Nick Griffin, hate crime expert

While his party crumbles around him, a curious tweet (well, series of tweets) emerges from BNP leader and MEP Nick Griffin. Strung together, they read:

Busy researching issue of racist attacks against English youngsters in Lancashire for short presentation to a Symposium on Hate Crime. Good to have been invited, shows that our message is getting through: racism cuts both ways! Special thanks to our Liverpool people who spent time in police cells for raising this matter in public. In end they were compensated, and now we're vindicated too.

It turns out that Griffin was invited to address a symposium at the European Parliament, organised by the When Law and Hate Collide: Perspectives of Hate Crime project. This is an EU-funded collaboration of the University of Central Lancashire (for which Griffin is the local MEP), the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, and the Goethe University Frankfurt.

Presumably Griffin was invited in his capacity as an MEP; or perhaps, given Griffin's 1998 conviction and suspended prison sentence for distributing material likely to incite racial hatred, the organisers recognised his particular expertise in this area.