Battle for Britain comes to Cumbria

IT WAS a great night on Saturday when the Battle of Britain Roadshow came to Cumbria.

There was a near full house in the village hall in one of North Cumbria's most rural locations, to see a very slick fund-raising presentation and a brilliant speech from British National Party chairman Nick Griffin.

I've heard hundreds of Nick's speeches but this one was something special and in conjunction with the film show, it provided a very potent message. No wonder nearly £100,000 has been raised from the 20-odd roadshows that have taken place in the past month.

The whole evening went very well with a super buffet, and a bar run by Tina and her father.

At the end of the evening, North West Elections Officer Clive Jefferson, made an impassioned plea for candidates to come forward for the Cumbria County Council Elections in June and when I left there was a queue of people waiting to give their details to him.

A full report can be found on Clive's Cumbria BNP website here.

Lots of correspondence this morning regarding Stuart Wheeler's £100,000 donation to UKIP. So they got in seconds what Nick and his team have spent a whole month on the road and 22 Battle for Britain evenings working incredibly hard to raise. It is a little upsetting but not something to fret about too much. In fact it is something that we should even welcome.

It won't do the BNP any good if the UKIP vote collapses and all returns to the Conservative Party. A bigger Tory vote raises the bar for us and the vote that we will need to get MEPs elected. We need UKIP to hold on to a 5-6% vote share just to keep the Conservative vote down and if Mr Wheeler's most generous donation enables this to happen then all well and good.

Margaret Hodge, whose warning about the growth of the BNP in April 2006 led to the Party wining 12 out of the 13 seats we fought in Barking and Dagenham, is at it again in today's Guardian. Let's hope her intervention has a similar effect on our European and County Council votes. You can read the report here.

And finally, what do you make of this? 'The Church' seems a little upset over our new poster which will be widely seen in the run-up to June 4th. No doubt Vasantha Gnanadoss will be livid, a thought that gives me a real lift this morning.