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...in each of Dudley, Calderdale, Stoke and Broxbourne. These areas, apart from Broxbourne (home counties), are in the midlands or the Yorkshire-Lancashire belt. (1) BNP leader Nick Griffin secured 993 votes in Oldham Chadderton North, although without winning the seat. Around ten thousand people voted for the BNP in Sunderland, in the north-east. Another BNP splinter, the Freedom Party, won seat on South Staffordshire District Council, with 641 votes. The results were a consolidation of BNP gains going back to the 2002 elections; between May 2002 and January 2003 it won five council seats. The pattern is reminiscent of that in France in the mid-1980s, when Le Pen's Front National used the publicity surrounding local electoral gains to establish a national party, with electoral credibility.
What is shocking is the speed with which the BNP has made these gains. As recently as spring 1999, the leadership of the party was seen as old and out of touch. Its total claimed membership stood at around 1,500, with less than 200 people attending meetings. (2) It had failed to achieve any gains following its previous success, Derek Beackon's election as a local councillor in Tower Hamlets (east London) in September 1993--a seat that was lost one year later. By 1999, the BNP was publicly identified as extremist, far Right or 'Nazi', with many journalists using the latter term.
Four years ago, the context was different. Labour was still popular, and Tony Blair's approval rating was high. By and large, 'race', except in the context of the Macpherson report, was seen by the press as unimportant and unworthy of sustained comment. During those four years, the BNP has transformed its image, with its new leader Nick Griffin appearing on high-profile media slots. Under Griffin, the party's fortunes have indeed improved. Membership has doubled and candidates have been elected. Yet, as I shall show, the BNP has not changed in character, or even much in style. So what are the factors behind the BNP's electoral breakthrough? The most important sources of its success, in my view, have been external. It is the press, the police and the government that have provided the BNP with the chance to grow.
Leadership?
Nick Griffin today poses as the architect of BNP modernisation, a modernisation that has made it easier for the party to appear moderate or 'normal'. Yet, as the anti-fascist magazine Searchlight has argued, Griffin was formerly among those who supported the outright National Socialist, John Tyndall (former National Front leader) and opposed any dilution of this politics in form or substance. (3) As one of Griffin's far-Right critics wrote in autumn 1999, 'He has been a conservative, a revolutionary nationalist, a radical National Socialist, a Third Positionist, a friend of "boot boys" and the skinhead scene, a man committed to respectable politics and electioneering, a "moderniser".' (4) As recently as 1998, Griffin was convicted of inciting racial hatred and was given a two-year suspended sentence for publishing anti-Semitic literature. At far-Right gatherings, Griffin has insisted that his party is still 'National Socialist'; it just puts its message across differently.
Since taking over the leadership in autumn 1999, Griffin has remodelled his party along the lines of the Front National, copying its language and establishing a party magazine, Identity, similar in tone to the French Identite. (5) Policy has changed, and the previous line that all black migrants to Britain--including their descendants--would be expelled, has been dropped, although Griffin continues to call in public for an 'all-white Britain'. (6) The BNP has established a routine of meetings, a monthly speaker event, with informal discussions in between. A network of paid regional organisers has been appointed and the party has centralised electoral technique, running campaigns around a hard-core of full-time organisers. An image is projected of plausibility, of reasonableness. To commentator Peter Hitchens:
Most of the time Griffin sounds quite reasonable. A...
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