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Author: Nick Lowles | Date: August 2004
The British National Party’s attempts to transform itself into a respectable political party were shattered last month when an undercover BBC programme revealed its true agenda of racism, violence and incitement. The programme has also precipitated the most serious crisis for Nick Griffin since he took over the party in 1999. Nick Lowles, a consultant to the programme, reports.
The British National Party has been left reeling from a BBC undercover programme screened last month. Party activists have been arrested, its leadership is under police investigation, it has been vilified in the right-wing press, its bank accounts have been closed down and members have walked out in disgust.
The Secret Agent was a six-month investigation into Britain’s main fascist party. BBC journalist Jason Gwynne joined Bradford BNP during the recent local and European election campaign. There he operated alongside local BNP organiser Andy Sykes, who unbeknown to the BNP, was secretly working for Searchlight and Bradford TUC. Sykes opened doors to the inner workings of the party and Gwynne filmed the results.
Searchlight and Bradford TUC approached the BBC last summer with the programme idea. We saw it as an integral part of our campaign to expose the true nature of the BNP. It complimented our strategy of localised campaigning. “West Yorkshire was always going to be a key target for the BNP,” says Paul Meszaros of Bradford TUC, “and yet it contained hardline racists and violent thugs. The BNP believed it was on the brink of success in the European elections and we felt that people needed to know the truth.”
The programme recorded BNP activists boasting of violent attacks on Asians, BNP council candidates describing how they wanted to kill Asians (in the case of one man on a total of 24 separate occasions) and a newly elected BNP councillor conspiring with other party members to torch a vehicle carrying the Searchlight election newspaper.
It also recorded a succession of BNP leaders, including Nick Griffin, giving highly inflammatory speeches. Two separate barristers both gave the BBC a legal opinion that they incited racial hatred and so should be prosecuted.
In one speech, Griffin claimed that the rape of white women was acceptable under Islam. Interviewed on Newsnight after the programme, he repeated four times that Islam used the raping of white women as a political tool in its bid for world supremacy.
John Tyndall, the founder of the BNP, was also filmed inciting racial hatred when he abused the Conservative leader Michael Howard for describing the BNP’s approach to politics as “alien to our political traditions”.
“Who is Mr Howard [or Hecht as Tyndall repeatedly called him] speaking of when he talks about, uses the word ‘alien’? How far does Mr Howard’s roots in this country of ours go back? His father and mother came here as Jewish immigrants from Romania in the late 1930s. This interloper, this immigrant or son of immigrants, who has no roots at all in Britain, has the effrontery to talk to us about what is alien, he has the effrontery to talk to us about alien things and alien ways. Mr Howard, or rather Mr Hecht, he ladies and gentlemen is the alien!”
Tyndall then went on to attack Africans.
“While this part of Britain was the industrial centre of the world, what was happening in Africa and Asia? The people there were squatting for century upon century on the ground of Africa, and what did they produce, apart from black magic, witchcraft, voodoo, cannibalism and Aids? That is what they have given to the world.”
Despite Tyndall being shunned by the party leadership his speech received the loudest applause of any meeting filmed by the BBC.
The programme received unbelievable media coverage, with every national newspaper trailing the programme and reporting the reaction to it. It was lead item on the BBC news and was reported on ITV, Channel 4 and Channel 5.
The best coverage was in the right-wing press, the very papers whose readers are more likely to vote BNP. The Sun ran the front-page headline: “Bloody Nasty People” on the day of transmission. The Daily Mail, another paper not known for its fondness for the BBC, devoted five pages to exposing the racist nature of the BNP the following day.
Unsurprisingly, the programme was given huge coverage in the Bradford Telegraph & Argus. The paper had come out against the BNP during the election campaign and was given an exclusive interview with Sykes before transmission. “The Lies That Hide BNP’s Mission of Hate” announced its front-page headline.
The following day it published pictures of the four Bradford BNP councillors with the headline: “Quit Now!”
Searchlight has learnt that the paper’s owners have made it a crusade to rid the city of the BNP.
“The local paper has been excellent,” says Meszaros. “It went out on a limb to criticise the BNP before the election and was attacked by some readers. They now feel their decision has been vindicated and appear determined to continue to speak out against them. Even if this is the only lasting thing that comes out of the programme then I’ll still see it as a success.”
The media outcry over the programme had another quite unexpected consequence when Barclays Bank decided to shut down six BNP accounts. Sources within the bank said that the accounts were already under review but the programme, with the party leadership’s outrageous racist attacks, proved the final straw.
Pressure is now being put on other banks to follow Barclays’ lead.
Predictably the BNP leaders have reacted with fury to the programme. They had been tipped off that a programme was in the making late last year but it was not until Tony Lecomber, the BNP group development officer, viewed the programme the day before transmission that they realised its focus and became aware of Sykes’s involvement.
Their initial response was to mock the BBC and the Blair’s liberal establishment whom they claimed was behind the programme.
“The latest offering, The Secret Agent, comes from the same production stable as ‘Death on Camera’ and ‘The Secret Policemen’ so it was no surprise to see the usual self-hating, white liberalism heavily laced with typical BBC ethnophilia,” complained one article on their website.
In equally conspiratorial terms another noted: “The blackmail of Barclays comes hot on the heels of the long planned BBC “expose” which was conducted with the Labour Party and a quasi-legal organisation called ‘Searchlight Magazine’”.
But the abuse became more vitriolic as the fallout ensued. The BNP has accused the BBC’s undercover journalist of encouraging a BNP member to plant bombs outside a mosque and Sykes of stealing money. Both allegations are completely untrue and libellous.
Griffin has found himself in a dangerous position. As his party gets attacked on every front, his obsession with conspiracies and doomsday scenarios, which might appeal to members when times are good, is undermining morale and even party discipline.
Coming on top of the BNP’s poor local and European election results, where the party performed well below its leader’s expectations, the programme, the media fallout and the Barclays debacle are disillusioning members.
Mark Payne has quit as Coventry organiser after only five people turned up to a party rally after the programme, as has the York organiser John Brayshaw, who has cited the poor BNP vote locally in June.
It has been a bad summer for Griffin and with the rank and file dissent over plans to allow non-whites into the party it seems set to continue. To add to their woes, Searchlight understands that libel writs will soon be issued against the party.
Some anti-fascists have questioned the programme believing that it told the viewers nothing they did not already know. “So the BNP is racist, tell us something we don’t know,” a few have commented.
But the programme was not produced for these people but for the general public of whom many still do not realise the true nature of the BNP. Over 800,000 people voted for the BNP in the recent European elections, many falling for the BNP’s alleged new respectability.
Judging by the letters that have come in to both Searchlight and Bradford TUC, at least some of these voters now regret their actions in light of the programme. Even one BNP council candidate in Bradford has made contact and denounced his party. Another, whom Sykes talked out of standing, has personally thanked him.
The one frustrating element of the programme was its timing. It was intended to be aired in May just before the elections but a last minute veto by the Acting Director-General pulled the plug. He feared that it contravened the Corporation’s policy of electoral impartiality though the programme makers argued that it was more about criminality than politics.
If it had been screened in May it is quite possible that the BNP would have several fewer councillors.
That said, the programme still destroyed any respectability the BNP might have accrued. The film focused on Bradford BNP but it would have discovered the same antics in branches across the country. Racism, violence and incitement are the cornerstone of the British National Party.
© Searchlight Magazine 2004