To What Extent Has the British National Party Moved from Being a Fascist Party to a Populist Party?


When almost five million people voted for Jean-Marie Le Pen in the first round of the French presidential election a ‘tremor of excitement’ was sent through the European fascist scene, especially in the British National Party; indeed, “parties with a partly racist, anti-immigrant, anti-asylum seeker agenda have been able to create a resonance in the voting population and win parliamentary institutions at various levels in a number of countries” . Now more than ever, with the right on the ascendancy once again, it is important to differentiate between fascist electoral parties and right-wing populist parties .
This essay examines John Tyndall’s writing using a New Consensus definition of fascism, arguing that he follows a neo-Nazi doctrine which places an emphasis on race in bringing about a rebirth of the nation. It then analyses the actions of Nick Griffin, and extracts of the propaganda he has written to assess how much the BNP has moved from being a fascist party to a mass populist one, and whether Griffin’s attempts to make the BNP a ‘respectable’ party are substantial or honest.

The ‘New Consensus’ defines fascism as a revolutionary form of ultra-nationalism, driven by a myth of the nations imminent rebirth from decadence . Fascists aim to create ‘new men’ and to revolutionise political culture, their actions are intended to mark a “sea-change or caesura in the nation’s current state of decline and can even be thought by some fascists to inaugurate a new era within the development of Western civilisation itself by putting an end to the era of liberal, Enlightenment concepts of a linear, increasingly rationalised and globalised process based on secular humanism” .
The fascism inherent in Tyndall’s writing is all too obvious, from the title of his book (‘The Eleventh Hour: A Call for British Rebirth’), to his call for a revolutionary form of nationalism to save Britain from decline. Tyndall claims that “every cult, every habit, every disposition conducive to the weakening of society, people, nation and race the left has taken up as a cause celebre: homosexuality, ultra-feminism, race equality, abortion, relaxation of the drugs laws, weakening of the police, soft sentences for criminals, indiscipline in schools, ugliness and decadence in the arts, downgrading of the work ethic, impotence in self defence” . This decadence, he claims, is promoted by the ‘lunatic left’, “a growth that first needed fertile soil for its germination. That soil existed in the atmosphere of liberalism that preceded the growth” . In order to overcome the ‘chaos of the present day’ forced upon the people of Britain by the liberal-left, “our thinking must begin with an utter rejection of liberalism and a dedication to the resurgence of authority…it must entail the embrace of a political outlook which is, in relation to the present, revolutionary. Nothing less will suffice” .
Accompanying Tyndall’s fascism is a preoccupation with race giving him the well deserved title of ‘neo-Nazi’. He writes, for example, that “the lunacy of ‘race equality’ has become the national religion” , that “over and above the rivalries of nations, there is the transcendent interest of Western Civilisation, Western Culture and – as the creator of these things – the White European Race” . To combat the ‘AIDS’, ‘chaos’ and “ruins wrought by the old politics, new men are rising…we feel the voices of these past generations calling down to us in sacred union, urging us to be worthy of their example and their sacrifice. To them we owe it to fight on, and to dare all, so that a great land and a great race may live again in splendour” .

Nick Griffin took over from neo-Nazi John Tyndall after the 1997 general election and stated that he was committed to transforming the BNP into a ‘new, modernist’ party, to provide the British electorate with the ‘chance to vote for a party like the Front Nationale’. To this end he has involved his party in a number of popular anti-government issues such as the Countryside Alliance’s attempt to ‘give rural England a voice’, the campaign against the Euro, support protestors against fuel duty and most recently - and perhaps most resonantly -, campaigning against asylum seekers and refugees from ‘swamping’ Britain . Griffin has also helped pioneer the BNP’s more sophisticated electioneering tactics that list ‘target areas’ where the BNP thinks it has a realistic chance of winning. In these areas, BNP branches are sent instructions on how to campaign, that include canvassing, producing glossy leaflets, sending letters to the electorate in the run up to the election and on the eve of the poll, organising petitions to attract media attention, handing out free CDs to young people and even setting up websites for local BNP campaigns .
Gerry Gable notes in Searchlight that the media and the extreme right are ‘making a fuss over what they claim is a new direction being taken by the British National Party’, in particular the step of creating links with various religious and ethnic groups. In fact, this dates back to the days of Oswald Mosley when in the 1960s, when a West Indian branch of his Union Movement was formed and actually paraded a handful of members . Griffin has also contemplated ripping up the party rulebook to allow those without direct British or European ancestry from party membership, courting figures from Sikh and Hindu communities in a bid to isolate Muslims; Griffin was, for example, depicted in the Birmingham based Sunday Mercury shaking hands with a west London Sikh called ‘Ammo Singh’ and has released an anti-Islamic audiocassette called ‘Islam – A Threat to us all’, which included contributions from Griffin, a Hindu and a Sikh. The Sikh contributor calls for the BNP to be applauded because Muslim extremists “plan to turn Britain into an Islamic republic, like Libya, Iran, Pakistan and Afghanistan by 2025, using a combination of immigration, high birth rate and conversion…Who will stop them and save the rest of us? Ironically, the party labeled by the media as ‘the Nazis’…let us join to salute the British National Party” .
In fact, these alliances, electoral tactics, glossy literature and media-friendly appearances are attempts by Griffin and his supporters to divest the party of its racist tag. All Griffin has achieved is encouraging “members of other communities to preach separation or apartheid” . Nick Lowles notes that news of these alliances “will horrify most BNP members, many of whom are already perturbed by the existence of the party’s Ethnic Liaison Committee and the admission into the party of Lawrence Rustem, who is half-Turkish” (, who was physically assaulted at a BNP meeting almost as soon as his appointment was announced); “as with most recent BNP activity under Griffin, this is no more than a stunt to legitimise the party’s racism” .
Even if Griffin has moved on from being part of the leadership of the Italian-neofascism inspired ‘Political Soldier’ faction of the NF in the 1980s , the core membership of the BNP continues to be extremist in nature. Stephen Belshaw, regional organiser for East Midlands, for example, was a Combat 18 (a violent Nazi group) activist between 1992 and 1993; Tony Lecomber the Group Development Organiser and branch organiser for Redbridge was convicted on five counts for offences under the Explosives Act and was imprisoned in 1991 for attacking a Jewish teacher and Scott McLean, the Deputy Chairman and regional organiser for Scotland, attended a Blood and Honour Nazi skinhead festival in Scotland . Searchlight obtained information on one BNP meeting held in Oldham after the general election and although the speakers tried to give the impression that the BNP was now a moderate party, many in the audience were ‘hardcore’: in addition to a handful of football hooligans (who resented having their pictures taken) were Nazis such as Dave Probert, active from the 1980s in the British Movement . In another article, Searchlight discloses that Chris Jackson, a BNP organiser, spent a night ‘fraternising’ with Nazi-thugs and Northern Ireland paramilitaries at a Blood and Honour social, hosted by Combat 18. Jackson set up a literature stall, and was in attendance with Kevin Gough and Jason Wilcox, two Oldham C18 supporters involved in the International Third Position group. Also present were a number of Loyalist Volunteer Force supporters, and Steve Irwin, a former member of the Ulster Freedom Fighters, the paramilitary wing of the Ulster Defence Association. Sam King states that the “open presence of loyalist paramilitaries makes Jackson’s appearance at the C18 gig all the more surprising. The obvious ease with which he sat through proceedings, which from time to time included Nazi salutes and shouts of ‘sieg heil’, clearly illustrates the overlap between C18 and the BNP…If Nick Griffin, the BNP leader, were serious about his hatred of C18, he would expel Jackson and the other BNP members linked with the C18 from the party immediately” .

Comparison of BNP commitment lists, drawn up under Tyndall in 1993, and under Griffin in 2002 demonstrate just how little the aims of the BNP have changed . On the face of it, the 2002 document is less direct in its assertions: ‘an end to immigration and a start to repatriation’ has been replaced with ‘abolishing positive discrimination, clamping down on asylum seekers and the introduction of voluntary repatriation’; ‘regeneration of British farming, with the object of achieving the maximum possible self-sufficiency’, is now replaced with a ‘commitment to quality not quantity, self sufficiency and organic methods’; commitment to repealing the laws permitting homosexuality and abortion and the ‘wiping out of AIDS’ are not even mentioned in the 2002 commitments. The differences outlined above should be seen, as Griffin intended, as attempts to appear more respectable. The current debate over immigration and asylum seekers has benefited the BNP, and their arguments have found some resonance, particularly from politicians in major political parties; by claiming to support ‘voluntary’ repatriation, the BNP appears relatively moderate given the incendiary language of most Tory and Labour politicians. Support for organic farming and quality not quantity should be seen as indicative of current popular notions of farming, and the loss of confidence the British population as a whole has of agriculture thanks to ‘mad cow disease’ and other food scandals. Given that some of the points in the 2002 list show shifts towards populist leanings, many of the underlying messages are the same. For example, education should be ‘traditional not trendy’ (read: liberal) and the death penalty should be ‘reintroduced with a harsher treatment of criminals’. More significantly, the racial dimension to the BNP that characterised Tyndall’s leadership is still evident, given that the 2002 ‘commitment list’ begins with immigration, and attacks the notion of open borders solely on the basis that ‘the native British people, will be an ethnic minority in our own country within sixty years’.
Griffin’s BNP propaganda, as published on a new – and highly respectable looking – BNP website, offer us an excellent opportunity to assess the ideological underpinnings of the new leader. The use of contemporary events for political gain is part of the modernisation project that Griffin has undertaken. Examples of this can be found when Griffin gloats that “demolition of the World Trade Centre didn't just kill some 6,000 people, it also killed multiculturalism” ; September 11th was to herald a decisive turning point in the liberal-lefts multicultural conspiracy. The events of September 11th led to a backlash against Muslims in general, and he uses this sudden interest to pick through the Koran to find passages which preach intolerance, concluding that ‘Islam’ is the “biggest threat Britain has ever faced “ .
Despite the ‘moderate’, or more accurately ‘modernised’ gloss to the BNP’s writings, the new leadership is as fascist as the old. In an article entitled ‘We’re living in interesting times!’, Griffin argues that that “our once great nation is on its knees -- industrially, socially and morally….The complete political establishment must be swept aside… It is time for the growing number of ordinary Britons who are sickened by such things to understand that local campaigns alone cannot reverse the tide of alien influence and filth sweeping over our nation. The only thing which can save everything we hold dear is total change at all levels of society; in a word, a revolution” . In addition to revolutionary ultra-nationalism, which he claims will be ‘essentially British in character and therefore quite peaceful’, the party continues to have a neo-Nazi obsession with genetics and ‘race’. Griffin claims that the Human Genome Project proves that races are discrete groups, and that scientists such as Cavalli-Sforza can recognise where someone’s ‘ancestry’ lies just from examining their DNA. This proof, he claims, destroys the ‘liberal myth’ of egalitarianism, and gives backing to Griffin’s aim for ‘voluntary’ repatriation and the right of white-Britons to their ‘homeland’. He concludes that “there are already so many non-whites in Britain, and their birth rate is so high, and our own ruling elites are so anti-white, that even if all fresh immigration stopped tomorrow, we would still be on course for our own dispossession and eventual slow genocide” .

Tyndall is now challenging Griffin for the leadership of the BNP. In a twenty page critique titled ‘State of the Party – A Frank Assessment of the Developments in the BNP in the Winter of 2001’, Tyndall makes a damning assessment of the current leadership. In addition to allegations of financial mismanagement and an attack on his leadership abilities, Tyndall attacks Griffin’s modernisation attempts as “flashy promotional stunts” which in a “bid to appear more respectable and moderate to the media and liberal society, and so avoid the charge of extremism, the BNP is jettisoning core party beliefs and traditions” . The change of the party logo and the replacement of the Welling Club with the Trafalgar Club are dismissed as ‘a Blairite-style repudiation of the past’, and the formation of the ‘Ethnic Liaison Committee’ is dismissed as an ‘obvious and shallow gimmick’. Media friendly messages, such as Griffin’s statement in a Spearhead article (November 2001), that a ‘bit of immigration is better than none at all’ is denounced by Tyndall as “a betrayal of everything the BNP has fought for over the last 19 years of its history”.
Griffin’s attempts to make the party respectable fall down when the criminal records of his core membership are exposed ; Roger Griffin notes that the respectable front behind which some fascist groupings camouflage their activities enable them to act as a permanent fifth column for their perennial enemy, racial intolerance ; this is precisely the tactic that the BNP is employing under the leadership of Nick Griffin. So whilst right-wing populist parties appeal to the resentments, prejudices and traditional values, offering simplistic solutions to problems , the BNP adheres to an ideology that at its core consists of a ‘palingenetic form of populist ultra-nationalism’ aiming to bring about a rebirth of the nation – through revolution –, by mobilising the national community so it rises ‘phoenix-like after a period of encroaching decadence’ . This fascist ideological commitment under the leadership of Nick Griffin remains unchanged from that of the previous leader. Modern election techniques, media-friendly gimmicks and some toned down rhetoric do not detract from the fact that the BNP remains as fascist at the core as it ever has been.

Bibliography:

Adams I – Ideology and Politics in Britain Today; Manchester University Press, 1998.

Breuilly J – Nationalism and the State; Manchester University Press, 1993 (2nd. Edition).

Eatwell R & O’Sullivan N – The Nature of the New Right: American and European Politics and Political Thought Since 1789; Pinter Publishers, 1989 (1992 edition).

Goodrick-Clarke N – Black Sun: Aryan Cults, Esoteric Nazism and the Politics of Identity; New York University Press, 2002.

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Griffin R – ‘No racism, thanks, we’re British’, a chapter for Wolfgang Eisman (ed.) -Rechtspopulismus in Europa: Analysen und Handlungsperspektiven; Czernin-Verlages, Graz, to be found at  http://www.brookes.ac.uk/schools/humanities/Roger/norace.ch2.htm.

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Journals and Websites

International Searchlight; July 2001, August 2001, January 2002, February 2002, March 2002, May 2002, June 2002.

Intelligence Report: Dangerous Liaisons – From Los Angeles to Moscow, Extremism Goes Global; Southern Poverty Law Centre, No. 103, Fall 2001.

 http://www.bnp.org.uk/policies.html : BNP - ‘The BNP: What we stand for’

 http://www.bnp.org.uk/articles/article11.html : Griffin N - ‘Time is running our for Western Civilisation!’.

BBC Panorama - “BNP - Under the Skin”, November 2001.

 http://www.bnp.org.uk/articles/article74.html : Griffin N - ‘We-re living in interesting times!’