UK: Griffin romps home in BNP leadership contest
01 September 1999
Nick Griffin is the British National Party's (BNP) new leader after defeating John Tyndall, who led the organisation unchallenged from its formation in 1982, in a leadership contest in September. A perfunctory notice on the fascist organisation's website announced that:
"...on September 29, Mr Griffin, has won the leadership - receiving 62% of the votes cast, against the 38% received by current leader John Tyndall..."
Griffin, whose victory was expected, will attempt to repackage the organisation along "new" nationalist lines, coercing "Middle Britain" while dropping the overtly nazi baggage associated with Tyndall. Griffin, who has been influenced by Le Pen's revamping of the Front National, is likely to see his attempts to transform the BNP into a coherent political force go the way of the French fascist party, riven by unsettled disputes and bitter legal actions.
Griffin's rapid rise to power since joining the BNP in 1995 was more surprising than September's victory over John Tyndall. While the new leader had the backing of the majority of party organisers, and therefore members, Tyndall was increasingly isolated and portrayed as a spent force. He was ridiculed by younger BNP members who advocated a modernisation of the party infrastructure and increased exploitation of new technologies such as the internet. His vitriolic campaign tactics reopened many old sores on the far-right and were used against him to show that his monopoly of power within the party was a hinderance to the development of a modern "post-fascist" organisation. It is a measure of Tyndall's political decline that Griffin, a politician whose ambition has split every fascist organisation that he has been involved in, was able to seize power less than five years after joining the party.
The Cambridge educated Griffin first came to attention as the national organiser of the Young National Front (NF) in the late 1970s. He was involved, both at an executive and leadership level, with the NF throughout the 1980s, playing a major role in several bitter leadership power struggles. During this period he also cultivated links with exiled Italian fascists from the Nuclei Armati Rivoluzionari (Armed Revolutionary Cells, NAR) and formed the International Third Position. At the time members of the NAR were wanted for questioning for terrorist activities in Italy, which included the Bologna bomb which killed over 80 people in August 1980. By the late 1980s Griffin had moved to Wales with his family, and following an accident in France in 1991 appeared to drop out of politics.
Griffin's return to far-right politics came through old contacts who were involved in BNP branches. A letter to the BNP journal Spearhead in July 1995, raised the party's electoral potential following their Millwall by-election victory, noting that "the BNP can only make real electoral gains once it wins the votes of "Middle Britain". To this end he envisages a campaigning nationalism with a coercive role for the BNP cadres:
"power...built not on short-term ballot box surges but on trained cadres, a sound economic base and a hard-earned reputation as a campaigning organisation which stands up for "Rights for Whites"."
The BNP is a vehicle "that was willing and able to stand up to protect its own and impose its own will" he adds. "In the coming crisis a frightened "Middle Britain" will certainly demand discipline, but it must go hand in hand with toughness..." (emphasis in original). Griffin's version of the iron fist in the velvet glove - with its coercive emphasis on will, discipline and toughness - differs from Tyndall's only in its presentation and focus on a "frightened Middle Britain".
Griffin's seizure of power will undoubtably allow the cosmetic infrastructural changes advocated by the modernisers; but professional and efficient packaging is unlikely to disguise the totalitarian vision that drives Griffin. Ultimately, his scenario of BNP "trained cadres" coercing<