Griffin reprises "Attempted Murder"

The following tissue of lies, half-truths, and evasions, with many a suppressio veri and a suggestio falsi thrown in for good measure, is so reminiscent of Mr Griffin's infamous work of slander, "Attempted Murder", published in 1986 as the National Front was tearing itself apart in an orgy of internecine factiousness, that one must assume, as a working hypothesis, that he is its author, perhaps in collaboration with his fellow 1980s factionalist, Pat Harrington.

Even the sub-titles, given as years, eg, 2001, 2002, 2003, etc, are in the style of "Attempted Murder". The article was published today on the web site of the British National Party, but published anonymously.

No doubt Eddy Butler will, as he tends to, assiduously refute on his blog each of Griffin's laughably infantile smears. As for myself I tend to agree with the anonymous Roman author of the "Augustan History" that to pursue everything to the end is tedious.

It has been aptly said that "Attempted Murder" was self-damaging to its author: that Griffin did more damage to his own reputation by its publication than he did to the targets of his spiteful vituperation. I am sure that is true. May this work, a worthy descendant of "Attempted Murder", also recoil on the head of its author. May all those who take the trouble to read it see it for what it is, and see the mind of its originator for what it is also.

It might perhaps be suggested that Mr Griffin is wasted as just another suited "fat cat" politician on the make, that he could do much better for himself financially writing fiction of the political espionage/crime genre, rather like Jeffrey Archer. But then perhaps Griffin prefers actually to live it rather than simply to write about it.

Some, perhaps Eddy Butler himself, may disapprove of my re-publishing this extraordinary article on my blog, arguing that to do so gives it a wider circulation, and that where mud is thrown some is bound to stick. I have to say that I disagree. The allegations made in the article, and their lack of corroboration, reflect very badly, not on their targets, but on their author. The puerile allegations of state sponsorship of his critics and challengers, on which Griffin always falls back when he feels what he has come to regard as "his" position of "Leader-for-Life" to be threatened, are fooling fewer and fewer BNP members, as the deadly effects of his corruption, incompetence, and petty authoritarianism, accumulate and threaten to capsize the party in which we have all invested so much, and from which he has taken so much.

Griffin's latest character assassination of his erstwhile highly esteemed lieutenant, Eddy Butler, now follows.

Butler – Making a Career of Division

Although he speaks 'mockney', Eddy Butler's own biography shows his upper-middle-class origins and explains the mystery of why he ends up speaking 'posh' whenever he gets drunk. Born in Bloomsbury in 1962, he lived initially in Harrow-on-the-Hill in north London, with a year spent in Chicago in the United States as a small boy, before his family settled in Wallington, Surrey. Butler went on to attend Whitgift School in Croydon before his family moved north and he went to Stockport Grammar School.

While in the sixth form at Stockport Grammar, he joined the National Front after first sending off for an information pack following the NF’s Party Political Broadcast for the 1979 General Election. He claims to have been involved with the Stockport Group and participated in activities with the Manchester branch.

In 1981 Butler went to Queen Mary College, University of London and graduated with a degree in History and Politics in 1984. While at university he became Organiser of Tower Hamlets National Front.

Asian girlfriends and mysterious protection

At the same time, Pat Harrington, who was also at university [sic, polytechnic] in London, became the focus of a nationwide far-left campaign to deny him his right to an education on account of his involvement with the Front. Why was no parallel campaign launched against Butler? Did the left-wingers at his college 'forgive' him because he made a habit of going out with Asian girls? Or was he already protected in a pattern that will become even clearer in due course?

Butler says he spent three years in the Territorial Army at this time. Again, there is no record of any complaints or campaign. (By contrast, the Cambridge student newspaper and left ran a series of attacks on Nick Griffin's involvement in the TA while at Cambridge just a couple of years before.)

In his biography, Butler claims that while in the National Front he contributed regular articles to their monthly magazine ‘Nationalism Today’. This is simply untrue. He had a couple of articles published, but no more. As with Ray Hill, Butler's self-serving account of his nationalist activities is repeatedly exaggerated to make him sound more important than he really was.

By 1986 the National Front was mired by infighting, while the BNP was on the point of collapse. While the division in the NF was partly ideological, it was triggered by bitter arguments over the position of the party's head of administration, Ian Anderson. The party was sinking into debt and demoralisation on account of Anderson's incompetence, petty theft and habitual lying.

Nick Griffin, Derek Holland and Pat Harrington led a majority of the governing body who demanded action against Anderson. A minority, including Andrew Brons, objected to his dismissal, claiming that there wasn't enough evidence against him and maintaining that he was being unfairly treated.

Everyone expected Butler and the influential Tower Hamlets branch to back the Anderson faction as he was regarded as sharing Butler's 'populist' political position. Had they done so, the 'Flag' NF would have emerged the clear winner from the time of division.

Given that both the Flag NF and Butler and the rest of the Tower Hamlets branch all agreed that careful and moderate electioneering was the way forward, everyone was amazed when Butler persuaded Tower Hamlets NF to defect to the BNP, which at that time under Tyndall was openly neo-fascist and had the electoral appeal and nous of a dead frog.

Bad judgement – or bad egg?

Even when the later breakthrough came in Millwall, it was in the wrong party, and Tyndall failed totally – and predictably – to build on the success. Butler's tactic of joining the wrong party (which he glosses over in his account by failing to point out the reality of the three-way division in the movement at the time) put back the cause of electoral nationalism by a decade. Was this in line with Ray Hill's 'divide-and-keep-insignificant' policy, or just another one of Butler's ego-driven errors of judgement?

Despite the BNP handicap, however, racial tensions in East London were such that, armed with local campaigning techniques developed in the community politics theories of the Nationalism Today team who had formed the backbone of the NF between 1981 and 1986, Tower Hamlets BNP and Butler won the Millwall council by-election in September 1993.

By this time, the BNP had taken over as the main nationalist party, following the final fragmentation of the rival National Fronts at the end of the 1980s and Ian Anderson's theft of the largest bequest ever received by the nationalist movement in Britain.

State-run disruption campaign

The victory in Millwall created an immediate response in terms of subversion from the far-left and the State. Butler himself agrees with Nick Griffin's old analysis of Combat 18 (when editor of the Rune magazine, Mr Griffin was the first person to put into print criticism of Combat 18 and to call it for what it was). In his own potted biography, Butler refers to ‘efforts by the state established gang called C18 to disrupt the BNP in the aftermath of the Millwall victory. The state agents who controlled C18 played upon the fears of the younger element. They were told by C18 that the BNP no longer wanted them, as the BNP was going respectable’.

In addition to later-proven State grasses such as Charlie Sargent, Combat 18 was also manipulated by several individuals who later turned out to be working for Searchlight, including Darren Wells.

According to his own account, from 1990 to 2009, Butler worked in the finance department of the Corporation of the City of London (not the most obvious use for a History degree, but there you go). This brings us again to the question of who has been protecting Butler, and why. He always claimed that the flexi-time, good pay and long holidays of this job left him free to do almost as much politics as he wanted.

Various local BNP campaigners have been targeted at work in jobs as 'lowly' as emptying the bins or even digging graves. But Butler never had any trouble. He was supposed to be the architect of the party's election strategy in London and the South East. He has a track record for involvement in political violence and headlines. One incident led to Searchlight making the following comment: ‘When Butler was running the BNP’s “rights for whites” campaign in the East End in the early 1990s he and a team of thugs laid into a group of anti-fascists with hammers and other weapons.’

Heavy violence, in other words, yet there was never once a single demonstration, or even a call for people to complain, over his position in the training department of the multi-ethnic workforce of the Corporation of the City of London.

It's preposterous! Butler was clearly protected, allowed to keep his 'job' because it left him free to be a key player in the BNP. The only question is whether he was protected by Searchlight and the far more powerful forces ultimately behind its pro-Zionist, anti-nationalist agenda, or whether his Sugar Daddies are in the Metropolitan Police and he is one of the ‘turned agents’ in the party to whom mainstream newspaper reports of the Met's undercover squads make explicit reference.

Despite being hypercritical of Tyndall's slow response to Combat 18, Butler stayed with the party throughout that period when its fortunes were in decline. It was only three years later, when Tyndall's Spearhead magazine had followed Griffin's Rune in confronting C18, and the gang of thugs had turned in on themselves, that Butler now decided to leave the BNP.

More divisiveness from the Usual Suspect

Yet again, therefore, he jumped ship and perpetuated division in the movement just at a time when there was actually far more unity than usual. The pattern repeats itself over and over with Butler. Again, we have to ask, is he working to someone else's agenda, or does he just have an absolutely lousy sense of judgement and timing?

He started by slagging off Tyndall's leadership to all the other key officials. At one stage this led to Tyndall being at odds with his entire leadership team. Butler tried very hard indeed to persuade John Morse (one of the Useful Idiots who had followed Ray Hill into the newly formed BNP from the British Movement) to stand against Tyndall for the leadership.

In the end, Morse was either too loyal or too scared to challenge Tyndall, but Butler had done quite a bit of damage with a tactic he has since used again and again, in trying to incite wholly unsuitable 'challengers' to put themselves forward for leadership contests which he then uses as an excuse for an orgy of mud-throwing.

While Tyndall deserved criticism for his handling of the party, Butler's attacks on him were so blatant and troublesome, and his constant talk of going off to form something else led 'J.T.' to condemn Butler as ‘a butterfly’. Teaming up with a few posh voices, Butler left the party in 1996 quit to form the Bloomsbury Forum with a number of others.

The Bloomsbury Forum was designed to bridge the gap between the nationalist right and the right-wing fringes of the Conservative Party. That Butler thought this was possible is proof he is a tactical cretin; that he thought it desirable shows that ideologically, if he is ‘on the right’ at all, he is an old imperial Tory and not a proper nationalist.

Despite having left the party, however, Butler continued to try to interfere in its affairs (as it turns out, for the good, but Tyndall didn't see it like that at the time!). He wrote articles for the independent magazine Patriot. Patriot's message of 'moderate' nationalism was necessary, but Butler from the very beginning wanted to go way beyond the switch from the unworkable policy of forced repatriation to voluntary resettlement (a policy which Tyndall was forced to adopt as a result of Nick Griffin's seminal Spearhead article 'No Time For Peter Pan'). Butler's proposal of 'minimalist nationalism' wanted to abandon principle altogether as 'unnecessary baggage'.

1999

In the late 1990s, Nick Griffin challenged John Tyndall for the party leadership, which he duly won in 1999. Butler was brought back into the party on the recommendation of Tony Lecomber. It soon became clear, however, that Butler and a small group of allies in the party had only backed Nick Griffin in order to use him to get rid of Tyndall (a man who, for all his faults, was far bigger than them) with the intention of then moving against the new leader before his position was fully consolidated.

2000

Groundless claims, big ambitions

Within months of the election, Butler was one of a small clique of ambitious subordinate officials who started making groundless claims of financial irregularity in an attempt to force Nick Griffin to hand over control of the party to a committee – run, of course, by them! They also did their level best to frighten members into creating a financial crisis by claiming that the party was about to go bankrupt. Their black propaganda campaign destroyed the BNP in the West Midlands and damaged it severely in some other places, but Nick Griffin kept going, and the rebellion fizzled out as they always do.

Twelve years later, Butler is still trying the same tricks, and the end result is going to be the same.

2001

When the attempt to lie their way into power failed, Butler and his cronies went off to form the short-lived Freedom Party. As well as taking an ultra-soft line on immigration, it was also very vocal in the thoroughly un-nationalist idea that there is nothing fundamentally wrong with the banking system.

Butler and his allies condemned the traditional nationalist position against the banks as a 'funny money' doctrine. Curiously, he's said nothing about this since the introduction of Quantitative Easing proved that real nationalists had been right all along about the banks creating credit out of thin air and screwing the productive economy for interest.

2002

The British National Party starts winning elections, first in Burnley's all-out council contests, then in first-past-the-post by-election campaigns run by Nick Griffin in Blackburn and Halifax. Butler snipes from the sidelines as his own party disintegrates.

2003

When the British National Party showed it could win seats, Butler abandoned the people he'd encouraged to split away and begged to be allowed to rejoin the BNP.

Despite Butler’s previous dishonesty, and conscious of how division does weaken the Cause, Nick Griffin let him back and, after a good election result in Broxbourne, made him National Elections Officer again.

2006

Butler was among those quietly angling for a leadership challenge in the run-up to the council elections in May. A string of great results for the party killed off such speculation.

2007

Renewed speculation about a leadership challenge received some extra weight when the BNP’s then cultural officer, Jonathan Bowden (an old ally of Butler in the Bloomsbury Forum and Freedom Party, whom Nick Griffin had also given the benefit of the doubt and a position in the party), announced that he would support a challenge,

Bowden's outburst came after Nick Griffin issued proscription notices prohibiting BNP members from associating with the New Right Group after it had held a meeting, co-hosted by Bowden, which was addressed by Lady Michele Renouf, a close confidante and backer of David Irving. Butler was firmly behind his old friend Bowden, but kept behind the scenes as far as possible.

The attitude of the Butler camp to such things is always an attempt to have their cake and eat it: the leadership is wrong to give the media opportunities to talk about 'Holocaust denial', but also wrong to take measures to enforce commonsense restrictions on individuals whose antics are used by the media to damage the party.

In Butler's ‘Through the Looking-Glass’ Humpty Dumpty view of the BNP, words mean only what he says they mean, and he'll say anything to anyone to further his own agenda.

Butler also kept out of the firing line in 2007, as a plot developed by a clique centred around Sadie Graham (later responsible for the unforgivable treason of leaking the BNP membership list) and Kenny Smith, with lesser bit parts played by people such as Chris Beverley, who had recently run the party's merchandising wing into the ground.

Ostensibly focussed on the 'rebels’' hatred for Mark Collett (now, of course, Butler's right hand man, with all the hatred – for now – put to one side), the plot ended with their publishing two bogus British Nationalist membership bulletins.

‘Mediating’ – to make things worse

Butler stepped forward and offered to 'mediate', but strangely his 'efforts' made matters worse. Unable to secure any kind of agreement, Nick Griffin ended up obtaining a High Court injunction to prevent the rebels using or leaking the membership list. In the end, Graham and her boyfriend Matt Single leaked it anyway, but a number of Butlerites still want them back. Meanwhile, Butler continues to snipe about the costs of a court case that had to be undertaken precisely because his 'negotiations' – whether by accident or design – failed to resolve the problem more sensibly.

2009

In the run-up to the European Elections in 2009, Butler's deceitful disruptiveness was noticed more and more widely. Everyone at the top knew that, despite being head of the Elections Department, Butler was hoping for a bad election result because it would encourage a challenge to Nick Griffin’s leadership.

Seen in this context, Butler’s order to Regional Organisers not to bother chasing postal votes, and not to bother sealing the ballot boxes each day as the postal votes were counted, is very suspicious.

After the double victory (which occurred because North West regional organiser Clive Jefferson overrode Butler's electorally suicidal commands), Nick Griffin spoke to various key figures about what to do with Butler.

Emma Colgate was known to be very close to him and advised that his fractiousness and lying was all due to his ‘not feeling valued’. With her assurance that ‘Eddy will be better if you show him you trust him’, Nick Griffin did just that. This, of course, turned out to be a mistake which Mr. Griffin says he will never repeat again.

Another such not-to-be-repeated mistake was to allow Butler to 'mediate' in a staff dispute that had arisen between three members of staff and Jim Dowson at the party's temporary overspill admin base in Stroud. Simon Darby was given part of this job and, with the pair of former staff workers with whom he negotiated, the issue was quickly and easily dealt with to the relative satisfaction of all. The case that Butler undertook to sort out, however, went disastrously hostile and remains another one of the court issues that he uses to snipe against the current leadership. A bit rich, given his role in winding up the problem in the first place.

2010

In March 2010, just prior to the General Election, Butler was relieved of his positions in the party and his well-paid job on Nick Griffin's European staff. This resulted from evidence of his close involvement in a campaign of subversion with Mark Collett and Butler’s withholding from the Treasury of more than 10,000 Euros in cash – money which Collett claimed would be used to fund a proposed 'hit' on the party's then fundraiser, Jim Dowson.

Collett wanted Dowson killed primarily because he had intervened to stop Collett handling the placing of big party leaflet orders, saying that he was getting cash kickbacks for doing so.

Collett also explained how he and Butler planned after the election to threaten Nick Griffin with false ‘evidence’ of financial wrongdoing and a massive smear campaign unless he would resign the leadership and go off quietly to concentrate on being an MEP. The then Treasurer was asked to refuse to defend Nick Griffin when he was to be falsely accused of stealing £200,000. According to Collett, ‘Eddy thinks Griffin will accept.’

The plan, you will probably already have noticed, was a carbon copy of what Butler and his clique tried in 2001. The tape of Collett’s revelations was sent to West Yorkshire police, but despite several former police officers who listened to it saying that there was clear evidence of law-breaking, at least by Collett, the police later announced that they would not be taking any action against Butler’s key ally.

This came on top of months of black propaganda lies by Butler directed against Nick Griffin and those Butler regarded as the leadership's valuable allies. Ironically, given their now close co-operation, his main targets at the time were Jim Dowson (Butler even stole a pen drive form Dowson's home, only handing it back when threatened with legal action if he allowed any of its contents to be published) and Paul Golding. For a while, Butler had nothing good to say about them. Now, however, he is calling for them all to bury the hatchet and get together to 'starve out' the party's democratically elected leader.

Curiously, the question of how Butler funds his politicking and his unorthodox family lifestyle again raised its head during this period. With his income down to one-third of what it had been in March, by June people in his area were asking him how he could afford to keep going. His reply was that ‘They're so incompetent they're still paying me.’ This was a lie.

When the lie wore too thin for anyone to wear, he then produced a totally new tale about a large family bequest. Maybe, but isn't it obvious that there's a track record going back twenty years here? Someone is paying Butler to do what he does. And, self-evidently, whoever it is, they are not friends of the British nation!

2011

Busy with his lie-filled blog, Butler yet again showed either his utter contempt for his nationalist audience or a breathtaking lack of grasp on political reality when he proposed 'unity' between the UK Independence Party, the British National Party and the various smaller groups ‘on the patriotic, nationalistic, “right-wing”, populist, non-politically correct, identity-related side of the spectrum’. These smaller groups included the ultra-civic English Democrats and the street-brawling English Defence League.

Such a party would, he claimed, ‘have over 30,000 members’ and ‘instantly be a major force in British politics’. It was also, of course, a ridiculous and unobtainable pipedream. As former National Elections Officer, Butler knows perfectly well that UKIP's leadership have repeatedly rejected both sincere and tactically offered proposals for even an electoral pact with the British National Party.

There is not the faintest possibility of such a thing happening, just as there is no prospect of any party that fights elections hooking up with the EDL. So why make such ridiculous proposals? In order to sucker the inexperienced and naive into thinking that his calls for 'nationalist reconciliation' are sincere – despite coming as they do from someone who has done more to divide the movement than anyone over a disruptive thirty-year career of subversion and disruption.