Redbridge councillor saddles up with Irving

HOPE not hate / Searchlight by Sonia Gable | Thursday, 8 October 2009

Leppert at a garden party at the home of David Irving

A row has broken out in Redbridge after the council’s sole BNP member was made vice-chair of a minor committee. Julian Leppert was nominated by a Labour councillor and seconded by a Liberal Democrat for the role on the cycling liaison group amid confusion over whether anyone else’s name could have been put forward.

The councillors involved cannot have known that Leppert had recently attended a garden party at the home of David Irving, the convicted Holocaust denier. Over a long writing career Irving, 71, has whitewashed the Third Reich and its Nazi leaders while describing Winston Churchill as a corrupt, racist alcoholic servile to Zionist forces.

Irving was further discredited as a historian after he brought an unsuccessful libel action against the American historian Deborah Lipstadt and Penguin Books in 1996. During the trial in London the court found that he was an “active Holocaust denier” as well as an antisemite and racist, and that he “associates with right-wing extremists who promote neo-nazism”. The judge also ruled that Irving had “for his own ideological reasons persistently and deliberately misrepresented and manipulated historical evidence”.

Pictures on Irving’s website showed Leppert at the party on 30 August along with some other BNP members.

Irving’s account reveals his racist and nazi mindset. “Steve drives Jessica [Irving’s youngest daughter] to Burnham station, as she wants to return to London (for the ghastly Notting Hill Gate carnival: Black-rap-crap all day. She’ll grow out of it),” wrote Irving. And Devon was “the last refuge for the White English from scoundrels”.

Finding some broken wine glasses he described them as having “made the ultimate sacrifice, für das Vaterland gefallen” (fallen for the Fatherland). The war is clearly never far from his mind.

Throughout this year’s European election campaign Griffin used Churchill’s image to illustrate the BNP’s “Battle for Britain” theme and claimed Churchill “would have been full square behind the British National Party”. Irving of course believed Britain should never have gone to war against Nazi Germany.

Griffin has claimed that the BNP has no time for nazis and Bob Bailey, the party’s London organiser, warned members recently against “adverse publicity arising from careless remarks or gestures” that might “impact on our chances in forthcoming elections and result in disciplinary action”.

As usual, the BNP’s words are a long way from its reality.