Al, you are absolutely correct. However, Griffin and the rest of the BNP leadership are too thick to run a whelk stall, let alone conduct a serious fascist takeover. Plus, I think the BNP has gone too far down the road of constitutionality and ostensible respectability, for them to reinvent themselves as the kind of street fighting semi-terrorist mob that is classical fascism, and which succeeds where constitutionalism doesn't.

In short, for fascism to stand anything more than a snowball in hell's chance of getting anywhere, it would need a new leader and a new and even nastier organisation than the one we confront at present.

The problem is that when the conditions you mentioned are in place, a demagogue will emerge to take advantage of them; someone who has brains and charisma, and an ability to connect with and lead the millions of disaffected. Griffin may be a nasty piece of work, but he falls well short of those requirements.

If the BNP is crushed well before said conditions and demagogue emerge, it won't represent an infrastructure that he can build from. That will give us just a little bit of a breathing space.

Silas, I'm afraid you're a bit late to buy from the extensive range of gollywogs, or gollys as the BNP rechristened them to avoid clashes with the law, from the BNP's Excalibur website. They started stocking them after Carol Thatcher (I think it was her)caused a furore by referring to someone as a gollywog, but have now reduced their selection to a poor and pathetic sampling. You can however still buy an "English by the grace of God" mug from them. If you don't like that, they have various books on sale retailing crackpot theories about race, evolution, DNA and how wonderful it is to be European. And there's "Enoch was Right" badges, a CD of songs written by Nick Griffin, plus a whole stack of highly offensive T shits. What a swinging place the Excalibur warehouse must be. What a personal embarressment that it's less than 20 miles away from where I live.