This coming period was - it hoped, and its enemies feared - to be the British National Party's time. Unemployment is rising substantially, and so might the demand for “nationalist” solutions - in which work-grabbing foreigners over here and business-grabbing foreign goods over there, will be given the elbow through cuts in immigration and trade protectionism.

It seemed like that for a while in the mid-1970s too. Unemployment was on the up and there was a sense of national decline. In the 1973 West Bromwich by-election, the National Front, the BNP of its day, in the burly shape of its national organiser, Martin Webster, won more than 16 per cent of the vote. This despite his his unfortunate promise to “build a well-oiled Nazi machine” in Britain.

Paradoxically, as the economy got worse, the NF's fortunes ebbed. Partly this was because of the reaction its success provoked, with organisations such as the Anti-Nazi League being set up to expose the awkward political ancestry of the NF's leading cadres. But the full-scale massacre of jobs that followed the 1979 election gave no benefit whatsoever to the far Right. By then even the pro-Enoch dockers of 1968 were beginning to realise that Britain was a multiracial society.

We are not a militant lot, and far-left and far-right groups have fared worse in Britain than in other countries. They traditionally blame the electoral system for this, arguing that were they able to get a toe in the door the whole fragrant body might follow. But since 1997 we have tested this proposition with proportional representation elections in Scotland, Wales, London and for Europe, and the voters still show a marked reluctance to support extremists. The gain of a London Assembly seat by the BNP last May has led to no dramatic (or undramatic) rise in its support.

Times Archive, 1981: National Front complains of police action

Mr Martin Webster claims that the Anti-Nazi League had published addresses and telephone numbers of party members and officials

• National Front blamed for attack on campaigner's home

• National Front advised to drop march

The same can be seen in the short history of George Galloway's fabulously misnamed Respect party, an odd alliance of Leninism and Islamism, where success, based on hostility to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, was followed by a plateau, and then a total fracture along its blindingly obvious faultline.

But at least Respect was briefly fashionable among anti-war, arty types. The BNP has never been, and never will be fashionable. It represents anti-fashion, the reaction of the unconsulted and unconsidered (as they like to think of themselves). The difficulty is that, in Britain, the slightly angry silent majority is never going to embrace an organisation that is seen as less than respectable.

The very fear expressed by members “outed” when the BNP's membership list was posted on the internet shows, in part, that they recognise their respectability problem. Small wonder, then, that the BNP's continuing dilemma has been how far and how quickly to make itself respectable at the expense of its own core beliefs.

Moderation sits badly with the BNP. Its activists comprise far more than the usual proportion of convicts and football hooligans. You have only to visit a few neo-Nazi websites to see the crossover between BNP-ers and their unmoderated alter egos.

The leader's own past is evidence enough. Nick Griffin once wrote a pamphlet on Jewish influence in the media and, when I interviewed him six years ago, it was evident that he remained a convinced ideological racist, in that he believed that race equalled destiny. Now he has to pretend not to, hence his claim to be a moderate in a moderate party.

Such a transformation is theoretically possible. Mussolini's heir in Italy, Gianfranco Fini, took the MSI party from his own enthusiastic claim in 1991 that “fascism is alive!” to being a centre-right presence in the Italian Government, in which he has been Deputy Prime Minister and, Foreign Minister. Sometimes in politics, if you pretend to be something long enough, you actually become it. But Griffin is no Fini.

On the website of Simon Smith, until recently a BNP councillor in Sandwell, West Midlands, you may note Smith's urgent belief that the Holocaust never happened, and is all a hoax got up by the Chosen People. This, of course, is not a helpful opinion for a BNP man to express publicly, and Smith is no longer a BNP man.

This is his understanding of the leader's reasoning. “Nick Griffin took the party away from the public debate of Revisionism [a fancy name for Holocaust denial]. In many ways this was understandable. The argument was that before history could be honestly taught, a Nationalist government was needed. In politics expediency is universal.” In other words, Griffin's position is: first get into power and only then tell the “truth” about the Jews.

It is precisely the far Right's militancy that so repels voters and yet so attracts its activists. Take it away, they fear, and you're not left with much, except UKIP Mark II, possibly, and UKIP Mark I is embarrassing enough. It is worth recalling that the BNP was originally a militant split from the then-moderating NF.

This is not to say that there won't be BNP alarums in the next few years. Voters should easily be able to forget the membership lists fiasco, and occasionally vote in another assortment of utterly useless, quarrelsome and temporary councillors. In one or two places, such as Stoke, they may even - like ordure flung against a door - stick for a while. For this purpose the BNP needs no more than 5,000 to 6,000 members to have a noisome presence, and to influence panickers in mainstream parties towards economic and social nationalism.

Simon Smith, the disgruntled anti-Semite, decided that the BNP was “being managed as a state safety valve”, and some might argue that every society could do with a legitimate far-right group to channel the activities of those who hate foreigners. Some may ask, doesn't every good country need a Nazi party? Just so long as it has absolutely no influence and does absolutely nothing is my answer.

*****

Martin Webster points out that he said: "We are building a well-oiled Nazi machine in Britain" in 1962 as a member of the National Socialist Movement, and not in 1973 as a member of the National Front, as might have been inferred from an Opinion column on November 20. We are happy to set the record straight.

Times Recommends

• We have kit and leadership. Let’s go
• Behind the scenes at the biggest deal
• Conferences — what a waste of money