re: #210 Charles

Wow. I don’t believe you wrote that.

The fact is that the BNP is one of the most extreme Eurofascist groups on the scene. And that’s saying something. Even Jean-Marie Le Pen of France’s Front National tries to conceal his racism and Holocaust denial — BNP leader Nick Griffin is a pure thug and outright Holocaust denier.

Seriously — you need to rethink what you wrote here because it is WAY off base.

I must admit that my knowledge of them comes primarily from my ex-wife who is British. I’d literally never heard of them before I met my ex, but then I was only vaguely aware of the mainstream parties in the UK anyway.

My ex doesn’t like the BNP one bit. She told me they were Nazis and I thought that must be an exaggeration since they seemed to have a following. Here in the US David Duke is a walking punchline, and so I found it strange that those of his ilk could have political capital in the UK. A casual search for information on them lead me to believe that their reputation was the result of the leftists who run things over there labeling a (somewhat nutty) libertarian group as Nazis. This was back in 2004. I know better now.

My ex detests this group, but some people in her family are supporters. Her relatives are not Nazi’s either, just normal people that agree with the PUBLIC platform of the BNP, and who distrust the Tories and Labour immensely. She’s from Stoke-on-Trent, an extremely blue collar area of the UK which not long ago was completely dominated by the Labour party. Voting for and supporting Labour was almost religious catechism. Today that is no longer the case.

While I was aware that they were fascists and racists, my perception of them was that they were a mild example of them. But if they’re more out-there than the other fascist groups in Europe, then they are indeed extremists.

That is not the face that they are presenting to the people who are now supporting them however. They are doing everything they can to distance themselves from the perception that they are Fascists and racists, at least when certain people are listening. In private they probably goose-step with the best of them.

The main thing that my ex’s relatives like about the BNP seems to be their anti-PC stance. In the UK, social decay has reached the point that the old adage that everyone is equal but that some are more equal than others isn’t an exaggeration. Just imagine a nation in which Gramscianism pervades the culture and the policies of the state and that is pretty much how things are in the UK, or at least how many people perceive things to be.

I for one am glad that I don’t live there. Used to be a great country, but it has destroyed itself from within, eaten away by the cancer of leftist ideologies, of which fascism is but one.

But even so, my original point still stands that people are voting for them not because they approve of fascism or racism, but because the party is addressing political realities that the mainstream parties are not. As soon as the Tories adopt the popular ideas of the BNP (which may be only tangentially related to the real goals or nature of the party), then the BNP will once again fade away into relative obscurity.