BNP mail swamps Lib-Dem Freepost service

[NWN: There are some very naughty boys running around in Yorkshire you know. A few years back, anarchists were doing this dirty trick but sending old housebricks to their Freepost address.]

A Freepost service for Calderdale residents has been axed after being bombarded by BNP literature.

Liberal Democrat councillors had set up a freepost address to encourage people to write to them with local concerns.

But in the last three months it has received about 250 letters containing official BNP literature, as well as 78 other envelopes full of anti-Lib-Dem, Labour and Conservative propaganda. More than 100 of the letters were election material for Illingworth and Mix-enden BNP councillor Geof-frey Wallace and another 130 contained the BNP's Beacon, Voice of Freedom and Pudsey Patriot newletters.

The rest were made up of the Lib-Dem party's own campaign material.

And since a change in postage charges, all the letters have been big brown envelopes, which have cost the party up to 79p a time.All the letters were directed to the home of Jennifer Pearson (Lib-Dem, Warley). She said: "My back porch has been absolutely full of them. What someone is doing is sending envelopes back to us with BNP on, which obviously costs us money. There was a spate of these three months ago. It has started happening again, this time in enormous BNP envelopes – 360 of them."She said the party had not budgeted for all the letters, as it had not expected such a huge response: "

We as a local political party don't have a lot of money to spend that we don't already spend on leafleting. What we were trying to do there was a service to the public. We were asking them to tell us their concerns in their community.

We have now had to withdraw that service. It has been a dirty trick.

It is not what we would have wanted to do. But money is tight and we can't have it wasted.

BNP spokesman Phil Edwards said: "We don't know anything about it. We don't encourage it. We've firmly said you don't do things like this."

Halifax Today