British National Party leader Nick Griffin once fed his family with a roadkill rabbit, he told supporters, as he urged them to sell scrap metal to fund the cash-strapped far-right party.
In a rambling speech at the party's National Conference in Coventry this week, reported by University of Nottingham academic Dr Matthew Goodwin, Griffin vowed his party would overcome Nigel Farage's Ukip, which is a "stinking mess of corruption and nepotism."
Nick Griffin has spoken about his time eating roadkill
But first the party must overcome its miserable finances. In December 2010, the last time the party declared its financial status, it owed £582,961 and had £15,846 in the bank.
He spoke about his own hardships, but said it was a lack of hope, not food, which was killing people. "Nobody starves to death in this country. You can scrape a dead rabbit off the road, if you have to. I've done it with our kids when they were young. When we were really skint, we've eaten roadkill. Yeah, that's what you have to do."
Griffin's innovative new approaches to party fundraising, including appointing a party 'eBay officer' and collecting broken fridges, suggest the party had not yet clambered back into the black.
He said in the speech: "People have been experimenting with scrap, it's great fun, something I've done in the past. Collecting broken fridges etc. Any idea of the price of copper? It's phenomenal.
"Bring copper along to the branch meeting, put them together and you can get a £1 per pound. That's good money. We should be doing that.
"We're doing experiments with an eBay account, we used to have jumble sales, but every branch should have an eBay officer, bring something I can sell on eBay to the branch meetings. The eBay officer should be the most important person in the branch, that's hundreds of pounds a year."
Griffin also suggested starting a "white cab" firm with white minicab drivers. "We should have every branch of ours connected with a local "white" cab firm, so families can send their daughters out knowing they won't be groomed, mugged or beaten with iron bars."
The BNP leader also alleged the "United States" had offered him money "to concentrate only on Islam, they wanted us to drop our criticism of the banking system. I refused, in 2007, and all hell broke loose."
Other targets in his speech were newsreaders, who are all apparently "glamourous Asian girls with cut-glass English accents, who've all been to very posh schools. And you get the message our society is so wonderfully multicultural."
Griffin used his speech to plea for other far-right splinter groups to rejoin the BNP as well as espousing his theories about the English Defence League, calling the group "a serious, systematic, hugely-funded effort by the Zionist, neo-con clique, to dominate nationalism, to use as a tool to encourage the white working class to go and fight their wars, and so when the banking collapse comes, people will be looking for blame in the wrong direction."
He said the party would begin community service work, including starting a meals-on-wheels service, delivering the BNP newspaper and running local minivans.