The Resistible Rise of the BNP

I’m referring, of course, to the British National Party, or Fascists in Suits, as I prefer to call them! I suppose I have to admit to a certain grudging admiration for Nick Griffin, the Party Chairman and public face, for his tenacity, his skill and his political savvy. Under his guidance the far right has made greater advances than it ever did under the charismatic Oswald Mosley, who was so ignorant of the tastes and prejudices of the English people that he remained blind to the simple fact that they were always going to perceive his brand of uniformed Fascism as foreign and ideological. And as we all know, as George Orwell certainly knew, the English don’t do ideology!

Griffin, in contrast, has little of the tub-thumping rabble-rouser about him, and he is not much of an ideologue. His greatest virtue is his patience, his ability to promote his brand of small-scale politics among the marginal and the dispossessed. And when I use these terms I am not referring to the ‘outcasts’ and the misfits, to those that Marx referred to dismissively as the ‘lumpenproletariat’, the natural fodder for Fascism. Oh no; for the ‘outcasts’, for want of a better term, are the traditional working class, once the backbone of Labour and the Labour movement. These are the people who have continually been taken for granted by the corrupt political oligarchy that controls England at the present; the New Labour establishment, created by the Tony Blair, and perpetuated by Gordon Brown; an establishment that concocted ‘marshmallow politics’ out of spin, sound bites, media manipulation and outright lies.

It’s so sad, is it not, when politicians fail to take account of the warnings passed before, warnings handed down by history? Lincoln was right, you can’t fool all of the people all of the time. We have in Gordon Brown, probably the most ludicrously incompetent person ever to occupy the office of Prime Minister, promising ‘British jobs for British workers’, knowing full-well that he was signing up to agreements with Europe that made these words a stupid lie, one which leaped up and struck him in the face.

Ordinary people, people long treated by Brown and his ilk as voting fodder, do not have a limitless capacity for stupidity. So they turn, slowly, perhaps, but they turn. This brings me back to Mr Griffin. Yes, I have said that he possesses certain political skills, but he is not likely to have travelled very far but for the indirect assistance of the old political establishment; Labour for their condescension and contempt for the working class, and the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats for accepting a hidden consensus, that there are political issues, unfashionable issues, that dare not speak their name! The present scandal over expenses has seasoned the mix with wormwood.

People by and large now have the deepest contempt for the whole political class, for the cesspit that Westminster has become. The BNP has travelled far, but it did not do so unaided. That is the most worrying thing of all.