bnp in 'bullshitting again' shock

It was pretty mad that UKIP used Churchill on their leaflet for the European elections last year. But not as mad as the BNP putting Nick Griffin next to Churchill on their new leaflet.



Not that they're a hate-based party or anything, no. I mean, who isn't motivated to vote out of a desire to 'get even'?

I've recently had the singular pleasure of seeing the latest copy of the BNP's quarterly magazine Hope And Glory. I know, I know, insert your own barrely-fishy-firearmsy metaphor here.

First up, their slogan for the general election.

In the late 1980s, following Tina Turner's hit single Simply The Best, a significant percentage of small businesses in Britain (and I'm more than willing to bet this was true for the USA too) used 'simply the best' as their slogan.

Lifting someone else's slogan is pathetically unimaginative. It says you've no idea about your own identity and no imagination. And that's true even without it being as vacuous as 'simply the best'. As a practice, it's as bad as the unfunny, desperate, can-we-end-the-meeting-please organisations that agree to call themselves 'The ----- With No Name'.

So, how could the BNP beat their anti-immigration leaflets last year using images of Polish pilots defending Britain in WW2, and foreigners from stock-image sites as the hard-working British taxpayers?

How about an act that involves displaying a lack of identity and importing ideas from a black foreigner?





The magazine itself is, of course, filled with bile and twaddle. Stuff about European Human Rights being 'Islamo-Marxist'. (That's the same European Convention on Human Rights that Churchill signed us into).

One thing did catch my eye though. They have the text of a speech Griffin made to the European parliament. He says that belief in human-caused climate change is

a refusal to accept scientific reality. According to the US National Snow and Ice Data Center, Arctic summer sea ice has increased by 409,000 square miles, or 26 percent, since 2007.

He goes on to say this means human-induced climate change isn't happening and it is, in point of fact,

the most expensive Big Lie in human history

Elsewhere, he says we should pay people of recent foreign descent fifty grand each to leave Britain. In case this isn't offensive enough, he makes an exception for Irish people because he regards them as British. We can, he says, pay for this by stopping our spending on climate change measures.

Back on their election leaflet, they say they'll raise pensions by ending spending on adaptation measures for 'non existent Climate Change'.



Now I don't expect his opinions on climate change to make any more sense than the rest of his lip-diddly fuckwittery. You'd need to be almost as much of an cockwad as Griffin himself to start looking for evidence-based thinking in the BNP.

But still, that Arctic ice figure he cited is very specific, and the US National Snow and Ice Data Center is a body to trust. So what's the score?

Stick that figure into Google and you hit denialist blogs saying what Griffin says and that

most of the Northern Hemisphere is much colder this winter than it's been in decades - and the Southern Hemisphere is cooler, too.

Even though the truth is that

The combined global land and ocean average surface temperature for January 2010 was 0.60°C (1.08°F) above the 20th century average of 12.0°C (53.6°F). This is the fourth warmest January on record.

So, what do the US National Snow and Ice Data Center actually say about the Arctic ice?

At the end of the Arctic summer, more ice cover remained this year than during the previous record-setting low years of 2007 and 2008. However, sea ice has not recovered to previous levels. September sea ice extent was the third lowest since the start of satellite records in 1979, and the past five years have seen the five lowest ice extents in the satellite record

As the Met Office explained

Global warming does not mean that each year will be warmer than the last. Natural phenomena will mean that some years will be much warmer and others cooler.

You only need to look at 1998 to see a record-breaking warm year caused by a very strong El Nino. In the last couple of years, the underlying warming is partially masked caused by a strong La Nina. Despite this, 11 of the last 13 years were the warmest ever recorded.