Though Cowards Flinch

The first thing to say about this book is that there is never a wrong time to publish critical, in depth material about one of the most – if not themost – electorally successful far right parties in the UK. On the day of writing this review, the Daily Mirror ran with a splash about the presence of a man – Chris Hopgood – who describes himself as the leader of the British arm of the Ku Klux Klan. The article goes on to quote Hopgood giving complimentary praise to Nick Griffin, the leader of the BNP, and its success on being “elected by the people of England” [sic]. It is episodes like this where one can console themselves that for every time the party tries to present itself as mainstream something reminds us of the truth (for which we should be grateful).

(Read on)

Nick Griffin has been re-elected as the party leader of the British National Party by the skin of his teeth – receiving 1,157 votes compared to his rival, fellow MEP Andrew Brons who secured 1,148.

The nine votes between the two demonstrates deep tensions within the party, which have been going on for some time.

In 2008 Matthew Single – the man who later leaked documents containing the names and addresses of BNP members – along with other dissident members of the far right party Steve Blake, Sadie Graham and Kenny Smith, attempted to challenge the leadership of Nick Griffin. The campaign fell flat, and Griffin acted, but tension was brewing in the ranks of the party, compounded by mounting financial difficulties, low support in elections – despite achieving two MEPs – and the infamous marmite incident.

Since then, the anti-Griffin contingent of the BNP have needed someone who they felt was a little more stable, had a decent support base, and was not going to go “soft” – as, for some strange reason, many on the extreme right of the far right party, seem to think Griffin is, opposed to the supposed moderate, suits instead of jackbooted Griffinites.

Andrew Brons has for some time been the candidate of choice for the anti-Griffinites. The British Resistance blog – formerly The Green Arrow – held Brons as the “unity candidate”. In a supportive blog post, they noted:

Nick Griffin must be replaced. He has totally betrayed the trust of all the party’s activists and thrown away the results of their years of hard work. Why he did this, I really do not know but have my suspicions. I could list and document a dozen pages of the lies he has told. Those still supporting him, remind me of the black people in America who despite all the evidence continued to scream out that O.J. Simpson was innocent. They are in total denial as I once was.

While the divide in the party became better known, the spat between Griffin and Brons went public. Earlier this year some BNP members in Brussels went to listen to Brons speak while uninvited, Nick Griffin sat next to his colleague to offer his concerns about Brons’ conduct, and the friends he kept – including the now suspended member Eddy Butler (video below h/t Political Scrapbook).

I asked Eddy Butler ( butlere2010@hotmail.co.uk ) - using an anonymous email address:

why didn’t you ask Solidarity [the odd trade union funded and paid for by the BNP to represent fascists in court, led by that odd chap Pat Harrington] to represent you when you’d been expelled? If you dislike them so much, their subsequent refusal to represent you could’ve acted as political capital for you in your quest against Griffin.

[To which he replied]

I did consider it for my dosmissal [sic] as a member of staff as the action against me was taken by by Adam Walker and Pat Harrington and they breached several basic codes of practice but I coluldn’t be bothered as it isn’t in my nature. I joked with them that I could have and they squirmed when I said it.

Last night, as the result came in, Nick Griffin’s Facebook page has attracted supporters wishing him well, and requesting he bring unity to the party, examples of which include:

Janek On Hiatus Łestelski: Congratulations Nick, now the real hard work starts. WE CAN DO THIS!

Thomas Matthews: Let’s take the fight 2 our pathetic weak government now and put a stop 2 all the in-fighting!!

Uther Aurelius: I hope those that voiced their support for Andrew Brons won’t be shunned from the party and this can be seen as a fresh start with all the senior members pulling together in the same direction!

Ian Dempsey: Now get your arse in gear and reunite the party Nick………..Please!

Mary White: Excellent, well done Nick, hope all those nasty plotters who conspired the smear booklet will be expelled, named and shamed ! God Bless xx

But other forums have shown just how much Griffin is loathed within the party, and how many in the BNP are getting so tired that they either want to leave, or form a new party, with Brons at the head.

In a blog post last night on the Brons-supporting BNP Ideas website, comments included:

Caractacus says: Stuff it Andrew, I cannot now work or serve under NG, so lets get going with a new party? We have most of the brains and activists on our side, the old bnp is now finished under NG and Britain NEEDS a real Nationalist Party. You had half the votes of the remaining 2 year plys members, add to those ALL those NG as expelled, driven out or those who left in dispair and with YOU as the unifier WE will be the voice of Nationalism in Britian before Christmas.

French Mike says: I agree with Caractacus. Strike now while the iron is hot. Before too long disenchanted Nationalists will never return to the fold. This is the moment of opportunity otherwise all is lost.

Jan says: Well done Mr Brons.9 votes, pity not everyone received their ballot papers, I’m certain if they had the outcome would have been you as leader.

James says: I am deeply saddened to hear that Andrew Brons has lost the leadership vote. This result means not only a loss for Andrew but also a loss for the Party and the future hopes of our children.This is not a Victory for The Party, this is not a victory for our people, nor is it a victory for reason, justice or Patriotism; this is a Victory only for Nick griffin.This result will only add to the long list of our best people who have already left the Party.

dave says: Andrew you must form a new party the BNP are going nowhere with Griffin, its not as if you would be starting from scratch,you would be taking almost all of the membership activist that voted for you and more to come later when Griffin is found out for what he is, hundreds more nationalist who have either been expelled or have left the party are just waiting to ralley to the banner.

pam says: Andrew please, please,give us a chance we need a new party supported by those that supported you.

TheBNPrenaissance says: This was a golden opportunity for the party to go forward with a professional and articulate chairman who would have done more than just smirk and squirm on a platform like Question Time. I really have to consider my support for the BNP while the current chairman is in place.

Graham Wakefield says: Well then that is the end of the BNP.

The split in the party is deep and public, and I’ll be surprised if it survives this tense public display.

The BNP’s Simon Darby has claimed that David Cameron’s speech on immigration is “advocating BNP policy”. On the BNP website they also claimed that recent debate on multiculturalism is another milestone in the “Griffinisation” of British politics.

I oppose many of the things Cameron said in his speech, but we cannot forget that the BNP are opportunists, dressing themselves in populist clothing to score votes with people not typically inclined to fascist politics.

In fact, in comparing Cameron to Griffin, we risk forgetting exactly what the BNP’s opinions on immigration are. Namely:

• Griffin said last year that some UK residents should return to the country of their ethnic origin, and Muslim immigration should end entirely. He also once said that al-Qaeda is the real expression on Islam and that moderate Islam is false.

• In 2009 Griffin opined that The EU should sink boats carrying illegal immigrants to prevent them entering Europe.

• In 1996, Griffin told Wales on Sunday that “All black people will be repatriated, even if they were born here”

• When defending a leaked document explaining why BNP members should no longer use the words “British Asians,” Griffin argued that immigration has caused a “bloodless genocide”

• Richard Barnbrook, member of the London Assembly, now expelled from the BNP, once blamed tuberculosis on immigrants. According to Hope not Hate Barnbrook ranted: “Yes I have got TB. Immigration has caused this.”

• Though denying man-made climate change as “myth”, the BNP asserted in its 2010 election manifesto that  the bulk of the environmental problems are caused by “mass immigration”, and that an end to immigration will relieve pressure on our green belts.

• The BNP, if elected to office, would offer £50,000 to anyone not defined “White British” as an incentive to return to their country of ethnic origin.

• In the BNP’s 2005 manifesto, it promised that a ”BNP government would accept no further immigration from any of the parts of the world which present the prospect of an almost limitless flow of immigration: Africa, Asia, China, Eastern and South Eastern Europe, the Middle East and South America would all be placed on an immediate ‘stop’ list.” The same policy as stated in their 1997 manifesto (which read as follows: 1 - Future immigration of non-whites must be stopped; 2 - Non-whites already here must be repatriated or otherwise resettled overseas and Britain made once again a white country), only with fewer overtly racist references.

• British National Party (BNP) member Adam Walker, who taught at Houghton Kepier Sports College near Sunderland, posted comments online describing immigrants as “savage animals”. According to the Socialist Worker, he also claimed that parts of Britain were a “dumping ground” for the Third World.

You see my point. Cameron’s electioneering should be condemned in the strongest terms – but we should not forget just how extreme the BNP’s policies and opinions on immigration are (and that’s in public!).

Sources:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/8639097.stm

http://www.digitalspy.co.uk/forums/showthread.php?t=1066780

http://www.zen26144.zen.co.uk/resources/The%20BNP%20Uncovered.pdf

http://www.pickledpolitics.com/archives/4366

http://www.hopenothate.org.uk/news/article/599/BNP-chief-blames-immigrants-for-TB

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/blog/2010/apr/23/climate-sceptic-bnp

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/bnp-would-offer-pound50000-to-leave-the-country-1957668.html

http://1millionunited.org/blogs/blog/2000/01/01/the-the-bnp-is-an-anti-immigration-party-myth/

http://www.socialistworker.co.uk/art.php?id=21367

For the last decade, working out what’s going on internally in the BNP has been pretty simple. A low level of friction has been generated by the ongoing conflict between two well-defined groups. On the one side, the people in charge were a core group of members who had been prominent fascists for decades but had been convinced of a strategy based on getting involved in community politics and putting serious work into standing in elections.

Opposed to them were a coalition of the dwindling band of hardliners nostalgic for the days of John Tyndall, people who think Griffin and co have their hand in the till and individuals who are quite obviously working for Searchlight.¹

This time it’s not so simple and so the following is a rough guide to the confusing events of the last few months that will attempt to do justice to the rich tapestry of mayhem going on inside the BNP at present.

The short answer to what’s going on is that Nick Griffin has announced he’s finally standing down as BNP leader in 2013 and that veteran fascist Eddy Butler is attempting to oust him before then.

Eddy Butler has long been on the modernising wing of the far right and was one of several prominent individuals who realised that his vision of the future involved more than the occasional ritual of a city centre demo to antagonise the local Asian population and the reds. His political CV stretches back to the late 1970′s and he has been a key player in most of the major events on the far right during the last 30 odd years.

The longer tale starts before the General Election, when Butler was sacked allegedly because he raised issues of financial mismanagement. Butler has previous with this sort of stuff, he was part of the Freedom Party which split from the BNP in the year 2000 over similar issues.

Fun and games

This was one of a number of strange things that happened inside the BNP around that time to cheer up anti-fascists.

Butler wasn’t the only one sacked from his position. Mark Collett, ironically publicity director for the party at the time, got his name in the papers again after being removed for his position for apparently threatening to kill Nick Griffin and having dodgy expenses claims (something the people over at Lancaster Unity have been going on about for years).

Emma Colgate, then staff manager in the party, was also given the boot for unknown reasons. Colgate is a controversial figure in the party after she voted to install a minority Labour administation in Thurrock when the general line of the BNP is that Labour are Muslim-loving Marxists intent on flooding the country with benefit-claiming, job-stealing migrants. Collett is close to Colgate and was welcome at her election count in Thurrock, despite apparently wanting to kill her boss.

Interestingly, unlike most people unceremoniously booted from the party Collett and Colgate have kept their months firmly shut.

The opposite example is Simon Bennett. He really provided the icing on the cake by suspending the main BNP website days before the General Election and replacing it with a rant about money he was owed.

Simon Bennett is either a transparent grass or has totally lost his marbles. His posts on various far right forums where he tries to explain his actions and simultaneously threatening his critics like an extra from a crap Guy Ritchie movie may point to the latter. He’s also promising explosive revelations that will end Griffin’s political career (readers with good memories may remember Sharon Ebanks offering similar tantalising and non-existent information). He is a bit part in the rest of the ongoing saga.

Rum, sodomy and the fash

The initial response to Butler’s challenge from the BNP leadership was an anonymous blog entitled ‘Eddy Butler Exposed’ which accused him of lying, being a drunk, gay, using black prostitutes and hinted that he was a long-term Searchlight agent who had helped stall progress in the old National Front by switching his influential Tower Hamlets branch to the BNP in the late 1980′s. This caused long-term disruption in the movement until saviour Nick Griffin rescued things in the late 1990′s. The other evidence for the prosecution is that Butler’s well paid job in the Corporation of the City of London has been curiously overlooked by the BNP’s opponents.

This begs the question: what saviour Nick Griffin was doing in the earlier period? (Clue: making unintentionally hilarious videos about how he is an eco-pagan who wants to work with Muslims. Seriously)

The other problem with this line of argument is that it could be equally applied to the man repeatedly praised on the attack blog: Clive Jefferson. More on him in a minute.

Disappointingly, the blog has now been suspended. This is no gesture of goodwill. Griffin and co eventually realised that the lurid allegations were making them look like the bad guys.

Butler’s campaign has been gaining momentum and this has unnerved the BNP leadership. The decision of Nick Cass, former Yorkshire organiser, to run alongside Butler as his deputy prompted Simon Darby to resign as Deputy Leader after he suddenly, conveniently remembered it was only a temporary measure put in place during Griffin’s trial in 2006 that lasted, er, four years.

Other prominent figures in the BNP now backing Butler include Richard Edmonds, a former hardliner and ally of John Tyndall, and Michael Barnbrook, a delusional man who genuinely believes that he is responsible for kickstarting the parliamentary expenses scandal, who alludes to the blog ‘Eddy Butler Exposed’ as a reason why he’s backing the man.

Trouble in the East End

Michael Barnbrook was a parliamentary candidate in East London and since Butler has been active in the area for decades it’s not surprising he has support there.

What’s more surprising is the recent fate of another Barnbrook, Richard (no relation) the BNP’s only representative on the Greater London Assembly who has been sacked as Barking & Dagenham Organiser and hinted at more revelations to come.

Richard Barnbrook has been recovering from a failed attempt to be re-elected to Barking & Dagenham in the Goresbrook by-election. Eddy Butler was supposed to be his election agent but was sidelined by Clive Jefferson. Barnbrook’s discontent may be connected to this.

Eddy Butler doesn’t like Clive Jefferson and accuses him of covertly filming him, stealing his job and changing the rules of the leadership contest to stop him entering.

Trouble up north

Clive Jefferson is a local boy made good. He lives near where I used and I wouldn’t want to begrudge a local lad who has found success in the big wide world, far from it, but his rapid promotion does look a bit suspect.

From a lowly branch organiser who didn’t even contest a by-election held on the estate where he lives in 2008, he was promoted to North-West organiser in 2009 and then replaced Butler as National Elections Officer in 2010. He is now regularly praised as a genius elections guru despite having never won an election.

This career success hasn’t passed unobserved. Over on the far right forum Vanguard News Network veteran Scouse fascist Joey Owens has a mega-thread where he accuses virtually everyone he’s ever met of either working for Searchlight, being a grass or a policy spy but in particular Clive Jefferson and Jim Dowson. Owens has been quick to spot wrong ‘uns in the past (notably Sadie ‘Shady’ Graham), has he finally lost it?

There are rumours that Clive Jefferson (who I’m sure had a perfectly legitimate reason to change is surname from Aitken) has a serious criminal past and the overlooking of this is suspicious in the same way that it’s unusual Eddy Butler’s employment is never mentioned. Usually people like Searchlight will happily publicise convictions of BNP members for relatively minor offences, why has Jefferson gone unnoticed? He has also been in the thick of it during earlier internal troubles was accused of breaking and entering to relieve Sadie Graham’s allies of computers and documents.

That’s a reasonable summary of events so far. Stay tuned for more details though, I suspect this one is going to run and run as with the exception of Voice of Freedom editor Martin Wingfield and Yorkshire MEP Andrew Brons, virtually every senior member of the BNP is embroiled in this mess.

Long may this continue.

1. Anyone who doesn’t think Searchlight recruit members of the far right to inform on their activities and generally undermine them should ask Ray Hill, Andy Carmichael, Matthew Collins, Darren Wells or Andy Sykes exactly what they were up to.

One indisputable bright spot for left-wingers in the recent elections has been the electoral wipeout of the British National Party.

Not only did the party fail to advance in their electoral ‘strongholds’ of East London and Stoke, where they threatened to take control of local councils, they lost virtually every council seat they were defending.

This includes all 12 in Barking & Dagenham, the ‘jewel in the crown’ according to Nick Griffin.

Despite standing candidates in a record number of parliamentary seats they didn’t come anywhere near to winning a seat anywhere in the country and lost thousands of pounds in deposits.

It’s a fantastic result and people have been celebrating accordingly. According to the Daily Mirror far right politics have been wiped out in Barking & Dagenham, UAF see it as a humiliation prompted by a wave of popular revulsion against the Nazis while this morning’s Guardian raised the question of whether this was the end of the party altogether in an article where academic Matthew Goodwin predicts they will shortly implode.

Add to this yet another bout of spectacular infighting and you could be forgiven for thinking the party’s over.

Memories of what happened to Britain’s last relatively successful fascist party encourage this line of argument. In the 1979 General Election the National Front stood a record number of candidates, overstretched themselves and in 303 seats they only chalked up 191,000 votes. Demoralisation and vicious infighting finished off the party as a functioning political organisation not long afterwards.

Unfortunately, I think the comparison’s a misleading one. For one, it was in 2005 that the BNP polled 192,000 votes. This time they polled 563,743. It’s been a week since the elections and it’s time to stop celebrating and take a sober look at the results (though anyone involved in the campaign in East London has earned the right to feel smug for months to come).

The first obvious point is that anyone with a reasonable degree of familiarity with the British far right will know that the BNP is always having bitter internal squabbles. The recent fracas between former webmaster Simon Bennett who appears to have conveniently lost the plot a few days before the General Election, suspending the website and launching into a rant about the party’s leadership (superb timing Simon), is merely the latest in the ongoing ‘fascists who think Nick Griffin is a slimy con-man’ saga that has been a regular feature of far right politics for some 25 years.

It’s worth remembering that while some of these feuds have hilarious and serious short term consequences, such as the release of their membership list for instance, the impact on support for the BNP has been marginal.

As I remarked recently:

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….

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.

The most transparent piece of wishful thinking currently circulating as analysis is this piece from There’s Nothing British About the BNP announcing that the party has split in two so they’re taking a holiday. Job done eh?

There’s no doubt some antifascists deserve a holiday after the election though. In the run up to the election there was a massive mobilisation in Barking & Dagenham by Hope not Hate, UAF activists and the Labour Party. According to Nick Lowles almost 1000 people participated in their campaign delivering an incredible 250,000 leaflets in the borough. I wouldn’t be surprised if the total amount of anti-BNP literature distributed in the area topped half a million.

The Hope not Hate and UAF strategy of mobilising an anti-BNP majority, which generally means the Labour vote, at the polls seems to paid off. The Labour vote increased and BNP representation vanished. What’s there to worry about?

Firstly, this was a mobilisation in response to a specific threat (the BNP taking control of a council) and I’m not convinced this level of activity is sustainable or can be replicated. Would there be  the same amount of resources to mount a simultaneous operation like that in, say, Stoke, Barnsley, Rotherham, Nuneaton and Thurrock in a few years time? I suspect not.

It’s also worth noting that the BNP vote in Barking & Dagenham did not collapse in any meaningful way. If we compare the 2006 results with the 2010 results it’s evident that at best it dropped slightly in numerical terms but mostly remained stable. That’s worrying. Glyn Rhys puts it better than I can to describe why:

What does this now mean in terms of those who, after all the leafleting, after all the door knocking, after all the arguments that the BNP are a fascist party, still voted for the BNP in Barking & Dagenham. Are we to now believe that these voters are all fascists?

There is a very real risk that by not providing any alternative and by continually marginalising those who will not tolerate the likes of Hodge, we actually push those who would vote BNP as a protest into actually identifying with the BNP and starting to think fascism is an answer.

Hopefully, Griffin won’t realise this and will stick to his promise to abandon East London because of demographic changes.

It’s wasn’t only the BNP who posted results in the local elections ranging from disappointing to humiliating. Respect lost almost all their local councillors as did the Socialist Party while the Greens polled votes that, in any other year, would have won them a number of new council seats across the country. Instead, they lost nine seats.

Is this a wave of popular revulsion against minority parties?

In fact, what happened in the council seats the BNP were defending was part of a broader trend in the local elections, a huge swing towards Labour that swamped all the minor parties.

In the General Election, the BNP vote held up better than most other minor parties such as the Greens. In a tight election in which the vote for minor parties was squeezed the BNP stood roughly three times as many candidates 2005 and got roughly three times the vote. Although gratifyingly the BNP has lost a large amount of in deposits in around 200 parliamentary seats the BNP vote was around 4%. A slight increase in the BNP vote brings them into the territory where they can stand in a large number of seats and save their deposit across large swathes of the country.

This election is a setback for the BNP. By wiping out many of the gains they’ve made it’s reset the clock for the party. However, the same factors that have been generating their support will continue to operate and it would take another huge swing to Labour in a few years time to eradicate their progress.

The BNP were defeated by a Labour recovery and the first past the post electoral system. Since the new coalition government has signalled willingness to countenanace some kind of electoral reform I wouldn’t count on either of these remaining a feature of the political landscape in the near future and if we ditch first past the post then the task of mobilising an ‘anti-BNP majority’ becomes near impossible. Working out an alternative to this strategy will soon be crucially important.

Update: The IWCA analysis of the BNP’s General Election performance is spot on.

The yolks on him?

Lancaster Unity reports that the governing body of Cambridge University (presumably, like at Oxford, a congress of all fellows) has voted by 64% to strip Nick Griffin of his 2:2 degree from the university. All that is required is the agreement of the Vice-Chancellor. Should we support this move?

Students seem to support it, with Griffin being voted “worst graduate ever”. It does strike a blow at Griffin’s mainstream credibility, though the immediate response of the press will likely be to go and interview him about his psychic pain. From the perspective of publicity, therefore, this move is probably a boon to Griffin.

Similarly, how many of the C2DE social group that comprises a huge chunk of Griffin’s support really give that much credence to Cambridge University?

I’ve always argued that it’s easy to underestimate the standing that learning has amongst people who have little themselves. There is respect for Oxford and Cambridge; the inverse snobbery of “you and your fancy degree” is less common than you’d think, though I’ve never tried to insert myself into a management position as a result of my degrees.

Yet both are still pillars of the Establishment, and with commonly-held disgust over the actions of British politicians and ‘them in charge’ generally, a move by Cambridge against Griffin is likely just to make him seem willing to defy whatever multicultural elite the conspiracy fantasists of the BNP choose to blame.

It makes him seem persecuted, which is a well-trodden narrative for the far-right. Having glanced over at Stormfront, the usual sociopathic bilge is on display in response: it’s “anti-white racism”, it’s a communist conspiracy and so on.

Tactically, the whole thing is probably a non-event, though it’s good to know where Cambridge academics are at. Academics should be activists, whatever their field. Maybe next time it would be nice to see them do something productive, rather than moan about Griffin to themselves. What about the principle?

Even allowing that the governing body of today is different from what it was in the 1970s, it’s a bit strange that the university votes to remove Griffin’s degree but had no problem with his founding the Young National Front Students. Or representing the University as a Boxing Blue. Is this to be stripped from him as well?

Cambridge students and townsfolk, unlike at the Other Place, have managed to stop Griffin appearing at the Cambridge Union, which is admirable. Yet I didn’t notice much full-throated opposition from the Cambridge governing body. Removing his degree seems like settling for the least academics can possibly do, which isn’t good enough.

There’s also the problem of precedent: having removed a degree from someone for political reasons, it makes the threshold necessarily that bit lower for the next attempt. This politicisation of university degrees is not to be applauded; people rely on their degrees for their livelihoods and even fascists have to work.

Awarding honorary degrees is an intensely political affair, and should probably be got rid of. It’s a procedure that stinks of patronage, and stinks all the more so due to the College system at Cambridge and Oxford, where I was once informed that I should vote for the Conservatives as Cameron was a good Brasenose (my college) lad.

Yet Griffin’s degree is not honorary. Presumably he showed enough merit to earn his 2:2. It’s not a commentary on the feasibility of his politics. It’s awarding should not become such a commentary, nor should it become a commentary on anyone else.

I am a supporter of the No Platform policy. It is my belief that communities can and should act to deny fascists the right to use community resources to spread their propaganda and wingnut lunacy.

Whether that community is an academic one, a geographical one or a media one is irrelevant. Collective solidarity demands that we act with colleagues and neighbours to determine how we want communal pools of money, or communal buildings to be used.

This is not what is at issue with the matter of Nick Griffin’s degree, for all his odious scumbaggery.

Protest march in 2009, taken by Sarah Wrack

Today in Barking, Youth Fight for Jobs organised a march to call on the government to provide jobs, to stop the cuts that would see £500 million slashed from the civil service and its pension fund, and to oppose the BNP’s racist message, which interferes with real solidarity and a fightback.

YFJ is largely supported by the Socialist Party, so a lot of the people on the march were from the SP. However, there was a lively contingent of about thirty from the Day-Mer community group, including families. The NUT branches of Waltham Forest and Lewisham also sent along contingents to the march.

In the event, the march was lively, receiving a warm welcome – including from a Unite Against Fascism stall outside Barking Tube station. The march attracted a lot of interest. While we passed, leaflets were distributed to all bystanders about meetings in Barking in support of a ‘national day of action’ on Thursday 18th of March, protesting cuts inflicted on higher education and other sectors.

Impetus and awareness will have been built by this march, which takes place in a key area. Nick Griffin will be standing in Barking at the next election, and with the unpopularity of the Labour government, Labour MP Margaret Hodge will be in for a four way fight between the Lib-Dems, Tories and the BNP.

None of this is helped by the fact that Hodge herself is not above making incendiary comments about immigrants.

Such an attitude is likely only to generate support for the sentiments the BNP thrive on. It certainly won’t act to build a concerted movement capable of showing workers there are better ways to demand housing and oppose cuts, and explaining, while at it, that the BNP are racist cowards who vote for the same cuts as Labour, Tories and the Lib-Dems.

The third function of the march was to bolster the spirits of the people who attended.

A dose of high spirits was heartening in a week where PCS were on strike, due to cuts announced by the government. The RMT signallers have balloted for strike. We’ve seen BA pilots commit to seven days of industrial action, and British Airways admitting that they want to break the strength of Unite, the union which represents their pilots.

Cars beeping and people giving the thumbs-up sign out of their car windows was encouraging. Even when people were initially hostile, having received leaflets and been informed that the march wasn’t anti-immigrant, stiff debate got across our point about the need to fight for public services and welfare, and to stand together with immigrant communities to do it. People didn’t always agree, but it was obvious we’d got them thinking.

Our attitude was summed up in the speech, after the march, by one of the Day-Mer marchers – that we needed solidarity, that each colour or nationality or race fighting for what it could get would only make it easier for the government to cut spending in the areas that need it most, the areas with least political clout.

In-fighting amongst workers would make it easier for bosses to hire cheaper staff and fight unions. It would make it easier for crime to drive a wedge between people instead of inspiring solidarity in neighbourhoods.

The key work is still to be done in Barking, but I was happy to lend a hand to the local activists, to get people talking about the issues that should decide the next election in Barking, and should thereafter be used to unite the labour movement to fight for key demands around jobs, housing and education.

(Paul Sagar of the Bad Conscience blog submitted this as a guest post in defence of the collective decision of this website to ask for a boycott of the Total Politics top blogs poll, should they go ahead with a Nick Griffin interview. Hyperbolic image choice is, naturally, mine – Ed).

The question of whether to boycott Total Politics magazine’s top blogs poll if it runs an interview with Nick Griffin is proving divisive. Giles is sceptical. More surprisingly, so is Sunder.

I wanted to set out why I think bloggers of the left should support the boycott.

Firstly, let me say that I am not a uniform supporter of No Platform. The world is too messy and complicated to apply one position to every circumstance. Thus, I was not opposed to Griffin appearing on TV per se but (for reasons that turned out to be off-target) to his appearing on Question Time because of that particular show’s format. With hindsight, however, the QT appearance did Griffin more harm than good. His odious personality and his cringing attempts to be loveable showed him up. Badly.

Yet a printed interview aimed at nerdy political anoraks is different. Griffin’s weakest asset is his face and his personality. He’s not TV-genic, and he doesn’t know how to behave under public scrutiny. In a magazine interview, those things don’t matter. No matter how “tough” Iain Dale’s questions, Griffin can lie and squirm around them. The crucial thing that made the QT appearance a glorious disaster was that people could see him squirming, hear his lies automatically challenged. Not so with a published interview.

But what really matters is not whether Griffin flounders on Dale’s questions or not. It’s about the long-run effect of having Griffin feature in a mainstream publication. Long after the specific questions that Dale asks are forgotten, people will remember that Griffin was interviewed by an (allegedly) respectable, mainstream publication. It will help to normalise Griffin and his party. It will encourage him to be seen as a legitimate politician with legitimate views to be considered a reasonable political option by reasonable people.

At present, the BNP is held back in huge measure because it lacks popular legitimacy. Its leader is largely seen as unpleasant and devious, the party as fascist and suspect. The BNP are still stigmatised in the eyes of the vast majority of voters. What the BNP desperately want is to break out of that, and to be seen as a reasonable political choice. That’s the only way they can move beyond the (already considerable) million people who voted for them last June, and into the political mainstream.

Sure, the BNP thrive in deprived areas on their status as underdog outsiders. That’s something we should worry about. But the solution is not to normalise them by ending their status as outsiders, making them a legitimate political choice in the eyes of the electorate! Yet by interviewing Griffin, in the long run Total Politics can only serve to normalise the BNP as a part of Britain’s political mainstream.

Now let me be clear: one thing I am not advocating is state curtailment of Total Politics’ activities. As an independent organisation, they can invite Griffin if they want to. It’s Iain Dale’s professional decision. In a democracy with freedom of press, he can interview Griffin if he wants. By the same token, those of us who oppose the legitimation of the BNP as a political force can withdraw our support for Total Politics, and do so by boycotting their poll with the hope of making it redundant, and thus hurting Total Politics.

Yet there is one final big question to ask: why does Total Politics want to interview Griffin? An obvious answer is that controversy attracts attention and shifts units. That may be all there is to it. But it’s worth noticing that the BNP are not presently a threat to the Tories – they are a threat to Labour. Traditional Labour areas – where the white working class feels abandoned, disempowered and angry – are what the BNP target. One does have to wonder if Dale would be quite so prepared to interview Griffin if the BNP leader was targeting Chelsea rather than Dagenham this spring.

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.