Norfolk Unity

On Saturday morning the BNP website carried one of those venomously torrid articles in which it seems to specialise, which baldly stated that “disgraced” former webmaster Simon Bennett had stolen the BNP’s email list and that legal action was being taken against him.

Some time during the afternoon the post (along with a lone “Hang him!” comment from a BNP nematode) disappeared into the cyber-ether, promoting an article on the failure of the CPS to prosecute BNP street thug and drink-driver Bob Bailey to lead story.

The BNP has a long history of threatening (or at least informing its gullible members that it is about to take) legal action against some person or entity, and almost always failing to do so. From memory, I believe we recorded three examples over the spring and summer of 2009, one of which included a promise to put the “lying” Daily Mirror in court for its coverage of “BNP mum” and female thug Helen Forster, who the BNP denied was a member after her conviction for the intimidation of neighbour Mrs Meherjan Miah was reported in the newspaper. The BNP despatched the long forgotten “Operation Fightback” in the form of lying Paul Golding to film an interview with lying Helen Forster, both of them brazenly continuing to deny Forster’s BNP membership. Within hours of the film and the BNP’s threats against the Mirror appearing on the party website, “Helen Forster” was recognised as “Helen Colclough” – BNP activist, and perfectly well known to Golding. The story quickly disappeared.

Why the BNP got cold feet after publishing its blunt accusation of theft against Simon Bennett we do not know. The normally voluble Bennett, prone to engage in long and tedious online spats with various representatives of the Green Arrow nursery class, does not appear to have noticed, but since he did not break off from arranging boxing matches and informing the world that his father was “lifed off for murder when I was two years old” until 4.20 am, perhaps he was still in bed when the accusation was removed.

Since Bennett, like the party from which he is estranged, is given to promising action which never materialises, it is unlikely that the highly libellous accusation was removed from the BNP website through any fear of him launching a legal action. It might have been taken down when somebody sobered up and realised what counter-productive hysterical nonsense it was, or because it was realised that the idea of the BNP having the financial wherewithal to launch a legal action against anybody would produce an avalanche of laughter from one end of the BNP to the other (Paul Morris and company excepted), as Nick Griffin had admitted that the BNP was skint and sinking just the day before.

Visitors to the BNP website cannot have failed to notice that despite repeated appeals from Griffin the BNP’s EHRC Fighting Fund, with a target set at £30,000, has remained stubbornly stuck at the £10,000 mark – itself a highly dubious figure.

Griffin’s latest appeal drips utter desperation in every word. “We need to raise £150,000 to keep the wolves at bay and to ensure our survival,” he pleads.

He’s clearly not going to get it unless some deranged benefactor with a penchant for lost causes comes to the rescue.

The parlous state of the BNP is frankly admitted by Griffin’s close friend Tony Lecomber, who posts on the British Democracy Forum as BNPhappy:

Activism has already dried up. Last month the whole of the East Mids got 4 enquiries and the whole of the North East got two! Whole branches are likely going to fold. When the fence sitters see this, they are going to get disheartened and also drift away. The knock on effect of this is that, ironically, those who have been loyal to Nick will then also get disheartened and many of those will drop out.

The Shelley Rose episode appears to have been the final straw for many “fence sitters”, particularly in the light of Jim Dowson’s craven and very public failure either to refute Rose’s allegations or to begin proceedings against her. Commenting on the Green Arrow website – one of the few places on the planet he can count on an uncritical hearing – Dowson lamely challenges Rose to go to the police, then claims that she is not worth “200 or 300k fees in clearing my name” – figures plucked out of thin air by a man clearly writhing in deep discomfort.

Dowson’s curiously non-combative attitude has only lent weight to Rose’s claims, and will boost Eddy Butler’s leadership campaign as the nomination gathering process draws to a close.

In the midst of all this fascist angst has come the expulsion of Mark Collett, a matter that once would have occupied several posts on this website but which – though Collett is central to the current turmoil – seems scarcely worthy of a sentence. It is, of course, as we haven’t heard the last of Collett (allegedly owed £20,000 by the BNP), who is involved in Eddy Butler’s campaign but who, for the negative emotions he excites, is wisely being kept from view.

To cover for the fact that the police and CPS dropped the Griffin/Dowson inspired “death threat” charges against Collett for lack of evidence, Griffin’s camp are suggesting that a private prosecution may be started against Collett. We don’t expect to be reporting any such case any time soon.

The nominations deadline is Tuesday, when it should become clear whether or not Eddy Butler has gathered his required 20% voting member signatures. His last call for support has the urgent air of a Nick Griffin appeal for donations. It does not ooze confidence, but then Butler has been understandably tight-lipped on the matter of exactly how many nomination signatures he has gathered to date.

If he cannot gather 840 signatures then there is no challenge. Even if he does there is the tantalising question of whether scrutineer Andrew Brons will accept those submitted on Butler’s own forms, as we understand that Brons is far from happy with the nomination procedure imposed by Nick Griffin.

Whatever happens, Tuesday will prove one of the most notable days in the history of the BNP, and the party’s civil war is certain erupt into ever higher levels of viciousness. Stay with us for news of the endgame as it plays out.

Denise Garside

A former deputy chairman of the British National Party says that many party officers and staff members are “scared to say what they feel” because of the way Nick Griffin takes “every bit of criticism as a personal attack”.

Scott McLean, a BNP member for 20 years, Scottish organiser from 1990 to 2007 and deputy chairman from 2002 to 2007, condemns Griffin mismanagement and “wrong actions [that] have purged this party … of the best that we had”.

Writing in support of Eddy Butler, who is challenging Griffin for the party leadership, he declares: “Every problem I’ve seen in this party is due to the wrong people being given jobs normally because of who they are, not of what they can do. We’ve seen masses of talent get thrown out or leave the party. Ask yourself how many management people or officers are now gone because of policy disagreements? Very little. They are all gone due to mismanagement.”

Echoing Butler’s accusations over the BNP’s finances, which are born out by Searchlight’s analysis, McLean continues: “Ask yourself why the party finances are a complete shambles? Lots of money going through over the years. Misspent and thrown away on stupid misguided actions.”

McLean’s criticism of Griffin is significant not only because of his party position but also because he was one of a small group of people who organised Griffin’s takeover as party leader in 1999. McLean, who claims dubiously that he built up Scotland as the largest region in the party in the early 1990s, had recognised that John Tyndall, the party’s prime founder and former leader, was holding the party back. “His outlook was more on the past than the future,” says McLean, stopping short of admitting that the past to which Tyndall looked was a pre-1945 German one rather than anything British.

McLean identified Griffin, then not even a BNP member, as “by far the most impressive” of a few potential new leaders for the party. Griffin “took a look at the party and saw it’s [sic] potential. A short time after that he became involved,” writes McLean.

The leadership challenge came in 1999. “Modernisers in the party myself included,” explains McLean, “felt that the party was being held back by not embracing new techniques that had proved successful for our elections guru Eddy Butler. He hadn’t got the proper backing with finance and manpower when he needed it most. Nick was put forward as the candidate for change.”

McLean advised Griffin and his campaign manager Tony Lecomber, who in the 1980s had served a three year prison sentence for explosives offences and later was jailed for another three years for assaulting a Jewish teacher, to “run a clean fight”, which, he says, they did.

However “Mr Tyndall’s camp ran a dirty campaign which I didn’t expect from him. … John Tyndall thought that the BNP was his and he found out the hard way that he was only a part of the machine.”

McLean’s implication is clear: that like the pigs in Animal Farm the former “candidate for change” has now become just like the old dictator he replaced.

Butler has also won the support of Chris Roberts, the BNP’s London regional organiser, who, like McLean, claims that the party’s branches and groups have not prospered because Griffin falls out with far too many people.

He also calls for an immediate stop to non-members of the party having “a bigger and more influential say on its affairs than the members”, a reference to Jim Dowson, the convicted criminal who acts as Griffin’s right-hand man and effectively owns the BNP.

“Furthermore,” continues Roberts, “it is disgraceful to employ non-members on the payroll … it’s our activists who got BNP representatives elected in the first place and they should be put above any outsider and especially outsiders from rival parties”. Although he does not name him, his remarks are directed at Patrick Harrington, a former comrade of Griffin from his National Front “political soldier” days in the 1980s, who is now one of the leaders of the rival, though much smaller, Third Way party.

Harrington is the general secretary of the BNP’s fake trade union, the speciously named Solidarity and was recently taken onto the BNP’s payroll in a human resources role.

Roberts also has some damaging comments on the BNP’s accounts, which have failed to meet the deadline for submission to the Electoral Commissioner “when the National Treasurer has assured us that everything is in order.

“Well I know for a fact that everything is not in order,” writes Roberts. “I have spoken to members of staff who have been paid very late and to activists who have not had their print bills settled for leaflets for the last election. Stop treating the members like idiots. Tell us what the real position is so there can be a proper consensus on what to do!

“The party needs a coherent management structure that all members can understand and follow. Our accounts need to be open to members to examine so they know exactly what amounts are being received and a detailed account of what it’s being spent on. We need to get our talented people running this party efficiently utilising the undoubted skills that exist throughout our ranks. People being employed in specific areas where they are skilled, not employing people in positions of authority because the chairman thinks they are a ‘good egg’.”

Butler has until 10 August to obtain the signatures on nomination forms of 20% of the party’s 4,200 members with at least 24 months’ continuous membership. Whether he succeeds or fails, with such prominent party activists in his camp, the rifts in the BNP are set to deepen.

Sonia Gable at Hope Not Hate

The second Norwich Pride Parade took place on Saturday (July 31st) – and what a fantastic day it was! Far larger than the 2009 parade (so we’re told – we were on holiday for that), the numbers were counted in “thousands” (but nobody knows yet how many thousands).

Anyway, here are a few random snaps we took during the day – not very good, but it’s difficult to hold a rainbow flag and a camera at the same time.

Gay line dancing at The Forum

Behind the North Norfolk Pride banner

Norwich Samba band and dancers leading the parade

Samba at The Forum

Gay faces in the crowd

The Killer Queens

Killer Queens and fans

More samba

At The Forum

Click here to visit the Norwich Pride website

Despite promise after promise that this year it would be different, the BNP has yet again failed to submit an annual statement of accounts to the Electoral Commission, incurring an automatic minimum £500 fine. The party’s Regional Accounting Unit has also failed to submit accounts and will be fined a minimum of £100.

In a statement made earlier today (Thursday) by the Electoral Commission, Chief Executive Peter Wardle said:

Most parties and accounting units submitted their accounts on time; one [the SDLP] made what we hope will prove to be a one-off mistake and will face a fine for late submission. But two parties have repeatedly failed to put information about their income and expenditure into the public domain on time.

That is not acceptable, and as well as fining these two parties for late submission, we will be monitoring them closely to try to ensure they meet the same standards of reporting as the others. The sanctions we currently have available to deal with this sort of non-compliance are limited, but we look forward to Parliament giving final approval to a wider range of sanctions, before the end of this year.

Joining the BNP in the doghouse is the tiny Christian Party.

Should the BNP fail to submit its accounts within the next three months the fines levied on the party will double, as they did last year when the party played fast and loose with the EC’s patience (and its own members’ subscriptions and donations).

Ever since the spotlight fell firmly on the BNP’s finances post-general election, Nick Griffin has been going out of his way to give an impression that all is well and that this year the accounts, now – allegedly – under the management of a professional accountant, would be submitted as required. Griffin must have been aware for some time that this would not be the case.

Cynics dissecting the series of self-serving treatises put out by Griffin post-election, forecast that the BNP accounts would again be late, since Griffin continually harped on about the complexity of the party’s financial operations and the difficulties inherent in keeping them in order, and seemed to be laying down an advance trail of plausible excuses.

This may also explain why a clearly uncomfortable David Hannam, the party’s national treasurer, has been pushed to the fore in the past week, being chivvied, we strongly suspect, into making a video for the BNP website and issuing a statement on behalf of his treasury department which promises much but clarifies little. The emailed version is “From Chairman Nick Griffin”, and while we don’t suppose he did more than outline what he expected the statement to contain, it’s also difficult to believe that Hannam’s is the only hand involved.

Nick Griffin having conveniently departed the country for a holiday, explanations for the lateness of the BNP’s accounts will be sought from Hannam, who may be wondering if he hasn’t been set up for a fall.

(For a fuller examination of this matter, see Sonia Gable’s HNH/Searchlight article, republished here.)

In the meantime…

Humberside Police have dropped charges against sacked BNP publicity director Mark Collett (above, with Griffin), according to a post on leadership challenger Eddy Butler’s blog. Collett was arrested on April 1st after Griffin had contacted the police claiming to have received death threats. A police statement made after Collett was bailed said: “This investigation was initiated as a result of a complaint by a member of the British National Party and inquiries are ongoing.”

Clearly, no, or insufficient, evidence existed upon which a charge could be sustained.

At the time Nick Griffin sent out a hysterical email linking Collett not only with the utterance of alleged death threats but with financial impropriety and of being part of a “palace coup” about to be staged against his leadership. Despite claiming that he was unable to discuss the matter due to rules of “sub judice” (which was untrue), Griffin (ignoring sub judice as it suited him) instigated a widely ridiculed “inquiry” that was held on Easter Monday (April 5th), in which twelve dupes were sent off to “authenticate” a highly edited recording of the “death threats”. Naturally, they gave the required answer.

Along with Collett, Eddy Butler and Emma Colgate were dismissed from their posts, and it is now apparent that the entire saga relates not to “death threats”, the misappropriation of BNP monies on Collet’s part or to “palace coups” but to allegations of serious financial wrong-doing at the top of the BNP, of which the trio had become aware.

News of Collett’s arrest was deliberately leaked to the media from within the BNP just as the party’s general and local election campaign was set to launch. How much damage was done to the BNP’s vote as a result, and how much it was responsible for the loss of so many BNP councillors is difficult to tell, since we believe the BNP was always on course for a hiding at the ballot box.

It is self-evident to all but the most blind and sycophantic of Griffinites that the dodgy “death threat” episode, played out in the press and on television, was an enormous own goal on the part of the leadership, far more damaging than the fleeting loss of the party’s website just before polling day. People may go to political websites in their hundreds, but they read newspapers and watch television in their millions.

With the charges dropped and any loyalties he might have held for Nick Griffin shattered, Mark Collett may well end his prolonged silence on the affair, an eventuality that on the surface can only benefit Eddy Butler. Butler is closer to Collett than he cares to admit, and thus far the Nazi Boy has been a peripheral, almost invisible figure, with very good reason. Collett is so widely reviled within the BNP that any open association between him and Butler would seriously damage Butler’s leadership campaign. His open involvement in the campaign would almost certainly kill it. Collett, then, is of limited use to Butler, no matter how innocent he may be of the charges levelled against him by Griffin – though he may yet damage Griffin to the favour of Butler in an apparently independent “off stage” role.

The weight on Griffin’s mind has been added to by news that the final part of the case he instigated (and has so far roundly lost) against the December Rebels will be heard at the High Court in Newcastle on November 29th.

Kenny Smith, one of the leading Decembrists, has reactivated the derelict Enough Is Enough website to announce that “Judgement Day is coming!”

Remarking that Griffin and Simon Darby “have tried every trick in the book, and indeed continue to invent new ways of delaying proceedings, to prevent the case they instigated at the Party’s expense coming to trial”, Smith gleefully adds:

Sadly for them, but happily for those who want to see justice done and the truth finally revealed in full, the trial has been fixed to start on Monday the 29th November 2010 at Newcastle High Court.

Kenny, Nicholla, Steve and Ian are all looking forward to their days in court and finally being able to expose Griffin and his cabal for what they are!

The Decembrists, somewhat pre-empted as Griffinite bugging of their private conversations led to the exposure of their intentions, launched the last serious attempt at unseating Nick Griffin, but the campaign soon floundered through indecision and the want of firm leadership. Then as now, Griffin began expelling or suspending individual Decembrists on eminently challengable grounds. At the time we observed that just one challenge to Griffin’s worthless writs of expulsion would stop him in his tracks and galvanise support for the rebels as hesitant individual members lost their fear of the Leader’s edicts. It is a lesson Eddy Butler’s supporters have failed to learn, as they allow themselves to be picked off one by one.

Griffin’s smothering tactics worked at the time but disguised the extent of latent discontent within the party. Seemingly united for the Euro election campaign, the cracks soon began to show as the false foundations on which the Euro success had been built were exposed by ever worsening votes which reflected the BNP’s true electoral position, and by Griffin’s inept approach to the EHRC case. The awful Question Time appearance, the dislodging of PPCs in favour of party “names”, the wild allegations against Collett, thuggish behaviour towards journalists and others, the needless courting of Unilever litigation, the general and local election rout have all done for Griffin what the Decembrists never could.

He did it all himself. And if he really were a leader of vision, the genius of strategy he is so frequently claimed to be, then he would have known that cutting off the Decembrist head while smothering Decembrist sentiment would leave hundreds within the BNP to brood and bide their time.

That they have done, for what else is Eddy Butler’s campaign but the second coming of the Decembrists, with new leadership, bigger and badder than ever?

While most trade union leaders have of late found a good deal to occupy their minds and their time as draconian government spending and job cuts loom, the general secretary of at least one alleged “fighting union” has other concerns that he clearly feels to be far more pressing than such bothersome trivialities as protecting and promoting the employment prospects of his members in the hard times to come.

These, after all, can be quickly disposed of in a few stock cod-radical phrases posted on the website of his “one big union” and regurgitated in a press release that will (for a fee payable to his friend Graham) then be posted on a free PR website, where it will attract its customary level of feverish disinterest and disappear without trace.

Patrick Harrington/Sharp, general secretary of Solidarity, director of the Third Way “think tank”, newly-coined BNP employee and fantasist par excellence has been extremely busy on Facebook just lately, patiently scanning his list of “friends” for any who link to the numerous enemies of the Very Important trade union leader and Political Thinker – a man so Important that he maintains his own Wikipedia page as a reminder to the rest of the world of just how Very Important he is.

Should Harrington discover the name “Simon Bennett” lurking amongst the friends of his Facebook friends, then the general secretary of the “fighting union” will employ some of his ample spare time to send a message warning that Bennett was responsible for “crashing” the BNP website on the eve of the general election and might use the personal details of those who link to his Facebook page in unspecified but detrimental ways. It would therefore be “unwise” to maintain a link to Bennett.

Mark Walker, also with more spare time on his hands than is healthy, performs the same service as the sneaking Harrington, but goes a little further in his “friendly” advice, warning that retaining Bennett as a Facebook friend might be “construed as disloyalty”.

Things must be getting desperate when trade union general secretaries and leading Griffinites begin to act like pre-adolescent school children and are driven to scour the pages of something so shallow as Facebook looking to rubbish their enemies – but then, Harrington and Walker both possess the type of mind that eminently suits them to such infantile activities.

Having made no secret of his support for Nick Griffin, and having openly attempted to exercise a negative influence upon the nomination gathering process on which a challenge to Griffin’s leadership depends, Harrington appears to have forgotten that his Third Way and National Liberal Party websites were hosted gratis by Bennett, who also owns the domain names. Not unnaturally, given the vitriol pouring down upon him from the Griffin camp, Bennett revenged himself by pointing the two domains at his YourBNP website.

Harrington, being Harrington (and sometimes being Sharp), thinks this most unfair, and so, while other trade union general secretaries devote their time planning for the difficult political and industrial struggles to come, the general secretary of the “fighting union” scrabbles about in the nether reaches of the Internet pursuing yet another of the personal vendettas that have peppered his less than illustrious career.

While Harrington gets on with what Harrington does best (which is not very much at all), the man he induced to undertake electoral spoiling duties at the behest of Nick Griffin flounders.

Richard Barnbrook, much pitied but largely abandoned to his own devices, appears to have been thrown into the laps of the Walker brothers, who are humouring him hugely. It was via Barnbrook’s Facebook page that Mark Walker sent out some of his ominous “friendly advice”.

Ultimately doomed by his initial association with the Butler camp, Barnbrook is the pliant prisoner of the Griffinites who captured him, painfully eager to please the guards set to watch and control his every move, cushioned from the reality of his humiliation by the carefully maintained illusion that he really is mounting a serious independent leadership challenge.

Doubtless the Walkers have difficulties in preventing a matching pair of sly smiles from stealing across their lips as they listen to the wretched Barnbrook’s plans and make approving nods in all the right places. Their job as his wards includes that of keeping Barnbrook busy, and to that end the GLA member is in County Durham to help in the campaign to have Adam Walker elected to Spennymoor Town Council.

For the occasion Walker has produced a cheap word-processed leaflet in which he says that a path he helped to clear was “drastically needed”, and seems, as BNP people are prone to do, to elevate the influence of the lowest and least influential tier of governance well beyond its bounds, asking: “Why do we need to produce council, benefits, medical and police documents in umpteen different languages and provide and pay for expensive professional interpreters?”

Why indeed, since this is not something likely to trouble Spennymoor Town Council?

How well Walker’s campaign is progressing might be gauged from a post made on Monday evening by Richard Barnbrook on his new blog, presumably in an unguarded Walker-less moment: “I have to laugh, or I would ‘Cry’…. So fare today 3 people turned out to canvas in Spennymoor!” (sic).

Not very well at all, then.

Still, while at least some microscopic BNP activity is taking place in the north-east, elsewhere

BNP activity flourishes according to the BNP website, which seems to report a fresh outbreak every other day. The trouble is that the bulk of these “activities” appear with a suspicious regularity to be concentrated in the north-west, the home turf of regional organiser, tall tale teller and Griffin goon Clive Jefferson.

These reports are invariably accompanied by photographs of a very few people who have apparently sold a very large number of BNP newspapers and delivered impossible quantities of BNP literature to an adoring public. New members are just falling out of the heavens, and talk of breakthroughs and successes to come abounds, much as it has for the past several fruitless years.

Breakthroughs and successes require money and activists, both of which are in increasingly short supply as donors are loath to throw good money after bad and members walk away in disillusionment or entrench themselves in the rival leadership camps. But no matter,

Nick Griffin has signposted the road to electoral heaven on the BNP website in a mini-manifesto entitled “What Is Going to be Done”, coincidentally (and wisely) decamping to France for his holidays before anybody can ask, “Exactly How Is It Going To Be Done?”.

A screed of praise to Jim Dowson intermingled with the same hopelessly unrealistic but fine-sounding plans that have been thrown at the jaded membership of every failing political movement since time began, I don’t propose here to discuss at length that which Griffin and the BNP cannot possibly achieve.

“What Is Going to be Done” may sway the gullible, as it is intended to do, with its magic vote-winning computers, mobile homes that dispense iced water and suncream on hot days, and a 30-acre BNP place in the country, but all of this requires money, and huge amounts of it. But money is something the BNP does not have – in fact it does not have it to the extent that it owes ever increasing quantities of the national currency to an ever growing list of unpaid creditors.

Unless Griffin has found for the BNP a sugar daddy, one who pays the rent rather than one who screws the party and departs in the morning without leaving so much as a discreet farthing on the mantelpiece, then his plans for the BNP will need to be retitled “What Is Not Going To Be Done”. As

Honest Eddy Butler points out, the needless EHRC case has so far cost the BNP £300,000 with more to come, both Michaela Mackenzie and Mark Collett are in a position to bankrupt the party, as are any one of a “frightening” number of creditors not as emotionally bound to the BNP as Mackenzie and Collett.

By way of example, according to Butler, who we have no reason to doubt, the party’s Midland depot is now four months in arrears with rent and council taxes, and the telephone, gas and electricity bills have not been paid. These debts alone must already amount to something between £5,000 to £10,000, and there is no obvious way in which they can be met.

The recent spate of hysterical postal appeals, as we know from other sources, have brought in desultory returns even when backed up by emailed variants, not even enough to cover the £5,000 cost (Butler’s figure) of each appeal.

So the grand plans of “What Is Going to be Done” are so much stuff and nonsense, as its author is well aware, since the BNP will be lucky to own a rubber stamp by the end of the year, let alone contemplate moving into a 30-acre complex somewhere in the Midland countryside.

Since throwing down the gauntlet, Eddy Butler has presented himself as the “honest man” candidate, one interested in financial transparency, the guy who’s on the side of the members, yet his remarks at a campaign meeting held in East London on July 20th would suggest there are limits to his more agreeable traits, and there are circumstances in which he would turn a blind eye to corruption at the top.

Here we must stress, as Butler repeatedly stresses, that what follows is hearsay – though it is hearsay he frequently returns to, and it is the same hearsay which underpins his campaign to unseat Nick Griffin. Butler clearly gives far more weight to it than he is prepared to admit to in public.

The story, as told by Butler, is that in mid-March the then BNP staff manager Emma Colgate visited treasurer David Hannam at his new office. While Colgate was there Hannam received a call from Nick Griffin, which was overheard by Colgate (Butler is hazy as to how, suggesting that Hannam had the speakerphone switched on). Griffin, it is alleged, asked Hannam to pay off his personal credit card in a sum, Butler says, that amounted to six figures. Hannam apparently demurred at the idea of using party money to pay Griffin’s personal debts, but Griffin “had a bit of a go” at Hannam and ordered him to pay.

Hannam then said to Colgate that there were “all kinds of bad things going on in the party, to do with the party’s finances – serious stuff”.

Serious stuff indeed. Serious criminal stuff, if any of this is true.

Colgate then told Eddy Butler, at that time the BNP’s national organiser. Publicity director Mark Collett became aware of the allegations, and soon after Hannam forwarded a recording of a private conversation he had held with Collett to Griffin, who then sacked Colgate, Butler and Collett from their positions, and, just as the BNP election campaign opened, ran to the press and police with wild tales of death threats which were to dog the BNP until polling day.

Explaining this at his campaign meeting, Butler says: “In discussions I said, look, if this is true … we’re in the run up to a general election campaign. If we don’t do well and we don’t get all these seats, and we haven’t got all the momentum with us – which would make up for everything, frankly, wouldn’t it? – then we’ll have to raise the issue…”

This seems a fairly clear indication that before his sacking, Butler was minded not to press the matter of the alleged credit card payment provided the BNP did well in the general election, and would have happily kept his inside knowledge of the alleged transaction from the membership in those circumstances.

This strange ambivalence does not sit well with the “honest man” image Butler is at great pains to project. Misuse of funds for the alleged purpose recounted by Butler is common or garden corruption. There is no sense in which corruption can be vindicated, no situation in which suppressing knowledge of it will “make up for everything”.

It is noteworthy that the mental circumlocutions afflicting Eddy Butler seemed also to afflict the audience to which he recounted his squalid little tale. He had, after all, just told them that their money had allegedly been stolen, but that would have been made up for if only the BNP had done better in the general election. Not one member of the audience took issue with him.

And finally, those of you of strong constitution who flock every Sunday morning to listen to the latest instalment of the Green Arrow’s “Voice of the British Resistance” may have been alarmed to learn from the constipated-sounding Voice that the “growth of babies born to foreign women has doubled.”

The Voice does not enlighten us as to the cause of this unparalleled phenomenon, but we’re fairly certain it is related to the heavy ingestion of alcohol on the part of an amoebic intellect seized by a compulsion to record dotty internet podcasts in the darkness of a coal bunker situate somewhere in South Wales.

Perhaps a friend – or even an ex-friend, if, courtesy of Harrington, he has one or two to spare – should have a word?

Denise Garside

A message from Nick Lowles at HOPE not hate:

Day by day the violent and racist English Defence League are becoming more dangerous. This shocking video exposes the truth behind this self professed “peaceful” group. Watch this video and then share it with everyone you know:

The EDL exists for one simple reason: they want to spread fear and hatred throughout the UK – and it’s only going to get worse.

In a few weeks the EDL will be invading Bradford for what they’re calling “The Big One.” Once again they plan on attacking the Muslim population.

We’ve been down this route before – the riots in Bradford in Oldham were sparked by small groups of violent racists attacking the local community.

We simply can’t let that happen again. I’ll be in touch about Hope not Hate’s plans to combat the EDL in the next few days – but for the moment please watch this video, share it with your friends and get as many of them as possible to sign up to our campaign.

http://action.hopenothate.org.uk/EnglishDefenceLeague (click)

We’ve really got our backs against the wall on this one – we’re all going to need to take ownership of this issue.

Please email a link to this post to everyone you know.

Best wishes,

Nick

HOPE not hate

BNP leader Nick Griffin will be denied entry to a garden party at Buckingham Palace “due to the fact he has overtly used his personal invitation for party political purpose through the media”.

In a statement Buckingham Palace said: “This in turn has increased the security threat and the potential discomfort to the many other guests also attending.”

Mr Griffin’s personal invitation to the garden party on Thursday was issued to him as an elected member of the European Parliament. The palace statement said: “The decision to deny entry is not intended to show any disrespect to the democratic process by which the invitation was issued. However, we would apply the same rules to anyone who tried to blatantly politicise their attendance in this way.”

The BNP leader was set to attend last year as a guest of a BNP London assembly member but pulled out after an outcry. In an e-mail to supporters sent on Wednesday, Mr Griffin said he would be representing “a million British patriots who vote for this party”.

“This event shows just how far this party has come in the last few years but I won’t be at the Palace for myself or my family. No! I will be there to represent the patriots who made this possible; I’ll be there for you.”

He asked them to suggest what he should say to the Queen if they spoke at the event.

He was set to attend the party with wife Jackie and fellow BNP MEP Andrew Brons. It is not clear whether Mr Brons will attend. The BNP leader was expected to be among the 8,000 guests at the event which will be hosted by the Queen and also attended by the Duke of Edinburgh.

Other members of the Royal Family who will be mingling on the Palace’s lawns include the Duke of York, The Duke and Duchess of Gloucester and the Duke of Kent.

BBC

From Clive Jefferson’s “Cumbrian Patriots” BNP blog:

Mr Griffin, himself a rare breed pig breeder, at his small holding in Wales, was most impressed by the rare and endangered breed section of the show and is pictured above with a endangered breed of goat that incredibly was imported into Britain by an ancestor of Mr Griffins in 1380

Some time ago a correspondent of mine described the relationship of Patrick Harrington and the BNP as being something like that of a louse to a human head, in that the louse, as nature has programmed it to do, goes about its parasitic business of sucking blood with no appreciable benefits accruing to the unfortunate head, and rather the opposite, since the itching caused as the parasite crawls about while excreting waste products on to the scalp of its host is thought to be an unhealthy state of affairs.

Mr Harrington (or Mr Sharp, as he prefers on the proper occasion to be known) is a past customer of ours, of note not for what he has achieved in the course of his political career, but for what he has failed to achieve. There are no heights to which he has ever risen, nor any depths out of which he has ever climbed – not, of course, that these impediments have ever prevented Mr Harrington from conceiving in his mind a stratospheric opinion of his own intellectual capabilities and apparently sweeping accomplishments.

Like the louse described by my correspondent, Mr Harrington is very difficult to get rid of once contracted. Immune to all known remedies, he relentlessly engages himself in the business of never having to earn his living in the workaday world, this business of never having to earn his living in the workaday world usually involving earning it, in one way or another, from the membership of the BNP – or the “plebs”, as BNP councillor Paul Golding so delightfully describes those who worked so hard to bring about his election and who pay his wages.

Mr Harrington, as we know, is very much concerned that the financial rug is about to be pulled from under his feet, his toytown “trade union” being dependent on BNP cash, and he himself now being employed by the BNP in a “human resources” role. Since Eddy Butler is certain to apply a very large boot to Mr Harrington’s backside should he, by some miracle, ever come to lead the BNP, Mr Harrington understandably finds his sleep much disturbed of late as support for Butler fails to subside.

He is also desperately worried that whatever the outcome of the BNP’s current tribulations, the remaining membership base will be too small to pay the party’s bloated wage bill, and that he may be obliged to return to a life funded by state benefits claimed in whichever of his names he represents himself to officialdom. And he is right to be worried. The BNP’s income stream has all but dried up, the regular appeals for donations are known to be failing badly, and the party is believed to be close to insolvency, if it is not already insolvent in fact.

The prospects look bleak indeed for Patrick Harrington, but his best and only chance of survival as Nick Griffin’s gofer in a somehow revived BNP lies in the survival of Griffin himself, which in turn depends on scotching Eddy Butler’s leadership challenge by foul means or fouler means. To that end Mr Harrington has set to work with a mendacious enthusiasm, openly abusing his dubious position as general secretary of the micro-”trade union” Solidarity by using it to issue anti-Butler statements (in a “personal” capacity, you understand) and tweeting in much the same vein to whoever on this planet it is that bothers to follow his self-important musings.

His best service to date is that of successfully (a word we do not normally associate with Mr Harrington) taking the flaky Richard Barnbrook into metaphorical custody, and to turn Barnbrook’s dissatisfaction with the Griffin leadership against Griffin’s deadly rival Eddy Butler, thus transforming Barnbrook into an active, if unwitting, agent of Nick Griffin. Butler, somewhat subversively, sums the matter up best:

Richard has been all over the place during the last few weeks and in a state of emotional turmoil. In this circumstance he has been preyed upon by Pat Harrington and a few others. Unbelievably, he is unable to see that Harrington is exploiting him as a stooge for Nick Griffin. Richard is distraught as his partner has left him, his house is empty of furniture and basics such as cutlery and crockery. He lost again in Goresbrook ward, he has been replaced as local organiser, his filmed performances in the Greater London Assembly have gone from bad to worse, and in addition to all this his main underlying problem has become more acute. It is actually a rather distasteful spectacle to see Nick Griffin cajole Richard, while in this very vulnerable state, into standing as a leadership contender. Richard has no serious backing apart from loaned false support from Griffinites eager to derail the process.

The problem with bringing Patrick Harrington on board is that he is widely detested even among some of Griffin’s closest allies, who are rather more au fait with Mr Harrington’s character and history than the average BNP member, who will know him only as the much lauded leader (the Walker brothers notwithstanding) of the stunted Solidarity.

Mr Harrington appears to have been on hand at the employment tribunal hearing the unfair dismissal case brought against Nick Griffin by Michaela Mackenzie, providing us with that rarest of spectacles, an employment tribunal at which a “trade union” general secretary is not on the team of a badly wronged employee, but that of the boss who wronged her. According to Mackenzie, Nick Griffin took the stand and began “venomously spouting the most ridiculous lies about me”. We do not know if he did so consequent upon any advice Mr Harrington might have proffered.

A further spectacle is provided by the employment of Mr Harrington and Solidarity president Adam Walker to oversee Human Resources and Staff Management in regard to BNP employees, who are all members of Solidarity – putting BNP employees in the unique position of having as bosses their own “trade union” leaders.

Of this situation Nick Griffin wrote: “We, however, have learned from this [the Mackenzie] case, which is one reason we have now created a dedicated Human Resources/Staff Management team to ensure that from now on everything is done by the book by people who know all the ropes.”

By which he means disgruntled BNP employees will find themselves up Harrington Creek without a paddle.

Getting back to Barnbrook, while the romantically challenged GLA member dithered over his initial support for Eddy Butler, his website remained online, the domain being owned by sacked BNP webmaster Simon Bennett. When Harrington “turned” Barnbrook (possibly offering to loan him a knife and fork as a sweetener) Bennett retrieved the richardbarnbrook.com domain, pointing it at his own YourBNP website.

Outraged Griffinites, comically crying that Bennett had sabotaged Barnbrook’s Griffin-inspired leadership non-challenge, immediately opened up the ever dripping tap of lies to claim that Bennett had pointed the Barnbrook domain at at Eddy Butler’s leadership challenge website. In fact, until the change propagated through DNS servers worldwide, those attempting to access richardbarnbrook.com got either the original site or were taken to YourBNP. At no time did the domain point to Butler’s challenge website.

However that may be, Barnbrook needed a website and a blogspot was quickly provided to assure him that he was still important, still loved, and still taken seriously. The website has everything but the stricture that “this website was created on the orders of Patrick Harrington”, who has rather a fondness for ordering websites into existence.

Barnbrook’s self-penned articles are easy to spot – “For the first time a Minister is to scrutanised….. Bob Neil MP (Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for Communitiess and Local Government” – but others (“Richard Barnbrook: Leadership Challenge”), like “his” 150-word statement on the BNP website, are clearly the work of an individual less well-acquainted with the joys of Oddbins.

Who that individual may be, we could not possibly say – but somebody sly, treacherous, and cynically willing to manipulate a man presently in his deepest cups, obviously.

Barnbrook has been played like a violin, as it is perhaps superfluous to state, and finds himself between a rock and a hard place since burning his bridges with Butler. He has nowhere to go, and no obvious future.

He has immediate usefulness to Nick Griffin only in as much as he has allowed himself to become a stooge in the stitched-up nominations process, but he has spoken against Nick Almighty, and for that there will never be forgiveness. If there is a BNP when the current turmoil has subsided, and if that BNP is led by Nick Griffin, then Barnbrook may be tolerated until he comes up for re-election to the GLA in 2010, but his days as an insider (if he ever really was an insider) are over, and – if, as is likely, Griffin refuses to allow him to re-contest for his GLA seat – his days as a BNP member are numbered.

As Barnbrook will sooner or later realise, his “friend” Mr Harrington has interests by far closer to his heart than those of a furniture-free GLA member, and that whatever is good for Nick Griffin and his gofer Mr Harrington will prove to be decidedly toxic to himself.

Of course, we are here factoring out the likelihood – the certitude, if we are to believe Eddy Butler – that the shady antics of Nick Griffin and the symbiotic Mr Harrington are pointing the BNP directly at the High Court – an eventuality (it is my personal opinion) that will throw the BNP back by at least a decade if it survives the experience at all, whatever the outcome.

The great shame of it all for Richard Barnbrook is that he finds himself simultaneously loathed by the Butler camp for his “betrayal”, and in the humiliating position of being little more than a patsy breaking on the megalomania of the man who promised him political riches but who effectively killed his political career stone dead.

Just a few weeks ago Barnbrook had it on Griffin’s authority that by now he would be leader of the BNP opposition on Barking and Dagenham Council, if not leader of the council itself, but here he finds himself, an object of contempt to both sides in the bitter civil war raging within the BNP, and without so much as a pot to… well, you know. Literally.

Denise Garside

Putting his name forward as a prospective leadership challenger, Richard Barnbrook has condemned the BNP to eternal rule by Nick Griffin.

Barnbrook, along with Griffin glove-puppet Derek Adams, has not the slightest chance of garnering enough nominations to put his name on the leadership ballot, but that does not appear to be the point.

In submitting themselves to the draconian Griffin-devised leadership contest rules Barnbrook and Adams are strengthening the Griffinite case for declaring Eddy Butler’s challenge invalid, since Butler has refused to accept the rules, declaring them “unconstitutional” while continuing to collect nomination signatures on his own forms, holding meetings and maintaining a web presence – all proscribed in an organisers’ bulletin issued by Clive Jefferson at Griffin’s behest.

Appearing unexpectedly on the BNP website late yesterday, the announcement that Butler, Barnbrook and Adams were seeking nomination seems to be little more than a sop to a notional idea of “fair play” utterly alien to the Griffin leadership but necessary to quell growing doubts amongst the membership at large and to arm Griffin with the right credentials against accusations of a “fix”. To that end, each of the three prospective challengers’ 150 word statements are published, along with that of incumbent Griffin – who cannot restrain his authoritarian tendencies, referring to “futile, time-wasting elections”.

Why the election is “futile” Griffin does not explain, but it really isn’t that difficult to work out.

The momentum gained by the Butler campaign has terrified Nick Griffin and those he has promoted to paid positions, who could not expect to survive a Butler win. One such is the execrable Patrick Harrington, now a direct employee of the BNP while remaining head of the joke Solidarity “trade union” and a member of the tiny National Liberals/Third Way. Harrington, as we saw many moons ago, sometimes likes to bank money in the name P.A. Sharp, which he – perhaps uniquely – claims to be his “married name”. (We should not care to encourage speculation in regard to which name Harrington/Sharp has thus far employed when claiming his state benefits).

Eddy Butler has been aware of Harrington’s interference in BNP affairs (clearly with the tacit approval of Nick Griffin) for some time, and yesterday, speculating the advent of a Griffinite stooge candidate, wrote:

…news has reached me that the mastermind of the ‘stalking horse’ campaign is none other than our old friend Pat Harrington. Harrington has been busily trying to bamboozle a ‘name’ into putting himself forward. Persuading the ‘name’ that he is ever so popular, that he can be the ‘third way’ candidate to unite the party above the Griffin-Butler factions. The ‘name’ is in a slightly vulnerable situation and can’t see that he is being used by Harrington as a stooge – to derail the nomination process on behalf of Nick Griffin.

As Derek Adams is hardly a “name” in the BNP at large, Butler is clearly referring to Barnbrook.

Even those kindly disposed towards Barnbrook would not claim for him either a sweeping intellect or any dim flickerings of managerial talent. Barnbrook would be the candidate everybody likes but nobody will vote for. In fact, hobbling his own chances of obtaining sufficient nominations to put him on the ballot, Barnbrook (or the sneaking Harrington?) begins his 150-word statement: “Famed as ‘the man in the beige suit’, dyslexic and partial to the occasional drink, I know my limitations!”

An inability to know when he is being suckered would appear to be high on the list of those “limitations”.

Completing the “fair play” charade is the announcement that the thus far silent Andrew Brons, youthful Nazi and now BNP MEP for Yorkshire and Humberside, is to be the “official scrutineer”.

This is indeed a clever move on Griffin’s part. Brons has respect within the BNP and has so far (apparently) kept his distance from the Griffin-Butler dogfight. He is seen as intelligent, working hard in the EU parliament, and about as fair and impartial as it is possible to be within the BNP. He lends, as is intended, a bogus respectability and legitimacy to the self-serving Griffin devised rules that will govern the conduct of the nomination gathering process.

Brons (assuming his impartiality is genuine) is as much a patsy as Richard Barnbrook.

The nuts and bolts of the game-plan are fairly clear now. The primary intent is to prevent Eddy Butler’s name ever going on to the leadership ballot, since even achieving the 20% voting member requirement would be tacit proof of widespread internal dissatisfaction with Nick Griffin, and would fatally damage his leadership.

To that end, out goes the failed strategy of the smear blogs and in comes something that is on the surface more agreeable but no less poisonous to the Butler challenge.

With fair-minded Andrew Brons superintending the bizarre nominations process, with the popular Richard Barnbrook and one other candidate joining the fray on the terms imposed by Griffin, the process is effectively legitimised. Griffin has but to point out that if the rules are good enough for Brons, Barnbrook and Adams, then why does Eddy Butler not accept them, and why does he continue to operate in clear breach of them?

From there, it follows, that every nomination signature gathered by the Butler campaign will, as the Griffin/Jefferson bulletin promised, be declared invalid, and with neither Barnbrook or Adams coming close to the 20% requirement there will be no leadership election.

This is going to end in tears. And in court.

Denise Garside