- Nick Griffin

A visit to the Mid-West, reflections on the BNP victory in Havering, and a tale of two pigs… latest blog entry from Nick Griffin.

The South West – and through to Easter

Monday. Just time to get through a big block of emails (but still not all of a backlog that built up a few weeks ago – if anyone sent anything important and hasn’t heard back, resend it. And if it’s not important please don’t send it, either to me or to any of key colleagues, as we all have too much of our time wasted by the invaluable curse known as email! If it’s not absolutely vital that a specific person doesn’t read an email, then don’t even send it – that way we’ll be better able to deal with the ones that really do require our personal attention. Thanks.)

Then it’s time to set off for a series of meetings in the Mid-West. As I leave I’m pleased to see that the big lump of frogspawn laid the other week in the larger of the two small ponds I put in last year is growing well. I’ve separated some of the eggs and put them in the other pond, just in case the main mass of them vanish down the elegant long throat of one of the herons that occasionally fly overhead on their way to the lakes in the old peat-workings up on the moorland to our east.

The first meeting in the Mid-West week is in the heart of the New Forest, right on the border with the South East region. It’s chaired by local Organiser Ian Johnson. Also present is South West Regional Organiser Peter Mullins and South East Deputy RO
Mark Burke.

Mark very often attends meetings in his capacity as a member of the growing BNPtv team, complete with broadcast quality camera. Tonight, however, he’s here to speak while the filming is being done by Nick the English Warbow maker (who has promised a display at this year’s Red-White-and-Blue – part of the event that I’ll certainly make sure I get to see)..

I’ve decided to try out a brand new speech tonight. It’s based on the work of US sociologist James C. Davies, published back in 1962, on the seven common denominators in political revolutions. More than sixty people are packed into the hotel room, some having to stand. There are a number of disillusioned UKIPers as well as committed BNP activists.

We start at eight and finish a long Q&A session at around about eleven. We have the whole hotel to ourselves, including the barrel of Ringwood bitter that the owner has got in specially for us. It’s slightly warm (the solution, for those unused to serving beer straight ‘from the wood’ and thus sitting in a warm room, is to drape the barrel with a couple of beer towels soaked in cold water and with a bag of icecubes shoved between them on top of it) but still very drinkable.

Mark Burke explains the new regional pyramid structure being developed in his region to widen the circle taking responsibility. His presence here is an example of the approach bearing fruit, because the South East’s overall Regional Organiser is busy at a meeting in Sussex, where Arthur Kemp is the guest speaker tonight.

Mark’s well received and deeply practical talk is followed by Peter, who gives an enthusiastic and enthusing account of progress in the far South West and nationally on things such as the BNP website.

During the break I talk among others to the friend of the homemade windmill builder I wrote about after my visit to nearby Bournemouth last year. Apparently he’s got most of his drive and gear mechanism built now, so the project is coming along well.

Another Post Office closure

Tuesday, so it’s time to head to Swindon. Stop en route at a Post Office on the edge of Salisbury. A notice says it’s closing permanently on April 1st “after national public consultation”.

That’s NuLabSpeak for them telling us what they’re going to wreck and hand over to their greedy Big Business friends as the liberal-fascist corporate state is imposed on the sullen and restless peasants. The Post Office, of course, is being stripped down for privatisation under a combination of EU and World Trade Organisation rules designed to turn public services into private profit centres.

Wiltshire is also under pressure from planned hospital closures. As elsewhere, land and buildings donated by individuals or paid for by public subscription over several generations is now being claimed by NHS bureaucrats as belonging to them. These community assets, truly part of our national commonwealth, are then sold for yuppie housing developments with the revenue used to offset the impact of the worst Government neglect and cuts.

The same relentless concreting over of our farmland and the gems of our Green and Pleasant Land is going on around the edges of Swindon. The Council plan to build over a huge swathe of countryside at Coates Water between Swindon and Liddington Hill and the chalk downs. This is the countryside that Richard Jefferies wrote about so movingly in books such as Story of My Heart and his wildlife writings.

These were a great favourite of mine when I was at University. I identified very closely with his slightly lonely raptures at the beauty of the rolling hills, majestic beech trees and the huge skies of the downs country (anyone who has ever run or cycled up the Gog Magog hills a few miles south of Cambridge, as I used to, will know how similar they are to the Wiltshire downs).

Swindon BNP Organiser Ray Morris and several other local members have taken the day off to show me around, and we go to look at Jefferies birthplace (sadly the little museum is shut) before braving a cold wind to see Coate Water and the Site of Special Scientific Interest that the Government plans to build over to enrich its developer friends and make room for even more immigrants into a country shortly due to overtake Holland in terms of overcrowding.

We also stop to be photographed with one of our local candidates on the piece of open green space near Swindon centre where a BNP campaign against proposals for a major mosque development seem to have pushed the threat back – for the meantime at least.

A big part of the afternoon is taken up in the superbly designed STEAM museum of the Great Western Railway that has been built in some of the huge railway factory buildings created by Brunel in the 1840s as he embarked on one of his greatest engineering projects in the days when Britain led the world in science and industry.

As we wait to go in we are passed by a classroom full of local (judging from their ‘diversity’) primary school children. They are clearly excited about their visit but are well behaved. One of the teachers with them is a youngish man (quite unusual among primary schools in particular, which is a national problem as the lack of male role models for young boys is clearly socially damaging. Of my primary school teachers, I guess that Mr. Bush from Monken Hadley is long dead, though I hope that the much younger Mr Crowe who – apart from the disastrous brush with ‘new maths’ - was such an inspirational headmaster at Cookley & Walpole in Suffolk is enjoying a well earned retirement).

But to return to Swindon, this chap spots me from across the entrance hall and comes straight over, checks that I am who he thinks I am and shakes my hand warmly – in full view of several of his colleagues. Something very deep and very radical is stirring in this country.

The STEAM museum really is worth a visit. Several full sized steam engines are awesome in their engineering, size and the sheer beauty of their shining steel and brass and gleaming paintwork. No wonder it’s said that all small boys during their heyday wanted to be engine drivers.

Equally interesting are the short video recordings of former workers from the giant site talking about their work there. The enjoyment and pride they derived from their hard and sometimes dangerous job shines through, and highlights the extent to which globalisation has been and remains a crime committed by our elite against the workers and working class communities of Britain.

At the meeting later I ask how many present have been to see the museum. About half raise their hands, which means of course that even some of the most nationalistically and social justice-minded people in the town and surrounding county haven’t been there yet. No doubt the proportion from further afield who haven’t even heard of Swindon’s STEAM museum is way higher.

Which means that most of my readers now have a new ‘must-see’ place to add to their list. Those with younger children or grandchildren in particular should make it an enjoyable duty to take them, so that they can learn a bit about the things their ancestors did, endured and achieved as the people of our land created the modern world.

Next door, for those with a deeper interest in history or actual research to do, is the National Trust’s national records archive. Despite its regrettable and sickly diversions into PC, the National Trust is one of the greatest institutions in today’s torn and corrupted Britain. The patriotic socialist visionary William Morris would surely be proud if he could see what his creation has become and achieved.

Salisbury contingent

In the evening, around 65 are present once again. There’s a wide audience range, including a good group that has travelled up from Salisbury. I talk to several from the city during the break – another good sign, the awakening of Middle England.

The significant number wearing regimental ties show Wiltshire’s long links with the British Army. Cllr Mick Simpkin is just one of those with a long service career behind him, while several are still serving.

Sit down for a while after meeting with Mike Howson and Tris Simpkin to discuss short- and medium-term plans for the Young BNP. It’s impossible to overstress the long-term importance of getting this right; we need to make a big investment in attracting and training young generation. I tell them I’m very willing to invest – on a scale that will dwarf the sum total so far ever spent on such things in the past – but only once they have been able to find and train the people needed to provide a nationwide infrastructure. It’s essential to build on firm foundations.

Wednesday – we meet Andy Bamford, Mendips Organiser, and several other Somerset activists in Shepton Mallet. On the way we pass through Bradford-on-Avon – a beautiful little town, a sort of miniature Bath – must go and visit sometime. Drive on to Wells and Glastonbury – it’s shocking to see that the handful of large factories that used to employ hundreds each, are now closed, derelict or bulldozed for more overpriced housing developments.

Cheddar Gorge

We also drive up the spectacular Cheddar Gorge. I’ve been here before, having first hiked down it after a cold, wet night trying to sleep in the back of an empty stock trailer, while on a camping holiday with a school friend. We were fourteen – an age at which two boys these days would, I guess, not be allowed to vanish to the other side of the country. Back then, though, being given some real scrumpy by a kindly farmer’s wife when we stopped to buy a piece of real Cheddar cheese was probably the most ‘dangerous’ thing that happened all week.

In one of the caves along the Gorge was found the skeleton of a 9,000-year-old Stone Age hunter-gatherer. DNA tests found that a local village school teacher was one of his direct descendants. So much for those ‘nation of immigrants’ fairy tales by which the PC Brigade seek to deny us our special status as indigenous people in this, our ancient homeland.

Somerset really is a lovely county – highly recommend for a late Spring visit straight after the May elections if you don’t yet know it.

The only drawback this week is that the extremely windy (as in winding, not as in gales) roads make it unpleasant to type on the laptop for long. Plus, of course, the temptation to gaze out of the window at the first signs of another Spring are much higher around here than in less fortunate counties.

The Guardian today describes the BBC’s White Season as “a feather in the cap of the BNP”. Indeed it is. Everyone who saw it has been particularly impressed by the remarkably sympathetic programme on Enoch Powell. I can almost forgive them for their cynical demonisation stunt when they had me on Newsnight from a studio so ill-lit that we were tripping over cables and steps, with a black and red backdrop which gave out subconscious associations with bombed out buildings, war, Hitlerism and Count Dracula. Perhaps next time they should bring along an actor in the advanced stages of AIDs in a dark hooded cloak and riding a very pale horse. And don’t forget the scythe!

We meet for the evening in a smart modern village community centre. ‘Somerset BNP meeting’ is up on the notice board of the week’s events. Most places are now booked openly in our name – another sign of the sea-change now sweeping the country. 60 are present. Robert Baehr speaks first. Robert came to the BNP from the environmentalist movement – he has the great honour of having been imprisoned for his part in the bid to save Twyford Down from being devastated by the Winchester by-pass.

He gives a thoughtful, passionate speech about the links between immigration, overpopulation and environmental degradation. Andy chairs the meeting. Bruce Cowd, organiser for the south and western side of the county also speaks, urging individuals to step forward and take a bit of responsibility for their own patch – a message that needs to be heeded the length and breadth of the country.

I develop the theme mentioned in my speech the other day – how to all of us over about 45 this is now a foreign country, while no younger person can really begin to understand what Britain used to be like when we were growing up. It is a huge transformation – nobody asked for it, nobody likes it, but it has been imposed by liberal elite nonetheless. They’ve used our taxes to turn the past into a foreign country – and the future into a nightmare of globalised poverty and ethno-religious strife.

One of the many people I talk to before the meeting and during the break is a gent who tells me that he spends half his time on business in Spain, overwhelmingly with British ex-pats and white flight émigrés. He suggests that we should be looking to organise among these people and is very pleased when I tell him that the job is already in hand. I promise to put him in touch with the team we are putting together to develop this. We’d be very interested to receive emails from other members or supporters either living in or who travel to Spain frequently, and who would be interested in helping too.

Thursday. We stay in the town of Street, near to the far better-known Glastonbury. In the morning I walk to the paper shop, only to find that the Post Office branch here too is due to be closed. No date has yet been set for this hammer blow to the local community, but it will fall, because the disgraceful Labour/EU privatisation plan can only offer a suitably tempting meal to global capitalism if the less ‘productive’ sections of this vital public service have already been scrapped before the final betrayal and sell-off.

The view from Andy Bamford’s kitchen window illustrates two of the other big problems facing towns like Street – a hundred yards away bulldozers are clearing away the last rubble from the main Clarke’s shoe factory. The newer section that survives further out of town is now mainly a storage and distribution depot for imported foreign footwear, and the old site where hundreds of local people used to work is earmarked for more houses (even though services in the area are being cut back).

Still, at least this new yuppy estate is being built on brownfield land. The orchard between it and Andy’s house, on the other hand, has also been ripped up, and more houses are going up on what until just a few months ago was productive farmland. This in a world facing a rapidly worsening food shortage. Madness!

Another megalithic masterpiece

Then it’s off to meet a few of our Bristol people, including one of the BNP’s main admin workers, Michaela McKenzie, and Mark Clutterbuck, head of our Central (staff) Management Team. We meet as arranged at the remarkable Stanton Drew stone circles. Some of the stones in this little known but huge Neolithic monument are every bit as big as the magnificent ones at Avebury and, despite the chilly wind, it’s a trip well worth making.

Having strolled through this giant monument built by some of our distant ancestors, we retire to the nearby Druids Arms (as ‘immortalised’ in The Wurzles’ song “When the Common Market Comes to Stanton Drew”) for a bite to eat and (in my case) a pint of Doombar, up from Cornwall, where local brewery Sharpe’s sponsor various sports and events, including the gruelling rowing races in traditional sea-going gigs that are so popular around the Cornish coast.

From there, we walk a half mile or so along a green lane (well, actually, a rather muddy track, but ‘green lane’ is the official term) to the smallholding of a couple of long-standing British nationalists. Graham and Eunice Manning were nationalist stalwarts in Bristol and Somerset as long ago as the 1960s – I remember a photo of a demonstration they helped organise against greedy banks, complete with a mock millstone around the neck of one of the activists. That would have been about thirty years ago, but the message is as topical and potent as ever.

It’s lambing time for their small flock of pedigree Suffolks. Cute now, the lambs that don’t go for breeding will end up slaughtered, butchered and sold locally – the way our farming should be ordered whenever possible. By the way, our plan at home for Easter Sunday centres around a leg from the biggest of the three lambs featured in my blog early last summer. All are now safely in the freezer, and replacement cades will be arriving to be bottle-fed any day now.

After a chat in front of a proper real fire we head back to our cars and then off to Michaela’s home on the edge of Bristol where I get a couple of hours to write and to work online with Richard Barnbrook and Mark Collett, who are in Leeds together putting the finishing touches to the BNP entry for the London Mayoral election booklet that will be sent to every home in the capital. These will be put online on our London BNP website in due course, but for now we want to keep them under wraps.

The far-left are frantic about our Bristol meeting tonight, and all day various journalists and polytechnic lecturers pretending to be journalists deluge us with calls as they try to find out the venue. They’ve announced a demonstration outside Bristol BBC studios over my appearance on Newsnight – the real reason of course is their forlorn hope that not only will they find the venue but also that they’ll have enough bigots and silly students to be able to move on to picket and stop the meeting.

Given that the hotel room we use is absolutely packed with members and supporters, and that our South West security team is particularly sizeable and well-trained, the chances of their having success tonight are pretty much zero. Mark Clutterbuck and Michaela McKenzie do a double act running the meeting from the top table, which I share with the imaginative and rebellious anti-EU/anti-tax campaigner Robin de Crittenden, who makes a truly inspiring speech. Then it’s home through the night.

Two events to savour

And since then? A mass of admin catch-up work; more discussions and actions on our continued management structure and training operation; some time off over Easter splitting wood and walking dogs. And two bits of really good news:

Mark Logan’s tremendous win in the Gooshays ward by-election in Havering. The stunned silence in the media says all that needs to be said about the scale of this victory.

When we first won the seat two years ago, we did so by taking the third place in a three seat contest, with two Tory councillors ahead of us. This time, we easily top the poll. It’s a remarkable achievement to increase our vote by 10% in a by-election caused by our councillor stepping down for work reasons - and this is done in the teeth of a massive push by Labour (who flooded the ward with activists, putting out an amazing four different leaflets on polling day alone), a big effort by the Conservatives, and a deliberate no effort campaign by the LibDems (hoping not to split the ‘left’ vote).

Furthermore, the need to carry on with our mass distribution campaign throughout London meant that this wasn’t even a full-on BNP campaign. Local activists put in a huge amount of work, and I’m glad that I took the opportunity to lead a BNP security team that spent half a day leafleting the northern part of Gooshays ward on last month’s big London Day of Action. I hope that the owners of the magnificent black chow who befriended us on our way around were among our voters – their amiable dog certainly seemed to approve of us.

That such limited efforts paid off is a testimony to the public mood, and to the fact that our candidate has treated the ward as if he was already its councillor throughout the last year. This is what really does the business in local politics – votes are secured many months in advance through low key local work while all the other parties are swanning around in the town hall.

“Not on your TV, but on your doorstep” has to be the message of every BNP candidate to local voters if we’re to see more great wins like Gooshays.

The Tory and UKIP votes collapse, and our margin over Labour is very comfortable, even though the Labour vote actually rose. Clearly the contagious financial collapse that has spread from Wall Street to the City hasn’t yet started to bite into Labour’s vote. But it will do, when the crisis in the financial sector spills over to create pain, and plenty of it, in the real world.

Even before that happens, however, this result shows that we’re on a roll in London in the run-up to May 1st. The far-left websites are aghast. But the outcome in London still depends on whether this result galvanises our people or theirs to try even harder in the few weeks that remain. On the face of it, only massive electoral fraud can deny us one seat on the GLA. A second one, by contrast, would take a huge amount of winning. The next wave of leaflets are at the printers now – it all depends on how many people make the extra effort to travel to London and help our hardworking local teams all over the capital put them out.

Pigs again – at last

The other piece of good news is personal – we’ve got pigs here again. After several years without any since the terrible Foot & Mouth outbreak, we’ve just bought a pair of sturdy Oxford Sandy and Black weaners. Their unusually long coats make them ideal outdoor pigs, so although still a rare breed the Sandy and Black (also known traditionally as the Plum Pudding Pig on account of its markings) is making a bit of a comeback. They certainly don’t seem to feel the cold, even though we wake on Easter Sunday to find the surrounding hills are all wearing nightcaps of snow, the pair chase each other happily. Pigs play ‘catch’, don’t let anyone tell you anything different.

The boy is definitely lined up for the freezer after, we hope, a happy summer here in the Welsh hills. His very talkative sister’s fate will be decided in due course; if she’s a friendly, docile, considerate beast she may well be kept on as a breeding sow (her markings are classic for the breed, complete with four white trotters). If she’s headstrong or keeps biting our boots, on the other hand …..

For now though, they divide their time between the feed trough, burying themselves in the deep straw in their corrugated iron house and snoring contentedly, and fossicking around in the grass for extra tasty morsels. Not a bad life at all.

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