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.

Playing the media

AT our Windermere conference back in December when we planned our European Election strategy, I was sitting next to Nick Griffin one lunchtime eating a chicken and chilli stew that he had made himself. It was so hot it nearly blew your head off.

We discussed the developments of the morning's session which had been an extensive run down of our Battle for Britain campaign. This was designed to motivate the British people to make a stand by rekindling the spirit of the Second World War and Britain's finest hour when, with our backs up against the wall, we fought off the enemy.

I said that I thought it was a brilliant idea and would certainly buoy up our own people for the arduous campaigning that lay ahead.

I also said that it was a pity that the media would 'black out' the campaign so that the public wouldn't be aware of it.

"It would have been good for our image for the British National Party to be associated with the songs of the time which are going to be played at our fund raising gatherings," I said.

"It would have been good for our image for the British National Party to be associated with the Spitfire, the symbol of British resistance, a photo of which is to provide the huge back drop at our functions," I said.

"It would have been good for our image for the British National Party to be associated with Winston Churchill and his V for Victory sign which is to appear on our Battle for Britain literature and which you make at the end of your speech," I said.

But the media won't touch our campaign with a barge pole I told the BNP Chairman - "It won't get a mention anywhere."

Nick said that he had a few ideas on how to get around the media black-out by using their enthusiasm to smear us as a way to get our message over to the public. I guess this is what he meant . . .

"There'll be blue birds over . . . . "

"Never in the field of human conflict . . ."

"We shall fight them on the beaches . . ."

The expression hook, line and sinker comes to mind.

Sometimes we don't even have to play the media. In their desperation to smear us the anti-BNP brigade, which is embedded in so many of our national and local newspapers, come up with the goods without even being prompted to do so. There's a classic in yesterday's Cumbrian Newspapers' News & Star.

Our old chum Neil Hodgkinson is the editor and he is very anti-BNP. He falls over backwards to publish anything that is derogatory about the Party, whether he writes it himself or whether it has been sent into his paper by our opponents.

This was a letter published yesterday.

A Labour candidate congratulating a Tory on winning, and praising voters for electing him! It can't get more bizarre than that, can it?

The letter confirms that there is no difference between the Old Gang parties and that they are all the same. This is something we constantly say in our election leaflets and here it is being confirmed by our opponents themselves in a letter to our local newspaper. We couldn't have asked them to do any more.

The BNP don't want to be tarred with the same brush as the Old Gang parties. We want to be seen to be different, so that all those people who have lost their jobs recently (including the 40 at the News & Star office itself) and who are really hurting at the moment, know that the British National Party is very different from the Labour and Tory Governments that have brought Britain to its knees.

I'm certain that the patronising tone of the letter won't go unnoticed either which will alert any readers to its purpose.