The sudden death of BNP founder John Tyndall will be met a mixture of wry smiles, cheers and guttural laughter amongst anti-fascists everywhere. The founder and fomer leader of the British National Party, Tyndall had spent the last few years of his life attempting to regain control of the party he had founded, from the man he had brought in to the organisation as his eventual succesor - Nick Griffin. Griffin's decision not to hang around, but to oust Tyndall in 1999, provoked a sulk of Ted Heath proporations.

A life long fascist, Tyndall was frequently pictured in his younger days in full nazi uniform, hamming it up at nazi camps in rural England in the early 60s. Such pictures were reproduced so frequently it was easy to forget that Tyndall was in many ways closer to the old Tory racist right than the neo-nazi right. This prompted one fascist opponent of his to comment "the problem with John Tyndall is not that he is a nazi pretending to be a Tory, but that he is a Tory pretending to be a nazi!"
Although Tyndall occasionally made overtures towards figures in the Conservative party (most famously Alan Clark) they came to nothing, indeed Clark complained that the Italian restaurant in Victoria where Tyndall had tried to wine and dine him was "appalling". It was only after Tyndall lost the BNP leadership that Conservatives began voting for, and joining the BNP in anything like significant numbers.

Two elements perhaps characterised Tyndall as a political leader - his ability to make a tubthumping, rabidly racist speech that would please the BNP rank and file, and his inability to spot any agent provocateur or spook in and around his circle, under virtually any circumstances. From Ray Hill, through to Eddy Morrison, Tim Hepple, Mark Cotterill and Peter Rushton, Tyndall missed them all. It was this type of "leadership" that ensured that the British far-right remained one of the weakest in Europe. For that we should be grateful.

Tyndall's main strategy as BNP leader was to hold marches and paper sales, and to stand in elections. From this, he expected the organisation to snowball into a mass organisation that would control first the streets of Britain, then its corridors of power. Instead the BNP were simply flattened, on a regular basis from one end of the country to another, as anti-fascists took the battle to them. By the early 1990s Tyndall was still advocating an approach that most of his party members knew, from painful experience, was unworkable.

One of his last tub thumping speeches - exposed in the BBCs "Secret Agent" documentary earlier this year - led to a charge of inciting racial hatred, which saw Tyndall clogging up the courts again with his plummy voice, combover and permanently outraged tone. It could well be the stress of that case, plus his explusion from the BNP, proved to much for someone who was after all in their early 70s.
If so it is worth remembering that John Tyndall died of natural causes - had he ever come to power he had a far worse fate in store for many of us!

 http://www.londonclasswar.org/antifa3.htm