A year on for Griffin and the BNP

Griffin: Needs a paying job

It’s been a year since Nick Griffin lost his seat in the European Parliament. He’d never been particularly keen on real work anyway, so he has not spent the last 365 days looking for alternative and dignified paid employment.

How we broke the good news..

Instead, Griffin has spent most of the last year traveling around Europe as a cheerleader for the Russian and Syrian governments, gratefully receiving the benevolent handouts of other European nazis along the way. He’s performed like a captive seal begging for herring.

Griffin’s less-than brilliant or promising political career fell into tatters the night he lost his seat and in turn set in motion one of the most brilliant spats in British far-right history.

Griffin has abandoned Britain altogether, though Britain had abandoned him long before he and his remaining supporters had to fight their way into and out of the losing count at Manchester Town Hall.

He left his mark, however. if you are an embarrassment in right wing politics, your enemies now call you a ‘new Nick Griffin.’

The fall out from Griffin’s defeat was felt right across the British National Party (BNP). The party lost some minor prestige when Griffin lost his seat, yes, but it could have probably survived in better shape and form than it has. Griffin began making plans for the eventuality of life without a seat in Brussels back in 2013. Sadly, for him, those he entrusted with his ideas stabbed him in the back on the very steps of the Town Hall that night he lost.

Griffin: Tried to give Pat a bonus

Clive Jefferson agreed to move against Griffin before the result was confirmed, not long before Griffin humiliated and mocked him for being a ‘cripple’ as they fought their way to get inside.

The gripe in the BNP, as always, was financial. Proper ideology had been abandoned by the party years before Griffin’s defeat. The more outright racist, fascist and offensive Griffin became towards the end of his tenure mattered little to those around him. The real drive in the final years of Griffin’s leadership and time as an MEP had been for the party to squander and cheat as much cash out of the system, the party, its supporters and members as possible. And we are talking millions of pounds. Griffin and his family were driven from the party as a matter of financial expediency by those who had invested and vested interests in maintaining their lifestyles sculptured around the endless begging, harassment and torture of those around them with money to squeeze. And yes, in one specific case, we do believe it does amount to torture.

Documents seen by HOPE not hate give a further picture of the complete and utter chaos that reigned-and still reign within the party. Unpaid bills, angry email exchanges, legal threats and begging letters between senior members. The backbiting is astonishing.

There’s even emails and letters from the European Union to the party, warning them to stop spending money that was not theirs, offering bonuses that were not theirs to give party employees, booking hotels they were not entitled to. The list is endless. What is perhaps most interesting, is how Griffin believed that he still had the support of Patrick Harrington and Simon Darby right until the end. This email to Patrick Harrington, the non-member that Griffin entrusted with his and the party’s darkest secrets was written just days before Harrington’s co conspirators moved against Griffin.

When Griffin thought Pat was on side still

Some party employees even took legal action against Griffin for not fulfilling their employment contracts, long before he had even lost his seat! There are a series of embarrassing arguments as to who did what and why in not just Griffin’s personal demise, but also the party’s. Thankfully, the BNP really is in the hands of people far less politically motivated and dangerous than Griffin ever was.

You’ll be pleased to know that one of those trying to claim thousands is Patrick Harrington, the BNP’s barrack room lawyer. I recall seeing Harrington defend the BNP in Belfast back in 2011 over the non-payment of salaries and holiday monies accrued by their office staff there. The shoe it appears, is now on the other foot, and Harrington has been suing Griffin instead.

That must really hurt Griffin, as we have seen a number of documents where Griffin has tried to have Harrington paid large bonuses for work and even for a year he was not in the employment of the BNP’s office staff in Brussels. All by human error, obviously.

Maybe that is why the BNP is now cleaning up their website and removing a series of embarrassing entries made previously in praise of Griffin.

The party’s recent election results are evidence enough that it is now beyond electoral concern. Yes, UKIP has driven some of the BNP’s values into the mainstream, but I would suggest that those values and arguments had quite comfortably settled in mainstream discourse already.

But, the BNP is not UKIP. Over on their website, the BNP is heralding the arrival of Jack Sen from UKIP to their party. Sen (who the BNP describe as UKIP’s former “rising star”) is according to the BNP’s leader just one of a “number of Ukip members have contacted the BNP with a view to joining us. Many now realise that Ukip is not the party for ordinary men and women who are concerned about the way their neighbourhoods and country are going.”

Vultures move in for the kill..

Really? The BNP make no mention of Sen’s admiration for 1930s British Union of Fascists leader Oswald Mosley, his admiration for National Socialism and his quote “A national socialist in his purest form wants to protect his country and loves his country.”

Good for Sen that both Walker and Jefferson turned up to empty his pockets, because judging by what we have seen of the party’s prevailing interests that is about all they will be interested in.

Gone: All evidence of previous lies