> Print window < | > Close window < |
Author: Gerry Gable | Date: August 2005
The British National Party suffered another setback last month in its top London target Barking & Dagenham when it finished a poor second in the Becontree ward by-election. The BNP had high hopes for Becontree, and for the Goresbrook by-election three weeks earlier, but a strong local campaign that dwelt heavily on the BNP’s lies, hypocrisy and terrorism and its lack of answers for local problems resulted in the party’s support falling away. Gerry Gable explains why Becontree was so important and what went wrong for the BNP.
When Eddy Butler, the BNP’s claimed election genius, analysed the voting figures in the European and London Assembly elections of June 2004, he discovered that several wards in the London Borough of Barking and Dagenham, and neighbouring Havering, offered the BNP potentially the highest votes in the country. As a result Barking and Dagenham became the BNP’s main London battleground. This was odd in one way as the BNP had no branch in the borough and only a handful of paid-up members, if that.
All the organisation and activists would have to come from outside the borough if the BNP was actively to contest any by-elections in the two years up to the full council elections in May 2006. The BNP also decided it would fight both the borough’s constituencies in the general election.
The party had encouraged Lawrence Rustem, a young man who had made a thorough nuisance of himself while a student at the University of Greenwich in the 1990s. Rustem had joined the BNP in 1997 but most London members saw his presence as perverse or undesirable as he was half Turkish on his father’s side.
But senior BNP officers, such as Butler and Tony Lecomber, the party’s national development officer, viewed Rustem as very loyal, with good reason. Since the early 1990s, when Rustem was living in Hackney, he had served as an infiltrator in a series of anti-fascist and left groups, passing information to the BNP.
What had turned this young man into such a dedicated nazi may be nearly as hard to fathom as why a young British Muslim can suddenly turn into a fanatical fundamentalist prepared to kill and die for his beliefs. By the end of the 1990s not only Rustem but also his father, mother and brother were BNP members. John Tyndall, leader of the BNP at that time, allowed them to join, against the party’s racial stipulations, as a reward for Rustem’s spying.
Early BNP successes
By 2004 he was ensconced in Dagenham and ready to stand in a by-election in Valence ward on 15 July. The BNP threw in a lot of support and he polled a remarkably high vote, coming second, out of five candidates, with 31.5%. Labour held onto the seat with 41.6%, but this was only 185 votes ahead of Rustem. The Labour Party had been unaware of the potential support that even a half Turkish BNP candidate might attract in the borough.
When the next by-election came up three months later in Goresbrook, the BNP had found a genuine local man who seemed just the ticket. The party poured resources into the ward, stripping activists from party branches and groups across London and Essex. Many came from south London, East Anglia and neighbouring Havering, led by Alan Bailey, a recently convicted thug. Teams of ten or more activists canvassed every day and on two occasions over 50 activists turned out, some coming from as far away as Ulster and Glasgow.
The BNP also drafted in its secret weapon, Richard Barnbrook a former Labour Party member from south London. An arts graduate with a middle-class accent - though only one suit - and a very high opinion of himself, he was just the type of person Nick Griffin, the BNP leader, wanted to spearhead this campaign, which represented the party’s best chance of victory in London. It worked. On 16 September Daniel Kelley topped the poll with 51.9% and became the BNP’s first councillor in London since the short-lived term of office of Derek Beackon in Tower Hamlets in 1993-94.
The BNP was ecstatic and started thinking it could repeat this success throughout the borough and beyond. It also proved a shot in the arm to anti-fascists and the other political parties. Searchlight stepped up its work in the community with most of the political parties and many local trade unionists and advised them that they must treat the BNP as serious contenders.
The turnaround starts
When the next by-election came up three weeks later in Village ward, Searchlight and the Labour Party distributed tough leaflets exposing the BNP’s outright lies and criminality and the hypocrisy of its candidate, which was Rustem again. A major feature article in the London Evening Standard on the eve of polling day confirmed everything the leaflets said and, more telling than anything else, exposed the disdain in which Rustem is held by other BNP activists. The Standard reporter had gone around with the nazi activists during two weeks of the campaign posing as a South African BNP supporter and witnessed the party’s true face. In a three-way fight Rustem came second with 38.5%. Although this was only 151 votes less than Labour, it represented the turnaround after the BNP’s Goresbrook peak.
The Village ward campaign was where the BNP’s “Africans for Essex” myth first surfaced - the claim that the council had conspired with Hackney and Newham councils to give African asylum-seekers £50,000 to buy houses in Dagenham. It reappeared during the general election, when it was again thoroughly exposed as pure fiction.
Barnbrook had intended to stand in Dagenham in the general election against Jon Cruddas, the popular Labour MP. After he saw Cruddas’s determination to give the BNP a whipping, he backed off and decided to fight Barking instead. Rustem was left with the second prize of Dagenham and all the party’s activists and money went into backing Barnbrook.
But Griffin’s confidence in Barnbrook turned out to be misplaced. Like many BNP activists he had a cupboard full of skeletons. First the media picked up his claim on his election leaflets to have the support of a range of celebrities, from Everton FC to members of the Royal Family to the singer Sting, for his work for a tree-planting charity.
The truth was that as well as Sting, who had the previous year accused Barnbrook of conning him, no one on his alleged list of patrons had supported him and the charity trustees had fired him when they found out he was a BNP officer.
Then on the eve of polling day, a local journalist revealed that Barnbrook had written, co-produced and appeared in a gay Marxist soft porn movie in his student days.
Although the BNP’s election literature was full of lies and the public were beginning to find out what a failure Councillor Kelley was turning out to be, Barnbrook and the BNP leadership still wanted to give the impression that despite all the criminal convictions they were just as respectable as any other political party. The more violent activists were not made welcome and those who did turn up for the campaign were warned not to make threats or beat anyone up. Apart from some criminal damage their violence was contained.
They were also terrified by the growing non-sectarian unity against them. Searchlight produced a very well received newspaper which 165 activists distributed to 51,000 homes in the borough over one weekend. A new local united group, Barking and Dagenham Together, which has since added Havering to its banner, held days of action and distributed newsletters and leaflets appealing to people to turn out to vote to stop the nazi BNP.
The BNP also shot itself in the foot by featuring on its website film of a local school child with learning difficulties and naming her contrary to all ethical and legal guidelines.
On the day of the general election Barnbrook whined that Searchlight and Together had turned out the black voters. He had seen the big response to our 12,000 personally addressed letters to voters and to the way we were addressing the grievances of the white working-class community and standing with the whole community to seek better services from the council and central government. Barnbrook, who had at one stage thought he could take the seat and at worst come second, ended in third place with just 16.9% of the vote. The only consolation for him was that it was the BNP’s best result nationally.
Clueless Kelley goes
Eleven days later Kelley threw in the towel and resigned as a councillor. He had lasted barely longer than Beackon and had been just as ineffective. He had become known only for his admission to the press that he did not have a clue what he was doing on the council.
Within the BNP people were looking for someone to blame for this debacle. Some accused the unpopular Rustem but anger quickly turned to Kelley himself for being incompetent. Then the finger was pointed at Barnbrook for calling potential BNP voters unintelligent because they did not know how to vote.
Barnbrook’s poor organisational skills had left the BNP with no one to stand in Goresbrook in place of Kelley, so Rustem was hauled out again.
On 21 May Griffin spoke at an international nazi conference in New Orleans organised by the notorious former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke. Also present were delegates from the German neo-nazi NPD, the party that earlier this year accused the Allies of being the real war criminals.
Within 24 hours of Griffin’s return to the UK, he and Rustem sped off with the BNP camera crew to the war memorial in Dagenham to lay a wreath. The local press immediately accused the BNP of hypocrisy in pretending to be patriotic and the local British Legion branch was outraged.
Scenes of Griffin at the war memorial formed part of a BNP DVD packed with lies and distributed to selected voters in Goresbrook. The BNP campaign was negative and devoid of ideas. Many party activists stayed away, demoralised after the general election and fed up with having to campaign for the despised Rustem, who had already lost three elections in the borough.
A strong campaign by Searchlight, Together, the GMB and the Labour Party reversed the BNP’s result of last September, turning a 52% BNP vote into a 51% vote for Labour.
The Becontree ward by-election, coming hot on the heals of the Goresbrook campaign, seriously wrong-footed the BNP. Physically weak and psychologically damaged, its barely existent local organisation collapsing around its ears, the BNP had difficulty even finding a candidate. Eighteen hours before nominations closed, the party was going around asking local people to sign a blank nomination form. Eventually they came up with John Luisis, a local man unknown in the BNP and with no profile in the community.
He remained unknown. Right up until polling day he was nowhere to be seen and gave no press interviews. When a local paper asked each candidate to write a few words about their policies, Luisis failed to take up this opportunity for free publicity. Until the last minute, he was not even intending to go to the count.
Many local observers thought Becontree offered the BNP a better chance than Goresbrook, but party activists were refusing to canvass. There were leaflets though, and from day one it was clear that somebody in the BNP leadership had decided that there would be no more of the BNP trying to be nice and respectable.
The leaflet was a parody of Peter Griffiths’s Smethwick by-election leaflet of nearly 40 years which had coined the notorious racist slogan, “If you want a n***** for a neighbour, vote Liberal or Labour”. Griffiths won for the Tories but became a parliamentary leper even among his own party.
BNP canvassers in Becontree were sparse on the ground, there were no days of action and most national officers stayed away.
Barnbrook sacked as organiser
As a result of the poor campaign Barnbrook, a full-time paid employee of the BNP, was given notice of dismissal. After his failure in the general election, and clearly upset by the constant sniping by Searchlight and the BBC about his brown suit, he had taken to wearing a black shirt and telling people that the only thing that would stop him continuing activity in the borough would be a bullet. How ironic that when the bullet came it was Lecomber, in charge of internal party discipline, giving him the sack as London organiser.
In a last minute stay of execution he was told he could stay on until after this month’s annual BNP Red, White and Blue festival. His reprieve may last longer as he has told people that he is taking up residence in the borough, which would in due course qualify him to stand in council elections.
Lecomber, a convicted terrorist bomber, appeared to have taken control of the Becontree campaign. Immediately after 7 July the BNP put out a leaflet with a picture of the bombed London bus and the slogan “Maybe now it’s time to start listening to the BNP”. This attempt to exploit a tragedy that had brought people from all communities together in condemnation of the terror bombers, was widely condemned in the local and national media.
Barking and Dagenham Together responded by delivering to every household in the ward issue six of Barking Matters. One side portrayed the Islamic fundamentalists and the BNP as two sides of the same coin - the politics of hate - and stated, “Fascists, be they Islamists or the BNP, cannot be allowed to succeed in dividing us”. The other side was devoted to the terrorist track record of the BNP. It was very well received by voters.
On the day of the bombing Jeff Porter, a Labour councillor in Barking and Dagenham and a tube driver, was driving a Circle Line train at Edgware Road approaching a train carrying one of the suicide bombers in the double width tunnel. He had started passing the other train when the bomb went off. His windscreen was shattered and the carriages behind him started to fill up with smoke. Cllr Porter told Searchlight that if his train had been a second or two earlier it would have caught the full force of the explosion.
He stayed calm and led his passengers to safety through his cab and along the tunnel to the station. Other trade unionists at the station joined in the rescue work. He was hailed as a hero in the media.
Cllr Porter is also an active supporter of the local Together group and a longstanding supporter of Searchlight, so two days after the bombing he was out in Becontree handing out anti-BNP material when three toe-rags carrying BNP leaflets threatened him and his wife with violence. One of them waved his clenched fist in his face asking him if he would like a f***ing slap. He walked away and police were called.
By polling day the Searchlight team was confident of victory. We believed the BNP had totally misjudged the mood of Londoners after the bombing and that its leaflet had backfired. Nevertheless some Labour Party members started to tell journalists that the BNP or Tories would take the seat, briefly spreading pessimism.
BNP violence
Having been well and truly beaten, the BNP was out for blood. It was noticeable at the count that Lecomber, who normally dresses smartly, had turned up in t-shirt and jeans. People wondered whether the BNP was preparing for trouble. Earlier that day there had been complaints to the police over the aggressive behaviour of BNP activists, who in some cases were moved off polling stations.
As the BNP activists left the count with their tails between their legs, the Labour Party agent Cllr Val Rush, a grandmother, suggested that the last one out close the door. At this she was viciously assaulted by Amanda Halsey, a BNP thuggette, who punched her in the breast.
Halsey, her father Fred and her younger sister are BNP activists from Wood Green. It was Amanda who appeared in the BNP Goresbrook DVD holding a baby and posing with her father as a Barking and Dagenham family who were at the back of the housing queue because of asylum seekers. The baby was not even hers and the whole claim was just another lie over which the BNP was caught out.
Asked about the assault, Lecomber described Cllr Rush as “that old hag” and alleged that she had called Halsey a nazi bitch. Ms Rush is far too polite to have said that, but if she had it would have been an accurate description.
Searchlight wants to know why Halsey was not arrested on the spot for assault, an arrestable offence that took place in front of dozens of witnesses and CCTV cameras. Police officers at the scene appeared very reluctant to take statements from some of the witnesses until councillors insisted that they did their job.
A letter has gone to the local Police Commander demanding that Halsey be charged. Searchlight supports this call and also demands action on the threats to Cllr and Mrs Porter and a full investigation into an anonymous inflammatory anti-Muslim sticker bearing the council’s logo, which appeared in the ward two days before the election.
The BNP could not even manage 20% of the vote, the party’s worst result in the five by-elections of the past 12 months. Nonetheless an anonymous BNP London correspondent writing on the party’s website reported it as a “fine achievement” and quoted Eddy Bulter (sic) claiming that the London bombs had resulted in the BNP’s vote doubling.
The writer then calculates the average percentage votes for the BNP, Labour, the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats in the two most recent by-elections and compares them with their votes in the whole Barking constituency in the general election. By this selective means he or she proves that the BNP’s vote has risen 10% while other parties’ votes have risen less or fallen - not difficult in the case of the Lib Dems who did not stand in either of the by-elections. The writer then adds the Labour and Lib Dem percentages together and thereby claims that only the BNP vote is rising, but in fact proving only that you can prove anything with statistics.
The victory against the BNP in Becontree highlights the validity of Searchlight’s policy of localised campaigning based firmly in the community to counter the BNP’s own targeted campaigning.
© Searchlight Magazine 2005