British National Party in a 'win/win' situation

“If we get a national leaflet out in Dunnington, will we get coverage for it?”

That was the chairman of the Green Party in York commenting in a report in the York Press at the weekend. It's a great quote and sums up the dilemma facing our opponents who try to use the media to denigrate and attack our Party. The full report is below:

York Press

Yesterday we spoke of how Searchlight promotes the BNP in the media by virtue of its attacks against us and so this is the case here. Our opponents think by their critical quotes against us in this report that they will influence people away from supporting the BNP. But, of course, attacks on the BNP from Labour, the Tories and the Lib-Dems are old hat so this is not the news that hits home in this report. The news value, as underlined in the headline, is that the BNP have been out leafletting in a leafy village in York, and that is all most people will take on board from the article.

The bonus for York BNP is that they probably put out less than 500 leaflets in Dunnington, yet for that hour or so of leafletting, thanks to the York Press, news of the activity reached 30,000 people in York itself.

And this is why, at our stage of development, it is a win/win situation for the British National Party. Of course we would prefer things to be on a level playing field and that like the other political parties we can go about our campaigning without interference from 'third parties' at election time and negative reports in the media. But our opponents won't allow us to do this. No, they prefer to oppose us at every turn, but now, even by doing this, they are helping to raise our profile.

These are difficult times and the British people are hurting. I believe that when many of them read in their newspapers about establishment politicians being "outraged" they are going to say "good!". It's the old gang parties that have brought this country to this shocking state of affairs and many would be quite happy to see them uncomfortably "outraged" and will look sympathetically on the reason that had brought it about . . . in this case the British National Party.

Trevor Agnew, a political colleague from Darlington with the same music tastes as me, emails that our favourite group, The Kinks, are re-forming with the original line-up from 1964, Ray and Dave Davies, Mick Avory and Pete Quaife. Now, I don't know whether this is good news or not. All four are over sixty and Dave is recovering from a stroke and Pete has a kidney problem. I think I would like just like to remember them as they were . . . back on a Sunny Afternoon in 1966 when England had just won the World Cup. Ah memories

I also think that some of the best Kinks songs came after Pete Quaife had left and John Dalton took over on bass and John 'The baptist' Gosling was on organ.

Finally on Radio 4 this morning, in a report on the rise in unemployment, they featured Shefffield and included a musical link from the Full Monty, the film that focussed on the decline in the steel industry in that city. But when talking about unemployment I would look further back to the 1980s and the destruction of our vital coal mining industry by the appalling Thatcher Government. No film better sums this up than Brassed Off and this is a cracking clip which I have played before on here but will play again now. In this scene it's band practice, and all the while the union rep argues in vain with the management to keep the colliery open.