He is Sparticus after all!

THE total of the membership subscriptions from Friday's post was over £6,000, but the one letter that gave me the biggest boost didn't have any money in it at all.

It was from a gentleman living in London who asked that we ignore his resignation letter of a week earlier. He explained why:

"I was told by a neighbour that I was on this list and that very evening I had an unsettling call from someone who said they knew where I lived and would be paying me a visit. The following morning I received a call from The Sun newspaper asking me if I were a racist. My wife was so distraught, I called the police and it was after their visit that I sent in my resignation.

"Now I feel angry about what has taken place, the theft of the list in the first place, its publication on the Internet and the way that journalists and anti-BNP activists have exploited the situation to target BNP members. Now I don't want to resign any more, in fact I want to be more active because something has to be done to stop this witch-hunt against the BNP."

While that's very welcome news indeed, it is also a sober reminder of the anxiety caused to hundreds, even thousands, of our members from a quite vicious campaign by the Labour Party and their friends in the media. The courage and fortitude of our membership certainly mirrors the spirit that Britons have shown in other times when they have been threatened and this bodes well for the future battles that we will no doubt face.

For the One Show on BBC 1 on Friday, the pre-show publicity said that Justin Rowlatt would look at how the British National Party might be affected by the worsening economic situation. In fact the report was nothing of the kind, it was just a pathetic attempt to try to unearth that old 'anti-semitism' chestnut in an effort to smear the BNP and to try to deter its viewers from supporting the Party.

The programme was ironic for two reasons. Firstly, it interviewed an elderly Jewish lady apparently still living in the East End who was a veteran of the Calble Street clashes of more than 70 years ago. She was prompted to say how worried she was by the rise of the BNP. In fact, of course, she should be worried by something much closer to her home. She lives in what is now known as 'Bangla Town' and that is because this area of London has been taken over by Muslims from Bangladesh. Now if this lady ever passed one of the numerous mosques in her area and heard what the Imams there have to say about members of the Jewish community she would realise very quickly that she has much more to worry about than the rise of the BNP.

Secondly, it was my old chum Justin Rowlatt who was the presenter of this report. Now I met Justin at the local council election count in Burnley in May 2002. In fact we came quite close together as I had to physically stop him from hounding our victorious candidate Carol Hughes as she tried to leave the hall at the Turf Moor Football Ground.

A year later Justin was behind the Channel 4 programme that uncovered details of an 18 month police and social services investigation into allegations that young Muslim men were targeting under-age White girls for sex, drugs and prostitution in the West Yorkshire town of Keighley. Justin, back then, appeared very clued up as to the threat from Islam, but in Friday's programme he completely ignored how the East End of London had changed beyond recognition since the days of Cable Street.
Thankfully, judging by the comments on the programme's website which can be found here, people don't appear to have been duped by the One Show.