Simon says . . . "You can smell the fear"

THEY are desperate, make no mistake about that. This morning's huge coverage in The Independent - as the struggling newspaper tries to out-Guardian The Guardian and capture that newspaper's left-wing readership in order to stay in business - just reeks of panic.

As British National Party Deputy Chairman and Press Officer Simon Darby, said in his excellent blog last week . . ."You can almost smell the fear as they see their power slipping away."

On its front page The Independent carries a large photo of some neo-nazi cranks and claims that they are BNP members. They pulled the same trick some time ago with exactly the same photograph and at the time acknowledged their mistake. You can clearly see from the banner being carried that the people in shot are nothing to do with the BNP, yet now the newspaper has done the very same again. That is desperation - so desperate to try to smear the British National Party that they are resorting to "lies and distortion".

In the very same report it was claimed that BNP supporters were chanting "Blacks Out" at the count in Swanley on Thursday evening. It's a blatant lie made up by a shell-shocked Labour Party campaigner.

All this makes The Independent's editorial "Expose the BNP's lies and distortions" all the more laughable coming from a newspaper that has sunk to new depths of the worst kind of journalism this morning.

Anyone who wishes to complain about the photograph should do so to the Press Complaints Commision under its Accuracy clause:
i) The Press must take care not to publish inaccurate, misleading or distorted information, including pictures.

The Independent is using picture of neo-nazi skinhead supporters and attempting to pass it of as BNP members.
That's all, keep it simple and be polite.

Another big day in Carlisle today with canvassing taking place in both Belah and Castle wards and then tomorrow I'm off to Glasgow for the Scottish European Election Candidate List interviews.

Reds are down at Tamworth this afternoon, taking on the team that is second in the Conference North table. I'm expecting nothing from this afternoon's 90 minutes after being so badly let down at Solihull on Tuesday. However, we do seem to raise our game when taking on the high-flyers in our league and have already beaten Tamworth at their Lamb Ground this season, knocking them out of the FA Trophy.

If it hadn't been for the credit crunch, this morning we would have been traveling back from a week's ski-ing holiday in Kuhtai in Austria. But when Sterling started to slide against the Euro back in October, we switched to a much cheaper week in January to keep inside our strictly limited budget. What a good excuse to inflict another holiday snap upon you . . . but no, I'll save it for another day.