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Author: Sonia Gable | Date: July 2009
As the British National Party celebrated its European election success at a “victory rally” in Blackpool on 20 June, Jim Dowson, its controversial fundraiser, announced he was stepping down as the party’s administration officer.
Taking his place will be Emma Colgate, the BNP’s Thurrock councillor and rising star in the fascist party. The appointment means she will have to resign from her full-time job as researcher for Richard Barnbrook, the BNP London Assembly member.
Her move will leave Barnbrook in dire straits. His other assistant, Simon Darby, who combines the job with acting as the BNP’s deputy leader, press officer and treasurer, was suspended from his post earlier in June for his remarks about Ugandan spear-throwers in an attack on the Archbishop of York, John Sentamu, during the election campaign.
But Dowson’s departure from the administration role is by no means a withdrawal from the BNP. Quite the opposite. Maybe he no longer has time for the administration job after taking over a large part of the party’s assets.
More likely Dowson is wise to the fact that as an officer of the party he could be jointly liable with other party officers for its debts. Both he and Nick Griffin, the party leader, want to avoid that at all costs. Griffin is well aware of the risk after being made bankrupt in the 1990s following some disastrous business ventures.
Dowson, who has a string of criminal convictions and has had links to the loyalist murderer Michael Stone, is responsible for raising hundreds of thousands of pounds for the BNP to fund its expansion and election campaign. But it is now becoming apparent that little of substance is held in the party’s name.
At the national launch of its election campaign in May the BNP boasted that it had opened four new party offices across the country as a result of its “rapid expansion plan”, which Griffin claimed raised £85,000. After viewing the BNP’s film of what it described as its new staff hard at work in these offices, which all looked very similar, this writer mused that it looked like the same office filmed from different angles.
Last month the Belfast paper Sunday Life uncovered that office at Unit 5 of the Carrowreagh Business Centre on the edge of east Belfast. Like at the former BNP warehouse in Searchlight, which Searchlight exposed last year, there are no signs advertising the BNP’s presence.
On the BNP film Dowson describes the office as the “administrative hub for the party” and says: “Here we’ve recruited staff of the highest calibre to take the party to the next level”.
In fact the 12 staff, who had innocently replied to call centre job ads, are not employed by the BNP but by Adlorries.com, one of Dowson’s companies. Registered in Loughborough, Leicestershire, it shares an address with Albion Logistical Solutions Ltd, a new Dowson company which organised the printing of the BNP’s 29 million election leaflets in April.
Although Adlorries.com has existed since 2004 it owns little of substance. Its latest accounts show fixed assets plus cash of nearly £27,000 against £25,000 owed in debts and long-term loans.
Its scanty website describes it as a marketing and business solutions company, but its name hints that its main activity might be the sort of marketing that takes place on the side of advertising lorries.
Last year the BNP claimed to have bought its “truth truck”, better known outside the party as the lie lorry, after a successful appeal to supporters to raise the £26,550 needed. In his 2009 New Year address, Griffin wrote, “your cash allowed the party to buy our very own state of the art advertising lorry and roll out the first of many nationwide Truth Truck Tours”.
Yet when bailiffs tried to enforce a county court judgement against the BNP, the party’s solicitors responded that the vehicle was “registered in the name of another person who … has no connection with the judgement debtors”. It is now clear that this is Dowson.
Dowson told the BNP’s Blackpool rally: “In 2007 [sic, presumably he meant 2008], we increased the party’s turnover to £1.1 million, more than doubling its income and considerably increasing its staff and infrastructure,” and predicted turnover of £1.5 to £1.7 million this year. The BNP will have its job cut out explaining to its auditors, the chartered accountants Silver & Co, and to those few of the party’s members not prepared to gobble up enthusiastically every lie that their leaders dish out, how money that Dowson raised for the BNP, and assets that the BNP supposedly bought, ended up owned by Dowson and his companies.
© Searchlight Magazine 2009