The far left, and the Establishment which supports it, doesn’t know how to grapple with the Griffin phenomenon
Special to Western Voices
Two things have to be said about Nick Griffin, the leader of the British National Party who made history by taking his party into elected office in the European Parliament: he is an expert at working the media, and he is fearless. Griffin’s polemical skills and his knack for staging highly engaging media events that often see him and his supporters put in real danger of violence, have won the BNP enormous levels of media coverage, circumventing the “No Platform” policy of all the political parties, as well as their far left allies, to deny the BNP any chance to make their case to the indigenous British public. Of course, the press, radio and television have been uniformly hostile, using lies, exaggerations and innuendo in an arsenal stocked by the Searchlight hate group, yet against all odds the BNP has been able, somehow, to turn these attacks to its advantage. “Any publicity is good publicity” is often just not true, but Griffin has been able to pull it off.
The latest http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=7288, showering the BNP contingent with eggs and bottles while chanting death threats. While the thugs didn’t manage to hit Griffin, a press photographer was blasted full in the face with an egg, and Griffin’s bodyguards hustled him and Brons to a vehicle, which was also egged, beaten with signs, and kicked. The area outside the Palace of Westminster, the seat of government, is one of the most protected places on Earth. Yet, ominously, the swarms of police, both uniformed and in plainclothes, did nothing to intervene.The mob scene at Parliament followed similar violence outside the site of the elections announcement in Manchester on the evening of June 7. When Griffin’s entourage arrived, his vehicle was attacked with eggs, and Griffin had to be brought into the site in a police vehicle while his bodyguards ran a decoy operation at another entrance. Unite Against Fascism (UAF), a group closely linked with the Searchlight organization and supported by all the main political parties, was at the heart of the Manchester violence. And just as the parties aid and abet violent street thugs through financial and moral support, they gave their tacit support to the mob that night. When Griffin rose to accept the results of the election, the hopefuls of all the other parties walked off the stage in a sulk, in keeping with the “No Platform.” Even more pathetically, members of the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP), a corrupt “soft right” anti-EU group relentlessly boosted by the media as a safe “alternative” to the BNP actually joined the crowd of thugs outside the hall as Griffin spoke inside. There is humor in the fact that, when leftists in the mob turned their anger on the Ukippers as “racists,” they had to be protected by UAF minders in the name of the “united front” against the BNP.
One of the things Griffin did when he was elected to lead the BNP in 1999 was to abandon the previous practices of street marches and similar confrontations with the radical left. The old tactic had certainly won headlines, but uniformly attracted mob scenes that associated nationalism with violence. In those pre-internet days, the public was not told that the nationalists were the victims of the violence, and so two problems arose. For one thing, nationalism was not taken seriously as a political movement; you never saw Labour politicians or Conservative hacks involved in bloody streetfighting. A second problem was that the fisticuffs distanced the BNP from the very people they needed, namely the white middle class. On the other hand, the “bother” did attract a number of brave, if marginal people whose appearance, behavior and words often made for great propaganda copy for the hostile media.
Yet Griffin has not abandoned confrontation per se. Instead he has used it to the advantage of his own agenda. The image of shaven headed goons fueled by mindless hatred beating defenseless and innocent people of color is a carefully constructed meme as powerful as it is false. Yet how do the media spin Nick Griffin and Mark Collett braving a mob to beat “hate speech” charges after being framed by the Labour government and its BBC mouthpiece, as they did in 2006? Or the http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=4924, a move greeted by “anti-fascists” actually plotting members’ addresses on Google Maps? Or the people fired from their jobs for the “crime” of belonging to a legal political party? The list goes on. But where in the past nationalists have had to just take their lumps, Griffin has been able to steal the thunder, putting the BNP in the position so envied in liberal societies: the BNP are now the victims, of “intolerance” and “hatred.” The BNP have even managed to bring “diversity” in, by arguing at employment hearings that BNP members, as indigenous whites, are being racially discriminated against by losing their employment.
Far from being a “victory over fascism” for the far left, the Westminster attack has become a debacle, an “own goal” showing them, once again, as intolerant enemies of “democracy.” Their media accomplices tried hard to smooth things over, providing excuses and ameliorations, but in the end the “No Platform” sacred cow of UAF and Searchlight was slaughtered, as Nick Griffin appeared on all the top television and radio news programs, and won front page newspaper coverage. The ordinary people of the UK saw for themselves not only the kind of unthinking hatred the BNP faces on a regular basis, but also the marginality of the BNP’s opponents. One UAF spokesman, Martin Smith, even appeared on a Sky News interview clad in an outdated “punk rock” getup!
The far left, and the special interests who control, protect and finance them, still haven’t figured out how to deal with the BNP’s public relations jiu jitsu. Stuck in first gear, the UAF pushed a line about the June 9 Westminster ruckus that reeked less of nerve than of confusion. In the melee which they started, a woman walking directly towards Griffin was unceremoniously pushed aside by a BNP guard. In between articles and comments gloating about their “victory over fascism” the UAF actually demanded the arrest and imprisonment of the BNP stalwart who reacted in a split second and in a violent situation, where he had no idea what he was facing. Of course, the UAF says nothing about arresting their own supporters who were randomly throwing bottles, potentially deadly weapons, at an elected parliamentarian. Organized “anti-fascism” hasn’t been able to tar the BNP with the violence label for a decade, but any port in a storm.
The UAF reaction to the Westminster “own goal” merely underlines their disorientation. The “united front” which saw Tories, Labour and all the other parties abandon political differences to attempt to thwart the BNP shows the total political bankruptcy of the Marxist left. In fact, the division of the left actually cost them the chance to defeat Griffin. In his North West constituency, the Socialist Labour Party, an old-line Stalinist group led by former “friend of the Soviet Union” Arthur Scargill, and the No2Eu Marxist campaign coalition of the Communist Party of Britain and other far left groups split enough votes between them that they would have kept Griffin out of the European seat had those votes gone to the Greens.
Nick Griffin has repeatedly called on all the main political parties to distance themselves from the political violence carried out by Unite Against Fascism. Yet the parties openly support the UAF, and the hatebaiting carried out by “mainstream” leaders has added to the dangerous climate now surrounding Griffin and Andrew Brons. Clearly, though, the left, and the Establishment which supports it, is confused and scared. For the first time ever, nationalists in the English speaking world have broken an electoral barrier that propels them into offices with international implications. The British National Party will now be looking to build on this success, as it swims further into the mainstream.