The BNP. Remember them? Man, they used to be big. Everybody loved porcine mole-eyed malcontent Nick Griffin. He was warmly received by the rest of the panel when he appeared on Question Time. And the general public often garlanded him with eggs as he walked down the street. Sadly, in the midst of all that his message: “vote for us or you'll have one-of-them living next door”, got lost at the last election, where pretty much every BNP stronghold – Barking, Barnsley, Dagenham, Belmarsh, Wormwood Scrubs – crumbled overnight.
Annons
Since then, they've had nothing but trouble: Mounting debts after they mortgaged the farm on a big election drive. Hounded out of Stroud when they tried to establish their national media headquarters there. The sacking of top-dog Richard Barnbrook in a bout of infighting that now threatens to cleave the party. The rise and rise of the English Defence League – a Real IRA to their Sinn Fein. So what do you do when your back's against the wall? When you're drinking in the last-chance whites-only saloon? Simple. You get Alan Partridge in a fat-suit to make a propaganda video about sheep getting shanked by towelheads, then sit back and wait for it to go viral.The sheer quantities of Partridgisms employed by Manchester BNP organiser Derek Adams in his piece to camera are eerie. It's in his old school tie, his golf club jacket, his pin badge and pen in his top left pocket. It's in his overly-conversational, unduly-reasonable manner. Mostly, it's in the way he corrects himself – the constant re-working of his scope in a series of bizarrely banal tangents between the emotive rhetoric.“I wanna talk to you about meat,” he begins, “I wanna talk to you about how I love meat. I'm a carnivore… Well, we're all carnivores. Just some of us choose not to eat meat. They're vegetarians…” And so, excruciatingly, on. “But that doesn't mean I don't care about how that animal is treated…” The best bit is when he invokes the spirit of Bulldog Britain: “Sit silent… we’ve all done it at Armistice day.”
Annons
Headline findings: White people treat their meat OK by shooting an electric bolt gun into its temple, giving it 20, 000V of the good stuff then tipping its stunned form into a slaughter-bin.And The Muslims? Well, brother, don't get Derek Adams started. Frankly, they do everything except fly their beef into landmark skyscrapers. “You ask most people in Britain, what is Halal meat, they'll say: that's the stuff that Muslims eat. It's supposed to be better meat, isn't it? They say a prayer over the animal before they kill it. Sounds so fluffy and wonderful doesn't it? Little sheep. Say a prayer over it. Then it goes to sleep. IF ONLY…” The film descends into ultraviolence as Dezza cues up long montages of stock footage of ritual slaughter. “Aware of its surroundings, and in front of its friends – other animals – a religious fanatic says a prayer over it in the name of Allah, pulls its head back, slices its throat while its still fully conscious, until, strung up in this totally alien culture, it dies.”For whatever reason, Adams seems to have a limited appreciation of the residual value of Halal. After all, the actual Qu'ranic provision includes this:“Forbidden to you are… that which has been slaughtered while proclaiming the name of any other than God, and one killed by strangling, and one killed with blunt weapons, and one which died by falling”Which at least put an end to all those pre-Islamic Middle-Eastern abattoirs that consisted of men pushing cows over cliffs and garroting them with piano-wire.So surely Halal is a force for good? Not for Dezza. In between yet more videos of sheep being Chelsea-smiled, Adams rails about how we're being fed Halal meat by the big chains without knowing it. Yeah, cos major supermarket chains will often choose production methods that cost more money, right? Here's the video in full. As he rightly points out “If you've got a weak stomach, have a sick bowl at the ready.” Though perhaps not for the reasons he gives.GAVIN HAYNES
