Richardson goes west

HOPE not hate / Searchlight by David Williams | Monday, 9 February 2009

A BNP councillor on Epping Forest District Council, Essex, is to address a racist gathering in the United States. Patricia Richardson, BNP councillor for Loughton Broadway, has been invited to attend the inaugural conference of Preserving Western Civilisation. The conference will discuss immigration, Islam and race, which its organisers believe pose a dire threat to America’s “Judeo-Christian heritage” and “European Identity”.

Like the conferences staged by American Renaissance, the weekend conference, which begins on 6 February in Baltimore, Maryland, is to be an upmarket affair – “jackets and ties for men; business attire for women”. Participation costs $130 per person.

“Racial differences in intelligence and how to deal with them” will, according to the brochure, be top of the agenda. This is hardly surprising given that the chair of the organising committee is Dr Michael H Hart, a Jewish astrophysicist and author of Understanding Human History, which attempts to apply the flawed logic of IQ testing to all human history.

Many of those speaking at the event have past associations with American Renaissance, the pseudo-scientific mag-azine devoted to idea that blacks are less intelligent than whites, or VDARE, a web-based anti-immigrant initiative founded by Peter Brimelow and named after Virginia Dare, the first English child born in the New World in 1587.

Richardson and her new friends will be discussing “the persistent disappointing performance of blacks (which many whites mistakenly blame on themselves)” and which the conference organisers believe have left whites with “guilt feelings that undermine Western moral and deter us from dealing sensibly with the other threats”. The subject of Richardson’s talk has not been announced but perhaps she intends to regale the audience with the usual BNP lies about impending race war in Debden.

Many of those involved with the conference, particularly the Jewish speakers, are on record as being unhappy rubbing shoulders with the neo-nazis who attend American Renaissance conferences. Richardson’s invitation appears to indicate a further push in this direction, both for them and for the BNP, which is anxious to shed its antisemitic image.

This is rather ironic considering that Nick Griffin, the BNP leader, spoke at the 2006 American Renaissance conference and was more than happy to rub shoulders with Don Black, founder of the nazi Stormfront internet forum, and the former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke, whom Hart denounced as a “f***ing Nazi”.

Among Richardson’s fellow speakers is John Philippe Rushton, a psychology professor at the University of Western Ontario, Canada, who argues blacks are less intelligent than whites. “Bad science and virulent racial prejudice drip like pus” from one of his books, commented one reviewer. He has received over $1 million from the Pioneer Fund, a racist organisation formed in 1937 to pursue “race betterment”.

Another is Srdja Trifkovic, an American-Serbian journalist and author of The Sword and the Prophet, an anti-Islamic tract beloved by the BNP.

Richardson may feel a bit out of place as most of the speakers are academics or prolific writers and activists. Richardson has achieved nothing during her nearly five years as a councillor. Her main claim to fame is that she is Jewish, enabling the BNP to argue that it is not antisemitic. Her trip to the USA would appear to be a reward for her dutiful acceptance of her role as the BNP’s token Jew.