The reason given for the suspension of my membership of the BNP was give as my "cyberactivities". The issue to which it pertained concerned what I said I would do if I had a severely disabled baby which my husband and I did not wish to bring up and the matter was not "taken care of" by the midwife in the old fashioned way.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midwifery#Early_Historical_Perspective
After the delivery, the midwife made the initial call on whether or not an infant was healthy and fit to rear. She inspected the newborn for congenital deformities and testing its cry to hear whether or not it was robust and hearty. Ultimately, midwives made a determination about the chances for an infant’s survival and likely recommended that a newborn with any severe deformities be exposed.
I said that, regrettably, I would feel morally obliged to commit infanticide rather than to pass on the burden to the taxpayer.
However, in Britain, the consensus appears to be that I should be forced to bring up my severely disabled baby, destroy my marriage, not try to have any more children. This happened to a school friend of mine, whose firstborn was a severely disabled daughter. She is now single, alone and effectively childless, with her disabled daughter confined to an institution, which may or may not be like Winterbourne View featured in
Panorama recently.
If I am to be disciplined, suspended or even expelled for saying this, then it appears that the BNP are saying that what I propose to do is wrong, and what my schoolfriend did was right. The mind boggles as to how encouraging every mother with a severely disabled baby who did as my school friended did would benefit the white race, but there you have it: that is the BNP's policy for mothers with severely disabled babies: they should be
forced to bring them up or the taxpayer
forced to pay for their institutionalisation, whether they want to or is in the public interest to, or not.
Unbelievable, imbecilic, coercive (on both the taxpayer and the mother) and irrational, but
there it is.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2011/jun/20/winterbourne-view-hospital-panorama-abuse
I have re-read the comments I made on Saturday 25 June on Charlotte Lewis's wall - the ones that were reported by Chez Dunn (a female BNP member who is a single mother with disabled offspring) who got me into trouble - and they really were quite innocuous. Even my BNP buddies who have berated me for being recklessly provocative cannot actually point to any comment that was obviously objectionable in that thread.
http://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=10150228596296430&id=694016429#!/permalink.php?story_fbid=2176919068524&id=1413277405
If nobody can find anything particularly objectionable, this means that to avoid being suspended, I should not have said what I said on the Victoria Derbyshire Show. However, there is no way I would have declined her invitation to express my views about Riven Vincent on air, even with the benefit of hindsight.
To not say what I think on the off chance of my becoming the BNP 2012 London mayoral candidate would have been overly optimistic. The whole point of doing what I did was in the hope that I would at least be tested by hostile questioning on the selection panel to see if I could defend myself effectively.
In the event, my suspension meant I could not even attend the meeting for the GLA elections that took place on 3 July. Even if I had attended, they still would not have been obliged to choose me.
What does all this say about the party?
I had no illusions about the hardliners who would resent the fact that I was a member. Their comments at
http://www.democracyforum.co.uk/bnp/96053-khaw-lewis-suspended-7.html
http://www.democracyforum.co.uk/bnp/95865-scatty-chav-chez-dunn-wants-charlotte-lewis-claire-khaw-booted-out.html
is evidence that they find my race very problematic indeed, which comes as no surprise.
Whatever has happened to my mayoral candidacy I can at least bask in the warmth of the messages of support I have received from BNP members who don't have an issue with my race, who recognised that I was really the best candidate they could have had. Their exasperation with me for getting knocked out when I was so close to being selected was clearly genuine. Some of them even contacted the Chairman to speak up for me.
I do not think however that they any of this could have been avoided. If it were not about what I would do to my own severely disabled baby it would have been about never married single mums. They would have found something because I do undeniably have controversial views and do seek to provoke.
Such was the opposition to the idea of having a non-white BNP London mayoral candidate that they were using me to discredit Nick Griffin in the coming leadership election with the slogan "Vote Griffin Get Khaw".
I know that the Chairman has said some complimentary things about me in the past to others and perhaps felt overwhelmed by the more vocal opposition against me as mayoral candidate (or even my membership of the party) and felt he had to do something.
The issue of what I said about what I would do to my own severely disabled baby seemed a good enough way of showing that I was unsuitable,
on more than grounds of race alone.
I asked Eddy Butler the expelled ex-National Organiser if he would have done the same thing in Chairman's position and his response was a definite no, though he would have suspended me, he said. He pointed out that my biggest mistake was in thinking that the Chairman cared anything for election results. The fact that I would have got more votes in London than any of the other mayoral candidates counted for nothing with the Chairman, apparently.
The Chairman submits to the view of the members who would rather have the weeds of ethno-nationalism than the fruits of civic nationalism.
Perhaps the Chairman feels he has to tread a thin line and to be all things to all nationalists. I know that he was being nagged by Jean Marie Le Penn during his visit to Britain to let the ethnics in as long ago as 2004.
The point is that if the Chairman had wanted to support me, he could have.
For fringe political parties, the only way forward is to fight elections and be seen to be doing better than before. The 2012 London mayoral elections would have been a superb opportunity for the party to show to the British public that it was less racist than it has been portrayed, but there is now the possibility that they will not even have a mayoral candidate at all.
What would I have done if I were Chairman of the BNP and was the same race as Nick Griffin?
I would have made a point of supporting free speech, supported the ethnic mayoral candidate's right to free speech, and made the leadership election
absolutely ideological, between the Modernisers and the Dinosaurs. It could then be presented as a contest between the incumbent modernising Chairman who backed me against the hidebound dinosaur challenger Andrew Brons who cannot stomach the idea of an ethnic representing the party in the London mayoral elections. Then there would have been clear blue water and the BNP would have turned a corner. The Chairman would have easily won too, if I were involved in the leadership campaign and accompanied him on the hustings.
Medium to high risk but worth doing, I would have thought, in the spectrum of calculated risks.
But it appears that it suits the Chairman not to take any risks and for the party not to do spectacularly well but just be chugging along, as long as the vote could be said to increase.
Well, there we are. I am just so glad I did not deactivate my blogs or stop myself from saying anything I believed in on the off chance that I might be made the mayoral candidate if I did shut up. It would be too awful if I had shut up and was still sacrificed to the T-Rexes of the BNP for some trumped-up reason.
http://thevoiceofreason-ann.blogspot.com/2011/07/transcript-of-what-i-said-on-victoria.html
