When a journalist turns rogue

A name that pops up in our office from time to time is a local journalist by the name of Danny Lockwood.

Not only a journalist, Lockwood is owner and Managing Director of The Press Newspaper, based in Dewsbury, West Yorkshire.

Lockwood first came to our attention in 2003 when his newly launched newspaper started giving a huge amount of positive coverage to the British National Party.

The coverage increased alarmingly when the BNP had three councillors elected in the Kirklees area between 2003 to 2006.

Writing mostly sympathetic articles regarding the BNP councillors, Lockwood even called two of them, Colin Auty and David Exley his personal friends.

With a letters page dominated by BNP members as well, you can understand why Kirklees BNP liked the newspaper as much as it did.

With the newspaper giving regular coverage to the BNP, Lockwood also pushed his own anti Islamic agenda in his “Ed Lines” column.

Eventually, Kirklees BNP imploded and the coverage of the councillors came to end, much to the disappointment of Danny Lockwood.

Lockwood continued to ramp up tensions in the Dewsbury area , In 2010 he wrote about the Cumbrian mass murderer Derrick Bird saying “If Derrick Bird had been carrying a Koran he would have been celebrated as a hero by tens of thousands, possibly more of so called “British” Muslims”.

This infuriated local Muslims who held a protest outside Dewsbury police station, demanding that action be taken against the journalist.

Lockwood realised that prejudice sells and in December 2011 released a book entitled “The Islamic Republic of Dewsbury”, rather unsurprisingly this book has become popular with the BNP and EDL and not just in the Dewsbury area.

And just this week Lockwood revealed a very interesting fact. He admitted that in January he attended a far right meeting that was held in Bradford.

This was the “Nationalist Unity “meeting that hosted members of The National Front, British Movement and the neo Nazi BPP, along with Yorkshire BNP MEP Andrew Brons who was guest of honour.

Why was Lockwood there? His book came out before the meeting so he can’t use the excuse of “research”. He certainly hasn’t written about the meeting before, so was it just a meeting of political minds for Lockwood?

A bigot sharing a dingy pub with other washed up bigots, sounds about right.

The EDL love Lockwoods book