Can the BNP ever lose its racist reputation?

A vandalised British National Party billboard in John Street, Carlisle

Splattered with paint and daubed with the words “Nazi scum”. . . an attack on a British National Party billboard in Carlisle shows emotions are running high ahead of European Parliament and county council elections.

Yet the far-right party, which has condemned the vandalism, insists it has received a positive response from voters across Cumbria as it canvasses for next Thursday’s ballots.

Some remain less enthusiastically inclined towards the BNP though. They are concerned a low turnout or an anti-establishment voting trend – in fury at the Westminster expenses scandal – could play right into the party’s hands and deliver the mass protest vote it has been hoping for. Those worries have triggered a campaign to limit any BNP gains.

Opinions about the BNP have rarely hit the middle ground since its formation in the early 1980s by John Tyndall, a former chairman of the National Front. He was a man photographed in Nazi uniform – without attending fancy dress parties – and who described Adolf Hitler’s book Mein Kampf as his bible.

Other members have also been reported making extreme pro-Nazi, racist or homophobic comments over the years. Mark Collett, the BNP’s director of publicity, was made infamous by the 2002 television documentary Young, Nazi and Proud.

Former deputy leader Tony Lecomber was jailed for possessing explosives in 1985 and again in 1991 for assaulting a Jewish teacher.

Party chairman Nick Griffin, who visited Whitehaven on Saturday, has tried with limited success to rid the party of its racist image. But controversy continues to follow him. He denied the Holocaust ever happened in a party publication in 1996 and received a suspended jail sentence two years later for inciting racial hatred.

Mr Griffin – his party’s lead Euro election candidate for the north west – this week claimed the ‘controlled media’ had resorted to rehashing comments made a decade and a half ago to throw the BNP into a poor light.

“I have gone on record repeatedly as saying such things [Holocaust rejection] were immature politics and all of us have moved on,” he said.

Yet his insistence on having turned a corner has done little to wipe the slate clean of suspicions which still stalk the party. There was outrage last week at the prospect of Mr Griffin attending a garden party at Buckingham Palace. Yesterday he announced he would not be attending the garden party, in order not to embarrass the Queen.

And leading clergymen – including University of Cumbria chancellor Dr John Sentamu – have pleaded with the public not to let the Westminster expenses scandal convert into BNP votes, in protest against the three major parties.

Carlisle Against Racism has been a prominent campaign group against the BNP, which is standing in 42 of the 84 council seats. By the end of this week, it will have distributed 30,000 copies of its anti-BNP leaflets to homes including those in Carlisle, Longtown, Brampton, Penrith, Wigton, Silloth and Alston. Chairman Brent Kennedy believes the newly glossed image of the party – activists wearing suits proffering slick campaign leaflets – could lure many towards an alternative.

“They don’t know about the truth,” he said. “People just see the glossy leaflets – the false image they are physically putting out.”

He and other campaigners have been working to gather support for their work in Carlisle city centre. Mr Kennedy said: “We have had people saying they are going to vote BNP because they are racist. Some are people who are not racist but desperate because of the economic crisis and angry about MPs enriching themselves. On the other hand, a big majority were really supportive. They were thanking us for campaigning against the BNP, which the political parties are not doing.”

The anti-racism activist, who claims he has been attacked and intimidated while carrying out his work, has clear fears should the BNP taste electoral success.

“I’m worried there will be an increase of racist abuse and attacks on people and political opponents of theirs if they get a Euro MP elected. I have already contacted the police about that,” he revealed.

The church has also been drawn into the electioneering arena with Dr Sentamu, the Archbishop of York, and Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams urging people to use “great vigilance” when deciding who to vote for. They claimed some parties would exploit the current political situation if elected and said the BNP fostered “fear and division within communities, especially between people of different faiths or racial background”.

“This is not a moment for voting in favour of any political party whose core ideology is about sowing division in our communities and hostility on grounds of race, creed or colour,” they added. “It is an opportunity for renewing the vision of a community united by mutual respect, high ethical standards and the pursuit of justice and peace.”

BNP supporters in Cumbria are undoubtedly in a minority. But in the European elections – where a proportional representation voting system is used to ensure the number of MPs from each political party reflects the share of votes they received regionally – that could be enough to secure a seat. That is a factor which has mobilised trade unions. The Public and Commercial Services Union has launched a Make Your Vote Count campaign, backed by the Northern TUC, and will be in Carlisle on Saturday. May 30.

Regional co-ordinator Gordon Rowntree said: “Because the European elections use proportional representation there is a fear there. In the north west Nick Griffin could be elected. That’s why we’re working to get turnout higher because that would help the other political parties.”

Clive Jefferson, the BNP’s Cumbrian organiser, maintains his party has moved on and away from the racism linked to it in its early days. He said: “All of the opposition or people who would tar us with the same brush are using things from decades ago. It’s not relevant to the party today.”

The activist, who said his chairman did not encounter any aggression in Whitehaven on Saturday and criticised senior churchmen for their comments, vehemently denied his party was racist.

“It’s not racist, fascist or Nazi, as left-wing extremists dub us. I don’t think the majority of people think that now. What we’ve got are left-wing extremists, as I would call them, peddling this kind of rubbish,” he added.

Mr Jefferson also denied activists used any intimidation and said: “If anyone is telling you that, I would like them to tell me. It should be reported to police. This will not be tolerated. That’s not how we go about things. We are a political party.”

He described the vandal attacks on the poster in Caldewgate, Carlisle, as “nasty”.

Polling stations will be open between 7am and 10pm on Thursday, June 4. Cumbria County Council ballot papers will be counted the following day. The European count will be delayed until other countries have voted on June 6 and 7.

News and Star

'British pensioners' on BNP election leaflet are actually Italian models

In fact NONE of them are anything to do with the BNP frauds

An elderly couple pictured on BNP election leaflets endorsing the party's anti-immigration views are actually Italian models, it can be disclosed.

Pamphlets being distributed by the far right party to 29 million homes ahead of next month's poll European and council polls feature testimonies from five "typical Britons", giving their reasons for voting BNP.

The endorsements from apparently respectable members of society – including a soldier, doctor, and young mother – reflect the party's attempt to appeal to mainstream voters. But far from depicting proud BNP supporters, the images are actually stock photos from online picture libraries that have been used by dozens of websites to promote everything from painkillers to caravans.

On the leaflet, the elderly couple are quoted complaining that hard-working Britons are being "pushed to the back of the queue by bogus asylum seekers". But last night Italian photographer Luca Di Filippo confirmed that the people in the photo were actually his parents, who had only ever visited this country as tourists and do not share the views of the BNP. The disclosure sits uncomfortably with the party's campaign slogan "British jobs for British workers".

Mr Di Filippo, who is now based in London, said he was astonished to see images of his mother and father being used to promote an extreme right wing party.

"I did not think they would be allowed to use a royalty-free image for political purposes. I'm really, really upset," he told The Daily Telegraph. "If the BNP had been open about what they were doing and asked me directly I would have said 'no thank you'."

The false testimonies were exposed with the help of a new site called The Straight Choice, which aims to compile all campaign leaflets produced in every constituency in the run up to the June 4 elections. Suspecting that the images on a BNP leaflet he scanned into the site were dubious, a blogger ran them through a "reverse image search engine" called TinEye, which traces previous appearances of pictures anywhere on the web.

At least three were for sale for a small fee on the iStockphoto website. The Canadian-based firm did not respond to enquiries about whether its customers were allowed to use images for political purposes. None of the people pictured, including an Irish Guardsman, would have given their explicit consent for their photos to be used to promote Nick Griffin's party, which is calling for the immediate end of all immigration to Britain.

Stephen Paulger, the 25-year-old computer programmer who with fellow blogger Tim Ireland uncovered the ruse, said that the misleading images caused the accompanying voter testimonies – which could be genuine – to lose all credibility.

"In politics everyone should always try to be as open as possible. I like websites like The Straight Choice because they force politicians to be more honest," he said. He wrote on his Newspeak blog: "The only conclusion I can make is that no real BNP voters were keen enough to appear on the leaflets."

Francis Irving, one of the team of volunteers who created The Straight Choice to "up the game" of the electorate and raise the level of political dialogue, said that he believed more stories would emerge as their library of election pamphlets grows.

"We hope to uncover a few political scandals and expose hypocrisy – like parties who produce a graph of past local election results but miss out the year they did badly. There's a whole bunch of interesting stories that will come out," he said. "First of all we want people in every constituency to scan in the leaflets they receive, to create a resource for other people to scrutinise and analyse.

"We are doing this to restore trust; it's positive. I personally think politics is really important and there are vital things going on in the world. We want to reduce the gameplaying of party politics and make politicians focus on things that affect people's lives."

The disclosures will embarrass the BNP, but could also have legal repercussions. European election law forbids candidates to pay canvassers, who are defined as anyone who "by word, message, writing or in any other manner, endeavours to persuade any person" to vote for a particular party.

The Electoral Commission, which oversees all elections held in Britain, said it was unclear whether a model who was indirectly paid to appear on a campaign pamphlet could be classified as a canvasser. It would be up to the police to investigate if they received complaints, a spokesman said.

A BNP spokesman said that the images were "clearly meant to be representative" and denied that the party had broken the law.

"All the major political parties use actors in their adverts," he said." We would love to use photos of real police officers and nurses who are BNP voters but they would have lost their jobs."

He insisted the party's employment policies were not undermined by using photos of foreigners: "How on earth are we supposed to vet all our models?"

Telegraph

Richard Barnbrook sidelined for BNP Euro election campaign?

I had to laugh last week when the BNP's Activists' and Organisers' Handbook and BNP Language & Concepts Discipline Manual got some coverage in the press.*

It was all too easy to see our favourite London-based fascist in the pages describing 'Walter Mitty characters' and 'oddballs'.

Apparently:

The Internet is also populated by superficially convincing conspiracy theorists. A few of these theories may actually be true, but the general public are unlikely to work that out, so for nationalists to accept and publicise them would only allow the media to portray us as cranks. If you have any such 'hobbyhorses', keep them strictly to yourself, don't discuss them at meetings and don't post them anywhere in cyberspace.
[From part 23, 'Technology', of Activists' and Organisers' Handbook.]

I wonder if they mean conspiracy theories like:

Most of it [real crime, which is done on the streets, as opposed to fake crime, which presumably goes on in buildings and forests] is being done by immigrants or by the sons of immigrants who have been protected by a despicable government desperate for the Ethnic Block-Vote.

Which appeared in an early version of Barnbrook's blog post Blame the Immigrants before it was swiftly removed from the post.

Or maybe they mean posts like one that was incredibly swiftly stuffed in the memory hole - the classic Throw the lot out - which included this:

Labour want to keep the terrorists here because they depend on the votes from the Muslims, and the Muslims have assured Labour that they will always vote for them as long as they don't come down too hard on any suicide bombers or jihadists.

The BNP also say:

never speak of the situation in Britain as hopeless or of British society as corrupt to the point of worthlessness.
[Bold and underlining in original. Sorry. From rule 10 of BNP Language & Concepts Discipline Manual]

I wonder if this rule had anything to do with the infamous Blame the Immigrants being removed from the blog completely, since it said, comically:

I have no time for these liberals. I despise them.....not for their person, but for their values....for everything that they believe in, although I am not so sure that they even believe it. I am talking about all these dirty politicians and journalists who sit in their homes smoking their drugs and telling themselves they have made Britain better. Well its not. Its a cess-pit and its the young people who have to swim in its filth.

Cess pit, eh?

Barnbrook has also recently stopped his practice of giving 'Walter Mitty' style interpretations of his performance in Mayor's Question Time while linking to actual footage exposing the reality of his abysmal performance, which sees him often impatiently dismissed, or openly laughed at and made to look a fool. Not by stopping the bits where he pretends to have really stumped the Mayor when in fact he's been told off for eating a banana or something, but by leaving out the links to the actual videos.

In fact, quite a lot seems to have been left out of Barnbrook's blog recently. I'm not just talking about New'd Labour in which he includes 'hilarious' pictures of himself and a woman in her underwear standing outside Jaqui Smith's house, but leaves out the detail that he stuffed mucky books through her letterbox (Google it - it was covered on the BNP site). I mean the entire blog. There hasn't been anything there for the best part of a month - despite his having led the BNP charge at the St George's celebrations in London last week, and the whole thing has been pretty anodyne for quite a while now.

Activists' and Organisers' Handbook is now missing rules 14 and 15, as pointed out by Eric the Fish. Don't be fooled into thinking this means the BNP have dropped the idea that there can't be Black or Asian Britons. Griffin himself appeared on Radio 4 to defend the idea after all.

It seems that the BNP have realised what those of us who oppose them have known for ages. That the BNP themselves are our best asset. Whether it's their members and representatives or their actual policies and rules, things seem to be disappearing all over the place. It should be worrying for the party that its member with the most political power and potentially the highest profile in the party needs to be censored so often and hidden from you. Mind you, given the picture at the top here, you can understand why, eh?

*You'll have to Google them if you want a look, I'm afraid. I have a policy of not linking to the shovel-headed goons' own website.

Five Chinese Crackers

Strangers in the night (truth and the BNP re-mix)

Breaking news: Suffolk BNP candidate arrested

The Suffolk farmer who built gallows for export has been arrested just weeks after the British National Party chose him as a candidate for the European elections.

The BNP has confirmed that David Lucas (left), of Mildenhall, was arrested on Thursday and questioned by Suffolk Police and that he had been released on bail.

A spokesman for Suffolk police said: “A 48-year-old man from Lakenheath has been arrested on suspicion of handling stolen goods.

“He has been released on police bail to return to Bury St Edmunds police station on June.11.”

The BNP has said that the alleged incident will not prevent Mr Lucas, who lives at Eldon Farm in Holywell Row, from standing in the European election. He is in fifth place out of seven candidates from the East of England chosen by the party to fight for a seat in Brussels.

A spokesman said: “David woke up to find the police around the house. He was interviewed and then released.

“It follows a big fund raising party held on his property to raise funds for the campaign. We are not worried about the incident and he will remain on the party's election list of candidates.”

Nominations for the June 4 election close on May 7.

Ipswich Evening Star


BBC report: BNP candidate quizzed by police

A candidate for the British National Party (BNP) has been arrested by armed police in Suffolk.

David Lucas, who is standing in the European elections, was questioned on suspicion of handling stolen goods.

The arrest of Mr Lucas on Thursday is in connection with an incident at Halesworth, in Suffolk, last year.

The BNP confirmed that Mr Lucas had been arrested at his farm near Mildenhall and questioned before being released on bail.