As of today, the BNP is no longer racist. Or is it?

On Sunday February 14th, an amazing thing happened: the BNP instantaneously stopped being a racist organisation. Such a miracle happened because ninety-nine percent of the party (and who cares about the remaining one?) voted ‘yes’ to a constitutional amendment that would allow non-whites to join. Apparently, they can now put all that nasty racist business behind them and concentrate on “saving Britain”.

Hang on, though; isn’t there something wrong with this picture? Well, yes actually; several things, not least that this vote was imposed upon them by the Equality and Human Rights Commission, and is in fact nothing but a farcical display of faux-democracy. Sorry to burst your bubble, Mr. Griffin, but doesn’t this mean that you didn’t so much jump into ‘multiculturalism’ but were in fact pushed by the long arm of Human Rights law? Once more, yes. This not only suggests that Griffin and the BNP bigwigs were previously in no hurry to instigate such an amendment, but that none of their members had any problem with a membership policy that excluded Britons who were not white. Had the amendment been rejected, the BNP would surely have once and for all been branded as an illegal political party; three hundred members saw to it that that wasn’t the case, while five voted against and four abstained. These nine are the most telling of the meeting’s attendants: they are either opposed to equality or apathetic. And these are the most dangerous qualities possible in members of the voting public.

The BNP’s principal showpiece in this elaborate fraud is Mr. Rajinder Singh: a Sikh who shaves his beard and wears a turban for public appearances only. He purports to share common ground with Griffin in his fears of the “Islamification of Britain”. The BNP have not-so-cleverly replaced racial discrimination with further racial discrimination and masked it with religious discrimination. Mr. Singh’s personal prejudices stem from his experience of the atrocities that followed the partition of India in 1947; committed by Muslim, Sikh and Hindu alike. Events of recent years have heightened Western Islamophobia, while the conservative and centre-Right is experiencing a resurgence across Europe and the US. Tempers are frayed, and the finger of blame is looking to settle on an obvious scapegoat. Parallels with twentieth-century history seem an overworked cliché, but they are disturbingly relevant. The Nazi Party did not invent anti-Semitism, but capitalised on its presence within society and built an incoherent political ideology around it. People like Griffin and Mr. Singh will represent tangible figures of representation for the views of a minority. But the fact that such a minority exists is enough for it to be exploited.

It is the commentator’s fallacy that we continue to pay Griffin undue heed, but doing so does not amount to an admission of his credibility. Instead, with this constitutional amendment, he and the BNP membership have conspired to present their own distorted image of the party: one that claims it to be progressive, accepting, and politically legitimate. While it continues to base its policies and rhetoric around fear and subjugation, it will never be any of these.