EHRC defeat in ‘Contempt’ case NOT a "Victory for Free Speech"
A BNP member has e-mailed me to suggest that the outcome of today’s Contempt of Court case brought against Nick Griffin and the British National Party by the Equality and Human Rights Commission was a further instance of the Establishment helping Griffin.
I do not agree with that reaction, and have replied as follows:
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This morning’s result in the High Court in which Griffin was found Not Guilty of “Contempt of Court” is NOT an instance of “The Hidden Hand” protecting him (as it has done before).
The hearing today was NOT on a matter of principle, but only on legal technicalities.
Griffin has NOT won a fight to allow the BNP to keep its original constitution which restricted membership to indigenous White people.
He surrendered that principle at a very early stage of this litigation. All sides agreed about that during this morning’s hearing, as BBC Radio 4 has reported.
On that point Griffin told BNP members in one of his bulletins (when complaining about the EHRC keeping the litigation going):
“We’ve given them everything they’ve asked for....”
The EHRC went to the High Court today to get him/the BNP punished for not abiding by the undertakings he gave to the lower court to change the BNP constitution to allow the party to have a multi-racial membership and to give effect to those changes.
The High Court, apparently, has decided that he has not reneged on his promises given to lower courts to open up the BNP to a multi-racial membership.
So he has NOT won a “victory” for free speech, freedom of association, the “freedom to be ourselves” or any other such thing as he now claims. He SURRENDERED those points of principle a year ago at the County Court hearings.
In my bulletin of Saturday 20th November I commented:
[quote]
However low my opinion is of Gri££in, I want the Equality and Human Rights Commission to lose its current litigation against the BNP so that a matter of principle may be upheld, i.e.:
That in a democracy, the government and its agencies have no right to dictate the terms of the constitutions of political parties, and thereby to dictate their policies. The sole judge on those kinds of matters should be the electorate.
I fear the EHRC may win because the BNP has not fought the case on this matter of principle. It surrendered that principle at an early stage, as Gri££in admitted in a bulletin to members deploring the EHRC’s continuation with the case, in which he said: “We’ve given them everything they demanded....”
Gri££in has only fought the case on a sequence of technical issues and not on the issue that in a democracy a political party has the right to regulate its membership recruitment in accordance with its lawful political objectives.
[end quote]
Unfortunately, today Griffin did NOT seek to reverse his earlier surrender of the point of principle. He merely sought to prove that he has done what he promised the EHRC he would do.
The BNP can now expect the EHRC and its agents provocateurs to continually test whether the party is allowing non-Whites to join the party and influence its policy objectives in equality with indigenous White British people. If he/the party obstructs that process, then he/the party will be back before the courts again to face “contempt” charges. In a statement broadcast by the BBC, the EHRC promised that very thing.
It is necessary to keep your eye on the ball, not on Griffin’s empty “Victory” announcements.
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There was no need for the BNP to have been continually dragged into court, racking up enormous legal costs.
ReplyDeleteThe EGM, held on 14 February 2010, on Mr Griffin's urging, voted to comply with the requirements of the Equality Commission (EHRC). Griffin then decided to be clever (God help us) and to see what he could get away with, in terms of making a mockery of the changes to the constitution demanded by the EHRC.
Surely anyone with an ounce of common sense would have realized that the EHRC were never going to stand for that, and that the party would be dragged into court, at enormous expense, not on the important point of principle, which Griffin had already conceded, with the approval of the EGM, but merely on a question of legal interpretation.
The EGM vote was held precisely in order to avoid the very thing (exorbitant legal costs, with an uncertain outcome) that Griffin subsequently, on his own initiative, decided to entangle the party in.
His, typically Griffinesque, changes to the constitution (not the ones outlined at the recent conference) have left the door open for the EHRC to keep coming back, like a shark, and taking bite after legal bite out of the party.
A leader with his feet on the ground, and his head screwed on, would have understood that the right strategy would have been either to go all out to fight the EHRC's demands on the principle at stake (viz, the right for a political party to determine its own constitution free of state interference) or, alternatively, in order to avoid the potentially crippling legal costs involved, to comply fully, leaving a margin of error, safe in the knowledge that what is stated in a party's constitution need have no implication for how a political party will act, once it is in government.
Griffin chose neither of these courses of action, instead falling between two stools.
In the last two years Mr Griffin has become a severe problem to the progress of Nationalism in the UK. He is content to squander his members funds on egotistical legal "posturing" while our people are under a sustained and fierce attack. (For example - British Schools are closing, while we are paying for the building of schools in Pakistan)
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