I’m also guilty of a bit of shorthand in referring to your members as declaring themselves to be ‘BNP’ers’, as you say, but I think that this is in practice what will happen. Even though BNP membership (or even support) is certainly no prerequisite to joining Solidarity, and you yourself have no direct connections (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solidarity_–_The_Union_for_British_Workers), the union is already so closely identified with the party, and so many early members are likely to be BNP supporters, that I believe a lot of people who aren’t BNP (or at least other right nationalist) supporters will be extremely reluctant to have anything to do with it, for fear they will be assumed to be a supporter too.

Agreed that choice of bargaining unit to limit your attempts at recognition to certain groups where you can identify more support could indeed make it easier to gain a higher proportion of the workforce (identifying a regional division of a firm based in an area where the BNP are polling better for example). But even then bargaining units need to be chosen to make some kind of industrial sense and I think it’s still hard to see any legitimate division where this might give you an advantage big enough to counter the disadvantages I mentioned.

Second, I have to take issue with your assumption that our Union is limited to members of the BNP or even supporters of it. I’m sure that you must know that I am not a member of the BNP but of Third Way (www.thirdway.org). It may interest you to know that a number of people joining our Union list themselves as supporters of the Labour Party and that we are recruiting amongst all ethnic and faith communities.

Third, the question of recognition which you raise is an interesting one. We have not yet applied for a Certificate of Independence in fact. At this stage we are concentrating on building our infrastructure, training officials and recruiting. You must know that the ‘bargaining unit’ is defined by the Union calling the ballot and so winning support is not as difficult as you envisage. I am also not convinced that there are no employers who would not recognise without the need for a ballot. All this is in the future and only time will tell.