As some readers will know, our editor John Tyndall was scheduled to speak at a meeting of the BNP Clitheroe (Lancs.) branch on Wednesday, the 28th April. This followed a highly successful meeting of the same branch at which he spoke last summer, along with Richard Edmonds, and at which a record attendance of over 100 were present.

Everything was building up to another excellent meeting last month, with a great deal of interest being shown by party followers all over the North West of England and places beyond. The meeting would have been a fine boost to the coming local government election campaigns in the region, not just as a morale-raiser but also as a means of raising money.

Then shortly before the date Mr. Tyndall received a letter from the party's 'Director of Group Development & Regulation' Mr. Tony Lecomber, which read as follows (without any correction):-

Dear Mr. Tyndall,

We are now in election mode in the lead up to June 10th. Accordingly I am instructed by the National Chairman to write to you in the following terms:

The many photographs of you in neo-nazi uniform have always been a public relations handicap for the Party. After the end of this week - weekending 18/04/2004 - I am instructing you, with the authority of the National Chairman, not to address meetings of the British National Party until after June 10th. This also applies to any interview requests from the media.

Yours for Race & Nation
A. Lecomber,
Director, Group Development & Regulation

This ban followed some weeks of attempted arm-twisting of various branch organisers in the North West of England by Mrs. Bev Jones, the party's regional organiser, clearly acting on instructions from Mr. Griffin, to put pressure on them not to allow Mr. Tyndall to speak. The arm-twisting succeeded in the case of two branch organisers but not in the case of the third, Clitheroe organiser Wayne Cox, who in addition to being an excellent organiser is no one's lackey. We are fairly sure that similar arm-twisting has occurred with organisers in other areas up and down the country and has succeeded or failed according to the degree of subservience or otherwise of the organisers in question.

Quite clearly, there is a policy, directed from the very top of the BNP, of 'gagging' John Tyndall. The reasons given for it in the letter from Mr. Lecomber are really quite comic. He (Tyndall) is supposed to be 'a public relations handicap' to the BNP because of a picture (or two) of him wearing a political uniform back in the early 1960s, and this is offered as an excuse to prevent him speaking to BNP meetings on the grounds that it could be used by the media during the run-up to the coming elections. Anyone with a grain of sense will immediately see that if people in the media wished to use the photo(s) before the elections they would do so quite regardless of whether Mr Tydnall spoke at the Clitheroe (or any other) meeting or not.

Apparently, this forty-two-year-old photo is a public relations handicap, whereas this does not apply to a photo taken of Nick Griffin standing in front of a huge portrait of Colonel Gaddafi when visiting Libya circa 1989 in order to solicit funds from the Gaddafi regime. The eccentric Colonel is publicly perceived in this country (whether correctly or not) to have financed the IRA for many years; to have authorised the sabotage that caused the Lockerbie air disaster; and to have ordered the murder of WPC Yvonne Fletcher in a London street just by the Libyan Embassy in April 1984 - a crime recently highlighted in the news by the fact that last month marked its 20th anniversary.

Then while we are talking about public relations handicaps, what about the selection as leading BNP candidate for the Greater London Authority of a man with a police record of disorder at football matches, including an arrest only three years ago for an alleged 'racist' incident, and a conviction for a public order offence at another match some years before that? Already this has been the subject of a report in the London Evening Standard, which has described the candidate as a former 'football hooligan'.

Not least, there is the case of Mr. Lecomber himself, who has been to prison twice, in the first instance being caught by police with explosives in the near vicinity of the headquarters of a left-wing organisation, and later for beating up a Jewish schoolteacher. These incidents occurred when John Tyndall was head of the BNP but out of a loyalty to Mr. Lecomber (which he now recognises to have been badly misplaced) he did not kick him out of the party.

The monumental hypocrisy of all this is revealed when we remember that shortly after Mr. Griffin's takeover in 1999 his people were attempting to persuade John Tyndall to serve as BNP President - a newly to-be-created office that was mooted in the hope that it would 'buy him off'. No mention of nazi photographs then!

The attempts to gag Mr. Tyndall as a speaker on BNP platforms began in August 2002, when strenuous pressures were applied by Messrs. Griffin and Lecomber against Burnley organiser Steve Smith to cancel an invitation to him to speak at a meeting of Burnley branch. Steve Smith, like Wayne Cox in Clitheroe, is not only an excellent organiser but is also not made of lackey material, and he stood firm. The next thing we witnessed was an Anti-Nazi League demonstration outside the meeting, not experienced at any Burnley BNP meeting previously nor since.

No legal authority

Following the Lecomber directive, Mr. Tyndall consulted two separate solicitors and obtained from them both the opinion that the party leadership had no authority whatever to deny him the right to speak on party platforms as long as he was a bona fide paid-up party member. He thereupon wrote back to Mr. Lecomber and informed him that he would be speaking at the Clitheroe meeting whether he or Mr. Griffin liked it or not. The Clitheroe branch organiser was advised of this and he completely supported Mr. Tyndall in the matter.

Then in the afternoon of the 20th April, the day on which this letter to Mr. Lecomber would have arrived, the organiser Wayne Cox received a 'phone-call lasting nearly an hour from regional organiser Bev Jones, clearly acting on instructions from above, in which more arm-twisting with a view to cancelling Mr. Tyndall's speech was tried. During the course of this conversation Mrs. Jones informed Mr. Cox that the Anti-Nazi League would be demonstrating at the meeting. Clitheroe BNP has held many meetings over the past two or three years and not once has the ANL shown itself. Mrs. Jones' excuse for this was that Mr. Tyndall's appearance at the meeting was mentioned in last month's Spearhead. This is nonsense. The ANL has informers throughout the BNP in the North West and knows about every meeting in the region. It would have most certainly known about the Clitheroe one last month, irrespective of the mention in Spearhead. Here memories of Burnley come to mind!

How regrettable that with all the important elections coming up the BNP national and regional leadership has nothing better to do!