They do love a good conspiracy theory in the BNP.

We don’t know the truth of that or of much else surrounding Lecomber, though there is more than a suspicion that in the past he has been helpful to agencies operating beyond the reach of the BNP. What we do know is that he is not to be trusted.

Lecomber was probably more responsible than Griffin for the success of Griffin’s long-laid plans to capture the BNP leadership from founder John Tyndall. He operated for years as Griffin’s second in command, and played a crucial role in the long roll-call of expulsions and divisions that have characterised the Griffin leadership.

When disgruntled members ask “Where has all the talent gone?” they should keep in mind that Lecomber stands squarely next to Griffin as the man bearing most responsibility for the purging and bullying that saw it off. Griffin routinely ousted talent that he saw as a future threat to his own position, together with those who – as so many in the BNP have belatedly come to realise – became aware of the shady financial business going on at the top of the party. Tony Lecomber was Griffin’s willing accomplice, if not, in some cases, the instigator.

Lecomber fell from grace due to his alleged involvement in a “death plot” (see here), but was not formally proscribed by Nick Griffin (and then in glowing terms) until after he attacked Eddy Butler at Loughton rail station – something that has never been properly explained. Even then, it was clear from early on that Lecomber remained involved with the BNP and was on the best of terms with Griffin.

With a record involving possession of explosives and various acts of thuggery, at first glance Lecomber appears little more than a violent loon, but he is that rare thing, a violent loon in charge of a brain that sometimes operates at a close to normal temperature, from which he derives the organisational ability and the nose for plotting and scheming which kept him at the top of the Griffinite BNP for so long.

Lecomber is one of those lurking in the background of the current dispute, presenting himself as an honest broker, and claiming to have offered advice to Griffin and Butler. He affects disappointment with Nick Griffin, saying that he advised Griffin to go directly after the Question Time debacle, and rather surprisingly admits that “only Eddy Butler” can save the BNP. In the manner of a despairing wife finally confronting the reality of a failed marriage, he complains on the increasingly crowded British Democracy Forum that he just doesn’t understand Nick any more.

That says “maybe”. Lecomber has a well earned reputation for double-dealing, such that those with experience of him immediately, and wisely, go on their guard when the ex-con approaches with his hand outstretched and friendly words tumbling from his lips. They wonder what his game is.

Though Lecomber doesn’t admit to criminal wrong-doing in regard to the BNP’s finances, he does come close to admitting the probability. Like most of those previously close to Griffin and who are now laying all manner of accusations at his door, Lecomber claims to have heard nothing and saw nothing that aroused his suspicion.

Well, he would say that, wouldn’t he? Tony doesn’t really have much of a choice.

[As a sidelight to this, I have an email from a Lecomber victim in which the sender wonders whether the former second in command isn't using the British Democracy Forum to subtly but publicly remind Griffin that he knows where the bodies are buried, Lecomber no longer enjoying the financial considerations that were once his. It's a thought - unlikely, but worth noting.]

Wherever in the current troubles Lecomber really stands, he does occasionally (amid much self-serving distortion) slip in information which appears to confirm that which reaches us via secondary sources, sometimes (apparently) gratuitously so.

Visitors to this and the Hope Not Hate websites will recall Sonia Gable’s recent article “BNP leadership may have pocketed party bequests”, which reported on a meeting of the Reform Group:

The meeting heard that questions had been raised over bequests and other large donations that had allegedly been paid direct to the leadership. It was unclear whether the party had benefited from these bequests and probate information would be obtained to investigate these rumours.

A short while after this a cryptic, anonymous comment was left here and moderated out (we don’t wish to become part of the battleground on which the BNP factions fight, or to spread the rumours both sides attempt to plant here). It spoke of a bequest that would (from memory) “give the BNP a lifeline”. Lecomber today (Friday) claims that the BNP is in line for two bequests which will prevent the party from going, as he puts it, “belly up”, at least in the short term.

These bequests must be of a substantial amount, though it is difficult to believe that together they could total more than the minimum £500,000 the BNP needs to crawl out of the financial mire into which Nick Griffin has plunged it. Perhaps there will be enough to cover some smaller debts and to make goodwill payments to the larger creditors, who will be staved off by promises to pay by installment. Even so, the BNP, shrinking, demoralised and barely active, is still left with the problem that even the most basic daily expenditure continues to outstrip income.

It would appear, then, that reports of the BNP’s early death are greatly exaggerated. There will be a slight recovery, but the prognosis remains terminal unless the party can clear its debts and cut expenditure to match its greatly reduced income. It can probably keep going long enough to outlast whatever danger is posed by the Reform Group, which is showing distinct signs of flagging together with what may prove a fatal loss of direction – the Reform Group’s failure to fund legal challenges on behalf of suspended members, or even to challenge – as promised – the rigged nominations procedure, is hardly helping morale. They could still do both and may yet surprise us, but as supporters begin to lose confidence in a Reform leadership that has huffed and puffed to little real effect for the last near four months, the possibility seems remote. We won’t write them off just yet, however, as there are several jokers in the pack and they have been dealt several. They only want for the will to play them.

In the matter of the two bequests mentioned by Lecomber, what is more interesting is his clear imputation that there must have been others which have gone unrecorded, and which, by implication, must have found their way into Griffin’s hands.

Lecomber, taking his customary swipe at the loathed John Tyndall, explains thus:

… the BNP pre-Nick had a couple of legacies. One was quite substantial. Tyndall blagged it as you know, quite legally. Nick is aware of how that particular trick worked.

…with a [pre-Griffin] party that numbered between 1,500 and 2,000 getting a legacy every 3 or 4 years and with its membership demographic being primarily poorer older folk and young ‘herberts’; how is it that a party with a considerably larger membership (3x – 7x) and with a more up-market demographic not had any legacies at all over all the period that the Electoral Commission has wanted published accounts? These legacies should show up either under a heading saying ‘bequests’ or as a humungous donation.

…So for 7 years we haven’t had a single legacy. Now in 2010, as the need is dire, two show up at once just like buses. It stinks. And I’m furious.

And if this is the way of it, then the real reason that Nick can’t step down is that someone will want to know why legacies are hitting the party account and going straight out again [my emphasis]. Of course, if it’s the case that the party Will Packs (which I devised) have been logged and those people asked to alter their Will to favour a person rather than the party, then that is legal. Though the person doing it should be taken to the back of an open sewer somewhere and decapitated.

The legacy “blagged” by Tyndall, incidentally, is a matter of ongoing dispute. For what it’s worth, Tyndall always claimed the legacy was made over to him to disburse as he saw fit, and one can see that a convinced Tyndallite might want to endow his fuhrer with the means to propogate the cause in a wider, unrestricted and independent manner rather than to sink funds into an inefficient party machine. Tyndall, after all, represented far more than the BNP could ever admit to, and every Tyndallite knew it.

Whatever the truth of that, there is no escaping the fact that Tony Lecomber clearly believes that a number of bequests have come the way of the BNP, and have managed, somehow, to escape attention. He also strongly hints that those lodging an intention to leave a bequest to the BNP may have been quietly asked to name the beneficiary as Nick Griffin.

We may be missing something here, but isn’t it a little odd that Griffin’s long-time second in command and close friend has only now noticed the complete absence of bequests over the past seven years? And isn’t it even odder that Lecomber, who claims to want the best for Griffin, a man he is still quick to praise, should go about it by adding substantially to the doubts surrounding his honesty?

It is altogether a curious business, but then, Tony Lecomber is a curious and interesting fellow. Why has he, a divisive and toxic figure, as he happily acknowledges, suddenly come up from between the floorboards to inject himself into the current troubles when there is so little apparent need? He is trusted by almost nobody, carries no real weight, has no future in the BNP or with the Reform Group, and can only harm the cause of whichever camp he sides with.

Perhaps we should ask the old lag directly – what is occurring, Tony?

Denise Garside

Butler’s personal blog report on the events of the evening constitutes one of his most savage attacks on the beleaguered BNP leader to date, employing the word “lie” seven times, “lies” six times, “liar” three times, and “lying” once, in a statement that leaves Nick Griffin looking deeply foolish and very guilty.

The “reform” leader repeatedly sneers at Griffin and brazenly attacks his personal integrity in what appears to be a transparent attempt to goad Griffin into taking precipitate action against himself and his supporters.

Butler relates how, despite being warned by letter not to attend the Dagenham meeting on pain of disciplinary action, “Everyone turned up!” while “A group of suspended members waited outside the venue with gags on their mouths, holding up placards reading ‘Gagged for telling the truth’.”

“Griffin sneaked into the venue and locked himself into the meeting room for forty five minutes sweating with his security entourage,” Butler gloats, then details that Griffin put his security goons (who included Clive Jefferson) on the door armed with a revised list of those to be refused admittance.

“Pandemonium broke out,” says Butler, but in the disorder several reformers got past the goons, one threatening to call the police if Griffin’s men laid a hand on him, though some were hauled out of the meeting room.

One of those refused entry was former goon Jay Slaven, who our readers will remember hustled Griffin away from the egg throwing incident outside parliament last year, and who brutally chopped the throat of an innocent (black) female pedestrian engulfed by Slaven, Griffin and several other panicking fascists, who then trampled her body as she fell to the ground.

Interestingly, Emma Colgate, one of the BNP’s last remaining councillors in the south east, was also refused entry. Colgate has kept a low profile so far, but her transformation from BNP to “independent” councillor in Thurrock cannot be long in coming.

Butler and ourselves (via another source) agree that about sixty people eventually got into the meeting, leaving between fifteen to twenty excluded. As many attending came from outside London, this turnout tells us much about the woeful condition of the BNP in the capital.

In his hubris, Nick Griffin claimed that ninety attended the meeting, which he described as “long and productive”. In fact Griffin talked and talked, and lied and lied (as Butler has it), leaving almost no time for questions.

Describing this, Butler is scathing. “A poor excuse for a man,” he says of Griffin, adding that the BNP leader’s speech was “boring and nervously delivered by a perspiring and stammering excuse for a man”, and “Virtually every word than came out of Griffin’s mouth was a lie.”

Griffin’s account, needless to say, differs markedly from that of Butler and a “reform” supporter who sat through the meeting. Griffin claims (or, being careful, says he was “told”) that he spoke for an hour and answered questions for two, which is not what we have been hearing.

On the BNP website a report, detailing the organisational changes to be made in the London region, has the same flavour as the legendary tale of the man who re-arranged the deck-chairs on a sinking Titanic. Griffin has split London in to five new “regions”, with Griffin trusties installed as local organisers – though he clearly trusts none of them enough with the post of regional organiser, which he retains. What, exactly, these new organisers will organise isn’t clear at all.

Butler’s report can be found on his personal blog, and speaks for itself. It is angry, contemptuous, and above all provocative, viz:

GRIFFIN IS A LIAR – VIRTUALLY EVERTHING HE SAYS AT A BNP MEETING NOW IS A LIE.

HE CANNOT FACE ME IN FRONT OF BNP MEMBERS AS HE KNOWS I WILL DESTROY HIS LIES AND LEAVE HIM A PATHETIC AND WASTED WRECK IN FRONT OF EVERYONE IN THE AUDIENCE.

IF GRIFFIN HAD THE COURAGE OF HIS CONVICTIONS HE WOULD NOT ACT LIKE THIS. HE IS A COWARD.

News from the north east, that was also news to us, is to be found at the head of Butler’s report, where he claims that “twenty five long standing members – officers, candidates and activists from South Tyneside and Morpeth” resigned en bloc from the BNP on Thursday in protest at Griffin’s “tyrannical actions”, which included the sacking of regional organiser Ken Booth.

In the north east Adam and Mark Walker are looking increasingly isolated as the local membership evaporates around them, and were recently obliged to import a small number of the similarly evaporating Liverpool activist base to help out in Adam Walker’s campaign for election to Spennymoor Town Council – a campaign the BNP has perhaps misguidedly hyped beyond its importance, most especially in light of Walker’s disgraceful comments prior to VJ-Day that Japanese war criminals “were doing what they thought was right at the time”, which is returning to haunt him.

Also helping out (or was he really being guarded?) in Spennymoor was Richard Barnbrook, also isolated, though for different reasons, and since cast adrift.

Barnbrook appears to have acquired either a ghost-writer or an extremely helpful “friend” to help him keep his barely-regarded blog up to date, and continues to labour under the delusion that he has any use at all to Griffin and the BNP.

In a “Message to voters and supporters”, Barnbrook, with touching sincerity, says that he had despatched a missive to “head office” (by which he means Nick Griffin) in which he set out his own observations of the current disputes and suggestions on their resolution.

This missive is so naive and child-like we can only assume Barnbrook’s ghost-writer had great troubles in maintaining a straight face as he tapped it out. We have no way of knowing whether the following suggestion gestated in Barnbrook’s mind or that of his unseen helper, but as part of the drive to root out infiltrators Barnbook recommends that polygraph tests be imposed on everybody at the level of regional organiser and above, apparently including (rather cheekily) Nick Griffin.

“I have not yet had any response which indicates to me that action will be taken on the points that I raised,” Barnbook concludes.

Richard just doesn’t get it, does he?

Denise Garside

The move came on the heels of the news that two more BNP councillors had declared themselves “independent” and the highly dubious suspension of Griffin gofer Paul Golding came to light.

Clearly not trusting local London officials, even those he had just hand-picked, at around 10 p.m. Griffin tweeted: “Busy evening putting together a great new London management team. I’ll be acting as their Reginal [sic] Organiser while they find their feet. I pass by while on the way to Europe anyway, so a bit of hands on leadership won’t be too hard. Vital we organise now to maximise chances in 2012 gla election. I did the same in the North West before handing over to Clive Jefferson. It worked well.”

Distrust and disaffection for Griffin is so advanced in London that imposing himself as the top regional official is more likely to entrench existing divisions and create new resentments than it is either to bring the bickering factions to heel or to initiate a period of calm in which some attempt at reconciliation can be effected.

In fact, reconciliation appears to be the last thing on Griffin’s mind. London, and particularly East London, being one of the hotter spots in the BNP’s fevered post-election discontent, is ripe for a thorough pruning, and it would seem that Griffin is placing himself in the best position possible to oversee it.

Griffin’s careless attitude towards the BNP’s dwindling number of elected assets was exemplified in his obvious contempt for the newly “independent” Richard Barnbrook, expressed via his Twitter account: “Disappointed by Richard. Have appealed to him to do decent thing and either come back to fold or . . .”

Since even Griffin might think Barnbrook’s honourable suicide a step too far, he presumably means that Barnbrook should resign his GLA seat.

Griffin’s contempt for Barnbrook long predates the current troubles, but Barnbrook also earned the open contempt of the Butler camp when, with the intervention of the oleaginous Patrick Harrington, he back-tracked on earlier promises to support the Butler camp and allowed himself to become a stooge candidate for Griffin. Barnbrook was quickly discarded when his usefulness ran out and has no political friends left. Even if – and it is a possibility – he were to further humiliate himself and return to the fold, his inglorious career in racist politics will end with the next GLA elections.

Shrugging off the BNP label with better grace than Barnbrook, West Hertfordshire organiser and county councillor Deirdre Gates has also resigned from the party. Three Rivers district councillor Seamus Dunne has declared himself an “independent”, but remains a member of the BNP.

Gates may have sought to pre-empt her own purging, but in resigning from the party has defied the advice of her friend Eddy Butler, for whom she was a prominent campaigner. Why Gates took this course is open to speculation unless or until she makes a public statement explaining her actions. There is a suggestion that Gates’s time as a county councillor may have have had a maturing influence on her, something that has happened in the past when BNP councillors have glimpsed political life beyond the BNP’s inane world of Marxist plots and Muslim takeovers, but, equally likely, she may know something of Butler’s plans which would render her continued membership of the BNP superfluous.

The suspension of one of Nick Griffin’s chief lackeys, Paul Golding, was greeted with derision by the Butler camp, suspicious of every move made by the embattled BNP leader. Golding was apparently suspended for abusing the official BNP e-mail lists, which he used to promote the infamous “attack blogs” and for transmitting a personal attack on Eddy Butler.

According to Butler: “Obviously Paul Golding will not really be punished for these ‘transgressions’. It is sop designed to imply that the leadership will be even handed when they try to expel certain people who supported me during the recent leadership challenge. It is a blatant fig leaf.”

Butler also claims to detect the hand of the sneakingly ubiquitous Patrick Harrington in the ploy, since: “Harrington knows that Paul Golding’s unwise attack e-mail gave grounds for other members of staff who were the subject of abuse, to claim constructive dismissal if no action was taken.”

Griffin is clearly positioning himself to take decisive action soon. Will he pick off Butler’s people piecemeal, or will there be a bloodbath?

Griffin’s reckless behaviour suggests to us that he really doesn’t care, and would rather see the BNP’s last councillors jump ship and the membership dwindle to a few Green Arrow-type fools before he will allow those oh so well guarded account books to fall out of his control and into the hands of a deeply interested membership.

Denise Garside

Doing what they thought was right at the time…

… so that’s all right with the BNP, then..?

The British National party’s sole representative on the London assembly has resigned the party whip amid speculation that the BNP is on the verge of unravelling.

Richard Barnbrook, who lost his Barking and Dagenham council seat earlier this year, is understood to have taken the decision in protest at the increasing tensions within the organisation, which has seen a series of spats between senior figures in the last few weeks.

Barnbrook told the assembly he had resigned the BNP whip because of several serious allegations circulating within the party and has called for an “independent internal investigation” to be carried out before he returns to the fold. He is understood to remain a BNP member.

Earlier this week Nick Griffin, the BNP leader, saw off a leadership challenge from Barnbrook and three others. However, critics say he only managed to hold on to power by carrying out a widespread purge of internal opponents.

Tensions have been growing since May’s general election when the BNP failed to make its promised breakthrough, and the council elections where all but two of its 28 sitting councillors standing for re-election were beaten.

“The BNP seems to be unravelling,” said Nick Lowles from Searchlight. “Griffin has sacked or suspended over 30 critics and Barnbrook’s decision seems to suggest the party is on the verge of full-scale revolt.”

The Guardian

The British National Party member Adam Walker (pictured above, with Nick Griffin) and France’s most famous Holocaust-denier, Jean-Marie Le Pen, will be among a group of European delegates to visit the Yasukuni Shrine, which venerates the militarists who led Japan’s brief but disastrous rampage across Asia.

“I realise that there are war veterans in the UK who will see this as an insult, especially on V-J day, but Yasukuni is dedicated to the souls of men who died fighting for their country,” said Mr Walker. “It’s easy to point fingers now but these people were doing what they thought was right at the time.”

Mr Walker was cleared earlier this year by the British General Teaching Council of “racial intolerance” after posting comments online calling immigrants “savage animals” and “filth” while working as a teacher in Houghton-le-Spring.

One of the most contentious pieces of real estate in Asia, Yasukuni is considered sacred by nationalists – and a monument to war, empire, and Japan’s unrepentant militarism by millions of others. A museum attached to the shrine claims that Japan was lured into the war by the US and waged a campaign to free Asia from white European colonialism.

Japan’s Prime Minister, Naoto Kan, who earlier this week apologised to South Korea for the colonisation of the Korean peninsula, has ruled out visiting the shrine out of respect for Asian victims of his country’s past militarism. The leader of the LDP opposition, Sadakazu Tanigaki, meanwhile, plans to visit the shrine tomorrow.

But the European visit looks set to stir greater controversy. The foreign delegation, which also includes ultra-right politicians from Portugal, Spain, Hungary, Austria and Belgium, has been invited to Japan by Issuikai, a right-wing association that denies Japanese war crimes and wants to build a global alliance of nationalist groups to fight American “hegemony”. Its leader, Mitsuhiro Kimura, counted among his friends the exiled Iraq leader Saddam Hussein, whom he urged to resist the US invasion of his country in 2003.

Yesterday he and other delegates attended a conference of “patriotic organisations” in Tokyo, where they discussed the perils of immigration, climate change and Islam.

One speech warned that “environmental Marxists” are exaggerating the quantity of CO2 in the earth’s atmosphere in a plot to bring more immigrants into the advanced countries and destroy the nation state. “More and more climate immigrants are coming to Europe,” said Thibaut De La Tocnaye, a leading member of France’s National Front.

The Europeans were applauded when they advised Japan to reject mass immigration and demands that foreigners be allowed to vote in local elections. Mr Le Pen gave a speech on Islam, which he said had a “long tradition of invading other countries”. “In my country they come and demand that they be allowed to build giant mosques. That’s political, not religious.”

Mr Le Pen waved away criticism of the Yasukuni visit. “These men are war heroes. We used to be enemies but I think we must pay respect to people who had to die for their country.”

The BNP’s Mr Walker, meanwhile, denied reports this week in The Daily Telegraph claiming that his trip was partly funded by British taxpayers. “The money came from Issuikai. I expect nothing less from The Telegraph. It’s just a left-wing rag.”

*North Korea has urged Japan to apologise and provide compensation for its harsh colonial rule, days after Tokyo offered an apology to South Korea for annexing the Korean peninsula, without mentioning the North.

North Koreans harbour deep resentment of Japan for using Koreans for forced labour and sex slaves during its 1910-45 occupation of the peninsula. North Korea does not have diplomatic relations with Japan.

Independent

Butler says he will not take legal action against the BNP over the unconstitutional rules that Griffin imposed for the challenge because “it would be very costly for us and for the party”. Butler is no doubt influenced by the fact that the BNP is insolvent and already has many unpaid legal bills, so even if he won he would be unable to recover his costs.

Urging his supporters to stay in the BNP, Butler writes: “Rather than get embroiled in legal action we will continue our battle to save our party from destruction at Griffin’s hands through other means”. He also hopes that his supporters will stay in their party positions if they can square it with their conscience.

Butler says that the requirement to obtain the support of 20% of long-standing members was “an impossibly high total”, which is why Griffin imposed it. He also claims that many members did not receive their nomination forms because the BNP’s membership database is “incompetently run” and that Griffin’s action in persuading two “stooges” to stand for the leadership as well complicated matters.

Griffin also used “political intimidation” by suspending many supporters of Butler. For that reason he has not handed in his forms as he does “not wish to compromise anyone”.

On the official forms, which members had to complete and send individually to the party’s official scrutineer, Andrew Brons MEP, Butler only obtained 214 signatures. The stooge candidates, Richard Barnbrook and Derek Adams, got 23 and four signatures respectively, while 971 people ticked the box indicating that they were satisfied with Griffin’s leadership.

The failure is testament to the fact that most BNP members do not go to party meetings or follow the various blogs that have exposed the gross mismanagement in the party and the way in which Griffin and his consiglieri, Jim Dowson, are using it as a cash generating machine for themselves. Griffin’s main interest now is in securing re-election to the European Parliament in 2014 so that he qualifies for a pension when he eventually leaves office.

Whether Griffin will allow any Butler supporters to remain in official party positions is unclear at this stage; likewise whether Butler’s supporters will want to stay in a party in which Griffin and Dowson are now even stronger than before.

Many activists, though not the bulk of the ordinary members, are now well aware that Dowson owns the BNP, that the party is insolvent and has been managed incompetently, and that Griffin never hesitates to lie blatantly to preserve his position. Many have already said that if Butler’s challenge fails they will leave, though most are undecided whether to join one of the tiny opponents of the BNP on the far right or to form a new party. Neither option is attractive for them.

Lee Barnes, the BNP’s former legal officer who resigned yesterday, can be expected to reveal more about what has been going on in the BNP, now that he has seen the truth about Dowson, whom he has described as the “Gollum” of the BNP and Griffin’s “cut price Rasputin”.

Most recently Barnes has described Arthur Kemp’s March of the Titans, a huge tome much praised by Griffin’s BNP, as “a regurgitated sub-SS handbook” and its author as a “Rhodesian Nazi terrorist” who “hates everyone and everything and believes everyone on the planet is below him”. According to Barnes, Kemp was known in the party as Napoleon. We look forward to further insights such as these.

Searchlight / HOPE not Hate by Sonia Gable

His resignation comes on the last day for receipt of nominations for Eddy Butler’s leadership challenge against Griffin and follows suspensions of several of Butler’s supporters. Butler needs the signatures of 840 people with at least 24 calendar months’ membership of the fascist party for an election for chairman to go ahead, but the support of suspended members will not count.

Barnes, who has a degree in law but is not a practising solicitor or barrister, has joined a growing list of BNP members who oppose the takeover of the party by Dowson, who is not even a member. “Jim Dowson now controls the BNP membership database, the BNP donor database, the BNP treasury department, the BNP subscriptions operation, the BNP media & communications operation and the BNP website,” writes Barnes in his long letter of resignation, which is free of his usual inane and extremist ranting. “This is completely unacceptable and legally questionable.”

Pointing out that Griffin does not have the power to move party assets into the hands of a non-member, he declares: “If party assets have been moved out of the party and into companies owned by Jim Dowson by Nick Griffin then this is potentially defined as ‘Fraud by abuse of position’ and is defined by Section 4 of the Fraud Act 2006. This is such a case where a person occupies a position where they are expected to safeguard the financial interests of another person such as BNP members, and abuses that position; this includes cases where the abuse consisted of an omission rather than an overt act.

“In such cases of potential fraud, it requires that for an offence to have occurred, the person must have acted dishonestly, and that they had to have acted with the intent of making a gain for themselves or anyone else, or inflicting a loss (or a risk of loss) on another. The fact that such issues may have potentially arisen means the party is at serious risk of investigation and prosecution,” says Barnes.

Barnes is also incensed at the party’s failure to investigate allegations by Shelley Rose, a young activist, that Dowson sexually assaulted her when they were away on party business and Dowson allegedly failed to book a separate hotel room for her. Barnes says he called on Griffin to initiate a “full and transparent investigation”, but Griffin ignored him.

“The BNP cannot ever be seen as a party that protects perverts or a party that refuses to address allegations of such a serious nature from a female member,” asserts Barnes.

“If Jim Dowson was found guilty of bringing the party into disrepute, Gross Misconduct and sexual assault,” continues Barnes, “then he should have been dismissed and sacked from all party offices he holds.

“Instead what has happened is that Shelley Rose has been suspended, no investigation has been initiated and no sanction applied against Jim Dowson.”

Barnes accuses Griffin and Dowson of repeatedly breaking “the most obvious of laws”, resulting in “hundreds of thousands of pounds … squandered on avoidable court cases”. As well as the matters often mentioned by Butler – the use of the Marmite image, the Equalities Commission action and the unlawful dismissal from employment of Michaela Mackenzie – he reveals that the unlawful use of stock images from a photoshop company during the European election also resulted in legal action against the party.

Showing his displeasure at being sidelined by Griffin, he complains that: “Legal issues that were once dealt with internally within the party have been ‘outsourced’ from the party to individuals paid by Jim Dowson and Nick Griffin, resulting in the parties internal legal affairs no longer being scrutinised or run by the BNP Legal Unit,” which he headed.

Like others, Barnes has been threatened with violence by Dowson, whom he accuses of being “a convicted criminal, with links to Loyalist terrorism and terrorists with a string of failed companies to his name who bought his ‘reverend’ title off of the internet”. When Barnes complained to Griffin about the suspension of Peter Mullins, the party’s former South West regional organiser, he “was threatened by Jim Dowson with violence for putting the parties legal interests first as he was the person pushing Nick Griffin to expel Peter Mullins and others. …

“It appears that when Jim Dowson doesn’t get what he wants he likes to threaten people with his connections to loyalist killers and terrorists in Northern Ireland in order to intimidate people into doing his bidding.”

Barnes points out that Griffin acted unlawfully in his move last Friday to suspend a long list of party members who support Butler. “Unfortunately, as the Peter Mullins case revealed, Nick Griffin thinks the law as regards the unlawful expulsion of members does not apply to him, even though he was shown by the courts during the John Tyndall case [when Griffin tried to expel his predecessor as party leader] that the law does apply to the BNP.

“The decision yesterday to unlawfully suspend dozens of activists simply for them standing against Nick Griffin in the leadership contest is the action of utterly irresponsible incompetents.”

As the BNP constitution was rewritten specifically to ensure that no one can ever remove Griffin as party leader, explains Barnes, Griffin is “tactically inept” in suspending Butler’s supporters as they “can now launch new legal actions against the party.

“The law is clear. BNP members have a constitutionally protected right to stand for party leadership. To suspend them for doing so is unlawful. The way they have been suspended is also unlawful.

“I have no doubt that they will now unite to form a class action against the party thereby incurring more legal costs and damages against an already virtually bankrupt party whose debts far outweigh its income,” declares Barnes.

Explaining his resignation, Barnes writes: “I cannot remain as the Legal Officer of a party that acts unlawfully towards its own members, that rewards years of party loyalty with unlawful suspensions and expulsions, that covers up serious allegations of sexual abuse by senior officers, that expels long standing members who ask for financial transparency within the party and that refuses to act to protect its own officers when they are threatened with violence by other senior officers.

“Such a political party cannot be trusted with political power in our society.

“If I stay on within such a party then it will appear as though I am supporting and condoning such actions,” concludes Barnes, no doubt mindful of the legal consequences of remaining the party’s legal officer.

Butler’s blog lists 31 people who have been suspended or expelled, or have resigned in anticipation of being suspended. The comments to his post add several other names and many people write they will leave the party or do nothing for it while Griffin remains in charge.

Butler also reveals that “due to the collapse of the party’s finances, approaching £100,000 worth of General Election expenses have still not been paid” in contravention of electoral law, which sets a stringent time limit on the payment of election expenses.

Furthermore, says Butler, the party’s candidates and agents were “lied to by the leadership” and wrongfully stated on their own election returns that all expenses have been paid, leaving them liable to a fine or imprisonment.

The expenses are apparently owed to printers and courier firms that transported the party’s election leaflets. Although, writes Butler, “our branches, groups and regions paid had the necessary funds in their accounts to meet these expenses … Head Office has stolen this money to pay for the bloated central bureaucracy – particularly to pay for the over staffed and highly costly Belfast operation [Dowson’s call centre] and also to pay for the court cases which we are embroiled in due to Nick Griffin’s incompetence and irresponsibility.”

According to Barnes, donations have dried up and the party is “technically insolvent”. However Griffin and Dowson will not suffer. “If the party is made bankrupt then the BNP membership as a whole will be directly financially liable for its outstanding debts as an unincorporated association and not Nick Griffin or Jim Dowson.

“This is because Nick Griffin has no assets and Jim Dowsons financial assets are probably hidden away in some Spanish or Swiss bank account outside the UK.”

Whether or not Butler gets enough nominations to continue with his leadership challenge, it seems that the BNP is unlikely to recover from the effects of the serious financial mismanagement of the party and the revelations that have emerged over the past few weeks.

Sonia Gable at HOPE not hate