This is a cross post by Maurice Cousins from Westbourne
During a recent conference speech to the Alliance of European National Movements in Brussels, a grouping of ten continental neo-fascist parties in the EU Parliament, the British National Party leader Nick Griffin MEP labelled Westbourne’s campaign against the BNP as “brilliant”.
In 2009, Westbourne launched a campaign called There’s Nothing British about the BNP. The campaign focused on messages that directly addressed potential voters, direct rebuttal of BNP policies and the mobilisation of relevant stakeholders. This “change opinion” strategy remains central to the Westbourne approach to communications.
Speaking in July 2012, Nick Griffin blamed the Westbourne campaign for his humiliating defeat in Barking during the 2010 campaign, claiming that we prevented him from taking something that “should have been ours”.
In a video posted on his party’s official YouTube account (watch from 21:16 mins), Griffin tells his audience:
“For those of you here, you know the pain we went through in 2010? With those waves of attacks against us from The Sun and so on? Brilliant, vicious, wicked, wicked lies. On the scale that Georgina and Bruno knows I am talking about. Those lies in 2010 that I am talking about, the most effective and cynical and the most damaging we ever faced came not from Searchlight they came from Nothing British”.
“They [Nothing British] put out so many lies and hatred that we didn’t win an election – when if you look at the external circumstances it should have been ours. They throw this hate at us and we then fail.”
Nearly three years after it was first launched, Nothing British – Westbourne’s high-profile and effective anti-racism campaign – remains a source of resentment and continues to send shock-waves through the international neo-fascist network. You can read more about our Veterans against the BNP campaign here and our other activities here and here.
Needless to say, our campaign wasn’t solely responsible for Griffin’s failure in 2010. But through good old-fashioned opposition research and rebuttal, Nothing British was able to use our skills and expertise to mobilise counter-intuitive, credible voices such as Andy McNab and Simon Weston and raise awareness about the dangers of voting for the BNP. Ultimately, the voters of Barking weighed up the evidence and were able to make a pretty damning judgement on election day
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Nick Griffin’s video is well worth watching.
He makes a series of utterly mad – and therefore, very funny – claims from about 21:17 onwards. They include the following:
– Nothing British About the BNP was run by Policy Exchange (It isn’t!)
– Policy Exchange is directly “hooked up” with the pretty nutty Frank Gaffney (again, it isn’t!)
The general argument appears to be that the English Defence League is a Jewish plot, of course. Increasingly, The BNP sounds rather like the far Left, doesn’t it.
