Published: July 18th 2010 - at 8:45 pm

BNP could face financial ruin over Marmite ad


by Sunny Hundal    

A few weeks ago we pointed out how Marmite brought down the BNP website.

In short, using Marmite in an ad, which many within the BNP thought would be a good stunt, backfired badly when Unilever decided to sue.

The Daily Mirror reports today that the party had to privately settle the court claim, and may now face financial ruin.

The party has reportedly been hit with a claim – estimated at up to £170,000 – over the TV stunt, in which leader Griffin was pictured beside a huge jar of the spread.

The party then showed a jar of Marmite – slogan “Love it or hate it” – with its own motto “Love Britain Vote BNP”.

A recent investigation by Searchlight magazine explained how the Marmite incident backfired so badly on Nick Griffin and how it exposed internal infighting.

After Unilever responded by launching proceedings over copyright infringement, Griffin and Dowson realised they had underestimated the severity of the legal and financial consequences and came up with pathetic excuses, such as a claim that a “joker” had amended the film.

When Unilever’s lawyers refused to believe them, [Simon] Bennett says he was expected “to go to court and lie through my teeth in order to bail them out of a ridiculous hole they had dug themselves into”.

Simon Bennett was the party’s online campaigns manager.

He responded by attacking the BNP upper hierarchy and taking down the websites for Griffin’s MEP website, as well as sites for Andrew Brons, the other MEP, and their London AM Richard Barnbrook – all just before the election.

Those websites are now back up but the party has not yet recovered from the stunt.


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About the author
Sunny Hundal is editor of LC. Also: on Twitter, at Pickled Politics and Guardian CIF.
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Reader comments


1. Heather Leith

Good to see that Marmite is good for something…

2. earwicga

Excellent. I love marmite as much as I hate the BNP.

3. cb

Just when I thought I couldn’t possibly love Marmite any more than I did…

4. Zarathustra

Proof, once again, that Marmite are indeed My Mate.

5. Mr S. Pill

Nice to see Unilever on the side of angels for once…*cough*

Disclaimer: I hate Marmite almost as much as I hate the BNP.

6. Mr S. Pill

Oh and a bit of unrelated information, the BNP have the address “British Heritage FREEPOST” and it costs them 42p for every letter they recieve. Naturally incitement to cause bankrupty is not acceptable and thus I am writing this purely for educational purposes.

7. Mr S. Pill

Oh damn I’ve found out the fascist scum closed down their freepost address so forget that post @6…

8. Chaise Guevara

LOL @ S Pill.

The BNP got in a similar bind awhile back when they unsurprisingly used ‘I Predict A Riot’ as the backing to a campaign video. Naturally, the Kaiser Chiefs kicked off, because they’re not racist pricks.

9. Shatterface

‘Nice to see Unilever on the side of angels for once…*’

Altogether now, Chumbawombles:

‘Whitewash
When you don’t want to feed the world
When you just want to feed your bank balance
Wash your guilt away
Unilever washes whiter
Soap to clean those dirty hands
And a slap for the people who work the land
Unilever…’

Much as I like to see the BNP get a slapping why does a symbolic gesture absolve one multinational of all sins while BP’s similarly self-serving PR exercise at the Tate is cause for ‘direct’ action?

10. Flowerpower

So, Unilever achieves at a stroke what the best minds of the Left failed to achieve for decades.

11. Gaf the Horse

Right, I hate Marmite with a passion, vile yeast based freaky sandwich filler that it is, (my kids love it though). However I am now going to have a Marmite sandwich for lunch and I’ll enjoy every disgusting mouthful with the thought of Nick Griffin bankrupt.

12. Cynical/Realist?

It won’t bankrupt them. The internal strife might do for them, but if not this would just be a fundraising rally call.

Plus, Unilever haven’t done this out of the goodness of their hearts. They did it to avoid their brand being rendered value-less by association with the BNP.

13. Daniel Hoffmann-Gill

All I long for is when the ‘could’ becomes reality.

Could is not good enough right now.

14. Mr S. Pill

@9

That’s why I said “for once” and linked to corporatewatch… Unilever get a couple of brownie points for screwing the BNP but that’s about it, my enemies enemy still isn’t my friend and until they’re run on anarcho-syndicalist & ecologically sound principles they’ll still be under scrutiny ;) [/hyperbole]

15. mymate

You do all know that the claim has already been settled.

And that the BNP are still going…

16. Chaise Guevara

“All I long for is when the ‘could’ becomes reality.”

Not so sure about that. I don’t really want to see a political party fail for lack of money. I want to see THIS* political party fail for lack of support.

*I hate all this capitals crap. Could anyone kindly tell me how to do italics so it doesn’t look like I’m SHOUTING at random INTERVALS?

17. Nick

(i)italics(/i) like this (angles)? Or [i]this[/i]? (square?) Or /this/ ? (forward-slash)

Go away, BNP. We don’t like you.

Go away, marmite. I don’t like you either.

18. Mr S. Pill

@16

ITALICS: use html tags and . erm.. which is to say, [i] and [/i] where [ =

Hope that makes sense.

(For bold use a “b” instead of an “i”)

19. Mr S. Pill

Balls. It’s the little triangle brackets above the comma and the full stop on your keyboard basically.

20. Chaise Guevara

it can’t be this simple

21. Chaise Guevara

WHOOP!

Now someone tell me how to do imbedded hyperlinks or whatever they’re called. Y’know, where you turn the text into a hyperlink instead of just pasting the hyperlink in in full. Google Chrome thinks that ‘hyperlink’ and ‘Google’ are spelling mistakes, BTW.

22. Mr S. Pill

At risk of derailing this thread into a beginner’s guide to html:

To create a hyper link you need to use this [a href="full url here"]some words[/a] again instead of [ and ] use those pointy brackets.

So [a href="http://www.google.com"]this is google[/a] makes “this is google” the link.

hopefully.

23. Chaise Guevara

This thread

24. Mr S. Pill

and seeing as we’ve started this little diversion, to do a

bit of quoting

you need to be using [blockquote] and [/blockquote] (again the angles not squares).

25. Chaise Guevara

Hang on:

This thread

26. Chaise Guevara

Hah!

Prior to your very much appreciated mentorship, blockquotin’ was my only html skill

27. Mr S. Pill

:D

28. Chaise Guevara

Nice one, S. Pill. I appreciate it’s hard to teach something when you can’t actually type it out because it’ll, well, happen.

29. Chaise Guevara

When I first learned to blockquote, I was really pleased with myself for all of three minutes until I told my mate and she said (ahem):

You mean you just found that out?

..as if I’d told her I’d just learned that Paris was in France.

Again, thanks for your help. I’m going to level up soon and try italics inside blockquotes. I suspect it’s rational and you just have to treat it like a mathematical formula, but I don’t want to derail this thread more than I already have. I’ll go find a rightwing thread and do it there.

Anyway, back on topic: BNP are cunts, Marmite is God’s salty goodness.

30. Mr S. Pill

No problem

I think those are the only ones that work on LibCon, other than the smilies of course 8)

31. Mr S. Pill

Oh and agree about the BNP but will have to disagree on Marmite. It would appear that Marmite love/hate crosses the political divide… I read somewhere that a lateral thinker reckoned Marmite would solve the problem of the Middle East because they don’t get enough zinc in their diet (no yeast in their bread) which leads to increased testosterone levels and therefore anger/violence. Something like that anyway….

32. Chaise Guevara

“Oh and agree about the BNP but will have to disagree on Marmite.”

Confound you! And I thought we were getting on so well…

Anyhoo, thanks for the link. It’s the very first page I’ve bookmarked in Google Chrome, which I downloaded today and is turning out to be a damn sight less intuitive than HTML. I miss QBasic.

33. D

Not a huge fan of Marmite but I feel I should now buy a crate of it in recognition!

34. James Garry

If true, a pie in the face for all haters.
(yay!)

Go for all possible damages Unilever, let them see that symbols cannot be highjacked without penalty.


Reactions: Twitter, blogs
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  27. Peter T

    Personally I'd rather eat one of those toilet blocks butI know have a little bit of love for Marmite http://bit.ly/dzse8Q

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  44. Daniel Phillips

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  53. Anti-Fascism is a Left Wing Issue « Bad Conscience

    [...] the BNP is hilariously threatened with financial ruin for a copyright infringement which can only be described as colossally [...]

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