Permanent Chairman and pensioner-for-life?

Acknowledgements to the Searchlight web site for the following article. 

Nationalists, including members of the British National Party, should read it, primarily for the insight it provides into how the party is currently regarded by our enemies.  It is always useful to know what the enemy is thinking and saying about one, even if, or perhaps especially if, it is unflattering.  Furthermore, if one grants that the article should be read, surely it is better to read it on a friendly, nationalist site than to give the traffic to Searchlight.

The author of the piece, one Ossowski (pronounced 'oss-off-ski', as in 'off-piste') has certainly been rather uncomplimentary about certain individuals, to not every one of whom he refers by name.  Considering that English may not be his mother tongue it is not written at all badly.

Should we care what our enemies say about us?  Well, it has been said (by a seventeenth century French aristocrat) that our enemies are closer to the truth in their estimation of us than we are ourselves.  Of course, what they really think of us may not be the same as what they say they think of us.

There can be no harm in reading the article, provided one bears in mind its source and treats it as the testimony of a hostile witness: to be taken with a grain of salt.

Should we care about the BNP any more?

12 January 2012

 By Ketlan Ossowski

Just two or three years ago, the British National Party was looking like it was rapidly becoming a force to be reckoned with. With a large complement of councillors in second position on Barking and Dagenham Council, a member of the GLA and a total of fifty-five councillors tucked away around the country, notably at Stoke on Trent, things were looking good for the country's most successful fascist party.

In fact, the only fly in the ointment was the party's apparent inability to fulfil its accounting duties for the Electoral Commission each year, and the curiously divisive nature of Nick Griffin's leadership style, which was, and always has been, a dangerous combination of dictatorship and cronyism. And one more thing: the sheer uselessness of the average BNP councillor.

This latter point has saved a lot of work for anti-fascists. I've no idea who, over the years, has been responsible for selecting people to stand for the BNP at local authority level (at various times it's been anti-semite and bomber Tony Lecomber, white supremacist Arthur Kemp and the increasingly moronic Clive Jefferson, among many others), but they've done a sterling job for us.

Just one example of the BNP's disastrous selection process is reflected in one of their first Burnley councillors, the late Luke Smith. Twenty-six year old Smith was a well-known and highly active football hooligan and thug but even after he had served a seventeen-month jail term for violence, the BNP declared that he was not a violent young man. Shortly after that, Smith attacked the BNP's head of security, following this with an attack on a pub landlord. And who was it who chose Smith for his disastrous and doomed stint as a Burnley councillor? On this occasion, Nick Griffin himself.

Less dramatically, a high proportion of BNP councillors simply stop going to meetings because they either find them boring or simply don't understand what's going on. Six months of no attendance results in an automatic disqualification and normally the triggering of a by-election, which is inevitably won by someone who will properly serve their community. Those who are left, generally lose their jobs at the next election simply because they are useless. Although they attend the minimum number of meetings required to keep them in place, they choose not to speak (unless it's to be racist or idiotically stupid) and hardly ever engage with the electorate. Thus they are kicked out at the earliest opportunity.

That the BNP's councillor selection process is flawed is made fairly obvious by the simple fact that two or three years back they had fifty-five councillors and they're now down, last time I looked, to eight. Great for us but pretty crap for them. Not that I'm complaining.

Arguably the most important of the BNP's councillors is the party's representative on the GLA. At the moment, they don't have one, but for a while there, it was the inept, incoherent, lying drunk Dicky Barnbrook. Dicky, without a doubt, was an absolute boon to anti-fascists and while (obviously) we didn't want the BNP on the GLA at all, it was a mercy that they hadn't chosen somebody who was even remotely competent (or indeed, coherent).

Dicky is now an Independent on the GLA following a terminal fall-out with Griffin, leaving the latter having to find another candidate in the forthcoming elections. Much to everyone's surprise, Griffin has chosen Carlos Cortiglia, about whom anti-fascists only need to know that during the Falklands War, he volunteered to fight against the British. Once again, Griffin's ability to select sensible candidates who might actually score with the voters, is called into question.

This is the problem when one runs a dictatorship and when said dictator has absolutely no idea of how to delegate to people who might actually have some idea of what they're doing. They become self-absorbed and lose all sense of reality. And thus we come to Nick Griffin himself.

Back in the heyday of the BNP, it was said (though never confirmed) that the party had 14,000 members along with its fifty-five councillors, one GLA member and eventually, two MEPs. Now, it's estimated that the party has around 2,000 members, eight councillors, no GLA member (and no prospect of getting one) and two MEPs, though one of them, Andrew Brons, has so far removed himself from Griffin's orbit that he could never be endorsed by the party again whether he's a member or not.

These are staggering changes over a mere two years and for some time speculation within the party membership has been rife as to how this rapid downturn can be reversed. Well, I'm here to tell the membership who are discussing this question, the answer. It won't be, because Nick Griffin has absolutely no interest in the party beyond securing his own financial future.

Griffin's election to the European Parliament was a shock to everyone, not least to the man himself. The appalling peculiarities of the D'Hondt voting system (look it up) used during the election were being worried over long before the elections were held, and warning bells were sounded by those with long experience in the mysterious world of election mathematics that we could end up with extremist MEPs in seats where, under the First Past The Post (FPTP) system that we usually enjoy for Parliamentary elections, we wouldn't see the likes of Griffin infesting the place for the next thousand years. Sadly, D'Hondt was what we were stuck with and Griffin and Brons is what we got.

It was very soon clear that Griffin's obsession with money had got the better of him. The wage and expenses MEPs can earn are phenomenal and to a former bankrupt who had previously had to scratch around trying to make a bit of cash with rubbish like Affordable Cars, the Skip-Hire Registry and the laughable Horse Matters, the new remuneration must have come as a very pleasant surprise. But there is more - and it's important. If Griffin wins a second term at the European Parliament, he will be guaranteed a pension for life at the end of his second term. This pension will be a) enormous, and b) bulletproof, unlike the pensions of public sector workers who are a hell of a lot more vital than Nick bloody Griffin. For the first time in his miserable life, Griffin will be financially secure.

The only problem is how Griffin can force his way back in as MEP. The North West (which he is laughingly said to represent) is an enormous area, and the costs of millions of leaflets, brochures and so on during what will have to be a super-intensive campaign must be worrying to the leader of a party whose membership base (and thus its income) has been cut so dramatically in so short a time. In fact, his only option is to cut back on non-essentials so the money can be siphoned off for his own election campaign.

For the past year or two, the BNP's campaigning performance has been described as lacklustre, where any real campaigning has taken place at all. It's a pretty fair guess that Cortiglia's campaign will be more or less invisible - after all, he's a blatant no-hoper, put in place only to be laughed at and despised by the electorate. No, Griffin is saving every financial asset that he can screw out of the BNP and its membership for one reason and for one reason only; to get himself re-elected and thus secure his pension plan. If anyone in the BNP cannot see this, they're idiots and deserve to be ripped off by their glorious leader. Unfortunately, it's not just them who will have to pay Griffin's pension for the rest of his worthless life - it's every single taxpayer. Oh, joy.

So should we care about the BNP any more? In my opinion - and I stress it's only mine - no, not while it's being run by Nick Griffin, who is wholly financially self-obsessed. Should anyone with even a speck of political talent take over, who is willing to self-sacrifice for what they see as a cause, however unworthy it may seem to most of the population, I'll have to reconsider.