As well as seeing the far right fail to muster a single candidate for the Police & Crime Commissioner last week, they also did very badly in the Corby by-election. The BNP fielded Gordon Riddell who only got 1.7% of the vote (in 2010 the party got 4.7% in Corby) and the English Democrats’ David Wickham did even worse with 1.2%. That’s two more lost deposits for the fascists!
Tag Archives: BNP
UKIP dominate Boston protest
Yesterday’s demonstration against immigration in Boston seemed to have been a moderate success for the right. In the end, the protest drew 150-300 people according to the Boston Standard. The event seems to have been dominated by local UKIP politician, Chris Pain, whose party’s flag was prominently positioned behind the speakers. Indeed, most of the placards displayed an anti-EU sentiment rather than outright xenophobia. Even so, it is worrying that an implicitly anti-foreigner event has drawn such a big turnout.
Protest organiser, Dean Everitt, searches for new ideas
EDL members from Lincolnshire, Nottingham and East Anglia traveled to take part in the event which was also trumpeted by BNP activist Craig Farnsworth. Their relatively small and muted presence (they didn’t feel confident enough to openly display their far right affiliations) was eclipsed by the better funded and more politically acceptable (to some!) politics of UKIP. However, that hasn’t stopped them from crowing about their success and how this small acorn will grow into a mighty oak and other such nonsense.
It is clear that, given the collapse of their own movements, the far right are now looking to other issues to piggyback on in the hope of finding new recruits and new forums for them to infect with their politics. Anti-fascists need to be alert to these tactics and be countering their arguments with our own perspective on global capitalist politics. It is only where the only voices are those blaming foreigners rather than the forces of international capital that the falsehoods pedaled by the extreme right can take hold.
The apparent success of the protest has led to the inevitable unimaginative response. They are going to hold another protest in the neighbouring town of Spalding some time in the future, presumably to keep flogging this horse until it’s well and truly dead.
Boston protest is a far right event
This Sunday will see an anti-immigration march take place in Boston, Lincolnshire. In the past, organiser Dean Everitt has made a big fuss about avoiding being “hijacked” by the far right but we can reveal that Sunday’s static demonstration at the Herbert Ingram memorial is a solidly far right event.
Dean Everitt has shown support for the Infidels of Britain, BNP and EDL on Facebook and of the 100 odd people who have signed up on Facebook, many are far right organisers and activists. They include Lincolnshire EDL organiser, Daz Healey, partner of Tony Curtis and former EDL speaker, Tracie Bird, organiser of the recent EDL demo in Norwich, Sam Burgess, BNP activist and in charge of the New Daily Patriot far right news site, Craig Farnworth, East Anglian EDL organiser, Ivan Humble, Shane Overton (Lincoln EDL), Sonya Greenberry-Coleman (Nottingham EDL) and Andy Reynolds (East Anglian EDL). Those who maybe going include Geoff Mitchell (East Anglian EDL), Louise Walsh (Nottingham EDL), Dom Woodhead (Keighley EDL), Tony Ball (Sunderland EDL), John Morrow (EDL) and Roy Wolfshead (CxF). The list of those invited includes British Freedom Party founder, Simon Bennett, Derbyshire BNP organiser, Paul Hilliard and Derbyshire BNP candidate, Emma Roper.
Dean Everitt: Organiser of the Boston Protest Group and currently under investigation for assault and criminal damage
- Tracie Bird, EDL speaker, partner of Tony Curtis and going to Boston this weekend
Sam Burgess, organiser of EDL demo in Norwich and fond of getting off on his own reflection
Craig Farnworth, BNP activist who runs the New Daily Patriot
Lincoln EDL member, Shane Overton, gets ready to “peacefully protest”
Considering the mess the EDL and BNP are in at the moment this could be a relatively big event for them and there will doubtless be more turning up who aren’t foolish enough to announce their presence on Facebook. It is quite hard to see how they this fits in with the stated mission of the EDL to combat “Islamic extremism” but when times are hard the far right turn to whatever cause they think is populist and likely to garner support for their own flagging organisations.
Local migrant rights organisations have expressed their worry about the demonstration turning ugly and resulting in violence and harassment of migrant workers and their families in the area. Given the kind of people who are pledging to turn up and the followers they will bring with them, it does not seem unreasonable. Let’s hope the people of Boston show them the same lack of respect they have done so far.
Nottingham BNP get behind Jimmy Savile
There aren’t many people prepared to publicly back Jimmy Savile at the moment. Nottingham BNP are willing to defend the dead abuser’s reputation, however – their spokesman, bonkers Bob Brindley, has taken to twitter to share his thoughts on the scandal.
Very tasteful, Bob. We have commented before on the far-right’s blind spot when it comes to white paedophiles, and Brindley again shows that horrendous abuse scandals only matter to the BNP if there’s a racist point to be made.
No “darkies” please – we’re the BNP
Anyone who’s been foolish enough to follow Nottingham BNP’s Twitter feed will know what a never-ending stream of reactionary rubbish it is. But this week Nottingham organiser, Bob Brindley, has surpassed himself with his advice to people voting for the Notts Police Commissioner:
Time to think b4 you vote for police commissioner in Nottingham – a hard line is needed – don’t vote for labour bloke or darkie
Well we would never think of this hanging and flogging enthusiast as anything but hardline, but this is really taking the piss. I mean, it’s not as if Labour weren’t hardline on crime with all of their “anti-social behaviour” crackdowns, draconian terrorism legislation and hundreds of new laws on the books. And what makes him think that the man he charmingly refers to as a “darkie”, Dr Raj Chandran, former Tory mayor of Gedling, won’t be hardline? Is it because he subscribes to some orientalist idea that Asians are “more feminine” than Europeans? Or is it just because he’s a fascist bastard? Does this mean that Brindley wants the official Tory candidate to be Police & Crime Commissioner? Or is he in favour of independent and former copper, Robert Spencer?
Sadly for Brindley there are no fascist candidates to vote for. Bob made a lot of noise about how he was going to run for the position earlier in the year, but has probably now been told that the party don’t have any money, seeing as Nick Griffin’s spunked it all up the wall fighting legal battles with Marmite and such. Besides, they almost certainly realise that sending a deranged, openly racist, spittle-flecked ranter out to public hustings with a BNP rosette on would be a PR disaster.
Brindley’s delicate choice of words to describe a non-white candidate isn’t coming at the best of times for the besieged fascist party. Former leader of the BNP in Stoke-on-Trent, Michael Coleman, was found guilty of racially-aggravated harassment last month, in relation to bile spouted on his blog. Coleman claimed that Stoke-on-Trent City Council were “flooding this city with Muslims and blacks, a complete population replacement programme. Darkies in, whites out”. According to Coleman, he had done nothing wrong, because he was just “explaining my views in the common language of the people of Stoke-on-Trent”. Presumably only the ones still using racist language from decades ago.
With cases like this cropping up all over the place, anyone would think the BNP was full of past-their-sell-by-date racists…
Gone with the wind
As an illustration of how the local BNP has been decimated over the past few years, check out this photo of local activists taken in the run up to the 2010 elections. All of these party activists have since fallen by the wayside.
- From left: Edward Holmes, Hilda Holmes, William “Chris” Bell, Lewis Allsebrook, Michael Clarke, Janina “Nina” Brown
Edward Holmes is probably the only Ashfield candidate to have featured in the local paper after being sent a blood-stained “hate effigy”. His other claim to fame was getting into a row with BBC presenter, Des Coleman, who was filming a documentary about the fascist party. Both Holmes and his wife Hilda were last seen standing as “independent nationalists” in Selston, at the end of last year, but there hasn’t been a peep out of them since and Holmes’ Ashfield Matters website, along with the Ashfield Patriot site, is defunct. Meanwhile, the Ashfield BNP which struggled to find candidates in last year’s local elections, has collapsed.
William Christopher “Chris” Bell, was the organiser of the always fairly weak Nottingham BNP until last year when he threw in the towel and left fascist nut, Bob Brindley, in control. Brindley was last spotted handing out leaflets on his own. Presumably Bell has gone back to running shit financial advice websites and being a dodgy student landlord.
Lewis Allsebrook had been falling out with just about the whole of the East Midlands BNP for a while before he finally quit the party in February this year claiming that the BNP only had a “shallow pool of members” in Amber Valley. He was backed by Mick Clarke, the party’s parliamentary candidate for Amber Valley in 2010 who also seems to have left the party. Allsebrook’s prediction proved to be correct as the BNP slumped at the polls and lost both its councillors in Heanor this May. Allsebrook maintained his Amber Valley Matters website for a while but it hasn’t been updated for months now. He seems to have given up hope on joining another nationalist party.
Nina Brown has been in and out of the BNP more times than we’ve been able to keep track of over the past 5 years. She was the person who famously let the BNP’s security team into Sadie Graham’s house to ransack it looking for evidence of treachery. Following this she and husband Dave were part of the group that resigned forming a major split in the BNP. When that didn’t work out the Browns came back to the fold, tails between their legs and were running the Broxtowe Nationalist website up until 2010. They were spotted representing the BNP at a neo-Nazi rally in Germany at the end of 2009. Broxtowe BNP has since collapsed and a recent attempt by David Wright to revive it seems doomed to failure.
Analysis of the leaked BNP membership list in 2008 suggested that NG16 in Broxtowe was the country’s “most racist postcode” with more members than any other. Leicester, Nottingham and Derby were the cities ranked as having the 2nd, 3rd and 8th most members, with Leicester and Nottingham both having more than London. Since those days the BNP has had a near total collapse across the region. Although the dregs still remain, the endless splits, exposures and infighting have destroyed the party and many local activists have left in disgust, been purged, or have just given up. Long may it continue!
Skegness abattoir controversy attracts fascists
Recent proposals to reopen an abattoir in Skegness have attracted local opposition, with a facebook group and online petition set up. The Heath Road abattoir closed down in January after it ran into financial difficulties , and the proposed re-opening has generated opposition because slaughter methods used there would be halal. Although the initial opposition was not overly linked to the far-right, fascists have been quick to take an interest in the issue, with the BNP’s Lincolnshire Coastal branch adopting it as their main campaigning theme. Other groups have been sniffing around the issue as well, and it’s certain that none would have criticised the abattoir reopening if it were to be staffed by “indigenous” knifemen.
Ritual slaughter for halal is becoming an important focus for the far-right, with the BNP in particular targeting it; they recently held a (piss-poorly attended) national picket of a branch of Subway in Sunderland which sells halal meat. They aim to portray their opposition to halal on the grounds of animal welfare, but unsurprisingly this rings rather hollow on investigation; there is no opposition from the fascists to factory farming in general, nor is there any indication of what they consider acceptable practice in a slaughterhouse might look like – the latest fundraising dinner of the Lincolnshire Coastal BNP featured Lincolnshire sausage, presumably obtained from consenting pigs who died quietly in their sleep, or something…..
The halal meat issue is (of course!) more complex than it is painted by the BNP. It is often argued by muslims that slaughter without pre-stunning (which is the central issue giving grounds to accusations of cruelty) is actually less distressful for the poor animal than the conventional methods of stunning – although almost every animal welfare organisation disagrees, and what scientific evidence there is suggests that stunning is less traumatic. For what it’s worth, this writer would guess that pre-stunning is indeed “less cruel”, but hopefully I’ll never know for sure.
However, it is important to note that, contrary to general impression, halal rules do permit the pre-stunning of animals, as long as the stunning itself does not kill the animal. It is also important to note that there are several interpretations of halal rules in practice – for example, there are differences about which methods of stunning are acceptable. The RSPCA cites an estimate, from the Meat Hygiene Service, that around 90% of UK halal-slaughtered animals are in fact pre-stunned – in other words, from a welfare standpoint, they are treated much the same as the majority of animals killed in non-ritual abattoirs. (The majority killed for kosher consumption are also pre-stunned, incidentally).
The BNP are yet again displaying their opportunism in portraying halal as “truly barbaric” and “un-British”, whilst showing no analysis of its complexities, nor any campaign on factory farming in general. Their failure to mention kosher slaughter, which is very similar to halal in most practical aspects, also shows their expediency – it’s not considered strategic to be overtly anti-semitic at the moment. A more progressive strategy for ensuring animal welfare in halal and kosher is not hard to imagine, perhaps involving campaigning for universal application of stunning to all ritual slaughter, for example. Of course many would argue that a slaughterhouse can never be “humane”….and non-halal abattoirs are certainly not exempt from shocking breaches of welfare standards.
The key point here is that any worthwhile campaign on animal welfare must be careful to deprive the far-right of another opportunity to demonise British muslims. The BNP and other fascist hangers-on will be unable to make political capital out of the Skegness abattoir controversy if they are opposed, and we hope that – yet again – they will be shown for the two-faced opportunists that they are.
Thurnby Lodge protests rumble on
Evidently sensing a major embarrassment, Leicester City Council is backpedalling furiously on its decision to lease an abandoned building to a Muslim charity. The latest news is that mayor Peter Soulsby has said that the council is looking for an alternative site for the As-Salaam Trust’s proposed community centre.
Mohammed Lockhat of the Muslim group said that some worshippers had stopped attending prayers at the existing community centre due to a level of “intimidation” from protests, which have featured members of the BNP, including leader Nick Griffin, the EDL and Casuals United. However, it would be wrong to write off the protests as entirely islamophobic in nature as locals have clearly criticised the involvement of “outside groups” like the BNP and EDL in the press saying that their protests are about a lack of transparency in the council’s allocation of the building.
The Leicestershire BNP’s report on the protests of course talks up the involvement of the party and introduces the Islamic bogeyman wherever possible, decrying the appearance of a group of Muslim youths after one of the protests. “[W]hy were random muslim youths from outside the area getting involved with an issue which is none of their business?” they ask with massive hypocrisy. Muslims from the other side of town had far more business to be there, when their co-religionists were facing intimidation from the far right, than did Nick Griffin, who drove over from Wales in an attempt to stir up trouble. Far right dregs from across the area descended like a pack of wolves at the rumour of a clash between whites and Muslims, so it was only natural that there would be some kind of defensive response.
The BNP repeated the long scotched fake rumour about a Christian cross being covered to avoid offending Muslims, although they picked a different area to the EDL. They also insinuated that once As-Salaam had the scout hut soon the pub would be shut, invoking the magical “thin end of the wedge” argument with apparently no evidence whatsoever.
The BNP are not very good at using the internet. “What is this As Salaam sect?” they ask. “Nobody knows, nobody has heard of them, and nothing comes up on Google.” They clearly aren’t very good at searching because within a few seconds I’d found the group’s Facebook page which is linked to from a number of other sites. Mystery solved. “Where is a small, completely unknown sect getting so much money from?” I would imagine that, like most religious organisations, As-Salaam gets its money comes from donations from local worshippers. Why there should be any dark secret about this is never explained.
Finally the BNP have their obligatory moan about the unfairness of the mainstream media, in this case the Leicester Mercury which they say has not “report[ed] what the people of Thurnby Lodge are protesting about. They’ve been awfully quiet on the subject so far!” What they mean, of course, is that the Mercury’s reporters aren’t giving coverage of the BNP’s own reasons for protesting. The Mercury has given extensive coverage to the protests and has quoted protesters at length but because it doesn’t match with the BNP’s analysis it doesn’t count.
On the positive side, the Cautiously Pessimistic blog has picked up on our posts on the matter and has some interesting ideas about how anti-authoritarians in Leicester could organise on this issue:
[I]f we’re going to decisively win people away from the far-right, we need to demonstrate that, while our enemies on the right are ultimately just another set of politicians-in-waiting, we’re actually willing and able to do practical things to improve our lives and the lives of those around us.
Cautiously Pessimistic suggests that helping to set up a community run social centre in the area might be a good way to do this:
It’ll take a lot of work, and at the end of the day you might not have anything much more interesting or radical than a boxing club to show for it. But it’s better than lining up on one side or another of a racial divide, or just chasing round after big one-day strikes, protests in London and international summits while the far-right recruits on our doorsteps.
Run! The Jews are coming!
A few weeks back we reported on the Dictator of Derbyshire’s Facebook group for maladjusted fascists: Nationalists Must Unite. We’ve continued to watch the group thrash around helplessly, tearing itself apart under the weight of its own internal contradictions. One of the recent threads deserves an honorable mention for revealing the anti-semitic rubbish that some of these losers spout as justification for their hateful political activities. The group seems to have rejected the counter-jihad far right politics of the EDL and stuck to a classic Jew-hating fascism.
Kicking things off, Paul asked “Why do people voice their support for Israel? What have Israel ever done for us?” Nick Thorrington quickly replied “Jews are our ultimate enemy”. From there on the descent into holocaust denial was rapid. Stevo Hoolygan came out with this ridiculous and offensive analogy:
so imagine this, your in house drinking a cup of tea then all of a sudden because a family down the road lose 1 or 2 people in a war the numbers are exaggerate to induce white guilt about a supposed holocaust and then the people are forced into your home and try take over and every time you speak out against it you are shot.
Jon Phillips hyped up the holocaust “conspiracy” a little more:
The Jews were talking about a holocaust of 6 million in the year 1900. Makes you wonder …
Clive Jones quickly chimed in with the old anti-semitic chestnut that Jews control the media and hence “our thinking”.
A lot of the anti-semitism is couched in supposed sympathy for the Palestinians. This is massively hypocritcal as the far right have never campaigned for Palestinian rights and frequently denounce the Palestinians as terrorists.
Not all posters were convinced though. Mikey Brown was unimpressed:
muslims and jews all the same to me , they are so similar in the way they think ! all middle eastern nutters !
Yes, they’re all the same these foreign types. Better make sure we hate them all.
Probably the most amusing bit of Jews-under-the-bed paranoia came from Paul Hilliard himself. Apparently the proof that “They are everywhere running everything” is that, if you rearrange it, “the olympics 2012 logo reads zion”! We’ve done a bit of investigation into this claim, which seems to have emerged from the holocaust denying Iranian regime, and have found that there is indeed a message in there for Hilliard and his fascist friends:
Paul Hilliard: You are a…
Far right not welcome in Thurnby Lodge
The BNP have been roundly criticised by locals involved in protests in Thurnby Lodge. Maxine Williams, manager of the Stirrup Cup pub, said outside groups such as the BNP and Nick Griffin were not welcome. In an extensive comment on the ThisIsLeiecstershire site, FORGOTTENEST said “It has absolutely nothing to do with Muslims!” and that
Neither EDL or BNP were invited to attend any of the peaceful protests staged by the local residents. They turned up of their own accord with their own agenda. This is not the agenda of the local community.
Another poster commented that “I would be the last person to vote the bnp in to power, our country is in enough trouble as it is thank you.”
Meanwhile, in a crass attempt to get more political mileage out of the situation, the EDL have been spreading a very obviously false story about a church cross in the area having to be covered up so that Muslims were not offended. Although they claimed to have “solid eye witness reports” they called out for anyone with “real legitimate news” to let them know. Well here goes: Canon David Monteith, Acting Archdeacon of Leicester, said: “There is no truth at all in the malicious rumour that the church was asked to cover the cross. The information is totally unfounded.”
Looks like another fascist fail.
