Nick Griffin Expelled as BNP Follows a Time-Honoured Tradition

 

When I stumbled by chance yesterday evening upon an article on the BBC News website breaking the news that Nick Griffin had been expelled from membership of the British National Party my first reaction was to laugh out loud.

My mirth was induced not by any desire to heap scorn upon a man whom I’d considered a friend and comrade in the days when we shared a political outlook which I’ve since come to despise. Rather it was the amused reaction of one who had once more been reminded of the perennial farce that is and always has been the far-right’s approach to organisational etiquette.

Griffin and I were both young men in the National Front in the late 1970s, when the racist party had emerged from an acrimonious split with a Strasserite faction, which had oddly allied itself to a right-wing Tory-inclined faction in an ultimately unsuccessful attempt to wrest control of the organisation from the national socialist clique which had ruled with a hidden hand more or less since the NF’s inception a decade or so earlier.

MARGINS

During the latter part of the seventies the party mood had been upbeat and expectant as election results got better and better and the breakthrough for which it had hankered appeared increasingly imminent. When instead of achieving that breakthrough electoral support crashed, membership figures plummeted and the organisation was reconsigned to the margins whence it had come the then NF leader John Tyndall scarpered to form his own breakaway party, the New National Front (which, ironically, would later become the British National Party). So bitter was the manner of his parting that Tyndall and those who had followed him very quickly became non-people, whose names could no longer be spoken.

Nick Griffin, the NF’s National Student Organiser, was by this time already firmly ensconced on the party’s governing body, the National Directorate.

A shadow of its only recently former self the NF trundled along, holding badly-attended public activities in the back of beyond which had become more of an institutional nostalgia trip than a serious attempt at winning friends and influence, until the de facto leader of the party and “mastermind” of the failing strategy, Martin Webster, was ousted from his post of National Organiser following a carefully managed coup in which Griffin was instrumental. Needless to say the transition from deposed leader to expelled ex-member was, for Webster, a rapid one and he and his supporters very quickly became persona non grata, the more outspoken amongst them soon finding themselves the unwilling recipients of some pretty disgusting (if sometimes rather imaginative) hate material.

For a few years thereafter the National Front, sans Webster, ploughed new furrows, enjoying small oases of success amid a wider desert of failure as the party remained the retreat of the lonely, the obsessive and the eccentric. Nick Griffin was a major player, although there were other major players too. There were fewer though once the split of 1986 had taken place. At a historic meeting of the National Directorate in Slough factions led on the one side by Griffin and on the other by Martin Wingfield, Andrew Brons and the late Ian Anderson went their separate ways in a dispute which began with the almost gentlemanly exchange of letters of expulsion and culminated in the attempted car-bombing of Anderson’s motor vehicle and the breaking of the then Griffin supporter Patrick Harrington’s arm during a factional scuffle outside an East London public house.

For the remainder of the 1980s the two factions, both calling themselves the National Front, dedicated themselves almost entirely to the cause of trying either to harass or to embarrass the other out of existence. When the anti-Griffin NF announced its intention to stage a march against Middle Eastern terrorism the pro-Griffin version would distribute a press release declaring its undying love for the fathers of the Iranian Revolution. When the Griffinites denounced the Union Flag as an imperialist rag the Wingfieldites, for want of a better term, would bedeck every page of their propaganda material with it.

ITALIAN EXILES

Then, in 1989, Griffin and a few others got itchy feet and decided they would relocate what was left of the party (or at least their faction thereof) to the French countryside, much to the chagrin of Patrick Harrington who by now was running the organisation on a day-to-day basis from his Mum’s basement pad in Kensington. The result, inevitably, was not a mature discussion on the future direction of the party but rather its division into two further factions, this time neither of them laying claim to the name “National Front”. The Griffin group, backed by the Italian exiles around Roberto Fiore, became the International Third Position whilst what remained in England changed its name to the Third Way. The Wingfield/Anderson faction, whose existence everybody had all but forgotten, thereby became the one and only National Front by default. Every one’s a winner.

By far-right standards the ITP/TW split was relatively civil. Both parties decided to go fairly much their own way and to do fairly much their own thing. Both organisations still exist today, in one form or another, but Nick Griffin has nothing to do with either of them

When I parted company from the far-right and its ideology towards the end of 1991 – many years later than I ought to have done – Griffin was still a member of the ITP, although recovering from the shotgun cartridge accident in France which led to him losing an eye. It was some while later that he joined the BNP, apparently via an incident in which he managed to relieve an ITP colleague of his life savings through an ill-advised printing venture, and determined from the beginning that he would usurp the leadership from the now ageing John Tyndall. Within a few years he had achieved his objective of taking control of the party which he had once so disparaged. Before long, naturally, Tyndall had been expelled.

Under Griffin and his “modernisation” strategy the BNP achieved considerable, if temporary success. At one point it was able to count its councillors (including parish) in three figures, as well as boasting two MEPs and an elected representative on the Greater London Authority. His ability to achieve this was down to lessons learned from the experience of the NF in the 1970s coupled with an understanding of the importance of building from the grass roots, a strategy to which Webster had been oblivious. Add this to a political climate in which establishment politicians were held in low regard, low voter turnout and an element of personal media savvy and he and the BNP were away. Sadly for him the quality of his elected councillors was found wanting and his unwillingness or inability to train them conspired against any prospect of sustained growth.

DECLINE

As decline began to set in BNP members began to ask questions. They questioned Griffin’s tactics. They questioned his commitment to core principles – some traditionalists felt he had moved away from those great fictions that have sustained “nationalist” ideology in the UK since the Second World War whilst some of the newer recruits feared he was still old guard at heart. Most of all, they questioned his financial probity. Talk abounded of large sums of money unaccounted for, dodgy deals, debts not honoured, employees not paid and all manner of other irregularities.

A common by-product of the disputes that beset the BNP during its later days of decline was the emergence of leadership challenges. Chris Jackson, Colin Auty, Eddy Butler, Andrew Brons – all of them tried, failed – and ended up outside of the party in short order. Nick Griffin, as the far-right itself, has never done “ordinary” leadership contests in which the best person wins and the other shakes hands and lends his or her full support to the victor. For as long as I can remember, every leadership challenge in the recent history of the far-right has resulted in expulsions, resignations and bitter recriminations.

As the BNP’s star has faded with the emergence to major prominence of UKIP which, despite its undisputed commitment to democratic traditions, casts its net wide enough to enable it to embrace most erstwhile far-righters, so my own interest in keeping a watchful eye on the BNP and other far-right groups has mellowed. Nevertheless I have been periodically following with voyeuristic interest the fortunes of what very little is left of the BNP, from the moment when Griffin “stepped down” to make way for one Adam Walker (whom I’ve never met, but from his track record he seems none too bright) to his inevitable expulsion.

My amusement derives from the fact that Nick Griffin’s BNP career has ended in precisely the same manner as that of every one of his victims, from his expulsion without a proper hearing to the obligatory whinging about the unfairness of it all.

It is difficult to predict where Nick Griffin will go from here. Much depends on whether, at 55 and with 40 years of flat-out political activity behind him, he has the stomach for beginning all over again. Maybe he’ll fight for his job back which, with the BNP’s current fortunes, is akin to squabbling over the best seat on the proverbial Titanic. Or maybe he will regard it as a blessing and launch a new project of his own, one more suited to the current UKIP-friendly climate. His traditional support base has not vanished, it has simply relocated to a nicer home. For as long as it exists, it has the potential to return to the far-right if it gets its act together and the “moderate” UKIP fails to maintain momentum. To get rid of it for good we need to educate, not manipulate.

To some Nick Griffin is the man who almost took racism and fascism into the political mainstream. To others he is a charlatan who has run the BNP in the manner of some two-bit gangster, first cooking up spurious charges and later expelling all his critics within the movement. It is difficult not to see that the folk now running the party who have expelled him for bringing the organisation into disrepute are treading a well-trodden track.

The Demise of the BNP and the New Challenges it Brings

Some while ago I wrote on this blog about the emergence from the wreckage of the BNP of a grouplet calling itself the British Freedom Party and in particular about its professed creed of “cultural nationalism”. I expressed doubts at the time that the BFP would come to anything much. It appeared devoid of anybody with sufficient pedigree or charisma to overcome the enormous challenge of emerging from amid the confused mess that is the far right today and, as former NF leader Martin Webster is alleged to have once put it, of “kicking its way into the headlines” (Webster maintains that he used the word “crashing” as opposed to “kicking” but the point I am making remains).

Indeed it appeared even back then that some of the personalities the BFP did possess were of the destructive variety and were primed to bring embarrassment to the new party at any moment of their choosing.

I also remarked that, whilst I doubted the organisational potential of the BFP itself, the concept of cultural nationalism was one that could emerge when the smoke clears to cause very real problems.

Since its formation the BFP has hardly set the world alight, indeed one of its few actions of note has been to engage in its own acrimonious split which has lead the tiny party to divide into two even tinier, rival parties. However the faction retaining the party name surprised a few observers recently when it announced the formation of some manner of pact/agreement/merger (the precise nature of the deal depends very much upon whom one is listening to) with the controversial English Defence League (EDL).

The EDL itself, of course, preaches a similar cultural nationalist message in that it professes to be a movement solely opposed to militant Islam and one that is not racially exclusive. The reality is that its ranks are filled with racists and politically is to all intents and purposes a street army of the far right. It, too, has experienced splits and leadership disputes in recent months.

More on cultural nationalism anon, but in the meantime it is worth taking some time out to catch up with developments within the mainstream of the far right, if that is not a contradiction in terms.

The BNP continues to crumble under the weight of serious debt, poor votes and a massive decline in membership numbers. As it does so sundry factions squabble over the corpse, some opting for fight and others for flight.

Those inclined to fight are largely rallied around Andrew Brons MEP, a retired politics lecturer from Harrogate who was elected to the European Parliament alongside BNP leader Nick Griffin in 2009. After months of apparent indecision Brons, a former Chairman of the National Front, this year challenged Griffin for the leadership of the BNP and lost by a mere nine votes in an election that seemed to be conducted very much on Griffin’s terms to say the least.

Despite his youthful activities as a keen member of the late Colin Jordan’s National Socialist Movement (he once wrote to Jordan’s equally Nazi wife Francoise that he held a “dual view” as to whether or not burning down synagogues was a good thing to do, whilst ordering a consignment of stickers with swastikas on), Brons seems to have managed to gain for himself a reputation on the far right as a logical and reasonable man, as well as being something of a thinker. His genteel manner, his intellect and his maturity in years command him respect and he would appear to have been adopted as some kind of wise elder statesman within the movement, although some others accuse him of being a ditherer due to his apparent reluctance to make a decisive move in his ongoing quarrel with Griffin.

The current state of play is that Brons and his supporters have created what they refer to as a “parallel party” within the BNP, retaining their membership and professing their loyalty to the party whilst not to Griffin himself and organising around a website called “BNP Ideas”, effectively daring Griffin to expel them.

Meanwhile the flighters include 2010 leadership challenger Eddy Butler, who has joined the English Democrats, an organisation that seems to operate just within the pale although the infusion of ex-BNP bigwigs may have the effect of changing that. They also include one Jim Dowson, a businessman whose recruitment by Griffin as an “industry expert” to make the BNP money was one of the biggest bones of contention at the time of the Butler challenge, but who has since fallen out with Griffin himself and now heads his own breakaway group calling itself Britain First.

What this all has to do with cultural nationalism is the opportunity that the general realignment of the far right affords it to reassess the way in which it pitches its message. With the field awash with small groups and disgruntled individuals as the parent organisation reluctantly but most certainly disappears further into oblivion the potential for fusion around a new strategy is a worrying one. Particularly when the message essentially masks the same underlying racist philosophy.

For what has changed is not the type of individuals that we are dealing with. There is nothing about the EDL that makes it in any way more cuddly or more acceptable than the BNP, or the NF of bygone days. Fascists have not suddenly become nicer people. On the contrary all that is different is the demographic. The far right, for the most part, recognises that a seismic shift has taken place in the composition of our society since the days when the movement could say “Send them all home!” and still credibly maintain that “they” had an identifiable home to go to.

Anybody who wishes to understand the potential for cultural nationalism needs only to walk into any working men’s club and listen for a few moments to the conversation when it gets around to immigration. The message everyday people are getting from the tabloids is that a new generation of immigrants is receiving everything on a plate, has hostile intentions towards the (now multi-ethnic) host community and is challenging us all for resources that with the economic downturn have already become scarce. In the absence of any information to correct these false perceptions it is little wonder that they are held close by people who are otherwise normal and decent.

Generally people are not racist in the sense of having a conscious belief that they are in some way superior to other people (although ironically some “anti-racists” of my acquaintance would appear to make similar assumptions about themselves). However in my experience there is clearly a “dislike of difference” which leads them to be mistrustful of others whose looks, dress and mannerisms differ from their own and which, when coupled with a belief that the other community is in receipt of special favour, makes many an obvious soft sell for the cultural nationalist argument that “it’s not about race but…”.

Where there are myths perpetuated about the nature and intentions of the group, as in the case of Islam, this is even more so.

A cultural nationalist position furthermore gives the racist an unhealthy amount of wiggle room. In defence it is not about race or ethnicity so nobody need be offended, but in attack it means that everybody needs to be “like us” and, where the message is receiving a sympathetic hearing, opens the door to all the prejudices and hatreds that have historically informed the far right. It is an expandable, contractible ideology which can mean almost anything the intended audience wishes it to mean, yet retains racism and xenophobia at the core of its message.

Common sense suggests that there will be a regrouping on the far right and whilst we rightly celebrate the demise of the BNP this, perversely, has the potential to trigger it. While the economic conditions remain, and ignorance abounds, there is no logical reason why fascism should suddenly vanish, or why racists should cease being racists and not look to organise themselves again. With the “soft” nationalism of UKIP and the English Democrats enjoying some popularity and with a small army of stateless ex-BNP and soon to be ex-BNP followers looking for a new home, it is important that anti-fascists do not take their eye off the ball.

If I sound defeatist or fatalistic then it needs to be understood that I flag up this prospect because somebody has to, and in the hope that those whose task it will be to confront the new threat will be ready and waiting for it. A new wave of far right activity is inevitable, but its success most certainly isn’t.

Walk Away

For over eleven years now I have been an independent councillor at the London Borough of Hounslow. Concerned by what I perceived to be a lack of community engagement by politicians in my own borough and in particular around Isleworth where I live, I helped set up a community action group which very soon found itself involved in electoral politics. In 1998 I became the first independent candidate ever to be elected to the London Borough of Hounslow. In 2002 two colleagues joined me and in 2006 we won six seats, and with it the balance of power on the local authority. We entered into coalition with the Conservatives - a decision taken purely on the basis of local considerations and not one that was based on ideological preference - which is where we remain today.

But for me it wasn't always that way. My first foray into the world of politics saw me riding the waves of the extremism which pervaded the latter part of the 1970s for many young people such as myself. At the age of fifteen I joined the National Front.

In a way it was an odd decision for me to take. I wasn't a natural racist. It sounds like a tired old cliche but some of my best friends honestly were black or Asian. But the dynamics of the age drove the more impressionable towards the political fringes, and in fascism I found a philosophy and a practice which satisfied my craving for excitement.

There was nothing particularly unusual about the story up till then. An awful lot of young people flirted with the far-right, as indeed others did with the far-left. If your respectable neighbour is a suited, booted family man in his late forties who works for a bank, there's a not insignificant chance that he too attended the odd NF meeting in his early days, either that or he ran with the Anti-Nazi League and harried NF members as they marched around the streets. What is different for me is that, as unfortunately befits my personality, I threw everything I had into my new vocation. I gave up my education, any hope I may have had of following a "normal" career, and almost certainly a great part of what otherwise might have been a very different and interesting social life.

It is difficult to explain to others what makes an otherwise reasonably intelligent person become more and more deeply involved with an absurd ideology which has it that almost everything that happens in the world is the result not of circumstance or even economic forces but of the dark machinations of a small group of people whose sole purpose in life is to perform evil deeds and to plot against anything that is right and good. But I could make a start by pointing out the obvious truism that when normal people start to shun you, and increasingly the only company available to you is that of others who share your affectations and prejudices, then before you know it the outside world - the real world - becomes a stranger and increasingly you hear only the things you want to hear.

As a member of the National Front I was not a bit-part player. I became a local official at the age of sixteen, and was elected to the party's National Directorate at the age of 22. During my five years at the top of the NF I worked closely with Martin Webster, Andrew Brons, Ian Anderson, Joe Pearce, Nick Griffin, Martin Wingfield, Patrick Harrington, Colin Todd, Roberto Fiore and Derek Holland. I knew all of these individuals, and at various times considered each of them to be my friends.

In 1989 I left the NF, but only as a result of a factional dispute which saw what was left of an already dwindling party break into two, with Griffin, Holland and Fiore leading what became known as the International Third Position (ITP), which I joined, and Harrington running the bit that was left behind, which very shortly afterwards adopted the name Third Way.

The ITP, very cleverly, sold itself as a "federation of autonomous groups". Thus it could work on many fronts simultaneously. For many it had a strong traditional Catholic ethos, for others its anti-Zionist (read anti-Jewish) enthusiasms were the dominating factor. It even had a vegetarian group! Speaking personally, during my later years in the Front I had already become very attracted to community politics (albeit, during those days, with a racist flavour) and the ITP was happy for my new locally-based group, Liberation, to operate with one foot in the parent organisation and one foot out.

It is difficult to say when I first began to question the prejudices that I had taken for granted throughout my adult life. But for whatever reason things came to a head and, by the end of 1991, I had decided that I'd had enough. I dropped out of far-right activity, left the house that I had shared with erstwhile comrades and which had become our local "base", and went "home" at the age of thirty to live once again with my parents.

Others who have walked away from the far-right talk of a Damascene conversion, of a particular incident which brought home to them the wrong that they had inflicted upon others, and themselves. In his book The Other Face of Terror Ray Hill, who worked as a mole within the far-right after having abandoned his once sincerely-held racist beliefs, talks of an encounter with an Asian family who had been evicted from their home as a direct result of his actions as a right-wing agitator in South Africa. For me there was no such experience, just a long overdue realisation that for nearly a decade and a half I had been living a lie.

I cannot say that on the day I walked away from the ITP I was the dedicated anti-racist that I am today. Although recollections are hazy I am sure I met former colleagues on occasions, purely socially, in the months following my decision. Even today there is barely a day, and hardly ever a week, that passes without me bumping into somebody who was involved with me politically on the local scene at some time during my racist "career". Do I ignore them or bawl abuse at them in the street? Of course I don't. Many, like myself, have changed anyway. Any who haven't who have the misfortune to engage me in political conversation are left in no doubt at all as to where I stand today.

But so much for the background, on to the point. During the time that I was involved with the far-right I naturally encountered a not inconsiderable number of those people who call themselves anti-fascists. When I was active, anti-fascism was almost exclusively the preserve of those on the political left. That is not to say that others not on the political left were not opposed to fascism, but simply that it was traditionally people from the left who were motivated enough to become seriously involved in combating it.

Not unreasonably, when I was a member of the National Front traditional anti-racists considered me to be their enemy. What is perhaps more surprising is, since I walked away and denounced racism and fascism unequivocally as I still do today, they became more hostile still. The harder I work, as a councillor and as a community activist, to build community cohesion and a society free from fear and hatred - often in the face of well-intentioned but short-sighted opposition from colleagues on the democratic right - the more vociferous, and sometimes vicious, the attacks become.

I can handle it. But what does disappoint me is the effect that this negativity could have on others who might find themselves in the position I was in eighteen years ago, still waving the banner of the far-right but thinking twice about the morality of what they are doing and looking, perhaps without even completely realising it, for a way out of their present emotional morass. It is as though there is a door, half open, which leads to the real world but with those who have always hated them for being on the other side of the door standing in the way, blocking their way out.

There are, of course, many celebrated examples of racists turned anti-racists who have been championed by traditional anti-fascists and who are able to perform valuable work in the ongoing fight against the far-right. If I am asked why the attitude of the same people towards me is so fundamentally different I can only express my belief that it is down to my purely local quarrel with the Labour Party, a quarrel which is of an organisational rather than ideological nature. Usually when I express this view I am accused of being paranoid. So I ask for a better explanation as to why it may be, and an answer is never forthcoming.

About a year ago I established contact with a very active and well-respected anti-fascist operation, following a bit of cock-up in which the group in question managed to blow a very effective anti-BNP operation of mine out of the water. We spoke of some work I might do to help them in their cause. There was going to be a meeting. Then silence. To this day I'm still denied access to their online forum!

I have been offering for years to visit local schools and sixth form colleges to speak to young people and warn them of the dangers of becoming involved with the far-right, spreading the message of tolerance and countering irrational but sometimes widely-held prejudices. On one occasion not too long ago I managed to get a group of teachers from Hounslow together and put it to them that I could perform a valuable service by using my experience to counter racism in the borough's schools. Most of those at the gathering, not a few of them Labour Party members and supporters, blushed guiltily and some looked at their shoes. There was no way they were going to invite me to do any such thing, it didn't portray the correct image of me as a person with a rival (if temporary) political agenda. Better the kids should go unwarned than a political point should go unscored.

I believe passionately that we should be making it easier, not harder, for one-time fascists who genuinely see the error of their ways to put the far-right behind them and re-enter normal society. Often they will have valuable information and experience to offer, and in my view the most effective way to counter fascism is to understand who the people are and how they work rather than just seeking solace in our own prejudices and mythologies. Of course anti-fascism needs to be on its guard for the odd Trojan Horse, but that is not an excuse for throwing the baby out with the bathwater. People such as Searchlight, whose business anti-fascism is, will spot any such people sooner rather than later.

And that is why I have launched this blog. I hope it will be read, and enjoyed, by anti-fascists, but its target audience will be those members of the far-right groups themselves who are sincerely looking for a way out of their destructive lifestyles. Its purpose will not be to criticise other anti-fascist operations beyond the things I have already said, and in a spirit of goodwill and co-operation I will link to them and encourage my readers to visit their sites and see what they have to say. But my way will be different. My way is about combating fascism, with no party political strings attached.

Any member of any far-right group (or anybody else for that matter) can contact me in absolute confidence. My way is about imploring reluctant one-time dedicated fascists to do the decent thing, and WALK AWAY!