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Author: Sam King | Date: October 1999
Nick Griffin is heading for victory in the British National Party’s leadership election. In what has become an increasingly bitter and acrimonious affair, the party’s director of publicity seems certain to oust the incumbent leader, John Tyndall.
VOTE for the old or a vote for the new. That is the choice being offered to members of the British National Party (BNP) as they cast their votes for the next leader of the party. There is John Tyndall, the man who launched the party in 1982 and has a tried and trusted record at the helm of Britain’s largest far-right group. In the opposing corner is Nick Griffin, the young Turk, who carries the motivation and energy of the “new nationalist” wing of the party, but is hampered by a less than glorious political past.
It is a contest that Griffin is almost certain to win, as he has the backing of the overwhelming majority of party organisers and activists, who in turn will influence their respective members. Tyndall must rely on the old guard, the organisers who are likely to be swept aside in the event of a Griffin victory, and older activists who have followed him through his myriad of nazi groups since the 1960s or have experienced Griffin’s bizarre political career at first hand.
The Griffin camp has made much of Tyndall’s age and questionable vitality, never losing an opportunity to contrast their man with the present leader, who is old enough to be drawing a state pension. Griffin carries with him the aspirations and intentions of the younger organisers, who over the past two years have made attempts to remodel the party as a more mainstream and respectable organisation. The watering down of the party’s “repatriation” policy, the attempt to recruit from “Middle England” at the expense of the Tories and the UKIP, the rural campaign and the emphasis on “community politics” are just a few of the developments introduced by this younger faction.
In contrast to Griffin’s emphasis on the future, Tyndall’s campaign appears tired and vindictive. “The BNP is in peril … You can save it” ran the front-page headline in the latest Spearhead. “Don’t let’s ruin it all!” began his open letter to party activists.
Tyndall’s emphasis has been on continuity and experience. “My record as head of this party during the 1990s has been one of considerable success,” Tyndall wrote in his election address circulated to BNP members. “And are we not successful?” Tyndall added in an interview in September’s Spearhead. “Don’t accept what I say on the subject. Just listen to Nick Griffin, who is on record in the July issue of Spearheadas saying that the party’s Euro Election campaign was a ‘remarkable achievement’. Why then, after this achievement, should there be change?”
He has also relied on fear of the unknown. “Upon the verdict of party members”, added Tyndall in his editorial in September’s Spearhead, “will rest the question of whether 17 years of hard work and sacrifice devoted to building up the BNP will remain worthwhile or will go down the drain – rendered a complete waste by a takeover by people of proven disloyalty and incompetence who, if the past record is anything to go by, will lead the party to ruin.”
He has even tried to portray Griffin’s leadership bid as a sinister state plot to undermine the party. “What we believe is happening now”, wrote Tyndall in the editorial of August’s Spearhead, “is the culmination of a state-inspired drive to smash it, with the principal activators seemingly completely unaware of the way in which they are being used.”
However Tyndall’s scare tactics have not only failed to pull voters away from Griffin, but worked to his disadvantage. “With the August edition of Spearhead earning top spot as the most negative nationalist publication for nearly twenty years,” wrote Tony Lecomber in The Patriot, “most BNP members will be wondering why John Tyndall has made such a ferocious attack upon BNP leadership contender Nick Griffin”.
By contrast, Lecomber wrote in Griffin’s 12-page glossy election address, “Nick Griffin is putting forward a positive vision of the future – and a blue-print to make it happen. The tone is upbeat, the confidence is infectious.”
Other key supporters have actively promoted this view. “John Tyndall has, in my opinion, taken the BNP as far forward as he possibly can,” wrote Mark Cotterill, in Griffin’s address. “I believe that Nick Griffin with our support can do what no other British Nationalist leader has ever done – lead us to the threshold of power!”
“The coming leadership election is a test of whether the party has what it takes to win,” wrote Mike Newland in the same publication. “Nearly everyone accepts the necessity of making the radical alterations needed to every part of the party, which should have been undertaken many years ago. John Tyndall now accepts this too, albeit without enthusiasm. Unfortunately, his acceptance has come decades too late.”
Organisers across the country are lining up behind Griffin. He has the Scottish, Welsh, South West, North East and West Midlands regions sown up, with strong support in north and east London, Leeds and parts of the East Midlands. Leading his campaign are many of the BNP’s most important regional organisers: Lecomber (north and east London), Newland (press officer), Scott McLean (Scotland), Steve Edwards (West Midlands), Bruce Cowd (South West), Chris Telford (North East) and Terry Cavill (South Wales).
In comparison, Tyndall’s support comes from East Anglia, southeast London, Croydon, West Yorkshire, Hampshire and the majority of the North West. Among his key supporters are Richard Edmonds (national organiser), John Morse (Hampshire), Paul Ballard (Croydon), Keith Axon (Birmingham North), Steve Belshaw (East Midlands), Iain Wilson (Dewsbury) and Alan Payne (Manchester).
Any thoughts that this election could have been conducted in a gentlemanly manner were dashed the moment the campaign began. However it has been at the meetings, held across the country, that the real animosity became evident.
At a meeting in Croydon, Edmonds likened Lecomber’s Patriot, with its numerous pages of pictures of Griffin, to a “love-in” between the two men. A meeting in north London descended into a slanging match between Tyndall and Lecomber, with the latter calling the BNP leader a drunk. Tyndall responded by saying that he would not accept a position in a Griffin-led BNP, describing his rival as “vile”.
A West Midlands meeting saw Edwards move a motion against Tyndall for using Spearhead to attack his rival, while Newland was busy telling any journalist who would listen that Tyndall was “a 65-year-old man who had achieved nothing for British nationalism”.
If Griffin’s supporters were irritated by August’s Spearhead, they were in for worse in September. “Nick’s words would seem to be whatever flavoured chewing gum for the ears that he calculates his audience of the moment might prefer,” wrote Morse. “It’s all done for effect. To this writer, as to anyone
Nick Griffin before their eyes for enough years, Nick’s auricular spearmint has long acquired a monotonous taste of cow dung.”
Morse’s article was written in response to what he saw as Griffin’s complete rewriting of his own political past. In a number of articles produced during the leadership campaign, Griffin has blamed all the faults of the 1980s National Front on others but has been quick to claim personal credit for anything that did go right.
Even the International Third Position, a group which Griffin helped found, has been baffled by his political gymnastics, as it reported in its email newsletter. “He has been a conservative, a revolutionary nationalist, a radical National Socialist, a Third Positionist, a friend of ‘boot boys’ and the skinhead scene, a man committed to respectable politics and electioneering, a ‘moderniser’. Which is he in reality? Perhaps he has been all of these quite sincerely – in which case his judgement is abysmal; or perhaps he has been none of them sincerely – which speaks for itself!”
Distancing himself from the bizarre politics of the NF, which included support for Colonel Gaddafi, the Ayatollah Khomeini and Louis Farrakhan, leader of the Nation of Islam, Griffin claims to have left the NF in 1989 because the party was “bedevilled by relidecision to leave.” So why, if Griffin was so consumed by sadness did he immediately launch an even more bizarre political party with those very same cranks?
In offering his vision, Griffin has spoken of the need for community-based politics to build respectability in the eyes of voters. “That is what produced the victory in Millwall,” he declared in his election address. Actually this is another huge change of heart from Griffin, for it was only four years ago he wrote in The Rune: “The electors of Millwall did not back a Post-Modernist Rightist Party, but what they perceived to be a strong, disciplined organisation with the ability to back up its slogan ‘Defend Rights for Whites’ with well-directed boots and fists. When the crunch comes, power is the product of force and will, not of rational debate.”
Having successfully clawed back some support from Griffin, Tyndall’s campaign suffered a major setback at a meeting in the West Midlands in September. Pressed by Lecomber and Newland about the absence of audited accounts for the party’s entire history, Tyndall told the audience that he had burnt them to protect the identity of the party’s donors. With quite obvious glee at this admission, Newland told the meeting that he did not know whether to laugh, cry or simply call in the police.
Tyndall’s campaign was derailed again with the publication, by the Griffin camp, of a letter in which Tyndall expressed an intention to sack all his opponents if he won. “There will be a time to be what you call an ‘utter bastard’, when all this nonsense has blown over and the Griffin takeover bid is well and truly sunk without trace. Until then, I’m playing my cards carefully.”
Griffin and his supporters have used this intercepted letter to the full. Griffin is now portrayed as the “unity” candidate in sharp contrast to witch-hunter Tyndall.
A Griffin victory is likely to herald changes to the BNP’s structures and personnel. Key supporters of Tyndall, namely Edmonds, Belshaw, Wilson and Ian Dell, are likely to be early casualties, with word emanating from the Griffin camp that Edmonds will be demoted from his present position of national organiser to being responsible solely for new branches.
Tyndall is unlikely to accept Griffin’s offer of life president. He has told colleagues that the offer is “meaningless and condescending”. Instead, while he intends to remain in the BNP, he plans to “concentrate on his writings”, which could spell long-term trouble for Griffin.
Buoyed up by their success, the “modernisers” will set about professionalising and restructuring the BNP. It will undoubtedly become a more efficient and effective organisation, entering new arenas and areas of activity.
Already Griffin is talking of expanding the BNP Internet operation, establishing a functioning youth section and standing a full slate in next year’s London assembly elections as part of its biggest push in local government. If it achieves local council success, Griffin believes that voters will at last take the party seriously.
“And it is at that point”, Griffin writes, “when the British National Party suddenly becomes the focus of the hopes not just of the neglected and oppressed white working class, but also of the frustrated and disorientated traditional middle class, that our future lies.
“This then is our task – to build a responsible and powerful nationalist movement which can unite town and country, and bring together the rank-and-file of the old ‘right’ with the voters of the old left. We are going to create a fusion of racial nationalism and social justice. And when that is done, we are going to win!”
While ultimate power will remain as elusive as ever for the BNP, a change in leadership and an improvement in organisational ability will undoubtedly bring some limited success. Griffin’s appointment heralds a new chapter in the fight against British fascism.
© Searchlight Magazine 1999