Scottish journey

It’s been a largely Celtic week, spent either in Scotland or Wales – and driving through Cumbria between them. At least that’s the simplistic way of looking at it, though in fact my first trip to Scotland is to the east of the country, to Aberdeen and beyond. This was heavily settled by the Angles, with the result that the local Scots-English dialect is reckoned to be the closest living tongue to the English written down by Chaucer.

The Lowlands and North East Scotland have always been very different to the Highlands, although both parts of the country suffered the Clearances when ‘improving’ lairds threw the poor among their own kinsmen off their ancestral land and into the Industrial Revolution cities or ships bound for the colonies. The earlier Lowland Clearances are far less well known – as is the fact that the Enclosures movement in England involved precisely the same state-sanctioned theft and brutality.

But while the east of Scotland is in fact far less ‘Celtic’ than the neo-Marxist anti-English bigots of the SNP believe, the Lake District of Cumbria, generally assumed to be quintessentially ‘English’, isn’t. Its native population was largely untouched by Saxon invasion, although significant numbers of Vikings did settle there somewhat later. As in some other parts of rural England, however (even including Sussex) local shepherds until the middle of the 19^th century still counted their sheep in the remnants of an ancient Celtic tongue far closer to Welsh and Cornish than to English.

Anyway, the first port of call was Aberdeen (the name is Celtic, ‘Aber’ meaning the mouth of a river) where I had to take Richard to a University engineering course open day. It’s a big, granite-built, imposing but chilly city; still clearly benefiting from several decades of spectacular oil wealth. What’s going to happen now that one-off natural bounty has effectively been ‘blown’ by a succession of short-termist Tory and Labour chancellors?

I leave him to it and head off up the coast looking for somewhere to kill a few hours. I find it at Cruden Bay, a little fishing village tucked down among high sand dunes. The lady at the village shop sells me a pork pie laced with pickle and a bottle of water, and I climb the cliff path to see where it goes. There’s a stiff breeze and the place is deserted. From the top, I see to the north the ruins of a castle or stately home of some sort. It appears to be not much over half a mile away so I set off to have a look.

En route I make a detour to a cluster of ruined brick and concrete buildings – clearly the remnants of a Second World War radar station or similar installation. I think of how the operators and mechanics in the RAF at the time (my own father was a radio engineer, although he spent most of the war on barrage balloon warning signals around London and then on communications equipment in India) must have hated being posted up here in the long dark days of winter.

The path to the castle is not as easy as it looks, for a deep sea inlet gashes the landscape – spectacular but impassable. A wide detour inland is necessary before I find a farm bridge across the stream and a track back up to the plateau that ends in such spectacular cliffs over the cold, grey, foam-flecked North Sea. How many ships have been wrecked along these wind shores?

The castle is, frankly, monstrous; spectacular but a backdrop for nightmares. The dark, brooding grandeur of the place is given an added sad twist by the memorial stone that warns visitors that the cliffs are dangerous by telling them of little Nicholas French, who fell to his death nearby, aged seven, on March 3^rd 1999. Surely no parent can see such a thing without a mental shudder and feeling a dark cloud taking the edge off the brightest day?

The main tower, perched right on the edge of the cliff, has a stone staircase which still goes up three storeys. I climb up, wondering all the time just how old the place is; some of the stonework looks really ancient, but some of the bricks are quite wide, placing their part of the building much later that medieval castle building times. Plus, the remnants of wooden joists – and even one piece of flooring – can be seen jutting out from the walls; clearly the place had a roof until relatively recently. The view from the top is stunning but, with the warning of death on the cliffs, also slightly unsettling.

I tread gingerly down, hurry through the maze of roofless, windowless walls and carry on about a mile northwards, until stopped by the sheer, seagull covered cliffs of another inlet and a spectacular bay. Although there’s only a breeze the waves crash onto the rocks far below. So I turn back past the castle and head back to the car.

Rehab

As I go I fall to thinking that a big fence of just a few hundred years would join the two inlets, shutting off the castle and some acres of the windswsept but clearly fertile farmland on its landward side. All it would then need would be some ex-army instructors and tradesmen-teachers, some portacabins and a huge store of building materials – and it would make the perfect place for cleaning up young drug addicts and turning them back into human beings with skills, self-respect and a purpose in life.

Within a few minutes I’ve sketched out the whole plan, complete with sticks and carrots to encourage real effort to get off the P*k* Poison (as it’s known in places like Keighley). The ones making most progress would be moved into successively better accommodation in the steadily rebuilt castle. Privileges would include being taught sea-fishing from the tiny natural harbour nearby, and working and social trips outside the fenced headland for those who are ‘clean’ and about to ‘graduate’.

Failures? Well, they’re going to die anyway so nothing more would need to be done for them except to keep them away from innocent people, because smackheads wreck every family and community unlucky enough to be within thieving distance. But at least such places would give them all one real chance – something at present only available to the junkie children of the rich and famous, but not to those of the taxpaying herd.

I decide to look the place up online when I get home and find out more about it. When I do, I’m struck by several slightly eerie close parallels between the reality of the place and my own ignorant thoughts about it.

Slains Castle

“Slains Castle was built on the edge of a cliff-top in 1597 by the ninth Earl of Erroll but really became famous because of its association with Bram Stoker and Dracula. The author often visited the area and is believed to have been inspired to write the horror classic by the castle and the cliffs. While not a particularly attractive castle, it has lots of visitors because of the Dracula connection.

“The pretty village of Cruden Bay, along the rugged Scottish coast between Aberdeen and Peterhead, was once considered the finest resort in Scotland. In 1893 Stoker took a walking tour around the Scottish coast, ending in Cruden Bay. He had visited this fishing village five years earlier while researching an Irving production of Hamlet. The impressive ruins of 16th-century New Slains Castle overlooking the Bay might very well have provided the model for Castle Dracula. A footpath leads from the car park on Main Street to the Castle, but visitors should mind the perilous cliffs. One mile north of Cruden Bay, another dramatic clifftop path winds past Bullers of Buchan, a superbly beautiful natural area.

”In his later years, Stoker returned summer after summer to Whinnyfold, a village within walking distance south of Cruden Bay. According to a village legend, at certain times of the year the bodies of those who have perished during the previous year come out of the sea to join their spirits in Heaven or Hell. This legend inspired Stoker to write Mystery of the Sea in 1902. Earlier, in 1895, he wrote The Watter's Mou based on local characters in Cruden Bay.”

And as well as the dark, brooding past, there’s a possible rebuilding in the future. Another internet entry tells how there is at present a planning application to restore the place into a 35-apartment luxury holiday centre, apparently widely supported locally on account of the jobs it would create, but opposed by many visitors and Dracula fans.

Given that the place was fully roofed when Stoker wrote about it, and was only turned into a ruin after the First World War, there is to my mind no reason to leave it empty and wasted. I still think that a truly ‘tough love’ rehabilitation centre for the lost and tortured souls of our torn society would be a better use for the place than turning it into yet another yuppy playground, but the odds are strongly in favour of Money in ‘modern’ Britain, so I recommend you take a look at the old Slains Castle soon, before you have to pay an arm and a leg to go there, and the cawing of jackdaws, the whistling wind and the crash of the breakers are replaced by Barry Manilow in the air conditioned corridors of privilege.

I pick ‘the Boy’ up at just gone four and we decide to head for Edinburgh by way of a detour through Braemar and the Grampian National Park. There is still a blanket of snow lying beneath the birch and pine trees, and even more so on the wild, bare moors and mountains. As dusk falls we pass several big herds of red deer. Magnificent beasts, although even with profitable deer-stalking there are too many of them to allow the great Highland Forests to regenerate as it should now that there are fewer sheep around to keep the place as a green desert.

Wildlife

Wolves! That’s what they need around here. Reintroduced to provide the top of the food chain predation to keep the deer down to a reasonable and healthy population. There have been a number of such proposals, but sheep farmers have been distinctly unimpressed. The problem here is that the plans so far involve the wolves going into competition with the farmers. Just a bit more vision could involve the farmers in ‘farming’ wolves – or, more accurately, the tourists who would flock all year round to go on ‘Highland Wolf Safaris’. Totally wild wolves could be watched from hides, even spied on in their dens thanks to hidden TV cameras and the like. It would be magical.

As a matter of fact the wolf packs would generally only take sick or injured sheep or deer, so there would still be the income from more traditional farming anyway. And since there is no genuine record of a wolf attack on any human being, returning a bit of the wild world - and one of our most magnificent native totem/folklore animals – to our countryside would enrich the lives of untold numbers of people and help the local economy, with no ‘downside’ in sight..

We reach Edinburgh in the middle evening and meet up with Pat Harrington. Pat made international headlines back in the early 1980s when he combined being a student in North London with heavy involvement in the then National Front (in the days before it descended to being little more than a gang of skinheads). He had to brave demonstrations, sometimes involving several thousand screaming far-leftists, and even had to go to the High Court to secure his right to tuition and to sit his exams.

It was an outstanding display of moral and physical courage, on top of Pat’s considerable talents as a strategist, organiser and writer. Although we subsequently parted company (not on particular good terms, as is often the way in such things) I’m very glad that all that is now water under the bridge. Although he is not a member of the BNP he is doing very valuable work in, among other things, the independent nationalist trade union, Solidarity. (Take a look at www.solidaritytradeunion.org and join!)

We get through a fair bit of red wine discussing not so much the past as ideas for the future. It’s very useful to see our organisation through sympathetically critical outside eyes, and stimulating to talk to someone with a talent for “thinking outside the box”.

On the long drive home Radios Four and Five both run stories on the 200^th Anniversary of the Abolition of the Slave Trade in the British Empire. All too predictably, this is an excuse for an orgy of PC ethno-masochistic self-flagellation. Instead of glorying in the key role of Britain in providing the lead in ending an international evil, and reflecting on the fact that, without our guiding hand, slavery has returned to Africa and Asia, particularly in Muslim countries, all the programmes are about white guilt.

Again and again we are told the wicked lie that the Industrial Revolution and the foundations of Britain’s wealth and power all rest on the profits of the slave trade. I say ‘wicked’ quite deliberately, and on three grounds:

First, such anti-white fantasies actively encourages the racial hatred and deep resentment that turns many young blacks living in Britain into racist bigots with chips on their shoulder. Innocent white people in places like London and Birmingham will still be being mugged, abused, stabbed and raped by ‘hit back at whitey’ thugs a decade from now as a direct result of this propaganda. The ultimate irony is that if the understandably angry ones’ ancestors hadn’t been sold as slaves to white, Arab and Jewish slave-traders then most of them would have died in Africa’s endless round of plagues, famine, tribal wars and cannibalism, so they wouldn’t even have descendants to feel aggrieved;

Second, because wall-to-wall Victim Status allows many black people to evade responsibility for the failings of their own communities and families. Whatever blacks do wrong can be blamed on slavery, so there is no need – or even internal pressure – to strive to put things right themselves. Teaching an entire community always to blame others for an inescapably stultifying history guarantees further conflict and endemic failure. White left-liberals, in pursuit of their own ideological fantasy Utopia, thus condemn the very people they claim to regard as special and worthy of help to a continued cycle of powerless victimhood. Black failure starts with Roots and ends with black teenagers gunned down at the ice-rink;

Third, because it is a total distortion of history. Slavery certainly did make large sums of money for a handful of British slavers, for the captains of their ships, and for the owners of the plantations of the West Indies. Some of the fine Georgian houses in Bristol, London and Liverpool, and even a few stately homes, were indeed built on this human misery.

But there are hundreds of stately homes and thousands of rich town houses all over Britain that owe nothing to the African slave trade. The money for them, and for the horrible, pretentious, snobbish lifestyle captured in such excruciating detail by Jane Austen, came from the exploitation of OUR people.

The Georgian pillars, chandeliers and paintings of your average National Trust pile were made possible not by the slave trade but by little English, Scottish and Welsh children dragging carts in coal mines, by boys forced up chimneys and girls herded into mills and match factories until the poisons in such jobs gave them cancer. Irish ‘navvies’ crushed to death digging canal and railway tunnels or falling from the scaffolding while laying the bricks that built our Victorian cities. Generations of men and boys who followed the shoals of herring and whose wives and mothers mourned them with no graves when the sea claimed its due. The arthritic, half-starved English ploughmen plodding through the cold mud behind a million horses for generations, condemned to death or transportation if they took one of the hares that would devastate their own tiny vegetable patches behind their collapsing ‘tied’ hovels. The generations of orphan children and broken families who went to paupers’ graves at the workhouses that loomed over every poor family in the land.

Don’t let any snivelling, self-hating liberal tell you otherwise: The grandeur and wealth of this country was sweated, beaten, starved and stolen from our ancestors, not from anybody else. And whenever some foreign tyrant or ideology of change threatened to overturn that status quo, those same ancestors provided the cannon-fodder to die to defend it on a thousand battlefields by land and sea.

In denying all these historical facts, the present white-guilt slavery orgy coldly and deliberately shoves the far worse (wage slaves cost nothing, don’t have to be looked after, and are replaced for free by volunteers once they’re worked to death) suffering of the white working class. It’s the PC version of Holocaust Denial – our own people never suffered, were never exploited, in fact may as well never even have existed.

And since none of that happened to our ancestors, us native Brits have no special, first-nation claim to this land. Which clears the way for the liberal elite’s Genetically Modified population transformation and cultural destruction ethnocide of the British and general and the English in particular. My God, how I hate these vermin!

Glasgow meeting

No sooner home from Edinburgh than it’s time to head back to Glasgow. Security with me this time so we can stop anywhere for fuel instead of having to avoid service stations likely to be ‘enriched’. Jackie is also with us, sharing the driving and having a quiet word with key players in the party to help bring some feminine intuition to various leadership considerations.

The Glasgow meeting goes very well indeed. There are several splendidly effective and inspiring speeches from some relatively new local organisers, and morale is sky-high. I speak about the long-term strategy of sinking deep community roots and putting together a “coalition of the excluded” – by which I mean the genuinely excluded, not scrotes, low-lives and spongers – Christians whose core values are derided by the BBC and turned into crimes by our Masters; Tories whose party has deserted them to become a New Labour clone; council house tenants who are set to be sold along with their Residents’ Associations to the highest bidding giant corporation; and white youth in places like Pollockshields.

I conclude by touching on Scotland’s first two Clearances, when the elite of the day stole first the commons and small peasant farms of the Lowlands and then the clan lands of the Highlands from the people of Scotland, and urging all present to strive to resist a Third Clearance – the one that will come all too soon in the form of White Flight in a country with a population so much smaller than England but now facing a tide of mass immigration every bit as large. The message clearly strikes home, not just with those from Glasgow (“the asylum capital of Europe”), but also with people who have travelled down from small towns where East European economic migrants are pricing locals out of jobs and homes.

The collection is stunning: £12,000 there and then, plus a further £2,000 previously pledged but now handed in. This will help to pay for a leaflet for every home in Scotland, plus a TV broadcast, and is I believe guaranteed to bring the BNP the highest ever vote north of the border.

Back home to Wales and half a day in the garden. Because we’re so high up (1,000 feet) in such a generally wet area and with thin soil, growing things here isn’t easy. So I’m part way through turning the front garden over to raised beds made of old railway sleepers. This should help drainage, productivity, pest control and even the length of the growing season in the vegetable section, and make the flowers part easier to manage with rather limited time.

Then on Monday evening it’s off to North Wales and a meeting of Bill Murray’s fast-growing Prestatyn group. There are some seventy people present, all bar a couple from North Wales (some Welsh, some English incomers). There are four councillors present, including quite a senior LibDem, and all are apparently impressed. I do one of the Question & Answer session meetings, which helps an audience as varied as this one (all ages, all walks of life) get a full picture of the BNP.

It also highlights the fact that this is the one party that avoids spin and pre-prepared speeches to hand-picked audiences. Direct contact between politicians and the people. That’s the way democracy used to work, the way it works in the BNP, and the way - one day - it will work again, once the grip of the media moguls, the moneybags and the union bosses has been broken for good.

Norfolk and Suffolk

Wednesday (14th)

Again it’s a bright blue early spring morning. So bright in fact that when I try to do so work as we drive through the Fens towards Kings Lynn I can only see the cursor on my laptop screen by putting my jacket over my head. This is OK on an ordinary road, but it would surely attract some attention on a motorway. By the way, for the avoidance of doubt, I wasn’t driving.

Kings Lynn used to be Bishops Lynn, until Henry VIII had different ideas. During the English Civil War (in due course, it will of course have to be called the First English Civil War, in order to differentiate it from the one to come) the town declared for Charles, and was besieged by and surrendered to troops from Cromwell’s Eastern Association. Now filling up with Chinese and Eastern European cheap labour, it’s a fine old town, though with considerable poverty among the local people.

We meet outside Kings Lynn station with our local organizer, Dave – a jovial Ulsterman – and a journalist and photographer from the local paper. The questions are sensible and the coverage later turns out to be fair. We hope to stand candidates here so this is good news.

Then we head off to a typical Victorian street corner pub in a terraced part of town. I’m expecting to meet half a dozen of the keenest local activists, for weekday lunchtimes are never a good time to pull people together. To my amazement, however, Dave has pulled together more than thirty people. One carload have come over from Norwich to support their fellow Norfolk comrades, and a few are from smaller neighbouring towns like Dereham, but the vast majority are local. Some are regular activists, others are recent enquirers.

One of the latter is a lady who was present at the first nationalist meeting I ever attended, in Norwich in 1974. She was at that time a former significant defector from the Monday Club, in which she had played a part in the struggle to defend the traditional identity of Southall from mass immigration. Later she dropped out after the general election disaster of 1979. She tells me she’s been following our progress in recent years with increasing enthusiasm, and has just got back involved. She’s not the only one, and such experienced old hands can be particularly valuable.

I speak briefly but mainly talk to people as individuals or in tiny groups over the buffet lunch. Several young men are present who are also involved in the independent nationalist trade union Solidarity. One has some years of union activism experience and is originally from an anarchist background. Having seen the extent to which mass immigration is promoted and facilitated by global capitalism, however, he’s now found a better use for his efforts.

We leave early enough to make a short detour to visit an elderly gentleman who, having been a keen member for years, is now pretty much housebound.

We have to be in Norwich by early evening, so drive on through the gently rolling Norfolk countryside. Fields full of free-range pigs have become a notable feature of the farming landscape around here. To keep such intelligent beasts in battery factories is particularly cruel and it’s great to see them enjoying the early spring sunshine – rolling in dust bowls, fossicking in the earth for roots or worms and, in the case of the piglets, playing ‘catch’. And no, this is not anthropomorphic sentimentality, they very clearly do.

The SatNav takes us to the postcode for another Good Beer Guide entry – this one specifically chosen for its entry specifying good value food – but it seems there’s been a typo on the postcode, for we end up being told “You have reached your destination” in the middle of nowhere. When these things work they are a really useful tool – particularly when trying to find private houses in unfamiliar suburbs – but when something goes wrong they can be a menace. Really it’s our fault for being lazy and relying on the SatNav instead of checking things out on a proper map.

Still, not long after we pass a sign to The Ratcatchers (about ten miles north north east of Norwich) which turns out to be an entirely suitable substitute. They do interesting things with local pork, which is really the only thing to eat when one’s been admiring Norfolk pigs. A pint of Wherry, courtesy of the small and relatively new Woodford Ferry brewery, goes down equally well.

It’s all a million times better than the industrialised, processed pap served up at places such as Little Chef, and only marginally more expensive. There really is no excuse for adult nationalists to patronise and help fund the anti-food, anti-culture fast food industry when so many independent businesses have done so much to raise the standard of ‘pub grub’ to a level which is often of better quality and value than that generally available in European countries with serious reputations for culinary excellence.

The Norfolk meeting is attended by some eighty people. I’m delighted to see Bill Fitt, still in his Marines blazer, as he was when he was Norwich organiser way back in 1974. The (relatively) new organiser, Chris, is a businessman who moved to Norfolk from Northampton a few years ago. Strangely, he comes from exactly the same part of that town as Adie, who’s with us on security this week. Later that evening they exchange reminiscences on old Northampton and its people, before it was multiculturalised into a foreign place. The meeting is filmed with a broadcast quality camera and it is such a good example of a local BNP meeting that the resulting DVD should deserve to be more widely circulated than in Norfolk alone.

As well as reminders about the regular leafleting operations in Norwich, Kings Lynn and Yarmouth, we also hear of plans for the first Norfolk St. George’s Day dinner on April 21^st. I speak about the way in which the current headlines about the Government’s betrayal of the wounded squaddies from Iraq and Afghanistan is nothing new at all; it merely mirrors the betrayal of the promises and implied promises made by our ‘elite’ to the lads doing the fighting and dying in the two World Wars.

Thursday

We skirt the edge of the Norfolk Broads on our way from Norwich to Great Yarmouth. The Broads – one of the loveliest ‘natural’ areas in England – are in fact flooded peat workings; the pits left as generations of early mediaeval locals dug their winter fuel filling up with water as a period of above recent average sunspot activity caused several centuries of global warming before the Little Ice Age that followed.

We’re due in Yarmouth for another lunchtime meeting. Again I’m frankly surprised by the turnout. About twenty people are present. This is another hitherto ‘unenriched’ town which is being transformed by a torrent of immigrant scab labour. We desperately need to stand candidates here for the first time, and I work as hard as I can to convince the still doubt-filled local ‘possibles’ to make a firm commitment to stand. The little meeting may just have done the trick. Certainly all present seem well pleased as we leave to head south for Suffolk and the last stretch of the tour.

We kill a surplus hour by making a slight detour to see the little house in Beccles where Jackie and I lived for a couple of years when we first got married (we went to the town to look to buy a boat to live on, as we couldn’t afford anything in the area even back then; except – we discovered – a tiny semi-derelict former almshouse down near the river. Our recollection is that it cost us the then staggering sum on just under fourteen thousand pounds. How we got a mortgage on something in such a state neither of us can remember, but we did, and the front door and windows we had put in are still there. The price tag wouldn’t be the same nowadays though.

Driving through many miles of familiar countryside, we arrive in Bury St. Edmunds and meet BNP web editor Steve Blake by the town’s huge abbey gatehouse, before hooking up with another local newspaper reporter for an interview. Again I have the pleasure of a sensible, searching but essentially neutral interview. Steve I’ve known since he first got involved in the Cause in Ipswich at the age of 14 in the late seventies – a great asset and a good friend.

Then we’re off to a village hall a few miles out of town for the Suffolk meeting. Sue, the local organiser, is slightly disappointed that ‘only’ forty people are present, but this has been a difficult area for us up until now and at least there is now regular activity in a number of towns, Ipswich included, and enquirers are being visited promptly. There’s plenty of growth to come here if they just keep at it.

Steve speaks before me – it’s the first time I’ve heard his ‘time machine/alternative futures’ speech, and I quickly understand why it’s been so well received at various branch meetings up and down the country. I decide not to follow such a good talk with another one, so instead I do an extended Questions & Answers session. A good collection and successful raffle raise a tidy sum and, again, we finish with enthusiasm and optimism.

Later into the evening there’s a chance to discuss several matters relating to the Internet with Steve. Such opportunities for personal discussions with key national and regional figures, and with individuals who could play such roles in the future, are among the less high profile ‘pluses’ of this system of monthly extended speaking tours.

We leave Suffolk next morning in, once again, bright sunshine. As we head for the main A14 back towards the Midlands and home there are two cock pheasants fighting quite near in a field of young corn shoots. As with boxing hares this is quite a spectacle, with the arrogant feathered fools leaping and fluttering into the air and kicking at each other with their spurs.

A few weeks ago we had a young cock pheasant living near us in Wales. Clearly reared at the big shoot a few miles away, he was virtually without fear of humans, following us for a good half mile on several walks and clearly hoping for food. I threw him several handfuls of dried, cereal-based, dog food and he got even bolder. I decided to see if he would eat out of my hand and he did indeed pluck up courage to snatch a piece from between my fingers. I put more on my palm and held it out to him, only to have to leap up and strike my hand with one of his spurs. The resulting hole was deep enough to pour blood for several minutes, so the mating display in the field today cannot be without risk to the pair of rivals. The pheasant near us has since vanished – probably into a fox.

The journey home is via Shrewsbury, where a garage has tracked down a more economical diesel I’m interested in. My average party mileage is consistently nearly 40,000 per year and the petrol vehicle I’ve been running for some months is not cheap to run. It drives well and I’ll probably have it.

So then it’s shopping – to the independent butcher and greengrocer, and to the inevitable Morrisons for the rest – in Y Trallwng (Welshpool to most of you) to replenish the pantry, fridge and freezer, which we know from long experience will in our absence have been stripped bare by a near Biblical plague of hungry teenagers.

East Anglia visit

We start the week with an early morning journey to Lincoln, via a brief rendevous in Northampton. We meet Richard Foster, the city’s tireless and ultra efficient BNP organiser on the edge of town, then hook up with a reporter and camera girl from BBC Look North before heading straight off to meet some local activists and candidates.

The street where we stop has a big spread of fading bouquets near one end, tributes to a popular young local man who was – allegedly, as we have to say - stabbed to death with a Samurai sword by a piece of white trash who was moved onto the same street from somewhere down south not so long before. The accused’s house is boarded up – angry locals forced his family to move within twenty four hours of the killing.

Further along the street there are BNP posters up in windows of a good quarter of the houses. Our candidate here caused a degree of excitement in the local press when they heard that he’s Jamaican. Indeed he is, in terms of where he was born and his accent. But what they forgot was that Jamaica always had a small white population – some descended from Cavaliers deported after Cromwell’s victory in the English Civil War, others from white indentured slaves, more still from the West Country men who rebelled against James ll in support of the Duke of Monmouth in the 1680s, and finally more as managers and administrators when the islands were part of the Empire.

So they were astounded to find that Michael Watts and his family are all as white as you and me. It’s like the Duke of Wellington said when he was called ‘Irish’ on account of having been born in Ireland to a family which was part of the Protestant Anglo Aristocracy: “If a cat has kittens in a stable it doesn’t make them horses.” Politically incorrect of course, but none the less true for that.

So what’s he doing in Lincoln? After independence, life for Jamaica’s white minority became harder and harder (one of those lessons of history that always comes as a shock to those who refuse to learn from the past), and Michael’s entire family returned to their English homeland in 1979. He’s clearly a popular character on his estate, and I was pleased to be able to put a few leaflets out for him and chat with sympathetic neighbours. We hope to be standing candidates in all eleven of Lincoln’s wards and there will be some good votes.

Mistaken identity

We go round the corner to do the TV interview. A group of young teenagers stand watching us from across the road. One of their mothers comes out of a nearby house and yells at them: “Get away from those weirdos, we’re Catholics.” Blank looks all round. What on earth is she on about? Looking at our suits and ties – in the middle of the day on a clinging-to-decency-by-its-fingernails estate -one of the local supporters with us suddenly twigs. “She thinks we’re Jehovah’s Witnesses!” The misunderstanding is duly cleared up and one of the young lads duly comes over and politely asks for a ‘flyer’. Ghastly Americanism, over here it’s a leaflet, but we let him off as his heart’s in the right place.

Then it’s off to one of Lincoln’s huge Victorian industrial complexes down by the city’s waterside. The engineering jobs have long been globalised away of course, but among the non-wealth producing replacements is the office of the local independent radio station. A thoroughly sensible interview there is followed by another with a pretty but ludicrously brainwashed and guilt-ridden upper class young blonde from the generally hostile Lincoln Echo. She has all the right questions - Islamophobia, 'gay' adoption, badly 'needed' Poles – who turn out to include one dentist and thousands of potato pickers, whose presence allows the supermarkets and gangmasters to get even more out of the farmers and public.

Fortunately the photographer is much more normal. We cross the busy road and canal next to a fine Victorian brick warehouse with modern extensions in steel and smoked glass - for once it works. Next door is a huge modern glass building which catches sunset in a spectacular blaze of orange and red. It’s a stunning backdrop and the pictures in the viewfinder look really atmospheric and arty. I tell him it's a shame the editor will probably crop off all the background and print it in black and white and he ruefully agrees.

The evening’s meeting is very well organised. Behind the table hangs a large hand-sewn, non-imported Union Flag, a donation from a lady who felt it wrong for a nationalist party to use tacky imported flags from China. A good literature and merchandise table, and a raffle take care of the background fundraising needs.

Sadie Graham, the East Midlands regional organiser speaks first. She is doing a great job as our first ever full-time Group Development officer. She has already clocked up 30,000 miles in this role – in her own car, which is something that is clearly unsustainable and we’re going to have to put right pretty soon. Such are the hidden costs of running a party as effective and professional as this one.

Among the enthusiastic audience are several refugees from UKIP. These are serious level local officials and we’re pleased to hear at the end of the meeting that they have made up their minds to join us.

We stay in a fine old Victorian farmhouse in a lovely part of the Lincolnshire Wolds. We arrive at gone midnight and turn in pretty promptly as it’s been a long day.

Tuesday

Wake to glorious sun and birdsong. There are a black Labrador and a ginger cat in the farmhouse kitchen – very traditional. After breakfast the cat sits in the sun outside, rocking to and fro and he nods off. I take him a piece of bacon rind and the ginger cat is well content with life.

Heading back to Lincoln we pass miles of tiny new hedgeplants in protective plastic sleeves. For decades we’ve wasted millions in taxpayers' money for farmers to rip up two hundred year old (minimum) hedges. Now we're paying them millions to put them back. Still, in ten years time they'll be a decent size and the landscape in this part of England at least will begin to recover from the disaster of the EU's Common Agricultural Policy (as uniquely badly applied in Britain thanks to the anti-family farm agribusiness faction that has dominated the National Farmers' Union since the end of World War Two).

The Times has picked up on the story in the Independent about my being seen at the 100^th Cambridge v Oxford Varsity Boxing Match in York Hall, the spiritual home of East London’s great boxing tradition. Unfortunately the Light Blues lost 5-4, but I ran into several contemporaries, and one of our Liverpool activists who also fought and won for Cambridge in this fixture a few years after me. It’s a small world. A number of gentlemen I’ve never even met before made a point of coming over and shaking my hand at some point in the gripping evening.

The boxers, on average, seem to be slightly fitter than we were (and we trained three hours a day, six days a week) but there doesn’t seem quite so much aggression – there is not a single knockdown in the entire night, although the referees repeatedly leap in to give standing counts. I suppose it beats the risk of brain damage, but it really isn’t the same as it was thirty years ago, when the Varsity Match was such a grudge fixture that some of the heavier weights especially fought each other through a haze of blood and nothing less than a knockdown ever produced a count.

I have a feeling that, as well as the headguards that we never used, amateurs these days use heavier gloves. We used to be able to feel our knuckles through our fighting gloves – a truly terrifying experience when you put them on for the first time just moments before stepping into the ring. The difference of a couple of ounces of padding would surely explain how I put two of my three Oxford opponents down on the canvass a total of five times, each in the first round, before those fights were stopped. Bear in mind that, compared to some of our team (and Oxford’s, for that matter, I was inexperienced and very much a novice).

If I’m wrong on that then we’re in trouble; a nation that has lost the ability to teach its boxers to use every ounce of their weight when punching is decadent beyond redemption. Anyone who knows the answer to this one, please drop me an email.

The prizes were presented by, among others, Barry McGuigan and Dave ‘Boy’ Green.

A student journalist from Oxford collars me for a brief interview. His final question is both apposite and different: “Have I ever had occasion to use my boxing skills outside the ring?” I reply with a smile and the words ‘No Comment’, although on reflection I suppose it wouldn’t have hurt to have told him the truth: Exactly two weeks ago in Sussex – and this is the first day since that my knuckles haven’t felt sore!

The post-match gathering was in the Blind Beggar – the pub where Jack the Hat found that it didn’t pay to cross the Krays. To be honest it’s rather ordinary now, although friendly enough.

Back in Lincoln I’ve got another radio interview. A probing but professional journalist from BBC Radio Lincoln asks awkward questions but allows me to answer them fully. This is proper, adult journalism the way it should be, and would clearly interest a lot of readers, whether they are for or against us. – I only hope the editor follows suit and broadcasts a representative cross-section of our discussion.

Then it’s round the corner to a daffodil-filled old graveyard with one of the ancient city wall gateways in the background, where another TV camera is waiting. This is for an interview with a specialist in local government, Richard Orange, who runs a website on the subject as well as providing footage and programmes to broadcast channels as a freelancer.

He asks about the Standards Board and monitoring officers and I explain the BNP’s concern that the growing power of appointed bureaucrats over elected councilors is another nail in the coffin of democratic local government. It’s all of a piece with the removal of so much financial power under Maggie Thatcher, and more recent attacks by John Prescott’s deputy PM office on the right of councilors even to speak on issues on which they have already expressed an opinion.

This has led – as it was intended to by a regime hell-bent on abolishing what remains of effective local democracy and replacing it with artificial Euro regions – to the ridiculous position where councilors elected on a certain campaign ticket (typically for voicing popular local opposition to greenfield building development) are then forbidden by unelected bureaucrats from speaking or voting on the issue on behalf of their constituents once they are elected.

Next we head to a local repairs garage, owned by one of our members, where one of the main men has agreed to be one of Lincoln’s eleven BNP candidates in May. He is standing in the surrounding ward, where a key issue is the proposed conversion of an historic corrugated iron clad church (known as the ‘Tin Tabernacle’, and one of only a handful in the country) into – you guessed it – a mosque. Local people are furious that the church did the deal, selling the site to the leaders of Lincoln’s 1,500 strong Muslim community, for way below its market value – without saying a word to local residents. Our candidate was 26 years in the army and a sensible, head-screwed on sort of chap. Lincoln’s political elite are going to have a nervous April.

Model citizens

As we say our goodbyes I get a call from the Edinburgh student newspaper. This was arranged yesterday. I did a telephone interview with a desperately brainwashed posh-spoken English girl from there a couple of weeks ago, but was told yesterday that she was so shaken by the experience that she hasn’t felt able to write about it!

Hence the rescheduled interview is with two equally brainwashed lads. One English middle class, one a Scot so upper class that his accent has all but vanished. Oh dear! These are the types who would make perfect, unquestioning, model citizens in any society in which they were brought up. Young Pioneers, Hitler Youth, Red Guards, whatever, just spoonfeed them the State pap of the day and they’d regurgitate it.

They are, predictably, fixated on the rights of gays and Muslims, and are simply incapable of seeing the impossible incoherence of such a position. Being taught by teachers taught by lecturers who have all abandoned genuine notions of right and wrong, their moral compasses spin wildly, settling only on their own pet issues.

They seem genuinely incapable of seeing that the right of homosexuals to do what they want in private needs to be balanced by the right of the heterosexual majority to send their children to primary schools where they will not have homosexuality forced down their throats at the age of four or five. They sincerely think that our policy of gently but firmly putting homosexuals back in the closet to do whatever they want to each other in private is ‘hate-filled’, whereas the mainstream Islamic penalty of stoning to death is somehow no threat to homosexuals. Perhaps, strangely enough, it’s a form of subliminated racism, I suggest; do they expect ‘brown’ people to behave less decorously than hideously white ones? Student Grant and his mate are not impressed and quickly change the subject.

They say they found one thing on our website “particularly risible.” I ask what they found so funny and am told that it is our ‘claim’ that scores of young white girls in northern English towns have been ‘groomed’ for sex and gang raped by racist Muslim paedophiles.

Do we really say ‘scores’? I ask them incredulously. They scent a retraction and gleefully confirm the figure. “Well, I’m sorry”, I say, “That’s badly wrong.” I pause and can almost hear them drooling on the floor. “It should say thousands” I tell them, “It’s an epidemic in places like Keighley, Blackburn, Bradford and Oldham.”

“Where are the statistics to support such a claim?” they demand. I explain, quite patiently at first, that there are none, because the police and local authorities try desperately to turn blind eyes to the problem.

“Why would they do that?” one of them asks. “Because the last time the police upset the Muslims in Bradford the resulting riot cost more than twenty million quid. And the police know they just couldn’t control another one.”

But they are still, I think, genuinely incapable of grasping the problem. In the end their constant excuse-making and willful blindness becomes annoying and I put the verbal boot into their most tender intellectual parts: “Stop believing what your teachers and the BBC have told you. Get your middle class arses down to Bradford and talk to some real people about the real problems on working class estates.” Again, they move swiftly on.

There is the same comprehension gap, and specious fifth form debating society logic, when it comes to the contrast between Islam and Christianity. Because some Christians some hundreds of years ago killed non-Christians and burned witches, it follows to them that it is unfair to condemn modern day Islam in any way because Christianity is just as bad.

Because I’m being driven and have nothing better to do for a few minutes I take them through the various points that rebut this nonsense. Among these is the fact that, if a powerful and growing Christian sect was threatening to create a theocracy where old ladies living alone with their cats would be burnt to death, and where democracy and free speech would be replaced by the rule of a handful of clerics, I would be at the forefront of the campaign to warn of the dangers and restrict their powers.

But they are not, so it is not an issue. Unlike the position with Islam. Again, they are either incapable of understanding the point, or pretend to be.

Beer bible

Still, we get to the end of the interview and they thank me politely enough. Then it’s grab the BNP speaking tour Good Book (the CAMRA Good Beer Guide) and find somewhere en route to Holbeach for lunch. We pass two hares in adjacent fields. We don’t get them in our part of Wales and I haven’t seen one for years. Unfortunately they’re not together and boxing as Mad March Hares really do when fighting for the favours of a female.

Years ago at home we used to eat them occasionally – jugged hare is one of the great dishes of English yeoman cookery - but I wouldn’t do so now; there just don’t seem to be enough of them around and they’re too elegant and inspirational to watch.

Exactly halfway is the village of Ewerby – about a mile off the A17. The Finch Hatton Arms is described as “retaining the charm of its past”. And that’s exactly what it does. The best English pubs are either plain rustic or town spit-and-sawdust, or mildly eccentric. This is one of the latter. Old farm implements and hunting prints adorn the walls alongside a row of brass hares. The heavily beamed ceiling is clearly a flight of fancy by some long-dead architect, large parts of it definitely have no structural value but it does look the part. The heavy glass paned front door is engraved with a quote from Oscar Wilde: “I have the simplest of tastes – I only like the best.” Thinking of Oscar – beware of the strange hidden step on the way to the toilet.

The guest beer is Summer Lightning, from Salisbury’s Hopback Brewery. The distinctive green man on a yellow label marks an unusually good bottled beer, but it’s absolutely superb on draught. Still, it’s lunchtime so I stick to one. Plus a fine locally made steak and kidney pie. Sometimes the fight to preserve our native culture and traditions is an onerous one!

All too soon we have to head on to Holbeach, where we’ve got another local paper photoshoot and interview booked. This is another young lady reporter, but this interview turns out to be a sensible one – purely about our policies and local issues.

That completes the work until the evening so we tuck ourselves away at the home of a local activist. I do some urgent paperwork I’ve had to bring away with me and then settle down to some work on the laptop, first tidying up and expanding the current blog entries, then carrying on with my article for April’s Identity.

The evening meeting is again a success. A good crowd in a small town like Holbeach, although I’m pleased to learn that people have traveled up from Peterborough and the Fens, where Sadie’s Group Development work is bearing fruit. Local BNP councillor the Rev. Robert West is one of several local speakers. I forego a formal speech and instead take questions, which makes a change and gives everyone a chance to find out what they want to about the party rather than what I want them to. People seem to appreciate such an open approach, in such stark contrast to the defensive spin of pre-prepared speeches employed by Blair, Cameron and Co.

The venue has a bar but it only has nasty fizzy chemical ‘beer’ so I stick to Diet Coke. Now that is a hardship!

Our host tonight is a highly qualified weather station systems analyst. The first real expert on the weather who I’ve had the chance to question about global warming. He installs, and manages over the Internet, weather stations as far away as Indonesia. So is global warming happening? If so is it man-made or a natural cycle?

He isn’t doctrinaire about it but on balance believes that we’re just in a natural warming phase and that various people have simply seized on it as an excuse for internationalising government and screwing yet more taxes out of us.

I’d already come to the same tentative conclusion, although I think it best to assume that the jury is still out and to avoid upsetting people who are genuinely convinced that global warming is a man-made phenomenon. BNP policies designed to meet the challenge of fossil fuel depletion would, in any case, tend to cut pollution and carbon emissions, so we don’t need to pick fights or fall out on this contentious issue.