Katherine Jenkins’s representatives last night confirmed they had started legal action to remove the singer’s image from an online video produced in support of the extremist British National Party. In a four-minute video posted on website YouTube on March 8, by a user calling himself “Egbert Saxon King”, the Welsh mezzo-soprano’s image is used in a bid to stir up opposition to plans to build Wales’ largest mosque in Cardiff.
Featuring designs apparently lifted from the website of the Madina Mosque in the Cathays area of the capital, the video claims the mosque would lead to the “Islamification of Wales” and uses a series of dramatic images to contrast stereotypical images of Muslims with stereotypical images of Wales. An image of riots in Bradford, for instance, is contrasted with a tranquil North Wales street market scene.
Viewers are then shown a picture of a woman in traditional Islamic dress, and a picture of Miss Jenkins wearing a Welsh rugby shirt. They are then asked which they would prefer. The video ends with an image of a BNP badge and the text “vote BNP”.
A member of Miss Jenkins’s management team said, “Katherine wants to have absolutely nothing to do with these people. We are trying to trace how someone got the picture. It was not passed on by the photographer or his agent. It is just stirring things up and we are striving to have the image removed.”