The stress which killed former BNP Treasurer David Hannam

Posted on my Facebook wall on 4 October 2011

From: martinwebstir@virginmedia.com

The stress which killed former BNP Treasurer David Hannam

Hello everybody:

I have just been sent a link to a posting on Simon Darby’s blog http://simondarby.blogspot.com/2011/10/bbc-update.html. Darby is in fact, if not in name, deputy to Nick Griffin, Chairman of the British National Party. I run out the item below.

Darby effectively accuses the BBC’s Panorama of being responsible for the death a couple of days ago of David Hannam, a former Treasurer of the BNP, as a result of the rigour of its investigation into the party’s financial affairs and the activities of Griffin and his wife Jackie in connection with those matters.

Darby’s effusion is a last desperate effort to distract attention from the evidence of the criminal misappropriation of BNP funds which will emerge in an edition of BBC1 TV’s Panorama programme scheduled for transmission next Monday evening, 10th October.

Griffin, Darby & Co are aware that BNP financial documents, such as bank statements, have fallen into Panorama’s possession. Panorama says it will hand the documents over to the Police after the programme has been shown.

These documents were supplied by a former leading official of the BNP who at one point assisted the kleptocratic Griffin regime, who was sacked by Griffin in one of his regular purges, but who kept copies of key incriminating documents as insurance, and has used them to inflict revenge on Griffin.

Hannam was appointed by Griffin to be party Treasurer despite — no, because — he was an ill-educated ignoramus in his twenties whose previous job was as a supermarket shelf-filler. If ever there was an obvious and cynical appointment of a ‘patsy’ by financial spivs, that was it.

COLLETT’S ‘DEATH-THREAT’ PHONE CALL

Early in April 2010, in the run-up to the general election, Hannam received a phone call from the party’s graphic designer and printing supplies manager, Mark Collett. Collett raged about Griffin terminating the “nice little earner” they had been operating for a few years. Griffin had decided to obtain all the party’s future printing supplies — including the huge general election requirement — from the Belfast-based businessman Jim Dowson.

Prior to this switch, Collett operated an ‘independent’ company which ordered the BNP’s printing needs from authentic printing firms. Those firms submitted their invoices to Collett who in turn invoiced the BNP, adding a hefty mark-up. Griffin ensured the party paid Collett’s bills promptly because the mark-up was shared between them. Such parasitic operations are known in the print trade as “print farming”.

Collett was unaware that Hannam was taping their conversation. Hannam gave the tape to Griffin. A copy was made to edit-out references by either Collett or Hannam to financial shenanigans. The ‘edited’ version was then presented to the Humberside Police by Hannam in support of an allegation that Collett had threatened to murder Griffin and Dowson.

Collett was arrested and, on the back of the uproar this generated, Griffin was able to purge a variety of other senior ‘colleagues’ who he felt were a current or potential threat to his position.

In due course the Police subjected the tape to forensic examination determined it to be an edited copy. They requested Hannam to provide the original. For obvious reasons he was unable to oblige, so Collett was released from custody without charge. Soon after, Griffin and Collett had a private meeting at which they came to a financial settlement and agreed, for mutual protection, never to discuss their previous business (and other) relationships.

“CONSPIRACY TO PERVERT THE COURSE OF JUSTICE”?

In these circumstances it seems likely that at some point after Collett’s discharge the Police will have suggested to Hannam that he was now in the frame for a charge of, at the least, “wasting Police time” and perhaps also of “conspiracy to pervert the course of justice”. That kind of issue hanging over someone’s head can impose considerable stress.

The stress was compounded even after the post of party Treasurer had been taken from him and awarded to Clive Jefferson, (a man “known to the Police”, though not in connection with politics). Hannam became aware that financial transactions engaged in whilst he had been Treasurer, and signed-off by him, and statutory duties required of a party treasurer whilst he held that office, continued to be his legal responsibility.

For example, he was liable for at least two sets of party accounts which the law requires be presented annually to the Electoral Commission. A long series of un-presented and/or inadequate accounts are now backing up. The BNP is the only nationwide party to be in this position. It is a situation which brings disgrace on the nationalist cause. If the BNP cannot produce in due time its own properly-audited accounts, how can it be expected to run a parish council, let alone the country?

The fact that Collett should telephone Hannam about the ‘skimming’ operation on BNP printing bills indicates that Hannam was fully aware of that and many another scam. He was doubtless made a beneficiary of some of them to ensure he would keep his mouth shut. Eventually he would have become aware that various kinds of investigators — and not just the Panorama crew — were closing in and that he was a prime focus of their interest.

THE STRESSES EXPERIENCED BY A MAN PLACED OUT OF HIS DEPTH

Would YOU wish to live with that kind of accumulating stress? It’s the kind of situation which prompts suicide or heart-attacks, especially among naïve people who find themselves completely out of their depth; when those they looked to for a helping hand turn their backs; and when it dawns on them that they are mugs of who been used by crooks.

If Darby is right that it was stress that killed the former BNP Treasurer and former supermarket shelf-filler David Hannam, then it was not mainly the stress imposed by the Panorama investigation, but the stress imposed by Griffin, Darby and numerous other senior BNP officials when they lured him into taking a job which he did not know how to perform and had no idea of the legal liabilities attached to it.

Some of the blame also attaches to members of the ludicrous Leadership Advisory Council and local and regional officials of the BNP who realised than Hannam was not up to the job; who were made aware for many years past that the most squalid predations on BNP members’ funds were being perpetrated by the Griffin clique, but who tried to close their ears and their eyes and who, if any of the warnings did penetrate their defences, reacted with anger, not against Griffin but against those who issued the warnings, disturbing their comfort zone.

It is because of those kind of people that Griffin has been able to get away with it for so long. They must be made to confront the consequences of their moral cowardice.

If a nationalist party is to be created with a hope of stability and success, it must be provided with a constitution which takes account of human nature and is not an Enabling Act for a shoddy dictatorship of embezzlers.

It is in this respect that the late John Tyndall can be held to have been the ultimate author of the current BNP catastrophe for it was he who, having failed to impose a Führerprinzip constitution on the membership of the National Front in 1979, broke away from that party in 1980, eventually to form the BNP 1982 which he saddled with the ‘constitution’ of his — and Nick Griffin’s — dreams.

I make no apologies for ending this item with a theme I have rehearsed in previous bulletins:

QUESTION: If Members of the House of Commons and the House of Lords could have been scooped up by career-destroying media publicity — and in some cases court appearances and imprisonment — with a few months of the Parliamentary Expenses scandal breaking, how is it that the Establishment’s law enforcement agencies and mass media allowed Nick Griffin and his gang to swindle the BNP and its individual members of very much greater sums of money over a period of more than a decade?

ANSWER: Because the Establishment is only too happy to see the damage to the nationalist movement Griffin was doing. The longer the Establishment could turn a ‘blind eye’ to Griffin’s criminality, the more of a wrecking job he could do. He has a long history of involvement in wrecking jobs in a variety of movement and parties — always in pursuit of money — from his early twenties. His lust for cash and his amoral sociopathic disposition were soon spotted and a policy of malign neglect was established so that he was free to do his thing.

Martin Webster.