The Rise Of British Racism May Be Horribly Close
THE SPECTATOR: As the June elections draw close, Fraser Nelson goes on the stump with the BNP and is struck by a troubling paradox: the less racist Britain is, the more popular this racist party becomes. As Westminster implodes, far Right politicians are posturing as the tribunes of working people

Angela Wallace is one of a new breed of wavering voter. ‘I’m disgusted with all of the parties,’ she says, peering suspiciously at the men with clipboards on her doorstep. ‘MPs are not like they used to be. Now they’re all as bad as each other.’ The political activists I am accompanying have a ready response. ‘Well, why not make a protest vote?’ asks the candidate. ‘We’re the BNP.’ They have a leaflet ready: ‘Punish the Pigs’, it says. The BNP, it continues, is ‘the only party that makes them squeal. We’re NOT in it for the money.’ She promises to think about it.

In these deliberations, she will be very far from alone. In next week’s European and local elections, some 800,000 people are projected to vote BNP if the party continues its steady, menacing and (since 1987) unbroken advance. This time it is on the cusp of a breakthrough. All it needs is 8.5 per cent of the vote in the North West and Nick Griffin, its leader, will be on his way to Strasbourg as an MEP. If so, he will achieve what the National Front and the British Union of Fascists could only dream of: a legitimate seat in a legislature.

Just ten years ago, obituaries were being written for British racial nationalism. Oswald Mosley may have filled the Albert Hall in 1940, but he never won so much as a council ward at the ballot box. The National Front won two such contests, but was crushed by Thatcher in 1979 and never recovered. The British National Party had a brief victory in Isle of Dogs in 1993 but then seemed to perish. To hawk its racism in a country as tolerant as Britain seemed as futile as trying to start a coconut farm in Yorkshire. It just didn’t seem to take root.

In recent years, however, under the very noses of the apparently triumphant mainstream political class, the BNP has suddenly started to grow again — and its rise is exponential. Nine years ago it scored just 3,020 votes in England’s local elections. Last year its total was 235,000, giving the BNP 56 incumbent councillors. One such is Seamus Dunne, whom I meet outside the Dick Whittington pub in South Oxhey, a Hertfordshire housing estate built after the war. He has agreed to let me tag along with him and his fellow campaigners, to see what he calls the ‘real BNP’ — not what he regards as the caricature invented by the media.

Certainly, Mr Dunne could scarcely be more different from the stereotype of the tattooed thug. Besuited and softly spoken, he talks about taking his family to Kew Gardens and says that he wants to serve locals — ‘black or white’ — as best he can. It is a racially mixed estate, and there is no telling what the ethnicity of the voter opening the door will be. But the first, a young white man in his thirties, is a quick success. ‘You’re the guy who sorted out the rat infestation for us,’ he tells Mr Dunne. ‘You’ll get my vote. I’m BNP, and so is everyone I know.’

This is the first important point to note: there is no explicit talk of race, immigration or the death penalty (which the BNP supports). Just rats. This chap had a problem; his councillor fixed it and secured at least one vote. This is a significant and new aspect of the BNP’s strategy. Just as Lib Dems talk about holes in the road, not holes in the nation’s finances, the BNP (in spite of its nationalist identity) focuses relentlessly on the local. It targets councils with huge (normally Labour) majorities which have, for whatever reason, lost the will or capacity to campaign and govern well. The BNP then seeks to make itself useful: most recently, by sending squads to clear litter in strategic locations. It is a devious ploy: distracting public attention from the racist reality of the BNP by presenting itself as the ‘helpful party’. >>> Fraser Nelson | Wednesday, May 27, 2009

Four Jihadis Get Life in Prison for July 21 Plot

Photos of ”the convicted men (clockwise from top left): Muktar Said Ibrahim, Yassin Omar, Hussain Osman and Ramzi Mohammed. Photograph: Metropolitan Police/PA” courtesy of The Guardian

THE GUARDIAN: The four convicted July 21 bombers were today jailed for life for an al-Qaida-led plot to murder dozens of people on London's public transport network.

Muktar Said Ibrahim, Yassin Omar, Ramzi Mohammed and Hussain Osman could not be considered for release for 40 years, judge Mr Justice Fulford QC said.

Their plan had been "a viable, indeed a very nearly successful, attempt at mass murder", he told Woolwich crown court in south-east London. Four July 21 plotters jailed for life (more)

Mark Alexander

The rise and rise of the BNP?
“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.'" - Nick Griffin

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

TIMESONLINE: 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”. White mischief (Read on)

BBC: Are BNP set for Sandwell gains? (”No to Asylum Seekers, No to the Council Tax, No to Anti-Social Behaviour, No to the Veil”) (Read on)

BBC VIDEO: BNP pushes for local gains

DAILY MAIL: Half a million migrants flock to UK in a single year by Steve Doughty

MIGRATION WATCH: Click here

Mark Alexander