Melanie Phillips on the troubling rise of the British National Party: Whoops! Someone’s Goosestep Is Showing.

It is a source of great concern that far too many otherwise decent British people now refuse to believe that the British National Party is what it is — a bunch of viciously racist and anti-Jewish bigots. The recent debacle in the Henley by-election, where the BNP did better than either the Labour party or UKIP , shows that it is now tapping into a disturbing level of support.

This is for two reasons. First, like all far right parties it opportunistically seizes upon genuine grievances that mainstream politicians will not address. At present these centre around the deliberate erosion of British national identity through unlimited immigration and a refusal to tackle the growing Islamisation of Britain. Mainstream liberal opinion holds that even to identify this as a problem is racist or ‘Islamophobic’. The result is that the truly racist BNP (which uses concern about Muslims to camouflage its real animosity against all Asians, people of colour and Jews) has seized upon these issues – with the further result that because it has done so, this ‘proves’ to the liberal classes that these issues are indeed racist. Which, of course, they are not. The idea that the only alternative to cultural and national suicide is neo-fascism is ludicrous. Yet that is precisely what liberal opinion, which demonises all attempts to uphold national identity as racist, holds.

The second reason is the fact that the BNP set out to sanitise its image of such unfortunate connotations of bigotry — going so far as to brandish support for Israel against Hezbollah, for example, to underpin its claim to be an entirely respectable party backed by Jews, black people and other minorities, all united in the mainstream cause of defending British national identity and western values against attack.

Now, however, this pretence appears to have broken down.

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