skinheads, but of pessimistic ex-Labour voters. And surely Britain, too, was a changed place? Hadn’t the battle by black and Asian immigrants to have equal place in popular culture been won? Hate racism? Well, of course – nobody in twenty-first-century Britain wanted to be known as a racist, not even the BNP.
At the time, I could not articulate these thoughts, and my overly cynical review of the festival drew stinging criticism from trade union leaders who had helped organize the event. Praise came from one quarter only: a BNP website that crowed about the party’s seemingly unstoppable rise. A few days later, the BNP candidate Richard Barnbrook was elected to the London Assembly with over 5 per cent of the vote. A relatively small achievement, but another first for a party whose opponents were adamant was a fascist one. ‘Knocking on doors is the secret of our success,’ claimed the website, adding: ‘Our strategy of meeting voters face to face on the doorstep and backing up our campaigns with well produced and easy-to-read election leaflets is providing the right results. There has been much talk . . . of the Labour Party being disengaged from voters – and it is. The BNP on the other hand, through our canvassing, are fully connected.’
‘Fully connected’? What on earth did that mean? And how exactly did a party whose own constitution bore a commitment to ‘reversing the tide of non-white immigration and to restoring . . . the overwhelmingly white makeup of the British population that existed in Britain prior to 1948’ win votes simply by ‘knocking on doors’?
These questions, and more, led me to think about this book. Who are the ‘bloody nasty people’ to whom the title refers? Most obvious are the men (and a few women) who have devoted their lives to fascist and racist politics. They are not foaming-at-the-mouth monsters – indeed, to be so would require far too unstable a temperament for the painstaking and unglamorous work they have put in, over years and decades, towards making the BNP a successful political party. Some may be oddballs and loners; others may be loving parents and partners; and many are gregarious (among the right people, of course). Like most of us, members of the BNP will be a combination of all these things. But they have committed themselves to a politics that even in its ‘voter-friendly’ incarnation would cause untold misery and conflict among the people of this country.
But there is a distinction between committed BNP members and those who have been drawn to support the party. Most – numbering well over a million – will have voted BNP at some point in the past decade. Some will have leafleted or canvassed. A few have even stood for election. There is a persistent image of these people as dejected, racist ‘white working class’. This has been distorted because the image of BNP voters is a powerful tool politically. In some quarters the accusation of bigotry has been a convenient way to dismiss legitimate concerns over jobs and housing. In others, such people have been evoked piously by advocates of a halt to immigration, or by those who proclaim the death of multiculturalism. We will see how this fits into a wider problem Britain has with addressing class, where working-class people have been virtually banished from our politics and media, only to return sentimentalized or demonized according to the occasion. ‘Bloody nasty people’ was a 2004 headline taken from the Sun – and I have used it to raise a question: to what extent have the actions of established politicians, and the mainstream media, given the BNP fertile ground on which to operate? And do the same factors lie behind the more recent emergence of the English Defence League?
Fascism is a heavily contested term: to use it will immediately conjure up images of Hitler and swastikas, or of Mussolini and jackboots. To many people it denotes a particular style of authoritarian politics, located in a historical era that has now passed, and may seem an unhelpful term when discussing the BNP and English Defence League.
For the purposes of this book, I have taken the work of the American historian Robert O. Paxton as my guide. In The Anatomy of Fascism, Paxton explains that while fascist movements throughout the modern period have varied in appearance and tactics, they ‘resemble each other mainly in their functions’. In other words, fascism is not a question of what clothes you wear or what poses you adopt. Rather, as Paxton attempts to define it, ‘fascism is a system of political authority and social order intended to reinforce the unity, energy and purity of communities in which liberal democracy stands accused of producing division and decline.’
This may sound vague at first, but this is because fascism does not offer a fixed set of policies; rather it seeks to recruit followers and bind them around a pole of extreme nationalism by appealing to what Paxton terms as ‘mobilising passions’: fear, betrayal, resentment, a mortal enemy within or without. ‘Feelings,’ he writes, ‘propel fascism more than thought does.’ Those ‘passions’ – the raw material of fascism – are not the preserve of a small group of fanatics, but exist in society at large.
In general, however, I have opted to use the more neutral term ‘far right’ when referring to the BNP and EDL. This covers a range of political positions, from anti-immigrant populism to outright fascism. It will become clear over the course of my argument that the BNP is fascist in origin, and has remained so at heart – but it has been able to progress only by appealing to a wider set of far-right interests. The EDL is an even looser grouping. I use the term ‘neo-Nazi’ only to refer to groups or individuals who seek to recreate the policies, or adopt the visual symbols, of the German Nazi Party. In the BNP’s history, there have been more than a few.
In Britain, the far right has often been portrayed as an aberration, a foreign malady imported into an otherwise tolerant milieu. This has had great strategic value for its opponents: highlighting the Hitler-worshipping tendencies of the National Front’s leaders during the 1970s was an easy way to discredit a supposedly patriotic movement. But this risks obscuring the home-grown intellectual traditions on which parties like the BNP draw. And by regarding them in isolation, we can also miss what they share in common with the political mainstream, the sources from which their propaganda draws its appeal.
As Enoch Powell once remarked, ‘The life of nations . . . is lived largely in the imagination.’ If that is so, then the story of the BNP takes us into the darker corners of this national fantasy. It may force us to confront some unpleasant truths about Britain, but it is vital we overcome our revulsion and examine it carefully: we must peer into its eyes, even if we risk finding ourselves reflected back.
It was getting dark in Essex, so Griffin and I moved inside the pub. Towards the end of our interview, during which the pub had been empty, a couple of men in rugby shirts came in and sat by the bar. After Griffin left (I thanked him politely and told him I hope he never succeeds), one of the men called over: ‘Good luck with the interview.’ Easy to spot I’m a journalist, I suppose. I apologized for having brought Griffin into their pub and explained that he wouldn’t meet me in central London.
‘Fine by me, mate,’ said one in a confident leer. I was puzzled by the ambiguity of that statement – was he happy for his local to be used by journalists? Or was the interviewee more welcome than the interviewer? I didn’t stick around to find out more. I stepped out of the pub with the questions left hanging.
PART I
1
A Nasty Little Local Difficulty
The Island is a funny place. People fall out with people, some groups fall out with one another. But if someone’s back is against the wall, they’ll all stand together. Because otherwise, they’ll pick you off one by one.
Rita Bensley, Association of Island Communities
The night of 16 September 1993 provided an unpleasant moment of farce to punctuate a slow, grinding tragedy. As protestors from the Anti-Nazi League gathered outside the Isle of Dogs neighbourhood centre, officials from Tower Hamlets Council were sifting through ballots cast in a local by-election. At 10.30 p.m., a murmur of surprise ran through the room as the Labour candidate,
