The BNP’s first ethnic minority member

This is a guest post by Maurice Cousins from the Nothing British about the BNP campaign.

******************

After the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) forced the BNP to change its membership policy to accept non-whites as members, some commentators argued it was counter-productive as they could no longer be labelled a racist organisation. While officially the BNP may no longer be a racist party, it still remains a party of racists.

The BNP’s announcement that they have accepted its first non-white member, Rajinder Singh, only proves this point.

Mr Singh is a former part-time teacher from Wellingborough. Born in Lahore, Pakistan, he came to Britain in 1967 after fleeing ethnic tensions resulting from the disastrous 1947 Partition of India. It was this event which saw the death of his father and has inspired Singh to hate Muslims ever since.

Singh has been involved with the BNP since December 2001 when he announced the setting up of the “Asian Friends of the BNP” group (even though the BNP didn’t want to be friends with Asians by not allowing them to become members). Although there is no sign that the group actually got anywhere, AFI was to act as a support and fund raising body for people sympathetic to the BNP’s anti-Muslim stance.

Singh’s hatred of Muslims is almost palpable. Earlier this month he wrote a rambling and intellectually incoherent article for the BNP’s Legal Director, Lee Barnes. Barnes, a well known anti-Semite, misogynist and conspiracy theorist, endorsed him by writing: “A good friend of the BNP, and a man I have enormous admiration for, is Rajinder Singh.”

In his article on the effectiveness of British Muslims to integrate themselves into British society, Singh wrote how they are “indigestible like a stone in stomach.” He then writes that Muslims also have some “very nasty political aims and aspirations.”

Drawing a comparison between Polish and Muslim migrants in Britain, Singh asks a series of questions based on a number of sensational and demonizing claims made by the BNP over the years:

Do the Poles seduce or groom naive native girls to obtain rights of stay and to produce more children? Are the Poles as unskilled as the Bangladeshis, Pakistanis, Iraqis, the Afghans, the Somalis and the Nigerians? Are the Poles notorious for drugs and drug pushing? Do the Poles run smuggling rings and vice parlours?

The EHRC’s actions have made it more difficult for anti-BNP campaigners to accuse them of being racist but ironically it has also been an important step in helping to combat the left’s inverted discrimination that only white folk can be bigoted and racist. Rajinder Singh shows how it is possible to be just as revolting as European neo-fascists.

In the run up to the General Election in 2010 the BNP will want to avoid all negative publicity – particularly its weird enthusiasm with racial hygiene. The threat that fig-leaves like Singh pose to British politics is that the BNP will use him as a surrogate to promote its anti-British values of hatred and division.