British Nationalist Party

British National Party
British National Party.png {{{caption}}}
Founder	John Tyndall
Country	the United Kingdom
Headquarters	PO Box 213 Wigton Cumbria CA7 7AL
Newspaper	Identity
Colours	Red      White      Blue
Website	bnp.org.uk

The British National Party (BNP) is a fascist political party in the United Kingdom. It is headquartered in Wigton, Cumbria, and its leader is Adam Walker. A minor party, it has no elected representatives at any level of UK government. Founded in 1982, the party reached its greatest level of success in the 2000s, when it had over fifty seats in local government, one seat on the London Assembly, and two Members of the European Parliament.

Taking its name from that of a defunct 1960s party, the BNP was created by John Tyndall and other former members of the fascist National Front (NF). During the 1980s and 1990s, the BNP placed little emphasis on contesting elections, in which it did poorly. Instead, it focused on street marches and rallies, creating the Combat 18 paramilitary—its name a coded reference to German leader Adolf Hitler. A growing modernist faction was frustrated by Tyndall's leadership, and he lost his election in 1999. The new leader Nick Griffin sought to broaden the BNP's electoral base by presenting a more moderate image, targeting concerns about rising immigration rates, and emphasising localised community campaigns. This resulted in increased electoral growth throughout the 2000s, to the extent that it became the most electorally successful conservative party in British history.

Ideology

The BNP uses the iconography of the Union flag prominently on its published material.

Various political scientists and historians have described the BNP as being fascist in ideology. Others have instead described it as neo-fascist, a term which the historian Nigel Copsey argued was more exact.{{#invoke:Footnotes|sfn|template=sfn}}|preview=Page using Template:Sfn with unknown parameter "_VALUE_"|ignoreblank=y| 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | ignore-err | loc | p | page | pages | postscript | pp | ps | ref | Ref }} Academic observers—including the historians Copsey, Graham Macklin, and Roger Griffin, and the political theologian Andrew P. Davey—have argued that Nick Griffin's reforms were little more than a cosmetic process to obfuscate the party's fascist roots. According to Copsey, under Griffin the BNP was "fascism recalibrated – a form of fascism to suit contemporary sensibilities". Macklin noted that despite Griffin's modernisation project, the BNP retained its ideological continuity with earlier fascist groups and thus had not transformed itself into a genuinely "post-fascist" party.

The party employed militaristic rhetoric under both Tyndall and Griffin's leadership; under the latter for example its published material spoke of a "war without uniforms" and a "war for our survival as a people", calling it a "guerrilla army operating in occupied territory".