BNP – Freedom Party!

Nick Griffin looks at the future for Nationalism

This article was published in the Spring 1999 issue of Patriot, a British National Party magazine edited by Tony Lecomber. In it Nick Griffin sets out his plans for the "modernisation" of the BNP, which involve hiding the party’s actual political objectives and presenting an entirely fraudulent "image of moderate reasonableness" to the electorate. Later that year, having deposed the veteran Nazi John Tyndall as chairman of the BNP, Griffin was in a position to implement his proposed "makeover" of the party. He has done so with some success, and the media now tend to treat the BNP as if it were a highly controversial but nonetheless mainstream political organisation. Griffin’s 1999 article provides confirmation that the BNP’s political "transformation" is in fact a purely cosmetic exercise which leaves the party’s core fascist ideology intact.

"THE BRITISH people are incurably apathetic. They’ve done nothing to stop fifty years of mass immigration, economic decline and political treason. They won’t do anything in the next fifty years either." "Economic and racial chaos will hit the fan very soon, then the public will turn to us." These two very different views can be heard on almost any occasion when racial nationalists meet. And both are wrong.

It is, of course, true that the British people have shown a woeful lack of resistance to the horrors inflicted upon our nation throughout the second half of the twentieth century. I was going to write "a remarkable lack of resistance", but that’s the point, it wasn’t "remarkable" at all. Under the unique circumstances it was probably inevitable. Those circumstances are that all the evils of which we complain were imposed or permitted under a system which, side by side with the problems, also delivered to the nations of the West the highest standard of living in the history of the world.

Anyone who can remember a grandparent born at around about the turn of the century has a direct and personal link back to the days when the first motor car trundled into town, a time when an attempt at powered flight was still regarded as a novel form of suicide, when flickering silent films were accompanied by someone playing a piano in the cinema. Everyone with a family member who lived through the 1930s has a direct link to an era when every working class street regularly lost lives or health to diseases such as TB and polio; a time when malnutrition was commonplace, when men queued – and even fought – for a day’s work; when the elderly dreaded the workhouse, and when the children of the poor went to school without shoes. And, most shocking of all, even those conditions were a vast improvement on the situation for generations before that.

Now contrast that with the post-war wonders of the consumer society: Cars; the NHS; central heating; social security; fridges full of exotic foods; foreign holidays; colour TVs; videos; home computers, etc, etc, etc. The propaganda clout of the mass media and the political hangover from a war against German nationalism have obviously been factors in encouraging the public to put up with liberal social engineering projects which have wrecked our society, but the transformation of our national standard of living has surely been the decisive factor.

That being the case, there can be no doubt that the reversal of those material and psychological gains through the globalisation of the economy will quickly provide a political opening for radical nationalism to a degree unseen for more than fifty years. Even more heartening is the fact that, the failure of the liberal experiment has already alienated millions of people from a system which cannot protect them from crime and has destroyed all the old certainties, moralities and identities. All these failings could be overlooked during the Golden Age of consumerist plenty, but will become unbearable now that it is passing.

Future opportunity
Poverty, malnutrition, insecurity and despair already stalk the run-down estates where the grandchildren of the betrayed Tommies have been abandoned by the system, over the next years these dark horsemen of the globalist apocalypse will visit more and more of this land. I believe that it is both our opportunity and our duty to lead our people in resistance to the evils of a system which sacrifices human dignity, national freedom and racial identity on the altar of Mammon.

The prophets of "incurable British apathy" have already been discredited by events such as the historic BNP victory at Millwall, direct action against paedophiles in separate episodes all over Britain, and by the militancy of once conservative and individualistic farmers. The next few years will see many more signs that our people are no longer asleep.

This, however, does not make the "people will turn to us in the coming crisis" fantasy any less false. For one thing, there is still no certainty that the crisis created by globalisation will ever actually be perceived as a crisis by the mass of the population.

They may well just see it as a continuation of years of steady, inexplicable decline. Such a view will make them more susceptible – as individuals – to the nationalist message, but will not lead them to look for an alternative to the old parties en masse. And, second, even if a sudden lurch into full-scale Slump does prompt a popular rejection of the existing order, that by no means makes it inevitable that the British National Party would automatically become the political beneficiary.

Quite simply, even if external circumstances make it possible for us to become a true mass movement and to get elected, this will only happen if – even before those circumstances have already arisen – we have already created the organisational skeleton of such a mass movement, and made ourselves electable. If we fail to do these things, then all the golden opportunities in the world will pass us by.

The work which will be needed to give the BNP mass movement potential and electability covers a host of different fields, but the basic requirements can be summed up in two words: responsibility and professionalism.

Let’s start with responsibility. Tony Lecomber’s review of The Failure of British Fascism in the last issue of Patriot included a frighteningly apt phrase in its description of the past efforts of British nationalism – "careless extremism". If we seriously want to be elected, the very first step is to look at the things we do, or condone, which make us unelectable, and then to strive to change them from now on, and to minimise the impact of past mistakes.

Far too many of the ‘smears’ against which we have railed in the past have in fact been own goals. Of course it is unjust that the media rake up old phrases and photographs from years or even decades ago, but since we know the kind of people who run the media, there is no point us complaining when they report facts. That doesn’t mean that we have to compromise our principles, ‘sell-out’ or whatever, but does mean that, for example, we must scrutinise past records of candidates in every election, and exclude those with unacceptable political skeletons in their juvenile closets.

Of course people change and grow up, and some people who made such mistakes years ago have played, and will continue to play, very important roles in the BNP. But anyone who expects more than a marginalised minority to actually vote for such individuals is living in cloud-cuckoo land. This is not to call for a politically correct witch-hunt, or to advocate a softening of policies, but simply to point out that, if we really wish to be taken seriously, we have to offer to the public candidates for whom Mr. & Mrs. Average Briton can vote. Those people who have now bitterly regretted errors in their past can do one hundred and one things for the party, but standing as unusually vulnerable candidates in important elections should not be one of them. However much we expect our enemies in the media to try to beat us, it is only sensible and responsible to refrain from handing them sticks with which to do it.

The same is true on policies. Nothing is easier for a group of isolated hardcore true believers than to create a fundamentalist programme of ideological perfection which positively petrifies ordinary voters. "C’est magnifique, mais ce n’est pas la guerre", remarked a French general as he watched the British Light Brigade charge to destruction before the Russian guns in the Crimea. "It’s magnificent, but it’s not war." The ‘hardliners’ equivalent is not even magnificent, it’s juvenile stupidity, and it most certainly is not politics.

Wanted: more guile!
There is a recurring tendency, mainly among younger nationalists, to want to nail their colours to the mast and to take on the world without compromise. This may be magnificent, but, again, it isn’t politics. Consider how our opponents have achieved so much of what they set out to do. If, right at the start, the people whose long-term aim was to create a coffee-coloured global proletariat had told the people of Britain this they would have got nowhere. So they started by talking only of ‘fair play’, of allowing a few thousand to come here to be trained or to be temporary ‘guest-workers’. Once that was done, they started to talk about a ‘multi-racial experiment’ – which by definition could be stopped if it didn’t work. As we know, it didn’t, but that didn’t stop them advancing to the next stage, the ‘multi-racial society’ with full-scale miscegenation. A similar process may be seen at work in the steady progression from Common Market, to EEC, to EC, to EU.

Why do nationalists, and nationalists alone, insist on spelling out in words of one syllable where they come from and where they want to go? Is it really honesty, or is it just plain stupidity? This is a life and death struggle for white survival, not a fancy dress party. A little less banner waving and a little more guile wouldn’t go amiss.

Fortunately, there are few, if any, people within the BNP to whom the above point applies. But there are many in smaller groups to which it does.

As long as our own cadres understand the full implications of our struggle, then there is no need for us to do anything to give the public cause for concern. Rather, since we need their support in order to be able to turn impotent theory into practical reality, we must at all times present them with an image of moderate reasonableness. What is the point of waving banners which frighten the horses?

This is so blindingly obvious that it shouldn’t even need saying, but there are still a few who confuse shouting hardline slogans with steady commitment to getting ourselves into a position in which we can put our principles into practice. Politics is always the art of the possible, so we must judge every policy by one simple criterion: Is it realistically possible that a decisive proportion of the British people will support it? If not, then to scale down our short-term ambitions to a point at which the answer becomes ‘yes’ is not a sell-out, but the only possible step closer to our eventual goal. To do otherwise is not principle, but irresponsibility, and irresponsibility is a luxury we must learn to do without on the long march from the political fringe to the mainstream.

The need for professionalism will be much less controversial, but in terms of the amount of work that needs to be done it is the much more daunting requirement. First, let me begin with an uncomfortable fact: Not one segment of the British nationalist movement since the war has ever managed to achieve, or sustain, the commitment to professionalising its operations which is needed to turn a minority sect into an embryonic mass movement.

This is partly a matter of a shortage of skilled manpower, but it is also a reflection of our concentration on the importance of having the will to win in the abstract, at the expense of exercising the will to do what is necessary to win in the everyday world. We will not create a power-winning machine by continuing at our present ‘adequate’ level – monthly magazine, monthly paper, a range of A5 leaflets. Of course, the BNP has always intended to go further – asset acquisition, large-scale video production and so on – but in the absence of firm targets, deadlines and budgets, such schemes remain feeble wish-lists rather than becoming concrete achievements.

Fortunately, the very clear improvement in the quality of recruits over the last year or so is beginning to give us the manpower base to which to delegate many of the tasks which arise in the course of turning ambitions into reality. So where should we start?

Well, we’ve already started. Over the last four years or so, the BNP has been developing a political training programme. As many training seminars have been held in the last four years as in the party’s entire previous history, but many more are needed, particularly intensive courses for our potential high-fliers. In the run-up to the Euro-elections there is not the spare time and money for more than a series of one-day events to train candidates and campaign workers in the technicalities of the contest, dealing with the media and turning follow-ups into new members. After next June, however, the party must devote resources to identifying and integrating into our organisation two-dozen future middle managers, as well as stepping up its grassroots training programme through seminars, tapes and videos.

Recent simple improvements, such as good quality membership cards and regular members’ bulletins are already beginning to convince members that they are valued and that, together, we are making progress – which is the key to getting them to rejoin, thereby putting the plug in the metaphorical nationalist membership bath. There has, always been a tendency among the leadership of organisations such as the BNP to expect rank-and-file members to be as fanatical and self-motivated as the people at the top. "They get a reminder when their subs are due, what more do they want?" was a particularly brutal expression of this attitude which I heard in the early 1980s, but variations on the theme are still widespread. Remembering how, as a young teenager in 1975, I had come close to not renewing my NF subscription because I felt that a card and two bulletins in the previous year wasn’t much of a return for my hard-earned money, I was appalled then, and I remain appalled by any suggestion that members should be as little valued.

Every new member has cost someone usually an activist giving up evenings to trudge along drizzled streets delivering leaflets – a great deal of effort to recruit. Accordingly, that new recruit must be made welcome, kept informed and made to feel an important part of his or her party. Unless we go out of our way to find ways to do that, then talk of building a ‘mass movement’ will remain just that. Let’s have action, not talk!

Similarly, monthly organisers’ bulletins and an expanding monthly literature delivery run to key units up and down the country may not seem much, but they are a big organisational improvement on the situation throughout the party’s earlier history. And, of course, such improvements lead to growth which puts us in a position to take further steps forward in turn.

One area which does, however, need particularly urgent attention, is the party’s administrative operation at national and regional level. While it might have been adequate for the slow, quiet days of the 1980s, it is hardly a state secret that the BNP’s administrative arrangements are not, in their present form, capable of supporting rapid nationwide growth. This is a challenge which requires prompt and decisive action, both in the short-term, before next June’s election, and in the medium-term, when wholesale reforms must be implemented.

As the party grows, it is essential that we develop a ‘talent-spotting’ capability. Although I have now been active at a high level in the BNP for several years, I am still finding people at meetings up and down the country who possess the most extraordinary and useful abilities. Sometimes their light is hidden under a bushel, but just as often their local party colleagues know about it, yet have never thought to pass the information on. Perhaps this is partly because they haven’t been asked to. Such a process needs to be formalised through a regular ‘skills audit’ and, having identified people with particular knowledge or skills, we need to look much harder for ways to harness them and to allow them to benefit from involvement in politics in turn.

Here too is a process which has already begun, but BNP teams such as the Media Monitoring Unit, the video unit, and initiatives such as the Land and People farming/environmental circle are only the start. Many, many more such semi-autonomous BNP-linked operations will have to be created as we duplicate various functions of the old system and create the ‘state-within-a-state’ which is an essential part of the preparations for any cultural and political revolution.

In increasingly hard economic times, a group of people the size of the BNP and its support base can provide a significant assured market for a variety of small businesses. Some of these are no doubt already in existence, but we also need to be looking for areas of potential for new businesses, and for ways to help unemployed members to start them up. Various immigrant communities have been doing this among their own people for years; it is time to emulate them rather than simply complaining about the symptoms of their success. Again, though, it is not enough simply to float a good idea and wish upon a star that it comes true. We need to create a feasibility study group from volunteers among our growing number of management consultants, marketing executives and so on, and put them in touch with our potential new businessmen.

A similar conscious decision to seek out and utilise the expertise which already exists within our ranks, or which can be gained by sending selected individuals on training courses, must also be taken with regards to future political initiatives. The best example of this has to be the potential virtual TV and radio programmes via the Internet. The potential of this new medium to destroy the mass media’s much abused position as self-appointed ‘gate-keepers’ – controlling which information the public receive and thereby the issues about which the public are concerned – is another point which does not need to be laboured here.

The Internet
What is, however, worth mentioning is the way in which intelligent use of this new medium will help to create the impression that to be involved in the racial nationalist movement is to be involved in something big, something really worthwhile. For while that is indeed the case, it is also a fact that the abandonment of some older forms of activity – while correct in tactical and propaganda terms – has weakened the sense of belonging which is one of our most powerful recruiting tools in an increasingly atomised society. The way in which TV soap operas have become pseudo-families for millions of lonely TV watchers gives us a clue as to the power which could be wielded by an Internet TV station in a few years’ time. As elsewhere, however, it is no good identifying a future opportunity if we do not follow it up with a practical programme to acquire the assets and skills needed to take the first few steps on that particular road.

The need to identify opportunities brings me to a further area where I believe that the BNP needs to create new structures to enable it to fulfill its potential. While the leadership principle which underlies its constitution is clearly superior to committee-rule, both in terms of the potential for speed of action and resistance to factionalism, it does have the big drawback that, in a world where technological progress is increasing exponentially, no one person can possibly keep abreast of all the possibilities for future development which arise as a result. Leadership in the modern world is less and less about day-to-day control and more and more about providing inspiration, looking for opportunities in the big picture, and training and delegating to build a guided team.

A Research and Development group will be a start, but even that doesn’t go far enough, particularly as the changing political climate takes us beyond the ‘keep the hardcore together’ imperative of the lean 1980s and into a period of unbounded potential for a well-led nationalist movement. The R&D team should therefore be only a part of a broader advisory Leadership Think-Tank, which should meet every few months. While the party chairman must always retain the constitutional right to ignore its proposals and advice, it would in fact be a foolish leader who would do so, save in very exceptional circumstances.

Such a leadership team would inevitably produce a whole range of exciting ideas for spreading the party’s reach into new areas and with new techniques. These ideas will in turn require money if they are to be put into practice, which is just one of the reasons why the party’s finances also need to step beyond the ‘potter along as we are’ comfort-zone which it is all too easy for any leadership to fall into. The BNP urgently needs to bring together a fund-raising team, and to boost the prestige of the treasurer at every level of the party.

Local units need to be provided with the training and incentives to become much better at raising money and, in return (and in order to comply with the forthcoming legislation on the registration of political parties) the party centre must provide audited accounts. This goes beyond a simple question of money and accountability, and brings us back to the need for professionalism. The BNP is a holy crusade to save and rebuild all we hold dear, but it is also a business. So it must be run on business lines. That doesn’t mean putting accountants or bureaucrats in charge, but it does mean setting targets, monitoring progress, identifying failures, and creating the management structures which allow us to do such things.

All the above will give us an increasingly broad base for external political advances and electoral success. At the same time, there can be little doubt that external circumstances will continue to move our way. It may still take some time before this translates into significantly higher votes but, even in the meantime, elections especially those which involve the distribution of huge numbers of leaflets produce recruits. Accordingly, we must contest them as widely as is practically possible, including in the case of new bodies such as the London Assembly, mayorial posts and such like.

Elections
My arguments against involvement in elections in the mid-1980s are still occasionally recycled by mischief-makers seeking to undermine the BNP’s growth or to cover up their own cowardice. As already pointed out, however, those were different times and very different circumstances. Furthermore, it is at least possible that I was wrong even then. Certainly, it is notable that the ‘no parliamentary road’ groups have, without exception, stagnated. Well, the trick in life is not to avoid mistakes, but to learn from them and to avoid repeating them. While it is true that elections are an expensive way to get recruits, they – and the effort and publicity which surrounds them – remain the most effective way. ‘Flying column’ teams targeting new areas, counter-power initiatives, Internet recruitment and so on, all undoubtedly have roles in building the party, but as ways of reaching large numbers of the public in short periods of time, elections are likely to remain king for the foreseeable future.

What message and image should we be aiming to get across in those elections? For the public as a whole we must keep it simple and put things across in the least controversial way possible. Of course, we must teach the truth to the hardcore, for, like you, I do not intend to allow this movement to lose its way. But when it comes to influencing the public, forget about racial differences, genetics, Zionism, historical revisionism and so on – all ordinary people want to know is what we can do for them that the other parties can’t or won’t.

Let’s keep it simple and, until someone comes up with something better, base our propaganda on the four key words which I identified last year: Freedom (which covers opposition to the EU, foreign entanglements, petty bureaucracy and such like); Democracy (whereby the wishes of the majority of the people prevail on vital issues such as immigration and capital punishment, in sharp contrast to the corruption of the metropolitan liberal elite); Security (from crime as well as from the unemployment and chronic economic insecurity produced by globalism); and Identity (a term which raises all the issues connected with mass immigration without touching off the negative Pavlovian conditioning which decades of brainwashing have associated with the word ‘race’).

With an increasingly professional organisation, one which puts its responsibility to the past heroes and the unborn innocents of this land before the empty satisfaction of sloganising, we can approach things from a hundred different angles and on subjects which affect any given target group personally but, wherever we start, we should always finish up hammering away to create links between the BNP and those four idealistic, unobjectionable, motherhood and apple pie concepts.

In the end, though, the most important word of all is one which relates to our own attitude: Ambition. We must have it. Ambition which is strong enough to get us out of the comfort zones with which all individuals and organisations surround themselves and strong enough to inspire others to do the same. Ambition which is strong enough to make us try new and audacious tactics. Ambition which bums away the paralysing fear of failure and replaces it with the will to win.

In the earlier part of the twentieth century in Britain at least, the public did at least have some real choice between the main parties – free trade or protection, Ulster or a United Ireland, Empire or anti-colonialism, private capitalism or Clause 4 nationalisation. Now there is no choice. Consensus is openly admitted by serious commentators in mainstream newspapers to be little short of a conspiracy to deny the public a choice on the truly great issues of the day – the relentless move to a federal Europe; abolition of capital punishment; the imposition of political correctness on the media, schools and every institution in the land; Britain’s ruinous exposure to the forces of globalisation; and, above all, immigration.

If democracy is a system under which the common man rules, then all the great problems which threaten the very existence of our race and nation are the consequence, not of democracy, but of its absence. Britain is not and has not been for many years, a democracy. It might be termed an elective oligarchy, an elective dictatorship, a plutocracy, or a media-ocracy, but most certainly it is not a democracy.

Parallel with this is that the Establishment wants nothing better than to be able to present us to the public in a box of our own, neatly labelled ‘Anti-democratic extremists’. The time has come for us to cease merely uttering denials, but to challenge the very terminology they use in their one-sided political character assassination. Yes of course they will still lie about us, but we can make sure that everything they say is 100% untrue. What we do, say, write and believe ourselves is, in the long run, the crucial factor which will decide whether the public believe what they hear about us.

So, since, as we have seen from the above, Britain would be far better off were we to truly have a democratic system; and it is known that a fast growing minority of the British people already understand that we do not have one. Appealing to these disgruntled people by proposing as a cure, for the present lack of democracy some sort of benign semi -dictatorship is simply not going to work! It’s time to use the weight of ‘democracy’s’ own myths and expectations against it by side-stepping and using verbal judo techniques.

Not only are we not ‘anti-democratic’, but we are in reality the only democrats. We are the only people who say what countless millions think. We are the only people who will do what countless millions want done. On all the key issues, we really do represent the wishes of the people. So why should we do anything other than embrace democracy wholeheartedly?

And what of our opponents? The people who hold the multi-racial state in such exalted worship that there is no infamy to which they will not stoop to preserve it for a little longer from its own fatal contradictions? The people who deny us the right-to-reply and to broadcasting time that we would guarantee to spokesmen of every and all political persuasions? The people who organise frenzied mobs to try to: attack our election candidates, close down our meetings, and march on our premises with the stated intention of tearing them down brick-by-brick? The people who order their political police to tap our phones, steal our computers, imprison our leaders and use agents provocateurs to sow dissension in our ranks? Are these tactics democratic? No. What are they? By any genuine understanding of the term they are, quite simply, fascist – And these people who employ such tactics are fascists. Fascists! Not us, but Blair, Ashdown, Hague, Condon, the worthies of the Guardian Trust, Michael Grade et al. They are all, in the dictionary definition of the term, fascists, although with the characteristic deceit and hypocrisy of their kind they leave the beatings and castor oil for dissidents to others.

So rather than endlessly denying their endless charges that we are fascists, we should take every opportunity to use the label against them. We cannot, in truth, call them ‘Nazis’ because National Socialism was based on worship of race, which – except for the Zionists – is clearly not something of which they can justly be accused. But their worship of the liberal multi-cultural state is plain for all to see.

Mention of National Socialism brings us to another point. In the ’30s, the Nazis seized upon the new technologies of the day: the recent invention of the spotlight, loudspeaker systems and radio made it almost inevitable that their movement would make use of huge rallies and the spoken word. But loudspeakers and radio speeches are old hat now. The public are disenchanted even of watching well-fed elderly men deciding their destinies at meetings covered briefly by TV news. There is a growing dissatisfaction with the remoteness of all this, and its unsatisfactory results. But within the next five years, ten at the most, the continued march of information technology into every home will give, to any would-be revolutionary force which cares to grasp it, an unprecedented opportunity to remodel our entire system of government. Every telephone and every TV will be capable of relaying information about an issue, and in registering the opinion of its owner.

It now seems to be generally accepted that it would be in order for Britain to hold another referendum over whether or not to hand more sovereignty to Brussels. Fair enough. How about a referendum on capital punishment then? On whether to allow imports from China to destroy our manufacturing base? On continued immigration?

Of course, steps would have to be taken to create a level playing field in such debates. One of the recommendations of Labour’s recent study into political reforms includes equal government financing for referenda. That’s a start – and an opening, particularly since Labour ministers have rejected the level playing field concept! Other BNP proposals could be that the media be bound by strict rules of impartiality, the right-of-reply enshrined in law, and enforced without fear or favour by independent regulatory bodies. In other words, the proposals for genuine freedom of speech made at the last election by the BNP, and the BNP alone. But wouldn’t we be far more likely to get a chance to turn those proposals, and all our other policies, into reality, if we hammered out such a programme into a genuine and crystal clear commitment to freedom and democracy which would leave our liberal opponents exposed as the closet totalitarians they really are? We must aim to seize the mantle long let go by the Liberals as the Party of British freedom. We should make it clear that the British National Party is the Freedom Party, the BNP is the Democracy Party. In doing so, we will capture the moral high ground. Sounds absurd? So was the idea of a nationalist winning a British election until the application of new ideas, fresh tactics and a whole new approach was tried and found to win at Millwall. The key to nationalist political advancement is to find new avenues, try fresh approaches.

Right now, our rulers are chipping away at our judicial system – the elimination of jury challenge is already a fact, and now the elimination of jury trials for some accused is the next step on the way to tyranny. Our right to own books of which they disapprove, and our right to bring our children up with the values we learned from our parents are also under threat. We should shout it from the rooftops: THEY ARE THE TYRANTS, we are the ones who stand for freedom.

To fight this creeping evil we do not need to look for models abroad. As our alternatives to elective dictatorship and creeping tyranny we should proudly and loudly propose direct democracy and freedom!