A Dickens recital

The following anonymous report of the proceedings of Richard Edmonds' Leadership Challenge Conference, Shaping our Future, was recently published on the Griffin Watch blog.

With regard to Mr Dickens' remarks about the alleged size of the British National Party's total debt: it should be borne in mind, when considering how much, if any, credence to accord Mr Dickens' information, that the financial scrutiny committee of which he is a member has yet, some nine or so months after it was formed, to publish either a final report, or even its interim report in full. We are not talking about auditing British Petroleum here. We are talking about an internal review of an unincorporated association, with a relatively modest income of considerably less than two million pounds per annum.

Mr Dickens assesses the BNP's total debt at approximately £400,000. While this is certainly a crippling liability for a party the size of the BNP (whose membership and hence income, moreover, are in sharp decline) and self-evidently ought never to have been incurred in the first place, it is considerably less (by at least one-third) than the £600,000 to £700,000 recently itemized in an article by an anonymous contributor to the Nationalism Today web site. The anonymous contributor in question might well be none other than the party's former fundraising contractor and Eminence Grise, 'his reverence' Jim Dowson.

" The Richard Edmonds' leadership challenge bid meeting was held in Nottingham today and some very interesting information came out of the meeting. Jeff Dickens of the financial scrutiny committee spoke of the debts and broke them down as £110,000 owed to suppliers, £240,000 owed in legal costs and legal payouts ( of this £170,000 is owed by Griffin in his capacity as chairman and £15,000 by Adam Walker for Collett's redundancy pay, which is being held back,) also Romac press in Ulster claim they are owed £42,000 but this amount is in dispute. Mr Dickens also found out that the reason the 2009 Central accounts were submitted late was that the Auditors Silver & Co were not paid for the work they did auditing the 2008 accounts, which amounted to £5,000, they were eventually paid. He told the packed hall today that the 2010 BNP Central accounts will also be late this year.

"A big shock was heard from Richard himself, that Griffin is holding regional meetings this week all over the country and is proposing that the EGM be brought back [sic, forward] one month to Sunday July 17th, ( the initial EGM was planned for the Red, White & Blue festival to be held August 14th.) At this EGM Griffin is looking at a further Constitutional changes including changing the rules of a leadership challenge yet again. this time Griffin is looking at the 4 year period in which the incumbent cannot be challenged, (this was what he was after during the 2008 EGM.) Please remember that the nomination period to submit nomination signatures for the leadership bid starts on Wednesday July 20th. Griffin has craftily planned all this.

"Lastly Mike Howson the South West Regional Organiser has sent out letters stating that no 'unofficial' meetings are to take place in his domain, if any do, the members responsible for such actions with [sic] be expelled, this is a firm warning not to invite Richard to the West Country."