Anger over 'hate' group parade
 
WAR veterans have slammed a right wing party for staging a whites-only Remembrance Day service at a town's cenotaph.

The White Nationalist Party (WNP), which was formed last year in the north, held the service at the war memorial in Oak Hill Park, off Manchester Road, Accrington.

Organisers said the service, which occurred on Sunday afternoon, just after the Royal British Legion held its annual Remembrance Day event, was in honour of white servicemen and women who lost their lives.

"It is an affront to all who fought or lost their lives," said Roy Lockwood, vice-chairman of Accrington, Church and Oswaldtwistle British Legion, speaking on the day the nation marked Armistice Day with a two-minute silence at 11am

But John O'Brien, who lives in Oswaldtwistle and is a member of the WNP, said: "It was just an ordinary service, we were not trying to offend anyone."

Around 20 people from the WNP and other far-right groups marched with flags, including a Celtic cross - a modern-day Nazi symbol - and a Rhodesian flag to the cenotaph. They then read poems, sang hymns and laid two wreaths.

In August the party did two leaflet drops in Hyndburn, pushing 500 leaflets through letter boxes in Peel and Oswaldtwistle. They also targeted Blackburn's Mill Hill ward and handed out leaflets in Burnley town centre during a recent Anti Nazi League protest.

Mr Lockwood, 68, of Foxhill Bank Brow, Oswaldtwistle, who served in the British Army in the 1950s said: "It is disgraceful. They are scraping the bottom of the barrel.

"Perhaps because of the low police presence with the football match they thought they could cause mayhem.

"It just shows you what sort of people they are. It is an affront to everyone, to every decent human being. I don't know what they were going to gain from this, it does not help their cause.

"We fought against the Nazis and everything that goes with it. They always have to muscle in on someone else's remembrance."

Ibrahim Master, chairman of the Lancashire Council of Mosques, said: "It is an affront to those people who gave their lives for Great Britain, which includes hundreds of thousands of Asians and Muslims, which people like these seem to conveniently forget."

Hyndburn MP Greg Pope said: "I knew nothing about this. I'm really appalled. The fact they are not a proper political party is shown by their failure to attend a proper service.

"What's particularly galling about this is that we represent the people who died in two world wars to stop the sort of politics they represent.

"As Jack Straw pointed out in his Telegraph column last week, thousands of Asian and Caribbean servicemen died in both world wars to protect our way of life from neo-Nazis like these."

Mr O'Brien, who said he is a postman and a former Queen's Lancashire Regiment soldier who served in Bosnia in the early 1990s, said: "The service was just to remember people in the past conflicts."

"It was organised by the WNP but a lot of people came over from Yorkshire and Lancashire.