27.07.1995

New terror group

JOHN GUMMER, the environment secretary, has upheld the planning inspectors’ finding that the use of the BNP HQ in Welling “was unacceptable on the grounds of public amenity”. The BNP must restore the premises as a book shop with a home above and remove the iron shutters.

Marc Wadsworth hailed it “as a victory for peaceful protest”, but the state’s action does nothing to remove the conditions that engender racial hatred. This method of restraining the BNP can surely be used by the bosses’ state against ourselves.

According to the anti-fascist journal, Searchlight (July 1995), the BNP is in rapid decline. Searchlight blames this on the organisation’s electoral defeats. Given the size of the BNP vote - which actually increased despite losing its Tower Hamlets seat - this seems a little tenuous. Searchlight itself hints at a more plausible explanation. Although the state is very tolerant of the far rights’ violence, BNP boneheads get into so many fights that merely through its normal functioning the state locks them up on a regular basis.

Many of this thuggish element, impatient with the BNP’s electoral tactic, are drifting to the newly formed terroristic National Socialist Alliance. One of the leading members of the NSA believes in flying saucers, wants to set up a racially pure Saxon homeland in rural Essex and thinks that “Adolf Hitler was the cosmic being, making itself manifest in a practical and conscious way.” Violent they may be, but sane they are not.

A serious fascist movement capable of challenging the working class will not come from these deadbeat loonies, but will be respectably dressed in mainstream British prejudices.

Phil Kent