In the land of the blind the one eyed man is king

From The Times
April 19, 2007
White mischief
As a Government minister warns of the dangers of immigration, Martin Fletcher finds a swath of middle England ready to vote for BNP leader Nick Griffin — a convicted racist who favours birching delinquent teenagers and paying immigrants to leave

It is, at first sight, a vision of rural bliss — a cream-coloured cottage high in the hills of Mid Wales and two miles from the nearest road. The daffodils are out. Lambs gambol in the fields. Chickens peck around the yard. In the side garden, beyond the rabbit hutch and fishpond, two blonde girls are playing in the sun. Look closer, however, and you spot the incongruities: the two rottweilers in their caged kennel, security cameras, the burglar alarm. You begin to suspect that the owner has chosen this house precisely for its inaccessibility. He has reason to.

Nick Griffin is leader of the whites-only British National Party and one of the most hated — and, to his many detractors, hateful — men in the country. He is a former National Front member, convicted of inciting racial hatred against Jews in 1998 and acquitted of similar charges against Muslims in two high-profile trials last year. He is a man who has called Britain a “multi-racial hellhole”, Islam a “wicked, vicious faith”, British Muslims “the most appalling, insufferable people to have to live with”, overt homosexuality “repulsive” and the Holocaust “the hoax of the 20th century”. He has declared that “nonwhites have no place here at all and [we] will not rest until every last one has left our land”.

I am about to spend two days with Griffin before next month’s local elections. Anti-fascist groups insist that the BNP should be denied the proverbial oxygen of publicity, but as the party gains strength with each successive election that stance becomes increasingly untenable. Nearly a quarter of a million people voted BNP in last May’s local elections and elected 49 councillors. The party is putting up 750 candidates on May 3, double last year’s tally, and may gain dozens more seats. The BNP is Britain’s fastest-growing party and it is absurd to hope that it will go away if ignored.

The self-styled champion of indigenous Britons greets me in a T-shirt and green wellies. He is a youthful-looking 48 with a plastic left eye (he lost the real one when a shotgun cartridge exploded in a fire) who has spent the morning working on his two acres. As he goes inside to change, I chat to his wife Jackie, a specialist nurse in Powys.

She and their four children — three daughters and a son, ages 14 to 21 — are BNP members, but she makes clear that she does not share all her husband’s views. “There’s some things you have common ground on and others you don’t agree on,” she says, refusing to elaborate. She clearly adores him, however. She frets about his safety. She calls him a “hopeless romantic” but merely giggles when I ask for examples. Griffin reappears in a purple shirt and suit — he disapproves of politicians dressing down, though he does wear a gold ear-stud. He poses for pictures in his tiny office. The wallpaper on his computer screen reads: “Haha, Dad you don’t know how to change this back!!” There are trophies from his days as a Cambridge boxing Blue. There is also a framed Kipling poem which starts: “It was not part of their blood/ It came to them very late/ With long arrears to make good/ When the English began to hate.”

Griffin kisses Jackie goodbye, reminds her to water his newly planted aubretia, and we head off in his Ford Mondeo estate for the fertile BNP territory of West Yorkshire, with its immigrant populations of 10, 20 or even 30 per cent. In the back is a book recording the Scottish National Party’s transformation from an extreme to a mainstream party.

Griffin’s inspiration, however, is Jean-Marie Le Pen, the leader of France’s far-right National Front, who turned “a bunch of crazies into a serious political force”.

“You’re all lying scum,” he replies when I ask why he is letting a journalist accompany him. “It’s part of your job. But you can’t say you’re a normal party, then hide yourself away. There’s nothing to hide.” That, of course, is the question.

He tells me about a life spent mostly on the extreme right of British politics. His parents met while heckling a Communist Party meeting in North London in 1948. During the 1964 general election campaign, Griffin pedalled up and down the street outside his home in Barnet with Conservative posters on his tricycle. By 1974 his father, a Tory councillor and member of the right-wing Monday Club, was so dismayed by Britain’s leftward drift that he took his family to a National Front meeting. Griffin, then 15, joined immediately.

After graduating in law from Cambridge he worked for the NF in London, living on the dole. The party imploded during the Thatcher years. He quit in 1989. In the mid1990s John Tyndall, the neo-Nazi demagogue who founded the BNP in 1982, lured him back into Far-Right politics.

Griffin made statements condoning street violence. He received a nine-month prison sentence, suspended for two years, for alleging the existence of a Jewish conspiracy to brainwash the British people. In 1999, however, he ousted Tyndall as BNP leader and set about turning a bunch of neo-Nazi skinheads into an electable party. The rhetoric was tempered, some of the worst rowdies left and suits replaced bomber jackets.

Griffin has earned his £1,800-a-month BNP salary. The party won three council seats in Burnley in 2002. It now has 49 nationwide, and on May 3 Griffin expects to win many more in what he sarcastically calls “enriched” areas such as inner Essex, the Black Country, West Yorkshire and Lancashire.

The party will also be contesting seats in blue-rinse towns such as Harrogate, Bath, Windsor and Torbay. One recent poll suggested that 7 per cent of the electorate would consider voting for it.

Griffin says that membership has risen from 1,300 in 1999 to 10,500, boosted by home-grown Islamic terrorist plots, globalisation and his dramatic acquittal in last year’s race-hate trials. Critics insist that the BNP’s move towards respectability is purely cosmetic. Griffin retorts, as we join the motorway, that it is “deep and sincere”. He admits “past stupidities”, and says that he regrets the way that the BNP used to provoke confrontations or to discuss race in a way that was “frankly crude, or cruelly and inaccurately supremacist”.

He is not racist, he argues. He does not believe that whites are superior. He believes that races are different and that multiculturalism is a recipe for disaster. He opposes miscegenation “because most people want their grandchildren to look basically like them”. If the liberal elite had its way, the world would become “a giant melting pot turning out coffee-coloured citizens by the million”.

The BNP no longer demands the recriminalisation of homosexuality, but Griffin still expresses disgust at the idea of two men “snogging in public”. His revised views on the Holocaust are striking, too. He says that he derided the Holocaust only because the Left used it as “a huge moral club” with which to beat opponents of multiculturalism. He now accepts that millions of Jews were killed, but claims that some historians (he cites David Irving) still question whether it was deliberate genocide.

The rules of warfare on the Eastern Front allowed 50 civilian hostages to be shot for each soldier killed in a partisan attack, Griffin states without trace of irony. “When you consider that the communists claim the partisans killed at least 10,000 German soldiers, that would account for five million people being shot to death.” Near Halifax we pick up Martin — Griffin’s hulking, 21st, shaven-headed bodyguard who bench-presses 500lb (227kg) but assures me that he is a “nice pussycat really”. Martin drives us to an evening meeting in Ripon. As we pass through Bradford he points to a mosque which, he claims, has a firing range beneath it. “That’s why we have a car with tinted windows,” Griffin adds. The BNP leader says that he can no longer visit Indian restaurants because “I wouldn’t know what’s in the curry” and within 15 minutes there would be a crowd outside “with iron bars and knives”.

In pockets of Britain the BNP is almost a mainstream party now, with ever more people daring to run for office or to put posters in windows. But it still prints its newspaper in Eastern Europe because British plants refuse to, has trouble renting halls and cannot advertise its meetings because they would be picketed. Potential supporters are instead instructed to gather at “redirection points” and told where to go.

In Ripon the meeting point is the town square, where the local BBC radio station interviews Griffin. Ripon and Harrogate are “lovely English towns and we believe they should stay that way. They can’t if there are high levels of immigration,” he says. On our way to the meeting we pass a painting of a black inmate outside the Workhouse Museum. Griffin splutters. It was poor whites who suffered in workhouses, he says.

About 70 people are packed into a back room of the Golden Lion pub, with not a skinhead or pair of Doc Martens in sight and more tweeds than T-shirts. They are male and female, young and old, working class and middle class, ex-Labour and ex-Tory, several of them Daily Telegraph readers. They are mostly solid Yorkshire folk who have watched immigrants transform areas in which they grew up and believe — rightly or wrongly — that their way of life is under threat. They are bewildered more than hate-filled. They are fearful more than fear-inspiring, and feel gagged by political correctness. They do not come from sink estates. They are stakeholders, people with something to lose. “We’re being overwhelmed,” laments a retired Latin teacher. “I’ve nothing against other races. It’s just that they keep flooding into the country to breaking point,” says a lorry driver. “We can’t invite the whole world to live in England,” says a former merchant marine officer. Few will give their names.

Griffin and his fellow speakers do nothing to calm their fears. Quite the opposite. In a promotional video he decries the alleged banning of the cross of St George, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and even Piglet because the character offends Muslims. Against a background of soft music and beautiful scenery, a woman’s voice decries the millions of foreigners of all races settling in Britain: “The one thing they have in common is there are too many of them.”

Michelle Shrubb, a candidate who lived in South Africa, says that a black crimewave is coming to Britain. Nick Cass, the BNP’s Yorkshire organiser, declares that “decent British people are fed up to the back teeth with seeing the country fall apart and being called racist when they want to do something about it”. The merchandise table offers “It’s Cool to be White” T-shirts and “I vote BNP because they look after me” bumper stickers. BNP candidates are presented with rosettes for daring to stand up and be counted. Griffin humorously coaxes about £500 in donations from the audience, then answers questions for an hour. He puts on no airs and graces. He has a pint on the table beside him. He presents himself as an ordinary bloke, like his audience, who is fighting a corrupt elite that bleeds taxpayers for its disastrous social engineering projects and treats them with contempt.

He is a shameless populist. He calls the rise of the BNP “a peasants’ revolt”. He talks of “our people”, meaning whites. He mocks those who regard criminals as victims, advocates “damn good thrashings” for wayward teenagers, and says of drug-dealers: “Hang the bastards.”

The audience loves it, but this is more than knockabout political rhetoric. Griffin firmly believes all this. Party policy — which he sets — is draconian and xenophobic. The BNP would deport all illegal immigrants, asylum-seekers and subversive foreigners, and offer existing immigrants money to return home. “It’s clearly worth talking in terms of six-figure sums to persuade families to go,” Griffin says.

He would create civilian anti-crime patrols. Anyone who has done National Service would be allowed to keep guns to shoot burglars, and as “a last resort against a tyrannical government”. He would restore hanging for the worst murderers, paedophiles, rapists and drug-dealers, and bring back the birch.

He would abolish affirmative action programmes and hate-crime legislation, ban the promotion of homosexuality, prevent the NHS from recruiting foreign workers and stop women soldiers serving on the front line. State schools would restore mandatory (nonhalal) lunches and morning assemblies with Christian worship (minorities should “either accept our ways or go somewhere else”). A BNP government would take Britain out of the EU and the European Convention on Human Rights.

Remove the BNP label, Griffin claims, and most Brits would support these policies.

The next day we go to Dewsbury (“It’s like living in Rorke’s Drift,” says a local BNP councillor), where The Dewsbury Reporter refuses to interview Griffin. Some people greet him on the street but no one heckles. “The English are very polite. If they don’t like you they walk away,” he says.

From a studio in Leeds he does a phone-in show for BBC Radio Wales, on which successive callers denounce him as a racist and fascist and he snarls back (“the usual Searchlight ambush”, he says later, referring to an antifascist group). We visit Heckmondwike, where David Exley, a soft-spoken and rather impressive BNP Councillor, has persuaded Kirklees council to restore a run-down park (wards that vote BNP find shocked councils suddenly chucking money at them).

We then visit an old factory near Leeds that houses the BNP’s recording studio, Great White Records. Griffin has written the lyrics for its first in-house album, The West Wind. One song begins: “I wandered through my native land/ And stood aghast at what I saw/ As she wept under foreign hands/ No justice, truth or rule of law.”

I suggest that Griffin’s one good eye sees only the worst aspects of Britain. “It’s already a divided, sad, overtaxed, fearful place,” he replies. “And it’s going to be too unpleasant to put into words.”

Between umpteen calls on his mobile phone — one is about ways to use Simone Clarke, the ballet dancer identified as a BNP member — I ask if Griffin sees any advantages to multiculturalism. Chicken tikka masala, he replies. And some good sportsmen, though he thinks that England’s all-white 1966 World Cup footballers outperformed today’s team because they had “common values and identity”.

Then he lists the downsides — a catastrophic loss of social cohesion, racial harassment and violence, spreading knife and gun cultures and old folk dying in nursing homes surrounded by staff who do not speak their language and feeling “totally alone, alienated and in a foreign place”.

He warms to the theme, claiming that some Muslims deliberately use heroin — “Paki poison” — to undermine nonMuslim communities around them. “It’s narco-terrorism.” Even worse, he says, is the way that hardline Muslim males deliberately seduce and corrupt “thousands” of young white girls in a practice called “grooming” that the authorities downplay for fear of being labelled racist.

But surely the vast majority of Muslims in this country are good, law-abiding citizens? Griffin disagrees: “The vast majority are entirely decent Muslims, but the better Muslims they are, the less good they are as British citizens.” The Koran orders them to obey the word of God, he says, not infidel governments: “Democracy and Islam are absolutely incompatible.” A Gallup poll this week suggested that 81 per cent of London-Muslims were “loyal to Britain” compared with just 45 per cent of nonMuslims.

In public Griffin appears personable and plausible. Talking in his car, he verges on the paranoid. Many British Muslims subscribe to a form of Islam that preaches a “ruthless, aggressive imperialism”, he says. Its goal is a world-wide caliphate. “It’s a takeover attempt,” he says, and it will end — literally — in civil war. Wherever an Islamic population establishes itself “you get all sorts of bloodshed and horrors and there’s no reason to think that this little part of the world will buck the trends of world history”.

I ask, mischievously, if Griffin can see himself as Prime Minister. It’s possible, he replies, though he says that he and Jackie have agreed that they don’t want to live in London. He then spells out how: the US economy collapses, decades of Western economic growth come to “a grinding, shuddering halt” and the people turn on the liberal elite. The only question, he says, is what will replace it — a “nativist backlash” or Islam. If the crash comes later than 2030 or 2040 “the likely winners will be the Islamists purely because of demographics”.

The 60 people at that night’s BNP meeting in a Batley pub are not thinking in such apocalyptic terms. They have more immediate and prosaic fears about the consequences of immigration — their children being squeezed out of jobs and council housing, the emergence of no-go areas, the undermining of their rights and culture.

“We’re frightened to be British,” says Ann Nailor, who runs five Age Concern shops. “I feel alienated in my own community,” says Neil Feeney, a water company employee. “People who read your paper have no idea about places like this,” said Marjorie Shaw, a former policewoman now in a wheelchair. “The BNP are the only ones standing up for this country,” adds Lynn Winfield, a pub dishwasher. Griffin fans the flames. He calls the English “one of the most oppressed peoples on earth”. He says that when people like him try to speak out about real problems “they try to throw them in jail”. He says that bad laws should be broken. He calls global warming “an excuse to say that we, the international elite, have to interfere with every sovereign state in the world, and if we don’t you will sink by Thursday”.

When I take my leave, Griffin asks what I will write. That he is both the BNP’s greatest asset and its greatest liability, I reply. He does not protest. He recalls something that he said earlier: “I perhaps have too much baggage that won’t be allowed to stay in the lost baggage office. I can take the BNP to a certain level, but to make the final push someone else may have to take over . . . I can go back to Wales and keep pigs. Tremendous.”

* Have your say

I find it difficult to disagree with much of what Nick Griffin says in the article. His most pertinent point was that if the BNP was not called the BNP most people would vote for it.

Much of his rhetoric is simple common sense and based on that they would certainly get my vote. The worry, however, is what would actually happen if the BNP were to win significant political power. What would happen to my gay, black or asian friends? Would they be left to their own devices provided they behave as the decent civilised human beings that they are, or would there be persecution on a grandios scale. of course the only reason they would succeed in the latter is our current governments reduction of the power of the House of Lords.....

.......congratulations to Tony Blair for taking advantage of most peoples ignorance and creating an elective dictatorship

Patrick Bateman, london,

An interesting and even-handed report.

The rise of the BNP is hardly surprising, bearing in mind that immigration policies have been carried out for decades with little or no thought for their long-term consequences. An example is my home town of Leicester, which in 40 years has seen an enormous population shift -- a 2006 visit to my childhood suburb showed not a single white face.

The rights or wrongs of this are not the issue -- what is important is that the main parties have bulldozed through immigration policies without public discussion or agreement.

DJ, Aylesbury, UK

Thank God for the BNP.The faster they grow the better.

iain elsby, sandy-beds, England

excellent reporting. thank you.

graham , dubai, UAE

More and more I find what the BNP is about makes sense. I know their history and I know they have many sinister elements inside their party. But then so does Labour. The difference is that the BNP is actually talking about issues that affect day-to-day life and how much things have changed, mostly for the worse. Let's be clear: our government has followed a policy that sees the UK as a globalised economy, not a nation. In theory that is fine, but in practice it is utterly unworkable and is the road to turmoil.

Bob Franks, Manchester,

The more is hear from the BNP, the more i find i want to vote for them.

James Pharon, Maidstone, England

This is awful. Everyone who uses the tired cliche about "PC" censors seem to lack the capacity for original thought. People are allowed to say what they want and they do. "Paki poison"? Come, the biggest share of crime comes from working class whites. As do the biggest problems of poverty and bad education. There are genuine problems of deprivation in England. However blaming immigrants, when they have done no wrong, won't solve anything. Do people really want more Facism?

Shankar, Coventry,

I agree with Pauline. Although I am not a supported of BNP policies and political thought (or lack thereof), their voice needs to be accounted for as an increasing population feels best represented by them. That, in itself, is a real threat to modern Britain - perhaps more so than other extremist groups.

Thanks for an insightful article.

Filip, London, UK

A great report, but a shame you can't do your maths - 50x10,000 is 500,000, not 5 million.

Ian, Chesterfield,

In addition to sponsoring of the repatriation of non whites from the UK will the BNP also force "our people " to return from overseas? Recent statistics show that there are more Brits living abroad than there are non-British living in the UK. So an even handed approach to their policies may not help to redue the intense use of reources in this country.

A Jones, London,

Well done all concerned with this report. Lets have more honesty and let us then decide on how this country can move forward. At the moment the Political Class has abused the system and we are all going pay for it. One thing for sure is that between Blair, Brown and Cameroon, there is virtually no difference and none of them can sort out our problems created by the political class which believes in the current false model under which we are governed both socially politically and economically. The doctrine of growth is not the way forward for the future of Britain that is for sure.

John , Farnam, Surrey

You shall reap what you sow! The BNP is doing well as a consequence of the overly liberal policies we have had to endure these past ten years. To counter the BNP we need strong and strongly enforced immigration controls. We need to abandon the discredited 1951 Geneva Convention on Refugees, which is no longer fit for purpose in an age of people trafficking and asylum shopping. There are many measures which could and should be taken, but won’t be whilst our establishment is in thrall to a perfidious, anti-English, liberal-left consensus. I don’t want the BNP to prosper, but they will for as long as mainstream politics remains contemptuous of the indigenous working class.

Richard, Worcester, England

Why does the BNP come in for such virulent castigation when we excuse murder and terrorism in Northern Ireland, and deep-seated corruption in Whitehall? Could it be that Nick Griffin is a convenient whipping-boy for incompetent government, a distraction to be hauled out every time our leadership (both government and opposition) disgrace themselves?

I find that there is nothing you can say to disparage the BNP that cannot be applied to the political spectrum in general.

Thank goodness someone has the courage to show up political correctness as base propaganda. And, thank goodness, more voters are realising that they too can express their fears and concerns as vocalised by the BNP.

Mike Smith, Salisbury, UK

He makes a lot of sense, and he os certainly correct in saying Muslims obey the Koran not the laws of the country.

Barry Holmes, Christchurch, New Zealand

I only wish Martin Fletcher's brave and honest report was receiving a much wider readership.

Once again The Times has had the courage to lead the way against the PC censors. Well done.

Pauline, Hornchurch, UK