BNP's Norwich North campaign in chaos

COUNTDOWN TO NORWICH NORTH BY-ELECTION - 2 DAYS

The BNP's Norwich North by-election campaign director was taken to hospital with a suspected heart attack over the weekend, according to an entry in BNP's Simon Darby's blog.

Dave Fleming

Dave Fleming has been following a punishing regime for the BNP, and is not a well man.

In May he was with a British National Party delegation which descended on a Sunday morning service in a Norfolk village church and then launched a scathing attack on the Church.

According to the site Religious Intelligence, "After the service the BNP’s area organiser - Dave Fleming, who attended the worship - said the visit had been made as ‘an experiment’ amid concerns about the way Christians were ‘not being properly fed by the clergy.’

Dave Fleming went on to observe "The Church in general is drifting away from Christianity, and the service at St Faith’s was amateur theatre and lacklustre. We sang some nice hymns, but rousing hymns are not enough to electrify the service. The scripture has to be illustrated and has to come from the heart. The Holy Spirit must move within the congregation. I did not feel any of that in church."

That particular delegation included self-ordained priest, Robert West, publicly shamed by Norfolk clergymen yesterday. Leading Norfolk churchmen castigated the BNP candidate and fraudulent cleric as one who "styles himself as 'Revd' and is often to be seen dressed as a clergyman.”

In June Dave Fleming continued his gruelling canvassing and publicity-seeking, but he was an unsuccessful BNP Euro candidate and also unsuccessful in the county council election candidate for the King’s Lynn North and Central ward. There he came third out of four, below Labour in the voting. This must have been very stressful.

And now for much of July, Dave Fleming has been directing the BNP campaign for Norwich North, which has not been a happy experience.

This campaign has been doomed from the start. First of all the BNP candidate, the disgraced Robert West, did not arrive in Norwich until well into the campaign. Then his seedy reception committee at the car park of a derelict pub was disturbed by three determined and well-informed Hope not hate campaigners who, despite being menaced and attacked, were able to photograph those present.

Thanks to those photographs, West's reception committee was later found to include Steve Ames, a dodgy car-dealer with a record for assault, and Martin Roberts, who peddles offensive racist items on his website, which is connected to known terrorist and BNP activist Lambertus Nieuwhof.

When the BNP was excluded from the question and answer hustings at Norwich City Hall last week, they threatened to hold a press conference outside the City Hall, but in the event, none of the apparently dispirited BNP turned up.

And the outing of Robert West by the clergymen of Norfolk as a fake priest yesterday has been another devastating blow to BNP ambitions in Norwich North.

Dave Fleming has been ordered to rest and recuperate, and I hope that he will recover from the frenetic pace of work he has been pursung for the BNP at so much personal cost to himself, and for so little reward.