Tell fascists to BNP off

Kevin Maguire | Wednesday, 5 April 2006 Source: Daily Mirror

HOOLIGAN Luke Smith was forced to resign as a Burnley councillor after attacking a colleague with a bottle at a summer festival kids had been invited to.

Waste of space Dan Kelley quit as a councillor in Barking & Dagenham, finally conceding he was clueless. "There's meetings that go right over my head and there's little point me being there," whinged the East London booby.

James Lloyd won his Sandwell seat on a law and order ticket without telling voters his teen son is one of the area's worst offenders, guilty of a string of offences such as theft and attempted robbery.

Then there's Burnley councillor Brian Turner, convicted of beating his wife and attacking a police officer during a domestic incident at his home.

The do-nothing incompetents and disorderly rogues listed above are a disgrace to democracy, falling down on the job faster than Didier Drogba.

And all were elected as members of the loathsome extreme rightwing British National Party, as odious a political bunch as exists in western Europe.

The BNP mob will be on the doorsteps in their sharp suits in the run up to May 4's local elections in England in their biggest drive yet to con the electorate.

Political detectives in the Searchlight anti-fascist group, who monitor the lunatic right, reckon the fascists are planning to field up to 800 candidates to expand on the 20 council seats the party already holds.

The BNP's offensive is to be matched by a counter-offensive involving unions and Labour's more progressive MPs, including Jon Cruddas in Dagenham and Ian Austin in Dudley.

With a paralysed Labour leadership fearing a May massacre, confront the BNP on the ground.

Searchlight is using union money and a Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust grant to deliver 500,000 anti-BNP newspapers and telephone-canvass thousands of voters in 12 councils targeted by the BNP including Thurrock, Sandwell, Oldham and Kirklees.

Singer Billy Bragg will preach an anti-BNP message on a union-sponsored 16-gig "Hope Not Hate" tour, opening in Wolverhampton on April 23.

"It's all about turning the tide by organising and building communities where people live side by side in peace," Bragg told me. "The BNP needed to be exposed for what they are."

The BNP is well versed in whipping up hate, capitalizing on the anti-Muslim backlash - and as crazy as fascists waving placards in favour of suicide bombers in the cartoons row.

In West Yorkshire, scurrilous leaflets have called for Asians to be banned from becoming train drivers or chemists.

Instead of helping the police, they spread false rumours, forcing the boys in blue to issue a denial after a claim in a council by-election that a 15-year-old girl was raped by asylum seekers.

The hope is the BNP have overstretched themselves, like reckless minor criminals who get overambitious after a successful little job and move into the big league where they are crushed.

The crude racism is sugared by synthetic concern for tenants on estates and the elderly trapped in high-rise blocks.

BNP candidates promise the earth, claiming to be on the side of the white destitute and dispossessed, yet the record proves they achieve zilch for the electors conned into voting for them.

At the last World Cup, BNP nationalists who drape themselves in the Cross of St George didn't cheer on England. They backed Denmark, as their team was all-white.

It'll be the same in June as idiots blinded by colour refuse to cheer on Sven's team if it has stars like Rio Ferdinand and Ashley Cole, who are black, or Beckham, a quarter Jewish.

If a BNP jackass turns up on your doorstep, with or without his jackboots, kick them where it hurts most: in the ballots.