Barnbrook faces Assembly ban without his 'unwell' legal rep

From HOPE not hate news:

Richard Barnbrook, the BNP’s London Assembly member who is facing a possible six-month suspension, will not be assisted by his legal representative at his hearing this afternoon (September 24).

Lee Barnes, who says he has been “voluntarily assisting Richard with this case” stated yesterday that he cannot attend City Hall because he is “not physically well enough”.

In a long and rambling post on his blog, he condemns the procedure against Barnbrook as “partial, biased and bent”.

Barnbrook, who was elected to the London Assembly in May 2008, faces a penalty, after he was found to have brought both the London Assembly, and Barking and Dagenham Council, the east London authority to which he was elected in 2006, into disrepute for fabricating murder stories to increase fear of knife crime.

An independent investigation found that Mr Barnbrook’s comments on YouTube about non-existent murders had showed “wilful disregard for the truth”. He said that he had got his words “jumbled up”.

Barnbrook is claiming discrimination on grounds of disability, citing his dyslexia. His attitude contrasts with that of the BNP’s central London organiser Jeff Marshall, who believes there is no point keeping disabled people alive.

Writing earlier this year about the tragic death of David Cameron’s son Ivan aged six, who had cerebral palsy, he went on: “We live in a country today which is unhealthily dominated by an excess of sentimentality towards the weak and unproductive. No good will come of it.”

A former leading national officer in the BNP, had even stronger views. Tony Lecomber, a convicted terrorist bomber, advocated a “racially purer” Britain through the sterilisation of the poor, the sick and the disabled.

Barnes, who many believe has been mentally unwell for a long time, has been bombarding the Standards Committee, of which two of its three members are independent of any political party or the Assembly, with “legal submissions” and has attacked the impartiality of the Greater London Authority’s legal officer.

He has posted all these on his blog, in between his usual semi-literate rants about Jews and Muslims and his cringe-making, cliché-ridden “Aryan” poetry. Earlier this month he posted seven sick verses extolling the idea of executing criminals by burning them inside a Wicker Man in some sort of weird pagan sacrifice ceremony, at the same time as a BNP community councillor in Wales was advocating hanging drug dealers on live television. He also claimed that schools were “willing to teach 5 year olds about homosexuality, abortion, anal sex and masturbation but not even teach them about patriotism let alone nationalism”.

Barnbrook’s video was not the first time he tried to exploit knife crime to whip up racism and division between communities, by claiming, falsely, that blacks commit all the crimes and whites are the victims. He also hijacked the name of a genuine organisation called Mothers against Knives, which he was later forced to call London Mothers against Knives when the two Middlesbrough mothers who formed it complained. Barnbrook’s one-man organisation is not known to have any actual mothers involved.

It seems that Barnbrook and Barnes well deserve each other.

by Sonia Gable for HOPE not hate / Searchlight on: Thursday, 24 September 2009