Deadline 1934

Nick Griffin will never be a Mosley, the man he once claimed to be in line of descent from.

The style, erudition and misguided intellectual rigour of the late fascist leader are entirely absent in the anti-intellectual Griffin. While Mosley engaged himself in writing long and deceptively well argued polemics which remain of interest to the political historian, the best remembered works to have come from the pen of Nick Griffin are the insane "Attempted Murder", which remains of interest only to amateur psychiatrists, and "Who are the Mindbenders", with its badly glued-together "facts" purporting to demonstrate Jewish control of the media, written in a sub-Martin Webster style.

With hindsight, "Mindbenders" can now be seen to be nothing more than Griffin pitching himself at the right audience at the right time as the intent to supplant John Tyndall evolved in his mind, and was therefore nothing more than a weapon in the factional manoeuvring in which Griffin had indulged since first coming to notice on the extremist fringe in the early 1980s.

Griffin is certainly clever in a devious, self-serving and wholly pragmatic way, but a deep and original thinker he is not. One is struck when reading his more political offerings by the second-hand, recycled nature of "his" ideas, stitched together with a thin thread of cod-intellectualism designed to impress the least intellectual minds to be found in any modern political party.

Even Oswald Mosley thought better of his members than that, and seems to have at least expected a modicum of critical intelligence on their part. Griffin neither expects it, nor tolerates it when he finds it.

What Griffin does have in common with the Blackshirt leader is an unfailing capacity to predict power-bringing calamities which never materialise - an unfortunate trait, when you have based your political strategy on exactly that.

Appearing on the BNP website is a lengthy piece titled "Deadline 2014: The Convergence of Catastrophes and What the BNP Needs to Do, by Nick Griffin". As I have no intention of repeating lengthy swathes of it here, you shall have to put on your proxy shoes and go along to read it, and when you have I'm fairly certain you will agree with me that it is little more than a confection of snatched ideas, standard fascist assumptions and regurgitated predictions served up as the reasoned thought of a master political strategist.

"Deadline 2014" has the feel of something hastily cobbled together by a congenital hysteric. It begins strangely enough:

You must have seen it, you must have felt it - everywhere you turn you can see the symptoms of a System in terminal crisis. We are entering an epoch-changing, history-making, period of drastic - almost unthinkable - change. A time our Viking ancestors would have called Ragnarok, the Twilight of the Gods in which an old world goes down in fire and ice, and which the great French political analyst Guillaume Faye describes as the Convergence of Catastrophes.

And it continues in a stream of formulaic buzz-words and phrases and hysterical hyperbole that have been characteristic of fascist writing ever since the word "fascist" first entered the lexicon. Sir Oswald Mosley would recognise them all, along with the necessary assumption that financial and social collapse will clear a path to fascist power - though we incline to the view that he would have written such an article in calmer, more measured tones, such as would avoid the impression of its having been smuggled out of a padded cell.

With catastrophic upheaval confidently predicted to beset the world some time very soon, Griffin is decidedly vague on the all-important subject of how the BNP will achieve power.

The problems faced will be "beyond the capacity even of a genuine nationalist party if it was to fall for the illusion that electoral power on its own is the Holy Grail," he says, adding, "That naive theory is based on the comforting but preposterous idea that, after decades of underhand bullying, goalpost shifting, persecution and subversive infiltration, the Establishment would allow us to contest unhindered a General Election we looked set to win..."

The main moving force behind that "naive theory" to date has, of course, been one Nicholas Griffin, who then egotistically takes credit for his "record of leading the BNP to unparalleled and previous[ly] undreamt of electoral successes" while side-swiping Eddy Butler for "complacency".

Broadly speaking, in the matter of gaining power, Griffin falls back on the vague (and classically fascist) premise of electoral success combined with mass protest:

That would certainly fit in with the British political tradition, and remains a possibility, but it is absurd to believe that anything less would compel the Establishment to respect the wishes of the British people to undo the slow motion PC revolution of recent decades.

Griffin then leaps to the question: "What Is Needed to Run the Country?" having failed to join up the bits that begin with the forthcoming Ragnarok and end by putting the BNP into a position of presumptive power. When detail is wanted, Griffin does not provide it, instead jumping into wild "radical" prescriptions which reek strongly of the Poltical Soldier ideals which so poisoned, divided and eventually destroyed the National Front under his leadership.

The mess of all too familiar paranoia and unreality that is "Deadline 2014" is intended to impress the impressionable Griffinite faithful (as it appears - unsurprisingly - to have done) with Griffin's intellectual credentials and stategic genius.

Along the way Griffin again justifies the parasitic relationship Jim Dowson's companies have with the BNP, and there is another plug for the "data-handling technologies" that will turn around the BNP's pitiful electoral fortunes, for reasons not readily apparent to those outside Griffin's charmed circle.

Helping "to put the management and motivation of our staff on a professional footing" will be Adam Walker, "backed by Solidarity trade union's employment law specialist" and long term benefits claimant Patrick Harrington.

I think that we can be fairly certain that in any dispute between BNP management and staff the oily Harrington, reliant on Nick Griffin's support to keep his pointless "union" afloat, won't be going out of his way to stand up for the rights of the shop floor.

It is fairly obvious that "Deadline 2014" is intended to take the intellectual (or should that be pseudo-intellectual?) high ground from Eddy Butler, who - mercifully - does not entertain the same pretensions.

It should be read in the context of the heavy-handed warnings falling from the party's paid staff on to the heads of the volunteer element that retribution will swiftly follow any expressions or acts made in support of a challenge to Nick Griffin's leadership; it should be read in the context of the growing number of suspensions and exclusions already made, and of the smears and tricks deployed against the putative challenger from the outset.

In that much "Deadline 2014" is as self-serving as "Attempted Murder" ever was.

Its sudden appearance underlines Nick Griffin's growing fear that his own self-preservation strategy is unravelling, and that if Eddy Butler achieves his 20% nomination qualification then, win or lose, Nick Griffin is effectively holed beneath the waterline.

What is most apparent from the vague "strategy" outlined in "Deadline 2014" is that Griffin does not have one. Falling back to the classic Mosleyite position of the 1930s is as good an illustration (if any were needed) that for all his political somersaults over the past three decades, Nick Griffin has learned nothing and forgotten everything.

Except how to scheme, con and take responsibility for his own failures.