Around 150 people took part in the National Front’s annual Remembrance Sunday parade in London, the 45th time the tiny fascist party has defiled the Cenotaph in this way. Claims that the march was smaller than last year were incorrect: the number of participants was very similar, despite some of the NF’s supporters giving the march a miss in favour of making a nuisance of themselves at an event in the North East.

Not all the marchers were NF members, the party being a mere shadow of its former self in the 1970s when thousands turned out. But the party, which maintains its permission to march on the Sunday afternoon after the official ceremony in the morning, always attracts participants from several other far-right groups.

As part of the outreach work by the Radicalism and New Media Research Group at Northampton University, Dr Paul Jackson, its director, is working with the National Union of Teachers and Show Racism the Red Card to develop awareness among teachers of the dangers of far-right groups and their racist messages.

To inform readers about the work of Show Racism the Red Card, Dr Jackson interviewed Paul Kearns, Deputy Chief Executive of Show Racism the Red Card.

Four by-elections contested by the British National Party in November provide an opportunity to assess whether the party is finished, as some commentators say, or “again on the road to winning major breakthroughs” as the BNP claims.

The answer is neither. The BNP made much of coming third in Rotherham on 29 November, the first time the party had come as high as third in any parliamentary by-election, though not its first third place in a parliamentary election: in Barking Richard Barnbrook in 2005 and Nick Griffin in 2010 both came third with 16.9% (4,916 votes) and 14.8% (6,620 votes) respectively and Barnbrook was 27 votes short of second place.

Far-right cross fertilisation, then and now

The current cross fertilisation between the many strands of the far right has a parallel in the 1970s when the Conservative Party leadership came under siege from the Monday Club, whose MPs, who held the balance of power in Edward Heath’s government, were trying to impose their ideas on the party. It failed then because Heath refused to be blackmailed by supporters of Ian Smith’s illegal racist regime and admirers of Enoch Powell for his “rivers of blood” speech about immigration. Their ideas enjoyed wide media support, which gave rise to violence in the streets against Asian refugees from Uganda and Kenya, and the growth of the National Front.