So apparently there hasn't been too much trouble in Luton. The entire EDL support turned up - numbering 3000. haha
Proof, if ever required, that violent scum will never attract a lot of people to their cause. They keep freaking out about being called right-wing extremists, but they simply can't understand that demanding people behave in certain ways and obey their government and local traditions is RIGHT-WING. It's the very fucking definition of the term.
update: from the EDL forum...
Quote:
A girl got dropped by one of the bolton lads and then one of the leicester lads stepped in so i was told and then a mass brawl kicked off..something like that..couldnt see properly as i was on the coach
They're battering women and fighting amongst themselves... where's the DIGNITY?!!
i don't understand the edl. this idea that we're all going to be forced to live under sharia law? how exactly is that going to happen?!
there isn't a political party standing in any election advocating that. but say there was, theres what, 2.5 million muslims spread about the whole country. if everyone else in the country forgot to vote, and if every muslim voted the same way for a party that currently doesn't exist that was advocating a policy that none do - then they might stand a chance - if they could get it passed the lords, and the other 60 million people that don't want sharia law ( and assuming all those 2 million muslims do - which polls show they don't )
and this idea we have an islamist government ( like the guy in the picture above ) - what?! i mean, maybe hes got a point - if the government is disguising their islamism by doing everything opposite to what the islamists say are their grievances against the west - like the war in iraq, afghanistan, support for dictatorships like in egypt, saudi arabia etc, unwavering support for israel, refusing to speak the democratically elected hamas government, sanctions against iran without any evidence that they're developing nuclear weapons etc
i just don't get it. i think they're just football thugs who don't get the rucks they used to at the football, and this is their new past time.
What's with the moron with the flag. Does he really think Cameron is an 'Islamist'; especially after the speech he made yesterday at the 'security conference'. Actually the EDL would have been in good company there. Cameron basically says what the EDL say but with more of a gloss...
Daily Star reporter quits in protest at tabloid's 'anti-Muslim' coverage Richard Peppiatt admits producing fictional stories about celebrities and accuses tabloid of inciting racial tensions
Richard Peppiatt said the suggestion the EDL was planning to field election candidates was known to be an exaggeration.
The Daily Star has been accused of printing fictional stories by a disgruntled reporter who has resigned over its "hatemongering" anti-Muslim propaganda.
In a resignation letter, Richard Peppiatt said he was leaving after the Star gave sympathetic coverage to the far-right English Defence League last month.
Peppiatt admits producing a number of fictional stories about celebrities during his two years at the tabloid, a practice he implies was sanctioned by his seniors.
The reporter, who was once made to dress up in a burqa, now accuses the paper of inciting racial tensions and Islamaphobia. "You may have heard the phrase 'the flap of a butterfly's wings in Brazil sets off a tornado in Texas'," Peppiatt wrote to the proprietor, Richard Desmond, in a letter seen by the Guardian.
"Well, try this: 'The lies of a newspaper in London can get a bloke's head caved-in down an alley in Bradford.' If you can't see that words matter, you should go back to running porn magazines."
Desmond's media empire has included pornographic magazines and adult TV channels as well as Express newspapers, Channel 5 and celebrity magazines. Desmond has said he was not consulted before the decision to publish the front-page story and editorial about the EDL.
Peppiatt tells him in his letter: "The weight of your ownership rests heavy on the shoulders of everyone, from the editor to the bloke who empties the bins."
Peppiatt, who handed in his resignation this week, said the "incendiary" suggestion the EDL was planning to field election candidates was known to be an exaggeration. "But further up the newsprint chain it appears a story, too good to allow the mere spectre of reality to restrain, was spotted," he wrote.
The EDL story is one of a number of prominent articles published by the Star that Peppiatt claims were made up, including some of his own. The reporter was recently involved in stories claiming Rochdale council had spent taxypayers' money on "Muslim-only squat-hole loos". In fact, the toilets were neither paid for by the local authority or "Muslim-only".
"I was tasked with writing a gloating follow-up declaring our post-modern victory in 'blocking' the non-existent Islamic cisterns of evil," Peppiatt wrote. The Press Complaints Commission later ruled the story was inaccurate and misleading.
The reporter also quotes Kelly Brook, who recently complained about the number of fabricated stories she reads about herself on the internet. She said: "There was a story that I'd seen a hypnotherapist to help me cut down on the time I take to get ready to go out. Where do they [journalists] get it from?"
Peppiatt wrote: "Maybe I should answer that one. I made it up. Not that it was my choice: I was told to." He said he had "plucked" the story about Brook's experimentation with hypnotherapy from his imagination, adding: "Not that it was all bad. I pocketed a £150 bonus."
In a list of "my other earth-shattering exclusives" for the Star, Peppiatt recalls producing articles about Michael Jackson, the pop star Robbie Williams and Katie Price which he said had no factual basis.
He also admits making up a story suggesting that Matt Lucas was on suicide watch following the death of the comedian's former civil partner. Lucas won substantial damages in court. Peppiatt criticises the Star's editorial judgment in his letter, accusing it of hypocrisy, and "arranging the day's news based on the size of the subjects' breasts".
He adds: "On the awe-inspiring day millions took to the streets of Egypt to demand freedom, your paper splashed on: JORDAN … THE MOVIE. A snub to history? Certainly," he writes. "An affront to Journalism? Most definitely."
As a young reporter desperate to make his name in Fleet Street, Peppiatt concedes he took to his commissions "with gusto", but now questions the ethics of what he was required to do, suggesting he was at times promoting an anti-Muslim agenda.
"On order I dressed up as John Lennon, a vampire, a Mexican, Noel Gallagher, St George (twice), Santa Claus, Aleksandr the Meerkat, the Stig, a transvestite, Alex Reid. When I was ordered to wear a burqa in public for the day, I asked: 'Just a head scarf or full veil?' Even after being ambushed by anti-terror cops when panicked Londoners reported 'a bloke pretending to be a Muslim woman', I didn't complain.
"Mercifully, I'd discovered some backbone by the time I was told to find some burqa-clad shoppers (spot the trend?) to pose with for a picture [with me] dressed in just a pair of skin-tight M&S underpants."
Peppiatt's letter concludes by criticising Desmond for not providing greater resources. "When you assign budgets thinner than your employee-issue loo roll there's little option but for Daily Star editors to build a newspaper from cut-and-paste jobs off the Daily Mail website, all tied together with gormless press releases.
"But when that cheap-and-cheerful journalism gives the oxygen of publicity to corrosive groups like the EDL ... it's time to lay down my pen."
The Daily Star rejected Peppiatt's claims, implying he may hold a grudge against his employer after being "passed over" for several staff positions. It said: "Regarding the paper's coverage of Islam, he never voiced any disquiet over the tone. For the record, the Daily Star editorial policy does not hold any negativity towards Islam and the paper has never, and does not endorse, the EDL."[Peppiatt] refers to a Kelly Brook story – in fact he approached and offered the newspaper that story, vouched for its accuracy, and then asked for and received an extra freelance fee for doing so," the statement said.
The Star also claimed that Peppiatt had been warned by senior reporters after suggesting he would make up quotes.
Richard Peppiatt's letter to Daily Star proprietor Richard Desmond Daily Star reporter Richard Peppiatt resigns in protest at what he says is the newspaper's anti-Muslim propaganda
Dear Mr Desmond,
You probably don't know me, but I know you. For the last two years I've been a reporter at the Daily Star, and for two years I've felt the weight of your ownership rest heavy on the shoulders of everyone, from the editor to the bloke who empties the bins.
Wait! I know you're probably reaching for your phone to have me marched out of the building. But please, save on your bill. I quit.
The decision came inside my local newsstand, whilst picking up the morning papers. As I chatted with Mohammed, the Muslim owner, his blinking eyes settled on my pile of print, and then, slowly, rose to meet my face.
"English Defence League to become a political party" growled out from the countertop.
Squirming, I abandoned the change in my pocket and flung a note in his direction, the clatter of the till a welcome relief from the silence that had engulfed us. I slunk off toward the tube.
If he was hurt that my 25p had funded such hate-mongering, he'd be rightly appalled that I'd sat in the war cabinet itself as this incendiary tale was twisted and bent to fit an agenda seemingly decided before the EDL's leader Tommy Robinson had even been interviewed.
Asked if his group were to become a political party I was told the ex-BNP goon had replied: "Not for now."
But further up the newsprint chain it appears a story, too good to allow the mere spectre of reality to restrain, was spotted. It almost never came to this. I nearly walked out last summer when the Daily Star got all flushed about taxpayer-funded Muslim-only loos.
A newsworthy tale were said toilets Muslim-only. Or taxpayer-funded. Undeterred by the nuisance of truth, we omitted a few facts, plucked a couple of quotes, and suddenly anyone would think a Rochdale shopping centre had hired Osama Bin Laden to stand by the taps, handing out paper towels.
I was personally tasked with writing a gloating follow-up declaring our postmodern victory in "blocking" the non-existent Islamic cisterns of evil.
Not that my involvement in stirring up a bit of light-hearted Islamaphobia stopped there. Many a morning I've hit my speed dial button to Muslim rent-a-rant Anjem Choudary to see if he fancied pulling together a few lines about whipping drunks or stoning homosexuals.
Our caustic "us and them" narrative needs nailing home every day or two, and when asked to wield the hammer I was too scared for my career, and my bank account, to refuse.
"If you won't write it, we'll get someone who will," was the sneer du jour, my eyes directed toward a teetering pile of CVs. I won't claim I've simply been coshed into submission; I've necked the celeb party champagne and pocketed all the freebies, relying on hangovers to block out the rest.
Neither can I erase that as a young hack keen to prove his worth I threw myself into working at the Daily Star with gusto. On order I dressed up as a John Lennon, a vampire, a Mexican, Noel Gallagher, Saint George (twice), Santa Claus, Aleksandr the Meerkat, the Stig, and a transvestite Alex Reid.
I've been spraytanned, waxed, and in a kilt clutching roses trawled a Glasgow council estate trying to propose to Susan Boyle (I did. She said no).
When I was ordered to wear a burkha in public for the day, I asked: "Just a head scarf or full veil?" Even after being ambushed by anti-terror cops when panicked Londoners reported "a bloke pretending to be a Muslim woman", I didn't complain. Mercifully, I'd discovered some backbone by the time I was told to find some burkha-clad shoppers (spot the trend?) to pose with for a picture – dressed in just a pair of skintight M&S underpants.
Forget journalistic merit, I heard this was just an ill-conceived ploy to land an advertising contract with the chain. Admittedly, that was unusual. Often we hacks write vacuous puff pieces about things you own. Few would deny there's one hell of an incestuous orgy of cross-promotion to leer at down at Northern & Shell HQ.
Never mind that it insults the intelligence of amoebas when your readers are breathlessly informed the week's telly highlights include OK! TV and the Vanessa Feltz Show.
I suspect you see a perfect circle. I see a downward spiral. I see a cascade of shit pirouetting from your penthouse office, caking each layer of management, splattering all in between.
Daily Star favourite Kelly Brook recently said in an interview: "I do Google myself. Not that often, though, and the stories are always rubbish. "There was a story that I'd seen a hypnotherapist to help me cut down on the time I take to get ready to go out. Where do they get it from?"
Maybe I should answer that one. I made it up. Not that it was my choice; I was told to. At 6pm and staring at a blank page I simply plucked it from my arse. Not that it was all bad. I pocketed a £150 bonus. You may have read some of my other earth-shattering exclusives.
'Michael Jackson to attend Jade Goody's funeral'. (He didn't.) 'Robbie pops 'pill at heroes concert'. (He didn't either.) 'Matt Lucas on suicide watch'. (He wasn't.) 'Jordan turns to Buddha.' (She might have, but I doubt it.)
I know showbiz is the sand on which your readership is built. And while I didn't write tittle-tattle dreaming of Pulitzers, I never knew I'd fear a Booker Prize nomination instead.
You own the Daily Star, and it's your right to assign whatever news values to it you choose. On the awe-inspiring day millions took to the streets of Egypt to demand freedom, your paper splashed on "Jordan … the movie."
A snub to history? Certainly. An affront to journalism? Most definitely. Your undeniable right? Yes, sir.
But what brings me here today is those times you dispense with those skewed news values entirely by printing stories which couldn't stand up to a gnat's fart.
It's those times when you morph from being a newspaper owner into the inventor of a handy product for lining rabbit hutches. While the Daily Star isn't the only paper with a case to answer, I reckon it's certainly the ugliest duckling of an unsightly flock.
Its endemic lack of self-perception really is something to behold. It only takes a comedian to make an ironic gag about racism and your red top is on hand to whip up a storm, demanding the culprit commit hara-kiri beside Stephen Lawrence's shrine.
Yet turn the page and Muslims are branded "beardies" or "fanatics", and black-on-black killings ("Bob-slayings", as I've cringingly heard them called in your newsroom) can be resigned to a handful of words, shoehorned beneath a garish advert.
Outraged, we brand other celebrities sexist, demanding such dinosaurs be castrated on the steps of the Natural History Museum.
Then with our anger sated it's back to task, arranging the day's news based on the size of the subjects' breasts.
Were this the behaviour of an actual person they would be diagnosed schizophrenic and bundled into the nearest white van. But because the mouthpiece is a newspaper, it's all supposed to be ok. Well, here's some breaking news – it's far, far worse. When looking for the source of this hypocritical behaviour, I didn't have to go far.
The Daily Star seems to set out its editorial stall as a newspaper written for, and fighting for, the (preferably white) working class.
Yet as a proprietor you recently dropped out of the Press Complaints Commission, leaving those self-same people with no viable recourse if they find themselves libelled or defamed on your pages.
Your red top drones on about British jobs for British workers, yet your own reporters' pay has been on ice so long it was last seen living in an igloo and hunting seals.
A great swathe of your readership lives in the north of England, yet you employ just one staff reporter outside London. One. I guess it makes the same sense to you up there in your ivory tower as it does to me down here on my high horse. I get it, I do.
Because no one has time for subtlety of language, of thought, when they're scrabbling to pump out a national newspaper with fewer staff hacks than it takes to man a yacht.
When you assign budgets thinner than your employee-issue loo roll there's little option but for Daily Star editors to build a newspaper from cut-and-paste-jobs off the Daily Mail website, all tied together with gormless press releases. But when that cheap-and-cheerful journalism gives the oxygen of publicity to corrosive groups like the EDL – safe in the knowledge it's free news about which they'll never complain – it's time to lay down my pen.
You may have heard the phrase, "The flap of a butterfly's wings in Brazil sets off a tornado in Texas." Well, try this: "The lies of a newspaper in London can get a bloke's head caved in down an alley in Bradford."
If you can't see that words matter, you should go back to running porn magazines. But if you do, yet still allow your editors to use inciteful over insightful language, then far from standing up for Britain, you're a menace against all things that make it great.
I may have been just a lowly hack in your business empire, void of the power to make you change your ways, but there is still one thing that I can do; that I was trained to do; that I love to do: write about it.
Yours sincerely,
Richard Peppiatt
Statement from the Daily Star:
"Richard Peppiatt worked purely as a casual reporter at the Daily Star for almost two years. Recently he became unhappy after he was passed over for several staff positions. He refers to a Kelly Brook story: in fact, he approached and offered the newspaper that story, vouched for its accuracy, and then asked for and received an extra freelance fee for doing so. Since he wrote his email we have discovered that he was privately warned very recently by senior reporters on the paper after suggesting he would make up quotes. Regarding the allegations over the paper's coverage of Islam, he was only ever involved in a very minor way with such articles, and never voiced either privately or officially any disquiet over the tone of the coverage. For the record, the Daily Star editorial policy does not hold any negativity towards Islam and the paper has never, and does not endorse, the EDL."
Puppet master Searchlight investigates the man behind the English Defence League.
searchlightmagazine.com
March 2011
Somewhere in North London a diminutive and slightly nervous man is scribbling on pieces of paper. He is involved in all sorts of organisations – political, street armies and religious – though conveniently keeps them quite separate. Meet Alan Lake, at least that is the name he is using now. Lake claims to be a multimillionaire who made his money in computers. More importantly, he is the man behind the English Defence League.
Lake’s association with the EDL has been known ever since he addressed a conference in Malmö on Islamisation organised by the far-right Sweden Democrats in September 2009. What is less well known is the central role Lake has played in getting the EDL off the ground.
Searchlight has learned that it was Lake who came up with the name “English Defence League”. He had heard about Stephen Lennon after the demonstration in Luton in May 2009, when Lennon and his hooligan friends went under the banner United People of Luton. The protest had been organised in conjunction with March for England, a group that Lake actively supports.
Through an intermediary Lake invited Lennon and a couple of others to London where discussions began about forming a national organisation. For Lake this was the chance to put into practice a plan he had been working on for at least a year. In the United People of Luton he found an uncompromis-ing group willing to take to the streets.
“Cut the politically correct tape tying everyone’s hands and do something about this Terrorist group who hate everything our great county stands for,” read the main statement on the United People of Luton website. “There is no point sitting in your armchair and shouting at the TV. The only way to get the message across is to take it to the streets. This is a chance to show the Police and the council the power of public opinion. The entire country is behind us!”
Lake liked this approach and made much of it in his hour-long Swedish lecture. “Another strategy we’re trying to do in the UK is reach out to more physical groups like football fans, get them involved,” he told his audience. “Well actually they’re contacting us, because they’re concerned, and these are people who are happy to go out on the street. I mean your average intellectual is happy typing on his PC, but we’ve reached the end of that road. You’re not going to get a fat lot more mileage out of that.
“You can blog and write letters to your MP as much as you like. Your MP doesn’t care, he doesn’t care what you say. The only thing that is going to make people start caring again, that is our nobility, our elite leaders, is if we have more numbers, and if we sometimes get out on the street. Then they’ll care but they don’t care about our words. They don’t care whether we’re right or wrong and they don’t read the blogs.
“So if you can engage with the physical groups, people who are quite happy to go on the street, the thing about the football fans is they go see a match, and then after the match, they’re already there on the street, so if you can then bring them off for a demo that works really well. You get the numbers. And they’re not scared as well. Everybody else is scared of being beaten up and attacked. They’re not scared of that.”
He expressed similar thoughts to Matthew Taylor of The Guardian in March 2010. “The EDL has a lot of support and is growing quickly and crucially. What it has done is deliver an activist movement on the streets,” said Lake. Pressed on the levels of violence at the demonstrations, he replied: “These people are not middle-class female teachers … if they continue to be suppressed it will turn nasty in one way or another … We have put bodies on the street, writing letters to The Times does not work … if we are going to have a mess that is so much grist to the mill.” Taylor noted: “Lake says he is opposed to violence or confrontation but regularly returns to the importance of the EDL’s physical presence”.
Lake certainly supported the EDL and soon began to put money into the organisation, giving it access to an international network of anti-Muslim organisations and, perhaps more importantly, political and strategic advice. It was Lake who suggested that Lennon use a false name to head the group. It was Lake who insisted that the EDL immediately and publicly dissociate itself from the British National Party and any other openly fascist organisation. This was despite the clear evidence that the political origin of the United People of Luton lay in Bedfordshire BNP. Even today Lake travels regularly to Luton to confer with Lennon and Lennon’s cousin, Kevin Carroll, number two in the organisation.
One of Lake’s key roles is to furnish international links and speakers for the EDL. This gives the group an increased profile abroad and credibility at home. It was Lake who arranged for Rabbi Nachum Shifren and the Austrian Islamophobic lecturer Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff to address the EDL demonstration in Luton on 5 February. It was Lake who previously made contact with the hardline anti-Muslim preacher Pastor Terry Jones and it was Lake who built a relationship between the EDL and Pam Geller, the director of the Freedom Defense Initiative and Stop Islamization of America.
Last September Lake and a number of EDL members attended Geller’s protest against a planned Islamic Centre near Ground Zero on the anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Carroll was among those in New York with Lake, though Lennon was turned away at US immigration. Geller has subsequently publicly aligned herself with the EDL and it is clear that she and a number of other right-wing Islamophobes like the combative approach of the British street gang.
“The middle-class intellectuals are coming forward and also American speakers – some of them quite famous, although I can’t give you names yet … they love the fact that we can have people that can go on the streets,” Lake boasted to The Guardian last year. There are even stories circulating of videos of EDL demonstrations and statements being played at right-wing meetings in the US. Lake is also actively using the EDL profile to fundraise across the Atlantic.
Christian fundamentalism
Not much is known about Lake’s political background but his antipathy to Islam could well have been formed, or at least developed, when he attended the Kensington Temple in Notting Hill Gate, west London. The Temple belongs to the Elim Pentecostal Church, a Protestant evangelical church, elements of which have attracted controversy for their hardline views on Christianity, homosexuality and Islam.
The Temple’s pastor is Colin Dye, who has links with a number of Christian right organisations, including the Christian Congress for Traditional Values (CCTV), which ran a high-profile billboard campaign in 2007 titled: “Gay aim: Abolish the Family”, and is linked to the Brentwood-based Peniel Pentecostal Church.
The Peniel Church was run by Michael Reid and attracted media attention after claims that his followers were attempting to take over the local Conservative Association. Dye eventually broke with Reid in 2008 after a sexual scandal beset the self-proclaimed Brentwood Bishop.
During his time at the Kensington Temple Lake might have also come across the anti-Islam speaker Sam Solomon. A former Muslim who trained in Sharia for 15 years before converting to Christianity, Solomon is now a hardline opponent of Islam. He even boasts of testifying before the US Congress and being “a consultant to the British parliament for matters regarding Islam”.
In December 2006 the UK Independence Party MEP Gerard Batten presented a “Proposed Charter of Muslim Understanding”, written by Solomon, to the European Parliament. The Charter called on ”Muftis, Ulemas, Imams, community leaders, heads of Islamic madrassas, Muezzins, Mazuns and all other Islamic relevant offices including those of free thinkers and leaders of NGOs as well as NPOs (Non-Profit Organisations), youth leaders, women leaders at all levels of all Islamic institutions” to abide by a revised version of the Qur’an and collaborate fully with police and intelligence services. Today Lake boasts of his links with Batten and in an interview with the Daily Star in the immediate aftermath of the Luton demonstration, Lennon called for a rewriting of the Qur’an.
Lennon’s political development has clearly been influenced by Lake. When the United People of Luton was formed, and indeed in the early days of the EDL itself, Lennon was at pains to stress that he opposed only “radical Islam” and not Muslims or even Islam as a religion. Today that has changed and the whole tenor of EDL rhetoric has become clearly anti-Islamic. Pressed on this by a Newsnight reporter a few days before the Luton protest, Lennon claimed he had changed his views after learning more about Islam as a religion. Lake’s continued influence and importance to Lennon was clear to see.
Lake claims no longer to attend the Kensington Temple but it is clear that he continues to hold many of its religious views close to him. In a strange positing on his 4Freedoms website in April 2010 he linked the theory of evolution with totalitarianism. In a chart of the political landscape, Lake put Stalin, Mao and Hitler on the extreme left of the political spectrum, all with a “Socialist Darwinist” label. He described Hitler as “left wing killer of 7 million Christians and 6 million Jews”. He noted that “all of these dictators believed in the so-called ‘Master Race’ which stems from Darwin’s so-called higher level of Evolution”.
In his eyes Liberals Democrats are not too far away from “extreme left wing” and “totalitarianism”, while at the other end of spectrum the US Constitution is close to “extreme right wing”.
Political aspirations
The EDL is just one piece of Lake’s jigsaw and, notwithstanding the wishes of the Daily Star, he does not see it as a political project. It is simply part of his strategy of tension, of winding up tensions and forcing the issue of Islam into the media spotlight through provocative marches.
Last year Lake thought the political solution was in the UKIP, the mainly anti-EU party which however, under the leadership of Lord Pearson, was taking a more anti-Islamic stance. Pearson regularly spoke out against Islam and attempted to forge links with the Dutch Islamophobic politician Geert Wilders.
As already mentioned, Lake was close to Batten and also to Magnus Nielsen, a UKIP candidate in the general election who Lake claimed was prepared to speak at EDL rallies. Nielsen describes Muhammad as a “criminal psychopath”, “the first cult leader” and “psychiatrically deranged”. Lake told The Guardian that there “is ‘some synergy’ between the two groups”. He boasts of connections with middle-ranking people in the UKIP though it seems that his plans came to nothing as the UKIP leadership publicly distanced itself from the EDL.
Lake has now turned his attention to the English Democrats (EDP). He has even claimed that he was recently offered a senior role in the party, which he declined, preferring to influence events in the background. There is a clear crossover between the EDP and March for England, a group to which Lake was connected, and several EDP candidates in last year’s general election, particularly in north London, regularly attend EDL demonstrations.
Given the infighting that is currently engulfing the EDP, Lake might eventually have to look elsewhere but his project is clear. He recognises, as Searchlight’s Fear and Hope study clearly demonstrates, that there is a huge vacuum on the right of British politics, in the space between the Conservative Party and the BNP, for a new right-wing English nationalist party that has no links to the old far right and is cultural as well as political.
Lake looks enviously across the Atlantic at the growth of the Tea Party movement and has been heard advocating the need for a similar group over here. His Facebook site is linked to the Patriotic Caucus, a right-wing political action committee established in December by the Tea Party favourite and failed Nevada Senate candidate Sharron Angle. Just to maintain his links with a wider movement, Lake is also involved in at least one British Army veterans organisation and promotes Armed Forces Day on his Facebook site.
While Lake waits for the party he desires to arrive he will continue to shuffle his papers and draw flow diagrams between the various organisations and campaigns with which he is involved.
Ex-Daily Star reporter 'gets hate messages' Richard Peppiatt, who resigned over alleged anti-Muslim 'hatemongering', claims to have received abusive texts and calls
Paul Lewis
guardian.co.uk,
8 March 2011
Police are investigating a claim that a journalist who resigned from the Daily Star has become the victim of harassment. Richard Peppiatt resigned in protest at what he alleged was the newspaper's anti-Muslim "hatemongering". His resignation letter, in which he confessed to making up stories during his two years at the tabloid, received widespread attention after it was disseminated via Twitter.
Peppiatt contacted police on Monday after he claimed to have received more than 30 abusive texts, emails and silent calls. He alleges they included warnings such as: "I am going to meet u now, pepps" and "you're nowe a marked man till the day you die – Oh dear". Another said: "we are planning a kiss n' tell on you".
Detectives are reviewing the messages and seeking to establish their origin. Peppiatt told them there is circumstantial evidence that a "likely source" may be connected to the Daily Star newsroom, although he concedes there is no firm evidence. He also expressed concern to them that his phone may have been hacked.
A spokesperson from the management of Northern & Shell, which owns the Daily Star, said he had asked several staff who had been in a position of authority over Peppiatt whether they were aware of the messages having been sent. "Every single one of them not only categorically denied it but evinced great surprise that the allegation had been made," the spokesperson said. "The same applies to any allegation of phone-hacking. We don't do that. It simply isn't done at the Daily Star."
News of the resignation of Peppiatt – who insists he has no knowledge of the source of the emails and texts – was published in the Guardian at 8pm on Friday. Hours earlier, Peppiatt says, he began to receive texts and emails from a tormenter using aliases such as "Micheala". The author knew he intended to go public with his grievances against the newspaper.
"Rich. It will tank. Maybe the best slot for you? Lots of love," said the first email, sent at 9.44am on Friday. Shortly after, another said: "Stop the bullshit, Pepps. We all know everything about you." Later in the day Peppiatt says he began receiving texts demanding a meeting and referring to the London suburb where he lives. Texts and emails named the Guardian reporter that Peppiatt had contacted. "Paul Lewis seems to know a lot about you, Pepps. You're far too trusting," said one. Peppiatt told police that Daily Star colleagues sometimes called him "Pepps".
The messages made references to a sitcom script Peppiatt was working on with friends in his spare time. Peppiatt had used his Daily Star email address to discuss the script about life in a tabloid newsroom and talked about the possibility of pitching the script, which is still incomplete, to a TV channel. Managers at the Daily Star have been aware of his scriptwriting for some time, but found those emails after he resigned. Peppiatt's tormenter sent messages such as "U will NEVER see ur stuff on TV" and – in reference to one of the characters – "Please rewrite the Jack role. It's shit."
Peppiatt has told police he was concerned about the possibility his voicemail messages were listened to by the author of the anonymous messages. "Change ur VM message U sound like ur still at school," one email said, hinting this was the case. Peppiatt said two voicemail messages temporarily went missing and were then referred to in the anonymous messages. One was left by a Guardian reporter, but Peppiatt did not receive the message for more than 12 hours. During that time he received an email stating: "Paul Lewis has a message 4u."
The final message sent to Peppiatt, on Monday, also appears to refer to a lost voicemail. The message, which was left by a friend apologising because he could not join him for a football match, appears to have gone missing, Peppiatt said. He has still not heard it. But the final voicemail made what Peppiatt believes may have been a reference to the contents of lost voicemail. "Sorry but cannot watch the football tomorrow night. I'll get back to you. PS This was my own decision, nut job. Adieu."
A Metropolitan police spokesperson said: "We can confirm that detectives are investigating an allegation of harassment received from a 26 year old man on 7 March 2011.
That was interesting. The guy in the interview clip was a gem. Have another pint...It is unfortunate how they have chosen to go about getting what they want. They sound far too much like football firms and not enough like citizens who care about the state of their county.
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