Nick Griffin’s Long March

The British National Party did very well at local elections in England on May 4 and now holds 54 council seats across the country. In some areas — notably in East London — it has replaced Labour as the dominant political force among the ethnically-British working — and lower-middle class.

According to the Spectator (April 15), Labour voters are switching to the BNP in such large numbers because they believe that only the BNP articulates what they are thinking: “Today’s BNP possesses the local campaigning skills and ability to make a personal connection with the voter that mainstream parties have forgotten.” Margaret Hodge, the Labour Employment Minister, told the press that 8 out of 10 white voters in her east London constituency of Barking admitted being tempted to vote for the BNP.

Is Britain on the verge of a major realignment, and can the bipartisan mould of establishmentarian politics be broken? Is the BNP becoming a respectable and electable party? This was the first question we put to Nick Griffin, the BNP Chairman, who gave us an exclusive interview during his recent visit to the United States:

Nick Griffin: I became involved with the British National Party out of desperation at the fact that no-one else was doing anything in Britain to stand up for the survival of Western culture, Western values, British independence in relation to the European Union, and a number of similar, closely related issues. I was elected to lead the BNP in 1999 and we changed it from being an unelectable joke into an organization with dozens of elected local government officials. We’ve been described by a number of hostile academics as having achieved more in terms of British nationalist success in three or four years than all the previous incarnations of this set of ideas since the 1970s. We are still a small organization, but with a very large and growing resonance with the British public as a whole.

Of course “respectability” is in the eye of the beholder, or whoever is publishing a newspaper, and we are not within the pale of the current British establishment. It is not somewhere where I wish to be, because that establishment has presided over the decline of Britain to a point where it is being destroyed as a sovereign political entity. Its traditional culture is being destroyed. The native peoples of Britain, according to our government figures, are going to become a minority in their own homeland somewhere between 2060 and the end of this century. The establishment which has done that while being paid out of our taxes, and which is putting in prison those who complain about it, is not an establishment by which I wish to be considered respectable.

We are ethno-nationalists but we are not racist. In any event, “racism” has become a Leftist cant term and now it can literally mean anything. Its real meaning is the belief that one race is superior to others, as opposed to being merely different from others. There are ethnic differences, there are racial differences between various groups around the world, which is a fact of life. If “racism” means anything, it means looking at those differences and saying that one group is better than another and entitled to a higher status than another. The ethno-nationalist position is to recognize that ethnic and cultural differences exist, that the best way to preserve the diversity of humanity and harmony within a community is to maintain as high a correlation as possible between the boundaries of ethnic groups and the boundaries of sovereign states. If you look around the world, the incidence of violence and strife is invariably high when this correlation between ethnic and national borders is low.

Q: In addition to your opposition to immigration, which is the defining trait of the BNP with many voters, what other issues you regard as important?

Griffin: We are particularly concerned about the very rapidly growing Muslim population in Britain, and the associated problem of the way in which our establishment bends over backwards to favor anything Islamic over anything Christian, but also over anything traditionally secular that Muslims decide to find objectionable.

In addition, we are opposed to Britain’s membership of the European super-state for a variety of constitutional, legal, political, economic, and practical reasons. The European Union has its roots in a socialist and materialist set of values that became dominant in Western Europe after the Second World War. Everything that the European Union touches, it seeks to homogenize. America is much bigger than Europe, but the process is vaguely similar in that it eradicates regional peculiarities. In Europe we still have huge differences in language and culture, ways of doing things, ways of being, ways of belonging, and all that within very small distances. The European Union, above all else, is about wiping out those differences. It is clearly eradicating them at the political and economic level, but also at the level of culture. It’s a force for making the entire continent of Europe blend in the sameness that destroys all particularisms that make it interesting.

Q: Would this indicate that you see “global capitalism” as an enemy?

Griffin: We are not “anti-capitalist” in that we do not believe that the state should be the dominant force in running the economy, but we believe that the state has the right and also the duty to create the overall framework within which private enterprise works. Unfettered global capitalism breeds “globalism,” which is a problem on several levels for people in any advanced Western society. It is in fact a threat to all the local identities, cultures, institutions, religions . . . of all peoples all across the world. We are witnessing a catastrophic wipe-out of human diversity. There is no giant conspiracy behind this, it’s just the relentless grinding on of a system that regards money as God. I support diversity, but the notion of “multiculturalism” is a misunderstood version of true diversity. Human cultural diversity, as well as biological diversity, is better than the lack of diversity. Their local customs, their language, their native particularisms, are things that root people in their community and make them fully human. The importance of rootedness is reflected in high suicide rates in large cities, compared to the local communities in which people have a place and a sense of belonging.

Q: Would a BNP-governed Britain continue to be a key American ally?

Griffin: The respect for national sovereignty and ethnic diversity also colors out attitude to the United States. The best of America — the Bill of Rights, say — reflects not some abstract notion of “progress” but the gradual trend, also present in the British political and constitutional history, towards greater freedom. This became fossilized in Britain, but the development has continued in the United States. Our common law system is being massively over-ridden by the statute law, in a way that has not happened in America as yet. On the other hand there is a less attractive, globalizing side of America, the one that makes many nationalists, especially in continental Europe, ambivalent about or even hostile to the United States. But when you look at all of the constitutional and legal values and institutions that we in Britain share with you, it is clear that we cannot attack “America” — in the way a French nationalist might — without effectively attacking ourselves.

So much for the ideological background to our attitude to America. At a practical level, we want to get Britain out of the European Union. We have to assume that Brussels will not be happy about our withdrawal — it could create a dangerous precedent for them — and in that situation we’ll need a political and economic counter-balance. While we don’t want to “cozy up” to Washington or anyone else, in reality we’ll have to keep our options open — and that demand excludes any knee-jerk hostility to the United States. After all, if you are hostile to the U.S. on some doctrinaire grounds, America might do a Serbia on you and bomb you flat. America has developed this capability to convince herself of her right to go and interfere in the affairs of other countries in various parts of the world pretty much at the drop of the hat. She can do so either on the whim, or as the concerted policy, of one or another of her constituent elites. For those reasons, and in terms of regaining and maintaining as much British independence as is practically possible in what is unavoidably to some extent a globalized world, we are probably better off allowing U.S. bases in Britain to stay, for as long as the United States agrees not to interfere in our political affairs. We would not want the CIA or American multinational capitalism to impose any Ukrainian-style “orange revolution” on us in Britain.

Q: But would it be fair to say that such policy considerations are nevertheless not as central to your platform and to your party’s electoral appeal as is the issue of immigration?

Griffin: How could it be otherwise when London has become “Londonistan”? That’s partly a reflection of the way in which successive British governments have refused to treat Islamic radicalism, and Islam in general, as a threat to Western values. It I also a reflection of a huge scale of Muslim immigration into Britain, which started decades ago but has been on an upward slope ever since. Under the Blair regime we’ve seen a massive increase in immigration, with the result that more than a half of all children now born in the whole of the London area are of immigrant mothers. A very significant number of those who do not fit into that category are the children of parents who themselves are of immigrant stock and who are not counted as “immigrants” because it was their parents and not they who came to Britain, they were born there. Demographers who use the government’s own statistics say that on current trends the native British — English, Scots, Irish and Welsh, together with the limited numbers of fully assimilated Central and East Europeans who came to Britain after the Second World War and their descendants — will become a minority in their own country, perhaps as soon as 2060. It’s a very serious problem, but it does not affect the whole country uniformly. There are large areas of major cities with massive concentrations of Third World populations that have transformed them beyond recognition.

The relatively new factor, which became apparent with the “Satanic Verses” controversy with Salman Rushdie in the late 1980s, is the sheer confidence of Islam and the Muslim population in Britain. By now they’ve come to believe that not only Britain but the whole of Europe is going to become what has been termed “Eurabia.” Their belief appears to be justified, because on current trends the rise of Islamic power is happening even faster than the demographic shift would have us believe. Because Islam is so aggressively powerful and such an effective political force, even if it commands the loyalty of only 15 or 20 percent of the overall population, it will dominate everyone else — especially as the elites continue to uphold socialist and liberal attitudes.

It dates back to the pie in the sky attitude of Socialist Prime Minister Clement Attlee, who declared back in 1948 — when the British Nationality Act was announced — that wars are caused by clashes between different ethnic groups and different races, so the best way to bring peace on Earth is to integrate all of the races of mankind into one. This is an ideological project, as opposed to the French notion of “Eurabia,” which was a geopolitical project meant to offset the power and influence of the United States. Both of them have had fatal consequences.