British National Front

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British National Front
Party leader Ian Edward
founding 1967
Headquarters Solihull
Alignment Neo-fascism , right-wing extremism , nationalism
Colours) Red, white, blue
Parliament seats 0 of 650 ( Lower House , 2010 )
Website www.national-front.org.uk

The British National Front (usually known as the National Front or NF ) is a British far-right party that had its heyday in the 1970s and 1980s .

history

Foundation phase

Othala rune on National Front flag

The NF was founded on February 7, 1967, under the chairmanship of AK Chesterton , cousin of the author GK Chesterton and former leader of the League of Empire Loyalists (LEL). Their aim was on the one hand to combat immigration and a policy of multiculturalism , on the other hand they wanted to block multilateral agreements and institutions such as the United Nations or the North Atlantic Pact ( NATO ), which were supposed to replace bilateral agreements between states. The new movement pushed the LEL into an ongoing coalition with the British National Party and a third of the Robin Beauclair-led Racial Preservation Society . While there was a ban to prevent neo-Nazi groups from joining the party, members of John Tyndall's neo-Nazi Greater Britain Movement circumvented this ban by entering as private individuals.

High phase in the 1970s

The NF grew during the 1970s and in 1974 had 14,000 members. The party achieved particularly good results in local elections. The NF (together with a splinter group) received 44 percent of the votes cast in Deptford, almost beating the Labor candidate. In three parliamentary by-elections, the NF came third, although it should be noted that it was only in one of these cases - the 1975 Newham by-election in which former Communist Party of Great Britain candidate Mike Lobb ran for the NF - more votes than the Liberal Democrats received.

The NF's electoral base consisted primarily of workers and self-employed who spoke out against the alleged threat from foreign workers. The party also attracted some disaffected Conservative Party members who brought a lot of expertise and reputation to the NF. Of particular importance was the so-called Monday Club , which was founded by the Conservatives in response to Harold MacMillan's Winds of Change speech . The political basis of the NF was anti-communism and liberalism, support for the Ulster loyalists in Northern Ireland , resistance to the European Economic Community and the advocacy of the forced expulsion of new immigrants from the Commonwealth , who were given equal rights at the time due to the passport system at the time Citizens could enter the UK.

The NF was known for its noisy demonstrations that were a common sight in the 1970s, especially in London , where the NF often antifascist resistance from groups such as the International Marxist Group of Tariq Ali or later the Anti Nazi League of Socialist Workers Party faced. Opponents of the NF viewed it as a neo-fascist organization, and its activities are still fought today by anti-racist groups such as Searchlight or Unite Against Fascism .

The NF was first led by Chesterton, who left the party after half of the board of directors (led by NF's chief financier Gordon Marshall - aka "Gordon Brown") withdrew their trust. He was replaced in 1970 by former Conservative John O'Brien, a supporter of Enoch Powell . O'Brien, however, withdrew when he noticed that the executive functions were systematically taken over by former members of the Greater Britain Movement . This wanted to achieve that the party could be dominated by John Tyndall and his deputy, Martin Webster. O'Brien and NF Treasurer Clare McDonald transferred a small group of supporters to John Davis's National Independence Party , leaving the leadership to Tyndall and Webster.

In 1973, the NF achieved success in a by-election in West Bromwich : The party achieved third place with 16 percent of the vote and was given back its electoral deposit for the only time in its history (candidates must deposit a deposit before the election, that they get back when they reach a certain number of votes). The main reason for the great success was the role of the nice "Big Mart" accepted by the candidate Martin Webster and the expensive election campaign in which busloads of supporters were carted into the district. In the period that followed, the party achieved considerable success, but could never win a seat directly in an election. The only exception was a seat in the by-elections to the city council of Carrickfergus in Northern Ireland in 1975, in which the opposing candidate was eliminated.

In 1974, the documentation revealed This Week the television station ITV , the neo-Nazi past (and ongoing connections in the present) of Tyndall and Webster. Two weeks later, this led to a turbulent party congress, at which the party chairmanship passed to the populist John Kingsley Read. However, this and his supporters were pushed out of the party after a short time - not least because of the intimidation attempts of the “honor guard” of Tyndall - and Tyndall returned to the top of the NF. Read then formed the short-lived National Party , which won two council seats in the 1976 elections in Blackburn .

Decline in the 1980s

Since 1979 the National Front has lost influence in the political life of Great Britain. The rise of the Conservatives under Margaret Thatcher and their restrictive positions on immigration and domestic policy completely sidelined the NF. Many former Tories returned to their political homes. In addition, Tyndall's short-term decision to fund the running of 303 candidates in order to create the appearance of growing strength brought the party to the brink of ruin, as all election pledges of £ 150 each were lost (most of the candidacies existed only on paper, and no real election campaign took place). Tyndall's claim to leadership was challenged by Andrew Fountaine , who, after being ousted by Tyndall, formed a split, the NF Constitutional Movement . The influential group in Leicester also split off at the time, ending up in the short-lived British Democratic Party . In view of this dramatic meltdown of the party, Tyndall was expelled from the party and replaced by Andrew Brons at the top of the party. Tyndall formed his own New National Front , which was however legally forced to rename. Tyndall decided to rename the NNF the British National Party (BNP) - he and his followers had been excluded from the original BNP. The BNP subsequently ousted the National Front from its place as the dominant party on the far right.

The party's decline in the 1980s was rapid, although the party managed to gain some support in the West Midlands and parts of London. The party tried several times in vain to gain a following in Northern Ireland. Its opponents viewed the NF as a skinhead party with barely veiled neo-Nazi views - a view that the party vociferously contradicted (and which many skinheads did not accept). Contrary to popular opinion and the presentation by the tabloid press ( Searchlight also took this view), the NF lost a large proportion of its Oi! Scene recruited followers as a result of their support for radical Islamic positions such as those of Louis Farrakhan and Ayatollah Khomeini . These lost supporters later joined the British National Party, the rapidly declining British Movement and the neo-Nazi network of Blood and Honor .

cleavage

In the late 1980s, the party split in two. Above all, the concept of the “political soldier” played a prominent role, represented by young radicals such as Nick Griffin , Patrick Harrington , Phil Edwards and Derek Holland, who became known as the Official National Front or Third Way . Under the leadership of the "Political Soldiers", the NF lost interest in elections and preferred a more revolutionary strategy. On the other side was the Flag Group , which consisted of traditionalists like Ian Anderson , Martin Wingfield , Tina "Tin-Tin" Wingfield and Steve Brady and ran under the banner of the NF in the 1987 general election. The Flag Group launched some rather amateurish political ventures; the ideas of social credit and distributism gained some popularity, but as always, immigration policy ( race relations ) was the focus of attention. In 1990 the Political Soldiers were divided into groups such as Third Way and the International Third Position (ITP), leaving the Flag Group in control of the NF, which Ian Anderson and Martin Wingfield then became chairmen.

Change of name to National Democrats

As the BNP grew in the 1990s, the NF shrank. As a result, Ian Anderson decided to change the party's name and try a new start as the National Democrats in 1995 . This move proved very unpopular (the results of the vote on the name change were questioned by many) and more than half of the 600 members continued to operate under the National Front name . The National Democrats brought out the old NF magazine The Flag for a while and beat the NF in the 1997 by-elections in Uxbridge (the two party leaders stood opposite each other as candidates). The NF, on the other hand, started a new magazine, The Flame , which continues to appear at irregular intervals to this day.

Current National Front

The NF is currently largely insignificant. The party did not achieve any significant success in elections. The current chairman is Ian Edward . The NF put 12 candidates in the 2005 parliamentary elections, none of which managed to get their election pledge back; in total, the party received 7148 votes. The NF has ties to loyalist paramilitary groups in Northern Ireland.

While leading representatives of the party used to make a name for themselves by denying the Holocaust , the NF is now holding back with explicitly anti-Semitic statements in official party statements and instead represents ethnopluralist positions. She tries to appeal to xenophobic resentments with campaigns for a “freeze on immigration” or “freedom of speech”. After the British National Party (due to a court ruling) had to formally allow non-whites to become party members since 2010, the NF claims to be the only British party to distinguish itself through "white purity" (which allegedly also led to converts from the BNP to the NF ).

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. a b c d e f g h i Piero Ignazi: Extreme Right Parties in Western Europe . Oxford University Press, 2003, ISBN 0-19-829325-9 , pp. 177 f .
  2. ^ Manning Marable: Black Leadership . Columbia University Press, 1998, pp. 176 .
  3. Revealed: How the Far-Right Targets Suburbs by Stealth; A Community Action Group Campaigning to Save Local Shops and Running a May Fayre Sounds Harmless. but Its Leader Was a Prominent Member of the National Front . In: Evening Standard . April 23, 2007.
  4. Wolfgang Benz (ed.): Handbook of Antisemitism. Hostility to Jews in the past and present . Vol. 5 Organizations, Institutions, Movements. De Gruyter, Berlin 2012, p. 418 f.