Blog: No love lost between BNP and free press
Blog: No love lost between BNP and free press on Valentine's Day
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By Darren Estwick. |  |
Monday, 15, Feb 2010 11:41
By Matthew Champion.
On the day the British National party voted to abandon a longstanding ban on non-white members, the party showed its true face within minutes when it ejected a widely-respected Times reporter from the press conference announcing the result.
Dominic Kennedy, the paper's investigations editor, had been invited to the event and was admitted by the party's press national press officer Simon Darby when a prominent BNP politician recognised him as a Times journalist.
Richard Barnbrook, the only BNP member of the London Assembly and a failed mayoral candidate, said Kennedy was not welcome in the Elm Park pub in London's East End where the presser was taking place.
Recalling the event in the Times today, Kennedy writes that he stood his ground, insisting he had been invited and declined to give a yes or no answer when warned he would be ejected if he did not leave voluntarily.
"One man grabbed my nose and tried to remove it from my face. I was seized and shoved out of the door towards a parked car," he wrote.
"After [Barnbrook] lost his temper with me I was quickly shoved and lifted out of the building, hit in the back and had my face squashed."
The incident took place in full view of the assembled media and as party leader Nick Griffin prepared to speak to the cameras.
"We will carry on throwing The Times out until they report the truth," he said, in apparent reference to a profile of Barnbrook published in Saturday's edition of the Times. "That's all we ask."
Griffin had earlier crowed about the BNP lifting its whites-only membership criteria, a position it was forced into by legal action by the Equality and Human Rights Commission last year.
The MEP said the change meant critics "can't call us racist anymore" but his failure to recognise the difference between no longer being racist legally and ideologically.
"I never thought I would actually get my nose bloodied trying to cover a press conference for a British political party," Kennedy wrote in his account for his paper. "But that is the true face of Nick Griffin and his BNP."
A racist party can vote to change its constitution as much as it wants; it's still a racist party at heart, and yesterday's events show how volatile and restless the BNP will continue to be under the eye of the free press because of it.