The Elder Statesman and the Seven Dwarfs

"The little men who talk about uniting Britain, the white race, Europe or whatever you prefer cannot even unite themselves. Any talk of a common fight against a common enemy is treated by them as a sinister plot to undermine their own precious private identities."

"[British nationalism] is an incohesive mass of jealously squabbling tin-pot Caesars, more concerned with the pursuance of private vendettas than with the aim of ultimate national salvation."

Thus John Tyndall in the article 'Where is the Right?' in the July 1966 issue of Spearhead.

In some ways it would appear that little has changed within nationalism in the intervening forty-six years. The bane of the movement is still the vanity, sectarianism, dogmatism, jealousy, pettiness and selfishness, of individual nationalist leaders; their purblind inabilty to see the bigger picture; their fear of the political big time and real electoral success; and their parochial determination to remain a big fish in a little pond at all costs, to the detriment of the interests of our people as a whole.

In 1966-7 negotiations between the various petty nationalist parties, conducted by John Bean, AK Chesterton and Gerald Kemp et al, finally bore fruit in the formation of the National Front, a party which presented a far more credible electoral challenge to the Establishment's status quo than any of its constituent elements could have mounted on their own.

Because of its espousal of a democratic constitution and collective leadership and its rejection of the cult of the leader and fuehrerprinzip, the National Front became, in the course of the 1970s, the most successful political party that British  nationalism had ever seen up to that time.

Its demise as an effective political entity came about, in the 1980s, as a result of forgetting the lessons which had created the impulse for its formation in the first place, namely, that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts and that unity is strength.

Some may say that this is precisely what we nationalists need today: a new coalition of nationalist parties presenting a united front to our enemies, a shield wall if you will, enabling us to cease our destructive internecine conflict and turn our fire where it really belongs - onto the traitorous political Establishment.

Sadly, I believe this to be a counsel of perfection. It would be wonderful if it could be achieved but politics is about the real world, the art of the possible, as Bismarck said.

We should bear in mind that the impetus that led to the formation of the National Front followed two decades of disunion and failure within the nationalist movement. There was a real appetite for a change of strategy and for co-operation.

Those conditions do not exist today. On the contrary, the prospects for inter-party co-operation on the face of it could hardly be worse. The leaders of the various nationalist and quasi-nationalist micro-parties, that I have referred to as 'the seven dwarfs', can hardly believe their good fortune. With the good ship BNP sinking slowly beneath the waves, these parties are like little lifeboats picking up survivors. Some, like the National Front, for example, may have doubled their membership in less than a year. Of course, in absolute terms, the numbers involved are tiny, though I suspect that the majority of recruits are activists, who are worth their weight in gold to any party that really means business.

The leaders of these micro-parties take their increased membership as confirmation of the correctness of their strategy of 'going it alone', even though they have really had nothing to do with the recruitment windfall, which is entirely due to Mr Griffin's alienation of the BNP's grass roots and particularly its activists.

"Why should we join with others when we're doing better on our own than we've done for the last twenty years?" is a question that the leaders of the National Front might well be asking themselves.

This is fine if one is prepared to settle for half a loaf.

On the other hand, if, like me, you want the whole bakery, then you will support the new nationalist party that I believe Andrew Brons and his key allies will announce before the end of the year. I believe that it will have a democratic constitution and a collective leadership, of which the nationalist elder statesman and MEP, Andrew, will be the chairman and figure-head. The new party's policies should be broadly similar to those of the BNP of about five years ago, around the time of its greatest electoral popularity.

The new party should prove to be highly attractive to the very many former members of the BNP who are currently unaffiliated, as well as drawing off considerable numbers from the seven dwarfs and most of the few remaining activists of the BNP itself.

Before long the new party is likely to have superseded the floundering and discredited BNP, presenting a clean new image of competence and respectability to the electorate but with no dilution of policy. Ceteris paribus, electoral success should follow.