This is a guest post by Matt Wardman of the Wardman Wire. It follows on quite nicely from what I said yesterday about the link between the way parties run themselves and what we can learn about what their Government might be like.

The Undemocratic Nature of the BNP

By Matt Wardman

This article is an introduction to a paper I have published showing that the BNP is dangerously focused on, and controlled by, the single person who happens to be the National Chairman, and is therefore unstable as a political party. You can download the PDF here, or read the full text on the Wardman Wire .

The Equality and Human Rights Commission has taken legal action to force the British National Party to change parts of its Constitution to prevent discrimination on the basis of race or religion. The BNP has agreed to use “all reasonable endeavours” to revise its constitution so it did not discriminate in contravention of the Equality Bill.

The debate has moved on to Nick Griffin’s ability to “persuade his party to allow the change“, with Griffin positioned as a leader attempting to persuade the “General Meeting” of his party to moderate its position.

This is the wrong focus, and it seriously misses the point.

The organisation of the BNP is unrecognisable from the democratic model used by other UK parties; rather, it is heavily dominated by the “National Chairman” himself. Rather than watching the party being gently reformed away from a racist constitution by its leader, we should be questioning the way in which the party itself is controlled from the centre.

The BNP Constitution reveals the party organisation and governance, just as it revealed the racial basis of the BNP’s politics.

Nick Griffin is the “National Chairman” of the BNP. As such, under Section 3 of the Constitution, he has full power over appointments to all other executive offices in the party (except the Party Auditor), routine executive, administrative, policy and tactical decisions, all organisational structures and how they are governed, and determine all policies to implement the basic objectives set out in the Constitution.

The National Chairman also exercises comprehensive control over the “General Members Meeting”, under Section 5.6 of the Constitution. This is the Meeting he needs to “persuade” of to change the Constitution in November. Such a meeting can only be called by two parties: the National Chairman at any time he wishes, or the “Advisory Council” after a two-thirds majority vote.

The Advisory Council can call a General Members Meeting over the head of the Chairman, but that Council itself is a creature of Nick Griffin. It consists of the “National Chairman, Deputy Chairman, the national officials of the party and the organisers of the partyís five most effective regions”; all of these are personal appointments of Mr Griffin. In the event of any disagreements, the decision of the National Chairman is also final. Just to be tidy, the Party Auditor – the only official not appointed by the National Chairman – is appointed by the Advisory Council, all of whom are appointed by the Chairman.

Section 13 of the BNP Constitution controls how General Members Meetings are called. It is all quite informal: “No rigid rules shall govern the holding of internal meetings of the party but such meetings will be held as the occasion demands.” And all Members can attend if their party dues are up to date.

Anyone can submit a motion (28 days in advance through the National Chairman), and if the motion is a proposal to change the way the party is governed, it can only go on the agenda with the National Chairman’s consent.

In contrast to the requirements laid on members wanting to submit motions to a General Members Meeting, there are no requirement for the National Chairman to give members a set amount of advanced notice of such a meeting taking place, or indeed to tell them that it is taking place at all.

In short, there is nothing to prevent the BNP National Chairman holding a General Members’ Meeting by inviting a few friends of his own faction round for tea and buns tomorrow, and voting through any changes they wish to make.

The BNP Constitution is more than 6,000 words long. That is a lot of verbiage to summarise organisational arrangements which I’d summarise as “Nick Griffin and a bunch of fig leaves”.

I’d suggest that the undemocratic nature of the BNP Constitution is every bit as crippling to its credibility as is its racism, and that scrutiny of the BNP should now focus on these aspects.

I am privileged to present a guest post by Dr Belinda Brooks Gordon, whom I had the pleasure of sharing a panel with about a month ago. She had done incredible work doing research and studies on the sex industry, and is here exposing the Government’s figures on Trafficking for what they are.

While Harriet Harman was sneering in her Labour Conference speech at women who model topless, some of us were quietly going through the statistics used to back up her more disproportionate and dangerous policies1, and now her latest whim: the termination of Punternet.

Trafficking figures are used by Harriet, the Home Office, and prohibitionist groups like Eaves/POPPY or OBJECT to support the criminalisation of punters:

“In 2003 a Home Office study on organized crime markets estimated that there were 4,000 women in the UK who had been trafficked for the purposes for exploitation” (Equalities Office Press Release)

The same figure of 4,000 trafficked women is now popping up everywhere, being used to support prohibitionist arguments, even in the recent Joint Committee on Home Affairs.

This seemed a suspiciously large figure given the evidence from the majority of academic, medical, health outreach sources. Given the vested interests in ramping up the trafficking figures, by organisations on the government’s trafficking payroll, by the government itself to hide poor immigration housekeeping, and most insidiously for the seizure of sex workers’ hard-earned assets, I was sceptical.

After 9 months and 2 FoI requests the Home Office finally sent this report ‘The impact of organised crime in the UK: revenues and economic and social costs, and criminal assets available for seizure’. It relies on three sources. The first is a 7yr old article in The Times, a report by Eaves/POPPY called ‘Sex in the City’. The third is Punternet’s British cousin McCoys British Massage Parlour Guide.

The Home Office report is based on such flawed methods as to be worse than useless, most of the figures are fabricated. While the authors use an apologetic tone and many caveats to excuse the poor data and high margins of error, Ministers, MPs and prohibitionists have seized upon figures as if they’re based on reality.

It makes me wonder if Harriet can read and write. It is beyond parody. It is like “Carry on Criminology”. If it wasn’t so tragic that women’s lives and savings are raided as a result of it, the poor methods would be funny. Now Nick Davies has taken up the cause, with his excellent piece on Prostitution and trafficking.

Why is it so bad?

1. The Home Office report states The Times article “reported an estimated 70 walk-up establishments” (p16). The article doesn’t mention walk-up establishments at all, let alone 70 of them. Rather, it states that: “Albanian gangs control about 75% of prostitution in Soho”. The Home Office report then takes its fictitious 70 and multiplies it by 6 on some wild assumption that 6 people are working in every walk-up. (The most I have ever seen in 15 years researching the sex industry is 2 – with one working, one maiding).

2. The report makes wild guesses:

“where reliable reporting not available it was necessary to use ‘best judgement’ to form assumptions” (pii).

No mention of how the judgement made.

3. It takes the flawed document Sex in the City, which relies on hoax calls to parlours, to be the most reliable evidence it could find! Yet a similar report by the same organisation had already been discredited by academics and practitioners in an Academic Critique of Big Brothel (one that had Ms Harman’s office telephoning in panic for authors to remove The Equalities Office from the critique).

4. Not only are hoax calls ethically problematic, they do not give brothels a chance to clarify misunderstandings so are likely to yield inaccurate information.

4. Wholly unrepresentative estimates are based on London before being ‘scaled up’ by the Home Office to rest of the UK. London is markedly different to small towns like Worthing. Scaling down would make more sense.

5. The Home Office uses patently untrue statements and then bases figures them. For example, it assumes that everyone foreign working in a walk-up flat is trafficked:

“Assumptions concerning flats, saunas and massage parlours are based with CO14, and researchers assume that all foreign workers in walk-ups are trafficked”.

This is not only racist but, if that were the case, why didn’t the police at Charing Cross (where CO14 is based) remove every foreign worker from every walk-up in Soho like they did in Pentameter operations?

6. Using McCoy’s Sex Guides and the Punternet website is a poor method of counting – it is the equivalent of trying to count the number of books in circulation using publisher’s adverts and literary reviews. But even their methods are more sensible than Eaves or the Home Office. (see also Anthology of English Pros http://stephenpaterson.wordpress.com/2009/07/15/exposed-the-home-office-dodgy-dossier-on-sex-slaves/#more-321)

7. Sex in the City claimed that 25% of women were from Eastern Europe and 31% from the UK and Western Europe yet coded women from Italy and Greece as coming from Eastern Europe. This would artificially boost the Eastern European percentage. Gross errors in data entry meant that some ‘ethnicities’ were coded as ‘mixed race’ or better still ‘exotic’. It admits that: “erroneous nationalities/ethnicities were identified across 33 London boroughs.” (p17). The funniest bits in the Eaves’ study is a graph on ethnicity spikes at ‘International’ as the commonest ethnicity!

As one campaigning sex worker put it when she read the Home Office report:

“Let’s face it, the only hard data in the entire discussion about trafficking EVER are the Pentameter figures of 255 trafficked people (TOTAL including domestic labour) and some cases aren’t through court yet, AND the revenue streams recorded in Eaves’ online accounts”

Ordinary sex workers are equivocal about punter sites, some think the sites useful so punters know the business is genuine and they are as far from trafficking as things can get. Others are not so keen, one sex worker put it.

“I get a great deal of business from Punternet… and buying into the Harman theory that the provision and exchange of punting information must be intrinsically bad is simplistic and blinkered in the extreme. But I don’t agree that so long as you good business from Punter sites, then telling the world what whores get up to sexually is ok and simply marketing. I don’t like reviews simply because I don’t like men who think it’s ok to brag about how good/bad their shags were for all to know. It’s tacky, degrading,  and  most often a breach  of trust. After all, we whores don’t write ‘reviews’ on clients. What we offer is confidential – so why not expect and demand same confidentiality back?  That’s what we did 10 – 15 years ago. Before PunterNet. And somewhat we survived and did good business then too.”

Rather different reasons from Harman’s.

My own view, in the Price of Sex is that criminalising clients is wrong in principle and dangerous in practice. For all her frothing at the mouth over ordinary punters, Harman will not listen to ordinary (ie active) sex working women and to my knowledge has refused to meet with any of the real sex worker organisations so far, preferring second hand information from those who have received money from her department.

While I respect Harriet Harman in other ways, it is well known by academics and grassroots organisations IUSW and ECP that she is pursuing the criminalisation of punters with a missionary zeal unrivalled by Tony Blair in the rush to invade Iraq, and making ordinary sex working women’s lives a misery.

1Try clauses 13 to 20 of the Policing and Crime Bill, for starters

I’m taking off my cynical, iconoclastic libertarian hat and replacing it with my rather dusty and unloved, “get the Lib Dems elected” hat for a minute.

Lib Dems have one killer policy: Set the threshold for Income Tax and National Insurance contributions at £10,000 a year (or roughly minimum wage). It’s so good Labour activists want their party to steal it. I wouldn’t be surprised if similar pressure is being put on David Cameron to do the same, although he won’t (tax cuts are for ‘Same Old Tories’ not modern, Compassionate With Your Money Conservatives)

Now, I’ll be honest, I love this policy for a number of reasons. First, it’s a tax cut, which I like. I’m against anything that punishes people for working or being successful, because working and being successful are actually good things that provide jobs and wealth and in doing that improves our health, increases our free time for leisure and personal pursuits and generally improves our quality of life.

It’s also a tax cut that does something about the problems faced by people moving from benefits into work, where, thanks to tax if you’ve got 2 kids you’re actually better off on benefits than a minimum wage job. That is, unless you’re willing to risk the tax credits system. Its painfully obvious that if you don’t take tax off people in the first place, you don’t need a monolithic, incompetent bureaucracy to then give it back again, wasting money for the sheer hell of it. Redistributing wealth from one group of poor people (those without kids) to another group of poor people is a whole new level of messed up politics, and one that people seem to blindly support.

I also love this policy for the message it sends: Tax Hurts.

Admitting that tax hurts, that tax is a bad thing is a major step forward. We saw a bit of it with the campaign against Council Tax. This was a big one, for me – I realised that increases in Council Tax are a consumptive plague on those on minimum wage, on pensioners and pretty much everyone. There’s nothing a council can do with extra money that would compensate for the damage done to someone on a fixed income having to find another £100 a year.

Income tax is the same. We’re making people at the very bottom of the employment ladder pay £700 a year in income tax. £700!!! That’s not small beans. That’s the difference between being able to get a car through the MOT so staying mobile, or being able to add more fruit to your kids diet, or any of the other things that people might want to do with an extra £58 a month.

One of my little soundbites I used at the Conference was this:

The amount that Labour has increased spending by since 1997 is more than it currently takes in Income Tax. In other words, without the increase in spending, we could be Income Tax Free by this point.

For Lib Dems, this £10k threshold is our best policy. It says that public money should not be wasted, that tax should not be a punishing, economy crippling burden. Good.

The security that this tax money buys for public sector workers makes private sector workers increasingly insecure, increasingly less likely to find work in a rigid, “I’ve got my safe job for life and fat pension, so fuck you” culture. The more Lib Dems can be authentically liberal on the tax issue, the more we stand out as being against those things that keep people poor.

We need more of this. Well, a lot lot more actually… but as far as seeds go, this is a welcome one.

Right, basically, I don’t have time to read Nick Clegg’s rather long pamphlet “The Liberal Moment” before Conference. I defer to my colleagues.

What I’ve read (about a third of it now) looks like an attempt at that elusive “Lib Dem Narrative” – I’d be interested to know what Neil Stockley and Simon Goldie make of it. It’s been far too long since I took an interest in how the Lib Dems ’sold’ themselves. The short version is: “People are realising that Labour’s means are wrong, bad, failing and dangerous. Liberalism offers them a way to get the progress they want but in an effective, working way.”

I quite like this – it’s how I’d do it (finding the common ground in ends, talk them into accepting your means), but I have my doubts that Labour voters blame anyone but the individual personalities in the Cabinet, rather than the ideas or principles behind the terrible policies we’re seeing. This is why they’re switching to the Conservatives who are presenting themselves as a tougher, leaner, more competent version of New Labour. Nick’s right to be as dismissive of this strategy, but it’s still what The People Want regardless.

When it comes to enthusing Lib Dems though, it seems to have done the trick – probably not something to be sniffed at just before a Conference. Let’s face it, it’s unlikely Nick would publish something that would make me leap with joy, but it does seem to show the gulf between us an Labour. More of this, please.

The question is (policy considerations aside) can you boil this narrative down to about 50 words? Is it something that most people, not just lib dems, will nod and agree with, or is the world view expressed too unrecognisable for most people? A narrative isn’t something you can just write – it has to be believable, understandable and feel ‘real’.

Annoyingly, as I thought this morning, there is some good stuff in there hidden in all the rather off-putting language of ‘progressivism’ and Lib Dem friendly disclaimers and caveats, but there’s also some pretty strange stuff that I don’t really understand yet, which is why I’m frustrated not to have been able to analyse it in more depth.

Still, 92 pages on liberalism from Nick Clegg is probably worth a million pages from Gordon Brown on Courage. *snigger*

Right, first, install CCTV in every single home, office and street in the UK.

How would you monitor all these CCTV feeds though? How could you be sure the children are safe?

Here’s where the plan is genius:  What we need is to vet everyone, and mark those who pass the test – wholesome lifestyle, no unusual sexual practices, no ‘dodgy mates’, no history of once, twenty years ago, puffing on a joint, no smoking, no over-eating, never been fired from a job, never been arrested or cautioned for anything – as “Trusted Workers.”

“Trusted Workers” will be entitled to a license to leave their homes without a permit. The permit system will be handed by Capita through a web interface – put in your request, state your reason for needing to leave the house, put your estimated time of leaving and returning and voila, your ID database entry is updated automatically! Only 50p a go, too!

In addition to this marvelous benefit, “Trusted Workers” will be entitled to a free choice of job, as it will be illegal to employ anyone who does not have “Trusted Worker” status. Everyone else? Well, these are the people who’ll monitor all the CCTV, and they’ll do it from their own homes, see? And because they’re second class citizens with a bitter hatred for “Trusted Workers”, they’ll be especially fastidious in their duties, reporting even the most minor indiscretion – swearing around children, for example, would be the sort of very foolish thing to lose your “Trusted Worker” status for.

I really can’t see the problem with this plan. It creates full employment and a beautiful utopian paradise where everyone is safe and secure forever.