BNP recruits in prisons, jail officers' leader warns

The first black national chairman of the Prison Officers' Association claimed yesterday that the extreme right-wing British National Party was involved in a recruitment campaign among Britain's 75,000 prisoners.

Colin Moses, who was elected head of the 30,000-member jail staff union earlier this month, said officers were increasingly finding BNP literature in the cells of prisoners.

He claimed that prisoners with connections to the BNP were gathering names of other inmates who could be given party publicity material.

Mr Moses, 51, said: "The BNP is using prisons as a recruiting ground for their foot-soldiers and their networks. If you look at the membership of the BNP, many of them have criminal backgrounds. Many of their thugs have connections to people in prison, they get names and use them."

He said that the BNP's literature was not allowed on open display but that the party was able to distribute it among inmates because censorship of mail was not permitted in prisons.

Mr Moses said the Prison Service was not doing enough to counteract the spread of "very extreme views" among younger sections of the prison population, adding that no BNP supporter would be allowed to be a member of his union.

He also said that prison officers were unfairly stigmatised by sections of the public as reactionary, a view he described as outdated.

He said: "I believe prison officers have been wrongly branded as some sort of right-wing grouping.

"My election just reaffirmed what I had always believed. The vast majority are decent, hard-working people."

This month Mr Moses became only the second black Briton to be elected head of a trade union. Bill Morris was made leader of the Transport and General Workers' Union in 1991.

He defeated Andy Darken in an election rerun earlier this month. Mr Darken had won a ballot earlier this year but the union asked its members to vote again after a complaint over procedural irregularities.

Mr Moses grew up in North Shields on Tyneside, the youngest of eight children. He is the son of a merchant seaman from Sierra Leone and an English mother.

Seven years ago he addressed the union's annual conference in Scarborough and gave a moving description of the abuse his family had faced during his childhood in the North-east. "The generation that I grew up in was a generation where overt racism was something that you often met," he said.

He joined the merchant navy as a teenager, becoming a chief engineer on oil exploration ships, before joining the chemical industry, where he was also a trade union convener.

"The place that rendered me fraternity and friendship was the trade union movement," he said.

"I have got a strong Geordie accent and sometimes your regionalism can overtake your ethnicity."

Mr Moses joined the Prison Service in 1986 and has been promoted to principal officer.

He said: "The Prison Service today is virtually unrecognisable to the one I joined in 1986. Back then, there was a culture of slopping out, working long hours and overtime."

He said the service was now more professional, recruiting many high-flyers, and pointed out that 7,000 of his union members were women.

His aims were to persuade the Government to implement a policy of "zero tolerance" of violence in prisons and for ministers to give greater recognition to the role played by prison officers in the criminal justice system.