Question 1 - What is the Plymouth UAF strategy for dealing with this unprecedented number of BNP candidates in the city?
Question 2 - What are your strategic priorities - defeating the BNP? Promoting Respect Unity candidates? Selling copies of Socialist Worker? or are you planning to hold another 'festival'?
Question 3 - Does the number of BNP candidates suggest that UAF has already failed and is unlikely to have any significant impact on the rise of Fascism in Plymouth?
Comments
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acronym watch
10.05.2004 22:20
UAF = Unite Against Fascism
info (hope I'm correct)
good to see
11.05.2004 04:27
lets never forget who the real enemy is, each other!
Sonic
The BNP are not fascist
11.05.2004 08:44
If you want an example of a real fascist regime then Saddam Hussein's Iraq would have been a prime example. A regime you so called anti-fascists were against going to war with to liberate the Iraqi people from real fascism!
By the way the left have not always been this stupid in the 1930s their slogan was fascism means war - reffering to Hitler's regime in Germany. A regime which the left thought it was worth going to war with to free Europe from a tyrannical evil regime. Today's left however totally opposed the war to overthrown Saddam's regime in Iraq, a regime which was the very embodiment of real Hitlerism!
To those say that Saddam did not pose the same danger that Hitler did, they should remember that Saddam set fire to hundreds of Kuwaiti oil wells, poured millions of gallons of crude oil into the Gulf and turned his forces on the Kurds forcing tens of thousands to flee AFTER he had surrendered at he end of the 1991 Gulf War.
real anti-fascist
BNP Plymouth candidates. Who are they?
11.05.2004 09:36
You want personal details? Plymouth Class War will be putting them out when we collate them (city candidates, euro candidates). Mail us for details at info@plymouthclasswar.org
Class Unity - Class Pride - Class War
PlymouthClassWar
e-mail: info@plymouthclasswar.org
Homepage: http://www.plymouthclasswar.org
not Fascist? well let's see:
11.05.2004 09:37
There is no greater insult to those who fought to keep Britain free than to deny the Holocaust happened. But that is what the BNP do.
BNP leader Nick Griffin says the Holocaust is a lie to make people feel sorry for Jewish people. He alleges that the concentration camps, such as Auschwitz, were built after the war by British and American soldiers.
The BNP has even produced a newspaper dedicated to denying the Holocaust.
2. Hitler worshippers
BNP youth leader Mark Collett told Channel Four only a few months ago that Hitler was his hero. He said he would have liked to live in Nazi Germany and found Nazi-saluting German soldiers "inspiring".
Another BNP leader, Tony Lecomber, has called Hitler "peace loving".
Even Griffin adores the fascists. Articles praising the evil Waffen SS and Britain's own fascist leader, Oswald Mosley, have appeared in his magazine.
3. Mengele's heirs
A BNP leader has proposed a Josef Mengele-type eugenics programme for a BNP Britain. Lecomber advocates a "racially purer" Britain through sterilisation of the poor, the sick and the disabled. He even thinks that the rich are "genetically superior" to ordinary people and that poor people shouldn't be allowed to have their own children.
His programme is almost identical to what led to the warped experiments carried out by Mengele and his sick friends in Hitler's Germany.
4. Combat 18 buddies
The BNP set up the nazi terror group Combat 18 (C18). C18 thugs regularly provided personal security for BNP leaders and their meetings. BNP members were involved in many of the worst C18 attacks around the country. The newly elected BNP councillor in Halifax was once an organiser in Combat 18. He ran a C18 magazine and was raided by police during a nationwide operation against C18 leaders.
Even today, photos and information provided by BNP members end up on a C18 internet hitlist.
5. Jew-haters
Like all nazis, BNP leaders hate Jews. Griffin recently wrote a pamphlet claiming that the Jewish people were actively conspiring to control the British media in order to brainwash us into accepting multiculturalism. Griffin's "proof" that the BBC was run by a Jewish conspiracy was the naming of 19 Jewish employees. That's 19 out of over 10,000 staff!
6. Bonehead pals
The BNP is closely linked to the Nazi skinhead gang Blood and Honour, a group that takes its name from Nazi Germany. Many of the leaders of B&H are BNP organisers.
B&H bands have played at nazi festivals in Germany and America. Money from B&H gigs has helped fund BNP election campaigns.
A few years ago, a skinhead band led by the loyalist terrorist Johnny Adair, called Offensive Weapon, performed at a nazi festival held on Griffin's father's farm.
7. Nazi murderers
The London nail-bomber, David Copeland, was a BNP member. Copeland murdered three people during a two-week bombing campaign in the capital in 1999.
Copeland learnt his Nazi politics as an active BNP member. He even boasted to police after his arrest that he wanted to spark off a race riot in Britain so people would go out and vote for the BNP.
8. Traitors
BNP leaders don't think Britain should have fought Hitler in the Second World War. Griffin once insulted the memory of those who died keeping this country free by marching with other nazi lunatics to the Cenotaph under the banner "No more brothers wars".
Lecomber has said that Hitler was a "peace-loving man" while Churchill was a "warmongering drunken slob".
9. Distributors of hate
Several leading BNP members have distributed hard-core Nazi material. Warwickshire organiser Mark Payne sold videos worshipping a 1980s US nazi terrorist group called The Order. Payne was so enchanted with its leader Robert Matthews that he adopted the man's surname.
Even today, the BNP bookclub still sells material from the world's leading Jew-haters and Holocaust deniers.
10. Nazi International Inc.
The BNP is linked to some of the world's most hardline nazi groups. Among them is the National Alliance, America's leading Nazi party. Its founder was William Pierce, a friend of Griffin and a guest speaker at a BNP London rally.
Griffin is also very close to David Duke, a former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan and still a hardline nazi. In 2001 Griffin spoke at a German nazi rally alongside Duke and other European fascists.
awake
You could dig up dirt about any party - remember the Liberal gay murder scandal
11.05.2004 13:27
I am sure any party has its fair share of dodgy members. The BNP has around 2,500 active members most of whom are just normal everyday people like you and me. Even groups like the Freemasons for example also have a lot of dodgy members many of whom have been involved in violent organised crime but do people protest at Freemasons meetings?
If you are going to judge a political party then you judge it by its manifesto and by the actions of its elected members. If anyone took time to read the BNP's manifesto they would be surprised at just how liberal it is. (thats liberal with a small l).
real anti-fascist
missed the point
11.05.2004 14:29
a learned friend
real anti-fascist needs to check their facts
11.05.2004 15:48
If you doubt it ask them if they think Jews run the world, and watch them squirm. They know it makes them look paranoid and racist to say yes, but they can't bring themselves to say no because they do really still believe it. Same if you ask them if they want an all-white UK/Europe, or if they think homosexuality should be illegal.
And a minor aside: the SDP was a split from Labour not the Liberals. So about as accurate as the rest of the comment!
type
Sectarian Ahoy!
12.05.2004 21:27
If you are so knowledgeable, perhaps you would care to share that knowledge with other groups instead of simply purporting to know while choosing not to share it with anyone.
I detect more than a touch of the same sort of Trot "We know what's going on really but we aren't about to share it with anyone" style sectarianism that caused me to leave the Trots in the first place. It was annoying enough when the Trots did it amongst themselves.
The UAF strategy will be to work with trade unions, Searchlight magazine and other groups, with support from high-profile public figures, MP's, celebrities etc to make life as difficult as possible for the BNP and their fellow travellers. It will not be to potter about in small groups, not involving the community at large and acting on behalf of people instead of involving them fully.
My personal priorities are simple. I want to defeat the BNP and stop them from gaining any councillors in Plymouth. I also want to stop them from getting any Euro MP's in the South West region as well. I'm not a member of the SWP or the RESPECT Coalition, so I don't know where you're going with that. I get the distinct impression that you have two major aims here. One is to believe that your group and yours alone has what it takes to defeat the Fascists, and that the efforts of other groups count for nothing. The other is to predict the failure of a campaign, then undermine it from the start and then sit there smugly saying "I told you so".
Personally, I'm happy to give info to other groups as long as I know they are going to use it properly. I don't have a problem working with others for a common purpose. You on the other hand seem to have one.
One final thing, who the hell are Plymouth Class War? I've been active in local and national activism since Genoa, and I've never heard of you. Email me on the above address and we'll talk some more.
Mark
e-mail: mark@scantlebury8205.freeserve.co.uk
We will know soon enough
13.05.2004 23:47
Up here in Wiltshire they have got loads of press coverage, inclunding several front page stories in the Wiltshire Gazette and Herald and a front page story in the Western Daily press about their intention to hold public meetings and stand candiadtes in malmesbury.
It was all bollocks.
After running a press releases about a public meeting which the press dutifully ran they never even confirmned the pub booking, and then made a big hoo haa in the press about calling it off due to left wing intimidation. they never intended to meet in the first place,
they then had a running story for weeks about standing in the local elections, and then they haven't - probably because they cannot find anyone mug enough to stand for them.
then you get all those suspicious letters saying "i am not BNP but they do have a point"
News paper editors need to be more repsonsible and stop giving the fash free publicity.
Andy
BNP only standing two candidates.
15.05.2004 11:53
This is in line with the old BNP tactic of over-inflating the numbers to get a media splash, which failed in Plymouth, and using the free publicity to garner extra votes.
So Franklin, it looks as though either your judgement was flawed, or you fell for that old trick outlined above, or your contacts were feeding you false info.
Mark