What Is Going to be Done
Nick Griffin sets out his agenda for the months ahead. This 'must-read' article builds on his incisive and insightful article Deadline 2014: The Convergence of Catastrophes and What the BNP Needs to Do published here on 6 July 2010.
The first article set the scene, describing the exciting and highly promising external circumstances now influencing our future as a party. This new article takes an in-depth look at the things we need to do together in order to fulfil our potential.By Nick Griffin — Brutal cuts, tax rises, growing anger over the no-win Afghan War, the second financial crash into double-dip depression, the looming threat of a US/Israeli attack on Iran, and the ever-present threat of an explosion of the growing tensions between 'British' Muslims and their long-suffering neighbours.
Did you ever imagine such a witches' cauldron of trouble for the Establishment, or such a time of opportunity for Nationalism?
I recently examined the terminal instability of liberal globalism in an in-depth article on this website. So now it's time to follow on from that with a detailed assessment of where are we now, and what is to be done next?
In brief, at the beginning of 2008 I agreed on behalf of the BNP a contract with a professional fund-raising and management firm, the Midas Consultancy. Run by Jim Dowson, a fiery Ulster Scot with extensive campaigning experience in the pro-life movement, this has revolutionised the party's central structure over the last two years.
Our fund-raising has soared from a couple of hundred thousand pounds a year to a staggering £1.6 million last year. Various measures to show our members they are truly valued has cut our annual drop-out rate for a shocking 70% per year at the start of that period to a mere 17% per annum last year.
The money that Jim Dowson has saved us through his cost-cutting advice has more than covered the total cost of his professional fees.
Innovations such as a hugely sophisticated database of members and supporters, our Call and Dispatch Centre in Belfast, effective staff monitoring to ensure that we get value for members' money, and accountancy procedures which give us the same level of financial oversight and transparency as a multi-national corporation, have transformed the effectiveness of the party centre.
None of this has escaped our opponents, who over the last year especially have used every black propaganda trick in their book to frighten Mr. Dowson off (and the threat to his safety from Republican dissidents, who are heavily linked to Islamic extremists, has indeed forced him into virtual exile from his Ulster home) and failing that to demonise him almost as much as me (which, you will appreciate, takes some doing.)
But despite the threats, pressure, lies and character assassinations, we and the rest of the team have persevered, and the amazing progress of the last two years has continued, and continues to this day.
The last key pieces of the jigsaw are now being put into place. Perhaps the most important is that, we have just had our first full year of not just having our financial affairs in order in accountancy terms but also of having absolutely every single transaction entered electronically as it has happened.
This means that, for the first time ever in the history of British nationalism, we not only can show that our financial affairs are conducted with complete probity, we are also now in the position to use that full year's figures to work out cash flow forecasts and budgets for the future and to plan ahead, rather than constantly working by guesswork and living from hand-to-mouth.
To anyone with serious business experience this may all sound fairly basic, but for a political organisation, staffed and run by people used to working with politics and ideals, this will be a huge step forward.
It should, of course, have been done years ago, but I am a political organiser rather than a financial whizzkid, and all our key people naturally also tend to think in terms of politics rather than business.
So until Mr. Dowson came on the scene this gap was left unfilled. Hence, while we have made good progress introducing internal controls to guard against possible misappropriation of funds, we have up until now still lacked budgetary control systems — hence a recurring problem with well-intended overspend at each big election. We did it again back in May, and it has to be the last time.
The second huge advance which is also only just beginning to kick in is that we have finally created a team, headed by popular persecuted BNP teacher Adam Walker, backed by Solidarity trade union's employment law specialist Patrick Harrington (who himself is a nationalist old hand who achieved national prominence over his brave and successful fight as a young student against the bigots of the far-left for the right to an education at the University of North London), to put the management and motivation of our staff on a professional footing.
This is something I have tried to do several times since being elected to run the BNP ten years ago. The most promising early effort came to a sad halt owing to the untimely death of Chris Green.
Subsequently I called together a group of long-standing members with business and management experience to brainstorm this issue.
We called them the Central Management Team but, for all their willingness and experience, the job turned out to be beyond the capability of volunteers.
There was also a problem with 'office politics', hence the decision now to use not only full-timers but also one who, while a committed nationalist, is not inside the BNP 'loop' and thus can bring much-needed objectivity to the vital job of staff management.
This in turn is only part of a wider reaching drive to modernise the party. Right at the start of the Midas contract, Jim Dowson and I decided that we had to get the party's administrative centre straight before working on ways to raise the efficiency of the BNP's regional and local operations. The process of dragging the party centre into the 21st century has not been easy.
The process of imposing even fairly basic commercial employment disciplines (such as time sheets and forward planners) on people who are at heart still political volunteers rather than paid administrative bureaucrats has not always been without friction. But it had to be done.
I do not believe that I, or any other party leader, has the right to waste members' money employing individuals who are lazy, incompetent or insubordinate.
But while there are still some minor failings to address and gaps to fill, the work of professionalising the central administration is now more or less done. Which means that it is now time to move on to the even bigger job of professionalising our regional and local structure.
This too has to be done. I dread to think, for example, how many members we have failed to sign up in the past because we spend so much of our time in heavy politics to grasp that most people don't get involved in a cause on account of careful consideration of political literature, but because they pick up the enthusiasm and follow the example of a friend who is already involved and who invites them to a social occasion where they suddenly find that they belong and feel at home.
I shudder at the thought of how many new recruits have dropped out after a year because their local organiser didn't bother to contact them or failed to involve them in suitable meetings or activities.
Did you know that, for all our years of canvassing, we have never instituted a programme to train canvassers in elementary sales techniques such as how to overcome objections and to 'close the deal'?
What little training was done under our old Elections Department was confined to showing people a hugely laborious way of turning the electronic electoral register into canvass sheets, and explaining how to fill them in; but as to persuading people to vote for us, nothing was ever done.
Incredible, isn't it? But don't these facts also show how much so far unfilled potential there is just waiting to be tapped?
Once again, however, it won't be easy. There will be resistance from those individuals who resent the monitoring and the targets that will follow the explanations and the training we will provide.
But we have to break through such personally motivated negativity if our party is truly to become the super efficient machine we need to overcome the thoroughly underhand treatment we all have to endure at the hands of the Establishment.
This is the key reason for my decision to step down as party leader at the start of 2014. It gives me a tight three year schedule in which to oversee and take the inevitable flak that will arise from this essential modernisation programme.
It is going to make me very unpopular among those officials who cannot or will not raise their game. But it has to be done, and we cannot afford to wait any longer.
My remaining job as the leader who has made this party a winner is to clear the decks and build the organisational superstructure for my successor (who, incidentally, contrary to black propaganda put out by our far-left opponents and those with personal axes to grind, will neither be a member of my family or a recently promoted youngster. This is not a job for someone who lacks extensive life experience, and my family have all seen enough of the burdens and heartaches to have the sense to wish to shun it like the plague).
With that done it is then my intention to concentrate completely on my North West constituency in the run-up to the European Elections in June 2014, and hopefully to provide experienced advice and assistance to my successor (realistically, it is impossible to hand over a machine as complex as the BNP has now become in one go. If there is not to be a dangerous disjoint, the outgoing and incoming leader must have a good working relationship and trust each other).
Then I intend to go on to lead the larger BNP group that is going to be at the centre of a more powerful nationalist resistance block within the European Parliament.
But we're getting a bit ahead of ourselves, so let's return to the present and get down to the nitty-gritty of my practical plans for our further and broader progress over the next three years.
While many of these overlap and mutually support each other, they can in general be put into seven broad categories:
1) Elections - getting back to winning.
i) I wrote in detail on our website about this within days of the election. In short, we have — and are already working — to emulate Labour's hugely successful combination of voter identification and engagement. We are going to do this through grassroots and telecanvassing campaigns, highly sophisticated data-basing of the resulting information flows, and targeted mailshots, call backs and personal visits at subsequent elections.
ii) Closely related to that, our new Elections Department, Communications team and internet technocrats are already well on the way to creating an interactive website which will give our front line workers all over the country instant access to full campaign templates, including all the leaflets, petition forms, posters, social networking tools and everything else they need to agitate and recruit on every possible subject.
We are well placed to create and use such systems of our own because the skills and technology we have acquired and bought for and through our own fundraising and call centre operations are absolutely transferable from internal organisation to external campaigning.
iii) This revolution in our electioneering backroom work will be complimented by planned advances in our front line capacity too. The Elections Department is already working on creating a highly trained elections taskforce, including insisting that all our BNP staff make themselves available at key moments in important by-election campaigns.
Not only will this provide extra manpower where it is most needed, but also that by leading by example and showing how to do it properly, the taskforce will help to train our local campaigners in our best practice techniques.
iv) Finally (for now) we need within a year to have bought, converted and equipped a mobile home or similar vehicle to create a mobile publicity production and data-crunching centre.
This would mean that instead of trying to find a spare room in which to cobble together a temporary campaign office, we would instead drive into crucial campaigns a mobile office, printshop and activist support facility (hot tea and bacon butties in the winter, iced water and suncream for follicly-challenged activists in summer).
2) Education and Training - the key to expansion.
This summer will see the start of a massive expansion of our E&T operation. This will be done in three main ways: An online distance learning site; regionally based evening classes and, as soon as we can afford it, weekend courses done at our communications and training base in Stroud. The courses will cover:
i) Practical organisational matters at various levels of the party, but with particular emphasis on raising the capabilities of teams supporting our Regional Organisers, councillors and candidates in winnable wards, and specialist groups involved in different aspects of more advanced electioneering;
ii) Nationalist ideology. It is essential to turn future waves of new recruits into proper, committed real nationalists - fully educated as to the bigger issues behind the immigration issue, the banking swindle and the other matters of principle that truly distinguish us from the Establishment and their safety valve parties.
Every few years some ambitious charlatan comes along and tries to turn the BNP into a civic nationalist sell-out party.
Frankly, if that was what we wanted, and if that was what was needed, we could all have left it to UKIP in the first place. But it is not. Just because a featherless biped can speak English and knows how to sign on for benefits, that does not make it one of us.
Nationality and identity are based on ancient roots and belonging, not on possession of a passport. And every new wave of new recruits must be taught this, or our struggle would be pointless.
iii) Our culture and heritage. This is especially important for younger people who have been so badly let down by the education system and so denied real informed pride in their ethnic roots.
iv) Personal character, proper behaviour and individual and community improvement. Our movement has to be so much more than a political party, it must also become the vehicle for a true national revival, and that has to grow first through our own ranks before we can even begin to change the wider community around us.
3) Alternative Media - further steps on a long road
Our left-liberal and internationalist enemies have a vice-like grip on the minds of the population through ruthless control of the mass media. For us to expect to beat them without breaking that grip through the development of an alternative nationalist media network is ridiculous.
That, of course, presents us with a huge task, but the way to walk a thousand miles is to stand up and start taking the first steps, so here is what we are going to do to build further on the remarkable and continued success of our website:
i) Radio RWB, our embryonic online radio station, is already getting many thousands of listeners. While it's early days yet, there is clearly huge potential for this to become further 'social glue' to attract and keep newcomers to the movement, and to motivate the new activists we need to strengthen our electoral challenge.
It should also become a way to attract a fresh generation of future nationalists, by playing demo tapes of whatever genre of music youngsters are making in garages and bedrooms.
The left have made the capture and distortion of young minds through music a speciality. We cannot just back and make no response, and while personally I love folk music I am very much aware that to appeal to young people it is essential to use the music with which they already identify.
Radio RWB gives us, and Great White Records, a way to break into those genres.
ii) Internet TV is already breaking the monopoly domination of the broadcast media by anti-nationalist forces. It is without a shadow of a doubt the way ahead, and is already the subject of discussions with a view to co-operation between the BNP and our partners in the Alliance of European Nationalist Movements.
What has been eye-catchingly and provocatively dubbed "the nationalist Al-Jazera" is not a pipedream, it is a seriously achievable aim within the next three years, as advances on the Internet remove the need for access to impossibly expensive satellite technology.
4) Breaking out of the Nationalist Ghetto — reaching out to the wider community
Over the last few years the BNP has won enormous 'soft' support and respect among millions of ordinary Brits. But to translate this into firm support, we have to show them that not only do we say what they think on the really big issues, but also that we can make a practical difference in real life. Hence the need to build on the experience and successes of the experiments in which we have already been involved.
i) Community Groups, especially on issues that the usual PC crowd won't touch, such as the scandal of the racist sexual grooming of young white girls by Muslim men. There is enormous scope for a combination of playing victim cards on behalf of our community (as done, to the horror of the left, with our mass mail-shot Racism Cuts Both Ways campaign) and encouraging self-help initiatives.
These played an important role in setting the scene for the rise of the early Labour Party, and their time will come again as the deepening economic crisis and corporate looting tear up the welfare safety nets of the old nation state. This too is ground that must not be left to our opponents.
ii) Solidarity. A couple of years ago, the independent nationalist trade union faced an intense campaign of black propaganda and subversion by in hindsight obvious far-left plants. With enormous effort it overcame those early assaults and has now grown from having fewer than two dozen members to around 500. That makes it a fully viable union that does very effective work on behalf of its membership.
It also means it is perfectly poised for major expansion, which will help to protect even more nationalist activists from persecution, but also begin to give us scope to turn to our advantage anti-BNP laws like those allowing 'third party disparagers' during elections. That's why, as soon as possible, we will be doing all we can to assist Solidarity in its drive to double its membership to over 1,000.
iii) Single issue campaigns. These have huge potential not only in terms of helping the public learn that we are on their side on more than the subject of immigration. They will also be invaluable as a way of bringing in names and contact details, as well as invaluable information about those people's 'hot buttons', which we can then press during recruitment and election campaigns. Opposition to the Afghan War is going to be a very good place to start.
iv) Local "propaganda of the deed". Again, we've already done the experimental work. From community clean-ups to Adam Walker's recent footpath building project, from Burnley BNP Councillor Sharon Wilkinson's pensioners' dining club to the Community Observation Patrols run by Mike Howson and our people in Corsham until Wiltshire police reintroduced evening police patrols — we already know these things work.
Again, the scope for this vital deep community roots work is set to grow exponentially as ConDem cuts take the police off streets, increase crime and leave neglected indigenous communities to sink or swim by themselves. It is our duty and great opportunity to make sure they swim.
5) Intelligent Militancy — time to make our presence felt
In the strange, hard times into which Britain has been plunged by the failure of globalism, there will be a growing collective desire for a movement which doesn't only stand up for traditional values, identity and its own people in theory, but which also does so — intelligently and legally, but forcefully — in practice. There are several ways in which, by the time I hand over the further improved BNP, it will be justly known for intelligent militancy such as:
i) "Legal Rioting". More properly known as Judicial Review Applications, which are tailor-made to allow our people to throw very chunky and rusty spanners into the works of any and every part of the machinery of central and local government.
While the cost to us is minimal, the cost to, for example, a Local Education Authority which refuses to keep records of the racist bullying of white schoolchildren, is shocking publicity and a legal bill of at least £20,000. This is why the majority of pre-action letters for Judicial Review lead to the institution in question agreeing to negotiate and to sort out the problem concerned. Now that's power, and the Equality Commission will shortly see us wielding it.
ii) Lightning demonstrations. While we will continue with the self-discipline of generally avoiding futile confrontations with large bodies of leftists, the new external circumstances do demand a higher profile as a party willing to make a stand on key popular issues.
A budget is therefore going to be set aside for an Instant Response Activities Organiser in each region. This will pay for the equipment and materials we need stockpiled ready to go, and to hire transport. The aim is for us to be able to mobilise, at very short notice (as we have already shown we can do, for instance, when I or others have been arrested for political offences) several hundred people for whatever demonstration is needed.
Opposition to the Muslim thugs who are making a habit of abusing army home-coming parades is an obvious starting point as far as I am concerned.
iii) Pressure on bullies, hacks and collaborators. How often have you like me seethed with anger when you've seen news reports of some PC council bullying a market trader for selling apples by the pound, or a guest house owner for politely turning away a 'gay' couple or a burqua-clad Muslim, or of some newspaper editor who openly lies about the BNP and thinks he's untouchable? Well, it's time to hit back.
So we're going to produce several sets of Truth Truck skins specially designed so it can turn up in the posh, polite, leafy suburbs where the bullies and the media liars live, and ruin their Sunday mornings off.
We'll have template leaflets ready to go to, so that their neighbours can be told what sort of people they really are, and understand why they are attracting such unwelcome attention.
6) Organisational Professionalisation
Increasingly favourable external circumstances are combining with our massive internal organisational advances, and with already extensive public sympathy for the BNP, to provide the potential for explosive growth.
This, of course, is the reason for the hysterically dishonest campaign to blacken my reputation, undo the advances of the last two years and to destroy the party. It is also the reason why, even while dealing with the smear mongers, we have to work flat out to put in place the systems that will allow us to manage and channel that growth.
This can only happen if we push through major reforms and improvements in our internal structure, including:
i) The creation of a sophisticated but user-friendly Intranet operation to provide an online tool for staff co-ordination and management, and for the support of officials and our hard-working local councillors.
ii) Training. Already covered in Section 2, but I cannot overstress the importance I attribute to this field over the next three years. We can grow massively, but only it will only be sustainable and lead anywhere if we train our existing people to raise their game, and teach the newcomers what we're about and how they can help.
iii) Target Setting, Performance Monitoring and Reviews. Our past and current standards of planning meetings and human resource and project management are frankly pitiful. To introduce proper business-quality practice in these fields is not 'alien corporatism' as the knockers claim, but basic organisational commonsense.
Imposing this from the top to bottom of the party is not going to make me popular, but doing it is going to provide my successor with one of my most valuable legacies.
iv) Recruitment and retention of members through social events and entertainment. In the hard times into which Britain is now plunging, there is going to be enormous power in cheap social events that give participants a sense of belonging and a few hours away from worry and being part of something bigger and worthwhile. Again, this is a pool into which we have already dipped our toes, most effectively with the Battle of Britain Roadshows that raised so much money and morale in the run-up to the European Election.
7) Finally, by the time I step down as leader, I aim to have well underway a serious programme to buy and equip a full, permanent, central England training/communications/administration/distribution centre. This would bring all our essential central functions into one complex, with all the proper permissions, security and facilities.
This has been the medium- to long-term plan for the last two years. The decision to set up our main administrative, call centre and dispatch centre in Ulster was taken reluctantly on the grounds that it was the only place we could find and employ the experts we needed to teach us how to do these things, and control them hands-on while our own people were learning.
But, for all sorts of reasons, now our young team knows how to use the sophisticated systems and delicate equipment involved and — just as important — understands the crucial importance of tight-deadlines and a proper work ethic, it would be more efficient to have everything based in the middle of England.
This is not something that can be done overnight, and for financial reasons it will have to be done in two stages in any case. First, we plan to bring the whole set-up to a rented unit in the West Midlands. This is all we can afford at present and, once again, we need to de-bug the new operation and establish exactly what and who we need there in order to maximise both efficiency and cost-effectiveness.
Having done that, we will be in a position to move to Phase Two, which is going to be the most ambitious and important project in British nationalist history — the purchase and edevelopment of our own fully integrated operational headquarters and training centre.
Of course, this will not come cheap, for a start it needs to be in at least 30 acres of our beautiful countryside to provide a permanent landscaped RWB site. But another property crash is just around the corner, and properties in need of development will, at the right time, be an affordable bargain for a united and confident movement that has been saving for several years and which has several hundred local units all doing their bit to reach our goal.
At which point, despite having much more to tell you, I am out of time. So I can only conclude like this: These are only the next rungs up on a long ladder. The only reason we are in a position to climb them is because what has already been done with so many people's dedicated, loyal and generous support.
What we have achieved, especially with what we have done at the party centre in the last two years, positions us for the next steps up, and for further advances after that. Sometimes this progress involves us taking two steps forwards and then one step back, but overall, our progress has been, is and will remain, relentless. Whatever our enemies do, we keep moving forward. Whenever they beat us, we learn and turn the lesson to our advantage.
This movement of ours is like a brave, loyal terrier with its teeth deep in the leg of a homicidal burglar, which is a good way to visualise those who have sold and raped our country and her people. We won't let go. And, sometime soon, we will get one, just one, chance to go for the burglar's throat and save all we hold dear.
We are here to save and to build a better future for the people of this our island home. I implore you not to sit and watch the chance pass us by, don't sit and watch as others make it happen. Be part of it. Don't make excuses, help us make history!
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