BNP stands barking candidate in "Arizona" by-election

News reaches us of the BNP standing a candidate in the Kentish Town by-election, now known locally as the "Arizona" by-election.

One of our party members was googling our latest fascist, and came up with this frankly barking letter to the Camden New Journal, written in Spring 2006, "So barking", Our comrade writes, "I remember reading it the first time round."

High price of the King's Cross loss•

IT is sad that the campaigners for more affordable housing at King's Cross have lost out to Argent. But the saddest people of all are, in fact, the apparent victors, in the devastatingly accurate street meaning of "sad".

Development in Britain became unsustainable when Henry VIII was forced to start conquering Ireland for wood for his ships, because he had chopped down most of England's forests. During the next five centuries the process snowballed, and now we are indirectly logging Indonesia for biofuel, having overdosed on carbon fuels.

We will overdose on biofuels too.History has a long and dismal record of civilisations which have used up their own resources, expanded colonially, used up those, and collapsed in a welter of "natural" disasters. The most familiar account of the process is the Old Testament, but other times and other zones have similar journals.

Babylonian texts record that Babylon was denuded of trees (still is) and salinised by over-irrigation so nothing would grow (still won't in what is now a semi-desertified northern Iraq and the southern Iraq desert that was once Ur of the Chaldees). Rome outgrew all its breadbaskets and collapsed. Hadrian refused to invade Scotland on the grounds that the Empire had overstretched itself – he was no fool, but it was too late.

All this doom makes the efforts of the King's Cross campaigners and millions of good-hearted people like them across the world all the more soul-saving as opposed to soul-destroying. If you are on a sinking ship you want to see around you the altruistic and their concern and compassion, however futile these might be. There is some point in trying to make the last hours as comfortable as possible for everyone and going down fighting; no point at all in skulking in the ships galleys scoffing all available food for storage like snakes and looting the cabins.

EDITH CROWTHER Belsize Park Gardens, NW3

In the recent Hampstead by-election the BNP only managed 29 votes.