BNP leadership lose their final throw
Posted by admin978 on November 11, 2011 · Leave a Comment
Not waving but drowning: Nick Griffin at an earlier court hearing
This week in Court 74 of the Royal Courts of Justice, Lord Justice Ward dismissed Nick Griffin and Simon Darby’s application for leave to appeal in the so-called Decembrist case, brought by the BNP leadership in February 2008 against a group of former party employees. This group (including Kenny Smith and his wife Nicholla, Steve Blake and Ian Dawson) had fallen out with Griffin and Darby over a corruption scandal at the end of 2007.
Griffin and Darby’s counsel accepted that this is the end of the road. The £45,000 that had previously been paid into the Court Funds Office was this week paid out to the solicitors for the Decembrist defendants. Kenny Smith et al. now simply await the “taxing” of the overall costs, which in December 2010 stood at c.£111,000.
In addition to any further costs incurred this year, and of course their own costs, Griffin and Darby will have to pay 8% interest (calculated from last December).
He concluded:
“None of the arguments are substantial enough to give a realistic prospect of success. I see no realistic prospect of success and I dismiss the application.”
Griffin and Darby were foolish enough to commence this action in February 2008, and I well recall their hubris when I met them in court early that year. (The last occasion I met Nick Griffin, as it happens.) They (and their trusting donors) must now pay the price of that folly – and it will be a very high price.
Despite further hubristic predictions on internet forums (even in recent months) the Welshpool cabal has been comprehensively outmanoeuvred by the Decembrist legal team, represented in court by barrister Adrian Davies.
