Predictably, the complaints about the rhyme itself are overwhelmed by complaints that reprimanding the teacher represents ‘political correctness gone mad’.Now I’m not black nor a boy, so I can’t comment first-hand on whether it would make me feel stereotyped as a rapist, with a hint of underage sex.  I’m also neither a young girl nor a rape victim so I can’t comment first-hand on whether I would feel comfortable having a crime against my person trivialised as merely ‘saucy’ – let alone the bizarre suggestion that virgins are somehow missing out on the pleasures of rape, but I’m sure everyone would have been happier with a less provocative mnemonic.

One argument used in support of this teacher is that the rhyme does work and is memorable and so everything is all right.  This is true to the extent that the alternatives offered up are quite frankly poor, but surely somebody could come up with something even more memorable that even black boys and young girls would be comfortable reciting – unless we don’t want them to get involved in electronics?

Wikipedia gives these alternatives, amongst others:

1. Bad boys run our young girls behind victory garden walls
2. Big boys race our young girls but Violet gernerally wins
3. Bye bye Rosie, off you go Bristol via Great Western
4. B B Roy of Great Britain has very good wife
5. Bak bro yeah greasy blubber’s very grabbable, why?
6. Big brown rabbits often yield great big vocal groans when gingerly slapped

The last one has the advantage of also including the last two colours, gold and silver, that most rhymes leave out, but none of them is particularly good and I really can’t see why the Wikipedia article describes No. 5 as easy to remember.

So here’s the challenge.  Use some of the energy wasted in moaning about ‘political correctness gone mad’ to come up with a mnemonic for BBROYGBVGW(GS) that is really easy to remember, so easy to remember that even die-hard racists would prefer to use it.  ‘Saucy’ is fine – but only a definition of saucy that doesn’t class rape as an amusing incident.

I don’t think I can do it, but I’m sure somebody out there can.

• Blair became really obscure,  yet Gordon blew voters, gaining weight, going sideways
• barbecue burning ready – obviously you get blowy violent gales with golden showers

See.  I said I couldn’t do it.  Why not show me up by coming up with a really good alternative.

That would be hilarious, and I think I would be up for that, but isn’t the BNP HQ miles away in Wrexham or somewhere like that?

Griffin shot himself in the foot so many times he probably had to be carried home afterwards.

I don’t think I have enjoyed Question Time so much since Robin Day was in the chair, although to be honest I haven’t really watched it much since Robin Day was in the chair, and hardly at all since the panel was increased to five.

And then something stopped me in mid laugh: the realisation that this idiot managed to get enough votes to be elected and represents Britain in the EU parliament.  There might be foreigners seeing him speak somewhere who think he actually speaks for us.  Its a bit like the feeling I got when Boris Johnson was at the Olympics handover ceremony, but more sinister.

Spare a thought for the casualty departments in the North, which are probably creaking at the seams with injuries from people kicking themselves and slapping their foreheads that they stayed at home on polling day and let it happen.

I can’t remember any casual racism on it, but I do remember being bored stiff by it pretty quickly.  I suppose it was no worse than our crap like Noel’s House Party, but it went on for ever.  In my memory it lasted for three hours, but maybe it just felt that way.  I really could not see what the fuss was about.

Here is what all the current fuss is about.  I did bother to watch it instead of  ‘doing a Mary Whitehouse’  and getting offended by something without even seeing it:

The BNP have a habit of booking their functions under false names like “British Heritage”.   The Morning Advertiser, the pub trade’s newspaper, is advising publicans and hoteliers to double-check bookings they have on Saturday 13th because experience has shown that hosting a BNP party can be bad for business.  Wherever the pub or hotel is, it is virtually guaranteed some money-can’t-buy publicity next week, but will it be for accepting a BNP booking or for cancelling one?

The initial fuss was when the list was posted online on a blogspot/blogger site.  Despite this being hosted in the US, it disappeared fairly quickly (opponents of Redwatch take note!).  The irony of this is that, as posted on that site, the list was actually fairly useless.  It was posted in 20 or more chunks by surname.  Each chunk was a plain text series of names and addresses laid out in such a way that it was virtually impossible to do anything with it except look for a specific person.  If that site had not been taken down far fewer people would have looked for, and found, the same list in a single text file, laid out in fixed-length columns and easy to import to a spreadsheet.  Even better, they could have found the same data already in Microsoft Excel format.

I am sure that most interested parties are more interested in searching by location than by name.  That would have been a laborious task on the original blogspot site, but a doddle with the spreadsheet so the rapid response to that original posting has led people to the same data in a much more dangerous format.

To anyone who has been even remotely involved in databases the structure of this data is as interesting as the data itself. The two formats it has been published in are very different.  Presuming it was stolen in only one of the formats a lot of work went into converting it to the other one.  I’m guessing it was an Excel file that was nicked: you could write a macro to generate a report that laid out the data in the other format – but why bother?  As a spreadsheet or flat file it was much easier to use.

Also interesting, and leading to some questions from the Data Protection Registrar, is what types of information the BNP feel it is necessary to keep.  More important to that, from a data protection point of view, is the fact that the database still contained records of ex-members.

From the clues in the list, it is a pretty crappy system they have, which is surprising given the BNP’s track record of very effective use of technology. There is a comments field that is used for multiple purposes – the bane of any database administrator’s life. Obviously the organisation is concentrating too much on ethnic cleansing to bother with some much-needed data cleansing.

As for the data itself, there is some debate about how up-to-date it is.  The BNP spin doctors are being quite successful in putting across the idea that the whole lot dates back to last year and many newspaper stories are now quoting that as fact.  However, if that is true you do have to wonder why there is a note against somebody in Coventry that says:

Was 15920 (04). 07 card lost: replacement sent 2/7/08

Note the past tense.  It sort of suggests that the file was being actively updated as late as four months ago doesn’t it?  Another note against somebody in Oxfordshire mentions that somebody who resigned in August 2005 was allowed to rejoin in February 2008.  This not only reinforces the proof that this is not a copy of the database from last year but also implies that somebody who resigned still had their record in there after their resignation.

A further implication of this is that it helps to work out what the membership total really is.  Nick Griffin had been talking up the membership figures and claiming some impressive numbers but this list has about 12,800 names on it.   We have already seen that it includes past members as well as current ones so it is inflated in that way.  BNP spokestwunts have been claiming that some names on the list don’t belong because they are not members, so take more off for that.   There also seems to be a habit of Nazi parents enrolling children into the BNP (with their consent? with their knowledge? who know?).  Make allowances for all that and you come to a number much lower than what Griffin has been telling the faithful and they are not happy about it.

One very specific example shows that not everybody on the list is a BNP supporter.  Look carefully and you will see the name Ian Campbell on there.  Ian Campbell was the Guardian journalist who went undercover, so I’m guessing he will not mind his name being quoted. The comments field notes:

Guardian plant (‘undercover’ report written for the Guardian 20/12/06. 07 renewal payment received 23/12/06

So…  he published his story on Dec 20th.  Three days later they received his payment for renewal?  It doesn’t say whether they banked the cheque, but nearly two years later he is still on their records. Curious.

For me, it is the reactions, especially from the BNP that are most amusing and illuminating.  Possibly the biggest irony is the BNP’s use of the Human Rights Act to get the information suppressed, when one of their policy platforms is a total opposition to the act, and possibly to the whole idea of human rights.

From the looks of it, this was very much an inside job.  Apparently the membership list was a very closely-guarded secret.  Even local groups only got heavily censored extracts from it: very few people would have had access to the whole lot.  The BNP is not a happy party and has more internal strife than most parties, so it is not unimaginable that somebody at the top took a copy to cause trouble.  And yet somehow Griffin still tries to suggest that this was a Labour party plot.

He said he had no problem with publication of members’ occupations but listing their names and addresses represented “a nasty piece of intimidation on behalf of the Labour regime”.

Or maybe he doesn’t.  Very crafty use of words there – but that has been printed everywhere.  Doubtless an attempt to appeal to the raving paranoia in the rank and file that caused many of them to join in the first place and persuade his mambers that the problem is not with his inability to keep any sort of harmony in the party – its all a dastardly plot.

The most illuminating aspect of the whole affair is the demonstration of how organised and disciplined the party is at one level.  The leadership may be in disarray and trying to stab each other in the back, but the troops continue to carry out orders with frightening effectiveness.

This is demonstrated in two ways.

Firstly, study the leaked list a bit.  You will find that members are in surprisingly short supply in some areas.  For example, in Crawley, there are only 50 members – and that is assuming that every single Crawley name in there is not a lapsed member or unwittingly signed up child – with nearly half of them coming from just three neighbourhoods (Furnace Green, Pound Hill and Bewbush)  In Broadfield there are only three members and yet the amount of stuff we get from them makes you think there must be dozensof them.  It is the same with the Tories, except they make themselves look more numerous by throwing Lord Ashcroft’s money at it – the BNP largely depend on a few people being incredibly hard-working/committed/fanatical.  Seeing the incredibly low membership numbers for them confirms what I suspected about them.

So the first demonstration is in the data, but the second is in the reaction to it.  The BNP have always been good at orchestrated campaigns of disinformation on the Internet using multiple sock puppets.  They obviously put out the word about what mesage they want to get across and then members (possibly using multiple alisases) bombard bulletin boards, blog comments, news sites comments, wiki discussion pages and any other channels they can find all saying more or less the same thing. The idea is two-fold: to get a particular idea or ideas repeated often enough that they register with the public and to make it look like there are more BNP supporters than there really are.

The irony here is that actually overdo it.  One of their favourite devices in the past has been to have somebody say “I used to belong to Labour/Tory/Lib Dem party and I am really moderate but I got disillusioned and joined the BNP because they were the only party talking sense about [insert one of non-overtly racist policy topics here]“  If one person says that it might be persuasive.  If a couple say it you might start to wonder if they have a point.  When dozens of them say it in loads of widely-different sites all using similar forms of words it just looks like an orchestrated letter-writing campaign.

Well that is what is happening now.  Bulletin boards and the comments sections on blogs are quite busy right now but a couple of things crop up with unfeasible regularity:

• People claiming to be ex-BNP members and saying that the fact they are on the list ‘proves’ it is one or two years out-of-date.
• People claiming to have been receiving lots of threatening/abusive phone calls since publication
• People saying they are proud to be on the list, nothing to be ashamed of, etc.

Anyone would think that there were swarms of BNPers out there… but we now know that their membership probably amounts to an average of little more than a dozen per parliamentary constituency across the whole country.

For what it is worth, anybody who has ever stood for election or signed a candidate’s nomination papers can be easily traced.  Certainly few people in Crawley who are interested in politics will be unfamiliar with the names Grice, Atkinson, Trower or Galloway. Their affiliations have been in the public domain for years yet I have heard nothing about harrassment campaigns. Why should that happen now?

Anyway, the whole thing just goes to show that it is not all doom and gloom in the papers all the time: sometimes there is top-quality entertainment too.  The only dark cloud on the horizon at the moment is that the excellent Wikileaks site is unavailable because of overloading.  I wonder why that could be…

Simon Darby, the BNP’s spokesman, said he found out this morning that the injunction had been broken, describing the posting as “malevolent and spiteful”.

Simon Darby is on the list (I checked). He continued…

“We are worried because kids’ names are on the list. It is not information that should be in the public domain,” he added. “We are always receiving death threats.”

I do not disagree with him.  Possibly the only time I would find common ground with him.  I wish them luck in getting the site closed down because every single justification they give also applies to the Redwatch site.  Whenever attempts have been made to close down Redwatch we are told that it is too hard because the site is hosted in the USA. So is this new BNP membership list.  If their injunctions and actions succeed in getting this list taken down it will set an interesting precedent.

Let’s remember that the Redwatch site contains photos and videos of people from the Crawley/Horsham/Redhill area, taken when there was a UAF meeting in Crawley last year.  These pictures were posted on a site where there is some history of those appearing on it getting stabbed.  Some of these pictures were of people attending a model car club that was meeting in the same building.

While I am forced to agree with what the BNP are saying here I do not think they really give a toss about the principle involved.  They have been more than happy to see names, addresses and photos of ‘lefties’ published for years (by their own supporters and fellow-travellers) but only object when the tables are turned.

In defence of the new site, all it does is present a list of names.  It does not make any sort of comment at all, unlike Redwatch which has phrases like “Remember places, traitors’ faces, they’ll all pay for their crimes.” on it and takes every opportunity to refer to people included as “scum”, “cretins”, “degenerates” or “targets”.

On this page they include details of several popular Crawley councillors, described thus:

Chris Mullins at the Crawley Campaign Against Racism’s 30th anniversary International Party in Maidenbower community centre. Mullens is an extreme left Marxist scumbag who is a disgrace to his race, and given the choice he would rather be asian.

and

Featured below is a Tory scumbag called Bob Lanzer. Lanzer is the Conservative leader of Crawley Council. During the last local elections in May, Lanzer was seen going door-to-door with U.A.F smear leaflets.

Both followed by full home addresses and phone numbers.

If any site deserves to be called “malevolent and spiteful” (Simon Darby’s own words) then surely it is this one.  If the publication of a mere list of names canbe seen as incitement to violence then what to make of one that refers to its subjects as ‘targets’?

There is a sort of unspoken assumption here in the UK that we are enlightened, liberal and tolerant in matters of racial politics. The US, on the other hand, is barely 50 years away from having officially sanctioned segregation, with large sections of the population looking back on the heyday of the Ku Klux Klan, ‘coloured-only’ drinking fountains and segregated buses with fond nostalgia.  The unthinking conclusion is that the redneck tendancy could win the day making the US look backwards and unsophisticated compared to us.  We can be quite smug about this, in a very unspoken way, but I am not so sure about it.

OK, there were some distinct signs that race is an issue and that many voters will not vote for Obama on purely racial grounds regardless of whatever the policies might be, but on the other hand… they actually have the choice.  We might congratulate ourselves that if we had a black candidate for PM it would not affect the way we vote, but its easy to assume that when there is no prospect of it happening.

Regardless of whatever the eventual outcome will be, the US elections will have a black presidential candidate.  We have never had a party leader who is black or from any other ethnic minority, and currently have nobody in any of the main parties from any ethnic minority who is anywhere near to leading them.  I can’t even remember us ever having had anybody from an ethnic minority in any senior cabinet or shadow cabinet position – although if any bona fide political anoraks want to correct me I will stand corrected.

The United States, on the other had, have had Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice as Secretary of State, and Powell was previously the National Security Advisor and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff – so he served under Reagan, Clinton and both Bushes.  At one point he was close to being America’s first black presidential candidate himself (and for the Republican party).  We had Paul Boateng as Chief Secretary to the Treasury for three years. So which country is more liberal and enlightened now?

Why is it that there are so few prominent black or Asian politicians here?  That is a genuine question and not a rhetorical one: I really have no idea.  I can’t believe that its the result of racism at a personal, specific level but is there a form of institutional racism at work?  That is probably too strong a term.  Institutional discrimination might be better.  In both Horsham and Crawley Labour parties the numbers of ethnic minority members falls far short of the percentage in the general population.  It would be wrong to extrapolate that across other parties and other places, but if it is typical then it explains a lot.  If a particular section of society is not joining at the bottom of the party then they won’t be getting to the top will they?  To a lesser extent the same thing happens with female members and politicians.

My boss has a possible explanation.  Nobody wants to make sweeping generalisations about entire racial groups or groups of racial groups, but he says what if its just that most members of ethnic minorities are just like him and have far too much sense to want to get involved in politics…

Its not even worth cherry-picking examples of of idiocy from this site to hold up to ridicule because there is no challenge at all – it would be like shooting fish in a barrel. Right at the top it says:

I beleive Vangewillbe best represented by Conervative Candidate. If elected I promise to be help with any issue thats within my power to deal with, no matter hoiw big or small that issue is.

The rest is no better written, looking like its been  put together by someone with English as a third language.  Worryingly, he says he is studying economics with politics at university…

More worrying is the content itself: there really is no need to vote BNP in Basildon if so-called mainstream parties can find room for someone like this.  His election campaign trots out the old canard of council housing going to asylum seekers (a claim recently proved to be a myth) and his policies generally are old BNP favourites (limit immigration and put everyone else in jail) or look like they come from Arshad Khan’s Justice Party.

No mention of policies on education though.  It would be interesting to hear how someone who talks about things “making no sence” , “a action day”, and  “a inconvenience” and has a random approach to punctuation would propose to improve education – he obviously has first-hand experience of a failing system, and his presence at university could be held up as proof of falling standards.

But that is unfair.  It is Essex county council that is responsible for his illiteracy and not Mackenzie himself, however he should be held responsible for his extreme views and his party should look to itself for allowing him to represent them after he was accused last year of producing BNP-alike literature.  At the time Jon Cruddas said:

This dangerous exploitation of people’s fears is a gift to extremist organisations such as the BNP. Peddling myths about immigrants pouring into a town or about asylum seekers supposedly being given council housing ahead of other residents is incredibly unhelpful. If David Cameron is serious about fighting racism he should disown this candidate straight away.

Far from being disowned, he is back as a candidate this year and I have a little less affection for my old manor than I used to have.

I missed it of course, I was out with the UAF in Pound Hill at the time,  but I understand they were protesting about something to do with freedom of speech.  I don’t know what their point is – perhaps they want the freedom to promote themselves without anyone else having the freedom to challenge what they say?  If they give us a bit of warning next time I shall turn up and hear what they have to say, and exercise my freedom to disagree with it.