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Guess what song is Nick Griffin’s ring tone. I was standing next to the British National party leader in a BBC green room last week when his mobile phone rang. Cue chiming guitar – it was Sweet Home Alabama. You guessed Ebony and Ivory, didn’t you? No, what Nick had blaring out of his phone was moderate, acceptable racism – a paean to the segregationist governor of Alabama and two-time presidential candidate George Wallace (who, before he died, rather movingly apologised to black people for his hideous policies).
It is sort of okay to play Sweet Home Alabama in polite company, a catchy howl of disenfranchised redneck southern anguish. There is no mention of black people in the song, it’s all in Lynyrd Skynyrd’s semi-coherent good ol’ boy subtext. It is, I think, how Griffin would like to see the BNP now – incorrigible, anti-Establishment, un-PC, telling a few home truths. Fifteen or 20 years ago I suspect his ring tone would have been by Wagner, and before that the Horst Wessell song. Except they didn’t have ring tones then, obviously.
It is being said that the BNP, along with UKIP, is likely to be one of the main beneficiaries of public fury over the MPs’ expenses scandal. Indeed, Griffin said to me, shortly before his interview, that the front page of that morning’s Telegraph was worth three or four extra seats for his party.
I don’t quite understand the logic of this. Our MPs are corrupt and venal – so let’s take it out on the blacks? But Griffin has been very canny in repositioning his party as a sort of all-purpose anti-Establishment front, rather than as a slightly less intellectual version of the Sturmabteilung. He has been abetted in this policy by all those despised mainstream politicians who join hands and plead that you not vote for the BNP, by local councillors who refuse to work with democratically elected BNP members, by television interviewers who simply bark insults at Griffin when he appears on news programmes and by the thick-as-mince middle-class lefties bellowing, “No platform for raaaaaacists,” every time the BNP stages a meeting.
As soon as the BNP is engaged, however, the poison begins to leak out and we hear the truth. Last week, on the day of its manifesto launch, Griffin was skewered by his fabulously stupid comments about British Asian people not really being British, a position which is not merely impolite and unfair, but illogical. He had made those remarks six years previously but he could not quite bring himself to disavow them, because they are at the heart of the rubbish his party believes.
Griffin the man is shrewd and articulate. There is no doubt that he has managed to secure the angry support of some white working-class British people, a tranche of the population that has been neglected by the mainstream parties and by Labour in particular. There is some truth to the BNP’s claims that poorly paid whites seem to find themselves at the back of the queue for everything. And beyond the racism there is much in the party’s socially right-wing but economically left-wing manifesto which finds accord with a subsection of the population which mistrusts stockbrokers and estate agents almost as much as it mistrusts homosexuals.
But even the BNP’s biggest vote-winner in recent years – attacking Islam – is a case of expediency and opportunism. It should not be forgotten that the earliest supporters in this country of radical Islam were the far right, Griffin prominent among them. Back in the 1980s the Ayatollah Khomeini and Nick Griffin shared rather more than a mutual, ideological dislike of Jews. They also shared a dislike of international capitalism, the USA, gender equality, homosexuals and liberal democracy. There is not much in the BNP’s domestic manifesto today with which Hizb ut-Tahrir would find fault.
The only reason the BNP dislikes Islam now is that it is practised largely by people with darkish-coloured skins. If that intellectual position is good enough for you, then by all means vote for them.
Well we had one Young Swinton South Councillor running for St Mary’s it was a great day, and yes we have one great sporting event but this is for the people and Local Charities so come on John lets get together and do it in Salford.
Who would you trust?
