There are many different reasons why I’m standing as a Liberal Democrat against Nick Griffin in Barking.
Here is just one of them.
My bus stop on the way home is outside Brixton station, next to Iceland supermarket. Waiting there, I recall what the BNP’s message of hatred can bring. For it was exactly at this spot on Saturday April 17th 1999 that the London nail bomber David Copeland planted his first bomb. The following Saturday, he planted another bomb in Brick Lane. A week later, his final bomb exploded inside a Soho pub, killing three people. Altogether 129 people were injured. Four victims lost limbs. In March 2000, Copeland received six life sentences.
Why is this relevant?
Two years before planting his deadly bombs, Copeland joined the BNP. He became a security steward at BNP meetings for the party leader, John Tyndall.
In the BNP, Copeland was encouraged to read the Turner Diaries, written by American neo-Nazi, William Pierce. The book advocates a race war: whites committing acts of terrorism against Jews, blacks and Asians. It inspired Timothy McVeigh to plant the Oklahoma City bomb in 1995, which killed 168 people. Mcveigh took the idea and the method directly from the book. When arrested, Copeland confessed that he had also been influenced by Pierce’s book. A copy was found in his room.
Copeland said in his police statement: “If you’ve read the Turner Diaries, you know there’ll be an uprising, racial violence on the streets. My aim was political – to cause a racial war in this country. There’d be a backlash from the ethnic minorities, then all the white people will go out and vote BNP.”
So who introduced Copeland to the Turner Diaries? Pierce spoke at BNP meetings. The author was regularly championed in BNP publications, which sold the book. In one BNP magazine, the Rune, Pierce was praised as: ‘One of the most thoughtful, dedicated, experienced and bravest men of our time.’
The author of that article was also the Rune editor: Nick Griffin.
Griffin did not plant nail-bombs. Griffin is not legally guilty of incitement to murder. But morally, Griffin has blood on his hands. He may not have taped nails on the bomb, or put explosives in the container, but Griffin and the BNP helped light a deadly fuse in Copeland’s mind. That’s what incitement to racial hatred means. And that’s what Griffin was found guilty of. For editing the Rune, he received a suspended prison sentence in 1998 – only months before Copeland planted his first bomb. Shortly afterwards, Griffin became BNP leader.
If you would like to help Dominic in his campaign, please e-mail: [email protected]
Follow @libdemvoice.org on Bluesky
Like us on Facebook
Subscribe to our feed
Sign-up for our daily email digest
Lochee Park - 1973 #dundeewestend
Urgent action needed on Welsh rivers
Llandow, 1950: The worst air disaster the world had seen
Electoral Calculus's local election predictions
Are memories like a row of telegraph poles?
tom arms
Simon R
Alan Jelfs
Peter Hirst
13 Comments
Thanks for this Dominic, all you can do to highlight the true nature of fascists and the fact that it isn’t only their rhetoric which drips with violence, is valuable.
And so Dominic, would you support Lord Clement-Jones’ amendment 120a on the Digital Economy Bill that would enable the censorship of any website (UK or foreign) that published the Turner Diaries, i.e. in order to prevent the public’s access to material liable to instruct, incite, and induce its readers into acts of terror against innocent civilians?
Bonus questions:
Is the citizen responsible for their criminal actions, or are they an intellectually feeble blank slate to be programmed with whatever propaganda first reaches them?
Should we have banned Star Wars because it symbolically glorified the destruction of the twin towers in the minds of those who saw themselves as striking a blow at an evil empire?
Articles like this show exactly why we need to stand up to and defeat the challenge of the BNP. Dominic Carman seems poised to do a very good job standing against Nick Griffin in Barking. The very best of luck to you and to your campaign.
Hi Dominic,
“Griffin and the BNP helped light a deadly fuse in Copeland’s mind” – well said. You make a thoughtful, coherent argument against the BNP with a lovely turn of phrase to boot!
I can see why Nick Griffin might not be keen to debate you. Let’s hope you do well for us.
Yeah, let’s all stand against Nick Griffin.
He won’t stand a chance!
Griffin did not plant nail-bombs. Griffin is not legally guilty of incitement to murder. But morally, Griffin has blood on his hands.
Because he wrote a favourable book review?
You’re joking right? This is some sort of experiment to see if you can provoke liberals into defending Griffin?
I’d have thought the case against him was air-tight enough without having to resort to hysterical hyperbole such as this, and I while it may get a few cheers from the choir I can’t see it eliciting anything but snorts of derision from those you are trying to reach – i.e those who might consider voting for him in the first place.
The quote is not taken from a book review, but an from a Rune article which Griffin dedicates in praise to a series of American white supremacist terrorists, bombers and killers – what he describes as ‘a roll call of the most thoughtful, dedicated, experienced and bravest men of our time.’ Apart from Pierce, who inspired terrorism, the achievements of the other men listed were bombing and killing opponents of the white race.
Emotive cobblers. Please leave the silly name calling and guilt-by association tactics to the Trotskyists of the SWP. Nick Griffin is a white nationalist who believes in homogenous societies based on common cultural values but he is not a Nazi and does not believe in nail bombing his opponents. He is not responsible for the actions of a deranged criminal. As liberals, we should debate issues openly, honestly and directly
Oh come on, surely the LD have better candidates than this. The man’s a loser. These sort of smears were seen through by the public years ago. At this rate Griffin won’t have to campaign, the LDs will do it for him. The voters are sick of this type of thing. What we want is policies.
Surely you should be taking on Margert Hodge, Griffin and is party are irrelevant.
“Oh come on, surely the LD have better candidates than this. The man’s a loser. These sort of smears were seen through by the public years ago. At this rate Griffin won’t have to campaign, the LDs will do it for him. The voters are sick of this type of thing. What we want is policies.”
Er, what sort of smears, Brian? I think that Dominic Carman is suggesting that, on his past record, Nick Griffin is not only unfit to hold public office, but is unfit to be allowed to talk on the same platform as decent, reasonable people. He has expressed support for murderers and fascists, and today denies it because he wants to get elected. To point this out isn’t to smear him at all. Who on earth are you, Brian, and what are you doing on a liberal site? As for Catherine Miller’s comment above yours, can you point out any ACTUAL silly name calling? I don’t see any. Although ’emotive cobblers’ comes close.
Catherine Milner:
If Nick Griffin is not a Nazi, why did he (1) join the National Front under the avowedly Nazi Tyndall and Webster, (2) follow the avowedly Nazi Tyndall into the BNP and (3) deny the Holocaust?
Griffin likes to present himself as a working-class thug, the champion of brainless, racist, beer-swilling morons, the scourge of middle-class trendies, gays and people with more than a handful of braincells. Actually, he is an upper-middle-class thug with a very rich Daddy who went to a posh school and has never had to work in his life.
The BNP are SCUM.
hey has anyone watched “children of men”? i tell you that will be the fate of Britain if they are under the BNP.