Harry's Place

This month, according to the BNP website, a meeting of the Barnsley branch drew ‘nearly 300 people’. The BNP’s London Assembly member Richard Barnbrook was there to give a speech, and shared a platform with the BNP’s head of publicity, Mark Collett.

According to the BNP report:

Mr Collett received a warm welcome from the audience and as usual, broke the ice with a few good laughs before moving on to the serious topic of the approaching European elections.

I wonder if the ‘few good laughs’ were anything along the lines of the ‘hilarious’ performance Collett put in on Channel 4 a few years ago, which included the following gems:

National Socialism was the best solution for the German people in the 1930s.

I honestly can’t understand how a man who’s seen the inner city hell of Britain today can’t look back on that era [Hitler's Germany] with a certain nostalgia and think yeah, those people marching through the streets and all those happy people out in the streets, you know, saluting and everything, was a bad thing.

Honestly now, would you prefer your kid growing up in Oldham and Burnley or 1930s Germany? It would be better for your child to grow up there.

I’m going to level with you. I’d never say this on camera, yeah, and you can say this to whoever you want, ‘cos it’s true. The Jews have been thrown out of every country, including England. There’s not a single European country the Jews have not been thrown out of. And let’s face it, David, when it happens so many times it’s not just persecution. There’s no smoke without fire.

Working on the principle of ‘no smoke without fire’, see what you make of this, recently posted by the old guard BNP faction over at Griffin Watch:

In fact the dark suspicion that Griffin has turned the party into a private money making machine, providing nothing but a play-ground for the worst elements of our movement, is bearing fruit (sour though it is). By this I do not mean the many good comrades who are still holding their tongues, as well as their faith, in our so-called Leadership but I instead refer to the two degenerate scumbags (Collett and Dave “Lock up your daughters” Hannam), who by their own admission tried to pressurise two underage girls into sex in their conference hotel rooms.

Nick has tried to sweep this fact into the memory-hole but he cannot pretend any longer that it did not happen, neither can I and neither should you.( As a matter of fact at Sunderland BNP’s Christmas social in 2005 Mark Collett had to be warned off from a public clinch with an underage girl. At the time we put it down to a drunken lack of judgement, not knowing his penchant for trying to take advantage of impressionable 14 year olds). Even an establishment Party, whose Leader had tried to keep such a sleazy scandal like this from it’s membership, would be forced to act and that “Leaders” feet wouldn’t touch the floor on the way out of the door.

True, but none of this should be overly shocking, given Collett’s boasts on the ‘Young, Nazi and Proud’ documentary:

I like to break people. When you’ve broken them and sucked that last bit of life out of them. That’s it. When people say that I am evil, yeah I am.

But it does say a lot about Nick Griffin and the BNP that, far from distancing themselves from Collett, they have instead made him head of publicity for the party and are happy for him to appear alongside the party’s London Assembly member at public meetings.