Barnbrook a non-person?

Just a few days before his hearing before the Standards Board and a week before the BNP's annual Derbyshire love-in for racists news has been reaching us that the party's much lauded Greater London Assembly member Richard Barnbrook is in deep trouble with the paranoic British National Party leadership.

In Orwellian moves typical of Nick Griffin and his Stalinist style of leadership the BNP has ceased making positive mentions of the man who, until the election of Griffin and ex-Nazi Andrew Brons to the European Parliament, had been the BNP's most prominent elected politician, and - more ominously - has removed a link to Barnbrook's blog from the main BNP website.

In fact the blog has disappeared altogether, replaced with a photo of Barnbrook captioned with the sinister words "Under reconstruction".

Since Griffin's election to the Euro Parliament a cabal of Griffin yes-men has been put in place to run the party during the leader's frequent absences, and it appears there has been widespread resentment at the influence of these lackies, who include the idiotic Mark Collett and shady South African emigre and former spook Arthur Kemp.

There is also on-going disquiet that yet again the party is to be fined for failure to file its accounts on time, internal BNP financial practices that give rise to suspicions of fraud, and - last but not least - some of the more savvy members have finally worked out that despite the lucky chance that saw Griffin and Brons elected to Europe, the party's performance was dismal in both the European and County Council elections.

This was driven home when the Griffin-selected candidate for the Norwich North by-election, the fake "reverend" Robert West, scraped only a morale destroying 2.7% of the vote, and in three notable local by-elections in recent weeks where its vote plummeted by a half to two thirds.

Richard Barnbrook seems to have become associated with BNP dissidents who believe that Griffin should step aside from the leadership, and his punishment (so far) seems to be that of being made persona non grata.

Griffin runs the BNP with the same degree of paranoia that he once ran the National Front, divisions and purges following the man around like a dog on a lead. Making Barnbrook a non-person could be the harbinger to yet another round of Griffin-inspired expulsions, but we doubt that Barnbrook himself will be touched unless a plausible excuse can be found to sell his departure to the gullible BNP membership.

We are, though, expecting the fun to begin at regional and branch level very soon as Griffin's men identify and isolate the dissenters.