Back to the West Country

Three good days in Wessex, the ancient English kingdom of the West Saxons and still one of the loveliest parts of England, typified even today by traditional villages and mellow stone market towns, set among the greenest (this wet summer at least) of rolling hills and lush pastureland.

The drive from Wales to Bournemouth is, despite the scenery, a long haul, but we arrive in good time for the evening’s meeting. I’ve not been down here for about three years, and last time there were scarcely twenty of us. Barry Bennett hadn’t long taken over as ‘temporary’ organiser and was only just learning the ropes. He’s still ‘temporary’ organiser, but now knows the ropes. He and his local activists had a good crack at four local seats back in May, and now there are more than sixty people, nearly all from Dorset, eager to hear the BNP message.

Barry also runs our Land & People rural affairs/animal welfare website and circle. He and one or two other regular contributors have been working away quietly on this project for some time now, and Barry tells me that a surprising number of Greens now visit the site regularly, expressing far more sympathy than he’d have thought possible just a couple of years ago. Deep beneath the apparently settled surface of British politics the shifting of the plates of old allegiances and preconceptions are steadily creating a future earthquake.

Barry isn’t just a theoretically ‘green’ nationalist, he’s also leading by example. The enclosed back garden of his suburban semi is home (apart from to half a dozen gigantic rabbits who have given up living in hutches and dug themselves a proper warren) to two wind turbines, an array of solar panels, a battery bank and an inverter to turn the power back into the free 240v supply that powers all his lights, computer equipment, phone chargers and TV.

Barry with his solar panels

Barry tells me that most of the equipment came from ebay bit by bit and that he’s put it altogether as an amateur. What would now cost more than £5,000 has probably taken about £2,000. He doesn’t know in detail how the economics work out, though his electricity bill has dropped very substantially. The biggest benefit, he reckons, is the satisfaction of being independent, the clean conscience of knowing that if more people followed his lead our country would be more independent and our world would be a cleaner place, and the fulfilment that comes from meeting a challenge.

He also shows me a sheaf of letters from the Jobsworths and tax-eaters at the council planning department. Despite all the New Labour waffle about global warming and energy efficiency, he has been forced to reduce the height of the pole for his tiny 50 watt turbine to ‘a maximum of 3 metres’ and to bring the bigger 500 watt one down below the level of his roof, thereby drastically cutting its efficiency.

500w turbine – output cut by council planning red tape

For much of Tuesday I write the bulk of my next Identity article on Barry’s wind-powered computer, in between all the usual party business phone calls. Later in the afternoon, though, we head off further along the coast for something really different. Another of our local members with an interest in alternative power has a sympathetic friend who is in the final stages of building a real windmill in his back garden.

Our inventive host lets us in through his garage, which he has turned into the best equipped private workshop I’ve ever seen. Unbelievably neat, it’s packed with every kind of metal lathe, pillar drill, compressor, welder and such like you could imagine. Laid out on the floor of the equally impressive workshop behind are the shining steel arms of the four sails, each at least fifteen feet long. This is going to be a serious piece of engineering.

Just part of the spick and span workshop

He leads us into the back garden and we see immediately just how serious. This isn’t the enlarged domestic turbine I’d envisaged, but a full size (though not giant) windmill. The brick base must be eight feet tall, and above that rises a tower of steel, wood and skilfully dressed lead flashing. It is truly a work not just of engineering but of passion and of art. Magnificent.

A real windmill! Amazing project.

Inside, we climb up an almost fully extended thirty foot ladder into the chamber which already houses the drive shaft. The whole thing is self-designed, taking as its starting point a detailed study of a traditional working mill in rural Dorset. How much power will it produce? The proud maker doesn’t yet know, though his cannibalised diesel generator parts are ready to be installed and connected up once the sails are in place, so he hopes to know by the autumn.

Up in the top of the windmill, the main drive shaft is already in place

There is a sad angle to all this. All the gleaming engineering equipment is British-made, but it all dates back to the 1950s or earlier. None of the companies that made them still produces anything in Britain. And all the engineering firms which he worked with in a lifetime of productive work have shut in the last fifteen or so years.

The British companies that made the best engineering equipment in the world are mainly long gone, but their pride in their products still shows

As a result the skills and the problem-solving abilities of men like this are also in danger of dying of. Inventiveness which should be harnessed to make this country the fount of a new ‘post’-industrial revolution of effective renewable energy in the post-Peak Oil world are in danger of being lost forever. Madness.

As evening falls we drive through the New Forest, one of the places where Old England is at her deepest. Ironic that, for it was effectively made when William the Bastard expelled entire villages of defeated West Saxons in order to make himself and his Norman/French usurper heirs a huge hunting reserve. The meeting tonight is with another new group. New Forest BNP is only a few months old and organised by Ian Johnson, one of those persecuted by the PC leftists in the Fire Brigades Union, hounded from membership of his union after decades of honourable service in one of the most honourable and bravest of professions.

Even in this thinly-populated area a band of more than twenty members and keen supporters has been gathered together in just a few months by Ian and his expanding team. One of the newcomers is a singer-songwriter who seems to know pretty much everyone who is anyone in the southern English folk music scene. We talk about him doing an album with Great White Records and about his songs, several of which were emailed to me at Barry’s earlier in the day.

One, ‘Sometimes On Rainy Days’, tells of when he was a boy and would sit at the kitchen table as his grandfather “an Englishman, so definitely English” would tell him of times long gone, and the empty darkness he felt when the “man of the blood red cross …. my hero and my friend” died. I wish I’d written the song, for I know exactly the experience and the feelings. But I don’t think I’d have done as well, and I look forward to hearing it and Barry’s others once they’re out on CD.

Among the other interesting and talented people at the meeting is a keen archer and longbow expert. He is a recent recruit but already, having heard a bit about the RWB, he’s hoping to bring some bows and other equipment and do a display at next year’s Family Festival. If only half of the improvements already being planned for next year come off the Ninth RWB is going to continue our tradition of perpetual improvement in style.

Next day we leave Hampshire and Dorset behind us, heading through the fine old market town of Dorchester and past the huge earth ramparts of the Iron Age hill fort of Maiden Castle to head north to Somerset. Apart from the rain, why anyone would want to par-boil on a beach holiday in Spain when they could spend the time discovering the hidden gems of a county like Somerset I cannot begin to comprehend.

Our host for this evening, Bernard, has an equestrian centre and is fund-holder for the new Bridgwater and South Somerset group. The farmhouse kitchen is bedecked with trophies, rosettes and photos of his daughter show-jumping.

Also heavily involved at the well-attended inaugural meeting is an old hand, Bruce Cowd, and the anti-road protester and Tinker’s Bubble rural collective co-founder Robert Baehr, who gives a quiet but passionate speech about how we each must strive to be worthy of this ancient and delicate land of ours. This is nationalism at its deepest level, almost of religious intensity and profoundly moving.

Regional organiser Mike Howson is also present (in a superbly restored Elizabethan farmhouse, now a smart inn, restaurant and meeting venue. Our room is dominated by an ornate plaster sculpture on the wall behind us). He and I have a brief talk about his continuing research on positive things to take to youngsters in areas where Community Observation Patrols of the type pioneered by his team are operating.

This project would be revolutionised – and would probably revolutionise us – with a ‘spare’ £30,000. There is so much we could do with even quite a small lump sum. The Telegraph recently referred to the £5,000,000 blown by UKIP in thoroughly futile election campaigns (£80,000 in one by-election alone) – over the last few years. Most of it given by a handful of well-meaning, patriotic millionaires and all of it down the drain. When oh when will one of these individuals – whose wealth would insulate them from any consequences other than a frisson of excited gossip in the County Set – put their money behind what they really believe and get themselves a place in the history books for having really made a difference?

The following morning we head for home, though only after a short detour to Glastonbury. No-one with a soul or the faintest glimmering of a sense of the other dimensions from which we mortals are excluded can fail to find something magical in Glastonbury and on the short steep walk up the Tor which is the defining sight of the Somerset Levels. Not even the occasional dreadlocked crusty hippy and the Americanised busker can spoil the atmosphere.

That atmosphere, furthermore, is changing subtly in our favour. When I first came here, some thirty years ago, the bookshops were full of Karl Marx – his dogmatic materialism at drastic odds with Glastonbury’s innate spirituality and Otherworldliness. Twenty years ago, the bloodstained creed of Marx was being washed away by Buddism and Native American shamanism. Ten years ago the shift was towards Earth Goddess feminism and Celtic mysticism.

These two are both still very strong, but the Anglo-Saxons are now creeping in among the New Age mumbo-jumbo. One of the shops has a big pile of the newly reprinted and still superb ‘Way of Wyrd’ by Brian Bates. One of the girls already in the shop is enthusing about it, though she rightly notes that the cover isn’t a patch on the first printing. Anyone who hasn’t read the ‘Way of Wyrd’, set in still mainly pagan Saxon England, won’t grasp just how important it is that trendy middle class ‘alternative’ types like this have discovered and love this book. But take it from me that it’s about ‘roots’ – and get hold of a copy while it’s still in print. The call of the blood can – and will – be stronger than globalist ideology.

More straws in the wind can be seen among the plethora of ‘alternative’ magazines on sale in the shops. The current Nexus, for example, has among the usual New Age crankery and Islamophile 9/11 conspiracy theories two serious political articles, ‘Economic hit men & the corporatocracy’ and one on the Bilderbergers. Namaste, meanwhile, contains articles by David Noakes and Brian Gerrish, the former UKIP high-flyers who have done more than anyone else to uncover and publicise the working of the sinister pro-EU Common Purpose cult.

The free-thinking ideological incoherence of New Ageism is becoming ever more pronounced, and much of what passes for analysis in its publications is in fact uncritically reproduced garbage. But once people get as far as being alive to issues such as the key role of the banks in modern capitalism, the essentially conspiratorial nature of the federal European project, and the reality of ‘elite’ organisations such as the Bilderbergers, and the evils of globalism in general, then they are just one more revelation away from becoming nationalists. The core Green slogan “think global, act local” is pregnant with principled and positive nationalism, not least because only the nation state has the power to resist the corporate takeover and rape of our cultures and our planet.

The slow, sub-conscious shift among sincere ‘green’ types towards the fundamentals of our nationalism is even further highlighted by the CDs from the brilliant West Country folk/folk rock band ‘Show of Hands’ that are on sale. I’ve been meaning to buy a copy of their album ‘Witness’ since being given a bootleg copy by an enthusiast some months back. Pirate CDs may help to build a band’s support base, but it isn’t fair – especially to the smaller groups which don’t get plugged on repulsive stations such as Radio One – to deny them the money they’ve earned with their time, effort and talent.

So I buy a copy and play it on the way north west over the Levels and towards the M5 (Steve Knightley, singer-songwriter extraordinaire, surely knows the road). Most of the tracks are non-political, my favourite, for those who already know the album and are curious, is ‘Undertow’.

Track 2, ‘Roots’, is one of the most powerfully politicising, nationalist tracks ever written. It’s politely put, but this is genuine ethnic English nationalism put over in a very accessible, modern way. It bemoans the way in which the English know no songs to sing when the professional music has been switched off at the end of a celebration, and it lays into the deracinated liberal elite who think that’s just great:

“And a Minister said his vision of Hell

Is three folk singers in a pub near Wells.

We’ll I’ve got a vision of urban sprawl

It’s pubs where no one ever sings at all,

And everyone stares at a great big screen –

Overpaid soccer stars and prancing teens,

Australian soap, American rap, estuary English, baseball caps.

And we learn to be ashamed before we walk

Of the way we look and the way we talk.

Without our stories or our songs

How will we know where we’ve come from?”

Indeed, which is why Great White Records and the Red-White-and-Blue may one day be understood to have been at least as important at this stage of our struggle as winning elections. These are early days on a long, long road and we’ll be more than glad of those songs and reviving traditions before we reach the end of it.

And then, to the right of the car on a sharp left bend a few miles away from Glastonbury, is a picturesque and slightly oddly proportioned medieval building, standing on its own in a lush green meadow on the edge of a village. Turn around, drive back, and stop for a proper look. The chance to discover little gems like this in out of the way places is really the only worthwhile ‘perk’ of this job.

Meare Fish House

The sign by the gate explains that this is Meare Fish House, built in the early 14^th century (just a couple of hundred years after the Norman Conquest, and well before the so-called Peasant’s Revolt - in fact a national rebellion in which the natives of south east England rose against their French-speaking overlords, and their lawyers, tax-eaters and imported labour - and began the long fight back for freedom and English identity). It housed the head fisherman overseeing Meare Pool, a huge shallow lake, up to five miles in circumference, which provided huge numbers of fish to Glastonbury Abbey. There was also a vineyard (but I must resist diversion into the problems with the man-made global warming theory).

5,000 eels were caught here each year, along with many other species. The fishery was recorded as long ago as 670 A.D., and King Alfred the Great must have enjoyed its produce, and indeed known it well, for the lake stretched almost to Wedmore, where he signed his Treaty with the defeated Danes after his long comeback from what at one time seemed like endless defeat.

The Meare was drained in the 17^th century and is now ‘just’ another part of the Somerset Levels, beautiful, especially when the distant hills are dappled with a mixture of sunshine, blue skies and clouds as they are today.

Looking north from the Fish House, across the site of the drained Meare.

The journey home then takes us onto the M5 and past the giant display of imported unemployment and industrial decline at the car import parks at Avonmouth docks. Then past Bristol and up to Malvern. I’ve arrange to meet Jackie there so that Martin can head on up to Leeds early and so we can spend some time together as she’s got a day off too.

We have a really well-made burger and salad on the terrace of a town pub (plus a pint of well-worth-trying White Bear, a wheat beer from a local brewery), over-looking miles and miles of Worcestershire and Warwickshire. Then we climb up onto the lower of the hills that overlook this quaint spa town. The view is even better from there, although we don’t have time to go to the higher point where a view pointer would show us which of the distant hills gave its name to Edgehill, the first battle of the English Civil War, or to look westwards into Wales.

Walking down with an icecream from the Victorian spring at St. Anne’s Well, a young dad also returning from the hilltop with his son greets me and shakes my hand. A Scot, he was a member of the party back in the nineties, when he lived in Islington. Now he’s a porter at a threatened cottage hospital in the country, and takes his lad walking during the summer holidays. He says that he keeps up with our progress on the Internet and I hope as we say goodbye that our meeting will kick him over into being a participant again, instead of merely a sympathetic spectator. (If you’re reading this, well met in any case, and well done for making the effort to bring the next generation up to appreciate this land of ours. Hope to see you and your family at next year’s RWB).

Home – my new wall and weather typical of this ‘summer’

Then it’s home, just as evening falls and another shower cloud skuds across the sky. About the only positive thing to say about this rotten summer is that the seemingly endless rain has helped to establish the plants (such as houseleek, red valerian and Welsh poppy) I built in or planted in pockets of soil on top of the dry stone wall that Richard and I built over a long weekend back in the Spring.

The latest such relaxation project (a change being as good as a rest) is an experimental cold-smoker. This truly hideous Heath Robinson contraption is at present smoking bulbs of home-grown garlic. Whether it works or not, I’ll tell you next time how it goes on – and show you the pictures that will explain why in either case I’m threatened with divorce if I make it a permanent fixture on the front yard!

Catching up

First, my sincere apologies for the long gap since a previous blog entry. There are three main reasons for this: First, things have been exceptionally busy in recent months and I really haven’t had time; second, during the BNP leadership election I felt that it might be unfair to exploit my access through the blog to so many members; third, I enjoy writing the blog too much. While it is undoubtedly a very effective communication tool, there is also a risk of it becoming time-consuming chatter and vanity, so I am very wary of making it too regular.

Dealing with the BNP Leadership election first, now that it is over I can say what could not decently be said during the contest: The challenge was not a genuinely legitimate one from a candidate with the genuine ability to run this party as it is, let alone take it further forward. It was a pathetic, pitiful, desperate attempt to cause trouble for the most modernised and most successful nationalist party in British history by a handful of cranks left over from the BNP’s most sterile past, aided and abetted by a gaggle of Hollywood Nazis, congenital losers and thieves.

I do not blame the candidate himself, save that he should have known better than to allow himself to be wound up and manipulated by such vermin. I’m certainly not going to kick him out for standing against me (for one thing, by giving the membership the chance to give me a 91% mandate to continue with our current direction, he’s unwittingly done the party a favour. For another, it was his democratic right to stand, and the right of others to sign his nomination papers, and no one can have any quarrel with that).

Why did the people pushing for the Charge of the Light Brigade challenge do so? A brief look at the different tendencies that came together is a valuable way of understanding what is going to happen over the next few months.

The first element was the handful of old John Tyndall loyalists who have never forgiven me for beating him in the leadership race of 1999. I respect their loyalty to their old friend, but he’s been dead several years now, the party he founded has never been stronger, and they must now either accept the status quo fully and get on board fully and constructively, or they must leave.

If they sincerely believe that the old Tyndall tactics and attitudes would be more successful than the way things have been done in recent years, then the proper home for them now is in the National Front. The NF has never given up marches, confrontations with the ‘Reds’ or demanding compulsory repatriation. It’s still ‘loyal’ to the old ways and still going nowhere, so it’s the right home for anyone who refuses to accept that the leadership election has given me and my team a huge mandate to carry on doing things differently.

The second element is even smaller – the handful of Tory nationalists whose call for an organisationally suicidal system by which party policies would be decided by vote of the entire membership (including bar-room patriots and the latest wave of naïve new recruits) was overwhelmingly rejected by our first Annual Conference of 2005, implicitly rejected again by the adoption of the Voting Membership system by our Conference of 2006, and now rejected again, this time by 91% of all our members voting on the issue.

This group must now accept that their scheme to put the destiny of the BNP in the hands of anyone who deigns to pay their membership has been comprehensively and permanently rejected, in favour of a system that gives power only to those who have earned it, and who continue to earn it. The argument is over, and anyone trying to raise it again against the repeatedly expressed will of the vast majority of the party will mark themselves out as a would-be saboteur and a candidate for expulsion.

Another element is best described as the conspiracy theory cranks. Yes, sadly we’ve still got a few of them and, thanks to the power of the Internet and selective observation to make strange theories appear superficially convincing, the odds are that we’ll always find a few of them cropping up. I declared war on these people and their insane and politically disastrous obsession with “the Jews” in a major article on the BNP site back in March 2006. Much of the mud-slinging directed against me in the run up to and during the leadership election has come from this small but Internet-noisy group.

There are two reasons for this hostility. First, my actual arguments in that article were incontrovertible – not one of the Judeo-Obsessives was able to produce an intellectually coherent response – but they are unable to adapt to real life and so are particularly full of hate towards me for pointing out the weakness of their position. Conspiracy theories are, by their very nature, more akin to religious faith than anything else, hence True Believers are prone to getting very upset when their Faith is challenged.

By the way, let me make it clear that I am not saying that conspiracies never occur, that Jewish and Christian Zionists around President Bush have not played a role in pushing for war in the Middle East, or that very powerful people do not engage in quasi-conspiratorial events such as Bilderberg meetings and Common Purpose cadre creation. I am merely challenging the belief that history and current events can be genuinely explained by all-powerful conspiracies, whether by Learned Elders, the Masons or giant lizards disguised as members of the Royal Family. It’s mostly hogwash, the paranoia of the powerless.

The second reason for the Judeo-Obsessive attack on me and the modern BNP is that their small and incestuous circles of crackpots are absolutely riddled with the paid informants and provocateurs of hard-left organisations such as Searchlight. And these sad traitors are continually pressed by their paymasters to feed as much politically suicidal anti-Semitism and crankery into the bloodstream of the nationalist movement, because it makes it so much easier for the liberal-left to demonise us and frighten off the general public.

A wooly aside

I had to break off at this point to deal with one of those eccentric crises that don’t happen in ‘normal’ families. Elen had been to feed our three cade lambs (with commercial feed nuts, the orphans have been weaned off their bottles for months now). Only two appeared so she went in search of the missing one, only to find it slumped in a corner, very sorry for itself. I go to take a look and, as I expected, the problem is fly-strike.

This is a truly revolting and, unless treated promptly, fatal problem. Blow-flies lay their eggs around the tail of the unfortunate sheep, which is then literally eaten alive. This one isn’t too bad yet, so Richard and I catch him and clip off some of the wool with hand shears (slowly and badly, I have to admit). We soon decide that too big an area of wool is full of eggs just waiting to hatch and join the maggots already eating their way through our future Sunday lunches and winter stews.

So we drive the patient to a neighbouring farmer, who shears the rear third of the sheep (first year lambs are not big enough for cold nights to be shorn) to clear all the fly-struck area. Then we pour on a good dose of a particularly unpleasant insecticide – I’d rather be organic in this, but nothing ‘natural’ will work anything like as well against one of Nature’s more cruel ways.

Then we catch and lightly hand-clip the other two, as a precaution. The patient proper looks confused and indignant, so should survive with a bit of luck. A good job we were home, as another day and that would have been that.

Back to politics

Returning to the political thread above, the deliberate manipulation and encouragement of extremism and anti-Semitism is a theme which always emerges whenever a Searchlight mole is exposed. The latest of these is a young BNP candidate in Luton by the name of Chris Brennan, who was for months at the centre of various attempts to set good local activists against each other, to spread lies about the party leadership, and to encourage ‘hard line’ rhetoric. Fortunately Brennan made the mistake of corresponding with Gerry Gable & Co from an email account set up for him by a BNP loyalist, so we were able to see precisely what he was doing, and to put an end to his little game.

I accept that a fair few conspiracy mongers do so in all sincerity, but that doesn’t make them any the less potentially damaging to our Cause. Hence this tendency also must either leave or accept the position as it will be from henceforth:

They are perfectly entitled to believe whatever they want to believe, and to discuss their beliefs privately with others already of like mind. But they are not to go posting their fancies online where every hostile journalist in the world can harvest their rantings and use them as sticks with which to beat the BNP. They are not to spout their theories at meetings, either as officials or from the floor. They are not to write to local newspapers about how Muslim terror bombings are ‘really’ the work of MI5 or the Mossad. And they are not to pour their personal opinions into the ears of new or young activists.

There certainly are strange and unpleasant things that go on in the realms of big business, high finance and world politics, but I’ve seen conspiracy theories drive good people almost literally mad, and have seen far too many potentially good new recruits driven away altogether by well-meaning individuals who make themselves – and us - look ridiculous to normal people.

As a matter of fact, even if the Queen and Prince Philip really were eight foot high alien lizards in disguise, that little known ‘fact’ would be so unacceptably bizarre to the 99.9% of the population that we would still have to ignore it and pretend that everything in the world is as the mainstream media says it is, since to do otherwise – even when in possession of incontrovertible truth, is a recipe for marginalisation and impotence. An effective political alternative always has to lead the more alert sections of the masses, but to lead effectively it is essential not to get too far ahead of those whom one would lead.

So that’s enough conspiracy talk – both in this blog and in our Movement as a whole.

Tall tales laid to rest

One final point about the leadership election, and then we’ll move on. Even the relatively short campaign unleashed a tidal wave of anti-Griffin fantasy tales and black propaganda. The two particularly big lies which hit the mainstream media are therefore worth dealing with:

Sadly, neither the BNP, nor me, have – or ever were going to have – any land in Croatia. We were offered a share in the profits for the party if we could provide the contacts needed to develop land there inherited by a long-term party supporter, and on that basis myself and several others made a brief exploratory visit. As it happens, for various reasons we concluded that the project was probably a non-starter, so that’s the end of that.

I do recommend Croatia as a cheap and friendly holiday destination, but when I retire (early, I hope) I’m after a cottage with a large vegetable garden in Wales or England.

Second, the allegation that the income and expenditure of the Trafalgar Club does not appear in the BNP’s accounts. Of course it does, every single penny, and those who say otherwise are either deliberately lying or are woefully ignorant of the workings and rules of the Electoral Commission, which would quite legitimately and properly have hung us out to dry several years ago if the T.C. wasn’t whiter than white and firmly in the sights of our own treasury department, the independent auditors, their professional scrutiny body and the Commission itself. The Trafalgar Club is simply one of the very useful, wholly integral, parts of the BNP’s central fund-raising machine, and all its financial transactions, both in and out, are therefore included in the central accounts.

A few people believe that it is possible to be a loyal BNP member and still associate with the proscribed extremist fringe who spread such lies. It is not. So now is the time to decide between the party and the cranks. We only have a few proscriptions against association with dangerous groups or deeply unsavoury individuals, but those proscriptions will be enforced. If that leads to squeals about a ‘purge’ that’s fine by me. Whenever something nasty drops into the toilet, it’s going to get flushed away.

Cohesion, principles and the future

A copy of the latest ‘Notes From the Borderland’ arrives through the post. This is roughly an annual magazine, produced by a hardcore, but generally honest (though often confused!) leftist/green named Larry O’Hara. A good two-thirds of it is always taken up with the left-wing version of conspiracy mania (everything’s the work of CIA and MI5 spooks) but the rest contains a few good points.

O’Hara regards himself as diametrically opposed to the BNP, though the truth is that if he only work out that mass immigration is more than anything else a capitalist ‘conspiracy’ to import cheap labour and extra consumers, he’d actually make quite a useful recruit.

I am reliably informed that he is an avid reader of my articles, and he has certainly taken careful note of what is being written and done within the BNP to move it from being a one-man dictatorship into a cadre-based movement. As he writes:

“Creating ideologically committed BNP members, thereby guarding against swamping by Tory populists, is behind the recent changes in BNP membership structure. Griffin doesn’t want a party full of Tory populists because BNP strategy is predicated on seizing opportunities that may be provided by economic and social collapse, prior to which organisational cohesion is more important than popular support. If such integrity is not maintained then the ‘unique selling point’ distinguishing the BNP from right-wing Tories will have collapsed. While Griffin’s critics on the right think this has already happened, as somebody who has been following his career for 25 years I can assure you it hasn’t.”

Indeed! And what neither he nor anyone else has been told up until now is that the move to put the party in the hands of a Voting Membership activist elite is only just beginning, and due to take several steps further forward this Autumn. The next stage will be centred on three points:

1. To create for the Voting Membership at Annual Conference effective powers of scrutiny over all central party finances. While the oversight imposed by the Electoral Commission and their auditing requirements already makes the BNP the most financially transparent and properly regulated nationalist organisation in British political history, creating scrutiny powers for the Voting Membership will reinforce this position;

2. To transfer to the Voting Members the key failsafe powers over the leader and leadership elections at present vested in the Advisory Council and deputy Chairman. When I created those powers they were a first step away from the primitive and dictatorial constitution that I had inherited, but having failsafe powers to deal with an insane or corrupt leader vested in the hands of people effectively appointed by that leader was always far from perfect.

The maturity shown by the Voting Membership at the Blackpool conference last year has, however, proven that the time has now come to entrust that body with more power. It is therefore my intention to propose, as part of a constitutional revamp, the abolition of the post of Deputy Chairman, and the transfer of that position’s power to the VMs, and the transfer or duplication of the Advisory Council’s oversight powers likewise to the Voting Membership.

By one of those strange coincidences that is probably nothing of the sort, Scott McLean, who has held the Deputy Chairmanship responsibility as a steady rock for seven years now, called me a week before the RWB and told me that he is stepping down from the position, and from the Advisory Council. He explained that he needs to concentrate on with a very hectic business and family life without the BNP Sword of Damocles poised to fall on his head at a moment’s notice without any warning.

I thank Scott for his loyalty, patience and trust and wish him all the very best for the future. But while I am very sorry to see him take such a back seat, I am glad that the proposed constitutional change which will (if approved in due course by the membership) abolish the post of Deputy Chairman, will not involve stripping a position from someone who wants it and might take being removed badly.

3. To step up the level of ideological training for VMs. Those who have read his magnum opus, The March of the Titans, or who joined the well deserved standing ovation he received for his speech at this year’s Red-White-and-Blue, will be pleased to hear that this is one of the jobs entrusted to Arthur Kemp. A Rhodesian by birth, he served in the South African military for four years, before going on to work as a journalist, political organiser and risk consultant, Arthur is a highly skilled and very welcome addition to our central team. I am delighted to have been able to bring him on board and hope he will be with us throughout the years of decision ahead of us.

The daily grind

Working out a role for Arthur is only one of a host of pretty much behind-the-scenes organisational jobs that have helped to keep me busy in recent months. I’ll return to the subject to look at what’s being done with independent nationalist groups such as the Association of British Ex-Service Personnel (ABEX), the Christian Council of Britain and Solidarity in a future blog. Suffice it for now to say that a lot of good foundation work is getting done. An explanation of the rational behind such bodies is provided in my article in August’s Identity, which several subscribers have already told me they consider to be a particularly important piece.

On top of such work there have been the usual meetings, both one-off evening events and full-scale tours of the North East, South West and Essex. The North East trip was the busiest, the South West perhaps the most enjoyable. Walking through a small Cornish fishing port I was stopped by a delighted BNP member on holiday from Birmingham, and the proprietor of the B&B we stayed in on the one night when we weren’t in members’ homes announced that he’d voted for us in the last European elections.

One of several south West trips in recent months also produced an interesting and publicity-grabbing session in Bath, where an invitation to speak to a group of university students was in the end withdrawn after pressure from 1968-vintage leftist lecturers. A small open-air meeting with nearly a dozen students nevertheless did go ahead, despite a belated appearance by a group of ultra-left freaks. The pink haired lesbian was frankly a little scary, but problems were avoided and the opposition presence merely added to our profile.

I also had to make a flying visit to the North East to plan and work on our campaign in the Sedgefield by-election. Eddy Butler and Mark Collett joined me and local activists to plan the campaign, which we explained right from the start was partly being run in a not particularly promising seat with the intention of ‘debugging’ our parliamentary by-election plans. Several bugs did indeed emerge, and hence will not bother us again. To have achieved that, and secured the highest ever BNP parliamentary by-election result to date was a major achievement. The Elections, Publicity and Treasury Departments did everything they could in a very short space of time and all the activists who helped as well can be very well pleased with the result.

While in the constituency we popped round to see if Tony Blair was at home. The answer was ‘no’, and none of the locals we talked to believe that he (or more to the point, Cherie) will want to set foot in the place again now there’s no money in it for them. Nevertheless, the unfortunate British taxpayer is still paying for the permanent armed police guards based in the gatehouse. Adam Walker, one of the newly expanded Solidarity Executive and a very hard-working BNP activist, is shown here being his usual cheeky self.

A bit of time off

Just before the early summer rains started, Jackie and I snatched a couple of days away. We spent a whole day in Stratford-on-Avon, doing all the tourist sites associated with William Shakespeare.

Interestingly (and frankly irritatingly, when the idea is to get away from it all) the Griffin recognition factor is higher than usual – among the Brits, that is, the gaggles of elderly Americans and young Japanese don’t count in such matters). I guess that it’s because the kind of person who makes an implicitly English nationalist cultural pilgrimage to such a place is unusually aware of the value of our heritage and, as a direct result, on average more aware of the threats to that heritage against which we warn and strive.

This theory was heartily endorsed at a meeting in the South West a month or so later, when a chap from |Plymouth came up to me and reminded me that he had been one of the several sympathisers who had said hello to us in Stratford that day. It’s a small world.

Incidentally, one of the exhibits in Stratford highlights the way in which the Victorians sought to fillet out of Shakespeare much of the bawdy sexual humour. The vicar mainly responsible, a Rev. Bowdler, even gave his name to the concept of a safely neutered work of art – it is described as “Bowdlerised”.

Anyone who believes that such pettiness and censorship are now in the past will be disabused of such a happy notion by a walk through the sculpture field behind Ann Hathaway’s cottage. There you will find a section of one of Shakespeare’s classic speeches – by John Of Gaunt in Richard II. Take a look at the photo of the stone here, and then compare it with the original to see a classic example of modern Bowdlerisation as un-PC sentiments vanish down the Memory Hole:

This royal throne of kings, this scepter'd isle,
This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars,
This other Eden, demi-paradise,
This fortress built by Nature for herself
Against infection and the hand of war,
This happy breed of men, this little world,
This precious stone set in the silver sea,
Which serves it in the office of a wall,
Or as a moat defensive to a house,
Against the envy of less happier lands,
This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England,
This nurse, this teeming womb of royal kings,
Fear'd by their breed and famous by their birth

“There wasn’t enough space for the whole speech”, would no doubt be the excuse, but look again at line ten in particular for the real reason. Ann’s cottage itself was in the final stages of being rethatched. I took the picture across the vegetables and flowers of the lovingly recreated garden, just as the thatchers were trimming the edges of the new roof. Thatching is always a pleasure to watch, the more so when on such a deeply historic building. This is the real, deep England at its best. The foreign visitors clearly appreciate it, but I don not for one moment believe that it speaks to them as it does to us. As I say in my RWB speech, we made this land, and it made us.

Another great RWB

Another year, another Red-White-and-Blue. As those who joined the crowds with us at the charmingly English new site in Derbyshire found out, the summer finally turned up right on time. A glorious weekend and a triumph of organisation by Dave Shapcott and his planning and build up team.

The overseas guests in attendance – from Sweden, Germany and the USA – were all ‘gobsmacked’ by the sheer scale and professionalism of the event, and by the huge number of babies, children and teenagers joining in and making the fun. The boss of the fairground rides also commented on our youngsters, describing them as the best behaved and most polite they’ve ever come across anywhere in Britain. One of the senior police officers involved gave another welcome compliment as well, describing the whole event as “the best organised festival I’ve ever seen.” Praise indeed.

Of course, we’re well aware that there are still many things to be improved or introduced, and the RWB planning team are already working on these. The date for RWB 2008 has already been set: Friday 15th to Sunday 17th August, the nearest weekend to the full moon which both adds something to the evenings and also provides townies and especially their young children with some background light for their couple of country nights. Please make a note of the date when booking holidays, weddings and the like. With next year being the 9th RWB Family Festival it will be a dress rehearsal for the Tenth, which is going to be something really special. I hope very much to see you all at both.