Happy Christmas

As promised the likely front page for the all-important January issue of Freedom.

There was an in-depth election strategy discussion yesterday with all the movers and shakers in that department involved. The outcome could be that a mass distribution of Freedom is used in the warm-up to a local election campaign, prior to the first Patriot leaflet being delivered, to prepare voters for when BNP canvassers come knocking on their door.

I'm highly delighted at this possibility, so fingers-crossed this new strategy gets the go ahead.

Off for a Christmas haircut later this afternoon and then we have guests this evening.

Happy Christmas to everyone who reads this blog, and apologies for those many days when I failed to make a posting. When sharing your thoughts with political associates, your morale at the time always plays a key role. Numerous posts have been deleted rather than posted when written because I felt they were too downbeat and didn't offer the reader anything positive.

As you can tell from my recent good run of posts, my morale at the moment is 'sky high'. Let's hope this continues well into 2009.

Media's anti-BNP bias is helping us in Cumbria

LABOUR WIN KELLS BY-ELECTION BY JUST 16 VOTES
"LABOUR retained the Kells and Sandwith seat in Whitehaven following yesterday’s by-election.
Mother-of-two Wendy Skillicorn won 418 of the 1,042 votes, beating the British National Party’s candidate Simon Nicholson by just 16 votes.
Brigid Anne Whiteside of the Conservative party got 190 votes.
Only 26.6 per cent of the ward turned up to cast their votes in polling stations across Kells and Sandwith.
The by-election was called to fill the vacant Cumbria County Council position left by Joe McAllister who died in July."

That's how our local newspaper the News & Star reported the result of last Thursday's Kells by-election in Whitehaven!

You can't help smirking, can you? The understatement is classic. No mention of the Labour majority slashed from 1010. No mention of the 900 votes that the Labour Party had lost. No mention of the British National Party taking 40% of all votes cast, or any suggestion that the 400-plus BNP votes almost certainly came from voters who had directly switched from Labour. It's as if the newspaper was completely unaware of the significance of the result.

But don't be fooled, the News & Star is all too well aware of the significance of the result, and that is why the report was so ridiculously low key.

On its website, the newspaper describes itself as thus:

A fresh, bright and bold daily newspaper that is genuinely ‘part of daily life’ all across North Cumbria. With its vibrant content of hard news, human interest stories, regular columnists, specialist features and supplements and unashamedly partisan football coverage, you can be sure the News & Star is connected to its local community."

There's one thing missing from this description. Added to the list should be "unashamedly partisan political coverage".

That's because the editor is Neil Hodgkinson, a person carrying so much political baggage that he must have trouble sleeping comfortably at night. Here's a snapshot of this chap's thinking, reported in the Press Gazette back in July 2004 when he was editor of the Yorkshire Evening Post.

"Editor Neil Hodgkinson said: The Evening Post has a policy not to publish any BNP statements or allow it right of reply."

Just Google "Neil Hodgkinson and BNP" and there are many more pages about him and his anti-democratic stance against the BNP.

So my irritation at the inadequate reporting of our sensational result in Whitehaven is tempered by the fact that I know that Neil's annoyance at having to pass a report for publication in his newspaper that wasn't openly critical of the BNP "trumps" mine. In fact, I'm quite content with the understatement of the report, because it suits us very well at this time.

Expectation is the demon of politics and unfulfilled expectations demoralise Party campaigners more than anything else I know. I would much rather that we go on churning out solid and constitent results here in Cumbria and building up our voter base for the European Elections and the General Election, by ducking under the media's radar.

And our votes in Cumbria have been quite spectacular over the past two years.

Average BNP vote in 2 Cumbria Council elections over the past 18 months: 25.5%.
Average BNP vote in 6 Allerdale Council elections over the past 18 months: 20.2%.
Average BNP vote in 3 Barrow Council elections over the past 18 months: 11.5%
Average vote in 15 Carlisle Council elections over the past 18 months: 15.5%
Average vote in 1 Copeland Council election over the past 18 months: 23.5%

In the run-up to June and the next round of County Council elections, our teams across Cumbria will be beavering away signing up new recruits and preparing our candidates for their campaigns. The face of politics in Cumbria is changing beyond recognition with former Labour voters deserting to the BNP every day, and whether a biased editor has a policy not to publish any BNP statements or allow it right of reply, will make no difference whatsoever.

Freedom is coming along well and I'll post a possible front page on this blog over Christmas.

The huge benefit of Thursday's results

I HAVE come into the office today because I want to write up those two brilliant election results for Freedom while they are still fresh in my mind.

I have just emailed Wayne McDermott, the man behind our stunning performance in Ibstock, to get a new photo of Ivan Hammonds, our excellent candidate, and within minutes there's a response and a choice of three photographs - so he's obviously on duty as well. Wayne tells me there are other important local council by-elections coming up in the next few months, not just in the East Midlands, so there will be no let up in our campaigning.

I know our election guru up here in Cumbria, Clive Jefferson, is "tired" after all the effort put into the Kells by-election in Whitehaven. And that's hardly surprising. To reduce a Labour majority of 1010 to just 16 votes is an incredible feat, and only came about after six weeks of non-stop campaigning.

I'm spoke with Clive yesterday and he was very complimentary about Freedom and how it helped the campaign in Whitehaven. Apparently most homes in the huge county council ward received a copy of the newspaper at the very start of the campaign and Clive said that this helped when canvassing because voters were already aware of what the BNP was all about.

He said that in his election report, he will be emphasising how beneficial an early distribution of Freedom across any ward being fought can be. Of course that makes me very happy. I want Freedom to be read by as many people as possible, not just the regular readership, and a mass distribution across a ward as soon as an election is called would seem to be a good way of maximising the potential of the newspaper.

The effect on our Party of Thursday night's results has been massive - just take a look at some of the comments on the main BNP website after my report. And this effect is much more important than whether we just won or just lost the election. Labour morale has sunk to rock bottom while ours is sky high and that bodes well for when the next local council by-election is being fought. Our election team will be raring to go, while Labour's will be dragging themselves around the streets fearing the worse.

There's talk in the newspapers this morning about a General Election in June, so we could have three elections on the one day. That wouldn't do us any favours and might harm our Euro-Election effort. Let's hope Brown is still the coward he was in November 2007 and bottles it again, hanging on till 2010.

2009 - The Year of the BNP

THAT'S the headline for the January issue of Freedom which will be available from January 7th.

It is an ideal issue to get the most important year in the history of the British National Party off to a flying start, with reports on our victory in Boston and our agonising defeats by 1 vote, 15 votes and 16 votes in Shildon, Ibstock and Whitehaven. There is also coverage of our Annual Conference in Blackpool and the Remembrance Day ceremonies that our members organised and took part in. Freedom shows the true face of the BNP and details our policies, two topics that the public will become more and more interested in over the next 12 months.

After three hourly news bulletins, BBC Radio Cumbria is still ignoring the election result from Whitehaven but that doesn't matter. Up here in the far north west corner of England there's a jungle telegraph and the real news gets around despite the efforts of the local media to put their spin on it. People knew that something was going on in Whitehaven. Two weeks ago I was told at a football match ten miles away in Workington that there were more 'Vote BNP' posters in windows in Kells than there were Christmas decorations!

They were massive votes for us last night. I know both Simon and Ivan will be disappointed that they are not, this morning, representatives of their local communities after coming so close, but looking at the bigger picture winning or losing isn't important. It is vote share that we should be focussing on, and that's because our opponents were hoping that by exposing the names on the 2007 BNP membership list and by hounding some of those people in their places of work and their homes, they would 'frighten away' support for the BNP.

Well exactly the opposite has happened and these results are further proof. Our membership responded in the Best of British traditions to this attack, not just by renewing their membership early but in many instances by taking out a Gold Membership. Lapsed members, including those who were 'outed' on the list, have re-joined, and there has been an incredible near-100 new members a week joining the Party since the media's feeding frenzy. Our vote share in Whitehaven and Ibstock is just confirmation that we are moving forward at a significant rate of knots, despite the efforts of those who oppose us.

On the economic front, no one knows what to expect next year. But when money is tight people start looking at their elected representatives to make sure they are doing their jobs to the best of their ability and not wasting hard-earned taxpayers' money. BBC Radio Cumbria might not have been reporting the Whitehaven result, but it did the British National Party no harm whatsoever with its lead story that £2 million is to be spent on a 'Travellers' Camp' in Carlisle to make a permanent home for just 15 caravans. So people who have contributed absolutely nothing to our county, apart from dumping their rubbish anywhere and everywhere they can find, are to be given our money. You could almost hear the BNP votes stacking up as the newsreader read the report.

Great excitement at home as the girls are back from Uni today. Family gathering tonight, football tomorrow and then the run- up to Christmas and the New Year.

Why Ed Stourton had to go

I wasn't surprised at all to hear that Ed Stourton had been sacked from the Today programme on BBC Radio 4. Ed is from the old school of news presenters, those who just delivered the news as it should be delivered, and without putting any spin on it.

Nowadays, news presenters have to tell the public what to think about the news they are informing them of. They have no intention of letting the listeners make up their own mind. The appalling James Naughtie, from the same Today programme, is a specialist at this. When he is presenting an item, he makes sure that his, and his editors', slant on the story is incorporated into the way it is presented. When it's a report about Africa, immigration into Britain, asylum seekers or migrant workers, you can hear his voice wavering as he struggles to get the words out. You can imagine him dabbing his eyes with his hankie in the studio as he shoulders the burden himself of the injustices put upon these unfortunate people, and he and his BBC editors are hoping that the listeners are doing the same, and will end up carrying that burden of guilt too.

And talking about Africa there was an interesting report from the Central African Republic in this morning's Today programme. It was interesting because of the BBC's choice of 'voice-over' translators for the African women interviewed in one tribal village. Now at a time when the BBC has more and more reporters and presenters from the ethnic minorities I find it bizarre that the "voice-overs" of African women should be delivered by those who appear to be 'highly articulate English roses', and not just one, but three different ones. Surely this would have been the ideal opportunity to use an ethnic minority, particularly an African, voice so it's strange that the BBC didn't do so. I know why this was deliberately done . . . and I expect you do too.

Enough ranting about the BBC, it only puts me in a bad mood for the Monday morning of what will be a very busy week, and that mood wasn't helped yesterday after I had a frank exchange of views with one of our members (shouldn't have answered the office phone on a Sunday). He wanted to tell me about some already well publicised anti-White racist attacks and demanded that a report about it must go into Freedom. I tried to explain to him that Freedom concentrates on more positive 'news', such as the growth of the BNP, but I'm afraid he wouldn't have that and said that this wasn't news. The call finished somewhat abruptly and I don't think I fully convinced him of my viewpoint which is disappointing.

Freedom is a newspaper, make no mistake about that, but it is a newspaper like no other because it carries positive stories about the British National Party. That's what makes it unique and that's why the public will be interested in what it has to say. Of course I could fill the paper with horror stories of the multi-racial nightmare that has been inflicted upon our country by corrupt politicians, but that would just make the reader even more depressed. The good news stories in Freedom give our people hope and that is the main purpose of the newspaper.

The production of Freedom has to be to the fore now if I want some time off over Christmas, so I'm clearing the decks to concentrate on it. Make sure you keep up-to-date with a fascinating Cumbria County Council by-election taking place in Whitehaven on Thursday, by visiting Clive Jefferson's blog here.

Meeting by the Lake

THE West Wing of a huge country house on the shores of Lake Windermere was the venue for a conference that Tina and I attended yesterday.

The meeting was most definitely on our patch, but getting there still took us over an hour and a half which just shows what a huge county Cumbria is. The house had been hired for four days and there were 12 or so of the BNP's leadership all sleeping under the one roof for the brainstorming conference on the European Elections, something which thankfully our opponents didn't know about.

Apparently the week has been a great success and certainly the intensive eight hour session we attended revealed that the Party is well prepared to make the maximum impact in the run-up to that all-important day at the beginning of June. Obviously I can't go into detail, but what I can say is that we will be matching the old gang parties with regard to the professionalism of our campaign and our publicity initiatives will certainly be much more eye-catching than any they will come up with.

I do feel very comfortable with the team that we have at the helm now, and I can't remember feeling so 'at one' with my close political colleagues. In the past there has always been one or two who worried me because their politics weren't really the same as mine. Now I feel that we are all on the same wavelength and are working towards the same goal.

As the meeting drew to a close yesterday, although there was to be another evening session after Tina and I had left, I thought about the past, which is something that you do more often as you get older. I looked at Nick Griffin in his multi-coloured rugby shirt at the head of the room drawing some diagram on a whiteboard and then across at Eddy Butler sitting in a huge armchair next to mine.

Now back in the summer of 1986, there was a Sunday morning at Brick Lane market when the three of us were leaning against the wall just a few yards apart selling nationalist newspapers. But what you might find interesting was that we were each selling a different newspaper promoting a different nationalist party. Eddy was with the BNP, Nick was with the National Front and I was selling my newspaper The Flag which was the mouthpiece of something then called the NF Support Group. Just two months earlier NG had ousted me from the Chairmanship of the NF and run me and my colleagues out of the Party. He wasn't my flavour of the month then but that's all water under the bridge now.

Regarding him yesterday afternoon, I now see the consumate politician and I feel much more warmth towards him, while Eddy has always been my favourite election guru and was responsible for bringing me back into politics after my five year sojourn in France.

Exciting footie tomorrow, weather permitting, an FA Trophy clash against Kings Lynn. There's £5,000 for the winner and that's money the Reds are desperate for in these credit crunch times.

Off to the mother-in-laws in a moment for a Christmas buffet from Iceland, you know the "500 king prawns for just £2". I just hope my stomach's OK for the big game tomorrow. When I come back I shall watch my favourite DVD again. Here's the final song for you.

Quiz of the week

THE week that saw the leaking of the BNP membership list was a nightmare with the telephones constantly ringing and huge numbers of emails to deal with. In amongst those emails was one from a former colleague, Steve Blake, who was one of those who in November 2007 decided that personalities were much more important than the Party and went for an attempted coup in order to oust those people he didn't like from the BNP.

I trashed the email at the time because I wasn't really interested in what someone, who had been prepared to play so fast and loose with the future of British Nationalism, had to say. But now, in the light of the events of last weekend, I re-read the email before completely deleting it and suddenly noticed a glarring ommission, well two actually, can you spot them?

This is what he wrote to me:

"Steve Blake, Ian Dawson, Kenny and Nicholla Smith are totally devastated at the loss of the membership list (sic - They stole it in the first place), the potential damage to the lives and livelihoods of thousands of individuals is unthinkable. We are also appalled and devastated that any of our names are being mentioned by leading figures in the BNP in the public domain as possible culprits of this wanton act. We are taking legal advice on whether those statements are libellous and if so we will pursue those involved. Please remember that we want to get back into the BNP in order to help lead and play our role in taking the Party to greater heights of political success. We want our people to survive and prosper in these islands - our homelands. We weren't playing games when we joined the BNP all those years ago in some cases in our teenage years; we are politically motivated and we want to win and ensure our people have a future for all time to come.
We believe that the leak of the membership list is part a long term plan to disrupt and damage the Party by persons as yet unidentified; we have been doing our digging around and do not believe that this is directly related to the events of December 2007 which were not part of any plot or plan to destabilise the Party but were borne from a clash of personalities and a frustration when it appeared that certain individuals were being "protected" from criticism. The leak and publication of the membership list is an act of unbelievable treachery which we would never for one minute condone or sanction. We trust that the culprit is traced and punished in accordance with the law. Our wishes are with our fellow Party colleagues, friends and members who may be worrying what their own immediate future holds." 

Need any clues . . . ?

Weren't there originally six conspirators?

Maybe Steve had something interesting to tell us after all!

Setting the record straight on that list

AS I have said before on this blog, I seldom visit what I call the crank nationalist websites. And that is because, in the main, they have just one purpose which is to try to undermine the morale of the rank and file membership of the British National Party.

Why the people behind these sites should pursue such a strategy is a mystery to me. The BNP is at the peak of its influence within British politics with seldom a day going by without a Government Minister expressing their concern at the progress that we are making. Internally we have the most competent local officials we have ever had, the Party has never been so effectively structured and on the election front we are becoming a formidable force.

Yet these agitators are not happy. It appears that they don't want the BNP to be successful and this is borne out by a mission statement on one of their websites which calls for a return to the days of John Tyndall. For some newer recruits to British Nationalism that means to pre-1999 when the BNP was a tiny organisation with no popular appeal and a set of policies that the British people had consistently rejected for more than 30 years.

It is almost as if these people are unhappy at our success which makes you question whether some of them are actually nationalists at all. And you might have further doubts if you view some of the comments posted by some 'anonymous' contributors in response to the various reports carried on the sites. Similar comments can be found on any anti-BNP website and it does make you wonder who is actually making the posts.

Well, that's a long-winded preamble to what I want to say, which I believe is important. On Friday evening, I must own up to visiting one of these crank websites and saw a comment posted by Chris Hill. Now I do know that Chris is a nationalist and a couple of years ago was an excellent BNP candidate in Lancaster. He claimed in a comment to a report on the "Arrests in Nottingham" that the Membership List that was published on the Internet wasn't the one that was stolen from the BNP at the end of November 2007 because there were some references to 2008 in it.

I'm afraid Chris is completely wrong and that is why I feel I must set the record straight. The fact that a handful of 2007 dates were changed to 2008 was just rather a pathetic attempt by those illegally posting the list on the Internet to try to cover their tracks. Each week there can be as many as a hundred changes to the list with renewals, resignations, changes of address, additional telephone numbers, skills sheet admissions etc. No two weeks can ever be the same and each week's list has its own very individual 'fingerprint' and that is why there is no doubt which list was leaked. That there were alterations made in an effort to cover tracks only confirms the guilt of those responsible.

In politics, there is never time off and this was no better illustrated than at Borough Park on Saturday afternoon where I went to escape to watch football and try to switch off. There I was accosted by a gentlemen who wanted to know what was going on in Whitehaven!
"There are roads in Kells where there are more houses with 'Vote BNP' posters in the windows that those with Christmas decorations," he delighted in telling me. He was very excited about this and the news soon spread throughout our part of the terraces.

This is, of course, the work of the brilliant Clive Jefferson and his team who are really pulling out all the stops in a County Council by-election that takes place in the west Cumbrian town just before Christmas. There's a real hope here that we can take second place off the Tories and significantly reduce Labour's huge majority. All the latest on this election can be found here

The persecution squad are getting desperate

AFTER re-reading some of my more recent posts, I'm slightly worried that any casual visitor to this site might think that I am anti-police. I can ensure you that this isn't the case. I have the greatest respect for the force, and have many friends and associates who are police officers. Over the past two weeks especially, I have heard countless stories from BNP members worried by threatening telephone calls, of a helpful and sympathetic response from local police officers in calming their anxieties.

Having set the record straight, I'm afraid I have one final salvo to fire off at Merseyside Police for their hounding of one of their own officers because his name appeared on a BNP membership list that had been stolen from the Party and which was posted on the Internet. As I have said in previous post, the officer heading the persecution has been in touch with the membership office on numerous occasions, asking for information and clarification of procedures in his effort to get the right result for his politically motivated superiors.

We have co-operated with Merseyside Police because we were asked to do so by the wife of the officer concerned.

The fact that this witch hunt was prompted and is being conducted on the contents of stolen property doesn't seem to concern Merseyside Police, but disappointingly for this unsavoury persecution squad they seem to be struggling to make a case from their ill-gotten gains. What they seem to have established is that it was the officer's wife who took out BNP membership and that it was the officer's wife who had a subscription to the BNP newspaper, Freedom. Will they 'hang' a fellow officer just because of the political sympathies of his other half?

Now having exhausted all the information gleaned from the stolen list which covered the membership for 2007, DC Tony O'Brien was back on again yesterday asking if the officer had been a BNP member prior to 2007. Now the police can side-step data protection laws if they are persuing a criminal case, but at the moment being a BNP member isn't a crime, so what he was in fact asking was for Tina to break the Data Protection Act that she had signed when she took up her post.

I don't know what you think, but to me this smacks of desperation.

And talking about persecution, would you like to know what effect the publicity detailing the persecution of the BNP in the media has had on our Party? This week, at this office alone which deals with membership payments received by telephone and post, we have taken £18,000 - and this doesn't include online memberships which is rapidly becoming the most popular way of joining the Party. But that's not the figure that is really staggering - this one is . . . over 100 NEW BNP members this week alone. Eat your hearts out, the old gang parties and their lying acolytes in the media. It is unbelieveable that with Christmas so near, and with the country in the midst of a recession, that over 100 individuals have decided to join our political party for the first time. I'm hoping that this surge is an indication of what 2009 holds for the British National Party.

This time last year I was struggling to do this blog. I was laid low with depression because of the attempted sabotage of our Party from within by a gang of power-crazed individuals. Their efforts did hurt us quite badly, especially in Yorkshire, and we are still struggling to recover from the effects of their attempted coup which split the Party in some areas of this county.

One place was Bingley, near Bradford, where in May 2007 we had polled 647 votes which was 13.2% of the vote. This was meant to be one of the strongholds of the 'plotters' who laughingly call themselves Democratic Nationalists despite their behaviour, which included the theft of the membership list, being anything but democratic. Last night they contested an election in 'their area' and polled just 61 votes which was 1.9%. It was a terrible result, but not quite as bad as UKIP's vote - their candidate polled just 49 votes. I don't think there's much else to be said on the matter, do you?

And now to music! It has finally arrived, or to be more exact, the replacement DVD has finally arrived, as my initial order of the 2001 Steve Marriott Memorial Concert was lost in the post. Tonight I shall sit down with a bottle of Cava and escape for a couple of hours back in to the late 1960s when everything was "all too beautiful". Here's the opening song and a taste of what I shall be listening to . . . It's the first time that I have heard of the Mods band and they seem a very tight outfit, so if any reader of this blog living down south has been to one of their concerts I would like to know what they think of them.

Editors box clever to beat the online bullies

THE front page of the Knutsford Guardian on Wednesday 26th November carried the story of a grandfather who is dying of chronic lung disease, and whose wife had died just four weeks earlier, receiving threatening phone calls because he was a member of the Brititish National Party.

Michael Beardshaw was telephoned at 1.30 in the morning, but the retired civil engineer who joined the BNP four years ago after leaving the Tory Party, said he would not be intimidated. The story under the main banner front page headline, "Dying man on BNP's list", reported that doctors at East Cheshire Hospice had told Mr Beardshaw that he only had weeks left to live.

Now I do know of Michael as he stood as a candidate for us in a local council by-election in Crewe back in 2006 and polled very well indeed, shocking a complacent Labour Party in the town and providing an excellent report for Freedom. It is upsetting to read of his ill-health and even more so because of the courage he is showing now in the face of terrible adversity.

I was sent the front page of the Knutford Guardian otherwise I would have known nothing of the newspaper's coverage reporting Michael's fortitude to the people of that part of Cheshire. Now, as I have said before, I have some pretty good search engines that uncover any article posted on the Internet concerning the British National Party, and Michael's story doesn't appear to be there . . . and I think I know the reason why.

It was a human interest story that was free of any political comment. It reported things as they were. A member of the BNP who was dying of lung disease being hounded by anti-BNP campaigners. It is not the the sort of story our opponents would like to see and that was probably the reason why it wasn't posted on the Internet.

The anti-BNP brigade like to police the Internet and when they find stories that are not critical enough of the British National Party they bombard that newspaper with complaints and threats to ensure that any 'fair' reports concerning the BNP never appear again. I know this because many editors have told me of such campaigns and I have experienced one myself back in 2002.

Then, I ran an online newspaper called Burnley Bravepages which provided news of the BNP's election effort in Burnley the year we made our famous electoral breakthrough in that town. The site was hosted by Bravenet who monitored it very carefully and were very happy with the content, after fielding a number of complaints about it. As polling day approached and the site was becoming more and more popular this prompted a campaign to get it shut down. I spoke to the chief moderator at Bravenet and he said the campaign involved thousands of complaints and a barrage of texts from half-a-dozen individuals threatening all sorts of legal action if the site was not removed. He told me he had never seen anything like it before.

This is how the Burnley Bravepages reported the campaign back in April 2002

"Bookburners at work . . . again!
Burnley Bravepages was off line for five hours last night after our server received 8,000 complaints in the space of 72 hours and a threat of court action. As with the previous attempt to silence Burnley's "Voice of Freedom", this orchestrated effort stemmed from outside of Burnley and was a blatant effort to interfere with the democratic election process in the town.
A stoical Burnley Bravepages editor Martin Wingfield said he wasn't surprised by this latest effort to silence his online newspaper:
"The establishment are petrified of the British National Party getting its message uncensored into voters' homes.
"In the past we have had no instant communication to the public, but now web technology means we can explain situations to our supporters and interested parties as they happen.
"For the first time ever we are able to bypass the censorship of NUJ guidelines and get our viewpoint over without the 'permission' of a journalist or reporter who is opposed to our polices."


and then the following day

Blair's Bookburners Target Bravepages
The New Labour Dictatorship jackbooted into Burnley yesterday and tried to stifle political debate in the town. A lawyer, acting in the interests of Burnley Labour Party, spent the whole of Saturday morning attempting to get the Burnley Bravepages website banned.
The website's server was contacted on four separate occasions by Dr Ronald R Heywood BA(Hons)(Law) LLD PhD who demanded the site be closed down because it contravened the server's code of conduct.
Our server asked for examples where their code had been broken, but Dr Heywood was unable to provide one single example. Instead he claimed:
"The manner in which this group has acted, has caused riots in Northern Towns in England including Burnley."
This assertion has no basis, as the three independent inquiries into the disturbances in Burnley, Oldham and Bradford confirmed.

Unfortunately the campaign was too intense for Bravenet and Burnley Bravepages was taken off line 12 hours later.

The point I'm making here is that some editors are being selective about the BNP stories they post online. They don't want the hassle that they know will follow when a fair story about the British National Party appears, so they keep these just for the printed newspaper.

We certainly shouldn't be worried by this apparent censorship, in fact we should welcome it. Thanks to our brilliant website we can win any propaganda battle online. The audience we need to attract more of to our ranks is from the older generation, those who still aren't computer-savvy, and who rely on their local newspaper for their news.

While our opponents can monitor the Internet relatively easily, they have much more difficulty in policing the real world of the printed newspaper, and that is why there has been much more fair and truthful coverage of the British National Party appearing in local newspapers over the past 12 months, than has appeared online.

Faces as red as Liverpool's shirts

THE Saturday morning distribution of notices by Merseyside Police informing the BNP's 'Liverpool 13' that they would not be facing any charges must have caused some red faces amongst that force's senior officers - not only red with embarrassment, but also red with fury that they had been forced to take such an action.

Embarrassment because they had been bragging to local Labour Party councillors and officials on Monday 24th November that anyone distributing the BNP leaflet 'Racism Cuts Both Ways' would be arrested and prosecuted. Then came the news on Tuesday 25th November that the Crown Prosecution Service had ruled that the leaflet "was unlikely to increase racial hatred" and could quite legally be distributed. Apparently police chiefs were livid and immediately appealed against the decision, sending in a huge list of objections to the ruling. But it was all to no avail and on Friday their appeal was rejected, which meant they had to inform the local Labour Party that the British National Party were quite at liberty to put their leaflets out in Liverpool after all.

It is interesting to see that the anti-BNP groups have started their annual vying for financial backing early this year. It's a lucrative contact to be the standard bearer of the anti-BNP flag with floods of money coming in from the Labour Party and Trade Unions. In recent years Gerry and Sonia Gable and their Searchlight organisation have scooped the jackpot much to the annoyance of the Socialist Workers Party-run UAF.

This rather unseemly scrum for money only goes to show that those who oppose us are not solely motivated on ideological grounds - financial reward has a major influence on how enthusiastic their opposition will be. The Anti-Nazi League was the SWP's baby prior to UAF, but after some terrible publicity, funds were withdrawn and its collapse was instant. The ANL website, which had been updated every day for over a year, was just left and never touched again, as if frozen in time. That's because the money stopped and without being paid, the web editor just couldn't be bothered to do the job.

So don't be surprised if you read of anti-BNP organisations at each other's throats and criticising each other loudly in the press. It's just a show for the Labour Party and the Trade Unions in the scramble to get their hands on the bulging anti-BNP purse both provide.

It is good to see that employers have been warned not to act against staff who are members of the British National Party.
Legal experts have told employers that they face unfair dismissal or discrimination claims if they try to persecute someone for their political beliefs.
An employment law partner at law firm Ralli said:
“No one has the right to dismiss an employee for membership of a political party.”
An associate practice lawyer at legal firm Eversheds added that staff with a year’s service or more would be protected against being unfairly dismissed.
“Dismissing someone simply because they are a member of a political party such as the BNP will difficult to justify. This is an extremely tricky legal area. Legislation prohibits discrimination on grounds of belief, and data protection laws mean there are restrictions on how employers use any information taken from the leaked BNP list."
Of course, what we really need is for someone who has been unfairly dismissed to receive a court ruling in their favour and a huge compensation package which would in itself deter employers from persecuting BNP members. Just like employers now are frightened of sacking anyone from the ethnic minorities because they know they will almost certainly face a race relations challenge. And again, we need a police officer to challenge the illegal policy now in place in Britain's police forces. One of Britain's leading employment barristers says that any challenge in the European Court would almost certainly be successful.

In the Membership Office, things are now at last beginning to quieten down and yesterday there were another two BNP members who decided they were Sparticus after all and I expect there will be more in the coming weeks. One interesting spin off from the leaked list has been the fact that many 2007 members who hadn't bothered to renew for 2008 have suddenly come back on board. Time and time again they have said on the telephone, "Well I'm being called a paid-up member of the British National Party, so I might as well really be one."

The witch hunt continues . . .

NEARLY two weeks after the publishing of a 2007 BNP membership list on the Internet, Merseyside Police are still busy scrabbling around trying to accrue enough evidence in order to persecute one of their own officers.

The family of the officer concerned asked us to co-operate with the investigation, so we have done so, and over that last fourteen days have answered numerous enquiries from DC Tony O'Brien who seems to be in charge of the witch hunt. Yesterday, there was another officer asking questions, but as Tina refused to discuss any information with him, it was O'Brien back on later in the day, this time wanting to know about the Freedom newspaper, how often it was sent out, and whether it was sent in a plain envelope. He also wanted to know if someone had taken out a subscription to Freedom, whether it was possible that the newspaper might be addressed to someone else living in that household????

Can you believe it? It is obvious where he is trying to go with this line of questioning and it makes me very angry to think that there has been a team of officers who have spent two weeks trying to gather such information because they are so desperate to hound one of their own out of a job. There is something radically wrong with a society when a police force believes this should be a such a priority.

And it's not only in Merseyside. Operation Grayling is the investigation of four BNP members in Lancashire for delivering alleged "racially inflammatory leaflets". In his orders to his officers, Senior Investigating Officer Neil Hunter, said he wanted the houses of the four accused searched and "photographs to be taken of Swastikas". I kid you not. What planet is this creep living on?

Only someone who has swallowed every single bit of anti-BNP propaganda ever published could come up with a statement like that. Hunter also wants a "Community Cohesion Team to complete a Community Impact Assessment (in the area where the leaflets were distributed) in case there has been an increase in community tensions," which in plain English means "in case the ethnic minorities have been upset".

Yesterday, I heard from a gentleman who had written a letter into Freedom earlier in the year. He is now under investigation at his work, despite the fact that his name was never appeared on the letter. Apparently the local trade union leader at the company pieced together the information in the letter to try to find out who had written it. So now it's not only about being a member of the BNP, it's also about writing in letters to the British National Party's newspaper. This is a frightening turn of events and suggests that in the coming months the Labour Party and Trade Union funded anti-BNP groups along with their establishment henchmen and dupes in the media will be turning up the heat on the BNP.

Thankfully our members have just had a baptism of fire, courtesy of the leaked membership list, and they will now be hardened to what our opponents throw at us next year.

He is Sparticus after all!

THE total of the membership subscriptions from Friday's post was over £6,000, but the one letter that gave me the biggest boost didn't have any money in it at all.

It was from a gentleman living in London who asked that we ignore his resignation letter of a week earlier. He explained why:

"I was told by a neighbour that I was on this list and that very evening I had an unsettling call from someone who said they knew where I lived and would be paying me a visit. The following morning I received a call from The Sun newspaper asking me if I were a racist. My wife was so distraught, I called the police and it was after their visit that I sent in my resignation.

"Now I feel angry about what has taken place, the theft of the list in the first place, its publication on the Internet and the way that journalists and anti-BNP activists have exploited the situation to target BNP members. Now I don't want to resign any more, in fact I want to be more active because something has to be done to stop this witch-hunt against the BNP."

While that's very welcome news indeed, it is also a sober reminder of the anxiety caused to hundreds, even thousands, of our members from a quite vicious campaign by the Labour Party and their friends in the media. The courage and fortitude of our membership certainly mirrors the spirit that Britons have shown in other times when they have been threatened and this bodes well for the future battles that we will no doubt face.

For the One Show on BBC 1 on Friday, the pre-show publicity said that Justin Rowlatt would look at how the British National Party might be affected by the worsening economic situation. In fact the report was nothing of the kind, it was just a pathetic attempt to try to unearth that old 'anti-semitism' chestnut in an effort to smear the BNP and to try to deter its viewers from supporting the Party.

The programme was ironic for two reasons. Firstly, it interviewed an elderly Jewish lady apparently still living in the East End who was a veteran of the Calble Street clashes of more than 70 years ago. She was prompted to say how worried she was by the rise of the BNP. In fact, of course, she should be worried by something much closer to her home. She lives in what is now known as 'Bangla Town' and that is because this area of London has been taken over by Muslims from Bangladesh. Now if this lady ever passed one of the numerous mosques in her area and heard what the Imams there have to say about members of the Jewish community she would realise very quickly that she has much more to worry about than the rise of the BNP.

Secondly, it was my old chum Justin Rowlatt who was the presenter of this report. Now I met Justin at the local council election count in Burnley in May 2002. In fact we came quite close together as I had to physically stop him from hounding our victorious candidate Carol Hughes as she tried to leave the hall at the Turf Moor Football Ground.

A year later Justin was behind the Channel 4 programme that uncovered details of an 18 month police and social services investigation into allegations that young Muslim men were targeting under-age White girls for sex, drugs and prostitution in the West Yorkshire town of Keighley. Justin, back then, appeared very clued up as to the threat from Islam, but in Friday's programme he completely ignored how the East End of London had changed beyond recognition since the days of Cable Street.
Thankfully, judging by the comments on the programme's website which can be found here, people don't appear to have been duped by the One Show.