Author: Nick Lowles | Date: March 2007

The men who are creating a new BNP ideology

Nick Griffin runs the British National party as his personal political fiefdom, that much is indisputable. As a sop to internal “democracy” he is assisted by the Advisory Council, the party’s governing body which functions “without hindering the Chairman’s ability to make the final decision on all matters”.

As part of the long-term programme of broadening BNP support and influence we need to engage in a War of Ideas with the liberal-left, especially at university level Nick Griffin (25 December 2006)

But in recent years it has become increasingly obvious that BNP policy is not being formulated by the Advisory Committee but by a small inner circle of men whose identity is unknown to both the wider membership and the general public. Their efforts are framed to provide the BNP with an intellectual underpinning it has hitherto lacked, part and parcel of Griffin’s attempt to position the party ready for the “crisis” which he, like Oswald Mosley before him, fervently believes will one day sweep him into power.

One may (or may not) remember the ill-fated appeal by Kevin Scott, the party’s former North East regional organiser, to BNP members through the pages of Identity, the BNP’s monthly magazine, for a think-tank that would generate “ideas” for the party. Presumably unable to conjure any up anything quite so nebulous as an “idea” Scott’s initiative sank without trace.

However since 2005 the BNP has again revived its desire to provide its racist anti-Muslim rabble-rousing with a quasi-intellectual veneer and in doing so to broaden its appeal among the middle classes, bestowing upon it the respectability Griffin so desperately craves.

Alan Goodacre: BNP “economics guru”

A key figure in this process is a name doubtlessly unfamiliar to most. Described by John Bean, lifelong fascist officer and editor of Identity, as “the BNP economics guru”, Alan Goodacre has come from nowhere to command a key role in the formation of BNP policy. He is an integral part of the internal “research group” run by Steve Blake, the BNP webmaster. Goodacre’s influence can certainly be detected in the economics section of the party’s 2005 manifesto, the publication of which the BNP rather prematurely proclaimed heralded the arrival of “Popular Nationalism” which ironically savoured strongly of the “Britain First” isolationist economics beloved of the British Union of Fascists in the 1930s.

The BNP appears to have been vetting its recruits, cherry-picking those who appear to have something to offer the party either intellectually or through their specific skills. It has arranged meetings for them shortly after recruitment with key figures such as its very own legal eagle and self-styled ideologue Lee Barnes before setting them to work on special projects ranging from overhauling the party’s ideology to helping in the construction of the party’s front groups including its trade union, Solidarity.

Goodacre has also been at the forefront of an initiative aimed at tapping into the far-right internet blogging community, which has been mushrooming in cyberspace. Many of the bloggers contacted were initially wary of his overtures.

According to Bean, Goodacre is also the editor of the BNP’s Jihad Watch bulletin, one of several subscription email bulletins the BNP sends out, which contain not original research but a highly selective set of press cuttings that give the deliberately distorted impression of an impending demographic and economic apocalypse: an acute blend of paranoia and fantasy dressed up as news.

Goodacre also stated his intention to try and gain the help of Adrian Morgan who writes regularly for the Western Resistance website and has previously contributed to The Guardian and New Scientist and was once a Fellow of the Royal Anthropological Society. Morgan also contributes to the “Islam Watch” website – “Islam under scrutiny by ex-Muslims” – which would explain Goodacre’s interest in him.

Indeed, Goodacre’s evident Islam-ophobia led him to write a letter to the Jewish Chronicle claiming that the party had genuinely repudiated antisemitism and no longer denied the Holocaust (news to us), while appealing to British Jews to understand that the BNP “are the only party in Britain that is truly serious about fighting the Islamofascist threat”. His views received short shrift from the Jewish community, which is only too well aware of the truth behind this pitiful charade. Interestingly Goodacre has recently been at the forefront of a prudish demand for a return to Victorian sexual values as the only way to attain an imagined morale high ground over Islam. With his retrograde and regressive socio-economic views Goodacre is clearly a man living in the past if not in cloud cuckoo land altogether.

Patriae Europae

One piece of research generated by Goodacre and this internal think-tank was a grandiose piece of nonsense examining the possibility of a creating a pan-European network of far-right parties to be called Patriae Europae.

At the centre of this was an Italian-born BNP member Giuseppe de Santis, a business studies graduate who moved to London shortly after graduating in October 2000 to learn English and look for work. De Santis, a member of the Monday Club (at least he was in late 2002) is also a member of the Brazilian Chamber of Commerce. The BNP was quick to embrace this particular economic migrant. Double standards? Perish the thought but then Griffin has always had a penchant for mixing with Italian extremists.

In an article in the now defunct Right Now! de Santis argued that developing countries were extremely xenophobic perhaps nowhere more so than in South Africa. Coincidentally de Santis has been actively trying to forge links between the BNP and white Afrikaners in South Africa whereby the Afrikaners would promote the BNP in return for exposure of the ANC and support for a whites-only homeland. Jan Lamprecht, owner of the African Crisis website, apparently expressed his support for the idea. De Santis went so far as to float the idea of offering the former South African president P W Botha and his wife BNP membership.

After much scratching of heads and stroking of chins Goodacre and de Santis together with the mysterious Icelander alluded to in The Guardian’s investigation of the BNP published just before Christmas (brought into the group after it was learned he was writing an anti-Islamic book), produced a long, rambling document, fantastic and fanciful in almost equal measure, on how best to create Patriae Europae. Stultifying, ill-informed about the personalities and policies of the groups themselves, not to mention the national contexts in which they operate, the really interesting thing about the document is those whom it leaves out in the cold. Among those far-right allies named in the document as unworthy of partaking in such an alliance are many of Griffin’s traditional allies – the French Front National, the German NPD and the BNP’s existing connections in Italy.

What they would make of the deliberate snub is anyone’s guess particularly given the close links between the BNP and these parties in the past. Maybe Griffin can inform them why they have fallen from favour next time he is off gallivanting around Europe on one of his presumably all-expenses-paid junkets to meet and greet.

“Peak Oil”

Another key figure invited to participate in Goodacre’s fascist focus group is Andrew McKillop, the man whose writings have inspired Griffin’s ideas on the “Peak Oil” crisis. McKillop, who lives in France, is a co-editor of The Fuel Energy Crisis (Pluto Press, 2006), which explores the crisis in fossil fuels. A writer and consultant on oil and energy economics McKillop’s work has been widely published in a range of journals including The Ecologist, New Scientist and Le Monde Diplomatique. He was a founder member of the Asian chapter of the International Association of Energy Economics based in Washington and has translated legal, technical and scientific texts for a range of prestigious French businesses.

“One crisis away from power …”

It would be easy to dismiss these quasi-intellectual shenanigans as peripheral to the electoral struggle against the BNP. However, it is also important to understand and tackle the ideology behind the BNP. Griffin has long been influenced by the teachings of the French Nouvelle Droite and its quest to construct a “right-wing Gramscianism”, the idea that only when a cultural and intellectual hegemony has been achieved can a political revolution truly succeed. Antonio Grasmci, the Italian Marxist intellectual who died as a result of his treatment in Mussolini’s fascist prisons, first posited this idea in the 1920s. His ideas of cultural hegemony have made him a hero for the left and latterly the right, which has begun to understand the importance of his ideas. Indeed, Griffin is painfully aware that British fascism is “particularly backwards” in attracting an intellectual cadre prepared to wage the “war of ideas” against the liberal left and is determined to change this.

The new BNP activists’ handbook makes clear that: “We cannot rely on the media to promote our policies and ideas … We have to rely on our members to get out there … we must effectively create our own nationalist community, our own sea in which we can swim politically”. In an effort to transform this tepid pond into an intellectual sea Griffin has already stated his intention to stage a conference in Britain “at which we can pull together the various strands of ‘New Right’ and traditionalist thought which do exist in Britain”. This would certainly explain the interest of Jonathan Bowden, the BNP cultural officer and resident “philosopher”, in the minuscule “New Right” group run by Troy Southgate, the self-styled “national anarchist” and former National Front organiser, which is regularly addressed by the Holocaust denier Lady Michele Renouf.

This desire to build these intellectual bridges certainly fits the emerging pattern. At last year’s Right Now! conference among the audience of around 90 were at least 20 senior BNP members including Scott, who now heads the BNP’s Civil Liberty front group, councillor Richard Barnbrook, Danny Warville and “Dr Stuart Russell” alias Dr Phil Edwards, the BNP press officer.

Behind the scenes a quiet ideological revolution is taking place, one masked by an understandable concentration on the “modernisation” of the BNP electoral effort. Griffin hopes that the appointment of an unelected intellectual cadre within the BNP will provide the party with an ideological underpinning beyond its crass and opportunistic anti-Muslim racism, gaining the party significant middle-class support as a result. Whether or not Griffin is ultimately successful only time will tell.

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