Gateshead - BNP meeting cancelled following local protest
NE Euro candidate Alan Patterson (pictured) and BNP Leader Nick Griffin (Euro candidate in the North West) were forced ‘to go underground’, by local protesters, and abandon the launch of their NE Euro campaign.
Photo: Alan Patterson
The meeting was scheduled to take place at the Teams Social Club, in Derwentwater Road, Gateshead, but management cancelled the booking following ‘the odd anonymous phone call’. The club chair states that they did not report calls to the police.
Locals spotted a group of ‘nazis’ gathered in a pub carpark elsewhere.
Kevin Scott, Patterson’s local political boss and BNP north east regional organiser, said in response to cancellation ‘…they have decided to back out. That obviously shows the type of people we are dealing with.’
Both Patterson and Griffin claim to be ‘number 1′ candidates for the June 2004 elections. But their failure rate, along with that of Scott and 53 other prospectives in local elections (May 2003) casts doubt on this claim.
Griffin may eventually need Patterson’s gift as a cosmetic surgeon (he runs a string of clinics in the North). Griffin, once described as a cameleon in a BBC profile, is putting on weight, and, according to Glasgow’s Scotsman newspaper, has lost his dress sense.
The Scotsman said: ‘With his ill-fitting suit and awkward demeanour, the chairman of the British National Party, Nick Griffin, looks more like an introspective office clerk than a man widely accused of being a serious threat to Scotland’s moral fibre.’
Continuing his campaign to re-brand the BNP, Griffin was accompanied in Gateshead by two women, rather than his usual bodyguard of thugs. He may have thought he was safe enough in Gateshead to leave bomber and BNP national organiser, Tony Lecomber, at home.
Patterson, a former Ulster Unionist, is no stranger to far right politics, with membership of the Conservative party and the UK Independence Party under his belt prior to membership of the BNP.
Patterson seems reasonably comfortable with the BNP’s criminal elements - Griffin, Scott and many others have, between them, convictions for rape, racist violence, firearms charges, fraud, theft, football hooliganism and other violent behaviour.
Newsflash: BNP local candidate, Mark Kilpatrick (North Road ward, Darlington Borough Council), aged 33, of Harcourt Street, Darlington, is to be sent to trial on a charge of head-butting his girlfriend on Valentine’s Day.