Nick Griffin, BNP leader
The British National Party leader, Nick Griffin, presents himself as a modern, respectable politician but he is nothing of the sort. For over 30 years he has been a hardline fascist. He is also a champion of the politics of factionalism which he uses to shore up and preserve his own position against those who would challenge his authority.
In June 2009 Griffin was elected to the European Parliament, and is using his position as an MEP to build links with openly Nazi and fascist politicians internationally.
Born in 1959 Griffin attended his first meeting of the National Front, a fascist predecessor of the BNP, when he was aged just 15. However he did not officially join the party until he was a student at Downing College, Cambridge, where he studied law gaining a lower second-class degree. He rose quickly through the ranks, becoming the NF's national student organiser in 1978.
In 1980, Griffin launched Nationalism Today, in support of "Third Positionist" fascism, which claimed to transcend the evils of both capitalism and communism. During this period Griffin developed a close political relationship with Roberto Fiore, a convicted Italian terrorist, who was then living in the UK on the run from justice. When Fiore arrived in Britain he was a member of NAR, a fascist terrorist group active in Italy in the 1970s and 1980s. NAR members bombed Bologna railway station in 1980, killing 85 people. Today Fiore leads Forza Nuova, a hardline Nazi group.
In 1986 the NF was torn apart by a bitter feud. The "radicals" grouped around Griffin and Derek Holland and proclaimed themselves the "official" NF while the "reactionaries" coalesced around Martin Wingfield and Ian Anderson, who established the NF "Support Group". During this split Griffin honed his skills at plotting against and smearing his colleagues, intrigue and using disciplinary tribunals and expulsions to manipulate himself into a position of strength.
Griffin turned his faction into a small core of trained political activists, which he called the "political soldiers". It was a forerunner of today's elite in the BNP, the voting members, who have to undergo ideological training.
In 1986 Griffin and two NF leaders took a fundraising trip to Libya as guests of Colonel Gaddafi's regime. He also made contact with Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran, the US black separatist leader Louis Farrakhan and both sides of the conflict in Ireland. But in 1989 he abandoned the NF for the International Third Position (ITP), Fiore's revolutionary "nationalist" sect.
Griffin finally joined the BNP in 1995. In the same year he became editor of The Rune, an antisemitic quarterly produced by Croydon BNP, which he used as a platform for opposing the "modernisation" of the BNP, accusing those who wanted change of "rainbow Conservatism". He also declared that the BNP should prioritise denying the Holocaust to schoolchildren.
It was his statements denying the Holocaust in The Rune that led to Griffin's conviction in 1998 of distributing material likely to incite racial hatred. He was given a nine-month prison sentence suspended for two years.
During the trial Griffin made his notorious statement: "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 Earth was flat … I have reached the conclusion that the 'extermination' tale is a mixture of Allied wartime propaganda, extremely profitable lie, and latter witch-hysteria."
Griffin was elected leader of the BNP in September 1999. During his election campaign he used Tony Lecomber, who had served two three-year prison sentences on explosives charges and for assaulting a Jewish teacher, as his hatchet man to circulate personal smears against Tyndall.
Attempting to emulate groups such as the French National Front, with which the BNP has close links, Griffin devoted himself to making the BNP electable by toning down the BNP's hardline Nazism. The moderation was only skin deep. Replying to criticism from other parts of the far right, Griffin told a private meeting of American nazis and racists that while the BNP needed to change to get elected, his core beliefs - that of the superiority of the white race - remained his driving force.
In the 2001 general election Griffin stood in Oldham in the hope of exploiting that year's race riots and gained 16% of the vote. In 2002 the BNP first won success in council elections (apart from Derek Beackon's short stint as a councillor in Tower Hamlets in 1993-94). In the 2005 general election Griffin stood in Keighley, West Yorkshire, again trying to exploit racial tensions. He polled 4,240 votes (9.16%).
In 2006 Griffin and Mark Collett, a BNP officer, faced two trials on charges of using words or behaviour likely or intended to stir up racial hatred. The charges arose from speeches at BNP meetings filmed for a BBC documentary. The first trial ended with the jury unable to reach a verdict. After a retrial both were acquitted.
Throughout his leadership of the BNP Griffin saw off several rivals and dissidents, including Tyndall himself whom Griffin expelled, was forced to reinstate and expelled again.
Dissent in the BNP came to a head in December 2007 when a rebel faction led by two national party officers, Kenny Smith and Sadie Graham, called for the sacking of two other national officers, Collett and David Hannam, because of their incompetence and unacceptable behaviour. The biggest crisis in the BNP since its formation in 1982, it quickly turned into a challenge to the leadership of Griffin himself.
However Griffin is a crafty and manipulative tactician and the rebels proved no match to Griffin's ability to hold onto the reigns of party power. The rebel leaders were quickly expelled and, out in the cold, never managed to capitalise on their largely justified grievances.
Griffin has always had links with US extremists. In 2006 he spoke at a conference organised by American Renaissance, a pseudo-scientific racist magazine, where he shared the podium with antisemites and Holocaust deniers. The audience was packed full of white supremacists including David Duke, a former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. It was his second turn at an American Renaissance conference; he had previously spoken there in 2002.
In October 2007 Griffin undertook an anti-Islam speaking tour of three US universities. The trip was organised and financed by Preston Wiginton, who also appealed for donations for Griffin on the Stormfront Nazi web forum.
In April 2008, Griffin met in London with three leading European extremist politicians. The meeting was organised by Arthur Kemp, the former agent for the South African apartheid regime and now in charge of the BNP's ideological training. Making the arrangements on behalf of the visitors was Georg Mayer, a senior officer in the Austrian Freedom Party. Mayer acted as the spokesperson for the short-lived Identity Tradition Sovereignty (ITS) group in the European Parliament until its collapse late last year.
Mayer brought with him Bruno Gollnisch, a French MEP and vice president of the far-right National Front, and Andreas Mölzer, an Austrian MEP and leading member of the Austrian Freedom Party.
Their presence confirmed Griffin's continued failure to break away from Holocaust denial and antisemitism. In January 2007 a French court handed Gollnisch a three-month suspended prison sentence and fined him €5,000 for denying the Holocaust. The court found he had "disputed a crime against humanity" in remarks he made during a news conference in the city in October 2004. Gollnisch, who was chair of the ITS group, had questioned the number of Jews who died in the Holocaust and said the "existence of the gas chambers is for historians to discuss".
Mölzer is the publisher of Zur Zeit, an Austrian political magazine in which racism, antisemitism and xenophobia are staple features. In an interview with Zur Zeit in spring 2008, Griffin assured Mölzer of his firm belief in "nationalist cooperation" to deal with the "Islamic threat" and "the tide of Third World immigration" and to oppose the entry of Turkey into the EU.
Griffin continued his strategy of building links with the European far right by addressing an open-air rally of the Hungarian fascist Jobbik party and its private army heavy mob, the Hungarian Guard, in Budapest in October 2008. Alongside him on the platform was Fiore. Griffin has been flirting with the Hungarian fascists since May when he met the Jobbik representatives Bela Kovacs and Zoltan Fuzessy in London.
A few days after his return from Hungary Griffin was cementing his relationship with the tiny anti-immigration, anti-Muslim and anti-Romani Czech National Party (NS) by addressing its rally to celebrate Czech independence. In his speech he railed against the accession of Turkey to the EU, saying that the introduction of millions of Muslims into the EU would "drive down wages, living standards and increase taxes". Griffin's trip, accompanied by several BNP activists, followed the visit by the NS leader, Petra Edelmannová, to the BNP's Red White and Blue festival in August.
