Britain is in a transitional process of political change. We are emerging from the purgatorial period of post-Brexit politics, in which ideological cleavages were retconned through the prism of anti-globalist 'somewheres' and globe trotting 'anywheres', to a conscious reckoning with the replacement of the native people of this island. The Daily Telegraph now forthrightly discuss the imminent minoritisation of White British people while Spectator articles defend the existence of an ethnic British group in the first instance.
All this is welcome but somewhat predicable. A British right deprived of the red herring of the EU while undergoing a generational shift to based zillenials and zoomers would eventually expound simple but elemental truths, like the right of white people to exist. It is ironically the electoral populists of the British right, Reform, which struggle to grapple with this new paradigm, vaguely clasping onto random Musk-derivative initiatives and an ill defined 'war on Woke'. Restore are somewhat closer to the mark, but still deflect to tedious euphemisms like defending our 'Christian heritage'. There is a broader point to be made that Farage, through his co-option of British nationalism and his reduction of it to monomaniacal Euroscepticism, seriously retarded the the development of a nativist alternative to the political establishment. In light of this, its worth skipping the past decade and a half of British to the last time there was a populist ethnonationalist politician, and to see what lessons can be learnt from the career of Nick Griffin.
To start, it’s worth briefly recounting the history of the BNP. Founded ironically by John Tyndall, at the instigation of the Searchlight spy Ray Hill, it collated a variety of NF dissidents and other WNs into a united front. While essentially an NF continuity movement, it attempted to distance itself from some of the explicit celebrations of fascism and national socialism which had previously been normative on the radical right. Throughout the 1990s it experienced some growth, but its ability to break through to mainstream voters was limited because of its strong associations with racialism and street violence. Modernisers did successfully change elements of the party's aesthetics and language, while making some successful outreaches to white communities in the East End, the West Midlands and parts of the North, but were largely opposed by Tyndall himself. It would periodically see localised electoral successes in Dewsbury, Tower Hamlets and Dagenham, often linked to racial tensions between natives and immigrants, but was fairly self contained on the extreme fringes of political life. It also experienced tensions as Combat 18, originally a self-defence force for the group, became something of a Frankenstein’s monster, engaging in direct action against the Morning Star before eventually mutating into the transnational terrorist organisation it is today. Counter-intuitively it was Griffin, after undergoing something of an ideological journey himself, who joined the BNP, leaving the 'Political Soldier' faction of the National Front, which was a radical traditionalist organisation (also ironically it was the Flag Group, which maintained a commitment to traditionalist nationalist politics, which had provided many of Tyndall's early defectors). Griffin, in spite of his earlier esoterism, became the figurehead of the modernising faction, wresting control of the party in 1999. He successfully lead the moderation of the party throughout the 2000s, leading it to its sustained electoral successes in the first decade of the 21st century, coming fifth in 2008 mayoral election and gaining two seats in the 2009 European election. This success culminated in increasing media attention on Griffin and in him being invited onto Question Time in 2009.
For the purpose of this article, I forced myself to rewatch this tortuous episode from British political history. Viewing it from 2025 on 2.00x playback speed is a strange experience; like a cross between Michael Radford's cinematic visualisation of the 'Two Minutes Hate' and a Harry & Paul skit, it brought home how utterly alien Blairite Britain, even in its twilight years, is to the country of Ballymena and Rupert Lowe. All the hackneyed multiculturalist arguments are presented in condensed format by a tokenistic panel (comprised of Jack Straw, Chris Hulme, Sayed Warsi and Bonnie Greer). However, in spite of their frothing irrationality, they are presented to the AstroTurfed Shepherd's Bush audience with a force and conviction that is absent within the political class today. The purported contributions of South Asians' to Britain's war effort, Afro-Caribbeans to the NHS and the presence of PoC Roman legionnaires all make their appearance in rapid succession. At one point an audience member opines that we are all ethnic minorities because of humanity's alleged shared origin in Africa, to the apparent consternation of non-white members of the audience. No politician could today say, like Straw does at the conclusion of one of many of his monologues, that 'diversity is our nation's strength'.
What really comes across is the sheer vitriol which emanates from Griffin's co-panellists and the spectators. It really was a carousel of hate which dwarves any malignancy attributable to the BNP. A whole series of literally non-logical sequential arguments were thrusted forth, mediated by the faux sage adjudicator that was David Dimbledy. The opening crescendo was literally a black man demanding that Griffin recognise the (unstated) contributions of his grandparents to the country, while more latterly a South Asian Muslim tells him that he should target Christianity instead of Islam for theocratic tendencies because of prophecies in Revelation that Jesus would rule the world with an 'iron fist'.
While I was told as a child in the noughties that Griffin had been decisively bested in a great British clash of ideas, he did do, given the heavily stacked odds, relatively well. Indeed, where the spectacle of Question Time becomes more interesting is at the moments when the discussion turns into a critique of the Labour parties' immigration policy (initially introduced as a way of attributing moral responsibility for the BNP's rise to the Blair government). Griffin is at points able to elicit moderate applause from a hostile audience when attacking Jack Straw for his support for the Iraq war amongst other things. It is also during this phase when the discussion begins to parallel contemporary discussions about ethnic substitution. The sudden willingness of establishment politicians to countenance 'concerns' about the 'pace' of change (as opposed to change in and of itself) after unleashing turbocharged demographic replacement is a perennially manifesting trope in British politics which we see in full force today. It should be noted that the constituency which Straw represented and mentions as having had an uncomfortable pace of change after becoming 28% Asian (Blackburn) is now close to 36%, and is represented by the anti-Zionist independent Adnan Hussain.
Griffin made an error in appearing on Question Time. While television, along with other traditional media formats, were still effective weapons of consent manufacture, they were already being weakened by the advent of social media, as testified by the BNP's own YouTube channel. He should never have consented to being grilled on the enemy's turf, particularly with his revisionist baggage which would inevitably become the focus of attention (as opposed to the reality of racial replacement taking place at the time). Griffin however also made errors in conscious eschewing of confrontation with his co-panellists. He attempted to be reasonable and chummy with people who were his implacable political enemies. Leftists want you to internalise the guilt they project onto you and to feel socially embarrassed at having nationalist politics. When you attempt to be reasonable and personally friendly, they will simply leverage this against you. Griffin endured constant puerile side digs from other figures present, particularly the idiotic Greer who was the primary spouter of anti-British ahistorical libels. Multiculturalists are responsible for the rape gangs and the murders of Richard Everitt and Kriss Donald; they're bad people and must be made aware of this. Griffin came off by contrast more strongly in his combative interview with Jeremy Paxman in 2001. If they're going to label you a racist at least appear to be a racist who has the confidence of his convictions.
While the 2009 Question Time appearance is often presented as being the beginning of the end of the BNP, this is simplification of the history of the party. The BNP had seen a gradual electoral growth under the Griffin's modernisation project but this was belied by a reality of internal disunity over an allegedly dictatorial leadership, financial mismanagement and ideological opposition to the (legally mandated) adoption of a non-discriminatory membership policy. Of course the latter episode itself was part of a broader campaign of para-state harassment which undermined the party; the Equality and Human Rights Commission, an egalitarian leftist body headed by the 'anti-racist' Trevor Phillips launched the legal challenge to financially drain and disunite the party. Jonathan Bowden, the cultural commissar of the party claimed that Phillips had stated that he wished to see no party further to the right of Farage operating in British politics. While it is difficult to verify this, it would have typified the basic impulse of the state towards ethnic nativist politics, which was (and is to an extent) one of barely disguised repression. I will therefore only touch on the interpersonal politics of the BNP briefly, as much of this will inevitably be coloured by individual biases and feuds which often characterise small radical movements and can't necessarily be regarded as reliable. But also more fundamentally because the party itself was more undermined by government sanctioned activism.
In 2008 the party's membership was leaked, with 12,000 names, addresses, telephone numbers and jobs being released onto a blog by a former activist, resulting in a number of public sector workers losing their jobs and more members being subjected to various forms of harassment. In 2009, shortly before Griffin's ill fated appearance on Question Time, a second list was released onto WikiLeaks, after the initial one had been taken down the previous year. While not conclusively provable, it seems probable that this was the work of agent saboteurs who had infiltrated the party. This theory would align with the documented infiltration of the party's Oldham and Bradford branches' in the early 2000s by Hope Not Hate as well as the longer term work of the left wing agent Tim Hepple, who amongst things helped instigate the 1989 Dewsbury riot (which originally started off as protest in defence of the right of white parents to withdraw their children from a 80% South Asian comprehensive school). There is also the more infamous work of the investigative documentary The Secret Agent, which saw the communist organisation Searchlight cooperate with the BBC in attacking an eighteen-year old Mark Collett. In 2006, Ian Cobain a Guardian journalist managed to become the party's central London organiser, leading to the doxing of numerous party members including the English National Ballet prima ballerina Simone Clarke. The party's devastating performance in the 2010 local elections was party a consequence of the targeting of the party's strongholds by both major political actors as well by Hope Not Hate, which was able to leverage the intelligence cumulatively gathered over the previous decade to undermine the performance of BNP councillors; the party lost all of its 12 seats in Barking and Dagenham (documented in the 'Battle for Barking) with an overall loss of 26 seats, reducing their total to a paltry 28.
These incidences cumulatively engendered paranoia within the party as well as undermining its organisational reputation with its support base. They also provided opportunities for those with an axe to grind against Griffin, who, in the wake of the 2010 elections, launched a series of challenges to his leadership, accusing Griffin of financial impropriety, amongst other things. It was from this point on that the great splintering of the nationalist right occurred, in which Britain First and the British Democrats (these are two of the more well know ones-the level of factionalism would put a minor student communist party to shame) broke off. In 2011 the other European MEP Andrew Brons launched an unsuccessful challenge to Griffin's chairmanship, subsequently exiting the party as well in 2012. In 2013 Griffin resigned as leader and in 2014 he lost his seat in the European parliament, leading to a final spat of infighting, recriminations and a spiral into total irrelevance with the party effectively having ceased to exist as of the late 2010s.
There are some lessons and more general observations to be drawn from the decline and fall of the BNP. Radical politics was and remains to an extent vulnerable to the type of subversion which LARPing groups of middle aged self-proclaimed 'anti-fascists' habitually engage in and is typified by the work of groups like Hope Not Hate. As a younger generation of nationalists emerge, they should be vigilant to more latterly joining members and also those who are (openly) over enthusiastic in discussing animuses against certain ethnic groups. Collecting large quantities of data, registration lists ect. in particular places is also highly unwise and is a liability waiting to manifest. Right wingers today should be wary of joining mailing support lists or political associations parading as open 'secret societies', such as the Basketweavers, which featured in a recent Hope Not Hate report. While coming out in the open always entails some element of political organisation and some collation of members' data, we should be particularly wary of processes which involve registration with no direct tangible outcomes to justify the corresponding risks.
More optimistically, we should also recognise that the BNP had a particularly bad 'human capital deficit' which is not true of modern nationalist politics. Its no surprise that a party which had to release guidelines telling activists not to run their own blogs because these were often punctuated by basic grammatical errors, was liable to being hoodwinked by relatively well spoke left wing activists, who offered to assume organisational responsibilities within the party. Likewise, the ability of groups like Hope Not Hate (as witnessed by the general MSM indifference to its recent activities) to browbeat their opponents has considerably declined. Left wing radical politics is self-conflicted due to the Israeli-Palestinian conflicts and ecological communism of groups like JTO, which now consumes a considerable amount of the energies of younger leftists. Even the rather bovine YCL, with his 1930s with its retro-socialist aesthetic, seems more concerned with understanding the causes of white working class disenchantment, as opposed to pathologising and engaging in violence against its opponents. Parastate thugs and hacks can also no longer rely upon a normatively anti-nationalist consensus as they once could; bear in mind the UAF, a terroristic Islamo-socialist street fighting organisation, could count David Cameron once upon a time as a nominal member. Nigel Farage now self-identifies as being to the left of major Conservative politicians and to the public at large, with the Tories, however incompetently lead, promising to expel foreign welfare dependents. The repression which now occurs is more open and correspondingly more reviled, damaging the regime's international and domestic legitimacy. Whoever competently reassembles a populist nationalist right will find a political environment radically more sympathetic to their aims.
As for the career of Nick Griffin himself, he will probably be more favourably remembered than he is at present. While he has chosen irrelevance through his advocacy of a WN version of the Benedict Option, he has been to date the most successful ethnonationalist electoral politician in recent British history. He successfully modernised the BNP at a time when it had reached nadir in the late 1990s, partially emulating the success of continental analogues, being the first to capitalise on dissent from the superficial Blairite hegemony. He also provides an insight into the evolution of modern European nationalist politics. Originally finding his feet as an Evolian third positionist in opposition to the Leesite John Tyndall, he would embrace the paradigms of counter-jihadi para-Zionist populism in the 2000s.If anything, he demonstrates the versatility of electoral nationalist politics, which often draws opportunistically for better or worse on ephemeral trends.
More importantly, he should respected as someone who raised awareness of the Muslim rape gang phenomenon when most politicians steadfastly refused to do so. The work of odious individuals like Simon Cooke, who in tandem with others delayed the release of the documentary Edge of the City (which explored the grooming occurring in Keighley), because of stated fears that it aid the BNP in upcoming local elections, should also never be forgotten. Griffin is a flawed man with some objectionable views, but someone who alerted the country to a genuine evil which was blithely ignored for decades until now. The country he opposed is dying, and is denuded of the confidence it attempted to exude under New Labour. What replaces it is up to a new generation of activists.