ABSTRACT
In October 1999, reflecting upon the recent electoral success of Jörg Haider’s Freedom Party in Austria – taking second place in national elections with 27 per cent of the vote – Guardian journalist Francis Wheen questioned whether the rise of the far right might happen here. ‘Probably not’, he felt, ‘but it would be dangerously complacent to ignore our home-grown fascists altogether. After years of hibernation something is stirring in their malodorous lair’. If something was stirring, what was it? In a development almost entirely passed over by the national and local media, the election of Nick Griffin as the BNP’s new leader in September 1999 had quickened the pulse of home-grown fascists. If the march of time (and also his abysmal record of failure) had finally caught up with John Tyndall, it was not simply business as usual, replacing one intransigent hardliner with another. The difference was that Griffin was intent on a party make-over, fast-tracking a process that BNP ‘modernisers’ had been promoting since the mid-1990s. ‘Whereas Tyndall was an old-fashioned rabble-rouser with a taste for Mosleyite uniforms and Hitlerian rhetoric’, Wheen wrote, ‘Griffin prefers Italian suits or smart-casual wear. He describes himself as a “moderniser” and “new nationalist”; he talks excitedly about liberating the power of the Internet; he is contemptuous of his party’s traditional supporters – the skinheads, the football hooligans’. In view of that, ‘[h]e may not yet have the popular appeal of Jörg Haider; but he certainly needs watching’.1
