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”.
“You’re all lying scum,” he replies when I ask why he is letting a journalist
accompany him. “It’s part of your job. But you can’t say you’re a normal
party, then hide yourself away. There’s nothing to hide.” That, of course,
is the question.
He tells me about a life spent mostly on the extreme right of British
politics. His parents met while heckling a Communist Party meeting in North
London in 1948. During the 1964 general election campaign, Griffin pedalled
up and down the street outside his home in Barnet with Conservative posters
on his tricycle. By 1974 his father, a Tory councillor and member of the
right-wing Monday Club, was so dismayed by Britain’s leftward drift that he
took his family to a National Front meeting. Griffin, then 15, joined
immediately.
After graduating in law from Cambridge he worked for the NF in London, living
on the dole. The party imploded during the Thatcher years. He quit in 1989.
In the mid1990s John Tyndall, the neo-Nazi demagogue who founded the BNP in
1982, lured him back into Far-Right politics.
Griffin made statements condoning street violence. He received a nine-month
prison sentence, suspended for two years, for alleging the existence of a
Jewish conspiracy to brainwash the British people. In 1999, however, he
ousted Tyndall as BNP leader and set about turning a bunch of neo-Nazi
skinheads into an electable party. The rhetoric was tempered, some of the
worst rowdies left and suits replaced bomber jackets.
Griffin has earned his £1,800-a-month BNP salary. The party won three council
seats in Burnley in 2002. It now has 49 nationwide, and on May 3 Griffin
expects to win many more in what he sarcastically calls “enriched” areas
such as inner Essex, the Black Country, West Yorkshire and Lancashire.
The party will also be contesting seats in blue-rinse towns such as
Harrogate, Bath, Windsor and Torbay. One recent poll suggested that 7 per
cent of the electorate would consider voting for it.
Griffin says that membership has risen from 1,300 in 1999 to 10,500, boosted
by home-grown Islamic terrorist plots, globalisation and his dramatic
acquittal in last year’s race-hate trials. Critics insist that the BNP’s
move towards respectability is purely cosmetic. Griffin retorts, as we join
the motorway, that it is “deep and sincere”. He admits “past stupidities”,
and says that he regrets the way that the BNP used to provoke confrontations
or to discuss race in a way that was “frankly crude, or cruelly and
inaccurately supremacist”.
He is not racist, he argues. He does not believe that whites are superior. He
believes that races are different and that multiculturalism is a recipe for
disaster. He opposes miscegenation “because most people want their
grandchildren to look basically like them”. If the liberal elite had its
way, the world would become “a giant melting pot turning out coffee-coloured
citizens by the million”.
The BNP no longer demands the recriminalisation of homosexuality, but Griffin
still expresses disgust at the idea of two men “snogging in public”. His
revised views on the Holocaust are striking, too. He says that he derided
the Holocaust only because the Left used it as “a huge moral club” with
which to beat opponents of multiculturalism. He now accepts that millions of
Jews were killed, but claims that some historians (he cites David Irving)
still question whether it was deliberate genocide.
The rules of warfare on the Eastern Front allowed 50 civilian hostages to be
shot for each soldier killed in a partisan attack, Griffin states without
trace of irony. “When you consider that the communists claim the partisans
killed at least 10,000 German soldiers, that would account for five million
people being shot to death.” Near Halifax we pick up Martin — Griffin’s
hulking, 21st, shaven-headed bodyguard who bench-presses 500lb (227kg) but
assures me that he is a “nice pussycat really”. Martin drives us to an
evening meeting in Ripon. As we pass through Bradford he points to a mosque
which, he claims, has a firing range beneath it. “That’s why we have a car
with tinted windows,” Griffin adds. The BNP leader says that he can no
longer visit Indian restaurants because “I wouldn’t know what’s in the
curry” and within 15 minutes there would be a crowd outside “with iron
bars and knives”.
In pockets of Britain the BNP is almost a mainstream party now, with ever
more people daring to run for office or to put posters in windows. But it
still prints its newspaper in Eastern Europe because British plants refuse
to, has trouble renting halls and cannot advertise its meetings because they
would be picketed. Potential supporters are instead instructed to gather at
“redirection points” and told where to go.
In Ripon the meeting point is the town square, where the local BBC radio
station interviews Griffin. Ripon and Harrogate are “lovely English towns
and we believe they should stay that way. They can’t if there are high
levels of immigration,” he says. On our way to the meeting we pass a
painting of a black inmate outside the Workhouse Museum. Griffin splutters.
It was poor whites who suffered in workhouses, he says.
About 70 people are packed into a back room of the Golden Lion pub, with not a
skinhead or pair of Doc Martens in sight and more tweeds than T-shirts. They
are male and female, young and old, working class and middle class,
ex-Labour and ex-Tory, several of them Daily Telegraph readers. They
are mostly solid Yorkshire folk who have watched immigrants transform areas
in which they grew up and believe — rightly or wrongly — that their way of
life is under threat. They are bewildered more than hate-filled. They are
fearful more than fear-inspiring, and feel gagged by political correctness.
They do not come from sink estates. They are stakeholders, people with
something to lose. “We’re being overwhelmed,” laments a retired Latin
teacher. “I’ve nothing against other races. It’s just that they keep
flooding into the country to breaking point,” says a lorry driver. “We can’t
invite the whole world to live in England,” says a former merchant marine
officer. Few will give their names.
Griffin and his fellow speakers do nothing to calm their fears. Quite the
opposite. In a promotional video he decries the alleged banning of the cross
of St George, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and even Piglet because
the character offends Muslims. Against a background of soft music and
beautiful scenery, a woman’s voice decries the millions of foreigners of all
races settling in Britain: “The one thing they have in common is there are
too many of them.”
Michelle Shrubb, a candidate who lived in South Africa, says that a black
crimewave is coming to Britain. Nick Cass, the BNP’s Yorkshire organiser,
declares that “decent British people are fed up to the back teeth with
seeing the country fall apart and being called racist when they want to do
something about it”. The merchandise table offers “It’s Cool to be White”
T-shirts and “I vote BNP because they look after me” bumper stickers. BNP
candidates are presented with rosettes for daring to stand up and be
counted. Griffin humorously coaxes about £500 in donations from the
audience, then answers questions for an hour. He puts on no airs and graces.
He has a pint on the table beside him. He presents himself as an ordinary
bloke, like his audience, who is fighting a corrupt elite that bleeds
taxpayers for its disastrous social engineering projects and treats them
with contempt.
He is a shameless populist. He calls the rise of the BNP “a peasants’
revolt”. He talks of “our people”, meaning whites. He mocks those who regard
criminals as victims, advocates “damn good thrashings” for wayward
teenagers, and says of drug-dealers: “Hang the bastards.”
The audience loves it, but this is more than knockabout political rhetoric.
Griffin firmly believes all this. Party policy — which he sets — is
draconian and xenophobic. The BNP would deport all illegal immigrants,
asylum-seekers and subversive foreigners, and offer existing immigrants
money to return home. “It’s clearly worth talking in terms of six-figure
sums to persuade families to go,” Griffin says.
He would create civilian anti-crime patrols. Anyone who has done National
Service would be allowed to keep guns to shoot burglars, and as “a last
resort against a tyrannical government”. He would restore hanging for the
worst murderers, paedophiles, rapists and drug-dealers, and bring back the
birch.
He would abolish affirmative action programmes and hate-crime legislation,
ban the promotion of homosexuality, prevent the NHS from recruiting foreign
workers and stop women soldiers serving on the front line. State schools
would restore mandatory (nonhalal) lunches and morning assemblies with
Christian worship (minorities should “either accept our ways or go somewhere
else”). A BNP government would take Britain out of the EU and the European
Convention on Human Rights.
Remove the BNP label, Griffin claims, and most Brits would support these
policies.
The next day we go to Dewsbury (“It’s like living in Rorke’s Drift,” says a
local BNP councillor), where The Dewsbury Reporter refuses to
interview Griffin. Some people greet him on the street but no one heckles.
“The English are very polite. If they don’t like you they walk away,” he
says.
From a studio in Leeds he does a phone-in show for BBC Radio Wales, on which
successive callers denounce him as a racist and fascist and he snarls back
(“the usual Searchlight ambush”, he says later, referring to an antifascist
group). We visit Heckmondwike, where David Exley, a soft-spoken and rather
impressive BNP Councillor, has persuaded Kirklees council to restore a
run-down park (wards that vote BNP find shocked councils suddenly chucking
money at them).
We then visit an old factory near Leeds that houses the BNP’s recording
studio, Great White Records. Griffin has written the lyrics for its first
in-house album, The West Wind. One song begins: “I wandered through
my native land/ And stood aghast at what I saw/ As she wept under foreign
hands/ No justice, truth or rule of law.”
I suggest that Griffin’s one good eye sees only the worst aspects of Britain.
“It’s already a divided, sad, overtaxed, fearful place,” he replies. “And
it’s going to be too unpleasant to put into words.”
Between umpteen calls on his mobile phone — one is about ways to use
Simone Clarke, the ballet dancer identified as a BNP member — I ask if
Griffin sees any advantages to multiculturalism. Chicken tikka masala, he
replies. And some good sportsmen, though he thinks that England’s all-white
1966 World Cup footballers outperformed today’s team because they had
“common values and identity”.
Then he lists the downsides — a catastrophic loss of social cohesion,
racial harassment and violence, spreading knife and gun cultures and old
folk dying in nursing homes surrounded by staff who do not speak their
language and feeling “totally alone, alienated and in a foreign place”.
He warms to the theme, claiming that some Muslims deliberately use heroin —
“Paki poison” — to undermine nonMuslim communities around
them. “It’s narco-terrorism.” Even worse, he says, is the way that hardline
Muslim males deliberately seduce and corrupt “thousands” of young white
girls in a practice called “grooming” that the authorities downplay for fear
of being labelled racist.
But surely the vast majority of Muslims in this country are good, law-abiding
citizens? Griffin disagrees: “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.” A
Gallup poll this week suggested that 81 per cent of London-Muslims were
“loyal to Britain” compared with just 45 per cent of nonMuslims.
In public Griffin appears personable and plausible. Talking in his car, he
verges on the paranoid. Many British Muslims subscribe to a form of Islam
that preaches a “ruthless, aggressive imperialism”, he says. Its goal is a
world-wide caliphate. “It’s a takeover attempt,” he says, and it will end —
literally — in civil war. Wherever an Islamic population establishes
itself “you get all sorts of bloodshed and horrors and there’s no reason to
think that this little part of the world will buck the trends of world
history”.
I ask, mischievously, if Griffin can see himself as Prime Minister. It’s
possible, he replies, though he says that he and Jackie have agreed that
they don’t want to live in London. He then spells out how: the US economy
collapses, decades of Western economic growth come to “a grinding,
shuddering halt” and the people turn on the liberal elite. The only
question, he says, is what will replace it — a “nativist backlash” or
Islam. If the crash comes later than 2030 or 2040 “the likely winners will
be the Islamists purely because of demographics”.
The 60 people at that night’s BNP meeting in a Batley pub are not thinking in
such apocalyptic terms. They have more immediate and prosaic fears about the
consequences of immigration — their children being squeezed out of jobs
and council housing, the emergence of no-go areas, the undermining of their
rights and culture.
“We’re frightened to be British,” says Ann Nailor, who runs five Age Concern
shops. “I feel alienated in my own community,” says Neil Feeney, a water
company employee. “People who read your paper have no idea about places like
this,” said Marjorie Shaw, a former policewoman now in a wheelchair. “The
BNP are the only ones standing up for this country,” adds Lynn Winfield, a
pub dishwasher. Griffin fans the flames. He calls the English “one of the
most oppressed peoples on earth”. He says that when people like him try to
speak out about real problems “they try to throw them in jail”. He says that
bad laws should be broken. He calls global warming “an excuse to say that
we, the international elite, have to interfere with every sovereign state in
the world, and if we don’t you will sink by Thursday”.
When I take my leave, Griffin asks what I will write. That he is both the
BNP’s greatest asset and its greatest liability, I reply. He does not
protest. He recalls something that he said earlier: “I perhaps have too much
baggage that won’t be allowed to stay in the lost baggage office. I can take
the BNP to a certain level, but to make the final push someone else may have
to take over . . . I can go back to Wales and keep pigs. Tremendous.”
