UK: Top nazi incited racial hatred
01 May 1998
A British National Party (BNP) leader, Nick Griffin, escaped with a nine-month suspended sentence and a ?2,000 fine after being found guilty of inciting racial hatred at Harrow crown court in May. Griffin, along with fellow BNP nazi Paul Ballard, who pleaded guilty and also received a suspended sentence, were charged after police seized nearly 350 copies of their magazine the Rune issue 12. It featured a noose on the front cover with the headline "What has a rope to do with white unity" and referred throughout to "mongrel slaves".
In an act of blatant political chutzpah Griffin managed to wheel out a couple of black US "Pan Africanists" in his defence. Where the prosecution described The Rune as "a call to arms to white supremacists", Osiris Akkebala and Kwame Akkebala told the court that they had no problem with the literature and that they considered Griffin as a "spiritual brother". This is not as surprising as it may appear as both men have previously been associated with other fascist causes; they attended a National Front conference in the UK and have collaborated with leading US white supremacist Tom Metzger. Another of Griffin's supporters, was the convicted Holocaust revisionist, Dr Robert Faurisson.
Since he joined the BNP two years ago, the Cambridge university educated, Griffin, has been running a distinctly unsubtle campaign to inherit the leadership from current leader, John Tyndall, when he stands down. His success has surprised neutral observers, and disturbed BNP veterans, who believed that his opportunistic conversion to the BNP's cause and disruptive record of splitting most of the fascist organisations that he has been involved with - for instance, the effectively defunct National Front - would be held against him.
His main competitor for the leadership, and a much more serious proposition, is Tony Lecomber, (aka Tony East, Tony Wells, Tony Le Comber) a veteran fascist who was jailed for 3-years after attempting to bomb the offices of political opponents in south London in 1985. Lecomber has a solid base of support in the east London branches of the BNP and has recently launched his own glossy magazine, The Patriot, which has assiduously cultivated members who are out of favour with the leadership. However, despite attempts to remodel himself as a Euro-nationalist, Lecomber lacks the "polish" of Griffin and is likely to find himself sidelined in the rush to adopt "post-fascist" electoral credibility.
Griffin's clout among the more street orientated members of the organisation - to whom he has been making overt appeals in the pages of the BNPs journal Spearhead - can only be enhanced by his token conviction, which is unlikely to cause him too many sleepless nights.