I have just been looking through some of the criminal records of current and former BNP members - quite revealing it is too. You get a sense of the kinds of people the fascists attract, as well as the things they prepare people to do. Because the remarkable fact is that the BNP have proven themselves adept at spreading terror in localised settings, despite lacking a police force, an army or even a paramilitary outfit that it would call its own ( these days, the BNP tends to maintain an organisational distance from the Combat-18 group it set up, although the ban on C-18 membership is known to be widely ignored in the party). It is well-known, for example, that when the BNP set up shop in Welling, the level of racist violence shot up three-fold. The election of a single councillor in Barking in 2004 was followed by an immediate 18% rise in racist violence. Former members like Andy Sykes have disclosed the fact that the party expects its members to get involved in violent acts (he was the one who helped make the documentary, The Secret Agent, in which BNP members confessed to violent assaults on Asians). When you look at the convictions lists, you see what forms this violence takes. Here's a relatively short list of examples, grouped very roughly by the category of the crime committed:

Terrorism/attempted murder/arson: John Laidlaw, whom says he was a BNP member (the BNP deny this), threatened to "kill all black people" before going on a shooting spree at Finsbury Park tube station. He shot two people, missed a third target, and hit a white woman - apparently by accident. Tony Lecomber, group development officer for the BNP, has convictions for handling explosives and for an assault on a Jewish teacher. This was when he was the party's Propaganda Director, back in its pre-'modernising' era. Robert Cottage, a BNP member and one-time candidate for that joyous bunch, was of course a co-conspirator in a massive terror plot that was barely even covered in the media, involving the largest haul of chemical weapons to date. Former BNP member David Copeland was, of course, the infamous nail bomber who killed three people and injured 139 with a series of bombings around London. Ex-BNP activist Mark Bulman tried to firebomb his local mosque, and daubed swastikas on local businesses he thought were 'ethnic'. Stephen Bailey, a Lincoln BNP member, is a convicted arsonist. BNP member Terry Collins is probably only recently out of jail after conducting a reign of racist terror and arson against his neighbours. His confederate, fellow BNP member Allen Boyce, will have got out a bit earlier, because his only crime was to teach Collins bomb-making instructions. The former leader of the BNP, the deceased John Tyndall, had numerous convictions including one for organising paramilitaries.

Assault: BNP councillor David Enderby has been convicted of assault, while his agent Kevin Hughes was convicted of racially aggravated assault. BNP councillor Brian Turner has been convicted of racially aggravated public order offenses (as well as beating his wife - they believe in patriarchy, the Nazis). BNP member Anthony Weeks has convictions for racially aggravated assault. Martin Glasgow, a BNP fundholder in Chesterfield, has served 12 months for a racist assault. Former BNP election agent Kevin Hughes has served jail time for assaulting an Iraqi asylum seeker. Kevin Scott, a regional organiser for the north-east, has been convicted of assault. Graham Tasker, a BNP branch organiser, has convictions for assault on a black woman and another on a solicitor. Steve Belshaw, East Midlands organiser for the BNP, has a conviction for assault. Former Oldham BNP organiser Mick Treacy, who got 11.21% of the vote as a candidate in the 2001 elections, has several convictions for theft and violence.

Rape: Roderick Rowley, one-time BNP candidate in Coventry, is a convicted child rapist; Ian Hindle and Andrew Wells, BNP members, have been convicted of molesting children and keeping explicit images of the rapes taking place. BNP member Robert Bennett, who was responsible for their leafletting campaign in Oldham in 2002, has convictions for assault and gang rape.

Threats/harrassment/incitement: Nick Griffin, supremo, fuhrer, duce, lord of the goosestep, has a well-known conviction for incitement to racial hatred, from 1998 when he published a magazine, The Rune, that effectively called for the lynching of opponents of "white unity'" . BNP councillor Brian Wainwright was found to have been sending letters to a local mosque, to a Muslim councillor, and to a local antifascist activists, threatening that "Muslim blood will be spilled" (he endearingly included an SS logo, just so that it would be understood what his position on the whole Nazi genocide thing was). One-time BNP council candidate Dominic Bugler has been convicted for possessing an imitation firearm. Joe Owens, Nick Griffin's former minder and former Merseyside organiser of the BNP, was also a gangland hitman, according to Searchlight, suspected of several murders by police. He has also spent time in jail for sending razor blades in the post to Jewish people and carrying CS gas. When he split with Nick Griffin a few years ago, he publicised claims that Tony Lecomber had tried to recruit him to an assassination scheme. Colin Smith, a regional officer for the BNP, has multiple convictions including for theft, assault, burglary and possession of an offensive weapon. Paul Ballard, a branch organiser in Croydon, has been convicted of incitement to racial hatred. BNP chief steward and branch organiser for Edinburgh, Warren Bennett, has convictions for public order offenses and connections with the neo-Nazi terror organisation, Combat-18. Former BNP candidate Darren Dobson, was convicted of racially aggravated harrassment, and he also had connections to C-18. Jim Dowson, the BNP's fund-raiser in Scotland, has a long list of convictions including for breach of peace, and possession of a weapon, and has links to loyalist terrorists like Michael Stone.

You get the picture. Certainly, few readers of this blog need to be reminded that the BNP are a violent Nazi organisation. Equally, if I wanted to be comprehensive on this topic, I'd have to write for a few more days. But it's worth highlighting a number of points that emerge here. 1) The BNP is not just circumstantially violent and criminal - it is violent and criminal from its leadership (advisory council) through its middling layers of organisation right down to its grassroots. 2) The BNP attracts paranoiacs and sociopaths of all varieties. It recruits them, cultivates them, and promotes them to leading positions in its organisation. 3) The BNP produces sociopaths who then, having been indoctrinated in the tenets of fascism, have a habit of going on the rampage. 4) The BNP is immersed in a violent Nazi milieu, which it has only recently felt the need to really distance itself from. Yesterday's BNP member is today's C-18 activist. Tomorrow's BNP member is today's Racial Volunteer Force member (they're the ones, apparently, who are protecting Johnny Adair from his former UVF confederates). And so on. If there was a Muslim organisation in this country which had the criminal record and mile-wide violent streak of this organisation, it would have been banned, its leaders hounded by the press, its members possibly even deported (or renditioned). Because they're white, they get respectful interviews with John Humphreys or Michael Crick on the BBC.