Are the BNP fascists? Ordinary members and voters may not be. They may own none of the party’s deeper convictions. Ordinary Germans who voted for the National Socialists in 1932 weren’t fascists either. The BNP’s hierarchy, though, is most definitely fascist through-and-through. Griffin’s convoluted thought process (which I hesitate to characterise as an intellect) delivers slugs of quite pure Mussolini-esque fascism, as here, in a screed apparently denying BNP/Neocon affiliation:
1) We are against the war in Iraq;
2) We are against overseas military adventures generally (though sending an SAS platoon to arrest and hang Robert Mugabe, and halt the persecution and extermination of the last white Rhodesians would be the exception to prove the rule);
3) We don’t want to export our political system to the Third World;
4) We don’t believe in imposing our economic system by force;
5) We don’t believe in multi-culturalism;
6) We don’t believe in laissez-faire economics domestically;
7) We oppose international free trade;
8) We don’t believe in ‘propositional nations’;
9) We don’t seek to impose Western culture on the whole world.
Griffin’s list contains at least half a dozen intersections with almost anyone’s ‘spot a fascist’ checklist so, yes, he’s a fascist.