Tribune: Stop the fascists from celebrating

We need to fight hard to keep Britain’s far right out of the European Parliament, says Glyn Ford

The European elections are less than three months away and the labour and trade union movement is in denial about the extent of the threat posed by the British National Party. While anti-fascist organisations such as Unite Against Fascism and Searchlight have been trying to desperately to sound a warning, the danger is that the response will be too little, too late.

But the warnings signs have been evident for some time. In May last year, Richard Barnbrook increased the BNP vote to 5.3 per cent from 4.7 per cent in 2004. Creeping over the 5 per cent threshold meant he won a seat on the Greater London Assembly.

The alarming prospect now is not that BNP leader Nick Griffin might just scrape a seat in the North West of England where he failed so narrowly five years ago. Rather, it is that the BNP will win half a dozen or more seats across the length and breadth of England.

The reason for this is the fatal conjuncture between these particular elections, the economy and the electorate. First, European elections are contextual. Voters treat them as less important and increasingly different from general elections where you chose the government for the next five years. “Less important” means lower participation. “Different” means an opportunity to lash out against the established parties.

This tendency has shown itself twice before in European elections in England. The Greens went from 1 per cent five years earlier to 15 per cent in 1989 – a result that would have netted them more than a dozen seats under Jack Straw’s proportional representation system introduced a decade later. Instead, the first-past-the post system gave them nothing.

In 1994, the UK Independence Party got 1 per cent of the votes and no seats. In 1999, with the convenient arrival of the cavalry in the form of proportional representation, UKIP got 7 per cent of the vote and three seats. In 2004, boosted by Robert Kilroy-Silk’s apostasy, UKIP got 16 per cent and 12 seats. In contrast the BNP got 1 per cent of the vote in 1999 and 5 per cent in 2004.

Second, we have a financial and economic crisis that is a product of an absurd casino economy born of deregulation and greed, mating with cowardice and complacency. The sub-prime mortgage fiasco was the trigger, not the cause. The smoking gun is a derivatives market totally alien from the real economy and one run in a manner that would put the average Las Vegas casino to shame.

The financial crisis has precipitated an economic collapse. Recently published figures from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development for the last quarter of 2008 suggest that European economies will shrink by between 6 per cent and 8 per cent this year. In Japan and Korea it will be double that. Millions will be left jobless. Yet we are spending twice as much and more on bank bailouts compared to labour market measures to protect jobs, homes and families. As a result, ordinary people are angry, afraid and vengeful.

In France in 1981, after more than a quarter of a century in power, the right was ousted by Francois Mitterrand’s Socialists. By 1983, the left was struggling without conspicuous success to cope with a sharp economic downturn. In December that year, there was a by-election in Dreux, a small industrial town to the north of Paris. With left and right discredited, Jean-Marie Le Pen’s Front National picked up 17 per cent of the vote. It went on to get 11 per cent nationally in the following June’s European elections, winning 10 seats and establishing the party as a permanent fixture on the French political scene.

A quarter of a century on, we face an identical scenario Britain. Having been in power for more than a decade, it is difficult for Labour to escape the blame entirely for the current fiasco. True, Gordon Brown reacted faster and more effectively than other world leaders. True, it’s a global problem. Yet all politics is local and national as well as international, and voters are looking for retribution. The only politicians they are able topunish are their own.

Even if the roots of the current crisis started with Margaret Thatcher’s “big bang” in 1986, Labour shares the blame. Folk memories of Thatcher still inoculate many Labour-leaning voters from ever voting Tory, so disgruntled former Labour supporters are now saying for the first time that they will vote for the BNP.

It has all been made worse by wildcat strikes in support of “British jobs for British workers”. There is a real problem, but it’s not the one whose flames are being fanned by the likes of the Daily Mail, Daily Express and The Sun. The problem is not foreigners stealing our jobs or Brits stealing theirs. The problem involves unscrupulous employers using loopholes in the Posted Worker Directive to import low wages, long hours and poor health and safety conditions. The answer is not xenophobia, whether this involves the Italian media reporting demands for British workers to be sent home or vice versa. The answer lies in the strength of the labour movement to demand that the legislation be amended to correct the anomalies.

Yet the main beneficiaries so far have been the BNP. This has been compounded by the tabloid campaign of denigration against all politicians and the implosion of UKIP since 2004, losing three MEPs: Robert Kilroy-Silk to narcissism, Ashley Mote to prison and Tom Wise to alleged fraud.

The result is a febrile political environment made for a BNP breakthrough unless the campaign against it is given a priority that is currently lacking. We need to get the message across to the electors. The BNP includes men and women with criminal convictions for race hatred, racial attacks and grievous bodily harm. David Copeland – the bomber found guilty of a series of terrorist attacks against the black, Bangladeshi and gay communities in London which killed three people, including a pregnant women, and injuried 129 – is a former member of the BNP.

We need to expose the kind of people they are in the BNP and what they stand for. In fact, this has already been well documented in the South West TUC’s pamphlet Who makes up the BNP. Published at the beginning of the month, it is available from South West TUC, Bristol, southwest@tuc.org.uk and should be publicised as widely as possible.

The kind of future we face from the far right is shown all too well in Claudio Lazzaro’s documentary from Italy, Nazirock (www.nazirock.it), where the fascist Forza Nuova thugs make the streets of many Italian cities and the terraces of their football clubs no-go areas for the left.

Nick Griffin can say what he likes about the BNP’s new image, but actions speak louder then words. Who is the BNP travelling with? Jean-Marie Le Pen recently stated that the Nazi occupation of France was essentially benign – apparently forgetting the 77,000 Jews who went to the concentration camps, with less then 10 per cent surviving. In April 2004, Le Pen came to Britain to speak alongside Griffin at a fundraising dinner for the BNP.

Forza Nuova’s leader, Roberto Fiore, is now an MEP, after Alessandra Mussolini – Il Duce’s granddaughter – went to work with Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s right-wing government in Rome. For many years, Fiore was skulking in London to avoid arrest for his role in the Bologna bombing which killed 85 people in August 1980. Although he was cleared of direct involvement in the atrocity, he was convicted of subversive association and jailed for nine years. This was reduced to five-and-a-half years on appeal and he returned to active politics in April 1999. While in Britain, Fiore and Griffin worked together with extremists from the Terza Posizione (Third Position) organisation.

So, on June 8 2009, don’t say you weren’t warned.

Glyn Ford is Labour MEP for South West England and Gibraltar, national Treasurer for the Anti-Nazi League and a member of Unite Against Fascism’s steering committee,


Tribune Comment: We must stop a BNP breakthrough

The British National Party is insidiously seeping into the body politic of Britain. Although its achievements in terms of getting elected are limited, and its performance in office risible, the racist party with its roots in fascism is becoming a household name, for all the wrong reasons.

A smattering of councillors and a cunning strategy to disguise its true nature have allowed the BNP a veneer of respectability that has resulted in its leading figures being interviewed as credible, legitimate politicians speaking on, for example, the economy on prestigious BBC current affairs programmes.

Now the European elections to be fought under the d’Hondt system of proportional representation offer the BNP the chance of the biggest breakthrough in British elections. It is a classic example of where PR can hand disproportionate representation to small, extremist parties. But it is not the system that needs to be fought, but the racists and the political and economic conditions which give succour to their sinister cause.

A broad alliance of the British Left, media and anti-fascist campaigns such as Unite Against Fascism, the indefatigable Searchlight, and notably the trade unions, has done much to contain the growth of support for the BNP. In many places where it had its recent breakthroughs – such as Bradford, Sandwell, Oldham and Kirklees – the party hardly exists on the ground anymore. But in many others, Barking and Dagenham being the most prominent, they are a present and gathering force.

As Glyn Ford starkly outlines on pages 10-11, and as MPs such as Jon Cruddas justly and relentlessly warn us, the political and economic climate is playing to the BNP’s advantage The party needs only a slight improvement on its 2004 vote to break onto the European stage. Every electorally successful member of the European Parliament would give it up to £250,000 a year in salaries, office costs and other resources.

In the north west, where its leader Nick Griffin is standing, Searchlight calculates that the BNP needs just an additional 2 per cent of the vote on its 2004 6.4 per cent to be virtually guaranteed a seat. Only a slight increase is required in the West Midlands and in Yorkshire and the Humber.

The threat is real, but remains dangerously underestimated throughout the country in spite of the efforts of campaigners. It is exacerbated by the traditionally low interest and turnout in European elections, by the collapsing support for the UK Independence Party and by the widespread lack of knowledge of what the BNP really stands for and what it does not. In his book Fatherland, author Robert Harris painted a nightmare picture of a defeated Britain under Nazi rule after the Second World War.

It is worth every canvasser confronted by a potential BNP supporter pointing out that at the very least the BNP does not stand in the great British tradition of tolerance, equality and compassion.

And at the worst, what it does stand for: an apartheid-style rule under which all those not born in Britain would suffer persecution and eventual expulsion from the country, where whites would be given first preference in housing, education and jobs. Where mixed-race relationships would be outlawed and where the answer to what would be a vastly escalating crime rate would be to allow every household to have a gun.

The abandonment of the white, working class traditional Labour voter by “new” Labour has regrettably turned into support for what the voters in Barking and Dagenham see as a redressing of the balance of opportunity. But it cannot be denied that the Labour Party and the Government were in denial for too long about the threat from the BNP.

Recent local elections have been a wake-up call and the movement has mobilised. But it needs more people to stand up and be counted, to take these European elections seriously and to stop the BNP in its tracks at this critical point in British political history. They must be denied this breakthrough and it can be done.

Tribune

Loughton: Local BNP leader nominated to be school governor

The group leader of the British National Party’s district branch has been nominated to be a school governor.

Loughton Town Council put forward Pat Richardson as a candidate for Hereward Primary School at its meeting on Tuesday evening. The decision was made without the knowledge of the Colebrook Lane based school who will now have to consider Mrs Richardson’s case as a potential governor.

Mrs Richardson became one of the BNP’s first district councillors in 2004 and was elected to Loughton Town Council last year. She is a high profile member of the nationalist party after appearing in a Channel Four documentary in July 2008 discussing attitudes to Muslims in Britain, and serves as the BNP’s group leader on Epping Forest District Council.

Chair of governors at Hereward Raymond Warner said: “We’re looking for somebody who’s got a range of skills. I’m hoping that politics in any shape or form won’t come into it.”

Are you a parent at Hereward School? What do you think of the proposal? Leave a message or call the newsdesk on 020 8498 3440.

Guardian Series

Petition calls for sacking of lecturer named on leaked BNP members' list

An anti-fascist organisation backed by the University and College Union is calling for a Birmingham City University lecturer to be sacked after he was named on the internet as a member of the British National Party.

The lecturer has denied that he is a current BNP member.

Unite Against Fascism has launched a petition calling for Andrew Glover, a visiting music lecturer at the Birmingham Conservatoire, which is part of the university, to be removed from his post.

Dr Glover's name was on a list of BNP members that was leaked last year and published on the internet.

This week he told Times Higher Education: "I have no connection with any political party, least of all extreme groups." Pressed whether he had ever been a BNP member, he said: "I am not a member of any political party and believe wholeheartedly in the diversity position held by my university. My research entails studying music from societies around the world, which gives me a love of many cultures. How can that make me a right-winger? ... For these extreme left-wingers to be baying for my blood is ridiculous. This is 2009. The way they demand things is former Eastern Bloc or Third Reich, not a 21st-century diverse Britain.

"This has all the hallmarks of a 1950s McCarthy witch-hunt ... Higher education is not a political football that Right or Left should be allowed to kick around, especially when innocent people such as myself get caught up in it. It is about time that we moderates reclaimed it and removed it from the extremists' agenda."

Unite Against Fascism and another organisation, Love Music Hate Racism, launched a petition headlined "No to Racism and Fascism in our Education System". A Unite Against Facism spokesman said: "Members of the fascist BNP should not be allowed into our education system. Students put their trust in lecturers and have a right to be taught by people who will not judge them as inferior because of their skin colour, sexuality or for any other reason. We demand that Andrew Glover be removed from his role at Birmingham City University."

Rose Mitchell, a second-year student who initiated the petition, which has attracted 300 signatures to date, said she had been shocked by allegations that Dr Glover was a BNP member. "He teaches students from all over the world. I don't have any evidence that he has behaved in a racist way towards students," she said, adding that the allegation that he was involved in a far-Right party was "very worrying".

Sally Hunt, general secretary of the UCU, said: "Universities and colleges are rightly held up as examples to the rest of society because of their diversity and tolerance. The BNP has no interest in sharing those values and preaches only hate and fear."

A Birmingham City spokesman said: "A review is now under way after a series of public allegations. The university accepts that the political beliefs of its staff are a private matter - but we also want to make clear that if such views affect that person's work and professional relationships, then the university will carefully consider its response. The university positively promotes diversity and is proactive in tackling any kind of discrimination or prejudice on its campuses."

Times Higher Education

Pub closed over fears of clashes at BNP rally

The fear of a violent confrontation between the British National Party and anti-fascist protesters led one landlady to close her pub last night.

Farm machinery was placed across the car park of the Huntsman pub near Thornbury after landlady Kaye Thomas found out that the right-wing group had told people to meet there before going on to a local hotel.

Mrs Thomas was told on Friday that a group of BNP activists were due to meet in her car park before going to a secret fundraising dinner at the nearby Park Hotel, booked by a group calling itself the British Heritage Party. Anti-fascists found out about the dinner and more than 25 placard-waving protesters demonstrated outside Mrs Thomas' car park.

After being told about the protest Mrs Thomas, 46, and her husband Jim, 54, alerted the police and were advised to close their pub for the night.Now they are angry that up to £1,000 in takings may have been lost because of a gathering which they had no part in organising.

A BNP spokesman accused the protesters of being responsible for Mrs Thomas' loss of trade and of preventing the party from holding a legitimate meeting. But he would not confirm that the booking at the hotel had been made undercover for the BNP. No references to the British Heritage Party could be found on the internet when the Post searched it last night.

Mrs Thomas said: "I had no idea these people were planning to meet in my car park and I've had to close the pub for the night rather than risk any trouble. It's been an incredibly stressful couple of days, finding out that the pub's name is being mentioned in all these circles, and now it's lost me money. It's hard enough making a living at the moment without things like this happening."

Mike Jones, manager of the Park Hotel, also said the weekend had been a difficult time and that he had been advised by police to cancel the booking for the dinner.

He said: "We were certainly never aware the booking was made for the British National Party but the event was cancelled because of all the things which have been related to it. We didn't want to cause any problems and we also didn't want to breach our licence by being responsible for any kind of public order offences.

"The complaint I have is with the people who have been starting up the protest, creating rumours which aren't even true and sending us nasty emails. They're the ones who've caused all this trouble and it's been a bit of a nightmare for everyone involved."

Last night the protesters held a good-natured protest outside both the pub and the hotel and the planned meeting of BNP members failed to materialise.

Simon Darby, BNP spokesman, said: "There's a group of left-wing thugs threatening violence which has led to a fundraising dinner being cancelled and this poor woman from losing trade. We're in a run-up to an election, we're contesting every seat in the South West and we've every right to hold a meeting. This woman is a member of the community and incidents like this aren't fair on her, or us."

Bristol Evening Post

Defectors expose plans of Germany's 'real' Nazis

Inside report reveals the violence and Hitler worship of the National Democrats, an overtly racist party on the brink of electoral success

Germany's main neo-Nazi party pretends to be democratic. But its members hoard weapons, plan to rebuild Hitler's Reich and are using the economic crisis to try to make sweeping gains in this year's elections, a new and disturbing study of the extreme right has revealed.

To write their exposé on the increasingly influential neo-Nazi National Democratic Party of Germany (NPD), the authors spent two years infiltrating Germany's far right. They interviewed party leaders and defectors who have since quit the organisation in disgust. "The NPD is a dangerous organisation," warned Olaf Sundermeyer, one of the two journalists who wrote In the NPD, published in Germany last week. "It pretends to be democratic, but make no mistake about it: these people are genuine Nazis."

Despite government attempts to ban the party, the overtly racist NPD has already won seats in two of Germany's 16 regional state parliaments. It has some 220 members on local councils, and expects to consolidate its political power base in a series of regional and local polls this year. The NPD's leader, Udo Voigt, admits that his party is unlikely to gain a foothold in the national parliament in Germany's general election this September. But he insists: " My vision is to obtain seats in the Reichstag in 2013."

To outsiders and the press, the NPD tries to portray itself as a middle-class party. Members are schooled in Berlin on how to cope with difficult questions about the Third Reich and the Holocaust. At election time, rank-and-file skinheads are replaced by men with short haircuts and suits and its handful of far-right "intellectuals".

In their book, Mr Sundermeyer and his co-author, Christoph Ruf, make it clear that the economy and unemployment are playing into the hands of the NPD. The party has infiltrated militant jobless groups, and is winning support. "Germany's ability to cope with such developments is going to be on trial in 2009. It will be a test of the country's political maturity," they warn.

Some of the most disturbing revelations about the NPD, which began life in the mid-1960s, are provided by former members who were shocked by the violence of its members and their hero-worship of Adolf Hitler. Uwe Luthardt, a taxi driver, was in the NPD leadership for three years, but resigned after watching his party colleagues severely beat a punk rocker who had shouted "Goodnight white pride" at the group. "It was the straw that broke the camel's back," Mr Luthardt said.

He revealed that the party's regional headquarters in Jena is deliberately called the "Brown House" after Hitler's Munich HQ. The cellars of the building contain a weapons cache, and are adorned with photographs of SS men. Party members sing the outlawed Nazi "Horst Wessel" anthem and a song called "We're Going to Build an Underground Train Line from Jerusalem to Auschwitz".

Mr Luthardt described how the party is funded by donations from expatriate Nazis and their families who fled to South America after the Second World War. Cash also comes from concerts staged by far-right skinhead rock bands. "The objective is to bring back the Third Reich," he said.

"A new organisation of stormtroopers would take revenge on anyone who disagrees with them. The concept is simply: let's kick out all the foreigners, then Germans will have jobs again. The are convinced that they will win an election one day, and that then things will really get going."

Mr Ruf and Mr Sundermeyer say some areas of eastern Germany have been designated "national liberation zones" by the party, because intimidated foreigners do not dare to be seen there. The head of the NPD's youth wing, Michael Schäfer, justifies the party's anti-foreigner campaign, saying: "The German Volk [people] have existed for 1,000 years; they cannot simply be allowed to disappear."

Independent

BBC to take action over use of Edinburgh Military Tattoo footage on BNP site

The British National Party is illegally using BBC footage of the Edinburgh Military Tattoo to promote its agenda among young people.

BBC lawyers have announced that they will be writing to the party demanding the footage be taken off BNPtv, its online television channel. The film appears on the Youth BNP site, and shows several pipe bands marching at the Tattoo, including some that are not even British. A member of one of the bands that features in the film said he was angered that their identity had been commandeered to serve a political purpose.

Justifying their use of the copyrighted material, the BNP said it had "history" with the corporation, which famously sneaked hidden cameras into one of their meetings two years ago.

The Sunday Herald brought the issue to the attention of the Edinburgh Military Tattoo organisers, who then prompted the BBC to take action.

A spokesman from the Tattoo said, in a guarded statement: "The matter has, we understand, been referred to the BBC's intellectual property lawyers in London. Clearance has not been obtained from either the BBC or the Tattoo for the use of the footage in question and it looks like a possible breach of copyright."

But an insider at the Tattoo revealed that organisers were "appalled" by the use of the footage. He said: "We're not happy that this footage has appeared on their website. The Edinburgh Tattoo has no connection with the BNP and we have no wish to be associated with them."

The giveaway that the film was under copyright was the use of a Steadicam, a camera used only by professionals. The BBC recognised the footage as their own and passed the matter on to their intellectual property department, who will take further action next week.

A BBC spokesman said: "Due to the growth of the internet, it is very difficult for the BBC to police all use of its material online. The BNP's broadcast of the Military Tattoo is not licensed by the BBC and we are contacting them to request its immediate removal."

The Scottish Trades Union Congress pointed out that the BNP had "shot itself in the foot", as the Military Tattoo was an event that was attended by a cosmopolitan group of troops and spectators from many different countries.

Ian Tasker, assistant secretary of the STUC, said: "We would not be happy with the Military Tattoo being used to promote the narrow-minded agenda of the British National Party. The Edinburgh Military Tattoo, albeit a display of militarism, propagates the sort of cross-cultural message that the BNP absolutely detests. We wonder what the message they are trying to get across is."

The bands shown in the film include corps from Australia and New Zealand, who marched alongside military bands like the Black Watch as well as university groups. The Aberdeen University Officers' Training Corp was one of those bands and regimental sergeant-major Angus Steele said: "The BNP have hijacked our identity. It's quite concerning."

Simon Darby, spokesman for the BNP, argued that the British National Party had every right to use the footage. He called the BBC and Edinburgh Military Tattoo's reaction "totally pathetic" and said: "We're not going to get intimidated by the politically correct brigade just for having images up on BNPtv of a spectacular event and part of our culture that we're proud of. It is much ado about nothing because, remember, this is the BBC that tried to smuggle hidden cameras into our meetings and then tried to get us locked up for seven years. I notice they didn't ask for permission to film us."

Sunday Herald

Hersham councillor Lara Conaway criticised for Auschwitz analogy

An Elmbridge councillor has been criticised after comparing South West Train (SWT) facilities with Nazi concentration camps.

Speaking at a council meeting on Thursday night, Tory Councillor Lara Conaway, who represents Hersham South, made the comments during a question and answer session with SWT stakeholder manager Phil Dominey. As well as comparing the tunnel running under the station with Auschwitz, she also described the queues of people trying to leave the station after alighting from trains with the Nazi-run prisoner of war camp Colditz.

But Dr Stephen Smith MBE, director of the Holocaust Centre, described her analogy with the concentration camp as inappropriate and offensive.

Coun Conaway told Mr Dominey: “I am a daily user of Walton station. The steps for the majority of the users are too small - people are struggling to get out of the station. The queues of people getting off the platform is huge. There is a safety issue - it’s like Colditz. The tunnel underneath the station is like walking into Auschwitz. It’s dripping with damp mould.”

Earlier in the meeting, Mr Dominey had told the councillors that people, in danger of missing their train because of long queues at ticket machines, could legally board the trains without tickets, as long as they made themselves known to the train guard. However, Coun Conaway, making another Nazi analogy, said there was a “massive distinction” between Mr Dominey’s suggestion and reality, as the SWT guards were like “Hitlers in suits”.

Dr Smith, who set up the Holocaust Centre based in Nottinghamshire, said he hoped Coun Conaway used the criticism as an opportunity to learn more about Auschwitz.

He said: “It is important not to cheapen the unique experience of the Nazi Holocaust in the public mind. This is not a matter of political correctness, but education. I hope that, if Coun Conaway takes the opportunity to learn more about the reality of Auschwitz, she will quickly realise the inappropriateness and offensiveness of the analogy.”

A spokesman for SWT agreed that Coun Conaway’s comments were not appropriate. The spokesman said: “While it is disappointing Coun Conaway is unhappy with the lay out of Walton station, we agree with Dr Smith that it is inappropriate to compare the station with Auschwitz.”

Your Local Guardian

BNP fundraiser alert

The British National Party’s nationwide “Battle of Britain” roadshow will roll up at an 18-bedroom country hotel in Gloucestershire on Sunday 8 March. Nick Griffin, the party leader, is touring the country with an “invited European mystery guest” to launch the BNP’s campaign for the European election.

The event, for which tickets are being sold at £30, promises an “exclusive preview of campaign film and broadcast, Champagne reception, entertainment and light supper”. Many of the party’s wealthier supporters live in the West Country and Griffin hopes the function will raise a large sum towards the campaign to get him a seat in the European Parliament.

As always with the BNP, the venue was supposed to be a well kept secret. People attending have to turn up a rendezvous point and only then are they told the actual location, which is usually quite close so that no one gets lost on the way.

But there are not many hotels that could host such a function near the RV point, the Huntsman pub off junction 14 on the M5 southbound. Three in fact.

A few phone calls quickly established that one had no functions booked for Sunday evening and another had a booking from a commercial wedding organising business. That left the Park Hotel in Falfield, a mile from the RV point.

Owner Lynda Jones told Searchlight that the hotel had a function on Sunday evening but it was definitely not the BNP, whom she would not want in her hotel. Even when we pointed out that the BNP often books venues under other names because many places will not entertain the racist party, she was adamant the booking was not the BNP. Too adamant. She sounded like she had been briefed.

Now the BNP has every right to book a hotel for a fundraising event. Equally, members of the public have a right to express their views, politely, to the owners, Mike and Lynda Jones, about them putting their hotel at the service of the BNP to raise money to promote racism and destroy British society. You can phone them on 01454 260550.

Hope not hate

BNP 'ghetto' plan

The far-right BNP would put children in care into a boarding school and vulnerable families on to a "caravan site" in Barking if it won power.

Labour councillors have attacked the plans for the £20million school, which would also take excluded pupils, as "heartless" and the caravan site for families staying in temporary accommodation as a "ghetto".

Barking and Dagenham's BNP party says the plan would combat "extortionate" fostering charges, adding £6million was spent on keeping 600 families in emergency accommodation.

Labour executive member for children, Cllr Jeanne Alexander, denounced the boarding school plan as "heartless" and a "kick in the teeth of vulnerable people".

Labour executive member for housing, Cllr Liam Smith, said the caravan site idea was reminiscent of 1960s South African policy and called it a "ghetto".

But BNP leader Cllr Bob Bailey denied the temporary "static site" would be a ghetto, adding the boarding school for primary and secondary children would be a "beacon" for other local authorities.

He told the Recorder: "Lot of children are excluded from school and placed with foster parents. They don't necessarily want to be with foster parents. We feel they could be looked after better in a school run by the council and receive proper care."

Both facilities would be built on the Barking Riverside site, currently earmarked for 10,800 homes.

The plans were crushed at Barking and Dagenham Council's budget meeting at Barking Town Hall, Town Square, on Thursday. The Labour majority instead pushed through a four-year £434million capital programme to help tackle the acute primary school crisis in Barking and Dagenham.

Barking and Dagenham Recorder

Anger as BNP leaves calling card at Bristol library Bhangra exhibition

Bristol City Council and the Asian Arts Agency have condemned racially-motivated attacks on an exhibition in the city celebrating 50 years of Bhangra music, culture & style in the UK.

Some of the exhibition materials from 'Soho Road to the Punjab', including a turban, decorative materials and jewellery were taken from a Bhangra dancer figure in the foyer and a BNP card was left behind. The incident was reported to police as theft and a possible racial crime.

Racist comments were also discovered after the incident in the exhibition feedback notebook in Central Library off College Green.

The Soho Road exhibition, which opened on January 19, is one of three exhibitions taking place at Central Library and the Watershed as part of The Bhangra Project, an arts and cultural venture developed by the Asian Arts Agency to celebrate and explore bhangra culture in the UK.

Councillor Gary Hopkins, Cabinet Member for the Environment and Community Safety, said: "I am very disturbed and saddened that a very positive exhibition celebrating the contribution of Asian arts to the UK should be targeted in this way. We take these attacks, which are totally unacceptable, very seriously and they are now in the hands of the police. The massive success of the film 'Slumdog Millionaire' here, and worldwide, shows that culture crosses boundaries and brings people together. I am sure that those responsible for the incidents at the library are very much a small minority and their actions are repugnant to the vast majority of the public."

The exhibition charts Bhangra's movement from Birmingham, where Punjabi nostalgia first fused with Caribbean beats and dance floor styles, throughout the UK and eventually back to the Punjab in India - the original source.

The free exhibitions continues at the Central Library and the Watershed until March 20.

24dash

Paying for incompetence

British National Party members and supporters are getting thoroughly fed up with the stream of begging letters landing on their doormats. Already this year there have been four, all signed by Nick Griffin, the party leader, asking for donations to support this, that or other aspect of the BNP’s “growth” and its European election effort.

The year had barely started when Griffin’s “new year address” landed on hard-pressed supporters’ doormats, with a plea to contribute to the party’s “People’s Defence Fund”. The fund had been set up following the publication on the internet of the BNP members’ list last November, with the aim of raising money to “employ legal experts to defend those of our people suffering hardship, discrimination and persecution in their employment for being members of this party”.

The People’s Defence Fund also had a wider political purpose: to “give a bloody nose to all those little press creeps and the Lab/Tory/Lib Dem sycophants who have built careers on the back of attacking the BNP and our long-suffering people”.

The new year address followed six appeals in 2008 for the “Building to Grow fund”, the London election campaign, to buy the “truth truck”, better known as the lie lorry, and to publish and distribute the outrageously racist Racism Cuts Both Ways pamphlet. Griffin claimed that all these appeals achieved “amazing results”.

Confident that his members and supporters had bottomless purses, Griffin did not even wait until January was out to launch the party’s appeal for funds to fight the European election. Headed “The Battle for Britain Commences”, it waxed lyrical on how winning “just one” seat in the European Parliament “would put us on the world stage and would lead to an avalanche of popular support throughout this country”. Controversially a leaflet with the letter adopted the image of an RAF Spitfire, now revealed to be one flown by the celebrated 303 Squadron of the RAF, made up of Polish airmen rescued from France shortly before the Nazi occupation.

The leaflet invited supporters to attend the party’s “2009 European election campaign nationwide roadshow”, which promised “multi-media sound and vision”, speeches from “Chairman Nick Griffin and invited European mystery guest” as well as Champagne reception, entertainment and light supper, all at a cost of £30. “I guarantee you will never have seen anything like this,” wrote Griffin.

By February the BNP was “struggling due to unprecedented growth”. So many people were “flocking to the BNP” that “we cannot cope”. So “I need you to support the party’s ‘Rapid Expansion Plan’ NOW”, demanded Griffin, followed by three exclamation marks.

The BNP needed to win a seat in the European election but it also had to have a “telecommunications system” and a “central administration office to deal with the current huge increase in enquiries, party membership and organisational growth” and the “40,000 – 75,000” enquiries and membership applications that would result from the distribution of “over 30 million leaflets across the UK” over the next six months.

On and on the six-page letter went, bandying about the word “professional” and claiming that £85,150 was needed to cope with a projected 400% growth in the party’s “database” in the next six months.

And the money was needed quickly: Griffin needed “to put the orders in next week”. There was even a marketing leaflet for the “professional communications system for medium-sized enterprises” that Griffin said he wanted to buy, though nothing about how the BNP’s largely incompetent staff would ever learn how to use it.

One could be forgiven a slight sense of déjà vu. In January 2008 the BNP was proclaiming proudly that its operations had been centralised for the first time in Excalibur’s “brand new ground-floor warehouse” with a “vast array of new equipment” as a result of the “Building to Grow” appeal. What happened to all the equipment after the party was evicted from the Evans Business Centre in Deeside was not revealed.

Hot on the heels of that exuberantly written appeal, full of bold text, underlining and italics, came a more personal and undated letter from Griffin asking supporters to make a standing order of “just £3.00 a week” to “save this country from destruction before it’s too late”.

It was recognition of how our HOPE not hate campaigning was hurting the BNP. “The Labour Party, the liberal media and a whole host of leftist fanatics, led by Searchlight, have now become so concerned about our success, that the latter has employed the services of the WORLD’S TOP campaigning team to prevent us from winning,” wrote Griffin. “Blue State Digital. They’re the team that co-ordinated Barack Obama’s campaign for the White House!

“Your £3 per week can help send Obama’s boys back to Washington with their tails between their legs,” claimed Griffin, after condemning them for being American. Griffin’s own longstanding connections with American nazis are of course quite different.

Those who have responded to these appeals may be regretting it. In January Mark Collett, the BNP’s head of publicity, had to admit responsibility for printing 700,000 “Euro warm up leaflets” without an official imprint, which meant they could not be distributed. We understand that dozens of BNP activists who could have been out canvassing are spending many hours peeling off thousands of tiny stickers to place on the leaflets as straight as they can manage.

HOPE not hate

BNP opposition groups stage pre-election meeting

Anti-racism groups have organised a conference ahead of forthcoming elections.

The North Staffordshire Campaign against Racism and Fascism (NorSCARF) and Unite against Fascism have arranged a meeting at Staffordshire University tomorrow. They aim to raise the profile of groups who are challenging the BNP ahead of forthcoming elections for Staffordshire County Council and the European Parliament.

The conference follows an October meeting at which the agenda of the BNP was discussed and efforts made to rally opposition against the party.

Staffordshire MPs Mark Fisher and David Kidney will both be attending as members of a panel. Stoke-on-Trent Central MP Mr Fisher said: "Everyone in North Staffordshire wants to avoid the European elections in May being dominated by the negative agenda of racist prejudice. We must make sure that the election is fought on the issues that are most important to people – jobs, the economy and housing."

Olwen Hamer, NorSCARF chairman, said: "There can be no place for BNP policies in a civilised society. I hope the electorate in the June elections will make that very clear."

The conference will start with a performance of Night of the Broken Glass, sponsored by the New Vic Theatre, before workshops. There will then be a feedback session and panel discussion.

The conference, in the Ashley Building, Leek Road, Stoke, will take place between 1pm and 6pm. To register, call 07778 913 528.

The Sentinel