Monday (15th). Head from Leeds up to Newcastle. The A1/M up here is a horrible, inadequate road that just 'feels' dangerous and we use the A19 instead. The scenery's far better and it's fast smooth dual carriageway all the way. We meet up just after lunch with North East regional organiser Ken Booth, who briefs us in full on the hectic schedule that he and his officials have worked out for the next few days. We check out the venue for the evening's first meeting and meet up with a small team of local activists. We head off into a nearby estate which forms part of the ward contested last year by Gordon Steel, who last year earned the distinction of being the oldest BNP candidate. At 84 the D-Day veteran and lifelong member of the Labour party (until a couple of years ago) just has the edge, I believe, on Sid Chaney in Essex. George obviously can't do as much legwork as our 'average' candidate and so we give him a headstart by blitzing two whole estates in the ward in a couple of hours.
One of the local leafleters is Jonathan Keys, who I've already been told has a proposal for me about setting up an online photo-library to provide BNP national publications and local leaflet designers with a wide range of potentially useful copyright free photographs. We make a point of teaming up for a while and discussing the idea as we leaflet alternate doors. I arrange to put Jonathan in touch with our cyberspace team and we agree that once the system is in place for emailing in, archiving and downloading photos, we'll strive to find a volunteer photographer with a decent digital camera in each region.
Another member of the team is a former member of the left-anarchist Class War organisation, who saw the light a year or so ago and is now a keen BNP activist. He is also involved in the independent nationalist trade union Solidarity. We too chat as we work; he is particularly struck by the more than a hint of syndicalism in Solidarity's subtitle 'One Big Union'. "When working men defend their rights, Joe Hill is by their side" goes the old song. To be honest, he's more likely to be spinning in his grave. Oh dear, how sad, never mind!
We knock off to head to the home of Dr. Alan Patterson to change and get a bite to eat. Alan joined us from UKIP some years ago now and was our lead candidate in the North East in the last European elections. Although it's getting dark by the time we arrive, his two teenage sons are in the front garden logging up a tree felled by the recent high winds.
The first meeting of the tour is in the ward we were leafleting earlier. It's one of Ken's 'subsidiary meetings', intended to reach people, particularly new enquirers or regular Freedom buyers who might not travel a longer way to just one or two bigger meetings. Old George also speaks, and says that although he is willing to stand again if needs be, he would really rather hand over to a younger candidate who could be more active in getting things done for local residents and boosting the party's profile.
The local business of the meeting is being conducted in the second half, so once my speech is finished I chat to various people for a few minutes and then have to head off with security to the second half of the next meeting. We move on to a smart pub in Walbottle, on the north east edge of Newcastle. Kev Scott is chairing this one and we arrive on schedule during the break. An unexpected speaker in the first half was Andrew Spence, the farmer and haulier who played a key role in sparking off and leading the 2001 Fuel Protest, which won overwhelming public support and came close to bringing down the Blair government.
Fuel protestor is new recruit
Mr. Spence went on to join UKIP and stood for them in the 2001 general election in a high profile challenge to Tony Blair in Sedgefield. How he became disillusioned with that party's money-grabbing, incompetent, unprincipled leadership is a story that emerges in an interview I later did with him for Identity, so I'll say no more about that for now. We speak together for a few minutes at the end of the meeting and he says that he is impressed by what he has seen tonight and that he is going home to consider whether and or when to join the party.
Instead of a set speech I give a brief introduction about how falling turnouts and popular resentment against the political elite result in part from the way in which the old politicians have withdrawn from contact with real people questions
The meeting clashed with a remarkable Dispatches on Channel 4 – all about how Islamic ‘extremism’ is not confined to a handful of small and unrepresentative mosques, but permeates the largest and supposedly ‘moderate’ mosques in England. We pick up a copy of the programme on way back to our billet for the week. Then we settle down to watch it – an hour-long vindication of the speech that nearly got me sent to prison.
Tuesday Morning. Should have been activity but I have to call off that in order to watch the Dispatches tape again and then write a detailed letter to the police in London and the West Midlands demanding action.
Blair’s local
Then it’s off to a lunchtime interview with a reporter from the Northern Echo. We meet in the Dun Cow, the thoroughly traditional ‘local’ where Blair had fish and chips with Bush a couple of years back. Apparently the pub had terrible trouble getting the bill paid - it took them months to get their money!
Leafleting in our Tone’s constituency home village of Trimdon we come across a chap repairing a wall. He spots the leaflets as we draw near: "If it's owt to do with Labour I'm not interested." He’s delighted to find it’s the BNP and take several extra leaflets for mates.
After several hours of solid leafleting in a chilly breeze we head to Spennymoor for the evening meeting. Andrew Spence comes along again, and this time speaks on his decision actually to join the BNP. He hands his £30 over to the organiser there and then.
Instead of making a speech as such I tell the audience that, unlike the old party politicians, we in the BNP don’t hide ourselves away from the voters, behind pre-prepared soundbites and televised ‘meetings’ with children or hand-picked supporters. The whole meeting is therefore run as one big questions and answers session. This goes down very well, and we cover all sorts of subjects, only realising at the end that the question of immigration and closely related topics has not even arisen. A local Independent councillor has come along and tells me after the meeting that he knows virtually everyone there (it’s only a small town) and that he never thought he’d every see them applauding any politician, let alone giving me the enthusiastic reception he’d just witnessed. “You’re nothing like what I expected from the television reports,” he tells me. Indeed.
Wednesday. Leafleting and knocking on doors of regular paper round customers in South Shields. We start in a street of historic Mariners' Cottages where nearly a quarter of the residents are repeat Freedom buyers. A reporter and photographer from the Shields Gazette spend a few minutes with us. Then we move on to an area once known as ‘Little Aberdeen’ on account of all the Scots who moved there in the nineteenth century to work in a shipyard founded by the son of a destitute Scottish crofter.
The shipyard is now earmarked as a ‘ship recycling centre’ – i.e. scrapyard – and the locals are worried by the threat of pollution and the job losses and cheap labour influx that even the yard manager has admitted will result from the change of roles. We put out a very good local leaflet on this issue, and get a great response from the few people we meet as we hurry from door to door on an even colder day.
Moving from Hebburn on to Sunderland for a lunchtime interview with another local paper we turn on the car radio and Jeremy Vine is discussing the latest pitiful government/policing failure. The Home Office is a complete shambles, with perverts and drug dealers on the loose, the prisons overflowing, assorted criminal foreigners making everything worse, etc, etc. Vine ends the session on all this with an interesting choice of record: Chris Rea’s Road to Hell.
Men only
In Sunderland we are due to meet a reporter and photographer in a Working Men’s club in one of our target wards. The photographer turns up first and is immediately stopped - politely but with no question of any debate about it - by the club doorman. Not because of her camera as I first assume, but because there are still a few places left where local choice prevails. The bar is for men only! I honestly had no idea that such places still existed – the Land that Time and the Social Worker Society Forgot! Incidentally, we in turn told that we couldn't go in the adjacent bar as the ladies were entitled to play bingo in there without masculine interference.
While there I get a call from a local radio station. The presenter, a Kiwi or Aussie, only really wants to talk about the storm in a teacup over the Big Brother ‘racism’ row. I keep trying to get on to the serious problems of racism – such as the fact that a teenager is lying in hospital in Swindon with his head caved in after a hammer attack by eight ‘Asian’ men – but all he wants to talk about is the anger that the hideous Jade Goody has sparked off in India, and the evils of calling people names. It strikes me that this is a fine example of the Gods making mad those whom they would destroy. To so trivialise ‘racism’ is to destroy the impact of decades of Pavlovian mental conditioning whereby millions of our people have been taught to regard it as the ultimate sin.
Two meetings this evening. The first is a small – about 30 local guests – affair that is the first ever held in Jarrow. Symbolically this is perhaps the most important Old Labour town in the country, but here too the audience’s detestation for all things about the modern Labour party is almost palpable. More questions and answers on all sorts of subjects before I leave them working out plans for May’s elections as I head off to Sunderland.
This second meeting is a fair bit bigger, in a venue I’ve been to several times before. The Q&As bring up the question of Englishness and Britishness (I run a show of hands straw poll to see who has Scottish, Welsh or Irish ancestry as well as English. Scottish comes out the biggest
indigenous ‘minority’ but the total number of ‘mixed British’ shows clearly that a total breakup of the UK would be as absurd as the present arrangement is unfair on the English who pay more tax than anyone else but don’t have the right to control their own affairs as the Scots and Welsh do. The BNP answer of an English parliament within a UK where an overall parliament deals with foreign affairs, defence, etc is the obvious solution for all present).
Tax question
Andrew Spence attends and speaks again. During questions he asks how the BNP would square the circle between popular desire for lower fuel taxes and the need to address the problems of climate change/reliance on diminishing oil reserves. He says that he’s asked the leaders of the other parties the same question and has never had a coherent answer.
I tell him that while the BNP supported the fuel protest, we have concluded since that high fuel duties are justifiable. The problem isn’t high fuel taxes, but rather high taxes in total. A massive cutback in government meddling, power and bureaucracy under the BNP would allow for a big overall tax reduction without hacking back essential services. We would then shift much of the remaining tax burden onto indirect taxation (not on core basics such as food and heating) which would see people mainly paying tax when they spend, instead of when they earn and save. This would be fairer and economically and morally superior than taxing people’s sweat and productivity as at present.
The tax which would remain high enough on fuel to deter its waste would therefore be far more bearable, and would be made even more so by being hypothecated – clearly earmarked only for use in improving the transport system and development of non-fossil energy sources.
Andrew is clearly delighted with the answer. Perhaps the other politicians will catch up in ten or fifteen years.
Thursday. In Stockton. We meet another local paper journalist and photographer in the town centre and then head off to go leafleting in a tightly packed terraced housing area. Moving on to some newer flats we meet a lady who knows one of our team as a result of his leading role some years ago in fighting the Labour party’s disgraceful demolition of hundreds of perfectly sound terraced houses and smashing up of the community into hideous flats. The fight was lost and no doubt Labour councillors pocketed the backhanders from the developers, but our man’s past efforts are still remembered. Combined with good local community work in the here and now, such recruits are going to become councillors in the North East before too long.
This evening we start with a meeting in Hartlepool meeting. This is another ‘first’, under a keen new organiser. We get twenty from the town and from neighbouring Easington. My speech starts by assuring them that far smaller inaugural meetings have led to establishment of really successful branches and winning seats. Then I explain why it matters, and the importance of what we're doing. Focus on immigration and tell them what things such as grooming really mean to families. Individuals can make a difference. I tell them that we would have to try even if it was too late in order to hold head up when asked in years to come what we did when there was still at least some hope. And, as a matter of fact, I don't believe it is too late, the BNP crusade is only just beginning.
Then on to Teesside via the transporter bridge. This was used in programmes such as
Aufwiedersehen Pet and Billy Elliot. Adam, our host, guide and additional security for the week, has never been over it despite being born and bred just a county away. Unfortunately the ferry platform is over on the other side of the river and the operator seems to be reluctant to venture out of his presumably snug nightwatch cabin for some time, so we lose the best part of twenty minutes off our schedule. Still, when he does arrive he quickly turns out to be sympathetic and he waves us off happily clutching a copy of Freedom to pass the time on the rest of the evening shift.
I’ve been to this venue before, perhaps two years ago. Tonight though the attendance is much bigger, well over 100 people, a complete cross-section of the population. I make a short speech and then again switch to Q&As. These are lively, good humoured and wide ranging. First meeting where questions about immigration issues are raised - Islam, halal slaughter, anti-white discrimination, etc.
In fact it’s all too wide ranging, so much so that, combined with the late start of my second half stint, and then photo opportunities at the end, we don't leave until much before half eleven. This is an hour later than hoped. It’s a long drive back home.
Overall though, this new system of one regional tour per month, with meetings close to home going on as normal as stand alone events, works well. It cuts the driving drastically, gives time to spend with organisationally important people locally, boosts media coverage and even gives me a chance to get out and get some exercise leafleting. Hopefully my presence on a few such sessions will also help organisers to shame a few armchair nationalists into getting off their backsides and becoming active.
This week I’ve done seven separate meetings. Total attendance some 350 with only a handful of cross-overs. Resounding success, but it is a long time away from home. For the sake of the family and to keep it genuinely sustainable I need to sandwich such a week between two weekends at home not two weekends with a chunk taken out of each.
Naturally there’s a pile of things to deal with once back home, so | don’t get a chance to finish off this blog entry for some time. The second issue of the redesigned Identity has to be proof-read, and held up to allow us to replace two held-over articles with an excellent interview with Andrew Spence. Mark Collett, who does all the design and layout work in this top quality production, doesn’t like such delays as he fears he’ll get the blame for missed deadlines but, as usual, it’s not his fault – just political necessity. There is already a good article exposing the way in which New Labour has manipulated UKIP as a block against the BNP, so with the fuel protester interview in as well it will be an excellent issue to send to potential UKIP waverers. Accordingly we run an overprint to give the extra supplies needed.
Bad ‘science’
Several newspapers run the story of how a number of Yorkshiremen with a surname beginning with ‘R’ have a rare ‘West African’ Y-chromosome. This fact emerges from a study done at Leicester University. Various multi-cult ‘research scientists’ (sociologists, mainly) queue up to crow about how this discover “debunks the idea of race”. Then the Mail on Sunday gives us a bit more detail: The surname is Revis, and seven men sharing it also have the unusual bit of DNA.
Then, in the small print, comes the fact which debunks the ‘African Yorkshiremen’ nonsense – the imported chromosome is in fact found not among black Africans as implied in all the other reports, but among the Berber tribesmen who live between the Sahara and the Mediterranean.
Thus, despite excited claims by Leicester Uni researcher Turi King that Africans helped defend Hadrians Wall and poured into the country during the slave trade, there is still no evidence whatsoever of African Y-chromosome lineage in Britain. For the Berbers are not ‘African’ at all in the way that the multi-cultists use the term. We’re back here to those ridiculous white liberal ‘Black Pride’ posters showing Cleopatra and Hannibal as black, when in reality virtually the only black people in their societies were slaves and both of them would easily have passed in modern Europe as Italians or Spaniards.
Many Berbers were early converts to Islam and their part of North Africa produced generations of Corsair pirates and slavers whose raids terrorised fishermen and villages also much of the coast of England and Ireland in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Although something like a million of their victims vanished without trace into the slave markets, some thousands of lucky ones were rescued or bought out of slavery and came home. The researchers could if they wished speculate that one of these female captives returned home pregnant by a slaver and later gave birth to the son who sired this tiny and wholly unique genetic cluster.
But, of course, they don’t, because to draw public attention to the huge but virtually unknown historical injustice of the white slave trade (well covered in the book White Gold, sold by Excalibur) would not suit their real purpose at all.
As a matter of fact, it doesn’t bother me in the slightest if a few of my fellow countrymen have minute traces of ancestry from Africa or Asia. Given the long history of the British Empire the real surprise is surely that such elements are not in fact more evident. The very fact that they are so submerged, however, is an indication of how thoroughly homogeneous the native peoples of these islands are and, in any case, the country is full. For environmental reasons alone further immigration is unsustainable madness.
So it does concern me, and the BNP, when neo-Marxist excuses for ‘scientists’ falsely extrapolate from such tiny shreds the mendacious claim that the British/English are “a mongrel race” who therefore have no identity to preserve or right to preserve it even if we did, and who use such specious ‘scientific’ reductio ad absurdam fantasies to push for unlimited immigration and to deny our children their fundamental human right and need to feel part of a unique and special ethno-cultural extended family.
The fallacy of this leftist propaganda line is easily understood by reversing the argument: Generations of wicked white slave owners and brutal colonial oppressors will certainly have left traces of their own genetic contribution in Africa, Asian and the West Indies. ‘Therefore’ there is no such thing as the black race or an Afro-Caribbean identity, and ‘Black Pride’ is nothing but false consciousness at best or ‘racism’ at worst. As a result, no black nation has any right to object if millions of us Brits decide to move en masse to colonise their homeland. An ‘African’ is anyone who settles in Africa, and any black person who dares to say otherwise is a racist bigot who wants to herd no-blacks into gas chambers.
Utter tosh, of course, but no more than the tosh that passes for science in Leicester University and in the addled brains of liberal newspaper editors.
Labels: bnp, British National Party, newcastle, north east england, sunderland, teeside, tyneside, wearside
