As we pointed out yesterday, Nick Griffin has talked a lot about his efforts to modernise his party: recruiting more women, a small number of professionals and a few ex-servicemen as candidates.
The clean-up operation is badly undermined by revolting outpourings of senior BNP staffers like of Lee Barnes, the BNP’s out spoken legal officer.
Until it seems now.
Griffin told Iain Dale in a wide ranging interview for Total Politics that he believed his conspiratorial legal advisor is a “strange and complex character” and rejected Barnes’ conspiratorial views on Zionists and the media as a “grotesque exaggeration”.
It is encouraging to hear Griffin trying to distance himself from repulsive individuals like Barnes, who is clearly an embarrassment to the party. But he needs to do more if he wants mainstream society to stop attacking the BNP for being an organisation of racists, weirdos and extremists. Simply distancing himself from his co-workers is not good enough, he needs to stop harbouring them.
Below is an extract from the magazine:-
Iain Dale: You present yourself as a moderniser. But a blog written by your legal officer Lee Barnes is all about how ethnic minorities and the Jews are awful. He reckons Britain is controlled by Zionists and their media puppets. There’s just no way that if he’s a national officer of the BNP, you can present the party as being anything other than obsessed by the usual issues.
Griffin: Lee is a very strange and complex character. He’s also regarded by all of Britain’s Nazis as a leading treacherous pro-Jewish liberal, who’s taken control of the BNP.
Dale: If he’s a liberal, I’d love to see someone who wasn’t.
Griffin: Lee is one of the people who believes that if you say that there’s Zionist influence in Britain, that does not make you anti-semitic. We’ve got Jewish members. We’ve got a Jewish council group leader.
Dale: So some of your best friends are Jews… I see.
Griffin: Lee is one of the ones who has taken most flak from Britain’s Nazis, as he’s taken the anti-semitism out of the BNP. But he’s still fiercely anti-Zionist.
Dale: But if you say: ‘Britain is controlled by Zionists and their media puppets’, there is only one way to read that.
Griffin: I would say that’s a grotesque exaggeration.
Dale: So you don’t share any of those views at all?
Griffin: No.
Griffin had the perfect opportunity to hang Barnes out to dry, but instead he leapt to his defence.
What modernisation?
Maurice Cousins
