BNP Links to Terrorists

As much as rather dimwitted BNP supporters and sympathisers tried to suggest otherwise, the BNP and the extreme right are explicitly linked to violence and terrorism.

The examples given below of Copeland and Lecomber are just a sampling.

More recently Lecomber was allowed back into the BNP as Searchlight reports:

"The British National Party’s return of election expenditure in a recent Redbridge council by-election shows that Nick Griffin, the BNP leader, has lied over the status of a convicted terrorist.

Although the documents state that John Evans paid all the bills for printing the large number of leaflets the BNP distributed in Bridge ward, copies of invoices show it was Tony Lecomber who ran the campaign, in which the BNP came within 157 votes of taking what had been a safe Conservative seat.

Lecomber was sacked as the BNP’s group development officer and head of internal discipline in January after it emerged that he had sought out a meeting with the Liverpool gangster Joey Owens in which he suggested Owens “take out” a Cabinet minister. Owens, who had been Griffin’s personal bodyguard until revelations about his gangland activities surfaced, was suspicious, thinking it was an attempt at entrapment of himself, the BNP or both. He reported Lecomber’s suggestion to Griffin and threatened to go to the press if Lecomber was not dismissed.

Griffin hesitated but eventually forced him out. A BNP organisers’ bulletin announced that Lecomber had resigned after “making a serious error of judgement” which could have “caused embarrassment to the party”.

This was not Lecomber’s first brush with terrorism and violence. Although his long criminal career is well known to BNP members and senior officers, it had not until this year prevented his rise to the party’s highest echelons.

In the mid 1980s Lecomber received a derisory three-year prison sentence after a nail bomb he was trying to deliver to the headquarters of a leftwing organisation went off prematurely in his car. When the Bomb Squad searched his home in Ilford, east London, they found home-made hand-grenades and electronic detonators.

On his release from prison, John Tyndall, then the BNP leader, warmly greeted the mad bomber, as Lecomber has become known, and promoted him in the party.

Lecomber changed his appearance. Gone was the street fighting nazi in a T-shirt that proclaimed the SS as his heroes, and in came a dark suit, glasses, white shirt and tie. That is how he was dressed when he and a gang of BNP thugs beat a young Jewish teacher senseless, a crime that got him another three years in jail.

Again after his return promotion was rapid. Tyndall might have expected some gratitude for standing by him, and even viewing Lecomber as his successor to the party leadership, but when Griffin moved to take over the BNP it was Lecomber who undermined Tyndall and became known as the Witchfinder General, using his position to deal ruthlessly with anyone who spoke up for Tyndall.

Lecomber’s resignation was not the whole story. He remained on the party payroll and while some party officers’ questions about Lecomber’s status were answered with lies, others were quietly told that his departure was only temporary and he would return when the dust had settled.

Griffin has even claimed that Lecomber may have been acting strangely when he met Owen because his diabetes gives him mood swings. Those who have known him since his early teens believe he is simply pathologically violent.

That Lecomber is still pulling many strings in the BNP is clear from the Bridge ward election return. Only two invoices are from suppliers outside the party itself. Both are addressed to Lecomber, one at his home address.

Searchlight had wondered how the BNP managed to produce nine leaflets within the election limit of barely over £1,000. The return shows that over half the expenditure went on 5,500 A3 colour leaflets printed by Pioneer Print of South Woodford for £424.00. Five thousand postcards from 1clickprint cost £80 and the other seven leaflets were supplied by the party print shop for a mere £306.30. Election agents are supposed to declare goods and services supplied at less than market value but the documents are silent on this point.

The return also lists three donations of over £50: from Sylvia Howard, Alan Thrower and John Evans, all in Redbridge.

Griffin and Eddy Butler, the BNP’s elections officer, were presumably happy with Lecomber’s role in the campaign but others in the party may be less enamoured with Griffin’s lies. "