Saturday, December 30, 2006

Post Christmas observations


Splendid couple of days doing not much. A shame the weather's been grey - 'grismal' at times in fact - and not enticing for a walk. Today was an exception but, Sod's Law, I had to finish off my contribution to January’s Identity and so was stuck in the office. Still, having done that and while in writing mode, may as well do a bit more blogging.

All the Yuletide menu arrangements went according to plan. We habitually avoid turkey on Christmas Day as the factory-reared things are a thoroughly disappointing meat as well as being nearly as inhumanely reared as battery hens and eggs (no-one who eats factory-farm eggs has the faintest right to criticise fox-hunting, most healthy foxes always stood a fair chance of getting away, and those that don't live free until the moment they die which is a luxury denied to millions of chickens). This Boxing Day though we had a free-range bird from a fairly local farm, as recommended by one of the two pukka butchers in Welshpool - take a look at Langford's Food Hall in particular if you're passing through Welshpool at some time. To add to the traditional nature of the day, and on the hunting theme, Rhiannon, Elen and I went down to see the Boxing Day hunt meet outside the Royal Oak in town.

Local Tory Assembly Member Glynn Davies was there trying to shore up his vote. He's not particularly popular though, as word has gone around of his smug comment to a well-known farmer a few years back when the latter offered him a bit of advice on how to do things better: "I've done very well for myself". Where do they get these greedy second-raters? Apparently the hunt was one of about 300 happily defying New Labour's purported hunt ban, and very fine they looked too. I spoke to several people who were proudly sporting 'I was there' badges from the Countryside Marches. While I appreciate that some people are as deeply opposed to hunting as the hunts and their supporters are to carrying on, I do believe that people who are genuinely concerned with animal welfare would do better to direct their efforts against the grotesquely unnecessary and wholly alien practice of halal ritual slaughter of literally millions of helpless farm animals, rather than bothering about a couple of thousand often elderly or injured foxes a year.

The best present as far as I'm concerned is, of course, simply being at home this Christmas, even more so without a looming court case (as far as I know!) In strictly material terms, though, my best this year has got to be a double CD, 'The Legendary Johnny Cash'. It features many of his best songs, all of which were re-recorded in the early 1990s when Cash signed to Rick Rubin's American Recordings label. His voice is amazingly strong for a man of his age, and his versatility shown by his ability not just with his own old classics but also on new covers of material such as Cat's In the Cradle, Wanted Man and even two by Elvis Costello. I'm pleased to say that I was a Cash fan some time before the recent film 'I Walk The Line' sparked a revival which has made him a musical icon even to many teenagers (if the music-playing ones around here are anything to go by, which they might not be of course). If all you know of Johnny Cash is a vague memory of one or two of his cheesier 1980s Country or Born Again Christian tracks, then I recommend you to get hold of this album. Brilliant stuff.

Local celebrities

Back on the subject of local celebrities, Richard and Rhiannon, out with separate gangs of mates in Newtown, were amused to have seen - several days before the story of their relationship broke in the press - Lembit Opick in relaxed mood in the Grapes and the Exchange pubs near to his constituency home, and his half of the Cheeky Girls out without him in the Castle Vaults on 'Mad Friday'. Say nothing, even the walls have BNP ears! Still, it's good to hear that at least one LibDem is hetero, I hope his colleagues won't persecute him to much over this shocking deviation from LibDem orthodoxy. At least by the time he splits up with Ms Cheeky there'll be a whole queue of Romanian (or, to be more precise, Roma) lasses available to anyone who has mastered a few basic phrases in their language.

My guess on the impact of EU expansion to Bulgaria and Romania is that tales of coachloads of sturdy beggars and pick-pockets piling into London Victoria will feature heavily in the tabloids for the first week or so of January. Thereafter, when it becomes clear that Britain hasn't immediately sunk beneath the added weight of south east Europeans, the story will fade away for a few months. This is simply a matter of practicality - it takes a while for the first arrivals, the bridgehead if you will, to get themselves dug in, to learn the ropes of false IDs and benefit fraud, to locate the greedy employers who'll turn a blind eye to bogus NI numbers, to find spare flats and ways they can make money by bringing in friends and relatives. The 'pull' effect of mass immigration always takes some time to kick in, and the same will be true with this lot. The flood proper will take until Summer, but then watch the place go several more stages down the tubes.

A new wage war

Paradoxically, the people who will be hardest hit may actually be the Poles who've arrived over the last year or so. They've already dragged wages down so low that hundreds of thousands more native Brits are already out of the labour market, so the latest arrivals won't make any difference to our people. It's the Poles who'll now find themselves being undercut, by people who can work every bit as hard as they do (I mean Bulgarians and Romanians when I write this, the Roma's idea of work is stealing anything heavier than a purse). As the song goes, I predict a riot.

Yesterday's Daily Mail had an editorial which put part a large part of the blame for this flood on lazy British workers. There is of course a shred of truth in this, but that's all. The reality is that, on top of the impact of decades of increasing 'dependency culture', the killing blow as far as the natives are concerned is that the East Europeans are able to undercut anything they can work for. There are two key reasons for this, neither of which is yet understood, let alone talked about by ignorant editors or shock-jock hacks like Peter Hitchens in their well-paid ivory towers: First, the newcomers often live eight or ten to a flat, dossing on floors or sharing beds in shifts. Second, the ones paying taxes are willing to live hand-to-mouth for ten months of the year (a combination of cheap supermarket special offers, eating at work, shoplifting and frugal peasant cookery of a sort that our pathetic school 'cookery' lessons dropped decades ago), with the savings they're after accruing in their tax and National Insurance contributions. Because, when they then go home at the end of nearly a year here, the British government kindly gives them all their tax back.

Tax refund

That's right, whether it's the initial emergency tax rate or the flat 22%, it's all paid over to them when they go home on holiday. All they've got to do is to use a fraction of the resulting handout to buy false ID and they're back taking another low paid British job a couple of weeks later. How can any native workers, with families to keep, homes to pay for, and Gordon Brown's tax-habit to pay for, possibly compete against that? What a shame it is that just about the only job that a bright East European immigrant can't take is one working as a journalist - the hacks might drop their condescending attacks on 'lazy' British workers if they could only get a taste of their own medicine.

One can't say quite the same for MPs, of course, because a fair few of them are already of East European ancestry. I was particularly amused to see Denis 'MacShane', Labour MP for the economic basket case known as Rotherham, and hence to more than his fair share of Islamic 'groomers', praising the Guardian for exposing the 'secrecy' of the BNP. For Denis was blessed at birth with an utterly unspellable Polish surname. Why did he change it? What sinister secret is he trying to hide? Not because having a strange name is an impediment to getting elected in tolerant, for if it was then Lembit Opick would be representing Riga East.

Guardian article

The Grauniad feature was one of the strangest pieces of journalism I've seen in a long time. As one reporter who called the Doc and me on the first day to see what we thought of it asked: "What did you have to pay the Guardian for that three page advert?" And the second day was even better. True, their wholly gratuitous 'unmasking' of several upper middle class type members was a nasty piece of McCarthyism, and something about which we will be talking to a senior barrister very early in the New Year, but the rest was a wonderful piece of 'repositioning' propaganda. Either the journalist and editor are both secret BNP supporters or, perhaps slightly less incredibly, this is part of a desperate New Labour/Joseph Rowntree Trust scheme designed to rouse the Grauniad's 400,000 readership into getting off their self-satisfied bourgeois liberal bottoms and opposing the BNP before it is completely too late.

My hunch is that these people are privy to some truly (for them) shocking opinion poll and focus group data which shows the few little BNP snowballs we've already seen rolling down apparently solid rock and ice hillsides are in fact on the verge of triggering a BNP avalanche. Near panic, that's what we're seeing.

And if they think it's bad now, have they any idea what might happen when one of those Islamist terror attacks that Dr. Reid and various top cops keep on warning about gets through? Of course, they are probably exaggerating the risk in order to justify their moves to abolish even more traditional freedoms, but saying that civilian Brits now face a greater danger than even during World War Two. That suggests 60,000 deaths in five years - around about 240 7/7 attacks a year for the next five years!

Either our Masters' arithmetic is deeply flawed, or they know nothing about World War Two, or their lust for all that extra power as driven them mad, or they know something they're not telling us (think Captain Hook with a supply of suitcase nukes and a group of spotty seventeen year old Asifs). None of the above options is particularly good news if you're a Guardian reader who thinks Britain's just great as it is and doesn't want anyone to come along and make a mess of it.

Sooner or later, of course, even if the Powers That Be are over-egging the threat by a factor of a hundred, the unexaggerated Islamic threat is going to do enough damage. The latest Establishment organ to display some faint inkling into what's coming our way is the Independent, with its revelation that at least 23,000 British-based Muslims are among the three million pilgrims travelling to Mecca for this year's Haj, and that an extraordinary number of them are much younger than is normal.

The Indie frets that it is 'alienation' and 'Islamophobia' that are radicalising young Muslims in Britain - it's all going to our fault, you see! is, of course, a bit to polite to point out the obvious - that since going to Mecca for the Haj is obligatory for all Muslims once in their lifetime, it might be a good idea for the security services to pay particular attention to those young 'radicalised' ones who've just fulfilled that requirement while still in their late teens or early twenties. In fact, if they're that keen on being Islamic, it might be a good idea simply to stop them at Gatwick and stick them on the first plane to Islamabad, because that would relieve them of their Koranic duty to strive mightily against their Unbeliever neighbours.

Spy unmasked

At the very least they need watching like hawks, and most certainly barred from certain jobs. One of the bullets that the British Establishment is going to have to bite sooner or later is the problem that all proper Muslims owe their primary allegiance to their religion and their co-religionists, rather than to an adopted kuffir country like the United Kingdom. It is this that makes it entirely feasible that Corporal 'Daniel James' - the 41-year-old British army interpreter now accused of spying for the Iranians - could be 'guilty' of treason. For his real name is Esmail Gamasai and he is an Iranian Muslim. As a matter of fact, I can't help wondering who will be the more guilty if he is convicted as a result of the allegations against him - the Iranian Muslim who, when the chips are down, sides with his blood brothers, or the elegant fools who thought it would be a good idea to let such people into the British Army at a time when Blair's criminal regime has effectively declared war on Islam?

It's not a mistake that the British army made for a hundred years after the shock of the Indian Mutiny, and it requires serious ignorance of history to run the same risks again, especially when the trouble that will result will be on our own soil this time around. Kipling, as so often, tried to warn us of the danger:

"The Stranger within my gates,

He may be evil or good, But I cannot tell what powers control -

What reasons sway his mood;

Nor when the Gods of his far-off land

Shall repossess his blood."

Not 'if'', but 'when'.

Monday, December 25, 2006

Christmas Day posting

Off on a brief trip down south. First stop is home of our dynamic South East regional organiser, Roger Robertson, who is doing a great job building on the earlier sterling work of ex-UKIP stalwart Brian Galloway, who had to step down due to family illness but who is still very much 'onside'. There I do an interview with a journalist who's working on what is supposed to be a big piece for the Telegraph. He's an amiable enough lad, but what on earth is the paper that used to provide a platform to the brilliant 'reactionary' satirist Michael Wharton ('Peter Simple') doing employing such dripping wet liberals? The questions are no more useful or incisive than those provided by sixth formers at the very occasional school visit that we get, and he seems genuinely to believe in the multicult Tooth Fairy. Over a month later, the 'big piece' has still not appeared.

Together with Financial Times columnist Gordon C. Tether, 'Peter Simple' provided much the only glimmer of genuine patriotism and talent among all the prostitute hacks of the 1970s, which was when the monstrous project which is approaching fruition under Bliar really took off. His death was a sad loss to honest journalism, for he combined the natural talent with words that he inherited from the East European Jewish side of his family with the love of the real Britain that came from the Olde English half of his ancestry. Wharton wrote me a short but kind and supportive letter after my first Race Act trial back in 1997.

The neo-Nutzi and clerico-fascist cranks who infest cyberspace always have to overlook people like Wharton in order to 'prove' their thesis that "the Jews are the Spawn of Satan" and so diabolically clever that to show them anything less than 100% hostility is to be fooled into becoming a "Zionist puppet". John Amery, the half-Jewish leader of the tiny British contingent of the Waffen SS is another one whose ancestry goes down the neo-Nazi memory-hole (all totalitarianisms have one). The same mentality also points to the very obvious Jewish links of the 'American' neo-conservative movement and concludes that the US/Blairite invasion of Iraq was a 'war for Israel'.

Well, if that's the case, these people aren't so diabolically clever after all, are they? Is Israel really 'safer' now that looming defeat in Iraq means that it would be virtually impossible for the most slavishly pro-Zionist US President (and all of them since Nixon have been) to do anything serious and effective either about Hizbollah rockets or an Iranian Bomb? The neo-con project to "remake the Middle East" has been a grotesque failure - if its real aim was to aid the establishment of Eretz Israel (the Israel-uber-alles-from-the-Nile-to-the-Euphrates scheme of the most ardent Zionists), or even to make Israelis safer within their existing borders.

Unless, of course, the neo-con project was actually something very different. Might not the plan to take out Iraq, to break Hizbollah and - coming soon - Iran, be someone else's scheme at root, even if some rather short-sighted Jewish fascists felt that it could be to their benefit too? Look at the victims of this 'American/Zionist' aggression: Shi'ite Iraq, Shi'ite Iran, Shi'ite Hezbollah. Look at who could have stopped the American war machine in its tracks with a single word and the turning off of the West's key oil supply, but who does nothing - Sunni Saudi Arabia. The desert kingdom could grind the dollar and the imperial pretensions of the USA into dust within a week if wanted to - which it does, but not yet, for these people play a very long game, measured in decades or even centuries.

Ever since the end of the Turkish Caliphate in 1922 there has been a power vacuum at the heart of Islam. Who will fill the gap? For the first time in more than a thousand years it could be the Shi'ites, since the bulk of the remaining oil reserves in the Middle East are now in Iran and southern Iraq, and Iran is closer than any other Islamic state to having an Islamic Bomb (the hybrid military dictatorship in Pakinstan doesn't count - they've even banned Hizb ut Tahrir, unlike Britain under Tony Blair). The Wahhabi fanatics who control Saudi Arabia have spent two hundred years fighting and plotting to spread their ultra-puritanical version of Islam over the whole world, and they're not going to take kindly to being pipped at the post for the revived Caliphate by a bunch of Iranian heretics.

So just as they used the 'New Byzantium' (the USA) to help them defeat the 'New Persia' (the USSR) once the Russians foolishly blundered into Afghanistan, so now it would suit them to use the USA to beat down the Shi'ites. Once that's done, of course, they can switch their main attention back to their last outstanding Big Project - the Islamisation of Europe (time-scale 20 - 40 years) and the subsequent assault on the USA (time-scale 50 - 100 years).

One thing is certain - there is no point looking to the writings and public utterences of the neo-cons themselves, for their great ideological and strategic guru Leo Strauss (an elitist German Jew who maintained friendly relations with the Nazi regime even after fleeing to New York and worming his way into the American Establishment) taught them that their Great Scheme for a neo-Platonic elite to dominate the rest of Mankind must be advanced mainly through deception - in particular never revealing one's true objectives. So the self-confessed intentions of the likes of Pearl and Wolfovitz shouldn't be given too much weight. 'The Jews' haven't been blameless throughout history, but they've also been convenient scapegoats throughout history. Medieval kings used to farm out tax collection to them so that the peasants would kick back at unfortunate and wholly innocent Jewish tailors and not at their ultimate oppressors in their royal families. How convenient to have all the conspiracy freaks in the world fixated exclusively on 'the Jews' (whose past disproportionate role in assorted civilisational wrecking sprees such as Bolshevism and multi-racialism has, to be honest, not been particularly good PR) while the Muslim Conquest machine rolls on and the super-rich think it is another odd mass superstition that they can control like so many others.

In the end, all conspiracy theories are matters of faith and not of rational interpretation of facts. Hence they are best taken with fairly large pinches of salt and even more commonsense. Is it good for Britain to have our troops dying in distant dusty lands where no genuine British interest is served? Clearly not. So whether the 'reason' they are there is Tony Blair's vanity, Tony Blair's pro-Israeli 'tennis partner' moneybags, or the fact that Bush & Co are in the pockets of the Saudis, we should bring them home immediately. That is all there is to say and know for sure.

Unexpected

After the interview we head off to a local meeting near Basingstoke. This is, by old rights, prime Tory and more recently UKIP territory, but Roger and his team are making big inroads. Around 100 people pack the function room of a centuries'-old local pub. A couple of local journalists have been invited (we get very fair write-ups subsequently) and all goes well. The landlord is quoted as saying we weren't what he expected (in a good way!) After the meeting one of our Surrey characters, 'Mark ye Morris' gets out his squeezebox and rattles off a few traditional tunes. I'm told that a mobile video of him and me doing "The Man Who Waters The Workers' Beer" will go up on You-tube. The growth of this instant, do-it-yourself media has to be this year's technological surprise and, yet again, shows new technologies undermining old monopolies.

The next day I fill in with a couple of private meetings, then it's off to the BBC headquarters at Portland Place to appear as a 'witness' on The Moral Maze, where the evening's Radio 4 discussion is on free speech. I'm first on, with Michael Buerk's panel being Michael Portillo, Claire Fox (ex-Living Marxism), the Catholic affairs correspondent of The Times and a leftist former BBC political bigwig. My security team are waiting on the other side of a plate glass screen in the same room as the producer and sound engineer. They watch in amazement as the producer signals to the panelists to verbally rough me up and to be even more aggressive. I like these kind of confrontations though and, after a few minutes, his gestures are to Michael Buerk - 'cut', 'get him off' are the hand gestures now. Accused of wanting ethnic cleansing, I finish my appearance by telling them that ethnic cleansing attacks are going on at that very moment in towns all over the north of England, but that as the victims are 'only' working class whites people like the panel simply don't want to know.

After the programme we head to the Millennium Hotel in nearby Grosvenor Square to meet someone else I need to see. Strange this, because I've never even heard of the place before but it emerges a couple of weeks later that if we'd gone there ten days earlier we'd have got a dose of radiation poisoning, and if we'd gone two weeks earlier I'd probably have been a suspect in the 'murder' of Litvenenko!

More meetings, organisational matters to sort and things to write, then it's off to the Annual Conference at Blackpool. This has been well-publicised elsewhere so little needs to be said about it, other than the fact that it is another step on the long road to move the BNP away from being at base a "one man band" and turn it into a sensibly revolutionary movement in which the overall direction is determined by an experienced body of officials and activists, such that it can withstand whatever hardships and tragedies may be thrown in its way before we reach our final objective.

The debates go well, with a great deal of maturity and generous attention to different points of view. The first thing that everybody has to learn is the importance of collective responsibility - even if the majority vote the opposite way to what some would prefer, the 'defeated' minority must accept the decision and work with it, while retaining the right to work by constructive persuasion and personal example to get the decision reversed at a future conference. On the Saturday evening everyone is eating out as the hotel venue, although large, cannot cope with food for so many people. To avoid placing an extra burden on security (there has been a far-left demo of a hundred or so in town earlier in the day) a small group of us slip away a few miles south to Lytham St. Annes. We find a quiet restaurant - modern English with French and Italian influence - where the owner/chef is very pleased to see us and sends various complimentary bits to our table. Sympathy, mind you, was the experience of all our conference attendees; we've 'cracked' Blackpool and have held a two-day event with extensive advance notice without more than a feeble token demo against us. This is another very significant advance on the road to normalisation; a few years ago it would have been unthinkable. Another resounding success.

Non-Dutch Holland and non-Belgian Flanders

The following weekend starts early with another trip 'down south'. This time it is to a big meeting in Barking. I share a platform with Chris Roberts, one of our 'old hands' and a very good media performer when he gets the chance, and with Cllr Richard Barnbrook. Richard gives another outstanding speech and then it's my turn. It turns out to be a lengthy speech, one of my more-than-an-hour ones, but it's a deeply political audience and it goes down well. Nearly all of our local councillors are there and the atmosphere is electric.

Our Barking councillors are now throwing all sorts of motions and verbal brickbats at Labour in the council chamber, and we're getting some remarkably fair publicity. It seems that there often comes a local tipping point when even a previously relentlessly hostile local press realises that our support is so strong that the pretence that we are wicked or incompetent 'outsiders' can no longer be kept up.

I leave the meeting a little earlier than usual as we have to get to an inn in Kent where we've booked two twin rooms for the night; we have to be in Dover early the following morning in order to get a ferry to a weekend conference in Flanders. We arrive as the locals are leaving but the landlord not only recognises me immediately but shakes my hand warmly and keeps on serving. The bitter is a bit disappointing but he has a fabulous draught Somerset cider which goes down very well.

To our suprise we find that we can still get an evening meal at nearly midnight - apparently the kitchen is still open as another late group of guests are due. So a little after us Jools Holland and Ruby Turner walk into the pub. The former front man of the late seventies group 'Squeeze' is now widely and justly recognised as a genuinely talented musician and entertainer, while Ruby Turner has the powerful voice of many black lady singers. Not really my cup of tea but good for all that. They eat their steaks and Ruby and a couple of others leave fairly quickly. Jools stays talking to the landlady and a couple of other late locals. He bids us a cheery goodnight as he leaves and, not much later, we turn in as well.

The event in Flanders is billed as the 'Euro-Rus Conference' and is organised by an independent group linked to the Altermedia nationalist news website (if you're not familiar with it, take a look). Even though I don't necessary see eye-to-eye with all those present, I've agreed to speak for several reasons: Russia's huge energy supplies and the fact that our own North Sea bonanza was blown by the Thatcher and Blair/Brown regimes as a way of covering up our catastrophic industrial decline, mean that we are going to be more and more reliant on Mr. Putin and his successors in the years to come. Accordingly it behoves us as far-sighted nationalists to learn as much about Russia as possible and to forge friendly links with Russian nationalists as well.

Second, I suspect that some of the other speakers will concentrate on the danger posed to Russia and her enigmatic President by the Oligarchs - including those living in exile in England and Israel - who are clearly not inclined to forgive Putin for curbing at least the worst excesses of their grand privatisation smash and grab raid at the expense of the long-suffering Russian people. I want to balance a potentially one-sided approach by drawing attention to Russia's own problems with militant Islam, and the still unresolved tensions between Germans and Slavs over historically disputed territories in Eastern Europe. Predictably, there are indeed criticisms of 'Jewish oligarchs', which I respond to by pointing out that the core of the problem is not that the oligarchs are Jewish (it's a simpe fact that all this lot are), but that there are oligarchs at all. Would it really be any better for the Russians to be looted by a clique of mega-rich Russians? Of course not, which makes the problem economic and social, rather than racial, for as long as there is a system which allows the super-rich to accrue ever-larger amounts of wealth and influence, then whichever is on average the most intelligent section of the population will exploit that system and lord it over the rest. The answer is to change the system, not to persecute innocent people who have something in common with the handful of exploiters.

My third reason for attending is that the other speakers include the long-term 'New Right' theorists Guillaume Faye and Robert Steuckers. The charming Frenchman Faye I have met before and want to meet again, Steuckers is new to me but we hit it off straight away. As part of the long-term programme of broadening BNP support and influence we need to engage in a War of Ideas with the liberal-left, especially at university level. Pragmatic England is particularly backwards in this field and I hope in due course to bring Faye and Steuckers over to a conference here at which we can pull together the various strands of 'New Right' and traditionalist thought which do exist in Britain. We'll see.

A number of attendees are from the Vlaams Belang and afterwards we end up at a local VB post-election victory celebration in a nearby leisure centre. Also present are members of a traditional Flemish folk dance troupe, who seem quite keen on attending the RWB. Still later we end up back where we've been billetted for the weekend and in turns out that our host and a friend of his are keen folk singers. Since I have nothing to do the next day save sit in the back of a car on the long journey home, I indulge myself my singing alternate songs with them until nearly five in the morning. Ridiculous behaviour, but we enjoy it at the time.

After the multicult - even greater madness

Back home in Britain (though some pretty wild seas and an extra delay outside Dover as it's too rough to put into harbour) there is some strange rhetoric in the air. Tony Blair comes out with a speech on multi-culturalism which confirms the Labour government's drastic shift from the Balkanisation-everyone-(except the English)-can-let-it-all-hang-out model to a One-Phoney-British-Fits-All system. On paper, at least. It's unconvincing stuff though, with Blair's attempt to steal Jean-Marie Le Pen's "France, Love It, Or Leave It" sentiments coming over as particularly unconvincing. In our more populist moments at elections it's a slogan we've adapted, so his tactical genius think-tank artists and speech writers have probably pinched it off us.

But making noises about veils and extremists while at the same time leaving Britain's front gates open and allowing creeping Sharia law in everything from halal school meals to tax-break polygamy is illogical nonsense. Still, everything the Establishment does to legitimise our message and to raise and then dash public hopes that something will get done will rebound in our favour in due course.

The more so because the Establishment alternative to voluntary multiculturalism is going to be enforced integration. The recently announced rebuilding programme for all secondary schools in the country is to be a key part of this, with no stone unterned in the drive to create racial harmony by forcibly mixing schoolkids. Those whom the Gods would destroy they first make mad!

Days later the same strange confused liberal-left reaction to the collapse of so many old certainties is visible in the announcement by the BBC that it has been too focussed on conventional middle-of-the-road liberalism. It's got to stop, says Auntie, so viewers can expect to see "more of the Taliban and the BNP on interviews from now on." Yes, of course, we're one-and-the same, and it's surely only reasonable that foreign terrorists who used to hang idolatrous TV sets and pull out the fingernails of women wearing nail varnish (though, strangely, Taliban males often wear it) are put in the same bracket as a legal British political party that is now showing more support in opinion polls than the Liberals used to register when I was first interested in politics.

This matter of growing BNP support is confirmed just a couple of days after noting the point above when we take more than 12% of the vote in ultra-posh Horsham, in Sussex. We easily beat the Labour party and absolutely thrash UKIP in what would, if they really had a heart, would be their heartland. This very significant result was well-worked for by local canvassing teams and gets a surprising amount of attention from the political and chattering classes. The BBC is still trying to talk up UKIP and Nigel Farage, but UKIP is losing activists to us as fast as the Cameroons are losing members to it.

Unusually, I go down with some kind of virus. Jackie says it's my own fault for staying up singing all night. Yes, nurse. I have to call off two meetings which I hate doing as I don't like to let people down. I hear they go well for all that though. There is so much demand on my time these days that in the New Year I'm going in normal circumstances to stop doing long journies to individual meetings altogether. I will still do so for venues within three hours' drive, which covers all Wales, the West Midlands, most of the East Midlands, and the core parts of Lancashire and Yorkshire. But for places further off than that I'll be doing a tour a month, with a number of back to back meetings on the same and adjacent nights, in one region per month. So in January I'll be in the North East, and in February it'll be East Anglia. March and April will probably see a mad rush around our main potential May election breakthrough areas.

Lots of hot air?

"Cows generate more greenhouse gases than all forms of transport combined, a United Nations report has revealed." So begins a short report carried in several newspapers. The study, entitled 'Livestock's Long shadow', warns that drastic action is needed if the methane and carbon dioxide produced by ruminants is not to turn Earth into a pressure cooker. Author Henning Steinfeld claims that "Livestock are one of the most significant contributors to today's most serious environmental problems."

Hmmm. Having had a small holding and seen how goats will stop at nothing to munch on young trees, I have no doubt at all that livestock play a big part in creating deserts, both the dry sandy type and the cold green ones of upland Britain. But as for farting cows destroying the world, I have grave reservations. Yes, in all probability there are more domesticated animals around these days; the growing demand for meat from China's burgeoning middle class alone almost guarantees that. But have the UN not given a little thought as to whether the resulting increase in domesticated bovine flatulence over the last century or so might not be offset by an even more drastic decline in the number of wild methane-machines?

Remember the endless herds of bison that used to thunder over the Great Plains of North America? The torrents of wildebeast and rhinos that used to pour over the landscape of Africa? The elephants of India and Africa and, going back just a blink of an eye in geological terms, their wooly cousins who used to dominate the tundra near the great ice sheets? Why didn't the farting of all those mammouths and wild aurochs stop the last Ice Age before it even got started?

Are today's livestock herds and flocks really doing more damage to the atmosphere than all the cars, lorries, planes and supertankers in the world? Or is this a dodgy piece of 'science' that is in reality a mere figleaf for ideologically motivated opinions and prescriptions for the future? In fact, how much of the whole man-made global warming scare is based on genuine empirical science, and how much is created by the Watermelon (green outside, red inside) tendencies of the post-1989 left? Are cows really going to kill the world, or is the tale merely useful to political activists who want to spread vegetarianism, encourage neo-Hindu meatless egalitarianism and to destroy capitalist farming techniques?

While we in the BNP also have strong objections to agribusiness industrial farming, we know enough about the devious nature of the regrouped Marxian left to be suspicious about the current global warming mania. Global carbon credit trading could be intended to save the planet, but it could equally be a crucial stepping stone towards One World Government and, more practically, a massive rip-off mechanism designed to fleece the productive nations of the world in favour of the basket cases and the World Bank.

On balance, it does appear that the world is going through a warming phase (though plenty of independent scientists whose research grants are not reliant on their finding evidence of global warming are not so sure). But when I hear that the Alpine glaciers are now back to where they were 1,000 years ago I have to wonder at the credulity of those who allow tax-guzzlers like Gordon Brown to blame the impact of Man (Dark Age Europe, of course, was well known for its huge polluting industries and traffic-choked ten-lane motorways).

Even more curious is the evidence from those remarkable NASA photos of Mars which show that water from melting ice has changed that planet's surface in the last five or ten years. So the climate of Mars has recently warmed up, and indeed may still be doing so. Is this due to larger herds of cattle in Brazil, or to China's new generation of coal-fired power stations, or to all those 4x4s on the school run in Surbiton? Or might it - and similar swings in the climate of our planet too - not just be down to cyclical changes in the rather ordinary star at the heart of our solar system, about which we still know so little?

Of course we need to cut pollution, for it's bad for us. Of course we need to stop wiping out tigers and whales, for they are part of the wonder of our world. Of course we need to move away from producing low quality meat packed with carcinogenic chemicals. And of course we need a massive R&D programme to end our addiction to finite fossil fuels - global warming or not, relying on the Iranians and Saudis for the energy that underpins our civilisation is insane. But let's not get carried away with global warming, because in a few years it might be as outdated as the idea that acid rain was about to kill off the last tree. Remember that one?

Cowardly cops and a 16-year-old "man"

A friend in Keighley sends me several cuttings from the local rag. "Youth hit over head on way to concert" is the headline on a 6" piece tucked away on page 9 (14/12/06). It relates how "A 16-year-old youth was hospitalised after being hit over the head with an iron bar, in Lawkholme Lane, on Friday night. The youngster, who was walking with friends to a concert at Victoria Hall, Keighley, was racially abused by one gang of youths before being assaulted by another group."

The attack was sufficiently serious that the lad had to be kept in hospital overnight. Local police spokesman Det Insp John Moutain said he believed the attackers were young Asian men and from the local area.

"It's the sword arm, the fighting arm, the arm you hit a white lad over the head with a baseball bat with" was one of the parts of the speech in Keighley for which West Yorkshire Police recently tried to send me to prison. The prosecution complained bitterly at my timerity in actually daring to mention the unmentionable in the town - that racist violence against young white males, and racist sexual abuse of young white girls, is largely the product of the 'culture' created by Islam. While two juries upheld my right to say such things, and to urge peaceful political action to bring them to an end, the very fact of the prosecution will have helped - as was intended - to place such discussions beyond the Pale. And, thereby, to have made it inevitable that there will be more victims in future.

One would hope that the police would have learnt their lesson by now, but sadly not. In the same report the Det Insp is at it again, using weasel words to downplay and minimise the incident: "The man was clearly shaken by the incident and kept in for observation." "Man"? The boy was just sixteen. If it had been the other way around, with two different white racist gangs abusing and beating teenage Asians, this dispicable excuse for a policeman would not have dared to play it down by calling the victim a "man", and, for that matter, the report wouldn't have been confined to the local paper. Keighley police are particularly bad - they STILL haven't even asked us for the name of the racist murderer of Sean Whyte, which they know we have on a video clip shot by BNPtv in their own police station in the town. Instead they, and the pathetic Ann Cryer, turn blind eyes again while a Muslim murderer and his gang swagger through their town intimidating not just local people but also law-abiding members of the Asian Muslim community.

This is what I was getting at near the end of that appearance on The Moral Maze - low-level ethnic cleansing attacks are going on against I(mainly young) whites every single night across a huge swathe of our country, and the police and the media and the politicians turn blind eyes or downplay it at every possible opportunity. Loathesome people.

The real trouble is that every time our Establishment fails to take effective action, the racist/religionist aggression and confidence of these Muslim gangs grows. "You can beat a white boy and no-one really cares," "if you get caught all you have to do is say he racially abused you," "White girls are easy meat, and their society is so rotten that you can do whatever you want to them and the kaffir police won't even admit anything's happening." These are the sort of messages throbbing along the Islamic bush telegraph in Britain today. As long as they continue to do so without a proper response from the Powers that Be then more white lads will be brained with iron bars and baseball bats, and more young girls will be seduced or dragged into short brutal lives of sexual exploitation and heroin addiction.

Truly, there is no place in hell hot enough for the editors, police bosses and politicians who know what is going on and cover it all up, thus dooming even more victims to the same sad fate.

Another one bites the dust

And so it's Christmas Eve. The BNP Christmas message, shot on location in the stunning Western Isles of Scotland so as to draw attention to our very serious efforts to break through with a parliamentary seat in Scotland next May, is done and dusted and being downloaded by the thousand. On the road across the Island of Mull we were treated to the finest double rainbow I've ever seen, one complete rainbow bridge arc in intense colours, and a second, almost complete, outside it. The road we were were on appeared to pass between the two. Wonderful. As I say in the piece near the start of the message, why on earth do so many people insist on all the hassle of travelling abroad when there is so much scenery, history and human interest and kindness to be found in our own country?

We stop in the little port of Oban on the way back. Even there I'm recognised - with comments by a dappy but slightly inebriated old gent who assures me that he is going to be world famous soon and that he has already screwed the Royal Bank of Scotland for a very large sum of money. He is very pro-BNP, unlike the barman's student-type mate, who hisses 'fascists' as I pay the bill. The silly thing is that if he actually took the trouble to find out what we really stand for he'd probably agree with most of it. Still, for now he'll have to make do with telling all his mates who he shouted 'fascist' at Nick Griffin and his 'minders' and lived to tell the tale!

Family preparations for Christmas are pretty much complete and the house looks stunning as ever. If and when I get time to write my autobiography thus far I'll have to include a picture of the poor place when it was a derelict shell - no roof and three and a half walls, no doors or windows, just gaping holes and piles of rubble - before years of on and off work transformed it. The shame is that young families in Britain today can no longer afford the wrecks that come up for sale. We were among the last ones to get on the ladder that way.

For us, though, it will be wonderful to be able to enjoy Christmas without the unspoken of spectre of trial and prison hanging over us. It's fine for me, I'm a volunteer, but Jackie and the children are conscripts in such matters. Thanks once more to everyone who helped out in any way while all that was still going on, and apologies to anyone I seemed to ignore, snub or snap at while somewhat preoccupied.

By way of one of those 'personal touches' that unaccountably do seem to be so important in blogs, herewith our Christmas menu, complete with who's doing what. Jackie's getting the main day off, although she's got to do the traditional bit on Boxing Day, when parents come round as well:

YULETIDE MENU

Rhiannon's Birthday Tea - 23rd December

Mussels in cream and white wine (Dad)

Lamb chops, cous cous, mediterranean vegetables (Mum)

Mince pies and brandy butter

Christmas Eve

Homemade pizzas and salad (Mum)

Christmas Day

Breakfast:

Seared scallops and sweet chilli sauce. Fresh baked bread (Rhiannon)

Lunch:

Carpaccio of beef (Richard)

Medallions of pork, colcannon and calvados sauce (Dad)

Self-saucing chocolate pudding and vanilla icecream (Elen)

Supper:

Paella (Dad)

Boxing Day

Breakfast:

Smoked salmon and scrambled eggs (Jennifer)

Lunch (all Mum):

Cauliflower and bacon soup

Roast mincemeat turkey and all the trimmings

Christmas Puddings flaming and frozen

Supper:

Jacket potatoes, cold turkey and pickles (Dad)

Key dates for next year are all set - the Organisers' Conference, Summer School, Red-White-and-Blue, National Conference. When the Electoral Commission publishes our accounts for 2006 next summer they will show that, in the dying days of old 2006, we are to all intents and purposes blessed with a clean financial slate. A fair few assets and no significant debts. John Walker and Dave Hannam deserve the credit for doing a fine job at Treasury and keeping firm, steady hands on the rudder in that department. Meanwhile the Membership Department is straining under but coping with a record number of early membership renewals and new members. A staggering seventeen thousand pounds was banked in membership payments last week alone.

So the Labour party goes into the New Year owing twenty seven million, and the Tories stagger in effectively bankrupt and a shocking thirty five million quid in the red. We, on the other hand, look forward to 2007 in the black and with enormous confidence. With two great court victories, a record council seat breakthrough and the collapse of the multicult myth, 2006 has seen fortune shine on the British National Party. What will 2007 bring? Well, a few more of our predictions will come true, but more than that no man can say. Only one thing is sure: It won't be boring, for this is the party that keeps British politics awake.

Friday, December 22, 2006

Friday November 10th

This is the long awaited post from Nick and Simon about the activities of the last day of the Free Speech Retrial last month. Better late than never!


Simon Darby’s notes:

Up at just gone 5 a.m. to be sure to get to Leeds on time. Some activists will already have been on the road for an hour or more – people are coming from all over for what looks certain to be a day of suspense and drama. History in the making.

The headlines on most of the papers could hardly be better. The head of MI5 has warned of a huge numbers of active Islamist terror cells, with 30 known mass casualty plots. “Vicious, wicked faith” indeed. A good day for the verdict, even if it’s a bad one.

Queue to get in at court once again. Nick and Mark’s families are let in to the public gallery first and I sit in the row in front of them. Jackie is with three of their four – Richard, now a strapping young man who looks more like one of the security team than a worried son, Rhiannon and Elen. Jennifer can’t get time off university. Mark’s parents, sister and girlfriend are here too.

Also in court are Emmanuel from the independent European nationalist Internet network Altermedia, and the Doc, who is braced for a flood of media calls starting the moment the verdict is announced. Even now, journalists keep calling him to try to find out when a result is expected.

10.30 a.m. The jury are called back into court. Their half hour out yesterday afternoon was time to elect a foreman – a big chap perhaps in his late forties. Could easily be a builder. Clearly there is no decision yet. They leave court to carry on deliberating, we all head for the canteen.

Scarcely twenty minutes later and a call comes over the tannoy “All parties in the case of Collett and Griffin please go to Court 8 immediately”. Surely no verdict already? If so it can only be Not Guilty. We return to the court, only to find that Mark has vanished. He returns just as we’re starting to have visions of the Judge coming in before him and going berserk! But Mark arrives in the nick of time and things get under way again. Nick has already told us that he’s been informed that there is no verdict yet.

So why are we there? It turns out that the jury wanting to see speeches again. A brief flurry between the lawyers and the judge and it is decided that they will do so in open court once more. The videos themselves effectively are the prosecution case. The Judge says that he believes that the defence case has been summed up so recently that there is no need to reiterate it. I am unhappy about this as we’d do far better to finish on the highnote of the defence case, but there you go.

We all watch the videos yet again. For the jury it’s the second time only, I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve seen them. It’s hard to see through the smoked glass between the public gallery and the jury box, but those members I can see seem utterly unaffected by the films. The foreman makes a few notes during Mark’s first speech, then just watches it all with the others.

Once the DVDs are finished (it takes about an hour) the jury and then we all leave once again. I go outside to speak to people in our crowd. I don’t use the megaphone in order to avoid any risk of inadvertently committing contempt of court.

Everyone is asking what I think and my answer is the same: “They’d have to be a really hard-nosed jury to convict either of them.”

I go back in. Mark is worried, telling us that “I’m going down”. Various people reassure him that it doesn’t look like that to people who are not so uncomfortably close to the action. Nick is stoic, a bit quieter than usual but otherwise unaffected.

Judge had said come back at 2.15 as he wouldn’t take a verdict over lunch. We return and the Jury come in a few minutes later – it appears that they reached their decisions either just before or over lunch. Quite a short time for six separate charges, which is perhaps a good sign.

The foreman is asked if they have reached verdicts on which they are all agreed, he nods almost imperceptibly as he says ‘yes’. The tension is unbelievable, for the defendants, their families and for me – perhaps a minute away from having the worst job in the country!

Charges one and two relate to Mark’s first speech. Charge one? No one breathes as we wait for the first syllable of his answer. While it be ‘N..’ or ‘G...’?

“Not guilty”. There is a sigh or gasp from the females in Mark’s life.

Charge two?

“Not guilty”. One of them begins to sob with relief.

Charge three?

I glance back at Nick’s family. All are deadly still, except that Rhiannon and Richard are shaking. Pale.

The answer to this one, though, has to be a foregone conclusion. For a jury to find Mark’s first speech legal but to say that Nick’s was intended to stir up hatred would be unbelievably perverse.

“Not guilty”.

Each verdict is now producing a gasp and sobs of relief from their relatives.

Charge four?

For me, poised to have to go down and face the battery of media cameras and to try to keep our people calm and positive if the worst comes to the worst, this is the crunch one.

“Not guilty!” The crying behind me is now uncontrolled and clearly uncontrollable.

Charge five, Mark’s second ‘intended’ charge, is almost lost in the relief as there’s really no chance of a different verdict on this one.

“Not guilty”.

Which leaves Mark’s final ‘likely’ charge. This is the moment where we find out if the jury members worked out some kind of ‘plea bargain’ among themselves – rather than a hung jury on a couple of charges a ‘not guilty’ on one and a ‘guilty’ on another.

“Not guilty!”

The biggest sigh of relief; desperate, racking sobs of relief from Mark’s loved ones. The Sky news reporter leaps from her seat and bolts out of the door. We suppress a cheer but the public gallery is noisy. The judge demands quiet and gets it, except for the crying.

Nick and Mark are released immediately. Some of the jury are smiling – for the first time – clearly in response to the smiles and nodded thanks from the two men they have just vindicated. They look pleased with themselves, as well they should.

The moment Nick is out of the dock he puts his head and arm over the glass barrier and tells and gestures us all to be silent. He does the same – a huge grin on his face, has he comes round the smoked glass and into the public gallery section of the court.

Mark is a pace behind him and they head for the door like horses or greyhounds out of the trap! The usher tells everyone else to stay where they are. As the court door swings shut behind the two now ex-defendants, a huge cheer from the people waiting in the foyer outside rings through the court.

The judge ignores it, perhaps because it’s cut short, and I guess he knows by now that Nick not only can control our people but also is doing so. Then he discharges the jury, telling them that they have tried a sensitive case carefully and fairly. They file out back to their day-to-day lives and out of history, no doubt to tell dozens of people at home or in pubs what they’ve just seen and done. Some will drink out on this for many a time!

“All stand,” says the usher for the last time, Judge Norman Jones bows slightly to the court for the last time, turns and walks out of the door to his left. Nick and Mark’s families dash out, and we all follow.

It’s chaos outside in the foyer. Everyone hugging, tears streaming down faces. Once the family embracing and kissing is over, I grab Nick: “You’re too clever for them, Nick” and then shake Mark’s hand “I told you you’d be OK.”

An elated calm descends. The supporters go out to join the rest of the crowd, leaving the families and security team. Nick and Mark both sit on the padded seats in the corner to work briefly on what to say outside. I fire a few daft jourrnalists’ questions at Nick by way of practice and suggest that Mark has a go at the BBC.

The Sky reporter comes back in and asks me what’s happening next. Then the Doc gets a call, one of the TV stations want them on live for the three o’clock news if possible.

Nick thanks the cops who are still standing near us in their high-vis jackets. They smile and nod in reply. All are friendly. We head downstairs past more smiling police officers. In the entrance hall Danny Warville and Nick discuss the arrangements outside with the senior police officer, who is clearly on top of the job and keen to let us have our moment outside. “It’s your show”, he tells Nick – and it’s going to be!

Danny pulls his security team together and gives them one final briefing: “Job’s nearly done, but it’s not over yet. Keep it tight. Let’s keep the box (the positioning of security personnel around the ‘principles’) and keep discipline.”

Then it’s outside to the huge BNP crowd going mad with joy and victory, the dozen reds screaming with frustration and hate, and the biggest bank of press cameras I’ve ever seen at any BNP event. A thicket of TV and radio microphones have been set up just our side of the police crash barrier and the two heroes of the moment speak standing next to them. You’ve seen the rest on TV.

I see Emmanuel fliming with the small but very serviceable camcorder he uses for AltermediaTV. He’s grinning insanely, bowled over by the enthusiasm of our crowd and the skilled, effortless way that both Mark and Nick are handling the media. “I love England and I you English,” he enthuses, and we have to forgive him – a foreigner after all! – for not noticing the Scottish, Welsh and Irish flags and accents among our crowd.

It starts to pour with rain, but none of us minds. Nearly half an hour later Nick and Mark have finished the media interviews at the lower end of the precinct and shaking hands and kissing their way up the line of our crowd.

Then we find a fresh scrum of TV cameras and radio mikes at the top end. Nick gives an interview to ITN resting his right arm, and hand holding a white champagne bottle, on a car. Soaking wet, he parries silly questions with practiced ease, and pauses between points to take a mouthful of champagne. (He tells me later that he was getting dry by this time, but that also he wanted to give them shots of insolent victorious defiance, “if they’re honest or daft enough to use them” – they weren’t!)

The two event stewards, both Leeds chaps who’ve worked incredibly hard at both trials, help see the cars away, while maps are given out to our people showing them how to reach the pro-BNP pub that we’re heading back to continue our celebrations.

The atmosphere there is electric too, with Nick thanking various notables, principally the brilliant security team, and with a special mention to Paul and Linda Cromie for their warm hospitality to so many people throughout both trials. We’d beaten ‘them’; as the rain came down outside we watched the early news reports on a giant pub TV, cheering each new bit of coverage. It was like some victorious tribe celebrating the defeat of a mortal enemy. I hope that some of the atmosphere at this will come over in the BPtv coverage to be released shortly. No one who was there will ever forget it.


Final word from Nick:

There is little more to say. The legal argument sections of my blog, which could not be published for legal reasons during the trial, will have to be published, not least so at to provide guidance for future victims of similar State repression.

As for this last day, I was truly pretty sure that we’d get a hung jury, perhaps with one or two majority decison ‘Not guilty’ verdicts, but didn’t dare let myself hope that the sea-change in public opinion since January, which we all knew had taken place, would actually extend to an entire jury to give ‘Not Guilty’ verdicts all round.

Jackie went out to see our crowd at lunchtime (as is normal in all cases, Mark and I were not allowed out once the jury had retired) in order to reassure them that the decision to watch the videos again was from the jury and not something imposed by the prosecution. Apparently she also told people that, even if we went down, it was still “win, win”. Politically, that is. Elen danced around in front of the crowd in the drizzle – another exhibitionist Griffin!

Actually, as we watched the DVDs in the light of all that had been said, I felt that they clearly bore out what we had said in our defence, rather than the highly selective and strained interpretation that the prosecution was inviting. They were much more comfortably viewing this time around – and clearly the jury decided the same.

The worst thing by far of the whole day was when I phoned Roy Goodwin at lunchtime, to suggest an activity in his North West region in response to something in a newspaper. I knew that Sheila, his wife, had been taken into hospital for tests, but it hadn’t sounded too serious. Now he told me that he’d just been told she was dying. What a blow.

But, to be honest, no external news could compete for our attention once we stood to hear the verdict. Would we get the best result politically possible – to be martyrs for free speech on the twin issues, asylum and Islam, where the vast majority of the public agree with us – or the second best result, walking free?

I’ve had a ‘Guilty’ verdict in the past, as well as a ‘Not Guilty’ one and a hung jury in January, so at least I’d done it all before. Mark was a bundle of tension next to me. The security staff in the dock with us were relaxed and reassuring.

Each successive ‘Not Guilty’ was another weight lifted from us. The last was beyond description. The security staff congratulated us as we left. Members of the jury finally made real eye contact and smiled broadly. I stopped for a moment before turning to leave the main court area until the judge gestured slightly for us to leave. I bowed my head to him, tried to take in my family and our supporters in the public gallery with a single glance, and got out of there as quickly as I possibly could!

Outside, the only point to add to what you already know is that the police had earlier told our event organisers that we would be arrested if we drank the champagne in Oxford Row precinct, so they’d had to put away the plastic but still passable glasses that had been brought along together with the red, white and blue bottles of best Jean-Marie Le Pen champagne. We were just supposed to spray the bubbly, but not to drink any of it.

I told whoever it was told me this, and any police officer within earshot, that they could arrest me for drinking in a public place if they were stupid enough to make a scene, but that I was going to drink it come what may. And I did, and so did Mark, several security lads (drinking on duty, whatever next?!), Jackie and I don’t know or care who else.

I could write a whole chapter about how it felt, and about the wonderful people in the crowd there to congratulate and thank us. Don’t thank us, thank the anonymous members of an ordinary jury – ‘ordinary’ Yorkshire men and women who refused to accept the would-be diktats of an out-of-touch, would be over-mighty State.

One other point about people in all this saga who might otherwise be forgotten. Much though John Tyndall and I disagreed and clashed on various matters, it should not be forgotten that he too was charged along with Mark and me, and that he died of a heart attack just days before an earlier hearing. Despite our differences, I want to record my belief that the Blair regime hounded him to death out of sheer malice and spite, and that his death is another stain on their revolting record of crimes.

But that’s enough for now. It remains only for me to thank our families for standing by us, our supporters – especially the loyal band who came every day and endured some bitterly cold weather to do so – who provided such a wonderful backdrop for media coverage of our trials and our triumph. Thanks too to the readers and uninvolved members of the public who sent us those heart-warming cards that came in piles each morning as we went into the dock.

Thanks too to Steve Blake and Emmanuel with the unspellable aristocratic French surname (do bookmark his Altermedia site if you haven’t already done so) for all their work in checking, posting and maintaining the blog, the excellent BNPtv footage (cheers Derek and Rod), and for fending off the various cyberspace attacks on our site.

Finally, a well-deserved mention to Martin, Danny and all the rest of the security team – pulled together almost from scratch back in January to a good standard, but a wonderful, supportive, professional team through the second trial. Thanks for everything, lads.

And thanks to you, the readers and donors who support this site. It gave us encouragement, a focus for our attention during the trial, and the knowledge that – whatever the outcome of the trial and ‘mainstream’ media coverage – the Blair regime could not lock us up without the truth of what had happened going out to a huge number of our people in Britain and indeed over the whole world. No wonder the enemies of freedom hate the Internet so much!

Oh yes, and special thanks to the BBC and David Blunkett for the best publicity we’ve ever had. Millions of ‘ordinary’ Brits who loath all your PC works now know beyond a shadow of a doubt that, even if others occasionally talk the talk, we’re the ones willing to walk the walk. It will, I suspect, be a long time before we can see just how much the Leeds Two Free Speech Trial has done for our party and our Cause.