Nick Griffin

Nick Griffin (2006)

Nick Griffin (born March 1, 1959 in Barnet near London ) is a British politician, the former chairman of the British National Party (BNP) and a former member of the European Parliament . He has been repeatedly indicted for hate crimes and was most recently convicted of incitement of racial hatred in 1998 .

Childhood and studies

Nick Griffin was born in Barnet in 1959, the only child of Jean and Edgar Griffin . When he was eight years old, Nick Griffin moved to Southwold . There he attended the former girls' boarding school Saint Felix School as one of only two boys with the help of a scholarship.

Griffin became a member of the National Front at the age of 14 , and he reportedly stayed with Martin Webster , a senior member of the National Front , at the age of 16 . In 1999, Webster claimed he had a homosexual relationship with Griffin, who was in charge of public relations for the BNP at the time. Griffin denied any homosexual relationship.

In 1977 Griffin enrolled at Downing College (Cambridge) to study history, then law. His relationship with the National Front was first publicized during a student union debate, and his picture was published in a student newspaper. Griffin later founded the Young National Front Student Organization . He graduated from law school with a grade of good. Griffin also learned boxing at Oxford after fighting a member of an anti-fascist party in Lewisham .

Start of political career

In 1995 he became active in the BNP, took over editorial responsibility for the party newspaper Spearhead and became party spokesman. On numerous occasions he made positive comments about Adolf Hitler . In 1998 he had to answer in court for "inciting racial hatred". In an article in The Rune magazine (Issue No. 12/1997), in which he acted as editor, he described blacks as "mixed slaves" among other things. In the course of the proceedings, he compared the idea that six million Jews had died as a result of the Holocaust with the idea that the earth was flat , and named, among other things, the French neo-Nazi and Holocaust denier Robert Faurisson as witness. He was given a nine-month suspended sentence and a fine of £ 2,300. After the verdict was read out, he filed a petition for appeal with the Royal Criminal Court. In the grounds he asked the court to provide evidence of the existence of gas chambers .

Party leader

1999 Griffin became party chairman by replacing the previous party chairman John Tyndall by a ballot . From now on he tried to give the party a new, more moderate image by banning all Nazi symbolism from public appearances (as was still common at the time of his predecessor). This policy was modeled on the French National Front and the Austrian FPÖ , among others . Since then, attempts have been made to avoid open racism and anti-Semitism , mainly criticizing multiculturalism , the allegedly threatened Islamization of Great Britain and the alleged restriction of freedom of expression through political correctness .

Griffin ran for the BNP in numerous UK elections between 2000 and 2009, but was unable to secure any seats. In 2004, several BNP members were arrested according to a BBC documentary, including Nick Griffin and John Tyndall, the founders of the BNP. During the undercover recordings, BNP members said, among other things, that they wanted to " kill Pakis ". In the proceedings that followed, Griffin stated that his remarks were not of a racist background but were intended to criticize Islam as a religion and invoked the right to freedom of expression . Ultimately, Griffin was acquitted of the allegations.

MEP

In the European elections in the UK in 2009 , Griffin and Andrew Brons won seats for the British National Party and entered the European Parliament . Shortly after the election, Griffin attracted renewed attention when he proposed sinking boats with refugees who want to immigrate from Africa to the EU so that Europe would not be "flooded by the Third World". When asked, he went on to say that the refugees could "throw a life raft so they can go back to Libya ".

In October 2009, Griffin was the first BNP politician ever to be invited to the BBC's prestigious policy program Question Time , a decision that was highly controversial among the British public. In the program he criticized Islam again. At the same time, he distanced himself from his earlier statements denying the Holocaust by referring to “European law” , but refused any further explanations regarding his change of position. On the same show, Griffin called homosexuals "scary" and defended appearances with leaders of the Ku Klux Klan . He claimed that parts of this organization were not violent.

In December 2009, Griffin criticized the UN climate conference in Copenhagen , in which he participated as a representative of the European Parliament. He described global warming as the "greatest hoax in history," which was only intended to justify increases in taxes and energy prices. By supporting biofuels , the cultivation of which is at the expense of food production, climate activists would become “mass murderers”. Griffin ignored the fact that environmental organizations like Greenpeace view the cultivation of biofuels very critically.

Griffin was non-attached in the EU Parliament. He was a member of the Committee on the Environment, Public Health and Food Safety , the Delegation for relations with Belarus and the Delegation to the Euronest Parliamentary Assembly. As a deputy, he was in the Committee on Industry, Research and Energy , in the Delegation for relations with Switzerland and Norway, as well as in the EU-Iceland Joint Parliamentary Committee and the European Economic Area Joint Parliamentary Committee.

Since 2014

After the BNP lost both mandates in the 2014 European elections , Griffin was expelled from the BNP on October 1, 2014. He founded the British Unity Party , but it mainly acts as a Facebook group. In February 2015, Griffin helped found the European party Alliance for Peace and Freedom .