Thursday, February 15, 2007

Huge BNP Bomb War Horror Shock Apocalypse

I don't know. When the 'BNP bomber' story first broke it sounded pretty sinister.

"what is believed to be a record haul of chemicals used in making home-made bombs was found in Colne ... The 22 chemical components recovered by police are believed to be the largest haul ever found at a house in this country ... She said a search of Jackson's home had uncovered rocket launchers, chemicals, BNP literature and a nuclear biological suit"


A week later, maybe less so.

Supt Smith added: "We are making inquiries in relation to what we have found at his address and to establish what offences he may have committed. He's not a terrorist and it's not a bomb factory but we are interested in what we have seized from his house. It will take expert advice to establish exactly what he has got."

Now I'm getting the distinct impression that Mr Comedy Cockup again triumphs over Mr Conspiracy. Our Junior Chemistry Set wasn't being monitored by the security services, but by a far more sinister organisation - the social services.

Kerena Cottage suffered mental health problems and told her social worker that her husband had several crossbows and chemicals stored in his home. She also revealed he wanted to shoot Mr Blair and local peer Lord Greaves, Miss Blackwell told the court. When police raided his house on 28 September 2006 they discovered 21 types of chemicals which, when combined, could form explosives. Miss Blackwell said they also uncovered a document called the Anarchy Cookbook, which detailed how to make different types of bombs.

I presume that's the Anarchist's Cookbook, put together thirty-plus years ago by some anarchist from the Orkneys, and in my youth available by mail-order from the Private Eye small ads. But what's happened to the rocket launcher, which seems to have turned into a bow and arrow ? And what of the 'largest haul' ? Was it largest in terms of the number of chemicals found ? Did it include rice and sugar ?

The court heard how Cottage was arrested and that 19 different chemicals and large amounts of rice and sugar were found during a search of the couple’s house on Talbot Street, Colne in September 2006.

A litre of hydrogen peroxide was also found at the house ... Ms Wilson conceded that seven of the chemicals found were either pointless or unnecessary for explosives, and one was a dietary supplement.

My chemistry tells me you need fuel and an oxidiser to make something go bang. One bottle of peroxide isn't going to set Lancashire ablaze. 600kg of ammonium nitrate fertiliser sounds nearer the mark. By which token there must be a dozen farmers within a few miles of Mr Cottage with the wherewithal. I wouldn't ask how many of them would like to shoot Mr Blair.

Mr Cottage and the lovely Kerena don't sound like the most solidly reality-based members of the community. And his friend looks altogether too much like the Cure's Robert Smith for a staid man's sleep o'nights. But I'm not altogether sure we've prevented another 7/7 here - perhaps at most a mini-Waco ?

Mr Cottage does however seem likely to discover that a desire to make improvised explosive devices, when mixed with right-wing politics, can be extremely hazardous to your liberty.



UPDATE - I should point out that a desire to make improvised explosive devices has historically been common among British youth. About twenty-odd years ago UK sellers of sodium chlorate weedkiller started adding fire-depressant chemicals to it, in reponse to the small but persistent toll of dead or maimed children who would make bangs by mixing it with sugar.

UPDATE2 - according to an anonymous commenter, Mr Cottage had previously been a Tory party member for 30 years.

22 comments:

Anonymous said...

Mr Cottage was a member of the Conservatives for 30 years and the BNP for a few months before being expelled.

Anonymous said...

Just passed the TV with a doco on Rudyard Kipling. It tentatively ventures, 'Today there is a swing back to' Kipling - nudge nduge wink wink. But the narrator makes it clear, Kipling is 'controversial'. Oh please! He was a proud Brit. Nothing controversial in that. I've been waylaid by old people in India, aghast that westerners are 'becoming hippies', 'Sahib, bring back the British rule, it was the best time ever for India'. Now that was 20 years ago and the younger generation see much more hope and prosperity in the future. Fine. But Brits can stand up proudly and say, with clear consciences, 'We did that!'. Racism? In my opinion Indians invented it and Brits caught it from them if at all, most racist place on earth - India.

Anonymous said...

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/lancashire/6361763.stm

Under cross-examination by Alistair Webster QC, it emerged touch explosives could not injure and were mainly suitable for "schoolboy pranks".

Touch explosive was the only substance for which all the ingredients were present at the house.

Ms Wilson conceded that seven of the chemicals found were either pointless or unnecessary for explosives, and one was a dietary supplement.

Anonymous said...

"..what's happened to the rocket launcher, which seems to have turned into a bow and arrow..

Oh, be fair! They must look exactly alike, as a highly-trained police explosives search team were obviously fooled...

What, that's not how it happened..? ;)

Anonymous said...

And as always strange timing a couple of months before elections. I predict many supposed/false controversies about the BNP before the elections. I'v been to a few BNP branch meetings and just ordinary people with bottle simple as that. Everyone should go to one if only for research purposes. The BNP are under siege for disagreeing with the prevailing orthodoxy. BNP nazis my arse.

Anonymous said...

Just a spot of venting above but tangentially related because all this BNP nonsense comes when mainstream normal British pride has been outlawed.

Anonymous said...

Improvised explosive devices were indeed once popular amongst english-speaking youth around the world. Just ask famous Oz musician Charlie McMahon, known to his friends since high school (suburban Sydney) as 'The Hook', guess why!

http://www.charliemcmahon.com/

Anonymous said...

You do understand that it was important that they find an indigenous bomb-making terrorist, don't you?

Anonymous said...

The man has reached an age where he feels assailed by the state of things in the country and retreats into paranoia.

I should think he is depressed. The CPS is barmy - but they need a BNP case before each local election so Ken Macdonald can keep his little barrister in bed and Lord Goldsmith can continue to set up British soldiers

The whole farce should collapse - it is fatuous. I do however start to wonder about these Muslims being arrested and what they are really storing at home....the police are losing credibility

paul ilc said...

Laban

Is this worth your time or so much space? Obviously, nutters will gravitate towards "hard left" (Verity) parties like the BNP: they always do, even if the parties then expel them. The idea advanced by some commenters that the prosecution of Cottage is a pre-election conspiracy to discredit the BNP is ludicrous: their credibility is minimal.

I thought you, Laban, would be rejoicing today at the news in The Times that: " Roman Catholicism is set to become the dominant religion in Britain for the first time since the Reformation because of massive migration from Catholic countries across the world."
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/article1386939.ece

But I forgot that you don't like Poles coming here, do you, even though they are largely culturally compatible unlike third world immigrants?

Anonymous said...

paul - I dont think LT has said he doesnt like Poles. His misgivings are about the sheer numbers of arrivals, if I may make so bold as to speak for him.

paul ilc said...

"anonymous"

If they are largely culturally compatible, then the numbers don't matter - to me, anyway. The people I wish to keep out are Muslims and Third Worlders; and in some quarters that makes me a 'racist'. However, I am in favour of the free movement of people, goods, services and money across the free world.

As for the BNP, Laban, it may expel someone like Cottage but it retains the loathesome Mark Collett (BNP Director of Publicity) who calls Churchill "a fucking cunt" for leading "us into a pointless war with other whites standing up for their race.” "Pointless"? When a psychopathic tyranny with a genocidal programme threatened our national existence and the safety and security of Europe? "Standing up for their race"? By mass murder on an industrial scale?

When the BNP expels Collett and all the many like them, then they might - just might - be worth voting for.

Anonymous said...

BNP electoral success is just what this country needs.

Anonymous said...

Am I a racist for expressing the opinion I did above?

Anonymous said...

Paul ilc - 'nutters' - in other words, people of whom you personally disapprove - may 'gravitate' to the hard left. Others, who are right wingers like myself, have been pointing out for years that the BNP is hard left, dear boy. We point this out at every opportunity because the BBC styles them hard right, and that gives us hard righters a bad name.

That does not mean I will not vote for them in the next election to put a rocket up the arse of the Tories. I cannot vote Tory while Dave's in charge.

Anonymous said...

paul, numbers do very much matter, you must be out of touch with the housing shortage if you think not. People where I live can't afford to buy because so many people are trying to buy from a limited supply despite large scale building projects.
No doubt as a libertarian you will say scrap the planning regulations, but at the end of the day this is a small country and we will run out of space sooner or later, what then? poor locals forced out to make room for wealthy foreigners?

Anonymous said...

"If they are largely culturally compatible, then the numbers don't matter - to me, anyway."

Sorry to disagree, but the sheer numbers coming into small areas do matter.

And I don't want to see any more of this in my country:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/02/15/nsigns115.xml

Anonymous said...

'Hard left' 'far right'. Its past the time these meaningless, one-dimensional terms were ditched. They dont help to get to the essence of any political movement (assuming that s what one wishes to do rather than just smear in which case they are fine).

As a nationalist party the BNP will adopt policies which it feels will benefit the indigenous population. As no side has a monopoly on truth or good sense inevitably these policies will include a selection from 'left' and 'right' and still a few others off the wall

Anonymous said...

Dave,

The needs-based system operated by local authorities and housing associations in allocating social housing is one of the biggest factors in the rise of the BNP. The families seen to be in greatest need jump the queue. These families are invaribly Bangladeshi or Somali. This system favours the goat-herder from the horn of Africa over the hard-working (white) mechanic from Bethnal Green, who's paid his taxes and made NI contributions. Only in Britain...

saltynick said...

From the BNP:

"The dirtiest anti-BNP campaign ever - but we still nearly got more votes than the parties of the Government and the official Opposition combined!"

That was the reaction from satisfied but exhausted BNP veterans at the count for Burnley's Brunshaw ward by-election last night.

In fact, from the number of leaflets put out by all the parties, it cannot have been far off being the hardest fought council by-election in modern times. The BNP put out no fewer than 12 different leaflets, a figure matched by the LibDems, with Labour and their far-left allies not far behind.

After a glossy anti-BNP smear paper was delivered to every home in the ward last weekend, the BNP then had to face two brutal and dishonest smear leaflets from Labour, and two from the LibDems, in the last two days. In total, the last four days of the campaign saw every house in the ward receive 12 smear leaflets - some of them distributed, we believe, by illegally paid non-political leafleters.

In the face of this barrage, however, the pro-British vote held up remarkably well, with our tremendously well-organised polling station telling and whipping-in operation finding that large numbers of our firm 'yes' voters went to vote for us early in the day, but with those who left it until late still being happy to be knocked up and given lifts to the polls.

In the end, by far the most professional and intensive BNP campaign ever in the North West was overwhelmed by a massively financed operation by the regional LibDem machine, working in collusion with the Tories (with whom they recently carved up the lucrative prizes of the council executive) and the Labour party.

Dirty tricks

Even those underhand efforts, and the outrageous interference in the democratic process by Labour's Stalinist Searchlight allies, would however probably not have helped them if it hadn't been for the shockingly unlucky (?) timing of the Robert Cottage 'bomb' trial.

Needless to say, no-one in the Establishment media was in the least bit interested in the fact that Cottage was a Conservative party activist for more than twenty years before switching to the BNP for one council election, then drifting away from us when our local team decided that he was becoming dangerously eccentric.

Nor did they mention the fact that his wife - who alerted the police - was also a staunch BNP activist. Nor (except in the small-print on the BBC website) was there reported the sad truth that the sum total of the supposedly massive haul of explosives that Cottage and his dentist 'accomplice' had 'stockpiled' was a gallon of hydrogen peroxide - a perfectly legal chemical used by dentists to whiten teeth.


This media onslaught clearly roused anti-BNP voters to a frenzy, and produced the wave of tactical voting which saw the LibDems take the seat comfortably. As our campaign workers agreed at the count, the wave of smear leaflets may actually have helped to get our voters out by making them angry at the attempt to bully them into changing their loyalties, but the media exploitation of the folly of Cottage clearly did mobilise the LibDem vote.

Despite all the waves of smears, and with fantasies about 'BNP bomb plots' advertised on every newspaper hoarding in the town as voters went to the polls, the BNP's hardworking candidate Paul McDevitt gained five times the Conservative vote and comfortably beat the Labour party (which took a seat in the ward last May).

Despite the fact that local Tory bigwigs were pleased to have kept their LibDem coalition partners in power, the last remaining Tory activists are now deeply demoralised not only by their party's leftwards drift but also by their continued collapse at the polls.

The full vote, with a 40% turnout, was:

LibDem 875
BNP - Paul McDevitt - 538
Labour 479
Con 90

Well done to Burnley organiser Dave Shapcott for running such a brilliant campaign, and to all the activists who did so much, including those who travelled from other parts of the North West to help the stalwart local team. The lessons and experience acquired over the last month place Burnley BNP right up with the best of our local campaign teams. Roll on May!

http://www.bnp.org.uk/news_detail.php?newsId=1363

Laban said...

It was a litre according to the papers, not a gallon. A gallon of 100 volume H2O2 - now you could make a bigger bang with that.

Anonymous said...

Cottage had stood as a BNP candidate on three occasions, so I don't see how he was expelled after only a few months. Why was he expelled anyway?

Much of the rest of this stuff is just alarmingly grim.