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.

Back in one piece

JUST back from a week's ski-ing in Kuhtai in Austria. We took our annual winter holiday early this year to save money and clear the decks for what is going to be a massive year for the BNP.

As you can imagine there were great celebrations on Friday morning when I logged on to the hotel's computer and found out the Bexley result. I had been hoping that we could reduce the Tory majority to around 250/300 votes, so to bring it down to just eight was an incredible performance. We had been discussing the by-election with a Tory Party agent and his wife who were also staying at the hotel. They put on a brave face - "a win is a win" - but looked shellshocked when I showed them the full figures.

I have 288 emails that need a response so I'm hoping to clear those today to leave next week clear for Freedom. Just checking my search engine for news of the BNP in local newspapers and there are 12 pages of results promoting the link to Harriet Harman's pronouncement that Nick Griffin might be a MEP in June. What great publicity for us and another 'own goal' by Labour. I'm hoping that it was my analysis on page 5 of the January issue of Freedom that prompted her outburst.

And talking of own goals, here locally the Tories have selected a former councillor who was reprimanded for viewing porn on his council computer last time he was in office, to contest the forthcoming Belah Ward by-election in Carlisle. His selection either shows the utter contempt the Conservative Party has for voters in the Border city, or the difficulty they are facing in finding suitable candidates to contest local elections here in Cumbria.

More politics tomorrow and back to the holiday to let the memories linger just a little longer. The recession is certainly hitting Austria. The food at the Sporthotel was excellent but that was only due to an imaginative chef. We had offal for three courses, and the local Zander fish on another three occasions. Last year there was plenty of beef and other more expensive cuts of meats on the menu - this year they were no where to be seen.

For us, it was the collapse of the pound that made everything much more expensive than last year. This meant that it was beer and chips for lunch up the mountain and drinks in the room before dinner with vodka smuggled in in our suitcase. Thankfully the weather was so cold that we could make our own ice by leaving ice bags on the balcony.

This resort is a gem, and an undiscovered one at that. Just a 30 minute transfer from Innsbruck, no queues at the ski-lifts and vast empty runs back to the village. The picture shows me taking a break on Thursday afternoon just before a final run down the mountain. In this bar we would stop for Jager tea - a rum and cinnamon based drink - which boosts confidence and gives you the strength to go flying down the mountain just one more time when your knees and back are saying that they have had enough.

Anyway, sadly that's it for another year. If funds permit and the body is still willing we shall be back again in 2010, although we might try another hotel as we have been to the Sporthotel for two years running now and this tends to blur each holiday into one.

Spring is in the air

IT'S A LOVELY day in West Cumbria and my general feeling of well-being has been helped by a vital point for Workington Reds against Hinckley United yesterday afternoon. The 1-1 draw maintains our position 10 points clear of the relegation zone with three games in hand and a far superior goal difference. It was a difficult afternoon with the visitors taking the lead against the run of play just before half time and we had to wait till five minutes before the end for Reedo (Michael Reed on as a sub) to level matters. The 370 crowd was better than on Tuesday night, but still a long way short of providing the much needed breaking even income.

My colleague Keith Thompson from Southend BNP responded to my report on our efforts in the Harrow by-election on Thursday. He wrote:

"I saw your article re the Harrow by-Election on the BNP website. I have a special interest in Harrow since I lived their for many years. I joined Union Movement in about 1961 as they had a branch. We fought lots of elections. Then came the NF period. They did even better. Of course the borough was getting darker by the day and we used to campaign with the slogan "Don't let Harrow become another Southall". Well, it certainly is now.

"I still go there from time to time and one hardly sees a white face. Neverthe less it is wonderful to see that some activity continues - and all these votes will help push up the British National Party's percentage in the GLA."

Keith also reported that he thinks that Southend BNP might be able to contest sixteen wards in the town in May. That is a brilliant achievement if it is the case, and a fine example to every other branch in the country.

It is now two weeks since we came back from our super holiday in Austria and I know now that I must let go of those wonderful memories for another year. Here's a website for that great little village just 30 minutes from Innsbruck.

http://www.lifte.at/kuhtai_en/index.php

I'm off for a walk along the prom to take in that first whiff of spring in the air, but will be back to see Richard Barnbrook on the London Politics Show at 2.00pm.

Back in the Swing

It's a natural reaction when you come home from a brilliant holiday to think back on your time away and feel melancholy for something that has gone and can never come back again. Tina and I try to overcome this by returning the following year, so that although we mourn what has passed, we can look forward to it coming around again.

But there wasn't much time for reflection when we came home from Austria. I had Freedom to get to the printers and Tina had a week's membership post to process.

And on that membership side, I can report that things are really moving ahead for the Party, with London and the East Midlands leading the way as far as new recruits are concerned. Have no doubt whatsoever, the BNP is easily Britain's fastest growing political party and if the intensity of the membership surge of the last four months is translated into votes at the ballot box in the local council elections, then Britain will have a record number of BNP councillors on May 2nd.

Freedom is out at the weekend and I'm happy with this issue which has caused me so many problems, far more than any of the previous 67 I have edited. In this one I especially like The Cathy Duffy Story - from Airline to BNP councillor. It's written by Cathy herself, who was one of the 'stars' of London Weekend Television's Airline series, and is in two parts with this Freedom covering her life up to the time when she was elected to Charnwood Council. It's something a bit different for Freedom and I know our readers will find it interesting.

I'm disappointed that our list for the GLA elections only has one lady candidate on it. With the media doing its best to portray us in the worse possible light, a BNP list of six men and five women for the GLA would have gone a long way to soften our image. Still, I live 300 plus miles away from the capital and the selection committee has every right to tell me to mind my own business. I'm just making this point as a 6/5 make-up of our London team would have warranted a front page spot in Freedom as a great recruitment photo, with ten men swamping the solitary Roberta Woods, the photo doesn't have nearly the same impact.

No doubt I shall be accused of advocating quotas and ignoring the requirements of any selection committee which is to choose the best people for the job. In my defence, I shall just say that I want to see the BNP get as many GLA candidates elected as possible and sometimes it pays to give the overall image of a team a consideration as much as the qualifications of each of the individuals concerned.

Simon Darby tells me he was celebrating last night after West Bromwich Albion's demolition of Bristol Rovers in the FA Cup. I'm afraid there's no such celebrations in line for me. Workington Reds went down again on Saturday 3-0 at Stalybridge and have now lost seven of their last eight games. They have dropped down the table and are now hovering dangerously close to the relegation zone.

I hope we survive because our team is built almost entirely on local lads, with some having come through the ranks of the youth team and the reserves to make the grade in Conference North. That is something very rare today with so many players prepared to travel to get a contract. My main worry now is finance. Our crowds have dropped to the 300 mark and we need 600 through the turnstiles to pay the wages, so precious financial reserves are being eaten into. Attendances haven't been helped by Carlisle United's promotion push in Championship One or whatever it now called (in reality it's the old Third Division) and with United at home tomorrow night and Reds entertaining high-flying Hyde United I'm fearful of a less than 300 gate.

Shocking blogger

ABOVE: I , along with our holiday rep, follow John and Tina as we make our way to a mountain- side cafe on the Tuesday evening. It was a 30 minute walk and as a reward we had a gluhwein and a couple of schnapps there before flying down the same road we had walked up on a toboggan. It's a frightening but exhilarating experience and something we do every year.

Apologies, apologies! The lack of entries on this blog is a disgrace and I have quite rightly been branded a "shocking blogger". But there are mitigating circumstances and I shall now tell you about them.

OK, hands up, at the end of January I was finding it difficult to write anything without referring to the minor troubles the BNP had experienced just before Christmas. Suffice to say that I was initially hurt, and then angry at the betrayal of my Party and an ideology that I have been working to promote, mostly as a full time worker, since 1976, by four former work colleagues. But I was getting over this temporary writer's block when one morning my trusty AppleMac gave up the ghost.

Now, I bought my Power Mac G4 back in 1999 when it was a top of the range model. My Indesign 1.0 and Photoshop 5.0 software were the latest issues and for the next eight years I produced 68 issues of Freedom and 20 issues of Reds Review, a magazine about Workington Reds. Although the equipment was long out of date and some time during 2005 I stopped accessing the Internet because it kept making my Mac crash, it still produced a fairly good copy of Freedom for the printers.

At the beginning of February I was busy running off pages of the March issue of the newspaper for proof reading when my Mac made a whirring noise and then appeared to shut itself down. There was nothing I could do to revive it so I called a local computer shop and they said they could probably save my files and replace the hard disk. Unfortunately however, after a number of round trips to Whitehaven, 20 miles down the coast, I was forced to accept that while the computer was working as such, my software had lost a lot of its functions and the files of every previous Freedom I had produced were damaged or incomplete.

The computer failure had set me back at least two weeks. I had been hoping to finish the March issue before I went on a ski-ing holiday at the end of February but despite working 15 hour days it wasn't quite possible. Freedom will be out next weekend.

The up-shot of my troubles was the blog and any local political activity was shelved as I battled to finish Freedom on the patched-up Mac and with damaged software. But now, thanks to the BNP, I have a new computer and the latest software to continue the Freedom production.

With our two daughters at university, the annual family ski-ing holiday to Kuhtai was just for Tina and I and our son John, but we were joined by Freedom journalist and long-time family friend Steve Johnson. Kuhtai is in Austria's Stubai mountain range and at 2, 200 ft the little village is guaranteed snow whatever the weather elsewhere. I can thoroughly recommend it for intermediate skiers, with no queues, no ski buses and excellent ski-to-the-door hotels. We have fallen in love with the place and couldn't think of ski-ing anywhere else.