There's been a fall out from Redcar!

THIS is the front page of the April issue of Freedom which is out this weekend. Remember, you always get to see it first here on this blog.

I just hope the newspaper is OK. It seemed to me that I was at death's door last week and even the simplest task gave me problems. Fortunately Freedom was mostly completed by then, so it was just a matter of pulling it all together. But then disaster struck again when Tina, my proofreader, went down with the same bug, so the weekend and yesterday was all a bit of a struggle.

Anyway, I'm better this morning and my first job is to comment on those excellent election results from last Thursday.

That was a brilliant vote in Leeds and congratulations to candidate Tom Redmond on beating Labour, and Leeds City councillor Chris Beverley, who fought a sophisticated and targeted election, which maximised the BNP vote in the face of huge campaigns from the main parties.

I'm grateful to Paul Harris from Barnsley BNP for an insight into the campaign as it was taking place. He told me:

"On the Halton Moor Estate, which is a large council estate comprising around 30% of the ward, we have been receiving between 4 and 3 to 1 'Yes' canvass returns to 'No'.

"On the private housing estates, it's not so good but we are still averaging around 50/50. Some parts are rather less favourable than that, for example one day I had 16 No's to 10 Yes's, and 19 possibles.

"Although we have done 3 sweeps, in many areas we have only talked to probably around 20% of the voters.

"The only reason I have been able to take part in this campaign is because I was made redundant in January, so it's thanks to Gormless Gordon that I have been able to spend so much time on the campaign.'

There was another very good vote in Redcar where Lynn Payne scored a more than respectable 16% of the vote. But what is important here is that there may well be wide-ranging repercussions from the overall result which saw Labour lose a safe seat to the Lib-Dems. Let's evesdrop on a discussion on the Redcar by-election on the influential by-election website Vote-2007.

One poster wrote:
"If UAF, Unite and the local anti-fascists had channelled their efforts and resources into supporting the Labour campaign we would have comfortably held the seat."

And another replied:
"Unite is a Labour-affiliated union (I am a member of it) and if Labour-supporting officers and activists have time to be spent on campaigning, they should really be using it to work for Labour candidates."

I'm certain that this is a debate that we shall be hearing more about as Labour struggles to motivate its activists to put out its own leaflets.

And finally, well done to Mike Witchell in Felpham West on another surprisingly good vote in the South East. This region has been virtually unconsidered as a possible for returning a BNP MEP but now there's just an inkling that it might be the dark horse of the Euro Elections for us.

Only one election this week, in Moston in Manchester. I haven't heard anything about our campaign but understand that there is a huge Lib-Dem steamroller campaign taking place which might propel them from third to first.

The BNP will, of course, be looking for the 8% required to get Nick elected to the European Parliament, and if possible 12% to incorporate a buffer zone for those areas where we might not be able to meet that level of support. If anyone knows how it's going, please let me know so that I can update the readers of this blog tomorrow.

This morning I'm starting on Freedom 105 which will be the big print-run Euro Elections issue and looks as though it will be having a record-breaking circulation of 125,000!