Suzy, Marlene and Lynne - fine ambassadors for the BNP

THE three ladies featured in Sky One's BNP Wives last night were a credit to the British National Party and the hour long programme certainly helped promote the BNP to a public who are becoming increasingly more interested in finding out more about the Party.
Suzy Cass from Wakefield, Marlene Guest from Rotherham and Lynne Mozar from Camberley, were followed by the programme makers for six months as they campaigned for the Party in their respective areas.
Marlene was featured organising the campaign for a local council by-election in Rotherham and the Sky cameras were outside the Town Hall to catch the BNP team coming out from the count after coming second and slashing the Labour majority by 600 votes.
Lynne was featured campaigning against a mosque in Fareham and then speaking at a local branch meeting. This was good PR for the BNP and the people representing the Party in both activities were a million miles away from the image of the BNP the media likes to portray.
Suzy was a superb ambassador for the Party. There can't have been many viewers who didn't relate to her observations on the changing face of Britain.
Of course no programme produced about the BNP by anyone other than the British National Party itself, will portray it as it really is. The editing the Sky team must have done of the footage from the Red, White and Blue Family Festival must have filled the cutting room floor. Children were hardly shown at all yet they made up over half of those who attended.
My favourite clip was Marlene dealing with that weasel-like interviewer at the end of the programme when he wanted to talk about Nick Griffin and his Race Act prosecutions and her views on the Second World War.
"No let's talk about our Prime Minister who took this country to war in Iraq on a lie which has resulted in the deaths thousands of people," she retorted.

Just 62 votes from victory in Ibstock

The British National Party came within 62 votes last night of winning a vital local council by-election that was seen as a crucial marginal in the battleground between Labour and the Tories for the next General Election.

In Ibstock & Heather Ward for North West Leicestershire District Council, the British National Party's candidate Ivan Hammonds came from nowhere to take second place, pushing the Tories into third.

The full result:
North West Leicestershire District Council
Ibstock and Heather Ward
Thursday 10th January 2008
Felix Fenning - Labour Party 699
Ivan Hammonds - British National Party 637
Paul Oakden - Conservative Party 515
David Wyatt - Liberal Democrat 441
BNP Percentage: 27.8%

This was quite an incredible result for the BNP defeating two of the three main parties and coming within 62 votes of victory in a by-election that was fought with the intensity of a parliamentary campaign. Following on from last week's 16% in Welwyn & Hatfield in another ward being contested by the British National Party for the first time, the BNP has started this most important year in the Party's history in a really positive fashion.

When the Ibstock and Heather ward was last contested in May 2007 when the result was:
Craig Bowley (Con) 737
Ted Blunt (Con) 731
Dai Male (Lab) 707
Penny Hopkins (Lab) 620
Mary Powell (Con) 599
Ray Merry ( Lab) 559
Adam Tilbury (UKIP) 411
Leighanna Littlejohn (Lib-Dem) 225
Ben Roberts (Lib-Dems) 222

Last night the Tories were confident of victory yet their vote was down in the face of this first time challenge from the British National Party. It also looks as though UKIP's vote went to the BNP proving what a potent force the two parties can be if working together to take on the pro-EU old gang.

And there could be more election news today as John Rowe and his team returns to the Royal Courts of Justice in the Strand for an announcement from the judge on the disputed result of the Rosegrove and Lowerhouse ward for Burnley Council from last May.

Ibstock today - Burnley tomorrow

There's an interesting council by-election in North West Leicestershire today where the British National Party will be hoping to come from nowhere and give an over-confident Conservative candidate a run for his money.

The BNP already has two councillors here and Ivan Hammonds has an outsider's chance of making it three.

The details are:

North West Leicestershire District Council
Ibstock and Heather Ward
Thursday 10th January 2008
Felix Fenning - Labour Party
Ivan Hammonds - British National Party
Paul Oakden - Conservative Party
David Wyatt - Liberal Democrat

The ward was last contested in May 2007 when the result was:
Craig Bowley (Con)737
Ted Blunt (Con)731
Dai Male (Lab)707
Penny Hopkins (Lab)620
Mary Powell (Con) 599
Ray Merry ( Lab) 559
Adam Tilbury (UKIP) 411
Leighanna Littlejohn (Lib-Dem)225
Ben Roberts (Lib-Dems) 222

This election has come about following the death of Labour councillor Dai Male, and it has already provided the BNP with a welcome boost with the local UKIP candidate, who polled very well last time, standing aside to give Ivan Hammonds a clear run as he has the better chance of making an impact.

Wayne McDermott is running the BNP's campaign and he reported on its progress yesterday.

"We had a team of 26 out canvassing on Saturday and 22 on Sunday. There were 3 from Newcastle staying overnight and 4 from Cumbria joining us on the Sunday - the rest were all from the East Midlands, mainly Leicester.
"We scored some vital political points on Christmas Eve by cleaning some graffiti off a road sign. Labour had put out a leaflet with the candidate and MP standing under the sign saying they were cleaning up Ibstock but then did nothing about the graffiti. So it was left to the BNP to clean it and then we put out our own leaflet with a photo of their leaflet and one of us actually cleaning up the sign - what an own goal for Labour!

"The Labour campaign has been lacklustre. Several leaflets have been put out but the quality and content has been poor - they look a spent force despite this election being in the MP David Taylor's home ward (He has been out on an almost daily basis and is probably Labour's best activist). The Tories are working hard to keep the advantage they gained locally in May while the Lib-Dem campaign is very negative - attacking everyone - and they have also delivered two anti-BNP leaflets, one from Searchlight and one from the UAF. The Returning Officer is aware of this and will be monitoring their expenses.

"I think we will poll very well. The energy we have put in and the numbers we are getting out is leaving the other parties far behind campaign-wise. In some polling areas our 'Yes' numbers are way ahead of the 'No’s' while others are even. Heather is our difficult district and it's where the MP lives. We are behind here although the strong showing from the Tories here could split the non-BNP vote and might just leave a crack in the door open for us.

"On the negative side I don’t feel we have canvassed enough - just 2 sweeps, although we have put out several leaflets and completed a mail merge. It was hard to knock on doors during Christmas as people don’t want to talk about politics during the festive period.

"I have just been writing down a few names of the people who have been out on the streets helping in this election and have already reached a total of 62 but may have missed a few off. This shows we have a credible electioneering machine here in the East Midlands, quite the contrary to what our opponents have been saying."

This is good news from Wayne especially in the light of a posting on the website called www.vote-2007.co.uk This is a cosy Lab/Con/Lib-Dem site which discusses local by-elections. I tried to join but they rejected my application!

One contributor claiming to be in the know made this recent posting:

"I would have expected the BNP to do well here, but it seems that most of their local group in NW Leicestershire have joined the rebels in their current internal disputes- so I do not expect they have done much more here than leaflet the ward. Regardless, would expect them to poll 15-20% here."

And after Ibstock there might be some news about the High Court contested election for Burnley Council's Rosegrove Ward.

Burnley organiser Chris Vanns reports:

"John Rowe is in London at the Royal Courts of Justice tomorrow for a hearing to determine a time and place for the announcement of the decision on his petition to overturn the result of the Rosegrove ward election last May.
"There is pressure to move this announcement to Burnley, but John wants to have it in London as it will go before judges there as opposed to a just a barrister in Burnley"

I expect BNPtv will be at the court so keep watching its website for news of the outcome.

Staff meeting & Small is beautiful

There was a very productive staff meeting yesterday in the West Midlands.

Some new and key appointments were made which will help the Party run smoothly as it goes through what many political pundits believe will be our most important year to date.

These new appointments will be covered on the website, but I would just like to say how delighted I am that Michaela Mackenzie has been taken on for the key role of Party coordinator. Michaela has been on the BNP's management committee since its inception but now moves on to this most important of roles within the BNP.

She has immense experience within business management and her expertise and drive is just what is needed to help the Party run efficiently.

January's Freedom is out this weekend and the Freedom website will be updated later today with a 'taster' of what is in the issue.

In the Daily Telegraph this morning columnist Simon Heffer bemoans the loss of small 'government'. He wrote:

"Anyone familiar with the way government used to operate a century ago cannot but be struck by the disparity with the way in which it operates now. Then, governments were small entities of a dozen or so cabinet ministers, matched by similar numbers of under-secretaries and ministers of state outside the cabinet. An empire on which the sun never set was ruled by roughly the same number of civil servants as are now to be found in the average department of state. "

His article prompted me to think of E.F. Schumacher who argued for the decentralisation and devolution of economic activity. He was one of those people whose political thinking inspired British National Party ideology and in Freedom Steve Johnson analysed why Schumacher's contribution was so important.

"IN HIS 1973 classic critique Small is Beautiful, subtitled ‘Economics as if People Mattered’, E.F. Schumacher (1911-1977) offered a mass modern audience that third choice, neither Capitalist nor Communist, which is at the heart of modern British Nationalist economic thought.
Born in Bonn, Germany, in 1911, Schumacher first came to England in 1930 to study economics at New College, Oxford. He then taught at New York’s Columbia University. In 1937, he moved to England for good.
At Oxford during the War he devised a plan for postwar economic reconstruction and after the War, Schumacher played a senior role in the British Control Commission which laid the foundation of the German economic recovery. From 1950 to 1970 he was Chief Economic Adviser to the National Coal Board. He argued that coal, and not oil, should be used to supply the energy needs of the world’s population.
He warned that oil would run out before coal and pointed out that whilst Britain, the United States and other Western countries have vast coal reserves under their feet, in the case of oil “the richest and cheapest reserves are located in some of the world’s most unstable countries”. He prophesied the rise of the Islamic-dominated oil cartel OPEC and the wars over oil that are taking place today in Iraq.
In 1973 Schumacher, despite his impeccable credentials as an Establishment economist, launched his devastating critique of establishment economics. He attacked the worship, shared by governments in West and East for a hundred years, of economic growth and efficiency as the highest good, regardless of all costs to the welfare of people and our planet. The worship of “economism” that is destroying the identity of nations and the environment of the Earth alike, responsible for woes from global warming to mass immigration. Economism Schumacher saw as “standing the truth on its head by considering goods as more important than people and consumption as more important than creative activity”.
Inspired by earlier Distributist ideas, Schumacher advocated, and provided economically-literate, practical guidelines for a workable alternative. The decentralisation and devolution of economic, and indeed political, activity to small human-scale communities, rooted in the land and preserving their local identities.
He favoured the use of sustainable “Intermediate Technology” rather than the vast polluting machinery of global greed, pointing out that the current system uses technology to produce as much output per unit of labour input as possible. Thereby making many workers redundant and entire industries dependent on equipment so expensive that only the global corporate giants can afford to use it. He felt, as we do, that technology should be aimed at enabling the self-employed, small businesses and producer co-operatives to dominate production.
Central to Schumacher’s thought was the concept of “decentralization”, of what he called “smallness within bigness”. He felt that for a large organisation to work it must behave like a related group of small, human scale organisations.
This is the foundation of the BNP’s concept not only of economics but of our nation and its society and democracy. It should be built from the bottom up, based on families in local communities, joined into local, regional and component British peoples’ communities of communities with as much power as possible devolved as far down as possible.
Schumacher’s vision of established communities living in harmony with the land in a society that puts the good of the community before the greed of the individual, inspires our own vision. It’s a vision of the New Britain we invite you to help us build together."

The Quiet Revolution moves to Welwyn and Hatfield

WITH 2008 just three days old the British National Party’s Quiet Revolution in local council elections was carrying on from where it left off last year.
In the two final council elections of 2007, BNP candidates polled over 20% in Essex and Leicestershire. Last night the BNP’s Quiet Revolution moved to Welwyn and Hatfield where British National Party candidate Mark Fuller polled 16.2% of the vote and pushed the Labour candidate into fourth place.

The full result was:
Welwyn Hatfield DC
Welham Green Ward
Thursday 3rd January 2008
Doug Berry (Con) 539
John Elvey (Lib-Dems) 484
Mark Fuller (BNP) 214
Bridie Croft (Lab) 88
British National Party Percentage 16.2%

Last time the ward was fought the Conservatives won with 707 votes from Labour with 198 and the Lib-Dems with 156.

It was the first time the British National Party had fought any wards in the district and the result was a brilliant debut in local politics. Welham Green is a small rural and town ward with a majority middle class population and hasn’t experienced the tensions caused by heavy immigration that Hatfield itself has experienced over the past two years.
The turnout was an incredible 46.6%, almost unbelievable considering the time of year and shocking weather forecasts. The increase was no doubt due to the Lib-Dem surge and 214 voters getting their first ever chance to vote for a local BNP candidate.

Well done to Mark Fuller and his team.