What is the British National Party?
The British National Party (BNP) is a far-right political party that operates throughout the UK. It was formed in 1982 from the remnants of the old National Front.
The BNP has claimed over 13,000 members. However it exaggerates its support and paid up members are fewer than 6,000 in number.
When the party was led by its founder John Tyndall (1982-1999) it was easily identified with Nazism through its extreme and provocative activities, associations and publications as well as its active denial of the facts of the Holocaust.
However, the BNP has undergone a number of ideological shifts and personnel changes during its 28 years.
.gif "John Tyndall (left) poses with fellow Spearhead members in the Notting Hill HQ of Colin Jordan's National Socialist Movement in 1962")
Tyndall (pictured left) was deposed as chairman in 1999 by a faction of “modernisers” led by Griffin who, ironically, had been responsible for some of the more extreme articles in BNP publications such as Spearhead (which he secretly edited for a period) and in his own journal The Rune, which led to his conviction for inciting racial hatred in 1998.
Since Griffin’s takeover, the BNP has played down its antisemitism, but individual nazis remain, such as the veteran senior activist Richard Edmonds, a voluble antisemite and Holocaust denier. Also, the BNP continues to cultivate links to individuals and parties internationally that are clearly fascist or nazi.
Under Griffin’s leadership the BNP dropped its policy of forcibly repatriating non-white people from the UK to soften its extreme image for electoral gain.
The organisation still rejects integration, equality and basic human and civil rights for people it describes as “non-indigenous” or “civic British” and claims to put the interests of “the British people”, by which it means white Britons, first. So, while the BNP has attempted to distance itself from its past it remains a racist party in the European fascist tradition.
The BNP has described itself as British nationalist, racial nationalist and more recently, ethno-nationalist. Its leader, Nick Griffin, has at times also referred to the party as a civil rights movement, especially since its electoral defeat in May 2010.
In recent years the party has concentrated on opposing Islam and actively campaigns against the establishment of mosques, halal meat and what it calls the “Islamification” of the UK.
It claimed in January 2011 that white people were being “exterminated” from British cities by means of “ethnic cleansing”. It also seeks to build support by a populist opposition to the war in Afghanistan.
Griffin and his colleague Andrew Brons were elected to the European Parliament in 2009. Since then the party has gone downhill, with severe financial problems and disastrous management by Griffin, who acts as a dictator.
Many officers and activists have left or been expelled. Griffin’s main goal currently is to secure election for a second term as an MEP to secure his personal financial position (two terms qualify MEPs for a pension) and, politically, to establish himself as the veteran voice European extremism.
