By Max Musson:
During the last few years before the British National Party (BNP) went into its current state of decline, Nick Griffin the chairman of that party engaged a professional fundraiser to help the party raise funds and by all accounts a sum in excess of £2m was raised, which later seemed to evaporate without any lasting tangible benefit.
Rumours have abounded, meetings have been held and discussion forums have from time to time been ablaze with passionate accusations and vitriolic denunciations of the central characters involved in the collection and administration of that money, and the consensus of opinion in many quarters is that much if not all of the money raised by the BNP was embezzled or found its way by some underhand means into various unscrupulous peoples’ back pockets.
Furthermore, an obvious feature of the BNP as an organisation in recent years, is that from time to time it appears to have provided a convenient source of employment for a number of Nick Griffin’s immediate family and this has led to accusations that it is a ‘family business’ primarily concerned with providing for the material needs of the Griffin family.
It is not the place of this article to examine the rights and wrongs of what happened with the BNP and as none of the management team of Western Spring were BNP ‘insiders’ with any involvement in the BNP’s internal structures nor any involvement in the fundraising debacle, we have no personal knowledge to share and no in-depth insights into what went wrong.
What I can share with you is that my instincts, having spent a career in finance, are that while some money must have been misappropriated, much of the money raised by the BNP will almost certainly have been squandered through incompetence.
The most significant factor stemming from the BNP fundraising debacle as far as Western Spring are concerned is that a very large number of nationalists have been left with a sense of having been ‘fleeced’ of their money, especially those who had in the past contributed large sums and who had been induced into buying life memberships.
This sense of having been ‘fleeced’ has quite understandably made many people sceptical of subsequent fund raising initiatives on the part of nationalist groups in general and this is the important issue that I hope to address in this article, because until this issue is laid to rest the nationalist cause will be hampered to such an extent that any thoughts of a future nationalist revival, let alone victory, will be out of the question.
One of the earliest realisations that I personally made as a young convert to nationalism many years ago, is that political power and influence can be bought by those who wield great financial power and I can remember many articles penned by A.K. Chesterton and others during the early days of the National Front in which they referred to the sinister, behind the scenes forces of globalism as the forces of ‘Money-power’. Clearly therefore, since the earliest of times there has been a recognition within the minds of nationalist thinkers and theoreticians that ‘money’ and ‘power’ are synonymous in the modern world.
In fact if anyone considers the most glaring difference between the political campaigns of nationalist organisations of the past compared with those of our enemies, that difference has always been the amount of money available to fund those campaigns, with nationalist campaigns invariably run on a ‘shoestring’, while those of our enemies have been well financed, with tens of millions of pounds at their disposal.
Address anyone who is familiar with the machinations of the powerful organisations that pervert the political process in this country and throughout the West and ask the question, ‘where does the power of these organisations come from’? The answer is always ‘money’.
Without money, the forces of globalism would be powerless. Their arguments are bankrupt and if they did not have the resources to fund writers, to buy media companies and to ‘buy’ governments, they would be rightly treated as the dangerous fools and criminals they actually are.
Similarly, if it were not for our lack of funding, racial nationalists would be as influential as liberal/Marxists are today, and racial nationalism would be recognised as the natural belief system of our people.
Despite the unpleasant memories of the BNP fundraising debacle, we nationalists must embrace the need for our movement to be well funded. We either belong to an organisation that we feed with money and which therefore has the capacity to achieve political power, or we remain powerless and resign ourselves to whatever fate our racial and political enemies have planned for us.
That is the stark choice that we face and there is no escape and no avoiding this choice – we either accumulate the money necessary to achieve political power and our people live, or our people will die a slow and agonising death.
Let us examine the fundraising engaged in by organised minorities as therein lies a salutary lesson in the acquisition of political power.
Most Londoners will be familiar with the East London Mosque, which serves the largest Muslim community here in the UK.
At the beginning of the 20th century, London was the capital of the extensive British Empire, which contained tens of millions of Muslims, but had no mosque for Muslim residents or visitors. On 9 November 1910, at a meeting of Muslims and non-Muslims at the Ritz Hotel, the London Mosque Fund was established with the aims of organising weekly Friday prayers and of providing a permanent place of worship for Muslims in London.
Interestingly, one of the trustees of that fund was one, Nathan Mayer Rothschild, and while fundraising was initially slow, it led in 1940 to the purchase of three houses in the heart of London’s East End and without going through all of the various stages in between, there was by 1985 constructed a purpose built mosque with the capacity to accommodate 2,000 worshippers and this eventually led to the building of the adjacent London Muslim Centre (LMC), which was completed in 2004 at a cost of £10m and with the capacity to accommodate 5,000 worshippers.
We have spoken in the past of the need for the nationalist movement to eventually raise £100m if we are to have any hope of achieving power and saving our country and our critics have sneered at the possibility of us achieving this figure. However, not only is this figure essential if we are to succeed, but as Muslims in this country have demonstrated, between 2001 when fundraising for the LMC began, and 2004, a relatively small population of Muslims were able to raise £10m, and so it must be possible for us to raise from among the far more numerous indigenous British people, the money that we need.
Those who criticise our plans as ‘unachievable’, not only ignore the fact that we must raise vast sums if we are to succeed, they also appear to believe that Muslims are more generous and determined than we British, and we must prove them wrong.
When we formed the not-for-profit organisation that receives funds donated to Western Spring, we modelled the constitution of that organisation in part, on the constitution of the European Jewish Fund, and it is a further salutary lesson for nationalists to read the constitution of the European Jewish Fund, in particular the sections on membership and the levels of donations expected:
Article VII, 2, states, “To qualify as a Member Governor, a person must donate and pay to the association, either at one time or on a cumulative basis, a membership fee of US$1,000,000 (one million US dollars).
Article VII, 3, states, “To qualify as an Associate Member, a person must make at least one donation to the association, of at least US$50,000 (fifty thousand US dollars) and pay an annual membership fee, the amount of which shall be determined by a decision of the Board of Governors upon recommendation of the Chairman, but which shall not exceed an annual maximum amount of US$25,000 (twenty five thousand US dollars).
As we can immediately see, we are not dealing here with individuals who are of average income or average wealth, but we are dealing here with people who mean business and who are determined to succeed. We are dealing with people who have an acute understanding of the relationship between money and power.
We at Western Spring do not expect the men and women who support us and who will be of average wealth in the main, to donate sums anywhere near as large as those donated by wealthy Jews, and we do not expect as some rumours would have it that members should sell their houses and donate all their wealth to our organisation, we simply expect members to donate on a regular basis, amounts that they can comfortably afford.
Our organisational model projects that we should eventually be able to attract 300,000 contributing members and that based upon an average contribution level of £30 per month, this will provide us with an income of £100m per annum.
During the last European Parliamentary elections approximately 900,000 people voted BNP and this indicates that we must aim to convert just one third of those people into contributing members for our plans to succeed.
Most of that annual income will be spent on funding the creation of the White enclaves that we have planned, but enough should be available to enable us to purchase a nationalist mass media capability and achieve all of the prerequisites that I cited in my earlier article ‘The Great White Hope?’, prerequisites that will be necessary for us to achieve political power in the UK.
When critics state that nationalism can succeed without money, they are deluding themselves and everyone who listens to them. As I have demonstrated, we are in direct competition with organised minorities who have millions at their disposal and it does not take a genius to understand why it is therefore that successive British nationalist organisations have failed to advance our interests.
However, the good news is that we can win, we can attract the numbers that we at Western Spring have targeted, but it needs nationalists to embrace our plans and to work with us on outreach programmes so that we can reach the 300,000 people we need.
In years to come those 300,000 people will be remembered as the saviours of our nation. They will be the British men and women who will prove that the spirit of our nation never completely died and that despite all of the financial hardships, despite the corruption and incompetence of the BNP, and the lies and smears, the deceit and corruption of our enemies, we never completely lost faith in each other – and the bond of blood that we share held true.
So my compatriots, if you wish to play your part in the salvation of our people, both physically and financially, now is the time for you to make yourselves known to us. Please email me [email protected] .
By Max Musson © 2013
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Rob Black
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If readers would like to find out more about the writings of A.K. Chesterton, who died 40 years ago to the day, please see the website of The A.K. Chesterton Trust at https://www.candour.org.uk
We are attempting to keep him ‘in print’, and are still publishing his journal, Candour (founded in 1953).
Anglo-Australian Alliance
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Likewise with Arthur’s cousin, Cecil and especially Gilbert Chesterton (both of whom I thankfully note on Candour along with Hilaire Belloc.
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The Distributists accomplished a prolific amount of work. I have barely scratched the surface but can highly recommend the following works:
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The Party System by Hilaire Belloc and Cecil Chesterton: https://www.candour.org.uk/#/shop/4566209131 –an old but by no means irrelevant expose of the corrupt party system well-embedded in our polity and why we are, by playing that game, effectively wasting our time. Indeed, Hliare Belloc resigned as M.P. for Salford in disgrace at what both he and Cecil Chesterton uncovered and thereafter conducted a campaign against the control of England’s political machinery by vested wealth.
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Usury by Hilaire Belloc: https://www.candour.org.uk/#/shop/4566209131 –Dispelling the myth at usury is profit per se.
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The Utopia of Usurers by G.K. Chesterton: https://www.cse.dmu.ac.uk/~mward/gkc/books/2134.txt –“a collection of aggressive, no-holds-barred articles written by GKC from 1915—1916 which take on modern capitalism and its apostles. Called by some ‘Chesterton’s angriest book,’ it is nevertheless a rigorous, logical, and thorough examination of all aspects of modern life which have been tarnished, spoiled, or downright ruined by the materialism and avarice of the modern economic system.”
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katana
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The Party System by Hilaire Belloc and Cecil Chesterton is available to download over at archive.org.
A clean PDF of the book can be found here: The Party System
This is the book description from Amazon:
Pertinent to America, Britain, and other Western democracies, this book explains that what people believe happens in national assemblies and parliaments is radically different from the reality. Instead of being places where debate is intense, passionate, and aimed at the national interest, the fact is most members of these institutions act on behalf of powerful, unelected interests. They know, implicitly, who really runs the country—and their only real task is to decide if they want to try and rock the boat (thereby risking their salary, their reputation, their future), or stay silent for fear or favor. The book demonstrates beyond any doubt that the very nature of the system is hostile to democracy as laypeople understand it.
Max Musson
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Thank you, Katana, that is very useful.
Kenny Bryant
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The need for money, and lots of it, goes without saying. To my knowledge nobody has ever questioned that. However, some nationalists are beginning to question the ever present and bogus ‘this is going take years’ routine – normally a sure sign, when attached to a request for nationalists dosh, that a long-winded scam is in the offing.
Max Musson
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It’s good that you accept the need for nationalism to be properly funded Kenny, but you are wrong on the second point. We at Western Spring are good, but we cannot perform magic and it is going to take several years to build up a network of activists capable of reaching 300,000 donors.
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It is one of the hard facts of life that you don’t get ‘owt for nowt’ – freedom cannot be gained for free – and nationalists are just going to have to grasp the nettle and accept that in addition to everything else, there will be a financial price to pay if we want our country back and if we want our nation to survive.
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It would be nice if we could promise to save the nation and all it would cost is the ‘small change in your pocket’, but then we really would be con-men and people would be right not to trust us.
SerpentSlayer
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Thirty pounds a month is one hell of a lot of money, especially for the average of the 900,000 who voted BNP in the last election. Finding 300,000 regular donors will be hard, but only a fraction of those will have that much they can donate a month.
Most important of all is a clear insurance that this money is looked after by a board of trusted and accountable members and for it to be legally scrutinized.
Once this is done you are essentially asking for a miracle, I’m not trying to put a downer on it all, just being realistic.
Our people are poor, especially those likely to side with the Nationalist cause, i.e the working class. I for one could not afford it without signing up as a mercenary in a foreign army and I doubt I am alone in that.
I think it is more likely that the majority of those with Nationalist sentiments donate what they can while the rich are allowed to anonymously donate larger amounts, both targeted using different methods of marketing.
For the record, if I do join a foreign army, I will send money back if I can.
Max Musson
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There is little point joining a foreign army. What would that achieve?
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You will be surprised what people can afford if only we have the courage to ask them. Some will donate £10 per month, while others will donate £100 per month or more. It is the average that needs to £30 per month and one should donate whatever one can afford, and yes, you are right, there will be particularly wealthy individuals who will make larger donations as well.
John S.
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Just two fewer pints every week ought to secure the £30 a month. Or one less football match each month. Scrapping the data package on one’s mobile and instead waiting till one is home for internet use.
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Three simple suggestions. Question is, do the hedonistic materialists value their and their family’s future enough to make one simple step to secure a safe future for children?
Max Musson
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Some good suggestions John, making a very valid point. Thirty pounds a month is not a lot these days for many people and our experience so far suggests that our plans are pitched at about the right level.
Thomas a'Becket
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I look at it as a sort of National friendly society. Not leaving things to chance or hope but actively directing funds and effort towards the final goal of securing a sound and prosperous future for generations to come.
Personally I have joined and donate not for my own benefit but to build up a National fund to help my children and grandchildren.
I know that they don’t fully understand what we are doing on their behalf, however, one day the penny will drop and they will look back with delight at our forethought and endeavor
Who knows, they might even say thankyou!
frederickdixon
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Max, like you I don’t know where the BNP’s money went but I suspect that £2,000,000 wouldn’t go very far in fighting a general election campaign, so maybe we don’t need to look for incompetence and embezzlement to explain its disappearance.
I know that people have strong views about Nick Griffin’s responsibility for what has happened to the BNP (understandable disappointment being at the root of those views), and I’m not qualified to say whether they are right or wrong. I do know, however, that Western Spring does not take sides in intra-nationalist disputes but would like to help all. The BNP remains a significant part of the nationalist scene and (Griffin or no Griffin) it may yet have a part to play in our country’s salvation, and since our country’s salvation is what Western Spring is for we must be ready to work closely together.
Max Musson
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I agree Frederick, the ‘incompetence’ that I referred to in my article could well be simply incompetence where accounting is concerned.
Kenny Bryant
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Water under the bridge, frederick – the enemy destroyed the British National Party… If Nick is not the enemy, then he is simply getting the blame.
rarecockney
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What i like about this site is its careful anaylasis of the BNP. It doesn’t make rash comment’s, about other Nationalist’s, and appears this site wants unity and their is a lot of sense to that. well done Western Spring
Max Musson
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Thank you comrade. There are people who have in the past damaged the nationalist cause through treachery or malice and this has created a tendency among some nationalists to always attribute sinister motives to the shortcomings of others, and to even attribute base motives to others actions even where there is no real evidence to warrant such suspicion.
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Experience and unbiased analysis has shown us however, that most of the failings and shortcomings that we see amongst our ranks should be rightly attributed to the far more mundane factors of thoughtlessness, simple incompetence or human error.
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Our first reaction therefore is to forgive the ‘trespasses’ of others providing they recognise their error and show genuine contrition, and to condemn only when there is no possible explanation other than malicious intent.
JohnB
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Max, money is not the main key but organization and party discipline certainly is, and if you with your well written well considered articles cannot be brought to see this then there is little hope making the bloke on the street understand it.
You already have a good organization The BNP put your talents to work backing Griffin and his band of stalwarts and discipline yourself to withstand the storms of criticism the attacks of the fools and moles and agents will generate. If you personally don’t feel the heat then the reality is that you are not close enough to the fire to be doing anyone any good. JJB
Max Musson
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Hi John, you will notice that while I made reference to the fact that others have made financial mismanagement their major criticism of the BNP leadership, I made mention of this fact merely in order to position that issue in relation to the need of all campaigning organisations to raise funds. I did not delve into the matter of whether or not financial incompetence or dishonesty lay at the heart of the public’s loss of confidence in the BNP as nothing positive can come from such muck raking.
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The act that finally sealed the fate of the BNP however, and which caused so many of the party’s key activists to walk away in disgust, took place at that Extra-ordinary General Meeting held near Manchester when Nick Griffin betrayed the trust of all of the ‘voting members’ by pulling a wad of 600 proxy votes from his pocket and voting down all of their motions.
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In a sense you are therefore right, that ‘organisation and party discipline’ are key factors in the success or failure of a movement, but unfortunately, the BNP has been shown to have been corrupted on both counts.
JohnB
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Sorry but proxy votes are legitimate and Nicks proxy votes were backed up by members who signed the form. They could not be there and trusted Nicks discretion and judgement
Whether or not one thinks their judgment in making that proxy selection was wise, it was certainly their democratic right to do so
The only people who object to proxies in meeting where they are great distances ( such as in any meeting of the entire British Nation) involved are those who wish to thwart the will of the majority’.
The technique is called “packing” a meeting.
Max Musson
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I believe there was no provision within the BNP constitution for the use of proxy votes prior to the meeting concerned and their use had been invented specifically for the purpose. That technique is called ‘gerrymandering the constitution’.
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However, despite the rights or wrongs of the use of proxy voting, invented specifically for that occasion, Nick Griffin had always previously spoken of the importance of the ‘voting members’ system, whereby the party’s activists would always retain control of the party in recognition of their years of sacrifice and so that a sudden influx of ‘armchair’ nationalists could never threaten to outweigh the will of the people whose hard work had built the party. Clearly the use of proxy votes on that occasion was a naked betrayal of this principle.
California
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Set up a Paypal account with monthly subscriptions starting at $5 and going up. We did this for a Asatru group and doubled our operating income. A monthly subscription beats an annual membership fee hands-down.
Offer small, medium and large subscriptions. In a pinch a subscriber can drop down to the lowest monthly subscription. Offer pins etc as rewards.