British National Party debates allowing non-whites to join

Britain's anti-immigrant party had won elections by reforming its image.

Gaiutra BahadurNovember 14, 2009 09:39Updated May 30, 2010 12:13

British National Party activist John Collins demonstrates at London's Speakers' Corner in October 2009. (Gaiutra Bahadur/GlobalPost)

LONDON, U.K. — Speakers' Corner in London's Hyde Park is a storied carnival of free speech: Anyone can hold forth as long as they don't use offensive language, and anyone can heckle. So it was no surprised when Union Jack-draped activists for the British National Party (BNP), disbanded by police in Trafalgar Square one mid-October Sunday, regrouped here.

"Are you going to set up next to him then?" said one BNP member to their local leader, Bob Bailey, while indicating a bearded black man in a long robe, a regular they have nicknamed "The Mad Mullah."

"Me? Next to 'im?" Bailey replied. "I'm sure he's got something interesting to say, though."

"Put women in their place," joked someone else.

"Ain't so sure about the alcohol thing, though," another riffed. "Can't be banning alcohol, can you?"

Bailey scanned the Speakers' Corner crowd: "Full of nutters," he said, using British slang for lunatics, adding, "present company excepted."

Of course, those who Bailey called "nutters" might have said the same about him. The whites-only BNP, founded in 1982 as a breakaway from the neo-Nazi National Front, has been trying to shed its nutter image as part of a bid for respectability in mainstream politics. It was recently given a platform far more prominent than Speakers' Corner, when its chairman, Nick Griffin, appeared on the BBC flagship program "Question Time" alongside members of the political establishment. Griffin was elected to the European Parliament in June.

This weekend, at its annual convention at an undisclosed location, 300 core BNP members will debate changing its constitution, which currently restricts membership to "indigenous Caucasians." The move resulted from a lawsuit against the BNP by the country's Equalities and Human Rights Commission, but Griffin is spinning it as further proof of a changed party.

Since becoming leader in 1999, Griffin has pursued a strategy of remaking the party's image from one of anti-Semitic, racist jackboots to one of electable suits — a feat, for a man who once referred to the Holocaust as the Holohoax and who founded the youth wing of the National Front when at Cambridge. He described his tactics of reinvention to sympathizers in Texas in 2000, from a stage shared with David Duke.

"There's a difference between selling out your ideas and selling your ideas," he told the American Friends of the BNP. "And the British National Party isn't about selling out its ideas ... but we are determined now to sell them."