National conference on September 27th

We are pleased to announce a follow-on conference on September 27th at the Queens Walk Community Centre, Nottingham starting at 11am.

The purpose of the conference, to which we invite both regional and national organisations, is to have an open discussion about what we do, from now on, to counter the BNP nationally but particularly in the East Midlands region.

An excellent start has been made in this area as a result of our protest on August 16th. Despite the invocation of the Public Order Act, and some very aggravating difficulties, we managed to have a legal and peaceful protest that was continuous from soon after 9am and remained there until 2:30 pm. At its peak it attracted approx 500 people. A march was held in the middle of the day organised by the Unite Against Fascism group.

We do not know yet whether the BNP intend to hold another festival in Derbyshire next year.

If they do, we hope for your support to stop it with more vigorous campaigning and a greater number of protesters if it actually goes ahead.

If they don’t, we will still need to do an awful lot of work not only to drive them back from the position they have achieved, with both councillors and members, after 30 years of existence in Amber Valley, but also to stop any further advances of the BNP in the East Midlands area and elsewhere in the country.

As a result of the protest, we now have a sizeable, very active and optimistic Stop the BNP group in Amber Valley.

We hope you will join us on the 27th September to discuss how we might do these things. We will be holding a planning meeting on the week-end of 13th-14th September to which we will be inviting sponsors.

Organisations wishing to sponsor please notify the organisers at the email address nobnpfestival@riseup.net

Download leaflet for conference from this link

Addendum/ Please note that there is a small admission charge to cover costs

RWB B&B

The BNP are a fragile lot and some of the poor dears are perturbed by the thought of a weekend under canvas. In order to ease these worries, those helpful souls in the BNP’s “Administration Department” have produced this list of local B&Bs. It’s highly unlikely that the BNP have consulted with any of the proprietors of these establishments and you have to wonder how many of them would want to be associated with the BNP’s so-called “festival.”

Police permission given for our Codnor protest from 9am

We are pleased to report that there was a very fruitful and productive meeting with the Derbyshire police this morning. The result of which has been that we have police agreement for us to congregate in protest at the BNP in Codnor as we originally intended from 9am onwards.

We understand that any concerns that the Midlands TUC had about our protest being legal and safe are now resolved and that locally unions and Stop the BNP activists from across the region and elsewhere will be able to congregate at 9am in Codnor.

It appears that there have been some malicious rumours been set up to disrupt our negotiations with the police and the TUC and we will be reporting on them in due course.

Public Order Act invoked against anti-fascist protests

Keep watching this site for important updates

This morning, Monday 11^th August, the Public Order Act will be invoked and signed off by Derbyshire Constabulary to cover the area of the BNP’s RWB festival on the week-end of 15^th-17^th August. The exact terms of the implementation of that Act we have yet to see but we understand that it seriously restricts the rights of protesters against the BNP’s Red White and Blue festival. We are unaware of any restrictions on any BNP activity.

A UAF demonstration has been organised on August 16^th under fairly tight conditions but the organisers of that march have at no time invited us to share in the planning of that activity.

This campaign still intends to exercise our legal right to protest as close to the BNP festival site as possible from 9-11am on August 16th.

The Notts Stop the BNP campaign, central to Stop the RWB Festival campaign, has arranged to meet with the police later in the morning of 11th August. Contrary to some rumour, the Notts Stop the BNP campaign had written to the police as early as 18^th July and received a reply informing us that we would be contacted in due course. We heard nothing further until the information about the Public Order Act restrictions was released to us via the Midlands TUC last Friday, 8^th August. This information was given in the lead up to a meeting between Midlands TUC, the UAF and the police on the same Friday.

The amended details of our protest will be announced as soon as we can find out from the police, both the terms of the Public Order Act and where we can congregate without risk to those involved. We hope to announce this within the next day.

Please try and attend this important protest. Those attending from Nottingham please contact the campaign (07980 089859) to obtain a coach ticket. We are strongly recommending that people use our transport to ensure we all arrive at the same place

We appeal to all other supporters to join us at the venue that we hope to announce by tomorrow.

Nick Griffin to reassert control at RWB

The BNP have always claimed that RWB is a non-political “family festival.” Of course, we’ve never taken this very seriously. The BNP have now gone a long way to abandoning the pretence themselves and are holding a “General Members’ Meeting” on Sunday August 17 in the Political Marquee, Red-White-and-Blue Field. The event, which is open to “paid up current BNP members only” is intended to implement a number of constitutional changes. These are mostly pretty banal and written in a deliberately dull bureaucratic style, but the crucial change is that the Chairman is now to be elected for a period of four years during which he cannot be challenged.

This appears to be Griffin’s latest attempt to maintain control over the party (they prefer the term “modernising”) following leadership challenges by Chris Jackson last year and Colin Auty this year. It is likely to be controversial and we understand from our sources (the BNP being a notoriously leaky organisation) that Sadie Graham and others associated with the Real BNP/Voice of Change/Independent and/or Democratic Nationalist faction will be in attendance. Graham’s faction (which has struggled to find a name it can stick with) emerged late last year after Graham and Kenny Smith were expelled from the BNP ostensibly over comments critical of Mark Collett, the party’s Head of Publicity and intially garnered considerable support from disillusioned party members, but appears to have lost this by its failure to openly challenge Griffin’s leadership with many one-time supporters returning to the BNP.