A story of HOPE and hate

posted by: Nick Lowles | on: Monday, 1 June 2009, 20:21

I would like to take a moment to relay two stories, one about hope the other about hate. This evening I was forwarded an email that was sent to our office from a 16-year-old A-level student who wanted to thank us for our campaign. He had used material from our website to dissuade several friends from voting for the BNP despite them being totally opposed to the Nazis of Hitler's Germany.

Contrast this great email with the antics of the BNP over the weekend. As I mentioned yesterday the BNP had produced a leaflet accusing the Archbishop of Canterbury of being Judas. I really did not think that any BNP member was seriously going to hand out these leaflets but this morning I heard that the BNP parked their Truth Truck outside Manchester Cathedral during the morning service and through two loud speakers began abusing the Bishop of Manchester. Quite apart from it being electorally stupid I am truly shocked by their outrageous behaviour. Fortunately, I think we'll be reading a lot more about this story in the media tomorrow.

It's been a totally crazy day. It began in London with a press conference on the South Bank then a train ride to Manchester for an interview with the BBC about our campaign in the North West. In between, Jason and I had to organise our D-Day events tomorrow. I have to admit that we've been well behind on this and it was only this morning that we began to sort out who was leading where and this afternoon when we began to distribute our leaflets. However, we've built such an infrastructure up here, and been joined by hundreds of new activists, that it was all a lot easier than I imagined.

We began the day with 90,000 leaflets stacked up by my desk. We now have just 8,000 left and those have been allocated to Manchester Victoria station tomorrow. In fact, we could have distributed more, and this is a problem we share with London. They have 150,000 leaflets for 100-odd events and speaking to Cathy just now it is clear she could have shifted another 50,000 leaflets.

Not that I'm moaning, it's certainly a good position to be in. Anyway, tomorrow is D-Day and across the country we hope to distribute 500,000 leaflets. I'm going to be in Manchester where I'll be joined by at least one local Bishop, trade unionists and dozens of volunteers.