Campaign gets underway

There was a General Election planning meeting in Workington last night attended by 20 key activists.

The weather was shocking with temperatures down to -5, thick snow underfoot and snow flurries in the air.

Full marks to one activist from St Michaels Ward who walked the two miles to the venue, up some steep and slippery hills, despite being partially sighted and having a guide dog. If our team shows that sort of commitment then we shall certainly have the old gang parties on the run.

Team leaders are to be allocated to each of the 25 wards that make up the Workington Constituency and a number came forward to take up the posts at yesterday's meeting.

I gave a brief outline of of how I hoped the campaign would go and an initial timetable for the first round of leafleting.

The first drop will start in Cockermouth with both Christchurch and All Saints wards completed by the end of the month.

Households here will get two leaflets. The full colour glossy A3 Nick Griffin leaflet outlining his work in the European Parliament and this will be accompanied by an A4 black and white leaflet both introducing me to the electorate and covering a local topic.

Below is the local leaflet that will go out in Cockermouth.

FRONT:


BACK:


The weather here today is shocking with near blizzard conditions but thankfully this has brought with it a slight rise in temperature.

Eddy Bulter is here to investigate the November floods on behalf of Nick Griffin. He had been hoping to visit both Crummock Water and the Thirlmere Reservoir this morning but it looks as though many of the Fell roads are blocked by snow.

However I believe that Eddy also has some meetings in Keswick with former United Utilities employees who will give him a briefing on procedures at the dams and on the responsibilities and consequences of opening the sluice gates.

Ever thought about stopping immigration?

When we get a ruling from the Royal Courts of Justice on the re-count of Burnley Council's Rosegrove with Lowerhouse ward, and if the outcome vindicates the BNP for taking the action to overturn the result, I hope visitors to this blog will post a comment on the 'Politic Site' which advertises on this page. (See link on left).

Its administrators are highly sanctimonious and cannot believe that the BNP might be victims of election fraud, so let's hope, if the result is in our favour, their forum gets swamped by posts setting the record straight. Someone should also tell them about the vote in Barking last year when one of our successful candidates had his vote announced wrongly by the Returning Officer and the seat was given to Labour. The BNP had to go to the High Court again to get that result overturned and give the BNP its 12th councillor on Barking and Dagenham Council.

Best of luck today for our BNP candidates, Peter Copper in Waltham Abbey Honey Lane Ward for Epping District Council and Michael McDermott in Manor Ward for Sefton Council. Whereas last week I had been informed that a good result was expected in Church Gresley, this week I have heard absolutely nothing. I know it will be hard for us in a big ward in Sefton with only a small unit there, but in Epping, if our elections guru Eddy Butler is involved, I know it will be a thoroughly professional campaign so hopefully we might be able to improve on our 20% vote in the ward last May. On the plus side, immigration and Britain's rising population has been in the news this week and if voters in these two wards are worried about it they will have the chance to vote for a political party that will stop immigration.

And talking of stopping immigration, no one did so this morning on Radio 4's Today programme. It was reporting that councils, police forces and fire services have raised concerns that they are being short-changed by inaccurate population estimates - which lead to smaller grant settlements from Whitehall. The authorities say the imbalance between funding and actual migration is placing a huge pressure on basic services such as transport, schooling and health.
In the past, only councils at the forefront of migration pressure, such as Slough and Westminster, have spoken out about the controversial figures. But now the Department for Communities and Local Government (CLG) has revealed that 41 councils, two police forces and two fire services have "made specific representations regarding population data".

The leader of Slough council was interviewed and she talked about how the figures for her borough were wrong back in 2001 even before the latest tidal wave of immigrants, refugees and bogus asylum seekers swamped Slough. She said that back then there had been a miscalculation by the Office for National Statistics on the borough's birth rate! Anyone who has been to Slough will know what she is talking about, but anyone not in the loop about the demographics of that town would be mystified as to why population experts could get its birth rate so horribly wrong. Sadly, the council leader did not elaborate on it. She could have mentioned that it was the immigrant population that was responsible for the birth rate boom in Slough, but she didn't. Neither did she mention stopping immigration. She acknowledged that the services within her borough were close to breaking point because of the huge number of immigrants arriving there, but all she wanted was more money from the taxpayer to help cope with this.

It seems nowadays no one is prepared to say on the national media that there must be a complete stop to any further immigration - no one expect for the British National Party. And that is where our strength lies. Let the other parties and the establishment 'safety valve' pressure groups talk about their points systems, their managed migration, and their 'strict' limits. To an increasingly frustrated British public such terminology is becoming meaningless. Our simple message will be 'Not one more', and I'm certain that is what they want to here.

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!

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.