BNP councillor refuses to explain outrageous lie

HOPE not hate / Searchlight by Sonia Gable | Thursday, 27 August 2009

A convicted racist who a British National Party councillor falsely claimed was not a party member has collected two new convictions and caused further embarrassment to her party.

In May Helen Forster received a ten-month suspended prison sentence for intimidation after leading a mob of children, some as young as ten, to throw eggs and fire an airgun at an Asian neighbour.

A report in the Daily Mirror said that after being sentenced at Maidstone Crown Court, Forster, who has previous convictions for dishonesty and drug possession, called on the council to “move on” Meherjan Miah, the victim of the attack, to stop further incidents. “And yes, I’m still in the BNP,” she added.

The BNP lost no time in mobilising its “rapid response team”. Paul Golding, the coordinator of the party’s “Opera-tion Fightback”, filmed an interview with Forster on the doorstep of her home in Gravesend, Kent in which he claimed she had never been a party member.

In the video, which is on the BNP website and YouTube, Golding, a BNP councillor in Sevenoaks, said: “Now soon as this smear was put up online on the Daily Mirror’s website, I contacted our membership depart-ment and asked them to check all of our records going back many years and she is not on there whatsoever.

“I spoke to Andy McBride, the southeast regional organiser, and he said no one in the whole region had ever heard of her.”

Forster also denied being a “paid member” though admitted to having worked as a graphic designer for the party. She claimed that the Mirror report was “basically incorrect” and “absolute nonsense”, and had misquoted her.

The interview was rushed onto the BNP website so quickly that despite some clumsy editing it was still possible to hear a man inside the house saying “it was a joint member-ship, it was a family thing and her name was put on it”.

Nevertheless Golding went on to threaten the Mirror with legal action “to make sure that they are punished for this outrageous fabrication. This latest story utterly discredits these media rats, and the public will now be able to soberly assess the veracity of all future anti-BNP smears against this back-ground,” Golding said.

But Searchlight was able to reveal that it was Golding who had lied outrageously and the only person utterly discredited was himself. As he well knew, Forster had joined the BNP before her marriage broke up and was listed under her married name of Helen Colclough at the same address.

On 27 July Forster pleaded guilty to common assault and perverting the course of justice at Maidstone Crown Court. She was remanded in custody and is due to be sentenced on 7 September. The charges relate to an incident in Gravesend a few days after she received her suspended sentence.

After the hearing a Kent police spokeswoman confirmed that Helen Forster and Helen Colclough were the same person.

When a local newspaper asked Golding why his video contained a lie, he said he could not comment. After conferring with “the BNP legal team”, presumably the deranged Lee Barnes, he said: “I was told data protection and litigation rules mean I cannot say anything about the story”.

Strangely those rules did not stop him lying about Forster’s membership in May at the height of the BNP’s European election campaign, when her conviction was proving embarrassing for a party trying to present itself as respectable and not racist.

Also embarrassing for Golding was the exposure of his brother’s criminal past. Jamie Golding has been convicted of stealing cars and committing more than 150 burglaries in Kent and the southeast London borough of Bexley.

Paul Golding was one of the main drivers of the BNP’s so-called truth truck, which anti-fascists immediately renamed the lie lorry. The A-frame advertising lorry toured the country late last year and during this year’s election campaign, mostly on empty streets.

BNP convicted racist Helen Forster