BNP : Roly Poly Fish Heads

9 Responses to BNP : Roly Poly Fish Heads

1. Rocky O'Rourke says:

   November 21, 2008 at 8:47 pm

   When Antifa jumps the shark

   Are Antifa and Slackbastard now in favour of having people sacked because of their political beliefs? That seems to be the result of the outing of BNP members that their websites are celebrating.

   Militant street level anti-racism like that detailed in the compelling read No Retreat by Tilzey and Hann has traditionally been targeted at groups and individuals that practice intimidation and violence against immigrants.

   The BNP may have plenty of ex-boneheads in its ranks but it isn’t organising in the way that the National Front did. It’s targeting elections. You may find its policies abhorrent but it is not employing thuggery and intimidation as an organising tool. In fact, some of its electoral success is down to the fact that it has become more ‘respectable’.

   Racism hasn’t abated in the UK, far from it, and racist violence is common, a notable example being the axe murder of Anthony Walker in Liverpool by Joey Barton’s brother. Organised bonehead-style thuggery is out though. You’d be game to get around an English city these days with white power written on the back of your bomber jacket. There are plenty more coloured kids around and they are much more assertive than they used to be.

   The are some parallels with Australia. Unpleasant as the notion of a few boneheads getting together here and there for a beer, a seig heil and some shitty music is, racist street gangs are not on the march, thankfully. Who would want to be a white power skinhead walking through Parramatta when a WRX full of Lakemba’s finest comes around the corner?

   In Europe the scene is different with hardly a weekend going by without antifa and besieged immigrant kids rearranging the street furniture in a picturesque city square.

   It’s good to keep anti-racism alive and kicking on the web but chatroom wars with boneheads are boring. On a more serious level, people should consider if outing members of political parties and publishing people’s addresses to enable reprisals is a road left wing anarchists should be going down.

   Do you think someone should be sacked from a job in the public service for being a member of a legal political party?
2. @ndy says:

   November 21, 2008 at 9:38 pm

   G’day Rocky,

   I dunno about Antifa (by which I presume you mean Antifa England). Whatever concerns you have about their approach/position would be best broached with them directly. On a side-note, Antifa England is an anti-fascist organisation comprised of a number of individuals — Slackbastard is just the name of my blog and, apart from extremely rare guest posts, consists of my own thoughts and opinions. So: I think drawing an equivalence between the two is problematic. (Leaving aside the fact that Antifa is a UK-based organisation, whereas I blog from Melbourne, Australia.)

   Regarding Antifa’s response to the leakage, here’s what’s been posted online so far:

   19/11: MORE SLEEPLESS NIGHTS AHEAD FOR BNP MEMBERS

   As dawn broke today, Wednesday 19th November, we imagine there are an awful lot of bleary-eyed BNP activists, lacking sleep for worrying about precisely what will happen to them next.

   After Antifa obtained the BNP ‘Security Manual’ (see issue 1 of the Antifa newsletter No Pasaran!) we warned BNP members: “If you are relying on the BNP’s security apparatus to protect you from antifascists, you have backed a loser.” After the entire BNP membership list was published online – including the names, addresses, phone numbers, and personal details of party members – we imagine there are some who wished they’d listened, and many more who curse the day they’d ever heard of Nick Griffin.

   The BNP membership list was placed on the internet last weekend, and as word got out, panic quickly began to spread in BNP circles, with near hysterical postings on fascist internet blogs and forums. As usual, feuding fascists also began to post up each other’s names and addresses.

   While Searchlight-affiliated antifascist groups reported the story, they failed to divulge the list or disclose the internet link allowing access to it. It was left to militant antifascists to openly publicise the material, despite the belated efforts of the BNP leadership to prevent this (somewhat like trying to close the stable gate after the horse, or in this case around 10,000 of them, has long since bolted we think).

   Antifascists are already having a field day with the information obtained, and look set to do so for the foreseeable future. It not only contains the personal details of the BNP rank and file (the Nazi Next Door so to speak), but those of leading BNP activists, the BNP ‘security’ team, and even those of Nick Griffin himself.

   Incorporated in the list are the employment details of many members, including a number of cops, teachers, screws, social workers, and members of the armed forces, who could very well now be sacked for being members of this discriminatory racist party. According to the list, a Mrs Yvette Bettley of Prenton, Merseyside, has “employment concerns” as she is a serving copper. We imagine you’re considerably more concerned today Yvette.

   Other personal information is also given. We are, for example, told that Mr Ian Underwood of Gillingham will not be renewing his membership because he objects to being told he can no longer wear a bomber jacket! As well as that Mr Paul Shaddick of Glastonbury may be a potential embarrassment to the party as he is a practicing witch! Antifa imagines that the BNP are considerably more embarrassed after being so careless with their entire membership list.

   If Nick Griffin is to stop his members resigning in droves he’ll certainly have a lot of work to do over the coming months. Nothing however, compared to the amount of work BT are going to have to do changing the phone numbers of angry BNP members. Nor compared to the work that glaziers, painters and decorators, and car re-sprayers may well be called upon to do around the country.

   It will be a long time before the fascists of the British National Party sleep soundly in their beds again.

   I’ve read this entry over, and while there’s certainly glee, there doesn’t appear to be a demand for BNP members to be sacked. Rather, the entry simply takes note of the fact that “a number of cops, teachers, screws, social workers, and members of the armed forces… could very well now be sacked for being members of this discriminatory racist party”.

   As far as I’m aware, this is certainly true of serving police officers — membership of the BNP is against police regulations, and a sackable offence — but I don’t know if the same applies to “teachers, screws, social workers, and members of the armed forces”.

   Regarding membership of the BNP by members of the armed forces, my understanding is that serving members are free to belong to (legal) political parties, but are not permitted to campaign on their behalf or to hold office. Regarding teachers, a recent article would seem to suggest that there’s no legal basis for dismissing a teacher on account of their membership of the party. See : ‘No teachers will be sacked over BNP membership’, Gordon Rayner, The Daily Telegraph, November 20, 2008: “None of the teachers named as members of the British National Party on a leaked membership list will be sacked or disciplined, the profession’s disciplinary body has said”.

   On my own response: I don’t give a rat’s arse for the careers of BNP members. On the other hand, I don’t think the fact that someone is a fascist means that they should necessarily lose their job. By the same token, I don’t believe that employers should have the right to dismiss employees simply on the basis that they don’t like their politics (that is, their ideas). On the third hand, I can see how belonging to a racist party like the BNP (an allegation which it naturally denies) could present problems in terms of the ability of employees (such as ‘cops, teachers, screws and social workers’) to perform their duties, especially when these are positions of authority, and the individuals over whom this public authority is exercised aren’t — unlike the BNP’s vision of a racially pure Britain — all White.

   In summary: apart from PC Dickhead, I believe it’s unlikely too many others will face dismissal. A more likely outcome, for some, is keen embarrassment, and social ostracism.

   More later.
3. @ndy says:

   November 21, 2008 at 9:51 pm

   He (and it usually is a he) is likely to be a John, David or Paul living in Nottingham
   Jonathan Richards
   The Times
   November 20, 2008

   About four fifths of the members on the leaked BNP list are men and the most common names are John, David and Paul. Those three names accounted for just over 1,000 of the 12,801 names on the list. Susan was the most popular female name. The postcode with the highest number of party members was NG16 – in northwest Nottingham – with 57. Among the more common professions listed by members are electrician, security consultant, former serviceman and IT specialist.

   The data on the list was scrutinised by The Times, revealing a clear picture of the geographical spread. Two hotspots of membership emerged, around Leicester and Birmingham. The list was divided initially into postal districts, of which there are more than 2,000. About a quarter of the 2,166 postal districts in which registered BNP members say that they live had only one member. Only 20 had 30 or more.

   Cross-referencing the list with socioeconomic data proved even more fruitful. According to analysis of the list by the Dr Foster health consultancy, which used social deprivation data from the Office for National Statistics, only 5 per cent of the party’s members live in areas with high Asian populations and only 2 per cent in areas with larger Afro-Caribbean communities. Eighteen per cent are from white working-class areas.

   The analysis also shows that BNP membership is higher in areas that have average or above-average deprivation. As opposed to the 22 per cent of BNP members who live in areas with above-average deprivation, only 16 per cent live in the least-deprived areas.

   About 1,000 BNP members described themselves as “activists”, including one who noted that he or she made “kites with BNP logos etc” and another who specified “discretion requested”.

   After John, David and Paul, the next most popular names are Michael (330), Robert (262) and Peter (261). Susan was 51st on the list.
4. PF says:

   November 22, 2008 at 7:26 pm

   Hey @ndy, who makes those pics like at the top of the post (the ‘oh noes’ one)? I assume British antifa?

   That’s a clever way of using propaganda. It’s efficient, w/ no costs involved and little time needed, but it also targets people beyond the activist circles. If you have any links to that stuff I’d love to have them.

   Cheers,

   PF
5. @ndy says:

   November 22, 2008 at 7:59 pm

   LOL GRIFFIN

   Fun for the whole family!
6. @ndy says:

   November 23, 2008 at 9:07 pm

   Rocky,

   More generally.

   I agree with you that the BNP of 2008 is not the NF of 1978 — this much, summarised as ‘suits not boots’, has been remarked upon by many. Insofar as the BNP still constitutes a fascist organisation, anti-fascist activity must respond accordingly. That is, insofar as the BNP has shifted its focus from controlling the streets to achieving success via the ballot box, ‘street-level’ anti-fascism of the sort described by Hann and Tilzey in No Retreat is of limited effect. This shift is otherwise known as ‘mainstreaming’; that is, attempting to more effectively tailor the Party’s imagery and policies to what is understood as being its potential support base. Hence Nick Griffin’s attempt to place a positive spin on the leakage of his Party’s membership list: “we’re not a bunch of skinhead morons”. This is correct: boneheads constitute a small minority of BNP members.

   Regarding the BNP and fascism, I think Geoffrey Brown’s article ‘Why the BNP is Still Fascist’ (What Next?, No.31, 2007) is useful:

   Enter Nick Griffin

   For all the carefully cultivated “reasonableness” of his public persona today, Griffin has a similar far-right background to Tyndall. He was a national organiser for the NF in the 1970s, and in the 1980s was heavily influenced by Roberto Fiore, a leader of the Italian fascist organisation the Armed Revolutionary Nuclei (NAR), who fled to Britain to avoid prosecution over the 1980 bombing of Bologna railway station in which 85 people died. Throughout the 1980s Griffin was a leading figure in what remained of the NF, promoting a NAR-inspired “Third Positionist” ideology that claimed to offer an alternative to both capitalism and communism. Griffin and the Third Positionists advocated a “political soldier” strategy which rejected the 1970s NF’s objectives of mass membership and electoral success in favour of building an elite corps of professional fascist “revolutionaries”.

   However, as the NF fragmented in an outbreak of political infighting, the Third Positionists broke away in 1989 to form a separate grouping, and by 1991 Griffin had abandoned organised fascist politics altogether. After a brief period in the political wilderness he joined the BNP in 1995 and became editor of Tyndall’s magazine Spearhead. Ironically, in view of subsequent developments, Tyndall brought Griffin into the BNP to act as a counterweight to an opposition headed by Tony Lecomber and others who favoured playing down the fascist character of the party in order to establish a broader popular appeal.

   Griffin used Spearhead to denounce the “spiral of sickly moderation” and scorned the idea of the BNP projecting an image of restraint and respectability. Commenting on the party’s earlier success in a council by-election in Millwall in 1993, Griffin wrote that the voters had not backed “a Post-Modernist Rightist Party, but what they perceived to be a strong, disciplined organisation with the ability to back up its slogan ‘Defend Rights for Whites’ with well-directed boots and fists. When the crunch comes, power is the product of force and will, not of rational debate.”

   In the course 1998, however, Griffin executed a dramatic U-turn and placed himself at the head of the Lecomber faction, arguing that the Tyndall-led BNP’s overt identification with fascism was a political liability. (As he and Lecomber later informed Tyndall: “The many photographs of you in neo-Nazi uniform have always been a public relations handicap for the party.”) When Griffin stood against Tyndall for the party leadership in 1999 he did so on a programme of “modernising” the organisation in order to make it more electable.

   Griffin was inspired by the example of Jean-Marie le Pen’s Front National, which has won significant electoral support in France by distancing itself from its fascist origins and taking on the character of a more mainstream right-wing party. (Griffin modelled the BNP’s “Red, White and Blue” festival on the FN’s “Fête Bleu, Blanc, Rouge” and the BNP’s magazine Identity borrowed its title from the FN’s Identité.) Having ousted Tyndall, Griffin set out to persuade the BNP membership to abandon their skinhead haircuts and swastika badges, wear smart clothes and in general project a more acceptable image, a tactic encapsulated in the slogan “suits not boots”.

   Griffin has a history of making sharp ideological turns in which he has embraced political views that he earlier repudiated and has condemned positions that he once enthusiastically supported. As some of his former comrades observed after he took over the leadership of the BNP: “He has been a conservative, a revolutionary nationalist, a radical National Socialist, a Third Positionist, a friend of the ‘boot boys’ and the skinhead scene, a man committed to respectable politics and electioneering, a ‘moderniser’. Which is he in reality?”

   Griffin himself would claim that over the years he has undergone a genuine ideological evolution in which he learned from his mistakes and adapted his views to a changing political reality. A more convincing explanation is that he is an unprincipled opportunist who is prepared to adopt or reject any variant of far-right ideology in order to further his own personal ambitions.

   Regarding the activities outlined in No Retreat, I think it would be more accurate to state that these activities were ‘militant street level anti-fascism’, not ‘militant street level anti-racism’, although there is obviously a close relationship between the two. Further, the book ends at around roughly the same time that AFA was winding up, partly in response to changing tactics on the part of organised fascists in the UK. So: I think those belonging to the ‘militant street level’ anti-fascist tradition were among the first to recognise the changing political landscape, and the pages of Fighting Talk (for example) are full of debate and discussion on this and related issues.

   Regarding parallels in Australia, see Cronulla, and the Southern Cross Soldiers.
7. @ndy says:

   November 24, 2008 at 1:11 am

   “The BNP may have plenty of ex-boneheads in its ranks but it isn’t organising in the way that the National Front did. It’s targeting elections. You may find its policies abhorrent but it is not employing thuggery and intimidation as an organising tool. In fact, some of its electoral success is down to the fact that it has become more ‘respectable’.”

   BNP: A party of convictions
   Kirklees Unity
   March 7, 2007

   The BNP claims to be the party of law and order but its ranks are full of people with serious criminal records.

   March 2007 David Copeland The Appeal Court increases David Copeland’s sentence to a minimum of 50 years. The London nail bomber, who had been an active member of the BNP, had originally been sentenced to a minimum term of 30 years for the three bombs he set off in 1999 which killed three people and injured 139 others.

   February 2007 John Laidlaw is sentenced to life after going on a shooting spree in north London in May 2006. He shot Abu Kamara in Upper Street before accidentally shooting Emma Sheridan at Finsbury Park Tube station, as he aimed at a second man. Laidlaw had a string of previous convictions starting at the age of 14. They included property damage, public order offences and 16 counts of theft and possession of knives. He also carried out seven armed street muggings and had been in and out of jail several times. In October 2004 he attacked a black motorist, hurling racist abuse at him. A police report written after Laidlaw was arrested for the attack said he behaved violently in front of officers and was “foaming at the mouth”. “In the presence and hearing of the black female gaoler the defendant made racist comments and remarks, stating he was a member of the BNP and that he hated all black people,” the document says. He also said he was going to “kill all black people”. He was convicted of racially aggravated actual bodily harm and using racist language.

   February 2007 Robert Cottage, a BNP member and former council election candidate, pleads guilty to possessing explosives. He denies, however, as does his co-defendant David Jackson, conspiracy to cause an explosion. The jury are unable to agree a verdict. A retrial will take place in July.

   January 2007 David Enderby, a BNP councillor in Redditch, is found guilty of assault on three members of his estranged wife’s family. He is fined £100 for each assault and ordered to pay £100 costs. His wife later told the local newspaper that he had a history of domestic violence.

   January 2007 Mark Bulman was jailed for five years for setting fire to Swindon’s Broad Street mosque. He used a BNP leaflet as a fuse for his petrol bomb.

   December 2006 Richard Mulhall, the BNP’s council group leader in Calderdale, was sentenced to do 200 hours of unpaid work on four counts of benefit fraud. Branding him “thoroughly dishonest”, Recorder Felicity Davies said he only escaped jail because relevant legislation was not yet in force when he committed the offences. He was also ordered to pay £2,000 costs and to repay £603.18 in jobseekers’ allowance. He had already repaid the housing benefit and council tax benefit. A jury had found him guilty in October of falsely claiming a total of £3,002.95 in benefits by concealing the fact that his partner was working.

   November 2006 BNP member Darren Francis is given a five-year restraining order after being found guilty of harassing Sally Keeble, the MP for Northampton North.

   September 2006 Robert McGlynn, a Swansea BNP activist, is fined £200 plus £200 costs for shouting racist abuse at an Asian woman. He was convicted on evidence from a passer-by. He later loses his appeal against conviction and is ordered to pay a further £140 in costs.

   July 2006 Allen Boyce The former National Front Remembrance Day parade bugler Allen Boyce, 73, now a BNP supporter, receives a two-year suspended sentence for giving bomb-making instructions to Terry Collins, a BNP member, who was sentenced to five years in 2005 for conducting a racist hate campaign against the Asian community in Eastbourne.

   May 2006 Angela Clarke A former BNP councillor Angela Clarke is fined £200 for resisting arrest during a fracas.

   May 2006 Kevin Hughes, who acted as election agent for the BNP Redditch councillor David Enderby in May 2006, is sentenced to 30 months in prison for assaulting an Iraqi asylum seeker. The sentence is later reduced to two years on appeal.

   March 2006 Luke Smith A former BNP Burnley councillor Luke Smith is imprisoned for 11 months for violent disorder, and a further six months for other violent offences. He is also banned from football matches for six years. Smith was expelled from the BNP in 2003 following an assault on a BNP organiser.

   February 2006 Stephen Bailey, a Lincoln BNP activist, is convicted of 35 charges of criminal damage and 19 of arson. He set fire to sheds, litter bins and a car and is believed to have vandalised more than 80 cars by slashing tyres and damaging bodywork. Bailey was arrested after police seized computer equipment and documents from his home.

   November 2005 Roderick Rowley, a former BNP candidate in Coventry, is imprisoned for 15 months after admitting 14 charges of making, distributing or possessing obscene images of children. He is also ordered to register as a sex offender for ten years.

   May 2005 Karl Hanson is fined £400 for possessing heroin and crack cocaine. News of his arrest broke a few days before the May 2005 local elections in which he was a BNP candidate in Huddersfield.

   April 2005 John Cope, a Cheshunt BNP member and election candidate, is fined £750 and ordered to pay £104 costs for harassing an anti-racist campaigner.

   March 2005 Terry Collins, a BNP member, is sentenced to five years in prison for a year-long campaign of terror against Asian families in Eastbourne. He claims the BNP “brainwashed” him. Collins, a former Territorial Army soldier, admitted charges of arson, racially aggravated harassment and criminal damage. He also admitted the possession of bullets found in his home and asked for 11 further offences of racially aggravated criminal damage to be taken into account.

   Also: June 2008 Former BNP member Martyn Gilleard. ‘Right-wing paedophile bomb-maker jailed for 16 years’, Tim Castle, June 25, 2008. “LONDON (Reuters) – A right-wing extremist and paedophile who wanted to “secure a future for white children” and kept explosives at his Yorkshire flat was jailed for 16 years on Wednesday. Martyn Gilleard, 31, from Goole, had been found guilty at Leeds Crown Court on Tuesday of preparing terrorist acts and of collecting information useful for an act of terrorism. He had pleaded guilty at earlier hearings to possessing live ammunition and 39,000 indecent images of children. On Wednesday he was jailed 11 years for the terrorism and ammunition charges, 12 months for the child images and given another four years because of the danger he posed to the public, a police spokeswoman said. Officers conducting a child pornography raid last October had discovered racist literature, home-made bombs, knives and a rifle at Gilleard’s flat. Among the material seized were membership cards for the National Front, British People’s Party and the White Nationalist Party…”
8. PF says:

   November 24, 2008 at 12:06 pm

   Thanks @ndy for the link. It looks like an isolated incident rather than a significant change in propaganda tactics, but I’ve sent it off to some of the people in Politics and English/Communications who may be interested. If you find any other sites or any evidence that these images are being created and used more often (including from the fash side) I’d love to hear about it.

   Cheers,

   PF
9. Kadet says:

   November 24, 2008 at 6:23 pm

   Good to see the BNP have their knickers in a twist and are literally shitting bricks over this.

   The only good nazi is a fucking dead one.

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.