BNP in European Parliament is no laughing matter

Jun 14 2009 by Ken Oxley, Sunday Sun

And if you think that’s going too far, let me remind you that during the BNP’s Euro campaign, photographs emerged of its leader Nick Griffin with the Klan’s grand wizard Stephen “Don” Black.

Black – who has an unfortunate surname for a white supremacist – famously defended a BNP leaflet that said black and Asian Britons should be referred to as “racial foreigners”.

It also emerged on Friday that James Von Brunn, the crazed anti-semite who shot and killed a security guard at Washington’s Holocaust Memorial Museum, had close ties with the American Friends of the British National Party.

That’s the calibre of “friends” they attract.

In all probability, the Equality Bill will not change the way people think about the BNP. The hardliners who support it will continue to do so. And the enforced change to the party’s constitution is unlikely to result in blacks beating a path to its door.

But even if the new law turns out to be purely academic and the BNP’s odious membership rules are never tested, it’s important to have a legal sledgehammer with which to smash this apartheid constitution should the situation arise.

I sullied myself by looking on the official BNP website before writing this. On it, the party’s leader, Nick Griffin, claims its membership qualifications are “wholly within the law as dictated by the Race Relations Act”.

He adds: “Nothing the Government does will change the party’s commitment to serving the interests of the indigenous population of our country.”

I don’t doubt that. An Equality Bill will not change what the BNP stands for. It won’t even clarify what is meant by the term “indigenous population”, which can be interpreted in a number of ways.

What it will do is open up the BNP to greater scrutiny, and lay bare the myth that it serves the interests of anyone other than bigots and thugs.