Indigo Jo Blogs

New Statesman - Letters

My letter, regarding the portrayal of Croydon in Brendan O'Neill's article "What's Driving the BNP?" last Friday, got printed in this week's New Statesman. The letters pages seem only to be archived for a week, so here it is:

Rotten boroughs

As one who was brought up in Croydon and who regularly travels back there for work and social purposes, I must respond to the references to that borough in Brendan O'Neill's article "What's driving the BNP?" (5 May).

The northern part of Croydon has had a substantial non-white population for decades, but I have personally travelled on buses and trams there, and have rarely been the only white person in sight. Most of Croydon, incidentally, is predominantly white.

Charlotte Lewis, whom O'Neill portrays as a ditzy woman with a chip on her shoulder, is in fact a former candidate for the British National Party. She stood in the 2006 local elections for the St Helier council seat in Sutton, but was exposed for falsely claiming to live in the borough (a requirement) when she actually lives in Thornton Heath, in Croydon.

At least four other council candidates did the same during those elections.

Matthew J Smith New Malden, Surrey

I actually told them at the end that I had gathered this information from a simple Google search, and that Lewis was deploying a time-honoured BNP tactic, namely lying. But the gist of it got printed and so a reply to the lies of a stupid, amateur BNP agitator was made, alhamdu lillah. Surprise surprise, my letter to the Spectator didn't get printed (although an opposing letter to Phillips did), so I'm still waiting to see whether my reply to John Draper Nordelph's letter will.

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Brendan O'Neill interviews the British Nazi Party trying to win hearts and minds in Stanmore (with all the Jews!) and runs into a chick from Croydon bleating about how out of place she is in her own country:

Housewives in jeans and short-sleeved tops talk animatedly about the beautiful weather. Charlotte Lewis, a 35-year-old unemployed woman from Croydon, is wearing a loud gold lamé jacket and black jeans. She speaks with a south London twang: "Sometimes I get on a bus and I'm the only white person on there," she complains. "It's a bit distressing."

As someone who used to live in Croydon, and who travels there regularly for work and sometimes even for social purposes, I can assure everyone that as a white traveller in Croydon you are quite unlikely to be the only white person on the bus (or tram). Most of Croydon's population is white (perhaps most of them drive or walk?) and there are only two main bus routes out of Croydon (the London and Whitehorse Roads, which go up to Thornton Heath) where you are likely to run across lots of non-white people, let alone a majority. Even there, most people are white. If you are the only white person on the bus in most parts of Croydon, the bus is likely to be nearly empty.

So it's another case of the BNP using outright lying as a campaign tactic. It's not surprising that Charlotte Lewis is involved, because she isn't just an ordinary south London housewife but rather she stood as a candidate for the St Helier seat on Sutton council in 2006. Lewis was exposed for claiming to live in Sutton when she actually lived in Thornton Heath, which is in Croydon borough, which meant she was not actually eligible to stand for the council as she had neither lived nor worked in the borough for the necessary twelve months. She was not the only one to do this - the council in neighbouring Merton borough reported two incidents of BNP candidates falsely claiming to live in the borough, and two more did the same in Barking and Dagenham, an east London borough. (Hat tip: lefthandpalm.)

Was there not enough time for Brendan O'Neill to investigate who this "ditzy woman with a chip on her shoulder" was, or not enough space in the magazine?

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I've just got a message from CAIR that "Young Americans for Freedom", one of the groups who have sponsored one of the so-called Islamofascist Awareness events in the USA, at which Rick Santorum spoke at Michigan State Uni, is now hosting a speech by the leader of the British National Party, Nick Griffin. The British National Party has a history which traces back through the National Front, a fascist and racist party which briefly enjoyed some popularity in the UK in the 1970s and then dropped like a stone. Traditionally it was anti-Semitic as well as anti-immigrant; in recent years, Griffin has moved the party to whip up anti-Muslim sentiment and to take advantage of any social crisis or unrest. The BNP has also made lame attempts to woo the Jewish vote. (Update 28th Oct: the Führer's speech was interrupted by about 75 students of various backgrounds, according to the Lansing State Journal. More: Umar Lee.)

Continue reading ""Anti-Islamofascist" group to host ... British fascist" »

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Pickled Politics: Sayeeda Warsi and the BNP

I thought someone would write a cogent reply to Sayeeda Warsi's interview in yesterday's Independent on Sunday, in which she claimed that the BNP have some legitimate views and that people who vote for them ought to be listened to. Sunny Hundal makes the point that the Tories have been listening to these very people for two successive election campaigns, running on explicit anti-immigration platforms, and lost both times. There is another issue Sunny doesn't mention, which is that the BNP's anti-immigration campaigns are often based on outright lies about foreigners being prioritised for housing over local people and even about rapes committed by immigrants.

I should add that this government has pandered to the anti-immigrant lobby and press to a disgraceful degree, and is notoriously eager to send refugees back, making excuses such as that rape is not torture. It even seeks to send people back to known war zones and to countries without stable governments which are in a state of ruin, and hinders people who want to bring spouses into the country. Perhaps the BNP really can't get much more over on the government, or even the Tories, on immigration anyway.

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Bath Chronicle: Yobs attack mosque in Bath

Police have issued a CCTV image of two yobs who entered a mosque in Bath (England) on 11th July this year and urinated on worshippers' belongings (strangely, none of the news reports ([1], [2]) have mentioned that this happened nearly two months ago). The press release is here and the full-size picture (much clearer than that in the Bath Chronicle) here. (Hat tip: Islamophobia Watch.)

(Naturally, the BNP have already started using it to their advantage, accusing the police of issuing the appeal just to curry favour with the local Muslim community.)

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Technorati Tags: this is england, shane meadows, national front, skinheads

This is England is a film about skinheads in the English Midlands in the early 1980s, written and directed by the British director Shane Meadows (interviewed here) and set mostly on a council estate which turns out to be in Nottingham, although no reference to Nottingham is actually made anywhere in the film; some scenes are shot in Grimsby, an east coast port and seaside resort. It mainly revolves around the character of Shaun, a 12-year-old boy who has recently lost his father in the Falklands war, and who is partly based on Meadows (and some of the other characters are also partly based on people Meadows knew). (More: Crooked Timber, BBC Movies, Future Movies, Pickled Politics.)

Continue reading "Review of "This is England"" »

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There is a letter in the current edition of the Jewish Chronicle, the "establishment" paper of the British Jewish community, from Alan Goodacre defending the British National Party from this article by Melanie Phillips the week before. The letter claims that the BNP has shed its historical anti-Semitic policies and accepted the fact that the Holocaust took place, that John Tyndall, its late long-time leader, was "discredited" and had been expelled, and that the BNP is "the only party in Britain that is truly serious about fighting the Islamofascist threat". An extract from the letter was published by Islamophobia Watch.

Continue reading "Rats out, roaches in as Nazis try to butter up Jews" »

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Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | Report says riots product of racist propaganda

The Burnley race riots of 2001 were fuelled by racists exploiting the perceived imbalances in council spending on different communities, according to a report published today.

The strongly-worded document, Burnley - the Real Story, admits "there is a serious problem of racism in Burnley".

It cites segregated schooling, unemployment and poor civic pride among the underlying causes of division in the Lancashire town.

The "segregated" schools in question being bad secular state schools which just happened to be in racially divided catchment areas, not well-funded faith schools, but doubtless this will be lost on the "mix all the kids up together and let them not hear of religion" brigade ...

A controversial "positive regeneration" scheme, that involved spending government funds on an area with a large Asian population, "ironically contributed to social fragmentation by increasing neighbourhood rivalries," the report says.

"Racists latched on to and encouraged the resentment" about the decision, it adds.

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Pickled Politics: Deport BNP council tax cheats!

Pickled Politics reproduces a report from last week by Andrew Gilligan from the Evening Standard on the latest scandal involving the British National Party's notoriously incompetent, criminal councillors:

Three of the BNP’s new councillors in Barking and Dagenham have been taken to court for owing thousands of pounds in rent and council tax.

The local authority has secured county court judgements against two, a third is being threatened with bailiffs, and a fourth is involved in a council probe into a potential £10,000 housing benefit fraud.

The disclosures will be hugely embarassing to the racist party, which has claimed ethnic minorities are being given a “free ride” by “suffering council-tax payers”.

So, who's taking who for a ride, then? How many more times will voters let themselves be deceived by this wretched gang of liars and delinquents?

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Nick Cohen has an article in today's Observer (which can also be found at his blog and at Comment is Free; the Observer's website is inaccessible to me at the moment) attempting to explain why the BNP won such a dramatic "victory" in the Barking and Dagenham borough local elections (11 seats out of 13 they contested). This is despite all that has been revealed about their party (European far right and KKK links, criminal records etc), including their notorious inactivity and incompetence when they actually get elected. Cohen sticks to familiar territory and blames all this on the fact of communal politics:

If polite society stuffs British citizens into hermetically sealed boxes and labels them as the blacks or the Muslims, it is not so strange that people should decide to be the whites and vote accordingly.

Continue reading "Nick Cohen: communalism and the BNP" »

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Guardian Unlimited: God is the God of all

Dr Giles Fraser (vicar of Putney and Oxford philosophy lecturer) on how the BNP tried to build up an alliance with evangelical Christians, but balked at the idea of all humans being descended from Adam and Eve (peace be upon them):

Despite all their talk of supporting "traditional Christians" - an increasingly transparent euphemism for fundamentalists - the idea that all human beings share a common parentage was a tradition too far for the BNP. Racists have always found it easier to warp the theory of evolution, arguing, as Edwards recently did, "that white people are more highly evolved than blacks". Within weeks of setting up the Christian Council of Britain, the alliance was in tatters. "If you don't believe in Darwinian evolution then you are even dafter than you appear," the BNP told the national director of Christian Voice, Stephen Green. The love affair was over.

For the BNP, Christian is just another word for white, just as Islamic has become another word for Asian. ...

But what is so utterly ridiculous about the BNP's desire to defend "Christian culture" is that the vast majority of Christians in the world are not white. The average Anglican, for instance is a black woman living in Africa. Moreover, if Jesus were ever to walk this green and pleasant land, the BNP would be committed to his repatriation. Even their great love of St George is a joke: George was either Turkish or Palestinian, and his legend migrated to this country from the Middle East.

Of course, George would not have been Turkish; he may have come from Asia Minor, in which the Turks arrived many, many centuries later.

Update: PhobeWatch has a quote from Christian Voice regarding the Islamic position on salvation: "no Muslim has any assurance of salvation, except as a Jihadist, and it is this belief that physical fighting in the cause of Allah is the highest calling that makes Islam so dangerous and implacable". This is simply untrue: the real Muslim belief is that dying with faith is itself a guarantee of entry into Paradise even if one has to be punished first; the idea advanced by certain Christian polemicists that "God might be having a bad day" on the Day of Judgement and send everyone to Hell is a false one. A person who genuinely dies a martyr (note that a substantial body of scholarly opinion rejects suicide bombing as a method of achieving martyrdom) is admitted into Paradise immediately.

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Something I'd been meaning to blog on as part of my "Melanie Phillips soundbite of the week" series, now that she's started blogging again, but Stuart Jeffries in today's Guardian has pretty much beaten me to it: the ludicrous idea of an alliance between Marxists (and the left generally), the Islamic movement and the far right. Anyone who has been even remotely aware of where the various parties stand in this country will know that to call whatever similarities exist between the left and the BNP and its ilk an alliance is beyond parody. (Tags: norman tebbit, melanie phillips, bnp, british national party.)

Guardian Unlimited: First Hitler in Germany, then Mussolini in Italy, and now the BNP in the UK: will this left-wing conspiracy never end?

Continue reading "The vast left-wing conspiracy" »

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The Guardian today has a feature on the British National Party and its threat to appeal to working-class white voters disillusioned by Labour (and with their heads filled with exaggerated stories about asylum seekers). The paper interviews a sixty-year-old cleaning lady who is thinking of voting BNP because of "all the horrible aggro ... all this stuff with asylum seekers". They also interview Neil Albert Walker, a council candidate in Stoke on Trent, who starts off on the subject of opposition to a new mosque (traffic, of course) but before long moves onto more familiar territory:

Does he think Holocaust denial is worth worrying about?

"Well, there's been more holocausts in the world than the Jewish Holocaust. I'm sure it was very wrong, what happened. But there's been bigger holocausts in the world. And every time someone mentions the holocaust, they choose to just link it to the Jewish one."

What does he think about mixed marriage? [Pause] "That's a tricky one, John, isn't it?" Well, I'd ask him it if he called. Because, as he knows, there are plenty of people from the BNP who think it's a very bad thing indeed. Another pause. "Well, it is," he says. "It waters down the gene pool. It's as bad for them as it is for us. It's not just about white and black people. If, like, a Somalian African were to marry an Asian Muslim, it's the same. That's what I think, anyway."

Guardian Unlimited Politics | Special Reports | Paranoia, poverty and wild rumours - a journey through BNP country

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The Independent today had a major feature on the practice of the British National Party of lying about immigration in order to scare working-class white voters in east London into voting for them. Most recently, the claims include one about a university campus being regenerated in order to provide houses for asylum seekers or other newcomers, and a preposterous one about Africans being given £50,000 grants to buy houses in the area (this is preposterous because that amount of money will not buy you a room in London, much less a whole home).

Continue reading "BNP shamelessly lying in anti-immigration campaign" »

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The Guardian reports on today's front page that the decision to choose an "ethnic" - a supposed descendent of an Armenian refugee with the unlikely name of Sharif Abdul-Gawad - has caused outrage among the BNP's racist membership, who insist that the party remain all-white:

Sharif Abdel Gawad, whom the BNP describes as a "totally assimilated Greek-Armenian", was chosen to stand in a Bradford ward as part of the party's biggest ever electoral push. ...

The BNP says Mr Gawad was named after the actor Omar Sharif because his mother was a fan, and that his grandfather was an Armenian Christian who fled to Britain as a refugee.

Judging by the picture of him on the front of today's Guardian, I'd say he looked North African (and the spelling of Gawad suggests Egypt), but it speaks volumes that the leadership had to explain to their gnat-brained members that he was not Pakistani. (Tags: sharif abdel gawad, bnp, racism.)

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