Great White bites off more than it can chew?

| Sunday, 1 July 2007 Source: Lancaster UAF

Yet another BNP business venture hits hard times - and far worse are coming.

The terrible Great White Records that the British National Party started up to exploit what Nick Griffin perceived as a largely untapped market for 'patriotic' music, appears to be floundering.

Nick Griffin, as you'll have read here before, has had an interest in the far-right music scene for years, formerly being involved in the Rock Against Communism (RAC) events back in the 80s. Indeed one RAC open air festival, starring the notorious nazi band Skrewdriver led by the even more notorious Ian Donaldson, took place at Griffin's father's farm.

Griffin always saw massive potential in so-called White Noise music, forming the White Noise Club, which back in those heady days was steered by, among others, the National Front's Patrick Harrington (now the BNP's fake union Solidarity's General Secretary - or possibly ex-General Secretary), Derek Holland and Nick Griffin, who can reliably be found wherever there is a personal profit to be made.

After a split in the amoeba-like National Front it emerged that the White Noise Club had not been paying royalties due to the bands, had been ripping off supporters of the bands ordering records through their mail order service and that Rock-o-Rama in Germany was owed around £3000 for merchandise obtained via the WNC. Totally disgusted with the way Harrington, Griffin and Holland had gone about things with their 'gross dishonesty', Donaldson handed in his letter of resignation to White Noise and the National Front, with most of the other White Noise bands following him. This heralded the end of the White Noise Club, with Donaldson going off to start and star in the extremely profitable Blood and Honour music scene.

There's a quote from Griffin that we use frequently, mainly to remind the members of his own party who are looking in that they are there simply to be exploited; 'In increasingly hard economic times, a group of people the size of the BNP and its support base can provide a significant assured market for a variety of small businesses.'

With that attitude, Griffin's eternal and never-satisfied greed and his past interest in the financial possibilities that arise out of the music scene, particularly where there is an enormous and largely unexploited user-base, it was inevitable that Griffin would eventually have another go and this he did with the formation of Great White Records back in February of 2006.

The whole point of GWR was to make money for the BNP and it tries to achive this via 'the cause of spreading positive patriotism', which we can assume means a load of racist tosh wrapped up in music and the Union Jack. This is confirmed by a statement from GWR itself; 'GWR is determined to create the musical revolution amongst our people, especially the young that will educate our people to the issues of concern, most namely the thinly-disguised genocide of the indigenous natives of the British Isles perpetrated by the policy of present government pushing mass immigration and multi-culturalism on the British native population.'

And so on.

What the membership of the party doesn't generally know is that the GWR studios in Leeds (shared with the BNP's Excalibur books scam) cost over £1000 a month to run - roughly £12000 per year which is equivalent to the annual membership fees of 400 members. And what precisely does the BNP get for that large investment? A few third-rate songs penned by the Leonard Cohen of the far-right Nick Griffin, BNP councillor Colin Auty singing a racist song about how many Asians there are in Dewsbury and Lee Haggan droning another Griffin song 'about the domination by foreign cultures of many of our cities and how one day we will reclaim them for the native people'. For God's sake.

All that rubbish aside, we'll repeat the question we asked - what does the membership get for the party's investment of £12000 (400 membership fees) in Great White Records per year? The answer is, very little.

Even those tone-deaf people who actually buy the crap GWR sells are rarely getting to listen to it. We hear rumours from all directions that credit card payments are being made and cheques are being cashed but the products ordered rarely arrive. This problem (for the customers) seems to be getting worse if all the reports we've heard are correct - and they're going to get even worse still in the very near future as Excalibur stops sharing the space (and the rent) with GWR and moves off to Wrexham, leaving GWR boss Dave Hannam to either cover the whole rent from fast-dwindling orders or move everything into his garden shed (if he has one) and run the whole thing from there.

Great White Records looks to be yet another one of the BNP's subsidiary businesses/organisations that's well on it's way out. The ridiculous Christian Council of Britain looks like it's dead or very close, Solidarity has hit bad account and organisational problems and now Great White seems to be rapidly sinking for the third time.

Strangely, whenever one thinks of former bankrupt Nick Griffin and his business abilities, the words 'organise', piss-up' and 'brewery' immediately come to mind.