The BNP thrive off an anti-establishment and anti-politics fervour. They thrive on a victim mentality that is ingrained in their hardcore supporters and attract whites who buy into that victim mentality. I get that. And MaidMarian in the comments earlier made a good point about the BNP being more about getting their message to be common currency, with votes and political office only as a secondary concern.
But there is a danger of going the other way too far. I don’t think BNP affiliated teachers should be banned from the classroom, and Neil Robertson makes a good case here, but some seem to worry that we should avoid doing anything that helps Nick Griffin play the victim card.
Listen folks, if you want to stop the BNP then volunteer for the Hope Not Hate campaign, don’t become so afraid of stepping on the BNP’s toes. There is a need to continue delegitimising the BNP while not letting them paint themselves as victims. But I refuse to go so far that we have to accept the BNP as equal partners because the alternative is that we feed their sense of victimhood. When will people call them out for that?
You must be aware the Equalities and Human Rights Commission is saying it may launch a legal action against the BNP for its discriminatory membership policies. Their press release today states:
The letter, sent to the party chairman Nick Griffin, outlines the Commission’s concerns about the BNP’s compliance with the Race Relations Act. The letter asks the BNP to provide written undertakings by 20th July that it will make the changes required by the Commission. Failure to do so may result in the Commission issuing an application for a legal injunction against the BNP.
The Commission has a statutory duty, under the Equality Act 2006, to enforce the provisions of the Act and to work towards the elimination of unlawful discrimination. This duty includes preventing discrimination by political parties.
The Commission thinks that the BNP’s constitution and membership criteria may discriminate on the grounds of race and colour, contrary to the Race Relations Act. The party’s membership criteria appear to restrict membership to those within what the BNP regards as particular “ethnic groups” and those whose skin colour is white. This exclusion is contrary to the Race Relations Act which the party is legally obliged to comply with. The Commission therefore thinks that the BNP may have acted, and be acting, illegally.
Anything that continues to highlight the BNP’s racist policies is good for me, especially since the BNP cannot say here that their membership policies merely echo those organisations such as the National Black Police Association (which has never had a bar on race).
But why has it taken them so long to launch this anyway? It’s good publicity now for everyone involved, but this BNP policy isn’t new, is it? Is this a belated attempt by Trevor Phillips to shore up his position?
Watch the press conference here (info via Zohra at the F Word)
Recently eGov sent the BNP a list of the ‘85 Questions’. We have now received an answer to the first twenty questions, while the other questions remain unanswered, with no indication of when they will be. The response was written by Lee John Barnes, a member of the BNP’s legal affairs’ team and a well-known blogger. Below his unedited response, a number of us have printed our collective reaction to his answers:
As I’ve noted before, there’s a Laffer Curve implicit here. If nobody ever egged Nick Griffin, then he’d never get egged, which I presume nobody wants. On the other hand, if he was egged every single time he went out, then he’d never leave his house – result, no eggings. But I really don’t believe that we’re on the right hand side of that Laffer Curve, not yet.
And in this particular case, the egging itself is actually a very important speech act and a significant contribution to our national debate. Based on the fact that they got two MEPs elected, non-white British citizens might justifiably be looking with suspicion at their white neighbours today, thinking that a significant proportion of us were secretly harbouring fascist sympathies.
And as a commenter notes right underneath that blog post: “As I recall, the fascists didn’t like it when people chucked bricks at them back in 1936; Mosley’s Blackshirts didn’t gain political support after that, they lost it.”
So frankly, I can’t say I have I did that much hand-wringing over Nick Griffin’s pelting. It is our democratic right to signal disgust at fascists and the pelting didn’t go completely over-board. Though I would probably draw the line at Unite Against Fascism basically stalking the guy and trying this at every possible event.
[This concludes Jai's 85 questions that the BNP need to answer, but are still refusing to do so- Rumbold's note]
Religious impact of a BNP government
74. During an interview on Sky News with Adam Boulton in June 2009 shortly after the relevant elections, Nick Griffin clearly stated that he would use the current Saudi Arabian policy on non-Islamic places of worship as a guideline for official policies towards non-Christian places of worship under a BNP government, thereby effectively turning Britain into a Christian version of Saudi Arabia. Therefore, upon the election of a BNP government, will it be legal to build new non-Christian places of worship?
75. Will it be legal to maintain existing non-Christian places of worship or will they be a) allowed to fall into disrepair or b) destroyed?
76. What will be the official BNP policy towards non-Christian white/Caucasian British citizens who have adopted other religions (eg. Buddhism, Hinduism, Sikhism, Islam or any others) or are the children of such individuals?
[This continues Jai's 85 questions that the BNP need to answer, but refuse to do so- Rumbold's note]
Social and legal impact of a BNP government (cont…)
55. What percentage of a non-white British citizen’s legal testimony will be deemed equal to the testimony of one white/Caucasian British citizen?
56. Will non-white British citizens have the legal right to prosecute white/Caucasian British citizens, and if so, under what specific conditions/restrictions?
57. Will non-white British citizens have the legal right to defend themselves against prosecution by white/Caucasian British citizens, and if so, under what specific conditions/restrictions?
Thanks go to Jonathan Bartley of the think tank Ekklesia, who asked the first one:
“On the programme [BBC1's Big Questions] today, I used one of the questions posted by Jai on the Pickled Politics blog and asked newly elected BNP MEP Andrew Brons whether, given that we can now determine people’s origins from hundreds of years ago, he would take a DNA test to determine whether he has non-european ancestry, and if so, whether he would then submit to ‘repatriation’ in line with BNP ideas.”
[This continues Jai's 85 questions that the BNP need to answer: these ones are my favourites- Rumbold's note]
Medical impact of a BNP government
20. What contingency measures does the BNP plan in order to effectively deal with the likely massive increase in accident- and illness-related casualties and deaths amongst the British population due to the rapid collapse of the NHS upon the pre-emptive emigration and/or expulsion/repatriation of non-white British citizens currently working as medical professionals in the NHS, considering that 16% of nurses are non-white, as are 40% of new dentists and 58% of new doctors (figures: May 2009)?
Economic impact of a BNP government
21. What contingency measures does the BNP plan in order to maintain the British population’s current standard of living if, upon the election of a BNP government, the United States leads and enforces an international trade embargo on British goods and services, along with applying sanctions and terminating foreign financial and business investment in/business ties with the United Kingdom? Particularly when, along with the United States, the fastest growing economies include China, India and Brazil — incidentally, all majority non-white countries — and are projected to join the United States as global superpowers during the next few decades?
[Today marks the start of Jai's 85 questions that the BNP need to answer- Rumbold's note]
Role models, affiliations, and policies of senior members of the BNP
1. Would Nick Griffin, Andrew Brons and all other members of the BNP be willing to submit to multiple independent DNA tests in order to confirm that none of them have any non-European ancestry within a particular timeframe (eg. the last 3000 years) ?
2. If Nick Griffin, Andrew Brons, or any other members of the BNP are found to have any non-European ancestry at all within the timeframe mentioned above, would the individuals concerned be willing to resign their membership of the BNP immediately and, upon the election of a future BNP government, submit to all the policies which would be implemented, including repatriation to a country which is the closest match for their non-European ancestry?
About ten years ago Nick Griffin gave a prominent speech in the United States at a American Friends of the British National Party event. In fact you can watch the speech online, and he says in his speech:
There’s a difference between selling out your ideas and selling your ideas. And the BNP isn’t about selling out its ideas, but we are determined to sell them. Basically that means to use saleable words such as freedom, security, identity, democracy. Nobody can criticise them. Nobosy can come at you and attack you on those ideas – they are saleable. Perhaps one day, by being rather more subtle, once we’re in a position where we control the British broadcasting media, then perhaps one day the British people might change their mind and say ‘yes, every last one must go’. Perhaps they will one day. But if you hold that out as your sole aim to start with, you’re not going to get anywhere. So instead of talking about racial purity, we talk about identity.
So we know the BNP hide behind words like ‘identity’ in order to push racial purity – after all their leader admits it. Anyway, it now turns out that the white supremacist and Holocaust Museum terrorist – James von Brunn – attended those meetings too. The Washington Post reports:
Von Brunn sometimes spoke of having fought for the wrong side in World War II, Blodgett said, and the two men sometimes attended meetings in Arlington County of the American Friends of the British National Party, which raised funds for the British white supremacist group.
Blodgett said that von Brunn never spoke of violent action in their conversations but that “a lot of these people, when they get toward the end of life, they say they’ve wasted all these years hating, and they want to make a statement somehow.”
Still think there’s no link between the BNP and violence?
At the time the BNP were forging close links with a variety of US white supremacists and the party’s leader Nick Griffin remains close friends with powerful American neo-Nazis such as David Duke, a former Klu Klux Klan leader and Don Black, another KKK chap who went on to found Stormfront and was placed on the UK’s banned list two months ago.
According to the Post, Von Brunn and Blodgett would regularly attend meetings in Arlington County of the American Friends of the BNP, which raised funds for the British white supremacist group.
The American Friends was wound up by Coterill in 2001 after the Southern Poverty Law Centre, which investigates American white supremacists, started looking into its fundrasing – but the links between the BNP and their sympathisers stateside remain strong.
Remember, a picture of Nick Griffin speaking alongside former KKK leader David Duke was unearthed recently too. Of course, none of the mainstream broadcasting outlets – who are busy condemning people for throwing eggs at poor Nick Griffin – will raise any of thise. Doing research is too much work these days.
If anyone can find a picture of Griffin alongside Von Brunn I’ll treat you to lunch, I promise.
There are two strategic reasons why the BNP was elected. First, the Labour party vote split and collapsed. Secondly, the left was split by infighting and small, inconsequential parties that had not much separating them. These things can be debated, and it’s right to ask why the Labour party has failed the working classes.
What does annoy me though are attempts by rightwing commentators, who really should know better, to pin the blame on ethnic minorities themselves and “the left”. It’s a nice rhetorical trick that makes them feel better – it’s not like the Conservative Party ever appropriated the language of the racists and had any of their members use the slogan “If you want a nigger for a neighbour vote Labour“. I mean that is just the work of fantasy isn’t it?
On centre-right, Graeme Archer, who usually is quite a sensible writer, is blaming the left for the rise of the BNP. Apparently there are two main culprits:
1) The rise of the “race industry”
2) The funding of anti-racism festivals such as Rise, which now has been axed by Boris (there wasn’t enough money to fund his PR people probably).
But there’s a lot missing from this simple and naive narrative.
There has been a lot of debate recently about whether the BNP is a far-left, or a far-right party. While this is an intellectually interesting question, I really don’t see the practical point of this debate (something which Anton Vowl sums up very well). The BNP has policies which can be classed as left-wing, and policies which can be classed as right-wing.
What we need to do is identify the non-racist issues that the BNP are using to woo voters, and get the other parties to deal with them (such as better provision of English language teaching in schools for children who don’t speak English). This will leave the BNP as little more than a racist rump, thus depriving them of plenty of votes, while their remaining supporters can be identified as racists without worrying about marginalising ‘protest voters’.
What is heartening though is that everyone is scrambling to classify the BNP as far away from themselves as possible.
Andrew Brons, the BNP’s MEP for the Yorkshire region, has a heartwarming backstory:
“Brons, 61, started his nazi career in the National Socialist Movement, an organisation that was deliberately founded on Hitler’s birthday by Colin Jordan, the British nazi leader who died in April aged 85. NSM members were responsible for an arson campaign against Jewish property and synagogues in the 1960s.”
Gordon Brown today joins a series of sports and entertainment stars to urge voters to spurn the British National party in Thursday’s European and local elections.
In a letter published in today’s Guardian, signed by the Little Britain star Matt Lucas and the Manchester United defender Gary Neville, Brown says that voting for the BNP “is a vote against everything that makes this country great”.
Firstly, who the hell is going to be convinced to not vote BNP by Gordon Brown? My mother would probably vote BNP if the only alternative was him. Secondly, why is the letter in the Guardian? What percentage of Guardian readers are likely to vote BNP?
These kind of meaningless stunts by liberal do-gooders annoy the hell out of me. The BNP has become successful because it positions itself as the anti-politics and anti-establishment party. Don’t these people realise that by allying themselves with the despised establishment candidate they actually help the BNP? I wish the Guardian would stop encouraging and printing this crap.
The leader of the BNP group on Barking and Dagenham Council, Cllr Bob Bailey, is due before magistrates this week after being arrested on suspicion of drink-driving on Thursday night.
Cllr Bailey, of Sylvan Avenue, Chadwell Heath, who is also a candidate in Thursday’s European elections, has been charged with failing to provide a specimen of breath, having no insurance and no MOT after being stopped by police in London Road, Romford, at around 11.20pm. He is due before Havering magistrates on Friday.
Hope not Hate have come up with a short guide to life in a BNP-ruled Britain:
*The BNP would kick out all those people who were not born in Britain. What if every other country in the world kicked out the Brits? A staggering 5.5 million people would be sent back here – far more than would leave our shores. This includes 800,000 from Spain, most of whom are pensioners.
*If non-white people were ordered out of Britain then the NHS would collapse overnight. 16% of nurses are from minority ethnic communities, as are 40% of new dentists and 58% of new doctors!
Richard Barnbrook, the BNP’s London Assembly member, having been a bit quiet since his German Crusade (against Muslims) ended with him running away, has recovered his nerve and now seems ready to set out again to fight the good fight, as shown by the photo below.
A friend and colleague remembers Blair Peach, killed by a member of the Special Patrol Group in Southall during a demonstration against the National Front (NF) on 23 April 1979.
Blair Peach was born in New Zealand in 1946. After earning his degree at Victoria University and periods of work as a fireman and hospital orderly, he arrived in London in 1969.
From that year until his death on the streets of Southall on 23 April 1979, he worked at Phoenix School in Bow, East London. He was a dedicated and brilliant teacher who was much appreciated by his pupils. As one of them wrote, after Blair’s death:
He was a different kind of teacher. His interest in his pupils was not confined to the schoolroom but extended into their homes, where he would visit and give advice and practical help whenever he could.
He was a man of high ideals, but ideals are no good if they are not put into practice. He always practised what he preached. At school he instituted a special class to help those children who had difficulty in reading and those classes were extended into the school holidays. He did this because he cared about these children and wanted them to be free thinking adults who would not be pushed about by the system. I know I will never forget him and he will always be remembered as a friend of the people.
A leaked BNP document orders BNP members not to refer to “British Asians” (or other such groups), as the correct term clearly is “racial foreigners.” When defending it, Nick Griffin argued that immigration has caused a “bloodless genocide”, which presumably means that the Anglo-Saxon members of the BNP are guilty of genocide as well. Although nothing in the document was too much of a surprise, it once again helps to undermine the BNP’s image that they like to project; that of good, honest, no-nonsense stout British yeomen. Rather they are a (fairly) media-savvy group of unpleasant racists.
The government are listening, says Philip Johnston in the Telegraph:
It is noticeable how the Government is suddenly responsive to concerns that many people have voiced over many years yet about which nothing was done at the time. Recantation is all the rage. Last week, a government-commissioned study said schools were no longer able to discipline unruly children properly. It took three years to reach a conclusion any teacher could have given in three minutes. They will be saying next that spelling and grammar are important. Now we have Phil Woolas saying that immigration has been allowed to grow so high that the BNP is picking up votes; Hazel Blears has discovered that political correctness has gone too far; Jack Straw has accepted that sharing people’s private data across Whitehall might not be a good thing…
Sounds like the Tory right are grateful the government is finally listening to the concern of BNP voters. Isn’t that nice.
Sport did a lot to shape my emerging politics. Norman Tebbit’s cricket test was confusing, because I supported England (though not against Viv Richards’ West Indies) though my Dad didn’t, and now I felt I didn’t particularly want to either. I discovered the emerging fanzine movement, subscribed to When Saturday Comes, and used to buy and browse others at Sportspages in Charing Cross in those pre-internet days. My first act of civic activism was in 1988: against ID cards, the project of the late and unlamented Tory MP and Luton Town chairman David Evans. (I felt even more strongly about plastic pitches, on which we always lost). I got a Football Supporters Association petition against and hawked for signatures at Roots Hall.
Football did a lot to introduce me to racism and to anti-racism too. John Barnes scored the greatest ever England goal against Brazil in the Maracana. England won 2-0 but the National Front contingent chanted one-nil. Barnes’ goal didn’t count. All hell broke out as John Barnes signed for Liverpool, captured in Dave Hill’s brilliant book Out of His Skin, with the famous picture of Barnes’ back-heeling a banana off the pitch at Goodison Park. Everton had a racism problem. At one Everton-Arsenal game where the Gunners had four black players, the racism was the worst you could ever hear. (At another, Arsenal were given a standing ovation at the end for playing Everton off the park on the way to the title).
Outside Selhurst Park in my Everton tracksuit, the voice behind me “Even the Pakis are supporting Everton now”. And Everton had no black players. At a Southend game, racist abuse of a Wolves player was challenged behind the goal: “Oy, mate, what’s Andy Ansah going to think about that?”. Skinheads and sarky sixth-formers chanted “Ansah’s black, Angell’s white, we are f-ing dynamite”. Andy Cole was the King of Newcastle. As Jean Marie Le Pen was to find out in 1998, the far right has to choose between the new reality of national and local pride as it now was, or the all-white fantasies which meant they had no club or nation of their own.
(And there I was, on my own, on the terraces at the wrong end at West Ham at an FA Cup quarter final in 1991 (ticket from a tout, expensive at £25) as the chant went up “I’d rather be a Paki than a Scouse”. So was I safe? I wasn’t sure this was progress. I hadn’t entirely lost my accent so I thought I had better keep my mouth shut. My heart jumped as we scored, but I tried to keep my head down as we lost a thriller).
I’ll come back to this theme later, but first I want to highlight a post on ConservativeHome which publishes this BNP poster:
The comments underneath the article betray typical Tory thinking on the issue.
maybe the Conservative party should plainly announce it’s views on Europe,immigration etc and reconnect with it’s core voters.
Posted by: R.Rowan | April 10, 2009 at 18:28
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How about a policy on immigration and overcrowding.
Posted by: erica | April 10, 2009 at 19:15
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This is not really worrying. Let’s please not exaggerate the ‘threat’ posed by the BNP. The will not win any parliamentary seats, they will not control any councils. If they win a seat at the European Elections it will be because of the absurdity of the electoral system not because of their popularity.
If we want to fight the BNP effectively then we need to have a coherent,effective policy on immigration which we can sell to all reasonable people.
Posted by: Malcolm Dunn | April 10, 2009 at 19:27
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I heartily agree with most of the posts here. You can’t defeat the BNP by calling them rude names, however well deserved.
The only way to beat them is to fight them on their own ground. But we are failing to do this. They have policies on immigration – where are our policies? They have policies on multiculturalism. We mouth PC platitudes…. I could go on.
Posted by: Country Mouse | April 10, 2009 at 20:15
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When all three establishment parties more or less agree when it comes to issues like immigration, crime, MPs expenses etc, it’s no surprise people are looking for answers elsewhere. As poll after poll tells us, people care about these issues, and are unhappy with the Labour-Tory-Lib-Dim line.
Posted by: James | April 11, 2009 at 12:34
A few points. First, the BNP poster doesn’t even talk about immigration – rather about corruption, and yet it’s the first issue many raise.
This then suggests that rather than saying ‘we should never have our policy dictated by fascists‘, or saying ‘we shouldn’t be fighting them on their ground because they’re racists/fascists‘ – these Tory supporters actually want to reclaim the ground from the BNP.
Not everyone says that on the thread of course. But my point is – no one actually challenges the view that the Conservative Party should not have its views dictated to by the BNP, and that the party should take a different stance. And actually, I don’t find this altogether very surprising.
Julie Burchill attests to “trying hard to be a Christian” and she’s loving it.
“I believe, literally, in the God of the Old Testament, whom I understand as the Lord of the Jews and the Protestants. I’m a Christian Zionist, as well as a Christian feminist and a Christian socialist. But over the past two decades, almost without me knowing it, the Christian part has become the most important.”
But because Julie Burchill is the world’s leading expert on “Julie Burchill”, her exploration of the motivation that drives a Christian Zionist such as she, seems less to do with the Love of Christ than the hatred of secularists, atheists and Muslims.
“When one considers the shocking plight of British Muslims who seek to convert to Christianity, it seems to me quite offensive that Christianity should be dismissed by Dawkins and his like in the same breath as Islam.”
Edmund Standing over at Harry’s Placereports that a BNP front group is attempting to capitalise on the recent protests over the use of foreign labour:
“A new website has sprung up ostensibly offering non-partisan support for the current ‘wildcat’ strikes in Britain. The site states that it is run by the ‘British WildCats Strike Support Collective’… So, the Collective supports workers ‘regardless of race, creed or colour’? If that’s so, then why is the site being promoted by the likes of the CUNT lunatics and the Stormfront ‘white nationalist’ forum?”
Whatever the validity of the protests, let’s hope that the BNP struggle to benefit from them. Sadly, I don’t think that this will be the case, as the government has failed to set out coherent reasons for freedom of movement in the EU (remember Gordon Brown’s ‘British jobs for British workers’), while the dishonesty surrounding the impact of the EU on Britain (80%+ of our laws emanate from Brussels) means that it is difficult to have a frank discussion about what should happen. This is because the government doesn’t wish to be seen to be powerless in the face of EU legislation, so pretends that it is still in charge.
