Royston. "BNP: Insignificant now, but a real growing danger if left unchecked."

I don't think it's possible to overstate the growing danger of the BNP, and of the other European fascist parties. At the moment, the BNP consists of a hard core of several hundred nutters, with proven unpleasant fascist credentials. They are surrounded by a much larger coterie of politically naive and largely passive members. Most of this lot appear to be little more than card carriers, and I'd guess that an awful lot of them are in fact lapsed members. Their electoral successes have been few and minimum. They have taken a number of council seats, with a high proportion of re-election failures; they won two seats in the Euro elections, purely because the Labour vote collapsed; and in the Norwich North by-election they were right down there with the lunatic fringe, on just 2.74% of the vote.

On current performance therefore, the BNP is highly dismissable as a gang of right wing lunatics who will never pose a threat to anyone.

The problem is that Griffin and co know perfectly well they will never get elected to government via constitutional means. They are in fact merely marking time until they can acheive their ends by unconsitutional means.

Their theories are founded on a combination of nazi white supremacism and something called survivalism. This is an idea, which started going the rounds of the far right about thirty years ago, namely that western society is decadent and doomed and headed for collapse. The BNP's take on this is the collapse will be brought about by a combination of economic chaos, oil shortages, climate change, and mass civil disorder. In other words they are planning to claw their way into power on the back of the same kind of socio/economic nightmare which was 1920s Germany.

How far their prognosis will prove correct of course is anybody's guess, but I would certainly tick at least two of those boxes. In other words there's worrying time ahead, and if they ever acheive their aim, then God help us.