Guess what? The BNP takes white-supremacist cash from the US

Who'd have thought it, eh? James Von Brunn, the white supremacist who shot dead a security guard, Stephen Tyrone Johns, at the Holocaust museum in Washington, attended fund-raising meetings of the American Friends of the British National Party.

Yes, I know you can't always blame political parties for where their funding comes from. But imagine if this had happened to a mainstream political party. Suppose the Conservative Party was found to have received funds from a raving anti-semite. Not exactly a source up there with Michael Ashcroft, is it? Suppose the Labour Party had accepted a donation from Hamas?

And remember the fuss we used to make about the IRA receiving financial support from the US? Yet somehow we're not that surprised, nor particularly alarmed apparently, that the BNP is supported by the kind of anti-semitic nutter who murders a Holocaust museum attendant, that BNP leader Nick Griffin has spoken at the AFBNP meetings that such pond-life attend and was only too happy to say that they made a "significant contribution" to the BNP's [2001] general election campaign.

I only mention this because the BNP's apologists have been out in force lately, after the ethnic-cleansing party won two Euro-seats, saying that I have to understand that the miseries and pressures put on communities subject to immigration push white people to vote for the BNP in protest.

I couldn't understand that, apparently, in my cosseted home-counties existence. Which is a bit rich when it comes from tank-topped, metropolitan, neo-cons, tapping away in their stripped-pine loft conversions, with their hearts bleeding for the oppressed Aryans of inner-city Bradford. Patronising or what?

Let me spell it out, BNP apologists. This is the company you keep when you concede that BNP voters have a point: James Von Brunn. It really won't do, saying: "I'm not a racist, but these immigrants are the problem, not the BNP." Immigration pales into insignificance as an issue compared with a party gaining elected representatives in the European parliament, which is funded by the Von Brunns of this world.

You don't have to be a wishy-washy, tree-hugging, airy-fairy, unpatriotic, sitting-on-the-fence liberal to rank the political danger of the BNP and its supporters above the effects of post-war immigration, serious as those are. You just have to be able to think. And to have read a book beyond one-shilling, war-hero trash mags. (Better now, thankyou, nurse).

Telegraph