The BNP came leafleting today. It’s not an impressive spectacle. A scraggy, skinny figure with nicotine dyed skin more yellow than white came limping down the path. He had the same look as every other BNP member I’ve seen in the flesh - a starved, lined expression, as if he’d been sucking a lemon.

What is it about neo-fascists and being as physically ugly as their politics?

Usually, my response to this is blunt. Either I dive into a combative argument of the sort I’ve described before - or I simply despatch them with a lustily bellowed FUCK OFF NAZI PIG! Today, though, I was curious. Regular readers will know of the occasionally vicious feud at the top of the BNP threatening to joyfully tear the party apart. But that’s only the view from the outside, or at best the top. What did grassroots members think? It was time to find out.

So, instead of ordering the filth out of my life, I simply took the leaflet, nodded and headed straight into conversation. I wasn’t really comfortable making small-talk here. They might get the wrong idea about whose side I was on. Breaking their illusions after that might have ended rather painfully for me…

I therefore kept it exceptionally blunt.

“Don’t you think that the split will make fighting elections difficult?”
“What?”
He looked supremely surprised at my question. Actually, it may have been that I spoke to him in the first place. BNP leafleters rarely get conversation beyond my abuse, I imagine. My neighbours, to their credit, meet them with an impenetrable wall of silence. And shut doors, which probably don’t help much.
“The Split. Between Griffen and the Real BNP?”
“Oh!” Surprise is replaced by complete bewilderment. His bloodshot eyes almost popped, judging by his astonishment. “Uh…how…do you know about that?”
It occurred to me at this point that telling him that I’m a left-wing anti-nazi following the story in the desperate hope that the BNP would collapse might not elicit the best response. So, I told a little white semi-lie:
“It was in the news a couple of weeks ago. I was just curious.”
He seemed scarcely reassured by this glib dodging of the question. His reply was shaky, almost a little worried.
“We…try not to let it bother us. Whatever’s happening at party level doesn’t stop us acting on a daily basis. Fighting for white people’s rights takes time and effort, and we’ve not time for distractions by…”
As he slid away from party politics and into unabashed bigotry, he became more comfortable. Unsurprisingly, I suppose. Most BNP members join because of bigotry, so I imagine they prefer talking about it…
But, we couldn’t have him getting comfortable. Back to the Split.
“Would you say it’s stopped you from fighting for those rights, though?”
“Not really. Who’s doing what might get confusing, but that doesn’t stop us going out and doing daily stuff like this…”

At this point, I surmised that I wasn’t going to get much more out of him, so promptly asked him to leave. Unfortunately, my questioning did give the wrong impression about whose side I was on. I was thus forced to request that he got the fuck out of my house now, and preferably my country as well as he was giving all the other White British he was so fond of a bad name. He fucked off.

Out of the house, at least.

I surmised that his actions in the split were perhaps typical when, bizarrely, another leafleter turned up about ten minutes later and told me much the same thing. Perhaps the two wings are campaigning separately now, and had just failed to tell me…

This one fitted another BNP stereotype disturbingly well: a short, shaven headed, pot-bellied waddler with an outdated England football shirt and nasal twang so pronounced it became hard not to try and break his nose at times. At first, I was tempted just to ignore him completely, but instead I decided to repeat the exercise and see if I got a different answer. I didn’t. So, I pushed my luck a little harder.

“Whose side are you on then?”
“Oh. Real,” came the quick, possibly uncomfortable response. It’s amusing just quite how edgy they’re getting about this…
“Really? Why?”
“Because I’m a democratic nationalist, and Griffen isn’t.”
“What’s that, then? Like a National Socialist?”
The response was a tad furious.
“I ain’t no communist cunt! Why the fuck d’you call me that?”
Because, my dear, you clearly didn’t know what National Socialism is, and the irony amused me deeply.
“Sorry, it’s just I’ve never heard the term before. I got confused. What does it mean?”
“Well.” He paused, looking at me suspiciously now. Had I blown it? “It’s like this. Griffen is stuck in the past. People don’t want his sort of politics any more, or his negativity. So we want to change things. We still oppose all that multi-cultural crap, and immigration, and foreigners coming to steal our country. But we want to change the way it’s said. Make nationalism seem the positive force it is - like, it’s not racism, it’s just giving the native White British their rights.”
Skipping over the irony of his condemning Griffen for being stuck in the past, while distributing a leaflet comparing the Britain of today to the Britain of 1950, I adopted a puzzled face:
“But, don’t they have rights too? I mean, if they’re citizens…”
“Ah, but should they be citizens in the first place? They were let into this country illegally, without the consent of the White British native population…”
“More consent than the Romans had…”
He rather misconstrued this idle jibe as agreement.
“Yes, them too! We’ve been flooded with those fucking Eastern Europeans since they joined the EU. A Pole passes through the borders of this country every few minutes!”
Should I have pointed out that Italy really wasn’t in Italy first, or that if his statistic were true, Poland would be empty in a matter of months…
“So what you’re saying is that you want democracy and rights for white people?”
“White British people.”
I felt the real need to find a chronology of immigration into the British Isles at this point and forcefully ram it down his throat. But, I had more questions first.
“Is that any different to what the old BNP wants?”
“No. We just want to say it properly, as the positive action of giving back white people’s historic right to decide who comes into their country.”
“Instead of mentioning how you’d do that, because that would sound bad?”
“I wouldn’t put it that way…”

I would, and did. This rather incensed the corpulent bigot, so he slammed off swearing heartily. I can’t say I regretted his departure. At all.

Two things have become clear as a result of this. The first is that the Real BNP really are no different to the old BNP. They’re still racist. They just spin it differently, focusing on green fields, Lord Nelson and the absurd notion of “racial self-determination” instead of deportations. But, we knew that already.

More worryingly, it also tells us that the split will do nothing to actively combat fascistic bigotry in the UK. It’ll stop them coming to power, sure. But it’s not going to stop people like this going out and doing what they did today, or any other low-level movements. They’ll still feel discontented, they’ll still blame immigrants for their problems, they’ll still go out and attack them. If anything does come of this, it’ll be that those attacks are driven further from the public eye, looking like randomly racist violence.

Racism and bigotry have far deeper root-causes than the presence of the BNP. If they’re to be dealt with, those root-causes need to be dealt with.

But, we knew that already too.