I have ranted on about the UK Conservative Party so often in this column that now my friends apologise if they so much as mention them in my presence. They obviously fear that the merest mention of the party's existence might send my blood pressure soaring to dangerous levels, or set me off on a two-hour tirade. Because of this, and because I don't want to repeat myself too much, I had resolved to leave the subject of the Tories alone this week, leadership election or no leadership election.

Then came last Friday, and a set of morning headlines that left me staring at my screen in open-mouthed disbelief. Edgar Griffin, vice-chairman of the Conservatives in the Montgomery area of Wales, and one of the vice-chairmen of Iain Duncan Smith's campaign for the party leadership, had been exposed as an activist for the extreme right-wing British National Party. To say the least, this was startling news. A rough American equivalent would be for the leading candidate in the Republican primaries to be found to have a prominent supporter who was a member of the Ku Klux Klan.

Then again, in one sense, Mr Griffin's involvement with the BNP was unsurprising; after all, his son Nick is that party's leader. Not only that, but his wife Jean stood as a BNP candidate at this year's General Election. Clearly, here, we have a case of family values the fascist way. I dread to think what the conversation must be like when the Griffins have a family gathering for, say, Christmas. ('Oh, you shouldn't have! Just what I wanted - a nice new pair of jackboots').

What is astonishing is that no one on the Duncan Smith campaign team noticed who they had on board their campaign bandwagon until a tabloid newspaper, the 'Daily Mirror', uncovered it by phoning the BNP's official hotline and catching Edgar Griffin answering the phones for them. It seems extraordinary that the name 'Griffin' didn't ring any alarm bells in the Duncan Smith camp before they put his name on their leadership campaign letterhead. For one thing, the loathsome Nick Griffin is a shameless self-publicist, who had a high profile after collecting more than 16 per cent of the votes in the Oldham West and Royton constituency at the General Election. For another thing, Jean Griffin had stood for the BNP in Chingford and Woodford Green, where the winning candidate was Iain Duncan Smith.

In fairness to Duncan Smith, once the fascism hit the fan he reacted decisively. Griffin was immediately sacked from his leadership campaign team. The following day, he was formally expelled from the Conservative Party.

But that wasn't enough to make the bad smell surrounding the affair go away. As the row rumbled on, Edgar Griffin continued to embarrass the Tories. When challenged about his support for 'voluntary' repatriation for members of ethnic minorities, he couldn't seem to understand what all the fuss was about. He declared:
'That is ordinary Tory grassroots opinion. They are ordinary Tory views. There is nothing strange about my views. My views are perfectly well known.'

Asked whether his son shared his support for Duncan Smith, Griffin confirmed that the BNP leader did indeed endorse IDS - and claimed that the BNP could expect a surge in support if his opponent, Kenneth Clarke, were to win the Tory leadership election. Nick Griffin, he said,
'...thinks he [Duncan Smith] is a very decent fellow. He's saying the BNP are getting approaches from people in the Conservative Party as high as county councillors. If Clarke were to win they would defect, and I am sure that is true.'

Edgar Griffin even directly likened the aims of the Conservatives to those of the BNP, claiming:
'The two parties are almost the same in terms of long-term plans. In terms of the manifestos of the Tories and the BNP, you can hardly tell the difference'.

Finally, asked whether Mr Duncan Smith was not something of an extreme right winger, Griffin made reference to the 318,000 Tory party members who are currently in the process of choosing the new leader. He said:
'There's nothing wrong with that. Of this 318,000, most of them are extreme right wing.'

Even I think that's possibly a little unfair on the Tories. I believe that they exploit racism and attract racists with their anti-asylum seeker and anti-Europe rhetoric. I think that's grossly irresponsible, but I don't believe that the Tories actively seek to stir up racial conflict like the BNP do. The last time large numbers of BNP supporters descended on my home city of Bradford, they sparked off a major outbreak of rioting. Were a large group of Conservatives to visit the city, I would expect nothing worse than an outbreak of braying in some of the more expensive bars, a few bread roll battles in restaurants and perhaps increased trading in the red light district.

But some serious questions remain unanswered. If Edgar Griffin's far-right views were 'perfectly well known' to his colleagues in the Montgomery Tory Party, then how did he become their vice-chairman? His links to the BNP must have been obvious, given his family's prominent roles in that organisation. Did no-one else in the local Conservatives think that there was anything disturbing about that?

Mr Griffin was outraged by his abrupt expulsion from the Tory party, claiming that party officials had treated him 'worse than a paedophile'. He was clearly amazed at the notion that holding extreme right-wing, xenophobic opinions should be seen as incompatible with Conservative Party membership.

I wonder why that should be?

Charles Fain has just been released from prison in Idaho after serving 17 years for crimes that he didn't commit. The crimes were appalling: kidnapping, sexual assault and murder, the victim being nine-year-old Daralyn Johnson. Fain's conviction was largely based on testimony from an FBI forensic expert, who testified that hairs found in Daralyn's clothes appeared to match Fain's hair. Now, new DNA testing has proven that those hairs could not have been Fain's.

Nothing can give Fain back the third of his life that he's wasted in prison. But in a way, he's very lucky, because he's still alive; and he spent those years on death row.

Fain's case is the 97th since 1973 in which someone has been sentenced to death in America, then subsequently released when the case against them collapsed. A full list of those cases can be found on the Death Penalty Information Center website. What cannot be known for certain is whether any wrongful convictions went undiscovered; whether any innocent people have been executed.

Meanwhile, the state of North Carolina is planning to execute Robert Frye this week despite the fact that the lawyer who represented him at his murder trial has admitted to being an alcoholic. According to his own testimony, Frye's lawyer Thomas Portwood drank at least 12 shots of rum every evening during the trial instead of working on his client's case.

This isn't an isolated case where someone on trial for their life in America has received grotesquely inadequate representation. On 13 August this year, Calvin Burdine was granted a new trial by the Fifth Circuit Court in Texas on the grounds that his lawyer had slept through large portions of his trial.

There have been other recent capital cases where there was no doubt about the guilt of the offender, but where a death sentence has been pronounced in circumstances where even a supporter of judicial killing might consider it shockingly inappropriate. Johnny Paul Penry confessed to the rape and murder of a 22-year old woman. But Penry has been assessed as having a mental age of seven and an IQ of 60. He can't read or write, and doesn't know the names of the days of the week. None of that stopped a Texas jury from sentencing him to death. They were not instructed by the judge in the case to take Penry's mental disabilities into account when deciding on his sentence. Fortunately, the US Supreme Court agreed that they should have done so, and overturned the death sentence in June.

More recently, Napoleon Beazley came within four hours of being executed in Texas for the fatal shooting of businessman John Luttig during a botched attempt to steal his car. Beazley doesn't deny his guilt, but he was only 17 and the time of the killing, and thus legally a minor. He wasn't old enough to vote or drink at the time of the murder, but the state of Texas was still preparing to kill him, until a late intervention by the state's Court of Criminal Appeals.

The state of Illinois declared a moratorium on all executions in January 2000 after 13 wrongly convicted men were released from that state's death row. It surely should be obvious from all the many miscarriages of justice that have taken place that the rest of the USA should follow suit. Even if you believe that the calculated killing of a human being by the state can be justified, the system that administers that extreme form of judgement clearly isn't working.

Dutch Researchers! Fancy a holiday with a real difference? Well, from next April, a company called Kamstra Travel will certainly be offering that. They'll be providing package holidays in London in which the 'accommodation' on offer will consist of one sleeping bag per customer. The 'Live Like a Tramp' package deal invites holidaymakers to do exactly that. They'll be given the choice of either a sketch pad and pencil or a musical instrument with which to try to earn money, and a meal on the last day of the four-day trip. Beyond that, they'll be left to their own devices.

Kamstra Travel's owner Bart Ganssens admits:
'We expect that after the four days our clients will be hungry and exhausted.'

Nevertheless, he says,
'... the package is proving very popular with businessmen and other wealthy tourists looking for something different.'

However, London's Metropolitan Police don't appreciate the joke. A spokesman has said:
'Homelessness on the streets of London is serious and should not be trivialised. If officers see holidaymakers begging for food and money they have every right to make arrests.'

I hope they will. This is, in the immortal words of The Sex Pistols, 'A cheap holiday in other people's misery'. Anyone perverse enough to be tempted by it might also like to consider the likely reaction of authentically homeless people should their cover be blown. The police might be the least of their worries.

Still, for all those of us who are struggling for cash: nice to know that so many of the rich think that our lives are such a laugh, eh?

And finally, following on from last week's item about Manchester United, it was good to see them fail to win again at the weekend. A shame (and typical of United's luck) that a late own goal saved them from defeat at Aston Villa, but they've still won only one of their first three games. If they can keep this up, there may be hope for everyone else this season.

Mind you, if they do keep this up, I fear for what remains of manager Sir Alex Ferguson's sanity. After the Villa game, he spluttered:
'Why has the referee got a stopwatch? How long should injury-time have been? 14 minutes at least!'

I trust that this year's crop of Premiership referees will understand Sir Alex's message. You're supposed to keep playing until United get the winner!

No wonder poor Sir Alex is livid. After all, referees usually seem to have understood that principle in the past.

Ormondroyd

30.08.01. Front Page

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