A-Z of the BNP
HOPE not hate's A-Z of the BNP
Last updated: 12 May 2009
L Le Pen
It is something of an irony that the BNP, a racist xenophobic party, has always looked longingly across the channel to the successes of the Front National (FN) led by Jean-Marie Le Pen, the pivotal figure in French fascism for almost four decades.
Le Pen's political career began in 1956 when he was elected to the National Assembly member for Pierre Poujade's UCDA populist party. He was at the time serving in the French army and in 1957 was sent to Algeria as an intelligence officer. He has been accused of engaging in torture, an allegation he denies though he admits knowing of its use. He sued Le Monde for defamation after the newspaper printed the allegation, but lost.
Le Pen was one of the founders of the Front National in 1972, which represented the political union of fascists, racists, antisemites, former Nazi collaborators, Catholic fundamentalists and terrorists linked to the OAS, a far-right, underground, French nationalist organisation during the Algerian war. Le Pen has been keen to rehabilitate those associated with the Nazis' puppet Vichy regime.
The FN hovered on the margins during the first decade of its existence before making a breakthrough in the early 1980s at a local level. It has since risen to become a serious force in French politics. In 2002 Le Pen came a shock second in the French presidential election, beating the socialist Lionel Jospin, before losing to Jacques Chirac in the second round. His personal fortunes have since waned and the FN is beset with financial problems as well as an increasingly acrimonious feud over who will take his place when he eventually retires - he will be 81 years old in June 2009.
Le Pen is a convicted Holocaust denier who was fined for stating that the Holocaust was a "detail" of history. He was also fined for attacking a female political rival, a disgusting incident that was caught on camera and which led to his suspension as an MEP.
Nick Griffin, the BNP leader, has always been keen to be associated with Le Pen and the FN. The BNP has copied much from the FN in an attempt to modernise and achieve a measure of political legitimacy. For example, in 1998 Griffin visited the FN's Fęte Bleu, Blanc, Rouge and decided to imitate it in the form of the BNP's Red, White and Blue festival, held in August. Griffin styled it as a family fun day to "normalise" the party further, though many of these shindigs have been marred by drunken violence and dubious entertainment such as stand-up comedians telling antisemitic jokes about Auschwitz. The BNP has borrowed many other ideas and slogans from the FN, proving that even its bigotry isn't that original.
Nick Griffin with French Nazi Le Pen during a recent trip to Britain surrounded by BNP heavies
Senior FN officers have attended the BNP RWB festival. However, the BNP's relations with the FN have cooled since 2004 when Griffin's overweening egotism led him recklessly to endanger the safety of Le Pen, who had flown from France to Manchester to promote the BNP's 2004 European election campaign. The event was a farce and Le Pen narrowly escaped being manhandled by anti-fascists after Griffin ignored the advice of his own security team to chase ephemeral media headlines. Le Pen was not amused and has not been back to Britain since then.
More recently Griffin has courted Bruno Gollnisch, Le Pen's deputy and another convicted Holocaust denier. Gollnisch is a rival for the succession to Le Pen, against his daughter, Marine Le Pen, which has led to further rancour in the FN. Griffin sees Gollnisch and not Marine Le Pen as the future for the FN. In April 2009 the BNP's deputy leader Simon Darby attended a fascist meeting in Milan together with Gollnisch and the convicted Italian terrorist Roberto Fiore, and was greeted by Nazi-saluting fascists.
Whether supporting Gollnisch turns out to be a misjudgment, only time will tell. Griffin previously backed Bruno Mégret, Le Pen's former deputy, who led a split from the FN and subsequently disappeared into oblivion. Nevertheless the BNP believes that a political partnership with the FN will be key to its future should it gain election to the European Parliament in June 2009.
K Arthur Kemp
Arthur Kemp performs the important role of ideological enforcer in the BNP. Kemp, who was born in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) and studied in South Africa, has a long history of far-right activism spanning some of the murkier periods of postwar fascist history.
After university, where he began working for the South African security services, Kemp became a journalist and was aligned with the pro-apartheid South African Conservative Party. He was particularly close to Clive Derby-Lewis and his wife Gaye. It was Kemp who gave her a list of names of prominent ANC activists and trade unionists - Kemp denied at the time that it was a "hit list". One of the people on it was Chris Hani, general-secretary of the South African Communist Party, whom Clive Derby-Lewis and Janusz Walus, a far-right extremist of Polish extraction, assassinated in April 1993. Their death sentences were commuted to life imprisonment. Kemp was arrested but released without charge.
Some on the South African far right believe that Kemp set them up to do the apartheid state's dirty work, speculating that this is why he left South Africa. Whatever the truth of such rumours, intelligence and police sources later confirmed to the South African media that Kemp had been an informant for the National Intelligence Service (NIS), South Africa's intelligence agency.
Kemp moved to Britain in 1996 and later became involved with the BNP. He was not alone. Several other white supremacist refugees from South Africa fled to Britain including Lambertus Nieuwhof, convicted in 1992 of attempting to bomb a children's school in South Africa. The BNP welcomed him with open arms. Nieuwhof was a member of the Afrikaner Resistance Movement (Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging, AWB), a racist terrorist organisation of which Kemp wrote a glowing history. Nieuwhof describes Kemp as "a very good friend".
Today Kemp is responsible for writing the BNP's education and training manuals, the content of the website and overseeing "Radio RWB". He also runs the party's merchandising arm, Excalibur, privately "under an annually renewable licence from the party". This gives him the freedom to select the books that BNP members are recommended to read. Several are his own works.
His presence in the BNP leadership also gives the lie to Griffin's claim that he has "no time" for antisemites. Kemp is the author of a massive white supremacist tome entitled March of the Titans, which denies the Holocaust and blames the Second World War on the Jews, much as the Nazis themselves did. It is therefore unsurprising to learn that in the early 1990s Kemp was a contributor to Nation und Europa, a journal founded by a former SS officer.
Kemp has links to some of the most hardline racist and antisemitic groups in North America where he often visits. His writings have regularly appeared in National Vanguard, the journal of the nazi National Alliance, which was founded by William Pearce. A one-time member of the American Nazi Party, Pearce is best known for writing The Turner Diaries, a fictional work of race hate frequently cited as a blueprint for terrorism and which inspired the Oklahoma bomber Timothy McVeigh. Kemp's racist ramblings even won him US$250, the prize attached to the "Dr. William Pierce Award for Investigative Journalism".
Kemp is also close to the racists and antisemites grouped around Willis Carto, the grand old man of American antisemitic conspiracy theories, and his publication The Barnes Review, which likewise plugs a ponderous diet of Holocaust denial.
J Jobbik
Nick Griffin openly began cultivating links with the Hungarian fascist party Jobbik (Magyarországért Mozgalom - Movement for a Better Hungary) in 2008. Contact between the BNP and Jobbik first publicly emerged in May that year when Griffin met two Jobbik representatives Britain. One was Zoltán Fuzessy, Jobbik's grandly named head of "international affairs", who lives in Gravesend, Kent. The other was Bela Kovacs, the even more grandiosely named president of foreign affairs. Kovacs passed on the best wishes of their leader Gabor Vona. The meeting lasted two hours and centred upon co-operation in the European Parliament should either party be elected.
Nick Griffin with Jobbik
leader Zoltan Fuzessy (right)
Griffin referred to Jobbik as "a strong and natural ally", adding that "the parties share common interests and aims". Shortly afterwards Fuzessy was revealed to be running an anti-Jewish hate website until The Sun exposed him.
None of this debarred Fuzessy from addressing a meeting of Greenwich BNP later in the presence of Griffin, Paul Golding and Michael Barnbrook, one of the BNP MEP candidates for the London region.
The obviously extremist nature of Jobbik did not deter Griffin from continuing to cultivate links with the party. At the end of October 2008 he flew to Budapest to address a Jobbik rally together with the convicted Italian fascist Roberto Fiore. Shortly after the meeting Griffin accompanied a ragtag group of Hungarian fascists to a police station to demand the release of several of their number who had recently been arrested.
Jobbik has a uniformed paramilitary wing, the Hungarian Guard, reminiscent of Hitler's Brownshirt thugs. Jobbik has been condemned for its fierce anti-Roma racism and violence, and for marching provocatively through neighbourhoods populated by Roma people in an attempt to intimidate and frighten them. It is a tactic that has brought Jobbik into contact with the Hungarian courts.
Jobbik is also vehemently antisemitic. Its vice-president József Tibor Bíber, speaking on 13 April 2008, made it clear that Jobbik believes that Roma people are part of a Jewish conspiracy to destroy Hungary. "Gypsy criminality is the Zionists' biological weapon," he declared.
On 20 April 2009 the police started proceedings against Istvan Dosa, a leader of the Hungarian Guard, and another member after a demonstration in which they made speeches denying the Holocaust. The two told 200 supporters in front of the German Embassy in Budapest on 18 April that "nothing of the Holocaust is true".
I International links
You can tell a lot about a person by the company they keep. In the case of Nick Griffin and the BNP examining his friends abroad is particularly illuminating. Griffin has tried to "modernise" the BNP and convince the electorate that it is not the party of racist extremists, antisemites and Nazis who founded the party in 1982. However, away from the domestic limelight the mask regularly slips as Griffin's international posturing brings him and his party into close contact with some of the most extreme racists and antisemites in the world including a number of individuals with convictions for terrorist-related offences.
The BNP has cultivated links with Andreas Mölzer (pictured), an MEP for the Austrian Freedom Party (FPÖ). Mölzer edits his own newspaper Zur Zeit, which features racist and antisemitic articles including some that question the historical reality of the Holocaust (read more). The BNP also has long standing ties with both the openly nazi National Democratic Party (NPD) in Germany, whose chairman Udo Voigt praises Hitler as a "great statesman", and the National Democrats in Sweden, led by Marc Abramsson, a convicted thug whom Griffin is proud to call a friend.
BNP links with the French Front National have cooled somewhat since 2004 when its leader Jean Marie Le Pen, visiting England to support the BNP's campaign in the 2004 European election, was almost manhandled by anti-fascists as a result of Griffin's lack of judgement. He hasn't been back since. Nor is he impressed that the BNP is cosying up to his deputy Bruno Gollnisch, who like Griffin is a convicted Holocaust denier, because Gollnisch represents a rival to Le Pen's daughter as leader of the FN when he retires.
Griffin has recently made great play of his links to a number of eastern European fascist sects including the Hungarian fascist party Jobbik (Movement for a Better Hungary). He visited Jobbik's boss Gabor Vona in October 2008, addressing a party meeting there with the Italian fascist terrorist Roberto Fiore (read more).
Griffin's other new friend is the Czech extremist Petra Edelmannová, leader of the tiny National Party (Národní Strana), whom Griffin invited to the BNP's Red, White and Blue festival in August 2008. Edelmannová demands a "Final solution to the Gypsy question", which clearly echoes the Nazis' "Final Solution" for the Jews (read more).
Deputy BNP leader Simon Darby recently underlined the extremist foreign links of the BNP when he addressed a meeting in Milan hosted by Fiore. Fascist thugs gave Darby the Nazi salute as he entered the building (read more).
Across the Atlantic too Griffin runs around with white supremacists. In 2006 he spoke at a conference organised by American Renaissance, a pseudo-scientific racist magazine, where he shared the podium with antisemites and Holocaust deniers. The audience was packed full of white supremacists including David Duke, a former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. It was his second turn at an American Renaissance conference; he had previously spoken there in 2002.
In October 2007 Griffin undertook an anti-Islam speaking tour of three US universities. The trip was organised and financed by Preston Wiginton, who also appealed for donations for Griffin on the Stormfront Nazi web forum (read more).
Nick Griffin in the US October 2007,
Preston Wiginton (right)
Griffin and Wiginton have collaborated for many years. Wiginton spearheaded US support for Griffin during his trials in 2006, setting up an online petition calling on the British government to drop the prosecution.
Wiginton has close links with Russian fascist organisations responsible for a wave of racist murders. Griffin endorsed Wiginton in an open letter to "European Colleagues" shortly after his US tour, praising him as a "very effective organiser and, rarely among American nationalists, understands the importance of image and popular acceptability to all nationalist parties". The letter explains that Wiginton "is very well connected in Russia, with good contacts with various nationalist organisations and elected politicians".
Referring to Wiginton's role in planning a "major march and rally" in Moscow in November 2007 Griffin continued, "the BNP supports this endeavour wholeheartedly and asks all our European comrades to do likewise, hopefully thereby creating the beginnings of an effective cooperation between patriots of both Western and Orthodox Christendom against our common enemies: Mass immigration; radical Islamism; Western liberalism and Wall Street/White House dollar imperialism". The language is typical of nazis. At the rally Wiginton, surrounded by people giving Nazi salutes, proclaimed "Glory to Russia" in faltering Russian while the crowd chanted "white power, white power" in English.
H Holocaust denial
The British National Party's leader is one of the most offensive Holocaust deniers Britain has ever produced.
Throughout the 1980s Nick Griffin claimed that the Holocaust did not happen. He repeated this antisemitic lie again and again in his personal magazine The Rune and in Spearhead, the BNP magazine he edited. The BNP also produced and distributed a newspaper called Holocaust News, which argued that the Holocaust was "a hoax"
Griffin boasted to undercover reporters that he had produced an updated version of the notorious Holocaust denial pamphlet, Did Six Million Really Die? The original was written in 1974 by Richard Verrall, a National Front officer, and was condemned in a case before the Supreme Court of Canada, which said it "misrepresented the work of historians, misquoted witnesses, fabricated evidence, and cited non-existent authorities".
The update never appeared, perhaps because Griffin believed discretion to be the better part of valour after he was convicted of inciting racial hatred and handed a nine-month suspended prison sentence in 1998. The prosecution concerned material in The Rune. It was during his defence that Griffin made his notorious statement: "I am well aware that the orthodox opinion is that 6 million Jews were gassed and cremated and turned into lampshades. Orthodox opinion also once held that the Earth was flat … I have reached the conclusion that the 'extermination' tale is a mixture of Allied wartime propaganda, extremely profitable lie, and latter witch-hysteria."
Griffin was a hardline Holocaust denier. He was appalled when David Irving, perhaps the most famous British Holocaust denier, admitted that some Jews had in fact died during the Second World War. Griffin attacked him in issue 11 of The Rune stating: "True revisionists will not be followed by this new twist in the sorry tale of the Hoax of the Twentieth Century."
The BNP leadership claims that Griffin has recanted and apologised for these views. This simply is not true. Simon Darby, deputy leader of the BNP, stated recently that Griffin was convicted for "telling the truth".
Griffin continues to deny the Holocaust. In 2006 he was interviewed by a local newspaper when the European Union was considering a proposal to outlaw Holocaust denial across all member states. Fearful of imprisonment, the fate of so many of his continental friends, Griffin said he believed that the Holocaust had happened because EU law told him it had happened - hardly a convincing proof that he had changed his mind.
True to form he continued to peddle his belief that the Holocaust was a myth in an interview with the Mail on Sunday in April 2006 in which he stated: "It's well known that the chimneys from the gas chambers at Auschwitz are fake, built after the war ended". Griffin also told the interviewer that prussic acid could "never have been used at Treblinka concentration camp - but it makes good Shoah business, doesn't it?" Shoah is Hebrew for Holocaust.
Griffin has been comparatively successful in persuading people that he and his lieutenants are no longer antisemites. It is worth remembering that Griffin remains what he always was: an unrepentant Holocaust denier.
G Great White Records
Great White Records (GWR) is the BNP's in-house record label, which Griffin once saw as both a lucrative cash cow and a stepping-stone to creating the sort of fascist "counter power" movement he had been harping on about since the 1980s.
Its founding statement was explicit that "the chief benefactors/recipients of money raised by GWR will be the British National Party". The party boasted it would release upwards of 13 albums, which would raise around Ł100,000 for the party.
It is highly doubtful that GWR has even paid back the initial outlay lavished upon it, however. GWR, which was incorporated in December 2005, has hardly released any records of its own and those it has have been underwhelming to say the least. To put it politely they are unlikely to chart any time soon. The company has only produced one set of accounts, which showed its total net assets at Ł8, and is currently on notice that it will be struck off. In 2008 its business was merged with the BNP's Excalibur merchandising operation.
It is not only about the money though. As one senior BNP figure observed in an interview about GWR: "People will listen to a song over and over again and take all the words in, in a way that you would be very lucky to get one in 100 of them to listen to a speech. Music is a very effective way of getting our views across." Ian Stuart Donaldson, lead singer of the infamous "white power" band Skrewdriver, said exactly the same thing. The music might have changed but the tune has not.
Despite the initial hopes placed upon it, not least by Griffin himself, GWR has stalled. Its lacklustre performance is largely down to the man placed in charge, Dave Hannam (pictured), the BNP deputy treasurer who was jailed for three months in 2000 for handing out antisemitic leaflets in Hull. Hannam was temporarily demoted in early 2008 to appease irate BNP organisers and activists after a former colleague accused him of being "crassly incompetent". GWR's other director, Nick Cass, who in 2007 was sacked as party manager, appears to be a silent partner.
Ironically Griffin's decision to back Hannam (and Mark Collett) during a damaging split in the BNP precipitated a minor disaster for GWR. Those who sided with the "rebels" included its two leading artists, one of whom was Colin Auty. Despite ridiculing Auty the BNP continues to sell his album Truth Hurts, presumably because GWR has so little else to justify its existence. GWR's next release was by Joey Barber, a BNP activist who records under the name Joey Smith. His "pop" album Not Just About the Music was truly execrable. Griffin loved it. BNP members did not.
GWR once tried to take the rise out of anti-fascists by altering the lyrics of a socialist anthem by the late great Woody Guthrie to reflect the BNP's racist prejudices. It would appear that the joke was on them. Guthrie once penned a song entitled "All You Fascists (Bound To Lose)".
If the performance of GWR is anything to go by they already have.
F Roberto Fiore
Roberto Fiore has been a political mentor, financial supporter and close friend of Nick Griffin, chairman of the BNP, since 1980.
In 1985 an Italian court convicted Fiore together with his political ally and business partner Massimo Morsello in absentia of "subversive association". Fiore was jailed for nine years, later reduced to five-and-a-half on appeal. The convictions stemmed from their involvement with the Armed Revolutionary Nuclei (NAR) in Italy. Some NAR members had taken part in the Bologna railway station bombing in August 1980 which killed 85 people, including two British tourists, Catherine Mitchell and John Koplinski, and left hundreds wounded. It was at the time one of postwar Europe's worst terrorist outrages. Fiore was not directly involved but prosecutors wanted to question him about links between NAR and two Italian intelligence officers.
Rather than help the authorities with their enquiries, Fiore and Morsello fled to Lebanon where Fiore worked briefly for British intelligence. This allegedly enabled him to gain entry to Britain and subsequently resist requests for his extradition.
Six weeks before the Bologna bombing a number of British far-right groups were approached and asked to supply safe-housing for some Italians who would be coming to Britain shortly. Fiore arrived in Britain in October 1980 and became a business partner and political mentor to Griffin, then a rising star in the National Front (NF). Fiore backed Griffin's faction in their putsch against Martin Webster, the NF organiser, in 1983 and then helped his "political soldier" faction transform itself from a conventional political organisation into what one leading commentator on the British far right called a "proto terrorist organisation", as the party became increasingly obsessed with clandestine activities and a desire for confrontation with the British state. Following the implosion of the "political soldiers" Griffin and Fiore helped found another openly fascist group, the International Third Position (ITP).
Fiore became a very successful businessman and amassed a huge fortune through business interests in London and later around the world. They included operating as a slum landlord and exploiter of people brought in from eastern Europe, Italy and Spain and passed on to gang masters to work on the land and in food processing plants. Fascist thugs were used to enforce his "trading standards". His business interests also include CL English Language School Ltd, a college for overseas students in west London, of which he is the sole director. Edgar Griffin, Nick Griffin's father, is the accountant.
Fiore was also one of the founders of the extremely violent Hammerskins skinhead movement and the fascist Forza Nuova party, which he has led since before his return to Italy after his sentence for subversive association "timed out" in 1999.
Fiore is closely associated with the far right of the Catholic Church in the guise of the Society of St Pius X, in which Bishop Richard Williamson was a leading light. In January 2009 in a television interview Bishop Williamson denied the existence of the Nazi gas chambers, which caused a scandal when the Pope lifted his longstanding ex-communication a week later.
Fiore is currently an MEP as a result of his FN becoming part of a three-party coalition led by Alessandra Mussolini, granddaughter of Il Duce. When she stepped down as an MEP to take up a post in the Italian government, Fiore took her place in the European Parliament.
Griffin and Fiore continue to grandstand on the international fascist scene addressing far right meetings together most recently in Hungary in 2008. Unlike his "old friend" Fiore is not ashamed to wear his true colours on his sleeve. Speaking in 1999 about the International Third Position, which he helped to found with Griffin Fiore told an Evening Standard reporter: "All I will say is that I don't deny I am a fascist and naturally I support this organisation's crusade for a better future. I sympathise completely with its views." Ten years on Fiore continues to sing the same tune recently telling a reporter from Corriere della Sera, "I have no difficulty in saying that I have sympathy for certain aspects of fascism".
E Richard Edmonds
Richard Edmonds was once a powerful figure in the BNP, the right-hand man to its founder, John Tyndall. Despite his marginalisation under the new "modern" BNP Edmonds remains an important figure whom Griffin cannot afford wholly to ignore, not for who he is but because of what he stands for. After Tyndall's death in 2005 Edmonds took over as the personification of the "old" hardline, antisemitic BNP, with which many of its activists still identify.
A former member of the National Front, Edmonds was a teacher in Tulse Hill, south London where teachers and pupils alike were less than impressed by his political activities. He is a convinced antisemite and played a leading role in producing the Holocaust denial newspaper Holocaust News.
During the 1990s Edmonds was the BNP's national activities organiser. Leading the celebrations of the election of Derek Beackon as the BNP's first councillor in Millwall, east London, in 1993, he cracked a open a bottle of champagne to toast "Councillor Beackon", while BNP supporters gave Nazi salutes and shouted "Rights for Whites".
Three days later Edmonds and three BNP members were drinking in The Ship on Bethnal Green Road when a black man and his white girlfriend happened to pass by. Simon Biggs, Beackon's chief canvasser, smashed a broken bottle into the man's face, cutting him to the bone and leaving him with severe facial injuries.
All four were arrested and charged with violent disorder. The arrest and remand in custody of Edmonds was a serious blow to Beackon who was "like a limp puppet" without his puppet master and consequently kept an extremely low profile. Edmonds was eventually sentenced to a mere three months for his part in the attack which, given the time spent on remand, resulted in his immediate release.
None of this bothers Griffin. Edmonds remains a popular speaker in the BNP, regularly spewing his racist bile at branch meetings. Indeed Griffin recently thought it would be a good idea to bring Edmonds onto the BNP's national Advisory Council, which brings together the party's leading officers "to act as a forum for the party's leadership to discuss vital issues and carve out the party's agenda". Such a move can only be interpreted as Griffin giving a nod and wink to hardline elements in that party that he recognises their ideological concerns.
D Simon Darby
Simon Darby is the BNP's press officer and deputy leader. He is also a part-time personal assistant to the BNP's London Assembly member Richard Barnbrook and the party's West Midlands organiser. In short, Darby is a busy man.
Darby was put in as Barnbrook's assistant largely to hold his hand and walk him through the day-to-day business. Left to his own devices Barnbrook is consistently outclassed by his political rivals. Darby has admitted that he conducts BNP business in Barnbrook's City Hall office.
When not washing down pork scratchings with a bottle of red wine, Darby can usually be found updating his peculiar blog which presents a heady brew of extremist politics and nature observations - the latter marginally more informative than the former.
Darby was a leading member of the far-right National Front in the 1990s. When it split he followed the faction led by Ian Anderson, which changed its name to the National Democrats in an attempt to kid people that it was not the same racist organisation. Darby proved not to be the best judge of character. One of his closest colleagues in the National Democrats was Andy Carmichael, who later turned out to be an MI5 agent.
After the BNP started gaining some small successes in council elections, Darby was elected to Dudley council in May 2003, only to lose his seat a year later.
Darby took over as BNP press officer from Stuart Russell, who used the alias Phil Edwards. Russell's abrupt departure in September 2007 was a sad day for journalists who could always rely on him to provide them with a good laugh and an outrageous sound bite. No such fun is to be had from his dour and humourless replacement.
C Civil Liberty
Civil Liberty is one of a number of front groups operated by the BNP. Kevin Scott, the party's former North East regional organiser, who has a conviction for violence, runs the organisation, which was founded at the beginning of 2006.
Scott (pictured) states that Civil Liberty is "independent of any political party and will step in to defend individuals". This claim is rather laughable given that Scott is a leading figure in the BNP and the fact that the only cases of "persecution" that Civil Liberty has taken up are BNP members whose activities have landed them in hot water with their employers. It has not exactly done a good job. Most have gone on to lose at employment tribunals. Indeed its only real activity these days is to dole out "defend free speech" banners to BNP members at demonstrations, most notably during the trial of Nick Griffin, the BNP leader, in 2006 on incitement race hate charges. Griffin was acquitted after a retrial.
Many people have suspected Civil Liberty of being a conduit for funds to the BNP from other countries, particularly the USA, in contravention of UK electoral law. A limited investigation by the Electoral Commission failed to find evidence of this. Nevertheless Civil Liberty's website still includes its "US appeal" for funds from Americans who can donate to "Civil Liberty" either electronically or by cheque.
In February 2006, two weeks after the jury had failed to reach a verdict in his first trial, Griffin attended a conference of the pseudo-scientific racist magazine American Renaissance in Virginia, just outside Washington DC. His sidekick Mark Collett scampered round the hall placing a copy of the glossy Civil Liberty brochure on each seat. Why would he do that if he did not believe that it might generate funding from America?
When the BNP's so-called "membership list" was published on the internet in November 2008, Civil Liberty had a bit of an online tantrum, conveniently forgetting that the BNP's own members regularly post the photographs and personal details of political opponents, and anyone else to whom they take a dislike, on the nazi website Redwatch. Civil Liberty does not believe in their liberties. Indeed in keeping with the BNP constitution, Civil Liberty does not care two hoots about your civil liberties unless you are white, and then only if you are a BNP member.
B Richard Barnbrook
Richard Barnbrook is, surprisingly, the most electorally successful far right politician Britain has ever produced. This is of course completely in spite of himself.
Outclassed, outwitted and outmanoeuvred at every turn Richard Barnbook has carried the BNP's racist standard into the Greater London Authority (GLA) following his election in May 2008. Simon Darby the BNP deputy leader has been parachuted into the GLA to work as his personal assistant and to try and stop him making more of a fool of himself than needs be. No other far right activist has ever ascended to such lofty heights. Barnbrook had previously been the BNP Group leader on Barking and Dagenham council where he was elected in May 2006. He has since handed over these duties to the London organiser, Bob "anger management" Bailey who appears mildly more competent.
An artist by training Barnbrook was once friends with the late filmmaker Derek Jarman in 1989 he directed his own homoerotic film HMS Discovery: A Love Story, which the BNP have been keen to emphasis "is not bloody porn".
Barnbrook achieved considerable notoriety following his engagement to Simone Clarke - the "BNP ballerina" - but the relationship soon fizzled out due to a combination of his boozing and infidelity.
Barnbrook who tried and failed to hijack a genuine anti-knife crime campaign has resorted to making something of a habit of seriously misrepresenting the facts and statistics about "racial" crime in the council chamber. He is currently under investigation by the GLA Standards Sub-Committee for a possible breach of the Code of Conduct after he made "totally false" claims in a video that there had been three racial murders in his ward. The complainant noted that this was "an absolute lie". The investigation is on going.
Whilst the BNP talk up the achievements of "Sir Richard" with dreary regularity in truth Barnbrook has made zero impact on the day-to-day life of Londoners or indeed his constituents in Barking and Dagenham. As a result he has been almost completely ignored by the media.
Using the pseudonym "Richard Brook" Barnbrook once addressed a meeting of the American Friends of the BNP where he was able to mingle with a broad assortment of white supremacists, former Klansmen and neo-Nazis.
B BNP
Formed in 1982 by John Tyndall, the former chairman of the National Front the British National Party (BNP) is Britain's premier racial fascist political party.
Tyndall, a confirmed National Socialist who once proclaimed "Mein Kampf is my bible" ran the BNP without much conspicuous success for almost two decades. His solitary achievement was the election of a BNP councillor in Millwall in September 1993 following a prolonged "Rights for Whites" campaign though the success proved nugatory and transient. The councillor lost his seat only months later, although with a marginally increased vote.
Since 1999 the BNP has been run by Nick Griffin, a Cambridge graduate, racist and anti-Semite who himself is a former National Front chairman. Griffin has attempted to "modernise" the party and pushing its anti-Semitism and biological Nazism into the background in favour of a populist but nonetheless virulent anti-Muslim appeal based in particular on attack "Islam" as a religion. Numerous undercover television documentaries have succeeded in highlighting the persistence of racism, anti-Semitism and violent extremism within the party, however.
Griffin's modernisation strategy has been markedly more successful than the policy pursued by his predecessor. The convergence of this ideological makeover - whilst ensuring the purity of its core principles - allowed the BNP to exploit widespread rioting in the Northern towns of Burnley, Oldham and Bradford in the summer of 2001 and the attacks on the World Trade Centre on 11 September, translating anti-Muslim sentiment into hard votes.
The party, which has fewer than ten thousand members, is the most electorally successful in the history of British fascism. It captured several seats in Burnley in 2002, though the party has since begun to stagnate after its initial successes were rolled back. The party has since captured a limited number of council seats across the country, though has emerged as a serious force in the former Labour strongholds of Barking and Dagenham and Stoke-on-Trent since 2006 indicating that its vote is no longer isolated or indeed ephemeral. In May 2008 the BNP narrowly secured the election of Richard Barnbrook to the Greater London Authority (GLA) with 5.23%. The BNP required 5% to qualify for a seat.
The BNP had just about recovered from a damaging split which engulfed the party at the end of 2007 when, in November 2008, it succeeded in losing its entire membership list which was subsequently posted on the Internet, allegedly by a former party official. Police investigations as to the source of the "leak" are on going.
Griffin has staked all, and indeed perhaps his own political future as leader of the BNP, on the party winning a seat in the European Parliament in June 2009. To this end Griffin has positioned himself at the top of the list in the North West were he and his party strategists believe they have their best chance of making a breakthrough. Mindful that if he does succeed he may well be completely isolated in Brussels Griffin spent much of the end of 2008 seeking to forge contact with an array of European fascists and extremists whom he hopes he will be able to join in forming a new far right block within the European Parliament.
A Association of British Ex-Servicemen (ABEX)
The Association of British Ex-Service Personnel (ABEX) is a front group for the British National Party (BNP), through which it hopes to recruit disillusioned ex-servicemen to its racist standard. Despite claims to the contrary, ABEX is not really interested in anything more than making cheap political capital out of the very real problems some of our ex-service personnel face once they are demobbed. ABEX's online forums offer few solutions to such problems, content instead to rant about "Muslim wars" in Europe, presumably as part of a strategy by Nick Griffin, the BNP leader, to talk up the prospects of an impending "race war".
ABEX was notably silent when the BNP claimed that Private Johnson Beharry, who was awarded the Victoria Cross, Britain's highest medal for bravery, did not deserve it and only received it because he was black. Such a disgraceful racist slur against one of Britain's bravest soldiers makes a mockery of the BNP's claim to support British troops. Presumably, like its racist parent, ABEX only supports white soldiers. The Royal British Legion wholeheartedly condemned the BNP over the remarks.
ABEX was launched in July 2007, or should we say relaunched. The BNP founded an organisation with the same name in 2000, which operated from Leicester. Unable to secure money or activists, it remained little more than a letterhead organisation. Not even this name was original. ABEX was a carbon copy of a similarly unsuccessful venture launched by the National Front in 1980 to give its annual marches to the Cenotaph to defile British war dead the appearance of respectability.
The relaunched version of ABEX, which exists primarily on the internet, is ostensibly the work of Simon Bennett (far left), the BNP webmaster, and Peter Mullins (left), both of whom live in Cornwall.
Ironically, one ABEX member decided to announce the launch of the organisation on Stormfront, the nazi web forum the members of which habitually deny the Holocaust and praise Hitler, whose armies and paramilitaries murdered British soldiers in cold blood including in POW and concentration camps where many were worked to death. What a strange place to advertise a "patriotic" British ex-servicemen's organisation.
The ABEX forum contains its fair share of antisemitism. Activists post links to Heretical Press and Historical Review Press, two of the more odious purveyors of Holocaust denial, which might come as a surprise to unsuspecting ex-servicemen tricked into joining what they thought was a reputable organisation.