MARKET CARNAGE – AND A ‘RED’ MOB

The usual round of speeches: Good meetings in places as far afield as Birmingham (two meetings on the same night, first East and then South), Manchester, Bradford, Cannock and Rotherham since my last entry. At the ones before Brown bottled it, everyone was raring to go for a General Election.

Of course, that was not to be. As I predicted in an earlier blog session, Gordon, while not a moron, is a serial coward. Had he called the contest at the end of the Labour conference he would probably have won, perhaps albeit with a reduced majority. But now he faces having to go to the country some time after the financial catastrophe still building up in the USA and world financial markets lets loose a tsunami of economic destruction on Britain. Brown just lost the election.

Despite the continuing and growing carnage in the American housing market, there are signs that the final bursting of the US consumer boom may take a little longer yet. Vast amounts of the inflationary credit injections made by the Fed into the economy over there in a desperate effort to stop a housing-bust led collapse are now washing up as cheap and easy money in sub-prime credit card lending.

Basically, once you’re stuffed on your house and are expecting to default and be bankrupted, living it up on credit card purchases that you never have the slightest intention of paying becomes a serious temptation. The signs are already there that huge numbers of Americans are now embarking on this road, which Bush will certainly not discourage in the hope that it will ease the Republican’s expected pain in the next elections over there.

If another big mortgage lender collapse doesn’t wreck the whole Fed boom thing first, then this credit card bubble will be the thing that finishes it – not that you’ll read that in any ‘serious’ press economic columns (except perhaps something by Ambrose Pritchard-Evans, who does often have his finger on the real pulse) for months to come.

My advice? Don’t buy a house, rent one. Don’t ‘invest’ in buy-to-let. Don’t put any more home improvements or holidays on the mortgage. Oh yes, and buy a car that has better fuel efficiency, because the Peak Oil phenomenon is now striking so hard that even quite significant economic pain in the West won’t offset the impact of growing demand from China and India.

We’re already seeing other commodity prices head the same way as oil – grain, and hence bread, meat and milk, are also going through the roof. The Biblical cycle of lean years following fat ones was something that the older generation of Brits probably thought had gone forever. Their children and grandchildren are all too likely to find out that the baby-bombers were an almost unique exception, a golden generation, uniquely lucky, uniquely spoilt, and uniquely guilty of handing the next generation not a poisoned chalice (they gave such things away or smelted them down for consumer baubles) but a polystyrene cup of excrement.

Thinking global, acting local

Still, life, and the work of building the only Movement with the ‘think global, act local’ nationalist logic that alone can mitigate the coming Convergence of Catastrophies, must go on. So there’s also a very civilised Yorkshire Black Tie fund-raising dinner in Bradford and a fun but uncivilised (to give you a clue, both Elvis Presley and I are among the singers – though the King is far better than me) ‘Supper Theatre’ in Stockport. Both get good collections and it’s good to see two of our most promising Euro seat areas already taking fund-raising for June 2009 so seriously. Special thanks to Nick Cass, Peter Hollings and Ian Dawson in Yorkshire and Bev Jones in Lancashire.

At the Bradford meeting a member comes up to me during the break. To my initial surprise he hands me a large bag of sawdust. All becomes clear when he explains that, having started out in catering, he has diversified into the luxury smoked foods market. He had taken an amused professional interest in my description of my hit-and-miss home-smoking experiment, and had come along with the oak sawdust and some good advice.




My home-made smoker. Still looking like something the gypsies left behind!



Such a change from the usual ‘shop talk’ at meetings! A few minutes later I’d been given a whole list of valuable tips. As soon as I get the time and a dry day in which to try out the sawdust and my newly acquired grasp of the process I’ll continue the experiment and let you know how it goes.

On the subject of updates (and, for that matter, thinking locally), the fly-struck lamb here made a full recovery and is now looking pretty much as plump as the other two. If we had more grazing I’d be sorely tempted to keep them until the late Spring, because young mutton has more flavour than lamb. But with animal feed prices going through the roof, it’s not worth risking a hard winter, so after a little longer to fatten they’ll have to go.



The three lambs earlier this year


And now – not so cute, and no way of telling now that the one in the middle nearly died of fly-strike


An evening with Rent-a-Mob

An interesting and enjoyable evening last night! It started out as a normal meeting as guest speaker at a meeting in Broxstowe to celebrate the local unit’s advance from Group to Branch status, and ended up with high drama with the usual far-left Rent-a-Mob.

The meeting was organised by local BNP councillor and Group Development officer Sadie Graham in the East Midlands town of Kimberley. Our candidate there back in May secured more than 200 votes with a paper campaign (the activists were busy helping Sadie win in our target ward nearby) and on the back of that the independent majority on the parish council bravely defied the bullies from the Labour minority who pulled all sorts of dirty tricks to get the meeting – in the parish hall – banned.

25 of our people managed to get into the hall before the combination of about100 bourgeois town hall parasites and middle class Student Gwant types (only one of the obscenity-screamers had a remotely local and working class accent) and politically correct policing by a seriously useless Inspector prevented any more BNP supporters getting in.

Not only did the police stand by as the brave leftist stormtroopers jostled and abused a couple of Octogenarian pensioners, but they then threatened to arrest our security team if they moved to help get our other people in. As always, the far-left are only actually brave when pretending to be trying to break through the feeble police line. A group of real locals gathered opposite to jeer at them.

A flavour of the drama may be got from the video still here:




The meeting itself went well, with a collection of more than £200. Sadie, local organiser Nina Brown and I all spoke. I covered mainly the irony of the fact that people who call themselves socialists and defenders of the working class and decent public services were outside trying to disrupt a meeting of the only serious party opposed to the privatisation of the postal service. That particular New Labour/Old Tory globalisation scam is proceeding apace, heralded by a new advert for “The People’s Post Office”.

Clearly this neo-Marxist replacement for the idea of the Royal Mail is supposed to con the left into overlooking the fact that behind the republican slogan there lurks a scheme to privatise the whole damn thing (as demanded by WTO and EU rules). As I point out, if the postal service was properly capable of being run privately, then the Victorians would have created it that way in the first place. But it is not, the Royal Mail is a natural state monopoly, one of the markers of a properly ordered national community, just like such as water, electricity and sewage.

So it is deeply ironic that the silly students shouting ‘fascist’ at us are in fact implicitly backing the genuinely fascist New Labour project to turn public services into private profit centres for giant corporations, and to demonise and marginalise anyone who opposes this massive theft of our national Common Wealth.

The high-spirited meeting, in a high ceilinged hall with nearly church-style acoustics, finishes with one of the loudest and heart-felt renditions of ‘Jerusalem’ I’ve ever heard and taken part in. Everyone belts it out, especially when one of the security team opens the front door so that the red mob outside can hear.

Sadie and I leave promptly, with security, at the end of the meeting so as to draw the cowardly mob off so that the other meeting-goers can leave in peace and safety. Two or three carloads of would-be thugs follow us and for a minute or two it looks as though things may get more interesting still but, just as we’re arranging to meet up with a back-up team and to persuade our pursuers to go home, a police car that had in turn followed them pulls them over.

While I’m over in the East Midlands, Sadie and I spend some time going over the plans for our Winter School and Annual Conference in Blackpool in November. A lot is being done to build on the success of last year’s event, and on lessons from this year’s successful Summer School. A great deal of emphasis is being laid on strengthening our education and training capabilities, the aim being to create a system which allows for rapid and sustainable expansion. Everyone can feel that we’re just one more turn of the screw away from a further leap in our public popularity. The time to organise for that is now, so that we’re ready for it, instead of having to play catch-up.

Other blogs worth a look

We then do a handy little piece about the evening’s events more or less life via telephone for Simon Darby’s increasingly popular and increasingly multi-media blog. Well worth a listen here.

Simon’s blog is of particular note for nature-watchers, with all sorts of titbits about different local flora and fauna. We’ve had some of the Big Cat sightings and rumours he mentioned the other day around here as well. An exiled Black Countryman living locally - one of that old breed with their really in-depth passion for and knowledge of ‘gardins’ and every sort of country pursuit – showed me the huge and unmistakably alien paw marks of one such beast in a patch of mud near his hen house a couple of years ago.

I know far less about birds and fish than Simon, but I can snap something of the beauty of our country from time to time. Here’s a shot of a woodland track on the edge of Exmoor I took a month or so ago. This is your country you’re looking at here – what are you doing to preserve it for your grandchildren?



Also worth making a note of when it comes to political blogs are Lee Barnes’ and Martin Wingfield’s regularly updated offerings. Lee’s, predictably, is an intensely argued, intellectually inventive thing with plenty of heavy political meat and blunt rhetoric. Here (and in two subsequent sections) is his take on the unholy alliance of Sharia Socialists and Hollywood Nazis attacking the BNP - here.

Martin’s, equally predictably, for the best popular nationalist journalist this Movement has ever had, covers current political news with his hallmark mixture of incisive analysis and simple, elegant prose. He has an interesting theory that the decline of the LibDems in the polls is largely down to public shock at the way the ‘nice’ party turned on and tore apart the unfortunate Kennedy over his drink problem. You can read more here.

Should everyone have a blog then? Yes and no! The only overtly political ones which are either justified or effective are a limited number from individuals who are so well known that any attempt to avoid a BNP ‘tag’ would be absurd and evasive. But for everyone else, the proper way to use the blogosphere is to draw in readers interested in a certain geographical area (“Yourtown Blog, by Fred the Whistleblower”) or in a certain hobby (“Eel Fishing Blog”, for example – and if by chance you’re into catching those amazing and still mysterious creatures I want to try smoking one) and then drip, drip the politics in as an ordinary Joe with no party axe to grind. That’s where the real power of this medium lies – not the naked politics that turns off most of the population, but subtle ‘independent’ popular validation of our views and our party.

Turning on the phone this morning I get several texts from people from Sedgefield and Sunderland to tell me of a hugely successful meeting in Spennymoor last night. Chaired by Solidarity Exec member Adam Walker, Mark Collett was the guest speaker and apparently gave a gripping account of the history of the BNP and its present progress. The meeting was packed out and Mark got a standing ovation from an enthusiastic crowd.

Here, as in Kimberly, pressure from the opposition gave an added ‘edge’ to the proceedings. The Northern Echo and a local Labour MP are running a week-long campaign against the BNP. To be fair to the Echo, they did print several very good letters defending the party yesterday. Sometimes I wonder if such operations are really about opposing us and not more a matter of using our name to sell newspapers? In media terms, this is a ‘sexy’ party, and every editor worth his salt (the phrase comes from the ancient Roman habit of paying soldiers part of their pay in salt) knows it.