The BNP have been delivering some especially nasty leaflets in Crawley recently. Copies have been sent to the Town Hall and to Sussex police, as some recipients feel that they are offensive enough to be illegal under electoral and normal laws.

I know of people in Ifield and Tilgate who have received these, but I am sure the BNP are delivering them elsewhere.

Much of what they say is the usual sort of thing and misguided as they might be, it is their right to put forward their views on education, health and crime. What is not right is the very strong implication that problems in all these areas are caused by immigration, muslims and non-Britons in general. The literature is quite insidiously clever in a way. It lists plenty of areas where everyone has concern, and you can’t argue that there are not problems. However, it it assigns the wrong causes to all these problems and proposes solutions which would not work.

It is all hate, trying to disguise itself as concern. One of the leaflets reproduces the cartoon from the Danish newspaper of the prophet with a bomb in his turban. Surely nobody can see that as anything other than a provocative act? (I wonder if they got permission from the cartoonist? Maybe we can get them on copyright offences if nothing else)

The good news is that our Crawley clergy are getting involved in all this. Even as an atheist myself I have a lot of time for most of the vicars I have met, and none more so than Father Leonard Doolan. He works in one of the affected areas, Ifield, and reports that the Bishop of Chichester has personally written to local muslims and other faith groups assuring them of his support and that of his churches.

The BNP are claiming to protect “our” Christian way of life, but all the Christian churches are united in telling them where to get off. If you are a Christian are you going to believe your own church or a group which your church totally abhor?

Its a shame that the Crawley UAF are not around to give a response to all this, and to organise opposition, but a timely reminder of why any of us are involved in politics – if we all did nothing this is the sort of rubbish which would fill the vacuum.

Apart from anything else, the BNP leaflets have a headline “more administrators – less beds”. How could anyone consider voting for a party with such poor grammar?

Update: 28th April

You will notice the absence of comments on this post, and the absence of a form to post any.

There are several reasons for this.

Firstly, an isolated initial comment soon developed into a private argument between two individuals. I have no problem if Rupert and Richard want to spend their time insulting each other, but they can do it by e-mail, where I am not paying for the diskspace.

Secondly, the debate (if it can be called that) was becoming very specific about an incident which is probably still under investigation, and was entirely an exchange of hearsay, speculation and invention between people who were either not there or at least claiming to have not been there. I have removed the comments more out of consideration for the welfare of the paper’s staff than anything else. Some other posts have comments on with which I strongly disagree, and which are still there, but this one was getting out of hand. Apart from anything else, the volume of comments was such that it stopped me spotting normal spam-attack comments which had slipped through the net!

So… commenting on this post has been disabled and existing comments, including my own, deleted to discourage further name-calling and clogging up of what is, after all, my own private site. Everyone is, of course, welcome to set up their own site or move the discussion to a site with lower standards.