11th October 2004

A BNP leafleting team stood up to police intimidation in the West Midlands at the weekend.

Simon Smith had organised a leaflet drop in Bearwood, near Smethwick in the Black Country on Saturday 9th with a view to distributing the Party’s perfectly legal “Asylum leaflets”.

14 police officers

Our activists were surrounded by no less than fourteen police officers from the West Midlands force who confiscated their asylum leaflets. Following a telephone conversation with Lee Barnes, head of our legal team, our activists involved with the leafleting made a visit to Smethwick police station to report the theft of our literature by their officers.

The police team removed from our activists the perfectly legal Asylum Leaflets and quoted something like paragraph 1936 of the public order act. We understand that police forces have tried this before elsewhere in Britain and as resulting court case, was dropped.

Front header of our Asylum leaflet. It can be downloaded free of charge from our store of online leaflets.

Testing the legislation

Anyway our leaflet team got the leaflets back after insisting on getting a crime number and politley informed the Sergeant involved that this was an area of law that would be tested in the future by Simon himself who would distribute the leaflets and thereby be prepared to be arrested and decide on the legitimacy of their interpretation of the law.

“Misunderstanding”

The officer involved was very much on the back foot during the conversation and apologised for what he suggsted was a “genuine misunderstanding” by his beat officers.

Simon Smith told us “I did say that we very much wanted to work with the police and not against them and said in the spirit of goodwill would not take the theft of our leaflets any further in this particular case.”