From race riots to civil war: What is the BNP preparing for?

“Welcome to Oldham, the front line of the race war,” a BNP officer told a party rally a few weeks before rioting broke out in Oldham, Burnley and Bradford in summer 2001. After the riots the cover of BNP’s magazine Identity sported a map of Britain with flames indicating towns where BNP-instigated race riots had already taken place and those where the BNP was still working on it.

Since those days there has been a growing belief that the BNP was working to a secret agenda as well as its public one. Even party members are concerned at the build-up of the BNP’s private army of security guards and the large sums of money spent on their training.

After the European elections in 2004 when the BNP got 800,000 votes but no MEPs, Nick Griffin said that the party might have to consider alternatives to the ballot box. At the time this attracted no more than a ripple of interest. Clearly the BNP leader was harking back to his days running the National Front Political Soldiers faction, when he was happy to rub shoulders with extremists including terrorists of many political hues.

More recent developments add to the evidence about where the BNP might be heading if it fails to make any real breakthrough at the ballot box.

Last autumn the BNP organised its first clay pigeon shoot in Yorkshire, attended by Griffin and BNP councillor Richard Barnbrook as a fundraising and social event but also to build up a core of party members who know how to handle guns.

Then Matthew Single, a regular BNP election candidate in Essex, boasted to the local press that he had been promoted to third in Griffin’s personal security detail and claimed that he had undergone “intensive training”. He has also started training BNP activists in “anti-hijack evasive driving”. Single has twice escaped justice in the courts and was in hot water over a false entry on his election papers last May.

And last month Griffin made an interesting remark as an aside in his blog about his speaking tour of East Anglia, writing: “During the English Civil War (in due course, it will of course have to be called the First English Civil War, in order to differentiate it from the one to come) …”. Was it Griffin who inspired Robert Cottage to stockpile explosives for what he told Manchester Crown Court in February were preparation for the coming race war?

Finally, why has the BNP stated that it is especially keen to recruit serving and recently retired police and army officers?

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