• Home /
• Statewatch Database /
• UK: BNP's bogus "trade union"

UK: BNP's bogus "trade union"

01 January 2006

The racist British National Party (BNP) has launched a "trade union", Solidarity - The Union for British Workers, which has been listed by the Trades Union Certification Office as meeting the basic statutory requirements of a trade union. Solidarity claims that it will be a normal trade union but it is described by the anti-fascist magazine Searchlight, as "a scab union and a front for the BNP." Searchlight journalists have seen the registration forms which state that the organisation will "resist and oppose all forms of institutional union corruption" and will "improve relations between employees and employers." Although there is no reference in the documents to the BNP, Solidarity will set up a political fund to publish material from sympathetic groups and will "aid and join" any organisation supporting their views.

Searchlight says that the president of Solidarity is Clive Potter, a long time BNP activist from Leicester who was expelled from the Unison trade union for improper conduct. Other luminaries include John Walker, the BNP's national treasurer and Jay Lee, a BNP activist who was recently expelled from the Transport and General Workers Union. Lee was one of a number of BNP members who have infiltrated the trade union movement in an attempt to undermine it. Searchlight told the Labour Research journal: "after years of encouraging members to infiltrate existing unions in the hope of seeking confrontation with officials, the BNP is now setting up an alternative structure."

It is not only trade union fronts that the far-right party is attempting to establish. It recently set up the Christian Council of Britain (CCB) to rival the Muslim Council of Britain, in a move that was denounced by the religious think-tank, Ekklesia, which warned that "the party was attempting to employ religious arguments in the run up to May's local council elections."

Searchlight Election Bulletin issue 17, 2006; Searchlight February 2006; Labour Research March 2005; Media Watch Watch, www.mediawatchwatch.org.uk; Ekklesia, www.ekklesia.co.uk