Matthew Goodwin charts the sharp decline of Nick Griffin’s former party

Nick Griffin used to tell his supporters that a crisis would bring them to power. Only when the economy had collapsed and the established political class had been discredited would voters turn to the radical and revolutionary aspirations of the British National party. It was an argument that had long roots on the extreme right; both Oswald Mosley and the leader of the 1970s National Front, John Tyndall, made similar predictions. But, as Griffin has now discovered, the argument is fundamentally flawed.

If the extreme right had ever wanted a perfect storm then the events of recent years appeared to bring this to the fore. The arrival of a global financial crisis and a period of sharp fiscal austerity fuelled public anxieties over scarce resources, providing ample opportunities for a party that claimed that migrants and financial elites were threatening ordinary workers. The sudden economic downturn also combined with rising public concern over immigration, which became the most important issue in British politics, as well as new threats from radical Islamism, as reflected in the murder of Drummer Lee Rigby and the arrival of Islamic State. If Griffin ever hoped for a moment of opportunity then it had surely arrived.

At least initially the BNP appeared to benefit from the downturn. Back in 2010 and before Nigel Farage had returned as leader of the United Kingdom Independence party, the BNP polled a record 564,321 votes, or 1.9 per cent of the vote. While it failed to match Ukip’s 3.1 per cent of the vote, and also failed to have a major impact in its two target seats of Barking and Stoke-on-Trent Central, the BNP’s result was the strongest performance by an extreme-right party in general election history. In the shadow of the election there was also further evidence to suggest that the BNP was benefitting from the wider crisis; the party polled strongest in areas of the country that experienced the sharpest rise in unemployment after 2005.

But behind the scenes the divisive Griffin had never managed to establish strong party unity, while the vast majority of voters continued to view his party as an illegitimate outlet for their concerns. Everybody who was anybody within the extreme right either fell out of Griffin’s favour or realised that the BNP leader was politically incompetent. Meanwhile, upwards of four-fifths of voters openly told the pollsters that they held ‘negative’ feelings towards his party. At the same time a series of unnecessary and costly legal battles, public relations disasters and ongoing financial problems ensured that the BNP was continually engulfed by infighting. Most of its more competent organisers left, either to join parties like the English Democrats or to abandon political activity altogether.

By the time that the BNP arrived at the local elections in 2012 the electorate had also cottoned on to its rapid decline. At no point during the campaign did support for the BNP surpass one per cent in the opinion polls. The results were equally catastrophic: 135 candidates failed to capture a single seat. At the same elections in 2008 the party had won over almost a quarter of a million voters. Now it relied on fewer than 26,000 votes. The writing was on the wall.

By the time of the European parliamentary election in 2014 Griffin and the BNP were fighting to avoid complete obliteration. By this time the rise of Ukip – a party that Griffin dismissed as ‘plastic nationalists’ – was further complicating matters. Ukip is not a far-right party and has officially proscribed that current and former members of far-right parties are forbidden from joining its ranks. As Rob Ford and I charted in Revolt on the Right, which details the rise of Ukip, since 2010 Nigel Farage’s party has drawn some support from members of the same social groups that previously tended to turn out for the BNP: older, white, working-class men who tend to have no formal qualifications and reside in white areas close to more diverse communities. There are some intriguing differences between these two electorates: the BNP’s support was slightly younger than Ukip’s and more economically disadvantaged, but the overlaps remain. The difference was that Farage was also making headway among a wider constituency of voters and lacked the stigma and anti-democratic toxicity that followed the BNP.

Confronted with the new challenge Griffin appeared to turn inwards, speaking to party members not the public. While previously he had stressed the need for his party to ‘modernise’ and downplay its racial nationalist ideology, he now openly praised neo-Nazis like Golden Dawn in Greece and shifted his attention to these international links. This did little to stem the decline or pacify his internal opponents. In 2014, the failure of Griffin in the north-west and Andrew Brons in Yorkshire and the Humber to secure re-election to the European parliament symbolised the BNP’s broader decline. At its peak in 2009 the party had won over 943,000 voters and 6.3 per cent of the vote. But five years later the BNP vote in British politics had dwindled to less than 180,000 votes and a one per cent share of the vote. It was barely visible, and now lagged behind the Green party. The collapse was especially apparent in the north-west where Griffin attracted just 1.9 per cent of the vote, a slump of more than six percentage points on his result in 2009. It was worse for the party in Yorkshire where its share of the vote slumped by over eight percentage points to just 1.6 per cent.

As Ukip won the elections outright the BNP suffered a major and likely irreversible electoral collapse. The few isolated pockets of support that remained for the party reflected its activism in earlier years, when for a short period it appeared as a relatively united and semi-professional campaigning organisation. In 2014, for example, the BNP was still able to attract more than 17 per cent of the vote in Thurrock and over 10 per cent in areas close to London such as Broxbourne and Basildon – parts of the country that are now likely to turn out in greater numbers for Ukip as the BNP withdraws altogether from elections. By the beginning of October, the internal problems culminated in the expulsion of Griffin from the BNP, a move orchestrated by his former confidant, Adam Walker, and a band of disgruntled activists. Given the BNP’s track record in recent months it appears highly unlikely that it will have a significant presence at the general election in 2015.

Of course, the BNP was not the only extreme-right movement to collapse. The English Defence League, which from 2009 attracted a following among British youths who were directly affected by the economic malaise, also disappeared. For a brief moment the emergence of the EDL had looked to offer the BNP a younger and more active street-based wing. Griffin, however, reached a different conclusion, viewing the EDL through a conspiratorial lens as a by-product of American neoconservative interests in stemming the rise of Islam and protecting Israel. Despite the EDL’s temporary resurgence following the brutal Woolwich murder, like the BNP it too proved unable to sustain its more confrontational challenge to the status quo. The imprisonment of its leader ‘Tommy Robinson’ combined with the broader fragmentation of the extreme right left the EDL a shadow of its former self. If there is a successor to these movements then it is most likely Britain First, a minor but confrontational group led by a former BNP stalwart, Paul Golding.

Yet it is important not to exaggerate the strength of what continues to linger on the extreme right. While Britain First has been engaged in provocative campaign activities, the movement appears unlikely to emerge from the shadows in the near future. Indeed there is a risk that, to quote Michael Billig in the 1970s, we may end up awarding such groups with a level of publicity that is wholly disproportionate to their actual significance. Nonetheless, the story of the extreme right in Britain is ultimately one that underscores the importance of party agency and the failure of political leaders to identify and exploit opportunities, to adhere to a basic sense of political reality and build a vehicle that appears to voters as a legitimate and credible alternative. And, of course, for the rest of us these internal weaknesses should be welcomed.

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Matthew Goodwin is co-author of Revolt on the Right: Explaining Support for the Radical Right in Britain

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Photo: BritishNationalism