We need to challenge the BNP

If a small group of people set up a stall in your high street one Saturday morning and started collecting signatures on a petition that wanted the government to:

- Deport all those who commit crimes and whose original nationality was not British;
- Review all recent grants of residence or citizenship to ensure they are still appropriate;
- Offer generous grants to those of foreign descent resident here who wish to leave permanently

would you sign it? Not many people would! And the BNP knows that, so they don't have a petition with their "immigration" policy on it.

If the leader of this group was someone who said:

I am well aware that the orthodox opinion is that six million Jews were gassed and cremated and turned into lampshades. Orthodox opinion also once held that the Earth was flat… I have reached the conclusion that the “extermination” tale is a mixture of Allied wartime propaganda, extremely profitable lie, and latter witch-hysteria.

would you give this group the free run of your high street in order to build their organisation? No, and that's one reason that BNP leader Nick Griffin - for that is who said it - has gone quiet recently on his Holocaust denial.

How about if they had a colourful banner which said “Support our troops – Bring our boys home”? Would you take them at face value? If you noticed that this was the BNP out on an opportunist recruiting exercise, would you think: well, they’re only talking about the troops today, so it doesn’t matter?

It would be a mistake to do that. The BNP are hiding their nasty politics behind anti-war rhetoric now, but if they are allowed to grow, they will show their true face.

They were disappointed in the general election, failing to achieve the breakthrough they had hoped for. They have been riven with vicious infighting ever since. But they still have enough confidence to try and break out of their ghetto of deserved unrespectability, and they are running "troops out" stalls in a few places.

They are being audacious; we should not turn a blind eye. We need to challenge the BNP. They are currently exploiting the sympathy for British troops fighting in Afghanistan. Soon they will turn to exploiting the discontent with the cuts in public services. Be sure of it. Yet they have no solutions to our social problems, their only answer being to scapegoat everyone who isn’t exactly like them.

Barnet trades council is drawing up a leaflet to counter the politics of the BNP. We are not prepared to just watch while the BNP tries to build its organisation.

Everyone who hates what they stand for needs to challenge the BNP.