Free speech party and a 3000 year old house
by Nick Griffin
The leader of the British National Party gives a personal update in his Chairman’s Column
What have I been doing since coming back from the http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=2306 USA trip? First a day and a half off. Then a mountain range of emails and phone calls and even some snail mail (though, as a rule, that’s so slow and inefficient that I have no choice but to neglect it as a rule – apologies to any readers who’ve experienced this).
Then a very useful visit up here at home from Eddy Butler, head of our Elections Department and an absolutely key player in the development of our election-winning capabilities. He’s come up to work on a team-building weekend which we intend to try out on HQ personnel first, and then perhaps roll out more widely if it works well.
We spend an enjoyable evening brainstorming ideas for it. Up early the following day to visit several places we intend to use. A bit to my surprise Eddy, who I’d always thought of as a bit of a townie, is raring to go and take in as much Welsh countryside as possible. We start off by walking the dogs to the top of the ridge across the valley. Even though the weather’s good the clear potential of the place to be drastically inhospitable for a bunch of amateurs in winter is clear enough to persuade us to tone down our plans for the winter-time event somewhat more. We want team-building, not hypothermia.
Then we head off to inspect our choice of venues and visit several sites of historic interest we may build in to the session, talking and planning all the time. I think that, when the event comes off, it will have been time very well spent. Eddy is something of an unsung hero, as commitments like this and playing a key role in so much by-election planning and work is all done in holiday time from a conventional job.
Next day there’s a meeting in Liverpool. Organiser Steve Greenhalgh goes through recent election results in the city, and introduces all the candidates who were ready to ensure that we would have stood in every parliamentary seat in the city had Brown not lost his bottle. Our support level over that of the Tories in virtually all the council elections over the last year has been so great that there has to be a possibility that we could beat them – the official parliamentary opposition – in terms of the votes we get in Liverpool next time. Cameron’s Torylite “revival” doesn’t show any sign of happening in this great city.
Bev Jones is also present, drumming up support and interest for her inventive and energetic campaign to raise the £40,000 and a bit more that the North West will need to pay for a top quality election address for every home in the region in June 2009’s European Election.
Come Saturday and Jackie and I head off to Leicestershire, where http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=248 has had the great idea of organising a Free Speech Day celebration on the first anniversary of the final acquittal of her son Mark and me on Race Law charges at Leeds Crown Court. The event’s an outstanding success, with several hundred people there (including many of those who most loyally came to support us outside court day after day, in some vile weather. Liverpool bring 14, there’s a carload from the North East, a good group from Birmingham, and loads of locals from the East Midlands, which Sadie Graham and several great local teams (particularly in Leicestershire, where there’s a wonderful mix of experienced “old hands” and hard working newcomers) have turned from a backwater into a BNP local politics powerhouse.
Also present as Guests of Honour on the free speech front are teacher brothers Adam and Mark http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=2321, and “BNP Ballerina” Simone Clarke. Each gives a short, powerful speech, as does Mark Collett. An audience like this is a joy to speak to, and my brief speech goes down well too.
All money raised at tonight’s social will be well spent in the end, for it’s going to the East Mids Euro Election Fund.
The end result is a magnificent profit of just over £3,000, a staggering £1,000 of which comes from Dave Bell, father of our hard-working South Birmingham organiser, Mike as the top bid for a single lot that I auction off: Two different enlarged and signed photos from the court steps after our acquittal, a bottle of decent champagne and three empty champagne bottles.
These are the matching red, white and blue set that Mark and I and Jackie opened in front of all the media cameras and a rapturous crowd a year ago in Leeds. They are the best quality and the smartest of the range that comes from a vineyard co-owned by Jean-Marie Le Pen, and given to me for such an event. I’m actually a bit reluctant to let them go, because there’s real sentimental value in them, especially the white bottle which is the one that I am a bit attached to.
I finished it off during the last media scrum interview session of that momentous day, happily getting soaked by the rain and positively buzzing. I knew as it was going on that the multiply filmed interview was – though I say it myself – a great piece of work, and I hoped that the calculated arrogance of swigging champagne in between shooting down out-of-their-depth journalists would get the moment on TV. Just how well it must have come across for us must be judged from the fact that not one second of the footage was ever shown, despite it being captured by every main TV channel in Britain. Happy days!
Still, it’s not every day one can get a grand for two pictures and four bottles, three of them empty, and I’ve always enjoyed auctions. We’re clearly headed for more than a hundred pounds in risk bidding before Mr. Bell wades in with his bid. “I’ve never seen Nick lost for words before,” quips Mark, showing that special talent he has for sizing up people and events in an instant – I was indeed dumbfounded as well as delighted.
So thanks Dave Bell, and to Carol and Maurice Collett for such a good idea and a great evening.
Sunday is spent mainly at the computer, finishing off various things that just have to be done before Jackie and I head off for four days holiday (the only one we’re getting this year). With the help of Ryanair tickets at 1p each on one leg of the journey, even after paying one or two of Gordon Brown’s stealth taxes we’re flying to Sardinia and back for £64 between us. Amazing, and if it melts another iceberg I’m sorry, but the planes were flying anyway and we don’t have a patio heater.
We fly to Alghero, an airport which sounds rather ugly, but turns out to be named after a splendid medieval Catalonian walled seaport, with a harbour full of pleasure boats and working fishing boats, and a holiday resort sprawl that doesn’t even stretch to a mile. We stay in a self-catering B&B in the middle of olive groves about two miles out of town. After getting a taxi there we spend the next two days walking everywhere. When we can walk no further we hire bikes. After a day of that we can’t sit on the saddles any more or walk, so on the last day we hire a Smart car (which I’ve always been inclined to mock, but are better on the inside than they appear from the outside) and drive off much relieved to catch a glimpse of this huge island’s ancient history and wild coastline.
I’d recommend it to anyone wanting a cheap but thoroughly different and relaxing break somewhere in which tourists are welcomed because – at this time of year at least – not too dominant. Many of the locals speak no English, but my five or six words of Spanish added to perhaps fifty of Italian, plus liberal use of the “posh” and hence Latin-based end of the English vocabulary and we get along fine.
On the way home we stop in at a big supermarket (yes, I know…) on the edge of Shrewsbury for essential provisions. Two ladies are selling poppies in the entrance and one of them turns out to be one of our best activists in Shrewsbury. In a way it’s a small world, but, there again, we’ve been pushing the idea of our people helping the dwindling number of British Legion collectors, and the idea is really catching on. Brilliant.
Among the post when we get back is the ballot paper for the Solidarity trade union elections, which has arrived from the chartered accountant who is running the independently scrutinised election as required by law. The completion of its first internal election will mark a further step in its development.
Just in time too, for the new Labour law allowing unions to kick out people for alleged political incorrectness means that there is no point at all in any member of the BNP paying in to any other union, because if one of our people needs union backing it simply won’t be forthcoming from the leftist time-servers who have hijacked most of them. Solidarity is different, a real union, with real union status, rights and powers, but run by decent people committed to free speech, democracy and the well-being of British workers. You can take a look at the quality of the people who have put themselves forward for its Executive here.
Remembrance Sunday falls on the 11th itself this year. I head up to Connors Quay in North Wales, to meet up with John Walker at the local parade he attends every year.
His dad is there too, with a chestful of medals from his time as a Royal Navy gunner seconded to convoy merchantmen. Sunk five times, by Germans and Japs, Bill’s a remarkable old chap with a twinkle in his eye and a great sense of humour. He’s got nothing against the Germans, whose crews in moments both of victory and defeat behaved just as the British did. But the Japs – well, he and several mates sunk while supplying the Chindits in Burma had to take their chance with the sharks while hiding under their life raft while fast Japanese gunboats machine-gunned survivors in the water.
The parade is several hundred strong, and John is greeted by various NCOs who he served with in the TA. Having stayed on when he left they now have almost as many active service medals as the increasingly frail and few World War Two veterans – and they keep on being posted back to Blair’s deadly adventures despite their having nothing to do with us.
The band plays “Abide With Me” as the wreaths are laid. The name of the “local” Labour MP is called, but he hasn’t even turned up. Saddest of all is the young woman in black who lays a wreath on behalf of the Iraq Families Group, wife or girlfriend of an RAF man killed by a mortar attack on his barracks out in that pointless desert. It really brings home what the poppies are all about – not just for those who have been unwithered in faithful memories for half a century, but dads and husbands and lovers who are still half-expected to walk through the door and end a nightmare.
All systems go for the BNP’s annual conference in Blackpool this weekend. Treasury are still taking bookings, http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=2085 is positively deluged with the thousand and one matters that fall to the overall organiser of such a major and complicated event. All the signs are it’s going to be the best one yet. Mark Collett has produced the best ever delegates’ pack – something that only the handful of people who have done top level Desk Top Publishing work can begin to appreciate in terms of the amount of work and skill involved.
The main hotel is still receiving all sorts of threats from the far-left. It seems they’re particularly upset now because the ultra-left Respect have been thrown out of a venue in the same resort this coming weekend having booked it under a false name. This richly deserved blow comes on top of a catastrophic split in Respect between the blustering wind-bag and the Bangladeshi wing on the one hand, and the SWP and the Bengali wing on the other.
The SWP stand accused of rigging the list of student delegates (surely not?!), and in turn condemn Galloway as a “communalist” on account of his allegedly favouring the http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=2090 (note that neither side could justly, indeed even possibly, be accused of favouring the English). Apparently membership numbers are now down to little more than 2,000 – a mere fifth of ours (though, of course, their “spokespersons” still get on the BBC far more than we do – licenced rebellion and special treatment for the liberal’s pet minorities).
Monday evening and a rare treat – a BNP meeting with a non-BNP speaker who I really want to hear. It’s near Worcester, organised by Martin Roberts, one of the friendly and helpful voices on our inquiry lines who has been the first BNP person that many of our newer members spoke to when they first got in touch (one recently, was an old friend of mine who’s been following us for several years and has just decided to join up).
The main guest speaker is Brian Gerrish, formerly a key figure in South West http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=809, but now out of favour with that party’s thoroughly seedy leadership and doing amazing work exposing the sinister pro-EU political mind-control cult Common Purpose. BNPtv have a two-man team down to film the event, and we’ll have Mr. Gerrish’s thoroughly documented and well-delivered presentation up on line for the far wider audience it needs to reach as quickly as possible.
The existence of this body, its subversive pro-multi cult agenda, the vast amounts of taxpayers’ money spent on its brainwashing courses, and its rapid cancerous growth through local government, the police, education services and the NHS – all these are a matter of record. Precisely what it’s aims are is more a matter of interpretation, but in truth you can make an informed judgement that this is a menace to our culture, society and freedoms simply on knowing the Marxist “past” of so many of its key figures, its incestuous relationship with the Prescott-led push for the undemocratic breaking up of England through regionalisation, and the number of names of left-liberal tax-eating ne’er-do-wells involved.
More on this many headed hydra from me and the BNP in due course.
At just gone eleven on Tuesday I’m speaking to http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=355 about English Partnerships meeting about housing in Central London for which he has three tickets tomorrow. We decide that, in order to make it impossible for the organisers to avoid the key questions that we want to put to them on behalf of those priced out of homes by speculating developers, greedy banks and mass immigration, we need a special leaflet putting together as well.
It takes me about twenty five minutes to write it, leaving Mark Collett about half an hour to lay it out, get it back to me for proofing, tweak it and get it off to Richard in time for him to print it before he has to leave for a series of meetings today. We manage by the skin of our teeth. No room for a picture, but as it’s aimed at a high-powered and serious audience that won’t matter. Mark breaks it up very well in any case, and Richard gets 500 copies printed off within the deadline. Good work all round.
Well over 3,000 words here now. Time for bed, because tomorrow I’ve got to pick http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=2093 up and head off to support our newest councillor in North Wales in court as he contests an outrageous attempt by the council to bar him from all council premises. More of that on Simon’s multi-media blog.
PS: The appearance of a BNP team at the English Partnerships events was a triumph. Despite http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=1564 having a copy of our leaflet half an hour before she spoke, Richard Barnbrook’s question about the three-year limit on planning permission floored her. One eye-witness tells me it was like watching a torpedo smack into a ship and explode; her pitiful attempt at an answer only added to the contempt that even many of the Great & Good there for the junket felt towards this lightweight New Labour hackette.
What’s more, word is that the policy proposal is so straightforward, attractive and obviously right that the Brown regime is now seen to have a serious problem on its hands: Does Gordon implement a BNP policy, or does he continue to back his FTSE 100 cronies and be seen by everyone in the sector as a phoney? If I were a betting man, I’d have a punt.
http://chairmans-column.blogspot.com/2007/11/free-speech-party-and-3000-year-old.html