Workers' Liberty

The British National Party has made a small but significant advance in May’s local and London Assembly elections. The BNP now have:

• A member on the 25 person Greater London Assembly;

Fascist BNP Gain Council Seats and GLA Member - Unite Anti-Fascist Campaigns with Working Class Politics.

The British National Party has made a small but significant advance in recent local and London Assembly elections.

The BNP now have:

"Of course we must teach the truth to the hardcore.....when it comes to influencing the public, forget about racial differences, genetics, Zionism, historical revisionism and so on......we must at all

Lively and loud with two bands on it, the Anti Nazi League march got a generally friendly response as it went through the streets of East London to the carnival.

This year’s National Union of Students conference passed a motion from UCL Union calling for NUS to lobby the government to ban the fascist website Redwatch.

How should student and labour movement activists respond to fascists being given a platform to speak — in student unions for example? Do normal considerations about “free speech” not apply?

From Indymedia.

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News from Russian comrades:

Janine on Stroppyblog about a statement being circulated by SERTUC.

More than 100 people attended the regional conference that took place in Nottingham on January 19th called by Nottinghamshire Stop the BNP and sponsored by a number of trade unions and campaigning organisations in the Notts area and other parts of the East Midlands.

The conference was called to discuss a campaign to stop a repeat of the 2007 BNP “Red, White and Blue festival” in Codnor near both Derby and Nottingham.

The KarlMarxStrasse blog reports that Germany's far-right party NDP has sent a delegation to Iran to beg for donations.

The British National Party is in the throes of a major crisis after a series of high profile expulsions and resignations. The root of the crisis is the outspoken fascism of leading BNP member Mark Collett and the contradictions implicit in an organisation attempting to hide its real politics.

Download two leaflets from the "Notts Stop the BNP campaign" (pdf): BNP in Turmoil and Stop the BNP in Kimberley.

The last few years have seen the British National Party make creeping electoral gains in local government. The foothold they now enjoy in borough, town and parish councils is directly related to two factors: their turn away from confrontational street politics to agitation around community concerns and the inability of existing anti-fascist campaign groups (Searchlight and the SWP-dominated Unite Against Fascism) to counter this new strategy.

Five of us from Workers' Liberty in London went yesterday to join our Oxford comrades in a protest against BNP leader Nick Griffin and far right historian David Irving, who were speaking at the Oxford Union (not a union but a posh debating society) at a meeting supposed to be about freedom of speech.

Mike Rowley is right to stress “the fullest freedom of speech” under what he calls “normal circumstances” (Solidarity 121), though it is not clear what these are, or whether they exist in the present climate.

As reported in the last Solidarity, a lot is being done in Oxford by local unions, Labour branches, student unions and community groups to stop the Holocaust denier David Irving and the BNP leader Nick Griffin speaking at the Oxford Union student debating society on 26 November. However, the contribution of the Unite Against Fascism national office has been questionable.

On 26 November, Britain’s two best-known neo-Nazis: Nick Griffin, leader of the British National Party, and David Irving, the “historian” and convicted Holocaust denier, have been invited to speak at the “Oxford Union Society”.

Over 100 anti-fascists protested in Kimberley, Nottinghamshire on Tuesday evening 16 October, effectively preventing a planned "mass meeting" of the fascist British National Party with its leader Nick Griffin.

By Pete Radcliff

The BNP finished its Red, White and Blue Festival in Codnor, Derbyshire on 5 August. Once again they were able to organise this mass fascist rally without facing national mobilisation from either of the two anti-fascist groupings, Searchlight or Unite against Fascism (UAF). Nor did they face any obstruction from local Labour councils or the police or fire services they are in charge of.

This article by Ruah Carlyle looks in depth at the 1936 Battle of Cable Street, where anti-fascists successfully fought to stop the police clearing a route for Oswald Mosley's fascist march.

1. The growth of the BNP is largely a result of three factors:

By Pete Radcliff

The BNP successes in this election were not as high as were anticipated. Instead of the 100 council seats they claimed that they would have at the end of this election, they only have the 50 or so that they started with.

By Pete Radcliff

We do not know the 3 May local election results at the time of going to press. But the BNP will probably have had a substantial number of council election successes.
A fuller post-election analysis of the BNP results can be found here