British National Party

Contemporary Perspectives

Nigel Copsey, Graham Macklin, Nigel Copsey, Graham Macklin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136820618
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book examines the recent development of the far right in Britain, with a particular focus on the British National Party (BNP) the most electorally successful far right party in British history. It brings fresh perspectives to our understanding of the BNP in order to make a significant contribution to scholarly debate on the nature of far right extremism both nationally and internationally.

The book is significantly different from other literature in the field primarily because of its focus on three important yet underdeveloped themes, which are reflected in the structure of the book itself. These are:

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• the ideological and cultural politics of contemporary BNP
• responses to the BNP
• the BNP's place within the contemporary domestic and international far-right milieu.

Written by an outstanding line-up of renowned experts in this field, this is essential reading for all those with an interest in British politics, fascism, political parties, race relations and extremism.

PART I Ideological and cultural politics

DOI: 10.4324/9780203830192-2

1 MODERNIZING THE PAST FOR THE FUTURE¹

DOI: 10.4324/9780203830192-3

Graham Macklin

It is possible, however, that the true future of British racialist politics lies with the British National Party, which is the only organisation formally to have broken away from the Fascist traditions of the 1930s … In the past three or four years it has advanced at a quicker rate than any other racialist organisation. It is smaller than the Mosley movement … but it is so closely tailored to current racial tension that it possesses a definite potential.

Colin Cross (New Society, 3 June 1965)

The phrase Modern Nationalism … is a genuinely very recent synthesis. While it is true that there have been several brief and short-lived spring flowerings of this ideology –starting with John Bean’s early efforts in the 1960s –it has not formed a coherent and firmly based position until our time.

Nick Griffin (Identity, no. 66, May 2006)

Introduction

Much academic research into the ‘modernization’ of the contemporary British National Party (BNP), led since 1999 by Nick Griffin, has highlighted, quite rightly, the important influence of the ‘continental model’ provided by Jean-Marie Le Pen’s Front National (FN) (Copsey, 2008). Indeed, the existence of this ‘continental model’ indicates that the ‘modernization’ of the BNP did not take place in isolation. Across Western Europe, extreme-right parties have sought to modernize themselves, shed their ‘fascist baggage’ and, in so doing, acquire political legitimacy and thus electoral support: a process that, in Italy for instance, culminated in a marked radical departure from the past, but that in Germany and Britain has proved little more than cosmetic. That the BNP looked to the FN to provide ‘the winning formula’ (Kitschelt, 1995) or ‘master frame’ (see Rydgren, 2004) is hardly surprising. The differences between the two parties could not have been more marked. The electoral success of the FN, following its breakthrough in Dreux in 1983, stood in stark contrast to that of the BNP, which, having been founded the previous year, spent the next two decades in the electoral doldrums, operating more as a street gang than a legitimate political party. The current electoral success (recently somewhat tarnished following its performance in the 2010 local and general elections) enjoyed by the BNP has led to renewed comparisons with the rise of the FN.²

Less often commentated upon was not so much the influence of the British National Front in the 1970s upon Le Pen but, prior to this, his relationship with the British National Party (BNP) in the 1960s, led by John Bean. Le Pen was a subscriber to Combat, the BNP journal edited by Bean, whom he visited in London in 1961 or 1962. ‘I recall clearly that we met under the clock outside The Cock public house where Fleet Street joins the Strand. I was holding a copy of Combat so he could identify me,’ recounted Bean:

One thing I am pretty certain we talked about was opposition to a centralised Federal Europe –as opposed to Tyndall’s isolationism … His English, though far from perfect was better than my French. Two colleagues of that era whom I am still in touch with recall standing with him at one of our meetings in Trafalgar Square, and both still recalled the long raincoat that he wore and his enthusiastic clapping.

(John Bean, letter to the author, 22 February 2001)

The above incident illustrates, as indeed do the two opening quotes, that there is an important dimension missing from the scholarly study of the contemporary BNP. First and foremost, there is the historical domestic context in which its ‘modernization’ has taken place, which has also had an impact beyond national borders. Understanding this internal historical continuum is crucial if we are to understand, not just the revisionist nature of the BNP ‘modernization’ project itself, but also the way in which the party has sought to revise and recalibrate its own history in order to shape its own political future. Indeed it reveals the lengths to which leading party strategists and ideologues have gone in order to obfuscate the racial-fascist ideological roots of the party and its founding cadres. The purpose of this exercise is to anchor their ‘new’ political project in a supposedly more ‘moderate’, far-right historical tradition, free of the taint of such extremism that, despite the election of Nick Griffin and Andrew Brons to the European Parliament in June 2009, continues to bedevil its quest for legitimacy.

Many shades of black, and grey …

Nowhere is the attempt to revise the internal history of British fascism more apparent than in John Bean’s autobiography, Many shades of black: inside Britain’s far right (¹⁹⁹⁹), which, on the face of it, is a remarkably candid account of half a century of far-right activism. Born in 1927 into a middle-class family in Carshalton, Surrey, his father a bookkeeper for the family confectionery business in Bermondsey, Bean was brought up by his step-mother following the death of his father, his mother having already died when he was a child. Too young to see active service in the Second World War, Bean served in the Royal Navy from 1945 to 1948, which took him to Trinidad three times. He subsequently took up employment as an industrial chemist with a firm of paint manufacturers, who dispatched him to India in 1950, ostensibly for three years but as it transpired only for six months. Nevertheless, of these combined experiences Bean later noted that they:

Signposted the political path I was to follow … I had become aware of the racial differences that had created the varied cultures of mankind. This made me a racialist, but certainly not a ‘race hater’. Twenty years of radical right activity were to make me realize that there can be, unfortunately, a rather narrow dividing line.

(Bean, 1999: 35–57)

Having returned to England, Bean’s ‘quest for the political truth’ (Bean, 1999:43) began in earnest, first as a member of Oswald Mosley’s Union Movement (UM).In his autobiography, Bean recounts his involvement with the British far-right,from his early involvement with the UM’s ‘Keep Brixton White’ campaign,through to his becoming northern organizer for the League of Empire Loyalists (LEL), which he left in 1958 to found his own group, the National Labour Party (NLP), together with a young John Tyndall, the future founder of the present BNP. The NLP sought to appeal to working-class Labour Party supporters through a mixture of racial nationalism and ‘a kind of popular socialism, shorn of left-wing ideology’ (Tyndall, 1988: 182).

During its brief existence, the NLP distinguished itself as a violent, racist groupuscule. On 27 February 1960, it merged with the White Defence League (WDL), led by Colin Jordan (1923–2009), to create the British National Party (BNP), a völkisch racial-nationalist organization dedicated to ‘the preservation of Northern European civilisation and the heritage of Britain’, which echoed the influence of pan-Nordic umbrella groups such as the Northern League, dedicated to propagating ‘scientific’ racism, to which the NLP and the WDL were both affiliated (Combat, no. 1, 1958). Given Bean’s later claim to moderation, point two of the original BNP policy is instructive:

To fight to free Britain from Jewish dominance and the coloured influx and to restrict permanent residence to Northern European foil; to terminate all non-European immigration, inclusive of Jews; and wherever possible to transfer humanely all racial aliens to their own lands.

(Special Branch report, 22 February 1960)

The BNP split in 1962 over Jordan and Tyndall’s Nazi-inspired histrionics (Thurlow, 1998: 234). Tyndall and Jordan subsequently founded the National Socialist Movement (NSM) on 20 April 1962, Hitler’s birthday. Bean meanwhile retained the BNP name and the bulk of the membership, at the expense of a party headquarters, which remained in Jordan’s hands. This incarnation of the BNP –the third organization to bear the name, the current being the fifth –existed until February 1967, when it recombined with the LEL and the Racial Preservation Society (RPS) to create the National Front (NF).

Without doubt, Bean was an important figure in the history of the British far-right. Some commentators on the far-right aver that, had Bean not retired from politics shortly after the foundation of the NF in 1967, and had that organization stuck to the strategy he pioneered, then the British far-right could have been spared three decades of political failure. Suffice to say that Bean has been reconceptualized, by the contemporary far-right and by Nick Griffin personally, as the harbinger of the ‘modern’ British ‘nationalism’ and, some might say, the best leader British fascism never had. Bean’s ideological and strategic innovations were not just recognized by Colin Cross in his 1965 New Society article. The anti-fascist magazine Searchlight paid Bean a backhanded compliment when it wrote that Combat, the magazine Bean edited, which regularly railed against ‘The Black Invasion’, was ‘one of the best publications ever turned out by the far-right. Bean … wrote with wit and hate. He was also one of the best street speakers the British far-right had after Mosley’ (Searchlight, no. 226, April 1994).

Bean’s re-emergence as a significant figure for the British far-right has not been accidental. The first observation to make is that, in championing the account of British fascism set forth by Bean in Many shades of black, the leadership of the current BNP has quite deliberately sought to manufacture a useable version of its historical past to validate its current strategic goals and, in doing so, serve the political future. BNP ideologues have highlighted Bean’s alleged attempt to purge his version of the BNP of anti-Semitism and his determination to prioritize electioneering and community politics, both goals of the current BNP. This serves a particular political purpose. In promoting the version of history propounded in Many shades of black,the contemporary BNP has sought to invent for itself a ‘moderate’ and, it has to be said, non-existent historical continuity that shifts the centre of gravity towards Bean rather than founding BNP chairman John Tyndall (1934–2005).This feeds into the party’s agenda of insulating itself against charges of racist political extremism, of which Tyndall was the personification. This failure to make a clean break with the past, opting instead to emphasize another part of the fascist historical tradition, indicates perhaps a less than whole hearted commitment to modernizing that party. Indeed, were the contemporary BNP genuinely committed to achieving democratic legitimacy, it would surely make more sense to break with the past entirely, instead of engaging in such quixotic efforts to edit history. Perhaps the easiest way to account for the desire of Griffin et al. to maintain a direct link with their political predecessors is that the core principles of ‘race and nation’ enunciated by groups such as the 1960s BNP are also the idées fixes of the contemporary BNP. To turn its back on the historical tradition from which it emerged, the contemporary BNP would have to reject the essential ‘truth’ of its own ideology and thus its whole reason for being.

Bean has been complicit in this historical subterfuge. This is not surprising.Despite his advancing years, Bean plays an important role within the contemporary BNP as the editor of its journal Identity. Bean quietly inherited the editorial chair from Griffin in April 2003 and has edited the journal ever since.³ ‘When you said you’d do it, with your past record, I was delighted’, enthused Griffin in an hour-long interview with Bean, which was subsequently circulated to party cadres and the public as a DVD entitled John Bean –a true Nationalist. The BNP website was equally delighted, lauding Bean as a ‘veteran nationalist who has given over a half a century to the movement’ and, in doing so, ‘has made a massive contribution to nationalism and has always been part of the progressive movement drivng [sic] nationalism forward to electoral success’.⁴

Tyndall, in contrast, barely warrants a mention on the BNP website and, since his death in 2005, has rarely been mentioned in party publications either.His apparent airbrushing from the history of the party he founded in 1982 can be deduced from the choice of words used on the BNP website to describe Bean,who, incidentally, only joined the BNP after Griffin became chairman in 1999,having been largely politically quiescent since the early 1980s, aside from the occasional contribution to Spearhead. ‘Progressive’ and ‘successful’ are the key words to fasten upon. Tyndall was neither of these things, and, during his tenure as chairman, neither was the BNP. Bean, on the other hand, represents, to a certain extent, the image that Griffin wishes to project of the BNP: modern and electable.

In order to understand the importance of this latter point, it is necessary to view Bean’s elevation to the position of ‘elder statesman’ within the context of the ‘modernization’ process itself. Many shades of black was privately published in 1999 during the increasingly acrimonious leadership contest ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of contributors
• Introduction: contemporary perspectives on the British National Party
• Part I Ideological and cultural politics
• Part II Responses to the BNP
• Part III International perspectives
• Conclusion: further avenues for research
• Index