Though Cowards Flinch

Have you heard the one about Nick Griffin, former Lib Dem MP Alex Carlile and a conviction for incitement to racial hatred?

If not, you will before the General Election’s out. Over and over again.

The recently launched anti-fascist media organisation Expose the BNP is aiming to lay bare the real intentions of the BNP and halt the normalisation process in the media whereby the BNP are treated as an ordinary political party.

The campaign argues that media workers have a special role to play in challenging the representatives of the far right when they are granted column inches or air time.

In some ways I sympathise with this argument, journalists are often poorly briefed on the BNP and there have been a few instances in recent months where the BNP and the far right in general have had an easy ride.

The two obvious examples that come to mind are the fiasco with Mark Collett being interviewed as the ordinary man in the street on Radio 1 and Channel 4′s ‘Young, Angry and White’ where the youth organiser of the National Front was presented as some misguided, troubled young man.

However, I have serious reservations about the underlying assumptions of this campaign. A failure to understand the way the BNP is gaining support and the impact this has on the process of normalisation and overestimating the ability of the media to influence BNP support will limit it’s effectiveness.

Firstly and most importantly, I think the campaign has got things the wrong way round. Favourable press coverage is a consequence of the growing normalisation of the BNP not a major contributing factor.

For understandable reasons fascist groups in Britain have generally got a pretty bad press since the outbreak of the Second World War. The BNP is no exception to this and hostile press coverage towards them has become a regular feature at election times.

Nevertheless, many fascist groups have used the press to win recruits and spread their ideas, either through the shock value of the ideas they espouse or taking advantage of journalists’ naivety about what they really represented. Combat 18 quickly learnt the value of the former approach in the 1990′s while the nice, moderate patriots of the National Democrats (who weren’t the old NF, honest) tried the latter at roughly the same time.

In this fascinating personal account of life in the National Front and the New National Front (the forerunner of the BNP) a former organiser describes how he combined both methods to generate large amounts of publicty for a march in the West Midlands that, in reality, they didn’t have the numbers to pull off.

Some far right groups still try this approach, with varying levels of success. The best example of it in recent years in the English Defence League’s amazing capacity to publicity when their marches involved a dozen blokes hiding behind police near a mosque in Harrow.

The BNP, however, do not rely on the media to build support and win recruits. For some years, the party has been following the ‘ladder strategy’ of taking power. This is not to say what the media prints plays no part in this but it’s not a very important part.

First outlined by National Front activist Steve Brady in the 1980′s (whatever happened to him?) the strategy envisages taking power step by step, gaining representation on a lower rung of the power ladder before moving up to the one above it.

This is what has been happening over the last decade. The BNP won its first county councillor last year in Burnley, where the party first made a breakthrough in 2002, and representation in the European Parliament after a decade of standing in local elections all across Yorkshire and the North-West.

This is the process of normalisation at work as the BNP become a familiar part of the electoral process for millions of ordinary voters through grassroots political work. They have achieved this in the face of the approach favoured by ‘Expose the BNP’. Formerly hostile press coverage is changing because people unfortunately increasingly regard the BNP as a legitimate part of the political process.

Without wanting to labour the point, it’s not because of overly favourable coverage from The Sentinel or the Barking and Dagenham Recorder that Stoke or parts of East London have become electoral strongholds for the BNP.

I think the best illustation of this argument is this article about the work of BNP councillors in South Oxhey (where the BNP had county councillor elected after first having representatives elected to Three Rivers district council):

TWO councillors from the far right British National Party (BNP) were entertained by a newly-formed community rugby club in South Oxhey yesterday.

The South Oxhey Rugby Club Exiles invited county councillor Deidre Gates, and Three Rivers district councillor Seamus Dunne, to share their post match drinks, and a game pie cooked in their honour at The Dick Whittington pub in Prestwick Road.

Mat Sharpe, who got the club off the ground at the start of the season in September, said: “If it had not been for the help given by these councillors, our club could not exist…

“South Oxhey is an area of high deprivation, and although there are five football clubs there isn’t much else for people to do for physical exercise.”

Anticipating criticism for accepting the BNP’s help – refused by the South Oxhey Community Choir – he said: “I am not interested in politics, but I know this club is a good thing for the community and I need help from wherever I can get it.

I’d be interested in seeing what supporters ‘Expose the BNP’ think would have been an appropriate response to this or what can be done about it. A rapid press release drawing attention to the convictions of a councillor in Burnley for football related violence? A link to the Youtube video of Nick Griffin spouting offensive bile on the Cook Report in 1997?

The second problem with the strategy of Expose the BNP is a shorter and more glaring one: what they are offering is nothing new.

We’ve been here before. The run up to last year’s European elections saw a huge campaign in the press and negative stories about the BNP making a regular appearance, particularly in papers like the Manchester Evening News. As Searchlight’s Nick Lowles notes anti-BNP stories were placed in the national press on a daily basis in the run up to the poll.

Whatever reason people attribute to Griffin and Brons election to the European Parliament, favourable press coverage was not among them.

The BNP have come to anticipate such campaigns and plan to undermine their impact. The BNP’s European election campaign last year which attempted to invoke the Battle of Britain, with the use of Spitfires, posthumously recruiting Churchill and plagiarising his speeches, was designed to wrong-foot opponents pinning the Nazi label on the party. Anti-fascists walked right into it because they didn’t have an alternative strategy beyond exclaiming that this was totally illegitimate because they were Nazis.

The motivations of the people behind ‘Expose the BNP’ are admirable, the results may be disappointing.