The Tyndall Diaries - Part One

Having recently completed John Tyndall's biography, it is apparent that he was undoubtedly a brave and extraordinary man, and whilst I do not agree with many of his views, a politician of integrity. Thus I feel compelled to share some of his words. In fact there is so much of note, that I will need to serialise the excerpts over the following weeks.

Millwall, Welling, Left-wing Violence and Electoral Fraud

Just a month after our election victory at Millwall, we became the target of another outbreak of left-wing violence. This was when a coalition of red mobsters operating under the umbrella of the self-styled 'Anti-Nazi League' got together to march on our shop premises in Welling. A huge crowd assembled for this jamboree, having been recruited from all over Britain and beyond. They had been incited beforehand by one of their organisers to tear the building down "brick by brick". A massive police presence prevented this happening, and so the mob turned on the police, as well as attacking local property belonging to people who had nothing to do with the BNP. The area became a battleground for several hours. A good many police were injured, including one black constable whom these 'anti-racists' made a special target because they thought he should have been helping them in their rioting rather than trying to stop it!

Writing about this affair afterwards in Spearhead magazine, I drew attention to the Public Order Act, under which I and others had been convicted and punished 31 years earlier for the mere supposition that we might be planning to do what this mob actually did at Welling on the 16th October 1993 and had likewise done a month earlier in the East End of London: use physical force in the promotion of a political object. There were quite adequate powers under the act, I said, to convict those who had been responsible for organising these acts of violence. Yet no prosecutions were ever taken out against these people. Why not - unless such decisions were being dictated by politics rather than normal considerations of justice.

Footage of this demonstration can be seen below:



Left-wing violence against the BNP reached a peak in the mid-1990s. In later years there have been some signs that this has lessened, and this could be a symptom of a general decline of the far-left - at least in terms of its ability to mobilise street mobs. This does not mean that we should underestimate its malignant influence in other sectors - a subject I have touched upon in an earlier chapter.

In the aftermath of this turmoil, we prepared to contest the scheduled local government elections in May 1994 with high hopes of retaining the East London seat that we won, and adding yet more seats to it. As I have indicated, our opponents simultaneously started planning to thwart our efforts. In this, they enlisted the mass media (naturally!); the trade unions, which began by attempting to organise a strike of council workers in the area where our councillor had been elected; Labour Party experts assigned by the party's headquarters descend upon the area to mastermind its anti-BNP campaign for the election; and the curiously named 'Anti-Nazi League', who for a while discarded their customary violent tactics to carry out an extensive canvass of local voters to persuade them not to vote BNP a second time. From the media point of view, the good white electors of Millwall became the subject of an extensive psycho-analysis aimed at divining what mental disorder had induced them on the 16th September 1993 to support a party that had been on the 'forbidden' list, instead of tamely voting for the parties for which they had been instructed to vote.

At the same time, as the poll approached, a massive operation was mounted by Labour to mobilise the Asian voters in the two boroughs of Tower Hamlets and Newham, where the BNP was standing several candidates who were considered to have a chance of repeating its Millwall success of the previous September.

On the day, we lost our Millwall seat, though our overall results across the two boroughs were impressive and enormously encouraging, with one or two bringing us very close to winning further seats. An investigation of what happened in Millwall gave us strong grounds for suspecting a number of irregularities in the way in which the election had been conducted. Large numbers of Asians appeared on the electoral roll who had not been there on the previous occasion - suggesting that many of them had been registered illegally. Our election helpers at the polling stations identified some Asians turning up to vote more than once. These were stopped after protests to the poll officers, but how many did vote a second or even a third time after not being spotted is anyone's guess. In one polling district where we had especially rock-solid support someone bore witness to the switching of boxes of voting papers but for personal reasons was unprepared to testify to this effect in the event of an inquiry.

As to the latter, at one time we had actually made the first moves in putting in an application to that effect, but this was later abandoned. At the end of it all, we were faced with the prospect of a legal bill of many thousands at a time when the party's election efforts had left it financially drained - and with no certainty of a verdict in its favour. The institutionalised corruption that had made the rigging of the election possible could well continue into the enquiry itself. At the same time, we could not be absolutely sure that this was the only factor that had cost us the Millwall seat. The anti-BNP propaganda drive, together with a skillful campaign fought by Labour, could have tipped the scales against us. We decided to cut our losses and look forward rather than backward, glad that we had established that the BNP could win an election - something which people had previously thought inconceivable. This portended well for the future, though not necessarily the immediate future.

To be continued...

Source: The Eleventh Hour; John Tyndall; Albion Press; 1998; pp. 497-499