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Nick Griffin was finally able to deliver his victory address today, ranting for so long that even his most hardened protesters stopped chanting to play Bob Marley songs at high volume before giving up and going home.
The leader of the British National Party had been pelted with eggs and chased down the street yesterday when he and fellow BNP MEP Andrew Brons tried to stage a press conference outside the Houses of Parliament to celebrate their election to the European Parliament.
His second attempt at being heard was shrouded in an absurd but ultimately pointless cloak and dagger secrecy. Journalists had been told by text message to congregate at a conference centre car park in Miles Platting, north of Manchester, to be informed about the venue — only to find that it had been locked by the irate management.
About 50 demonstrators waving Unite Against Fascism banners were already moving en masse, confident that they knew the ultimate destination, before a bullet-headed BNP official was able to tell pressmen to go to the Ace of Diamonds pub, a known nationalist stronghold, only a short walk away.
The protesters’ attempts to storm the rundown public house was frustrated by two lines of burly policemen in fluorescent jackets. They settled for chanting “No platform for Nazi Nick” and “Nazi scum off our streets”.
Inside the grimy snug bar, decorated by German beer steins, Mr Griffin was already posing for pictures in front of a VE-Day backdrop and clutching a carton of fresh eggs. Several newspapers, including The Sun and the Daily Mirror, found themselves barred.
For the next hour Mr Griffin launched into a unrelenting diatribe, delivered at machinegun speed, railing against the violent mob outside, the snobbery of the Metropolitan ruling elite with their snouts in the trough, the “privatisation theft of Britain’s common wealth by conglomerates” and his desire to slow down the advance of unelected bureaucrats in Europe. He would also revive grammar schools.
Stopping only to sip half a pint of bitter, he moved seamlessly on to the issues of race, immigration, the “lies” about his party’s policy on the Gurkhas and what he described as the scandal of criminal Asian paedophile gangs who are grooming young white girls for “sex, drugs and prostitution”.
He boasted that he was now eligible to attend the Queen’s garden party at Buckingham Palace if he were to be invited and that he was eagerly awaiting his high-security pass to the Palace of Westminster.
Referring to the battle of College Green on Tuesday, he said: “The police allowed the mob to run wild. I think it is very sad that a hostile mob which is partly paid for by taxpayers and backed by Labour and Conservatives is allowed to get away with mob violence on the streets of Britain in 2009.
“I have got to go and visit constituents in places like Preston and Andrew Brons has to go to places like Bradford. The police need to get a grip on these people and stop them throwing eggs and bricks. Like it or not, we are a democratic party elected by people who have specific concerns they think we will address properly.”
He complained that his party had been denied the right to stage the victory speech in Manchester Town Hall, later comparing what he described as the persecution of the BNP with the plight of the Labour Party in the 1920s.
“The mob outside are allowed to met in Manchester Town Hall to plot violence against the BNP,” he said. “If that is not persecution, pray tell me what it is?”
At one point he hinted that his party’s lawyers were looking to change the BNP’s whites-only policy and said that he wanted to represent constituents “regardless of their creed and colour”. However, he expected ethnic minorities to continue to go to the Labour Party.
He said his first task in Europe is to send in his party’s researchers to find evidence of how the ownership of Britain’s “common wealth”, its national assets, had been privatised and ended up in the hands of foreign conglomerates.
Of his election to the European Parliament, he said: “It is a huge victory. We have been demonised, persecuted and denied the right to hold public meetings. In Oldham alone there have been hundreds of thousands of pounds spent on employing bogus community workers to keep us out. To triumph against that level of pressure as a political party has never been done before.”
About half way through the question and answer session the chanting and Bob Marley songs penetrating the thin walls stopped as the demonstrators called it a day and dispersed. They had disappeared by the time Mr Griffin was driven away from the pub under the protection of his minders.
Paul Jenkins, one of the UAF organisers, said: “We are here today to outnumber the BNP and show them that we are the majority”.
Earlier at Prime Minister’s Questions, Gordon Brown told MPs that mainstream parties needed to expose the BNP’s “racist and bigoted” policies. He called on all parties to unite to fight the BNP.
Police said that they made one arrest after a protester, in his twenties, spat in the direction of the MEP’s car.
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