November 21, 2008 - By George Fanning

Quite the most remarkable feature of the controversy over the stolen BNP membership list has been the sheer hypocrisy displayed by a spectrum of Establishment institutions as they manoeuvred to attack the British National Party.

From police forces threatening to break the law, through Labour ministers plotting repression in the name of tolerance, to BBC executives executing clumsy policy u-turns, the whole affair has provided an ugly spectacle of the corrupt ruling elite at their worst.  And their worst really is very bad indeed.

Let us consider the police.  The Guardian newspaper has reported that every police force in the UK is scouring the stolen British National Party membership list for the names of serving officers.  In law, any employer who downloads stolen, criminally-manipulated and out of date sensitive personal data from an internet blog, formats it and then cross-references that data to their own employee database is guilty of processing personal data unlawfully under the Data Protection Act.   You might expect senior police officers to have a basic working knowledge of the law, but apparently not.   Membership of the British National Party is not a criminal offence, even for police officers, so Chief Constables have no right to use the criminal justice exemption to the Data Protection Act, or otherwise to ride roughshod over the law.  It seems that Labour dictats carry more weight with certain police forces than the law of the land.

The Chief Constable of Greater Manchester, Peter Fahy, who is never slow to leap on any bandwagon in his efforts to attack the BNP, has said “Membership or promotion of the BNP by any member of the police service, whether police officer or police staff, is prohibited……Whilst the policy may have been controversial at the time it was enacted, in 2004, it has since been accepted by all staff and staff associations and remains unchallenged thus far.” 

This is simply wrong; the policy of institutional police discrimination against BNP members remains very controversial indeed.  It has passed unchallenged to date, only because Fahy and his comrades have so far managed to maintain a climate of fear, whereby no serving officer has dared to challenge the prohibition in court.  Legal advice indicates that the police policy of institutional discrimination against BNP members is in fact likely to contravene the Human Rights Act.  In administrative common law, it is also an arbitrary policy which is being applied rigorously to the BNP, but not to other ethnically-defined organisations such as the Black Police Association, and it is not based on objective assessment criteria, applied uniformly.  The absurdity of this situation is illustrated by recent media reports about the number of Islamic extremists, and indeed convicted criminals, who continue to serve as police officers.

The Labour Government too, is guilty of the sin of rank hypocrisy on an industrial scale and should be held to account for it.  For all their bogus blather about Human Rights, nobody should harbour any doubt that persons allied to the Labour party have facilitated, planned and coordinated this gross breach of Labour’s own Human Rights and Data Protection legislation. For years, Labour have systematically and deliberately whipped up intense hatred against BNP members. It follows that moral responsibility for the ongoing harassment of BNP members and their families can firmly be laid at the door of Labour and their various anti-BNP front organisations, such as “Searchlight” and “UAF”.  

There are now ominous signs that Labour is plotting to use the release of the stolen BNP membership data as a pretext to broaden their anti-BNP discrimination policy to encompass the whole public sector.  That is what Trevor Philips, chairman of the absurdly mis-named “Equality and Human Rights Commission”, has stridently and repeatedly demanded.   But let Labour heed this warning: we will draw a line and make our stand here. Any extension of this discrimination will generate a far larger pool of people who have no choice but to challenge this repression in court and it will take just one fair-minded judge to bring Labour’s whole edifice of political repression finally crashing down.

The BBC also ranks highly in the roll-call of organisations which have disgraced themselves with hypocrisy and double-standards over the past week. The BBC long ago ceased to honour in practice the principle of political impartiality to which it still pays lingering lip-service.  So it was no surprise that the BBC did not deem the BNP important enough to warrant fair representation on a recent edition of ‘Question Time’ from Stoke, where the British National Party has 9 councillors and would certainly have won the mayoral election, had not Labour cynically abolished the Stoke mayoralty in the nick of time.   In contrast, when the BNP membership list was stolen, the BBC suddenly decided it was sufficiently important to report as the lead item on their main BBC1 10 o’clock news.  

This inconsistency is very simply explained.  BBC executives are desperate to prevent the tremendously popular policies of the British National Party receiving any uncontrolled airing, but they do want as many people as possible to seek out and misuse the names, private addresses and personal telephone numbers of BNP members and their children.    Unfortunately for the media, their inflated coverage also afforded an opportunity for effective BNP spokesmen like Nick Griffin to wipe the floor with some of Britain’s most pompous and arrogant broadcast journalists – and generate a vast increase in traffic to the BNP website to boot.

The Establishment powers will never forgive the BNP for defying their malign agenda.  But it is a tribute to the resilience and raw power of the BNP’s “rebel yell” that State institutions now feel compelled to resort to such hypocrisy and illegality in their desperation to press home the attack.  

Various organs of the State have sought to destroy us so many times before and they have not succeeded, nor are they succeeding now.  They have for years tried to close our bank accounts, jail our leaders, intimidate our activists and subvert us from within, all conspicuously to no avail.  Every devious scheme and vindictive act of repression has failed and ultimately served only to strengthen us further.

One might think our rulers would have learned their lesson by now.