> Print window < | > Close window < |
Author: Gerry Gable | Date: February 2007
In the first few days of 2007 a 15-year-old white school boy was attacked with a hammer in the grounds of a school in Wroughton near Swindon. The British National Party made much of this because the attackers were said to be an Asian gang, and laid the blame on growing inter-communal tensions. The local BNP unit lost no time in delivering an inflammatory leaflet about the attack to residents.
The victim has now been released from hospital and is at home recovering. But the fallout from the attack continues.
The BNP is trying hard to make political capital out of the incident, but it is the BNP that has done the most to promote racial terror in the area.
Four years ago David Tovey was sentenced to 11 years’ imprisonment at Oxford Crown Court for possession of an Aladdin’s cave of terrorist equipment in his house in Oxfordshire, including military explosive and bomb manuals. Police also found a hand-drawn map of the site of Swindon’s Broad Street mosque and were satisfied that he intended to carry out a terrorist attack against the building and its congregation. He had applied for membership of the BNP.
In January last year 16-year-old Michael Matthews received a two-year detention order for a spate of racist graffiti and criminal damage at the Swindon mosque. The regional organiser of the Young BNP, Mark Bulman, who also called himself Mark Bullock, denounced Matthews in the local media as someone the BNP wanted nothing to do with.
Matthews was an impressionable youth who had come under the influence of the BNP’s keenest activists in the region.
At the time that Matthews was trying to set fire to the mosque Bulman and a much brighter young nazi by the name of Danny Lake were busy leafleting local schools and colleges with the BNP’s hate material. Students and teaching staff had reacted angrily and driven the BNP activists out of a number of colleges. Lake was charged after one of these incidents but was acquitted.
Yet while older members of the BNP were talking up the possibility of interracial clashes in the region Bulman, 22, had already started his own mini race war, which culminated in a string of daubings, criminal damage and firebomb attacks on the Swindon mosque.
Bulman phoned the police to turn himself in after a Molotov cocktail he had hurled through a window at the mosque last August failed to ignite. He had used a BNP leaflet as a fuse. When the police picked him up he was armed with a chair leg to “protect himself from the enemy”. He referred to the Broad Street area as “enemy territory” because it had businesses owned by people from ethnic minorities.
He was remanded in custody and from his prison cell wrote a series of rambling letters to a Swindon anti-fascist admitting his crimes and giving vent to his obsessive antisemitism and nazism. It was no surprise that a judge at Swindon Crown Court ordered a psychiatric report before sentencing him.
After receiving the report Judge Douglas Field decided Bulman was sane but a danger to the public. Describing him as “a racial bigot”, he jailed Bulman for five years.
Bulman’s lawyer Philip Warren claimed Bulman while in custody had reflected on his “skewed views” of society and wanted to change. He asked for permission for Bulman to address the court but the judge refused saying “I am not going to allow a political speech”.
Bulman had told the examining psychiatrist that he had wanted to reduce the mosque to “ash and rubble” and “to give the establishment and lefties a wake up call”. His words bore a striking similarity with the statement of the London nazi bomber David Copeland that he wanted to start a race war that would see a BNP government brought to power.
As Bulman looked forward to a long time locked away, what of his erstwhile close buddy Lake, now a student at Bath University. Well in his warped wisdom Nick Griffin, the BNP leader, has just appointed him the party’s national youth organiser.
© Searchlight Magazine 2007