Daniel Thorlby bnP is a BNP member, of the british national party. Links to him are numorous
and found below.
Oh Daniel Thorlby, Daniel Thorlby.
Below is an article about the BNP in general too
The rapid growth in support at the ballot box for a nationalist party of the right has gone
hand in hand with voter cynicism and disillusion with the main parties
On a sunny day in Stanmore, north London, a motley crew of people gathers at the Tube
station. An elderly man leans on a walking stick, a faded blue, white and red tattoo saying
"Proud to be British" just about visible on his forearm. The tattoo might be older than I
am. Bert, a sixty-something retired heavy-machine worker, is inappropriately dressed in a
woollen jumper and beige overcoat. He lets out a yelp of approval when a truck with a Union
Jack on its side - carrying "British Meat" - hurtles by.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."A white van swerves into view, beeping at the group of 15 men and women to move out of the
way. Out steps a BNP man, dressed in a khaki suit and with a roll-up between his fingers. He
has the look and swagger of an old colonialist. I can picture him leaping out of a jeep in
white-ruled Rhodesia in the same manner he leaps out of his white van in multi-ethnic
Stanmore. His two helpers, big men in T-shirts, unload boxes of leaflets headlined "The
Changing Face of London". They show a group of smiling white women at a street party in the
1940s (the good old days) next to a picture of three women wearing burqas, one of whom is
giving a two-fingered salute to the camera (the bad new days).This is the London wing of the British National Party. Five days before the local and London
mayoral elections, it has come to Stanmore and Edgware in north London - which have large
Indian and Jewish communities - for some last-minute electioneering. Its members are
confident, even cocky, about their chances of a seat on the London Assembly. "We'll
definitely get one, maybe two."
"If I had to put our concerns in order of importance, I would say: housing, transport,
health, education, the environment and law and order." So immigration isn't a concern at
all? "Well, immigration impacts on all of those things," he says. "It causes overcrowding in
housing, strain on the transport system, more pollution in the environment and it disrupts
law and order."I see. Behind his "respectable issues" there lurks the odious far-right idea that immigrants
are the root cause of every social ill.Cocky leafleteersHe and his eager leafleteers have reason to be cocky. At the time of writing, many predict
that the BNP will make important gains in the local and London mayoral elections. In London,
parties must win 5 per cent of the vote in order to get a seat on the 25-member Assembly.
That threshold was introduced by the government to allow minor parties such as the Greens to
be represented, while keeping out the far right. In the last London elections in 2004, the
BNP won 4.7 per cent of the vote - only 6,000 votes short of the threshold for gaining a
seat. This time it is expected to win bigger, especially since the UK Independence Party
(which won 8 per cent in 2004) is in disarray.Around the country, the BNP has grown in local electoral strength over the past ten years.
Under its founder, John Tyndall, the party was a racist menace but electorally
insignificant, only ever winning handfuls of votes. That began to change with the election
of the new Chairman as party chairman in 1999. He set about trying to improve the BNP's
image. The party had won its first-ever council seat in the east London borough of Tower
Hamlets in 1993. After the local elections of May 2006, it had over 50 council seats: 12 in
Barking and Dagenham, and a smattering of seats in the north of England: mainly in
Stoke-on-Trent, Burnley and West Yorkshire."The BNP has tended to prosper in segregated poor, white communities in the north, and in
parts of the south-east where there have been unexpected infusions of new immigrants," says
Tony Travers, an expert in local government at the London School of Economics. The party's
vote has grown exponentially at general elections, too. In 1992, it won 7,005 votes; in 1997
it won 35,832; in 2001 it won 47,129; in 2005 it won 192,746. What is behind the growth of
the BNP? How has it managed to gain a toehold in local politics?Many would argue that the party's recent success represents the re-emergence of flick-knife
racism, even that "neo-fascism" is on the march. In fact, the expansion of the BNP can be
seen as a product of mainstream political failure. The party - a ragbag of ageing skinheads,
slick wannabe politicians and ditzy women with chips on their shoulders - thrives on
disillusionment with the three main parties."There is research evidence that a lot of people who vote for the BNP are not aggressive
neo-fascists, but rather are cheesed off with mainstream politics," says Travers. "The rise
of the BNP can be seen as a grim indicator of the failure of the Labour and Conservative
parties. If the parties functioned properly, then probably the BNP could be contained. Its
supporters would be tempted away by old-fashioned Labour values or by the legitimate,
centre-right nationalism of the Tories."But today, Travers says, there is a "clustering in the centre" in mainstream politics, and a
"collapse of the ability of the mainstream parties to win new members and supporters". The
effect has been to allow the BNP to proliferate."If the other parties were doing their job properly, we wouldn't be here having this
conversation right now," says Barnbrook. "I know we win votes because people are angry with
the other parties."Far from being a clear-headed neo-fascist party, the BNP comes across as a mess of
contradictions opportunistically trying to pick up the votes of the disillusioned. For
example, Barnbrook tells me the BNP has "no problem with black people". Someone clearly
forgot to brief Bert, an older member of the BNP, who says "mixed marriages are just wrong
because both races become denigrated". Bert has "no comment" on the question of whether six
million Jews were exterminated in the Holocaust, yet Charlotte from Croydon tells me she was
"really, really moved" when she visited Anne Frank's house in Amsterdam a few years ago.
Barnbrook says the BNP has "nothing in common with the thugs of the NF"; Bert tells me the
NF "are decent blokes". Most strikingly, where Barnbrook tried to convince me that "millions
of Britons empathise and support our message", Charlotte reveals that a party stalwart
advised her to walk to the top of a cul-de-sac and leaflet outwards. "It's safer that way,"
she says. "You can run away if people get angry."With them for a day, I noticed two things about the BNP: its reliance on mainstream fear
about immigration and its opportunistic exploitation of people's disdain for Labour, Tories
and Lib Dems. BNP doorsteppers talk about Britain being "overcrowded" and claim immigrants
are polluting our environment; they argue that Poles lower British wages. These are
thoroughly mainstream ideas. They tell voters, in the words of Bert: "If you're pissed off
with the rest, vote for the best!"All parties should be concerned that the growth of the BNP over the past 15 years - from
7,005 votes in the 1992 general election to 192,746 in 2005 - has coincided with political
malaise and cynicism across the UK.Perhaps the best way to smash the BNP is to challenge the mainstream fear of immigration
that it feasts upon and give voters something inspiring to vote for in its place.
www.pcs.org.uk/en/campaigns/national-pay-campaign/pay-petition.cfm
www.bbc.co.uk/1xtra/tx/bnp.shtml
www.biggerbooks.com/isbnbrowser2/isbnstart/97805213
http://www.thegreen.20megsfree.com/photo.html
http://www.lugnet.com/people/members/?m=1172
http://www.chroniclelive.co.uk/north-east-news/elections/newcastle/
