Richard Barnbrook (born 24 February 1961) is a British politician and a former member of the London Assembly. He was elected as a British National Party (BNP) list candidate in the 2008 election, though he resigned the BNP whip in August 2010 and subsequently sat as an independent. Barnbrook was a councillor, and leader (2006–08), then deputy leader (2008–10), of the BNP group on Barking and Dagenham London Borough Council. He represented Goresbrook ward. Barnbrook retired from politics in May 2012. Background Barnbrook was born in Catford. He had his first public art exhibition, of landscape watercolours, in 1971. In 1981 he attended an art foundation course for a year at Grimsby College of Technology. From 1982 to 1985, he studied at the Royal Academy of Arts, where he obtained a first class diploma. During that time he attended Limoges College of Art and Craft on a minor scholarship and while there gained his first lecturing position (1984). He was awarded an interim Master of Arts degree from the California Institute of Arts and a PGCE from Greenwich University. In 1985, Barnbrook won a research and lecturing UNESCO scholarship to Silpakorn University in Thailand. He went on to lecture in Thailand, Europe and across the USA. In 1989, he was awarded an EC Film Award (fellowship) from Braunschweig University of Art in Germany. He completed his studies in 1995. He then worked as an artist and art teacher/lecturer. His art projects included writing and directing the theatre piece Human Soup and the film HMS Discovery: A Love Story, the latter of which received substantial media coverage as a result of its scenes of male nudity and homoerotic themes, and which was described as "gay pornography", but which Barnbrook insists was nothing more than an art film and certainly not homoerotic. In 2000, Barnbrook set up and was appointed managing director and artistic designer to the Jubilee Woods Trust, which he established to create new woodland plantations with the theme of environment, education and art, one for every county in the UK, to mark the Queen's Golden Jubilee, to which Sting was one of the principal benefactors and Sir David Attenborough showed support. Barnbrook received acclaim for his designs for heraldic planting formations, but only one of these came to fruition in Sefton, north Liverpool. When Barnbrook's connections with the BNP came to public notice, Barnbrook was dismissed before the project