Nick griffin

This afternoon Jeremy Corbyn received the news that Israel’s Labour party are to suspend relations with him – accusing the Labour leader of sanctioning anti-Semitism. However, Corbyn can at least end the day even – having won a surprise endorsement. Former BNP leader Nick Griffin has taken to social media to say that he plans to vote for Labour for the first time – on the condition that Corbyn ‘sticks to his guns’ and ‘refuses to blame Assad’ for the suspected chemical attack in Syria: IF he sticks to his guns then for 1st time in my life I will vote #Labour – right now NOTHING is more important than resisting

The British National Party found itself back in the news today after years in the wilderness. However, it was bad news once again for the beleaguered party — the Electoral Commission had removed them from the register of political parties. While the decision was met with cheers by many, it hardly came as a surprise given the party’s difficulties in recent months. In the general election, they fielded only eight candidates as their vote share dived by 99.7 per cent. Despite this, the celebrations may have been somewhat pre-emptive as the party have now hit back. They says that they are definitely not over. Instead, they simply encountered a ‘small clerical error’ which led to the party

One hundred and twenty eight days from now, British voters will head to the polls to have their say in elections to the European Parliament and local elections. Between now and then, much of the political debate will continue to focus on the UK Independence Party, which has mobilised the single most successful insurgency in English politics since 1945 (and one that we put under the microscope in a forthcoming book). Among pundits and politicians there is a consensus that 2014 will be another record year for the Ukippers. But as one insurgent has prospered, another has fallen. While the elections in 2014 may see Ukip’s revolt on the right reach new

If two things fuelled the rise of the BNP last year, then they were probably the mainstream parties’ reluctance to talk about immigration and a general disillusionment with Westminster politicians in the wake of the expenses scandal.  There are tentative signs that the parties are getting their act together on the first.  And, now, Nick Griffin  may have undermined his own party when it comes to the second. After coming under fire for not being transparent about expenses since becoming an MEP, Griffin has now published a very loose account of them on his website.  The bottom line is that they add up to over £200,000, but here’s some detail

I’m aghast. I never imagined that even Griffin and Brons would fall at the first, and eminently negotiable, jump. The Telegraph reports that Nick Griffin and Andrew Brons have given insufficient detail of their expenses, worth nearly £500,000. All other parties provided detailed returns. Griffin stood on an anti-sleaze ticket last June, and successfully exploited the widespread contempt for mainstream politics. Griffin has abused those disenfranchised voters’ trust. For which we should be grateful, but there is a possibility that some will respond by completely disengaging with politics and embracing deeper extremes; mainstream parties must ensure they do not and take the opportunity they have been presented. Griffin cannot save

Frank Field was characteristically forthright on the Today programme this morning. “I don’t believe, given the strains (on the economy), we will be able to maintain an open door policy without serious unrest on the streets,” he said, and this brings me to a Sunny Hundal article on the media’s approach to the BNP. Hundal is extremely eloquent but his premises are ill-conceived. He aligns the BNP exclusively with racism and immigration, because it follows that a racist is illegitimate and can be consigned to irrelevance. He writes: ‘If you want to vote BNP and think people of different cultures and races are scary, why not just say so? Every

The Guardian reports that the BNP membership is going to vote overwhelmingly in favour of allowing non-whites to join the party. The BNP’s electoral success entitles it to a fair hearing in the political mainstream. The Spectator has maintained that the party’s domestic policies are inspired by racial supremacist ideology and that its economic policies are like Dagenham – that is, three stops beyond Barking. The membership’s decision, forced on them by a court order with which they must comply, changes nothing.   There is more chance of Dennis Skinner being elevated to the peerage than there is of Afro-Caribbeans and Asians joining the BNP. But this development is a

Labour has at last acknowledged the damage the BNP’s rise has caused them. Interviewed by Andrew Neil, Peter Hain admitted that government failure on housing and migration had heightened the BNP’s appeal, and, in an interview in this morning’s Independent, Alan Johnson elaborates on his claim that successive governments have been “maladroit” in handling immigration. “Part of its (the BNP’s) attraction is that it is raising things that other political parties don’t raise. It would take the absence of a national debate as the green light to distort the debate. It has absolutely no inhibition about lying about these issues.” Griffin’s and Brons’ victory proved that starving the BNP of

This week’s interviewee on the BBC’s Straight Talk with Andrew Neil is Peter Hain. One of the topics for discussion is Labour’s disengagement with its core vote and the rise of the BNP. Hain admits that this can be ascribed to Labour’s failings and Westminster’s disengagement with voters. Certainly, Labour’s failure on housing and migration has been a major factor in Griffin’s rise. But there is nothing to suggest that Labour has the political strength to re-engage. Even after the recent furore, there have been no new initiatives on housing or migration, just pitiful contrition in the place of action. Hain’s outright refusal to share a platform with the BNP

It’s an odd one is today’s ICM poll in the News of the World.  Most of it makes for sobering reading for the political class: it finds that two-thirds of voters think the mainstream parties have no “credible policies” on immigration, and that one-third agree with a core BNP policy on removing state benefits from ethnic minorities.  The Tories will be disappointed to see that only 20 percent of respondents think that their plan to cap immigrant numbers will work. But there are also some findings which support Alex’s thesis that we shouldn’t be unduly troubled by the levels of support for the BNP.  For instance – and despite all

Here are the stand-out findings from today’s YouGov poll, conducted after this week’s Question Time, for the Telegraph: “The survey found that 22 per cent of voters would ‘seriously consider’ voting for the BNP in a future local, general or European election. This included four per cent who said they would ‘definitely’ consider voting for the party, three per cent who would ‘probably’ consider it, and 15 per cent who said they were ‘possible’ BNP voters.” This just reinforces my qualms about Thursday night’s show.  Yes, Griffin embarrassed himself in front of a hostile audience and panel, but that may not have mattered.  He had already reached out to any

Nick Griffin has just made the following statement: “It was not a genuine Question Time, it was a lynch mob… People wanted to see me and hear me taking about things like the postal strike. Let’s do it again and do it properly this time.” He added that he would lodge a “formal complaint to the BBC over the way it twisted Question Time”. As James wrote last night, the debate was an extended navel gaze into whether it was right that Griffin appeared on the programme. Whilst Griffin unquestionably came off worse by babbling about a rather enigmatic, non-colour specific group called British aborigines, the panel missed the opportunity