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June 1, 2006updated 22 Nov 2022 7:34pm

Kent reporter gets £5K offer from BNP

By Press Gazette

British National Party organiser Dennis Whiting offered Whitstable Times reporter Constance Lee £5,000 to return to her parents' homeland of Malaysia during a newspaper interview.

Lee asked the former librarian: "Your party believes in voluntary repatriation with financial incentives. How much would you offer me to go back to Malaysia?"

He replied: "It would be a practical amount. About £5,000."

Whiting, 75, also told Lee: "It does get a bit muddled up. People from the Far East, Asia and Africa are less capable of being able to assimilate because different racial characteristics lead to different cultural characteristics.

"We don't think it's a good thing that the whole world should end up coffeecoloured."

Lee, who is a British-born journalist whose family moved to Kent from Malaysia in the 1970s, told Press Gazette: "Everyone knows how underpaid trainee journalists are and £5,000 would have been quite a welcome offer.

"When someone has such strong opinions it makes it so much easier to tease them out.

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"While I was outraged at some of the things he was saying, the journalist inside me was leaping for joy at all these fantastic quotes."

The BNP has around 50 members in Thanet and east Kent, with half a dozen of them living around Whitstable and Herne Bay.

The party recently made headlines for gaining the second highest percentage increase in the local elections, more than doubling its number of seats and bringing its total number of councillors to 53 out of 20,000 in the UK.

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