Ibstock today - Burnley tomorrow

There's an interesting council by-election in North West Leicestershire today where the British National Party will be hoping to come from nowhere and give an over-confident Conservative candidate a run for his money.

The BNP already has two councillors here and Ivan Hammonds has an outsider's chance of making it three.

The details are:

North West Leicestershire District Council
Ibstock and Heather Ward
Thursday 10th January 2008
Felix Fenning - Labour Party
Ivan Hammonds - British National Party
Paul Oakden - Conservative Party
David Wyatt - Liberal Democrat

The ward was last contested in May 2007 when the result was:
Craig Bowley (Con)737
Ted Blunt (Con)731
Dai Male (Lab)707
Penny Hopkins (Lab)620
Mary Powell (Con) 599
Ray Merry ( Lab) 559
Adam Tilbury (UKIP) 411
Leighanna Littlejohn (Lib-Dem)225
Ben Roberts (Lib-Dems) 222

This election has come about following the death of Labour councillor Dai Male, and it has already provided the BNP with a welcome boost with the local UKIP candidate, who polled very well last time, standing aside to give Ivan Hammonds a clear run as he has the better chance of making an impact.

Wayne McDermott is running the BNP's campaign and he reported on its progress yesterday.

"We had a team of 26 out canvassing on Saturday and 22 on Sunday. There were 3 from Newcastle staying overnight and 4 from Cumbria joining us on the Sunday - the rest were all from the East Midlands, mainly Leicester.
"We scored some vital political points on Christmas Eve by cleaning some graffiti off a road sign. Labour had put out a leaflet with the candidate and MP standing under the sign saying they were cleaning up Ibstock but then did nothing about the graffiti. So it was left to the BNP to clean it and then we put out our own leaflet with a photo of their leaflet and one of us actually cleaning up the sign - what an own goal for Labour!

"The Labour campaign has been lacklustre. Several leaflets have been put out but the quality and content has been poor - they look a spent force despite this election being in the MP David Taylor's home ward (He has been out on an almost daily basis and is probably Labour's best activist). The Tories are working hard to keep the advantage they gained locally in May while the Lib-Dem campaign is very negative - attacking everyone - and they have also delivered two anti-BNP leaflets, one from Searchlight and one from the UAF. The Returning Officer is aware of this and will be monitoring their expenses.

"I think we will poll very well. The energy we have put in and the numbers we are getting out is leaving the other parties far behind campaign-wise. In some polling areas our 'Yes' numbers are way ahead of the 'No’s' while others are even. Heather is our difficult district and it's where the MP lives. We are behind here although the strong showing from the Tories here could split the non-BNP vote and might just leave a crack in the door open for us.

"On the negative side I don’t feel we have canvassed enough - just 2 sweeps, although we have put out several leaflets and completed a mail merge. It was hard to knock on doors during Christmas as people don’t want to talk about politics during the festive period.

"I have just been writing down a few names of the people who have been out on the streets helping in this election and have already reached a total of 62 but may have missed a few off. This shows we have a credible electioneering machine here in the East Midlands, quite the contrary to what our opponents have been saying."

This is good news from Wayne especially in the light of a posting on the website called www.vote-2007.co.uk This is a cosy Lab/Con/Lib-Dem site which discusses local by-elections. I tried to join but they rejected my application!

One contributor claiming to be in the know made this recent posting:

"I would have expected the BNP to do well here, but it seems that most of their local group in NW Leicestershire have joined the rebels in their current internal disputes- so I do not expect they have done much more here than leaflet the ward. Regardless, would expect them to poll 15-20% here."

And after Ibstock there might be some news about the High Court contested election for Burnley Council's Rosegrove Ward.

Burnley organiser Chris Vanns reports:

"John Rowe is in London at the Royal Courts of Justice tomorrow for a hearing to determine a time and place for the announcement of the decision on his petition to overturn the result of the Rosegrove ward election last May.
"There is pressure to move this announcement to Burnley, but John wants to have it in London as it will go before judges there as opposed to a just a barrister in Burnley"

I expect BNPtv will be at the court so keep watching its website for news of the outcome.

Reaching new readers is the key

I have just seen a contact sheet of photographs from the Trafalgar Club Dinner and they look stunning. I had originally left half a page in Freedom for this annual event, but this morning I shall try to 'jig' reports around to give it extra space so that more photographs can be included.

This black tie dinner shows the BNP in its true light and makes a nonsense of the media's 'knuckledragging skinhead' smears. When such events are reported in Freedom with a host of positive images of the membership of the British National Party, it makes the newspaper a particularly powerful propaganda tool. When people see a copy of Freedom for the first time it immediately blows away the media's distorted view of us. I know, because over the years I have received hundreds of emails from first-time readers that say exactly that. And that is why it is so important for BNP branches and groups, and individuals who have their own door-to-door rounds, to keep pushing to get the newspaper into the hands of people who haven't seen it before.

Of course, selling Freedom at branch meetings to our members is as important as servicing existing door-to-door rounds to keep our supporters and voters up-to-date with what is happening and what we think. This also provides a vital stream of income. But getting Freedom out to a new readership is the priority, to spread our message even further so as to bring on board a whole new raft of members. And this is happening. In November's issue there are a host of reports of Freedom sales stalls being set up in town centres up and down the country and a roaring trade being done.

Talking of making space in Freedom for reports, I am leaving some for what I hope will be a positive result from the Royal Courts of Justice with regard to the Rosegrove with Lowerhouse Ward election last May. You may remember that our excellent candidate John Rowe, won the contest by two votes before two previously rejected ballots were added to the Labour vote to make it a tie. Labour then won the seat on the drawing of straws.

John and his fellow councillors in Burnley were outraged by the decision and took their case to the High Court where it was agreed that another count should take place and the rejected ballot papers be re-scrutinised. That re-count took place over FOUR weeks ago and there still has to be a decision on it. Maybe it will come today.

First job for me this morning after posting this blog, is Freedom's Letter's Page. There's room for just 6 to 8 letters, yet there are over twenty that have been put on the short list for publication. Unfortunately for me, some of the best letters are hand-written and sent in by snail mail which means that they have to be re-typed if they are to be included. In an ideal world they should all be emailed letters which I could 'cut, paste & edit' in a matter of minutes, but sadly life is not that easy. The sort of letter I particularly like tends to come from Freedom's older readers who are not computer literate which gives me extra work. Still if it's a good letter the effort is worth it.

And finally, I am always delighted when our opponents end up with egg on their faces. In Kendal in Cumbria, the Westmoreland Gazette tried to do a hatchet job on the BNP after a papersale was held in the town. Together with a front page story and editorial attacking the Party, there was a cartoon about a man having to pull out his own teeth because the BNP had stopped all the Spanish and Polish dentists entering Britain. But the 'joke' misfired and only went to stimulate a debate on why this country wasn't training its own dentists instead of having to recruit them from abroad. Sometimes the anti-BNP brigade can be too clever for their own good.

Lunchtime in the Freedom Office

It's been a busy morning with lots of reports of BNP activities and comment on the current political situation filling my inbox.

At lunchtime I normally trawl through some of the regional newspaper websites that start to post their stories online at this time, but with Monday always a quiet day, I'm taking the opportunity to update my blog.

Although I'm a blog novice, I have had a couple of websites which has helped to instill the discipline needed for regular updates to keep the website of interest.

My first website was Books on Vietnam, which as the title describes was where I bought and sold books about that country. Of course 75% of the books were about the American/Vietnam War but the most popular ones and most in demand were the books dealing with the military and political situation before the American troops arrived in 1965.

Another website was Burnley Bravepages which had a brief and fraught existence back in 2002 in the run-up to the May elections in that Lancashire town. Visits to the website grew steadily during the early part of that year and we were receiving around 2,000 hits a day. Once the campaign started and the website address went out on election leaflets, visits were up to 5,000 a day.

With about two weeks to go to polling day, I came down one morning to find that there had been 15,000 visits to the site overnight. I knew something was up and my fears were confirmed when Bravenet emailed me to say they had received 13,000 complaints about the site and were pulling it.

The customer services chap was very apologetic. He said he couldn't see anything wrong with the website but that the high number of complaints and the threats to take this issue to the highest level were more aggravation than he needed.

I later found out that a campaign against Burnley Bravepages had been organised by a trade union and they had fed all the anti-BNP websites with an email complaint form to Bravenet. Thankfully there were a couple of mirror sites, and by using the BNP server we were back online within a couple of days. I think the website played its part in helping to secure the BNP's three new councillors in those local elections - and by the reaction of our opponents, they must have thought so too.

Books on Vietnam? Why Vietnam I can hear you ask, and the simple answer is that I don't really know. I think it must have been something to do with the TV images that were on screen almost daily from 1965 to 1975, charting America's disastrous war in Indochina and that they left a lasting imprint on me. The first book I ever read on America's war there was Neil Sheehan's A Bright Shining Lie, the story of John Paul Vann. It left so many questions unanswered that my fascination was stirred, so much so that at one time I had over 2000 books on Vietnam.

My interest was always more in the political nature of the time, especially the ill-fated rule of President Ngo Dinh Diem, a Vietnamese nationalist ruthlessly murdered in 1963 by an American financed and promoted coup. Once Diem was gone so was any chance of Vietnamese nationalism and the way was left clear, despite America's military might, for the Communist takeover of the country.

It's a complex story, but I find it riveting and shall return to in future posts.

Now back to work on Freedom and a report of a successful fundraiser in Stockport on Saturday.