What they are saying about: The BNP

With the BNP predicted to perform well in this week's local and European elections - here is what commentators are saying about Nick Griffin's party.

Will Self, The First Post:

"The old rump of the left, whose war cry was always: 'No platform for racists and fascists!' need to ask themselves why, exactly, the BNP is gaining ground? It's not enough to cover their eyes and see no evil, because the solution to some of greatest problems lies in the answer to this simple question: why does a party which pledges stringent economic protectionism and a complete end to immigration now hold nearly a hundred council seats?"

David Aaronovitch, The Times:

"When I interviewed him [Nick Griffin] six years ago, it was evident that he remained a convinced ideological racist, in that he believed that race equalled destiny. Now he has to pretend not to, hence his claim to be a moderate in a moderate party. Such a transformation is theoretically possible. Mussolini's heir in Italy, Gianfranco Fini, took the MSI party from his own enthusiastic claim in 1991 that 'fascism is alive!' to being a centre-right presence in the Italian Government, in which he has been Deputy Prime Minister and, Foreign Minister. Sometimes in politics, if you pretend to be something long enough, you actually become it. But Griffin is no Fini."

Fraser Nelson, The Spectator:

"Studies show that the BNP derives no electoral advantage from an influx of Indian settlers to a neighbourhood, and do badly in areas where there are many Britons of Afro-Caribbean descent. It is in places with Bangladeshi and Pakistani communities - that is, Muslim areas - that the BNP does well. Its focus there is not how people look, but how some act. The trick is to take the minority of veiled or bearded Muslims as a proxy for Islam as a whole. If a (mainly white) local authority bans Christmas lights, so much the better for the BNP. This is why the mill towns of the North are now proving more fertile ground than the London suburbs."

Rod Liddle, Sunday Times:

"Griffin has been very canny in repositioning his party as a sort of all-purpose anti-Establishment front, rather than as a slightly less intellectual version of the Sturmabteilung. He has been abetted in this policy by all those despised mainstream politicians who join hands and plead that you not vote for the BNP, by local councillors who refuse to work with democratically elected BNP members, by television interviewers who simply bark insults at Griffin when he appears on news programmes and by the thick-as-mince middle-class lefties bellowing, 'No platform for raaaaaacists,' every time the BNP stages a meeting."

Johann Hari, The Independent:

"We have turned the white working class [who voted in large numbers for the BNP in the London elections] into a national punch-line. We dismiss them as 'chavs', 'pikeys' and racists, and jeer at their clothes, voices and names. So we don't really have the right to act surprised when they vote in a way designed to tell us – as the woman standing in her damp flat, carrying bags of economy-brand food from Iceland, told me – to 'fuck off'."

Lynsey Hanley, The Guardian:

"There is now a group that is said to act as one and for whom a vote for the BNP can't truly be condemned, such is their suffering and ignorance - the 'white working class'. Its members are believed to have separate values, needs and motivations to working-class people who aren't white, and are said to be revolting at not having received preferential treatment from a Labour government. There is a small problem with this take on things. Voting for the BNP is a deliberate decision: you are not 'driven' to it any more than a car drives itself. It is a decision to allow self-pity to influence your vote and to disguise it as righteous anger. "

Stephen Glover, Daily Mail:

"Look at the sidekicks who accompany the BNP's leader Nick Griffin whenever he makes a foray in public. He is not surrounded by pleasant looking doctors and nurses and civil servants, the like of whom may appear in small numbers on the BNP's membership list, but by thuggish looking men, some of them with shaven heads, others with dark glasses, whom you certainly would not invite to tea with the local vicar. These heavies represent the true soul of the BNP. They are the poisonous sect behind the re-fashioned, apparently half-respectable organization."

Charlie Brooker, The Guardian:

"According to the BNP, I'm wrong. Being British is actually about feeling aggressed, mistrustful, overlooked, isolated, powerless, and petrified of 'losing my identity'. Britishness incorporates a propensity to look around me with jealous eyes, fuming over imaginary sums of money being doled out to child-molesting asylum-seekers by corrupt PC politicians who've lost touch with the common man - a common man who, coincidentally, happens to be white."

Nick Cohen, The Observer:

"Alongside honourable concerns lurks a suspicion of popular power. Listen carefully whenever proposals are discussed to improve local democracy by, say, electing chief constables and police authorities. Eventually, an authoritative voice will tell you that the British cannot be trusted with more power because they may let the BNP take over the police forces. Similarly with reforms to the national voting system. Once again, we are told that a fairer election system cannot be contemplated because it will let the BNP out of its cage."

David Lindsay, The First Post:

"The BNP are also talking about the real concern that the white working class has been left behind. And that no one ever mentions manufacturing, which still accounts for more than twice the GDP of the entire financial services sector, never mind the bailout-begging City. Meanwhile, because the powers-that-be are unable to distinguish between the respectable working class and the characters from Shameless, council and housing association tenants now face having Shameless characters moved in next door to them, or even in place of them."

Frank Field, The Independent:

"We must not be fooled. There are some BNP members who hold the most wicked views. But do not make the mistake of thinking BNP supporters are of one ilk. Listen carefully when many of them talk. They express a great love for their country, think it is becoming the pits, and have real anger against a political class who won't talk about non-PC issues like immigration."