Though Cowards Flinch

As others have noted, the recent capitulation of the BNP to the EHRC and the decision to allow non-white members changes nothing about the party (apart from giving them the opportunity to claim legal approval as a non-racist party, cheers Trevor Philips).

The fallout from the decision is also helping provide a degree of consistency to stories about the BNP in the mainstream media.

One angle of this story is a new variant on the staple of pieces on the BNP; another round of speculation that the BNP is undergoing internal turmoil, is facing a serious split, will shortly see Griffin removed as leader or expelled from the party, etc.

This time the fantasy is that BNP members are leaving in droves for the more hardline National Front as a result of the sell-out by Griffin and co:

Rise of the NF in Yorkshire

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I’ve no idea what the BBC are playing at here. The idea that the National Front is about the be rejuvenated by an exodus of hardline BNP members is laughably silly. Five minutes research on Google would reveal that the NF is not a functioning political organisation. It’s best seen as a holding pen for racist misfits and people expelled from other fascist parties for being suspected police spies or drunken incompetents.

Is this shower on the brink of winning over BNP branches across the country? No.

The evidence offered in the clip that this could take place is an interview with a former BNP organiser who is now a member of the NF and pointing the 7.4% of the vote the NF received in a by-election in Hull 13 months ago.

The latter is hardly ground-breaking success and the former would be a bit more convincing if the man in question wasn’t Steve Smith. Steve isn’t a recent departure disgusted by the sell-out who quit to join the NF. In fact, he left the BNP around seven years ago and was heavily involved in the English First Party in the intermediate period.

Deja vu

This isn’t a one off lapse in concentration. For as long as I’ve been an active anti-fascist (which, in fairness, is not a huge amount of time!) stories about internal troubles in the BNP that could provoke its collapse and the apparently precarious position of Griffin as chairman have been written or circulated by anti-fascists indulging in a bit of wishful thinking every few months.

Take this offering which appeared 11 years ago in Searchlight magazine:

NICK GRIFFIN intended the recent BNP’s Red White and Blue festival to be a celebration of his first year as leader of the party. In fact, it turned into an embarrassing public display of the crisis gripping the country’s largest fascist party.

With several leading party officers not present, the gathering was held against the background of growing animosity towards Griffin and increasingly strong-arm tactics by the leader…

The Advisory Council meeting will determine whether this schism will erupt into a party split.

If any of that sounds familiar you must be a subscriber!

These stories aren’t works of fiction though. There has been some huge internal disputes inside the BNP in recent years and the main issue in virtually all of them has been people opposed to Griffin’s position and conduct. Steve and Sharon Edward’s took the bulk of one of the party’s early growth regions (the West Midlands) with them when they left in 2001, Sharon Ebank’s tried to do the same several years later after being expelled, Griffin’s right man Tony Lecomber was caught red-handed trying to solicit the murder of establishment figures, Sadie Graham threatened to split the party and the entire organisation’s membership list was leaked online.

A focus on these events and it may seem fair to construct a narrative where the party is always on the verge of collapse, lurching from one crisis to the next. However, the end result of all this ‘turmoil’ is that the BNP is more successful now than it ever has been while Nick Griffin is still leader and facing no serious challenge.

The reasons why these internal rumblings have such little political significance beyond the short-term are simple: There is no figure on the fascist right capable of challenging Griffin’s position as BNP leader or has a credible alternative to his ideas about the necessity of moderating the party’s image and publicly stated policies. He was no serious challengers either inside the BNP or outside it.

Middle management

Most prominent BNP members are veterans of the far right and after the vicious internal struggle that destroyed the old National Front in the 1980′s (in which some of them were on opposing sides) reached the conclusion that the mainteance of unity was of paramount importance.

A long-term weakness of the BNP, and something we should be thankful for, is the failure of this existing leadership to recruit and retain a layer of competent ‘middle-management’ able to effectively organise electoral interventions without the baggage of a well documented openly extremist past or serious criminal convictions.

Either something about the existing leadership rubs these individuals up the wrong way producing destructive friction, for an example of this see the  hilarious departure of Andrew Spence – the most successful far right parliamentary candidate to date, or they are transparent opponents of the party, like Sadie ‘Shady’ Graham and her hapless boyfriend Matt Pringle, who work hard in order to reach a position where they can best destabilise things.

This process is evident at a local level as well. The main figures in Cumbria BNP are long-standing fascists. Clive Jefferson has been a member for years while both Martin Wingfield and Paul Stafford were in the NF. While these individuals remain a constant unwelcome presence the last few months has seen the departure of both Simon Nicholson, a competent new recruit was just 16 votes away from becoming the party’s first county councillor in December 2008, in unclear circumstances and the acrimonious resignation of former Carlisle organiser Alistair Barbour who has cultivated a refreshing hatred of his former colleagues.

The obvious by-product of this is that there are no figures in the party willing or able to challenge Griffin. The only ones with the profile to do it are veteran fascists who (unfortunately) know the results of a bout of infighting.

Only show in town

Another reason we have to be thankful for is that the BNP’s success in the last 10 years hasn’t been replicated by any other far right party.

The myriad of would be competitors from existing fascist or neo-Nazi groups have ably spent the last decade proving that for all the time they spend meeting in grim pubs up and down the country they couldn’t organise a piss up in a brewery.

This would not be much of a change from their performance in previous decades, given that it’s much the same people running these tiny groups, were it not for the glaring comparison with the BNP. Many have sunk without trace, Combat 18 being the best example, while others do little but update a website, like the fruitloops from the International Third Position.

The losers of the various disputes inside the BNP during this same period should have had better prospects for success, given that some of them like the Edwards’ and Sharon Ebanks were effective local organisers, and many did set up their own political organisations.

The fact that groups such The Freedom Party, New Nationalist Party, the England First Party and Voice of Change  are little more than short entries on Wikipedia now gives a good indication of the success they had.

The elements inside and outside the BNP opposed to him have been stripped of all political significance by the success of Griffin’s strategy. The angry mutterings (and, importantly, nothing more) that emanate from these people over the internet is a testament to the way they have been totally defeated.

The only far right organisation with even a fraction of the BNP’s profile and success is the English Defence League, which is different kettle of fish altogether.

There is little prospect of an exodus from the BNP to the National Front. Even if hardliners in the BNP are privately critical of the capitulation to the EHRC there is literally nowhere else for them to go beyond joining the ranks of disgruntled former members posting on sites like Stormfront about how they are permanently offended by all aspects of modern Britain.

Griffin will remain BNP leader in the foreseeable future and it’s a safe bet that this will be accompanied by plenty of articles detailing how the party is on the verge of collapse.

Complacent anti-fascists convinced that the BNP are in danger of imploding, and bank on that accordingly, are backing a loser.