Ten Questions on the BNP and the Far Right in Britain

What do you think poses a greater threat to political life and social peace in Britain: fascist street politics and militancy or the ‘respectable’ party-political groupings, the men in suits, that seek to change parliamentary democracy from within?

There is very little fascist street militancy at the moment. With the collapse of Combat 18 and the near-disappearance of the National Front, there is no fascist party of any size that has completely rejected all electoral politics. Many of the street militants have been absorbed within the British National Party. The leaders of the BNP meanwhile have been relatively successful in persuading their members to treat elections as the be-all-and-end-all of fascist politics. The absence of a street presence for the past five or six years has been very striking. Nick Griffin has very consciously modelled his party on the French Front National. The BNP has a magazine Identity named after the FN's Identité. The BNP organises a summer festival, modelled on the FN's festival. But there is no equivalent of the FN's annual May Day processions. Because the electoral tactics have been relatively successful, and because they followed a long period of stagnation, so the leaders of the BNP have found it relatively easy to hold their organisation to this line.

How did (and do) British fascists come to terms with the central paradox that their creed is nationalism and national self-sufficiency, but that that very creed is, ultimately, a foreign import from Italy or Germany?

This is a constant problem for the BNP, as it has been for all post-war British fascist parties. Sometimes, the BNP tries to respond by projecting an image based on old symbols of wartime British patriotism: for example, by recording election broadcasts showing the leader Nick Griffin beside the white cliffs at Dover. Sometimes, BNP members attempt to draw up lists of respectable, patriotic British writers and politicians, in whose tradition they are said to stand. Neither of these strategies ever quite sticks. The lists of influences are constantly changed. The popular distrust of the BNP never quite goes away. But the BNP has become much more media-savvy than it used to be. I have mentioned the model of the FN; another influence is a very cynical reading of the media-driven success of New Labour. Thus the leaders of the BNP are much less likely to make comments of the character of Jean-Marie Le Pen's description of the Holocaust as a mere detail of history, or Jörg Haider's various speeches praising the role of SS veterans. They make fewer wild statements, and are only more rarely caught out.

In the 1920s and 1930s, there seems to have been a lively exchange of ideas, persons, and logistics between the established Conservative Party (and indeed Labour) and the groups of the radical right. Are there still such links today?

Not in any meaningful way. There are small groups of former BNP supporters working around a journal called Right Now, which has some supporters within the Conservative Party. But if you compare that to the 1930s, when the leader of the British Union of Fascists Oswald Mosley was a former Conservative (and Labour MP), and received the open support of the owners of the previously-Tory Daily Mail: there are no links on that scale.

In the early 1990s and 2000s, the BNP achieved unprecedented electoral success for the radical right. Did this reflect a real increase in right-wing sentiment in Britain or was it caused by other factors (as for instance the crisis of the Conservative Party or Labour’s move to the centre, which may have disaffected many of their conservative or working-class voters)?

Traditionally, the British extreme right has done well in periods where more people identified with the right, but before the Conservatives have been able to hegemonise that mood: as for example in the period 1974-1978. Once Thatcher seemed capable of winning an election, they became irrelevant. There may have been a similar cycle at work in the past five years, with the BNP growing before the Conservatives had fully regrouped. But the other factors may also be significant. Certainly, I think that Labour's turn to the right has made it much harder for anti-fascists in working-class communities, who want people to vote against the BNP. Ordinary voters say 'Well, who else should I vote for?' In areas such as the North East of England, there are local government seats which have been held continuously by different Labour councillors, sometimes for as long as eighty years or more. These same areas are just as poor as they were ten years ago. Which makes everything much easier for the far right.

In Germany, there seem to be a number of discourses that shape the general public’s understanding of right-wing extremism: usually it is perceived as being caused by unemployment and lack of prospects, as thus affecting young people in particular, and as being especially strong in the East. Recently, it has been diagnosed that even more and more middle-class youngsters fall victim to the fascist cause after having been brainwashed by the clever manipulations of the Nazi music scene (who apparently now even use hip hop and mainstream pop to broadcast their messages). Are there similar discourses in Britain? Is right wing support perceived in terms of class, region, age or gender? Would it make sense to do so?

At times in the past ten years, there has been a definite problem with a right-wing music scene, which has been able to raise money for a number of unpleasant far-right causes. But just at the moment the Nazi music scene is relatively low-key. I think that goes back to the points I was making earlier that right-wing extremists have been showing chiefly their electoral face. For many reasons that say as much about German history as they do about Britain, there isn't the same press fascination here with the problem of right-wing extremism. The normal media story tends to concentrate instead on the cleverness of the BNP leaders in repackaging their party. There have been relatively few series studies of BNP voting, and the ones that have been conducted have had relatively little coverage. Among the studies that do exist, some writers point to the location of the British National Party successes in local elections, many of which have been in Labour-voting, former industrial areas (Oldham, Burnley, Sunderland). Others argue that the BNP has tended to do well on the margins of these areas: in clusters of working-class Conservative voting. A third view argues that the BNP has been picked up by young voters, who had not previously voted for any political party, who clack the union and party identifications of their parents. Personally, I think it's too early to say which of these analyses is right.

How concerned are the British about the rise of the right? Does serious concern extend far beyond anti-racist organisations and minority ethnic communities, and how do the established parties respond to fascist representatives and issues? Is there a tendency to ignore or to integrate them?

Anti-fascist politics remains very much an issue for the trade unions, for black people, and for members of left wing or anti-racist groups. There isn't a wider audience; unfortunately. The tendency is to ignore right wing voting. When there have been race riots, as at Oldham in 2001, these generated much more publicity, and have had more impact on government policy. You can see this most clearly in terms of Labour Party policy towards migration. The government is now deporting more than 10,000 refugees a year, with around 3-4000 held at any one time either in prison or in 'refugee detention centres' (that is, prisons masquerading under another name). Conservative policy at the moment is in flux, and is influenced much more by relatively short-term considerations designed to embarrass Labour.

The BNP suffered some setbacks recently in both local and the general elections. Is this to do with voters’ disappointment with the actual performance of BNP councillors or have people realised that the possibilities of the protest vote have been exhausted?

Again, it is too early to say, although we will have a better idea after this spring's local elections. The numbers of people voting for the BNP have not fallen, but have ceased to grow. In most local council elections, the BNP will still expect to pick up an average of around 20 percent of the vote. They have less ability to win consistent high votes in elections to parliamentary constituencies, which cover larger areas, or for the elected mayors. The real problem for the BNP, I think, has not yet been declining popularity, but a much greater sense among the rival parties of the need to work collectively to stop the BNP. This starts with the anti-fascist coalitions in most areas, which are usually the product of the last 3-4 years. After that, there is a greater trend of Labour and Liberal candidates standing down or not campaigning, so as to field single candidates against the BNP. Of course the BNP councillors have been of a very poor quality, few have bothered to attend even crucial council votes, while others have been involved in petty crime, fighting and the like. But such is the general cynicism about local government, that there is not yet a clear trend of definite anti-BNP voting.

In the past, the BNP dropped compulsory repatriation from its programme and now the party appears to have changed its racial nationalism into a concern with ethnicity and culture. What are the chances that the party may in the future even downplay or jettison their racism and anti-Semitism even more in favour of their ‘socialist’ ideas, including elements of distributism, small-scale economies, decentralisation, destruction of the stock market, and de-urbanisation? Would such a turn not be able to strike a note even with leftist or green voters alienated by what is perceived as increasing globalisation?

The BNP is capable of promising all things to all people. But some promises are made occasionally, and some repeatedly. If its key target audiences are disillusioned Labour voters, or suburban middle-class people living on the edge of declining cities, or simply young apolitical voters – none of these three groups would be interested in distributism or decentralisation.

What should be done, politically - which conditions would have to be created - to put paid to fascism as a political factor once and for all?

For anti-fascists, our long-term problems include the pervasive structural racism of the British press and parliamentary system, the recent wave of new racisms aimed against refugees and asylum seekers, the unequal geographical wealth of Britain, the failure of the new industries to generate large-scale employment in cities in Yorkshire, the North East and North West. Take away these problems, and fascism would be gone. But Britain, in many other ways would also be a very different place.

It’s hard to make predictions about the future, of course, but what would you say will be the state of the radical right in Britain be in ten years from now?

The BNP is a momentum party: between 1999 and 2002, it was winning new seats each year, and doubling its membership annually, from one to two, to four and eventually to nearly eight thousand members. Since then, the BNP has stabilised. Momentum parties very rarely hold together at a consistent level: they survive by demanding high levels of energy from their supporters. Even stability is a source of crisis. In ten years, the BNP might easily have elected politicians in the European parliament, in ten years, if challenged properly from below; it might easily not exist at all.

From Hard Times 79 (2006)

Also see:

Explaining the success of the British National Party (BNP) 1999-2003
The political economy of fascism
Women and Fascism
An Unbiased Watch? The Police and Fascist/Anti-Fascist Street Conflict in Britain 1945-1951
A Provisional History of Anti-Fascism in Britain: The Forties
Towards a Marxist Theory of Fascism
Fascism and the Extreme Right: reading list
Fascism and the Extreme Right: lecture notes