Griffin seeks the Midas touch

Sonia Gable | Tuesday, 8 April 2008 Source: Searchlight

Far-right activists posting on a popular nazi forum recently got hot under the collar about whether it was right for the British National Party to put on a management training course in Spain rather than in Britain, until the site administrators pulled the discussion thread. But as usual they did not even get close to the heart of the story.

On 19 February Michaela Mackenzie, who styles herself “BNP Administration Support” and works full-time for the party, emailed several key BNP officers to invite them to “the next wave of high level management training”. This would be arranged by “a professional management consultancy and training company”, which “uses a property in Spain as its main training base”.

Knowing this would raise questions among the xenophobic party’s members, Mackenzie, a former employee of the BBC in Bristol, explained it was cheaper to send people there than to hire suitable facilities in Britain. “It also gives us the chance to say ‘tahnk you’ [sic] to our key officials for all the hard work you put into pushing the party forwards.”

The course would run from 1 to 4 April, but those who could not make those dates might find places on an earlier course from 26 to 29 March.

The height of the council and Greater London Authority election campaign is a strange time to be taking activists away to say “thank you”, when the party is constantly appealing to members to help with canvassing and leaflet distribution. One of those on the course was Nick Eriksen, the BNP’s London organiser, whose name was removed from the list of Assembly candidates while he was abroad, after the Evening Standard

exposed his despicable views on rape. He appears still to be the London organiser.

Some BNP supporters wondered why the course could not have been held in the barn on Nick Griffin’s farm, which he converted with the help of a loan of several thousands pounds from the party shortly after he became its leader. The party quickly wrote off the loan on the grounds that the building would be available for party functions free of charge.

It is a good point, but Searchlight was more interested in the company that was running the course. It certainly seemed professional, judging by a report in the BNP’s new quarterly fundraising magazine, Hope and Glory

, which featured a picture of the first batch of participants, clutching their course certificates, who were dispatched to Spain in the second week of February.

“Some of the lessons are so simple that they’re blindingly obvious,” one of them declared, “but until you’re taught by an expert you just don’t see them. I was already working hard for the party, but now I know how to ‘work smart’ as well.”

It did not take long for Searchlight to establish that the organiser was a Belfast-based business called the Midas Consultancy, not to be confused with a number of other training and consultancy businesses using similar names, and that the training base was in Valencia on the Costa Blanca.

Last October Arthur Kemp, who in summer 2007 was entrusted with the ideological training of party activists, went to Belfast to meet James Dowson, a businessman, self-styled vicar and militant anti-abortion campaigner.

Kemp, who is also in charge of the party’s internet operations, had been preceded that spring by Griffin and Collett, who claimed they were trying to increase the BNP’s appeal among Catholics by highlighting their opposition to abortion. Searchlight ensured that their meeting with Dowson, the founder of the controversial LifeLeague, made the press, prompting condemnation from other anti-abortion campaigners.

The true purpose of these meetings was to develop a business relationship and enable the BNP to benefit from Dowson’s skills in fundraising and management, which he markets through the Midas Consultancy. Kenny Smith, then the BNP’s administration officer, accompanied Griffin and Collett to Belfast and claims that he set up the arrangement. Smith was expelled during the major internal crisis in the BNP in December and the party is now taking legal action against him and others for alleged misuse of party membership lists.

The first outcome was the professionalisation of the BNP’s fundraising efforts in the form of the Building to Grow appeal at the end of last year, which the BNP claimed had raised £70,000. It was this fund that, the BNP said, paid for the new Excalibur warehouse to house and distribute party merchandise and publications. Sending the glossy Hope and Glory

as a thank you to donors and encouragement to potential donors follows the example of the many charities that send out free magazines to supporters.

The second outcome was the management training courses on which, according to Hope and Glory

, regional organisers would “join central staff as we implement a policy of ‘cascading’ management skills down through the party”. Revealing that the training was closely linked to the BNP’s election strategy, it continued: “The aim of these initial steps is to ensure that the people running the BNP’s national and regional structures will be ready to cope with the big increase in popular support, new members and potential that will follow if we can break though in style in the May elections. This progress will in turn set us up for an even bigger push for seats in the European Elections next year.”

The first course took in Griffin, Simon Darby (deputy leader and press officer), Mark Collett (graphic designer), Dave Hannan (former deputy treasurer), Mark Clutterbuck (head of the Central Management Team), Jackie Griffin (the leader’s wife) and Mackenzie herself. The presence of the unpopular Collett and Hannam showed that the two, whose incompetence and arrogance provoked the December’s internal crisis, are still at the heart of the party leadership despite their ostensible demotions. Whether Dowson’s training has helped them remains to be seen.

Dowson is a former member of the Orange Lodge in Northern Ireland and has admitted involvement with hardline loyalist groups in the West of Scotland. He was reported to have been the organiser of a flute band in Cumbernauld which recorded a tape in honour of Michael Stone, a member of the terrorist Ulster Freedom Fighters.

Stone was jailed for attacking a Republican funeral in west Belfast, throwing hand grenades and firing at the mourners, including women and children. Three people were killed.

The LifeLeague, which is secretive about its finances, uses highly provocative tactics, such as publishing the home addresses of abortion clinic staff. Similar actions by anti-abortion groups in the US have resulted in the murder of doctors.

Police have described LifeLeague’s tactics as “akin to those of animal rights extremists” and the group has been investigated by the National Extremism Tactical Coordination Unit.

Dowson has denied that he is a far-right sympathiser, claiming to be a Christian Socialist. In October, he told The Observer

: “I find the whole of the right-wing utterly ridiculous”. That was around the same time he was meeting Kemp to set up his relationship with the BNP.