BNP Nick Griffin in a tight spot...

...as he's confronted by campaigners from Searchlight and Hope Not Hate over that little incident last week when two BNP councillors got themselves into a street brawl, being the legitimate politicians that they are. Watch his fat face when he realises he's not going to wriggle his way out of this one!

Nick, looks like your horrible little party is once again revealing itself to be nothing more than a pitiful gang of racist scumbag thugs. The election results from Barking appear to suggest the country is realising this, too.

Twelve points from Griffindor!

According to the BBC, the British National Party have lost all twelve of the seats they previously held on Barking and Dagenham Council.

So stick that up your fat Nazi arse.

This is a clear message to the party and its leader Nick Griffin, who was comprehensively defeated by Labour's Margaret Hodge (54.3% to 14.6%) in this constituency where he hoped to find sufficient support to enable him to take the BNP's first Parliamentary seat, that they are not wanted by the British people.

It's also more proof that, anywhere people fall for all the lies and give the BNP any sort of power, they rapidly discover the truth and waste no time in getting rid of them as soon as they possibly can.

Will Nick and the BNP finally realise they're destined to always be a marginal party, supported by nutters and loathed by the majority? Will they, as a result, crawl back under the stone where they rightfully belong? I doubt it - but this confirmation gives the rest of us reason to be cheerful.

Jewish BNP candidate stands in Epping

The Jewish Chronicle's article "Election 2010:Jewish candidates await the results" includes a list of "other key Jewish constituencies to watch" - one of which is Epping in Essex.

A very brief bit of research reveals that candidate Patricia Feldman Richardson is - apparently - ethnically Jewish, though she does not practise the faith.

The BNP's Jewish candidate Pat Richardson

Image from Hope Not Hate.

Now, we sincerely hope that Jewish readers of Acid Rabbi are not the types to vote for someone simply because they're Jewish. However, politicians are well aware that there are people out there who pick which candidate's going to get their X on the ballot paper according to such criteria as how attractive the candidate is, whether or not they dress well and, indeed, their religious and/or ethnic background. What politicians won't admit - because it'd make them look elitist and lose votes - but we will is, basically, quite a high percentage of the population are not all that bright. In fact, we'd even go so far as to say quite a lot of people are thick as shit.

With that in mind, anyone from Epping tempted to vote for Ms. Richardson simply on account of her ethnoreligious status should think carefully before doing so, as a quick look at the ballot paper will reveal she's standing for the extreme right British National Party - and the BNP who are certainly no friends to us Jews, no matter how often party leader Nick Griffin claims to no longer deny the Holocaust. Nor, for that matter, how many times Ms. Richardson says the party is neither antisemitic nor racist.

Since 2009, Richardson has been leader of the BNP on Epping's council and during that time the group has campaigned against Muslim prayer groups. Jews, throughout the millennia that we have existed, have been subject many times to attempts to prevent us practising our faith and so it is our duty to protect other people's right to practise their own.

The BNP are a group so hungry for power that they will say just about anything if they think they might get a few votes out of it. In Britain today, that means claiming not to be racist - "racism" is a dirty word, and even those who admit to such beliefs are frequently apologetic when doing so ("Well, I'm sorry but I do think they're just over here to claim benefits..." "I know I shouldn't say this, but if I see a black man in the street at night..."). However, "Islamophobia" is not - following the terrorist attacks in New York, London and other places, British Muslims have been demonised in very much the same way that we were at various times in our history and the BNP are taking advantage of that by using people's fears to advance their racist ideology by stealth.

Remember Pastor Martin Niemöller's famous poem about the inactivity of German intellectuals allowing the Nazis to rise to power?

THEY CAME FIRST for the Communists,
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Communist.

THEN THEY CAME for the Jews,
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew.

THEN THEY CAME for the trade unionists,
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a trade unionist.

THEN THEY CAME for me
and by that time no one was left to speak up.

It still rings true today - the only difference being we've moved a few notches up the scale as the fascists have identified new enemies.

THEY CAME FIRST for the Muslims,
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Muslim.

THEN THEY CAME for the Poles,
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Pole.

THEN THEY CAME for the Africans,
and I didn't speak up because I was not an African.

You can be certain that, if the BNP achieved power and removed Islam from Britain, they'd pretty soon move onto their next target. It might be Poles, or it could be Africans, or it could be homosexuals. However, sooner or later - no matter how many other groups were targeted first - it'd be our turn, because the ultimate aim of the BNP is and has always been a Britain populated solely by white, Anglo-Saxon BNP supporters.

Pat Richardson may be ethnically Jewish, but that's no guarantee that her party is not antisemitic. Her membership and position on the party, in fact, seems a calculated attempt by the group's leadership to prove that the BNP is not antisemitic - she may be convinced the BNP is not antisemitic but would they retain her, do you think, if antisemitism was as widespread among the general population to whom the party is trying to appeal as it is among its members? Poor Ms. Richardson is yet another victim of the cynical BNP's lies.

Make sure you don't fall for them too - and if you live in Epping, don't vote for Pat Richardson even if a candidate's ethnicity is the best reason you can think of to vote for them. There are far, far better reasons to vote against her.

BNP to LibDems? WTF?

Not too far from Acid Rabbi Towers is a house that, during the European Elections last year, had a BNP poster displayed in its window. Mrs. Rabbi, who walks past the house daily, regularly sees the man who lives there and so we know for a fact that the man who put up the BNP poster is still living there.

Today I walked past and guess what? He has a big Liberal Democrat poster on display. Explain that if you can.

We have no BNP candidate standing here, so he wouldn't have been able to vote for them anyway - but nevertheless, if you have any belief in the BNP and their extreme right wing policies, you're unlikely to pick the central left LibDems as an alternative so what could possibly have caused such a seismic shift in one man's opinions?

If it was Nick Clegg's performance in last week's Leaders' Debate, then Mr. Clegg can be assured he achieved something in this election even if he's not the Prime Minister by May the 7th because convincing even one individual not to vote for the fascists is worthy of praise.

One thing that does still concern us is that the ex-BNP supporter also has a Status Quo poster in his window (which seems a peculiar mix). While opposing everything the BNP say and do, we respect the right of each member of the electorate in this democratic nation to support any political party they choose - but try as we might, we can see no excuse whatsoever for liking Quo.

BNP ballot box worries

We suppose when the vast majority of people hate you and everything you stand for - as is, thankfully, still the case for the extreme right-wing British National Party - it's easy to slip into a paranoid persecution complex. Having said that, paranoia is not always an imagined fear, of course. In the BNP's case their worries are very real and leader Nick Griffin knows it - he wouldn't last five minutes on Britain's streets without his security and that's why a phalanx of large, stocky men accompany him wherever he goes. Precisely why the vitriol spat at him from all quarters isn't enough to make him realise that his particular brand of hate-fuelled politics is in direct opposition to everything the British electorate hold dear is a mystery. Maybe he took one too many punches to the head whilst boxing at Cambridge, or maybe he's just a nasty fascist scumbag who is so desperate for any sort of power he carries on in blissful ignorance.

"We know it happens. We just can't prove it," says BNP spokesman John Walker, refusing to admit the reason the BNP don't get many votes is because they're a bunch of Nazi thugs and anyone with any sense hates them.

News came last week that Nick and his Nazis are so concerned that the British establishment and Labour Party will scupper their chances of electoral success (they're forgetting that British values and revulsion at racist politics will do that) that they've invoked the Ballot Act of 1872 which gives candidates the right to place their own seals on ballot boxes in addition to the official ones in order to prevent shadowy figures from opening them up and stealing votes for parties with which they disagree.

John Walker, a BNP spokesman, says that vote tampering has taken place in the past. "We know it happens. We just can't prove it," he claims, which rather reminds us of an LSD casualty who thinks aliens are trying to abduct them - they can't see that the reason they can't prove it is because it's not really happening.

Erm, are you forgetting something here, BNP guys and gals? We're the democrats - we believe in free elections and all that. We don't do vote rigging like you fascists. Anyway, we don't have to - the British people enjoy civil freedoms and have a long history of tolerance and multiculturalism, which means you'll never get the power you crave. For that reason, BNP seals on ballot boxes are a good thing - come the General Election, when you yet again fail to get an MP, you won't be able to pretend it's due to fraud. When that happens, you'll hopefully finally get the message and crawl back under your stones.

Let's keep Griffin and the BNP where we can watch them

Well, well, well. Didn't Nick Griffin do well on Question Time last night? Of course, when I say "do well," I mean he did well for us rather than for him and his disgraceful little band of bigots - he revealed himself as the poisonous idiot that he is.

BNP leader Nick Griffin, probably not listening to the latest Wu Tang Clan album.

For those who didn't see it (like, where were you?! See it right after reading this by clicking the Question Time link in the paragraph above), a large part of the show went something like this: David Dimbleby: "Mr. Griffin, how do you explain your comments concerning X, in which you stated that X is evil/unBritish/etc.?" Griffin: "Oh no, no, no. I never said that. The newspapers and the BBC said I did, bit I didn't." Dimbleby: "But Mr. Griffin - it's on video. There is a record proving you said it." Griffin: "Er...oh yeah. I did say it. [ridiculous smirk, possibly intended to look charmingly boyish but actually looking more like the exagerrated facial expressions of a man who realises he's being made to look like a fool]."

Time and time again, Griffin vomited up the revolting rhetoric we expect of him and his ilk, and time and time again the main party guests used the most effective weapon that those of us who oppose the BNP's policies have - they simply replied with cold, hard, logical common sense and facts. It works like a charm - nothing the BNP say can survive this sort of attack. Every single one of their arguments withers and dies if there's even the merest whiff of intelligent, empirical reasoning in the air.

Acid Rabbi was pleased that the BBC allowed Griffin a platform last night, despite the widespread attempts to stop them so doing. Not because of the right to free speech; which, it seems to me, should apply only to those who support such a right (Griffin, like all fascists, does not - he would prefer to silence those with viewpoints different to his own, and in doing so forfeits his right to that freedom), but because we need to keep these people out in the open where we can keep an eye on them. Did the National Front conveniently vanish in the 1980s after the Anti-Nazi League and other groups responded in physical terms? Unfortunately not - they just retreated underground where they festered for a few years and - once they'd had time to recover up they popped like the weeds that take over your lawn every summer. Many of them had decided to change their name, adopting that of 1960s far-right movement the British National Party and remain with that title to this day but they were the same old racist, homophobic, anti-semitic and, despite their own claims, anti-British Nazis that they always had been. Keep them where we can see them - and, what's more, it's much easier to attack someone when they're where Mr. Griffin was last night - a person on a podium is a very easy target.

There were some worries that the show's audience would be taken over by BNP supporters, but this did not happen - rather surprisingly, because Griffin likes to have a few big men backing him up at all times. There were one or two, of course, but all in all it represented British society rather well. OK, a million people voted BNP in the last elections and that's a million too many. But there are 49,138,831 people in England alone. 11,132,847 of those are children. So assume there are around 38,005,984 adults able to vote - whether they do or not is a different matter - and we can see that far from being currently on the crest of a wave of popular support, only around 1 in every 40 people voted BNP (many of these people are probably not even racists - some will have voted BNP as a protest vote against the main parties and some may have fallen for the BNP's lies when it claims to be a democratic party that represents the nation's best interests). There is, after all, a big difference between voting BNP and being a member of the BNP - far more than is the case with the other parties (they have a total of members. If the BNP really spoke for the country's best interests, surely 11,560more than 0.02% of the population would scrape up the £30 a year it costs to join?). The audience at the very least approximately reflected this, and it shows that Griffin's attempts today to write off Question Time as no more than a "Let's all bash Nick Griffin" event is rubbish. It was not a carefully-planned exercise aimed at discrediting him - simply yet more evidence that if you take a random cross section of British society, the majority will have passionately anti-racist views.

The BNP have around 50 councillors at the moment, but it's interesting that those areas which elect BNP representatives very rarely do so twice. Perhaps it only takes a bit of apathy, one election with a low turn-out, for the BNP to get in - but once they are, the local electorate get rid of them again as soon as they have the chance. Maybe sometimes a sufficient number of people get fed up with the main parties' failings that they decide to vote BNP - but again, once they've had some experience of what life is like when the BNP get any power, they soon turf the fascists out again. This is reflected in the party's membership lists, which were once again laid bare for all to inspect this week following the appearance of a leaked one online (that's right - another one): of the twenty constituencies with BNP members, only four recorded an increase in member figure between the end of 2007 and April 2009 . With these facts in mind, it seems obvious that the BNP have very little real support, far less than Mr. Griffin tries to convince both himself and the world in general, and the only chance they ever have of getting into power is when people who are not BNP supporters vote for them. I'll bet a fiver that both Griffin himself and Andrew Brons lose their European Parliament seats in the 2014 EU election.

Let's keep Mr. Griffin right where we can see him so we all know what he really stands for. That way, his nasty gang of racist thugs will have to rely on the very limited numbers of true supporters they have. They won't get the message that they're not wanted and go away, unfortunately, but we will at least know that here in Britain, with its liberal, tolerant, multi-cultural, welcoming and above all decent society, they will never get the power they crave.

BNP beats up man outside pub?

Here's an interesting story. The BBC report that David Drew, the MP for Stroud, says that British National Party supporters gave a man "one hell of a hiding" after spilled beer on party leader Nick Griffin.

Nick Griffin - with some beer. We hope that it was only St***a Ar***s that was thrown over him - we'd hate to think of nice beer being wasted on a neo-Nazi.
Image from Wikipedia, used in accordance with Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 2.0 license.

According to Deputy Leader Simon Darby, Mr. Griffin and guests were having a meal in the pub when an unnamed man spilled beer on him. Both Mr. Drew and Mr. Darby agree that there was an altercation in the pub and the man was asked to leave by the landlord, but at this point the stories differ. Mr. Drew says that the man was then taken out of the pub and beaten up by the holocaust denier's supporters, while Mr. Darby says that the man then lay in wait outside where he threw the beer over Mr. Griffin, at which point he was "restrained by our [the BNP's] security because he had a glass in his hand..." Mr. Drew is "trying to distort and warp the situation," he claims, adding that the party "have yet to decide whether to report it to the police." Notice the difference in the two stories over when the beer was spilled - was it in the pub, resulting in the man being ejected, or outside the pub as Mr. Darby claims? Was beer spilled twice, and if so why hasn't Mr. Darby emphasised this, if only to make his version of events watertight?

Hmm. Definitely worth keeping an eye on. Mr. Griffin is always, when in public, accompanied by group of rather large and tough-looking men: "I am not prepared to accept that any politician has a private army," Mr. Darby says. Bodyguards are one thing - even we would agree that Mr. Griffin - who is most certainly more likely to be attacked or even killed than most of us - has the right to exist, even if we do hate everything that he and his party stand for; but if it is shown that they really did give the man "a hiding" rather than merely restrained him to prevent injury, it shoots rather a noticeable hole in their claims to be a legitimate, democratic party.

There is no mention of whether or not the unnamed man is also considering pressing charges. If he does, however, it may well be the case that he has witnesses. If he does and the BNP do not, it will be very hard to believe Mr. Darby's claims. Like we say - worth keeping an eye on.