‘Let him speak his evil, poisonous bilge’

| Wednesday, 31 May 2006 Source: Ilford Recorder

A VETERAN councillor stepped in to demand controversial BNP member Julian Leppert be allowed to speak – then condemned him in a lacerating speech.

Liberal Democrat Richard Hoskins denounced the far-right party's anti-immigration views as "bilge" and "evil", but defended newly-elected Cllr Leppert's right to address the council.

A heavy police presence and a demonstration led by the anti-racist group Redbridge Together ensured Thursday's meeting at Redbridge Town Hall, High Road, Ilford, would be a tense affair.

Cllr Leppert had already said he would not vote for a resolution tabled by the Labour Party, which said the council should reject "any attempt to divide the communities of Redbridge and pledge to continue its commitment to equality and diversity".

After a string of speeches from Labour and Liberal Democrat councillors supporting the resolution and praising multicultural Redbridge, Mayor Ashok Kumar announced the council would go to a vote on the motion, despite the fact Cllr Leppert had been standing for some time and indicating he wanted to speak.

Cllr Hoskins stood up, saying: "Let him speak and then let the council show what we think of him. I don't want to hear what he says, but I defend his right to speak."

Cllr Leppert said: "Will this motion include some kind of provision and protection of the celebration of our own Christian British traditions?

"Redbridge, just like the rest of the country, has already been divided as a direct result of the various numerous acts of high treason committed by many post-war governments" who wanted "cheap immigrant labour for the financial backers of the Conservative Party and cheap immigrant votes for the Labour Party".

The result, he said, was "conflict-ridden multicultural chaos".

Cllr Hoskins replied: "Sentiments like these need to be ventilated, like boils need to be lanced. They are bilge. They are evil."

He spoke movingly of a visit he made to a town in Bosnia where civil war had broken out between Croats, Serbs and Muslims.

"They had followed his (Mr Leppert's) poisonous reasoning," he said.

"The Serbs and the Croats had tried to massacre Muslims they had grown up with over hundreds of years. They had destroyed their homes. They had destroyed their schools. Why? Because of the kind of thinking – if you can call it that – that Cllr Leppert expressed.

"They slaughtered people they had been to school with because they could not create and hold together a cohesive community like we have in Redbridge.

"What they had left was a destroyed town and a heritage that had been ripped apart because they listened to these kinds of rumours, poisonous threats, imaginations and vapours.

"It is essential that this council unites against this man and against his policies.

"There are members of this community – Jewish members of this community – who know what Fascism is all about.

"We owe it to them to reject this man."

The motion was passed by 59 votes to one, with Cllr Harry Moth, the Conservative member for Fullwell ward, abstaining from the vote after saying the resolution was unnecessary.