WHEN the British National Party scored its stunning victory in Gooshays ward for Havering Council in March of this year, it came on the back of a year long campaign by the victorious candidate Mark Logan and his dedicated team to alert voters to the excesses of the local Conservative-run Council.

High on the agenda of this campaign was the Tory scam to try to sell-off the borough’s greenbelt land to developers. Havering BNP scuppered this plan by planting eye-catching banners on the land in question and warning residents of the council’s intention.

The BNP also employed a solicitor to mount a legal challenge, collected over 3,000 signatures on a petition, and exposed the fact that Havering Council were in breach of the law and failing in their bio-diversity plan because there was an endangered species which had made their habitat on the site – even the RSPB joined the BNP campaign to oppose the plan to destroy this open space.

In the end the council were forced to back down and the BNP campaign against any building on the greenbelt – “Hands-off the Green Lungs of Havering”, was a huge success.

The residents of Gooshays ward showed their appreciation for the BNP by electing Mark Logan with a 10% swing to the BNP to secure a huge 38% share of the votes cast.

The full result then was:

Havering Borough Council
Gooshays Ward
Thursday 20th March 2008
Mark Logan (BNP) 865
Yve Cornell (Lab) 741
Malcolm Fox (Con) 489
Lawrence Webb (UKIP) 70
David Durant (Lib) 62
Ian Sanderson (Lib-Dem) 52
BNP Percentage: 38%

Two months later voters in Gooshays ward once again made the BNP their No.1 choice in the ward when the Party came first in the Top-Up List vote for the Greater London Assembly. This show of support came after another BNP exposure of the Tory policies that were hurting the ordinary working people of Havering.

Only the BNP was prepared to highlight the council’s local housing scandal that had 4,000 people in the borough on the council housing waiting list, many of whom would never ever get a council home. This was because the council-appointed East London Lettings Company was forcing local people to enter a ‘bidding system’, to make them compete for housing with people from other London boroughs and immigrants who had only just arrived in Britain.

The British National Party said this practice was unacceptable and that a BNP-run council would only put the local people of Havering in the borough’s local social housing and not those from other parts of London or from overseas.

The British National Party is now the only political party to campaign against the sell-off of council housing to private housing associations or “Arms Length Management Organizations” (ALMO). Labour and the Tories want to privatise all council housing and to scrap secure tenancy agreements. Almost £2 billion is siphoned off from council housing every year by the Labour Government, and the previous Conservative Government cut investment in council housing by 80%.

In 2007 council tenants in Havering were denied their right to a formal ballot and their homes handed over to ALMO “Homes in Havering”. Rents shot up by over 12% in fourteen months – and now the Conservative Council wants to sell-off another £500 million worth of council homes to a housing association.

The BNP fights for tenants’ rights, demanding that local authorities use the money from rents and capital receipts to build more urgently needed council homes for local residents.

Local council housing has been starved of money by both main political parties for far too long – only the British National Party will change this trend by investing in local council housing for the people who need it most – low-income LOCAL people.