Contra Brons' mantra

Some are born leaders, some achieve leadership and some have leadership thrust upon them. Mr Brons, I fear, falls into the third of these categories.

Mr Brons refers often to 'breakaway parties' and to a suppositious and supposititious 'iron law' which governs the fate of such parties.

The first point to note is that the BNP itself falsifies such an assumed 'law', since it overtook and replaced its parent party, the National Front, within a few years of its formation. There is also the point to consider, that since something like nine-tenths (it may be 85%) of the members the BNP had a mere two years ago, are no longer members and the vast majority, while still sympathetic to nationalism, have not joined any other party, there is really nothing to break away from any longer. A new ethno-nationalist party would be mainly fishing for recruits in this vast lake of demoralized former BNP members. In what sense then could the new party be said to be a break away?

Virtually the only thing the new party would be actually breaking off from the 'parent body' would be one of the latter's two MEPs. Almost everyone else who is likely to go has already gone. But they have, in the main, not gone to the four points of the nationalist compass. And this very fact illustrates the need for a new and respectable, broad church ethno-nationalist party, with all that was good about the BNP, particularly its policies, but without its fatal defects - a lack of democratic accountability of the leader(s) to the membership, a culture of financial laxity and an absence of free speech. It is because there is currently nothing out there which fits this bill, that the bulk of the members who have left the BNP over the last two years have not yet joined anything else.

Mr Brons may say that they could have joined the Democratic Nationalists. The fact is that they have not done so. Does this fact refute my argument? Certainly not. Many of them have probably never even heard of the Democratic Nationalists. Those who have looked at the party's web site (its shop window) will not have been impressed. Shrinking violets are of no use in politics. It is at all times necessary to let one's potential supporters see and hear what one has to offer. The message, while good and true, has still to be sold to the electorate.

Mr Brons' arguments do not withstand close scrutiny. For example, what does it mean for the BNP to be operationally dead? How dead would it have to be before Mr Brons felt safe to challenge it?

 

No one need admit they were wrong, nor eat humble pie. Many activists, though, are not happy with their current political home and many more are politically homeless. Many of them would eagerly join a new party - the right kind of party.

 

Mr Griffin will keep the BNP going, as a web site, a street gang and most importantly of all, of course, a repository for legacies, but it should be evident that as an effective political party it is finished.

 

I do not expect to convince Mr Brons with these arguments. No doubt he has heard them and others like them from colleagues more eloquent than myself.

 

Perhaps the most that those, like myself, who wish to form a new party, should hope for from Mr Brons is a strict neutrality. If he would declare himself neutral, like Switzerland, it would make things much easier.

 

Dr Andrew Emerson