A terrible week for the BNP

Sonia Gable | Friday, 8 February 2008 Source: Searchlight

A BNP candidate in last May's council elections faces a £30,000 bill for legal costs after losing an attempt to overturn the result.

Paul Reynolds, the Labour candidate, was declared the winner in Rosegrove and Lowerhouse ward in Burnley in May after lots were drawn when the vote was declared tied. The result will now stand after Mr Justice Tugendhat and Mr Justice Blake ruled on 8 February that a single disputed ballot paper had been rightly counted for Labour.

John Rowe, the BNP candidate who had agreed to the procedure of drawing lots to decide the result, is now likely to find the party unforthcoming. After the BNP encouraged Sharon Ebanks to defend the incorrect declaration that she had won the vote in Birmingham’s Kingstanding ward in 2006, she was left high and dry when the party refused to hand over the money that it had apparently collected towards her costs – and that was only £5,000.

The High Court decision came at the end of a week when everything seemed to go wrong for the party.

Alan Bailey, the BNP’s sole councillor in Havering, east London, resigned his seat claiming that his workload as a councillor kept him away from his young children.

In December the BNP’s London website highlighted Havering as a place where the party’s support was increasing “enormously” and said it was looking to gain more councillors at the next local elections in 2010.

No date has yet been set for the by-election in Gooshays ward.

Elsewhere Alan Warner has resigned his seats on Heanor town council and Denby parish council in the East Midlands. “I wasn't getting any cooperation from the councillors in Heanor and nobody spoke to me at the meetings” he said. “I just started to think ‘I’m wasting my time here’,” proving that non-cooperation with BNP councillors works.

Warner is the owner of the field where last year’s BNP Red, White and Blue festival was held. He says this year’s festival will return there. When the crisis in the BNP broke in December, Warner at first supported the rebels but soon changed his mind.

He appeared to think his former council seats were secure for the BNP. “Someone else from the party will stand in my place straight away. I’m assuming the party will put someone forward for the position.”

In West Sussex the woman whom the Daily Mail

dubbed “the BNP’s blond bombshell” failed to win election to Upper Beeding parish council on 7 February despite a long, fawning article in the rightwing newspaper. In a three-cornered fight with two independents, she came in 20 votes behind the winner with 36%.

The BNP fared worse in a by-election for Wyre borough council in Lancashire on the same day. James Clayton took just 15% of the vote, coming third of four candidates.

To cap it all, on 31 January the House of Lords refused to grant two BNP members leave to appeal against a decision that an article about them in Searchlight was protected from a defamation action by the reportage defence.

Brothers Barry and Christopher Roberts had petitioned the House of Lords for permission to appeal against the Court of Appeal’s decision upholding the judgment of Mr Justice Eady in the High Court that the article was protected by the reportage defence.

The brothers had sued Searchlight, its editor and a writer over an article that appeared in the magazine in 2003.

It reported a dispute within the BNP, including allegations that Christopher Roberts stole money collected at a BNP rally, and that the claimants made threats to others and might be subject to a police investigation.

Mr Justice Eady upheld the reportage privilege in a decision in May 2006.

In July last year Lord Justice Ward, upholding that decision in the Court of Appeal, said a review of the authorities showed that a journalist had a good defence to a claim for libel if what he published, even without trying to verify its truth, amounted to reportage.

The best description of reportage was that it was “the neutral reporting without adoption or embellishment or subscribing to any belief in its truth of attributed allegations of both sides of a political and possibly some other kind of dispute”, he said.