The BNP’s revamped website of Sunday 9th December 2007 must have given quite a shock to members and sympathizers alike. Two headline pieces announced that Sadie Graham and another leading member had just been expelled. Accompanying this news was a transcript of a phone conversation between the two alleged conspirators.
My knowledge of the BNP is solely what I gain from visiting its website each day and reading the monthly Party newspaper ‘Freedom’. As anyone who reads our website will know, Radical and Right are BNP sympathizers. Above all, we defend the right of the BNP members to enjoy free speech and the right to assemble, organize, canvass their views and contest elections – all without being physically intimidated by Leftist thugs, deprived of public service and private sector employment and unlawfully persecuted by policemen and Courts. We sympathize with and support the following central policies of the BNP – the halting of all immigration into the UK, the halting of all admission of asylum-seekers, reversing the UK’s entry into the totalitarian EU, no more building on Green Belts and a return to deterrent sentencing for law-breakers. I am sure there are quite a few other policies we could wholeheartedly support.
Our disagreement with BNP policies include the Party’s opposition to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, its unwillingness to stand alongside the US (Britain’s traditional ally), its silly talk of ‘war for oil’ and neo-con conspiracies by the Bush Administration, and the advocacy of an isolationist policy for the UK.
We also disagree with the Party’s racially based view of Party membership, its opposition to inter-racial marriage, its espousal of nationalization of big industries and services, its opposition to supermarkets and UK participation in the global market, and the Party’s intention to seek economic autarky if it ever achieves control of government. Job protectionism by the State may appeal to some workers but it is the road to poverty and unemployment for many. We think the BNP’s economic policies are socialist to the core and will require oppression and ultimately terror to sustain. In a truly democratic party, such policies could be argued over, challenged and intellectually tested.
Unfortunately, the Party also has another socialist (Communist would be a better word) aspect that is straight out of the Stalinist playbook. It is called ‘Democratic Centralism’ and it is the method by which the BNP’s hierarchy is organized. As with all good sounding words used by Leftists, ‘democratic’ is deliberately misleading for democratic this system is not! The BNP has a series of qualifications that limit the rights of paid-up members to vote for those who govern the Party. The rationale for this limitation on the ability of the rank-and-file to control the Party from the bottom up is that without it the Party’s enemies and other opportunists would infiltrate the Party in order to destroy it. Given the deadly hostility of the UK’s elites (The Media Class, the bureaucracy, the rich, the Leftists and the major political parties who fear free speech) to the BNP, there is more than a grain of truth in this defense. However the obvious consequence of top-down control of power is an entrenched leadership and a set of Party policies that cannot be challenged or altered. As far as I can judge, it would be virtually impossible for someone who disagreed with the Party’s opposition to the war or to its policy on intermarriage in the UK (itself a huge denial of individual freedom) or to its policy of renationalization of the coalmines, to be active in the Party and to argue their corner. Certainly, no group of members who combined on such issues would be able to avoid leadership denunciation and expulsion. Such an organizational framework does of course protect ideological purity and so here we are back with socialism and the seeds of totalitarianism. The BNP is not a broad church!
The BNP repeatedly expels members, denounces former members, whips up an atmosphere of paranoia about internal enemies and wastes scarce energy on bitter in-fighting. The history of Leftist sects shows how leaderships get addicted to the dramas and excitement of this atmosphere. Whilst they do so, more than a few longtime members become demoralized and quietly leave and new members and sensible ordinary people are repelled.
Sadie Graham looked like a rising star of the BNP. According to the Party’s own media, she was successfully recruiting members and had won a hard fought council seat in the East Midlands. Now she is revealed to be an enemy conspirator, willing to make some kind of common cause with the odious Searchlight organization. It may well be true, but surely the Party should learn from the history of Leftist sects, and from its own experiences, that something is going very wrong.
When ideological purity is required in order to belong to a political organization, when there is no place for divergence of views, when the ‘leadership’ is designed to be self perpetuating, when the leaders do not have to submit themselves and their policies to the challenge of ideas from within, every disagreement becomes a personal attack on the leader – and conspirators conspire. On the released transcript of a phone conversation, Sadie Graham sounds childish, amateurish and silly and certainly up to no good. Perhaps she will mount a good defense or defect to the BNP’s enemies. Griffin may be a good and high-principled man struggling to live down past bad judgments and attempting against great odds to lead his party to save the UK from its approaching demise. I have no idea and only time will tell.
The recent loss of one of the Party’s few Council seats indicates that electoral support is brittle. It would seem that the Labour Party’s support for the US (notwithstanding the Media’s incessant propaganda) is not so unpopular in the public’s gut and maybe many UK citizen’ are not attracted or convinced by the BNPs doom and gloom about the economy and world trade. No-one doubts that immigration is unpopular and swamping the native culture but is the electorate turned off by enthusiasm for nationalization, by policies to expand the State apparatus and the intrusions into personal freedoms that the BNP offers?
Who knows? But at present the Party’s members cannot debate such issues and conspirators breed in the absence of robust debate. It is all very sad, for the UK is in dire need of a good nationalist (but not National Socialist) party.