Scotsman.com News - Party Denies Being Racist - But Promotes End to Immigration

High-profile arrests of members of the British National Party tonight threatened to overturn Nick Griffin’s attempts to portray his far-right party as a mainstream and legitimate political force in the UK. Father-of-four Mr Griffin took over as the chairman of the BNP in 1999 and set about trying to shift its image away from the National Front movement of the 1970s and its associations with open racism and violence. Impressed by the successes of the French National Front in the 1990s and then the Austrian Freedom Party, Mr Griffin set about attempting to make the party’s message acceptable to disillusioned sections of working-class Britain, especially in industrial towns and cities in the north of England. Mr Griffin’s BNP denies it is racist but promotes an end to immigration and the “voluntary resettlement” of immigrants already living here legally. The party website opens its policy section with the statement: “On current demographic trends, we, the native British people, will be an ethnic minority in our own country within sixty years.” But the BNP’s legion of critics say its membership today has changed little from the neo-Nazi core, led by National Front founder John Tyndall, which started it up in 1982.