Couple of goodies gleaned from the BNP website…

With only a couple of weeks to go to the close of nominations for Parliamentary Elections the BNP are reporting that as of April 1st (yeah, yeah I know about the date) they were £50K short of the necessary to put up the 120 candidates they want to run at the General Election.

At £500 a deposit that would mean, if this isn’t a April Fool’s gag, that they were coming up a hundred deposits short with only a fortnight to pull the cash together.

Even if they make it and do put up all their candidates, this should mean that Electoral Commission’s register of political donations should make for interesting reading as it lists donations totalling only £110K over the last four years in declarable donations.

On the cash front as well, the BNP report spending £75K on their own in-house print shop - one reason why they’re light on deposits. This, again, may well merit monitoring as by moving their printing in house it then becomes much more difficult for the Electoral Commission to verify whether BNP candidates are staying within the rules on campaign expenditure for candidates.

BNP founder John Tyndall has been charged with using words or behaviour likely to incite racial hatred in the aftermath of the BBC’s exposé of the BNP ‘The Secret Agent’ which aired last July.

In case anyone’s in any doubt, Tyndall’s ‘previous’ is listed below:

16 October 1962: Imprisoned for training a Nazi paramilitary group, Spearhead.

1966: Found guilty of being in possession of 30 wood coshes, six metal bars and two saw blades. Imprisoned later the same year for possession of guns and bullets.

1986: Imprisoned for incitement to racial hatred.

Nick Griffin is also, today, answering police bail in Halifax having been arrested in December last year in relation to the same West Yorkshire Police inquiry which led to Tyndall’s arrest and, as usual, claims that everything is ‘politically motivated’.

The BNP are also claiming on their website, which you’ll need to find for yourself as I’m buggered if I’m linking to them, that Labour have paid a number of ‘agent provocateurs’ to infiltrate their demonstration outside Halifax Police Station - all of 130 people according to the Beeb - to ‘make Nazi salutes and act in an unacceptable juvenile manner in front of TV crews and photographers” in order to discredit them, as if the BNP ever needed ‘infiltrators’ to egg their supporters on into acting like a bunch of low-forehead morons.

Update: 8:06 pm

Griffin’s been charged with four counts of incitement to racial hatred and is now claiming that the charges are a New Labour conspiracy to win back the Muslim vote and will be dropped after the election.

All I can say to that is that the CPS must now rise to the challenge and take these charges all the way to court.