Fiona's not a red, but probably just a blue . .

Some lovely photographs from the Red, White & Blue's Christian Service on the Sunday morning.

This is always a well-attended event and this year, in the light of the tragedy unfolding in Afghanistan, saw a large contingent of serving and former soldiers who paraded to the church tent. The Last Post was played at the end of the service providing quite an emotional finale.

Full marks to the Reverend Robert West and his team for a poignant and relevant service as always.

When I read the huge amount of rubbish written about the RWB and the protests from our opponents by supposed creditable news sources it makes me want to spit.

It is such a blatant distortion of the truth.

I don't often take issue with Simon Darby and John Walker over press matters by I'm afraid I have to disagree with their decision to allow Fiona Hamilton from The Times into the event, not once but twice!

I think the poison she writes is just as bad as anything that appears in the Daily Mirror and that she should be treated in the same way as the journalists from that rag are.

Now I have my theory about Fiona. She turned up out of nowhere in the run-up to the European Elections and started writing smear stories about the British National Party in The Times . . . and that's just about all she writes.

I reckon she's on the Blue State Digital payroll. That's Barack Obama's website team that was signed up for £1million by the Labour Party to try to stop the British National Party getting MEPs elected on June 4th. Hopefully when the £million has been spent, Fiona will disappear back from where she came from.

And on the subject of the media's apparent softly, softly approach to the violent protests outside our family festival, did you see that our Foreign Secretary has condoned terrorism! He said that it's OK if the cause is just and cited the ANC terrorist campaign in South Africa.

No doubt Milliband considers attacking the British National Party as a "just cause" and that's why the Government funded the thirty odd coaches that brought protesters from across the country to Denby at the weekend. Apparently they all were given a lunch box as well as a supply of free drinks.

And finally back to Afghanistan. We are told that our soldiers can occupy the villages of Helmand by day but when they go back to camp, the Taliban return after nightfall. This is Vietnam all over again and the whole sorry saga will end the same tragic way with the British Army, this time, making a humiliating withdrawal and the country being left to the enemy forces.

America lost 58,000 soldiers in Vietnam - let's just hope our Government sees sense before we get anywhere near that death toll.

Welcome to Vietnam

WHEN I was a teenager I can remember sitting watching the news with my parents. It was the late Sixties and almost every bulletin seemed to have a report from the war in Vietnam.

I could have stepped back forty years in time last night when I saw the report about the British and American offensive in Afghanistan. Same strategy as used in Vietnam - flying out to a village, dropping troops to secure it, then leaving a token force to hold it against the Viet Cong.

I have read a few hundred books on the Vietnam war and at one time had a collection of over 3,000 books which I bought and sold via my website Booksonvietnam.

In all the recollections and history books on the war the message was the same - the war couldn't be won. The French couldn't win in Vietnam before the Americans tried and the Chinese couldn't win after the Americans.

Afghanistan is the same. The war can't be won so every British serviceman or women who loses their life there has done so for nothing. It make me want to cry when I think of the grief felt by those families, and then it makes me angry that Blair and Brown have squandered British lives in this way.

Well done to Peter North for his 211 votes in last night's local council by-election in Sutton. He polled more than twice as many votes as the Labour Party's candidate.

The full result was:
Sutton Council
Nonsuch Ward
Thursday 2nd July 2009
Gerry Jerome (Lib-Dem) 1665
Chris Dunlop (Con) 1329.
Peter North (BNP) 211
Marcus Papadopoulos (Lab) 88
BNP Percentage: 6.4%


If you fancy a weekend campaigning in Norwich in this lovely weather, then let me introduce you to Julia Howman and her team (above) who will no doubt be delighted by any offers of help.

And as it's Friday what about a Kinks' classic. This is a shortened version of Shangri-la for a BBC programme on Ray Davies from about 15 years ago. This was one I my Kinks favourites but sadly it wasn't a hit at the time because it was probably too melancholy.

Blogging and the BNP

Quite often when I turn on my computer in the morning and my home page of British National Party 'news' searches springs up, there's a diary story from The Guardian at the top of the pile. The diarists on this newspaper seem to have a growing fascination with the BNP which is quite surprising since they purport to abhor everything we stand for - maybe it's our policy to nationalise all essential services and the railways that might be winning a few of them over?

This morning it's Hugh Muir who bemoans the fact that the BNP is using blogs to recruit supporters. He writes:
"At all ends of the political spectrum, the problem is the same. How to convey the message; how to engage. The problem is more acute for the far-right shock troops of the BNP, who know that most will refuse to read their unsavoury internet ramblings unless they are disguised to make them palatable."

Hugh goes on to quote Nick Griffin apparently lecturing potential bloggers on how to make the most of the service . . . ' the real power of this medium lies - not (in) the naked politics that turns off most of the population, but subtle 'independent' popular validation of our views and our party'.

Well if that's the case, I'm obviously off beam with the BNP Chairman's thinking on this. My blog is 'naked politics' under my handle of 'the editor of the British National Party's newspaper, Freedom.' I suppose I could have been not quite so 'in the face' with who I am, but I'm not keen on hiding my political light under a bushel.

I'm new to blogging, putting one's thoughts down on your own personal page, but I have been publishing my viewpoint, as such, for the last two years. First job in the morning was to trawl all the media outlets online looking for the sort of stories that I could comment on. National newspapers, local newspapers, magazines, news sites, nearly all of them provide some sort of comment facility to express your views on. I had great success with this, making sure that the BNP was mentioned and our policy on the relevant issues.

Then at the beginning of this year someone started 'tailing' me. They must have been using a similar search engine code. Whenever I posted a comment, they would be right behind with their posting which stated "Martin Wingfield edits the BNP newspaper and is being disingenuous in not stating this". Even when I dropped the 'Wingfield' and just used 'Martin from Carlisle', they were there stating who I was. The outcome of this was that suddenly my posts to the national newspapers didn't get published any more and then the larger regional newspapers followed suit.

So that's why I've started blogging. I like to start the day getting some views 'down on paper'.

When I was running my Books on Vietnam website I met hundreds of people online and debated the various issues concerning that country's history. The name Martin Wingfield didn't mean anything to most of them so I could have made that 'subtle 'independent' popular validation of our views and our party' and probably did. There was a lecturer at the London School of Economics who sussed me out straight away but despite differing viewpoints we had a long and interesting correspondence for nearly a year. And then there was a UNICEF official in Australia. We debated long into the night the merits and shortcomings of the Ngo Dinh Diem Government and at the end of our exchange of emails he wrote . . "You are either a geography teacher from Sussex University or a leading light in the British National Party. I hope it is the former, but I suspect it is the latter."

No independent popular validation achieved there then!

Democracy, Vietnam & Stalybridge Celtic

We get a box of fruit and vegetables grown locally delivered every week, to show support for Cumbria's farmers and to avoid putting any money in the pocket of the supermarkets. Everything always gets eaten and if there is anything left then we make it into a soup which gives us lunch for a couple of days.

I mention this because it was while I was enjoying a bowl of leek and potato soup and listening to Radio 4's World at One today, that a Labour adviser, being interviewed by Martha Kearney, confirmed the points I had made in my blog this morning. He thought that the convergence of Labour and the Conservatives into the centre ground was bad for democracy because voters were being denied a real choice. He also went on to say that it definitely wasn't the way forward for the Labour Party which was losing support hand over fist in its traditional heartland . . . and we all know where that support is going.

There have been a few emails over the blog entry concerning the Vietnam War. My interest in the 20th century history of Vietnam is anything but support for American involvement there after the country was divided at the Geneva Conference in 1954. American foreign policy was a disaster for Vietnam and the Vietnamese people.

I also get irritated by those who dismiss Ngo Dinh Diem as an American puppet. Once they start down that track I know that they have only read the one book on Vietnam - Stanley Karnow's Vietnam - A History. Diem and his brother Nhu were nationalists who had the best interests of Vietnam at heart. A great many Vietnamese thought so too because when the country was about to be divided, over 1 million people left their property and belongings behind in the North to move to the South to be under Diem's rule rather than that of Ho Chi Minh. America's involvement there was never about Vietnam or the Vietnamese people, but just about confronting Russia and China.

When I was running my 'Books on Vietnam' website I was always being asked to recommend books. Obviously it depended on what the reader was really after, but if, like me, they were interested in the time when French rule was coming to an end, I always pointed them towards Lucien Bodard's The Quicksand War. This book provides a vivid picture of what Vietnam was really like in the early 1950s. Once you have read it you will know why the Americans were destined to fail and acknowledge the massive achievement of Diem to bring order and stability to the country.

UPDATE: In yesterday's blog I said that Stalybridge Celtic were one place below Workington Reds in the Conference North table. Well they beat Gainsborough Trinity 5-1 last night and are now one place above us. Let's just hope that the scoreline included the goals they were going to score this Saturday as well.

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.