The British National Party is now at an important crossroads. After the successes of the last decade, which resulted in growing influence on the national political narrative, the party has been weakened by a split between supporters of the party’s leader Nick Griffin and his opponents, many of whom have been pushed out of the Party. Despite this, at the last leadership election this July, Griffin was re-elected by the narrowest of margins. In a vote that was limited only to voting members, Griffin received 1157 votes, against the 1148 votes cast for Andrew Brons, his challenger and fellow Member of the European Parliament.

While there have been calls from some to form a new nationalist party outside the control of Griffin, others believe that the way forward is to continue working within the BNP. What follows is an article by John Bean, a leading figure in nationalist politics since the 1950s and a key mover in many of the events that have shaped British nationalism. Until recently, he served as the editor of the BNP’s influential magazine, Identity, and is presently an important influence in the Brons camp.

In the article, which was originally published on the BNP Ideas website last month, this much respected elder statesman and intellectual of British nationalism uses his years of experience and insight to identify key points and tactics in the struggle to secure the goals of British nationalism. This is an article that has relevance not only for British nationalists but for nationalists everywhere.

~Colin Liddell 

For Nationalism to achieve the minimum of power required to act just as a brake upon the socio-political policies that are destroying our national identity—let alone reverse it as is required—ideally we need to win at least two Parliamentary seats and five MEPs within the next decade. Council seats and members of such bodies as the London Assembly are but stepping stones. We cannot, for example, follow the tactics of Gramsci and the Frankfurt school with the successful Marxist Long March Through the Institutions, for time is not on our side.

The long-term success by incremental steps of the Marxists and liberal-minded “useful idiots” who have made up the bulk of our teachers at schools and universities over the past 30 years has encouraged the nation to reject its cultural heritage without knowing it. This has resulted in our being colonised by a tsunami of Afro-Asian immigration. For immigration to continue, even at half of its present rate (as the Tories suggest they are aiming for) for another decade, could mean that the battle is lost. In 30 years at a “reduced” rate it would definitely be lost. Therefore the policy of ending immigration is not negotiable under a reformed BNP or a new Nationalist party. It must take priority over all other aspects of policy.

On Monday 10 October the BBC aired a Panorama shockumentary film about the British National Party (BNP). This was the latest in a series of ‘exposés’ about that organisation, previous ones having been Channel 4‘s Young, Nazi, and Proud (2002), the BBC’s ‘BNP: Under the Skin’ (another Panorama film from 2005), and the 15 July 2004 edition of BBC One’s The Secret Agent.

Unlike its predecessors, this film, made by Darragh MacIntyre, did not focus on that party’s discussion of race and immigration (what he referred to as ‘racism’), but rather on the BNP’s financial management and accounting practices.

The film also enjoyed the participation of former senior party officials and employees, who had fallen out with the party leader and Member of European Parliament (MEP), Nick Griffin. These included the former party fundraiser, Jim Dowson; the former Director of Publicity, Mark Collett; the former treasurer, John Walker; former webmaster Simon Bennett; former party Administrator Marion Thomas; and former party worker Alistair Barbour. According to MacIntyre, he also spoke to various others, off the record, including David Hannam.

As a method of inspiring caution towards Griffin and his party among lukewarm supporters the film is effective. It reinforces earlier news reports about the BNP’s current financial troubles and persistent late filing of accounts and, more damagingly, presents its accounting practices as governed by a semi-criminal ethos. Only those with first-hand information, those sensitised to media tactics, and those who do their own research before forming an opinion will come to a nuanced—although not necessarily more positive—view.

Colin Liddell’s recent article about the British National Party needs some additional comments, as it concentrates on the party’s leadership while leaving out some important reasons why the party fails in the polls.

It bears asking: Given that successive British politicians since the 1950s set, then improved, then perpetuated conditions that have left the country open to colonisation by peoples of the Third World, without ever asking the citizens whom they represented whether they wanted to be thus colonised; given that they have a proven record of not acting in the national interest, favouring instead plutocratic, globalist, and even foreign lobbies; given that they have repeatedly lied to the citizenry on immigration, multiculturalism, and foreign wars in Iraq and Afghanistan; given that they have wrecked the economy, mortgaging, if not hobbling, the future prosperity of the nation; given that so many have stolen from the public purse for personal benefit—given all this, would it not make sense to vote into power the one party that ostensibly stands against all of the above, and whose policy is to put the interests of the indigenous peoples of the various parts of the United Kingdom first?

All else being equal, it would make sense, wouldn’t it?

Especially after seeing, and in some cases living, what happens when Whites become disempowered minorities in former—and formerly prosperous—British colonies.

Why, then, are British people not voting for the British National Party?

Liddell has suggested some of the reasons: a neo-Nazi past, which in the minds of ordinary citizens means a neo-Nazi present; poor staffing decisions by the party leader, which has resulted in maladminstration; and, although not explicitly stated but clearly suggested by the choice of illustration in the article, an uncharismatic leader.

These are serious handicaps for a party that is constantly under attack by the political and media establishment—over the years we have seen a number of money-draining court cases, bank harassment, gerrymandering, media ambushes, and a consistently negative portrayal, with images of the party leader in the mainstream media chosen on the basis of their unflattering quality.

Yet, to my mind, the most serious handicaps are internally generated: 1) the very nature and character of the BNP’s message; 2) its failure to professionalise its operation; and 3) which is releated and dependent on the previous two, its lack of presentation skills.

The Message

I contend that even if the BNP were left entirely alone by the establishment, it would still fail to inspire the electorate.

The problem with the party’s message is that it is almost entirely negative. It is based purely on a negative proposition (Britain is going to the dogs, the establishment is corrupt); it is concretely and emphatically anti-everything (anti-immigration, anti-establishment, anti-globalisation, anti-multiculturalism, anti-Islam, anti-feminism); and it is pessimistic (everything will get worse, the economy will collapse, Britain will be Islamised). As a result, it seems acutely paranoid rather than simply realistic.

Where an effort has been made to make the party’s message positive (and the recent logo re-design seems part of this) the message remains for the most part reactionary and conservative, expressing a yearning for a return or restoration to a pre-liberal past, rather than a will to rebirth or regeneration in a post-liberal future.

To be fair, both the reactionary-conservative and archeofuturistic currents exist within the party, but the latter (which, from my very limited vantage point, seems more prevalent among some younger members) is not dominant—and yet that latter current is the one capable of producing a winning formula.

The citizenry already knows that Britain is going to the dogs—they know it deep down, even if they do not feel immediately threatened because they have good jobs, live in non-diverse areas of the country, or have insulated themselves from the effects of the ‘equality’ project; yet no one wants to hear endless complaining, pessimism, and paranoia from dowdy angry middle-aged men, who deliver their remarks with sarcasm and a scowl.

It never matters whether they are right: people do not want to hear it.

Most want to feel happy and optimistic. They want to look forward to, rather than dread, the future. And most importantly they do not want to be like ‘those awful BNP supporters’—at least how they imagine them to be.

In other words, the negative message implies a negative identity—an identity defined against an establishment that enjoys the benefit of possessing and regulating access to status, power, and money.

The BNP would perhaps increase its appeal were it to emphasise how Britain was going to be better off with the party in charge, as opposed to how Britain is going to be worse off with the mainstream parties; and if they emphasised the positive without relying on the negative: that is to say, if ‘better off’ was not a simply consequence of avoiding ‘worse off’, but rather also the result of a unique, forward-looking social programme of rebirth and regeneration.

One of the keys to success is in being able to formulate a unique proposition, implying a positive identity, and having everyone else define themselves either for it or against it.

The BNP so far has done the reverse.

Professionalism

Having said the above, even a fantastic message is useless if the citizenry lacks confidence in the party’s ability to deliver.

The terrorist Left has made great capital from exploiting manifest weaknesses in the party’s accounting systems and record-keeping. The latter have enabled the BNP’s enemies to scare the electorate by implicitly posing the question: if a small party with ten thousand members cannot keep on top of its own accounts, how on earth are they going to keep on top of the nation’s accounts?

Moreover, anti-racist legislation has contrived a number of employment bans and convictions, thus enabling the BNP’s enemies to brand the party as composed of unemployable criminals.

Nick Griffin has made efforts to professionalise his party, but these have yet to prove sufficient to inspire confidence in spite of establishment enmity.

While most citizens would like to see an end to the colonisation of Britain and Europe, even they would worry were the BNP to win a general election tomorrow.

Presentation

Similarly, even a fantastic message is useless without the skills to deliver it in a manner that maximises the party’s appeal.

Since gaining seats in the European Parliament the BNP has grown better at doing media and made visible efforts to develop their own in order to improve their image and their outreach. However, this is recent, and for most of its history the party has lacked media skills.

In a media age, this is a big minus.

Even now, results are inconsistent. Some good performances by Griffin have been recorded, such as this short interview. However, many still remember his embarrassing performance in 2009 on the BBC’s Question Time, where he spent much time explaining and defending himself rather than attacking the enemy and putting across the case for his party.

Besides the problem of media skills, there is the problem of the overall presentation strategy having been defined around a negative message. 

Yes, there are legitimate reasons to be angry. And yes, given the record of the mainstream parties and politicians, it would seem logical, reasonable, and justified for a party purporting to be one of fundamental change to define itself against them. Yet, that alone will not work and has rarely if ever worked. The most spectacular electoral wins have been led by politicians who inspired optimism, not politicians who prophesied doom.

A clear example is the United Kingdom’s 1997 general election. The Conservative Party’s most famous slogan was ‘Britain is Booming, Don’t Let Labour Blow It’; the Labour Party’s was simply ‘New Labour, New Britain’. Labour won by a landslide and a wave of cheer swept the country. Eleven years later, an obscure Black United States senator campaigned with the simple slogans ‘Hope’ and ‘Change’. He became president and a wave of cheer swept the country.

It seems the matter of presentation is very simple. A vague, wishy-washy appeal to optimism is far more effective than hard-boiled realism.

No one wants to be a realist.

Endgame

It may seem preposterous to discuss the viability of a British national party when prospects of real political power for any such entity are presently so remote.

Some may argue that party politics is futile, since we will not likely vote ourselves out of the present mess.

Yet party political work is far from futile or pointless, even at this juncture.

Firstly, there needs to be a continuous political presence representing fundamental change in the right direction, if only to exert political pressure and remind people that such a position exists. Secondly, there need to be professional campaigning organisations capable of assuming political power in the event of an opening.

Such an opening is, of course, unlikely to occur without there being a fundamental change in the culture that prepares the citizenry to accept values and propositions that today are seen as marginal. This is so much the case that, in fact, party political activity will only become immediately relevant at the end of a long process of cultural transformation. Political power is the last stage, not the first, in the project of transforming society.

Thus, at least in peacetime, party politics is the instrument of the endgame. No party proposing fundamental change will be voted into power unless that fundamental change has already occurred.

Given how far we are from the kind of culture that would make political victory possible for the kind of party the BNP ought to be, I do not think Nick Griffin holds the key to anything except the fate of his party.

I suspect the BNP’s electoral prospects will improve after a change of leadership—but only marginally, assuming no change in the culture. And any new leader would need to be young, charismatic, and not part of the existing leadership clique. Crucially, he would need credibly and successfully to represent in the public eye the political expression of a counter-cultural current, a real break with both the past and the present.

That seems a long way off for now, and there is no credible party on the horizon. 

So the multicultural project continues . . .

Across Europe ethno-nationalist parties have been making considerable gains, but in Britain, one of the countries most threatened by mass immigration, multi-culturalism, and the liberal fascist thought crime legislation needed to maintain this unnatural state, the main ethno-nationalist party, the BNP, has been failing miserably.

In recent months, the party's vote has dropped dramatically in every election, and it has even been humiliated twice in a row by UKIP, a civic nationalist party, in former party heartlands such as Oldham and Barnsley. What makes this so tragic is that for a few years in the last decade the BNP was the rising force in British politics. Led by Nick Griffin, the party weathered everything the establishment could throw at it and made one breakthrough after another.

Contrary to what most of the pundits are saying, the recent Oldham East and Saddleworth by-election in the UK was very revealing about the state and direction of British politics.

With Labour winning a seat they have held since its inception (42 percent of the vote), the Liberal-Democrats coming second with a marginally increased percentage of the vote (31.9 percent), and the Conservative vote being squeezed in a seat they had little hope of winning (12.8 percent), political commentators have been left with little of interest to remark on. But this is because they have been ignoring yet again the increasingly important substratum of British politics and how it impacts on the top flight.

I’m not about to say that the substratum parties—essentially the BNP, UKIP, and the Greens—are about to break through, but, with parties outside the big three scoring almost 12 percent of the vote in the last general election, how the political establishment deals with this increasingly important segment of the electorate will determine which of the big parties runs Britain and how.

The most significant fact of the 2010 general election was the narrowness of the result. After 13 years of economic mismanagement, rising taxes, and destructive social engineering, at a time of severe economic turbulence, and with a leader who lacked the glib charm now required by voters, the Labour Party should have been wiped out by the Conservatives.

As it was, there was only a 5 percent swing from Labour to Conservatives, so that the Conservatives were forced to rely on the help of Britain’s perpetual bridesmaid party, the Lib-Dems, to form what may yet prove to be ramshackle coalition.

According to an article in the Independent, the English Defense League is taking a, shall we say, interesting approach to resisting Islamic colonization of the United Kingdom and the perceived encroachment of Sharia law. Some excerpts:

A white extremist organisation is forging links with Jewish, Sikh and gay communities to fuel prejudice and fear and hatred of the Muslim community, it was claimed today.

New branches of the League, such as the Jewish Division, could exploit the existing religious hostilities caused by territorial disputes in the Middle East, says Professor Copsey whose report was commissioned by the organisation Faith Matters.

It claims that these inter-faith tensions were brought into sharp focus last month when the senior US Jewish leader and Tea Party activist Rabbi Nachum Shifren denounced Islam at a EDL rally outside the Israeli Embassy in London. Israeli flags have also been spotted at several EDL demonstrations across the UK.

As well as aggravating religious tensions, the EDL has established a Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Division to "defend" gay people from Sharia law. There are also specialist divisions for women, soldiers and disabled people. The report warns these communities to be vigilant against "selective racism" and the EDL’s attempts at manipulation.

Contributors to the EDL Facebook site confirm that the group wants to work with other minority organisations including those which promote women’s rights. One member writes: "After all, leftists have portrayed themselves for decades as the only ones really interested in promoting a progressive and inclusive agenda: homosexual rights, women’s equality, minority rights, reproductive rights, immigration, world peace, among others."

One member added: "Remember there is a difference between being anti-Muslim and anti-Islam. We are against the ideology not the people. Let’s not forget that many Muslim women and children are victims of their own religion."

On the surface at least, the EDL appears to be less concerned with developing a serious and reasonable defense of Western cultural heritage than in crude, philistine Islamophobia resembling that of American neocons, combined with the hoary leftist habit of denouncing everything to the right of Leon Trotsky as racist, fascist, sexist, and homophobic. Indeed, the Islamophobia of the neocons sometimes comes close to resembling the anti-Catholic tirades originating from American know-nothings of the mid-nineteenth century. It is possible to recognize Islam as one of the world’s great civilizations and religious traditions, and even find much that is admirable about Islamic culture and history, while also recognizing that uncontrolled mass immigration by Muslims into the West amounts to cultural and demographic suicide. It is even possible to at once favor the preservation of Western civilization and agree with thinkers like Michael Scheuer and Robert Pape that much of the problem with Islamic terrorism is indeed “blowback” generated by unnecessary Western, mostly American, interventions and interference in the Islamic nations, and that some kind of apocalyptic showdown between the West and Islam is neither necessary nor inevitable. As Pat Buchanan says, “They are over here because we are over there,” and there is no clear reason why we Westerners should not seek peaceful co-existence with Islam as much as possible. While we don’t want to surrender Western nations to Islamic colonization via mass immigration, there is no reason why Muslims cannot exercise sovereignty in their traditional homelands.

The English Defense League is an organization I admittedly know little about. Perhaps English readers can enlighten me. If the depiction conveyed in this article is accurate, it would appear that the EDL is less interested in defending the Western civilization of Aristotle, Seneca, Augustine, and Michelangelo than in defending the Western civilization of Theodor Herzl, Betty Friedan, Harvey Milk, and RuPaul. AlternativeRight.Com contributor Richard Hoste has in the past made the plausible argument that a Europeanized Islam might even be an improvement over much of what goes on in Europe at present: “I don’t know what a Swedish Islam would look like, but it probably wouldn’t be half as ugly as the feminist-communist dystopia that the country is today.  The culture of that Nordic state repulses me a lot more than that of, say, Turkey. “

I’m inclined on one hand to regard these activities on the part of the EDL as one of those “So this is how it ends?” moments. If the principal objection to conquest of the West by means of demographic aggression by hostile immigrant populations is that some of the immigrants aren’t PC enough, then why bother? Surely a civilization that has sunk to such levels would deserve to die. Still, political pragmatism and eclecticism have their place. The approach of the EDL resembles in some ways the Dutch left-nationalist movement of the late Pim Fortuyn, and even my own approach to certain questions (for instance, my blurring of the left/right distinction when attacking the managerial state) bears a casual resemblance on occasion. A commenter on my blog suggests that the EDL’s efforts are largely motivated by a desire to steer anti-Islamic or anti-immigration sentiment away from support for the British National Party. That would seem to be as good an explanation for this spectacle as any. However, the EDL may have the positive unintended consequence of providing an entry level gateway for participants in its activities, particularly young people inclined towards either the Left or neocon sympathies, to eventually develop a more serious critique of the threat posed by uncontrolled immigration and a more solid intellectual and political defense of their cultural heritage and civilization.

As the UK general election campaign moves into its final 48 hours, the Conservative Party has crept into the lead, with circa 35 percent of the national vote and Labour and the Liberal Democrats jointly on 28 percent.

The Labour campaign, always lacklustre, has become demob-happy since Gordon Brown's gaffe of last week, when he was recorded describing a lifelong Labour supporter in Rochdale as a "bigoted woman." Three government ministers have now urged Labour supporters in Conservative/Liberal Democrat marginal seats to vote Liberal Democrat rather than Labour to keep out the Conservatives, and one Labour candidate has even described Gordon Brown as "the worst prime minister in the history of Britain."

The Liberal Democrats, too, have faltered slightly, as the more rational 'floating voters' forget Nick Clegg's TV thespian skills and look more closely at Lib Dem policies, which include such turn-offs as amnesty for illegal immigrants and joining the Euro.

Conservative seats are generally larger and have higher turnouts than Labour seats, so the odds are always a little against the Conservatives -- they need around 40 percent of the vote to attain a majority, whereas Labour could achieve a majority with just 34 percent. Nevertheless, the Conservatives look likely to win with a workable majority (YouGov estimates 300 seats, to Labour's 230 and the Liberal Democrats' 90). The chief unknown factors are the performance, first, of the Liberal Democrats and, in a small number of southern English seats, the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP).

 

Connoisseurs of cliché will find much to relish in the works of Guardian journalist Joseph Harker.

It is fair to say that our Joseph is interested in race. Of the last 50 or so articles that he has written for the Guardian, around 48 (I fell asleep counting) are about race. And I would not be at all surprised to find fleeting references to race within the texts of the other articles.

His countless contributions to 'debate' include classics like "A voice for minorities" (bet no-one's thought of that before), "Labour has not eliminated racism" (just as well really, or Joe would need to find another topic), "What an all-black Cabinet could look like" (to be fair, it couldn't be worse that the one we have), and "The ordinary brilliance of black youths" (maybe they should be fast-tracked into the Cabinet).

He is also in a pother about the "whitewashing" of Mothers' Day, the non-diverse media, Trevor Phillips's problems, the "n-word," and even anti-racists (he is offended seeing white people arguing about "how offended they are by a bigot with hardly a black or Asian voice to be heard").