Kaczynski killed

Polish president and co-founder - with his twin brother Jaroslaw Kaczynski - of the "traditionalist Catholic" right-wing Polish Prawo i Sprawiedliwosc party Lech Kaczynski, was killed this morning at 6.56 GMT when the Tupolev aircraft he was flying in crashed into trees near Smolensk in Russia. At the time of writing the crash is said to have claimed 96 lives, many of them PiS figures, though Russian reports have put the death toll at 130.

Lech Kaczynski, 18th of June 1949 - 10th of April 2010.

Image from Wikipedia, used in accordance with GNU Free Documentation licence.

Prawo i Sprawiedliwosc, as regular readers of this 'ere blog will know, is one of the groups with which the British Conservative Party in Europe has allied itself under David Cameron's leadership by becoming part of the European Conservatives and Reformists (which also includes the SS-glorifying Latvian LNNK party) - the cause of much controversy due to the Polish group's rather dubious history which has seen them accused of homophobia and antisemitism. Whilst mayor of Warsaw, Lech banned a gay rights march and then allowed a "Parade of Normality" - a fact that led former Minister for Europe Denis MacShane to accuse the Tories of having links "with gay-bashing homophobes." Jaroslaw, meanwhile, has claimed that homosexuality "will cause the downfall of civilisation" and another PiS member said that President Obama's election would spell "the end of the civilisation of the white man."

Gordon Brown, who has been busy in his native Scotland trying to talk people into voting for him, took a break from the campaign trail to express his condolences. "I think the whole world will be saddened and in sorrow as a result of the tragic death in a plane crash or President Kaczynski," he said. David Cameron said that Kaczynski "...always stood up for his beliefs..."

The whole world, except those who don't share Kaczynski and his loathesome party's revolting homophobic and racist beliefs, may well be saddened but please forgive those of us who are unable to regret the loss of such an unpleasant and dangerous man.

Tory MEP Edward McMillan-Scott gets the boot

A row between Conservative MEPs, who are no doubt fighting over who gets what after joining the European Parliament two days ago much like school children fight over who gets the best desk in the classroom (and, amusingly, trying to sit as far away as possible from - the two most unpopular boys in the class - the British National Party's Nick Griffin and Andrew Brons), has resulted in the disciplining of Edward McMillan-Scott.

Edward McMillan-Scott has been disciplined after having the nerve to oppose Conservative party rule which would have forced him to make way for far-right PiS member Michal Kaminski. Good man - and that's not a thing we often have the opportunity to say when discussing a Tory.

As the Tories' longest-serving MEP Mr. McMillan-Scott represents Yorkshire and the Humber, as does ex-member of the openly neo-Nazi National Socialist Movement Mr. Brons. Conservative group leader Timothy Kirkhope had ordered Tory MEPs to make way for Polish Michal Kaminski in the vote for vice-president. However, he disobeyed his leader's command and stood against Kaminski which has led to the removal of his whip.

Michal Kaminski is Warsaw's MEP and a member of the Prawo i Sprawiedliwość party, an organisation widely considered racist, homophobic, sexist and anti-semitic.

McMillan-Scott has been an MEP for a quarter of a century and was leader of the Conservatives in Europe in the past. It is widely considered that he will decline to stand in the next European elections, which may have given him more confidence to oppose party rule. He has expressed his concerns over the Conservatives' decision to make allies of those he terms "extreme rightwingers" - under the command of party leader David Cameron, the Tory MEPs - much to their own worry and dismay in some cases - have joined the European Conservatives and Reformists; an alliance which also lists Kaminski's controversial Prawo i Sprawiedliwosc party among its members and which has become notorious for its racist, sexist, homophobic and anti-semitic views and policies. That Mr. Cameron has chosen a party of that type over the more moderate, centre-left conservatives Angela Merkel of Germany and Nicholas Sarkozy of France makes his recent efforts to tranform the British Conservatives' image into that of a caring, sharing, non-racist, non-homophobic party look rather false.

"Despite what David Cameron has said there are already indications that some of the members have links with extremist groups and I feel very, very uncomfortable with that," says Mr. McMillan-Scott. He's not the only one - many people in Britain must surely be wondering about some of Mr. Cameron's chosen bedfellows, especially Prawo i Sprawiedliwosc chairman Jaroslaw Kaczynski who is on record claiming that "the affirmation of homosexuality will lead to the downfall of civilization. We can't agree to it."

Kaczynski's identical twin brother Lech, who is now the Polish president, is also a member of the PiS. During his time as Mayor of Warsaw, he banned a gay rights parade but permitted a homophobic "parade of normality." Very odd people for modern, accepting, anti-discrimination Mr. Cameron to want to have anthing to do with, don't you think? You could almost end up suspecting that he's no different to the prejudiced Tories of old and all he has said in support of equal rights is no more than a cynical and deceitful ploy to attract more votes.

For all his undoubted and rapier-like wily skills as a politician and popularist David Cameron seems oddly unaware that, just like all of us, he will be judged by the company he keeps. Or is he a fascist in liberal clothing?

It looks as though Messrs. Cameron and Kirkhope may have shot themselves in the foot somewhat, however, because Mr. McMillan-Scott was voted in as an independent vice-president regardless, whereas Kaminski failed to win a post which leaves the Conservatives and Reformists as the only group without a vice-president. If he now chooses to leave them, the alliance will slide from being the fourth to the fifth largest group in the EU Parliament.

That Mr. McMillan-Scott has been successful while taking a stance opposed to the far-right and extremism is clear evidence that that type of politics does not enjoy the support that many proponents of similar ideology believe. This is very much the case in Britain as well as in Europe, where despite the success of Nick Griffin and Andrew Brons in the recent elections, the vast majority did not and will not vote for their party. If David Cameron is genuinely the figurehead of a newly inclusive and humane strain of Conservatism he will need to make a real effort to demonstrate the truth of what he says; because his actions are liable to create suspicion that he hasn't been straight with us and to give the impression that he's no more than an unpleasant racist, homophobic Tory of the type he's trying hard to convince us all is now extinct.

Let Mr. McMillan-Scott know of your support for his opposition to dangerous far-right extremists by e-mailing him: edward.mcmillan-scott@europarl.europa.eu

BNP failing in Europe already

British National Party leader Nick Griffin has been travelling back and forth from Brussels ever since his election as an MEP, trying his best to find enough like-minded members to form a bloc of far-right MEPs so that he can take a central role within it. However, on Tuesday he was forced to admit that there is "no possibility" of finding that degree of support for his party. "We have failed to form a formal group," he says. "It's disappointing but not surprising." Especially not for the vast numbers of European citizens who are opposed to extremist politics, despite Mr. Griffin's belief that he speaks for a significant percentage of people who share his racist views.

Fascists Nick Griffin and Andrew Brons will not be allocated an office in the EU Parliament building. Maybe they could find shelter in the bins round the back where they, their party and their policies belong instead.
Image by Zinneke, taken from Wikipedia, used in accordance with Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 3.0 license.

This is a major set-back to both Griffin and the party's dreams of grandeur. If they remain unattached to a larger group, their two MEPs - Griffin and Andrew Brons - will lose out on an extra £1 million of funding, will not be allocated an office, will not get administrative staff and won't be permitted to take part in the European Parliament's main committee votes. Sajjad Karim, the Conservative MEP representing Griffin's North West England constituency, says that the organisation's failure is evidence of "how ineffective the BNP will be in the European Parliament." Karim's sarcasm is admirable. Griffin and Brons have been holding talks with officials from the French Front National, Belgian Vlaams Belang, Bulgaria's Ataka and Hungary's Jobbik parties. All share similar right-wing policies but can summon up insufficient MEPs between themselves to form a bloc which, according to EU rules, must number at least 25 people from seven different countries. Other groups, such as the Northern League of Italy, have similar views to those of the BNP but are hesitant to form an alliance with it due to its controversial reputation. With any luck, this is an early indication that the fascist BNP's recent electoral success is no more than a transient phenomenon and will soon be seen to be no more than an anachronism. Griffin, Brons and the rest of their hate-filled cronies are all too fond of tricking themselves into thinking they have widespread support - hopefully this will serve to remind them that they speak only for a tiny minority and as such will not gain the support they require to achieve any sort of real power.

Brons' wrongs

Andrew Brons, the MEP-elect for Yorkshire and The Humber who we've already talked about once today, will be able to buy himself as many nice new suits as he could ever wish for to go with his nice new job and he'll have no problems storing them - his cupboard is being well and truly vacated by a whole gang of skeletons. Brons is a classic example of the new, genteel face of the British National Party who claimed on Channel 4 News last night that he and his party "don't wish people to hate other races."

The BNP has been very keen on pretending it's not racist in recent years, ever since they finally realised that the vast majority of British people find racism abhorrent and refuse to vote for any organisation that espouses such policies, and have been successful enough to have persuaded quite a few people to tick their box at the polling stations - enough, when combined with the extremely low turn-out at last week's European election, to have got two BNP members seats in the European Parliament, in fact. But can we really trust a man who, in addition to the incidents already mentioned in the earlier article, also:

Claimed that racist idealogies have a scientific basis whilst giving lectures on racial nationalism when he was a National Front education officer?

Edited the NF magazine New Nation with Richard Verrall, the writer of Did Six Million Really Die?, a work that as its title suggests doubts the authenticity of claimed Jewish deaths during the Holocaust?

Said he was an ex-university lecturer, while in reality he worked at a secondary education college?

BNP: Racist? Us?

Here's Andrew Brons, the British National Party's new MEP who'll be representing the good people of Yorkshire and the Humber on last night's Channel 4 News.

Let's have a little bit of background on the man to start with. Brons has been active in far-right politics for many years, having started out in the National Socialist Movement when he was just 17. National Socialist...hmm...sounds a bit Nazi-ish, doesn't it? Back in those days, the far right weren't so keen to distance themselves from Hitler's fascism as they currently are now, probably because they hadn't cottoned on to the rather obvious fact that the vast majority of the United Kingdom's electorate are highly unlikely to vote for any group resembling the very people that many of our grandparents (and, back in those days, parents and even friends) gave their lives to defeat. During the 1960s, members of the NSM - an organisation formed from a splinter group of the original 1960s BNP on Hitler's birthday by one Colin Jordan who died in April this year. Jordan advocated "pan-Aryan universal Nazism" and openly used Third Reich symbols - were responsible for a campaign of arson against British synagogues and Jewish property.

With the NSM in turmoil following the departure of John Tyndall, Brons left to join the 60s BNP, which later merged with the League of Empire Loyalists - a group led by Arthur K. Chesterton, who had served under Oswald Mosley in the British Union of Fascists - to form the National Front. Brons stood as an NF candidate in both of 1974's General Elections, winning 2.3% of the vote in both instances and became leader of the party following its poor performance in the 1979 General Election. During this time, he and a group of NF supporters conducted a leafletting campaign in Leeds and were heard to shout slogans including "White Power" and "Death to Jews" - when a policeman of Malaysian ethnic origin asked the group to disperse, Brons called him an "inferior being." This event led to his appearance before magistrates and he was convicted with abuse and breaching the peace, for which he was fined £50 (a reasonable sum at the time).

Brons put his political life on a back burner in the mid-1980s, concentrating instead on his career as a lecturer in Politics and Law at Harrogate College. He retired from this position aged 61, and a number of articles attributed to him have subsequently appeared in Identity, the BNP's magazine (warning - that link connects to the magazine's website, so don't click it if you're likely to feel offended by the contents). During this month's European Election, he won 9.8% of the vote in his constituency, making him the BNP's first (and so far one of only two, the other being BNP leader Nick Griffin) MEP.

That's all we're going to say on the man himself and his political leanings (for the moment, at any rate) - it serves as an introduction for those not previously familiar with him and readers can probably guess the opinions of a blogger called Acid Rabbi when it comes to groups such as neo-Nazis. What we want to take issue with here is the interview from last night's news.

Interviewer Krishnan Guru-Murthy asked Mr. Brons for his thoughts on racism (01.01): "What about racism? Do you think racism is a terrible thing, or do you quite like it?" Brons replied with a bit of bluster on how the term is a Trotskyist invention, adding that "racial hatred of any kind is unpleasant and must be condemned. We don't wish people to hate other races."

Nick Griffin, leader of the "non-racist" BNP, received a suspended prison sentence in 1998 for... wait for it... incitement of racial hatred.

Er...right. So what about that bit in the 2001 General Election BNP manifesto where it states that native Britons - who, according to the party, can only be white people - being given priority in the jobs and homes market, effectively making non-whites second class citizens? What about Nick Griffin's statement to Wales on Sunday back in 1996, when he said that "All black people will be repatriated, even if they were born here"? What about his conviction for inciting racial hatred in 1998? Not forgetting your party's gloating in 1991 when a group of your supporters stabbed that African immigrant at London Bridge Station, you know the one - your newspaper claimed the victim had had his kidney surgically removed during the attack?

Or the part of the BNP constitution that says the party is "committed to stemming and reversing the tide of non-white immigration" - "immigration" could be construed as non-racist, but not "non-white immigration." What about Richard Edmonds' reply in 1993, "We are 100 per cent racist" when asked if the BNP was, in fact, racist by Duncan Campbell of The Guardian? While we're on the subject of Mr. Edmonds, who is a high ranking BNP member and served as their National Organiser, what about his time in custody in 1993 over a racially-motivated attack? Or his conviction for deliberately smashing the statue of Nelson Mandela on the South Bank in London? OK, so he was expelled from the BNP eventually - but then he was brought back in by Nick Griffin and given a job on the Advisory Council. That's a very strange thing for a non-racist party to do.

Richard Edmonds, who serves on the non-racist BNP's advisory council, is a veteran of the far right who was convicted of a racially-motivated attack. Image from Hope Not Hate.

Brons offers an absolute delight of an idiotic statement when he claims that (07.00) "...many parts of this country are almost unrecognisable to the original inhabitants." Well, they would be. After all, we have cars, houses, science, televisions, microwaves, aircraft, medicine, domestic animals, farming, money and literature nowadays; we also cook our meat and don't cower overnight in trees to escape the attentions of things like bears. We're now an island too, no longer connected by a land bridge to mainland Europe. All of those are big changes to have taken place in Britain since the original inhabitants set up home here sometime before the last Ice Age.

Most of us can see straight through all the BNP lies, Mr. Brons. Right now, it seems you have succeeded in convincing a worryingly-high number of people that your party isn't racist. It is obvious that this was necessary if you were to gain any power - let's face it: you're so desperate for power you'll all say just about anything in order to get it, won't you? - because the vast majority of people in this country are proud of our long and honourable tradition of offering asylum to those who need it and our tendency to accept anyone, no matter what colour they happen to be, if they're decent, hard-working people. That's why so many of us admire Gandhi. That's why so many of us maintain friendships with the peaceful, hard-working Asians who have contributed so much to our society. We also know that we have benefitted enormously from the cultural contributions made by immigrants to this nation - Britain would be a far poorer place without reggae, rap, drum and bass, the blues, rock and roll, jazz, bhangra, belly dancing, steel drum bands, samba bands, the Notting Hill Carnival, curry, chicken chow mein, fish and chips (an adaptation of the traditional Jewish dish gefilte fish) and many more; not to mention the many British sportsmen and women who are of immigrant stock. You know, don't you, that the reason the far right have never enjoyed any real success in Great Britain in the past was due to your overt racism and because the British people are, with few exceptions, quite simply not racist. You also seem to have finally worked out that it'd be a good idea to try to hide your admiration for the policies of the Third Reich, because no patriot in their right mind would ever vote for a group who align themselves with the Nazis when countless brave men and women risked their lives and our country's future existence to defeat them. You took your time on that one though - are you really all so stupid?

If - and God forbid it ever happens - your party achieves its aims, allowing you sufficient power to start shaking off the sheep's clothing you're all wearing and to once again display your true selves, you can be sure that, overwhelmingly, this nation will turn its back to you. You represent none of the aspects of Great Britain that make us proud to be British.

Andrew Brons will be taking up his seat in the European Parliament on Tuesday 14th July 2009. Following that date, he'll be easy to contact via the UK Office of the European Parliament website - this link will take you straight to the relevant page - so, if you love Great Britain and are proud to be a part of it, make sure you take a few moments to let him know what you think.

Onoes! We're all too stupid to vote!

The United Kingdom Independence Party, desperate as ever to do all they can to ensure the maximum number of people vote for them, are threatening legal action due to the way the ballot papers being used in today's election are folded. In areas with many candidates, a larger ballot paper is being used to fit all the names on - polling station officers have been instructed to unfold the papers before handing them over to voters.

The anti-EU party is at the bottom of the list of parties contesting the European election on the paper which is folded in half - this has apparently proved sufficiently fiendish to confuse many a poor, simple UKIP voter, a number of whom have contacted the party to complain. Godfrey Bloom, UKIP MEP, says that if it proves to have been as much of a problem as suspected, his party will demand a re-run of the entire voting process. He added that UKIP fears it will lose thousands of votes (with any luck, that's quite a few more than they'll get anyway) as supporters prove to be in possession of insufficient intelligence to work it out for themselves and unfold the paper - presumably they'll then pick whichever candidate has the funniest name instead.

"Even people who have been going in to the polling stations intending to vote for us have not been able to find UKIP on the list because the paper is razor-folded along the bottom edge. It makes it extremely difficult in some parts of the country to find us on the list and several hours have elapsed in which this fault has not been rectified," he says.



Meanwhile, Labour's Tom Harris - who appears to have a little more faith in the public's intellectual capabilities - has argued on his blog against those who have compared the deviously-arranged papers to electoral fraud in Zimbabwe.

"The thousands of political refugees who have claimed asylum in Britain in recent years rarely mention the murders, rapes, beatings, intimidation and land-grab. No, no, no… It was the insistence by Harare returning officers on folding ballot papers that finally persuaded them to jump in the back of that lorry for the 3000-mile journey to Blighty," writes the Glasgow South MP.

So, UKIP voters...how does it feel when the party you wish to represent you and your country in Europe publically declares you to be stupid?