reveals the British National Party to be a “vile bunch of racists, oddballs and thugs.” Or so the
tells us. Since I’ve been defending the BNP for the last few years, I thought I’d go through Pendlebury’s article and see if the BNP was as bad as he said. The entire piece is below, interspersed with my bracketed comments. (You should also take a look at the original article at the
, as it features photos of fascists that it’s trying to associate with today’s BNP.)
An economy in chaos and now those expenses. BNP leaders hope it’s the ‘perfect storm’ that will sweep them to power
By Richard Pendlebury
16th May 2009
But as the Mail’s investigation reveals, this vile bunch of racists, oddballs and thugs make today’s MPs look like paragons
Almost exactly 75 years ago, Sir Oswald Mosley, the leader of the British Union of Fascists, attracted an audience of 10,000 people to hear him speak at London’s Olympia.
That dramatic evening of June 7, 1934, with its highly choreographed bombast, noisy hecklers and brutish retaliation by black-shirted thugs, saw the high water mark of Far Right politics in Britain. [LA comments: Pendlebury thus frames the entire article by invoking the Oswald Mosely fascist movement of the 1930s. But what connection is there between Mosely and today’s BNP? Pendlebury doesn’t say. His method reminds me of an ABC program in the 1990s which interviewed racial theorist Michael Levin at his apartment and interspersed the shots of Levin with footage of prisoners in Nazi concentration camps. This is known as “journalism.”]
The scales fell from many hitherto admiring eyes. The BUF was never an electoral force again.
Fascism, with all its ludicrous posturing, simply wasn’t in the British social DNA.
And yet today, after years in an electoral wilderness of skinhead haircuts and Third Reich nostalgia, British nationalists are displaying something of the cocky confidence of Mosley and his street corner cohorts.
On June 4, members of the British National Party—Mosley’s ideological descendants—go to the polls in the European Parliament and local elections, with a spring in their step.
In their target Euro election regions of the North West, Yorkshire and Humberside, the West Midlands and Eastern England, they need only between eight and 11 per cent of the vote (under the proportional representation system) to get seats in Brussels.
Part of this rise in expectations is due to the application of a (very thin) veneer of mainstream styling. [He asserts it’s only a thin veneer covering up BNP’s true fascist essence. But does he demonstrate this? In reality, the BNP has made substantive changes in its entire approach and philosophy. For more on this, see my linked articles at the bottom of this entry.]
Experience has taught them to swap their previous uniforms of denim and shaven heads for sober suits and ties. [Exactly the same was said about the speakers at the Preserving Western Civilization conference at which I spoke. Michael Hart, Philippe Rushton, Serge Trifkovic, Lino A. Graglia, Henry Harpending, Roger D. McGrath, Brenda Walker and others were just extremists covering our extremism by wearing suits and by keeping out anti-Semites.]
They have also learned to tone down their racial supremacist rhetoric—in public at least. But what has given the BNP a sudden and unexpected confidence boost is the newly revealed behaviour of a large number of our elected MPs.
It would have been instructive, if not sobering, for the latter to have been present this week—as I was—when the BNP’s chairman Nick Griffin breathlessly declared that ‘a perfect storm’ was about to blow his party back to a position of political credibility.
They would win not just one, breakthrough, seat in Brussels but possibly ‘six or seven’, he claimed.
He even used the phrase ‘when we are in power’, although that was only to whip up the credulous faithful.
The ‘perfect storm’ of which Griffin spoke is a confluence of various voter concerns such as the credit crunch, Islamic extremism, immigration and disaffection with Brussels.
But the BNP believes that the tipping issue for significant progress at the ballot box is the MPs’ expenses scandal.
After all, thanks to repeated electoral failure, no BNP MP has ever had the chance to claim from the taxpayer for his or her moat renovation, chandelier installation, helipad, tennis court, third home, non-existent mortgage or a riverside flat for their student daughter.
Almost overnight, it is no longer a matter of what the BNP is—a marginal group with a rotten ideological core—but what it is not. [More derogatory adjectives with no facts. Wasn’t this article supposed to be an “investigation” which reveals the awful truth about the BNP?]
Earlier this week I travelled to Grays in Essex, where the BNP was launching its national election manifesto.
As I drove there, I listened to a BBC talk show with increasing gloom and contempt as both Labour and Tory MPs refused to condemn their colleagues by name, while blaming ‘the System’.
Each interview was a little nudge in the back of the floating voter. I was heading for the eager, Far Right alternative.
Confidence may be high but the BNP continues to be shy of the kind of advertised public appearances which the mainstream takes for granted.
As I drove there, I listened to a BBC talk show with increasing gloom and contempt as both Labour and Tory MPs refused to condemn their colleagues by name, while blaming ‘the System’.
Each interview was a little nudge in the back of the floating voter. I was heading for the eager, Far Right alternative.
Confidence may be high but the BNP continues to be shy of the kind of advertised public appearances which the mainstream takes for granted.
I picked up its campaign trail, as instructed by the BNP press operation, in a quiet corner of an Aldi supermarket car park.
A chubby little man in a suit and tie was waiting by a decrepit Vauxhall Astra and a shrouded BNP hoarding. [Ok! Our first sighting of the “vile bunch of racists, oddballs and thugs” that constitutes the BNP: “a chubby little man” is obviously not one of us politically correct elite types.]
A few yards away, two policemen yawned and dozed in their BMW. They were there to protect Astra man from possible anti-fascist agitation, which was conspicuous by its absence. [So now the fact that there weren’t demonstrations against the BNP is somehow a mark against it.]
He directed me to another car park, thence to the BNP launch at the town’s municipal theatre.
‘It’s opposite the war memorial,’ Astra man repeated (it wasn’t but, as I was to learn, the modern BNP is anxious to commandeer British wartime sacrifice). [So the BNP, which believes in Britain, not in any international ideology, is now somehow cynical for appealing to images of British heroism in World War II.]
On arrival, the media was corralled into one part of the theatre lobby. A tall, gimlet-eyed young man in a tightly buttoned dark suit [uh-oh! “a gimlet eyed young man in a tightly buttoned dark suit”—there’s another fascist creep for you!] made sure there was no inter-action between the journalists (whom the BNP need, but hate) and the party candidates and members, who might say something off colour.
‘I’ve told you before that the Press are not to speak to anyone,’ the goon hissed at us, as we tried to strike up conversation with a pensioner BNP supporter.
‘If you do, you will be out on the street. Simple as that, OK?’
[Makes perfect sense to me. Why should an organization that the media is simply seeking to demonize be allowed to set up members at a meeting and try to extract something that they will twist against the organization?]
Once allowed into the theatre auditorium, it was clear that this was no hot ticket.
The room held 300, but the BNP had struggled to fill half the seats, largely with local election candidates and their supporters.
On stage, victory against Nazism in World War II was the dominant (and utterly cynical) motif. [Notice Pendlebury’s acute investigative and analytical abilities? He says that the conference’s WWII motif is “utterly cynical,” and therefore it is utterly cynical.] Winston Churchill’s photograph was displayed alongside the image of a Battle of Britain Spitfire (the plane the BNP had unwittingly chosen to use for its campaign was from a Polish-manned squadron).
Other pictures showed the D-Day beaches. Here was a party that clearly wished to be synonymous with our ‘Finest Hour’. There were no searchlights, nor marching bands, a la Olympia, 1934. [This is exactly like Dinesh D’Souza’a coverage of the 1994 American Renaissance conference, in which he kept noting to his surprise that there were no people in Ku Klux Klan robes present, implying that the conference (at which, by the way, four of the ten speakers were Jews) really was a Klan meeting but was concealing the fact.]
But Griffin, the new Great Leader, was as late as Mosley had been on that momentous night. [Ahh! The mighty Pendlebury has finally shown a connection between Griffin and Mosely! They both showed up late to a meeting!]
While we waited, the PA played a selection of what sounded very much like ‘Forces’ Sweetheart’ Vera Lynn, while Richard Barnbrook, the BNP’s eccentric London mayoral candidate and one-time gay porn director, pranced around trilling:
‘This is going to smack of Cecil B. DeMille!’
What followed Griffin’s grand entrance—he flashed a Churchillian Victory V sign—was more David Brent than The Greatest Show On Earth.
The projector wouldn’t work when required; the curtains failed to open on cue; the music was too loud and a ‘piece of theatre’ involving activists wearing pig masks grubbing in fake money filled troughs, smacked of the sixth form.
A centrepiece film boasting of the BNP’s growth was so amateurish that it reduced some among the Press to giggles. (Griffin later emailed his supporters to say that we had been ‘shocked’ by its brilliance.) [Pendlebury says the film was amateurish, therefore—since he’s already established his credibility with his previous astute and well-reasoned remarks—it must be true.]
But one thing shone through: the MP expenses scandal now dominates BNP electoral strategy.
Only when pressed in a concluding media question-and-answer session did Griffin rant about race and Islam, the core issues which recently saw him support an internal party ‘style’ manual which stated: ‘BNP activists and writers should never refer to “black Britons” or “Asian Britons” etc, for the simple reason that such persons do not exist.’ [So that’s Pendlebury’s “research.” He’s actually read the 13 paragraph BNP manual that was published at the BNP website and at the Mail itself several weeks ago. Give this man the Woodward and Bernstein award.]
Twenty-four hours after the rally in Grays, I was sitting down in Yorkshire with an old friend of mine, a former coal miner called Pete.
We both knew that this would be a slightly awkward conversation; rather like the confession of an extra-marital affair.
On the phone the previous night, Pete had even used the phrase ‘indigenous people’, which is straight from the BNP lexicon of racial terminology.
Pete used to be, as he puts it, ‘a Red’. He first went down the pit as a teenager and immersed himself in Left-wing politics.
Marx’s Das Kapital was on his bookshelf while Robert Tressell’s socialist novel The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists was his Bible.
As a card-carrying member of the Labour Party, CND and of course the closed shop National Union of Miners, he saw the UK via marches and rallies.
During the miners’ strike of 1984-85 he was arrested twice while on flying picket duty in the ‘scab’ coalfields of Nottinghamshire.
We used to go down there at night in balaclavas to put in the strikebreakers’ windows and set fire to their cars,’ he admits without a hint of regret.
From the window of the pub near Wakefield where we meet he can see the car park where ‘100 scab buses would gather every morning. Me and me mates would hide behind those hedges down there and pelt ‘em with bricks before legging it across the fields.
‘All very cowboy and Indians.’
Pete’s pit closed a couple of years after the strike, though he continued to work on mining contracts elsewhere. He still voted Labour and to this day hates Margaret Thatcher.
But his part of Yorkshire was changing and Pete grew ‘hugely disillusioned’.
‘I was a socialist and believed in socialism,’ he said. ‘But any man-made system or belief will be corrupted.
‘The Labour Party grew complacent. They believed that they had the white working-class vote in their pocket by right.
‘It stopped being concerned about us. We weren’t given the chance to vote on whether or not we wanted multiculturalism.
‘Now there are parts of Yorkshire that are no-go areas for me because I’m white. I’m surrounded by industrial estates where you can’t get a job unless you are East European and prepared to work all day for peanuts. I’m not racist, but…’
He stopped voting in elections in 2001. He won’t ever vote Tory, nor support UKIP because ‘it’s too middle class’. But six weeks ago he phoned the BNP.
They snapped him up, very efficiently. Pete even got to talk to Griffin who, he says, promised to make him a local councillor if he wanted.
Pete is still thinking on this. It may be a step too far. But he will be voting for the BNP in the foreseeable future ‘to say “up yours” to the mainstream parties as much as anything’.
He drives me to the station. As we parted he said ‘Don’t make me look too much of a s*** . I know they still have the nasty Nazi knuckledraggers in the shadows, but the leaders are saying the things that I am thinking.’
[So that was Pendlebury’s next revelation: that a former lifelong socialist activist and brand new BNP member says that the BNP “still have the nasty Nazi knuckledraggers in the shadows.” The case is proved. BNP is really a Nazi party.]
We stared in silence at each other. Then we shrugged and went our separate ways.
[Here comes Pendlebury’s next “discovery” the true roots of the BNP in the National Front. But the BNP has completely changed since then, lots of older members and anti-Semites were kicked out, and so on. He ignores all of this, and portrays this profound change in the BNP as nothing more than a matter of putting on suits.]
What was there to say as the expenses scandal raged on? Well, this perhaps: for all their newly donned suits, calls for ‘patriotic duty’ and posters of Spitfires and Normandy beachheads, the BNP was founded by a man called John Tyndall who said of Hitler’s political work: ‘Mein Kampf is my Bible.’ Tyndall was the party leader before Griffin.
The late John Tyndall was best known for leading the National Front in the 70s and for founding the British National Party in the 80s
The late John Tyndall was best known for leading the National Front in the 70s and for founding the British National Party in the 80s
Churchill’s use as a BNP vote winner is strange as BNP director of publicity Mark Collett once said of the great man: ‘He was a f***ing c*** who led us into a pointless war with other whites [Nazi Germany] standing up for their race.’ [After over 2,000 words, there is the first piece of evidence showing something damaging about today’s BNP. But when did Collett say this? Remember that the entire BNP, led by Griffin, has renounced its former anti-Semitism. A few months ago I showed how commenters at the BNP website were consistently defending Israel during the Gaza incursion, even as the right-thinking left of Europe were denouncing Israel.]
BNP deputy leader Simon Darby appeared on stage at Grays to say: ‘We are not like the other politicians, who are, quite frankly, a greedy, lying treacherous bunch of swine.’
Mr Darby is also different from ‘the other politicians’ in that he attends neo-fascist conferences. He was recently photographed entering one such event in Milan, as other delegates gave the Nazi salute. [Really? Having been called a fascist and Nazi myself, I’d like to know more about this supposedly “neo-fascist” conference and that salute.]
For his part, Griffin admitted this week that he had shared a platform with former Ku Klux Klan leader Don Black.
He did so, he claimed, ‘because I believe in freedom of speech and argued that his way of doing politics is wrong’.
It seems Black has yet to be persuaded. The American is behind the Stormfront website which carries a forum thread titled ‘BNP revolution is happening’.
One contributor writes on it, not untypically: ‘I’m sorry, but Jews are not British no matter how far their lineage goes back. Jews out. Always. It’s all or nothin’ folks.’ [So, a commenter at the Stormfront website disagreeing with BNP’s denunciation of anti-Semitism proves that BNP is really anti-Semitic. As for Griffin’s association with Black, I’ve always said that Griffin, being a former anti-Semite, gets a special dispensation. He comes from a bad background, he’s actively trying to lead others out of it, and it’s not reasonable to expect him never to have any contacts with anyone from it.]
Griffin has spoken of his ‘direct’ political line back to Mosley. So it is timely to recall that while Poles were flying Spitfires in defence of Britain, and our soldiers were fighting, Griffin’s fellow-traveller was interned in Holloway jail or under house arrest, as a danger to national security. [How about a full, in-context quote of Griffin, plus the date when he said it?]
When the Grays launch had ended I passed two BNP activists who were complaining about a question asked by a Channel 4 journalist. ‘Of course, Channel 4’s full of Asians,’ one told the other, by way of explanation. [Pendlebury’s investigation has truly hit paydirt now. Two BNP members noted that Channel 4 is staffed by Muslims who are anti-BNP. Shocking, shocking.]
It was a relief to be out in the clean air and sunshine. I walked back to my car, past the memorial on which the World War II dead of Grays are listed alphabetically, from a Private Allen to Aircraftman Williamson.
They did not fight and die for the right of MPs to charge moats, chandeliers and non-existent mortgages to the taxpaper.
Nor for bankers to line their pockets while the economy imploded. Or communities to be divided down racial or religious lines.
But it is also a travesty that their sacrifice is now being used by the Far Right.
This week, Lord Tebbit suggested that on June 4 voters should turn to the smaller parties—except the BNP which he described as ‘Labour with racism’.
Certainly, respect for the mainstream parties is at an all-time low. But 75 years after Olympia, we mustn’t let our rotten MPs hold open the door for Mosley’s successors.
[end of Pendlebury article.]
Pendlebury went to this conference to cover it, and didn’t quote a single substantive thing said by the speakers, let alone a single substantive thing said by any BNP member that shows the BNP to be a “vile bunch of racists, oddballs and thugs.” Yes, that remark of Mark Collett’s about Churchill being a “c—t” shows Collett to be a thug. But when did he say it? And let’s say for the sake of argument that Collett is a thug. Would that make the BNP a vile bunch of thugs? At a major Republican-conservative conefence in 2007 Ann Coulter speaking before cameras
John Edwards a “faggot.” Did that make the Republican Party or the conservative movement a “vile bunch of thugs”?
Pendlebury was apparently believed that his penetrating investigation was burying the BNP. But the only thing he buried was his own journalistic reputation, assuming he had any.
Here are the first eight or so comments following the article. They are all pro-BNP and anti-Pendlebury. There are more comments online.
I for one will be voting for BNP, I am fed of Europe dictating to us, and then these paracite MP’s feeding off the taxpayer. It’s about time the British people stood up to be counted.
- Eileen, Notts (UK, or was once), 16/5/2009 07:20
Well, Richard Pendlebury…. you really don’t want me to vote BNP … do you ?
You would prefer I voted for one of the—decent—moral—parties that have made Britain the wonderful nation we have today like Labour—Conservative and Liberal…..
You know—the parties that gave us the EU nightmare.
The parties that taxed us to the point of penury.
The parties that are full of crooks and fraud.
I am just an ordinary person who wants his country back, Mr Pendlebury.
So…… who do I vote for ? There really isn’t any choice at all…… is there Mr Pendlebury ?
I’m voting BNP because I want to use them….. use them to smash open the rotten political cesspit of corruption that British politics has become.
To replace it with something new…… something better.
The BNP have no chance of ever being a major political force…. but they can be ’ used ’ as a weapon to get my country back on then tracks.
If you have any sense, Mr Pendlebury…. you’ll vote for them too.
- Jack Russell,,, Yorkshire. England, 16/5/2009 07:12
WE ALL HAVE A CHOICE,VOTE FOR WHO WE LIKE AT THE END OF THE DAY THE VOTES WILL SHOW WHO WE TRUST, FUNNY I DONT THINK LABOUR HAVE A CHANCE. THINK WHERE HAVE ALL THE JOBS HAVE GONE?BROWN SAYS TESCO ARE TAKING PEOPLE ON (MINIMUM WAGE) £12000 PER YEAR ,THATS A QUARTER AN MP CAN GET ON EXPENSES ITS A JOKE.
- leicesterblue, leicestershire, 16/5/2009 07:11
Stop the smears. They’re the only hope we’ve got of saving this country.
- Bob, Pimlico, 16/5/2009 07:10
another load of rubbish,another article trying to scare people out of voting for the only party prepared to listen to the british public.
- mat, nottingham, 16/5/2009 07:09
Sir
Once gain you have confirmed the media’s bias when it comes to reporting anything BNP related. You state that the BNP hate journalists but is it any wonder when you refuse to report in a fair and impartial manner and resort to every trick in the book to distort the facts. Had you been doing your job correctly, then why did you not mingle with the multitude of BNP supporters who were milling around outside the venue? There were no restrictions on your talking to any of them had you been willing to put yourself out. Perhaps to have done so would have constituted something too much akin to ‘work’.
Why cannot you accept that under the stewardship of Nick Griffin, the party has modernised beyond recognition and rather than continually belittling the efforts of same, with particular reference to the ‘“amateurish” film, could you not see yourself clear to at least mention just what the party has achieved within a very small timeframe? The film in question was not, to my mind, amat
- Dave, Southend-on-Sea, Essex, 16/5/2009 07:05