Déjà Vu in Staffordshire

Shaun Grimsley

I’ve never been to Cannock in the West Midlands, but it’s a place I feel I know well.

I have written about the local BNP group previously and now déjà vu appears to have returned to the Staffordshire town.

Alwyn Deacon, the West Midlands BNP organiser has announced that the organiser for the area, Bill Vaughan has had to stand down due to ill health.

Deacon then went onto drop the proverbial bombshell; the new Cannock organiser is a rather familiar face to Hope not Hate, Shaun Grimsley.

Grimsley is an unabashed Neo Nazi, a fact that Alwyn Deacon knows only too well, yet perhaps in desperation, he still appointed Grimsley the organiser for the town.

When Deacon was the landlord of a rather grotty pub in Nuneaton called Eliots Bistro back in 2009, I wrote about how Eliots Bistro hosted a social event by the violent and self-styled British Freedom Fighters (BFF).

The leader of the BFF, Mike Heaton, who attended the Nuneaton shindig, was later jailed in 2010 for calling for Jews to be killed on a Nazi internet forum.

Embarrassingly for Deacon, photographs were taken of the drunken BFF event which showed members of the BFF giving Nazi salutes outside his licensed premises. The incident caused some anger among BNP organisers in the West Midlands and at least one, Chris Turner of Coventry, resigned his position because of it.

Shaun Grimsley, who attended the social was the West Midlands commander of the British Freedom Fighters along with being a member of the National Front and associated with Blood and Honour, the Nazi skinhead organisation.

Having previously stood as a BNP candidate, Grimsley also has links to the English Defence League and post such delights on his Facebook page as “Hail the British Freedom Fighters, I am a Nazi HAHAHAHAHAHA 88 red scum”. The number 88 is in reference to the numerical position in the alphabet of “HH” – Heil Hitler.

Commenting about Rudolf Hess, Adolf Hitler’s failed deputy, Grimsley has written that Hess is “The man I most admire ever”.

When one of his friends made a lengthy posting about the London nail bomber David Copeland, who killed three innocent people including a pregnant woman and injured 129 others, Grimsley left the chilling note “Hero 88”.

With the BNP haemorrhaging members at a rate of knots there seems little doubt that the leadership of Nick Griffin are having to scrape the barrel when it comes to appointing new local organisers.