The BNP and their Mixed Messages

international | miscellaneous | news report Wednesday August 20, 2008 12:37 by anti-fascist

You have to hand it to those tireless activists over at British National Party HQ in the land of the brave and the home of the free (England, for the unitiated in imperialist propaganda).

The intrepid campaigners for racial purity have been so busy churning out their ‘information’ on “immigration invasion” that they simply haven’t had the time to verify the appropriateness of some of the images they’ve been using on their website.

In an August 4 article entitled Spot the Difference: Zimbabwe or the EU?, far-right readers are confronted with a prominent image of a No to Lisbon leaflet (carried here for those who don't wish to boost the ratings of Britain's super xenophobes) recently published by none other than an Irish socialist-republican party, éirígí.

The Irresistible Image

Unless there has been some colossal shift in the politics of one or other of the parties, éirígí and the BNP would appear light years away in terms of ideology.

While Nick Griffin’s race warriors see their cause célèbre as stopping a process as old as humanity itself – immigration – éirígí has been involved in several anti-deportation campaigns in Ireland and has consistently stated its opposition to racist policies and opinions.

Then there’s the small matter of what éirígí constitutes as Ireland and what the BNP constitutes as ‘Britain’. As an Irish republican party, a central plank of éirígí’s policy is obviously the reunification of the country and the removal of the British government from the North. On the other hand, the BNP has been guilty in the not-too-distant past of whipping up racist sentiment in unionist areas of the Six Counties in an attempt to gain a foothold as ‘defenders of the Union’.

In June this year, the BNP went apoplectic when the British Union Jack at Belfast’s City Hall was replaced with the flag of Iraq on the occasion of the visit of war mongers George W Bush and Gordon Brown to the city.

The fascists hysterically attacked anyone who dared defend the gesture as promoters of “anti-British sentiment”.

Given this, it may well be time that the BNP removed from their website the material of the organisation that removed the Union Jack – éirígí.

As éirígí spokesperson Daithí Mac an Mháistír succinctly put it when informed of the BNP blunder, “I would suggest that they replace our image with a similar one from an Irish fascist group which campaigned against the Lisbon Treaty, but, thankfully, no such party exists and won’t in the future if Irish republicans have anything to do with it.”