Nick Griffin has, since he took over as leader of the British National Party, tried to give the impression that he has a softer side – as, we are led to believe, does his party. This is untrue though. Griffin has always been a hardcore fascist and a racist. This leopard has certainly not changed his spots though, in an attempt to fool the public, he may well have changed the apparent targets of his racism.

Griffin’s connections with fascism go way back. His father introduced him to the National Front by taking him to a meeting when he was just fifteen. Griffin’s mother stood for the BNP in 2001 (against Iain Duncan-Smith). His early interest in the far-right grew during his time at Cambridge University (he graduated with a 2:2 in Jurisprudence) and, by 1978, he was the NF’s national organiser.

Two years later, Griffin and Joe Pearce, a long-time racist and editor of Bulldog magazine, launched Nationalism Today. Through NT, the two of them developed their conviction that a ‘third way’ was necessary to replace what they believed were Zionist-controlled capitalism and communism. The Third Positionist ideas of Nationalism Today were adopted by the National Front over the next few years

It was around this time that Griffin began to link up with international terrorism. Roberto Fiore, the Italian fascist who was linked with the bombing of Bologna railway station in 1980 in which 85 people died, became a good friend of Griffins and in fact joined him in his company, Heritage Tours. Griffin’s father was also involved with Fiore, being for many years his personal and business accountant.

Griffin’s personal beliefs on racial separatism led to some strange bedfellows. In 1985, Griffin praised the black separatist Louis Farrakhan: ‘White nationalists everywhere wish [Farrakhan] well, for we share a common struggle for the same ends: Racial Separation and Racial Freedom.’ The National Front rank and file were not impressed. They were even less impressed when Griffin went to Libya to try (unsuccessfully) to get money out of Gaddafi, and when he expressed support for Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini.

Since then, his judgement in friends has, er, improved. Nowadays, he only mixes with the like of Jean-Marie Le Pen, leader of the French Front National, and David Duke, former leader of the Ku Klux Klan.

In 1989, Griffin, ever the political chameleon, left the NF and formed the International Third Position, a fanatically Catholic fascist group. The ITP campaigned against Coca Cola, McDonalds, urbanisation and Zionism. His involvement did not last beyond a few years. In 1991, after a failed business venture which ended in bankruptcy, Griffin went his own way.

Finally, (or at least, for the moment) in 1995, Griffin joined the BNP. He began to edit The Rune, a violently anti-Semitic quarterly. One of his more bizarre pronouncements was that the BNP should prioritise denying the Holocaust to schoolchildren. He very swiftly earned himself a two-year suspended prison sentence for his sickening views on the Holocaust. In 1998 he was found guilty of inciting race hatred at Harrow Crown Court for denying that the Holocaust ever took place.

In his defence during his prosecution, Griffin said: ‘I am well aware that the orthodox opinion is that six million Jews were gassed and cremated and turned into lampshades. Orthodox opinion also once held that the world is flat...I have reached the conclusion that the 'extermination' tale is a mixture of Allied wartime propaganda, extremely profitable lie, and latter witch-hysteria.’

Nor has his hatred of Jews disappeared, despite his present emphasis on the horrors of multiculturalism and rabid attacks on Muslims. Griffin's 1997 pamphlet, ‘Who Are The Mindbenders’, alleged that a cabal of Jews controlled the British media. His more recent public stance in this area is illustrated by the section ‘It's all a Zionist scam’ in his dreadful and tedious Chairman's Column (see ‘Dealing with peak oil criticisms’, BNP website, September 23rd, 2005.

Griffin had his sights upon leading the BNP from the moment he joined it. He swiftly became editor of Spearhead, the then BNP magazine, from 1996 until his split from former leader John Tyndall in 1999.

Griffin has spent the years of his leadership trying to convince the voters that his BNP is respectable; that it is reputable and modern and yearns toward community-based politics. Yet his history keeps following him around. Perhaps this quote from The Rune, printed at the time when the BNP’s first councillor had just been elected, is the truth about Griffin:

‘The electors of Millwall did not back a post-modernist Rightist Party, but what they perceived to be a strong, disciplined organisation with the ability to back up its slogan ‘Defend Rights for Whites’ with well-directed boots and fists. When the crunch comes, power is the product of force and will, not of rational debate.’

The confusion over Griffin doesn’t only come from the left or the centre of the political arena. The right is just as confused about both his motives and his varying political stance. The International Third Position wrote this of him:

‘He has been a conservative, a revolutionary nationalist, a radical National Socialist, a Third Positionist, a friend of the ‘boot boys’ and the skinhead scene, a man committed to respectable politics and electioneering, a ‘moderniser’. Which is he in reality? Perhaps he has been all these quite sincerely – in which case his judgement is abysmal; or perhaps he has been none of them sincerely – which speaks for itself!’

Griffin is no stranger to controversy both in and out of politics, though his private and public lives seem inextricably linked. The party's treasurer, Michael Newland, resigned in disgust after Griffin used party funds to add an extension to his house. West Midlands fascists who complained that calling in interior designers was not the most effective way to create a new fatherland were purged.

Give Griffin a subject and, like Bernard Manning, he’ll make something offensive out of it. After David Copeland's 1999 bombing of the Admiral Duncan pub in Soho, London, Griffin wrote: ‘The TV footage of dozens of ‘gay’ demonstrators flaunting their perversion in front of the world’s journalists showed just why so many ordinary people find these creatures so repulsive.’

Griffin’s confusions seem to embrace all aspects of his politics. He seems at the moment to believe that the BNP needs to spread itself in every direction, regardless of its relevance to white nationalism. The recent creation of the Christian Council of Britain is a good example – set up only so that it could take advantage of the furore surrounding the ‘Jerry Springer – the Musical’ extravaganza. But the CCoB is far from the only BNP-front out there – nor is the creation of front organizations a new departure for the British National Party.

At the moment, BNP energies are being spread in several directions; the CCoB, the establishment of the fake ‘Solidarity’ union, Civil Liberty, which purports to protect the civil liberties of unjustly treated members of society (apparently as long as they’re in the BNP), and ‘The truth is no defense’, which states that it represents those who have suffered from those who are persecuted under the highly-dubious banner of free speech. More on each of these curiously BNP-centric organizations here  http://82.69.12.18/lancasteruafblog/index.php?itemid=66

In the more distant past, though still under Griffin’s leadership, the BNP has had a whole series of hopeless and now thankfully defunct front organisations on the go – among them the South West Family Defence Organisation, the British Countryman and Save Our Sterling. And the point of them? Go to any nazi, fascist or right-wing forum on the internet and the confusion is profound. Nobody sees any point other than the vague hope that a few odd fascists can be filtered off into the BNP from some event that one of these groups have organised. Given the amount these groups cost to set up and maintain, their uselessness is more than obvious to everyone except Griffin, whose bizarre scattergun approach to far-right politics they apparently suit.

Antifascists, of course, revel in this strange quirk of Griffins. While the nazis are messing around with Christians, they aren’t messing around with anyone else and, let’s face it, Christians are capable of looking after themselves. Almost unanimously, the various denominations of the faith have come out and roundly criticized the BNP and CCoB, the campaigners who the BNP had hoped to hijack have attacked them and a great many other church-related organizations have stated clearly that the BNP is not welcome on its patch. All good stuff and yet another example of Griffin’s sometimes startling errors of judgement.

Griffin is a populist and will use anything to further what he sees as the current cause. When he realized that the red-tops were providing ammunition for his hatred of Muslims, he changed tack, dropped the constant harping on about the Jewish ‘conspiracy’ and moved the party firmly into the new direction. Tabloid attacks, frequently aided and abetted by dubious and inflammatory government statements, made an issue of asylum-seekers and refugees for the BNP to jump on and claim as its own. The reality of the ‘flood’ of asylum-seekers though, was not quite what it seemed. An interesting article from the Observer in 2000 had this to say:

‘In 1996, under the Tories, applications for asylum were 29,000. In 1997, the figure rose to 33,000, in 1998 to 46,000 and in 1999 to 71,000. This is a large increase, but still statistically insignificant given Britain's population of 60 million. If you average the figures over the past four years - 50,000 asylum seeker applications per annum - the British Home Office, under its international obligations, is being asked, in population terms, to consider one refugee case for every 12,000 UK citizens. Given that many applications will be rejected, the true figure for successful applicants is probably 1 per 25,000 native head of population. New Labour's ministers may, in their harsh, tabloid-pleasing rhetoric, be fighting back a’"flood’, but the asylum seekers ‘crisis’ is actually a trickle.’

Nevertheless, the public largely chose to believe what it read in the tabloids and Griffin, ever the opportunist, was quick to jump on the bandwagon. Gone is the hard fascist approach of sending immigrants home ‘in bodybags, if necessary.’ In its place is the softer, allegedly more humane, idea of ‘voluntary’ repatriation. Alongside this is the similarly tabloid-generated hatred of the EU and the BNP’s often-stated vow to remove the country from it the moment the BNP take power. Perhaps slightly more worrying, Griffin’s clearly-stated hatred of global capitalism is one that will have even the hardest of left-wingers casting a sympathetic eye in the direction of the BNP bunker though the BNP’s dislike of homosexuality, environmentalism (which it quaintly equates with Marxism), anti-Semitism and anti-feminism should soon turn that sympathy away again. If that doesn’t work, Griffin and the BNP could air its views on multiculturalism, which it abhors.

There are only two issues on which the BNP has never changed. That black or Asian people are somehow inferior to whites and that there is a Jewish conspiracy to run the world. Of course, it’s not just the BNP who believe those two stupidities. There’s one other thing about the BNP and particularly Griffin, that’s never changed – the leader has always surrounded himself with his acolytes, nearly all of whom have long and impressive criminal records and/or associations. Tony Lecomber, who was recently thrown out of the BNP for allegedly suggesting the assassination of a government minister, is a convicted bomber. He was also convicted of making grenades, detonators and bombs and later for assaulting a Jewish teacher. BNP member Stephen Richardson was jailed in September 1993 for three years for assaulting a black building worker. There are many more examples posted around the blog.

Violence, intimidation and the BNP are rarely separate. Electors in the Isle of Dogs in 1993 found fifteen to twenty nazis outside polling stations. Not surprisingly, many people were too frightened to vote. Later one local resident recalled, ‘All the Asian and black people stayed inside. My neighbour has a black son, and she had sent him away for a couple of days for protection.’ Anti Nazi League (now absorbed into Unite Against Fascism) members leafleting on the Island were attacked and in some cases beaten up.

Where the BNP or other racist and fascist organisations are active, the level of racial harassment and violence goes up dramatically. This has been clearest in the areas of South East London around the BNP’s headquarters in Welling. This was the area where schoolboys Rolan Adams, Rohit Duggal and Stephen Lawrence were killed. As the newspaper, the Voice, said of Stephen Lawrence, who was killed while waiting at a bus stop, ‘His only crime was being a black man in modern day Britain’. The same pattern of attacks was clear in East London. A week before the Millwall by-election in September 1993, Quddus Ali, a seventeen year old college student, was viciously beaten on the Whitechapel Road. Following Derek Beackon’s BNP victory racial attacks in the area rose 300 percent. The streets are simply not safe when the BNP is roaming round them.

The BNP made its first breakthrough in September 1993 when Derek Beackon was elected BNP councillor for Millwall. Violence and racist intimidation in and around Millwall were important. However, what was most important was the way the nazis used people’s fears and sense of hopelessness about education, about crime and, above all, about housing in order to scapegoat Bangladeshis and other black and Asian people, and to demand ‘rights for whites’. One man quoted in the Guardian (18 September 1993) stated, ‘It was a vote of protest and it’s going to work, it’s going to shake things up here.’ Housing was a massive problem, with local people finding it virtually impossible to get housing, as the London Docklands Development Corporation built expensive office blocks and apartments. Local people were squeezed out, and Bangladeshis were blamed. In fact Bengalis themselves were suffering even more from the same lack of affordable housing.

The BNP’s attitude to minorities was fairly clearly summed up by the BNP’s first councilor, Derek Beackon. ‘I am only going to represent the white people. I will not represent Asians. I will not do anything for them. They have no right to be in my great country’. On being asked about rubbish collection on the Isle of Dogs: ‘The Asians are rubbish and that is what we are going to clear from the streets’. On crime: ‘I don’t care what the Bengalis think. We are here for the white people.’

In public the BNP tells people it is concerned about their problems - lack of housing, unemployment, crumbling schools and hospitals. It also claims it is simply ‘nationalist’, putting ‘British’ people first. What does it really think? The BNP is clearly racist and anti-Semitic. The report on Racism and Xenophobia by the European Parliament described the British Nationalist Party as an ‘openly Nazi party whose leadership have serious criminal convictions, and whose crimes range from bomb making, organising illegal paramilitary groups, possession of firearms and a series of convictions under the Race Relations Act and Public Order Act…’

They claim the Holocaust didn’t happen. However, their then own magazine Spearhead stated, ‘Adolf Hitler showed the way to a proper, fair and final solution to the Jewish problem’.

The BNP is against democracy and a free press. ‘Democracy drives our youth onto the streets with limitless spare time to fritter away, the Jew comes forward and seduces them with his cunningly devised amusements, such as comic papers, sex films and rock and roll’ (John Tyndall in The Authoritarian State).

The BNP is against the NHS. ‘The NHS symbolises everywhere that is wrong with British society today - with its indiscriminate and promiscuous compassion and most of all its contention that everyone is entitled to the full range of health service benefits without regard for their circumstances.’

The BNP is against trade unions (except the ones it makes up itself). ‘People whose freedoms must be curbed are the pressure groups, the media and trade unions’.

The BNP is against women’s rights. ‘Much of the rampant feminism of our times is due to the general decline among the White Race of real manhood. The real man brings out the best in women.’

The BNP is against young people. ‘Our young people should undergo a period of compulsory national service to teach them discipline and obedience. ‘Pop’ music is of course one of the major weapons in the assault on white civilisation’ (John Tyndall, The Authoritarian State).

On the BNP: ‘We are 100 percent racist, yes.’ (Richard Edmonds, 20 February 1993, the Guardian). Richard Edmonds was convicted of helping to destroy a statue of Nelson Mandela. Conviction for possessing an offensive weapon, a knife, carried while electioneering. Arrested on Sunday 19 September 1993 after being driven off Brick Lane by anti-Nazi protesters. BNP members launched a vicious racist attack on a black man and his white girlfriend. The man’s face was severely cut with a beer glass. One BNP member was sentenced to four years and Edmonds was given three months for this racist assault.

Griffin’s BNP saw something of a boost in popularity immediately following his acquittal at Leeds Crown Court in January (on half the charges of inciting racial hatred) and the sometimes violent protests against the prophet cartoons. The BNP immediately jumped on to the free speech bandwagon, claiming that free speech is the right of everyone – even if that right offends. Yet the BNP hypocritically demands the suppression of ‘Jerry Springer – the Opera’ because it doesn’t approve of its content. One rule for them…

That small bubble of popularity seems to have burst over the last few weeks. With the jailing of Luke Smith, one of the BNP’s former councillors, for football-related violence, and with the resignations and sackings of a number of high-profile members of the BNP (Tony Lecomber among them), swiftly followed by the resignation of Angela Clarke, one of the BNP’s more voluble councilors, everything seems to have gone suddenly pear-shaped for Nick Griffin. His personal and violent hatred of Muslims is causing problems for him both inside the party membership and amongst other white nationalists/nazis who aren’t directly associated with the BNP but would usually support it. While he seems to view Muslims as the arch-enemy, the rest of the nazi world wants to stick with the old game of blaming the Jews for everything that goes wrong. On this occasion, the dictatorial powers given to the leader of the British National Party seem to be being used to attack the wrong imagined enemy and a lot of the membership of the BNP don’t like it. Even the bombings in London last July didn’t accelerate the wave of anti-Muslim feeling that had been produced by the Twin Towers attacks, in the way that Griffin patently expected and had hoped to capitalise on.

Despite his efforts at publicity – and while he can be criticized for many things, it’s difficult to fault him as a self-publicist – his party simply isn’t doing very well. As fast as they get new councillors, they’re sacked for non-attendance, leave in a fit of pique, get jailed or get in and do absolutely nothing. Current membership of the BNP only stands at around six thousand and while that’s six thousand too many, it’s very far from the mass movement that Griffin would like us all to believe he has behind him.

All Griffin seems to have as an answer to this is the continuing formation of new, irrelevant and unnecessary appendages for the BNP, continued attacks on Muslims that aren’t working and the occasional verbal sideswipe at Jews, which are blatantly insane and increasingly seen by the population as almost laughable.

The fact that the BNP continue to allow this buffoon to head up their party seems to indicate that there’s no-one better waiting in the wings. Good. Maybe, when the doubtless disappointing (for the BNP) results are read out following the elections in May, it’ll be the end of both Griffin and the BNP.