THE BNP Ideas Conference on Saturday was the nicest and friendliest, as well as the most professionally organized, British National Party event I think I have ever attended.
Was this because of the absence of Mr Griffin and his entourage?
No doubt their absence helped to make the ambience much more civilized than it would otherwise have been.
But there was more to it than that.
The 150 plus activists in attendance, both past and present members of the BNP, were the party's best and bravest. Some of the best minds in nationalism discussed the impasse in which the movement currently languishes and arrived at the best solution. Of that there can be little doubt.
A list of the names of those present at the Conference reads like a Who's Who of British Nationalism.
Uncannily, nationalism has been in this situation before, with the same prominent nationalists opposing each other now just as they did back in the late 1980s.
Messrs Griffin and Harrington no doubt hoped that Andrew Brons would form a new political party with his supporters, leaving a remnant of the BNP in their hands.
But Griffin and Harrington can hardly have forgotten the victorious strategy of the Flag Group between 1986 and 1989. This is the 'Fabian strategy' they most dread and with good reason.
This is, inter alia, to continue to self-identify as BNP members, even if unjustly expelled from the party by means of Griffin's abuse of the disciplinary/disputes procedure. Existing members should maintain their party membership, renewing it as it falls due, in order to retain (or to acquire) the right to vote, which an unforeseen exigency may enable them to exercise.
If one has allowed one's membership to lapse, which approximately ten thousand members have over the last eighteen months or so, then, by taking the trouble to register as a supporter of Andrew Brons' new 'Flag Group' within the BNP one will be doing one's bit to oppose Griffin's misrule: helping to build a parallel, or alternative, party structure - in effect a new leadership in waiting.
The strategy is also one of a withdrawal of co-operation and goodwill. A 'work to rule', if you will. How each member and/or supporter interprets this in practice is to be left to their own discretion.
One should also eschew joining other parties, whether genuinely nationalist or not. The other genuinely nationalist parties are too small and their media profile is too low (can a flat line be described as a profile?) to make any difference. The aim is to seize, and thereby rescue, the BNP at the most propitious moment. This is likely to come sooner rather than later, but in any case within the next six to nine months.
Resorting to the courts is not cost effective. A political problem, namely Griffin's abuse of power, requires a political solution, rather than a legal one.
Disciplinary action by Griffin is nothing to be feared. If he knows that you, as a BNP member, have supported a constitutional challenge to his leadership then your card is marked in any case, whether formal disciplinary action has yet been instituted against you or not.
In the event that you receive notification of a local party meeting and turn up to it, if you are not turned away at the door, the fact that you are persona non grata with the party leader is likely to be communicated to you in other ways by his supporters.
Furthermore, even if you voted for Griffin in the leadership election, you ought to understand by now that under his continuing leadership the party is going in only one direction: down the plug-hole.
Consequently you have nothing to lose and your party to gain, by disregarding, as unlawful, any disciplinary action the party purports to take against you, if, as is likely, it contravenes the rules of natural justice. Griffin and Harrington, in their anxiety to purge anyone whom they suspect of being capable of getting between them and the BNP feeding trough, tend to overlook little details like observing natural justice.
The rules of natural justice cannot be abrogated by any written constitution, notwithstanding any pretended claim to the contrary within such a document.
It is enough to know this and to act accordingly in the full confidence that right is on one's side, without paying to go to court in order to prove it, though this always remains an option for up to six years after the event.
My own view is that the new 'Flag Group' (its real name has not yet been announced) should not field candidates against the 'official' BNP in the way that the 1980s Flag Group did against the 'official' National Front, on at least one occasion. I see nothing wrong with 'Flag Group' members/supporters standing as Independents though, for example in certain London Assembly constituencies, provided there is no 'official' BNP candidate standing in the constituencies concerned.
The outcome of the current power struggle within the BNP is likely to be similar in certain ways to the outcome of that which took place within the National Front between 1986 and 1989. That saw Griffin become a discredited outcast, wandering in the political wilderness for years as a pariah-dog, until given a chance to redeem himself by a magnanimous John Tyndall.
We know how Griffin chose to repay his patron's generosity: with a knife in the back.
Napoleon was also given a second chance to behave himself, which he declined to take. But he was not given a third chance.
As Andrew Brons has said "Some people never learn". This is a great pity because Griffin has clearly made a historic contribution to the nationalist cause.
As Shakespeare has Mark Antony say, "The evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones..."
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