By Max Musson:
It is my great pleasure to announce former BNP Greenwich Branch Organiser, John Leech as the fifth nominee for the 2015 Jonathan Bowden Oratory Prize. John is a very popular individual and this nomination relates to a speech made by him at a meeting of the London Forum in November 2014.
As we can see, John’s speech was very fluid, with good use of gesture and emotion to underline the emphatic nature of his message.
By Max Musson © 2015
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A Mayer
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Somewhat ‘rough and ready’ but an effective speech in its way. Regarding the content; there seems to be an unexpressed loss of morale with the demise of the BNP which with the right leadership could have progressed from its base of some 15000 members. The inept leadership seems to have got away with its stubborn destruction of the party from within. Figuratively speaking, there should have been an enormous bloodletting,it should not have gone down with barely a whimper. The speaker refers to the catastrophic publication of the membership list, which revealed the particular incompetence of the ‘organisation’. The leadership tried to pass this off lightly- it would show the calibre of its members.etc,an utterly stupid way to cover up a multitude of faults. I feel sorry for those people who lost their careers including policemen and a young television reporter. Thank you Mr Leech for referring to this travesty.
Max Musson
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At the time of Nick Griffin and Andrew Brons’ election to the European Parliament the BNP had reached a major constraint point organisationally. In the current socio-political environment a nationalist political party will not be able to consistently galvanise the support of more than 5% – 10% of the electorate over any sizeable area, not enough to get candidates elected under the first-past-the-post system, but enough to get one or two MEPs elected to the European parliament under proportional representation.
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The BNP leadership under Griffin had no strategy for advancing the nationalist cause beyond this point. Their strategy was to continue to field candidates in local, unitary authority and parliamentary elections and to hope that Nick Griffin’s fame/notoriety as an MEP would provide the impetus for significantly larger numbers of people to start voting for them. It didn’t and furthermore, instead of remaining in the UK and campaigning to build up the party machine and strengthen the party’s support base in the constituencies, Griffin scuttled off to Brussels where he became an absentee leader, spending his days speaking to a large chamber of foreign politicians who had not the slightest interest in anything he had to say.
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The BNP from this point onwards was directionless and effectively leaderless. None of the BNP leadership knew how to advance the part from this position, including Griffin and so the individuals concerned turned in on themselves in mutual acrimony. Griffin began expelling people who opposed his directionless leadership and to use Lyndon Johnson’s crude analogy, eventually found himself with ‘more people outside his tent pissing in, than there were inside his tent pissing out’.
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It is all too easy with hindsight to heap all of the blame for what happened onto Nick Griffin, and while he must accept responsibility for what happened, unless the BNP had embarked upon a strategy of becoming a social movement rather than a purely political movement, the organisation was doomed to stagnate and infighting would have resulted irrespective of Griffin’s involvement.