Nick Griffin expected at white supremacist conference

From There's Nothing British About the BNP:

Left Foot Forward is carrying an interesting story that Nick Griffin MEP is to attend a white supremacist conference in America.

BNP leader Nick Griffin will join Ku Klux Klan members, neo-Nazis, holocaust deniers, anti-immigration extremists and eugenicists at the white supremacist American Renaissance conference in Virginia next month.
Griffin is an enthusiastic attendee of these sorts of racial hygiene events. He has regularly visited similar conferences hosted by the conspiracy theorist David Duke in America with his wife Jacqui. In May 2005 Griffin attended Duke’s European-American Conference in New Orleans, Louisiana.

Also at the conference was the Swedish National Democrat’s ideologue Vávra Suk, Front National’s Jean-Michel Girard, Simon Darby (deputy-chairman of the BNP), Karl Richter and Marcus Haverkamp from Germany’s neo-Nazi party National Democratic Party (NPD), Deirdre Fields from South Africa, Don Black the founder of the neo-Nazi forum Stormfront, Lady Michele Renouf and a host of other white supremacists and extremists.

According to the Anti-Defamation League, an organisation that aims to combat racism and extremism, American Renaissance, the group who are organising this 2010 event, “promotes their views by attacking racial, ethnic, and religious diversity, which they call ‘one of the most divisive forces on the planet’ and therefore ‘dangerous’”; and that, “many of North America’s leading intellectual racists have written for American Renaissance or have addressed the biennial American Renaissance conferences.”

Griffin has spent 10 years attempting to re-model his party into a popular nationalist movement that supports neo-racism and non-integrationist ethnopluralism. Attending this conference would do serious damage to the BNP’s cosmetically enhanced image.

by Maurice Cousins
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HnhNorfolk agrees with the point 'Nothing British' makes (above) that attending this conference "would do serious damage to the BNP's cosmetically enhanced image".

So why would Nick Griffin contemplate such a move?

One theory is that the BNP is desperate for funds at the moment, although that is difficult to judge due to the lack of proper records. The BNP could face more fines or even prosecution for breaking the law over its accounting. The BNP has been fined five times in two years for breaking rules on financial records. Late last year it submitted accounts to the Electoral Commission but independent auditors Silver & Co said they did not give a "true and fair view” of its affairs. The auditors wrote:

In our opinion it cannot be said that the accounts comply with the requirements of the Political Parties, Elections and Referendums Act 2000, as adequate records have not been made available.

In addition, the BNP is not receiving any new membership fees since the Equality and Human Rights Commission took legal action against the party, freezing membership applications, accusing it of breaching race relations laws.

Even the most loyal and long-suffering of existing BNP members are starting to question the BNP's accounting practices, and many members have already left the party in disgust.

BNP's pursuit of foreign handouts:

The BNP often proclaims itself as being totally independent of the US and other foreign countries.

In reality, however, one of Nick Griffin's first tasks on becoming a Member of the European Parliament was to form a colalition with other far-right European parties in pursuit of EU funding. However, as EUOBSERVER / BRUSSELS announced:

The European Alliance of National Movements (AENM), the coalition of far-right parties formed October 2009 in Budapest, has failed in its an attempt to get its hands on European Parliament cash, as the jumble of reactionary rightists did not manage to file the application on time.

There have also been numerous questions raised over the years about the BNP's acceptance of donations from the US far-right through various intermediaries (see here, here and here).

Surely Nick Griffin will not risk the credibility of the BNP, such as it is, in order to solicit funds from the US far-right?