Barking Sane

I will no longer associate Barking with "mad". The people of that consituency gave us a fresh blast of good sense in their voting this week. They showed the BNP it is not wanted and not part of the British way. Indeed it was a double humiliation for the Hate Party -- Nick Griffin helped Labour to a huge majority in the Westminster vote and on Barking and Dagenham Council the BNP lost all its twelve council seats.

I think we should introduce the phrase "Barking Sane" as our vote of thanks.

Best moment of the night was watching the buffoon Griffin bleating that his defeat was the electorate's fault for turning out to vote in such high numbers. No Nick that's democracy -- showing your true colours or just being thick? Perhaps if your party didn't spend the campaign infighting, candidates didn't brawl in the street, you didn't have one faction or another shutting down the party website or accusations from one of your own candidates about the Neo-Nazi links of party kameraden and perhaps, most of all, if you kept your mouth shut you might have got a few more votes. Not many though.

There will be tears before bedtime...

BBC and BNP

The BBC's defence of Radio 1 Newsbeat's kid-glove handling of BNP spokespeople is unravelling. Roy Greenslade's criticisms of the corporation's journalistic failure appear to have been vindicated and now there is worse . I do wonder why the BBC is bending over quite so cravenly to the BNP? I am all in favour of the party being featured on BBC programmes like putting Griffin on QuestionTime. The BNP's lack of ideas and pointless hatreds collapse under fairly modest challenge. The criticism of Newsbeat is that there was no hard questioning, challenge or it seems basic research.

In a small way I experienced the BBC's jitters a few months ago. Asked for my views on a Radio 4 website I decided to contribute to a debate about protestors pelting Nick Griffin with eggs. I simply wrote that this was a time honoured British tradition for dealing with the pompous and unpopular. Of all people, Nick Griffin -- who constantly says that his party is the home of British heritage -- should understand this. My comment was moderated out straight away. Opinions like this clearly have no place on a BBC website. When I complained about the moderator's action I was warned that I was in contravention of the BBC website guidelines and if I persisted could be banned from any future participation...so much for the BBC and free speech.

White Supremacists

I have had the odd insulting comment on this blog from self styled white supremacists. I find these people very peculiar. Is skin colour (which is after all one thing none of us has any control over) the only aspect of their being that they are proud of...? Do they have no achievements of their own, no strength of character, no admirable traits? The answer is invariably no. They have very little if anything to feel supreme about, they are sad, ugly, self-loathing bedwetter types. All they manage to do is to direct their inadequacies into the hatred of others.

A typical white supremacist

Lookalike

Nick Griffin

Baboon's Arse

Jackboots to Strasbourg

Well it's nice to discover that the lesser known of the two newly elected BNP members, Andrew Brons, not only fits but exceeds the stereotype of the loony far right.


As with most BNP leaders his motivation stems from a mixture of childish infatuation with Hitler and an equally one-dimensional hatred of black or jewish or moslem or gay people (in fact anyone who is not in the ubermensch category like his good self). Brons was previously an enthusiastic member of the National Socialist movement here in the UK; a virulent anti-semite; and purchaser of swastikas and other Nazi memorabilia. Lederhosen all the way to Strasbourg. In his formative years Brons worshipped at the feet of Britain's post-war National Socialist Fuhrer, the peculiar Colin Jordan.

Jordan -- who sadly went off to Nazi heaven or hell in April this year -- was one of the old boys of my college in Cambridge. He didn't get mentioned very often. In a thoroughly disreputable political career Jordan founded any number of batty fascist parties. He loved prancing round in jackboots and in 1975 he was convicted of stealing women's underwear from a branch of Tesco. In later life Jordan declared that Jesus Christ had been an imposter and the real messiah was Adolf Hitler. It's nice to know that our newly elected MEP has such an illustrious mentor.
Loony Nazi Colin Jordan, posing in a rather fetching brown shirt.

BNP

I received my BNP election leaflet this weekend. Full of happy smiling white British people -- except as it turns out the wholesome British subjects were actually posed by American and Italian models.

In a darker fantasy I imagined there actually were some BNP MPs and they got caught up (as no doubt they would) in the expenses scandal. So far the bogus claims have been, most reassuringly, running along party lines -- Tories clean their moats and stay in their Pall Mall clubs; New Labour MPs are obsessed with very expensive flat screen TVs; old Labour buy bookshelves; and the Lib Dems go for trouser presses and scatter cushions.

So what would we see from our BNP representatives? Swastika bedspreads, skin-whitening cream, extra tight lederhosen or perhaps entertaining evenings with Max Moseley...?