Nick Griffin: ‘If Hitler hadn’t been so daft, they’d have exterminated the German Jews’
The following is a transcript of Dominic Carman’s speech at an Expose the BNP media briefing in London, held at the NUJ headquarters on 7th April. Carman spoke in his capacity as the unofficial biographer of BNP leader Nick Griffin.
At the 1987 General Election, the BNP put up two candidates and received 553 votes. It was beaten hands down by the Monster Raving Loony Party which put up five candidates and won 1,951 votes. The BNP was irrelevant. It was a joke.
But that joke isn’t funny any more. At last year’s European elections, two BNP candidates became MEP’s and the BNP received 943,598 votes. This year, the BNP claim to be putting up 326 candidates at the General Election: the same number as needed for a working majority in parliament.
Politicians and the press cannot – and should not – ignore the threat posed by the BNP.
David Cameron recently called Nick Griffin a “ghastly piece of filth”. Last week, Gordon Brown called for a united front against the BNP. Both of them are right. But as a Liberal Democrat, I am doing something more than being part of a united front or dismissing him with abuse. I am taking the fight to Nick Griffin by standing against him at this election with a mandate to expose what he really believes.
The battle against the BNP on the ground is trench warfare. And the front line is Barking. It is a battle that has to be fought and won. Inch by inch. Voter by voter. Doorstep by doorstep. It’s a battle which I passionately believe is worth fighting.
But enough of the political speech.
The purpose of this evening is for me to share with you some of my experience which may help you as journalists when dealing with the BNP in interview.
I first interviewed Nick Griffin in 2003. I had recently done lengthy interviews with the then opposition party leaders, Michael Howard and Charles Kennedy. I had known Tony Blair since the early 1980s – before he was an MP.
Griffin was nothing like Howard, Kennedy or Blair. But then Griffin is not a normal politician. After the European Elections of 2004, I embarked upon the task of writing his unauthorised biography. It was a journey into the murky, disturbing world of far right politics. Griffin’s biography remains unfinished and unpublished. And that’s how it will stay.
The BNP was founded in 1982 by John Tyndall, a veteran Nazi who described Hitler’s Mein Kampf as his bible. When I interviewed him at his home on the Hove seafront, his first question to me was : “Mr Carman, are you Jewish? Someone told me you’re Jewish.” Only after I assured him that I was Catholic did he agree to answer my questions.
Hitler worship and hatred of Jews are no longer openly expressed by the BNP as articles of faith. Their stated enemy now is Islam and Muslims.
So what does Griffin think of the press? Griffin told me: “Jews have simply bought the West, in terms of the press, for their own political ends” – before concluding: “In 1938, ….if Hitler hadn’t been so daft, they’d have exterminated the German Jews.” That also is on YouTube.
So what should you know about the BNP?
Although it’s registered as a political party, the BNP operates as a cult.
Before joining the BNP in 1995, Griffin had been in a fascist religious cult for three years called the ITP, the International Third Position. Griffin told me: “I joined a cult. The funny thing about being in a cult is you don’t know you are.”
Like most cults, the BNP is isolationist. The BNP cult thrives on alienation from the outside world. It has total distrust of government, of big business, of authority and of the media. Instead there is fear: fear of change, of difference and of diversity. For BNP members and supporters, all their problems are reduced to one simple explanation, which is repeatedly emphasized: immigrants and immigration.
The BNP cult also centres on the leader and the authority of the leader. It’s worth taking a brief look at the party constitution and its history.
The BNP constitution is based on the Führerprinzip idea – the same political authority used by the Nazi governmental structures of the Third Reich. This principle is best understood to mean that “the Führer’s word is above all written law”. Griffin told me that Tyndall borrowed the idea directly from Oswald Mosley. Griffin inherited the constitution from Tyndall. It gives “strong, absolute total control” by the chairman, it’s “a fascist ideal”, Griffin told me. That too is on YouTube.
So how do the BNP regard the press? Griffin privately sees them as the enemy – part of the great Jewish global conspiracy. But the labels he most often uses publicly are “Marxist” and “Marxist liberal”.
Although I will plead guilty to being a liberal, I am not a Marxist. But according to Griffin, I’m in good company: the BBC is Marxist, Gordon Brown is Marxist, and so are Nick Clegg and even David Cameron. I bet they never called him that at Eton. But what Griffin really means by Marxist is that none of us share his distorted view of the world.
Griffin hates the BBC because of Question Time. Last month, he refused to go on the BBC Politics Show to debate with me and Margaret Hodge. When asked why, he said: “Because these are the same people you see who organised the Question Time stitch up.” We are apparently all part of a far left Marxist lynch mob.
Another favoured tactic is to use psychiatric terms as insults to undermine journalists and political opponents who are labelled unstable, psychotic or psychopathic. Ironically. Griffin told me that he did not sue the Sunday Times over allegations of his gay affair with Martin Webster, because as he said rhetorically: “What your reputation worth anyway Griffin, psychotic bunch of racists you lead.” That too is on YouTube.
Griffin may hate the press, but he knows that they are also very useful for him – maybe without realising it. ‘The best recruiting sergeants I have are the Sun, the Daily Mail and the Daily Express,” he told me with glee.
So what does he mean?
Every headline about immigration, immigrants, illegal immigrants, asylum seekers, crime, criminal, muslims and terrorists – or some combination of theses words – might well help to sell newspapers. But it also serves to boost support for the BNP. And Griffin knows it. That is something newspaper editors need to think about carefully when deciding on stories and headlines.
Think carefully about how you report the BNP. Question what they say. Keep questioning it. And question it again.
For example, the centrepiece of the BNP General Election campaign is Afghanistan. British Troops out of Afghanistan Now, Bring Our Boys Home is the slogan.
But Griffin told me “While as a general rule there should be no interest in British troops going into other people’s countries and interfering, any countries such as Afghanistan and Colombia which allow the growing of cocaine or opium are committing an act of war against us and we should send troops in to obliterate every field of the stuff. And if they interfere, we should obliterate as many cities as it takes until the government learn to stop it.” This is also on YouTube.
Griffin is therefore advocating mass slaughter by British troops of the civilian population of cities in Afghanistan. Not quite “Bring Our Boys Home”.
There is a lot I could say about why the BNP is not a normal political party, what you need to know about its strategy and tactics, what the BNP is up to in Barking and Dagenham, how the BNP manages the media and pitfalls for journalist. But I’ll leave you to ask me questions on those topics.
Finally, a word about the BNP and violence. Last weekend, I discovered that Nick Griffin and I have something in common: we’ve both been issued with death threats by BNP supporters. In the last month so has Trevor Phillips and Labour Peer Baroness Udin.
Griffin becomes the fourth person in four weeks to have received a death threat from a BNP member. As BNP chairman, he should not be surprised. His party membership list is full of criminals with convictions for violence. This is the true face of the BNP showing itself in public: a party of violence, committed to violence, using the language of violence.
And Griffin himself uses the language of violence frequently. He once called for a defence of white rights with “well directed boots and fists”. He told me in interview that people “have the right to hurt people to maim and blow things up when they are not allowed any other any way of expressing a legitimate grievance.” [That is also on YouTube]
When he had Dominic Kennedy of the Times roughed up and ejected from a BNP meeting in February, Griffin said it proved his party was “not going soft”.
When I asked Nick Griffin who was his political hero, it was not Adolf Hitler or Oswald Mosley. The man he chose was Gerry Adams. Griffin would perhaps do well to remember: “Hate begets hate; violence begets violence.” If he has received death threats from within his own party, then it is perhaps a true reflection of the culture of violence he encourages and supports.
[...] Dominic Carman, a journalist who is standing for the Lib Dems against BNP leader Nick Griffin in Barking, has highlighted some of the unsavoury things that have allegedly been said by the party on this subject. [...]