Nick Griffin has appeared on this morning’s Andrew Marr Show in what Simon Darby had built up as ground-breaking television. 

(That is the full extent of the interview.  Anyone in Britain who wants to see the whole show, however, can view it over the next seven days on the BBC i-Player here.  The Griffin interview runs from 34 min 12 sec to 42 min 22 sec.)

Obviously, there is always going to be a difficulty with media-stereotyping of the BNP.  The prigs need only make up an entirely fictional story about the party or any of its officers, as they so love to do, and then that is picked up by every subsequent interviewer.  Result: no substantive engagement with the too-too awful fascists.

Marr accorded Griffin a little over eight minutes of programme time.  But he invested almost all of it in the customary exploration of the press’s BNP myths.  Griffin defended himself without difficulty, not least because Marr himself was not overtly hostile.  In addition, though, Griffin uttered a few ameliorative policy noises (with which I do not agree).  More importantly, he also spoke fundamental truths that the public needs to hear, specifically:

“... to point out that Trevor MacDonald is not Welsh or English is not to do him down and say he’s not British.  If Trevor MacDonald’s English then the English are nothing, and that’s a racist position and it’s wrong.”

And:

“... we had to fill in a Census Form.  I had to describe myself as white British.  I’m not white.  I’m English.  But I’m not allowed to say that.”

And he managed to say that the alternative to stopping the current wave of African migration to southern Europe is:

“...  accepting that Britain, eventually, is going to end up like Africa.  And the liberal elite have no right to impose or to allow that to happen when the British population do not want it to happen.

He did well.  He doesn’t possess the qualities of a truly inspirational leader, the sort who might come along perhaps only once in three or four decades of the nation’s political life.  But I agree with Sean Gabb’s assessment that he is clever and not less competent than his opponents in the mainstream parties.  Good luck to him, and may he find it possible in the future to talk much more about the fundamentals, and less about the lies.

by Dan Dare

Readers may recall the brouhaha that erupted several months ago when Boris Johnson, the Mayor of London, announced his intention to commission a study of the economic aspects of an amnesty for illegal or ‘irregular’ immigrants.  Hundreds of thousands such migrants are suspected to be present in London, as well as Britain as a whole. Boris was roundly scolded for his troubles by political leaders across the spectrum, including his own party leader, David Cameron. Nevertheless Boris pressed ahead and the study, prepared by specialists at the LSE, appeared in final form on June 16th.  It is titled “Economic impact on the London and UK economy of an earned regularisation of irregular migrants to the UK”.

Unsurprisingly, the report reaches the conclusion that the overall economic effect is positive, and recommends that Boris and the GLA should just get on with their plan. More interesting than the anodyne conclusion, however, is the additional light that the investigation sheds on the scale of illegal immigration into Britain. It indicates that there were between 417,000 and 863,000 irregulars present in Britain as of 2007, with a central estimate of 618,000.  The report states that around two-thirds of this estimate consists of around 400,000 failed asylum seekers, which can actually be confirmed through inspection of the Home Office’s quarterly statistical reports on asylum.

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by David Hamilton

The Ideological Caste in the broad sense - the corporate, banking and political classes, intellectuals and academics, media personnel, and so forth - are in league with people who are engaged in taking our country off us and taking our children’s futures from them.

Enoch once stated that immigrants are swaggering around our cities like conquerors. More people every day are also starting to see it as it becomes clearer what is really going on. I have written before that our elites are surrendering us to Islam by allowing them to take over.  At the highest levels, bankers and politicians make deals to get money from people like the Saudis, who finance Wahhabism, to conquer the West through a pincer movement of violence and cultural infiltration. The Prime Minister and Lord Mandelson asked the Saudis to put money into the IMF and offered them and other Gulf states more influence in global institutions in return. Barclays Bank, has had nearly £6 billion invested from Abu Dhabi and Qatar.

This has consequences in ordinary life.

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It is four years ago today that I sat down to write a brief post under the heading Seven Seven, and followed it up a few days later with a longer account of my own tangential and highly tenuous contact with history.

A lot of water has flowed under the bridge since that day.  If we are to believe our rulers, there have been scores and perhaps even hundreds of Islamic terrorist attacks that our (it is said) brave and professional security services have disrupted.  Suspiciously few of these, however, have resulted in a prosecution.

In fact, suspicion seems to be the lasting product of 7/7.  On the day that the memorial to that event was consecrated, more or less, the Daily Mail, having picked up yesterday’s snippet in the Guardian, was shouting from the rooftops that:

Far-Right extremists ‘are plotting spectacular terrorist attack in UK’, police warn

Neo-Nazis are plotting a ‘spectacular’ terrorist attack on Britain to fuel racial tension, Scotland Yard’s counter-terrorism officers fear.

Senior officers have increased their surveillance of suspects to monitor their ability to carry out a deadly attack aimed at causing a ‘breakdown in community cohesion’.

The chilling warning comes after last month’s startling gains by the BNP in the local and European elections which many fear may ‘embolden’ violent Far-Right extremists.

Commander Shaun Sawyer, from the Met’s specialist operations wing told a meeting of British Muslims last night: ‘I fear that they will have a spectacular ...

‘They will carry out an attack that will lead to a loss of life or injury to a community somewhere. They’re not choosy about which community.’

...  Sir Norman Bettison, the chief constable of West Yorkshire, said: ‘The big bad wolf is still the Al-Qaeda threat.

‘But my people are knocking over right-wing extremists quite regularly. We are interdicting it so that it doesn’t first emerge into the public eye out of a critical incident like an explosion.’

There is vanishingly little information given to back up the claim.  A Hitler-idolising fruitcake named Martyn Gilleard, who was jailed last year, is the best they can come up with.  Does that wash with the British public?  Take a look at the recommendation figures on the comments to the Mail article.

For their part, Nationalists are deeply vexed.  Nationalist bloggers have been quick to pour scorn on the story, and point out that it bears the imprint of the ubiquitous Gerry Gable of Searchlight, the Community Safety Trust, which is where the British Board of Deputies meets Mossad, and the Muslim Safety Forum, which is the interface for “British” Muslims with the police.  But the worrying possibility exists that it signals the start of an aggressive police campaign against Nationalists.  We shall see.

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The Observer reports on an obscure mayoral election in Hénin-Beaumont, and the anticipated resurgence of FN under Marine Le Pen.

Le Pen’s daughter scents victory for resurgent far right

With a cheery “OK, let’s go,” Marine Le Pen leads her troop of activists down the steps of their campaign headquarters, through the narrow streets and into Hénin-Beaumont’s weekend market. Bottle-blond hair, white stilettoes clicking on the pavement, white jeans a sharp contrast to the tracksuits around her, the 40-year-old former lawyer and far-right politician offers handshakes, leaflets, smiles and encouragement in her smoker’s rasp.

By her side is Steeve Briois, the local boy and Front National (FN) candidate who she hopes will be the mayor of this depressed former mining town in northern France when the final count from the second round of Hénin-Beaumont’s municipal election is known at around nine o’clock tonight .

... For the Front National and Le Pen herself, a victory in Hénin-Beaumont would be “the start of a new era”. The FN would be running a municipal authority again for the first time in several years and for the first time in the blighted post-industrial political landscape of northern France.

Also, a first critical step will have been taken to reverse the steady decline since the heady days of 2002 when Le Pen’s father, Jean-Marie, the former paratrooper who founded the FN in 1972, made it to the second round run-off in national presidential elections with a countrywide vote of 18%. And finally, Le Pen fille will be established as the unchallenged “leader in waiting” of the party once her father, now 80, retires as promised next year. Le Pen and her team are confident. In the first round of voting a week ago the FN scored well above 40%, twice as many as the nearest challenger.

... In Hénin-Beaumont, run by the Socialists since 1953, things could not be much worse. This weekend’s poll follows the imprisonment of the serving mayor on wide-ranging charges of systematic corruption and the resignation of virtually all his colleagues. The fraud is reported to have cost the town colossal sums, leading to local taxes rising steeply while schools’ grants are cut. To make up the losses, taxes will have to rise even further or deep cuts be made in the municipal budget or both. To make things even easier for Briois and the FN, the local Socialists have split.

... First, Roget said, came unemployment and the crisis of the welfare state. “The kids in France have got no jobs at all and we are all being asked to work longer and have our pensions and benefits cut.” Then came the politicians and the Paris elite who “don’t give a stuff about ordinary people” and simply spend money on “fast trains or big planes”. They never listened to any “ordinary people”.

Third, there was globalisation and, specifically, the Chinese. “We had jobs in Hénin,” Roget said. “But now everything is made in China. We can’t compete with them. They have factories where it is slave labour. What are we going to do? Work like slaves ourselves?

... The strategy of hunting for votes on the left as well as the right has split the FN and the debates have mirrored those in the British National party. Three years ago Marine Le Pen persuaded her father to ditch the hardline anti-immigration language and tone down the borderline racism and implicit antisemitism. Instead, she argued, the FN could break the barriers placed in its way by traditional parties by becoming “respectable” and gain support by adapting its key message. “We have put the economy, the preoccupations of ordinary people, in the foreground. I’m happy to see that my strategy has worked.” The extremism of her father, who dismissed the Holocaust as a “detail of history” and called the Nazi occupation of France “relatively humane”, was part of the past, she said.

“It’s true that we have sometimes given our opponents a stick to beat us with but ... as regards immigration ... my father was a visionary, far ahead of his time, and was attacked because of the truths he told. Immigration - economic, humanitarian, of relatives, because of global warming - is going to be the number one issue in the 21st century.

Whatever works, I guess.

UPDATE 06.07.09

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When we originally covered the story of Jörg Haider’s death last October, several commenters were very quick to sieze upon the assassination angle.  Today, The Times carried a story titled, Investigative reporter offers murder theory over death of Jörg Haider:

When Jörg Haider died in a car crash last year, many Austrians mourned the complex, fast-living populist. He may have been an admirer of Hitler’s employment policies, but he seemed to many rightwingers, frustrated with the Vienna Establishment, to hold the key to a new Austria.

Now pressure is growing to reopen the investigation into his death, and at least one investigative reporter is asking whether the 58-year-old politician was murdered.

“There are too many open questions,” said Gerhard Wisnewski, the author of the book Jörg Haider: Accident, Murder or Assassination? that has been selling quickly in Austria since it was launched last Tuesday. “After eight months of research I am convinced that it is highly probable that Haider was the victim of a politically motivated assassination.”

... “This case has to be reopened with an independent prosecutor . . . and with the involvement of international experts,” said Stefan Petzner, the former spokesman for Mr Haider and a leading figure in the right-wing BZOe party, the Alliance for the Future of Austria. He is threatening to mobilise a referendum on the issue unless the Justice Minister complies.

Mr Haider’s wife, Claudia, has also joined in the critical chorus, questioning the narrative provided by the police investigation team in the week after the crash. The police version, much of it leaked to the press before the official report, was that Mr Haider had visited various bars, including a reputedly gay hangout, on the night of Saturday October 10, in the town of Klagenfurt. He had drunk the equivalent of a bottle of vodka, according to blood sampling, and had driven at 142 kilometres per hour.

The car, a Phaeton limousine, had ricocheted from a fire hydrant into a noise-protection wall, against a tree and then bounced back on to the road about 100 metres farther along. Claudia has always denied rumours that her mercurial husband, the father of her two daughters, was gay and doubts many of the other details.

Interestingly, the story does not appear to have been reported at all by the English-language Austrian Times.  It might also be interesting to know who owns that publication, and whether Herr Wisnewski’s thesis has been reported by other national media in Austria.

A fissure appears to be opening between the views of some national governments in Europe struggling with recession and those of the more detached and strategically-inclined EU Commission.  Among others, Greece, France, Spain and now Italy have adopted some strict measures to discourage immigration.  But Italy’s populist center-right coalition, which includes the Northern Leagues, has gone a good deal further than the others, even criminalising those who house illegals.  On Thursday the senate, Italy’s upper parliamentary chamber, endorsed a vote in May by the lower house.  Unmoved by the left’s inevitable comparison with Mussolini’s racial purity laws, and by criticism from human rights groups and the Vatican, the senate voted 157 in favour and 124 against to bring the package of measures into force.

They include:

1. Illegal immigration becomes a criminal offence punishable by a fine of between 5,000 and 10,000 euros and immediate expulsion.

2. Anyone caught housing an illegal immigrant could face jail.

3. Unarmed citizens patrols will assist the police by mounting patrols on the lookout for public order offences.

4. Parents will have to prove their legal status by presenting their passport or residency permit when they declare the birth of a child.

The European Commission, meanwhile, is looking for ways to strike at least some of these provisions down.  It has announced that it will examine the new law to determine whether it complies with EU norms.  “Automatic expulsion rules for entire categories are not acceptable,” it says.  The Commission is probably miffed because it has only recently opened the first of several African migration offices, this one in Bamoko, the capital of Mali.  The plan is to bring in 50,000,000 + Africans over the next few decades to counter the ageing European demographic.

If national governments will only now address the ageing issue, the Commission’s race-replacement scheme could be in terminal difficulty.