After a long struggle to find a suitable place of worship in the town, the small Muslim population of Clitheroe has, by the narrowest of council votes, secured planning permission to convert the Mount Zion Methodist chapel into its first mosque.

The stipulations are strict. No domes or minarets. No calls to prayer. But the 300 local Muslims, who have resorted to praying in a room at the town’s council chambers after 30 years in futile pursuit of a mosque, are delighted and Sheraz Arshad, the young British Muslim whose campaigning efforts have secured the mosque, is determined that it should be a community facility where those of different faiths can find out more about each other. “We want it to become one of the first in Britain to incorporate a multi-faith facility,” he said.

But Mr Arshad’s gesture appears to mean little to those – including the far right, who will bid for political power in Clitheroe at next month’s local elections – for whom Muslims are unwelcome here. The chapel, still vacant while money is raised to convert it, has come under attack three times since planning permission was granted, and leaflets for the England First Party, which is contesting the Primrose ward where the chapel stands, are explaining to voters why this mosque might presage an Islamic invasion.

The party knows it is on solid ground, since 900 people lodged objections to the mosque plan – 200 in terms deemed so offensive that the council would not publish their submissions. The editor of the local Clitheroe Advertiser and Times also stopped publishing letters on the subject two weeks before the planning decision, citing “legal issues over content, the length of letters and restrictions on space”.

Independent, 19 April 2007

See also Guardian, 18 April 2007

Nick Griffin is leader of the whites-only British National Party and one of the most hated – and, to his many detractors, hateful – men in the country.

He is a former National Front member, convicted of inciting racial hatred against Jews in 1998 and acquitted of similar charges against Muslims in two high-profile trials last year. He is a man who has called Britain a “multi-racial hellhole”, Islam a “wicked, vicious faith”, British Muslims “the most appalling, insufferable people to have to live with”, overt homosexuality “repulsive” and the Holocaust “the hoax of the 20th century”. He has declared that “nonwhites have no place here at all and [we] will not rest until every last one has left our land”.

He warms to the theme, claiming that some Muslims deliberately use heroin – “Paki poison” – to undermine non-Muslim communities around them. “It’s narco-terrorism.” Even worse, he says, is the way that hardline Muslim males deliberately seduce and corrupt “thousands” of young white girls in a practice called “grooming” that the authorities downplay for fear of being labelled racist.

But surely the vast majority of Muslims in this country are good, law-abiding citizens? Griffin disagrees: “The vast majority are entirely decent Muslims, but the better Muslims they are, the less good they are as British citizens.” The Koran orders them to obey the word of God, he says, not infidel governments: “Democracy and Islam are absolutely incompatible.” A Gallup poll this week suggested that 81 per cent of London-Muslims were “loyal to Britain” compared with just 45 per cent of non-Muslims.

In public Griffin appears personable and plausible. Talking in his car, he verges on the paranoid. Many British Muslims subscribe to a form of Islam that preaches a “ruthless, aggressive imperialism”, he says. Its goal is a world-wide caliphate. “It’s a takeover attempt,” he says, and it will end – literally – in civil war. Wherever an Islamic population establishes itself “you get all sorts of bloodshed and horrors and there’s no reason to think that this little part of the world will buck the trends of world history”.

Times, 19 April 2007

For a 1999 article by Griffin in which he outines his plan to hide the BNP’s fascist politics and portray it as a mainstream populist party see here.