We All Make Mistakes…
June 12, 2010 in Reform by newsteam
We all make mistakes. That is human. I sent out an e-mail yesterday and made three bad errors in one go!
But what do you make of this, from the 2005 British National Party manifesto?
‘Put simply, guns do not kill people, criminals kill people…
…all law-abiding adults who have successfully completed their period of military service are required to keep in a safe locker in their homes a standard-issue military assault rifle and ammunition.’
The opening sentence is repeated in this year’s manifesto.
I would suggest that in this day and age, when we do not live in a responsible society, when all sorts of nutters regularly reach for their guns and go shooting, when weapon owning is not the norm and hasn’t been in Britain for well over a hundred years (before living memory in fact), then it isn’t appropriate for the Party to make such gratuitously macho statements.
Of course it goes without saying that no one was to know that someone would go on a horrific gun rampage in Nick Griffin’s own constituency a few weeks after the manifesto was published. But in this dysfunctional society such break downs are all too commonplace – which makes having such a policy more than a mistake. It is foolishness on a grand scale. A hostage to fortune.
During the 2005 General Election we were contesting a local council by-election in Broxbourne, Hertfordshire. Interestingly enough it was a ward we had won before, with 48.4%, but in the by-election, despite a first class campaign we only got only 26.3%. This was because the by-election was on the same day as the General Election and we were killed by the turn out and the electorate’s focus was on the main two parties. This usually happens. In this instance the Conservatives were the beneficiaries – and please note, they were not helped by Blue State Digital or any state of the art technology. It does however illustrate that our public profile has scarcely improved between the two General Elections as we are still incapable of being taken seriously when a big election takes place.
Anyway back to the thread of this article. On the day our manifesto was launched in 2005, I was canvassing some of our regular supporters in this ward. As I went from door to door I was literally mocked and derided as the only item the media focused on from that manifesto launch was the ‘guns under the bed’ policy. It was such an obviously ridiculous thing to come out with. It was humiliating.
When I asked Nick Griffin about it (naturally, no one knew about this policy in advance), he congratulated himself on the grounds that the media led the reportage of our manifesto launch with ‘BNP have nutty gun policy’ rather than ‘Nazi BNP launch manifesto’. That was the limit of his ambition in launching our manifesto. He also talked about the right to bear arms in the United States, which is a consequence of their frontier origins a little over a hundred years ago.
This is the sort of gaffe to which Nick is so prone. This is the sort of gaffe that has weighed Nick down with so much baggage that he has become a liability to the Party. He has, unfortunately, got the knack of throwing out these rhetorical boomerangs that fly back to hit him on the head. One only has to think of the ‘friendly Ku Klux Klan’ of Question Time fame, or his constant wriggling over the Holocaust.
For the record, I have no objection to this matter of fact policy (also in this year’s manifesto) stated in clear and non-dramatic language, as is appropriate when talking about lethal weapons:
‘The BNP would restore to legitimate and law-abiding sportsmen the right to possess and use those weapons curtailed by the 1968 Firearms Act and subsequently restricted by later legislation.’
Do the maths
Talking about mistakes, the leadership knows that it is under intense scrutiny due to disquiet within the Party over its financial management. To answer this, a number of BNPtv films have been released and several articles have appeared on the main Party website. These are designed to illustrate that everything is hunky-dory. The trouble is, the figures they release never add up. It’s as if they imagine they can throw out random numbers and hope no one notices. You would have thought that, given the rumours, they would take special care to present accurate figures.
In the latest BNPtv film shot in Jim Dowson’s Belfast industrial unit, Nick Griffin’s daughter, Jennifer, presents a series of membership figures. Jennifer is not to be blamed she is just reading a pre-arranged script. The film can be viewed here:
http://bnptv.org.uk/2010/06/membership-database-overview/
Jennifer says that of 3,514 members due to rejoin last December, 2,515 did and 599 didn’t. She said the renewal rate was 83%. For this to be true and for the figures to add up, 2,915 must have renewed not 2515. Or the 599 figure is wrong and it should be 999 and the renewal rate reduced to 72%.
Jennifer then listed the different types of member
Life 858
Gold 2209
Standard 4,488
Family 726
Family Plus 907
OAPs 2,520
Unwaged 1,958
Students 179
Overseas 179
This adds up to 14,024 but at the outset she said there were 14,032. The small discrepancy can probably be found within the Students and Overseas members as it is very unlikely there would be exactly the same number for both. The Student membership is incidentally shockingly low.
She claimed that the call centre had upgraded a thousand members in the last six months (to Gold or Life). Yet the Life member scheme was run last October and there have only been a handful of new ones since then. Last April there were 10,276 members and 13.5% were Gold which is 1,387. More will have been upgraded to Gold between April and December. This year’s Gold membership is 2,209. So it is unlikely that 1,000 upgrades can have been made in the last six months. – the difference between 2,209 and 1,387 is 822.
Nick Griffin’s article on the website called ‘Building Our “New Model Army” Was Never Going To Be Popular among Our Enemies’ which I have referred to in a previous article, includes the following passage:
‘Last year’s accounts — on course to be submitted to the usual intense scrutiny of the Electoral Commission in July — show a fantastic rise in central income to £1.9 million, of which £1,600,000 was raised in donations thanks to our main expert external contractor having developed for us the most sophisticated fundraising operation in British political history. With our regional accounts also showing a massive increase, to a very healthy £254,000 this gives us a total turnover of approximately £2,353,201.20.’
I have already pointed out that Nick’s figures don’t add up – that if central income is £1.9 million and regional accounts total £254,000, the grand total comes to £2,154,000 – not £2,353,201.20. But I am more concerned with the £1.6 million donation figure.
Another article entitled ‘The Advances Brought to the British National Party by the Midas Consultancy’ goes into greater detail on the income side. This interesting article provides the following figures for fundraising:
2007: £100,000 (December only)
2008: £662,217
2009: £1,608,321
Set against this is the following cost of collection – this section needs to be quoted verbatim in order to appreciate the claims being made:
Fundraising fees
As can be seen from the figures above, thanks to the expertise and efforts mainly of the Midas Consultancy, we have jumped from a donations income of approx £100,000 per year to a staggering £1.6 million in just over two years. For this service, our consultants have cost the party in professional fees:
Consultant fees etc. since 2007: £165,000
Midas have raised £2,362,000 million
Leaving the BNP with £2,197,000 million
Midas is in reality cost negative
Although specialist consultants have cost the party in fees etc £165,000 over two years in return for a fundraising income in excess of £1.5 million, the good news is that the Midas involvement with the BNP doesn’t actually cost us anything.
Thanks to a large range of cost-cutting exercises, the Midas involvement with the BNP is actually cost negative. Here are just some of the Midas cost-cutting achievements:
Print costs (leaflets, magazines etc): £93,000
Reducing outgoings and expenses: £63,000
Total savings: £156,000
Firstly the ridiculous claim is made that donations leap from £100,000 to £1.6million in two years. In fact the £100,000 was from one appeal conducted by Jim Dowson in one month. Before December 2007 we ran other appeals ourselves. The total donation income figure for all of 2007 is not given.
Then Jim gives, as his cost of collection, his fee of £165,000, saying that all the rest is profit. Is this realistic? Is this how any business would calculate how much they are left with?
What about the cost of the envelopes, the appeal letters, the electricity for running the machines, the considerable telephone bills, service charges, rates and rent for the Belfast industrial unit, the staff costs for manning that unit (on average ten people), the massive cost of franking or stamping envelopes, the cost of obtaining the telephones and computers and state of the art database software? There are also the desks, chairs and filing cabinets and stationery.
What about Jim’s personal travel and hotel expenses when he visits Nick? What about the fees he charges for attending other events, over and above the set amount he gets in relation to his specific fundraising activities?
We can only hazard a guess what all this costs. My ball park figure is £700,000 – to which should be added Jim’s normal consultancy fee for that year of about £100,000.
Did we really raise £1.6 million in donations last year when total central revenue was £1.9 million?
Looking at memberships, we raised about £330,000 from the life membership scheme and normal members must have raised about another £320,000 – based on about 12,000 people joining last year and paying the average fee of £27 each that Jennifer gave.
On top of that there is the Trafalgar Club which was not then run by Jim Dowson – say £100,000.
Then we have Identity sales and subscriptions (before we started giving it away at great cost – about £30,000 over two free issues), VoF sales and subscriptions , leaflet sales – these will add up to another £100,000. We also have various other donations that do not come in via Jim Dowson’s operations. In any case we have already accounted for well over £800,000 of the £1.9 million – which brings the donation income down to little over £1 million – not the £1.6 million claimed.
The £1 million cost us at least £800,000 to collect. This gives us a profit of about £200,000. If we are generous and give more leeway it could be £300,000. I very much doubt that when the figures are presented to the Electoral Commission that we will be able to determine what the real costs are.
To be fair some of the ‘cost of collection’ is spent in collecting memberships and we should be paid by the Life League or whatever it is called which operates from the same premises and uses all the same facilities.
The frightening truth is that the whole fundraising activity virtually serves the purpose of funding the fundraising activity. Money is sucked into the centre and out of the regions, which starves our front end operation of money. That is why the branches and regions had to pay for the General Election campaign. Any money left over from head office goes on legal fees resulting from the numerous expensive court cases we get embroiled in.
But how successful are our fundraising efforts? If we had, say 12,000 members by the end of last year, and we raised just over £1 million in genuine donations then that is considerably less than £100 a head. Our donation database is supposed to be much larger than that figure, so clearly we are not getting a very big return per person.
It is time that the meek and uncritical acceptance of this state of affairs comes to an end. We must have proper accountability. We must have financial transparency. We cannot tolerate for a moment longer the smoke and mirrors approach to our Treasury function.
Summary
Claimed Income Distribution
Jim Dowson Donation Income: £1,300,000
Other Central Income: £300,000
Claimed Total Central Income: £1,900,000
Estimated Actual Income Distribution
Life memberships: £330,000
Other memberships: £320,000
Trafalgar Club: £100,000
Subscriptions and sales: £100,000
Jim Dowson Donation Income: £1,050,000
Claimed Total Central Income: £1,900,000
Claimed Cost of collection
Jim Dowson fee (apportioned): £100,000
Estimated Actual Cost of Collection
Jim Dowson fee (apportioned): £100,000
Belfast office staff costs, commissions and on costs: £300,000
Jim Dowson expenses and extra fees: £100,000
Rent, Rates: £18,000
Telephones, Computers, Database, desks etc: £25,000
Franking/stamps: £200,000
Telephones, electric: £24,000
Free IDs: £30,000
Stationery: £1,000
Letters/envelopes: £40,000
Total (but many costs also used on memberships): £838,000
