports on education he said: “They find some ugly geeza bird with hairy legs called Miranda who then bangs on about …” and claimed schools were run by “boring left wing assholes”. When Barnes does try to be intellectual he rapidly becomes incoherent, drawing implausible conclusions from dubious evidence using ever lengthening words and sentences. Several people have described Barnes as very eccentric.
Emmanuel Brun d’Aubignosc
One of the least known of Griffin’s new clique, Emmanuel Brun d’Aubignosc runs the Altermedia “white nationalist” news network and provides web services to the BNP as well as managing several leading European hate websites, according to his own postings on the international nazi Stormfront forum. A wealthy Belgian in his thirties, he claims Jean-Marie Le Pen, leader of the French National Front, personally tasked him with creating a pan-European white nationalist web presence.
He also acts as webmaster to David Duke, the former US Ku Klux Klan leader who now plays a leading role in the international extreme right. Duke, d’Aubignosc and Griffin met in Germany in summer 2002. D’Aubignosc designs, manages and updates Duke’s official website and also does business with Chris Evans, a former unit commander of the US nazi organisation the National Alliance and marketing director for its hate-music company Resistance Records.
D’Aubignosc holds hardline antisemitic views. In May 2004 he wrote on Altermedia: “Our enemies are the vicious people who hate black people so much they have been using them to destroy us by miscegenation or ‘racial mixing’ which is a form of genocide for us. They are the people who lie, lie, lie to drive America into wars of Israeli conquest. They are the people who deny every nation the right to its own secure living space, while, at the same time, they demand that same space for their own people. They are the ones who plunder American and European taxpayers to subsidise their own terrorist state. They are the ones who poison our children’s minds with MTV. They are the people who sell our women on the meat markets of forced prostitution and pornography on the streets of Jerusalem.”
Patrick Harrington
Not only is Patrick Harrington not a BNP member, he is one of the leaders of a rival political party, Third Way, which also cavorts under the name National Liberal Party.
Harrington is also a longstanding political comrade of Griffin from their days in the National Front in the 1980s and notably accompanied Griffin to Libya in 1988 in a failed attempt to obtain financial support from Colonel Gaddafi. A year later their NF political soldiers group had split, with Griffin forming the International Third Position and Harrington setting up Third Way a few months afterwards.
Harrington reappeared at Griffin’s side in 2006 when he was brought in as general secretary of Solidarity, the BNP’s trade union front. At first it seemed he was there to maintain the fiction that Solidarity was independent of the BNP. But when a row broke out between Harrington and the two BNP members on the Solidarity executive, which quickly led to a split in the union, it quickly became clear that Harrington was the only man Griffin could trust.
Since then Harrington has brought in two more Third Way activists, Graham Williamson and David Kerr, to help run Solidarity. Third Way’s political philosophy would appear to differ considerably from that of the BNP. Its website features an equal opportunities statement and it claims to welcome “guest workers … to fill gaps in the country’s infrastructure”. It seems that Griffin’s desire to build a political elite along the lines of the political soldiers overrides any superficial ideological differences.
Alan Goodacre
The BNP’s economics guru, Alan Goodacre has come from nowhere to command a key role in the formation of BNP policy as a member of the party’s Policy Forum. His influence can readily be detected in the economics section of the party’s 2005 manifesto and several articles by him appear on the BNP’s website.
According to John Bean, editor of the BNP’s magazine Identity, Goodacre is also the editor of Jihad Watch, a BNP subscription email bulletin. Griffin has become increasingly Islamophobic and Goodacre helps fuel this obsession. In a letter to the Jewish Chronicle he claimed that the BNP had genuinely repudiated antisemitism and no longer denied the Holocaust, while appealing to British Jews to understand that the BNP “are the only party in Britain that is truly serious about fighting the Islamofascist threat”. His views received short shrift from the Jewish community.
Goodacre has also been at the forefront of a prudish demand for a return to Victorian sexual values as the only way to attain an imagined morale high ground over Islam.
Simon Darby
The only BNP member among Griffin’s new cabal, Simon Darby was recently appointed the BNP’s press officer after the abrupt departure of Stuart Russell who, rumour has it, was told to go away by Arthur Kemp. Darby was already, and remains, the BNP’s deputy leader, a fact that emerged during Griffin’s first trial on race hate charges early in 2006, when everyone assumed it would be Scott McLean, the BNP’s deputy chairman, who would take over had Griffin been convicted and imprisoned.
Darby, who has also been the BNP’s West Midlands organiser and director of information technology, demonstrated his ability at dealing with difficult questions when he took part in a studio discussion after the screening of a documentary on nazi hate music early in 2006. He was totally demolished by Lord Lester, QC and after evasion, lies and an eruption into antisemitism, he seized the opportunity of a commercial break to disappear.
Like many BNP members these days, Darby is a keen blogger. Coincidentally his blog started two days before the sudden resignation of his predecessor as BNP press officer, Stuart Russell. It is an eclectic mixture of twitcher notes, political musings and attempts at developing his technical skills with video, sound recordings and camera. One clip of a recording of a telephone conversation last month attracted several complaints from readers who were unable to play it. He has now expressed a desire to upload a recording of the deep grunt of a fallow deer at the start of the rutting season.
Tony Lecomber
Although Tony Lecomber was removed from BNP membership in summer after he assaulted Eddy Butler, the BNP elections officer, he still acts as a behind-the-scenes adviser to BNP officers and rumours continue to circulate that he remains close to Griffin.
Formerly Griffin’s number two, Lecomber was convicted and jailed on five charges under the Explosives Act after he tried to bomb the headquarters of a political organisation in the 1980s. He received another three-year prison sentence when he assaulted a Jewish teacher. Lecomber ran Griffin’s campaign for the party leadership in 1999 and has acted as his enforcer, much to the resentment of many party members.
More recently, in 2006, Lecomber tried to encourage Joe Owens, repeatedly named by Searchlight as a gangland hitman, to carry out a “hit” on a Cabinet minister. Nevertheless Griffin was reluctant to ditch him. Griffin even kept Lecomber on the party payroll while telling party members that links had been cut.
When Lecomber attacked Butler outside Loughton tube station, Griffin was only able to prevent Butler from going to the police by promising to expel Lecomber. But unlike other people removed from the BNP, Lecomber was not “proscribed”, which meant party members were allowed to associate with him socially. A very mild notice to members described Lecomber as “a long-term, devoted and very valuable key official in the BNP and a genuine nationalist” and recognised his “sterling work for the cause in the past and his selflessness in stepping away in order to avoid compromising the future”.
If Lecomber is part of Griffin’s new cabal that would leave Butler, architect of the BNP’s elections strategy, in an invidious position.
Searchlight
Arthur Kemp
Nick Griffin has always believed in forming a political elite. In the 1980s he called them his “political soldiers”. Now they are the BNP’s “voting members”, the only people allowed to attend the party’s annual general meeting and vote on resolutions. Activists have to meet several conditions to qualify as voting members. One is to attend ideological training to ensure members support the right policies, and it is Arthur Kemp whom Griffin charged with its delivery.
Born in what was then white-ruled Southern Rhodesia, Kemp studied and worked in South Africa, where he became a state intelligence agent and played a role in the run-up to the murder of the prominent ANC leader Chris Hani in April 1993.
Kemp regards himself as something of an expert on race and is famed in white supremacist circles internationally as the author of March of the Titans, a monumental tome which contends that civilisation collapses when “swamped” by “racial aliens”. His sources for the book, which is also vehemently antisemitic and questions the veracity of the Holocaust, include hardline nazis. He attends Holocaust denial and hardline racist conferences in the US and contributes to journals in that field.
Lee Barnes
The BNP’s “legal eagle”, though not a party member, Lee Barnes’s unpopularity in the BNP grew after Griffin put him in charge of moderating the BNP’s internal forum, to which only party members are allowed access. The row led to the forum’s temporary closure just when Griffin’s second trial on race hate charges opened in November last year. Although Barnes’s name is no longer on the BNP’s list of national officers and his column has disappeared from the party website, Griffin recently commended Barnes’s blog describing it as “an intensely argued, intellectually inventive thing”.
Inventive is right. As for intellectual, recently he described a well known musician as “Junkie scumbag piece of shit worshipped by scumbag UAF fuckwits and NME wankers”. And writing about BBC reports on education he said: “They find some ugly geeza bird with hairy legs called Miranda who then bangs on about …” and claimed schools were run by “boring left wing assholes”. When Barnes does try to be intellectual he rapidly becomes incoherent, drawing implausible conclusions from dubious evidence using ever lengthening words and sentences. Several people have described Barnes as very eccentric.
Emmanuel Brun d’Aubignosc
One of the least known of Griffin’s new clique, Emmanuel Brun d’Aubignosc runs the Altermedia “white nationalist” news network and provides web services to the BNP as well as managing several leading European hate websites, according to his own postings on the international nazi Stormfront forum. A wealthy Belgian in his thirties, he claims Jean-Marie Le Pen, leader of the French National Front, personally tasked him with creating a pan-European white nationalist web presence.
He also acts as webmaster to David Duke, the former US Ku Klux Klan leader who now plays a leading role in the international extreme right. Duke, d’Aubignosc and Griffin met in Germany in summer 2002. D’Aubignosc designs, manages and updates Duke’s official website and also does business with Chris Evans, a former unit commander of the US nazi organisation the National Alliance and marketing director for its hate-music company Resistance Records.
D’Aubignosc holds hardline antisemitic views. In May 2004 he wrote on Altermedia: “Our enemies are the vicious people who hate black people so much they have been using them to destroy us by miscegenation or ‘racial mixing’ which is a form of genocide for us. They are the people who lie, lie, lie to drive America into wars of Israeli conquest. They are the people who deny every nation the right to its own secure living space, while, at the same time, they demand that same space for their own people. They are the ones who plunder American and European taxpayers to subsidise their own terrorist state. They are the ones who poison our children’s minds with MTV. They are the people who sell our women on the meat markets of forced prostitution and pornography on the streets of Jerusalem.”
Patrick Harrington
Not only is Patrick Harrington not a BNP member, he is one of the leaders of a rival political party, Third Way, which also cavorts under the name National Liberal Party.
Harrington is also a longstanding political comrade of Griffin from their days in the National Front in the 1980s and notably accompanied Griffin to Libya in 1988 in a failed attempt to obtain financial support from Colonel Gaddafi. A year later their NF political soldiers group had split, with Griffin forming the International Third Position and Harrington setting up Third Way a few months afterwards.
Harrington reappeared at Griffin’s side in 2006 when he was brought in as general secretary of Solidarity, the BNP’s trade union front. At first it seemed he was there to maintain the fiction that Solidarity was independent of the BNP. But when a row broke out between Harrington and the two BNP members on the Solidarity executive, which quickly led to a split in the union, it quickly became clear that Harrington was the only man Griffin could trust.
Since then Harrington has brought in two more Third Way activists, Graham Williamson and David Kerr, to help run Solidarity. Third Way’s political philosophy would appear to differ considerably from that of the BNP. Its website features an equal opportunities statement and it claims to welcome “guest workers … to fill gaps in the country’s infrastructure”. It seems that Griffin’s desire to build a political elite along the lines of the political soldiers overrides any superficial ideological differences.
Alan Goodacre
The BNP’s economics guru, Alan Goodacre has come from nowhere to command a key role in the formation of BNP policy as a member of the party’s Policy Forum. His influence can readily be detected in the economics section of the party’s 2005 manifesto and several articles by him appear on the BNP’s website.
According to John Bean, editor of the BNP’s magazine Identity, Goodacre is also the editor of Jihad Watch, a BNP subscription email bulletin. Griffin has become increasingly Islamophobic and Goodacre helps fuel this obsession. In a letter to the Jewish Chronicle he claimed that the BNP had genuinely repudiated antisemitism and no longer denied the Holocaust, while appealing to British Jews to understand that the BNP “are the only party in Britain that is truly serious about fighting the Islamofascist threat”. His views received short shrift from the Jewish community.
Goodacre has also been at the forefront of a prudish demand for a return to Victorian sexual values as the only way to attain an imagined morale high ground over Islam.
Simon Darby
The only BNP member among Griffin’s new cabal, Simon Darby was recently appointed the BNP’s press officer after the abrupt departure of Stuart Russell who, rumour has it, was told to go away by Arthur Kemp. Darby was already, and remains, the BNP’s deputy leader, a fact that emerged during Griffin’s first trial on race hate charges early in 2006, when everyone assumed it would be Scott McLean, the BNP’s deputy chairman, who would take over had Griffin been convicted and imprisoned.
Darby, who has also been the BNP’s West Midlands organiser and director of information technology, demonstrated his ability at dealing with difficult questions when he took part in a studio discussion after the screening of a documentary on nazi hate music early in 2006. He was totally demolished by Lord Lester, QC and after evasion, lies and an eruption into antisemitism, he seized the opportunity of a commercial break to disappear.
Like many BNP members these days, Darby is a keen blogger. Coincidentally his blog started two days before the sudden resignation of his predecessor as BNP press officer, Stuart Russell. It is an eclectic mixture of twitcher notes, political musings and attempts at developing his technical skills with video, sound recordings and camera. One clip of a recording of a telephone conversation last month attracted several complaints from readers who were unable to play it. He has now expressed a desire to upload a recording of the deep grunt of a fallow deer at the start of the rutting season.
Tony Lecomber
Although Tony Lecomber was removed from BNP membership in summer after he assaulted Eddy Butler, the BNP elections officer, he still acts as a behind-the-scenes adviser to BNP officers and rumours continue to circulate that he remains close to Griffin.
Formerly Griffin’s number two, Lecomber was convicted and jailed on five charges under the Explosives Act after he tried to bomb the headquarters of a political organisation in the 1980s. He received another three-year prison sentence when he assaulted a Jewish teacher. Lecomber ran Griffin’s campaign for the party leadership in 1999 and has acted as his enforcer, much to the resentment of many party members.
More recently, in 2006, Lecomber tried to encourage Joe Owens, repeatedly named by Searchlight as a gangland hitman, to carry out a “hit” on a Cabinet minister. Nevertheless Griffin was reluctant to ditch him. Griffin even kept Lecomber on the party payroll while telling party members that links had been cut.
When Lecomber attacked Butler outside Loughton tube station, Griffin was only able to prevent Butler from going to the police by promising to expel Lecomber. But unlike other people removed from the BNP, Lecomber was not “proscribed”, which meant party members were allowed to associate with him socially. A very mild notice to members described Lecomber as “a long-term, devoted and very valuable key official in the BNP and a genuine nationalist” and recognised his “sterling work for the cause in the past and his selflessness in stepping away in order to avoid compromising the future”.
If Lecomber is part of Griffin’s new cabal that would leave Butler, architect of the BNP’s elections strategy, in an invidious position.
Searchlight
Labels:
Arthur Kemp,
Barnes,
BNP,
Darby,
Emmanuel Brun d’Aubignosc,
Goodacre,
Griffin,
Harrington,
Lecomber
Hatewatch for the week of October 31st 2007
KKK Group To Protest Rival KKK Group
The Alabama Ku Klux Klan intends to stage a counter-demonstration at a National Knights of the Ku Klux Klan rally November 10th in order to protest the "ignorance and stupidity" of racial slurs and threats...
White Nationalist Group Announces MLK Day Rally In Jena
The Nationalist Movement revealed plans to hold a "Jena Justice Day to Empower the Majority" demonstration on January 21st 2008...
Family of Fallen Marine Sues Anti-Gay Church
The parents of a U.S. Marine killed in Iraq filed a lawsuit against the Westboro Baptist Church after WBC members cheered and waved "Thank God for dead soldiers" signs outside their son's funeral...
Croatian Neo-Nazi Rock Star To Perform in New York
Protests are rising against two upcoming concerts by Marko Perkovic, a Croatian heavy metal singer whose lyrics glorify the Holocaust and celebrate the Ustasha, Croatia's former Nazi-backed military regime...
Creator Skinhead Charged With Felony Assault
Jeffrey David Labor, a self-declared "reverend" for the Creator Skinhead Movement, allegedly stabbed a man less than a month after Labor was arrested for distributing skinhead fliers outside a Jewish-owned jewelry store...
SPLC
The Alabama Ku Klux Klan intends to stage a counter-demonstration at a National Knights of the Ku Klux Klan rally November 10th in order to protest the "ignorance and stupidity" of racial slurs and threats...
White Nationalist Group Announces MLK Day Rally In Jena
The Nationalist Movement revealed plans to hold a "Jena Justice Day to Empower the Majority" demonstration on January 21st 2008...
Family of Fallen Marine Sues Anti-Gay Church
The parents of a U.S. Marine killed in Iraq filed a lawsuit against the Westboro Baptist Church after WBC members cheered and waved "Thank God for dead soldiers" signs outside their son's funeral...
Croatian Neo-Nazi Rock Star To Perform in New York
Protests are rising against two upcoming concerts by Marko Perkovic, a Croatian heavy metal singer whose lyrics glorify the Holocaust and celebrate the Ustasha, Croatia's former Nazi-backed military regime...
Creator Skinhead Charged With Felony Assault
Jeffrey David Labor, a self-declared "reverend" for the Creator Skinhead Movement, allegedly stabbed a man less than a month after Labor was arrested for distributing skinhead fliers outside a Jewish-owned jewelry store...
SPLC
Skeletons in the cupboard
Here's to skeletons in the cupboard.
The nation is divided between those who have a dodgy past, and those who dearly wished they had. But what to do when it catches up with the present?
That's the as-yet unanswered question.
Imagine for a moment that you are Steven Kerr, an occasional Labour supporter and respected trade union official. What do you do when it emerges that you have a track record as a far-right activist? When you are forced to admit that you ran a mail-order firm selling Nazi memorabilia? When David Irving, the disgraced historian with such interesting views of the Holocaust, speaks with some knowledge about your politics and Searchlight, the anti-fascist magazine, reveals that a room that should have been used as part of his speaking tour was booked in your name?
You might, as Mr Kerr did, protest that it was all in the past: "Youthful indiscretion." You might say that your former lodger booked the room for Mr Irving using your name without telling you that Mr Irving was to appear there. You might say that you have not spoken to Mr Irving for several years and that your association with your troublesome former lodger is at an end.
This is certainly the sort of thing you would tell your union Unite when it launched its own investigation, which a spokesman confirms is ongoing. It's not guaranteed to get you out of trouble. But good luck.
Guardian Diary
The nation is divided between those who have a dodgy past, and those who dearly wished they had. But what to do when it catches up with the present?
That's the as-yet unanswered question.
Imagine for a moment that you are Steven Kerr, an occasional Labour supporter and respected trade union official. What do you do when it emerges that you have a track record as a far-right activist? When you are forced to admit that you ran a mail-order firm selling Nazi memorabilia? When David Irving, the disgraced historian with such interesting views of the Holocaust, speaks with some knowledge about your politics and Searchlight, the anti-fascist magazine, reveals that a room that should have been used as part of his speaking tour was booked in your name?
You might, as Mr Kerr did, protest that it was all in the past: "Youthful indiscretion." You might say that your former lodger booked the room for Mr Irving using your name without telling you that Mr Irving was to appear there. You might say that you have not spoken to Mr Irving for several years and that your association with your troublesome former lodger is at an end.
This is certainly the sort of thing you would tell your union Unite when it launched its own investigation, which a spokesman confirms is ongoing. It's not guaranteed to get you out of trouble. But good luck.
Guardian Diary
Labels:
David Irving,
Holocaust,
Labour,
nazi,
Steven Kerr
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